Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  “In Valladolid, I suppose, or the Open University.”

  Irene nodded.

  “In the OU, yes. In Soto del Real.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Irene sighed.

  “In a women’s prison.”

  And then she told me how her husband died.

  She had met Paco at school, one of these cases that everyone has heard about: the children who are described as partners by their classmates long before they really are, who study together at primary school, grow up together, go out with each other at thirteen, break up for a few months and get back together again, until one day they find themselves holding hands in the doorway of the local church, being showered in handfuls of rice thrown by their friends and relatives. Paco, according to what she said, had studied a module in occupational training (I don’t remember exactly whether electrical or mechanical engineering) and he did odd jobs for various local companies.

  “He was a perfectionist,” those were the words Irene used to describe him, “so he was rapidly promoted.” Within a year and a half he was already maintenance supervisor in one of the area’s most important factories. He did everything properly and wanted to see everything done properly. A place for everything, and everything in its place, that was his motto.

  I don’t suppose his workmates were very happy with that motto. Perfectionists — particularly when they are just above you in the pecking order — can make you uncomfortable. It’s like having a stone in your shoe, or a few grains of sand in your socks.

  “He was a dab hand in the kitchen. He was a better cook than me, I tell you!” continued Irene, letting out a chuckle. “Most of the time, when he was on the morning shift and he arrived home in time to eat, he helped me cook lunch. He was a dear. He always put me right when I made a mistake. Always.”

  I recall thinking I had known several people just like that in my student days: teachers who want everything done perfectly, with pinpoint accuracy, to their liking; pests that never let you rest until the dissertation is exactly the way they want it, with circular diagrams the exact colour they and only they can see in their mind and the explanation boxes with their bloody rounded edges. Yes, I had known people like that, but I found it difficult to come around to the idea of what it meant to grow up next to someone of that sort, to spend your whole life together with someone like Paco, always criticising you, always having to be right. I knew then the origin of Irene’s nervous movements, as if she always feared she was going to be reprimanded, a “That’s not the way to do it” shouted from behind her only a second before her husband said to her, “Bring it here, come on,” and took whatever it was out of her hands, to show her the correct way to do it.

  “The thing is, I went through a bad time,” said Irene after a pause in which she wiped her lips with a napkin, took a sip of wine, and wiped her lips again. “A bad time... and I blamed him; it wasn’t his fault at all, poor thing. He only wanted to help me do things properly, because I was a bit clumsy and a bit... slow. But I thought he was a bad person, you know? And I didn’t deserve that kind of treatment from him, you know, always telling me off and all the rest of it. So I killed him.”

  That’s how she said it, all of a sudden, a stream of words (I reckon) she had held back since the moment we met, which I’m sure she held back whenever she met anyone, as if a voice within her said, “Not yet, wait, don’t tell him or you’ll frighten him, that’s not the way to do things, dear, not like that.”

  When she had finished, she stared at me, her neck drawn in, her lips pursed, her pupils occupying almost the whole iris, as if her whole body complained, saying, “Are you angry? Do you still love me?”

  “Did you say that... that you killed him?” I stuttered, looking around to make sure that nobody else had heard these words.

  Irene nodded, and some look akin to desperation appeared on her face.

  “That’s why they took me to Soto del Real.”

  “But how...?”

  “I poisoned him.”

  She poisoned him. The words bounced around my head like Ping-Pong balls: She poisoned him, she poisoned him... According to what she told me next, she had bought rat poison the week before, for no particular reason, simply because the drugstore was having a closing-down sale: two bottles for the price of one. That intervening week, however, prevented her from pleading temporary insanity during the trial. Her husband’s murder had been premeditated, said the public prosecutor on the stand; she bought the poison a week before, in the sales, for God’s sake.

  “I didn’t buy it for him. I was thinking of drinking it myself, but then...”

  Then she thought it would be better if her husband drank it. Her husband, who every time he got home found reason to complain, to reproach her for the slightest thing, to tell her with words bathed in affection that she was useless.

  She poisoned him. She dissolved rat poison in the bottle of wine, in the soup pan, in the chicken sauce. She wanted to make certain. Then she went out and left a note for Paco saying that she was off to see her sister, but lunch was in the fridge. She didn’t want to be there when he died. She wasn’t courageous enough.

  Suddenly, the sirloin steak I had been enjoying up to that point no longer appealed to me. I dropped the fork on the edge of the plate and looked at Irene, without knowing for sure if I should believe what she was telling me. She was toying with a bit of fish, slowly breaking it into small pieces. Apart from that, her meal was still intact.

  “Those are the things...” she began to say, but she looked away, nodded, and then looked at me again. “Well, the things you could find out. Do you still want to be with me?”

  How the hell should I know?

  We didn’t finish the dinner. At least I didn’t feel up to it. I paid the bill and we left the restaurant together. It had turned cooler outside. The nights are cold in October. When I felt in my pocket, next to my fingers, the warm bulge of the little box with the ring, I withdrew my hand quickly, as if something had bitten it.

  We took a long stroll together to the bay. The tide was high and the waves broke near the pier. The prostitutes had begun their procession through the Jardines de Pereda, but they didn’t say anything. If you don’t look at them, they don’t look at you.

  When we reached the Palacete, I turned to gaze at her. Irene was startled, as if she feared I was going to tell her something unpleasant. The sea behind her was an oil slick. Beyond that the lights of Somo and Pedreña twinkled, like gems in a black velvet display stand.

  “What did you do next?” I asked finally.

  “Next?”

  “Yes, next. You went back home? Called the police? What did you do?”

  Irene nodded and took a deep breath.

  “I went back home.”

  She went back home, but it wasn’t easy. She had spent the evening wandering through the town, feeling that the whole world was watching her. She didn’t dare go back, because she didn’t know if Paco had eaten the soup and the chicken and drunk the wine that she had left for him, or if, on the contrary, after noticing the meal tasted strange, he had preferred to cook something himself. He was such a good cook!

  However, at about nine in the evening she decided to return. She went up the stairs to put the moment off. They lived on the fourth floor; according to her own words, every step was a little Everest. When she got to her door, her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the key ring on the floor twice before she was able to put the key in the lock properly and open it.

  “Holy smoke!” exclaimed Irene after a pause. She was scared to death!

  She closed the door after her and crossed the hall. She moved forward, all ears. Paco used to eat with the telly on. From the corridor she could hear the newsreader handing over to the weather-girl. She stopped for a few minutes next to the kitchen door, rooted to the wall, listening for the sound of crockery, the noise of plates in the kitchen sink or Paco’s groans as he lay dying on the linoleum. After a few minutes in which only the weather forecast broke
the silence in the house, she went in.

  “He was dead, and the kitchen... my God, the kitchen was a mess: plates scattered here and there, a chair overturned, pieces of chicken and noodles all over the place. Paco was in one corner. Fortunately he’d landed facedown, because if I’d seen his features, I... I don’t know...”

  A bitter breeze like the sharp edge of a sheet of paper drifted through the bay and Irene shivered. I hesitated for a moment, but finally put my arm around her shoulder. That gesture I had repeated so many times over the last few months gave me the creeps on that occasion. Irene snuggled up to me and put her little head on my shoulder, with that combination of fear and admiration that I had fallen in love with. I turned my face towards her and looked at her, so small, so delicate. Who would have imagined she was a murderer? How can you know what’s hidden behind any given face, what’s rotting slowly under the gentle reflection of a calm bay?

  Shit, who can know the first thing about another person? What other way is there of getting to know her, apart from asking questions until the whole truth comes out?

  After all that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I had to know everything. Beyond a certain point you have to know the details, you have to lift the blanket and look at the corpse, lower the window to pass next to the crashed car that has kept you waiting two hours on the motorway. Beyond a certain point it’s no longer possible to change the channel during a Don’t Drink and Drive advert.

  Anyhow, we turned round. We had already reached Cuesta del Gas. Up ahead, Avenida de la Reina Victoria is long and, during the night, lonely. The case of the female teacher murdered there a couple of years before came to mind, so I insisted we go back.

  “What did you do when the police arrived?”

  But Irene shook her head.

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  Irene shook her head again.

  “Christ!”

  “I was frightened.”

  “Frightened of what, for God’s sake! He was already dead!”

  Irene shrugged.

  “I didn’t want them telling me off again. The police, just like Paco, just like you now...” said Irene. Her bottom lip was trembling. I didn’t know whether to make a run for it or console her or... well, I didn’t know what the hell to do.

  “But then, what did you do?”

  “Cleaning. I cleaned everything. I mopped and wiped up. I cleared the table and the hob. And when everything was as clean as a new pin, I sat down in the living room and switched on the telly. They were showing that series — I don’t remember what it was called — that Emilio Aragón was in. I loved it. I always watched it although Paco thought it was garbage.”

  I got the impression that this was said with a degree of pride in her voice.

  We sat on one of those benches in Castelar that look directly onto the boats rocking in Puerto Chico. The halyards echoed as they rattled on the masts of the sailing boats. I, admittedly, was in a state approaching shock and at that point had decided to accept whatever she said to me. That’s why, instead of jumping off the bench and beginning to cry out like a madman because the woman I loved had killed her husband and then sat down to watch Médico de familia, a soap opera about a family doctor, I merely asked her if she remembered anything about that day’s episode, but she shook her head, pinching her bottom lip with her thumb and the index finger of her right hand.

  “No, to be honest, I don’t remember what episode it was, but I don’t think Emilio Aragón was still with Lydia Bosch, because I’d already seen the installment with the wedding in Soto del Real. I switched on the telly but no, I didn’t pay much attention, really. In fact, I was thinking about what to do next.

  “Well, in this neighborhood there were many cats, so...”

  It was an old neighborhood next to an overgrown park. The cats kept the rats under control, that’s why the neighbours were delighted with the cats and put out the previous day’s leftovers by the doorway for them, in little plastic plates or crumpled-up tinfoil. It was common at five o’clock in the evening to see half a dozen alley cats prowling around the area, waiting for their ration of leftovers. On Boxing Day they had a special menu.

  Irene thought it would be a good idea for the cats to eat her husband’s remains. Sitting on the sofa in the living room, pinching her bottom lip with her thumb and index finger while she watched the grandfather scold Chechu for lying about the exam results, she decided that the best course of action would be to chop her husband’s body into pieces small enough to boil in the pressure cooker, so that the flesh came away from the bone. When she was a little girl she had taken part in the pig slaughter in Quintanilla del Colmenar, so she had some idea about how to chop up meat.

  “The problem was, I didn’t dare turn him around and look at his face,” said Irene with a vacant gaze. “I loved Paco. I didn’t understand how I had been able to do that. What could I have been thinking? How was I going to manage to chop him up while he was looking at me? I was desperate!”

  However, after a while, a solution occurred to her. Taking advantage of a commercial break, she got up off the sofa and went back to the kitchen. After raking around in one of the drawers, she took out a plastic bag. Once she had put it on her husband’s head, she turned the body over. Paco had been sick before he died, and his shirt was a mess, so Irene stripped him and threw the dirty laundry into the washing machine.

  “It’s better to wash off those stains as soon as possible,” she said. “If not, the marks remain.”

  After putting the washing machine on, she returned to the kitchen. I pictured her then, running about the house with those little steps of hers, short and nervous, without totally realizing the seriousness of what she had done, and what she was about to do. She certainly would have disheveled hair and tension in her face. She said she couldn’t find any suitable knives and had to look in her husband’s toolbox, but actually I think she was too nervous to see anything except the naked corpse on the floor.

  Looking back, in retrospect, I wonder how it is possible that I didn’t make a run for it that night. I still had six months ahead of me before the entrance exams were held, enough time to make up the lost hours; and, furthermore, the half-completed draft of the novel I had dreamed of was lying unfinished on my desk. Why did I stay there? I don’t know.

  To be honest, I felt safe. I listened to Irene coldly and with some scepticism, like the time, at the age of eight, when I listened carefully to the stories of my imaginative twelve-year-old friend telling me at playtime about his adventures as a secret CIA spy: without believing all of them, but savouring the possibility (just the possibility) that they were true.

  But with Irene it wasn’t the same. We weren’t primary-school children, neither of us were kids. I didn’t have any reason to doubt what she was telling me except — except the outlandishness of the whole thing, of course. It was all totally absurd, grotesque, like a bad horror film that basically makes you laugh.

  Irene, visibly affected, was telling me how she had killed her husband, and I was treating it all like a story, like entertainment, savouring the possibility (just the possibility) that it wasn’t true.

  “Then I took one of Paco’s saws and carried it to the kitchen,” said Irene, next to me. I looked at her. She was gorgeous under the streetlight.

  “What saw?” I asked, going round the bend.

  “A big metal one, like this,” she replied, drawing a rectangle in the air.

  “A hacksaw. It wouldn’t have a blade to cut metal, would it?” I said, enjoying myself.

  “Well, yes, I found that out later, but at that time I didn’t know how to use the other handsaw, it had very large teeth! So I picked up the hacksaw and took it to the kitchen.”

  She kneeled down next to Paco’s body, on a folded towel so that she didn’t hurt her knees, and began to move the saw over her husband’s right arm, at elbow level. The blade sank slowly in, covering everything in blood. She soon began to perspire.

  “I, well, I
think I was crying, because despite the plastic bag that was Paco, you know? I knew every single scar of his, every one of his moles. It was Paco. I heard a voice inside me... a quiet voice that told me I was doing it wrong, that it was going to be a right mess, that wasn’t the way to... to chop up a person, that I would have to put a plastic sheet underneath to collect the blood, that, basically, I was a bad wife.”

  Irene was devastated. I felt sorry for her, and wouldn’t deny I felt a bit guilty about putting pressure on her to keep talking. She had probably been in a terrible state that night in the kitchen. Who knows what depths she plummeted to after what she did that day?

  “As I was sawing off my husband’s arm, the voice got louder and louder until I finally recognised it.”

  Kneeling on the towel next to Paco’s body, with the bloody saw still in her hand, with her blouse splattered in blood and a crazy look on her face because she didn’t manage to cut off the arm as it should be done, she recognised the voice she was hearing inside her head.

  “It was Paco’s voice,” Irene murmured.

  I nodded. I was expecting something like that, really. In fact, it would have surprised me to hear anything different at that stage. In a way, it was the only thing that made any sense. I suppose, in her position, I would have heard my mother’s voice.

  A woman approached from the esplanade, walking slowly. She pressed her bag tight against her side, as if she was worried that at any moment someone might snatch it. I waited until she was some distance from our bench before carrying on.

  “And what did he say to you?” I asked her.

  Irene blushed, cleared her throat, and then lowered her voice by two octaves. “He said, ‘What the hell are you doing with that hacksaw in your hand, dear? Do me a favour and get the handsaw, can’t you see that’s for metal?’ ”

  My laugh reverberated like a clap of thunder in the silence of the city. The woman with the bag, who was already ten metres ahead, hesitated and turned round to look at me for a second before walking on, this time more quickly. I kept on laughing, deeply relieved.