6. THE TERRACE
LUCKILY I FOUND YOU, my dear. I made up my mind to stop by your house once and for all to tell you all about it. Nobody else is home, right? Thank goodness. Bring me a glass of water, I’m very agitated. You wouldn’t believe what happened to me, what I’ve found out. What a news flash. Let’s go out on the terrace: there’s a nice breeze. Yes, I’m in shock. It’s something you wouldn’t believe. Try to guess. It’s got to do with Olga María. You can’t guess, can you? Are you ready, my dear: apparently Olga María and Alberto had an affaire. Yes, my ex-husband, if you can believe it. I’m going to tell you everything, blow by blow. Settle in, because it’s a long story. I love how you can see the city from up here, especially at this time of day, when the sun has already set. The chaise longue turned out so pretty with that printed fabric. Well, the thing is, this morning I went to Mercedes’s beauty salon to get my hair done. Do you like how it turned out? I told her to straighten the ends, like Turlington wears it, that model from the States—though they say her mother is Salvadoran, but who knows what kind of family it is. Anyway, I was at the beauty salon for about an hour, chatting with Mercedes—she’s really nice. At some point, I don’t know when, we started talking about Olga María. Mercedes loved her a lot. She’s been doing our hair for ten years. I don’t understand why you’ve never wanted to give her a try. Anyway, the thing is that while we were talking about Olga María I sensed a change in Mercedes’s voice, a different tone, like there was something she didn’t want to talk about, or like she had something to hide. I was flipping through a magazine. But then I looked up and saw Mercedes in the mirror, and something had changed, she had a completely different expression on her face. She realized that I’d realized. You know what I mean? Something weird was going on. Since I don’t know how to keep things to myself, I asked her what was wrong. She turned her back to me and asked me why I was asking, she said nothing was wrong, other than that she got really sad whenever she thought of Olga María. But sadness wasn’t what I’d seen in her face: she knew something she didn’t want to tell me—that was my intuition, my dear. You know I’m not paranoid. Maybe it struck me so hard because I’d never thought that Mercedes might know something about Olga María’s death: she was only her hairdresser, like she’s mine. The point is, she was anxious to change the subject, and I couldn’t keep insisting, mainly because she had other clients waiting, and one of them was Inés Murillo, who is such a busybody—I don’t like her at all. The whole incident left me with a bad feeling. This terrace is so refreshing. No, my dear, no, thank you, I’ve already had enough coffee. But that’s only the very beginning; the best part happened afterward, when I’d left the beauty salon and was about to get into my car. Can you guess? I had a flat tire. I was mad as hell. Those things always happen to me at the worst possible moments. I was about to go back to Mercedes and call the Automobile Club when this person suddenly appeared: he came right up to me and told me not to worry, he’d change my tire. I was suspicious, as you can imagine. I said, thank you very much, but I don’t want to bother you, I’ll call the Automobile Club, and they’ll send somebody out. The guy was adamant: he told me I would waste more than an hour waiting for the Automobile Club truck to come, he was a member, too, and he’d had a similar experience a few weeks ago. I checked the man out more carefully: he didn’t look like a hooligan, though these days one can never be sure, but also there was a guard with a huge machine gun right across the street at the mall. That’s why I figured I wasn’t risking anything, and there was no question he’d change the tire long before anybody from the Automobile Club showed up. When he saw me hesitating, he took off his blue linen jacket and walked around to the back of the car, then he motioned to me to open the trunk so he could get out the tools and the spare tire. He’s dark, short, he’s got a typical-enough face, but he was wearing khakis and a white Polo shirt and those Bostonian shoes everybody and his brother wears. I told myself he’d just happened to be walking by and he wanted to be chivalrous and maybe ask me out for a date afterward. You know how men are, my dear. We don’t expect them to do something like that for nothing. And I was right. He hadn’t even finished changing the tire when he started staring at me: he had this look of surprise on his face, as if he knew me from somewhere and had just then recognized me. I expected him to come out with something stupid, like those idiots who say, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” but then he asked me if I was Laura Rivera. I stood there staring at him, very serious and not very friendly, I felt like asking him what it was to him who I was, don’t be so nosy, just change the tire, which anyway I’d never even asked him to do, he’s the one who insisted on helping me with who knows what ulterior motives; I even had the urge to tell him to get away from my car immediately, don’t touch it again, or my tires, or my tools, go, get lost now, I’ll call the Automobile Club like I should have from the get-go. I was about to walk over to the security guard and ask him to watch my car very carefully and make sure that man leaves it exactly as it is while I go to Mercedes’s salon to use the phone, I was on the verge of blowing up over the nerve of that dark, fat-lipped dwarf, when he mentioned Olga María. This is what he said: that I was best friends with Doña Olga María de Trabanino, he recognized me from several photos he’d seen at her house, photos Don Mario—that’s what he called him—had been kind enough to show him. The man spoke quickly: he didn’t give me a chance to get a word in edgewise, and I could tell he was trying to make a good impression. It made me furious to think that Marito’s the only person I know who’d even think of going around showing pictures to the first person who asked to see them. Then the man said what a coincidence it was: he was on his way to the beauty salon to interview Mercedes, and here he’d run into me, how fortunate, fate was clearly on his side. That was when I realized who I was dealing with: he had to be that detective Diana hired and Marito told me about. To top it off, his nose looked like a fried egg. I was incensed, it was obvious this guy had been looking for a chance to meet me; I got the feeling there was much more than met the eye behind this supposedly chance encounter. But just then he held out his hand and told me his name was Pepe Pindonga, it was an honor to have this opportunity to meet me, several people had spoken very highly of me. I was about to tell him to get lost, make yourself scarce, but my curiosity got the better of me, my desire to find out why this detective had decided to question Mercedes, so I didn’t send him on his way right then and there. I like this terrace; and if you had a drop of something to drink, now that things have cooled off, it would be fantastic; yes, I’d love a shot of Kahlua. While he was putting the tools away in the trunk and sweating like a pig, I asked him, pretending I was just curious. He told me that one of his hypotheses in the case—that’s what he said, “hypotheses” as if he were Deputy Chief Handal himself—had led him right to this beauty salon I had just left. I wanted to tell him that it seemed like a dirty trick for a phony like him, a charlatan who passes himself off as a private detective, to try to implicate a working woman like Mercedes in Olga María’s murder. But this Pepe Pindonga didn’t let me talk, he was irrepressible, vehement, gesturing wildly, it was like the world was about to come to an end and he had to utter the most amount of words in the least amount of time possible. He told me it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to discuss such a delicate subject there in the parking lot, he would very much like to talk to me in private, try to corroborate some information he had, and he’d be delighted to tell me all about his hypothesis about the beauty salon if I’d accept his invitation to go with him to have a cup of coffee. This Pepe Pindonga doesn’t beat around the bush, my dear; he’s dangerous, he swallows you up, as if he were a hypnotist or a magician. At some point, I don’t know when, he’d gotten into my car and sat down next to me, then he asked me to put the air conditioning on full blast otherwise he’d never stop sweating. The guy is like a machine gun, he doesn’t stop talking, and about any subject whatsoever: he said he loves BMWs, he’s a great admirer of these cars, even though he’s
never had one, but at one point in his career as a journalist he worked for a magazine about automobiles, that’s why he knows so much about them and nobody can get anything past him. I had to force him to be quiet so I could ask him where we were going. Mercedes’s beauty salon is in the Balam Quitzé mall, as you know, that’s why he suggested we go to the Hotel El Salvador; that was the nearest place. I wasn’t so sure about it: I didn’t relish the prospect of walking with that guy into a place where I’d probably run into more than one person I knew, but I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go, and I wanted to hear all about the Mercedes connection. This Pepe Pindonga should be a radio announcer instead of a private detective: in that short ride to the hotel he managed to tell me a huge chunk of his life story. During the war he lived in Mexico, where he worked as a reporter for one of the major newspapers there. He told me how one time he came to San Salvador to do a report on the bizarre suicide of a captain in the armed forces, a squalid story that implicated several other officers and resulted in Pepe Pindonga having to make a quick getaway to avoid being killed. That was during the war, according to him. He was telling me all this on our way to the hotel, and I wasn’t paying much attention because all I wanted to know was about Olga María’s case and his hypothesis about Mercedes. But I couldn’t figure out how to make him shut up. He told me he came back to live here a few months after the war ended, when President Cristiani had already surrendered to the terrorists, as papa says. He worked for a while at Ocho Columnas. Can you believe it? Yes, indeed, my dear, the very same newspaper that waged the campaign against Yuca. I was in shock when he said that. The first thought that came to me was that this big-mouthed phony was part of the conspiracy against Yuca. I was about to read him the riot act, demand that he get out of my car immediately, when he asked me if I knew Rita Mena, the reporter from the same newspaper who was in charge of investigating Olga María’s murder. That was the last straw. I told him I didn’t, I told him I had absolutely no interest in meeting that kind of trash, I consider journalists to be a filthy race, buzzards, vultures after carrion, flies hovering over shit—and that stupid reporter from Ocho Columnas more than any of them, I consider her an accomplice in the plot against Yuca, and it’s only because I’ve got good manners that I’d give him a ride back to the mall because I had nothing more to say to him. He told me to take it easy, not to get the wrong impression: he hated Ocho Columnas, too, everybody who works there, and especially Rita Mena; it was her fault he’d had to leave that paper, he could deliver truckloads of dirt on that sleezebag. He convinced me to keep driving to the hotel when he told me he was certain that Rita Mena and the newspaper had been involved in a bigger conspiracy aimed at removing Yuca from the political arena. The way he said it, it sounded like he was repeating my very own words. He has absolutely no doubt that Olga María’s murder is being used to finish Yuca off. His words. If the case is rigorously investigated the clues will lead to those who have been the main beneficiaries of Yuca’s political demise. I was stunned, my dear, that was precisely what I was thinking but I hadn’t been able to put into so many words, plus I realized that this detective knew a lot. You know what else he said? That only an idiot or someone with ulterior motives would think that Yuca or another one of her lovers would’ve had Olga María murdered; we’re dealing here with a crime committed for perfectly calculated political motives, not a crime of passion, like that Deputy Chief Handal is trying to make us believe. Precisely what I think. I managed to ask him if he’d spoken about all this and in such clear terms to Marito. He told me they were paying him to investigate a murder, not sink a recently widowed man into a deep depression; if he was telling me this, it was because he was sure I already knew about Olga María’s escapades. “Escapades,” the moron said, like she was some kind of floozy. Luckily, when we got to the hotel I didn’t see anybody I knew, and in the café I chose a corner table and sat with my back to the entrance. I love how they remodeled that hotel; it looks so modern, so spacious, the decor’s in such good taste. I like the architecture of the boutiques the best. Did you know that when they first started the remodel they asked Olga María if she wanted to open up a branch of her boutique there? But she thought it was too risky. The thing is, once we were sitting in the café, I asked him how he’d found out about Yuca and Olga María’s relationship. He told me that when they threw him out of Ocho Columnas, he went to work as the head of PR for the police academy. Can you imagine the contacts he established there? He’s made a lot of progress in the investigation. He told me a ton of things. Supposedly, we were just going for a cup of coffee, but we talked for about four hours; first in the café, then we went to the bar, and then we ate at the restaurant next to the pool. He doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol or smoke; the exact opposite of the private detectives in the movies. He says he’s already used up his quota of drinking and smoking, he’s already ingested enough toxins for a lifetime. He doesn’t look that old to me at all, but who knows what kind of life he’s led. He ordered a chamomile tea and I had a coca-cola. Then he told me that Diana had hired him totally out of the blue, he’s never met her, all he’s seen is a photo Marito showed him; they’ve spoken on the telephone, it would be ridiculous if they hadn’t at least done that. He says about fifteen days ago he received a fax in his office, near Bloom Hospital, next to the university, in that area, I’m not sure exactly where, I get lost in that neighborhood. The fax was from Diana in Miami, requesting his services to investigate the murder of Olga María. Diana doesn’t trust the police. He claims he doesn’t know how Diana heard about him and decided to hire him. But he immediately plunged into the case. He’s had access to the police reports, he says, and I believe him, my dear, because he knows more than we do: he mentioned Olga María’s relationship with Julio Iglesias, with José Carlos, with Yuca. Then I went totally numb when he asked me if I knew that my ex-husband had had an affaire with her. It took me so much by surprise that I didn’t know what to say. I still haven’t fully digested it. Can you imagine Olga María finding Alberto attractive? I simply can’t make heads or tails of it. That’s what I told that detective when I came out of my state of shock: I told him he’d have to show me some proof if he wanted me to believe him, it was some kind of misunderstanding, malicious gossip cooked up by the police. And I couldn’t even manage to get angry because suddenly I was putting two and two together. Pepe Pindonga was categorical—the man is heartless: he told me that Olga María and Alberto had met at least a couple of times before we got divorced. Imagine that! What a fool I was not to have realized it. He went on to explain that the first time was at Olga María’s, the morning after a party, when you-know-who returned to the house with the excuse that he’d left his sweater there, and they took advantage of nobody being home; the other time Alberto picked her up at the beauty salon. That must have been why Mercedes got so nervous when I started talking about Olga María, because the detective had just been there questioning her and gotten that information out of her. Then, while my brain was working a million miles a minute, I began to catch a glimpse of what the beauty salon “hypothesis” consisted of. I was determined to have the answers. He said, yes, Alberto’s name appeared in a report about the investigation into her lovers, especially because he’s been managing Olga María’s and her family’s finances. By this time, my dear, we were in the bar, so I ordered a double whiskey. He said he’d talked enough, he’d told me everything he knew, now it was my turn, I needed to help him, tell him everything I knew so we could work together and that way he could move his investigation forward. He mainly asked me about what you already know, but in much greater detail than the police. The horrible part is that the more I talked the more I realized that this man was only looking to confirm what he already knew; I wasn’t, in fact, telling him anything new, just corroborating the information in the police reports he’d read and the inquiries he’d carried out on his own. The truth is, I was feeling pretty distressed, choked up and all, because of the Alberto thing, and I wanted to get back to th
at, hear more about the relationship between my ex-husband and Olga María. Weird, because I didn’t feel angry, none of that rage that blinds you when you feel like you’ve been betrayed, but instead there was this sadness, anxiety, as if suddenly nothing made any sense. That’s why I wasn’t responding with much enthusiasm and Pepe Pindonga had to pry everything out of me. There was a moment, around when I ordered a second drink, that I felt like crying, I swear, that’s how I felt, because I’d always been so loyal to Olga María, and now it turns out she didn’t show me the least consideration at all. Pepe noticed my state of mind—he’s very sensitive—and he said maybe it’d be better to change the subject; he saw me so sad, he hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but it was better for me to know so I wouldn’t hear about it later and be even more shocked. He tried to comfort me: Olga María didn’t want to hurt me by getting involved with Alberto, she probably didn’t have any control over those unconscious urges that made her have sex with men, I knew her better than anybody else did and should forgive her. Pepe Pindonga said all that. I couldn’t control myself any longer and I shed a tear, then another, and another; it all happened in silence, with no big fuss, a mournful cry, melancholic, like I was remembering somebody I’d lost a long time ago. Luckily, it’s pretty dark in the hotel bar and the TV’s always on, so nobody knew what was happening to me, only Pepe: he took my hand and squeezed it. It’s pretty awful, my dear, to find out about something like that. With my last glimmer of hope I asked him about his sources, how he’d gotten his information. But Pepe had already warned me that he wasn’t going to reveal any names. All I can guess is, other than Mercedes, maybe Julita, Olga María’s housekeeper, maybe she confided in her, or in those blabbermouths Cheli and Conchita, who work at the boutique. Who knows? It’s unbelievable how you can live, being deceived by your best friend and your husband. Though I couldn’t care less about Alberto; on the contrary, he must have something going for him besides his moneymaking ability, otherwise our friend wouldn’t have gotten involved with him. Bring me some more water, my dear, my mouth is dry from talking so much. I don’t want to get sad again, especially on this overcast afternoon. But I’m telling you, I’m going to call Alberto later tonight when he gets home from the office, I don’t want him to think I’m a total imbecile, to think they can cheat on me like that and me not have a clue. Pepe Pindonga advised me not to: why dig up dirt from such a long time ago? But I’m not going to repress myself. That’s what I told him when we were already at the restaurant by the pool; Alberto’s going to pay for this. You’d keep your mouth shut, wouldn’t you? So what if we got divorced a long time ago. Pepe says maybe Olga María seduced him; but no man goes to bed with a woman by force. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the same goes for Olga María. Pepe told me he’s trying to create a psychological profile of her—it would help his investigation—because even though he’s almost a hundred percent sure that the murder was planned to hurt Yuca, one should never completely neglect other lines of investigation. He told me that my name appears in the police reports as a possible suspect, because of the affaire between Alberto and Olga María and my connections with Yuca. Can you believe it? I got indignant, my dear. Not only do I have to swallow the fact that my best friend slept with my ex-husband but also that they suspect me of having killed her. It’s unbelievable. I was so angry I lost my appetite. I had the urge to immediately call that Deputy Chief Handal and give him a piece of my mind. But Pepe tried to calm me down: I wasn’t a suspect in the strict sense of the word, it’s just that I’m considered part of secondary investigations, offshoots, ones that feed into and support the central inquiry. No matter what, it’s outrageous. Now, after thinking about it a lot, I disagree with Pepe Pindonga: I believe Olga María went to bed with Alberto fully conscious of what she was doing. She was perverse, my dear, it all started when I told her that my relationship with Alberto was on the rocks, he was useless in bed, life with him was the most boring thing that could ever happen to me; that’s all she needed to hear to decide she wanted to give him a whirl. That’s what I think. She wanted to try him out to see if what I told her was true or not. Simply perverse. Most likely she found out I wasn’t lying, because Pepe Pindonga assures me that he has dependable information about only a couple of encounters. My head hasn’t stopped racing all afternoon, my dear. Horrible: I’ve had the most awful thoughts. I haven’t had a moment of peace. Now I feel a little calmer. Your house really is in the best part of the city: you have a gorgeous view, it’s super-cool here, and it’s not that far away from shopping and everything else you need. You know what I’ve even started thinking? That Alberto hurried the divorce through—even though I was the one who first suggested it—because he had hopes of starting up something with Olga María. It’s not paranoia, my dear. All of them were ready to separate from their wives so they could be with her. Why would Alberto, who was sort of dense about things like that, be the exception? I might be exaggerating, you might be right, but by now anything seems possible. It’s as if I just got rudely awoken with a slap across the face. What a nightmare. The worst part is that there I was, accomplice and confidante in all her romances: I feel cheated, and idiotic. I’m going to get even with that piece of shit Alberto, and I’m going to force him to confess everything, absolutely everything, the whole nine yards. Who does that idiot think he is? The good part is that this Pepe Pindonga is a great conversationalist, he knows an infinite number of stories, and when he saw how distraught I was he changed the subject to get me to calm down. He started telling me about something super-interesting: his experiences at a school of the esoteric. He said he was in some kind of monastery, in the mountains in central Mexico, where the masters are old indigenous people who’ve experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms. He asked me if I’d been in Mexico. I told him only briefly: papa hates that country, he says Mexicans are thieves and bums, and the Aztecs were barbarians. That’s why I’ve never been very interested; I prefer to go to Miami or New York. Don’t you feel the same way? The thing is that there we were, the detective and I chatting away, right next to the pool, hanging around after dinner, about to have coffee or tea. I don’t know how we got back to the subject of Rita Mena, the reporter. He told me that she’d accused him of sexual harassment and that’s why his situation at the newspaper deteriorated to the point where he had to resign. Seems like that girl blows everything out of proportion, she’s a compulsive liar, ever since she covered that story about the snakes; do you remember that huge scandal, about that maniac in a yellow Chevrolet full of snakes who went around terrorizing the population a few years ago? She thinks she’s the cat’s meow, but she’s just a nobody, that’s why anybody can easily manipulate her, like they did to wage their campaign against Yuca. Now she’s trying to get in to interview that RoboCop criminal so she can write an article that will earn her one of those journalism prizes the priests hand out. That’s what Pepe Pindonga told me. But it seems RoboCop plays his cards very close; that man’s kept his lips sealed, that’s why they hired him. Oh, dear, it’s getting late. It’s so pleasant here on the terrace, but I can’t stand it any longer, I have to call Alberto. He’s going to be so surprised, this Olga María case is getting uglier all the time. I get the impression nobody has found the unifying thread. You can tell that Pepe Pindonga is no simpleton, but even he admitted there comes a point where all the trails go cold. By the way, he asked me about you. Yes, Pepe did, about if you had been a good friend of Olga María’s, where you work, how much I trust you; the man is nosy, I’m warning you. I told him I was sick of being interrogated, you are one of my best friends, and you weren’t about to go gossiping about me. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to interview you. He’s nice enough. We left it that we’d meet again in a few days. He said he’d get in touch with me, even though he also left me his card. Here it is in case you’re interested. I bet you’ll run into him when you least expect to, like I did, but once he gets hold of you he doesn’t let go. You know I e
ven got to thinking that the sly fox probably let the air out of my tire. Too much of a coincidence, my dear. I can’t trust anybody anymore.
The She-Devil in the Mirror Page 6