“Did they say where they were going?” the man asked.
“No.”
“They didn’t mention it at all?”
“No, when we got back to the house Daisy asked that I pack her suitcase. She said they would leave during the weekend.”
“But they didn’t say how long?”
“I thought it might be a permanent move.”
“You didn’t think this was unusual? That they’d leave from one day to another?”
“Not really,” Viridiana said. “Daisy didn’t like the town much.”
“Why didn’t she leave before, then?”
“She had unresolved business with Mr. Landry.”
“But that business had been resolved, after the visit to the notary public.”
“Yes, that was my impression.”
The man wasn’t really writing anything down. Viridiana could write in shorthand and take dictation. He was idly scribbling a single word here and there, like it didn’t much matter what she said. That’s what the recorder was for, she supposed. And still, she thought this detail mattered. That it wasn’t good.
“What kind of business did Daisy have with Landry?”
“Her husband died here in town. Ambrose—he fell down a staircase. Mr. Landry came to settle her husband’s will. He is heir to Ambrose’s estate and he gets to control it. That’s all I know.”
“What did you do after you packed Daisy’s clothes?”
“We did some other packing, but then Gregory said he wanted to go to the beach, so Daisy and Gregory went.”
“Alone?”
“They asked me to tag along. To bring the beach umbrella, their sun tan lotion. It’s the kind of work I did for them. Like I said before, I was their personal assistant.”
“Then what?”
“Daisy and Gregory asked me to fix them drinks, and I talked with them for a little and had a drink too,” she said, because they might have also dusted for fingerprints in the living room or they might count the glasses, or who knew. She needed to hew as close to the truth as possible. “Then, I went to my room to nap, and when it was dark, and since it was Friday, I decided to come into town.”
“What did you do in town?”
“I came to see Mr. Landry.”
“How long were you with him?”
“I spent the night with him.”
“The whole night?”
“That’s what I said.”
The police officer nodded. He slowly drummed his pen against the notebook and leaned forward, staring at Viridiana. Whack, went the pen against the notebook. Whack. A little louder each time, until he set the notebook and the pen down.
“That’s mighty convenient.”
Viridiana felt her breath hot in her mouth. She wanted to cough. “What?”
She had gone over every question they might ask her but she hadn’t expected that. This man was inflexible and you could tell he wasn’t the type that drew his paycheck and let things go by.
“I said it’s mighty convenient. Mr. Landry had been going around town for days, asking if the death of his uncle looked suspicious, questioning people. He was convinced there had been foul play. He probably didn’t feel very friendly towards Daisy and Gregory and suddenly one is dead, the other disappears into thin air.”
He stood up as he spoke. Rounded the desk. When he was done talking he let a hand land on her shoulder. He let it lay there, unmoving, like an ugly tarantula creeping out of its burrow.
“That’s ridiculous. We were together.”
“I’m sure you made it to the hotel. The front desk clerk remembers seeing you.”
“Then?”
“He could have slipped out sometime during the night.”
He was beginning to spook her. His tone of voice was outright hostile and his hand was still resting heavily against her shoulder. “Are you covering for him? You better tell me now.”
“No.”
“Think harder,” he said, giving her shoulder a painful squeeze. “Because there are bits and pieces that are not aligning. I hate it when things don’t align,” he said.
Viridiana decided she was not going to reply to that. After a couple of minutes the man lifted his hand and sat down again, staring at her.
Shit, she thought.
* * *
“What did they ask you?”
She had gone up to Lawrence’s room because no peace could be had anywhere else. If they sat at a restaurant, people would stare at them or eavesdrop. Thus, they’d kept their distance from each other but that day Lawrence was fed up and he’d waited for her outside the police station and brought her to the hotel.
“A bunch of things,” she said. “The cop told me maybe you’d killed them and I was covering for you.”
“That’s nonsense! If they start with that, why… why, I’ll have to get my lawyer out here immediately. They said it was only routine questions but it’s been two days of that now,” Lawrence declared.
He took off his jacket it and tossed it on the back of a chair. He also removed his shoes and sat at the edge of the bed, shaking his head.
It was odd being in the same room with him.
She did not feel much like talking to anyone. The police already asked her to talk too much, and at home her mother demanded answers. At home she had become a stone and her silence had extended to him.
This had not been her plan
“As if I had anything to gain from their deaths.”
“Revenge,” she said. She thought then of Gregory’s unseeing eyes, his body crumpled by the bathtub.
“Garbage,” he muttered, steadying himself. He opened the newspaper he’d bought in the lobby and looked for the news item he knew would be there. In the capital, no doubt everyone, including Alarma! would have reported on the case. It would have been a huge deal. But there were only a couple of reporters who’d come into town. It was a pain in the ass having to send someone to Baja California and they probably were feeling cautious. Maybe those Mexico City lawyers had phoned certain editors real quick, too, because the article in the paper was not very long.
“Christ, right there, my damn name,” Lawrence said, nevertheless, smacking his hand against the newspaper.
There were two photos. Daisy and Gregory. It must have been their passport photos because they were staring right at the camera, right at Viridiana.
“Could be worse,” she said, looking away.
“My picture isn’t there, but it’s no picnic. Look at that, right there, ‘Stanley Lawrence Landry, 24, a resident of Mexico City.’”
“My name’s there, too.”
Viridiana snatched the newspaper from his hands and crumpled it, tossing it away. She didn’t mind her name there, she didn’t want to look at Daisy and Gregory’s faces. The officer had flung pictures of them in front of her already, and she remembered perfectly what Gregory looked like.
“I’m an idiot,” he said soberly. “I’m sorry, it must be very bad for you, too.”
He tried to grab her hand in sympathy but she had the sudden, ridiculous notion that if he did, he might read her thoughts. That a simple caress alone would reveal her every secret and she took a step back.
“You shouldn’t touch me,” she said, rubbing shaky fingers against her arm. “It’s not right.”
“I’m sorry, Viridiana,” he repeated. “But you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You have no idea,” she whispered, despite herself. The talk with the police investigator must have rattled her more than she thought. That damn bulldog, sniffing and sniffing and going at her again and again, waiting for her to make a mistake. And the cop knew she’d make a mistake at one point, he was absolutely certain. Maybe you developed an instinct for these things if you conducted enough interrogations.
Lawrence leaned forward, looking serious.
“Okay, look, it’s not wrong.”
She closed her eyes and pressed a hand ag
ainst her face and she thought about Daisy, somewhere, with those men. Dead, perhaps, or held prisoner. Gregory’s blood on the floor, tinting the bathroom red.
No, it had been wrong.
It had been terribly, horribly, wrong.
She’d be found out. Surely she’d be found out and—
“Making love, I mean, I know there’s the whole Catholic thing, but you won’t burn in hell, I swear.”
“Sorry?” she said, blinking and moving her hand away from her face.
“Sex. That’s what’s bothering you. Isn’t it? I won’t touch you, I swear. But it’s what it is. It’s done, I mean.”
She nodded, realizing how much of an idiot she was. One quick interview with a police officer and she was ready to fall to pieces. Why, that judicial didn’t know anything! He thought Lawrence was guilty which meant he didn’t think she was guilty. She was tying herself into knots over nothing. And he’d said it himself: his lawyer could jump onto a plane and start pushing them away real quick if they pushed back too hard against Lawrence.
Lawrence was her best card, her shield—not an alibi, but a pristine exit.
Gregory was dead, Daisy was missing. It was very simple. All she needed to do was calm down.
“It is what it is,” she said slowly. “It’s all over and done with.”
He must have taken this to mean there wasn’t anything between them because he nodded sadly.
Viridiana sat on the bed and rested her chin on Lawrence’s shoulder, hiding her face against his neck. She heard him inhale in surprise.
“Don’t be blue. There’s no reason to be blue,” she said. “I can stick around for a bit if you want.”
“A bit” turned out to be three hours, which she honestly had not expected. They played cards since he had a pack in his suitcase.
She was tired and she was irritated, and she wanted to be with someone who liked her. At home everyone was mad at her, in the streets they stared, the cops were relentless.
She’d suddenly think, I let him die, and feel a chill go down her spine.
She wondered if Gregory’s ghost would slip under the sheets late at night while she slept.
She played cards with Lawrence Landry and tried not to chew her nails. Card by card, minute by minute, she relaxed. They watched TV. It was nice to discover he was like this in private, tranquil and sort of sweet.
When she left she kissed him on the lips, quickly, and he grabbed her hand. “Come back tomorrow?” he asked.
She nodded.
* * *
“How well did you know Daisy and Gregory?” the man asked. His sunglasses rested on the desk. This time he had dispensed with the notebook and merely clasped his hands together and stared at her. He knew something was up, alright.
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” she replied.
“Were you good friends?”
“They employed me.”
“But working for them, living with them, it must have been easy to get to know them.”
“I guess.”
“We found a few interesting things around the house,” he said, opening a drawer and taking out an envelope. He dumped its contents on the desk. Gregory’s IDs. She thought they would have found those long ago, but he must have moved them, made them more difficult to find. Or had the cops simply kept this discovery a secret? There were also several passports she did not recognize. Daisy’s?
If they dusted for prints, wouldn’t they know she had touched the IDs? What to say, then? How much could he know? Viridiana decided to say nothing.
“You haven’t seen these before?”
“I’m not sure what that is.”
“A driver’s license. And another,” the cop said. “One, two, three, four passports. An address book.”
He shoved the passports toward Viridiana. She looked down at them and struggled to keep her face impassive.
“You tipped him off, didn’t you?”
She clenched her left hand closed and rested the right on it. At the tip of her tongue there were words she wanted to start yelling, but she could not speak them. The cop must have thought her silence was as good as any answer because he grinned at her and jabbed his finger against the desk.
“You told Landry those were criminals, didn’t you? That you’d seen their fake papers. And he went and he killed them. Where’s the woman’s body?”
Viridiana didn’t parse what he was telling her at first. Landry? He was still going on about that? She recalled what Daisy had said about improvising. All right, she hadn’t exactly imagined she’d be having this sort of conversation, but she might as well go with it. Let the cop say whatever he wanted.
Skew as close to the truth as possible. Skew close and he’ll miss, she thought. Please, God, let him miss.
“Landry killed them,” he said sharply, pointing a finger at her. “Tell me now. He killed them.”
“He didn’t kill anyone,” she said.
“He had a reason. He thought they offed his uncle. They demanded money and he didn’t want to give it to them. Didn’t want to part with his cash.”
“Lawrence Landry has money. You think he couldn’t part with a tiny bit of it?”
“Okay,” the cop conceded. “Maybe it wasn’t money. But he didn’t like those people. A crime of passion. Maybe jealousy?”
“What?”
“We found the tapes. We played a few. You go on an awful lot about that fellow, Gregory. Maybe Lawrence Landry didn’t want any competition.”
Those stupid tapes! She ought to have destroyed all of them, but she didn’t think they’d matter. Damn it. Viridiana didn’t recall everything she had said in them. She hadn’t spoken explicitly about Gregory and her. She would have been too embarrassed to discuss her sexual relationship with him. But she had said things. That he was good looking. That he was interesting. That he’d given her a camera.
She’d destroyed one measly tape and left the others around. Since she didn’t recall the details of those tapes she wasn’t even sure what she should admit and what she should deny.
“Lawrence Landry already disliked Gregory and Daisy. You picking Gregory over him could have sent him over the edge.”
“You’re making things up,” she said and she knew how she sounded: a little breathless, a little desperate. He kept coming closer and closer, a shark sniffing blood.
“You don’t talk about Lawrence Landry in these tapes and you sound very interested in Gregory. Let me show you,” he said, giving her one long, steady look.
The cop took out her tape recorder and stuffed a tape into it. He pressed a button. Viridiana’s voice sounded strange to her ears. It was her, though. No doubt about that.
“He reminds me of Montgomery Clift. No, not Clift. I can’t even decide if he’s more Errol Flynn or not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I can’t stop thinking about him. God, Gregory.”
The man gave her a satisfied smile. The tape kept going on with more inane words. What a ridiculous idea. At the same time, it was uncomfortably close to the truth and if this cop started thinking this way, he might start thinking she had something to do with Gregory, and then that led to questions she didn’t want asked.
But what to say? How to deny it?
The cop was now toying with his sunglasses, smirking at her like fucking Alejandro smirked at her, that smile that spelled “you little hussy”. And then it occurred to her, quite suddenly, that she didn’t have to deny it at all.
“Sure, I started thinking about Gregory, but Gregory had no cash. Lawrence did.”
The cop frowned. “So what? You decided you weren’t interested in him all of a sudden?”
“There’s no point in chasing a guy who admits his bank account is almost empty.”
Viridiana leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. She wasn’t Liz Taylor in a Place in the Sun. No, no. A pretty socialite? Impossible. She had to be Liz in Butterfield 8. She had to be the gol
d-digger.
“I change my mind all the time. You can ask around town. I dumped my boyfriend because he wasn’t good enough. Then I stopped paying attention to Gregory because he wasn’t much better. Now there’s Lawrence Landry. I’m a regular Goldilocks trying all the beds,” she said, and she said it like Liz would have said the line, imperious. “Is that a crime? I don’t think it is.”
The cop was frowning, trying to reconstruct his theory in his mind, making it fit. But it wasn’t, and the picture he was getting was of something very prosaic. A girl trying to get trinkets from the rich tourist, cavorting with him, and they both come back to the place where she works to find a corpse. Nothing to do with them. A coincidence.
“Look, I don’t know what happened to Daisy and Gregory. Neither does Lawrence Landry,” Viridiana said.
The cop stopped the tape. He was silent. No blood in the water, after all.
* * *
The investigation fizzled out. The cops couldn’t find much more than what they already had, which was two American nationals who were wanted for fraud and other crimes in their country, and one of them had turned up dead and the other was missing.
Lawrence Landry’s lawyer phoned a few people who phoned other people who told the judiciales to stop inconveniencing the young man.
There had been a third story in the papers about the case, but it was short, Daisy and Gregory’s photographs reduced in size. The fourth story was a mere stub. The cops decamped back to wherever they came from, and that was the end of that.
There were no ghosts chasing Viridiana, either, and she was beginning to forget the color of Gregory’s eyes.
“Did you have any idea who they were?” Lawrence asked her after he read the stub in the paper, which mentioned some of the aliases Gregory and Daisy had used.
She was seeing a lot of Lawrence— there were no other people to see. It was impossible to spend any time at home. She went to visit Reynier, who asked her no questions, quiet and solemn as he’d always been. Then she stopped by Lawrence’s hotel.
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