Querida Mariela, here are organic versions of things I hadn’t cooked in a long time. Things you used to love, that remind me of you. I know you don’t like favors, or accepting help from others, but this is my way of telling you that I’m here for you, no strings attached. (Not too many, anyway.)
It was a good thing that, being a chef, Jorge slept when people gossiped and worked when people slept, because it was clear he hadn’t heard about the little visit police had paid me.
I just thought you’d be in no mood to cook, because let’s face it, when were you ever? Now, if someone who cared about me sent me soup, I’d accept it and think it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. So, at least taste the soup. It might not be the best you’ve ever had, but it was sent by someone who will always care.
Chapter 23
Attorney Consuelo de Pokkos advertised as a “spiritual lawyer.” Iris warned me that she was a bit unorthodox, but said she couldn’t have gotten back on her feet after her husband’s death without her and I should come see her because she would advise me well, allay my fears, and only charge what she thought I could pay, which, right now, was very close to nothing.
That Friday, the bus left me a few steps from the weird little building where Attorney Consuelo kept an office. I looked again at the name, address, and phone number Iris had written down for me. Attorney Consuelo? What kind of lawyer without a daytime TV show calls herself by her first name?
I waited for the bus fumes to dissolve and crossed the street toward the narrow, two-story building. A bistro called Fresco California occupied the entire ground floor, sporting a chronic inability to make up its mind in the form of a green awning that read: PASTA PIZZA SALADS TACOS BURRITOS.
Upstairs, the door to the only other business led directly into a waiting area with no receptionist and no waiting chairs, just a daybed with a night table holding a small lamp that had an open-winged Murano glass bird hanging from the brass-colored pull and copies of Tricycle, Good, and Shambhala Sun magazines next to it. Was I going to be waiting that long? I looked at the bed with the knitted blanket laid carelessly on it. It seemed to be telling me, “What’re you, slow? When have you seen a bed in a waiting room? You’re going to be waiting so long, you’re going to want to take a nap. And the magazines? Just here in case you’re one of those people who can’t sleep if they don’t read first.”
I wasn’t. But Hector had been.
“Every night?” I’d asked incredulously, watching him smoke after sex.
“Every night.”
“What if you want to have sex with your wife? Do you read before or after?”
“Mariela—”
“All right, all right, I’m sorry,” I’d said, not knowing that just a few weeks later he’d finish the sentence by telling me not to do “that,” whatever else I might do, or that he would soon thereafter be unable to tell me much of anything at all.
I could now hear the faint sound of voices coming from the office on the other side of the door. What kind of lawyer had such thin walls? I looked at the daybed, the magazines, and the blanket that I had to admit seemed to beckon me to take refuge under it, feeling as if I’d entered a parallel universe.
After a few minutes, I considered leaving, but Iris had taken the trouble to make this appointment for me and I didn’t want her to think I didn’t appreciate it. Worst-case scenario was I’d listen to what the lawyer had to say, get some information in case I was questioned again, and leave it at that. I hadn’t been accused of anything, at least not yet.
Instead, I tiptoed over to the closed door and put my ear to it. (Yes, I know it’s wrong to snoop, but you can see how having been clairvoyant as a teen helped erase my scruples about listening to other people’s business, especially when their lawyers weren’t smart enough to install soundproofing.)
A woman was crying. Then another woman’s voice said, “You’re human, you love, the person you love humiliates you, replaces you, forgets about you. You say you want to ‘understand,’ but if you really wanted to, you would have. What you really want is for him to have to continue to explain himself so that he can feel guilty, realize he’s made a mistake, and come back to you.”
The other woman stopped sniffling abruptly.
“Is it so bad to want things to be the way they were?” she said after a few seconds.
“Of course not. That’s just how stupid we all are. But even if you get back with him, you’ll need your little revenge, and you know why? Because you don’t want to feel you allowed the infidelity. You want to feel you did something about it, stood up for yourself, refused to be an accomplice.”
“But I did.”
“But you didn’t. Your worst-case scenario has already happened and, at some level, you allowed it to.”
Oh my God! It was as if someone had opened a window and given me a light to shine into Olivia’s mind. Olivia had gotten tired of allowing Hector’s infidelities. One happening so close to her home, a space she obviously valued and took good care of, had been more than she could stand. It wasn’t complicated. It was simple. She had finally become angry and hurt enough to kill.
Though the idea still didn’t feel right inside me, I now knew that being so close to the questions I was asking, my intuition was on shaky territory. As much as I was trying to trust myself again, I had to remember that, in this case, the fact that something didn’t “feel” right to me didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Just that morning, and as part of my resolve to relearn to see and recapture my gift, I’d begun reading Laura Day’s How to Rule the World from Your Couch. She’d written, “Intuition may not show you the whole picture, but if it is working right, it will draw your attention to what you need to know for your question or goal.”
And then a few hours later I stumble on this gem of a conversation? What else could this be if not my intuitive guidance trying to tell me something?
The woman inside was saying, “But what does that mean? That he has the right to go on with his life without care or pain? Without mourning us for so much as a single minute? It’s just not fair. I want this ending to hurt. We should both be hurting.”
I stood there with my ear to that door and my heart pounding hard, listening as if someone’s death, or at least the quality of his post-death life, depended on it, because maybe it did. Laura Day said we rely on symbols, and that metaphors were tools that our subconscious sometimes uses to show us the truth of a situation, but dressed as something else, so that we can see it more clearly. I knew that’s what this was: a story that was there to tell me another story. This woman’s words, her hurt, were Olivia’s hurt. Maybe this was a gift, a message to help me jump-start my own compromised intuition.
The attorney was saying, “I thought you just wanted to understand, to validate, thought you didn’t want money—”
“I don’t. Not really. But there has to be something I can do here because I can’t live with this anger in my chest.”
Hearing her, it was as if Olivia were inside me. I could see what I’d done to her and what Hector had done to her. I’d made infidelity impossible to ignore. He’d made her hate him. Together, we’d forced her to decide to live without him, and I couldn’t be sorrier. Somehow, I now knew that Hector’s ghost was right: She’d hated him, and then she’d killed him. But why? Or why now?
On the other side of the door: “Never fails: Show me a woman who doesn’t want revenge, and I’ll show you a woman who secretly hopes to reconcile with her husband. The minute they see the light . . . Erika, fighting for more money than is due you or delaying the divorce is not going to help your self-esteem or your pride, and it certainly won’t make you happy. It will just make you old. And fat, causing you more than one blister and a couple of bunions, but you can do it, if it’s what you really want. Your decision.”
Olivia had finally decided she didn’t want him, and that she’d take her revenge instead?
“It’s not about revenge,” the Erika woman said. “I thought you were a re
al lawyer.”
“I am. I thought you were a coward, and you are. Why aren’t you embarrassed to admit you want to take your husband back, yet you won’t admit you want your revenge first? Do you want it for free? Ah, you want Attorney Consuelo to do everything! You want me to ruin my ‘karmic’ record, get the wrinkles, gain the extra pounds and the bunions! Well, I won’t if you won’t do your part.”
This lawyer was nuts! I thought of leaving again, doubting Iris knew Attorney Consuelo had lost her mind since the last time she’d consulted her. But I was hooked. I needed to know everything about the client on the other side of the door. Somehow, she’d become Olivia in my mind. She’d become the woman I’d never felt I’d really been and always been curious about: the wife.
The voices were lower now, calmer. I held my breath and got ready to scramble to the other side of the room if the Erika woman’s voice came closer to the door, but it didn’t.
“Now then, do you want to take revenge against your husband, yes or no?” Attorney Consuelo was asking.
“Well, yes,” said Erika this time.
I would’ve felt the same way she sounded: defeated, drained, unable to think.
“Good,” said the lawyer, who was crazy with a capital L for crazy-ass lunatic.
I looked around the office and found what I was looking for: a candy dish filled with business cards next to the small lamp, each one with a picture of Attorney Consuelo to help me put a face to the voice. In the picture, she looked to be in her early to mid fifties with the roundest face I’d ever seen, brown curly hair, big brown eyes, and a huge mouth she seemed to think she needed to enhance with bright red lipstick.
My cell phone rang then. It was Gustavo, but I let his call go to voice mail along with the other missed calls from clients who hadn’t yet heard of my sordid present. Seemed like everyone and their mother had decided to call me today, except Jorge. I thought that for a guy who’d put so much effort into doing something that would put a smile on my face, he had tremendous restraint when it came to seeing the actual smile. I also realized I wanted him to call and wondered what had made him kiss me, then stick to his “one kiss” promise as if it had told him all he needed to know.
The cell phone had alerted Attorney Consuelo and her client of my presence and now the door to the lawyer’s office opened and a young, tall, elegant woman with glasses and long curly hair hurried out. Her face was red from crying, and I busied myself with the magazines so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. Soon the other woman, Miss Red Lips from the picture on the business cards, was waving me inside.
“So.”
“So,” I answered.
“Mariela Mia Estevez Valdes,” she said, reading from her appointment book.
“That’s right,” I said.
“I like it.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You’re also afraid of being accused of murder?”
“Yes.”
“So did you do it?”
“Of course not!”
“Of course not! Just checking,” she said, smiling as she stared at me.
I was staring at her too, because the moment I’d come in, I’d begun to hear the low but insistent sound of invisible glass wind chimes being swayed by a breeze.
“Are you ever going to sit down?” she asked.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t. The office was a vortex of energy, and thoughts, and sounds, and the chair, well, the chair had just too much to say.
Finally, I decided to tell her the truth.
“I’m getting something from that chair.”
“How could you be getting something from the chair if you haven’t sat on it yet? And, whatever it is, you really can’t get it while fully dressed, that much I know.”
“No, I mean . . . I’m psychic,” I said, believing it for the first time in decades.
“Yes, I know.”
“You know? How do you know?”
Instead of answering, she extended her long arm and index finger as long as she could and pointed to a hand-painted sign above her window.
“What does it say there?” she asked.
“Attorney Consuelo de Pokkos, spiritual attorney at law,” I read.
“Exactly. Spiritual Attorney Consuelo. That’s me.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll give you the psychic thing, but you’ll have to sit in the chair and tell me what you get.”
Of course she didn’t believe me. She was either testing me or making fun of me, which was fine with me since I had a hard time believing she could’ve passed the Florida Bar, or any legal exam, so we were even in that respect.
“Okay then,” I said, sitting on the chair and closing my eyes. The message was sudden and clear, as if it had been inside me all along, as if I were the message, or rather the situation the woman had been crying about.
“It’s about the woman who just . . .”
“Erika. Her name is Erika. What can you tell me?”
“He’s going to come back to her.”
“Oh, no! Really? Are you sure? It’s a shame. She deserves better. We all do.”
I wanted to shush her, but didn’t want to lose the feeling of definitive knowledge I hadn’t felt in so long.
“But it’ll be a lie. He’s . . . not a good person . . . his soul is in constant pain. He doesn’t know how to be a good person.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“But she’ll be okay.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sorry, that’s all I get. Not even sure it’s right,” I lied.
“Oh, it’s right, all right,” she said, chewing on the pink side tip of a pencil. “So, getting back to you. I made a few calls. Police say death happened inside a very narrow time window because of the poison used, uh, let’s see, belladonna is its name. I did some checking, and the plant doesn’t grow naturally anywhere in Miami and, apparently, if ingested, a poisonous reaction can happen anywhere within ten minutes to an hour,” she finished, sounding fascinated with her own ability to Google stuff.
“What’s belladonna?”
She showed me an Internet picture of a five-tipped green leaf from which hung a single black fruit resembling a berry. The caption read “Atropa belladonna.”
“Other names for it are deadly nightshade, devil’s herb, love apple, sorcerer’s cherry, murderer’s berry, witch’s berry, devil’s cherry, and naughty man’s cherries,” she read, in case I wasn’t getting the idea.
“So it’s poison . . . for unfaithful men?”
“Seems that way.”
“I feel sick.”
“You should. But. Who has the most to gain from punishing a wayward man?”
“His wife?”
“His wife, who thankfully lives right upstairs, so even though they may be right about time of death, they’d have to be exact to the minute, since Mr. Ferro could’ve gone from your apartment to the one shared with his wife within a literal few of those.”
“That’s . . . great? But how can I be sure?” I asked.
“All they have is a breakup letter that proves you were having an affair, and ending it, if only because you expected him to end it first if you didn’t. It seems to me you have nothing to worry about.”
Then why did I still feel this weight, this sense of doom surrounding me?
“Look, they just got the tox report results yesterday. My guess is they’re going to go after the wife.”
You’d think I’d be relieved, but I wasn’t.
“So what now, Attorney de Pokkos?”
“Consuelo,” she said, waving the air with her hand, as if she were clearing the air of formality.
“Consuelo,” I repeated.
“No, no, Attorney Consuelo,” she corrected me again with a freakishly virtuous grin that would have been useful to show a person less desperate than me that she was absolutely and irreparably insane, alerting them they should find themselves another lawyer.
But since I was desperat
e and had little money . . .
“Okay. So, what now, Attorney, um, Consuelo?”
“Um is not part of my name, but okay, the answer is nothing. You do nothing. You’re not a suspect. And if they want you to answer any more questions, you call me and wait for me before you say anything.”
“What should I do in the meantime? And what do I owe you?” I asked, holding out my hand as I stood.
“For now, just one dollar. As a retainer, so that our conversation can be considered confidential. Not that I think you’ll need me. But just in case, lay low, stay out of trouble. No, wait. Wait,” she said, standing, putting the tips of all her fingers on the desk, and closing her eyes for a moment before saying, “As your attorney, Mariela Mia Estevez Valdes, I’m going to tell you what I tell all my clients: In the meantime, you go do whatever you want, whatever fills your heart. You go live, while you have a life.”
Chapter 24
I never told Attorney Consuelo that there was a third person who also lived just a minute or two away, and at whose apartment Hector could have chosen to stop before heading to his own on the night of his death: Abril.
In my vision, the one I had when we’d crossed paths on the sidewalk as she was returning from Hector’s memorial service, I’d seen Abril and Hector facing each other like the opposite ends of a rubber band about to snap. Had they been lovers? Or had there been something else going on? How could I be sure the tension I saw was sexual, and not adversarial, as I’d thought at first?
Oh, please, I scolded myself. What else could it be? She was a beautiful young woman, and he was a philanderer who wasn’t above having affairs close to home. There was also the fact that she inexplicably broke up with Gustavo on the same day Hector broke up with me. Maybe Hector had mistaken her overt friendliness for flirting. On the other hand, she might really have been flirting with him. Maybe she was tired of struggling, figured Hector for an easy sugar daddy, and traded Gustavo in for the older model, convincing herself she was doing it for her son. Maybe that’s why she was so angry: She thought I’d killed the man who could’ve made her life a little easier.
The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Page 19