Hot Sur (64 page)

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You were about to murder a man . . .”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Let me finish breaking it down for you. You asked me why I chose Monarch Mountain, and I told you the first reason. Second reason: I needed to keep María Paz distracted and clueless while I did my thing. More than once, she had told me she had always dreamed of going skiing, and I wanted to make sure that such a dream was fulfilled—so she would have at least one good memory of America before she left. Third reason: a guest is much safer and better protected in a five-star hotel than in some fleabag place by the side of the road.”

They checked into the best chalet available at the San Luis Ski Resort, a large Alpine hotel complete with cheese fondue and cuckoo clocks, fireplaces in the individual chalets, and yodeling and accordion performances on Saturday nights. A minibus shuttled guests to the slopes, which were fifteen minutes away. Lying on the bed of their room, there was a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and of the surrounding forest crisscrossed by paths, on which they could take strolls with Otto, Dix, and Skunko. So there, in that ersatz Alpine hideaway, María Paz and Rose bided their time and waited for the handover of money, which would take place at some unspecified time whenever Sleepy Joe arrived in Colorado from wherever he was coming.

“The hotel offered dog care,” Rose tells me. “A crucial detail because it allowed me to leave the dogs in good hands while I took care of my business.”

Rose rented a full set of ski gear, clothing, and accessories for María Paz, reserved a whole set of private classes with a personal instructor, and while she took her first tentative steps on the magical white carpet, surrounded by the children also learning, he watched from the deck of Los Amigos Bar, seated under the outdoor heater, sipping on a frosty mug of beer, and picking at a plate of chorizo quesadillas with red sauce, because although the hotel was Swiss, the cuisine of choice at the food lounges was purely American-Mex. (“How fake can you get?” Cleve would have snipped.)

“I had never seen María Paz so happy,” Rose tells me. “Those endless expanses, with her hair blowing in the wind, must have felt like the opposite side of the world compared to Manninpox.”

“And were you also feeling good?” I ask. “Had you abandoned plans to off Sleepy Joe?”

“No, I never said that. What happened was that once I had dealt with the practical technicalities of the situation, it was simply a matter of waiting.”

“But you must have been twisting yourself into knots with fears and scruples and doubts.”

“None of that. Not even a little bit, actually. More like an astonishing sense of peace, quite astonishing, as the editorials said after Mandra X had told reporters about experiencing a similar feeling right before she murdered her children.”

Rose is careful to stress that those days were quite peaceful for him. He read the papers, was endlessly amused by the antics of María Paz on the small hill with the other beginners, enjoyed every sip of his frosty beers. Today, a couple of years later, as I interview him in the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel in New York City, I ask him to elaborate on why he thinks he was overcome by this astonishing sense of peace, as he calls it, because it is both a general and hyperbolic assertion that I’m just not buying. He replies that it was simple: Sleepy Joe had to die, he would die, and Rose did not feel there was anything wrong with that at all. He felt only relief, as if the air had become milder. He even came to the conclusion that the most burdensome aspect of committing such an act was physical and not moral at all. When it came down to it, it was almost natural to kill another person, something that was almost inconsequential: a few days before, he would never have suspected this, so he felt it was some sort of revelation. Despite the cold, the Colorado skies were radiant. A splendid dome of the purest blue was suspended above him, and he says he remembers thinking, there on the deck facing the slopes, that if all people had to do was push a red button to eliminate anyone who annoyed them, the human race would have perished.

I try to follow his reasoning, transcribing every sentence in my notebook word for word, so as not to distort what he is saying. I’m paying a heavy price for acceding to his request not to use a recorder; my hand is numb and swelled from all the frantic scribbling. But I can’t stop now; I don’t want to miss a single word, not at this stage. We are moving into delicate ground with damning revelations, and although Rose knows that I will not use real names or compromising details in my book, he begins to grow more evasive and restless. His responses, which up to this point were plentiful and flowing, suddenly seem to come as if carefully measured from a dropper. I have to extract them from him with my journalistic forceps. It is almost as if we have decided to switch roles, because now he is asking questions and I am responding—a technique we settle upon so that he can say what he has to say without saying it.

“Let’s see,” I say, veering the conversation back to the proper topic. “You had decided kill a man, had found a method that you thought would be most effective, and it was as if your conscience had completely divorced itself from this matter. Is that a fair way to put it? But let’s leave that and move on to this method that you had settled upon as the most efficacious.

“I’m guessing you intended to shoot him at close range as soon as he showed up for the handover.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that. Like I said, the physical part is what can trip a person up. How in the world was I supposed to figure out where and when Wendy Mellons would meet Sleepy Joe? And even if I did figure it out, how would I get there without being noticed?”

“What about hidden in the trunk of her car . . .”

“I fantasized about that possibility at first. I played flawlessly edited films inside my head in which I surreptitiously snuck into her car, or I lay camouflaged among the piles of trash in Wendy Mellons’s backyard, until I leaped out like a superhero, Ming’s gun in hand, professionally spraying my target with bullets. I imagined dozens of variations of this, all equally infantile. Until I stopped messing around and settled on the safe bet, which in this case also happened to be the easiest option.”

“I would wager that you found a red button,” I say. “That’s clearly where this thing is heading? But don’t tell me . . . You bribed Wendy Mellons!”

“Your words, not mine,” he responds.

“But am I right? Wendy Mellons does not seem like the type with impeccable principles. So a simple bribe would not have seemed far-fetched at all.”

“No, it didn’t seem far-fetched in the slightest.”

“You could easily have gone behind María Paz’s back and had a little chat with Wendy Mellons. ‘Listen, Wendy, just forget about this guy and keep the money, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars all for you.’”

“Well, there was not quite one hundred and fifty thousand left in the stack anymore,” Rose corrects me. “María Paz had put only about one hundred and thirty-three thousand in the red backpack.”

Of the seventeen thousand or so she had taken out, only a small fraction was for her to keep; the bulk of it was to pay the coyote. She had already postponed her departure date a few times, and now she annoyingly insisted on abandoning the crossing into Canada and trying to cross into Mexico instead, so the guy was justifiably pissed off and charging her additional penalties for anything he could come up with. Six thousand dollars was to compensate Rose for all the money he had spent out of his own pocket to help her, but he refused to accept any of it.

“Okay,” I tell Rose. “So I was wrong about the one hundred and fifty thousand, but still one hundred thirty-three thousand and whatever was not something to sneeze at. Wendy Mellons could not have refused such an offer . . .”

“Well, that’s where you’re mistaken. Wendy Mellons was actually very levelheaded. And she would indeed have refused such an offer.”

“At first, perhaps. Maybe she would have even been outraged at first, and would have yelled at you. How you can think such things? That she would help you murder Sleepy Joe? Were you crazy? This boy who yearned to be her son! Am I right, Mr. Rose?”

“You should know,” he tells me, “you’re the novelist.”

“So I’ll go on. You have suggested to Wendy Mellons that she not be so rash, at least to give it some thought and not refuse the offer outright. Look, Wendy, you would have said, your real son is this boy Bubba. Sleepy Joe is your lover, let’s not mince words and instead call things what they are. And how many manhole covers would Bubba have to steal to make anywhere near such an amount of money, and how many pots would he have to forge? Not to mention that sooner or later your little Bubba will be nabbed and sentenced to jail for stealing and destroying.”

“There is no doubt that Wendy Mellons would have been receptive to such an argument,” Rose admitted.

“It’s amazing what people may be receptive to when money falls out of the sky like that. But I haven’t resolved one problematic detail, Mr. Rose, the receipt that María Paz demanded as proof of delivery. If Wendy Mellons became your accomplice in killing Sleepy Joe, how could you produce the receipt?”

“Good point.”

“I would say you gave Ming’s Glock to Wendy Mellons and said, here, take this, Wendy, and do what you have to do with it, but first make sure that you get a signature. And then bring me back the receipt and the gun, but please, not a word to María Paz about our little agreement.”

“Do you want to see it?” Rose asks, and hands me a sheet.

“What?” I ask.

“The receipt. Well, it’s actually more than just a receipt. Read it, if you can decipher the writing. It’s worth it. It’ll clear up a lot of things before we go on.”

The following is the transcript of the famous receipt. To make it understandable, spelling has been corrected, some punctuation has been added for clarity, and lines that were downright impossible to make out were omitted. Hot Ass is Sleepy Joe’s nickname for María Paz, and Cuchi-Cuchi the nickname he uses for himself.

My Beloved Hot Ass,

I didn’t want to kill your puny, sickly dog, although he deserved to die, I really had no intention of killing him. I just wanted to make him wail and howl a little bit so you would confess where in the hell you were hiding that money that today you have so kindly sent my way through the help of our mutual friend Wendy Mellons, but that before you had arbitrarily refused to share with me for no good reason without realizing that there was enough for both us and that with it we could have lived together in a safe place if you had not been so vicious and resentful. How happy we could have been if you had known how to forgive instead of being such a treacherous bitch, you preferred to be with others instead of accepting the proposal I made to you to live together as we knew how and love would wait for us, maybe not tomorrow or the next day because I had some pending cases on the side. This would have been possible only if you forgave me, and you had to accept the fact that I did not kill my brother, you of all people knew best how much I loved him and was in his debt because he was the only one who could be bothered to care for me during my difficult childhood with a dead mother and a father who never knew how to love me. I saw Greg’s murderers, saw them with these very eyes that God gave me, and you have to believe and have faith in me because I recognized them. They were former police officers like Greg, his partners in the arms sales business who learned God knows how that he was going to rat them out, and it was very possible that the FBI itself had passed on this information to them, because it goes without saying that those fuckers are loyal to no one, not even their own mothers, in other words, motherfuckers through and through. What I mean is that when Greg’s partners learned that Greg was turning on them, they pounced immediately and resolved the issue right then and there and I saw them, Hot Ass, I saw them kill him because that night I was on my way to meet him, the night of his birthday, remember, and he went out to meet up with me, and I had even brought him a gift, a Blackhawk Garra II knife that I had gotten secondhand but looked new. I was carrying the gift with me, and when I saw that those guys were going to shoot my brother, I immediately tried to stop them, I was not going to let a vile murder be committed against my own blood, especially against an unarmed man like Greg was at that time, that’s the kind of person I am, as you well know better than anyone. But they overpowered me. They were armed and it was three against one, and all I had was the Blackhawk Garra II knife that was no more useful than a butter knife in a situation like that. Or I could say I didn’t stop them, I failed miserably, and those bastards killed my brother right in front of me, which is why I waited around until they left, and came out of the hiding place I had found after they tossed me aside and I went to my brother, at least I wanted to prevent that he die right there on the street like a dog, but he was already dead and the only thing I could do was honor his death and let him die with Christ as he would have wanted. I shut his eyes and performed the last rites in the tradition of our culture before I got out of there. I wanted to tell you all this the night after our reunion after you got out of prison, so that you would have all the facts and not blame me for his death. I wanted to tell you everything on that night that started off so beautiful, a night of love that unfortunately ended in the unnecessary death of the doggie. It was all because of your stubbornness, Hot Ass, because when I ask you to do something, you do exactly the opposite, and that just brings out the worst of me and I lose my patience and it is impossible for things to get done properly, on the contrary, everything goes to hell simply because I respectfully ask you to watch how you act with me. The fuckers who killed my brother Greg owed me, they would shed tears of blood, and maybe you have heard that two of them have already paid dearly. But there are still critters scattering about, hiding in holes like cowards, meaning that I still have certain commitments I must keep before we run off together with this money, you and me together to wherever we end up, if you still love me, that is. But I should tell you that this dream life isn’t possible yet, because like I said, I still have some unfinished business to take care of. I knew you had found the money there in the nook between the bricks of the grill on the roof where Greg and I had hidden it. Hot Ass, do you remember when my brother and I told you that we needed to enlarge the old brick grill on the roof so that we could grill more burgers and corn for the Sunday family dinner? But the truth is that we only wanted to build an extension for the grill to create a perfect nook to hide our stash. I still remember and laugh about how you wanted us to grill this huge roast and we nearly burned our stash to a crisp. We thought that it all had been an innocent coincidence on your part, since you could not have known about the stash, but now I realize this wasn’t the case, you had figured out where we hid the money and you wanted to make us sweat, you cunning little fox. On the night of Greg’s murder I wanted to grab the stash of money from the grill for us to live the beautiful life we had dreamed about together, but you had beat me to it, you bitch, you had already betrayed me and the hundred and fifty thousand was gone, and you had already set all the bricks back in place as if nothing had happened, you fucking bitch, and then the FBI burst in and everything went to hell. Fortunately you have repented for your misconduct and ingratitude toward me and I hereby acknowledge receipt of the sum of one hundred thirty-three thousand and five hundred dollars ($133,500) that I just received from Wendy Mellons. This is a very generous gesture on your part, Hot Ass, but I nevertheless will not ignore the fact nor fail to always keep in mind always that you skimmed the missing $16,500 from the top. All this does not mean I have forgotten about you, my beloved Hot Ass, nor about the beautiful moments that in spite of everything we shared, some of the most beautiful of my life, although I admit that there were other times that were not so beautiful and if I made you suffer you should forgive me and I apologize for any such actions, sometimes we just have to accept that life can be as sweet as it can be bitter. Again, I thank you for this gesture, but don’t forget that money is not everything in life and love comes first. I will continue to pursue what I need to finish settling accounts with those that did me harm, teach them a lesson they will never forget, already they are falling one by one leaving nothing but birds flying above them. They say even in hell you end up chasing memories and I swear by my mother, Hot Ass, that even there they will suffer eternal torment as consequence of their actions. And as far as you’re concerned, you know what happens if you do not come with me, Hot Ass, don’t shatter all my dreams and hopes, I have given my heart and you will not be able to simply walk away and neglect it, if there’s something I simply abhor it is treason, you know that, Hot Ass, you’ve experienced some of the repercussions, remember that I know both your weak points and your not so weak points very well. I yearn for your kisses and all your other womanly delights in bed. Consider yourself warned, do not deny the love that awaits you in my arms.