Don't Send Flowers

by Martin Solares

  “Look, Treviño, I’d never do anything illegal, especially not if you call me from a cell phone to ask me to do it. But lots of people show up at my office with things I never asked for. Maybe I know someone who could help.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll be there soon, but I have to see someone first.”

  “Deal. We’re thrilled to have you working with us on this.”

  “Go to hell. You said the same thing when I was looking for that chainsaw asshole.” He hung up, knowing Williams had no comeback.

  Seeing that Treviño was in a bad mood, the Bus took the opportunity to say, “That’s one good-looking wife you’ve got, man.”

  The detective looked at him out of the corner of his eye but didn’t answer. A minute, minute and a half, later, the Bus added, “She’s not from around here, is she? I don’t know why, but she reminds me of one of those immigrants from Colombia or Central America—illegal, yeah, but hot—who come here trying to make their way to the United States but then things go bad and they decide to stay.”

  Treviño turned slowly and stared at the Bus. The driver felt the detective‘s eyes boring into his right temple, but before he could complain, Treviño said, “You’re not from around here, either, are you?”

  “Sure am.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  The Bus looked at him with something resembling disdain. The detective went on.

  “No, you must be from Nuevo León or Coahuila. If you pressed me, I’d say Coahuila. But your last name isn’t common around there.”

  “I’m from Piedras Negras.”

  “Aha,” the detective continued. “And when did you get here?”

  “Three years this February.”

  Treviño did the math. “I’ve been gone longer than you’ve been here. Did you know the girl well?”

  The Bus looked suspiciously at the ex-cop.

  “As well as anyone in the family.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did she spend her days?”

  Distracted by the road, the driver took a minute to respond.

  “She loved exercising. When she lived here—she’s been living in Switzerland for the past six months—she used to go to the gym every day. She took jazz and aerobics classes, plus French and Italian.”

  “Who took her?”

  “I did. Her father had me keep an eye on her.”

  “Where did she take those jazz classes?”

  “At her father’s club.”

  “And she went to the nuns for language instruction. I bet you had to be careful when you parked around there, so as not to upset the ladies. And then the shit hit the fan and they sent her to Switzerland. They didn’t happen to send her there to keep her away from a bad influence, by any chance?”

  Curious, the Bus turned to look at the detective.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does she do drugs? Does she know any dealers? Have any friends with ties to the narcos? Don’t tell me she didn’t have vices.”

  Before answering, the Bus took a sharp turn to the right. “Every now and then she’d sneak a glass of wine or a Baileys, a Midori, but always as dessert and always at home. I never saw her drink when she was out.”

  “Did they ever get any threats about her?”

  “No.”

  Treviño reflected for a moment and smiled. “Lucky for the kidnappers, the boyfriend’s in a coma. What can you tell me about him?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What was his relationship with the girl like? Aside from that nightclub, where people go to buy drugs, what other kinds of places did he take her to? Do you know if he took pills or did coke?”

  The Bus mopped his brow with his handkerchief.

  “He’s from a good family, pretty low-key. He never raised his voice to us, not like some of the young lady’s other friends, who were impossible. The kid spent all his time reading. He sent her handwritten letters. He was a poet.”

  The detective examined the photos that had been taken of the boy’s personal effects and paused when he got to the short-sleeved Lacoste shirt.

  “Did he wear a lot of pink?”

  “He liked light colors. She brought that shirt back for him from Switzerland.”

  “Did you ever see him take liberties with her?”

  The driver, uncomfortable, shook his head.

  “Were they sleeping together?”

  “No way.”

  The detective didn’t say a word, so he added, “They didn’t let her go out without her friends.”

  The detective nodded and went back to looking at the photo of the pink shirt.

  “A poet in a country of machos. That’s bravery for you. Was she a virgin?”

  “Look, man. We all showed the young lady respect. That was our job. We aren’t like the old drivers, that pair of deadbeats the girl called Uncle and who quit as soon as the shit hit the fan. We’re here to take a bullet for her.”

  “Did you ever see her naked?”

  The Bus stared at the detective, his jaw set, and didn’t answer.

  “You have a criminal record?”

  “What’s your problem, asshole?”

  “You spent some time locked up. What did you do?”

  The Bus didn’t answer. They were driving along one of the city’s main avenues.

  “Drunk and disorderly? Robbery? Assault? Drug trafficking?”

  The driver slammed on the brakes, turned, and grabbed Treviño by the guayabera. “Look, man. I’ll say this once and only once. Don’t even think about giving me shit.”

  Treviño gave a nod and added, “Bar fight.”

  The Bus’s face turned beet red, like something was about to boil over inside him. Then he heard a click and realized that Treviño’s Taurus PT99 had been pointed at his belly the whole time. Their eyes locked for a moment while the car’s engine sputtered and popped. Then the driver let go of the detective and took a deep breath. Treviño slowly put the Taurus back under his shirt and smoothed the wrinkles in his guayabera.

  “You’re not the only guy in this fucking city who’s been locked up over a fight. And if Mr. De León hired you, it’s because you come recommended. Who put your name in for this job?”

  The Bus took his time in responding.

  “Representative Campillo.”

  “I know him,” said Treviño. “He’s the one who owns those tortilla factories. Good guy. Where’d they lock you up?”

  The Bus didn’t answer right away.

  “Laredo. Just forty-eight hours.”

  Treviño nodded and the two were silent until they reached the next light, at which point the Bus said, “Why the fuck are you asking all these questions?”

  “Because when a woman like Cristina is kidnapped, it’s usually someone close to her, or at least someone who has at least one point of contact with her, and plenty of opportunities to make her disappear. There are two profiles: the psychopath who wants to satisfy his base urges and the businessman who’s in it for money.”

  The Bus looked straight ahead and didn’t respond. Then the detective asked,

  “Do you find her attractive?”

  They drove the rusted white Maverick down the Avenida de las Palmas toward a restaurant called the Grand Vizier. As they crossed the city center, they saw Chief Margarito’s precinct office in the distance and Treviño said, “That’s where it happened. It’s a miracle they didn’t kill me.”

  The Bus stole a glance at the scar Treviño had on his left parietal and discreetly stepped on the gas.

  While they waited for a convoy of trailer trucks to let them cross the avenue, the detective phoned the consul.

  “Did they call?”

  “No, still nothing. I just wanted to remind you that the clock is ticking. If this is a kidnapping, the risk that they decide to get rid of her goes up every minute they have her.”

  “You don’t have to remind me. Do you have what I asked for?
”

  “The transcription’s ready, but there’s some shorthand we can’t make out. You’ll have to come decipher it.”

  “And the videos?”

  “We don’t have tape from around the nightclub, since all the cameras in the neighborhood are pointed toward Avenida Hidalgo. We do have a video that shows the moment Cristina drives up to the club with her boyfriend at exactly eight fifteen, but that’s all.”

  “Got it. Write this down: I want you to check to see if sometime after nine, maybe around nine thirty, any of the nearby cameras captured two new pickup trucks driving at full speed, maybe changing lanes or flashing their high beams at the other drivers or making any suspicious moves. One red and one black. See if you can make out their plates.”

  “This is good. We’re making progress. We’ll take a look right now,” said the consul, and they hung up.

  They finally made it across the avenue and Treviño signaled to the driver that he should turn left onto a tree-lined street.

  “Here?” asked the Bus, and Treviño nodded.

  A moment later, the Bus was parking the car grudgingly in front of a strip mall on its last legs.

  “It’s a bad idea to go in there,” he advised. “That’s where the cops hang out.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be a relaxed little chat. Intimate. Wait for me here. I don’t want you scaring my contact.”

  Treviño got out of the car, slamming the door, and walked away.

  The Bus chewed it over for a moment but ended up getting out of the car and running after Treviño. The detective stopped him cold.

  “This is a private conversation, partner. Wait for me here,” he said, indicating with an unequivocal gesture that the driver should beat it.

  The detective wasn’t messing around, so the Bus sat down on one of the two benches on either side of the entryway of the ice-cream shop next door. He calculated which one would best accommodate his enormous haunches, grabbed what was left of a newspaper from the seat, and collapsed into it.

  In the distance, the Bus caught sight of a man with sideburns and a mustache. He was wearing a rumpled green military jacket and standing next to a newspaper kiosk reading, or pretending to read, a magazine. When he saw Treviño he gave a little nod, paid for the magazine, and entered the restaurant.

  Treviño walked up to the entrance, and—after making sure none of his former colleagues were inside—headed toward the table where his contact was sitting.

  7

  OFFICER CORNELIO’S STATEMENT

  Cornelio says he got a call from the suspect in the late afternoon. He claims he told him to go to the restaurant downtown where they used to eat all the time, years ago. He’d recognized his voice immediately when he heard it, but couldn’t believe Treviño had the nerve to come back, like they hadn’t been looking for him since he quit. He tried to discourage him, but Treviño insisted he needed to talk, that it was urgent. He says he thought twice about it, but agreed in the end: after all, it was the best excuse he had for taking another pill. He’d already had two. In the name of all that’s holy, it’s not like he went out looking for Treviño, much less asked him to meet. He just wanted to come down to earth, to be the one in charge of himself, instead of the pills, to take the reins of reality.

  The last time they’d seen each other had been in the precinct parking lot. His colleagues had been giving Treviño, who was Chief Margarito’s star agent at the time, a brutal beating. It was one against half a dozen or more, but Treviño didn’t give up, and every so often he managed to give one of his attackers a head butt or a swift kick to the gut. Cornelio says that everyone, some more than others, was taking the chance to get back at Treviño. Most of them were jealous of him. Cornelio states that he was completely surprised by the attack. He’d just parked his car and didn’t recognize his colleagues, which is why he drew his sidearm. And also why, when Treviño scrambled over to him, not only did he not shoot him, which he easily could have done, but instead he aimed at the other officers and asked them what the hell was going on. Which is why, Cornelio insists, in those ten seconds of stolen time, Treviño was able to stand up and get into his car, a white Maverick, and hightail it out of there. One of the cops threw a bottle of beer, which shattered on the back windshield, but didn’t break the glass. “What’s wrong with you cowards?” Cornelio had shouted. “It should be one-on-one.” He knew he was in trouble when they yelled back: “Fucking stupid Cornelio. Why’d you stick your nose in? The boss ordered this. He’s gonna be mad as hell.” And he was: from then on, Cornelio’s career went from bad to worse. Defending Treviño cost him his good standing and sent him into free fall, like a stone tossed into a gorge.

  The waitress motioned to him that he should sit wherever he liked, there were plenty of empty tables. After all, who the hell would want to go out on a Saturday night in this town and risk getting riddled with bullets? Then she gestured that he should wait a second. She’d be right with him. He says he knew it was going to end badly when a cover of Walter Wanderley’s “Beach Samba” started playing over the speakers: it was the kind of music Carlos Treviño liked. In this version, though, a talentless organist playing off-key destroyed whatever merit the song might originally have had. Cornelio says that he chose a table all the way in the back behind a column because he didn’t want to take any risks, and that he scanned the faces of the other diners before sitting down. A few clueless tourists, low-level bureaucrats, at least two tables of retirees playing dominoes, a few women over sixty made up like hookers who were trying to get the attention of the much younger bureaucrats. Which is why he missed the exact moment Treviño slipped into the chair across from him.

  “’Sup, buddy?”

  He says he got nervous, like he’d forgotten about their meeting, and blurted out, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  But right then the waitress appeared, set two mugs on the table, and poured them strong black coffee they hadn’t ordered. For the past few years, ever since he defended Treviño to be exact, every time Cornelio sat down in a restaurant someone automatically served him a cup of black coffee, as if it was written across his forehead that they should bring something dark on the double, because a black hole just walked in the door. The waitress, a woman in her fifties making an obvious effort to seem nice, didn’t wait for their reaction.

  “Can I bring you a menu? Today we have carne a la tampiqueña, fish Wellington, and enchiladas.” Then she ran through a long list of dishes they weren’t going to order before finally reaching the end of her speech: “And for dessert, we have Tres Leches cake.”

  “No thank you, my friend,” said Treviño.

  Cornelio states that all of a sudden he heard himself saying something he shouldn’t have. Like in one of those nightmares where you only do and say things that create problems for you: “The gentleman won’t be staying long,” he offered. “The police are looking for him.”

  Like a joke. He immediately regretted his words. He’s felt for a while that the pills he’d been taking to relax weren’t really helping him think, that they were making choices for him without having much life experience to back it up, those assholes, or much of a sense of humor. The result was that he was living his life like something that wasn’t really happening or was happening to someone else or that didn’t matter, like one of those horror films you watch on television after midnight, half asleep, not caring at all what happens to the characters because in the end you know they’re all going to die. Or: like those video games where you’re driving a race car against opponents who are faster than you, who box you in mercilessly and never give you a chance to break free, and every second that goes by, you go further out of control and you know you won’t be able to stop, the kinds of races that rattle your nerves and always end with you driving straight off a cliff.

  He says the waitress lifted her eyes slowly, slowly, and cast a sideways glance at Treviño, as if he was a wanted criminal and she was going to identify him. Even so, despite her fear, she man
aged to leave them a bowl of sugar, a little pitcher of milk, and two napkins each: napkins so minuscule they might as well not have been there at all. The poor woman took a step back from the table, and Cornelio added, “If they catch you, they’re gonna to kill you.”

  Treviño smiled as though he were kidding. “You and your bad jokes, brother,” he said.

  The waitress left their table significantly paler and more frightened than when she arrived. Cornelio says he didn’t care, because it was all happening to some guy who looked like him, some guy in his seat at the table that night. Which is why he went on to say, “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. The chief has you in his sights, but you insisted, so here we are. I really don’t know what you’re thinking, Carlitos. No idea what’s going through that head of yours.”

  He noticed that Treviño was leaning forward, as if he were studying the napkin dispenser. “Lower your voice, Cornelio,” he said. “There’s no need to draw attention to us.” And it took the officer a few seconds to understand that the visitor was right, that he was an idiot, that he was yelling and didn’t even realize it, and he fell into a shamed silence, staring at his little napkins until the detective asked him how he was doing, how things were at the precinct. Cornelio says he made a serious effort to answer the question like a normal person, instead of a pill head.

  “You don’t have anything on you to even me out, do you? Something to get my feet under me?” And Treviño shook his head as though he felt something worse than pity for him.

  As Cornelio recalls, the high notes of the terribly flawed version of “Beach Samba” fell over them. He took off his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes to see if he could ground his body and stop flying around above reality. Treviño didn’t ask him any more questions for a while. He was distracted by the scars around Cornelio’s eyes. That was when Cornelio mustered the concentration to ask the visitor, “What can I do for you, Treviño?”

  The detective leaned over the table again and said quietly, “Have you ever heard of a guy they call El Tiburón?”

  “Javier García Osorio, a.k.a. El Tiburón. Why?” Cornelio was acting almost normal by now.