An Inconsequential Murder (6 page)

“
Do I need to remind you…?”

“
No, you don’t need to remind me. I know I still owe you. Leave them and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Casimiro had often told Lombardo that in his highly disciplined life, he only had one bad habit—he liked to gamble. On Saturday afternoons, as the football games were starting in Mexico, he would arrive at the Caliente betting parlor on Garza Sada Avenue, impeccably dressed in a blue blazer, gold and blue stripped silk tie, and gray trousers. He would stay there, sipping whiskey and sodas, eating very little or nothing at all, and betting heavily on every single game. During the American football season, he would do the same thing on Sundays.

As he had admitted to Lombardo, he won and lost small fortunes each weekend.

During a particularly bad lo
sing streak, Casimiro had not gone to the Caliente betting parlor but rather to independent bookies and had bet large sums on the horse races in Tijuana in an effort to recover from his losing streak. He had gotten into an even deeper hole.

When the bookie
’s bill collectors had come looking for him, Lombardo had called on some of the thugs that owed him favors to get them to back off. Casimiro had paid off his debt to the bookies but he was grateful to Lombardo for having avoided the beating Casimiro would have surely gotten.

When Casimiro offered him half the money he had won in a football pool, Lombardo refused it and said that he only wanted three favors in return. He always put a number on the amount of favors he asked of someone because he believed that an open-ended obligation was comparable to blackmail or extortion.

Lombardo handed Casimiro the handkerchief.

“
Where do they come from?” asked Casimiro.

“
Casimiro, don’t tell anyone you are doing this for me, OK? In fact, don’t tell anyone you are doing this, period.”

“
Of course not. I would be fired if I did.”

“
I’m not worried about your boss, I’m worried about the floosies you hang around with,” said Lombardo dryly.

Casimiro laughed. “But seriously,” Lombardo continued, “I have a feeling that if the thugs who smoked these found out what you are doing for me, it might do you worse harm than getting you fired.”

“
Hmm, it’s that bad, huh?”

“
Yeah, because if my hunch is right the heavies that left those around wouldn’t like me to know what you’re going to tell me, you see? And they are pretty dangerous folk.”

Casimiro
looked at Lombardo. The Captain was not a man to warn you about inconsequential things or imagined threats.

“
OK,” Casimiro said quietly.

“
Let me know when you have something. Don’t use voice on your cell phone and don’t leave voice messages on my cell phone. Send a text message saying my laundry is ready. Got it?”

“
Your laundry is ready, right,” repeated Casimiro. “By the way, why didn’t you take this to your people in the forensic lab?”

“
I want to know right away who I am dealing with; the forensics people have a lot of other cases; I would just get put in the back of the line because I haven’t saved any one of them from thugs, you see?”

“
I’m beginning to think I should have taken the beating.”

“
Aw, that would have spoiled your beauty, Casimiro.”

“
I would’ve recovered, which is something I can’t say about our ‘friendship,’” said Casimiro. “By the way, how old are these things and where did you get them?”

“
Whatever’s on them can’t be more than a day old. There’ll be a lot of dust and stuff on them because they were on the ground, in a parking lot.”

“
Hmm, properly contaminated with all sorts of junk from cars, I suppose.”

“
You tell me, Casimiro. I have to go now. Let me know as soon as you’ve got something.”

Lombardo turned around and left the laboratory.

“
Yes, you are welcome, Captain,” shouted Casimiro at the retreating Lombardo who did not go out the front of the building but rather through the back door.

There was a small
parking lot for the laboratory’s personnel in the back of the building that opened onto a side street.

L
ike a lot of the streets in the Obispado section of Monterrey, the little side street was steep and narrow. During the thirties, forties, and fifties, this section of the city had been
the
place to build a mansion—if you were rich and wanted to be in high society. In those days, there were three things that were indispensable if you wanted to be part of Monterrey’s elite: a mansion in the Obispado, a membership in the Country Club, and a membership in the Casino.

The Casino was
still an exclusive place for the wealthier classes, although it was now mostly where the young and rich went to get drunk during the afternoon “soirés” or for “
quinceañeras,
” the coming-out parties for 15-year-old girls. The Country Club was, well, the Country Club where, if you could find someone to sell you a membership, it cost around three hundred thousand dollars just to join. But in terms of places where to live, the very rich had created other, more exclusive sections in the farthest corners of the city. The growing
insecurity and appalling rate of kidnappings had driven them to gated communities with homes protected by security people hired in the United States or Europe. Now, most of the mansions in the Obispado, which had been built during the time when the rich could live in a house surrounded by huge lawns and open spaces that looked like private forest reserves, were now abandoned or had been turned into offices for computer-related businesses, or clinics, or worse, insurance companies.

Only those very stubborn or old
-fashioned, or those whose fortunes had dwindled to the point that they were of no interest to kidnappers, had stayed. Their mansions, like old elephants walking to their graveyard, slowly slipped into that state of decay from which they would not or could not be recovered. One by one, after their owners died, they were being razed and replaced by yet another clinic, or a convenience store, or just simply a parking lot.

Lombardo reached the street where he had left his car. As he opened the door, he noticed it had a flat tire. “Damn!” he said as he slammed the door shut. He was forced to go back down the street to Hidalgo Avenue to hail a cab. As the cab started off, he remembered he had not locked the car so he said aloud, “I hope someone steals the damned thing.”

“
What’s that, sir?” asked the cab driver.

“
Nothing, nothing—just talking to myself.”

Lombardo looked at his watch; it was one thirty in the afternoon. He might as well as go home and have something to eat, and like the Fat Man, have a little nap.

Chapter 8
: A Home Like a Hole in the Ground

Lombardo was glad to be home. He liked the quiet, cool darkne
ss of the house. They had called him very early to inform him of the body that had been found so he had not slept much. The nap he would have after eating something would be welcomed.

As he took off his coat and unholstered his gun, he stared at the photographs on the wall.
There were still many things in the house that were reminders of a time when it had been less quiet and much more full of life. In the small living room there were pictures of the boys and of his former wife; some had been taken when they had gone on a skiing holiday, others in some beach resort when on summer vacation. Lined up on another wall were the school photos, one for each year his children had been in primary and secondary school. He stared at them longingly. It was almost like seeing them grow up again.

On the wall opposite the one with the vacation photos there were formal studio portraits of Lombardo and of his former wife, and one that had been taken on their wedding day. A young man, dressed in a tuxedo and black tie, with a thin beard and long hair stood by a beautiful, dark-haired girl dressed in white. He often looked at the picture and wondered aloud, “What happened to those two people? Where did they go?”

He went to the fridge and got a beer; he opened a can of sardines and got a couple of packets of crackers. He doled out a dozen of the delicious Spanish olives stuffed with peppery pimento and sat on his easy chair. He turned on the TV to watch to the news.

There was nothing in the news
cast about the dead man. If the murder was not reported in the afternoon editions of the newspapers or the evening news, that meant that someone had managed to suppress it. That was more than likely. The University and the Dean were powerful entities in the community and from the way the interview with the Director of the Computer Center had gone, it seemed they were not eager for the story to be treated as a big news item.

Lombardo felt
sleepy when he finished his lunch. He was too tired to go to the office and face the Investigations Department’s Director’s questions about the investigation. Most likely Gonzalez would hurry there in the late afternoon to give him a full account of the interview with Dr. Delgado anyway.

Lombardo went upstairs to his bedroom. As he undressed, he looked out the window. The street was quiet, peaceful under the grayish light of the autumn afternoon.

Lombardo
’s little, three-bedroom house was in the southeastern part of Monterrey. Most of the houses in this area had been built during the eighties. The walls were made of the cheapest, thinnest cinder blocks and the rooms were tiny. Originally they had been marketed to young, newlywed couples but now most were occupied by retired people or low-income families who, in spite of the number of children or family members, could not afford anything larger.

All of the cars parked in the street (the houses were built in the smallest piece of land allowed by law and therefore did not have space for a garage), were used, ten-year-old models—not only because they were cheap to buy but because the owners avoided paying the yearly “car ownership” tax. “Stupid morons,” said Lombardo to himself when he thought about the bureaucrats that thought up the damned tax that encouraged people to keep old, smog-producing heaps of junk and punished those who bought newer, more efficient cars.

When the Social Security S
ystem for the state’s bureaucrats had offered him a zero interest loan to buy a bigger house, Lombardo refused it, because, he said “I like where I live.” He had explained that he liked the modest, unpretentious people that brought out chairs to sit on the sidewalk after dinner and who politely left you alone if they sensed that you wanted to go no farther than the customary “
Buenas noches
” when you passed them on the street. He said he liked the fact that they were quiet folk who sent their uniformed children on foot to the near-by public school instead of rushing out in a stream of vans and SUVs as was the case in most upper–middle-class neighborhoods of the city.

But
, most of all, he liked the tranquil rhythm of life of the neighborhood: father went to sleep early because he left at seven for the factory, mother had had a long day of housework (there was no morning swarm of maids coming to work in these homes) so she retired early, too, and the kids, well, the boys played football in the park and the girls gathered in the corner store to gossip about the boys. After dark they went home, had dinner, did their homework, and watched TV. When he saw these kids going by in the morning, with their khaki-colored uniforms and blue sweater, well-brushed hair, and well-pressed clothes, Lombardo would pretend to be reading the paper outside just to be able to say “
Buenos días.
” He liked these well-mannered kids; they reminded him of his own.

His two boys had once gone to school dressed like that, carrying huge backpacks full of books, and chatting with their friends. Now, one was a lawyer in Mexico City and the other, having something to do with computers, was living somewhere near San Francisco. “Don’t you ever call your sons?” Lupe, his friend, had once asked him. “Yes, yes, I call them often,” he had said—but the truth was, he never did.

Lombardo had bought his
house as an “investment” when he was in the police force in Guadalajara. But the truth was that he had
bought it to please his former wife who was from Monterrey and had always said she wanted to come back here to live. But, they had divorced and his wife remarried and, ironically, settled in Guadalajara. His boys had lived with their mother until Guillermo, the oldest one, went to Mexico City to study law, and Roberto, the younger one, went to get a graduate degree in Computer Science in Berkeley. He never saw them again.

After his divorce, he
made the mistake of confiscating a truck full of smuggled goods that were under the protection of the General in charge of the 14th Military Region. That and the fiasco with the Governor’s daughter who had eloped with the drug lord had left Lombardo’s superiors with no other option but to force him to accept a promotion to Captain, which meant he would also be transferred out of Guadalajara. Given several options, he chose Monterrey for no other reason than the fact that he owned a house there.