Chapter One
The cop happened to look up at just the right instant or
he would have missed it, not the actual impalement, but
the fall itself. It took him a disorienting second to
realize what he was seeing, the swelling black mass
against the white stone and glass of the hotel facade, and
then it was finished, with a sound that he knew he would
carry to his grave.
After that, he took a minute or so to sit on the bumper of
his car with his head down low, so as not to pollute the
crime scene with his own vomit, and then reported the
event on his radio. He called it in as a 31, which was the
Miami PD code for a homicide, although it could have been
an accident or a jumper. But it felt like a homicide, for
reasons the cop could not then explain. While he waited
for the sirens, he looked up at the row of balconies that
made up the face of the Trianon Hotel. The thought briefly
crossed his mind that he ought to go and check the guy out
to make sure that he was actually dead, that perhaps the
wrought iron fleur-de-lis spearheads protruding from the
man's neck, chest, and groin had missed all the vital
organs in their paths.
He was a dutiful officer, but this was his first fresh
corpse, and he decided not to investigate more closely
than a couple of yards, telling himself that it was better
not to contaminate the crime scene. The corpse had been a
good-looking guy, he thought, leather-dark skin but
aquiline features: hooked nose, thin lips, a little spade
beard. There was something foreign about the face,
although the officer could not have said what it was.
Turning away from it with some relief, he inspected the
facade of the hotel, noting that there were three vertical
columns of balconies adorning the twelve floors of the
building, which was capped by a copper roof styled after a
French chΓ’teau. That was the theme of the Trianon Hotel,
as much French as would fit: besides the roof, there were
gilt cornices, coats of arms, New Orleans-style wrought
iron on the balconies, and, of course, fleurs-de-lis on
the iron fence that surrounded the south face of the
property. People were coming out of the hotel now,
frightened men in the hotel's white livery, a few guests
from the lobby. A woman's shriek recalled the cop to his
duty, and he herded them all back into the cool interior.
A broad man in a double-breasted cream suit accosted him
at this point and announced himself as the manager. He
knew who it was, a guest, 10 D, and gave a name. The cop
wrote it down in his notebook. The manager departed,
dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief, and the cop
resumed his study of the facade, although his eye kept
drifting over to the victim. The flies arrived and got to
their buzzing tasks, and shortly after that an ambulance
pulled up. The paramedics emerged, took in the scene,
declared the man officially dead, made wiseass paramedic
remarks, and went back to their bus to wait in the cool of
the AC. The crime scene van arrived, and the CSUs started
to assemble their various implements of investigation and
their cameras, while making some of the same cracks
(that's what I call piercings; sorry, he can't come to the
phone right now) that the paramedics had made, and after a
little while an unmarked white Chevy pulled up, and out of
it came a neatly built, caramel colored man, in a
beautifully cut gray-green silk and linen suit. The cop
sighed. Of course it had to be him.
"Morales?" asked the man. The cop nodded, and the man held
out his hand to be shaken, saying, "Paz."
"Uh-huh," said Morales. He knew who Jimmy Paz was, as did
everyone on the Miami PD, as did everyone in Metropolitan
Dade County who owned a television. Morales had not,
however, met him professionally until now. Both men were
first-generation Cuban immigrant stock, but the patrolman
considered himself white, like 98 percent of the Cuban
migration to America, and Paz was not white, yet also
undeniably Cuban. It was disconcerting, even without the
tug of racism, which Morales was conscious of trying to
resist.
"You're the first response on this?" Paz was not looking
at the corpse. He was looking at Morales, with a pleasant
smile on his face and little lights glinting in his hazel
eyes. He was looking at a man in his early twenties, with
a fine-featured beardless face, in the complexion usually
called olive, but which is more like parchment, a face
that might be choirboy open when relaxed but was now
guarded, tense, the intelligent dark eyes focused on the
detective so hard they almost squinted.
"No, I was here already. Somebody called in a disturbance
at the hotel. It was a hoax call. I was just about to pull
out when he came down."
"You saw him drop?"
"Yeah."
Paz looked up at the face of the hotel and saw what
Morales had seen. It was perfectly clear from which
balcony the victim had begun his fatal descent. All the
balconies but one had their glass doors closed against the
afternoon heat. In the single exception the door was open
and the white curtains were flapping like flags. Paz
counted silently.
"It looks like the tenth floor," he said. Now for the
first time he inspected the corpse. "Nice shoes," he
said. "Lorenzo Banfi's. Nice suit too. A dresser. Tell me,
why did you call it in as a homicide?"
"He didn't yell on the way down," said Morales, surprising
himself with this statement. Paz grinned at him, a catlike
grin, and Morales felt his own face breaking into a
smile ...
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