Havana Noir (19 page)

Later, after the danger had passed, it wasn’t El Torpedo’s pitches that caught our attention, but his composure, the dignity with which he took the pitcher’s mound, serene, smiling. Azúcar returned to his seat at the beginning of the eighth inning.

“My condolences,” Luis said, and Azúcar told him to go to hell. Chewing on his cigar, eyeing his friend sideways, Luis was having as great a time as me, and he made fun of my earlier apprehensions. “I told you, Artur, those guys drink beer the way you and I drink water.”

My greatest happiness occurred on the way out of the stadium, when I heard Las Ratas fans praising El Torpedo.

“He’s a genius,” Luis declared.

“He’s a motherfucker,” Azúcar responded.

It was a great game, though it lacked any real significance for either team. Sometimes glory is wasted. I remember it now for other reasons.

At dawn the next day, it was my mother-in-law who first opened the front door. I was in the kitchen preparing coffee. She called me to come look: Two squad cars were parked in front of Pupy’s parents’ house and various cops and neighbors were standing on the porch, their faces worried. My motherin-law crossed the street. I remained at the front door, waiting for her. I saw her put her hands on her head, then hug and kiss Pupy’s sister and go into the house. When she came back, she looked like she’d been crying: Pupy had been found murdered in the women’s bathroom at the Latino. Guillermo was a suspect.

All day, news kept coming in waves that were often contradictory: The body had been found during the eighth inning and not at the end of the game; no, it was found during the ninth; actually, it was two hours before the lights were turned off at the stadium; she’d been strangled; she was stabbed; it’d been a devastating poison; the body was stuffed in a closet; it was left in the parking lot; it was found sitting in the bleachers and she looked like she’d fallen asleep; they’d found her because Guillermo had called the police; Guillermo had left the Latino without the slightest concern about his missing wife (“Were they actually married?” my mother-in-law asked, astonished).

Shortly after lunch, we saw the new widower arrive. I asked my mother-in-law to go back and get more information (she could always take some fresh coffee over, since the flow of visitors had not ceased all day long). But she was embarrassed. She thought I wasn’t dealing with Pupy’s death the way I should. She mentioned the newly motherless children, the pain her parents must be experiencing.

They released the body that night (that’s how they said it in cop speak, and that’s how the neighbors repeated it: Her possessions had been retained, examined, and now they were free—to satisfy the rituals of death? So as to actually have peace in death?) and though my mother-in-law insisted we go to the funeral home right away, I refused to go until the next day. The burial was slated for 3 in the afternoon and there would be plenty of time to offer condolences.

There wasn’t room for one more soul at the funeral home. There were two squad cars outside (the cops inside sweating through their heavy gray shirts, were they her husband’s old colleagues? Or were they still investigating the murder?). As soon as we went in, my mother-in-law made her way, as expected, to the viewing room where she found Pupy’s parents, children, and sister. She distributed kisses and approached the casket, peering at Pupy’s face, which I imagined pale and dark around the eyes (as if she hadn’t gotten sleep in the morgue). She strolled among the other neighbors huddled throughout the funeral home. I did not see her greet the widower, who was talking nonstop, surrounded by about a dozen people.

The haze in the funeral home caused by the smokers drove me outside, far from all the chattering, where I engaged in monosyllabic exchanges with acquaintances who went in and out. My mother-in-law came out now and then to share what she was hearing inside: It looked like it was true about the closet and the knifing, though the stab count varied between one and five (the theories about strangulation and poisoning, which had struck me as crazy, had disappeared). The issue of the time also appeared to be resolved: A little before 10, Pupy had left her seat to go to the bathroom. The game had ended at 10:40 and Guillermo didn’t think it was particularly strange at first that his wife hadn’t come back before the game’s last out. On nights like that, with the stadium full, the lines in the women’s bathrooms were long, interrupted now and again by employees in charge of flushing the toilets by forcing buckets of water into them.

I approached the chorus surrounding the widower: He was ashen, and he kept pausing to explain more than tell about the moment when he arrived at the women’s bathroom and found an employee closing the door. The woman had assured him that there was no one inside except an older woman, whose description didn’t fit the person Guillermo said he was looking for. He thought maybe Pupy had gone to the bathroom on the other side of the Latino (those near where we had been sitting), and he went around, avoiding the employees who’d started to put up gates and burglar bars, only to find that bathroom empty as well. He climbed the stairs to the stands, looked over to the area behind third base: There was no one there except the cleaning crew, which was sweeping. He went out to the streets, moving from one entrance to the other.

“I was just walking from here to there and there to here,” he said. Somebody from the chorus asked what he’d been thinking during his search. “You know, Pupy was kind of nutty,” he answered, “and since I’d moved from where we’d been sitting to go look for her, it occurred to me that maybe she’d gone ahead to the bus stop.”

According to the police, what made Guillermo a suspect was that he’d been found at home, fast asleep, when Pupy’s body was discovered in the closet in the third base women’s bathroom, surrounded by buckets and mops.

“They just don’t know how it happened,” the widower tried to explain. “How was I supposed to know she was dead?”

According to Guillermo’s own telling, the two of them had drunk an entire bottle of Patricruzado at the stadium just before the seventh inning. Azúcar, Luis, and I had finished off our rum in the ninth, with the last out.

“I was beat when I got home, I threw myself in bed, and I was dead to the world,” Guillermo said. The cops came knocking on the door around 2 in the morning. A stadium worker had found the body when she went looking for the acid to pour into the toilets after the general cleaning.

The mourners demanded that Guillermo enlighten them about possible motives, that he name suspects, that he repeat every word uttered by the police.

“You all knew Pupy,” he said, “and there was stuff, but she always tried to get along with everybody. As far as I’m concerned, they just got her mixed up with somebody else.”

I asked him if she’d left her seat before or after the seventh inning.

“During the walk,” he responded.

It was almost 11 o’clock in the morning. Sunday’s game started at 2 and the players from my team might still be hanging out in the hotel lobby. I asked my mother-in-law to wait for me. When I parked next to the Plaza de las Banderas, I saw the players’ bus leaving. A few foreigners waved goodbye from the sidewalk with a certain familiarity. I identified a few picture hats, a cap with a Marlins logo.

At five till 2, I entered the Latino. The stadium felt like a different place. The sun washed out the colors in the stands, the worn field sparkled, and a few kids ran in the aisles. The silence came not from awe but from abandonment. I found the place where the tourists had been seated the night before. Nobody was watching the access door now. I sat down in the very middle of the section by myself. The applause and whistles after good plays sounded like the echoes of a small town stadium. The players were closer, and more visibly tired; the uniforms dirty; the bats scarred. I left before the game had even reached its midway point. Las Ratas were ahead but nobody seemed to care, not even me.

A few weeks later, the radiator in my car began to leak; days later, it had become a stream that lined the walk from my garage. When it got to be a hose watering the garden, I remembered Azúcar. I found him on the basketball court in a bad mood: His team had just lost and the players were arguing about whose fault it was. He told me there were no radiators to be found, and then gave me an obscure address on the banks of the Almendares River where I could get a box of balloons and the sealant to repair the damage myself. The postseason had already begun and Santiago had destroyed its first rival in only three games. I told Azúcar that I was sure El Torpedo would take us through to the championship.

“That guy throws rocks,” he said. “That night was different, but anybody can have a game like that.” Then he laid out El Torpedo’s career statistics, which were, in fact, mediocre.

I mentioned that a neighbor of mine had been killed at the Latino.

“You’re neighbors with the late Pupy?” he asked. “Well, you
were
neighbors.” He grinned. “Hell, you still
are
—you didn’t move.” He stood there thinking. “Fuck, how would you say that?”

“I was neighbors with the late Pupy.”

He repeated it. “You were neighbors…” He wasn’t sure I was right.

“I guess she had to pay,” I said.

“She was out of her league,” he responded.

“How much did you lose?” I dared to ask.

He looked at me uncertainly. “Forget about that.”

Two months later, Pupy’s death was still in the shadows. Guillermo was brought in once or twice and Pupy’s mother told my mother-in-law that something had happened with the woman who cleaned the bathrooms. It was also being said that a woman’s wig and high heels had been found that night abandoned in the stands.

“Did they make him try on the shoes?” I asked her, trying to imagine that robust black guy in high heels and crowned by a brilliant blond wig. Were we now playing some kind of Cinderella game in reverse, with the police going door to door to see which of the men who had been at the Latino that night could fit into the shoes worn by the killer transvestite? My mother-in-law suggested I be more respectful.

The championship was about to end, my team looked invincible, and I invited Luis and Charo, his wife, for lunch at my house to watch the decisive game, being broadcast from Santiago. As my friends rang the bell, Pupy’s father, bent over an old cane that looked like a stick of wood, passed by on his morning walk from one corner to another.

“Poor man,” Luis said after I told him who it was.

I lit the coals and brought out the plate of chops marinated in sour orange, salt, and garlic.

I tried to make sure Pupy didn’t get dropped from the conversation. I reminded Luis of El Torpedo’s exploits. The chops, now resting over a slow fire, began to drip on the burning coals and release a smell of burning fat. I suggested to Luis that we make a game out of guessing Pupy’s killer.

He laughed. “Artur, you’re such a kidder…”

My mother-in-law brought out a tray of pork rinds, “so you have something with which to fill your mouths.” I asked her to join us. She preferred showing off her flowering rhododendrons to Charo, as well as the lilies that would dry up if the rains didn’t come soon.

I got a piece of paper and drew a few lines that could be the field and others that attempted to define the stands. Underneath, I made a mark suggesting a timeline. At the beginning I wrote in
twelve noon
.

Luis asked me if that was when I’d called him. “I don’t remember a thing, Artur.”

I knew I’d gotten his interest. On the timeline, I started scribbling in words to define actions: the moment I saw Pupy with El Torpedo, when we arrived at the Latino…And on the diagram of the stadium, I marked the hours in which these events occurred: A little before 10, Pupy gets up to go to the bathroom; minutes later, second base gets stolen from under El Torpedo and he allows a hit; then Azúcar leaves our side.

As soon as I wrote
Azúcar
, I could see Luis’s eyes getting worried.

“No, Artur, not Azúcar.”

I calmed him. I explained that his neighbor being a fan of Las Ratas did not, in my opinion, make him a killer. But later I did raise the topic more soberly: If in fact Azúcar had gotten up from his seat with the purpose of murdering Pupy, fate was sweeping by us (I only said “us” to implicate Luis) with such force that, in a way perhaps we didn’t yet understand, we might also be guilty.

Luis shot up, his hands in the air as if asking for a time out, and made his way to the pork rinds. He grabbed a fistful (some were hard, or “past their prime,” according to my mother-inlaw). “Let’s see, let’s see,” he said. “So Azúcar didn’t kill her?”

“Correct.” I needed him not to feel compelled to defend his friend.

“Well, then, go on.”

But Azúcar could certainly be useful: Why did he get up from his seat just as Las Ratas were threatening in the seventh inning?

Luis demurred—how could he possibly know?

I was as clear as I could be: Azúcar had gotten up to make a bet.

Luis narrowed his eyes, now two little lines on his face.

I told him about the conversation I’d had with his buddy when I went looking for the radiator.

Luis pulled a cigar from his pocket and asked me for a light. The flame on the stove was better than the burning coals on the grill.

“You want me to tell you the truth?” he asked on his way back from the kitchen, a little bit of malice in his voice. “That night, Azúcar lost a bundle.”

I liked the phrase, and it sounded natural in Luis’s voice: “a bundle.”

I called over to my mother-in-law and my wife, who was prepping the salad. “I’ve got it,” I said euphorically.

My mother-in-law told me to lower my voice: Behind the patio fence bobbed the heads of some of our neighbors. She always assumed their ears were on alert, spying on our conversations.

I explained the diagram and the timeline. On another sheet of paper, I scribbled my logic:

a) Someone whose identity we’d yet to discover contracted Pupy to seduce El Torpedo and somehow convince him to lose the game;

b) El Torpedo went to bed with Pupy (“Pupy slept with El Torpedo,” my wife clarifled) and agreed to drop the game. We can assume that the sex alone was not enough to convince him (Pupy was no longer young and, according to my wife and mother-in-law, had never been pretty). The pitcher was probably also offered a substantial amount of money.