An Inconsequential Murder

by Rodolfo Peña

  The Dean appeared at the banister thus sparing the old lady from having to go up the grand marble staircase that led from the open, courtyard-like first floor to the second floor, to fetch the Dean. He asked, “What is it, Ponciana?”

  “This man says he is a police Captain and he wants to see you.”

  “I will be down as soon as I change,” said the Dean who was wearing a dressing gown.

  When the Dean opened the door to the room from where he had emerged, Lombardo heard the voice of a man asking, “What is it? Who’s down there?” He didn’t hear the Dean’s reply because the door closed behind him.

  Lombardo turned to Ponciana and said, “I hope I am not disturbing the family.”

  Ponciana looked at him with a face dripping with disapproval. “There is no family to disturb, señor. The Dean is not married.”

  “Oh, I thought I had heard someone…”

  “That is a close friend of the Dean’s,” she said and walked away. The manner in which she had pronounced the word “friend” spoke volumes.

  When the Dean came down, Lombardo introduced himself and the Dean politely asked, “How can I be of service to you, Captain?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a young man who was murdered a few of days ago—he worked in the University’s Computer Center, you know.”

  “Yes, I know, Captain,” said the Dean, apparently undisturbed by Lombardo’s ironic tone. “But I thought you had already talked to people at the University about him. Weren’t they helpful?”

  “Yes, they were, but, you see, I’ve learned a lot more things about this remarkable young man since I talked to your people.”

  “Oh?” said the Dean. “Do you mind if we sit down while you tell me all about what you have learned? Would you like something to drink?”

  He took Lombardo by the elbow and led him to a pair of sitting room chairs that were in the large niche under the staircase. From a small, roll-top desk that stood between the two chairs he took out a bottle of whiskey and glasses. “Do you want ice or sparkling water?”

  “Neither,” said Lombardo.

  After they both had taken a sip of their drink, the Dean took a gold lighter and a pack of cigarettes from the pockets of his cardigan sweater. He offered Lombardo a cigarette.

  “No, thanks,” said Lombardo, “I have my own.”

  Lombardo lit his cigarette and said to the Dean,” You are going to great lengths to show me you are not that interested in what I have to say or what I am going to ask.”

  “Not at all, Captain; I am very interested. But I also believe that there is no circumstance which calls for abandoning civility.”

  “Too bad that the people who killed Victor didn’t think the same way.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Dean, “that poor, unfortunate boy—I am very sorry about what happened to him.”

  Lombardo finished his drink and poured himself another. “Exactly what do you think happened to him?”

  “I am sure you know more about that than I do,” answered the Dean coyly.

  “I am not talking about the circumstances of his murder. I already know all the details of that.” Lombardo made a pause and as if accusing the Dean of something, he looked at him with hard, cold eyes. “Three men abducted him shortly after he left the Computer Center; they took him to the edge of a reservoir outside of town, beat him, and then, to wake him up after he had fainted, they stuck his head into the reservoir’s water. He aspirated water and dirt and ashes, and something else, and he asphyxiated. The something else he aspirated was a piece of paper, Dean Herrera. He probably had that piece of paper in his mouth because it was recovered from his trachea by the forensic medical staff.”

  Lombardo stopped talking and the Dean waited, anxiously swirling his whiskey until he had to ask the obvious question, “What was on the paper, Captain?”

  “It was a long series of numbers and letters. I had a friend look at it—a friend who knows a lot about computers. He told me it was one of a pair of what he called ‘encryption keys.’” Lombardo took from his pocket the paper Victor’s widow had given him. “This is the other half of the pair,” he said showing it to the Dean. “As you can see, it says you were supposed to have the other half, the one that matched the key that ended up in his trachea.”

  “But, I never…,” the Dean started to protest.

  “I know, I know,” said Lombardo. “You don’t have to tell me you never got the private part of the pair. He didn’t live long enough to give it to you.”

  “Where did you get the private key, Captain?”

  Lombardo ignored the question and said, “The important question is, why was he sending you the private key?”

  “I assure you I…,” the Dean started to say, his cool composure and his ‘civility,’ now having vanished.

  “Don’t assure me anything, Dean Herrera; I am not interested in you. Although, God knows someone should take an interest in you.” Lombardo put his glass down and said slowly. “I have read some of the documents that Victor encrypted before he died. I have an idea of what was going on but I would like for you to fill in some of the details. I want to know the whole story.”

  “And, what will you do when you have ‘the whole story,’ as you put it?”

  “I am not going to run to anyone to denounce anybody, if that’s what’s worrying you. I am certainly not going to my boss because I have a feeling he has recently shifted sides in this little war you people are fighting. I am just interested in catching up with whoever killed Victor.”

  “Why?” asked the Dean.

  “Because I’m a cop, that’s what I do,” said Lombardo. “But, never mind that. Tell me how you are involved in this and why.”

  It was now the Dean’s turn to pour himself a large drink. “I became involved, in a way, years ago, before I was named Dean of the University. You see, my doctorate was on demographic research. As head of the School of Social Sciences, I did a lot of work for the PLR.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “It was all pretty innocent stuff. They wanted to know voter tendencies, what undecided voters were thinking, what issues rankled voters most—the usual pre-election stuff. They also had me test ‘pre-candidates’ for local, state, and federal offices—you know, to see how they were perceived by the voters.

  “Governor Sanchez was then the party’s secretary for political action. He was the one who approached me to use the school’s computing resources to crunch the numbers, as it were, and apply my knowledge of predictive statistics to the information. We developed, if not a close friendship, at least a close working relationship, so, when he became Governor of the state, he named me Dean of the University.

  “When this drug problem started getting out of hand, with the Cartels fighting each other, and practically every institution of the country being corrupted with drug money, people not only in the government, but in the private sector, started to worry about Mexico being turned into another Colombia.

  “A lot of talk revolved around the fact that Mexico was suffering because of the insatiable demand of the United States for drugs. ‘Why should we suffer so much violence and corruption,’ they said, ‘just because the damned gringos want to consume tons of junk.’

  “A lot of people were angry that the United States kept pointing the finger at Mexico, calling us corrupt and so on, while they did nothing about consumption. They pressured us into a ‘War on Drugs’ but where was their ‘War on Drugs’? And, if you want to talk about corruption, if tons of the stuff were getting into the United States, what does that say about corruption on their side?

  “Anyway, people in the Party started discussing the idea of legalizing drugs, or at least some drugs. We knew that the United States, especially the more conservative elements, would be violently opposed to it, so when the PLR’s presidential candidate was named, and he seemed agreeable to considering legalizing drugs, the Governor asked me to conduct some demographic research. They wanted to know how the people in Mexico wo
uld react to a presidential candidate proposing the legalization of drugs or usage of drugs, and so on.”

  Lombardo said, “But, it seems to me, having read some of the emails and other documents, that it was not only the gringos who were opposed to the idea of a future President, or shall I say potentially future President, supporting the legalization of drugs.”

  “No, of course not,” agreed the Dean. “The party has never been monolithic. It has left-wing factions, conservatives, center-right and center-left groups, Unionists, and what have you. A strong, conservative faction that is controlled by several ex-Presidents is strongly opposed to what we are trying to do. And, of course, they get money and support from the conservative elements in the U.S.”

  “Was Senator Romero, who was recently assassinated in Mexico City, part of the group that opposed you?”

  “Yes, he was one of the leaders of the group that opposed us,” said the Dean, “at least the visible leader—there were a lot of powerful men, both from the public as well as the private sector, behind him.”

  “Some of the emails I read mentioned that a certain Senator from Coahuila was entrusted with keeping an eye on him.”

  “Yes, I remember reading something about that,” said the Dean in an obviously nervous tone, “but I thought it best not to make it my business, understand?”

  “Yes. What is the good Senator from Coahuila up to now? Do you know?”

  “No, certainly not, and I don’t want anything to do with that man. He is dangerous.”

  “What do you mean by ‘dangerous’?”

  “He’s the kind that will do anything, anything, to get ahead, and to, uh, gain the favor of the powerful, do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, I do,” said Lombardo. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything else you think I should know? Something that might help me to find whoever killed Victor?”

  “I can’t think of anything for now,” said the Dean; then, after a pause he added: “I tried to keep from getting too involved is this whole thing. In fact, I wish I had never been involved at all.”

  “But you are, Dean Herrera, you are.” Lombardo got up, put his hat on, and without shaking hands said, “Good night, Dean Herrera.”

  As Lombardo walked to the door, a man’s voice from the top floor asked, “Are you still down there, Filiberto?”

  Part 5: Day 7

  Chapter 27: Bad News Is Good News

  After Governor Sanchez’ last attempt to send the case up to the Federal Prosecutor failed, Lombardo was informed that he was on the case yet again. The suspension order had gone nowhere, as Lombardo had predicted, so his boss reluctantly allowed him to go on with the investigation.

  But the Director was still very unhappy that Lombardo had not closed the case as quickly as he wished. He had repeatedly called Lombardo to ask him to hand in the final report.

  So, Lombardo had spent two days writing his findings, collecting reports from the SEMEFO on their forensic studies, and generally filling the case folder with information. He had not filed a suspect profile report or asked for an arrest warrant, which was necessary before the Public Ministry could hand over an indictment to the judge assigned to the case.

  Lombardo’s boss called him into his office and asked, “You’ve been working on this for nearly two weeks, so why haven’t you arrested anyone or charged somebody with the murder?”

  “Because I don’t know where they are.”

  “They?” repeated the Director. “You think there’s more than one?”

  “Yes; in fact, I think there were three men involved.”

  “Well, who do you suspect and where do you think they are?”

  “Read my reports in the case file when I am done,” Lombardo said getting up.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “To visit one of the main men of the only organization that knows what’s really going on in this damned state.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “A guy who’s in jail,” he answered.

  When Lombardo left the Investigations Department’s building, the sun was setting behind a feature in the mountains commonly known to the people of Monterrey as the “M.” There weren’t many things that he liked about this city but Lombardo had to admit that the sunsets were spectacular. “Unfortunately,” he’d tell people, “they owe their extravagant coloring to the smog and dust in the air.”

  His eyes were tired from having gone over the forensic reports time and again, trying to find that bit of information, that connection between the facts that would make it all coalesce, come together into a whole, as if it were a photograph, slowly appearing under the action of the chemicals of reason.

  What did he know? He knew that Victor had accidentally died under interrogation. He had been interrogated out of town and had been dumped by the railroad tracks perhaps in a clumsy attempt to hide the reason for his abduction. The forensic evidence pointed to three men having been the abductors. And, he knew that Victor was helping the Dean to safeguard information and incriminating emails that named the members on both sides of a struggled to legalize drugs. It was obviously the anti-legalization faction who had sent the three thugs to coerce Victor into giving up the key that safeguarded the information, but, who had sent them and where were these three men now? If he didn’t answer those two questions, he’d never be able to nail the bastards.

  It was no good going to the Public Minister or to a judge with what he had; everyone, all the way up to the Governor, was trying to bury this case, so if there were any loose ends, it would be shelved. So he would have to solve it on his own, and hand the case over when it was so tight that they would have no choice but to issue warrants.

  Then there was that other reason for solving this case—he had to find the murderers or else he would never be able to face the widow’s eyes again.

  As he went down to the garage, his cell phone dinged. The message said, “Your laundry is ready.” The message was from Casimiro.

  It had been a long time since he had been eager to do anything swiftly or go anywhere in a hurry. Not wanting to fool around with his cranky old car, he asked one of the cruisers that were going on duty to get him to the laboratory where Casimiro worked as quickly as possible. He was even tempted to ask the driver to use the siren and lights but thought better of it.

  The patrol car swerved into Fidel Velazquez Avenue and he settled back to look through the decrypted print out of the documents that were in the files they had found.

  After David and the log manager had managed to decrypt the information, he had asked them to let him look at it alone. He told them that for their own safety, and for credible deniability in case someone asked them, they should be ignorant of what was in the file.

  As Lombardo read the contents, he selected some of the most interesting documents for recording on a CD.

  When he was done, he asked them to encrypt the files again, to make a copy of them on a CD and to have the copy delivered at the Investigations Department addressed to him. Then he told them to isolate the machine not only virtually but physically from the network, and to say nothing of his visit to anyone, although he was sure David would report to whoever he was working for.

  As his patrol car reached Hidalgo Avenue, he told the driver to go around to the back of the laboratory and drop him off in the street parallel to the Avenue. He didn’t think anyone was following him but he could not avoid his habit of being careful. When he got out of the car he told the driver not to wait for him. He would take a taxi when he was done.

  He went in through the employees’ entrance and after showing his badge to the private security cop that sat in the bulletproof booth, he went straight to where he knew he would find his friend hunched over some piece of equipment or other.

  He rushed by the enclosed lab spaces in which young men and women, dressed in lab coats, surgical masks, and caps, moved about slowly, quietly from instrument to instrument as if following a soundless choreography.

 
He spotted his friend and tapped on the glass partition. His friend pointed to the partition’s door and when he came out, he nodded his head toward an office. After they sat down, Casimiro took out two unlabeled bottles of beer from a small refrigerator. “I made this at home,” he said as he opened the bottles. “It’s better than the piss they sell in stores.” Lombardo swirled the beer in his mouth a bit before swallowing. It was.

  “My tests are not complete,” said Casimiro, “because, as you can see we’re very busy and I have to do things discretely, in off hours, but I can tell you two things: the persons that smoked those cigarettes are not Mexican—most likely they are males, Anglo-Saxon—and one of them might be African-American.”

  “That’s it?” asked Lombardo.