by Carmen Amato
Emilia stepped to the breezeway doorway, a roll of toilet paper in one hand and the duct tape in the other. “CeCe,” she called softly. “Could you please come here?”
The maid appeared in the hallway a moment later. She took one look at Emilia and blanched.
“CeCe, what’s the matter?” Emilia asked.
CeCe’s her face crumpled and she began to sob.
Emilia’s stomach clenched with uncertainty. “CeCe, tell me what’s wrong.”
She steered the maid into the study and onto the sofa, then shut the door behind them.
“It was me,” CeCe said. “No more, I said, and then I hit him.”
Emilia left the toilet paper and duct tape on the desk and sat by CeCe. “What are you telling me, CeCe?”
“I hit him and he died.”
“Lt. Inocente?”
“Yes.”
Emilia put her arm around CeCe. “CeCe, what did you hit him with?”
“My fist.”
“CeCe, I know you didn’t do that.” The maid could no more have crushed Lt. Inocente’s head with her fist than she could have flown to the moon. “Why would you say this now?”
CeCe rocked on the sofa, in her own private hell. “I did it. I killed him.”
“Because of toilet paper and duct tape, CeCe?” Emilia asked quietly.
Emilia’s voice seemed to cut through the maid’s misery and she looked up. “Every few weeks el señor liked to . . . he liked to . . .” she faltered.
“He liked to have sex with you,” Emilia said as evenly as she could.
“Yes,” CeCe whispered. “He would wake me up and make me come in here. He would tape my mouth so I wouldn’t cry and make me hold the roll of toilet paper and then he would--.” Her face collapsed again and she cried silently.
“Do things,” Emilia whispered. She tightened her arm around CeCe’s shoulders but couldn’t control her own shaking. “Things that hurt.”
“He did things,” CeCe said. She drew in shaky breaths. “The tape would take my skin when he pulled it off.”
“How many times did he do this, CeCe?”
“Many times.” They were both speaking in whispers, huddled together on the sofa.
“Why didn’t you quit, CeCe?” Emilia asked. “No job is worth that.”
“He said . . . he said if I left he would . . . he would take Juliana. So I had to stay. La señora is never here.” CeCe looked up at Emilia. “Juliana is so small. Who would protect her if I left?”
“Madre de Dios,” Emilia swore. What the maid had gone through was horrific.
“But he lied.” CeCe gulped for air. “He lied and he took her anyway.”
“When was this?” Emilia asked but she already knew the answer.
“The night he died,” CeCe said.
Emilia kept her arm around the maid. “But you’re not strong enough to have killed Lt. Inocente, CeCe. He was a big man.”
CeCe sobbed anew.
Emilia was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering. “The guard at the marina said he saw Lt. Inocente that night. He said he saw him go out on the boat.”
CeCe kept crying, rocking back and forth as she sat there.
“The guard is your friend, isn’t he?” Emilia asked. “He lied for you.”
“Stop,” CeCe pleaded.
“Did your friend hit Lt. Inocente? He knew Lt. Inocente was hurting you and he hit him?”
“No!” CeCe shook her head, still rocking, close to hysteria.
Emilia covered her own eyes with her hand. Prade had said the murder weapon might have been rounded. Possibly the flashlight. Maybe something thicker. Emilia felt sick but she had to know. “Was it Juan Diego?” she asked softly. “Did he hit his father? With a baseball bat?”
The air went out of the maid and Emilia let her crying peter out. They sat in silence for a long time. Finally the maid coughed and could talk again. “El señor had gone out. Juliana went to sleep. Juan Diego stayed up to watch television. I went to bed. Sometime, I don’t know when, el señor came back and took Juliana and brought her here. Juan Diego heard noise and got up and saw his father--.” She sobbed once.
“He saw his father raping his sister,” Emilia supplied.
CeCe slumped against Emilia. “She couldn’t call out because he’d taped her mouth, too. Juan Diego shouted and tried to pull his father off. El señor was . . . was . . . in back of her. But Juan Diego couldn’t make his father stop. So he put a bag over his father’s head to make him suffocate and pass out.”
“When that didn’t work he hit his father with his bat.”
“Yes.”
Emilia felt the tears rolling down her own face. “Did you help him take the body to the boat?”
“Yes.” CeCe looked at Emilia with swollen, reddened eyes. The scars around her mouth stood out in sharp relief. “Juan Diego knew how to work the boat and he swam back after making it speed away.”
Except that the boat didn’t have enough gas in it to go very far, Emilia thought. “Your friend saw, didn’t he?”
“He was only trying to help me,’ CeCe whispered. “He knew about . . . the way el señor . . .” She couldn’t go on.
“And then both children went to school the next day,” Emilia said. “As if nothing had happened.”
“Yes.” CeCe’s voice was thin. “Juliana bled for a week and her mother never knew.”
Emilia fought against the bile in her throat and the heaving of her stomach. All this had taken place while Maria Teresa had been at her charity event and then at her lover’s house, drinking champagne and fucking the night away. Meanwhile her children--and the woman who’d gone through years of hell to protect them--lived out a nightmare.
“Does their mother know now?” Emilia asked.
“No.”
“CeCe, come with me,” Emilia heard herself say. If she stayed in Fausto Inocente’s office another minute she was going to vomit.
She led the way back into the main part of the apartment and knocked on the door that on her previous visit CeCe had identified as belonging to Juan Diego. He answered immediately and she opened the door.
The room was an homage to Mexican and norteamericano baseball. The walls were busy with colorful posters of baseball superstars. Shelves were loaded with the boy’s own trophies. Several fabric pennants hung from the ceiling.
Juan Diego had been sitting in a low-slung chair but he stood up when he saw Emilia in the doorway.
“I’m Detective Cruz,” Emilia said and showed him her badge. “We talked at your father’s funeral.”
“I know,” he said. His voice shook. “I know why you’re here.”
“You do?” Emilia asked.
“No,” CeCe said urgently. “I did it. Juan Diego, listen to me. I did it.”
“I hit my father.” The boy was shaky but didn’t waver or step backwards. “CeCe didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” Emilia said.
“I hit him to stop him doing it to my sister.” Juan Diego was crying now but stood tall. “She’s a baby and he did that to her. Taped her mouth shut and raped her.”
A blur of white got by Emilia and then Juliana was in the room, too, sobbing. She was a beautiful miniature of her mother, with honey-colored hair and an expensive white track suit.
Juan Diego picked her up, the same way he’d done at the funeral. “She’s my sister. I’m all she has. And CeCe.”
“Your mother . . .” Emilia couldn’t even complete her sentence. The emotion in the room was raw and all encompassing.
“What does she care?” Juan Diego looked up from Juliana, his face fierce with the need to protect his sister. “If she cared she would have been here. She should never have let him touch either of them.”
“What is going on?” Maria Teresa came out of the room she’d called her sitting room and frowned at the little crowd gathered in Juan Diego’s room.
“Señora,” Emilia said. Her chest hurt so much she could hardly breathe. It was taking ever
ything she had not to break down and sob, too.
Maria Teresa looked startled to see Emilia and it took her a moment to place her. “Detective Cruz, isn’t it?”
“We need to talk, señora,” Emilia said.
“Have you gotten my children upset again?” Maria Teresa demanded. “You’re like a witch who flies into our lives and destroys everything.”
“We are going to talk,” Emilia said loudly. She grabbed Maria Teresa by the shoulders and marched her into the hall. She heard Juan Diego’s door close behind them.
Once they were in the sitting room Maria Teresa struggled out of Emilia’s grip and tried to slap her. Emilia blocked the hand and when Maria Teresa tried again Emilia smacked her across the face, hard enough to send the woman to the floor.
Chapter 29
“This is beyond my experience, Emilia,” Padre Ricardo said.
Emilia shook her head. “That’s not the worst of it, Father.” She wasn’t crying but she felt the tears roll down her cheeks nonetheless. “He would come into the bathroom at work when I was there and he’d see me with my own roll of toilet paper. The one I kept in my desk because there wasn’t ever any in the bathroom. And . . . and . . . when he raped this woman and his own child he made them hold toilet paper, too.”
Padre Ricardo covered her hands with his. “This was not your fault, Emilia.”
Her own guilt rose up. “If I’d never become a detective, Father,” Emilia said chokingly. “If I hadn’t been so stubborn about using the detectives’ bathroom.”
“We deal with things as they are, Emilia,” Padre Ricardo said. “Not as we would have them be. This man’s soul was corrupt.”
“I can’t understand this.” Emilia’s throat felt scraped dry. “He raped his own daughter. When he had a wife and hookers. Lots of women. He didn’t need to do this.”
“This was your murder investigation, wasn’t it?”
“We actually thought he’d been killed by one of his drug smuggling partners,” Emilia said. She was in her dark uniform, her police hat with the shiny visor and gold trim on the priest’s kitchen table. “Because he’d tricked them out of money used to ransom a child. He substituted counterfeit money and did something with the real money. Probably paid his gambling debts with it.”
“He was involved in all that?” Padre Ricardo got them both a glass of juice from the small fridge in the rectory kitchen.
“We just didn’t have a way to prove it.” Emilia accepted the glass of juice with a shaky hand. Silvio hadn’t understood at first when she’d called him from the Costa Esmeralda building yesterday but then he’d come to the apartment, collected the children and deposited them with a shocked Rita Inocente who’d immediately called her husband at his office.
“What will you do now that you know the truth?”
“I don’t know, Father.” The juice was fresh and cold and helped clear her head. Besides herself and now the priest, only Silvio, Bruno, and Rita knew the truth. But Chief Salazar was expecting her report later today. “What good does it do to ruin this boy, Father? He’s 16, a golden child who wants to be a professional baseball player. A man before his time who was trying to protect his sister.”
“What choices do you have?”
Emilia listed the options that had been running through her head as she’d gotten ready for the funeral. What would Rico do? had drummed in the background the whole time. Which lie would he have told?
Padre Ricardo pressed his lips together in distress.
“The mayor had hinted that she’d give me a job,” Emilia said. She fingered her uniform hat, knowing she had to leave soon for the funeral. “Huge salary. Car and driver. If I made the city look good. Had an appointment with her people and everything. But they’re all so . . . so . . .” The right words wouldn’t come to mind. Corrupt? Grasping self-serving snakes? “I said I wasn’t interested. Besides, if I leave the police, who else will keep looking for las perdidas?”
“You have a strong heart, Emilia.” Padre Ricardo knew of the list and occasionally directed family members of the lost her way.
“I don’t know, Padre,” Emilia said miserably.
Padre Ricardo stood up. “Let us pray for strength, Emilia. And someday we’ll pray for the repose of this man’s soul.”
“But not today,” Emilia said.
Chapter 30
Emilia stepped to the witness box, warm in her stiff gray suit. The courtroom was in the city’s new judicial building. The walls were paneled in pale wood and there was a huge Mexican flag painted across one wall. The judge’s desk was a massive carved affair.
She’d been to a few inquests before. They were generally small, private affairs. The inquest for Lieutenant Fausto Inocente wasn’t small.
Maria Teresa was there, with her parents and two attorneys, studiously ignoring Bruno and Rita Inocente. Emilia knew that Juliana and Juan Diego, as well as CeCe, were still with them in the house high above Las Brisas.
Chief Salazar and Obregon were in the courtroom as well. In the past week both of their offices had made statements about the discovery of the smuggling route under the Maxitunnel that praised the heroic efforts of the police and mourned the deaths of officers Villahermosa, Fuentes, and Portillo. Knowing the official line didn’t keep Emilia from being speechless with anger when she’d read the words in the newspaper. As she promised to tell the truth she thought of using her testimony as a pulpit to shout out the guilt of the dead men.
But she wouldn’t; she’d do it just like they’d rehearsed. Antonio Prade would testify after Emilia. Substantive experts would be last.
Silvio was there but he was not scheduled to testify. His bruises had healed fast and he was his usual scowling self again, although for once he was wearing a suit and tie.
The court investigator was an attorney named Enrico Calves with a reputation for toughness and national-level political ambitions. He crossed the space between his desk and the witness box like a bull charging into the arena.
“Detective Cruz, I understand you were in charge of the investigation into the death of Lt. Fausto Inocente. Is this correct?”
“That is correct.”
“Can you give me the details of how you found the victim?”
“The victim was found in his own speedboat, off the beach owned by the Palacio Réal hotel on Punta Diamante. The boat was out of gas. Water Patrol towed the boat to the hotel marina.”
“At which time you and your partner Detective Portillo discovered the body.”
“The water patrol officers had already informed us via radio that there was a body on board.”
“Thank you for that clarification. Please tell us the conditions of the body as you saw them.”
“Fausto Inocente was face down in the cabin of his boat,” Emilia said, keeping any emotion out of her voice. “With a plastic bag over his head that was knotted tightly around his neck. The back of his head inside the plastic bag had suffered a . . . fracture. Blood from the head wound had soaked the shirt.” She purposely avoided saying the word victim.
Calves asked her a few more questions about the location and state of the boat and Emilia answered them briefly, not saying more than necessary.
“Now your investigation results,” Calves said presently. “Your investigation was very intense for approximately four weeks. Is that correct?”
“Approximately.”
“And please share with us, Detective, your findings as to the cause of death of Lt. Fausto Inocente.”
Emilia took a deep breath. “Our investigation concluded that this was a self-inflicted accident. The Acapulco police intend to take no further action in regard to this investigation.”
She saw Obregon give a start. Antonio Prade looked down and crossed his legs. Emilia caught Silvio’s eye. His expression didn’t change but she knew he was telling her to go on.
“The cause of death was blunt trauma.” Her voice was completely even and without strain.
Calves gestured to her. “P
lease detail your reasons for that conclusion, Detective.”
“Given the position of the body, the blood alcohol level, and the traces of semen found on his clothing, it would appear that Lt. Inocente used the plastic bag to restrict his wind while masturbating. A lack of oxygen is reported to enhance male pleasure.” Emilia’s heart pounded but the whole thing came out naturally, not as if she’d said it fifty times in front of her bedroom mirror. She went on. “We concluded that he was unable to control the boat while performing a sexual act. He fell and hit his head on a large metal flashlight which was found on the deck of the boat next to the body.”
“I see.” Calves folded his arms. “This would appear to be a simple deduction, Detective. Why did it take four weeks to arrive at this conclusion?”
“Given Lieutenant Inocente’s position in the police department,” Emilia said. “We wanted to rule out all other possibilities and make sure his death was not related to any cases. We ran down all the fingerprints found on the boat, all marina activity that night, questioned all the residents of his apartment building and those with access to the beach near the hotel where he was found. We also looked into his personal activities. Hobbies and associates.”
“This sounds like a thorough investigation,” Calvo said.
“It was.” Emilia pressed her hands together in an effort to hide her sweaty palms.
Calves nodded. “Thank you, Detective. You are to be commended and please accept my condolences on the recent deaths your department has suffered.”
“Thank you,” Emilia said.
“No other questions, Detective Cruz. You may step down.”
Emilia moved out of the witness box to the seat assigned to her.
Antonio Prade talked at length about blood alcohol levels while operating a powerboat and masturbation techniques practiced by risk takers, until Calves thanked him and allowed him to sit back down. A local meteorologist testified about rough seas on the night in question. The speedboat company representative was sworn in next.
The judge looked bored.
Calves looked as if this wasn’t worth his time. He dismissed the company representative and looked at a red-faced Maria Teresa. “Señora, our condolences to you and your family for the loss of your husband, a loyal official of our city government.” He addressed the judge. “No further comments.”
