The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho

by Anjanette Delgado

  And then he was on me, like water when it feels solid because of the sheer amount of it, and the speed at which you’re hitting it, or it’s hitting you.

  “You’re choking me.”

  “Flaca?”

  “Don’t ‘flaca’ me. Get off!”

  It was like having a heart attack, this enormous pressuring weight crushing my chest. Did Hector want to kill me? Maybe he thought I’d killed him and was trying to pay me back by taking me with him. So I struggled, thrashing about like an evil green-faced teenager in dire need of an exorcism.

  “Please, please, Mariela,” he said, though it sounded more like Merry Ella. “I need you . . . listen, please. I can’t go.”

  “Get off. Now!”

  And off he went. I felt him go, or rather felt the big space in the place where there’d been an urgent energy.

  “Wait!” I said after I’d caught my breath.

  Nothing.

  “Hector?”

  “This better?” he muttered from somewhere in the vicinity of the far end of the hallway.

  “Better,” I said after a few seconds.

  “I did somesing bad.”

  “You did, but it’s better now, when you’re not so close.”

  “No . . . I did somesing bad.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t know!”

  Well, he didn’t have to get snappy.

  “Did you . . . do this? Did you . . . kill yourself?” I asked his soul or whatever other part of him was in the room, invisible to me.

  He didn’t answer in words I could hear, but I felt his answer, like a “harrumph,” as in, “Are you kidding me?”

  “Flaca . . . I did somesing bad. So . . . so . . . soooorry . . .”

  “Hector, I can hear you. I never thought I could, and I’m, and I’m sorry too. Listen, I’m sorry I wished you dead, I’m sorry for how I acted, and I’m so, so sorry you’re gone,” I said, rushing my words for fear I’d lose him again, and overcome with emotion, amazement, and gratitude at being able to hear his voice.

  “They’re caaahl-ming.”

  “Who’s calming? Hector?”

  “Going now.”

  “No, wait, don’t go. Tell me what happened. Who did this to you?” I asked, trying to hold on to him, wondering if I had lost my mind to think I could hear him when I couldn’t possibly, not after so many years of strictly enforcing a “no ghosts allowed” policy on my life.

  “For you,” he said.

  “For me?” (He died for me? Because of me?)

  “They’re caaahl . . . ming.”

  I was suddenly very afraid. So afraid, a little gasp escaped my throat when I heard two decisive thumps on my door.

  I got out of bed, threw on my pink kimono, and rushed out of the bedroom to find that, unlike my bedroom, the living room was bright with blinding sunlight.

  “Yes?” I asked the two police officers I’d never seen before. They weren’t uniformed, but they showed me their badges and offered me business cards.

  “Mariela Estevez?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d like to ask you to accompany us down to the station.”

  “Why?”

  “There’ve been some new developments in the case of your tenant’s death, and it would be convenient if you could come with us to help shed light on some of the new information.”

  They were talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was so nervous, I kept waiting for one of them to reach out, grab my wrist, handcuff me, and say I was under arrest for the murder of Hector Ferro.

  “Can’t we talk here? I’m not even dressed. Was just waking up.”

  “We’d prefer it if you’d come down. You don’t have to come now. You have our cards. Come down at your convenience, but it would help if you—”

  “No, no, you know what? I don’t have a car, and I don’t leave the neighborhood much. I, I have no idea where this is,” I said, looking at the card. “If you’ll just wait a few minutes so I can get dressed?”

  I needed to know what had happened to Hector, didn’t I? Well, apparently, here was my chance.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong? Mariela?”

  It was Gustavo, leaving for work and finding the detectives blocking his view of me.

  “I’m fine, Gustavo. But will you let Iris know that I’m going to the police station to answer some questions for these officers?”

  “Why?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Then why are you going? Wait, are you arresting her?”

  The detectives turned fully toward him now. One said, “Why would we be arresting her?” even as the other one said, “We’re not arresting her, sir.”

  “What’s going on, Mariela?” he asked me, ignoring them and making it clear he didn’t trust or believe them.

  “Nothing, Gustavo. It’s nothing. Don’t worry. Just make sure Iris knows where I am, okay?” I said, giving him the card the detectives had given me.

  I went inside to dress, trembling like a crumbling bridge. I felt like taking a shower, but was so nervous, my space so invaded, first by Hector and then by the police, that I couldn’t think. Was this it? Did they really think I’d had something to do with this? How was I going to prove I’d been sleeping all night the night Hector died?

  I threw on some jeans and a hoodie rescued from my heap of a hamper, all the time looking over my shoulders, expecting Hector to come back and tell me what he’d been trying to say. I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that I’d been able to hear him just before the police came for me.

  When I stepped out, hobo bag slung over my shoulder, I knew this was the moment I’d been fearing since the night before his death. Gustavo was still standing in the foyer, arms crossed, watching the detectives like a gargoyle, while they stood their ground and glared right back at him.

  “It’s fine, Gustavo. Don’t worry. Just call Iris,” I said, before following them into the unmarked car I imagined speeding off toward some corner of hell destined for people stupid enough to refuse seeing to such a level of blindness, that they manage to get themselves wrongly accused of the one thing they could never do.

  Chapter 22

  So what happened was everyone found out about Hector and me. It seems Gustavo ran over to Iris’s and blurted out that I’d been taken away by the police and that it was about Hector’s death, before noticing she was on the phone with Carmita’s partner Betty, who was so psychologically incapable of keeping a secret, she should’ve been a journalist.

  That, and the fact that, unbeknownst to me, Ellie had been making the rounds of Coffee Park cafés, the laundromat, and even the naturopathy pharmacy, telling anyone who’d listen that I’d been having an affair with Hector, that she’d heard us break up the night before he was found, and that the reason she knew all this was I was a crazy bitch who’d kicked her out for no good reason, causing her to come upon the scene when she was picking up the very lot of personal items that I’d thrown out and on a rainy night, no less.

  I could just imagine her, coming back for her things and hiding in the bushes when she overheard us fighting. She was probably still there when, minutes after he left, I threw out the letter. She’d probably picked it out of the bin, figuring it could be useful, easy payback for putting her out, a gift from the god of potty-mouthed Valley Girl wannabes.

  Which meant that the story had been making the rounds for over a week now, even as both Olivia and I were crying over Hector’s death and waiting for the results of his autopsy. Betty’s confirmation, heard straight from Gustavo’s mouth, was just the stamp of proof my neighbors needed to let loose.

  Ellie’s vendetta was also the reason I’d been summoned.

  After planting enough poison to kill an entire village, or at least my relationship with the people in it, she’d gone and turned the damn letter in to a police officer who frequented the McDonald’s where she worked. The letter that specifically confirmed, in my own handwriting, that I was not only expecting to see Hector on th
e evening of his death, but also that I anticipated that he would break up with me that very night. The added fact that Ellie found the letter in my trash can, with Hector’s “good job” written on it with his pen and in his handwriting, well, that was just the dome on the cathedral, from where the police stood.

  “Why get rid of the evidence if you had nothing to hide?” one of the detectives, Martinez, I think his name was, asked me that morning.

  “I didn’t know it was evidence of anything when I threw it out!”

  “Then why throw it out?”

  “Why not?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to keep something so private?”

  “No. And you know what? I think the fact that I threw it away should tell you I had nothing to do with this.”

  Then again, it hadn’t helped that I’d almost fainted when after a few minutes of questioning, they’d shown me the letter I’d so desperately wanted to get my hands on before they did.

  “We never said you did,” said the other one, a detective whose name I can’t remember, but who looked more like a male model than a policeman, all big eyes, long nose, and juicy lips on smooth black skin, as he typed out the statement I’d been asked to write on a simple sheet of plain white paper, the contents of which they were “just reviewing” with me now.

  “But out of curiosity, why would it prove you weren’t involved?” asked Detective Martinez.

  “Because if I’d known I was going to kill him, I wouldn’t have thrown the letter out in my own recycling bin, where anyone could find it and know it was mine.”

  I had him there, I thought, sitting back for the first time while he considered this.

  “Maybe you didn’t know you were going to kill him, and just forgot the letter in the heat of things.”

  “You know what? Are we done here? Because I’m a little tired, and whatever I had to say, I already wrote.”

  “I understand, but let’s just follow your own hypothetical logic here. If you have nothing to hide, why would you conceal the extent of your relationship with Mr. Ferro after something as serious as his death under suspicious circumstances happens right across the street from you?”

  Now he had me, because even I had to admit that my silence made me look more than a bit guilty, even if only over the affair.

  I kept answering their questions, each one more invasive than the last, making me worry and wonder whether this was the point where I needed to ask for a lawyer, but afraid to ask for one.

  It was all clearer now. Unaware of Ellie’s gossiping and distraught by Hector’s death, I hadn’t put two and two together, but now I realized that the reason people had been crossing the street on their way to pick up their kids from school rather than walk in front of my stoop wasn’t because they were uncomfortable with death. It was because there was always the chance I’d be sitting at my laptop, by the window, and they’d have to say hello or decide to turn their heads, awkward as that would be. I could almost see their faces upon reading the headlines if I were arrested for Hector’s death: The Miami Herald would read “Landlord Kills Married Tenant/Lover.” The Miami New Times would call me the Murdering Mistress of Coffee Park. Even WTVJ’s channel 6 would lead their five o’clock newscast live from my empty stoop to recount how I’d been dragged from home by police and arrested in connection with the murder of my alleged lover, a prominent Little Havana businessman and patron of the literary world, whose wife happened to be my tenant and lived right upstairs just a few steps away from where the beautiful, young, hip reporter would be standing. Trust me: I’d be the wrong kind of famous by all of Coffee Park standards.

  Unfortunately, after answering all of the detective’s questions and being released for the time being, I got home only to have to hear the stories from Iris. Apparently, she came close to clocking the lady who owned The Little Vintage Shop Down the Street for saying she worried that my “involvement” in Hector’s murder would keep customers afraid of crime away from her Coffee Park shop.

  “That bitch,” Iris said to me that Saturday night. “It’s all because of the time you told her she should shorten that long-ass shop name of hers. Let me tell you, if something scares people away from her shop, it’ll be that thirty-pound hissing queen of a black cat she allows to roam around and sit on the merchandise like he owns the place.”

  Still, said Iris, trying to make me feel better, there were plenty of people who said nothing at all, refusing to get on the gossip bus. But even she had to admit it wasn’t because they believed I was innocent. It was because they didn’t want to give Little Havana people another reason to deride Coffee Park and its reputation as a liberal lifestyle oasis. Bottom line? I was now persona non too grata in my own neighborhood, which goes to prove it’s not true what people say: Liberals do draw the line at actual murder.

  Or do they? Because according to Iris, the issue wasn’t the murdering. It was the “mistressing.” Well, in fairness, not so much the “mistressing” as the convenient location in which I’d chosen to do it. Had Olivia lived even a couple of blocks away, there would’ve been money pools organized on my behalf and painted “We Support Mariela Estevez” signs denouncing police overreach. But not when I’d had the descaro of carrying on with Hector so close to his wife’s very flowerpots. There were thousands, if not millions, of unfaithful men in Miami. I couldn’t have picked another one? Apparently not, and that they could not forgive, not that I blamed them.

  Since the conversation with Olivia, I’d reconsidered the affair too and decided I was sorry about Hector. Sorry I’d ever been stupid enough to convince myself married men were fair game. Sorry about all of it.

  When I’d been the one being cheated on, I’d felt ugly, inside and out. Worthless. An unfeminine joke. A fool. So I’d somehow decided it was justified to create rules that would protect me from ever having to occupy that place again. Let some other idiot be the trusting wife for once. Let someone else be the one divested of any self-love she might have possessed, the thing not good enough being returned to the store to be exchanged for something better.

  I didn’t entirely realize it at the time, but that day with Olivia, I’d seen something amazing. Instead of an example of the ugly, unworthy woman I thought I’d been when I’d been the one cheated on, I’d seen a self-possessed person, elegant, flowing and true to who she was, and to the good and bad decisions she’d made in her life. Even in her mourning craziness, and possibly even in her guilt, she’d been whole, open, a presence no one, not even Hector, had been able to minimize. I’d truly seen Olivia for the first time that afternoon, and understood that shame need never attach to the victim. The wife is still also a woman, the marriage is whatever both husband and wife make of it, and the decision of either partner to be with someone else doesn’t make the other any less of a whole person.

  As for me, I hadn’t even had love for an excuse. I’d only had loneliness and insecurity, but was that as good an excuse as love? That day I thought not and, apparently, so did my neighbors. (I’ve since changed my mind about that too. I don’t think I’ll be having affairs with married men again anytime soon, but, understanding firsthand what a deeply insistent lacerating bitch loneliness can be, I won’t be rushing to judge someone who does either.)

  “Screw the whole lot of ’em,” Iris said to us the following Saturday evening from the tight backseat/storage area of Gustavo’s Chinese-red Tacoma pickup as we drove to do our grocery shopping on Twenty-Seventh Avenue, considered the outskirts of Little Havana, to avoid the busybodies, the staring, and the whispering. “They’ll get over it, darling, and if they don’t, so fucking what? Like they all don’t have some crazy shit poking out of their recycling bins. They’re lucky I don’t talk, ’cause if I did—”

  “I still want to hear what they’re saying behind my back. Come on, you can tell me,” I insisted, sounding like Olivia.

  “Nothing to me. They all know better than to mess with me when I’m stressed. But this one.” She jutted out her chin toward Gustavo, who p
retended to concentrate on driving. “It’s like he has a promise to the heavens: Be Mr. Nice Guy to all these sons of b—”

  “Iris! Now come on, vieja. Is that the way a fashion designer speaks?” said Gustavo.

  “Don’t vieja me. I know what that means, and calling me old is not going to make me stop, so there.”

  “It’s a respectful endearment, and I only say it because I love you,” he said to her before whispering to me, “Ñooooo . . . She’s been cursing darts all day.”

  “It’s the nerves, Mariela. When Gustavo ran in with his face translucent as a spring roll wrapper, I thought I’d die imagining all the things they could do to you. I hate to tell you, my friend, but I don’t think you’d survive in jail. I just wish I had some fuck-you money to give you so you could move to wherever you wanted, not have to put up with these mother—”

  “Who says I’m going to jail?” I interrupted her. “And what in the world is fuck-you money?”

  “It’s when you have enough money to say fuck you to any job, husband, or neighborhood trying to mess with you. Have you thought about how much this is going to affect your business? Who’s going to give you their taxes to do? Who’s going to rent that apartment, right across from where a man you supposedly killed lived?”

  I had, but had put it out of my mind because I had bigger problems at the moment, like a couple of questioning policemen who hadn’t sounded like they were done with me when I’d left their precinct.

  Later, when we were on our way back from the market, Iris asked, “So what are you going to do about Morticia?”

  “Olivia,” I corrected her.

  “Yes, that’s who I meant, the frigid bitch,” muttered Iris.

  “Now, Iris, why is she the bitch? It’s not like she owes me any favors,” I said.

  “Still,” said Iris stubbornly. “And she does owe you if she killed him, Mariela. She has turned you into a pariah in your own hood, and you don’t think she owes you for that?”