To Selena, With Love

by Chris Perez

  Selena hired her cousin Debra to work in the boutiques and help expand the business into Mexico. Debra quit within a week, telling Yolanda that she was unhappy with how staff members weren’t reporting their sales. Yolanda told Selena not to worry about any of this. “I’ll take care of the problem,” Yolanda promised.

  Soon after that, Martin Gomez asked Selena to buy him out of his contract, because he felt that he could no longer work with Yolanda. “She’s been mismanaging affairs from the start,” he said, and told Selena that Yolanda had destroyed some of his original designs and hadn’t paid his bills.

  Both stores began to suffer losses. Yolanda fired anyone she didn’t like, so employee attrition was steady; the staff had been cut in half and employees continued to complain about the way Yolanda treated everyone. Selena turned a deaf ear, not wanting to believe that Yolanda would ever do anything to hurt her.

  Eventually, the employees started talking to Abraham, who in turn expressed his concerns about Yolanda’s business management skills—or lack of them—to Selena. She tried to laugh this off as well.

  “Dad always thinks people are bad,” she told me. “You know he never trusts anyone.”

  By early March, however, Selena and I could no longer deny that there were problems in every aspect of the business that involved Yolanda—which was most of them—and in the fan club as well. Certain people had sent in cash or checks to become fan club members, but they had never gotten the T-shirts and other items they were supposed to receive in exchange; they were now writing or calling to complain. Yolanda was even instructing some fans to make checks directly out to her instead of to the fan club.

  Abraham started to receive calls from some of Selena’s disappointed, confused fans. On March 9, he called Yolanda into the offices at Q Productions for a private meeting along with Selena and Suzette to find out what was going on.

  Yolanda couldn’t explain herself, Selena told me later. As Abraham questioned her, Yolanda kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Abraham told Yolanda to get off their property and to never step foot on it again, or he’d have her arrested. He also threatened to take her to court for embezzlement.

  Suzette called Yolanda a thief and a liar, and said that she was disgusted that a woman she had trusted enough to have her participate in her wedding had been doing this to the family—and especially to Selena, who had been so good to her.

  Selena was the opposite of Abraham in some ways: she was as trusting as he was suspicious. She was torn between feeling betrayed and angry as she watched Yolanda trip over her own lies, and feeling compassion toward the woman she had once considered one of her best friends.

  I think that, in many ways, Selena couldn’t believe what she was seeing as Yolanda unraveled right in front of us. However, by this point, she, too, was ready to sever all ties with her former friend—but first she wanted Yolanda to return the missing paperwork. The fan club had been her breaking point. To Selena, her fans were her family, and now her family had been hurt.

  The morning after that meeting with Yolanda, Abraham’s brother Eddie called to let Abraham know that Yolanda was at Q Productions with another employee from the Corpus Christi boutique. Abraham drove straight to the office in order to inform Yolanda again that she was no longer welcome anywhere on his property.

  That same day, I heard Selena arguing with Yolanda on the phone. After Selena hung up, she said, “I can’t trust her anymore.”

  She was right. The day after Abraham banned Yolanda from Q Productions, she went out and bought a gun.

  Selena finally started quizzing various workers at the boutiques about Yolanda’s behavior. They all told her that they had been having problems with Yolanda. What’s more, several employees at the San Antonio salon came forward and told her that Yolanda appeared to be stealing money. Yolanda had even gotten involved in Selena’s perfume line, picking up samples from Leonard Wong, the man she was working with on creating the perfume, but never giving them to Selena.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Selena said to me, distressed because this had all been going unnoticed while we were busy on the road. “I should fire Yolanda, but she’s still holding on to some papers we really need for our taxes. I don’t want to alienate her completely and risk losing those records.”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. I knew that Selena didn’t want to involve Abraham. This was her business, and she wanted to resolve the problems independently from her family.

  In my mind, I knew it wasn’t life or death paperwork—I probably would have just let lawyers try to wrest it from Yolanda—but I also knew that it wasn’t in Selena’s nature to leave any stone unturned. Selena was stubborn, which is partly what made her so successful professionally; she just wanted Yolanda to return what was rightfully ours before she washed her hands of the woman whom she had once trusted so completely.

  Selena and I went back and forth about possible solutions that ranged from firing Yolanda on the spot to calling in a private investigator. Finally, Selena said, “I can’t let Yolanda know that we suspect her of misusing our credit cards or stealing money. I doubt that she really has any proof that she’s not stealing money, like she says. But we need to get our business papers back from her for the taxes. We can’t let her know that we’re thinking about firing her. Not yet.”

  I agreed, and that’s when the real game of cat-and-mouse began. Over the next two weeks, Yolanda kept claiming that she had proof that she wasn’t stealing from the boutiques or embezzling money from the fan club, but every time Selena met her to see the receipts and other papers that would be evidence of Yolanda’s innocence, she somehow didn’t bring the right documents.

  Sometime around March 15, Selena told me that she was going to meet Yolanda in a restaurant on the outskirts of Corpus to collect the necessary paperwork.

  “Why can’t she just bring the papers to the boutiques?” I asked.

  “She’s afraid,” Selena said. “Yolanda won’t drive into Corpus because she says she’s been getting threatening phone calls.”

  At the restaurant, they sat in Selena’s car because Yolanda was too nervous to go inside. Yolanda gave Selena almost all of the paperwork that we needed for our business—but not quite.

  “Maybe I should work someplace else,” Yolanda said. “This is too much for me.”

  I doubt very much that Yolanda really intended to resign. She was just trying to manipulate Selena. And Selena did feel sorry for Yolanda, because her former friend looked so despondent. At the same time, Selena had her own reasons for pretending to believe in Yolanda’s friendship: she was still very intent on recovering our paperwork.

  Thinking fast, Selena decided that the best stance to take would be a conciliatory one, at least for the time being. “No, no, no,” Selena told Yolanda. “Please don’t quit. I need you for the Mexico deal. I really need your help. You can’t quit, not when we’re so close!”

  When Selena said this, Yolanda’s demeanor changed completely. “She was suddenly in a good mood again, all buddy-buddy with me and laughing like we were friends,” Selena told me afterward.

  Then Yolanda said, “You want to see something?”

  “Sure,” Selena said. “What is it?”

  Yolanda reached into her purse and pulled out a gun.

  As Selena told me this later, I had a sinking feeling. I knew now that Yolanda was even crazier than I thought. “What the hell?” I said. “She had a gun in the car?”

  “Uh-huh,” Selena said, but she didn’t seem at all unnerved by this. “Yolanda pulled the gun out and said she’d bought it for protection.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I went off on her and said that she needed to take that gun back to the store right now, of course,” Selena said.

  Later, investigators discovered that Yolanda had gone on March 11 to a gun range and store called A Place to Shoot in San Antonio. Yolanda had told one of the employees there that she was a pr
ivate home nurse and that some family members of a patient had threatened her. She wanted the gun for protection.

  Yolanda had to wait for three days for a background check, then picked up the pistol and bought twenty hollow-point bullets—the kind designed to open up fast on impact, causing maximum damage. The next day, she brought the gun when she met Selena at the restaurant.

  After her meeting with Selena, Yolanda thought that they were still friends. She returned the gun to the store and told the clerk that she’d changed her mind and didn’t need the pistol after all.

  I still wonder sometimes if Yolanda might have shot Selena on the day she first showed her the pistol if Selena had gone ahead and dismissed her. Maybe. I carry a certain sense of guilt that I never said anything about Yolanda having shown Selena the gun in her purse.

  What if I had told the police? Or Abraham? Who knows how Abraham would have reacted? Maybe he would have called in a favor with the police and had them scare Yolanda, and it would have been over. I still live with those questions.

  A few weeks earlier, Selena had gone into Q Productions to work on “Dreaming of You,” the song that would become the biggest hit on the mainstream English-language album we were scheduled to release later that year. I was going to go with her, but on the same day, Abraham asked me to work with the lead singer in that rock band that he was trying to promote—the one I had been working with at our house when Selena showed me how one of the songs I’d written for them should sound.

  “Do you mind if I help out your dad instead of going to the studio with you?” I asked Selena.

  “No, that’s fine,” Selena said. “You do the best you can do with this guy, and I’ll be right back.” She gave me a hug and a kiss. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  I wish that I could say that I had some kind of premonition that the end of my time with Selena was rapidly drawing near, but I did not. I just went to work. But I’ll always have regrets about what happened later that day.

  I worked with the singer from Abraham’s rock band in our home studio right through the afternoon and into the night. I had my cell phone set to vibrate on the mixing board; I was trying to mold this singer’s vocals when the cell phone went off. It was Selena.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” she asked.

  “Still working,” I said.

  “Can you get away?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Please? Can’t you just say you’ve got to go somewhere?” Selena asked. “I’d really like it if you came over to the studio.”

  “I could say that, but we’re finally making a little progress,” I hedged. “I need to see this thing through for a little bit longer. Then maybe I can come by. Why? What’s so important?”

  “I really want you to come hear something,” Selena said. “It’s that song, ‘Dreaming of You.’”

  I knew which song she was talking about, of course, but I hadn’t yet paid much attention to the demo with the lyrics on it. I had no idea what the song was about. “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I really want you to come over here and listen to what I did on that song.”

  Then we hung up. Later—much later, after it seemed like the world had ended and my heart was torn in two—I thought about that phone call. I like to imagine that Selena was thinking of me when she recorded that vocal track. I think that’s the truth, too, because Selena had never before asked me to drop whatever I was doing to come hear something she was singing.

  That’s what I should have done—drop everything to spend a few more precious minutes with my wife. If I had done that, my last moments with Selena might have included standing right next to her in the studio and hearing that song of hers, which carries all of the feeling she had for me.

  I still feel happy when I think about how Selena was thinking of me when she sang that song. But I’m also torn up by the fact that I didn’t go to her then. Why didn’t I just leave work so that I could listen to what my wife wanted me to hear?

  The answer is simple: I didn’t realize that my chances to hear Selena sing were nearly over.

  On March 30, Selena and I were at home, waiting for my father to come in from out of town. He was going to spend some time with us and stay in our guest bedroom. Before my dad arrived, though, Yolanda called to say that she was at the Days Inn in Corpus and had finally brought the missing paperwork that Selena needed for her business.

  “Just come over here and get the papers,” Yolanda told Selena. “I don’t want to have to deal with anyone.”

  “She sounds kind of shaky,” Selena said to me after they’d hung up.

  “She’s always telling stories,” I reminded her. “What makes you think that Yolanda has the papers this time, when she never has before?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going over there,” Selena said. “It’s worth a shot.”

  “Let me drive you to the motel,” I said. “I don’t want you going over there at night by yourself.”

  I drove Selena over to the hotel in my truck and parked. Selena got out of the truck and told me that Yolanda was in Room 158.

  “She wants to see me alone,” Selena said. “Why don’t I do that, and you stay here. She might be more likely to tell me the truth if I’m alone.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Besides, if you’re out here in the truck, I’ll have a good excuse to leave.”

  “Okay.” It was a nice night. I turned the ignition off and rolled down the windows. I listened to the radio, but when Selena didn’t come back after a while, I decided I’d better go see what was going on.

  I locked the truck and followed the path that Selena had taken. The door to Yolanda’s room was open and light was spilling out of the doorway. I looked inside and saw that Yolanda was sitting on the bed. She looked like she had been crying. Selena was standing in front of her, looking upset as well.

  “Hey,” I said. “Everything okay in here?”

  “Yeah, everything is cool,” Selena said.

  Neither of us knew that Yolanda had returned to the same gun shop in San Antonio a few days before this, where she repurchased the exact snub-nosed Taurus 45 revolver that she had bought before. I didn’t see the gun. All I saw was a small, sad, ugly little woman sitting on a bed, not a murderer.

  Who knows? Maybe Yolanda would have killed Selena that night, if I hadn’t come along. In any case, Selena followed me back out to the truck, and told me that Yolanda had been telling her about being raped in Monterrey earlier that day.

  “What?” I turned around in shock.

  “Yeah, she was trying to show me her torn clothes,” Selena said. “I offered to take her to the hospital, but she wouldn’t go, probably because it’s another one of her stories. It looks to me like Yolanda did that to herself.”

  We got into the truck and I started the engine. Selena turned on the overhead light and started flipping through the papers. “It’s not all here,” she said in frustration. “There are more papers missing, Chris. Let me go in and see Yolanda again.”

  I was already pulling the truck out of the motel parking lot. “No, let’s just go,” I said. “You know what’s going to happen if you go back there. Yolanda’s just going to make some excuse about why she can’t give you anything else.”

  Selena sighed and leaned her head back. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  By the time we got back to our house, my dad had already arrived from San Antonio. We hung out for a while and made plans for the next day. Selena made a list of things for me to buy at the grocery store; she was planning to make my favorite meal of black-tipped shark.

  Eventually, my dad went to the guest room to unpack. When he came back to the kitchen, Selena and I were paying bills. We both had our checkbooks out on the kitchen table. Seeing that made my dad laugh and get his camera.

  “Here,” he said, aiming the camera in our direction. “I want to get pictures of you two paying b
ills like grown-ups and being so responsible.”

  That was the very last picture ever taken of Selena alive.

  If I had to pick my happiest memory with Selena, I’d probably pick the night before she was killed. Things were so good with us at that moment. As we always did, when Selena and I went to bed together, we hugged and said how much we loved each other. That night, she lay with her head on that sweet spot on my shoulder and we talked about the future. It was one of those moments when you’re so in love with somebody and you feel that love coming back to you. I’m happy to have that memory of our last night together as a reminder of how rich and full of love our lives were, despite everything.

  The phone rang as we were lying there, and Selena looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s Yolanda.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  Selena rolled over and picked up the phone. After she’d said hello, Selena listened for a minute, then said to me, “Guess what? Yolanda found those missing papers. She wants me to come back to the motel and get them. She wants me to go alone.”

  “No!” I said. “Tell her that you’re not going back. It’s too late. No way. Plus, I don’t want you going over there alone.”

  “No,” Selena repeated into the phone. “Chris says it’s too late. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Yolanda then started talking about the rape. Selena stopped her and said, “If you want to go to the hospital, I’ll take you. I already told you that.”

  When Yolanda said no, that she didn’t want to go to the hospital, Selena said, “You know what? It’s late, and this conversation is over.” Then she hung up the phone.

  “She probably thought I would be with you, and that’s why she said no,” I said.

  “Yeah, and she probably also knows that if I take her to the hospital, they won’t find anything wrong,” Selena said. “Maybe I should go over there anyway.”