by Johnny Shaw
Bobby refilled our glasses with the remainder of the Barrio Mary. He sat on the ground and lifted his glass to the body under the blanket. I lit a cigarette, and we sat quietly through the length of that smoke and the next one. The cicadas and shotguns continued their cacophonous background score. As I lit my third cigarette directly from the second, Bobby spoke.
“Well, that happened. Fucking Christ,” Bobby said. “Feel better?”
“No, but I’m glad we did it. Is there anything else we should do?”
“We should do nothing. What we done so far, we shouldn’t’ve done. Makes us one past what we should’ve.”
I turned to him. “You would’ve left her in the water? You were here alone, you would’ve left her?”
“Didn’t know her.” Then Bobby thought about it and shook his head. “I don’t know. Just saying, they’re going to tell us we shouldn’t’ve. That’s all. I’ve been trying to act like more of a grown-up lately.”
“Nothing we can do about it now.”
Bobby nodded, his eyes glued to Yolanda’s covered body. His cell phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket, looked at the face, and then slipped it back in his pants. “Griselda will be here in about fifteen minutes.”
“Isn’t that your girlfriend? You called your girlfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes, I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking,” I said. “A woman is dead. Someone I spent time with. Someone who was important to Pop. And it’s nothing but some big party to you. Cocktails, now a ‘plus one’ on your guest list?”
“Griselda is a sheriff’s deputy,” Bobby said. “When I said I had called the sheriff’s, I called her. I thought under the circumstances, it’d be a good idea to have someone we knew. Someone I trusted.”
“Oh” was the best I could do by way of apologizing.
“She’ll keep Jack out of this. If you decide to tell her about their thing. I’ll talk to her. No reason no one should know about your old man and her. And offhand, just because a situation is serious don’t mean you get to be a dick about it. So I made drinks. Most of the time when I really need a drink, it ain’t any kind of party. Just the opposite.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just…sometime last night while we were drinking, while I was getting shit-faced drunk, while I was doing I have no idea what, she died. Something happened and she ended up down in that water. We were right across the street.”
“Don’t mean it’s on us.”
“No, you’re right. It’s not on you. But it’s on me. I found her. She wouldn’t’ve even been here if not for me.”
“Don’t be a fucking retard. That’s like driving someone to the airport and then blaming yourself when the plane crashes. Next you’ll be blaming yourself for your dad’s death.”
Taken off guard, a short, abrupt laugh escaped my mouth.
Bobby blurted out, “Did you kill her?”
“What? No,” I responded, surprisingly defensive. “Just the same, I can’t remember a thing from last night.”
“Trust me, you didn’t kill her. You’re not capable of it. You couldn’t kill a fly.”
Pop’s face flashed into my mind. My hands on the pillow. I said nothing.
“So forget about it. No matter what you do now, no matter what you think, it ain’t going to make her any less deader. Guilt is for assholes. Particularly guilt for something that you haven’t any reason to be guilty for.”
At a distance, Imperial County Deputy Sheriff Griselda Villarreal looked all of fourteen years old. But as she neared, it became obvious that she was a couple years older than me. Griselda, at five foot three (if she was standing on a something that was three inches), must have worn heels to make the height requirement. She had that cop walk, a taurine stride with an extra hitch in her hip. On her frame, it worked. She wore her hair in a ponytail, never took off her hat, and always seemed to have a knowing grin on her face.
As Bobby and I approached her, she looked past us to the blanket-covered body.
“Hey, Gris,” Bobby said. “Thanks for coming out.”
He leaned in to kiss her, but she backed up a step and pushed his face away with an open hand.
“When’d you get shy?” Bobby sounded hurt.
“He knows about us?” Griselda asked, not acknowledging me past the pronoun.
Bobby nodded.
“Let’s get some things straight, Bob,” Griselda said. “I am here on official business. I’m treating this like any other investigation—and the two of you like any other witnesses.”
“Sure,” Bobby said. “I was just saying hi. Your job’s important, I get that. Don’t mean I can’t give my special lady a little sugar.”
Griselda rested her hand on her sidearm, only slightly casual. “No, that’s exactly what it means. No sugar. We’ve talked about this.”
“It kind of hurts me that you don’t want no one to know we’re going out. Am I that bad?” Bobby flashed his puppy eyes.
“Should I let you two talk?” I was already backing away.
“Yes, Bob, you are that bad. You have a reputation with the sheriff’s department. Also with the El Centro Police Department, the Holtville cops, most of the city of Brawley, that dog catcher out in Plaster City, the Border Patrol, the I-8 CHPs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were on a Homeland Security watch list. I’m not going to let you impact my job. I’m a short Mexican woman. That don’t put me exactly on the fast track in the department. I can’t let you make it that much harder.”
“Baby,” Bobby tried weakly.
“Baby? That’s what…?” She stopped and took a deep breath. “You called me because you found yourself a dead body. That’s serious. Treat it that way. Most cops’ boyfriends just try to get out of traffic tickets. Moment I stepped out of my car, this became my case. You got to treat me like any other cop.”
“But I hate cops,” Bobby said.
She walked the couple of steps to where I had retreated. Griselda nearly crushed my hand and introduced herself as “Deputy Sheriff Villarreal,” but I had already decided that I liked the name Griselda too much.
“How much did Bobby tell you on the phone?” I asked.
“That you two found a body.”
“Might as well put me down as the one that made the call. If it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m not trying to lie or nothing, but Bobby—his reputation.”
She nodded. “Name?”
“Jimmy Veeder. James. It’s my house. Now. My dad died. Natural causes. I live here,” I said, nodding my head toward the house.
“Bob told me about your father. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“Tell me what happened.”
I gave her the rundown of the morning. How I woke up, no water pressure, went to the pump, found the body. She took notes and cut in with a couple of time-related questions, but mostly just let me tell it.
“Was she alive when you found her?”
“No, she was definitely dead.”
“Then why is she over there? If you weren’t trying to save her, why did you move the body? Why did you take the body out of the well?”
“It’s not really a well. It’s more like a standpipe.”
“Why did you move the body?”
“It didn’t seem right to leave her down there.”
Deputy Griselda’s disappointment laced her slow, steady voice. “You should know better. Don’t you watch TV? Haven’t you ever seen a cop show? You should know. Everybody knows. You don’t move a dead body. Little, stupid kids know that.”
“Bobby told me to leave her. It’s on me. He was the voice of reason.”
“That would be a first.”
“Didn’t seem right. We waited and nobody came. What else can I say? I did what I did.”
“Yeah, and what you did was not only stupid, but illegal. I could cite you.” She shook her head, looking up from her notepad. “I’d tell you, ‘Next time, don’t let that happen,’ but let’s hope there isn’t
going to be a next time.”
Griselda and I walked to the body together. When we got within twenty feet, she slapped a backhand into my stomach, making a loud smap. It stopped me in my tracks.
“Hang out. I’ve got more questions for you and Bob.” She pointed to where Bobby was sitting on the low stucco wall. I shrugged and joined him.
Bobby and I watched Deputy Griselda put on some rubber gloves. She grabbed a corner of the blanket and took it off the body, setting it to the side. She seemed to know what she was doing. But since I had no clue what she was doing, appearances could have been deceiving. She looked at the hands and then concentrated her attention on the face and head, turning it from side to side, spending a lot of time on the back of her head. Twice she walked to her car to get supplies. She put each hand in a paper bag, holding the bag in place with rubber bands at the wrists.
Her preliminary look at the body completed, she walked to the water pump, yelling to us on the way. “Was there any ID? A wallet? A purse? Anything?” Bobby and I shook our heads. She pointed a flashlight and looked down into the cistern. She kept a hand on the ladder, but didn’t climb in. She squinted her eyes, looking around the tall grass that surrounded the water pump and the side yard, and then she walked to me and Bobby.
“I’ll need to get official statements from you and you. Also, I’m going to rope off this area until I can make a thorough search. Including the water pipe she was in. It doesn’t look like there’s a way to drain it, but we can fish the bottom. We may find something. I contacted the coroner’s office on the way here. Someone will be out to retrieve the body. On their time.”
She walked to her car. I followed.
“Can I ask what you think happened?” I said.
Griselda popped her trunk, took a digital camera from a case, and fiddled with some buttons on it. “Too early to say. She’s got a big divot on the back of her head. My guess is that’s what killed her. But hard to say if it was from the fall or before. Not like the edge of the well is low, so it seems like it would be hard to fall in on accident. Does it have a cover?”
“Yeah, usually, but the tarp wasn’t on it this morning.”
“Coroner will get an ME to determine cause of death, autopsy, but that’ll only tell me so much. Whether it was the knock on her head or the water, not much more. Doesn’t look like there was any kind of struggle, but they’ll check the fingernails. It looks suspicious to me. Like someone was trying to hide her.”
“Her name was Yolanda.”
Griselda raised her head from the camera and turned to face me. “You knew her? Yolanda what?”
“I don’t know her last name. I could maybe find out. She was a Mexican. From Mexico. She was…sometimes they have women across the street.” I pointed to Morales Bar. “Mexican girls come over here to make some money some nights.”
“I know what hookers are.”
“I’ve known Mr. Morales since I was born. Don’t want no trouble for him.”
“I’ll ask him some questions, but I’m not concerned about his side business. Did you have a relationship of some kind with this Yolanda?”
“Relationship would be a pretty generous term,” I said. “I knew her.”
“Bob and you were across the street all last night, right? Bob invited me. I was on duty. Some kind of makeshift wake?”
I nodded.
“Was Yolanda present?”
“That’s the thing—I don’t know. She was at the memorial, so I assume she came out,” I said.
“I’m going to need you to tell me what you remember from last night.”
I let out a big breath. “Nothing. I had already drunk too much by the time I got to the bar. I remember walking in the door and waking up on a ditch bank. Other than that, I can’t help you. I was blacked out.”
She nodded. “Luckily Bob drinks like he gets paid for it. If I know him, he’ll have remembered every detail. I have to secure the area, take photos, and essentially do my job. When I’m done, I want to sit down with you and Bob and try to establish a timeline. Get an idea of who was there last night.”
I nodded, looking at the sun still low in the sky. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.
“Place was packed. Hunters, locals, the funeral people for Big Jack. Most of the Valley was at Morales. Might save time if I just told you who wasn’t there.”
Bobby had been talking for a while, trying to settle his memory and get the events of the night into some semblance of an order. He closed his eyes and moved his hand slowly from left to right.
“Not everyone who was at the reception came out to Morales. And there was like a ton of people at the bar that had nothing to do with Big Jack. Here’s who I remember. Jimmy and me were there. Mr. Morales was behind the bar, a given. His grandson, Tomás Morales, was there too. He had this massive Mexican dude with him. Don’t know his name. Good luck trying to talk to them, but they were the ones that brought Yolanda. Mike Egger was there with a bunch of his guys, like Daniel Quihuis, Israel Ramos, Tony Villalobos, and some other guys who I know by first name or nickname, but you’d have to ask Mike to get their whole names. There was a group of like a half dozen high school kids, four boys and two girls. They weren’t Holtville kids or I would’ve known them. They were mostly white, so probably not up from Calex. Maybe El Centro. Probably figured who’s going to card anyone at a wake, right? So figure them for smart kids. Some random field-workers trickled in and out. Guys with their straw cowboy hats and muddy boots. It’s not like the bar was closed. Mr. Morales was running business as usual.
“With dove season, there were even a couple of out-of-towners ballsy enough to brave Morales. Kind of dudes that wear those pants with like eight, ten pockets on them. Some of me and Jimmy’s high school buds were there: Kirch, Gweez, Scrote, Gooch, Buck Buck, Snout, Thorn, The Train. Maybe a couple more, if I keep thinking. Some of the older generation: Red Fidler, Fritz Rubin, Felipe Zabala. Give me a couple pieces of paper and I’ll make you a big-ass list.
“Mr. Morales drinks steady behind that bar, but I ain’t never seen him drunk. Not once. He knows everybody and forgets nothing. You charm him, maybe flash a tit, he’ll remember real good for you. Between my list and his, you should be able to name most everyone we know. Everyone except them high school punks and out-of-towners.”
I let the water hit the back of my head and trail down my neck. I watched the gray grit of the morning run down the drain of Bobby’s shower. It would be quite a while before I would feel comfortable using the water back at the house.
I scrubbed the slimy black remnants of the cistern from my skin until it burned, but I didn’t feel clean. I closed my eyes, only to see Yolanda floating just below the surface of that black water. Her lifeless face replaced Pop’s final laugh haunting the disquiet of my mind. Worst-case scenario, the two would eventually merge just enough to drive me bananas. At least I had that to look forward to. I wished I hadn’t seen her dead boob.
What could have happened that ended with Yolanda in the water? She couldn’t have fallen in. Griselda was right. The standpipe was too high to fall in accidentally. Suicide? She didn’t seem the type. Like I knew her enough to make that call.
The more I spun it, the more I was convinced that someone had put Yolanda in there. Not necessarily killed her, but at the least put her in the cistern. Probably killed her, but definitely probably put her in there. Who would do that? Why?
It didn’t really matter. Nothing I could do about it.
Griselda had kept at Bobby and me with questions for another hour. She had searched the scene and photographed every inch of the side yard. She seemed smart, yet realistic. The Imperial County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t big enough to warrant a homicide division, so Griselda was it: the first responder, the evidence technician, and the investigator all rolled into one. I told her everything I knew, except for Yolanda’s relationship with Pop. I didn’t see how that could matter, and I didn’t see how it was any of her business.
Griselda only
allowed her pessimism to show through once or twice. She confided that the dead body of an illegal alien didn’t rate that high. Dead Mexicans were too common to chart on anyone’s priority list. However, Griselda was a pro and would let the evidence dictate the investigation.
“All victims deserve the same. Dead is dead, and a crime is a crime. If someone did this, I’ll do everything I can to find them,” she said.
An ambulance arrived while Griselda and Bobby were fine-tuning his list and trying to put some names to some faces. The driver and medical examiner waited in the ambulance with the engine (and the air-conditioner) running until Griselda approached them. I found out later that Imperial County doesn’t have its own pathologist, but farms it out to a few local doctors or brings them down from San Diego. The coroner shares an office with the sheriff, too. I wondered if Andy and Barney let Otis sleep in the jail.
Griselda and the medical examiner toured Yolanda’s body. The ambulance driver turned off the engine and took the opportunity to have a smoke. Having burned through all of mine, I bummed one. He was in his mid-fifties with a red nose that suggested he had a flask within reach. He wore his uniform sloppily and treated his job like most people, counting time, trying to get to the end of the day. I let him talk.
“Soon as it cools down, there’ll be plenty more of ’em. Dead Mexicans. Weird to think that they’re already dead, some of ’em. But they’re out there. Desert’s full of bodies. Out there drying in the sun. Leathering up. In the dunes. In the desert.
“Don’t know what them poor bastards are told when they slip the border. What kind of advice they get. But it’s all bad. ’Cause from the border to the nearest road, it’s fifteen, twenty miles in most parts. In this heat, on a day like today, it’s impossible to carry enough water to travel that distance.
“They’re out there, all right. Gets nice, drops down to low nineties, weekenders’ll start hitting the dunes in their quads, finding corpses left and right. Folks from the city’ll find a family stuck to each other and coyote-chewed. I’ll be out there trying to pick ’em up without them falling apart. ’Fore they turn into dust. They make like a crackling sound when you move them. Smell like pork rinds. Skin like deer jerky, most of the time. You got no idea.