Death Gets a Time-Out (31 page)

We wandered for close to two hours, and finally, just when we were about to give up, we came upon a portion of the cemetery back near the entry that was walled off from the rest and closed behind a locked gate. Over the wall we could see a much more orderly graveyard. The markers were less elaborate than their native fellows. There were crosses, and even a few stars of David, but there were fewer weeping angels, and no statues of Christ with beseeching arms spread
wide. Peering at a small square tombstone close to the wall, we could just make out the name
IRVING SILVERMAN.
Mr. Silverman had begun his life in Poland on July 18, 1914, and ended it here, in San Miguel, in the winter of 1977.

Peter and I looked at each other, and then, without a word, he made a stirrup with his hands. I put my foot into it, and he hoisted me up and over the wall. He clambered over after me, and we continued our wanderings through what was clearly the
gringo
section of the cemetery.

We found what we were looking for almost immediately.

Trudy-Ann’s tombstone was simple and spare. A block of stone, roughened by the passage of time, it was etched with her name and the dates of her life. The stone was soft, and the words had begun to blur. There was no fence demarcating her grave, nor was there any decoration. It looked like what it was—the forgotten grave of a woman whose husband and child had left her long ago.

We stared at the marker for a few moments, without speaking. Then I crouched down and scrabbled through the dusty earth until I found a smooth, round stone. I brushed it clean against the side of my pants, and placed it carefully on top of the gravestone. I closed my eyes and dredged my memory for the words of the
Kaddish
, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. I recited them silently, skipping the parts I couldn’t remember. Then we climbed back over the wall, leaving the remains of Lilly’s mother alone again.

After breakfast, Peter and I made our way to the police station across the square from the church. The officer guarding the front door looked like he couldn’t possibly be any older than twelve. He was too busy struggling to stay upright under the weight of a rifle almost as long as he was tall to ask us our business or block our entrance. There was a long counter against one wall of the entry hall, with just a single person behind it—a surly policewoman with purple lipstick and a mole on her cheek in a rather alarmingly similar shade.

In my best Spanish, rolling my
R
’s and coughing my
J
’s, I explained my business. I’d spent two months in an intensive Spanish language program in Guatemala before I’d gone to
law school. My vocabulary of the names of baked goods was particularly excellent, since my tutor and I had spent every afternoon in a local café, eating cake and conjugating verbs. I was fluent enough to say that I was a private investigator from the United States and was seeking information about the death of an American woman in San Miguel thirty years before. The clerk stared at me balefully and wordlessly. Suddenly, she grunted, turned around, and walked through a doorway behind the counter. I turned to Peter and raised my eyebrows.

“Helpful,” he said.

“Very.”

“Now what?”

“God only knows.”

We waited for a while, and finally, just when I was about to give up and tell Peter we could spend the rest of the day eating tacos and visiting churches and art galleries, the policewoman came back through the door, accompanied by a uniformed man who was about twenty years older and six inches shorter than she was. He sported a bushy mustache and a scowl. He turned to Peter, and in perfectly grammatical, if heavily accented English, he said, “I am the captain of this station house. I understand that you are a private detective working on a case. How may I be of assistance to you?”

I interrupted. “I’m afraid I’m the one who is the private investigator.” I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Juliet Appelbaum. And this is my husband, Peter Wyeth. He’s assisting me.”

The captain’s eyes widened, but I ignored his aghast expression and explained once again that I was investigating a murder in Los Angeles, and had reason to believe that there might be a connection to an accidental death that had occurred in San Miguel in 1972. I refrained from mentioning that I no longer had a client, and when I’d had, he’d been the accused murderer. I was pretty sure that in Mexico, as in the United States, police officers had little time to spare for criminal defendants and their representatives. To my relief, the officer didn’t ask who I was representing.

“Ah,” he said. “Nineteen seventy-two. That is unfortunate.”

“Excuse me? Unfortunate?” I said.

“Yes. Because of the fire.”

“The fire,” I repeated, my hopes sinking.

“The fire in this station. In 1979. Everything was destroyed. Files. Papers. All our records. Nothing remains.”

“Nothing?” I said plaintively.

“Alas, nothing.”

“Perhaps you remember the incident?” I asked. “A young North American woman was shot in her home?”

“Yes, of course. I was a young man. A very young man. New to the department. But I remember when the
gring
 . . . the North American woman was shot by her own daughter. It was a tragedy. A great tragedy. But of course, it was not surprising.”

“Not surprising?” I was beginning to sound like a parrot.

“Of course not. Those oppies. They were capable of anything. Anything at all. We were not at all surprised that they gave their children weapons.”

“Oppies?” I said.

Peter murmured in my ear. “He means hippies.”

“Oh, right. Hippies.”

“That is what I said,” the captain bristled. “Ippies. North American, drug-using ippies.”

“Do you by any chance remember who was the investigating officer on the case?”

“Of course.”

I waited.

He said nothing.

“Do you mind telling me?” I said.

He blew a puff of air through his mustache and the stiff hairs waggled for an instant. Then he said, “What do you intend to do with this information?”

“I’d just like to speak to him, to see if he can remember anything that might be helpful to me. It’s been a long time, I know. But he may remember something.”

“Ah.”

“I just want to ask him a few questions. See if he might be able to shed some light on the events.”

“I don’t think he will be able to help you.”

“Perhaps not, it’s been a long time. But I’d like to try.”

“Perhaps the man is busy. You know, his time is quite valuable.”

Now I was beginning to understand. “Of course,” I said. “Of course it is. And I’d be happy to compensate him for it.”

“The others who came, they paid for
my
time, as well.”

“The others?”

“From the newspapers.”

I wasn’t surprised that the papers had been there before me. I didn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that the articles had included no great revelation from their Mexican investigation. On the one hand, I was relieved for the sake of Lilly’s privacy. On the other, I had hopes of finding something new, something that would exonerate Lilly. If they’d been here before me and found nothing, that didn’t bode well for my chances.

The captain stared at me blandly, waiting.

“Of course, I’ll be happy to compensate you, as well.” I reached into my wallet but the man held up his hand.

He shot a furtive glance at his colleague. She was staring off into space, giving a near perfect simulacrum of someone not paying attention to the goings-on around her. After reassuring himself of her silence, the captain said, “A fee of one hundred dollars is customary in these situations.”

“Of course, how utterly reasonable,” I said, smiling falsely, and handed him the money.

He returned my grin with one equally genuine, “The man you seek is Eduardo Cordoba. I will give you his address and notify him that you seek an audience.”

Seek an audience?

“Thank you so much,” I said. “What is your name, sir? So that I can tell him who sent me?”

“Captain Eduardo Cordoba.”

“No,
your
name.”

“That is my name. The man you seek is my father.”

E
DUARDO
Cordoba, Senior, sat in an old, faded armchair in his garden. He was a big man, with a vast expanse of belly against which the suspenders holding up his pants strained like guy wires keeping a basket attached to a hot-air balloon. He wore a stained and frayed Panama hat, and had the same mustache as his son’s, although his was yellowish white and stained with the coffee he was drinking when we arrived.

“Sit, my friends,” he said, indicating a pair of wooden chairs pushed against the pale pink adobe wall of the house. We hauled the chairs over to him and sat down. We’d been greeted at the door by an overweight young woman in a faded cotton dress and a food-spotted apron who had led us through the large house, past rooms full of ornate wooden furniture, and out to the garden. She had vanished as soon as we sat down, but soon returned, bearing a blue glass pitcher. She poured us each a tall glass of cold lemonade. She blushed at our thanks, and scuffed her way back into the house. Her feet were stuffed into ancient men’s bedroom slippers with broken backs that revealed the cracked skin of her heels. We sipped
greedily at our drinks. It was cool in San Miguel, but the air was very dry and dusty.

The older Cordoba did not have the same facility with English as his son, so I conducted our conversation in Spanish. “We are interested, sir, in anything you remember about the death of the American woman, Trudy-Ann Nutt.”

He nodded, but didn’t reply.

I waited for a minute, and then I recognized his bland smile. It was identical to that of his son. I reached into my bag, pulled out my wallet, and removed one of the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills I’d withdrawn from the bank before we left Los Angeles. I handed it to the old man, who studied the bill, turning it over and holding it up to the light.

Finally, he nodded approvingly and said, “I’ll tell you what I told the other North Americans—the ones from the newspapers. The woman was killed by her daughter. A terrible accident.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“Shot. By her own daughter.”

“You were the investigating officer?” I asked.

He grunted, and took off his hat, fanning himself with the crumpled brim.

“Can you remember what you saw when you got there?”

“El Señor was sitting out in the courtyard on the stone bench. He had the little girl in his lap. He told us what happened.”

“In front of her?”

“Of course. She was in his lap.” He seemed impatient with my interruption. “The girl had her arms wrapped around El Señor’s neck. We could not pry her away. So we tried to talk to her there. I asked her questions, but nothing. No answer. She refused to speak. She never spoke, not once during the entire investigation. Not long after the shooting, they sent the girl home to North America. So we couldn’t ask her any more questions.”

“Did the Señor send her without your permission?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Permission? He didn’t need permission.
The girl wasn’t under arrest. One day she was gone, and that was the end of that.”

I asked him questions about the scene, the location of the body, other witnesses. But he could remember nothing more, or at least would admit to no further memories.

Finally, I said, “Señor Cordoba, do you think it would have been possible for someone else to have committed the crime, and then blamed it on the little girl?”

“No,” he said firmly, waving away the very idea with his hand.

All in all, the man told me no more than I already knew. One thing seemed very clear. The investigation had been shoddy, at best. The police had spent a day or two cursorily interviewing the residents of the house and then closed the case, deeming it an accident.

As we prepared to leave, I asked the elder Cordoba one final thing: the names of the Mexican employees at the house. He looked positively bewildered at the query, and wrinkled his brow and stuck his lower lip out. Finally, after much thought, he said, “I think it was Felipe Acosta’s girl, Juana, who worked for them then. If there were others, I can’t remember.”

“Do you know where I can find Juana Acosta?” I asked.

He shrugged and shook his head. Then he rose creakily from his chair and walked across the courtyard. He disappeared into a door at the far end. Our hundred dollars’ worth of conversation was up.

“Juana has a store in the market,” a soft voice said in Spanish.

I turned to find the young woman who’d let us into the house.

“You know her?” I asked.

“She sells dresses in the central market. Confirmation dresses.
Quinceñeros
gowns. That kind of thing. She’s in the market. Most days. You’ll see the booth. It’s the biggest one.”

I smiled at her. Then I thought of something. “Did you tell this to the other North Americans who came here? The reporters?”

She shook her head. “They didn’t ask about her.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out another hundred-dollar bill. I pressed it into the woman’s hand, and she stared at it, her face flushed pink. “Mother of God,” she murmured, and then grabbed my hand and brought it to her lips. Mr. Cordoba obviously didn’t pay her very well.

“So, what happened in there?” Peter said, once we were standing back out on the street. His Spanish is limited; unless you’re talking guacamole and tortillas, he’s clueless. So I summarized my conversation with Cordoba.

“Not very helpful,” Peter said.

“Nope. But I did get the name of the maid who was there at the time.”

We decided to head right over to the market. We only had another day in San Miguel and couldn’t afford to waste time.

In the taxi, I turned to Peter. “Did that strike you as a rather fancy house for a police officer?” We’d walked through at least five rooms in the pink Colonial house, and there were many more than that. Each room had been bursting with furniture, none of which looked particularly inexpensive.

“I was looking through the open door facing out to the garden while you were talking, and I think I saw a big-screen TV in one room. But maybe he’s got a wealthy family or something,” Peter said.