Tequila Blue (10 page)

My head ached from listening to all this. I asked:

“Who brought the drugs?”

“What drugs?” She looked at me warily, halfway through eating a doughnut.

“Cocaine,” I said. “The accountant tells a good story too.”

Tears trickled down Estela Lopez de Jones's cheeks. I took advantage of the two minutes she spent crying to press my knees against hers under the table. She accepted them, withdrew hers slowly, repeated the same movement a second time. A trickster, a cheat. Carlos Hernandez is a good judge of women.

She used several handkerchiefs to blow her nose then admitted:

“My husband supplied it. There were a lot of drugs in his circle. Jones made all four of us snort it.”

“Was that in your orgies?”

“What orgies?” she asked, apparently genuinely surprised that anyone should use such a grandiose
term for what went on in their parties. She shook her head at unfortunate memories, lowered her eyelashes to emphasize her embarrassment. She was facing something women always find difficult and unpleasant. (I've known women who have tortured their own children and always, absolutely always, what has been most difficult for them has not been the fact of doing it but having to admit it, to realize other people know it, to feel themselves condemned. Something similar happens with men, of course; perhaps there is a difference in the hypersensitive nature of women, their greater dependence on other people's opinion.) Without looking up at me, she said:

“Yes.”

“Did Jones film the orgies?” Now I'd got the word accepted, I wasn't going to let go of it.

“No . . . yes . . . sometimes.”

That's the way. My next step would be to ask her to take me to where all this fucking went on; then of course I'd try to get a peek at the films. After that I could suggest we might take our clothes off and reconstruct some of the scenes, the ones with fellatio for example, or with whipped or penetrated backside. If I guaranteed her protection, perhaps the widow would go for it. The down side was that since in addition to being a widow she was a murderer – a self-made widow, as they call it in Bucareli – she could decide at any moment to get rid of me as well. She might even use the fellatio to bite it off. This thought raced down from my brain to the centre of my body, instantly deflating my
jack-in-the-box. If that was the case, I'd better forget about her mouth, stay well away from those piranha teeth of hers. Whatever I did would have to be behind her back, and with her hands in cuffs as well. I imagined the scene and perked up at once.

When the widow had finally finished with her buns and cakes I asked to see the rest of the house. She stood up and led me along corridors that smelled of money, antiquities, signed paintings, plants, pieces of furniture that were new and expensive rather than tasteful, a darkroom whose walls were plastered with photos of attractive young women posing against parks, waterfalls, monuments and ruins. A lot of them were of Estela Lopez de Jones herself: in a bikini by the sea, in a T-shirt and jeans in the garden, in evening gowns and so on. I was able to confirm her appetizing charms and asked if any of the other women was Victoria Ledesma. The widow put on a perfect look of not knowing what I was talking about. We went upstairs, and there it was, together with desks, chests of drawers, mirrors, that round thing women sit on to do their makeup, and a king-size bed large enough to offer more than enough room for four bodies in motion. There was the altar with its huge, plump, welcoming surface. Welcoming yes, because I had come up there to fuck on it, that's what I was there for. Now all I had to do was strip the murderer, use my darting tongue between her legs until she was melting for me, turn her on all fours
on top of the tortoise, then position myself behind her so we could make the three-headed monster my fantasy had been sketching ever since the first morning I saw it.

“Nice tortoise,” I said, to set the ball rolling.

“A present from my husband,” the Aztec virgin replied, strangely serious all of a sudden.

“It's big enough to use as a mattress,” I said, giving her one of my looks.

Estela Lopez de Jones turned on her heel and walked out of the room. I was left on my own with the tortoise. I thought of following her and dragging her back by the hair to show her who was boss. To teach her that an Aztec virgin chosen for sacrifice cannot escape her destiny.

A minute later I followed her downstairs. She was sitting in a chair in the living room. The look she gave me showed there had been one of those abrupt role changes that women are so fond of: now she was the Virgin of Guadalupe and I was the ragged beggar Juan Diego. I wasn't going to stand for it. Not me.

“Who was Victoria Ledesma?” I became the grand inquisitor, turning her into one of the witches of Salem.

“Who?”

“Victoria Ledesma.”

“I don't know her.”

“You should. She worked with your husband on a film about Teotihuacan. A short while later they found her dead body.”

“So?”

“Your husband was investigated over her death.” Once again, fear flashed in her eyes, and a scarcely contained anger.

“I refuse to speak to you any more. Or tell me if I should have a lawyer to defend myself against a policeman investigating my husband's death who treats him more like a criminal than the victim of a crime.”

Like I said: an expert at switching decks. I wouldn't like to have her as a mistress. I began to remember a phrase of Schopenhauer's, so I repeated it:

“You won't need lawyers, if you tell me the truth. If you lie, you'll definitely need them.”

“I don't know anything about that woman. I've never even heard her name.”

A fruitless morning. I was wasting my time, and I was no longer interested in this tramp with her outraged expression; I was sick of her.

Before I left I heard that someone had tried to burgle the house a few days earlier. Apparently a gang had been doing robberies all over Copilco in recent weeks. Talking to their neighbours, Estela and the maid from Oaxaca – who was back from doing the washing and had joined in our conversation as naturally as if we were three Zapotec Indians talking about the prices for mats in Juchitan market – had heard of several break-ins.

The previous Thursday, shortly before two in the morning, Estela Lopez de Jones had heard noises at the fence and in the garden. Frightened, she got out of bed, switched on all the lights on
the top floor and looked out of a window. She shouted for the Indian maid and caught sight of two or three men jumping down into the street from the garden fence. She didn't want to buy a dog, because she was going back to Colombia in a week.

I congratulated her on being so brave, thanked her for all her valuable information and for the two watered-down coffees she had offered me, calculated that in a week the Jones case would be either solved or archived and left, the tortoise having completely slipped from my mind.

I called Lourdes and what I could sense from her voice was a good omen. I know that woman the way you know someone after eighteen years of sharing life's ups and downs with them. We talked about the kids, about work, about the house. I didn't ask her to come back – there was no need, because that's what I had been doing from the moment she crossed the threshold on her way out. I invited her for a coffee that evening, and she accepted. I told her I'd pick her up at seven. We said a fond goodbye.

I dialled the office number and was in luck: Silver Bullet answered the phone. He started speaking, and that was the end of my luck.

“I went to the Buenos Aires,” he said. “Everything went fine. But that might be the last time, because they're closing down.”

“All right. We'll talk about it later,” I replied. I didn't have a lot to say, it's not the sort of thing to talk about, especially given the number of microphones there are waving about everywhere, just waiting to pick up some audible indiscretion.

“I didn't have the same success with the other business,” James Bond went on.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I couldn't find him. I got tired of phoning, so I went to his apartment. He's not there any more. He's gone.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“A woman neighbour saw him leaving with two suitcases and getting into a taxi.”

“Aha . . . and what about the caretaker?”

“He wasn't there either. I only found two young children. When I questioned them they stated that their mother would be back in half an hour, but I couldn't wait, and the kids didn't know anything anyway.”

“OK,” I said, and just as I do whenever I say that word, I felt a cretin. “Give me his number and his address.”

I called Valadez's apartment. Nobody answered. He'd flown the coop. With my holiday bookings for Cancun.

*

I rang the bell at the Rio Atoyac apartment several times. No reply. A Spaniard with bushy eyebrows came out of the caretaker's cubbyhole. He told me: “Senor Valadez left on a trip yesterday morning.” I showed him my credentials and learned that the trip was to Miami and that the declared reason for it was business. Clever son of a bitch! Who could find a democratic Mafioso Cuban in a city where nearly all the foreigners are Mafiosi and democratic! I asked when he would be back, and the Spaniard said: “Senor Valadez will be gone three or four weeks.” The apartment was empty,
and Senor Olmedo – that was Bushybrows' name – was to collect any mail. That was all. The caretaker did not get mixed up in the lives of people living in the building. He did his job and was paid his wages. He was so full of the importance of his job that I felt like teaching him a lesson or two, but then I thought I might well be back in a month. Not to mention the fact that to a policeman we're all equal before the law, even Spanish caretakers with bushy eyebrows.

A hunch led me to Calle Marsella, between Berlin and Dinamarca Streets, to the first floor of a flashy building where Mr and Mrs Accountant lived. With all my suspects disappearing, my week looked as if it might turn out like the guy's who was hanged on Monday. The cases were different, though. Valadez had reasons to escape and people to escape from. He had to get away from me and Silver Bullet's pressure for payment. With the accountant it was different. In theory, he had merely been one of Jones's victims. There were lots of things to clear up, though. I still had to have a real talk with him, on the understanding that it's the one who controls the money who tends to know the most.

Mr and Mrs Accountant weren't there either.

“They've gone,” a neighbour told me. “A removal van came and took all their things.”

It's hard not to be in a bad mood when all of a sudden everything turns out badly. I spend the whole day working. I'm given a case in which it's important to keep tabs on various people, and I'm
not even assigned an assistant. I have to pay Silver Bullet out of my own pocket. They talk about austerity but put dozens of cops on guard duty for any bureaucratic politician whose number has come up in this presidency.

I asked more questions and learned that the Accountants had gone for good. They had left at the crucial moment, just before I was going to consult Mr Accountant on financial matters. I enquired about removal firms in the area and eventually came up with the man who around two the previous afternoon had taken the Accountants' things to a stall in the La Merced flea market.

“Why to La Merced?” I asked. “He's got more class than that. It would have made more sense to take them to somewhere better.”

“He was in a hurry to sell,” the van driver explained. “I told him he'd be able to offload them there straightaway, and he accepted the idea.”

“Did he know he wouldn't get much of a price?”

“Yes, he knew.”

La Merced is full of traders, all kinds of meat, vegetables, fruit, endless disposable objects. Then there are all the old dames of the city who come to buy, a shopping basket on each arm. And there are more whores and pickpockets than there are old women buying all the crap.

When after two hours' search I found the stall, I was confronted by an Arab from Tabasco with the face of an assassin. Once I had shown him my ID and the butt of my gun, he decided to play ball.
He admitted he had le-ga-lly bought a load of furniture from a pale-faced, stupid-looking foreigner. He showed me the receipt : “Received, one million pesos for one load of furniture”, signed with a scribble which, he said, was the le-gal signature of paleface.

In La Cotorra they serve the best drinks in the Mexican capital. Generous glasses, more the sort you expect at a friend's house than in a public bar. I sat down to think with a dish of peanuts and a couple of tequilas. The bar was close to where I had to meet Lourdes, and this made the wait more palatable. The Jones case was becoming clearer. There are many reasons for three suspects to disappear on the same day, and none of them is a coincidence. They are all to do with guilt. Those three sons of bitches had done for Jones. The motive had to be money. Which meant that Jones's business – the real, pornographic business – made a healthy profit. And the essential part of any successful business is the market, the customers. Once you have a captive market, which must have been the case here, it's easy to organize the rest. The accountant dealt with all that, the invoices and the clients. So why shouldn't he decide he could take over the business, particularly if a snake like Valadez was tempting him with his contacts, his influence and networks that would mean the two of them could line their pockets with gold? You can get whores just by whistling on any street corner round here, and you can hire someone who can use a camera at the
entrance to any TV station. They no longer needed Jones, so between the three of them they got rid of him. Perhaps the man-woman in the hotel was the accountant's wife, using two blond wigs – one for a man, the other for a woman – to conceal her auburn hair and turn the porter's head. Perhaps Mrs Accountant went in disguised as a blonde woman and Mr Accountant came out disguised as a transvestite. She went in with Jones and killed him. He came up the service stairs and joined her. Afterwards, he went out the front way, while she sneaked out of the service exit. Then again, perhaps she went in with Jones and Mr Accountant came in with a local whore, and Valadez arrived with another one. Between them, they dispatched Jones. Mr Accountant dressed up as a transvestite and left. They either drugged the two whores or paid them a good wad of banknotes, and Valadez left with Mrs Accountant. There were lots of possibilities, and a detective isn't meant to play guessing games. A detective is meant to catch the guilty sons of bitches, give them a thorough interrogation and get at the truth.