Havana Twist

by Lia Matera

  “What happened? What’s going on?”

  The security guard hung back, standing near the door. The sunburned cop said, “It appears there’s a problem in your room. I think we should wait a few minutes until we have verified data.” He patted my arm. “Please try to relax for a few minutes.”

  I looked at the other cop, hoping he might be more forthcoming. But he was mumbling to the security officer. A few seconds later he left the room.

  The sunburned cop said, “I’m sorry to make this kind of request, but … we’d like to have a look in your purse.”

  “My…?” I handed it over. I didn’t want to ask. I was afraid to.

  Police, an ambulance, now they were searching my bag. Something terrible had happened to Agosto, and they were making sure I hadn’t done it. They were searching for a weapon.

  The security guard returned a moment later holding the clothing bags I’d left beside the pay phone.

  The policeman tilted his head toward them and said, “Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  I watched him paw through my new clothes. He looked carefully at the receipts. “You used a credit card?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. The receipts were computer stamped with the time of purchase. The credit-slip signatures would show I’d done the purchasing. “We may have to keep these,” he said.

  “Just tell me what—”

  The other cop returned. He saw the receipts in his partner’s hand.

  Sunburn said, “Four purchases within the half hour from nine-thirty to ten.”

  That seemed to settle something for the other cop. He looked at me, and sighed. “I’m afraid we have some bad news.”

  No kidding, and here I thought I’d finally been cornered by the fashion police.

  He waited. But I couldn’t make myself ask. I sat back, wishing I never ever had to hear it, never had to find out.

  “The man you were with,” were, “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  I felt like I’d been kicked. I couldn’t speak.

  “He tried to call nine-one-one, apparently. The hotel has a record of an attempt to get an outside line just before ten o’clock.” He looked sympathetic. “You have to dial nine here to get an outside line, so it went through as an aborted long-distance call. You know, nine for an outside line, then one for long distance. The phone was left off the hook.”

  I continued staring at him, watching him grow blurry as tears filled my eyes. My face was so hot I thought my skin would curl off. There were rocks in my chest. I heard myself say, “Please don’t. Please don’t say …”

  The sunburned cop squatted beside me, offering me a tissue. “Housekeeping found him. It looks like a homicide,” the other policeman said. “And I’m afraid, from what the medics tell me, that it’s too late to help him.” He watched me sit there, just sit there. “We understand you and your friend filed a report with security here regarding a theft last night,” he continued. “So when you’re up to it, the sooner the better, why don’t you tell us about it?”

  “How did he…? You said it was a homicide?”

  “We’d better wait a little bit, until we have more details, before we discuss it. Beyond telling you he’s dead, we don’t want to misinform you.”

  It was already too late to help him, and it had happened between nine-thirty and ten, if the receipts were exculpating me. So it had to have been violent. It had to have been a gun or a knife. Maybe a knife across the throat. Just like Hemingway’s maid. Poor Agosto. What had I gotten him into? What had my mother gotten us all into?

  20

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to continue with the half-truth I’d told the police at Hemingway’s house or tell them everything in hopes it helped them find Agosto’s killer. For a while, the point was moot. I was too upset to be coherent.

  That didn’t last long. The San Diego police weren’t going to let me impede their investigation of what might be a double homicide. Dr. Hemingway’s maid and Agosto Diaz must have been killed for related reasons, if not by the same person. Why else had Agosto and I shown up at Hemingway’s house the day before? Why else had he been murdered the same way, with an immobilizing blow to the head followed by the severing of the carotid artery in his neck?

  I gave up on trying to protect myself and my mother. At least two people were dead because of something I couldn’t figure out. It was time to tell all.

  I told homicide investigators the whole long, strange story. Then I told two FBI agents who’d driven down from L.A., and three officials from the U.S. State Department, who’d flown in from Washington. It would certainly bulk up the package when I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see my government files. But no one talked about pressing charges. Hoping it was a loophole, however small, I continued claiming I’d spent only Mexican pesos in Cuba. The State Department officials said that didn’t matter, but they didn’t look completely sure, so I mentioned it several times.

  Given the larger stakes—three Americans unaccounted for in Havana, a famous poet sneaking out with a now-jailed American’s passport—my transgression didn’t seem to strike them as especially heinous. I hadn’t gone to Cuba to cut cane and sing songs about the glorious revolution, I’d gone to find my mother. Maybe they’d make trouble for me later. Right now, they had other matters to attend to.

  My father flew down almost immediately, looking shockingly changed. The murders had made him pessimistic about Mother’s fate. He appeared ashen and bent, and he was so distracted he could hardly carry on the simplest conversation.

  For a few days, men in suits came and went, interviewing me and sometimes my father in a hotel conference room. (My father and I remained at the hotel—not in room 412, of course—without charge, thanks to a freaked-out hotel management.)

  Martin Marules flew to San Diego, too. He seemed to have aged fifteen years overnight. He wept so much and so openly—so Latinly—that I thought I’d go crazy watching him.

  Sarah Swann, one of Mother’s companions from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, showed up, too. She was closeted for hours with the State Department officials, talking about the group’s trip to Cuba. Afterward, her eyes glittered and her jaw was clenched—she looked like the Amazon Queen after a fierce and bloody battle. I presumed she’d made it clear what she thought of their Cuba policy.

  Sarah and my father held hands and had anguished conversations. Sometimes they tried to console Martin Marules, who kept repeating that he’d lost a son.

  I took long walks just to get away, just to keep them from magnifying my already unbearable grief. I felt untethered in a crazy world, adrift in tragedy and dread. I clung to memories of Agosto. I suppose I’d forgotten the warmth of a friendship deepening into romance—it had been so long since I’d had one.

  Sometimes I tried to puzzle things through, but the police remained tight-lipped about Dr. Hemingway and his maid. And they’d made it very clear I’d be in big trouble if I tried again to contact him. Not that I cared much about pleasing them—it seemed irrelevant. I had already cooperated to the point where Mother and I could be charged with a federal offense. Agosto had died in a room we’d shared. So I couldn’t work up much distress about displeasing the San Diego police.

  As often as I could, I escaped the hotel and everyone in it, hoofing for hours through Spanish stucco business districts and bland suburban streets and palm-lined beach-front boulevards.

  And as often as not, I would end up at Dr. Hemingway’s house. I would stand out front and stare as if the place could tell me something. I’d walk around back, peeking into windows and through French doors. I saw rooms full of plain, serviceable furniture with color-coordinated drapes and carpets. But I never caught a glimpse of anyone inside. And if the house was being watched, no one ever came and rousted me off the property.

  Someti
mes I’d find a pay phone and dial Hemingway’s number just to hear the voice on his answering machine, the voice of his dead maid. I memorized her beautifully musical accent and wondered if my coming here had killed her.

  Once, I called the “in case of an emergency” number on the tape. I reached a doctors’ consortium answering service. Dr. Hemingway was not available, I was told.

  I dialed Dr. Hemingway’s office several times, but got only a machine saying the doctor’s office would be closed through next week, and to call the emergency number for the on-call doctor.

  As much time as I spent in phone booths, it never occurred to me to call my house and check my own machine. Those messages, that life, might as well have belonged to someone else. Someone who wasn’t avoiding a grief-stricken father, a teary-eyed WILPF organizer, a sobbing Mexican journalist, and five government agents with ever-growing lists of questions to which I had no answers.

  So I just walked. Walked anywhere and everywhere. Oddly, the longer I walked, the more stares and smiles I got. I guess I looked like a sunkissed tourist instead of a woman mourning a would-be lover and, perhaps, a mother.

  It was after one of these walks, returning to the hotel lobby with my face composed to pretend I didn’t notice the stares of valets and bellmen and desk clerks, that I saw Don Surgelato.

  I stopped halfway across the lobby, feeling my jaw drop. From the moment I’d hung up on him, I hadn’t thought of him again. Eventually, I suppose I’d have called back and explained. I saw him rise from a lobby couch, and I guessed he’d gotten tired of waiting.

  He hadn’t changed much, and yet he couldn’t have looked more different. In my mind’s eye, I saw him in terms of my connection to him, my gratitude toward him, my mixed-up longings, my inappropriate feelings, my out-of-bounds actions. I saw him in glimpses tinged with my own embarrassment and angst. I saw him in tableaux where I was the cringing star, where the hot lights beat on me and my discomfiture but left him in shadow, a short, powerfully built man obviously of Italian extraction.

  Now, in the bright afternoon light through the lobby’s plate glass, he came into unaccustomed focus—ruggedly compact with short black curls and clothes that, though casual, bespoke a fortune inherited from Italian entrepreneurs who’d set up one of San Francisco’s first banks.

  Maybe I seemed different, too. He looked at me as if I did.

  The last few days had nearly inured me to serious-looking men coming to see me. I crossed to him and stuck out my hand. He looked slightly taken aback, but he shook it.

  I said, “I forgot to phone you back. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know you’ve had your hands full.”

  “Why did you come down here?”

  In the past, the few times I’d urgently needed his help, he’d sent a crusty Homicide inspector named Krisbaum. So it was strange to see him here, unbidden.

  He smiled as if my question were a little too complicated to answer. Maybe I should have followed up with, Did you bring your wife?

  “You want to go somewhere and talk?” he suggested.

  “Sure.” I looked around the lobby as if a place would appear for us by magic. My reasoning skills were somewhat impaired by circumstance and too much sun.

  “You want to come up to my room?” he asked. “It’s private.”

  I tried not to smile. Ironic to hear this now and in this context. God knew, I’d tried to elicit these words many times in the past. “Sure,” I said again.

  He put a light fingertip on my elbow as we walked to the elevator. Weird to feel electricity there still.

  The elevator was slow and crowded. We didn’t try to talk. But I noticed in the mirrored panels that he kept glancing at me, his low brows knit. With his prominent nose, dark brows, full lips, and cleft chin, he looked like a hit man or a deli waiter or a football player. He looked physical and sensual and not all that smart. But if that were true, I’d probably have gotten him into bed years ago.

  We got off at (presumably) his floor. He pulled out his room key as we walked down the quiet corridor. A room-service waiter stared at me as he passed. I was the big celeb around here, the black widow herself.

  Surgelato noticed the waiter’s look and scowled at him. He still scowled well, with macho authority and a cop’s scariness.

  We reached his room, and he unlocked the door, swinging it open for me to precede him in. It was a small, drab room. My comped suite was at least twice as big, and the furniture was real wood instead of particleboard. They really treat you right when your traveling companion is slaughtered in one of their beds.

  Surgelato closed the door, offering me the room’s only chair. He sat on the bed, facing me.

  “Aren’t you always supposed to position the suspect so the light’s in her face?” I asked him. I had my back to the window. He was the well-lighted one.

  He smiled. “I’m off duty.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “See what’s up with you.”

  “I would have called you back eventually. Or you could have called me.”

  “I did call you.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t really checked my room messages. Everyone I needed to talk to was down here already.

  “So tell me about it.” I must have made a face, because he added, “I’m not just indulging idle curiosity, Willa. You know that.”

  I nodded. You didn’t get to be The Man in San Francisco’s Homicide Division unless you had something to offer. “It’s just that I’ve been talking about it for days. San Diego police, FBI, State Department, U.S. Customs, and that’s not even … Agosto Diaz worked for Martin Marules—he’s down here now. He hasn’t stopped crying. And my father’s here. One of my mother’s friends came down. I’m just so sick of it.” I felt myself flush. “That must sound pretty cold.”

  He raised his brows. “No. Of course not.” He started to reach toward my knee as if to pat it. But he stopped, dropping his hand awkwardly. “I know a little less than the cops down here know. But I’ve been on the phone to them plenty.”

  “You have?” I pushed my hair off my face. “Didn’t they think that was a little strange?”

  He shrugged, obviously not caring. “I vouched for you. They told me what they knew. We didn’t get into the whys and wherefores.”

  “They’re very close-mouthed about the maid.” I leaned forward, hoping he wouldn’t be. “What’s her story?”

  “Alicia Mendoza,” he said. “She was originally Cuban, but her family moved to Guatemala when she was a teenager. Her father had something to do with importing clothing from there into Cuba. He took his family on a trip to Los Angeles and then refused to go back to Guatemala, saying they’d make him go back to Cuba. He died after running through the family savings getting all the paperwork and green cards and all that. So Alicia’s been a maid for quite a while. She worked part-time for six different local families, about seventy hours a week.”

  I raised and lowered my shoulders, trying to unknot them. I’d been so tense lately I kept imagining I was having a heart attack. But it was just the strain of keeping my shoulders up around my ears.

  “Did you already know this?” Don wondered.

  I shook my head. I would dwell on Alicia Mendoza’s circumstances later, in the privacy of my own room.

  He said, “You didn’t kill her, you know.” I guess my lack of affect didn’t fool him. “Or Agosto Diaz.”

  I jerked at the sound of Agosto’s name. Every time I heard it, it was like a Taser zap on a raw wound.

  “One possibility the police are considering,” he continued, “is that someone stole your bags so you’d have to go shopping. Basically assuming you’d split up to do it. Which would imply that he was the target all along, that whoever did this wanted to separate you from him.”

  I was sitting as still as I could, trying to control how much I let in, ho
w much I let myself understand. Because I didn’t want to cry. I’d been doing so much of it. And everyone around me had been out of control. I wanted to keep it together at least until this conversation was over.

  “Under that theory,” Don continued, “he must have known something or been close to something. Whoever did it wasn’t worried about what you knew, or that you were a threat. But somehow Diaz was.” He sat forward, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced. “It’s tricky, huh? Something Diaz hadn’t told you, but that he already knew. Can you think of any possibilities?”

  “Jeez, virtually everything. I only knew Agosto a couple of days. I knew almost nothing about him.”

  “But it would have to be about this situation. Think—Cuba, Dr. Hemingway, the Associated Press reporters, the Cuban poet …” The SDPD certainly had filled him in. “Any inkling? Anything Diaz might have been getting ready to talk about?”

  “No. I don’t know.” I rubbed the spot between my brows. I’d just taken a long, exhausting walk and my head was aching.

  Don got up and poured me a glass of water. “You look hot.”

  I took a long drink, then pressed the glass to my forehead. “If I had to take a wild guess, I’d maybe say Dennis and Cindy, the reporters. If he knew something in particular he hadn’t brought up, it would probably be about them. He’d known them for two years. Martin Marules, his boss, said they were good friends. Dennis and Cindy had his number programmed into their autodialer.” I shrugged. “But we didn’t really talk much about them. We talked about Lidia Gomez and Hemingway and all of that. Because it was right in front of us.” I set the water glass down. “And because he was worried about them like I’m worried about Mother. He didn’t talk about his friends, and I didn’t talk about my mother. It would have made everything too hard.”

  Don nodded. “So tell me, what do you know about the reporters? Tell me what you know for sure, first hand, then what you think they wanted you to believe, and then what you’ve been told about them.” I must have looked boggled, because he said, “I know it sounds laborious. But go with me. Let’s try to do some work.”