Hard Cold Whisper

by Michael Hemmingson

  “A jury could see it otherwise,” I said.

  “Juries tend to not like p-servers. The D.A. will make sure they have half a jury that’s been served with a process they weren’t happy about.”

  “I’d rather be optimistic, Allen.” He was getting me down all right, making me second guess my own legal problems.

  “I’m pragmatic,” he said. “And I’m confident you can run this place while I’m in the pokey.”

  Yeah, I could.

  But I didn’t want to.

  I didn’t want to be here anymore.

  I wanted to travel the world with Gabriella and make babies with her, spending that three million like carefree hooligans who got away with murder. Then we would settle down somewhere in Latin America, in a big house, kids running around all over the place, laughing and crying and screaming and screeching.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, holding the cell phone close to my lips.

  24.

  Gabriella was cold and calculating—yet I knew that she was also scared because she told me so. She was doing a good job hiding it; she would've made an excellent poker player. Or chess champion, the mathematics of manipulation doing overtime, as each move on her part built up to the grand scheme of things. I admired her ability to do this and found myself wishing my own blood could run with such ice in it.

  And there the two of us stood: in her aunt’s bedroom, gazing on our intended victim; the old woman lightly snoring, mumbling something now and then. I wondered about her dreams. I wondered about the curse she apparently put on me, and would her death cancel it?

  Gabriella handed me a thick down feather pillow. I thought about that trick question: What’s heavier, a pound of rocks or a pound of feathers?

  “I have to do it?”

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  She was the brain; I was the muscle.

  I was up to me. Gabriella’s task was to turn her aunt over so the woman was on her back. I wanted to suggest that perhaps she her adenoids would close up and that’d do the job for us, since that was going to be the explanation for her death. Would it still be murder? I imagine the D.A.’s office would attempt to argue that . . . if they suspected foul play.

  “Do it,” said the girl I had fallen in love with. “Three million dollars, baby,” Gabriella reminded me with a hard cold whisper.

  And so I did it.

  It was easy, in retrospect; I simply strolled over to the bed and placed the pillow on the woman’s face. For a moment I thought I was being watched, thought I saw movement outside the window, and decided it was my paranoid imagination. The only one watching me, the only witness to my crime, was my lover.

  I pressed down on the pillow, a hand on each side. The old woman did not put up a fight. Her body shook a couple of times and after a minute or two she became still and the room started to smell like urine and shit. Gabriella’s aunt (hell, I didn’t even know her proper name, I then realized) had soiled herself the way people do when they die, when the sphincter and bladder relax and body waste is evacuated. Gabriella was not ready for that, she didn’t know about this fact of death. I only knew because I had read about it, and had, as a child, seen it happen to a dog that had been hit by a truck—in the dog’s final moments, in the street on a hot summer day, it let out a single bark and died and shit and peed itself.

  And my mother: when I found her dead in bed from a silent heart attack. I was five years old and I shook her and said, “Mommy?” and she did not reply. Remembering that always froze me. “Mommy, wake up…”

  “David?”

  I returned to the moment.

  “It’s done,” I said, removing the pillow.

  “Are you sure?”

  I bent down toward her aunt, trying to detect breathing. “I’m pretty sure.”

  Gabriella looked at the woman’s body for a long minute of hell. “She sure looks dead.”

  “What now?”

  “We go sit down and watch some TV or something,” she said, mechanical in the suggestion. “In a couple of hours, I’ll look in and her and see that something is wrong. Then we’ll call 911. You’ll tell the cops, if they come . . .”

  “They’ll come for an unexplained dead body, either here or the morgue,” I said.

  “You’ll tell them, ‘Yeah, I was here with Gaby Amaya, and she said she had to make sure her aunt wasn’t lying on her back, but she was. I’ll act devastated, I’ll act guilty. It was all my fault, I was irresponsible. I can’t be charged with that, right? It’s not a crime.”

  “Can you fake tears?”

  “You may have to slap me some. I’m sure you’ll like that,” she said.

  I surprised her by slapping her right then and there, a hard one across the face. She stared at me in complete surprise, a “how dare you motherfucker” gleam in her dark brown eyes. I don’t know why I did it—a combination of fear and anger and disbelief over what she had talked me into are my excuses.

  I was about to slap her again, raising my hand, and she came after me, her fingernails out, ready to claw out my eyes.

  She grabbed my hair and we kissed and we both fell to the floor.

  We made love right there at the murder scene.

  We fucked next to her aunt’s dead body, the blood still warm, the blood hot and rambunctious in our connected bodies, connected by saliva and then semen.

  Gabriella got up from the floor and went to the bathroom down the hall, next to her bedroom.

  I lay there, staring at a painting of the Mother Mary holding the baby Jesus on the wall. The eyes of Mary appeared sad and benevolent at the same time, as if she were disappointed in the two sins I had just committed in front of her.

  I stood, zipped up my jeans, and walked down the hall. I thought I heard Gabriella crying in the bathroom.

  Not crying. She was talking, saying something I couldn’t make out, words Spanish and fast.

  I knocked on the door.

  She stopped.

  I said, “Baby?”

  She said, “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Hey, get that bottle out, okay? I need a drink,” she said.

  I went to the kitchen and found several tequila bottles in the overhead cabinet. She was always well-stocked in the stuff and I wondered how she got booze, she wasn’t old enough to purchase it and her aunt never went outside or was able to shop. Delivery, perhaps.

  “Good job, amigo,” a man’s voice said.

  I turned around, holding the tequila bottle by the neck.

  Pablo Martinez stood there and he held a gun, that Glock 9mm he had used to shoot at me before.

  That Glock was pointed at my chest.

  25.

  I was about to ask him what the fuck was he doing in here; before he even told me, I figured it out.

  “You handled the old woman pretty neat,” Martinez said, “or so Gabby says. She didn’t go into detail but you did the job like a pro, and you’ll go down for it like a pro.”

  Adding, “Bro.”

  “The fuck,” I said: a mumble.

  She was talking to him on her cell phone from the bathroom. That was him at the window, looking in; I hadn’t imagined the movement, that feeling of being watched—he had been here the whole fucking time.

  I remembered the other time I heard her talking to herself, when she was getting the tequila that day, and a few minutes later Martinez came out of his house. She had been talking to him then, too.

  They had both been playing me from the starting gate.

  “That’s right, buddy,” he said. “The slut seduced you and,” he laughed, “you fell for that bitch’s sweet ass. You bought the whole act, huh? You really thought she was in love with you, a white boy?” He shook his head. “You are one dumb motherfucker,” he said, “motherfucker.”

  I felt like one too.

  “You get me to kill the old woman,” I said,
“I take the fall and you and Gabriella get the money.”

  His smile showed me the gold in his teeth. “Maybe you’re not so dumb after all.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” I said. “Sure, I’ll go down for it, but I’ll take you and her with me. We can all get the death penalty together.”

  “You’ll probably get twenty-five-to life,” Martinez said. “I have homies inside on that stretch for worse thrill kills.”

  “This was pre-meditated murder, on all our parts. Who do you think the cops will believe?”

  “It won’t matter,” and he was smug, “because you’ll be dead. You see, you were obsessed with my girl. She kept telling you no, she wasn’t interested, but you kept coming around—neighbors have seen your car, and so have I, it's here almost every day. You got so obsessed that you killed her poor old aunt to get Gabby away from here, but Gabby fought you—look at those scratches on your face, bro—and you were going to murder her too, in a love-crazy rage, but I happened to come by and stop you from doing the deed.”

  “You have it all planned out,” I said.

  More teeth. “Yeah, I may get a gun possession charge, but I’ll be a hero. Might even get my face on the evening news. In the newspapers, they will say what a fine citizen I am.”

  “And rich.”

  “The little whore has a--” His face contorted and he said, “What the fuck, bitch?”

  He turned around. He was bleeding from his back. Gabriella held a large cutting knife in her small hand. The knife dripped blood.

  Martinez yelled: “What the fuck you doing?!?”

  She started stabbing away at him—his neck, his chest—saying with each thrust: “I am not a whore, I am not a bitch, I am not a slut!”

  He dropped the gun. I went for it like a starving person on a ham sandwich.

  Martinez had no interest in the weapon now. He was trying to defend himself from the knife.

  Gabriella was quick, a whirling dervish of slicing intent.

  She got him in the heart and he went down.

  Martinez was still. His body lay in a pool of blood and he pissed and shit himself, the sure sign—again--that death had arrived.

  “Do they always do that?” Gabriella said. “Stinks!”

  I pointed the gun at her.

  Right between the eyes.

  “I just saved your life,” she said.

  “You have a lot of explaining to do.”

  26.

  She told me everything, how she had slept with Martinez off and on the past year not because she liked him, or loved him; she was bored and she wanted sex and he was the only guy on the block she could stand for a few minutes of physical need. It was his idea to off her aunt and collect the money; what they needed was a solid plan, a patsy to step up and take the blame.

  A fall guy.

  Martinez had an older brother who was recently served a restraining order from his now ex-wife; his brother was looking for a hit man in Tijuana to take her out. The cartel down there had contract killers who would come across the border, do the job, and go back to hiding in Mexico. But his brother was arrested on a drug possession charge before he could take out the contract. All this gave Martinez an idea, something so convoluted that the cops would never be able to piece it together.

  Gabriella said he thought he was pretty smart coming up with this.

  “I would go to the court and ask for a protective order against him,” she explained. “I’d say he was an ex-boyfriend harassing me and I’d use a fake name. It’s a great loophole—they don’t check your identification down there, they take it for granted you’re telling the truth, there’s even a room in the courthouse with these lawyers and butch man-haters who are more than happy to help you and tell you how horrible it is that you’re a woman and a victim in a world run by men, and how the courts can protect you from psycho ex-boyfriends and husbands and all that.

  “So that’s what I did. And I hired the first company I saw by the courthouse to serve the papers on him.”

  “Which happened to be Westlake and Marshall,” I said.

  “Roll of the dice, baby. I followed his plan—oh, his name isn’t Pablo Martinez. That was made up too.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “His real name is Miguel Lamada.”

  Fake people, real court orders. You had to love the system.

  I said, “And Miguel’s plan was . . .”

  “Play hard to get, but you’d get him, or almost, and he’d attack you,” she said. “And I’d come to your aide and nurse you.”

  “You put on the charm hard.”

  “You kissed me first.”

  “You were sending out signals.”

  “I didn’t expect to be attracted to you,” she said, and: “Or to fall in love with you.”

  “You called me and said Martinez or Miguel or whatever the fuck's name is, was—you said he was home, so I’d come running, huh?”

  “And you did,” she said.

  “And you got naked,” I said.

  “I wanted to get naked,” she said.

  “You seduced me,” I said.

  “I wanted to seduce you,” she said. “It was no act.”

  “His little fool-proof plan was to get me to fall head over heels in love with you so I’d agree to murder your aunt.”

  “No, that was my idea.”

  “How impressive of you,” I said. “Baby.”

  She shrugged and smiled. “I got the idea from one of the books I read.”

  “Let’s hear it for trashy romance novels.”

  “In the story, they get away with it.”

  “Not this time.”

  “We still could.”

  “We?”

  “Davey and Gaby.”

  I looked at the dead man on the floor and moved my foot away from the spreading blood.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You killed him.”

  “I had to. He was going to kill you and I’d be stuck with him and I didn’t want that.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I’m in love with you, you fucking fool,” she said. “I changed my mind, David. I sure as hell didn’t expect to fall in love with you for real but I did.”

  “Love,” I said.

  “Real love,” she said. “You know it’s true. You feel it between us. It’s not fake. Maybe at first, but things changed. My heart changed. We connected in a way….I’ve never felt anything like it…just like in the books, and I knew what they write in those romance books really is true. I love you. I want to be your wife and have your babies just like we talked about.”

  She had me.

  I was an utterly confused nincompoop.

  I asked, “So why did you let this happen? Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I had to go through with it,” she said. “I had to keep Miguel thinking I was still working with him. So yeah, we’d kill my aunt, and when Miguel came in to shoot you, I’d kill him. Which I did. He doesn’t get to share my inheritance. You do. Pretty good plan, huh?”

  I had to admit it was.

  I still didn’t trust her.

  She dropped the knife and took several steps toward me.

  “If you don’t believe my heart, shoot my heart in half,” she said softly, seductively.

  There were two dead bodies in the house and that was a problem.

  There could be three.

  “Go ahead and pull the trigger,” Gabriella said.

  27.

  I lowered the gun and said, “We have to do something with his body.”

  She smiled. “I got a plan for that, baby. I did think this through.”

  She came to me, embraced me, and we kissed.

  “Gabriella,” was all I could say. I was weak. I needed her. She was now my drug and I was her junkie and every other fucking cliché you can think of.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I had to make Miguel think I was still on his game or else it could’ve all gone wrong.”

  “Wha
t’s your plan?” I asked.

  “We can’t leave his body across the street or anywhere in Chula Vista,” she said. “His homies would get suspicious and start snooping around. Who knows who he’s told about all this. He swore he was keeping his mouth shut but he told me some shit about members of his crew that was supposed to be top secret, so he’s not all that loyal to his word.”

  “Were you sleeping with him when you've with me?”

  “David, don’t ask such things.”

  “I have to know.”

  “The answer is no, if you must know,” she said. “I was never into him, not like you and me. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “We’re going take his body down to Tijuana,” she continued. “We’ll dump him there. There’s a place I know of, it’s over by the airport. They call it ‘El Fin del Mundo.’ The end of the world. It’s where the drug gangs dump their kills. The cops down in TJ and his gang homies will think he pissed off someone in the cartel and they offed his ass.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” and she made the sign of the cross.

  “This is no time to get religious,” I said.

  “Do you want to go to prison? Or have Miguel’s homies come after us for revenge?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then this is what we gotta do, baby.”

  I asked, “How do you know about this place, this El Fin del Mundo?”

  “I hear things,” she said.

  I gave her a look.

  “Before I came to live with my Aunt Yolanda, I lived in Tijuana. I know about things down there, how things work,” she said.

  Aunt Yolanda.

  At least she had a name now.

  28.

  We wrapped Miguel’s body up in two big, dusty old rugs from Aunt Yolanda’s closet and carried him to the alley and loaded him in the trunk of my Mustang, which was a good size for a body, with plenty of room left for another if need be. There are three things I always have in my glove compartment: a flashlight, leather gloves, and the collapsible steel baton. I used the gloves to handle the rugs and the body.