An Inconsequential Murder

by Rodolfo Peña

  “¿Qué tal, Lupe?” he said as he shook his friend’s hand.

  José Guadalupe Salgado was a friend from his University days. While Lombardo had studied economics because that was where all the political action was going on, his friend Lupe, always the practical man, had joined the very first generation of a brand new faculty, Computer Science and Systems Engineering. While Lombardo was hiding away in the U.S. Army, Lupe had graduated as a Systems Engineer and worked for corporations as a programmer, computer technician, and computer site manager. Eventually he quit to form his own company. He had set up the very first ISP, Internet Service Provider, in Monterrey.

  Ugly as a toad, Lupe nevertheless had a “way with the ladies” and had 6 kids with two different women by the time he was 21. “I love fast cars and faster women,” he would say with a chuckle. Lombardo thought him a jerk on that score but had to admit he was a genius when it came to computers.

  Before Lombardo even sat down, the waiter was already there waiting to take his order. “The same,” said Lombardo pointing to his friend’s Bohemia beer.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Lupe.

  “Yeah, too long. They keep me busy at the Department,” said Lombardo while lighting a Delicado.

  “I can’t believe you still smoke those things; I mean, I could see why you smoked them when we were students and had no money but now…” said Lupe. He smoked Marlboro Lights. He had always smoked the most popular brands. Lupe had smoked nothing but Raleigh cigarettes when they were the most popular, and the most expensive, back in the seventies. Then, for a time he smoked small, Cuban panatelas because it was very fashionable to do so.

  Lombardo, on the other hand, was oblivious to what was fashionable and trendy. People mistook this for a stubborn devotion to habits, but in reality it was that he saw no need or reason to change. He clung just as stubbornly to his honesty and his immunity to corruption for the same reason, not out of any set of moral beliefs but as a way of life that he saw no reason to change. He had no ambition for money and certainly no use for power, so why change his way of life?

  Lupe said, “I know what I am going to give you as a Christmas present, one of those nice, light tan colored summer suits so you don’t have to wear this damned, drab coat in hot weather.”

  Lombardo shrugged and said, “It’s your money.”

  Lupe laughed, “I can see that you’re thrilled by the idea. You’re still wearing the same suit you wore at my wedding.” The waiter brought Lombardo his beers. It was still happy hour; beers were two for the price of one. The second beer was put into the little pail with ice where Lupe’s second beer was being kept cold as well. “I was really surprised when I got your email; it has been so long.”

  Lombardo poured the beer slowly into the frosted glass the waiter had brought. There was one thing that never changed in Monterrey—no matter what the weather, beer was served very cold. “The thing is,” Lombardo said finally, “I need you to explain some things to me and to give me some advice.”

  “What about?” asked Lupe with a little laugh. “I don’t know a damn thing about police work.”

  “Have you heard about what happened to Victor Delgado?”

  The smile left Lupe’s face. “That’s all computer people have been talking about today. People are really riled up; everybody’s fed up with all the killings, and murders. Every goddamned day there are pictures of bodies in the papers. They are saying they want the Army to come into this. People have had enough.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Lombardo. “I have been assigned to Victor’s case. That’s why I called you.”

  Lupe poured beer into his glass and said, “Sure, what can I do to help?”

  “Did you know Victor Delgado well, Lupe?”

  Lupe twisted his lips in the half-pout and half-frown that was his equivalent of shrugged shoulders. “He was a colleague. I had dealings with him, you know, professionally. We developed some applications for the University and Victor had to sign off on them.”

  “Did you ever hear of him being in trouble, or having problems?”

  “Victor? No, never. He was known as a quiet guy, a bureaucrat type. You know, kind of ‘gray’ professionally; not too smart but not dumb either, more of a technician than an executive; the type of guy who does his job and is happy with that.”

  “Do you think he was well liked? What did your colleagues think of him?”

  “I don’t think they thought anything about him. He was not the kind of guy that makes much of an impression on people. Certainly he was not disliked, I think.”

  “Well, somebody didn’t like him, judging from the way he was killed.”

  Lupe was silent for a moment then asked, “Was he badly, you know, uh…?”

  “Yes, he was pretty well worked over. That’s why this case is kind of strange. By everyone’s account, he was a quiet, unremarkable person—a bureaucrat, as you say, albeit a technical one. And someone picks him up, beats him to a pulp, and then kills him. It’s not a robbery—I know that. It’s not the cartels—I know it from the way it was done, it’s not their style. This is why I called you. As I said, I need you to explain some things to me.”

  “Sure, what do you want to know?”

  “Do you know anything about his personal life?”

  “I know what’s common knowledge in the computer community. He married some girl who was a student in the Business Management and Accounting School. It seems they had to get married. She was pregnant at the time and rumor has it that Victor was not the father. They married two or three years ago. Other than that, he has been a pretty low-profile kind of guy, you know, nose to the grind stone and all of that.”

  “He didn’t fool around with women, did he?”

  “Victor? No! The guy was like an altar boy. Why do you ask that?”

  “I’m trying to rule out a crime of passion. I guess I should ask his wife and maybe his brother.”

  “You can but I doubt very much that you’ll get a different answer. Word would’ve gone around. You know, Monterrey may have nearly 4 million inhabitants but the middle class is the size of your thumbnail. Everybody knows everybody. And the computer community is even smaller.”

  “That’s true, Lupe, but if there is something I’ve learned in this job it’s that people never cease to surprise you.”

  “Well, if he was fiddling around, he kept it well hidden, and I certainly would be surprised, considering what he had at home.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You haven’t met the wife, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You’ll see what I mean when you meet her.”

  After talking to Lupe for several hours, Lombardo left the bar very late that night. Lupe wanted to go to a whorehouse and asked him to come along but he begged off saying he was tired, had had a long day, and had to get up early the next day. Lombardo had never liked whorehouses; he hated the smell of the mixture of cheap perfume and cigarette smoke that impregnated every stitch of your clothes, and worse, the over made up, over ripe, and over aggressive whores were unbearable. “Bad whiskey and worse women,” is how his father had described them, although Lupe would surely have disagreed.

  The taxi he took home raced down the nearly empty avenues and streets. The cool night air cleared his mind and he made notes about what his friend had explained. Yes, system managers have access to everything that’s in a computer, one way or another. Yes, there is very little information that they cannot reach, access, manipulate if needed. “What was the most sensitive kind of data?” he had asked. “Well, that depends on where you work. In a University it is probably budgets, salaries, performance evaluations, email, lots of stuff.” Lupe had said. “Sensitive?” “Yes, but nothing to get you killed,” Lupe remarked. And, according to Lupe, no one had ever heard of Delgado doing anything shady or illegal.

  Lupe wanted to know why Lombardo was so interested in Victor’s job. Lombardo had said that he could only think of three things
that could have led to someone wanting to rough up and eventually kill the young man: something to do with his job, something to do with drugs, something do to with a love affair—a crime of passion. Since this last was out of the question, he was starting to look at the other two possibilities.

  He had said that his instincts and experience told him that it was probably not a drug-related case—not in the traditional sense, anyway. He was not killed in the usual way, was not left in the usual spots, and so on. A love affair? A crime of passion? Homosexuals gone rampant? Jealous husband that hired goons to work him over and kill him? Not from what everyone kept telling him; nice guy, normal, quiet, a simple technocrat. Jealous lovers kill in the bedroom, in the hotel room, even at work, like that woman who walked into the corporate offices where she worked and shot her boss. Those were the easy cases. Not much to do—gather the facts, let the Medical Examiner do his job, the judge took care of the rest.

  No, there was something about this case that did not fit. It was too cruel for a simple murder. Was this a message? Was someone sending a message? But, who, to whom? What was being said? Who was being warned? Why would the killer or killers leave the body in such an obvious place and his wallet and things on his body, which would make it easy to identify him? Was the severed head a mistake? Or was it intentional? When cartel killers severed heads they made sure that the act made the headlines, like those poor seven bastards, the soldiers they had rounded up in a whorehouse and executed by the highway. Heads neatly severed and put into sacks, hung on the fence near the bodies, just to show the Army that if they came into the drug wars, it was in for a tough fight.

  Then there was the speed with which the story had disappeared from the media. Who had squashed it? This bullshit about the University being embarrassed—they had had riots on campus, for Christ sake! Someone had called his boss to get him to wrap up the case, be done with is as soon as possible. Why was this little guy’s murder so important behind the scenes, yet made to look unimportant publicly? Why did it matter if the media made a big thing out of it or not. No one seemed to care to muffle stories of the thousands of cartel members, soldiers, and innocent bystanders that died every year in the drug wars, so why was this one different? Nothing made sense. Nothing—including those cigarettes.

  Lombardo put away his notes. He had arrived home.

  Part 2: Day 2

  Chapter 11: A Visit to the Medical Examiner’s Office

  Lombardo had no hangover the next day because he had learned from his father that to avoid one you had to take two Alka-Seltzers and an aspirin before going to bed.

  As he shaved, he frowned at how his face seemed even more haggard and worn of late. “Damned cigarettes are killing me,” he said aloud and put out the one that was burning in the ashtray on the toilette’s lid. He looked at his slight, thin frame with its too prominent collarbones, and light brown, leathery skin. When he was a student in the University they had called him La Agonía, the agony. Everybody had a nickname, which one usually got around secondary school or a bit later. It usually stuck for life. Lots of conversations started with questions like “Do you remember La Güera? or, “Have you seen La Marrana lately?” The blonde one or the sow—funny how most nicknames were of the feminine gender. He moved his shaving mirror so he could look at his back. There were red spots where the shoulder strap of the holster rubbed against his back. He reached back to dab some of the antiseptic cream he had bought at a discount pharmacy. “It’ll ease the itching,” the young woman behind the counter had said, “but it won’t cure anything.”

  A couple of years ago he had relented and gone to see a doctor in the Social Security Health Center. He had had a nagging cough for weeks and wanted something to get rid of it.

  “There’s no medicine that will cure it,” the doctor had said, “it’s just your lungs protesting against all the filth you insist on putting into them. You’ll have these fits of cough the rest of your life—what little there will probably be of it if you keep smoking and eating badly the way you do.”

  “Well, thank you, Doctor,” he said aloud and relit the stubbed out cigarette.

  Lombardo went into the bedroom to get a fresh set of underwear. He looked at his body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. “It certainly does show the wear and tear,” he said. He looked at the ugly scar on his left shoulder—a hastily sewn rip that a piece of shrapnel had made in Viet Nam; his right knee had scars on both sides, too—souvenirs from a car crash he had suffered as he and a former partner chased two suspects. He had survived it, his partner had not. The skin of his upper arm was starting to sag as was the skin on his neck. He had a small pot belly in spite of his overall thinness. He said, “Not too many kilometers left on this old wagon.”

  After his shower, he dressed slowly, putting on a fresh, white shirt over his V neck T-shirt. He put his suit into a bag which he would drop at the cleaner’s on the way to the Department. His other suit was the same as the one he had taken off. They were interchangeable in style, in the worn look they had, in the same dark-gray color. No wonder people thought he always wore the same clothes.

  He called the Department’s garage. Yes, they had retrieved his car. Yes, they had changed the tire, the oil, filled the tank. OK, he’d take a taxi to the Department and pick it up.

  He called the Medical Examiner’s office. Was the doctor there? “Doc, have you got anything for me? OK, I am on my way.” He told the taxi driver to go by the cleaner’s on Garza Sada Avenue and then to take him to the Medical Examiner’s office.

  After he dropped off his suit at the cleaners, he sat back to wait for the taxi to thread its way through the usual morning rush hour traffic. He thought about his boss and again wondered why people wanted this case to go away as quickly as possible. “There’s something wrong, something’s not right,” he said aloud.

  The taxi driver looked at him through the rear view mirror. “What’s that, sir?”

  “I said that the dry cleaning is getting very expensive,” he said and laughed.

  “Dry cleaning, sir?”

  “Yeah, but never mind.”

  The taxi exited from Gonzalitos Avenue and turned into Madero Avenue. At the red light it turned into the University Hospital. He showed his badge to the guard so that the taxi could go into the reserved parking lot.

  “Wait for me,” he said to the driver whose face stiffened thinking he was out of a fare. Lombardo said, “Keep the meter running. Don’t worry; you’re going to get paid.”

  He went into the stark white building whose only features were the glass entrance doors and a few small windows, which were curtained with white cloth. A sign above the entrance simply read, “Servicios Médicos Forenses” to announce the Forensic Medical Services.

  A girl in a white lab coat, sitting behind a beige counter asked, “Yes?”

  “Dr. Figueroa, please.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “He’s expecting me,” he said.

  The girl, without taking her eyes off of him picked up the phone, spoke into it, and then pressed the buzzer, which sounded unusually harsh and loud.

  “You may go in,” she said. “Do you know where he has his office?”

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” he said to the girl and opened the buzzing door without waiting for her to reply.

  Dr. Figueroa was standing by the door to his office, with one foot out of it, and speaking to someone inside. He made a motion to Lombardo to stop, and said to the person inside that he would be right back.

  He made a motion for Lombardo to follow him and they walked quickly down a hall and into another office. A sign on the door said that this office belonged to a Dr. Pineda but Dr. Pineda was not there.

  Dr. Figueroa closed the door and without any preliminaries said, “The body you came to see is not here anymore.”

  Lombardo furrowed his brow but did not ask the question.

  Dr. Figueroa sighed. “The family had an order signed by a judge. It allow
ed them to take the body away without further, uh, abuse to it, as the father put it. We had to stop the autopsy, return the organs, and forget about including the lab reports in our write-up.”

  Lombardo nodded and was about to ask him something when the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag, the kind reserved for evidence. There was a wet and crumpled piece of paper in the bag. “I found this deep in his trachea.”

  Chapter 12: The Governor Calls the Dean

  In the Dean’s office at the University, his new cell phone rang.

  “Yes?” said the Dean tentatively.

  “Ah, Dean Herrera. I see you have installed the cell phone I sent you. Well, from now on, I think we should use these phones exclusively when communicating.”

  “Yes, thank you Governor; I was…”