The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (13 page)

“People were probably sleeping.”

“Yes, that's possible. In any case, there'll be an autopsy, and we're going to need all the cooperation we can get,” he finished, sliding his hand into the interior pocket of his jacket and handing me a card that smelled faintly of garlic. “If you see anyone suspicious, remember something, or think of anything that could help us, I want you to call me.”

“I won't. I mean, I will. But I don't think, I don't think I'll remember anything more. I've already told you what I know,” I said, knowing how I sounded but unable to soften my tone.

“Which is surprisingly little, given such a small building, such close proximity between front doors, all of your front windows facing the park,” he insisted.

Well, I know an
indirecta
when I hear one, but I was silent, even as he continued to peer at me, scratching his head, letting me know with every little picky gesture that this was serious, possibly as serious as murder or manslaughter or whatever they called deaths that weren't supposed to happen.

“I see you were shopping this morning. Where did you shop?” he asked casually, trying to fool me into believing the question had just occurred to him.

“At the hardware store on Twelfth.”

“Ah, yes. I've shopped there myself. They make all kinds of keys there. Were
you
making new keys?”

“No.”

“Did anyone see you go there?”

“Many people.”

“I only ask because maybe whoever you went with remembers seeing something when you left your apartment to go there.”

“I went alone.”

His cell phone started ringing, but he kept looking right at me.

“Were you in your apartment last night?”

“I was.”

“But you didn't hear anything.”

I shook my head no, hoping he'd strangle himself with his own tail the way he was running around in circles.

“Anyone with you who might have seen or heard something?” he said, and I realized he was just goading me now.

“Yes. At least one person,” I said to goad him right back.

His phone rang again, and he stood up and turned sideways to fish his cell phone out of his left pant pocket as if he were leaving.

But then he silenced it and turned back around to face me, an unfortunate sign of intelligence revealing itself to me in his expression.

“One more question, Ms. Estevez.”

“Y dos también,”
I said, which means something along the lines of “ask away.”

“When was the last time you saw or spoke to the deceased, exact time and date please, and what exactly did you talk about?”

Chapter 15

I
t was close to six in the afternoon by the time they finished interviewing everyone and writing down our names, addresses, and telephone numbers. A section of the park had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, while upstairs,
apartamento cuatro
was silent, Olivia somewhere inside, left to mourn her husband all by herself.

I walked into my own apartment and sat in my red corduroy armchair, unable to grasp what had happened. Hector couldn't really be dead. I'd just talked to him last night. I'd even argued with him and he'd been fine. I tried to focus, to bring back the last thing he had said to me, his last glance. But all I remembered was how insanely angry I'd been and the stupid things I'd said that I'd never be able to take back. The worst of it was I'd put it all in writing, something my mother warned me a million times never to do. And hadn't it been just like him to leave my “nice” breakup letter behind for me to throw away and take the nasty, sarcastic one—for him probably the interesting one, fascinated as he was by internal conflict and human motives.

Wait a minute! The letter he took. Where was it? What had he done with it? The police would find it! Oh my God, Olivia would find it. Maybe she already had.
Everyone would find out we'd been having an affair,
I thought, beginning to hyperventilate. I had a vision of a group of people stoning me for carrying on with a tenant whose wife slept mere yards from me. My Dominican neighbors would say,
“Oh, pero que mujer más sucia”
(What a dirty woman) and my Puerto Rican neighbors would call me
la chilla
(aka skanky ho). And my friends, Iris, Gustavo, Doña Carmen, the Salvadoran lady who'd trusted me with her bank deposits for years, they'd say that I was a
descarada,
a woman without shame.

But then I remembered Hector was gone and wished I had the choice of going through a little well-deserved embarrassment if it would reverse his death, or at least bring him back long enough for me to say good-bye, make sure he hadn't suffered. But he was gone and there was nothing I could do.

I sat up.

Or was there?

After a life of running away from the possibility of contact with the dead, from the future, even from the sounds of my own mind, I'd gone from being willingly blind to wanting to reclaim my clairvoyance twice in less than one week. Except that this time was so different. Before, I'd wanted to see out of jealousy and fear. It had been a weak want, stoked by ego alone. How different it was now. The want I felt then as I sat in my apartment was fierce, fearless, radical. It made me long to talk to the darkest of the dead again, to run from one to the next asking if they'd seen him.

And what if I still could? I'd have to hurry. The longer I waited, the farther and denser his energy, I thought, imagining him walking away, his back to me, trench coat flapping against the backs of his legs, unable to hear me yelling for him to stop.

I took several deep breaths, so deep that deep whooshing sounds came out of my throat, and focused on imagining that I heard the low rap on the back door, that I felt him sitting down next to me, heard his breath very close to me. I don't remember being afraid, but only because I didn't really believe I could still cross the figurative gate of death.

If you want to know exactly what I did, I'll tell you, though I doubt it will do you much good right away. The secret to talking to the dead is not in the method, which is so simple and well-known as to be boring. The key is in the mastery you acquire by practicing, and in the quality of your inner space, energy, and your belief that you can do it. But if you ever want to try it, this is what you do:

I don't know how long I sat, focusing with all my might, before opening my eyes, a tenth of me expecting to feel him, the other ninety percent wishing I weren't such a mediocre medium.

But I was. I was a terrible clairvoyant who'd thrown her gift away and would now have to resign herself to never seeing, feeling, or hearing him again. The good thing is that after I forced myself to accept this, even saying it out loud, I was at least, at last, able to cry again, not knowing if I cried for the lover friend, not to be confused with a loving friend, who had taught me good and bad things in such a stylish and memorable way, or for the small, small, small man I'd become attached to despite the easy way he'd disengaged from me in the end.

Or maybe I was crying for my own screwed-up psyche, still so incapable of dealing with something as mundane and common as death, even when the deceased was someone I had told to get out of my life just hours before.

I thought of Hector, but the image that came into my head was of Abril. She looked angry, talking on the phone while putting things inside an envelope, maybe a letter. That got me to my feet and pacing, eyes wide open. What if Olivia found my letter and killed Hector because of it? And what if after, she gave it to the police to deflect attention from herself? After all, he'd died mere yards from her front door too.

Giving the police the letter would bring her revenge full circle, wouldn't it? God, what was I thinking? Sure, she was weird, but I couldn't imagine Olivia killing. Then again, neither could I imagine anyone else having done it, and he was with her when he died. He had to have been because he sure hadn't been with me.

At the thought, my heart began beating furiously. Was it a supernatural sign that Olivia was indeed involved? Or was I just imagining things? I mean, they'd been married for years and she hadn't killed him before. Why now? Then again, I had to admit cheating with a woman who lived right downstairs seemed to me like a perfectly plausible reason for killing a man. Hell, I'd wanted to kill him just for breaking up with me on the eve of my birthday. And why else would she have killed him last night of all nights? It had to be because of the letter! That was the reason for that awful dream. I was responsible for his death because she had found the letter and done something about it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

When someone dies, taken from you forever, the pain is bearable only if you can transform it into an insatiable appetite for knowing everything. How he died, where he was, what he said, and to whom he said it. You rethink every second and its possibilities, like a sleuth in a detective novel going over odds and likelihoods, time lines and probabilities, rummaging through the wreckage of the mind for the one detail with the potential to hold the story of what happened, the key to everything, within it.

I was no murder detective, but a few things were clear to me that Saturday evening, sitting in that red armchair watching day turn into night, my own birthday forgotten:

First, Hector was really dead. I couldn't do anything to bring him back. No one could. Second, there was a very good possibility that he had not died of natural causes, given that he was in much better health than most men his age, which either meant that his wife had found out about our affair and had somehow ended his life, or that Coffee Park wasn't nearly as safe as I'd imagined. Third, even this second scenario, that someone had tried to rob him and killed him in the process, made little sense. While he was not a rich man, Hector was a pragmatic one. If someone had asked for his wallet or for the gold pinkie ring he always wore in memory of his mother, he would have handed both over with a sardonic smile. They wouldn't have needed to kill him or even hit him. And if he were in the park, that meant he'd been nowhere near his Saab, which he kept parked in front of my building unless he needed to go beyond his walking range of fifteen blocks. Carjacking wasn't even a possibility.

Then there were the things I couldn't figure out, but needed to. Like, why had he gone to the park on a rainy night? And why hadn't his body been found on our side of the square? Oh my God, of course: He was meeting someone! (A hit man for his business rival Mitch Kaplan? It was ridiculous, of course, but I smiled thinking this was just the kind of thing Hector would have said to make me laugh if he'd been sitting next to me right then. He'd have said, “If we're going to play this game, let's play it well. Where's that collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories I gave you? Best example of detecting you'll ever find is right on your shelf ! ”)

That he'd been meeting someone was just an unsupported theory, but what I knew for sure was that if I could somehow find out why Hector had gone to the park, I'd be much closer to knowing how and why he died.

Another unresolved issue was that there was a letter, the one he'd taken, in the hands of God knew who. A mocking little letter that first one had been, clearly proving that I'd been having an affair with him and that things were not ending well between us. (This thought filled me with a terrible unease. Not only was it possible that I'd be exposed as his lover, but if that letter came to light, what was there to keep the police from thinking I'd had a reason to want him dead?) Thankfully, the other one, the nicer and blander “I wish you well” letter, was in my trash, where I'd thrown it after our fight.

I thought of the officer who interviewed me. Had it been my imagination or had he been all too willing to believe any one of us was guilty of hiding something? What would he think if he knew about the last time I'd seen or spoken to the “disease-t,” and what, exactly, we'd talked about? (He'd scowled when I answered his probing with a slow shake of my head and an, “Mmmmm, you know? I really couldn't say, exactly.”)

Which was a big fat lie, of course. I remembered every word of my last conversation with Hector. Wait! The trash. I couldn't leave the letter I'd thrown out there, where the police might search. I raced to the back door, wanting to keep the letter from others, but also hoping to touch one of the last things he'd touched, written on, to save it where I could use it to remember.

Except that the lid on my blue recycling bin was open, as if someone had rifled through it, the neat stack of old
Siempre Mujer
magazines I kept around for my clients scattered below and above the plastic milk jugs and water bottles. Could it have been the police? Who else would want to search through my trash? And where the hell were those damn letters—the one he'd taken and the one I'd thrown out?

As dusk began to settle in, I went from sad to frantic, visions of being whisked away to jail piercing my brain so intensely that I froze when I heard the knock coming from the other end of my apartment. Slowly, I went inside, closed the kitchen door, and walked to the living room to look through the peephole, convinced that the obnoxious policeman would be on the other side of my front door, holding the letter I had not found, ready to torture me with more questions and demanding to know why I'd concealed the true nature of my relationship with his victim.

But it was only Gustavo.

“Just heard,” he said. Then, “What are you doing? Turn on some lights. You're spooking me.”

I tried to muster a smile to serve as a reply, but nothing came. I switched on the lights.

“I can't believe it,” he went on. “What happened? Do you know? How bad did it look? Even Abril fainted when she heard that he might have been killed. Oh, and Iris, she won't even talk about it in front of Henry, says he was pretty shook up when he heard.”

“Is Abril all right?”

“She's fine. At least that's what she said when I helped her up to her apartment, just before she slammed the door in my face,” he said, shaking his head, his face a frustrated scowl. “It's fine if she doesn't want to talk to me, but I'm worried about Henry.”

“He'll be okay,” I said.

“Notice Ellie picked up all her stuff?”

“She did?”

“Yeah. Just now on my way in I picked up some trash the crowd left in front of the building and took it around the side to throw out. Her stuff isn't there.”

I'd been so distraught looking for the letter that I hadn't even noticed.

“I'm going to guess she didn't pay you?” said Gustavo.

“I didn't even see her. But that's not strange with all the people around here. You should've seen it, Gustavo. It was a circus.”

“Well, at least she's gone, huh? But look, I just wanted to see if you were all right.”

“I'm fine. It's fine,” I said, feeling uncomfortable, as if I were usurping Olivia's condolences and realizing that mistresses not only have to love in secret, they have to mourn in secret too.