The Dead Women of Juarez (29 page)

A wave of the hand encompassed the suite. Everything was broken, even the pots of the plants, their dirt scattered.

“How could he possibly know?”

“Maybe I ate with the wrong fork,” Sevilla said. He didn’t laugh at his own joke and Enrique only frowned. “Damn me, I’m a fool.”

Enrique let Sevilla have the bottle of single-malt whisky. He stalked the shattered rooms while Sevilla drowned the rest of his pain in spirits. Outside, the sun was going down. At the pool all the
mothers and children would be out playing in the cool evening air before dinner. The windows were too far to drag himself.

“There’s no way they could have known,” Enrique said at last. “There’s nothing here.”

“Exactly,” Sevilla agreed. “There’s nothing here. No backstory, no paper trail, no nothing. I thought I could convince them with my word. There was no way. It was stupid.”

“It
wasn’t
stupid,” Enrique returned. “You had no way to know.”

“I knew I was too old for this kind of game,” Sevilla said. “It should have been you. Sebastían might have trusted someone closer to his own age. But I thought… I don’t know what I was thinking. That they would confess to me? ‘Yes, I had Paloma Salazar killed. I ordered the death of her brother, her lover. I did it all.’”

The whisky was fully in Sevilla’s brain now, soaking up his thoughts and pushing away worry. In a way he was clearer than before. His body was almost numb. If he drank more he would be entirely numb and unconscious on the floor. It took all his will to set the bottle aside.

“If they knew you were a policeman, why do this?”

“They didn’t know; they mistook me for a confidence man. In a way, I suppose I’m lucky.”

If there was anything else to say, Sevilla couldn’t think of what it might be, so he merely sat and waited for the minutes to pass. It was easier with the whisky in him. How many times had he done the same thing on his own, sitting in his car with the bottle between his legs, drifting on the currents of his own languid thoughts?

“I did what you asked,” Enrique said at long last. “I followed Ortíz all day. I know where he’ll be on Friday: at the
palenque
with his birds. We could lean on him. He’s the connection, like you said. He’ll tell us what we want to know.”

“He’ll tell us nothing.”

“How do you
know
that?”

“Because… I don’t know.”

Enrique helped Sevilla to his feet and into the bedroom. The men had torn the bed practically in half and gouged deep wounds in the mattress. Enrique wrestled the mattress back into place and put Sevilla there to rest. He began to pack. “Tell me everything,” he instructed Sevilla. “Leave nothing out.”

Sevilla did as he was told. He held the picture of Ana and Ofelia tightly, but he never crumpled it. There was no other copy. He was more grateful for this than he was for his life. The men from Madrigal could have taken both from him.

“Now I’ll take you home.”

S
EVILLA RESTED IN HIS OWN BED
for a day of nearly unbroken sleep. When he woke the swelling in his eye had subsided and the pain in his knee was bearable. He was in his pajamas, though he didn’t recall changing into them. Enrique put coffee on his bedstand. The man looked alien standing in his bedroom. He seemed bursting to speak; Sevilla saw it all over him.

“How long have you been here?” Sevilla asked.

“A few hours.”

“Get out of my bedroom.”

Looking at himself in the mirror was as shocking as Sevilla expected. A butterfly bandage held the cut over his eye closed, but his face was blotched with deep bruises. A scrape on his nostril was livid.

His body was no better, and when he urinated he did see blood. Washing himself took a long time, but four aspirin taken from a bottle in the medicine cabinet brought the worst aches under control. When he brushed his teeth, his mouth no longer tasted like blood.

Enrique was in the kitchen with coffee of his own. He had buttered toast and half a grapefruit set aside for Sevilla. They ate in silence.

“Marco Rojas, he’s the cousin Madrigal spoke of?” Enrique asked at last.

“I don’t know. Is he?”

“A maternal cousin, yes,” Enrique said.

“How did you find that out?”

“Computers,” Enrique replied. “I checked the records overnight. Gabriel Madrigal and his cousin, Marco Rojas, were both convicted of drug charges and rape in New Mexico. Madrigal overdosed on contraband heroin after three months in prison. Rojas is still there.”

Sevilla put down his spoon. “Rape?”

“Yes,” Enrique said. His eyes gleamed. Sevilla understood.

“You know where Marco Rojas is?”

“A place called Hiatt. A state prison. North of El Paso.”

“You’re already going to go,” Sevilla said.

This was the thing Enrique had been waiting to say. He leaned across the table and the words came quickly: “The government has been trying to bring Rojas back for four years but his lawyers in America have been fighting for him to
stay
in a Texas prison. I looked, I know that the Rojas family is as wealthy as the Madrigals. If Marco Rojas came back to Chihuahua he would be turned loose in months, maybe weeks. It makes no sense!”

“No, it doesn’t. Unless he fears Madrigal’s wrath. Then there would be no release. He’d die like Estéban Salazar… or end up like Kelly.”

“I can drive there in a day,” Enrique continued. “No one will have to know. I arranged for two weeks of sick leave. Even Garcia won’t be able to check up on me. I’ll find out what’s happening.”

“You think the Americans will just let you visit one of their prisoners?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason you thought you could get close to the Madrigals.”

Sevilla shook his head, but the gesture didn’t bring pain. He was grateful for that. “I failed. Maybe they didn’t know who I was or where I came from, but they knew I wasn’t one of them. These are police. They’ll ask questions.”

“Then I’ll answer them.”

“You’ll lie.”

Enrique was steadfast. “I will.”

“As if I could stop you,” Sevilla said. He sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Each drink made the cut on his lip burn afresh. He made no effort to protect it.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Enrique said. He got up from the table. Sevilla didn’t watch him go.

F
OR MOST OF HIS LIFE
S
EVILLA
had not seriously contemplated the inevitability of old age. When he was in his twenties old age was an impossibility. Surely he would be dead by then, he thought, but death was itself an abstraction not worthy of real thought. Even his thirties were much the same until forty loomed and his older heroes began to pass away with greater and greater frequency.

He was always surrounded by death, especially the more time he spent working against the
narcotraficantes
. In the 1980s the
narcos
suddenly discovered that killing was a powerful tool, but not so powerful that it could be deployed in every circumstance to solve every problem. Where there had been only bushels of marijuana or stacks of packaged cocaine and heroin there were piles of spent bullet casings and blood and bodies. Car bombs were rare, for which Sevilla was thankful, because the carnage of such things was almost too much for him to withstand.

With his forties behind him he faced death each time he looked in a mirror at sagging flesh and fading muscles. Even his skin took on a different quality. The wrinkles he expected, but not the strange texture of roughness and looseness that began on the back of his hands and slowly spread elsewhere.

Now he was old, unquestionably old. All the things he knew were coming were here, from the thinning hair to the beard that was now more white than anything else. His vision was going,
though he still refused glasses. When he wasn’t drinking his hands were steady, but this was only one small thing to be proud of in a sea of other failures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an erection.

With Enrique gone he shuffled around the house in his slippers and housecoat, took naps on the couch and flipped idly through channels on the television. He lacked the energy or the focus to read, though there were many books on the stand beside his bed. He avoided going into his daughter’s room though eventually he knew he must; the photograph needed to be back where it belonged.

It was evening and after a quiet meal that he finally entered. He knocked lightly on the door as if to announce his presence and slipped inside. The spot where he sat on the edge of the bed was dented, he saw.

He put the photo on the nightstand and sat. In the angled light of the lamp he saw that it was wrinkled and this made his heart ache. He wanted to press the picture, smooth it out like a piece of cloth, but the damage was done. As on his face, the lines could not be made to go away.

All day he had felt a weight on him that he thought was sadness. Alone in his daughter’s room with his granddaughter’s crib at hand, he understood it was anger. He felt far gone from himself, so much so that even the Madrigals did not recognize him for a cop, but as a crook, a con man. They did not see any iron in him. He was ashamed.

“I’m sorry I could never bring you home,” he said to the empty room. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. But it wasn’t because I didn’t care. You know I would give my life to have you home again.”

Sevilla wrung his hands. The knuckles of one hand were bruised and scabbed.

“I want you to know that what I do now isn’t because I’ve given up. Whatever anyone thinks, whatever they say, that’s not the reason. It’s only I don’t know what to do. I’m not as smart as I believed I was.”

Once there was a time he could have asked for help. He was surrounded by men like himself, men who had become authority because it was, like themselves, immortal and unchanging. Over the years they had fallen away. Some died. Some quit. The ones who remained were worn on the inside and out. They didn’t speak to one another anymore and the new young men… they were not interested.

“There is nothing so worthless as an old man,” Sevilla said.

He took from his pocket his pistol and put it on the bed beside him. It was the first automatic he had ever owned, a .45 given to him by an American policeman from a joint task force south of the border. He still remembered the man’s name: Joe Hopkins. He was young like Enrique Palencia was young and full of the energy long missing from Sevilla’s life.

“A .45 will put a man down and keep him there,” Hopkins told Sevilla. “That .38 you’re carrying is never going to get it done. They’re carrying big guns. We have to do the same thing.”

“I don’t have anything to give you in return,” Sevilla said to the American.

“You don’t have to. Do somebody else a favor someday.”

Sevilla held the pistol in both hands, feeling its weight. The metal was worn from a long time in his holster. He kept it clean and the parts maintained. The weapon held only eight rounds, but they were enough. For the thing Sevilla sometimes had in mind there was need for only one.

Tonight he wasn’t thinking of ending himself, and no matter what he would not do it here in this room that waited and would forever wait for Ana and Ofelia to come home. This room was untouched, sacrosanct. Sevilla thought instead about his old .38 revolver, the one he kept in a locked box in his bedroom closet. This was the weapon Liliana brought out one night when Sevilla was away. Why she chose to kill herself in the kitchen he didn’t know. A perverse thought once occurred to Sevilla that she wanted it to be easy to clean up.

Ana and Ofelia had Sevilla and Liliana to remember them. Liliana had her husband. Sevilla had no one. Perhaps Enrique would regret Sevilla’s passing, but they did not know each other so well. The people in Sevilla’s department knew him not at all; he was a ghost passing through their halls from investigation to investigation, the man all wished would retire but did not even though it was well past time. They sensed the mantle of death around him that didn’t come just from age.

If Kelly ever woke, he might be sad to learn Sevilla was gone, but he had too many other lives to remember. Their closeness was one only Sevilla felt. He followed Kelly and learned of Kelly and eventually there was a sensation of kinship that could only come from long association, but this was something Kelly could not feel because he didn’t know Sevilla was there. Maybe the nurses would tell Kelly how Sevilla called every day to check on him, or how he came to visit when no one else did. Maybe this would make a difference. Most likely it wouldn’t.

The gun whispered ideas to Sevilla, but he didn’t listen. He turned his mind to other things. If he had whisky he would drink it now, right here on the edge of Ana’s bed, beneath the roof of Liliana’s house, and would go on drinking until he could see just straight enough to put the barrel of the gun to the underside of his chin and pull the trigger.

“No,” Sevilla said aloud. “I said no.”

He hoped for a telephone call from Enrique to break the silence, but there was no call. Sevilla didn’t know how long he stayed in Ana and Ofelia’s room. Abruptly he stood and left, taking the gun with him.

Sevilla went to his bedroom and opened the closet. His old suits, his
real
suits, awaited him. He stripped naked and took a shower and scrubbed himself hard enough to make his skin tingle. He shaved his neck and cheeks until mustache and beard were only a rough square around his mouth and on his chin. He put a touch of Dr Bell’s Pomada de La Campana in his hair and slicked it back. It
did not make him look younger, but he felt something he could not quite identify.

His holster went into its place at his side, easily hidden by his jacket but where he could reach it quickly. He checked the magazine and the bullet in the chamber.

In his sock drawer he found a matte-black cylinder of rubberized metal. It wasn’t heavy and it fit in a pocket. A flick of the wrist revealed ten inches of blackened steel.

After he settled the knot in his tie, Sevilla looked at himself in the mirror behind the bedroom door. The gun was invisible, the bulge of the impact baton something that could be keys or an oddly shaped wallet.