Sarya quickly pocketed the earrings. “This is our little secret,” she whispered to the Buddha head.
Her eyes widened when she saw Tuason. Her fingers tightened around the doorknob. “We forgot something,” Tuason said, sounding apologetic. She pushed open the door without waiting for an invitation to enter. But she noticed that Sarya’s ears were now bare.
“Empty your pockets,” Tuason said.
Sarya stood unmoving, as though confused.
Tuason showed her the warrant once more, and repeated her instructions.
Sarya looked trapped. Her eyes flitted around the living room, then she sighed and took the earrings from her pocket. “I found them in Kuya’s drawer. I was going to give them to you.”
The earrings still felt cool. “We both know you didn’t.”
“Yes I did. I swear. It was him. He killed during his rages. Don’t you remember? I was at the station when those women were killed. I was hurt myself, remember?” The words tumbled out of her mouth like overactive children.
“Very clever of you, having the police as alibi, all those self-inflicted wounds, planting evidence against your brother.”
“No, it didn’t happen that way, Ma’am Tuason. It was Kuya, I swear.” She looked as helpless as she had all those times when she was taken to Lakeview, bruised and battered.
“Your brother is left-handed, and the killer is right-handed, just like you.” Sarya sagged against the foyer table like a rag doll whose stuffing had been removed. In a blur, her hand curled around the bonze Buddha head. She swung it at Tuason. Tuason dodged, but not swiftly enough. The Buddha head hit her on the shoulder. The force threw her off-balance and she fell to the floor. Sarya advanced toward her, the Buddha head raised to pummel Tuason’s face. “Lies, all lies!” Sarya screeched.
In a flash, Tuason thrust her foot, tripping Sarya. She fell face down. Tuason pounced on her, but Sarya could not be subdued so easily. She rolled away, still holding the Buddha head. She hit Tuason. Once again, the blow landed on her shoulder. Pain exploded in Tuason’s body. Sarya was stronger than she looked. Tuason lunged at her and wrenched the Buddha head away, sending it skittering across the crazy-cut marble. They grappled on the floor, Sarya trying to grab Tuason’s holstered gun. Tuason clutched a handful of Sarya’s hair, yanked the woman’s head up and banged it on the floor, stunning her. She gripped Sarya’s arm and twisted it to near breaking point, and cuffed her. She stood up and hauled Sarya from the floor.
“Sit,” she said, and a now listless Sarya obediently sat on the couch.
“Why did you do it, Sarya?”
“I didn’t do anything, Ma’am Tuason.” Her voice was plaintive. Her shoulders sagged. Once again, she was the Sarya that Tuason had seen countless times at Lakeview. “Kuya must have gotten tired of those sluts. He must have realized that they’re gold diggers. They would have bled him dry. There would have been nothing left for me.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Come on, we both know you framed him. Pretty cunning of you. You even had us fooled.” Tuason shook her head and clucked her tongue. “We’ve been looking for the earrings and the bat in your house, but I’m sure we’ll find the sedatives once we search again. You’ve been drugging him.”
“You’re mistaken, Ma’am Tuason. I wouldn’t think of harming him. He may be a dictator, but I love him.”
“You love his money more, don’t you? Here’s what I think happened. You got tired of being beaten up. So you drugged him. Maybe, at first it was just to calm him down. Then you thought of killing those girls and framing him. Pretty neat. Once he goes to jail, you’ll be administrator of all his money. Otherwise, you have nothing.”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Her tone had changed. The cowering victim was gone. “Do you know how it feels to be a 21st-century slave? To waste your education? To wither away?”
“Murder is never the answer. Confess and we could help you. I know that there were mitigating circumstances.”
“Enough. I won’t say anything more unless Atty. Torres is present.” She held her chin up.
Tuason grimaced. People must be watching too many TV cop shows, just like Joshua. There was an epidemic of lawyering up. Her eyes darkened. And if this Atty. Torres mounted an insanity defense, and if he was any good, then Sarya could walk. Just as others before her had done.
Joshua rushed in. “There’s been a mistake. Kadyo is left-handed . . .” his voice trailed as his eyes fell on a handcuffed Sarya. “Oh . . . how did you know?”
“He handed her the lawyer’s calling card with his left hand and she received it with her right hand. She dialed with her right hand.”
“You could have said something earlier,” Joshua said, starting to sound like Tuason.
“What, and ruin all the fun?” She massaged her aching shoulder. “Besides, I had to be sure.” She nodded at the earrings that had fallen to the floor during the struggle. “She hid them cleverly.” She pushed Sarya toward Joshua. “Book her.”
On the way out of the house, Tuason glanced at Sarya’s goblet. All the ice had completely melted, making the goblet sweat and turning the wine a light pink. Tuason’s face clouded when she saw a silver creolla and a blue sapphire stud at the bottom of the goblet, mocking her.
A DEATH IN LOOBAN
“Are we lost?” Police Officer II Joshua Rios peered at the narrow road where his partner, Inspector SJ Tuason had taken a right from Commonwealth Avenue. There was a dead body in Looban Ocho and he could not find the place on Waze.
“Don’t worry. I know where it is,” Tuason said, though she could no longer find the once-familiar row of cheap apartments that marked the approach to Looban Ocho. The informal settlers must have encroached on the crumbling structure. It had been falling apart even in her teens.
“Why do we keep getting these cases with unidentified bodies in godforsaken places?” Rios muttered, tapping on his phone in a futile search.
Tuason ignored him and concentrated on the road. Her gray-green eyes, a color uncommon in someone with cinnamon skin, narrowed to a squint. She eased her foot off the accelerator, bringing the police Car to a crawl. She usually brought her ten-year old Sentra, but this morning, a fully gassed vehicle had been available. When she saw what remained of the old Police Outpost, she relaxed. She turned into what was once the parking lot and parked.
Across the street was a sari-sari store where istambays had gathered for their morning fix of alcohol. At the sight of Tuason and Rios, the istambays’ rambunctious laughter died down. They watched the police officers with hooded eyes. Tuason walked cadet-like on long legs to where they stood, followed closely by Rios, whose eyes pingponged from the car to the istambays. Even without the police hat that went with her blue uniform, Tuason looked taller than her 5’7”. Her strange-looking ears stood out because of the way her hair had been severely drawn back into a tight bun. “Pinaglihi sa halaan,” her mother used to say about the ears crinkled like clamshells.
“What are you boys having?” Tuason asked.
To a man, the istambays stared at their drinks, searching their brains. What could they have done lately that could have drawn the police here?
In the silence, she called out to the man behind the wire mesh that separated the store’s goods from its customers. “Another round of what they’re having, and two of your coldest soft drinks.” She pushed some hundred-peso bills through the small square opening.
The storekeeper slid bottles of gin through the opening. Then he grabbed two bottles of Sprite. “For here?”
Tuason shook her head. The storekeeper transferred the Sprites into two plastic bags and stuck straws on each. Then he handed them to Tuason.
“Tagay, mga boss,” the toughest-looking among the istambays, biceps replete with full color tattoos of the Mother of Perpetual Help on the right and a rose and dagger on the left, offered his bottle first to Tuason, then to Rios.
“Next time na lang, we’re on duty. You know, our bosses a
re stricter now.” Tuason softened her reply with a helpless shrug. Declining his offer without some believable excuse would have been disastrous. She handed Rios his drink.
The toughie nodded. “To you,” the toughie said, raising his bottle.
Tuason and Rios raised their plastic bags of Sprite, then turned to leave. Tuason paused, as though remembering something. “By the way, you guys observed anything out of the ordinary around here?” She made it sound like an after-thought.
“No,” came the quick reply. Too quick, thought Tuason. She shrugged, and said, “In case you think of something . . . meanwhile, please keep an eye out for the car.”
The detectives continued on foot towards the interior. When they were out of earshot, Rios said, “Was that necessary? We’re on police business anyway.” He sucked on the cold drink, looking genuinely puzzled, and bolstering Tuason’s opinion that book learning paled in comparison with street experience. She wondered when the apprenticeship of her honor-graduate partner would end. After one last sip, she crumpled the plastic bag of her drink and tossed it atop a pile of moldering trash by the roadside.
“Sometimes, money talks louder than police sirens. Besides, it’s always nice to build goodwill.” Tuason often relied on information from snitches, although she regarded them as opportunists and mercenaries, sometimes hardly distinguishable from the criminals they help to put away. To her, they were necessary evils that she had to use in the absence of modern crime-fighting equipment. Calling them Confidential Informants had not made them less sleazy to her.
Joshua nodded. His father had been right. Tuason could teach him a lot.
The concrete road had turned to potholed asphalt, then to a muddy path. Half-naked children played in the mud giggling. Stray dogs yelped and radio sets blared from shanties that hung higgledy-piggledy atop one another. Most were made out of a patchwork of rotting wood and moss-covered hollow blocks. Sometimes the walls were nothing but tarpaulins from long-ago election campaigns. Old rubber tires and rocks held down rusting tin roofs. Faded clothes hang limply from clotheslines in front of the shanties, some from poles protruding out of second floor windows like remnants from a long-forgotten fiesta. The humid air stank of canals and uncollected garbage. At one street corner, plastic chairs stood outside one of the larger shanties, practically choking off the narrow path. The chairs were shielded from the sun by a yellow tarpaulin. Tuason’s eyes darkened and her hands bunched into fists.
“There’s a wake,” Rios said.
“It’s an illegal gambling front,” Tuason motioned for him to keep on walking.
A woman with a bundle of laundry atop her head came from the opposite direction, squinting at them with suspicious eyes.
“Do you know where No. 15 is?” Tuason asked.
“Turn right on the next corner, boss, it’s the third house on the left,” the woman pointed with her mouth, relieved that the police were not there for her family.
Police tape secured the entry of a shanty which had the distinction of having unfinished hollow blocks for walls. Usis crowded around, craning their necks, trying to catch something, even if the door and windows were closed. A fat woman with hair up in rollers opened the door a crack, let in Tuason and Joshua, then retreated to the back of the shanty. The Scene Of the Crime Operatives were bagging evidence. One of them was scraping gunk from under the victim’s fingernails.
The senior SOCO said, “We had to close up the house. Too many usis.” Sweat stained his black shirt with crescent-shaped patches on his armpits.
The victim was in his early twenties. Tan with a stubble and mestizo good looks: narrow, high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones. He lay supine on a scarred wooden sofa with sulihiya. Some parts of the woven cane were frayed. His head rested on a pillow whose tattered casing was once white. Even with bruises around his eyes and swelling on his lips, he looked handsome.
“Fresh tan,” Tuason said, noting the band of white flesh on the wrist. “Anybody seen a watch?”
Before anyone could respond, Joshua cut in, “Is that Justin Sievert?”
“You know him?” Tuason asked.
“You don’t?” Joshua whipped his head towards Tuason, eyes wide. “He used to be the hottest matinee idol in the country. He’s so much darker and thinner now, but it’s him.”
“No wonder he looked familiar,” the junior SOCO said as he sealed a plastic bag containing the gunk he had collected from under the victim’s fingernails. “But his driver’s license studied the license and the other contents of the wallet. She turned to Joshua.
“You’re sure?” She showed Joshua the license.
Joshua looked closely at the license. He nodded. “John Valdez is his real name.”
Tuason exhaled. “So you’ve switched from watching U.S. cop shows to local romance.”
“No. But I used to date a girl who loved teleseryes,” he grinned.
Tuason puffed her cheeks then blew air out with a pop. “Not a word about this,” she told the men. “Unless you want a circus, with us as popcorn.” She knelt beside the corpse that lay on the rickety sofa. “A matinee idol, and he had fallen this far?”
“Maybe you can ask him,” The SOCO pointed to a young man huddled in a corner.
He was almost Justin’s age and built, but was so much darker and not as good-looking.
“Justin was immersing himself for a big role. Lead character in a teleserye. So he, I mean we, stayed with a family to get a feel of the character. A neighborhood toughie, a Robinhood-type bida-contkrabida, you know.” The young man’s words were laced with sorrow, his face dimmed with sadness.
“And who are you?” Tuason looked at him intently, from his red-rimmed eyes, to his bruised cheeks, scratched arms and raw knuckles.
“I’m Ricky Diaz. Justin’s personal assistant. We’ve been friends since we were kids.”
“Friends, huh. But the two of you fought last night?”
He looked down on the floor covered with linoleum-look sheeting. “Not with each other. We had some trouble with the local goons.”
“Which ones?”
Ricky pursed his lips, then reluctantly said, “The ones at the gambling den, in the corner where the wake is.”
“Names.”
“I don’t know all their names. Just Boy Anay. And his gang. Justin accused them of cheating. Boy Anay took Justin’s watch because we had ran out of cash, and Justin was losing heavily.”
“Do you think they came back and finished him off?” Joshua asked, his eyes trailing to the door with a joke for a lock. Even he could pick it.
Ricky shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. I fell asleep before Justin did. It was a long day. Or maybe it was bangungot. Justin ate a lot of inihaw and garlic rice for dinner. He eats a lot when he’s stressed.”
“Or maybe kulam!” The fat woman with the curlers had joined in without invitation. She fanned herself with an anahaw fan and continued, “Oh, I’m the owner of the house. Justin is my favorite actor and when Ricky here told me about their plan, I was excited. It was like being in a suspense movie. All the secrecy. And these two practicing scenes. Grabe. But I didn’t breath a word to anybody. Not even my kumadres. I swear.”
“Notice anything unusual?” Rios had removed his hat to fan himself, baring his prematurely thinning black hair. Wisps lay flat on his skull like shredded seaweeds on a rock.
The woman shook her head.
Tuason frowned and thought: getting killed in a roomful of people without anyone noticing was unusual in itself. The back of her ears prickled, warning her that something was amiss.
“I tell you, someone must have fancied him, used gayuma, but failed. Some gayuma could be . . . what’s the word . . . oh, toxic. Sayang, he’s so good looking even in disguise.” The woman’s shoulders juddered and she smiled. She could still feel kilig for a corpse.
Tuason made a mental note of the woman who seemed to know a lot about kulam and toxic gayuma. “If you think of anything else, call us.” She handed her card.
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“Does Tita Bianca know?” Ricky asked. “God, she will be devastated.” His shoulders heaved. “Justin was her everything.” He covered his face with slender hands.
Tuason shook her head. She wiped off sweat from her upper lip. The heat was cloying and the stench of sweating bodies in a confined space melded with the putrid odor of open canals. “What about you, Ricky, what was Justin to you?”
“He was my best friend. We’ve been through a lot together.”
“How do you feel about being a PA while he basked in adulation and earned millions?”
“I’m happy for his success.”
Tuason cocked her head. He sounded a bit rehearsed. As if he had answered the same question several times before and had come up with a pat, politically correct answer.
“Any arguments? Any chance the rehearsals your landlady overheard were actual arguments?”
“We were just rehearsing.”
Ricky joined the fat woman in Tuason’s list.
From the shack, they went to the wake. Tuason knew that the body in the coffin was a rent-a-corpse, and, like the wakes of her childhood, this one was a front for illegal gambling operations. Her mother used to ask her father, “How can you stand being there with those rotting corpses and with a young child at home?” Sometimes, the question led to heated arguments. That her father was not a violent man had been a small mercy for Tuason.
At the sight of the uniformed police officers, some of the “mourners” disappeared. Tuason intercepted one of them. “Where is Boy Anay?”
“Sorry po, I don’t know.” Then he surreptitiously pointed his lips to a tall man in a red shirt whose back was turned from them, and rushed away.
“Boy Anay?” Tuason called out.
The tall man in red turned. His face was heavily pitted, the acne scars visible even in the gloom, as if an army of termites had feasted on his cheeks. But the shadows made him look younger, and Tuason gasped, her heartbeat racing. Seeing him in his natural habitat of the illegal gambling den, among wooden tables and a cheap coffin, had picked forgotten locks in her brain. The tall man in red was Boy Tangkad, the illegal gambling operator’s son. And in an instant, she was a young girl again, dragged by her mother to the den, bewildered by the heat, the sweat-infused smoky air, the loud customers. Fearful about the arguments between her mother and her father for the public to hear, and of the operator’s son shooing them away. Heat rose to her face, while her heart thumped hard and fast. She had to capture him.
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