by Ed Teja
After a time, I reached through my fog to ask, “Doesn’t it seem to you that the evidence against Tim is really a bit thin? Unless there is something we don’t know, all the police really have on him is a few secondhand reports of a fight between friends and some muttered threats. There is no connection between that and the drugs they found, and no proof they were Tim’s.”
“It was enough to get him arrested,” she said sullenly.
“Yeah, but I don’t think Tim has to worry about much, even in a Venezuelan court. We get him a good lawyer...” I was already brightening at the prospect, seeing myself saving Tim with the judicious outlay of a few gringo dollars.
Maggie laughed in surprise. “Martin! I thought you understood how things operated down here. A trial is a long way away. Years, if there ever is one. A gringo doesn’t do well in prison here under the best of circumstances, and if he is thought to be involved in drugs he won’t live long enough to get to trial. The other prisoners will kill him if they think he has access to drugs and won’t share. It isn’t enough to be able to prove Tim didn’t kill Antonio, we have to find out who did and convince the police of the error of their ways. Fast.”
As I said, Maggie was never much on mincing words. She was right, too. I hadn’t thought through that part of it. I guess I was looking for a way to untangle myself from this mess, hoping to find a simple, speedy and painless solution, the kind only useful to wrap up a television sitcom. My heart knew that a prison term, with or without a trial, would be the same as a death sentence for Tim.
“Then we will figure out how to do that,” I said, hoping it was true.
Maggie picked up the bottle and refilled our glasses. “I’m sure you will,” she said, her voice honey soft.
CHAPTER THREE
The morning grew bright early. There was no wind. The calm, still water reflected the sunlight and I could tell it would be oppressively hot soon. About six thirty, someone on shore turned a radio on loud. Thin and badly distorted cuatro music took over from the peaceful silence.
“Mochima wakes up,” Maggie said cheerfully as she poked her head up into the cockpit. “Ready for breakfast?”
I was starving and said so. I had been sitting in the cockpit since before sunrise with my mind churning like a tumble drier. I couldn’t have any real peace while I kept rummaging through the few tangled bits of information I had about Tim’s case. Worse, I kept imagining what I would or might learn next. I knew this wasn’t productive, but I had begun to feel as if I were trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle while half the pieces were still in the box. I nodded my head at the distracting noise from the shore.
“Does this happen every morning?”
“Just on weekdays and weekends,” she said. “This, or something quite like it.” Then she ducked below and shortly the smell of bacon and eggs took my mind off the abrasive pretense to music that floated from ashore. The delightful town of yesterday seemed far less idyllic at the moment.
About the time she brought breakfast up on a tray a gentle breeze had begun to cool me. This breeze came from far out at sea. It had that kind of salty freshness that gave renewed hope for the day. As we ate our breakfast in the cockpit someone ashore mercifully turned the music down a bit and I began to feel more human and ready to face the day.
I saw Maggie’s cool blue eyes appraising me. “Are you going to shave this morning?” she asked.
I told her that I hadn’t thought much about it one way or another.
“Well,” she said, “when you talk to the police, you’ll get a lot more cooperation if you look more like ex-Navy SEAL and a bit less like a scruffy freighter captain.”
“Ah. You seem to be telling me that you think I should shave. Go incognito.”
“Right.”
It made sense, just as many of her ideas did. So, I shaved, showered, and generally spruced myself up. So, by the time we took the dinghy ashore, retrieved Jezebel and headed back across the hills toward Cumaná, I not only looked presentable, I felt more refreshed too.
There were only a few ancient and battered Ford Galaxies that passed for taxis on the dusty road, so we made good time, arriving into town while it was still cool and early. Things don’t ordinarily get much of an early start in Venezuela. Venezuelans don’t do morning. Most business and stores don’t open before eight thirty or nine, and only the banks are crowded that early, with people lining up to do their banking or get tax stamps for official papers.
The jail, Tim’s current home, was located between the old city center and the municipal pier, which is mostly used by the military these days, except for the huge ship that brings cars in once a week. Venezuelans are fond of parks, which offer some respite from the sunny sidewalk, especially at midday, and Cumaná has a number of them. At the one near the jail, people gathered under its shade trees to talk, or hung around the banks of nonfunctional pay telephones where enterprising vendors offered juice and food. The park has a refreshing and relaxing feel. The building next to it, the jail, has all the grace and charm of institutional buildings everywhere, which is to say none at all.
We parked the cooperative Jezebel in a parking garage a few blocks away. That would keep her out of the sun and save us baking more than we needed to later on. We walked through the park to the jail. Maggie led the way in the front door, bypassing a couple of unattended desks and heading directly to a battered gray metal desk in the rear where she began speaking rapidly in Spanish to a battered and obese man behind it. I saw him shake his head, so I moved closer as much curious to discover if my rusty Spanish could make sense of his words as anything.
“We have no such prisoner,” is what he was saying.
Maggie winked at me as if this was a pretty normal way for encounters at the jail to start. “Are you certain?” She asked. “He was here when I came to see him before.”
He was certain. He pointed to a box of dog-eared file cards. He kept the records, after all. Who could be more certain than the record keeper?
Maggie smiled at him in a way that I can only describe as winningly. She put her hand in her back pocket and pulled out a few Bolívar notes, then she reached over and took his hand as if she wanted to hold it.
“I am sure that there is some mistake, Señor,” she said pleasantly. “If you could take another look at your records, I’m sure you will find him. It can’t be that difficult for an observant man like yourself to locate a young gringo in here.”
The man glanced in his hand as she pulled hers away. Taking a quick count of his haul was my guess, and then he smiled warmly. “A gringo? Why didn’t you say that before?”
He opened his desk drawer and took out a large book, the kind of ledger used in Charles Dickens's days.
“Of course, I know who you mean now,” he was saying as he opened the smudgy ledger.
The ledger binding was roach eaten, they love the glue, and the pages were ready to leave the book. But this was the sacred record of comings and goings of visitors to the guests of the establishment. Each prisoner had his own page, and everyone had to sign in.
Maggie kissed my cheek. “Sign the nice man’s book and have a good talk with Tim.”
“You aren’t going in?”
“No. You two should talk alone. Besides, I have some shopping to do.”
“Women,” I chuckled. “Never miss a chance to shop.”
“Oh, yes,” she cooed. “I need some frilly sandpaper, I hope they have pink, and I want some bedding compound for some deck cleats that won’t clash with the rest of the decor. They might have the new styles in and who can guess what they will do with the necklines on the things this year?”
“I see those are important issues,” I said as I signed the book, taking my time so that I could scan the names, hoping there might be something interesting in the list of those who came to see Tim before me. I noted a few names that I didn’t recognize appeared several times. They had started coming right after the arrest. Possibly they were poli
ce or from the public prosecutor’s office, but I didn’t know if they would be required to sign in.
After that flurry of activity there was only Maggie’s elegant signature. It surprised me to find no evidence that Victoria López had been there. At least I couldn’t see that name in a legible signature. And there were no other women’s names. The book was no help at all in that regard.
Maggie called from the doorway. “Should I bring you an arepa when I come back?”
Arepas are a cornmeal bread with some kind of filling, usually, and the vendors sell them along the street during the mornings.
“Great,” I said. “But meat, carne mechada if possible. If all they have is ham and cheese, forget it.”
“Meat,” she repeated as she left.
The man with the ledger book looked wistfully after Maggie, at her legs actually, and asked, “Ella también?”
“Just me,” I told him. He looked disappointed for a moment, then went to arrange my meeting with Tim. As he left, I sat down in a broken kitchen chair that had its back to the wall. As I waited, I blessed Maggie for omitting the optional stirring lecture about being nice to Tim in his hour of need. She was clever enough to know that if we were going to snap at each other we would anyway, and a lecture would just annoy me.
A few minutes later, the fat man waddled back into the room and motioned for me to go with him. I followed and we passed through a series of heavy metal doors. At each he had to go through an elaborate show of unlocking and relocking each door, making it clear that each door had its own key. Finally, he unlocked a door that was labeled Interview Room, which struck me as a pleasant name for an airless, windowless box with harsh yellow lighting that flickered from ancient fly spattered ceiling fixtures. And for our interviewing comfort there were more of the same broken-down kitchen chairs that abounded in the reception area. I sat down.
My stomach knotted as I waited. I struggled with the entire idea that I waited for the police to bring my little brother in. I wasn’t so sure I was up to this meeting, but there wasn’t an honest way out of it, and it all came down to being forced to confront the unpleasant to get to the truth. That seems to come up far too often in life for my tastes.
My history with Tim had a lot of rough spots. I was fifteen years older, and although I'd taken care of him when he was a toddler, I hardly knew him as a man. I went to college and then was in the Navy, seldom coming home, the entire time he was in high school. During the last years of high school, those troublesome teen years when the world is seen through hormones, his troubles started.
Mom’s letters told of his unsuccessful battles with the system, and she even admitted she worried that he was secretly drinking. As one who never got along too well with authority in any degree myself, I wrote off most of her worries to normal parental paranoia.
I assumed she had watched me grow up with the same apprehensions and would have written to an older brother about me, if I’d had one, just as she wrote to me about Tim. But I was wrong. Despite his problems, Tim did well enough in school to get into college, but he soon got tossed out for reasons I was never too clear on.
A year later, Mom and Dad were killed in a car wreck and he got worse. He quickly ran through the little money he had inherited. I bought my first boat with mine, well, made the down payment anyway. The next thing I knew, Tim was well into a long run of trouble, which he called bad luck. His attitude grew sour. Once he even told me that the only truth, he believed in was “life sucks.” It was easy to see the candor he put in that statement.
“Not always,” was about the cleverest retort I could think of.
“Yes, it does, and I can prove that a lot easier than I can prove the existence of gravity,” he’d said.
Optimist that I am, I continued to think he’d snap out of whatever it was that had a hold of him. But now he was twenty-five and it didn’t seem to have happened yet. Over time we grew further apart. We only seemed to touch each other’s lives now and then, and our history was that it only happened when he was in trouble. Like now.
The door opened suddenly. He came in, escorted into the room by the sleepy-eyed guard Maggie had warned me about. I stood and froze in place.
I have to say, in my defense, my first instinct was to grab him in a big, brotherly, bear hug. He looked so frail, surprisingly frail, and maybe that’s why I didn’t do it. But maybe I was also too concerned about making some big display of affection in public. I don’t know, but I do know the moment for that hug slipped by in a gut-wrenching moment before I did anything at all.
He must’ve sensed it, too, because he gave me a foolish grin and said, “Hi.” Then he sat down.
We sat in the chairs facing each other wordlessly. The guard became wallpaper, as Maggie had said. The air felt stuffy, heavy with dust and maybe anticipation as well.
I took a moment to look him over more carefully now. His normal sartorial preference leaned toward the scruffy, but he looked bad, even by his standards. His tee shirt and jeans were filthy dirty. His shoulder peeked out, dirty white through a tear in the shirt. He hadn’t been starving since I’d seen him last, in fact he’d filled out a bit, but he wasn’t fit. People don’t realize it is often muscle tone more than bulk that decides whether someone looks fat or fit. He looked soft and doughy. It’s an unhealthy combination. He had also acquired a swollen left eye and a dark bruise on the right side of his head. I could tell they had a rough playground here and recess was probably no longer his favorite time of day.
“Well, bro,” he said smiling and showing a chipped tooth. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Well, you know it’s a small world, Tiny Tim. How are you doing?”
He indicated the place with his upturned hands. “Hey, I’ve got luxury accommodations in a tropical paradise. And for free. Does it get better than that?”
I looked around. “Yeah. It does. In a few gutters I’ve been in.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Are they feeding you all right?”
He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one with a lighter the guard handed him. He blew out a cloud of white smoke and handed the guard back his lighter and a cigarette. The cigarette had been expected.
“Yeah, the food’s fantastic, but they do let the champagne get warm and we have to brush after every meal. They are brutal about that.”
“Sarcasm won’t help. I need information.”
He smiled. “Sure, sarcasm helps. Why I feel better already. Loads better. And you want information? What brand? We’ve got all kinds of information. We know who is holding and what cell is best avoided after dark.”
“Information about you. Your story. Your telling of what went down that wound up with you landing in this vacation spot.”
“I guess I won the lottery.”
“Start with the truth. Tell me what happened.”
“So, you can sneer at it?”
I shook my head. “So, I can prove it.”
He grinned and shook his head. “News bulletin, big brother—the truth doesn’t matter to anyone in this burg. They’ve got me, and I’m going to die in this hole.” Then he sat back and lapsed into sullen silence.
“Tell me about the murder.”
His eyes flashed a hard, challenging look. “I didn’t do it. End of information available to this reporter. Watch for film of me not doing it at eleven.”
“Any guesses as to who did do it?”
I caught a flicker of relief cross his face, a look that quickly switched into sadness. “No.” He thought a moment longer. “None at all. I can’t even imagine why anyone would have wanted to kill Antonio. He was a great guy.” He puffed on his cigarette thoughtfully. “Of course, neither can anyone else. That’s why I’m in here.”
“Tell me about the fight.”
He looked surprised. “Fight? What fight? It wasn’t a fight.”
“That’s what it says in the police report.”
“Yeah, well
we disagreed that night, but it was more like a pissing contest. I know the difference. I’ve been in real fights.”
“Ever win one?”
He grinned. “This was the first time. I’ve never won a real fight.”
“So, tell me about this pissing contest.”
His hand was trembling as he took another drag from his cigarette. “I like to hang out in a local fisherman’s bar. It’s a nice place. I don’t like fancy and as you’d expect it’s a bit low class, but clean and they have fair prices and good people. That kind of nice place. And I’ve never seen tourists there. But it is better than parts of the barrio. You can play a game of darts and not get killed. We go there to play dominoes and darts, tell lies, drink...I had been drinking kind of hard when Antonio came in that night.”
“Why? Anything special?”
“It’s this job I’ve got. With the Foundation.”
“Maggie told me a little about it.”
“Well, Chris, the asshole I work for gave me a bad recommendation. I hoped to get his job when he got rotated back to the U.S. of A., but because he lowered the boom on me for no reason, they decided to bring somebody new in and leave me at the bottom of the heap. As if Chris’s was such a difficult and demanding job. Anyway, I asked him to reconsider, and he said he was. But I found out from a friend in the U.S. office that what he was reconsidering was whether or not they ought to let me stay on at all. Then I heard he wanted to stay and keep it himself.”
“Okay. I get the picture.”
“So, I bought a bottle of Anís de flamenco, the real cheap and strong stuff, and was sharing it with some of the guys when Antonio came in. He walks right up to where I am sitting with María—that’s his sister—and starts yelling that she should stay away from me or he’d tell her papá. There was a whole bunch of other shit, but he was talking too fast in his bogus fisherman dialect for me to get most of it. I thought he was drunk. I asked him what fly got up his nose, and he said he has seen me, and he knew what I was doing. That made me mad. I hadn’t been doing anything that should bug him. I figured he was just ragging me because he knew I was sleeping with María and for some reason it suddenly bothered him. Not that she was a virgin when I met her. Anyway, it didn’t make any sense to me, but somehow, we got to pushing and shoving each other. I guess, well I’ve been told, I finally cold cocked him and took María home.” He rubbed his chin. “And that’s really all I know about it. I never did find out what he was really in such an uproar about.”
