Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Benefits?”

  “Twenty-three-year-old supermodel in waiting?” Nate said, bumping me with his hips, doing his eyebrows. “I mean, everybody knows rookies—female rookies—tend to fall for the first male with authority who pays them any attention…”

  “This is—” I said, unable even to find the right word. Bullshit wasn’t enough. “Richard didn’t steal me away, Nate.”

  “Not you specifically,” Nate said, “but the… coital opportunities you present to a man of Detective Madrone’s unique carriage and… proclivities…”

  “He likes Mexican women?” I said, my whole face drawing up in disgust. Smelling his finger on my lip again.

  “Likes to pay for his taco meat…” Nate said, “yeah,” his words clipped like English wasn’t his first language. He leaned far away from me then, grinning large. I followed him with the light right in his eyes. I hadn’t heard ‘taco meat’ since high school, probably.

  “Richard didn’t steal me away, though,” I said. “They made him—pick me. Pick someone. It could have been any of us.”

  “Had to twist his arm, like?” Nate said, then, in falsetto, “Hundred extra dollars a month, sir, and if you play your cards right, this one’ll even let you move in with—”

  “It was disciplinary action on him or some shit,” I said, cutting him off. “I was punishment. Training me was the deal he made. He told me. He’s not getting the money.”

  “As far as you know,” Nate added.

  I nodded. As far as I knew. And maybe bullshit was the right word for all of this: because Richard had chosen me instead of whatever other punishment the department had lined up for him, for whatever he’d done, not only did all my classmates think I thought I was better than them now, but I was a non-person now to the lead detective on my first unofficial homicide. A walking talking reminder of what might have been. Less than that, even: an intruder. Taco meat.

  Perfect.

  Forty minutes later, Nate and I had twelve petals and fragments of more, each bagged and tagged. More in the P-trap, for sure. Nobody offered us any coffee.

  “Take your shades off then,” Nate said, as if he’d been trying to figure out just how to say it. Like we’d been talking about this all along. “So I can see your eyes,” he added.

  “You my commanding officer?”

  He turned away.

  It wasn’t the first time Richard had hit me. The only difference was, last night, I’d told him it was the last time.

  Not that it was any of Nate’s business.

  Any anyway, the ibuprofen was keeping most of the swelling down. With makeup, it’d be hard to even see in a day or two.

  “Who’s going to D.I., you think?” I asked.

  Nate shrugged, knew I was just trying to change the subject. He was dusting the vase the roses had come in. It was just another thing the CSU crew could write him up for, but he didn’t care. What, were they going to bust him down from lab assistant to lab custodian?

  I just watched, didn’t need to get written up.

  And there weren’t any prints anyway. Not even a smudge.

  More than anything, that suggested Nate was right about means of entry. Because you don’t wipe down vases in your own home.

  “Think I’ll get credit for it?” Nate asked, smiling like he knew the answer.

  I started to say something then stopped: the kitchen light had dimmed. The floor, shaking.

  I pushed off the counter with my hips.

  “They’re here…” Nate trailed out, pursing his lips, nodding to the front of the house.

  The CSU crew. They were using the garage, the electric opener drawing enough juice that it pulled everything in the house down a few amps.

  “Our cue,” Nate said, opening the screen door into the backyard again.

  I followed, stepped off the concrete block of the porch. Could see Juarez from it, like a pale reflection.

  “This is bullshit,” Nate said.

  “Just figuring that one out?”

  “I mean you,” he said. “You and Ricky Ricardo.”

  “Nate—”

  “Marta.”

  “Not now, please.”

  “Then when?”

  This time I turned away from him and stayed that way. Leaning against the back of the house was a half-painted door. Probably from when Jennifer Rice had moved in for a month or two, four years ago. It was the way things tended to happen in Segundo.

  Now, in the closet, her eyes were clouded with potassium. Like glaucoma. All the blood in her body congealed in her lower extremities.

  “How long had she been there, you think?” I asked Nate.

  “Four days,” he said. “Maybe five. It’s been hot, dry. Unseasonable, I mean.”

  I laughed, because he was joking: it was El Paso, in July.

  “You shouldn’t let him—hit you, anyways,” Nate said.

  I didn’t answer, didn’t look at him.

  “I have to say it,” he said.

  “Fuck you, Nate,” I told him, with as much affection as I could.

  He shrugged, spun on his left heel, and then one of the officers was holding the screen door open beside us, his eyebrows raised.

  “You were the first ones here, right?” he said.

  “Besides all of you,” Nate said.

  The officer just stared at him, held the door open more. “Need you to sign something, I don’t know.”

  Nate looked back to me, shrugged, and I followed him in.

  Because there was yellow tape across the doorway from the kitchen to the living room—the staging room of this crime scene—the officer led us around through the hall. We lagged behind some, of course. The door of the closet Jennifer Rice was in had been delicately removed from its hinges, so she could be properly photographed. In the silver light of the flashes she looked even more delicate than before. More fragile.

  Just past her, the bathroom was leaking ultraviolet light.

  Nate stopped in the doorway, lifted his chin to one of the techs.

  I stepped in beside him, had to narrow my eyes: the whole room was blue. Not just spots or spatter, where the Luminol was reacting with blood, but everywhere.

  “She explode in here or what?” Nate said, smiling.

  “Something like that,” the closer of the two techs said, and then the officer was looking back, dragging us on.

  The clipboard he gave us was clear, had a pen strung to it.

  Nate leaned over, signing and dating, then passed the clipboard to me. Automatically, I turned the page, for mine, Nate talking to himself beside me: “…bleach.”

  “What?” I said, only half with him.

  He was looking back to the bathroom.

  “Bleach,” he said, with more certainty. “Nobody’s got that much blood. Her killer, whoever, he rubbed the whole bathroom down with bleach. It reacts to Luminol the same way blood does.”

  I nodded, scanned the page for the line I was supposed to sign. Couldn’t find it.

  “…then that’s where she—where he killed her,” Nate was saying, then, finally, focusing back down on me, the form I was obviously lost on.

  “Not that,” he said, taking it, “that’s just the coroner request—” but then stopped. “Shit,” he said, rubbing his mouth hard with the side of his pen hand.

  “What?” I said, trying to guide the board back over.

  He let me, his thumb on the line Madrone had already filled in.

  “Your other boyfriend,” he said, his grin wide, playful.

  The medical examiner’s representative for the day was Hector Davidson.

  “He’s still suspended though,” I said.

  Nate shrugged, said, “Somebody should tell him, I guess.”

  I turned away, scanning the room.

  “And he’s not my boyfriend either,” I said, just loud enough for Nate.

  Hector Davidson was in a dark blue coroner’s windbreaker on the other side of one of the news vans, looking at me, smiling in the w
ay that only Mexican men who are secretly still eleven can smile.

  I shook my head at him, looked away so nobody would see anything in my face.

  He stepped out, around the deep bumper.

  “Hola, Martina,” he said, hands deep in his tan pockets, cholo style. The way he was walking, too, leading with his feet like he was wearing Stacies, wanted everyone to know. His coroner jacket hanging off the back of his shoulders, so the bottom hem bunched against his wrists. It was all supposed to distract from the acne he’d carried with him out of high school. The red, inflamed scars around his mouth from it, that he could never quite stop touching.

  “You’re suspended,” I said, my lips thin like I didn’t want him here.

  “Not anymore,” he said, and flared his eyes. “Not today.”

  “Trevana’s fishing?”

  Mitch Trevana was the deputy coroner—Davidson’s boss, my old professor.

  “Trevana’s always fishing,” he said.

  “And there’s nobody else?”

  “He trusts me, know? You should try it.”

  “They called you in just for this, though?”

  “Shit—just?”

  I stepped closer, used my index finger to pull the skin under his eye down. Without thinking, remembering, I lowered my sunglasses to see better. Shook my head about what I saw.

  “You’re stoned, Hector.”

  He shrugged, nodded to my bad eye. “You’re one to talk there, ’tina.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. Didn’t say anything.

  His ’tina was the way he had of making Richard my Ike; he’d done it before, when Richard had first started finding me down in the morgue, my shift over, Davidson’s just starting. What I was doing was teaching him the Spanish he should have got in the cradle, the womb, before he got adopted out to white hippies—the Davidsons, Berry and Marcia, like a sitcom. I’d helped smuggle a nickel bag into the nursing home for them once, barely enough to roll one loose joint. It was mostly sage and oregano.

  The reason Davidson was suspended, though. It was my fault. I’d been explaining mija to him one night, over one of Trevana’s dissection tables. How it was a compound word, the mi just possessive—mine—the ja the last part of hija. Girl, daughter. How it was a short word now because Mexican fathers were perezosos, lazy asses, kept dropping a syllable when they said mi hija. Mijita was the same, just a little more tender: mi plus hijita, or jovencita. My little girl.

  “Hijita’s a word, really?” Davidson had asked, the morgue fluorescents washing his skin white, almost.

  I shrugged, wasn’t sure. My father’d called me that anyway.

  “What about mijo?” he asked then, quieter, trying to look away before I could see the real question.

  He wasn’t fast enough, though.

  “I’m a girl,” I said. “Mija.”

  “But me,” he said, touching his mouth, catching himself doing it, “what am I?”

  What he was saying was that no one had ever called him that—mijo. That it hadn’t been in the Davidsons’ freeze-dried vocabulary. And it got to me in a way I didn’t know I could be got to. I reached across the table, my hand to the side of his face, and said it to him—“mijito”—then found my mouth on his, his mouth on mine.

  We pulled away because Trevana opened the door at the bottom of the winding stairs that led to the morgue. That last door before the morgue. And that was that, until, four days later, Richard was at the door of my house, to pick me up for work.

  Instead of his usual fake Hey, he held up a black VHS his friends in the security box had slipped him. His hand around the tape was red and torn at the knuckles, from the talk he’d had with Davidson. I didn’t know that then, though, that he’d found Davidson in a hallway, between cameras. That Trevana had patched him up, snuck him out through the parking garage. All I knew when he walked in that morning was the tape. It was a copy of the security recording of me and Davidson in the morgue, my hand at the base of his skull, pulling his mouth into mine. With no sound the moment was base, pornographic.

  Richard let it play until our mouths had been touching for maybe four seconds, then ejected it, set it on top of the VCR, daring me to deny it. Waiting for me to explain.

  I couldn’t then, and still couldn’t, nearly a month later.

  We’d just kissed, that once. That was my only defense, my only explanation: that it hadn’t happened again. And that Davidson was more like a brother to me than a—anything else. It was probably why I let Richard move in when he got kicked out of his apartment: to prove it was him I wanted, not Davidson.

  Instead of punishing me for it, of course, Richard just told me over dinner one night—a Monday, Macho Monday—that Trevana’s assistant had been suspended, wasn’t even going to make it to his six-month eval, probably.

  I’d looked up to him, over my burrito paper.

  “Suspended?”

  Richard shrugged, filled his mouth, waited to swallow until saying it was impropriety with the dead or some shit, he didn’t really know the gory details.

  I stared at him, didn’t eat anything else, and didn’t let myself call Davidson to ask. Because the less we talked, the less Richard could do to him. But now here he was, in the field, six days before his four weeks were supposed to be up. It was the first time alone at a scene for both of us, each of our superiors AWOL.

  “Can you do this?” I said, watching his eyes instead of his mouth.

  He scrunched his nose like of course, but then shrugged too, a little boy again. Three years older than me, but younger too.

  I looked to Jennifer Rice’s house with him.

  “CSU can’t process her until you pronounce,” I told him.

  “Mu-ert-a,” he said, overdoing it, and I hit him on the shoulder, and he fake spun around from it.

  “Really,” I said. “If you mess it up, then everything’s screwed.”

  Davidson just looked at me, almost disappointed, and hooked his head for me to follow him to his leather bag. Trevana’s leather bag.

  “I thought coroners only carried those in movies,” I said.

  “Everything’s a movie for Mitch,” Davidson said, and unzipped it. I looked in. On top of all the equipment—thermometers, swabs, mirrors, measuring tapes, mini-recorder—was a fax of the proper procedure for a death investigator. Davidson had highlighted the important steps. I pulled the paper out, turned to the end—his report. It was still blank, all empty lines and body diagrams.

  “This is the important part,” he said, pointing to the bottom of the last page. It was where his signature went.

  I gave the papers back to him.

  “You know—” I started, then again, in Spanish: “Tú sabes que estoy apesadumbrada.”

  Davidson looked to the house, then back to me. Had to narrow his eyes to translate it out: “…you owe me?”

  “I’m sorry. Lo siento. For Richard. Whatever he did to you.” Davidson touched his ribs and bared his teeth, in memory maybe. I went on: “But yeah. I owe you. For whatever he did to get you suspend… to get you—these last four weeks.”

  Davidson shrugged, lifted his eyes to a point behind my right shoulder. A moving point.

  “Fan club,” he said, lifting his black bag, and I turned—a reporter I recognized from TV, approaching on slingback heels, her cameraman a blond giant—and when I turned back to Davidson, to tell him he didn’t want to be here, he already wasn’t.

  Like Nate, ten minutes earlier, a moth drawn back to the blue light of the bathroom.

  Like Richard, hours before that.

  Just as the reporter held her microphone to me, my cell phone vibrated.

  I held my hand up to the reporter long enough for the second ring, caller ID.

  It was Richard.

  I clicked the line open, held it up to my mouth like a walkie-talkie, the heel of my hand to my chin, and said it in the most even voice I had, that my battery was dead, then dial-toned him.

  The dick.

  The fight had
started at ten-thirty, twelve hours ago, the sky sparking with leftover catherine wheels, green cascades of flame. The news had just gone over. It was his seventh night living with me. Exactly. One week to create a world we could live in together. He’d just shown up the Friday before, three hours after dropping me off from work. His boxes in his car, his car in the driveway.

  “So?” I’d said.

  “Yeah,” he’d said back.

  He had a family a few moves behind him, but didn’t carry any pictures. All he ever said about the apartment complex he was leaving was that he was going to shoot somebody in the face if he had to sleep there even one more night.

  “So you’re not getting the deposit back?” I’d said.

  He smiled.

  The first couple of days it had been convenient, going to work together, coming home together. Not having to call to coordinate a place to meet. But then, as the week went on, it became a burden, going to work together, coming home together. Not getting to call to coordinate a place to meet—not getting to lie sometimes, that I couldn’t make it.

  I never realized how important dishonesty was to a relationship, not until I had no choice but to be honest.

  At night we watched the news. Just to find something to fight over. It didn’t take much.

  Last night it had been Channel 7, the new reporter Liz P., the way she’d said a Hispanic councilman’s name. Like she was from here, could make her Rs into Ds like that, then hardly even say them.

  I’d just smiled and looked away after Richard called her on it.

  “Or is that—is that right, Miss Marta?” he’d added, in what was supposed to be a child’s voice, a student’s voice. Davidson’s.

  I don’t know how he’d originally found out about the Spanish lessons but knew better than to ask, too. Didn’t want to hear his mocked-up version of Davidson, crying from the floor of the stairs that that’s all it was between me and him, language. Nothing else.

  I shrugged like I didn’t know if it was right, didn’t care either.

  The black VHS tape was still on top of the VCR, watching us.