The Demands of the Dead (25 page)

He should be scared of me, but he isn't,
I thought
.

“Beltran and Saltillo”, I continued, “want to make believe it’s the Zapatistas and they hope I’m incompetent enough to pin it on them. They put us together so you would spend less time figuring out what happened and waste more time taking me around. But neither of us were what they thought—and when we split up, they panicked. So they grabbed the two Zapatistas and threw you off the case.”

Chavez drank the rest of the water. I got another bottle out of the minibar and passed it to him. “What will you put in your report?” he asked.

“What can I put? I have circumstantial evidence. If I had testimony from you, Beltran, the PRI bosses, the cartels, I could bring a real case against Marchese—and the US government.”

Chavez shook his head. “You can’t quote us. If you do, I’m dead. Even in the US. They can get me there.”

“Then I’ll write my report like this: ‘The Zapatistas didn’t do it. Some evidence suggests police, army, and US complicity in the killings.’ Then let them come after Hoffman and me in the US with a lawsuit. We’ll be forced to put all our circumstantial evidence on the table in public. They won’t do it, I bet. And if anyone asks, we can send them the evidence privately. Without using your names.”

Chavez nodded. “When?”

“I go back to the US the day after next. I’ll release the report the day after that, as soon as I write it. When is your drive to Monterrey?”

Chavez stood up. “I was going to leave now.”

I made a hand gesture to remind him there were two beds. “Stay here. It's safer, and you're unarmed.”

“So are you.”

“Even still. When you leave in the morning,” I said, “be seen.”

“Why?”

“I'm going fishing. You're my bait.”

I gave him cash and told him to book a room in his own name, for three more nights, before disappearing. No doubt the hotel staff were suspicious, but no hotel staff anywhere were guardians of public morality and wouldn't question my visitors, so long as I paid. I planned to have another visitor, actually, who I would be receiving in Chavez's room.

He went to the bathroom. I fell asleep while he was in there. When I woke up, it was morning, and Chavez was gone, the bed neatly made. He probably didn’t have a hotel, I realized. The guy had been sleeping in the streets to avoid using his accounts and leaving his name. But I thought Walter would be able to get him to safety. He was good at getting across the border unseen.

I had breakfast on the street, tacos and a hot chocolate corn drink. Then I found a cybercafe. Susana's message was no surprise. No text, and a subject line that said “3”.

I sent an encrypted message to Walter's losmuertos account, outlining where and when to meet me at Bosque Chapultapec, Mexico City's version of Central Park. The second encrypted message was to Hoffman, via Maria, with a precis of my investigation, and explaining what the unencrypted one that I was about to send was about. And then, clear channel to Hoffman: “Professor Hoffman. Lieutenant Sergio Chavez has informed me that he has managed to obtain ballistics information that positively identifies the killer and that because of jurisdictional issues relating to the killer's identity, he intends to provide us with all of the evidence tomorrow evening.” I wrote out the name of the hotel and told him I would be meeting Chavez in his room at 11pm, where he was staying all night for security reasons, and could he please be available for us to call him from there.

My final report would set out all the hard evidence, show how none of it implicated the Zapatistas, emphasize the legal argument that the accused didn’t have to offer an alternative explanation in order to establish their innocence, and then contradict myself by listing the ‘inside job’ and ‘paramilitary’ hypotheses as alternatives, and throw in the ‘US complicity’ line as well. It wouldn’t get the Garcias out, it wouldn’t guarantee Chavez’s safety, and it wouldn’t land Marchese in Cerro Hueco, or in the ground, where he belonged. But people would know the Zapatistas were innocent of the crime.

I met Walter in the Third Section of the Bosque de Chapultapec, starting at the fountain and walking southeast into the woods. I told him about Chavez's family and the job I needed him to do there. He accepted, since it was on his way home anyway.

“How did you know Marchese was here in Chiapas?” I asked him.

“Marchese the guy from the Embassy?”

“You don't know...? Walter, Marchese got those guys to kill Shawn. They were a dirty unit, hitmen... Shawn figured it out and they took him out on Marchese's orders. Then he came here, set up another dirty unit, and killed those cops. I thought that was why you came here.”

“I'd been coming here,” he said. “When they killed Shawn it was the only place that made sense for me to be. I didn't come here for Marchese or anybody else.”

“But his information was in Shawn's files.”

“Mark, I never looked at Shawn's files. I put them in your place because I thought you would want the information. Because I thought you and Maria could find out who put those cops on Shawn.”

“I don't understand. Why did you send me that message if you didn't want me to come here to get Marchese?”

“When Shawn died, I was scared. Sad, and angry. I wanted revenge. I took his files, I took his passport, and then I did what I always did when I was in trouble: I came here. And worked. Down here, I realized I'm not the only person who's lost a brother. I'm not the only person who's survived a death. And these people, they don't do what they do for revenge. They do what they do for the future, and not for themselves.

“When I heard you quit being police I thought, good. You weren't ever real police. But you got it all twisted in your head. Shawn didn't die because you were police. Shawn made choices, and he died like a warrior, with honor. I wrote you that message so you could come here, maybe see what I see, maybe move on, find something other than revenge. That was the point of the message – the dead demand more than just vengeance.”

“And the living? Your parents? Maria? Don't they deserve to know you're alive?”

“I'm going to make that right, Mark. I will.”

Walter handed me what I'd asked for, in a bright plastic bag with white and blue stripes. “But now that we know that Marchese is the killer, this stuff seems a little light. Shouldn't we be putting him in the ground? And all the others, too?”

“Believe me, Walter, I would like that,” I said. “But now, I can't. You gave me Shawn's information, sent me the message to come here, so I could solve the case, and I did, but I would never have done it without Hoffman giving me the job. He set me up with the Embassy, with the police command here. If I kill the prime suspect, I would have to dishonor his trust and lie to him. For my own revenge.”

“He killed my brother,” Walter said.

“And mine,” I said. “But I can't do it.”

“You might have to,” he said. “He might resist arrest.”

“I can't arrest him. I have no authority.”

“You're letting him go?”
“I didn't say that, either. Let me try it my way. I am going to wrap him up and give him back to the Embassy. After that, I need to figure out how to balance going after him and his rotten unit legally with going after them publicly. There's a reporter who works out of One Police Plaza who could put this story out there. But I also have enough evidence for a wrongful death suit, maybe, even if not for a murder charge.”

“My parents?”

“They want to try to move on. They think I'm stuck on it.”

“Shawn would have wanted that too,” he said. “But not me. I'll let you try it your way. But if they do get out, if they're still walking the streets in another year, then I'll be back in the States and we are doing it my way.”

I imagined being back home, Walter running around trying to assassinate Marchese, Salant, Brewer and Carr. What would I do?

I really didn't know.

“Okay,” I said.

“And get with Maria.”

“That doesn't just depend on me!”

“Yeah, right.”

I turned around and started us walking back, towards the Avenida Ignacio Zaragoza and then out of the park.

Then, I went back to the hotel room Chavez booked in his name, set it up, turned the lights off, and sat quietly in the dark for a couple of hours, in a chair I set up next to the door, which I'd left unlocked.

At 10:15, I watched the door handle turn, ever so slowly, the Glock-22 enter followed by the wrist. I wound up and slammed into the door with all my weight, smashing his hand. His pistol fell. I pulled the door open and hit him with a mouthful of foam pepper spray. Then an arm drag from freestyle wrestling to pull him into the room, over my waiting leg, and to the ground, where he held his eyes and screamed. I put my knee in his back and wrapped his hands up behind him with a zip-tie. He continued to groan because of his eyes, and he no longer had his hands for comfort. I picked up his Glock.

“You sent just one guy, again,” I said to Joe Marchese, The Trainer.

“That was your mistake in San Cristobal too. That was when I wondered if it wasn't official Public Security, but someone in the US Embassy. Beltran would have sent at least two, and they would have done it officially. An arrest gone wrong, maybe. But just one guy? Then again, you did kill your other guy.

“But I knew it was someone at the embassy too, because the arrangement with La Migra was too tight. You were so quick to get there. Would have made a nice scene though, your goon long gone, the American investigator tragically murdered by unknown assailants before deportation?

“Of course, monitoring my emails to Hoffman would also be pretty routine for the embassy and pretty extraordinary for Mexican law enforcement.

“I've beaten you twice, now. The third time will be for keeps. I promise you.”

He was in too much pain to respond. “I'd keep them closed,” I said. “The tears will clear it away eventually. Shouldn't be any permanent damage.” I wasn't sure, actually. An eyewash station would probably be in order before too long, if I didn't want him blinded for good. I wasn't sure I didn't.

The US Embassy's political attache Janet Hamilton, and her assistant Kenney, came to the hotel equipped with eyewash, and took delivery of Marchese and his service weapon, separately.

“Madame attache, it seems that the independent stage of this investigation is concluded, and the rest of it is entirely your problem.”

Hamilton said: “Please let the record show that Mr. Marchese was acting without our knowledge and without our sanction.”

We both knew it was more complicated than that. But we also knew my hand was played. “Of course ma'am. The embassy has been nothing if not extremely helpful through this whole process.”

Helpful right to the end. They even gave me a ride to the airport. Not in Marchese's car.

I went home and wrote the report. I took it to Hoffman’s place the next morning. We haggled over the wording in a few places. He mostly took it as I wrote it. We put the ‘Zapatistas are innocent’ version on the web. We sent the ‘case against the US’ version to the embassy of course, also to the Mexican Prosecutor General, and sent a copy to Amnesty International and another copy to the Chiapas Human Rights Defense Network. I sent Walter, Evelyn, Francois, Luis, and Susana the full version by email.

Hoffman passed the cheque from CRAR, what the Mexican Government had paid us after my expenses were deducted. It wasn’t a lot of money.

“I don't know if our agricultural company client will still want the survey after this. They'll probably wait, or look somewhere else in Mexico for the seeds. Maybe Oaxaca.”

“Are we going to get in trouble with the State Department?”

“I doubt it. Reports come out that implicate them all the time. Besides,” he said, packing up his briefcase, “if nothing else, they’ll know we know what they’re up to.”

He might be in the private sector, but Hoffman certainly acted like a tenured professor nobody could fire. My brain was a bit fried. It was 6pm. My work was done. The reports were sent out. I went home.

Before Shawn declared us enemies because he thought it would protect me, we were drinking beer in my apartment after a pickup game of basketball in the park. He had come over to distract me from the end of a long run with a girl who had been really bad for me. I wasn't missing the ex-girlfriend. That part was easy – a relief, even. To Shawn and, if I was honest, to me too. My problem was Maria, who had become really distant. She had started letting the time stretch out between when I could see her. When we did meet, she would control the venue, the time, always have somewhere she had to go next.

“Do you know why she would be avoiding me?”

“Do they really let you call yourself a detective?”

I said nothing.

“Maria is in love with you, man. You need to deal with that. I've dealt with it. I'm good with it. I'm tired of waiting for it. And for her to have to listen to you whining about someone who isn't worth half of her, it's too much to ask.”

“Me... with me? But I always thought... the two of you would get back together.”

“It's always been you, and you've always been too scared to do anything about it. Don't put that on me or on her. You're a man now, and it's time for you to stop being a coward.”