“I’d just like to speak to him, to see if he can remember anything that might be helpful to me. It’s been a long time, I know. But he may remember something.”
“Ah.”
“I just want to ask him a few questions. See if he might be able to shed some light on the events.”
“I don’t think he will be able to help you.”
“Perhaps not, it’s been a long time. But I’d like to try.”
“Perhaps the man is busy. You know, his time is quite valuable.”
Now I was beginning to understand. “Of course,” I said. “Of course it is. And I’d be happy to compensate him for it.”
“The others who came, they paid for my time, as well.”
“The others?”
“From the newspapers.”
I wasn’t surprised that the papers had been there before me. I didn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that the articles had included no great revelation from their Mexican investigation. On the one hand, I was relieved for the sake of Lilly’s privacy. On the other, I had hopes of finding something new, something that would exonerate Lilly. If they’d been here before me and found nothing, that didn’t bode well for my chances.
The captain stared at me blandly, waiting.
“Of course, I’ll be happy to compensate you, as well.” I reached into my wallet but the man held up his hand.
He shot a furtive glance at his colleague. She was staring off into space, giving a near perfect simulacrum of someone not paying attention to the goings-on around her. After reassuring himself of her silence, the captain said, “A fee of one hundred dollars is customary in these situations.”
“Of course, how utterly reasonable,” I said, smiling falsely, and handed him the money.
He returned my grin with one equally genuine, “The man you seek is Eduardo Cordoba. I will give you his address and notify him that you seek an audience.”
Seek an audience?
“Thank you so much,” I said. “What is your name, sir? So that I can tell him who sent me?”
“Captain Eduardo Cordoba.”
“No, your name.”
“That is my name. The man you seek is my father.”
Twenty-seven
EDUARDO Cordoba, Senior, sat in an old, faded armchair in his garden. He was a big man, with a vast expanse of belly against which the suspenders holding up his pants strained like guy wires keeping a basket attached to a hot-air balloon. He wore a stained and frayed Panama hat, and had the same mustache as his son’s, although his was yellowish white and stained with the coffee he was drinking when we arrived.
“Sit, my friends,” he said, indicating a pair of wooden chairs pushed against the pale pink adobe wall of the house. We hauled the chairs over to him and sat down. We’d been greeted at the door by an overweight young woman in a faded cotton dress and a food-spotted apron who had led us through the large house, past rooms full of ornate wooden furniture, and out to the garden. She had vanished as soon as we sat down, but soon returned, bearing a blue glass pitcher. She poured us each a tall glass of cold lemonade. She blushed at our thanks, and scuffed her way back into the house. Her feet were stuffed into ancient men’s bedroom slippers with broken backs that revealed the cracked skin of her heels. We sipped greedily at our drinks. It was cool in San Miguel, but the air was very dry and dusty.
The older Cordoba did not have the same facility with English as his son, so I conducted our conversation in Spanish. “We are interested, sir, in anything you remember about the death of the American woman, Trudy-Ann Nutt.”
He nodded, but didn’t reply.
I waited for a minute, and then I recognized his bland smile. It was identical to that of his son. I reached into my bag, pulled out my wallet, and removed one of the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills I’d withdrawn from the bank before we left Los Angeles. I handed it to the old man, who studied the bill, turning it over and holding it up to the light.
Finally, he nodded approvingly and said, “I’ll tell you what I told the other North Americans—the ones from the newspapers. The woman was killed by her daughter. A terrible accident.”
“What kind of an accident?”
“Shot. By her own daughter.”
“You were the investigating officer?” I asked.
He grunted, and took off his hat, fanning himself with the crumpled brim.
“Can you remember what you saw when you got there?”
“El Señor was sitting out in the courtyard on the stone bench. He had the little girl in his lap. He told us what happened.”
“In front of her?”
“Of course. She was in his lap.” He seemed impatient with my interruption. “The girl had her arms wrapped around El Señor’s neck. We could not pry her away. So we tried to talk to her there. I asked her questions, but nothing. No answer. She refused to speak. She never spoke, not once during the entire investigation. Not long after the shooting, they sent the girl home to North America. So we couldn’t ask her any more questions.”
“Did the Señor send her without your permission?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Permission? He didn’t need permission. The girl wasn’t under arrest. One day she was gone, and that was the end of that.”
I asked him questions about the scene, the location of the body, other witnesses. But he could remember nothing more, or at least would admit to no further memories.
Finally, I said, “Señor Cordoba, do you think it would have been possible for someone else to have committed the crime, and then blamed it on the little girl?”
“No,” he said firmly, waving away the very idea with his hand.
All in all, the man told me no more than I already knew. One thing seemed very clear. The investigation had been shoddy, at best. The police had spent a day or two cursorily interviewing the residents of the house and then closed the case, deeming it an accident.
As we prepared to leave, I asked the elder Cordoba one final thing: the names of the Mexican employees at the house. He looked positively bewildered at the query, and wrinkled his brow and stuck his lower lip out. Finally, after much thought, he said, “I think it was Felipe Acosta’s girl, Juana, who worked for them then. If there were others, I can’t remember.”
“Do you know where I can find Juana Acosta?” I asked.
He shrugged and shook his head. Then he rose creakily from his chair and walked across the courtyard. He disappeared into a door at the far end. Our hundred dollars’ worth of conversation was up.
“Juana has a store in the market,” a soft voice said in Spanish.
I turned to find the young woman who’d let us into the house.
“You know her?” I asked.
“She sells dresses in the central market. Confirmation dresses. Quinceñeros gowns. That kind of thing. She’s in the market. Most days. You’ll see the booth. It’s the biggest one.”
I smiled at her. Then I thought of something. “Did you tell this to the other North Americans who came here? The reporters?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t ask about her.”
I reached into my purse and pulled out another hundred-dollar bill. I pressed it into the woman’s hand, and she stared at it, her face flushed pink. “Mother of God,” she murmured, and then grabbed my hand and brought it to her lips. Mr. Cordoba obviously didn’t pay her very well.
“So, what happened in there?” Peter said, once we were standing back out on the street. His Spanish is limited; unless you’re talking guacamole and tortillas, he’s clueless. So I summarized my conversation with Cordoba.
“Not very helpful,” Peter said.
“Nope. But I did get the name of the maid who was there at the time.”
We decided to head right over to the market. We only had another day in San Miguel and couldn’t afford to waste time.
In the taxi, I turned to Peter. “Did that strike you as a rather fancy house for a police officer?” We’d walked through at least five rooms in the pink Colon
ial house, and there were many more than that. Each room had been bursting with furniture, none of which looked particularly inexpensive.
“I was looking through the open door facing out to the garden while you were talking, and I think I saw a big-screen TV in one room. But maybe he’s got a wealthy family or something,” Peter said.
“This is an intensely class-conscious society. I don’t think someone whose family had enough money for a home like that would be a cop.”
“Maybe he was well paid.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it. I bet mine wasn’t the first hundred-dollar bill he pocketed during the course of his career. Who knows, maybe he got a pile of them from Polaris Jones.”
Just then we arrived at the central market. I paid the driver and we picked our way past the outspread blankets of vendors whose wares consisted of various tourist kitsch—little dolls wearing traditional indigenous clothing, ashtrays and pots painted in vivid colors, beaded earrings and necklaces. I stopped at one blanket and crouched down to look at the rows of little green wooden turtles with bobbling heads. I couldn’t resist. I bought Ruby and Isaac each a handful of the tiny creatures.
We wandered deep into the market, past stall after stall of knock-off jeans and T-shirts, pens and flashlights, bright woven shopping bags with pictures of burros and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Tucked in between these stalls we found one that was unlike its neighbors. It was about twice the size of the others, and its wares weren’t hung over bars or heaped on tables like the rest. Racks of pastel dresses dripping in tulle, beading, and sequins were carefully arrayed in cabinets behind glass doors. The counters were glass boxes, revealing rows of white gloves, hair ribbons, and fluffy hats decorated with fabric flowers and beads. I fingered the white gown that hung on a headless mannequin in a corner of the store. The nylon was shiny and stiff. I’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a natural fiber in the place.
“Can I help you?” a voice said in thickly accented English.
A small woman stepped from behind the counter. In stark contrast to the dresses hanging around her, she wore a simple black skirt and a white blouse with just a touch of lace on her collar. A measuring tape hung around her neck, and a pencil poked out of the roll of black hair bobbing precariously at the top of her head. Her eyes were crinkled at the corners, as if she’d done a lot of smiling in her fifty-odd years. She was smiling at us now.
“You speak English?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Do you buy for yourself, or perhaps for your daughter?”
I looked again at the rows of fluffy marshmallow dresses Ruby would have killed to own. “How much are the confirmation gowns?” I asked.
“For what size?”
“A six-year-old girl.”
The woman pulled on the silver chain around her neck and a key ring appeared from deep in her cleavage. She unlocked one of the glass cases and pulled out four little piles of tulle and lace. One, in a white so creamy it looked almost peach-colored, had a bodice of pearls and little puffs for sleeves. It screamed Ruby Wyeth at the top of its lungs.
“This one,” I said.
She checked a little white tag hanging from the sleeve and named a price in pesos that I was astonished to realize translated to less than forty dollars.
“We’ll take it!” I said, and reached into my bag for the money. She carefully wrapped the dress in a black trash bag, flipping up the wire circles of the crinoline so that they lay flat. Then she took a pair of gloves and a tiara from behind the counter.
“These belongs to the dress,” she said.
“Wow,” Peter said. “Ruby is going to flip out.”
“You have only one daughter?” the woman asked.
“And a son,” I said.
“How old?”
“Almost four.”
“One moment,” she said. She ducked out of her stall, walked down the aisle, and turned into another stall at the end. In a moment, she was back, carrying another black garbage bag. She pulled out a miniature mariachi outfit, white with black piping. The sombrero was decorated with rows of pearls, similar to those on the dress.
“How much?” I asked.
“Same price.”
“We’ll take it.”
I handed her the money, and as she was wrapping up Isaac’s outfit, I said, “Is your name Juana Acosta?”
“De Suarez,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Juana Acosta de Suarez. My husband was Angel Suarez. He is dead. Last year.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
She shrugged. “He is a good man, my Angel. But I give him no children, so now I am alone.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“This is life,” she said. “Why you know my name?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m a friend of Lilly Green’s. Do you remember her? From thirty years ago?”
Juana had been straightening the rows of gloves in her display case, but her hands froze. She stared at me and her face softened. “Lilly? Lilita? You know her?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That is her, yes? The movie star? The one she has blond hair?”
“Yes, that’s her.”
“I know that that is Lilita. Not only because of the name. She looks the same. Just like when she was a little girl. Mi pequenita Lilly. Ay yai yai. Lilita. How is she? She remembers me?”
“She’s good,” I said. “She’s all right.”
“She sends you here to find me?”
“Not exactly. I got your name from Eduardo Cordoba.”
Her eyes narrowed. “From the police?”
“The father, not the son,” I said.
“Why he give you my name?”
“I asked him who was working in the house back then. Juana, I hope you can help me. Lilly might be in trouble. I’m trying to find out what happened to her mother. I think it could help her.”
“Pobrecita. Pobre Señora Trudy,” Juana whispered.
As soon as I’d mentioned Lilly’s name, Peter had begun easing his way out of the booth. He knew that Juana was more likely to talk without him there. He caught my eye and raised his eyebrows, motioning over his shoulder. I nodded and he melted away, leaving us alone.
“Were you there when she was killed?” I asked.
Juana’s chest rose as she heaved a sigh. She leaned on her elbows against the counter. “I am there, yes.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“They say Lilita play with the gun and shoot her mother.”
“And is that what happened?”
She frowned. “You try to help Lilita, yes?”
I nodded. “I’m her friend. Please tell me what happened. It’s important. For Lilly’s sake.”
“It is long time ago. Many many years. Thirty years!”
“Juana,” I said softly. “Lilly has spent her entire life believing that she killed her mother. Can you imagine what an awful thing that is to have to live with? Don’t you believe she has a right to know if she didn’t do it?”
Juana rubbed her forehead with one hand. She bobbed her head in a tiny nod. “Yes.”
“What do you think happened in that room?”
“I don’t know. All I know is this. Lilita could not kill Señora Trudy. She could not. I not believe it. I never believe it.”
“Why not?”
“She is by the fountain, plays with the little boy. With Jupé.” She pronounced it Hoo-pay. “I am washing clothes on the roof, and I hear their voices over the sound of the water. I hear them, right before I hear the gun. I hear Jupé say, ‘Where you going?’ and then I hear the gun.”
Lilly herself had remembered playing with Jupiter in the fountain. “Are you sure? Are you sure she was still in the courtyard when you heard the shot?”
“Yes. I think so. Jupé say, ‘Where you going?’ and then maybe a few seconds more and I hear the gun. Only one minute. No time for her to go to the room, find the gun, kill her mama.”
I leaned forward, excited. “Tell me everything that you remember from that day. Everything, no matter how small.”
Juana’s memory was as clear as could be expected, given the many years that had passed. She remembered little about the morning of the day that Trudy-Ann was killed. She did remember, though, fixing the children lunch and serving it to them out in the courtyard. She’d left them with their food and gone to do the washing.
“On the roof?” I asked.
“Yes. I do laundry on the roof. I have there a sink and strings for the clothes. I hear the children, and when I go to the side, I look into the courtyard and see them.”
Juana had been scrubbing sheets and listening to the radio. She was sure she heard the children’s voices beneath the sound of the music. She’d heard the sharp retort of the pistol and had dropped the sheet she was washing and run down the stairs. The courtyard was empty. She raced into the house, to Trudy-Ann’s room.
“What did you see?”
Juana trembled and hugged her arms close to her chest. “Jupé in the hallway, crying. I run past him and through the door.”
“Wait a second. Jupiter was there? Did he see what had happened?” Jupiter had claimed not to know how Trudy-Ann had died. Now, maybe that was true. Maybe he’d been too little to remember. But I doubted it. A memory like that seemed too traumatic to forget . . . unless it had been repressed. And you know what? I just wasn’t buying that anymore.
“I think Jupé no see nothing. He crying from the noise. There’s no time for him to see nothing.”
Maybe. “What did you see when you got into the room?” I asked.
“Lilita. She screams, ‘Mama, Mama.’ Her hands, they are red. Red with blood.”
“Who else was there?”
“Señor Artie, he there.”
“He was in the room when you got there?”
She wrinkled her brow. “Yes,” she said.
“What was he doing?”
“He holds her close to him. She is fighting him. Trying to get to her mama. She kick him, hit him. But he no let her go.”
“Did you see the body?”
Juana was crying now, fat tears that left trails in the thick paste of her makeup. She rubbed a ribbon of mucus away from her nose with the back of her hand. “Half of Señora Trudy on the bed, half on the floor. Her white dress—red all over here.” Juana motioned at her own chest. “So red. Her, what do you say, sleep dress? What she wears at night? It so wet with blood, I can see shape of her body, her breasts.” She swallowed hard, and for a moment I was afraid she would be sick. But she just inhaled sharply and said, “I take the girl. Drag her from the room. I remember I am so angry. Her father he do nothing. Nothing.”
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