She went with the woman, who treated her kindly, cut off her braids and took away her skirt and her petticoat and her huaraches and gave her a dress and a pair of shoes she couldn’t walk in. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it, the woman said, you can learn to get used to anything, we all do, and Maria Crucita looked at herself in the mirror and cried a few small tears. She’d have liked to have cried an ocean, but she didn’t know how to do that either. After a year of giving the young man all the money she made every day, lying under drunks who puked on her when they tried to put themselves inside, and other men who beat her, and every now and then someone she liked all right but who wasn’t any different in the end, she only wanted to go to bed with the young man and she’d forgotten all about the other side. “What do you think?” she asked me all of a sudden, angry, nervous. He finally showed up one day and said, get ready, I’m going to take you over, it’s about time now, isn’t it? Now all your dreams are going to come true, Maria. He gave her a necklace and some shiny earrings, and they crossed the bridge without any trouble. She hanging on to his arm, feeling a little sad, like the sun in winter. He left her with another woman, in a nicer room than the last one, with a bed, a dresser, a big mirror, a closet. He promised he’d visit her every month, she was his little Maria after all, wasn’t she?
When the woman told her about the work, Maria tried to explain that no, no, there must be some mistake, that was all over now, there must be something else she could do. The woman shut her up with her bad Spanish—si no guster larguer—but Maria understood well enough. She went to her room and looked at herself in the big mirror and cried. She learned to cry an ocean, she spent the next ten years crying and then decided it was time to go back.
“The things I could tell you … it was hell. Hell. Look.”
She opened her blouse and I saw her burned breasts, wrinkled like prunes with deep black scars. Some asshole threw acid on me, she said. But that was just part of it. That boy lied to me, no one’s dreams ever came true, he lied, there aren’t even fake dreams there. He lied to me and he broke my spirit.
The Investigation
I went to the commander who’d taken Videla’s place and asked him for an interview for the paper. He was more than happy to give it to me. He’s the kind who likes to talk, he needs to build up his image if he’s ever going to be able to even half fill Videla’s shoes.
“Do you have any clues, Commander?”
“Too many. We arrested two drug runners, four coyotes, three black marketers, a couple of drunks. All on suspicion, and they all talked. They talked too much. We let them all go. None of them had any reason to kill Videla, they all respected him. No, it was more than that. In every case the respect was mutual.”
“Do you have a make-up on the murderer?”
“Videla’s killer was a young man, very strong.”
“How do you know?”
“Only someone young and strong could have stabbed him that hard nine times.”
“What was the murder weapon?”
“A kitchen knife. We haven’t found it yet. How about that? And Videla with his thirty-eight still in its holster. Sounds like a joke.”
“From the expression on Videla’s face I’d almost say that he knew who his killer was.”
“You can go ahead and think that if you want to. I’d heard you’d been pushing that angle, the look on Videla’s face, his eyes were all bugged out that way. Every corpse looks the same, young lady, don’t let yourself be fooled.”
“Some people say that before Commander Videla joined the police force he worked as a coyote, running people across the border.”
“Rumors. It’s an easy thing to destroy a man’s reputation once he’s dead. Videla was a good man. Now and then he’d help someone get across, sure. He was a good friend of the gringos, he was everybody’s friend, but he’d only do it to help someone out, just like that, for free.”
“Yes, of course. How did he decide to become a policeman?”
“We came in together. We were tired of scraping around for work all the time, no steady job, always on the run. So we decided to join the other side.”
“What do you mean by ’on the run? Who were you running from?”
“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to say it that way. We were young, you know how it is, women, bars …”
“And the ones you helped cross over for free …”
“Watch your step, young lady. Just because I let you have an interview doesn’t give you the right to come in here and talk to me like that. You can take your little games somewhere else.”
“Commander, I didn’t mean …”
“That’s enough. I’ve got my hands full trying to catch this murderer and you come in here and waste my time for nothing.”
“Please, Commander, I didn’t mean any offense.”
“Offense? What kind of faggot do you think I am? You go ahead and write in your newspaper that we’re on the murderer’s trail, we know it’s a young man, strong, in good physical condition, and that there are witnesses.”
“You have witnesses?”
“Yes. A woman. But that’s entirely off the record. It could be dangerous for her.”
“Give me a break, Commander. Tell me something about her. Who is she?”
“All right, morena, but I don’t want to hear you’ve been yakking. I’ll have that pretty little tongue of yours cut right out. One of Videla’s friends saw the two of them leave the Coconut Club together on the night he died. We found her later on in the Cairo Hotel. She’s one of these wetback sluts who’s decided she wants to come back home. She was with him when they were attacked. She says she thought it was a holdup, but that the murderer kept saying ‘you lied to me, you lied to me,’ every time he stabbed him.”
“Is she telling the truth?”
“Yes, absolutely. You know how it is, we put a little pressure on her just to be sure.”
“Right. Everyone knows the police force never fails in its undying search for the truth.”
Lost Dreams
Lost dreams kill hope, they kill the will to live, hide the sun, squeeze a person’s guts until they explode in a thousand painful colored pieces.
That’s how I found Maria, sitting on her bed with her head between her hands, small, shrunk into a disintegrating ball, twenty-six years old and with the scars of forty years on her skin, forty years on her shoulders.
They’d moved her into a boardinghouse. A cop at the door said he was protecting her, the only witness. He let me go in to see her. All the cops know me now since I’ve been working the crime beat.
I went back on my promise to myself again. This destroyed old woman-child got to me somehow. This life I’d never lived started to ache inside me. This life I only knew secondhand, from the outside, from the edge of the edge of nothing.
“What really happened, Maria? It was you, wasn’t it?”
She looked at me and smiled shyly.
“What do you care? What’s it to you?”
“They’re going to find out sooner or later. Why’d you tell them you were with him? You could have denied it, said you’d already gone back to your hotel or something. I don’t know …”
“I told them what I told them because they kept sticking my head in a bucket of water until I thought I was going to die. And I didn’t want to die.”
“Why’d you kill him, Maria? Did you hate him that much?”
I’m a piece of shit, I thought, I want to help her but maybe I care more about finding out what really happened, about the story I’m going to write.
“No, I didn’t hate him, or, yes. I don’t know. There’s not a lot to tell. I waited for him for ten years.”
In a quiet voice with a chilling clarity, her eyes lost somewhere, her body unmoving, she told me the second part of her story.
When the time had passed even for little dreams. When all she could feel anymore was the desire for death and to kill the young map who’d lied to her, she decided to come back. She went l
ooking for him, the knife hidden in her purse. Finally, that night, she found him. He didn’t recognize her. I’m Crucita, remember me? Maria Crucita, the one with the braids. You gave me this necklace and these earrings. And he was even happy to see her, with her war paint on, her tight cheap silk dress, her high-heeled shoes she could walk in just fine now. A little worse for the wear, but you look real good, Maria, he lied to her again.
They went to the Coconut Club for a drink and she made a scene. Why didn’t you ever come back like you said you would? With his most patronizing smile he told her how his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, how he’d become a cop, how the girl was from a good family and he’d had to marry her for their sake, he told her about his children, his new life, you understand, don’t you, Crucita?
But Maria, who’d always had to understand the señora’s bad moods when she’d worked as a servant, the baker’s contempt for her dark Indian skin, the denial of the boy who was her baby’s father, the hang-ups of the johns when she was a prostitute, Maria who’d always, automatically, understood and accepted everything, said, No! No, I don’t understand, the hell with it! They walked through the park toward the hotel, her mind was made up. You, you had your dreams come true, you told yourself the truth, but you lied to me. He kept quiet. If he’d said something I would have believed him all over again. I swear it to you, morena. But nothing, not a word, just the night and the silence, until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I took out the knife and stabbed him in the stomach. The blood came out in a big rush and he fell down backward with his eyes wide-open, like when you see something that scares you. His head hit the pavement hard and he didn’t move after that, she stabbed him again and again until it felt like his blood burned her skin. She was scared and ran away.
She stuck to the shadows and went back to her hotel. The night clerk was sleeping it off behind the counter. She went to her room, took a shower, and soaked herself with lavender. Carefully she washed her dress, her shoes, her purse, hid the knife under a loose floorboard. She was drowning inside herself. She had to tell someone that the young man had lied to her. That she’d waited for him for ten years. That she’d never learned to laugh that spontaneous uncontrollable laugh. She went back out into the night. She’d lived in the night so long it didn’t scare her anymore.
Not Filed
When you write the crime beat, you learn to always start out with the headline, CRIME OF PASSION. No. SHE KILLED HIM BECAUSE HER DREAMS DIDN’T COME TRUE. No, too long. SHE STABBED HIM BECAUSE HE LIED TO HER. No. SHE KILLED THE MAN WHO DRAGGED HER INTO THE GUTTER. No. HE WAS HER PIMP, HER COYOTE, AND TEN YEARS LATER SHE CAME BACK AND KILLED HIM. No. No. No.
I’m Miss Marple. Or Jessica Fletcher. I found the murderer, not them. This story’s my ticket to the big time, the female cannonbail.
But I need a headline that really drives home, something that says it all. A great story deserves a great headline, WETBACK MURDERESS. No. POOR INDIAN GIRL LURED INTO SIN KILLS HER PIMP. No. COMMANDER VIDELA WAS SCARED SHITLESS. No, that one could cost me my scalp.
I rack my brain for the right headline while Maria sits once again through another lineup of suspects. Yesterday the Commander got really pissed off. Not him, no, not him either, not that one either. Wake up, you goddamn wetback Indian bitch! We’ve got to find the killer, time’s running out. Not him, no, not him either, not that one either.
What’s the matter with you? You don’t recognize any of them? Are you sure it wasn’t you? Son of a bitch.
Yes, it was her, Commander, I wanted to shout out loud. But what the hell did I care anyway? I had my scoop, my all-time big story.
To hell with this shit. I threw some clothes into my suitcase and left it at the baggage check at the bus station. I went to her boardinghouse, had a word with the cop at the door, and went in to see Maria.
They’d beat her up pretty bad but I pretended not to notice. There wasn’t any time to waste.
Here’s the claim check for my suitcase. Get past the cop, you know how, you learned something in these last ten years, at least. The bus leaves at one-thirty. Change buses in Matamoros for Tampico, and then go on to Veracruz. Don’t put on any makeup. Don’t talk to anyone. You’re Maria Crucita, the one who never made it as far as Nuevo Laredo. You’re Maria Crucita who never learned to laugh like crazy or cry an ocean. You like the sun and you’re afraid of the night. You’re an old woman-girl who’s just been born.
What a pain in the ass, I’ve got a thousand headlines buzzing around inside my head and I just thought up the best one yet. I took all my notes for the big story, lit a match. I watched them burn and drank a glass of tequila in memoriam.
Epilogue
The Commander got a well-deserved promotion when he identified a local wino as the strong young man who had murdered Videla.
The reporter quit her job and took off for Mérida. Just to be on the safe side.
No one ever heard from Maria Crucita again.
ANTONIA FRASER is best known for her historical biographies of such notables as Mary, Queen of Scots and the wives of Henry VIII. However, she has also written a series of novels featuring Jemima Shore, a British investigative reporter. Fraser has been a chairperson of the British Crime Writers Association and lives in London with her husband, dramatist Harold Pinter.
A Witch and Her Cats
Antonia Fraser
A t first Jemima Shore thought that the elderly woman was shaking due to the frailty of age. It was bakingly hot outside. For a moment Jemima wondered if the woman, a stranger, was ill, faint, needing water. Then Jemima realized that she was trembling with anger. The woman—seventysomething? Eighty?—was standing on the doorstep, very close to the door itself, when Jemima answered the bell.
“Mine, mine,” she was saying, or rather gasping, as if the strength of her anger was robbing her of breath. “How dare you … evil, wicked … How dare you? Mine, mine.” The torrent of words, some of which Jemima could hardly make out, continued for a while. Then, while she was apparently exhausted, the woman shook her fist in Jemima’s face.
Amid her general astonishment, Jemima had time to reflect that this was something that had never happened to her before. Fist-shaking belonged to the world of melodrama: outside the opera, Jemima did not think she had ever seen the gesture performed seriously before. She certainly did not expect to open the door of a London house and encounter such a histrionic denunciation.
Part of Jemima’s shock was due to the fact that the woman, quite apart from her imprecations, did have a distinctly witchlike appearance. And she was certainly behaving in a traditional witch’s fashion: that is to say, cursing. In principle Jemima was dead against labeling older women as witches, simply because they had become skinny and wrinkled with age, had started maybe to mutter aloud aggressively, due to loneliness or disappointment. That was misogynist stereotyping at its worst and quite intolerable. On the other hand, when you were confronted with a shaken fist and a stream of invective issuing from an elderly female, bowed and scraggy in her black dress, with sparse gray hair in a bun and two long prominent front teeth, it was difficult to suppress the instant reaction buried in childhood memories of fairy stories: This was a witch.
At this point Jemima suddenly realized who her caller must be. This was Miss Pollard. Jemima had had that very conversation about the cruelty of describing elderly ladies as witches only a week ago. She had ticked off her goddaughter Claudia for referring to their neighbor as “that old witch” only to have Claudia mutter rebelliously: “old bat, then.” But still, Jemima was confident that her point had been made. And now the old witch/bat was gibbering in front of her (as Claudia would have put it). For the invective had started again and what was more, the voice was growing stronger.…
It was the emergence of the words “cats … my cats! Mine, mine … my cats” which gave Jemima at last her clue to what this was all about. Rosy and Rusty, the adorable young marmalade cats—not much more than kittens, really—to whom Claudia had taken such a fancy
.
Jemima did not actually own the house in Edwardes Terrace, West London, in which she was currently living, a tall narrow house, with a long thin garden at the back. Recently there had been an insidious unchecked flood in her own mansion flat while Jemima was away. The result had been not only the ruin of carpets and furniture but also the destruction of floors. The only thing to do was to move out entirely while builders wrestled with the damage. And the Edwardes Terrace house—although larger than Jemima wanted—had been available for instant rental.
It was at this point that Claudia Farrow had come to join Jemima. The Farrow parents’ ever-troubled marriage was finally coming to an end and the fallout was considerable. Alexa Farrow did not wish her daughter to witness it. So Jemima, as a gesture of godmotherly solidarity, offered to have Claudia to stay until times were calmer. With Claudia came her nanny/au pair, Maureen. And with Maureen, a good deal of the time, came her boyfriend Johnnie. After that, Jemima reflected dryly, the house did not seem in any way too large.
Maureen herself was quite a withdrawn character. She had the kind of ample—not exactly fat—figure which Jemima presumed must give a sense of security to a child; but she certainly could not be described as a jolly, comfortable person. Her hair, brownish and not very thick, was scraped back into a severe ponytail; her face was pale and rather square.
Johnnie the boyfriend was undoubtedly far better looking for a man than Maureen for a woman. He also sported a ponytail but his was a macho masculine ponytail, which set off his neat if slightly wolfish features. Johnnie’s only flaw in terms of appearance was in fact that very neatness: he was a little shorter than the lavish Maureen. At the same time, Johnnie was extremely muscular as Jemima could not help noticing from the skimpy clothes, vest and shorts, he generally wore in the hot weather. Either Johnnie’s building job had done that for him or else he worked out. Any six-foot man would have been proud of Johnnie’s biceps.
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