The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

by Anjanette Delgado

  I tried to understand what was happening around me. Parked on the sidewalk, there were now two more Miami-Dade county police patrol cars. I recognized them because they were white with a green stripe. There was an ambulance, but the white vehicle resembling an ice-cream truck had left with Hector inside. From where I sat, I could see a plainclothes officer or technician taking pictures of the area at the far end of the square, where I guessed they’d found him.

  There were a couple of TV station live trucks parked across the street. I remember someone asking if I wanted to go inside where it was cooler, but I don’t remember who. People kept telling other people that I was the landlord, that the dead man was my tenant. That he’d been found lying under one of the benches in the square, soaking wet, wrapped in a trench coat and scarf, some blood covering his face. I heard people whispering, “Was he beaten?” “Was he mugged?” “Did he have a heart attack?” I turned my head looking for the person being asked, but invariably they’d be someone who didn’t know better than to shrug their shoulders.

  The dead man. How had he died? When? What had he been doing in the park? Maybe he’d been upset and had a heart attack, I thought, imagining him doubling over and feeling horrified at the thought before telling myself it just wasn’t like Hector. Excess emotion did not seem like the thing to kill him, and I obviously had no longer been important enough to cause such a reaction. Or had I? All my screaming to get the fuck out? Still, he’d seemed fine to me when he left last night, and definitely healthy. He’d even taken the time to draw a smiley face on my letter!

  The anger and hurt I’d felt the night before now seemed so small, so petty and unimportant, as I sat on that stoop praying for this to be a nightmare, begging God to bring him back to life so that I could hate him knowing he still existed. That it all wasn’t so over, so final. But it was. He was dead. I would never see him or hear his voice again. Never touch him or put my finger on the line between his brows before kissing him, magically replacing the frown with a smile.

  Just when I thought my chest could not compress any farther, the tears came, and, as if my tears had called him, a man walked over to me and introduced himself as an officer belonging to the Miami-Dade crime scene investigations unit. He had a navy blue rain jacket with yellow letters and navy blue pants, and I disliked him immediately. I could see others dressed like him interviewing other people. I disliked them too.

  The officer, I forgot his name as he said it, squinted to read the message on my T-shirt denying him doughnuts, then raised an eyebrow and asked me my name. He asked other questions, or rather the same question asked in different ways: Had I seen anything? Did I know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Hector?

  Then he asked me if I’d been close to the deceased, pronouncing it “disease-t,” which reminded me of Hector and his terrible accent, and made me laugh, visualizing Hector as a trench-wearing, walking disease, which I’d sometimes thought he was. That was enough to get me laughing like a crazy person, kidnapped by my own nerves.

  “Sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said, wiping the tears that, despite my laughter, continued to march down my face, like deranged mourners compelled to dance obscenely during a funeral procession. “It’s a nervous reaction. I am, I mean, I was his landlord,” I said, ignoring the air-sucking way my stomach contracted again when I heard myself say “was.”

  “Were you close to him and his wife, Mrs. Estevez?”

  “No. No. Not really.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Nothing,” I said too quickly, shrugging my shoulders like a thirteen-year-old responding “I dunno” when asked, “Whose cigarettes are these?”

  “Really?” he asked with new interest.

  “I didn’t know him well. Didn’t know them well. At all. Didn’t know them—”

  “Right, but, they were your tenants for years. You must know something about them.”

  “They have a bookstore.”

  “Did they get along?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean did they get along.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you?”

  “Me?” I said, recognizing the creeping warmth of red on my face before it got there.

  “Yeah, were you close to them? Did you ever drop in for dinner? That kind of thing.”

  He waited.

  “We got along. All of us. Them. They. Me. Us.”

  “And they got along, you say?”

  “I said I guessed.”

  “Yes, you did. You did say you guessed,” he said, looking into my eyes with a new squint. “Do you know if he had any enemies, someone who wished him harm?”

  I knew of one person who’d wished him harm last night.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “One of your neighbors found him in the park. There was blood on his forehead, probably a concussion. Could’ve happened if he fell over after cardiac arrest, but we can’t be sure, so we’re treating it as a suspicious death for now,” he said, more to himself than to me. Then he seemed to remember I was there, and added, “We don’t really know yet. Could be any number of things.”

  All this he said as importantly and unemotionally as a headwaiter reciting a new menu of house specialties.

  “Not cardiac arrest,” I said, the image of him doubling over in pain doing an instant replay in my head.

  “Why not?”

  “He was, you know, he was healthy,” I said, trying not to cry as I thought of Hector trying to breathe, caught off guard for once. Had he realized he was dying? Had he had time to open his eyes in shock, unwilling? What had he been doing in the park? Oh God, maybe he’d gone to the park to think or to reread my letter without his wife asking what he was reading. Maybe he’d tripped on something and hit his head and died from the impact.

  “Well, one never knows,” he said.

  “And his wife?” I asked, thinking of Olivia, imagining her reaction when they told her and feeling sorrier for her than I’d ever felt during the time I’d seen fit to sleep with her husband under her very roof of sorts.

  “She’s catatonic, hasn’t spoken.”

  “Catatonic?” I said, wondering what What’s-His-Face’s notion of “catatonic” was, because I’d always thought Olivia had been born catatonic.

  “Yes. Why? Do you have reason to believe she’s responsible in any way?”

  “What? No! I’m just asking if she’s okay.”

  I had asked sincerely, truly wanting to know if she was all right, thinking, and not for the first time, that there’s this strange little connection “other women” have with the wives of their lovers. It’s not necessarily jealousy, although there’s always some of that, but more of a morbid curiosity mixed with imagined affinity, as if the wife were your sister from your father’s first marriage whom you’re not allowed to meet, but sometimes find yourself thinking you’d like to because you have someone in common, and probably the answer to many of each other’s questions.

  “Oh, well, she’s as okay as can be expected. If you remember anything that can help us to rule out any foul play—”

  I felt the laughter re-erupting immediately, my nerves threatening to abduct me for good.

  “Again, sorry. So sorry,” I finished with a barely audible squeak, wishing he’d go away so I could get ahold of myself, think, or cry, or do whatever I was suddenly desperate to be alone to do.

  But he stood there looking at me for a long time.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “Sometimes things like this just happen.”

  I looked away.

  “It’s hard, I know,” he persisted. “This job, you know—believing in God helps.”

  “No,” I said, anger surfacing as quickly as the laughter before it had. “Things like this don’t just happen, and God has nothing to do with it,” I told him, thinking that if God had done this, he would’ve at least made it grand, a fucking global war, a tie-dyed red sea. Instead, this had happened: a cheap, artless th
eater production Hector would have derided.

  “You seem angry,” he said.

  “Of course I’m angry. My tenant . . . is dead.”

  “Yes. I can see how much you cared about him,” said the officer now, looking at the space next to me, assessing its suitability as if planning to settle in.

  Sure enough, he took some gum out of his left pant pocket, offered me some with a motion, accepted my refusal with another motion, pulled up his pant legs, and sat next to me on the stoop as if it were a throne. He smoothed back his prematurely balding jet-black hair and crossed his hands, leaning back to rest them right on his emerging beer belly, all the time chewing his gum and nodding slowly like he knew everything.

  My heart sank. I wanted him to leave. I wanted to be alone to think about all I didn’t understand. Like the death itself. Or the fact that it might have been a crime like a mugging.

  Or that I had dreamed it, for once seeing something accurately before it actually happened, or maybe as it was happening.

  “I can see you’re distraught. I understand and, like I said, I’m sorry for your loss. I can also appreciate how worried you must be that some prowler may be lurking in your peaceful little neighborhood here, but I’m going to level with you about something, Mrs. Estevez. If this was murder, it doesn’t look like the work of a prowler to me.”

  “Miss,” I said because I felt stoned, drunk, and stupid, in addition to stunned. “And what do you mean?”

  “Well, because of the vomit, the head trauma, and the fact that his wallet is missing, robbery is a possibility. But there’s also the fact that he had no obvious reason to go to the park on a rainy night, and according to neighbors, never did, that the possible crime scene is surrounded by homes and businesses, yet nobody, including his own wife, or anyone else in your building, saw anything, despite the proximity of all your apartments to the crime scene.”

  “People were probably sleeping.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. In any case, there’ll be an autopsy, and we’re going to need all the cooperation we can get,” he finished, sliding his hand into the interior pocket of his jacket and handing me a card that smelled faintly of garlic. “If you see anyone suspicious, remember something, or think of anything that could help us, I want you to call me.”

  “I won’t. I mean, I will. But I don’t think, I don’t think I’ll remember anything more. I’ve already told you what I know,” I said, knowing how I sounded but unable to soften my tone.

  “Which is surprisingly little, given such a small building, such close proximity between front doors, all of your front windows facing the park,” he insisted.

  Well, I know an indirecta when I hear one, but I was silent, even as he continued to peer at me, scratching his head, letting me know with every little picky gesture that this was serious, possibly as serious as murder or manslaughter or whatever they called deaths that weren’t supposed to happen.

  “I see you were shopping this morning. Where did you shop?” he asked casually, trying to fool me into believing the question had just occurred to him.

  “At the hardware store on Twelfth.”

  “Ah, yes. I’ve shopped there myself. They make all kinds of keys there. Were you making new keys?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone see you go there?”

  “Many people.”

  “I only ask because maybe whoever you went with remembers seeing something when you left your apartment to go there.”

  “I went alone.”

  His cell phone started ringing, but he kept looking right at me.

  “Were you in your apartment last night?”

  “I was.”

  “But you didn’t hear anything.”

  I shook my head no, hoping he’d strangle himself with his own tail the way he was running around in circles.

  “Anyone with you who might have seen or heard something?” he said, and I realized he was just goading me now.

  “Yes. At least one person,” I said to goad him right back.

  His phone rang again, and he stood up and turned sideways to fish his cell phone out of his left pant pocket as if he were leaving.

  But then he silenced it and turned back around to face me, an unfortunate sign of intelligence revealing itself to me in his expression.

  “One more question, Ms. Estevez.”

  “Y dos también,” I said, which means something along the lines of “ask away.”

  “When was the last time you saw or spoke to the deceased, exact time and date please, and what exactly did you talk about?”

  Chapter 15

  It was close to six in the afternoon by the time they finished interviewing everyone and writing down our names, addresses, and telephone numbers. A section of the park had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, while upstairs, apartamento cuatro was silent, Olivia somewhere inside, left to mourn her husband all by herself.

  I walked into my own apartment and sat in my red corduroy armchair, unable to grasp what had happened. Hector couldn’t really be dead. I’d just talked to him last night. I’d even argued with him and he’d been fine. I tried to focus, to bring back the last thing he had said to me, his last glance. But all I remembered was how insanely angry I’d been and the stupid things I’d said that I’d never be able to take back. The worst of it was I’d put it all in writing, something my mother warned me a million times never to do. And hadn’t it been just like him to leave my “nice” breakup letter behind for me to throw away and take the nasty, sarcastic one—for him probably the interesting one, fascinated as he was by internal conflict and human motives.

  Wait a minute! The letter he took. Where was it? What had he done with it? The police would find it! Oh my God, Olivia would find it. Maybe she already had. Everyone would find out we’d been having an affair, I thought, beginning to hyperventilate. I had a vision of a group of people stoning me for carrying on with a tenant whose wife slept mere yards from me. My Dominican neighbors would say, “Oh, pero que mujer más sucia” (What a dirty woman) and my Puerto Rican neighbors would call me la chilla (aka skanky ho). And my friends, Iris, Gustavo, Doña Carmen, the Salvadoran lady who’d trusted me with her bank deposits for years, they’d say that I was a descarada, a woman without shame.

  But then I remembered Hector was gone and wished I had the choice of going through a little well-deserved embarrassment if it would reverse his death, or at least bring him back long enough for me to say good-bye, make sure he hadn’t suffered. But he was gone and there was nothing I could do.

  I sat up.

  Or was there?

  After a life of running away from the possibility of contact with the dead, from the future, even from the sounds of my own mind, I’d gone from being willingly blind to wanting to reclaim my clairvoyance twice in less than one week. Except that this time was so different. Before, I’d wanted to see out of jealousy and fear. It had been a weak want, stoked by ego alone. How different it was now. The want I felt then as I sat in my apartment was fierce, fearless, radical. It made me long to talk to the darkest of the dead again, to run from one to the next asking if they’d seen him.

  And what if I still could? I’d have to hurry. The longer I waited, the farther and denser his energy, I thought, imagining him walking away, his back to me, trench coat flapping against the backs of his legs, unable to hear me yelling for him to stop.

  I took several deep breaths, so deep that deep whooshing sounds came out of my throat, and focused on imagining that I heard the low rap on the back door, that I felt him sitting down next to me, heard his breath very close to me. I don’t remember being afraid, but only because I didn’t really believe I could still cross the figurative gate of death.

  If you want to know exactly what I did, I’ll tell you, though I doubt it will do you much good right away. The secret to talking to the dead is not in the method, which is so simple and well-known as to be boring. The key is in the mastery you acquire by practicing, and in the quality of y
our inner space, energy, and your belief that you can do it. But if you ever want to try it, this is what you do:

  1. Find a quiet place and sit or lie down. (I used to prefer sitting with my heels on the floor, where I could feel it vibrate as my energy changed and became lighter.)

  2. Clear your mind of thoughts and worries. (The best way to do this is to make a mental note of irrefutable good things before you begin and think about them to get yourself started.)

  3. Once you feel relaxed and at peace with the world (meaning okay with bad existing alongside the good because you trust in a natural order of things), construct a mental picture of the person you want to talk to.

  4. Think of him or her in life until you get a sense of connection. You’ll know when you have it because talking to the person will seem natural to you at that point. (Many people never lose that connection to those they were close to in life, able to talk to them every day as if they were still here.)

  5. Then and only then, ask them a question. You don’t have to do it out loud, unless it helps you stay focused. (And remember, do not try to deal with the energy of a dead person before you’ve protected yourself with love and positivity.)

  6. After you ask, you wait. Keep your vision of the person in your head. Do not put words in their mouth. Just smile and wait patiently.

  I don’t know how long I sat, focusing with all my might, before opening my eyes, a tenth of me expecting to feel him, the other ninety percent wishing I weren’t such a mediocre medium.

  But I was. I was a terrible clairvoyant who’d thrown her gift away and would now have to resign herself to never seeing, feeling, or hearing him again. The good thing is that after I forced myself to accept this, even saying it out loud, I was at least, at last, able to cry again, not knowing if I cried for the lover friend, not to be confused with a loving friend, who had taught me good and bad things in such a stylish and memorable way, or for the small, small, small man I’d become attached to despite the easy way he’d disengaged from me in the end.

  Or maybe I was crying for my own screwed-up psyche, still so incapable of dealing with something as mundane and common as death, even when the deceased was someone I had told to get out of my life just hours before.