Trauma (15 page)

“They—uh—they said they didn't need me today. Overstaffed. They sent me home.”

“They said they didn't
need
you, on your first day?”

“That's right.… It happens sometimes. Business gets slack. They don't need so many people stocking the bar.”

“This is the middle of the vacation season and we're talking about the Century Plaza Hotel and business is slack and it's your first day?”

Duke stared at her and obviously didn't know what to say. On the next sun lounger, Ray had suddenly become aware that she was there and opened his eyes.

“Duke,” said Bonnie, “I can think of two possible options here. The first is that you're telling me the truth, in which case I'll call your boss at the Century Plaza and check it out. The second is that you're lying, which will save me the trouble.”

Duke looked over at Ray, but all Ray could do was shrug. In the end, he looked back at Bonnie and said, “Save yourself the trouble.”

“Okay, you're lying. So I can think of two further options here. The first is that you haven't shown up for work without bothering to tell your boss, in which case I'll call him and make an excuse that you're sick. The second is that you don't have a job at the Century Plaza at all—that you never made even the slightest attempt to get one—in which case I don't have to make the phone call at all, do I? I can save myself even
more
trouble.”

Duke chewed over this for nearly half a minute. Then he said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah what, Duke?”

“Yeah, save yourself even more trouble.”

She called Esmeralda shortly after three. Esmeralda said, “Everything's arranged. Come downtown and see us at eight o'clock.”

“Okay, I'll be there.”

“You don't sound so good. Is everything okay?”

She turned to look at Duke and Ray, still sprawled on their sun loungers out in the yard and said, “Sure. I can manage. I'll see you later.”

Esmeralda lived in a seven-story apartment building on Sixteenth Street only a block away from the Santa Monica Freeway. It was a brown brick edifice that stood on its own between two rubble-strewn demolition sites. Outside, children were playing in a dilapidated Mercury Marquis with no windows in it.

At 7:56 P.M., Bonnie parked Duke's Buick next to the Mercury and climbed out. She checked her lipstick and primped her spray-stiffened hair with her fingers. The traffic noise here was tremendous, and there was an eye-watering tang of exhaust fumes in the air. She climbed up the steps to the front door, which was already half open. It was freshly painted in glossy maroon, and inside Bonnie could see a green linoleum floor that had been polished to a high
shine. She pressed the door buzzer for apartment four, and a man's voice said,
“Quién?”

“It's Bonnie Winter. I'm looking for Esmeralda.”

“
Sí
Esmeralda's here. Come on up.”

She walked along the corridor until she reached the elevator. One of the apartment doors was open, and she could see a young woman standing in front of a mirror fixing combs in her hair. A TV was tuned to a Spanish-language comedy program, and the young woman was smiling at herself.

Bonnie went up to the fourth floor. The elevator was cramped and slow and smelled of Lysol, but somebody had tried to make it more cheerful by pasting postcards of Mexico on the walls and varnishing them.

Esmeralda was waiting for her outside the elevator. She was wearing a crimson satin dress that Bonnie had never seen before, and there was a crimson ribbon in her hair. “Juan is already here,” she said, in a hushed voice.

She ushered Bonnie into a small living room that was filled with oversize 1950s furniture—a chocolate-brown couch with white lace antimacassars on the back, two chocolate-brown armchairs with tapestry cushion covers, a circular table with a brown fringed velveteen tablecloth. In one corner stood a glass-fronted display cabinet crammed with china and ornaments, and the fireplace looked like the altar of a Catholic cathedral, with a plaster figure of the Virgin Mary, candles, rosaries and luminous plastic grottoes.

In one of the armchairs sat Esmeralda's father, whom Bonnie had met several times before. He was
a shy man with curly gray hair, a large gray mustache and an intensely white shirt. In the other armchair sat a thin, almost emaciated man of about forty-five with acne-pitted cheeks and hooded eyes. He was handsome in a ravaged way, with slicked-back black hair and chiseled sideburns. He wore a black shirt with a silver bolo necktie and a black suit with a narrow waist and very wide lapels.

“Bonnie, this is Juan Maderas.”

Juan stood up and took both of Bonnie's hands. He was very tall, at least six foot three inches, and he was wearing some floral cologne that immediately took her off her guard because it reminded her so much of the camellias that had been laid on her father's casket. “Esmeralda has told me about you,” he said, in a deep, hoarse voice. “It seems as if you are somebody very special. The job that you do, that takes somebody very special.”

“I just do my best,” said Bonnie. “Thanks for taking the trouble to see me.”

“No, no. No trouble. I was very interested when Esmeralda told me about the butterflies. Very interested.”

“I never saw anything like them before, and I've seen just about every creepy-crawly that there is. In my business, you get to be an amateur expert on bugs.”

“Why don't you sit down?” suggested Esmeralda's father. “Esmeralda, open some wine.”

“I never drink and drive, thanks,” said Bonnie.

“Coca-Cola, maybe?”

“Watching my figure. Water would be fine.”

She sat down on the couch next to Esmeralda's
father. Juan Maderas sat down, too, and laced his long fingers together. On his right middle finger he wore a silver ring with a skull on it. “Esmeralda said that you took the butterflies to a professor at UCLA.”

“Howard Jacobson. Yes, he's the best. He's written all kinds of books on bugs and forensics. Often it's the only way that you can tell how long somebody's been dead, by the life cycle of the flies that infest their body, having regard to the ambient temperature and all. People go off real quick in a heatwave—you'd be surprised.”

“And this Professor Jacobson was sure that the butterfly was the Clouded Apollo?”

“That's right. And he told me about the legend, too. The demon goddess whose name I can't pronounce too good.”

“Itzpapalotl,” said Juan Maderas. “Her name translated means ‘obsidian butterfly.' That was because she had broad butterfly wings sprouting from her shoulders, with the blades of sharp obsidian knives all the way around the edges.”

“That's what Howard told me. He said she had a knife for a tongue, too.”

“That's right. Itzpapalotl fell from heaven, along with the Tzitzimime, who dropped from the sky in a tremendous variety of shapes, such as scorpions, or toads, or even walking sticks. We call them ‘deadly things.' There was one Tzitzimime which took on the form of a donkey's skull, and it would appear at crossroads at night. If you saw it, it would follow you all the way home, screaming.”

Juan Maderas took another sip of wine, and then he said, “Itzpapalotl sometimes wore an invisible
cloak so that nobody could see her. At other times she dressed up as a lady of the Mexican court, caking her face with white powder and lining her cheeks with strips of rubber. Her fingers tapered into the claws of a jaguar, and her toes into eagle's claws.

“On certain days of the Aztec calendar, she would fly like a butterfly through the towns and villages with scores of dead witches, also butterflies, swarming behind her. They would enter people's houses and settle in their ears, whispering evil words to them, persuading them to murder their wives and their children. Itzpapalotl wanted more spirits in Mictlampa with her, even more butterflies, and the most loyal spirits were those who had loved their families dearly but had turned on them, and killed them.”

“That's it,” Bonnie nodded. “They killed the people they loved the most. That's exactly what happened in all of the three cases where I discovered these butterflies.”

Juan Maderas stared at Bonnie, and his hooded black eyes glittered like beetles. “Can you really believe, in the twenty-first century, that these people were murdered by an ancient Aztec demon?”

“I don't know. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? It really sounds crazy. But none of these people seemed to have much of a motive … not for killing their children, anyhow. One family was having problems over child custody, and one family was full of druggies, but the other family … Everybody said the father was such a good father, but he shot his three kids for no obvious reason at all.”

“Sometimes people do that kind of thing. You
should know that better than anybody. It doesn't mean that they've been encouraged to do it by Itzpapalotl.”

“But the only common elements between these three trauma scenes were the butterflies and some kind of Mexican connection. I don't suppose the Mexican connection would mean much, normally, but Howard said that the Clouded Apollo butterfly is never found here in California. Never.”

Juan Maderas was silent for a long time. He sipped his wine again, then took out a black silk handkerchief to wipe his lips. “I don't know what to say to you. There are many who still believe in Itzpapalotl and Micantecutli, the great lord of hell, and the Tzitzimime. I saw some old men when I was younger, friends of my father's, who drew blood out of their noses and their ears and dripped it over walking sticks to keep away the evil spirits that they believed were concealed inside them. But these days, I'm not so sure.”

“What did people do to keep Itzpapalotl away?”

“They sacrificed people, usually, cut their hearts out, and they would sing her a flattering song, calling her their mother and their protector.”

“And it worked?”

“According to the picture writing, yes. The Aztec priests kept extraordinarily detailed records of everything they did, every sacrifice they made.”

Bonnie thought for a while. But then she said, “I'm a very practical woman, Mr. Maderas. I've seen a lot of dead people, and I don't believe in ghosts. But something's happening here, something very strange, and there has to be a reason for it.”

“Well … you may be right. The Mexican people suffer many injustices in Los Angeles, and a great deal of prejudice. Perhaps Itzpapalotl has come back from hell to start some kind of crusade on their behalf.”

Esmeralda's father suddenly cleared his throat and said, “When I was young, the man who ran our local store insulted my mother. They found his body in Griffith Park, with his tongue cut out. That was the way that Xipe Totec, the night drinker, used to kill his victims … cut out their tongues so that they bled to death, and drink it.”

“They never found who killed him?”

“How could they? It was Xipe Totec.”

Bonnie stayed a little while longer, but she was very unsettled. She couldn't decide if Juan Maderas really believed in Itzpapalotl, or if he was humoring her. His tone of voice was dry and monotonous and matter-of-fact, as if they were discussing the price of candles, yet there was something sly about him, too. Occasionally Esmeralda's father would interject some odd non sequitur, such as, “You mustn't sleep in hell.… You must keep awake to endure your punishment.… That's what they say.”

Bonnie left the apartment building feeling confused and depressed. She thought of calling Ralph at home, but then she decided that it would probably make him even angrier with her than he was already. She had felt so elated after spending the night with him in Pasadena, especially after her humiliation at Kyle Lennox's party. She had really felt that her life was going to change. She hadn't allowed herself to consider
the possibility that she might have actually left Duke and gone to live with Ralph instead; but she hadn't been more than one step away from it.

She played “Evergreen” on the car stereo as she drove back home. She sang along, and suddenly the tears burst out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks and dripped onto her new stonewashed jeans. She couldn't bear the thought that Ralph might never make love to her again.

Up ahead of her, the traffic signals danced red and blurry and bright, like lamps at a Mexican carnival.

When Bonnie opened her eyes the next morning, the first thing that struck her was the silence. She lay in bed looking up at the ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the plaster which had always reminded her of a witch, with a pointed nose and a pointed chin. The sun shivered across her face and made her look as if she were winking her eye. After a little while she sat up and checked the bedside clock. It was 8:23 A.M.

She sat up, horrified. Duke was going to be late for work and Ray was going to be late for school and she was going to be late for—

Then she suddenly realized. None of them was going to be late for anything. Duke didn't really have a job and Ray wasn't going to school and she didn't
have a job to go to, either—not unless Ralph changed his mind about Phil Cafagna.

She prodded the bundle of sheets next to her. “Duke—it's almost eight-thirty. You want some coffee?”

He didn't answer, but then, she didn't expect him to. You could have crashed a 747 right outside the house and he wouldn't have woken up. She prodded him again. “Do you want some coffee? I'm not cooking you anything this morning. I wouldn't want you to accuse me of murdering you.”

Still he didn't answer. Exasperated, she said, “Come on, Duke, you're not lying in bed all day. You're going out to find yourself a job.”

She took hold of the sheets and dragged them off him. Except that he wasn't there. The shape that she had thought was Duke was simply the extra pillows that she must have discarded in the heat of the night.