“She did say it … In her own way. The worst thing, Condemned, is that this has the looks of being irreversible. You didn’t let sleeping dogs lie, and now, bro, there’s no way to stop it…”
* * *
Waking up was just as terrible as Conde deserved: his temples throbbed, the back of his head was on fire, his skull treacherously pressed into his mushy brain. He didn’t dare pat the area around his liver out of fear of discovering that the organ had escaped, fed up with the abuse. When he was able to open his eyes, challenging the anguish, he confirmed that he had gone to sleep with all of his clothes on, even one shoe. Tamara, on the other side of the bed, with the ring on her finger, looked dead. She wasn’t even snoring. The explosive mix of champagne, wine, rum, and Irish cream had created an atomic reaction in their respective senses of ridiculousness and caused devastating internal combustion. Now, the newly engaged couple was paying the price of the excesses committed the night before.
Like someone out of a bad gangster movie wounded by bullets, Conde managed to reach the bathroom by leaning on the walls. He took the bottle of aspirin out of the medicine cabinet. He tossed two in his mouth, and drank water from the washbasin tap. He undressed however he could and got under the shower’s cold jet of water, holding himself up on the built-in soap dish. For ten minutes, the water tried to clean his body and the washable parts of his spirit.
Carefully, he dried his head and then rummaged in the pocket of his discarded pants, from which he withdrew the small jar of Chinese ointment and slathered it on his temples, his forehead, the base of his skull. The balm’s heat began to penetrate through him as, a towel on his shoulders and his nuts in the air, he went to the kitchen to make the coffee. He had to sit down to wait for the infusion to percolate, although he knew that the army called upon to relieve his cephalea was already en route. When he drank the coffee, the improvement became obvious, but the cigarette caused a hacking cough, and in order to avoid shaking his head, he chose to put it out. “I’m getting old,” he regretted in a whisper, and to prove it, he had only to look at his hanging scrotum dotted with gray hairs.
Only then did he have a notion of the domestic disaster that had occurred the previous night. Putting that kitchen and dining room back together would be a mission for the Titans. Had nine or ninety people eaten and drunk there? His first and logical reaction was to go back to the bathroom, get dressed, and escape as soon as possible. But a strange and unprecedented feeling of responsibility prevented him from doing so. Despite the poor state of his brain, he managed to reach the understanding of that unforeseen attitude and was horrified. Could it be possible that he had turned into a different person from one day to the next? Or was he still experiencing the worst drunkenness of his life? Could these perhaps be the most alarming symptoms of entering his years as a senior citizen? Any response seemed worse. As always, Candito was right.
He peeked into the room and confirmed that Tamara was as still as the dead, although she was now snoring. With another cup of coffee in his hand, he tried again with the cigarette that his body demanded. This time, he managed to smoke without the cough bothering him and felt himself becoming a person again. In reality, another person. Because he put on Tamara’s apron and, with his ass uncovered, began to wash the dishes with the same gusto that some believers practice their penitence: conscious that they do it to screw themselves, sully themselves, punish themselves. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault … And he kept washing.
Two hours later, a resurrected Tamara marveled at her would-be husband’s attitude, kissed him, and, after giving him chills when she caressed his uncovered ass cheeks, told him that she would take care of putting away the plates, the crystalware, and the newly shining silverware. Conde, shocked at himself, returned to the bathroom in search of his clothing, but first stopped before the mirror to look at himself with the apron on and his ass in the air. Pathetic and irreversible was his conclusion.
Whatever force was responsible for his patheticness now compelled him to go straight to the TV room and place in the DVD player the copy of Blade Runner taken from Judy’s room a few days before. Amid his own tribulations, he had completely forgotten about the young disappeared emo and his intentions of calling Manolo, but the unexpected demand to take in that dark and rainy movie again had revealed to him that his concern was only submerged and a deep claim was bringing it back to the surface. The idea that he was out of ideas, the certainty of not knowing which door to knock on to get closer to the girl, jabbed at him with an unhealthy persistence as he watched the story of the hunt for some replicants (very well done, incidentally, he told himself, surprised by the beauty of Sean Young and Daryl Hannah) who become conscious of their condition as live beings and, along with it, the desire to keep that extraordinary quality that, nonetheless, their creator has denied them. Toward the end, when the last of the replicants pronounces his farewell to the world, Conde felt how that speech in the movie, which his memory had taken hold of, gave him at that moment a strange resonance, capable of stirring him like one of his painful premonitions: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
With the uncomfortable feeling that that lament was the bearer of a dismal resonance capable of reaching all the way to him, Mario Conde went out to the yard of the house that would probably soon be his house as well and, below the avocado tree weighed down by green fruit with its shining skin, promising the basic delicacy of its matter, he sat down to smoke and to wait. This time, he didn’t think about Garbage II destroying the surroundings … Because his premonitions never failed him, he was sure that that was going to happen. That was why, when Tamara leaned out and yelled that Manolo was calling him, the former policeman knew the time had come. It’s time to die.
9
Leaning out the window, Conde lit his cigarette and concentrated on observing the panorama that seemed sterile from the perspective of distance and height. He saw the green blanket made by the foliage of the Mexican bay leaf and the sparrows that, in groups or alone, came and went between the leaves. He looked in the distance, beyond the houses and buildings crowned by antennae, pigeon lofts, and laundry lines with sheets so worn they were nearly transparent. Like years before, he had a glimpse of the sea, in all certainty, reverberating and magnetic below the June sun. Although the picture that could be contemplated from the window had barely changed, Conde knew that this was a deceptive perception. Everything moved. Sometimes toward a cliff: because that would also be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Manolo returned to the office with a folder in his hand and a shadow of visceral exhaustion across his face.
“Put out the damned cigarette, you already know you can’t smoke here.”
“Go to hell, Manolo. I’m going to keep smoking,” Conde said. “And if you want, put me in jail.”
Manolo shook his head and took the chair behind the desk. He opened the folder and took out a photo that he handed to Conde.
Next to the coarse trunk of a tree, on the grass, rolled up any which way, were the black pants and blouse and, next to them, what Conde thought could be the tubes of striped fabric that emos usually wore as sleeves, and on which it was possible to make out some darker stains. Scarlet?
“Give me the others,” Conde demanded.
Manolo gave him the two sensitive photos. In the first one, you could barely see a coarse field of weeds that sank and darkened into what ended up being the opening of a well. In the other, on top of that same field of scrub, placed on a plastic sheet, putrefied, swollen, eaten away by ants and other insects, lay the body of the person who had been Judith Torres. After looking, in silence, at that image of death for a few minutes, Conde let the three photos fall on the table. He felt useless and frustrated.
“She really hadn’t gone anywhere … Or she had. F
ucking hell! Tell me about it,” he then demanded of Major Palacios.
“A few days ago, a man who has some crops in that area was seeing some vultures. He searched several times to see what it could be, but not too much, thinking it must be some dead animal, but he didn’t find anything.”
“Where is that?”
“Coming out of the Cotorro, about a mile along the Carretera Central. There are hardly any people living in that area…”
“How in the hell did that girl get all the way there? Did you notice that she was naked but wearing her Converse?”
Manolo nodded and moved his hand across the table to take a cigarette out of Conde’s pack. He looked at it, decided not to light it, and returned it to its case.
“Yesterday afternoon, when he returned from work, the man searched again, because he was curious. Then he says he remembered that there was a well on the property. When he approached it, he got a whiff of rotten flesh … And he found the clothing. The well is about thirty feet deep. It appears that they covered it many years ago…”
“What does the autopsy say? Did they find any traces of drugs?”
“They’re still working on her, look at the state of the corpse.” Manolo made a decision and lit the cigarette with the lighter hidden in a drawer of his desk. “But they already know that she died due to a massive loss of blood.”
“Because of the fall?”
“Yes and no. When her body fell in the well, the girl was still alive. But it appears that she had already lost a lot of blood. She had two vertical wounds, one on each arm. The kind that real suicidals make. And a very strong contusion at the base of her skull, perhaps caused by the fall in the well. Although it could have been premortem.”
“How long had she been dead?”
“Between twelve and fifteen days. It’s not going to be easy to be more specific. In recent days, it has been very hot, it has rained several times, the temperature at the bottom of the well goes up and down more slowly than on the surface, the humidity level…”
“There’s something that doesn’t make sense,” Conde muttered, lamenting the poor physical state of his brain. “She cut herself and then threw herself headfirst into that well?”
“Could be. But now, they’re analyzing everything they found. Because on Judy’s clothing there are two blood types.”
“What the fuck, Manolo?” Conde protested when he heard the information capable of moving the pieces he had been placing in his mind.
“I’m telling you, old man! One thing at a time…”
“One is her blood. And the other one?”
“Somebody who maybe was with her, I’d say. But God knows how that blood got on her clothes. Because it still looks more like a suicide.”
“But she was naked. Why? What did she cut her arms with?”
“With a scalpel … They looked for it all the way at the bottom of the well and finally found it near her clothes. It has remains of blood, but no fingerprints. If it had any, the rain washed them away.”
Conde’s brain screeched as it tried to place each piece of evidence in reasonable slots.
“What else did they find?”
“This piece of paper.”
Manolo opened the folder and removed the clear bag that held half a sheet of white paper, no longer very white. He held it out to Conde, who read: “‘Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing. The soul wished the body meager, ghastly, and famished. Thus he thought to escape from the body and the earth.’”
“Thus Spake Zarathustra … But I don’t know that it’s a suicide note … She often wrote things like that, she copied them from books.”
“It was in in her pants pocket, along with her ID card and a plastic baggie. But there wasn’t any money or anything else…”
“There wasn’t money?”
“No, I’m sure. Since the man who found the clothing saw it was stained with blood, he didn’t touch it.”
“She had stolen some money from her grandmother. About five hundred dollars.”
“The investigators don’t know that. Nobody told them anything…”
“Well, it’s a clue.”
“Yes, the money.” Manolo was writing something down in his battered notebook. Conde, meanwhile, was trying to process that information and marry it to what he had already amassed.
“How much time does the lab need to do a DNA test?”
“Five days.”
“What the fuck do you mean five days, Manolo?”
“Listen, this isn’t CSI, this is Cuba and this is reality … Besides, when you were a policeman, DNA tests didn’t even exist and cases were also solved. While we wait for the results, they’re going to keep working … But there are no DNA banks here, so proof of the other blood type isn’t going to do much for us. Unless we compare it to some suspect and it matches.”
Conde nodded ill-humoredly.
“Isn’t it possible to find fingerprints or footprints or traces of blood?”
“I already told you that it has been too many days and the heavy rainfalls took everything away. We can’t even determine how long she has been dead.”
Conde took back the pack of cigarettes, lit another smoke, and looked out the window again.
“I wish she had gotten on a balsa raft … Maybe she wouldn’t be dead … But there’s something fishy in all of this.”
“You think that somebody cut her arms, then undressed her and threw her in the well? That that same person took the money, if she had it with her that day, but left the stained clothing, perhaps even stained with their own blood, and left Judy’s ID?”
“It’s something I am thinking, yes.”
“But who could put that whole thing together and at the same time commit the idiocy of not taking the clothing, the ID, the scalpel?”
“Somebody who nearly went crazy when what happened happened. Somebody who maybe didn’t want to kill her, but killed her … I don’t know … We need the forensics to verify whether Judy was really a virgin or if she had had sexual relations … if she had them shortly before dying.”
Manolo took a deep breath. Forcefully, using his nails, he rubbed his head.
“Conde … don’t put more noise in the system. The forensics know what to do…”
“I’m thinking about Bocelli, the Italian … I can’t imagine a character like that playing the platonic little friend of an eighteen-year-old girl…”
“Me neither, but…” Manolo was speaking in his firmest tone. “Look, I called to tell you that Judith Torres showed up dead.” He paused, looked toward the window, and made a decision. “Give me a cigarette.”
Conde handed over the pack. Manolo lit the cigarette and exhaled the smoke.
“I called to tell you that we’re investigating all evidence … But also to warn you about something. Please listen closely to me.” Manolo put his two index fingers to his ears, to emphasize his demand. “From now on, you can’t get involved in this story. It’s no longer a missing, hidden, or whatever girl. Now it’s a dead person, and until it’s proven that it was a suicide, there’s a criminal investigation in process. And any interference can fuck up the case, and you know that better than anyone. Her friend asked you to help find her and the family thought it was fine that you do so … Well, you’ve done what you could, and if you couldn’t do any more, it’s because she had already been dead awhile … From this point on, keep yourself far from the investigation, for the good of the investigation itself and that of the truth. We have to move very carefully now … You know what I am asking you and you also know that you can’t do any more on your own.”
Conde had been moving until he was in front of the window again, his back to Major Palacios. Through his own experience as an investigator, he knew no reasons existed to refute the other man’s demand. But that bothered him.
“If anything else shows up,” Manolo continued, “if we find any clue, or we declare it murder or suicide, whatever, I’ll cal
l you and tell you. Besides, you know that if you get involved in this investigation and they find out, the first person they’re going to come asking is me, and then the one they are going to kick in the ass is me. Is that clear? The private detective game is over…”
Conde turned around and looked at his former subordinate.
“Who’s going to tell her parents?”
“Chief of headquarters and the captain leading the investigation. They are already on their way over there.”
Conde thought of Yadine, Frederic, Yovany, Ana María the teacher. But no, he wouldn’t tell them what had happened. In his time as a policeman, he had never liked that difficulty.
“Am I going to be questioned?”
“Certainly. Her father, her mother, or grandmother are going to talk about you. And what you know could help the investigator.”
“What about Frederic? Yovany? The teacher?… Yadine? Are they all going to be questioned?”
“Yes. They have to do it. And they’re going to tighten the screws…”
“It’s all so shitty, isn’t it?”
Manolo smoked his cigarette.
“As shitty as can be,” the policeman agreed.
* * *
Garbage II was quite disgusted by the abandonment to which Conde had subjected him in recent days. To relieve that feeling, the man merely said a few words, excused himself, and served him a plate brimming over with the luxurious leftovers from the previous night. The dog, beyond hungry, turned his back to his owner and concentrated on what mattered.
The headache was again tormenting Conde, although he was well aware that it was not due to the effects of the hangover. Despite having gone past lunchtime, he hadn’t felt any desire to eat. He decided to send another aspirin to his devastated stomach, rubbed his temples and his forehead abundantly with Chinese ointment, and, after turning on the fan, let himself fall on the bed, which looked more like an abandoned nest. He didn’t even look at the soporific, asthmatic novel that helped him sleep.
He felt a deep exhaustion in his arms, shoulders, legs. Also an emptiness in his chest, an inability to move, or to even think. Feelings of guilt hounded him over not having been able to find the way that would have led him to Judy, and even the certainty of knowing that when Yadine had asked for help it was already impossible to help the young girl brought him no relief. But it still seemed like a macabre game to him that while he was thinking about books, money, rings, weddings, birthdays, and lost Rembrandts, the body of that girl who had dreamed of so many freedoms and who had searched for them via so many paths could be rotting in a dry well, after having watched the earth swallow up her blood and the eighteen years she’d been alive. Was this her own choice?
Heretics Page 57
