Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  “And for María Paz also. But Gunnora is Gunnora. Gunnora, his daughter, his granddaughter, his house in the suburbs, his library, Paris, his Lamborghini, his rose garden . . . all these things exist in a whole different reality for him. A reality that he gives priority.”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. I was beginning to have another kind of image of him, even thinking he wasn’t like other lawyers . . .”

  “And you weren’t wrong, sir, that’s a fact. Think about it, he’ll only be gone for two weeks. It’s not like he’s deserted his causes forever. He’ll be back in two weeks, leading the crusade for María Paz again. And we’ll lose him again for Gunnora’s birthday or whenever they perform The Marriage of Figaro at La Scala in Milan.”

  “What happened in that trial, Buttons? That’s what I want to know.”

  “As do I, Mr. Rose, but I don’t know, I can swear to you. I can tell you what I personally witnessed that day, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

  The trial was set for 11:30 a.m. at the Bronx Criminal Division courthouse on East 161st Street, where Buttons arrived with his boss two hours beforehand. Pro Bono likes to be early; he’s not one to risk racing against the clock. Neither Pro Bono nor Buttons had eaten breakfast, so they went down to the cafeteria.

  Pro Bono picked up copies of the daily papers on the way, and ordered coffee, a fruit bowl, and a muffin. Buttons had a slice of pizza and a soda. They sat at a table away from the others and ate in silence. The boss didn’t like to chat or be distracted in the hours before a trial. He needed to focus. They exchanged at most a few words, from what Buttons recalled. Pro Bono told him he had had a good night’s sleep, that he was refreshed and rested. He added that the duel that morning would be unto death, but that he was confident it was winnable. Buttons was somewhat more skeptical, but in general he agreed. The evidence against María Paz was very weak. And then they parted. Buttons had other things to take care of that morning, and he left Pro Bono there reading the newspapers. María Paz had not yet arrived at that point, but nothing to worry about. There was plenty of time.

  “And that’s it,” Buttons said.

  “Not much,” Rose responded.

  “Not much at all, really. But that’s all I know about it. I saw the boss again that afternoon in the office. That’s when he told me that María Paz had never shown up. He was as befuddled about it as I was. We didn’t have a clue what had happened.”

  “And you never saw her again?”

  “To this day.”

  “It’s so strange, her whole story. Unbelievable, even. You can say she actually escaped from Manninpox. Well, with the clamp and all, but still. In the end, she escaped . . .”

  “True, you can say that,” Buttons said. “But, you know, from the moment she missed her trial she became a fugitive from justice, and that unleashed the state police, the FBI, Interpol because she’s a foreigner, the DEA because she’s Colombian, and the CIA to come after her. Not to mention the famished, unscrupulous packs of bounty hunters. And that’s supposing she was still alive, of course. Do you know how many prisoners have escaped from American prisons since 2001? A mere twenty-seven. That’s it. And of those twenty-seven, you know how many were recaptured?”

  “No idea.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Twelve?”

  “Twenty-six. Out of twenty-seven. That means that during the entire decade, one prisoner successfully escaped.”

  “Two with María Paz, if we count this as an escape,” Rose said, toasting with his beer.

  “The boss asked me to conduct an investigation,” Buttons said, finishing his meal and tossing a last piece of burger to one of the dogs.

  “No!” Rose screamed. “Don’t feed them human food. They’re trained to eat only from their dishes. You’ll spoil them.”

  “Did you hear what I said? The boss asked me to conduct an investigation.”

  “And?”

  “I found out some things. Unpleasant. About the death of your son.”

  “The authorities that investigated the incident said it was a traffic accident. Open-and-shut case.”

  “They’re part of the bureaucracy, they don’t care. But I think I came across something.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” Rose said, even though he had been living the past few weeks unable to free himself from anything having to do with the death of Cleve, looking for any shred of evidence that would help him understand the unfathomable and irreversible fact of what had happened. Yet he shut his eyes tight and turned the other way, terrified, each time he came upon something concrete. “You have to understand. It’s just too much to take for one day. For the moment. I’m taking the dogs out. Make yourself at home, Buttons,” Rose said on his way out. He rested for a while on the porch, petting the dogs and trying not to think about anything. Skunko lay at his feet, Dix bit the hem of his jacket, and Otto scratched behind an ear. Why is this dog scratching himself so much? Rose thought. Not that ear infection again, I hope. He wondered if his desire to disconnect was the result of the Effexor he had just taken.

  “When are we going to talk about the death of your son?” Buttons asked later that night as he built a fire. He didn’t have a car to drive back to the city, so he accepted Rose’s invitation to stay.

  “I ran to the morgue when they called me to identify the body,” Rose said. “I prayed the whole way there. Let it not be him, let it not be him, still convinced it couldn’t be Cleve. And in a manner I had been right, that dead person wasn’t Cleve. He was so disfigured, so still. That couldn’t be my boy, my Cleve, my only son, that destroyed wounded body. But all it took was a second look to make clear that it was him, in spite of the grotesque, wounded face, almost unrecognizable, but there was the lightning-bolt scar in the middle of his forehead. That was all that was really left of him. Afterward, they couldn’t pull me away from him. They would have to shut the place down, or go home, or put away the bodies, whatever it took, but I wasn’t going to walk away from Cleve. At some point, Edith appeared, not exactly sure when. A few years before, she and Ned had returned from Sri Lanka and settled down in Chicago. That’s where he was going. He wanted to be at his mother and Ned’s anniversary celebration. I don’t know the years, not sure if they ever officially married, well, no, they couldn’t have, because Edith and I never got around to getting divorced. There he was right in front of me, Cleve, my son, covered in a shroud. Edith was on his right, and I was on his left. I should tell you this, Buttons, just to make it clear. There were three dead people in that room. You may notice that I walk, and work, and even enjoy a hamburger and a beer, just like a normal person, but it means nothing. It became very clear to me at the cemetery, when Edith and I were finally able to look into each other’s eyes; we both knew that three people were being buried. That was my last stop, what’s happened since is of no matter, it has become all about enduring and letting time pass. And taking care of my dogs, they need me. Actually, what followed afterward was the guilt, mountains of guilt, or remorse, of beating myself to a pulp for allowing it to happen. An insane guilt, you know. The shrink even prescribed some pills, so I wouldn’t go off the deep edge permanently.”

  “Do you want to tell me about that?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have all night.”

  Rose had no idea where to start. Maybe on the day Cleve, when he was ten, had leaped into an empty pool after his parents had lost him. Apparently, he had jumped even though he was fully aware it was empty. He dislocated his shoulder, broke an arm, and split his forehead open when it smashed into the floor of the pool. You couldn’t really say this was a child who had just tried to commit suicide; the pool wasn’t deep enough for that, even a kid his age would have known that. But it had been a call for attention that alerted his parents that they had a very sensitive child, one much more vulnerable than they had imagined. F
rom that day, the Z on the child’s forehead was proof that in their dysfunctional family there was a weak link that would snap if too much force were applied. Years later, when Cleve, already an adult, made the decision to go live with his father in the Catskills, Rose was clear about the fact that he had taken on a humongous responsibility, which came to a climax with their feelings about the motorcycle. For Cleve’s generation, a motorcycle was simply a means of transportation, good times, hot women, and, with any luck, sex here and there. To Rose, on the other hand, the very word “motorcycle” spoke of extreme danger, risking one’s life, a guaranteed accident on wheels, or any such parental hysteria. And he warned and warned his son about all this till his breath ran out, and this led to huge fights and chilled relations between them, something that was constant from the day that Cleve showed up at the house with that Yamaha to the day he died, on that very day they had fought about it.

  “It was a monster with four cylinders, four carburetors, and four cylinder heads,” Rose informed Buttons. “It guzzled gasoline like some rabid dog and it was unbeatable on the road but almost impossible to handle in an emergency situation because it was so long and heavy with a high center of gravity. Every single day I admonished him about it. But he would admit to none of these flaws, he worshipped the thing, was madly in love with it. That Yamaha had him under a spell. He was always cleaning it, hugging it, and structured his days around checking the air filter, carburetors, oil, gauges. He spent a fortune using only premium gasoline. It was blind love, a total understanding between man and machine. So put yourself in my position. My most important job in the world was to stop Cleve from repeating what he had attempted ten years before. A pool then, a motorcycle now. The only thing I had to do was prevent that. I failed. No other way to put it.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Rose. You can’t torture yourself like that. If it were only so simple. Like I said, I did some investigating. Cleve died on a secondary road that ran parallel to I-80. It was raining that afternoon, and he was about an hour and a half away from Chica—”

  “I’m very well aware of all that,” Rose cut him off. “It was raining and Cleve lost control of his bike and ran completely off the road.”

  “I was told your son was a very experienced driver who would have known how to deal with water from the sky. The thing is that it’s not certain if the accident happened because the pavement was slick or because he was run off. Think about it, he could have even lost control of the bike as he was trying to lose a pursuer. He might have noticed that someone was following him,” Buttons said. “But it’s impossible to know for sure because there were no witnesses, no radar guns, no criminal investigation. The only two entities involved in the case after the accident were the highway patrol and the paramedics, and the autopsy concluded that it was an immediate death due to the blunt trauma caused after having lost control of the motorcycle because of a combination of the excessive speed and the wet road. It is well known that rain greatly increases the chances of a rider losing control of a motorcycle, so they don’t usually think twice about assigning blame in such cases, and they are almost always ruled accidents. In Cleve’s case, they didn’t tape off the area or preserve the integrity of the crime scene; they stepped all over the ground, littered it with cigarette butts, and decided to forgo tests without even considering connections . . . because it was never considered a criminal investigation.”

  “There was no crime. And stop chewing on that button, it makes an irritating noise.”

  “Not a problem,” Buttons said, spitting out the button. “They did not follow guidelines with regard to keeping the scene, but they took pictures, lots of pictures. I downloaded them to my Mac. Do you want to take a look? Maybe you should have a drink first. Are you ready? Look at this one. You can see the body exactly as it was found. There are cuts where he was struck by the thorns.”

  “Of course he was cut by the thorns,” Rose said, barely looking at the images on the screen. “I’m going to beg something of you, Buttons, don’t make me relive these events if you don’t have something worthwhile to add.”

  “Fair enough, so let’s move slowly. Look at this one; Cleve’s not wearing his helmet, it rolled somewhere below.”

  “Why are you torturing me with this nonsense? He’s not wearing a helmet because it came off during the fall.”

  “Or someone took it off.”

  “For what purpose? Not to steal it, they left it right there. It came off; it’s not a very complicated mystery.”

  “It’s a great helmet. A half helmet with a full face shield of excellent quality and double straps into double buckles. You can see that if I magnify the image. One of these helmets doesn’t just come off, and your son was not one to ride with it unstrapped, especially if it was raining. I think, after the accident, somebody took the helmet off.”

  “He could have taken it off himself.” Rose clutched both hands to the side of his head. “If he didn’t die right away, he could have pulled it off. He always complained it was too tight.”

  “Possibly; there’s a lot we don’t know, too many things. But let’s go back to the thorn cuts. Look at this, on his forehead, there are nineteen little cuts, almost equidistant and almost in a straight line. And now take a look at the acacia branch right next to his body. You see how it’s bent? If we increase the magnification to three hundred, we can see that at some point that branch had both ends tied together.”

  “In a circle?”

  “Or a crown. And now look what happens when we use Photoshop,” Buttons said, moving the piece of the branch and putting over Cleve’s forehead on the screen. “You see it? The thorns of the branch are a precise match with the cuts. If we had that branch here, there would be blood on it.”

  “A crown of thorns,” Rose, who had grown very pale, said.

  “Are you okay, sir? I’m sorry, breathe, lie down. Wait up, I think I should get you that drink after all,” Buttons said, and when he returned with two whiskeys, Rose had gotten up. He was no longer faint and the concerned expression on his face had vanished. Unlike before, he seemed frighteningly calm.

  “Let me ask you just a couple of questions. Just respond yes or no. My son did not kill himself in that accident, he was murdered.”

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  “Yes or no, Buttons.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they tortured him.”

  “I think they took off his helmet to press that crown of thorns on his head.”

  “Was he still alive?”

  “Impossible to know. But I would guess he wasn’t. The fall most likely killed him and the crown of thorns was later. A ritual or something, we’re still investigating. While you walked your dog, Mr. Rose, I took a walk around the property. I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I had to. I called Eagles’s widow. Her number was on the bags of dog food. She told me some things. And then I rummaged in the attic. The attic was Cleve’s room? That was pretty clear. I found some women’s clothes, some makeup.”

  “So what if my son had girlfriends, or friends, who came to visit?”

  “They had name tags on them that suggested they could have belonged to María Paz. But wait, that’s not all. Outside, in a clearing in the woods behind the house, there is a wooden cross. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you ever seen it? But maybe the point of it is to remain unseen, in fact, to go unnoticed, a makeshift cross. You could say that it is just two sticks tied together with twine. Well, I assumed it could be signaling a grave or something like that, and I dug around a bit. But all I found was this box, one of those that could be used for ashes, and also this.” Buttons reached out and handed Rose a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon soiled and eaten by fungus. “What I want you to be keenly aware of, Mr. Rose, is that danger is near, that it has been lurking right outside. Maybe it has even snuck into the house.”

  Rose scrutinized the bronze medal on one side an
d the other.

  “I think I know where we can find María Paz,” Rose said.

  8

  From María Paz’s Manuscript

  Here I am, Mr. Rose, out of Manninpox but still wandering through America, “saltando matones,” as they say. That was one of Bolivia’s many Colombian expressions, leaping over bramble patches. I have never talked like this, but as time passes, I am beginning to sound more and more like her. Saltando matones, indeed, because matones are exactly what I am trying to avoid, but not in the sense that it is used in the expression of brambles or thickets, but in the other sense of the word, which also means thugs and killers. In spite of it all, I still sit down to do my homework for you, as if to keep you updated, Mr. Rose. As if it is certain that I will no doubt see you again one day and turn all these pages in, so you can add them to the manuscript that I sent you from Manninpox. As you can see, I have not forgotten about you. It hasn’t been easy. To survive, I mean, since getting out of jail. I didn’t dare return to my apartment right away because of everything that had happened there. My whole being shrank at the mere thought of returning to that place, but I had to go look for Hero. I decided to make rounds in the neighborhood first, fearing what I would find there, or more to the point, who I would find there. I was not ready to come face-to-face with Sleepy Joe. I strolled by a few times first, getting closer and closer to our building, but not too close, to see if I could get news from someone. About Hero, you know. The first thing I had to do was figure out where my dog was. I sensed that people were pointing me out: There she goes, look, that’s the one they just let out of jail, the one who murdered her husband, who was fucking her brother-in-law, all that and who knows what other gossip. Fortunately, a neighbor did have news about Hero, good news. She told me that the cops had turned him over to an animal protection organization, so that perhaps I could get him back one day if I ever got out. Had they taken pity on Hero because he was lame? Maybe they had heard that he was a war hero, and this world is not so far gone that it’d let a decorated patriot starve to death.