Hot Sur (43 page)

“There was no crime. And stop chewing on that button, it makes an irritating noise.”

“Not a problem,” Buttons said, spitting out the button. “They did not follow guidelines with regard to keeping the scene, but they took pictures, lots of pictures. I downloaded them to my Mac. Do you want to take a look? Maybe you should have a drink first. Are you ready? Look at this one. You can see the body exactly as it was found. There are cuts where he was struck by the thorns.”

“Of course he was cut by the thorns,” Rose said, barely looking at the images on the screen. “I’m going to beg something of you, Buttons, don’t make me relive these events if you don’t have something worthwhile to add.”

“Fair enough, so let’s move slowly. Look at this one; Cleve’s not wearing his helmet, it rolled somewhere below.”

“Why are you torturing me with this nonsense? He’s not wearing a helmet because it came off during the fall.”

“Or someone took it off.”

“For what purpose? Not to steal it, they left it right there. It came off; it’s not a very complicated mystery.”

“It’s a great helmet. A half helmet with a full face shield of excellent quality and double straps into double buckles. You can see that if I magnify the image. One of these helmets doesn’t just come off, and your son was not one to ride with it unstrapped, especially if it was raining. I think, after the accident, somebody took the helmet off.”

“He could have taken it off himself.” Rose clutched both hands to the side of his head. “If he didn’t die right away, he could have pulled it off. He always complained it was too tight.”

“Possibly; there’s a lot we don’t know, too many things. But let’s go back to the thorn cuts. Look at this, on his forehead, there are nineteen little cuts, almost equidistant and almost in a straight line. And now take a look at the acacia branch right next to his body. You see how it’s bent? If we increase the magnification to three hundred, we can see that at some point that branch had both ends tied together.”

“In a circle?”

“Or a crown. And now look what happens when we use Photoshop,” Buttons said, moving the piece of the branch and putting over Cleve’s forehead on the screen. “You see it? The thorns of the branch are a precise match with the cuts. If we had that branch here, there would be blood on it.”

“A crown of thorns,” Rose, who had grown very pale, said.

“Are you okay, sir? I’m sorry, breathe, lie down. Wait up, I think I should get you that drink after all,” Buttons said, and when he returned with two whiskeys, Rose had gotten up. He was no longer faint and the concerned expression on his face had vanished. Unlike before, he seemed frighteningly calm.

“Let me ask you just a couple of questions. Just respond yes or no. My son did not kill himself in that accident, he was murdered.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Yes or no, Buttons.”

“Yes.”

“And they tortured him.”

“I think they took off his helmet to press that crown of thorns on his head.”

“Was he still alive?”

“Impossible to know. But I would guess he wasn’t. The fall most likely killed him and the crown of thorns was later. A ritual or something, we’re still investigating. While you walked your dog, Mr. Rose, I took a walk around the property. I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I had to. I called Eagles’s widow. Her number was on the bags of dog food. She told me some things. And then I rummaged in the attic. The attic was Cleve’s room? That was pretty clear. I found some women’s clothes, some makeup.”

“So what if my son had girlfriends, or friends, who came to visit?”

“They had name tags on them that suggested they could have belonged to María Paz. But wait, that’s not all. Outside, in a clearing in the woods behind the house, there is a wooden cross. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you ever seen it? But maybe the point of it is to remain unseen, in fact, to go unnoticed, a makeshift cross. You could say that it is just two sticks tied together with twine. Well, I assumed it could be signaling a grave or something like that, and I dug around a bit. But all I found was this box, one of those that could be used for ashes, and also this.” Buttons reached out and handed Rose a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon soiled and eaten by fungus. “What I want you to be keenly aware of, Mr. Rose, is that danger is near, that it has been lurking right outside. Maybe it has even snuck into the house.”

Rose scrutinized the bronze medal on one side and the other.

“I think I know where we can find María Paz,” Rose said.

8

From María Paz’s Manuscript

Here I am, Mr. Rose, out of Manninpox but still wandering through America,
“saltando matones,”
as they say. That was one of Bolivia’s many Colombian expressions, leaping over bramble patches. I have never talked like this, but as time passes, I am beginning to sound more and more like her. Saltando matones, indeed, because matones are exactly what I am trying to avoid, but not in the sense that it is used in the expression of brambles or thickets, but in the other sense of the word, which also means thugs and killers. In spite of it all, I still sit down to do my homework for you, as if to keep you updated, Mr. Rose. As if it is certain that I will no doubt see you again one day and turn all these pages in, so you can add them to the manuscript that I sent you from Manninpox. As you can see, I have not forgotten about you. It hasn’t been easy. To survive, I mean, since getting out of jail. I didn’t dare return to my apartment right away because of everything that had happened there. My whole being shrank at the mere thought of returning to that place, but I had to go look for Hero. I decided to make rounds in the neighborhood first, fearing what I would find there, or more to the point, who I would find there. I was not ready to come face-to-face with Sleepy Joe. I strolled by a few times first, getting closer and closer to our building, but not too close, to see if I could get news from someone. About Hero, you know. The first thing I had to do was figure out where my dog was. I sensed that people were pointing me out:
There she goes, look, that’s the one they just let out of jail, the one who murdered her husband, who was fucking her brother-in-law,
all that and who knows what other gossip. Fortunately, a neighbor did have news about Hero, good news. She told me that the cops had turned him over to an animal protection organization, so that perhaps I could get him back one day if I ever got out. Had they taken pity on Hero because he was lame? Maybe they had heard that he was a war hero, and this world is not so far gone that it’d let a decorated patriot starve to death.

My main problem was (and continues to be) the lack of money, so at night I stayed with my mother’s old friend, Socorro Arias de Salmon. I had given her my manuscript in Manninpox, and she assured me that it had been delivered, sent by mail to the proper address. That made me very happy, it has made me hopeful that you read all of it, which is why I continue to do my homework, writing whenever and wherever I can to finish my story for you. Like I told you once, I don’t like novels with wishy-washy endings, or worse, those kinds of endings that just tick off the reader. But staying with Socorro wasn’t easy, given her husband wanted to know nothing about me. This Mr. Salmon, also an immigrant, was an Olympic asshole, one of those who still believed that coming to America was the closest thing to going to heaven and spent his life making sure he wouldn’t get expelled from paradise. I’m talking about the on-their-knees, hypergrateful bootlickers who are more Catholic than the pope. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. So Socorro let me stay there, but hidden from her husband, and the neighbors as well, of course, and the whole world, because the woman had a serious case of heebie-jeebies and her skin broke out in hives because I was staying there. Hiccups, allergies—what didn’t she come down with? Shitass-scared, they call those kinds of people in Colombia, shitting on themselves about anything, that’s how they were, the Salmon couple, he with his adulteries and double standards, she with her breakouts and rashes, and me in a corner of the basement next to the washing machine as if I were a pile of dirty laundry. The poor woman twisting herself into shapes with all my used tampons, because I’m still bleeding, not as much as before but a little bit every day. Imagine poor Socorro, having to throw out all those tampons in the neighbor’s trash because of what her husband would say, how would she explain such a thing when years before she had already been the very figure of menopause on two feet, or rather menopause with her hair in a bun, skin breakouts, and nails painted a bright red, that was Señora Socorro. No sir, this was no life, some development, out of jail and into a hole. The worst of it was that I couldn’t have my dog with me. I could go claim him—but where would I take him? I had to work up the nerve to go back and live in my old apartment, me and my dog, and maybe someday my sister as well. There was an eviction notice plastered on the door of the place, and it had been sealed off with police tape, and it was still fire damaged—but so what? I would sneak in through a window and take it from there. I had learned that at least it was still empty. The owner had not rented it to anyone else. It’s not easy to find good tenants in those shitty neighborhoods today. “I would never put you out on the street,” old, sly Socorro said to me, though she was deep-down glad I was getting out. As a parting gift, she gave me this mink coat, pretty amazing, I have to say, a bit moth-eaten and such, way out of fashion and with the lining all torn, an old geezer of a coat that smelled disgustingly of mold, think Grace Kelly crossing the Atlantic to become the princess of Monaco. But hell, enough complaining; it was a mink, after all. Socorro probably gave it to me to soothe her guilty conscience, so that I wouldn’t leave empty-handed. She said it was for the cold or so that I could sell it and get some cash. For the cold? Yeah, sure thing, tightwad, I was going to go around looking like Cruella de Vil, so that the animal rights people would spray me with paint for skinning the good Lord’s little creatures. The only person who would have bought such a thing was Prince Rainier himself. Can you imagine the whole scenario? Coming back from prison without a penny to my name but wrapped in a fur? It was funny, given everything that had happened. Maktub, I know all fate is maktub—remember that?—written down somewhere, but whatever entity is in charge of destiny has a good sense of humor. Anyways, I got to my neighborhood with everything I owned on me, and my Hero, my little sweetheart of a dog, who had gone crazy mad when he saw me. I couldn’t tell who was squealing more when we first saw each other, Hero or me—enough to break someone’s heart.

It wasn’t easy to go back. I was panicking—the shitass-scared one was me now. I swear, Mr. Rose, I felt like Lazarus come back to life still stinking of the dead. Confinement in prison is hard, but it’s harder to poke your nose back out into the real world. I soon realized how maddeningly difficult it was going to be to return to real life, which was not the same one I had left and which wasn’t really mine anymore. What had been mine had come to an end. That day I returned will always remained burned in my memory, me hugging Hero tight, both of us trembling, as if he knew what I knew or feared finding Greg there, both of us in the same state, not being able to confirm the rumors about Greg’s death really until that day. Everything that led up to that day had been so unreal, beginning with his death, a bit of news that I wasn’t sure whether to believe. There I was, back home, slowly climbing the stairs of my old building and recognizing the old smells that were different on each floor. A scorched smell on the first floor from the time the owner tried to burn down the place to collect insurance, cat piss on the second floor, pine-scented disinfectant on the third floor, and cigarette butts on the fourth floor. I went late on purpose that night to avoid running into anyone. I had no wish to run into the other tenants and have to deal with their questioning and accusatory looks. There she goes, the woman from the fifth floor, the one from that huge controversy, with the murder and the bursting down of doors, who was sent to prison and now is back. I didn’t want them to look at me with suspicion or, worse, pity. I didn’t want to be that person, the one from the tragedy. Truth was, I didn’t want to be any other person either; I didn’t want to be anyone. Ideally, I would have liked to have been invisible and gone into the old apartment like a ghost. Fortunately, not a soul was around that night, not even the silent boy who always sat in the stairway between the second and third floors, perhaps asleep already, or his family had moved, leaving the building desolate. And I was a ghost as well, and Hero half a ghost, returning home. Except not returning, just getting there; we weren’t really returning, returning to what, to whom, because there was nothing left of what we had once had, ruins perhaps, embers, ashes, a profound hurt in the chest and stabs of disillusion. Although actually, everything was the same, difficult to believe things had changed so little. The same light-colored floor tiles, handrails with chipped gray paint, the meager light from the few lightbulbs that weren’t burned out. I paused at the last landing on the stairs before reaching the fifth floor to look for the keys in my bag. I’m going into my turf. And what is there to greet me?

A humid cold that encircles my legs and gusts of air that flow in through the broken windows, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need my keys—for what?—considering all the locks had been burst open, and the door knocked against the doorjamb, letting the wind pass like through the door of a saloon. That’s what it was like. And inside? A hole, a real shithole, like they say here. No water, no electricity, no telephone, because of course they had been cut off, the furniture all destroyed, grime and stink everywhere. Because the locks had all been broken and there was no way to shut the door from inside, I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in. Unbelievable, I thought, all those bars and locks in Manninpox so that I wouldn’t open any door, and now not even a miserable little dead bolt to lock my house. I’m telling you, that maktub writer likes his laughs. A little bit of a downer, the whole scene. Downer and then some, but what was I to do? I wasn’t going to sit there and start crying. I had come from the depths of hell and this was supposedly a new chapter. “On the stairway to heaven blind with tears,” another of Bolivia’s sayings for you. Make the best of it, I told myself, and I got to it. I found an extension cord, plugged it to one of the public outlets outside, and ran it into the apartment. It was freezing cold, with no heater or anything, but I knew that in the basement there was always a collection of useless and not-so-useless things, piles of stuff—you know how the gringos are, even poor gringos, who use their things for a year and then just toss them. I went to down to dig around in the pile and found a small heater that didn’t look in such bad shape, and just as I thought, the thing worked. Nothing outstanding that put out suffocating heat, but enough to survive, though only at night. During the day, I had to unplug the extension cord so the neighbors wouldn’t notice and complain. And for water? Well, I did it by the bucketful, like we used to do whenever we visited our family in the country as children. Whoever used the outhouse went down to the river and hauled up a bucketful of water for the latrine. That’s what I had to do now, but of course not from a river, I had to haul water up from the faucet downstairs. Don’t think that’s such an unusual thing around here. How many people make do without any money to pay for public utilities? You can pass by and everything seems copacetic, but just take a peek behind the façade to see what real poverty is. Guess what I did for food. Depended on the charity of soup kitchens: good hot soup, some fruit, often a bit overripe, and little cartons of milk . . . not bad compared to Manninpox. To sleep? Well, to sleep, Hero and I used a thin foam mattress I had found in the basement. We had to improvise in that area because the FBI bastards had disemboweled all the mattresses and furniture. Then the smell. That was the worse. Rotted food in and out of the fridge. There was no way to get rid of the stink, although I spent a whole day of scrubbing away with those steel pads and a whole bottle of Ajax, which I had to buy, because they had emptied the old ones on the floor, looking for cocaine probably. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, I don’t want to bitch, it would be a serious lack of appreciation, but I swear sometimes I even missed Manninpox. There at least we had electricity, and running water, and three meals a day assured. And if I start complaining about these days, how do I tell you about the days that followed, all that stuff that happened afterward that was much worse? One night, I got home late and put Hero on the floor—I took him with me everywhere, night and day, in a tattered old bag—and I searched for the extension cord to turn on the light. There were only a few days left till the trial, and I was hoping that everything would go smoothly and I would be able to reestablish my identity as a free individual, so I could go back to work for the cleaning supplies company, make some money, reactivate my credit card, pay the old bills to get heat and water and light again, fix up some of the furniture, and rid the place of grime and memories. Clean out, as they say, and learn to forget. I had been unexpectedly released and life was giving me a second chance. It wasn’t something you waste. If fate had forgiven me, I was going to have to learn to forgive myself. Maybe I could even get a loan to buy the apartment. Who knows, there had to be some program for ex-prisoners in such a great democratic country that helped with things like that. Of course, nobody came by this house anymore, not even the cops. It’s as if the place had been erased from the map. Not even the owner came around to collect the rent. Maybe he was dead or had just given up on this place, left it like all the other godforsaken places in this neighborhood. After “white flight,” it was we persons of color who stayed behind, or I should say persons of many colors. As I figured, all I would have to do was take possession of my apartment and get everything in order again. How difficult could it be to set up a place to lead a decent, independent human life? I would get in touch with my old work buddies, throw a dinner party, and I would tell them such strange stories about what had happened to me since they had last seen me, almost like I was telling them about an old movie, one of those that they showed on TV recently, but no one could remember the plot. Then after that, I would go get my sister, of course. That would be the true beginning of a new life. I would take Violeta out of the special school, thinking of the face she would make when I showed her I had fixed up the room on the roof, the one she had always liked, her refuge upstairs, and I would lead her by the hand to the bathroom I had fixed up just for her, with a Jacuzzi and everything.
You don’t have to bathe using the sink,
I would tell her. I hoped Violeta would listen to me and not make a scene, Violeta who hated to shower and instead loved to clean herself in the sink on the roof, not caring about the cold or about parading around naked where everyone could see her, no matter that I got tired of telling her, you’re not a girl anymore, you’re a woman, a beautiful woman, and should act as such.