This last one was drawing spirals on a blank paper when a pack of Faros fell onto his desk.
“Sorry for being late, but I had to go all the way to the avenue.
Do you need anything else?”
There was no one in sight. The rest of his colleagues had gone to lunch, so Rangel motioned for Romero to keep the change and offered him a cigarette.
“Did you see Taboada eating?”
“Of course I did: he was in the Rose Garden, talking with Professor Edelmiro.”
“Edelmiro Morales?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why would I be wrong?”
Professor Edelmiro was the leader of the Professors’ Union for the entire region.
“Who else was with him? Cruz?”
“Mr. Cruz, no. Some other people I don’t know, and Mr. Chávez.”
“All right,” said Rangel, “get me a cup of coffee.”
It seemed strange to him that El Travolta would be seen with Professor Edelmiro. He rolled this news around in his head for a few minutes. Then he reviewed his notes from the Bar León, until he had his first hunch. Hmm, he said to himself, before I make any moves, I have to find more evidence. If I want to arrest that guy, I’ve got to come around the back way, so he doesn’t have a chance to retaliate. He wanted to light a cigarette, but the lighter slipped out of his grip: Fuck. His hands were all chapped and he was losing feeling. If he kept up like this, they were gonna start bleeding again.
At 4:30, he saw Chief García come back and then go into his office. Lolita went in, too, her heels clicking behind him. “Sir, they called from City Hall—” And she closed the door.
Still worried about the possibility that the suspect would complain to the chief, Rangel stood up and looked out the window toward the docks. Twenty minutes later he saw El Travolta pull up. The fat guy parked his patrol car and took out a handcuffed man, a person he knew. No shit, he said to himself. Taboada had arrested the Prophet. The Prophet was an ice-cream vendor who waited for his clients in front of schools, like everyone in his line of business. Fucking Taboada, now I know what you’re trying to do. And he stood up. From that moment on, things between Rangel and El Travolta were headed on the wrong track.
On El Chicote’s battery-powered radio, an announcer gave the weather: “Button up if you’re going outside, my friends. The weather’s cloudy and getting cloudier, with the possibility of rain tonight. You know how the city gets before a storm: the fog comes in, no visibility at all, hot as hell, and you gotta turn on the fans just to breathe. If you gotta drive your car and you don’t have air-conditioning, bring along an oxygen tank. . . . You are listening to La Cotorra, and next up is Rigo Tovar and Las Jaibas del Valle.” Fuck, Rangel said to himself and switched the station.
As he was walking in front of the chief’s office, García called him in.
“Rangel, come here a minute.”
He showed him a reddish paper. It was a flyer printed on news-print, with the logo of Cola Drinks.
“Salim found them blowing around in the street.”
The headline said, A KILLER AMONG US. The flyer reproduced the photo of Karla Cevallos’s body, taken from El Mercurio, and on one side there was an image of a smiling John Williams Jr., with a wineglass in his hand, at a party with friends. For the flyer’s author, there was no doubt that the murderer was young Williams. It even called him Jack the Ripper. The article said: The same day that the second girl was violently killed, Mr. Jack Williams, Jr. was seen in the Bar León. The officers let him leave and Chief García didn’t mention his name in the press conference. How do you explain that? The flyer reasoned it through: For the murderer to go unpunished, he has to be extremely powerful; Jack Williams is such a man and he was at the scene of the crime, so he must be the guilty one. Everyone knows El Junior has exotic habits, and the police don’t go after him for anything. How long are they going to protect the Jackal? At the end, the flyer suggested it was even possible that the Jackal was dissolving his victims at the family-owned bottling plant. More than one person had found strange things floating in their cola.
“Do you have something to do with this?” The chief stared at him for an eternity. His look could have taken X-rays, but Rangel didn’t move a hair. “I’m asking you a question.”
“You know I don’t.”
He was sure the chief thought he was responsible. That’s what I get for asking around to find out if the chief was meeting with Jack Williams. He watched as his boss tore up the reddish paper and threw it in the trash can.
“Don’t get mixed up in this one, Rangel.”
When he got back to his desk, El Travolta was getting up.
“What’s happening, Taboada?” Fatwolf asked him. “How’d it go?”
“Fucking great.”
El Chicote and the other officers turned to look.
“You got him?”
But El Travolta didn’t answer. He sat down at his desk and typed with two fingers, while he smoked a cigarette. Then he called El Chaneque on the phone and he brought him the Prophet. The prisoner had a black eye and his shirt was torn.
“Fucking Taboada: that’s him?” Fatwolf gloated.
“He already confessed.”
Everyone was consumed with excitement about the reward, except Vicente Rangel. Fatwolf slapped Taboada on the back, El Chicote congratulated him loudly and immediately followed up saying that an officer about to write a report would probably want a cup of coffee. Taboada agreed and motioned to Romero, who ran out, hurrying, to get the drinks.
“What do you think?” Wong asked, and tossed Rangel the papers.
Rangel picked up the document and read the first page. Taboada whined, “Fuck, that’s none of your damn business.” And when Vicente stood up, he stared at him.
Rangel walked over to a file cabinet, pulled out a notebook, and checked a list of crossed-out names. After a minute, he lifted up his head and concluded, “This isn’t the one.”
“What?”
“I said this isn’t the one. It’s not possible.”
El Travolta moved toward his desk. “Who the fuck made you the motherfucking judge and jury?”
El Chaneque stood next to Rangel’s desk and stuck his hand in his pocket. The people working at nearby desks stood up discreetly. On another occasion, Rangel had seen Chávez pull out brass knuckles from that pocket, and even though he was dying to take him on, he realized the best idea was to avoid this fight. He was in a really bad spot, stuck between the desk and the wall, with the fat guy in front and El Chaneque behind, so he adopted a more conciliatory tone.
“Look, Taboada, calm down a little. I’m just saying this isn’t the one.”
“Prove it.”
Rangel noticed out of the corner of his eye that Chief García had entered the room, behind Taboada’s back, so he was emboldened a little and showed the fat guy the list of prisoners from the month before.
“Is this your signature?”
Taboada didn’t answer.
“This is your signature. This vato was sleeping in a cell from the thirteenth to the twenty-first. You yourself picked him up for being drunk. He can’t be the murderer.”
El Travolta trembled with anger. When he started to add something, he saw the chief’s icy stare.
“Taboada,” said the chief, “I want to talk to you.”
Now he’d really fucked it up, Rangel thought. El Travolta left without looking at Vicente. The rest of their colleagues toiled conscientiously on their paperwork. Only El Chaneque stared at him resentfully.
Vicente decided to respond. “What the hell? What do you want, asshole?”
But El Chaneque just stared at him and went back to the main entrance.
When El Travolta came out from his discussion with the chief, Romero offered him the coffee—“Here you go, chief”—but the fat guy hit the tray and the liquid spilled out onto the madrina’s clothes. As Romero dried himself off, El Chicote said to him, “Don
’t take it the wrong way, Blind Man; they’re just joking. Jokes are a fact of life around here.”
Rangel went down to supervise the release of El Profeta and ran into Wong.
“What you did was right. Cruz and I are going to get a drink at the Cherokee, if you want to come.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’ve got a lot to do.”
* * *
He took people’s crime reports on the phone until 10:30 at night. There arrived a moment when the entire city seemed suspect to him, and he was thinking along those lines when in walked Congressman Tobías Wolffer. “Good afternoon,” said the politician. Rangel saw him go into the office of Chief García and realized that the majority of his coworkers were almost salivating, waiting for the next money delivery. To everyone’s surprise, the expensively dressed congressman pointed to him, before leaving, and the chief called him into his office. When Rangel went in, the chief was facing away from him.
“The congressman left this for you. He said you did a really good job with his family. Keep it up, Vicente. Don’t get distracted by the bullshit.”
There was an overstuffed envelope on the desk, an envelope with the logo of the Professors’ Union. The congressman was an advisor of theirs. The chief offered him the package and Rangel left without saying anything. Once at his desk, he saw that it was a considerable amount. He left a third of the money in the envelope and put the rest in his pockets. Wolffer was repugnant to him, but nothing could be done about it.
When it was eleven, he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. Since his shift had ended hours before, he announced he was leaving and went down to look for his car. As he made his way through the first floor, he ran into the Blind Man, who was coming out of the bathroom with the stain on his shirt. Rangel got his attention and threw him the envelope.
“For the coffees,” he said to him, making sure no one else could hear, and left before the Blind Man was able to respond. His gofer stood there, like an abused dog who couldn’t understand kindness.
El Chicote was in the parking lot. Rangel wanted to give him a piece of his mind: Why’d you do that? How could you do that? Why ruin all the time he put into the investigation?
“What’s the deal, Chicote?” Rangel asked. “Were you in on it, too? How much were they going to give you?”
El Chicote was stunned. He didn’t say another word. The Blind Man came up to him, holding the envelope’s contents tightly, and said, “Jokes. Jokes are a fact of life at headquarters.”
11
Rangel turned on the car radio and heard the sound of mysterious drumbeats. It was the voice of Rubén Blades: “The roar of the roiling sea / the waves break at the horizon / the blue-green of the great Caribe glistens / in the majesty of the setting sun.” Since he stopped playing and dedicated himself to his current work, Rangel’s only pastime was listening to music, certain music that helped him disconnect from everything: Rubén Blades, Willie Colón, Ray Barretto, Benny Moré, disco music, soul, Aretha Franklin, the sappy songs by Marvin Gaye, blues, Eric Clapton, the rhythms of Creedence, the harmonies of the Beatles, but no corridos or Rigo Tovar, even if they were in style. He had lived without a record player ever since that ill-fated Sunday when he decided to kick it to pieces because it reminded him of a certain person. He didn’t get another one until he saw the sales at Mr. Guillén’s store, but he hardly ever used it. Now his time for daily leisure activities consisted of the songs that he listened to in his Chevy Nova, while going to or coming from the office. But something must really be going wrong, the policeman reasoned, when even his last refuge had become unbearable. The Panamanian’s lyrics had taken on another dimension:
The shark goes out looking
the shark never sleeps
the shark out on the prowl
the shark a bad omen.
Holy shit, thought Rangel, this case is really getting to me.
Anyone else would have gone home and focused on his own life, but Rangel was a good and decent police officer and felt obligated to arrest the person who was guilty. Against the advice of his uncle, he was becoming obsessed with these girls who’d been killed. Look, Vicente, you have to toughen up so your work doesn’t affect you so much. Get a thicker skin; listen to what I’m telling you and don’t dick around. You gotta understand you can’t get involved in your cases and keep your objectivity. When you make a job into a personal issue, your blind spot grows, you can’t see clearly, and that can get really dangerous. You have to work from outside, like it’s someone else who’s dealing with all this stuff.
The fog is getting thicker, Vicente thought; as far as he could see, the street was empty. It looks like a ghost town, he said to himself. Whenever there’s fog, it’s always the same; everyone runs to their houses to escape the heat. It’s what I should do myself. He was exhausted. The only thing he wanted to do was roll into bed and sleep eight hours. Get rid of his worries, forget the pain in his hands, the fight with El Travolta, the accumulated tension. But sometimes we make tiny decisions that change our lives, without even noticing it. Just when Rubén Blades sang,
And the horizon swallows up the sun
and the volatile sea begins to calm
you can hear the mermaids’ lullabies
captivating the sky with their song,
Rangel turned to the right, looking for a way out.
When he got to the corner of Ejército and Aduana, he saw the outrageous neon lights at the Cherokee Music Disco, a second-rate club that was going from bad to worse. He said, Oh, shit, and parked. He had enough money to down a few drinks, even to leave with a bar girl, and still be able to eat like a king the following day at breakfast at Klein’s. Besides, today was a show day. Every Tuesday, starting at eleven, the Cherokee Music Disco attracted a good number of hookers, and there was a show where they danced in bathing suits. Rangel decided he wasn’t going to take one home, but he thought he should distract himself for a few hours, send his brain on vacation, forget about the case for a while.
It was past eleven. Before turning off the car, he heard some more Rubén Blades lyrics:
The stars are shining in the night
the moon rests in the silence
only the shark is still on the prowl.
He was just getting out of his vehicle when two kids ran up to him: “I’ll take care of it, man” and “You want it washed, chief?” Rangel shook his head and headed to the club.
El Watusi and Juan Pachanga were guarding the main entrance to the Cherokee. El Watusi was a black man from Jalapa, almost six and a half feet tall, who had previously been a fisherman. Juan Pachanga was the administrator, always a little tipsy, a few whis-keys above sea level. Since they knew Rangel by sight, they let him go in without searching him, like they should have done. For sure, they can see how tired I am, thought Rangel. A sign was hanging off his face that said: DON’T BOTHER ME.
He pushed aside a beaded curtain and waited a second while he got used to the contradictions of the place. Even though there was one of those mirror balls spinning nonstop at the center of the dance floor, the music was a salsa by Roberto Roena: “You’re loco-loco . . . and I’m chill.” The decoration was leftover from the prior owner, Freaky Villarreal, a disco music aficionado who went bankrupt and had to sell the business. Another person bought the club and salsa pushed the Village People aside.
The bar had started to liven up. Four bar girls danced on the floor, and their mistress, Madam Kalalú, was mingling with the regulars, leaning on the bar in a wispy red dress, with her customary cigar in her mouth. As soon as she saw him, she sent him two bar girls, who went to give him the traditional welcome. As soon as someone came into the Cherokee, one or more of these scantily dressed women would rush to stroke him suggestively a little, so the new guy would buy them a drink. The ones who hugged the detective now, wrapping themselves around him like a pair of boa constrictors, were very disappointed, because Rangel sent them away with an ugly gesture. He had walked over to the bar when he heard s
omeone talking to him.
“Jackie Chan!”
It took him a minute to recognize the butcher from the Colonia Coralillo, the black man he had almost arrested with his uncle. He didn’t seem to have any hard feelings and raised his glass to toast him. He was at a nearby table with two other guys and three bar girls. As he remembered the circumstances of their last meeting, Rangel moved his head discreetly to say hello and continued on his way. Two steps from the bar, he heard someone else shout his name—“Rangel!”—and saw that the Evangelist was motioning to him from another table close by. Rangel accepted the fact that the solitude he longed for was not possible and went to sit with his colleagues.
Wong and Cruz Treviño were with the Evangelist. A bar girl was comforting Cruz. There was a half-empty Bacardi bottle in the middle of the table, about the size of an elephant’s foot. Since the Evangelist had a Coke in front of him, Rangel assumed that the rum was flowing through Cruz Treviño’s six-foot, three-hundred-pound frame. Cruz hadn’t even seen him come in. The Evangelist offered his hand, and Rangel did the same.
“What’s up, John One Four?” Every time they saw each other, Rangel rebaptized the Evangelist with a verse from the Bible. “I thought you didn’t drink. Aren’t you condemning yourself?”
The Black Minutes Page 19