Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Seven Spanish Angels

  by Stephen Graham Jones

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2011, Text by Stephen Graham Jones

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2011 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBook Design by Matt Bell

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1936873456

  Printed in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  CONTENTS

  Seven Spanish Angels

  Acknowledgements

  for my sisters

  Seven Spanish Angels

  all the Federales say

  they could have had him any day

  —Townes van Zandt

  Before.

  It was the night I learned how to put a telephone back together. My soldering gun trailed smoke up to the ceiling. The shoe I’d beat the phone apart with was planted in the television. It was his television, Richard’s. It wasn’t getting put back together. But the phone. He was going to get as far as Alamogordo, Las Cruces maybe, then stop, lean into a booth, call me.

  I wasn’t putting the phone back together to answer him, but to hang up on him.

  It took three hours to get it done right. I pretended he was watching me do it, too, judging, following behind like he still did at our mock crime scenes, to see what his little evidence tech was missing, how she could be processing the scene any better, any more like him.

  Every solder was perfect. Each button had a tone. Time was 3:42AM, temperature 68º, and when I dialed my number, hung up, the phone rang under my hand.

  Now he just had to call. To try to apologize.

  I sat back against the couch to wait him out, rolled my exacto knife around and around my index finger, catching it by the handle each time. I could roll it as fast or slow as I wanted; maybe my mom had been a maquiladora worker, doing something small with her fingers all day. For a dollar.

  In case she was watching, I made myself roll the exacto with more and more control. It became a game to catch it closer to the butt, at the last instant before it got away. And still Richard didn’t call. I started rolling my fingers closer to the blade then, to where the raspy edge would slap into the pad of my thumb.

  Richard hadn’t even lasted a week. His boxes were still in the hall, taped shut. The phone still wasn’t ringing.

  At six, the sun angling into the top of the curtains in the living room, I grubbed around on the table behind me, for my cell. The plan was to call myself, make sure Richard had an open line, no excuse, but then my Frankenstein phone rang before I could dial.

  I looked at my cell: I hadn’t done it.

  The second time the phone rang I realized what was so different: without the plastic case, the bell had nothing to resound in, was pitched higher than felt right.

  But fuck it, too. A ring was a ring.

  I uncradled the phone long enough for him to say my name then slammed it back down, held it there.

  Seconds later the cell came alive in my other hand. I dropped it into the carpet. It rang again, and again, and finally I flipped it over like a beetle, for the caller ID: it wasn’t Richard.

  Two rings later, I thumbed the talk button.

  Nate Koenig, a junior criminologist for the Sheriff’s office. He was being patched through Dispatch, because there was a rule about releasing personal telephone numbers.

  “It’s Saturday, Nate,” I said.

  “I’m supposed to ask for your, y’know. Your better half.”

  “Where’s he need to be?”

  “El Paso city,” Nate half-sang, “on the Rio Grandé…”

  I said it again: “Where?”

  Nate fed me the address. It was deep in Segundo.

  “Marta—” Nate said, just as I was thumbing the red button. I pulled the cell back up, felt that my jaw wasn’t working the way it used to. Fluid draining down around the hinge.

  “What?”

  “That was you that hung up on me, the landline?”

  I leaned my head back into the couch cushions, closed my eyes.

  “Not you,” I said, “no.”

  Day 1

  Saturday 5 July 2003.

  The first thing Nate asked when he had me alone was where was Richard?

  I was wearing Jackie O sunglasses, had too much make-up on, enough ibuprofen in me that my lips were numb.

  “Richard,” I said, rolling the latex onto my left hand, looking at my fingers instead of Nate. “We’re not a package, you know?”

  “But—” he started, looking around to a patrolman, watching us like we didn’t belong.

  But I needed my Homicide chaperone. But I was coming up through the ranks all wrong—handpicked out of my last semester by a Detective 2 for six months’ field training before going active with a CSU unit.

  “I got my certification, Nate,” I said. “Just like you.”

  Nate smiled, backed off, both hands up, and had no idea how nervous I was behind the glasses—that I was going to contaminate the scene, break the chain of evidence, make one of the hundred other mistakes everybody would be expecting me to make.

  If I were with CSU, like I was supposed to be, I’d have a crew to watch me, to double-check my work this first time.

  Now, though. Now I was forensic support for a Homicide detective who wasn’t here. A magician’s assistant standing alone on the stage, the crowd waiting to see what I could pull off here. What I couldn’t.

  I rolled my right glove on finger by finger, snapping it tight.

  “What do we know?” I said.

  Such a standard line, but for a reason, I guess.

  Nate studied me for maybe five seconds, trying to see through my glasses, I thought, and then just stepped aside, gave me the hall.

  “Marta Villarreal, meet Jennifer Rice,” he said, then added, “deceased.”

  Behind me, one of the other officers laughed into his cup then pinched it off.

  “It’s undisturbed, I take it,” I said, stalling, looking down the only hall, at the closet door the dead girl was evidently behind.

  Nate laughed through his nose, didn’t have to answer. It was six o’clock the morning after a national holiday that had nearly burned the city down. Of course it was undisturbed. Nobody wanted the paperwork, especially not for some nobody from the barrio.

  “Jennifer Rice,” I said.

  “Twenty-eight, single, Mexican,” Nate said, then flashed me a bagged snapshot probably taken from the fridge: a foggy Jennifer Rice and some boyfriend.

  “He found her?” I said.

  “Sebby Walker,” Nate said. “The man made of dime bags.”

  “Suspect?”

  “He was on a—what you might call a buying trip down south. The tax-free kind.”

  “Documented?”

  “Incriminated, even.”

  “But her name’s Rice.”

  “Spanish rice?”

  “But he’s not. Mexican.”

  “Half,” Nate said, pursing his lips like half was enough?

  I turned away, was running out of questions. Down the street to the south, where Tays dead-ends against 9th, there’s a two-story mural on the windowless side of an apartment building. The painting is an angel, shepherding a boy and a girl out of the mural. Or maybe it’s Jesus. Either way, the mouth’s been chipped away somehow,
exposing the grey cinderblock beneath. Like ash. Thinking about it made me cough.

  Driving up to the house, all the men and women of the neighborhood had been standing out on their wrought iron porches, watching me with slit eyes. Their doors and walls painted oaxaco blue, deep pink. Nothing growing in the yard because the dirt there was packed down from generations of cars.

  At the other end of Tays was 6th, a tiendita down there by St. Vrain that had been a panadería when I was girl, before it sold out to all night convenience. I only remembered it because 6th had railroad tracks down the middle of it, buried in the asphalt, and my father had made me stop there once, to be sure a train wasn’t huffing down on us out of the nineteenth century, carrying sad-eyed Apache to Florida.

  “Well then,” I said to Nate, and he bit his lower lip, was loving this.

  I didn’t take my Jackie O sunglasses off for the narrow hall. Already there were floor lights baking the wallpaper.

  And the closet door.

  It was shut.

  I turned back to the living room once more, like to say goodbye, or to let the patrolmen know I was doing this, yes, and one of them was tamping something down into his chest pocket, then buttoning the flap. A dime bag. I didn’t let my eyes stop on this. Growing up Mexican in a border town, you have no illusions about the law. Or, your only illusion is that, if you were a cop, it would all be different. Meaning you wake up years later behind the temporary badge of your first assignment, maybe don’t recognize yourself.

  But the closet door. Jennifer Rice.

  I rolled the latex onto my right hand, snapped it tight over my fingertips, and made my way down the hall, turned the knob, thought that because I was on display here, all the officers in the living room watching me and pretending not to, I’d be able to control my response.

  I was wrong.

  First, I let go of the doorknob as if it were hot. Next I turned away, hiding my face. What the officers couldn’t see were my eyes behind my sunglasses, closing.

  Not because she was dead, Jennifer Rice—I’d seen cadavers in Forensic Anthropology—but because, at first, she didn’t look like she was: dead.

  She was down in the corner, her arms around her knees, black hair spilling to the ground. Like she could look up at any moment, run off down the hall, her footfalls muted, a long whisper of motion.

  From what I could make out of the skin on her forearm, she’d been dead for days: it was mottled, drawn, dry.

  To see her better, I lowered myself to my knees. Became aware of my own hair in a new way—that I needed to tie it back, tuck it under my shirt, keep it from contaminating the scene, mixing with hers.

  From my new angle I could see her shins, the back of her thighs. They were aquamarine; she was wearing scrub bottoms. Up top as well, just cream-colored, with little dancing boxes for a pattern. The slope of her shoulder smooth enough under the thin top that there was no bra strap there. And you don’t wear your old prom bra for a twelve-hour shift.

  Meaning—she’d been dressed?

  I wanted to reach out with a finger, thread her hair behind an ear. Give her that dignity at least.

  But I had been trained, knew the rules.

  “Jennifer,” I said instead, just a whisper, and she didn’t look up.

  “Think she no sabe the English muy bueno…” Nate said from above, his voice dragging like Speedy Gonzales. He was only person in El Paso I would let say that, like that. He was half-in, half-out of the kitchen doorway.

  “They let you out of the lab for this?” a patrolman said to him, passing through the kitchen.

  “Weekend pass,” Nate answered without looking around, and the way he kept his eyes on me I could tell he had something to show me, here.

  “Well?” I said.

  He just smiled.

  The thing about Nate was that he’d failed the FBI test four times in a row already. The general one, that you had to pass before even getting considered for whatever was in line for an analyst slot. Probably what he’d done was offer the agent at the front desk of the field office a profile, or tried to solve the case of which elevator was going to open first, and why, and then drawn an elaborate diagram or probability tree, something that was supposed to charm, establish him as agent material.

  I’d been two years behind him at school, but we’d sat through some of the same courses. Where my degree qualified me for entry-level criminalist, his had swelled out into a full-fledged case of criminology. The profiles he’d turned in for his behavioral studies classes were legend. Not so much for their accuracy as for their false precision: on paper, he was like the psychic who can ‘see’ that the kidnapper has a golden, slightly asymmetrical scorpion mounted in his belt buckle, and can tell the belt buckle is definitely from a maternal uncle, but as to whether the kidnapper’s in Florida or California? Foggy; ‘Somewhere with an interstate.’

  Now, instead of profiling, he was running fiber samples in the lab at the Sheriff’s office. Had been for two years. Until now.

  He plucked me away from Jennifer Rice as if he couldn’t imagine I wouldn’t want to see what he’d found.

  It was a rose petal, deep in the garbage disposal. He had to hold the rubber flaps to the side with tweezers and a probe, the flashlight in his teeth.

  I nodded, shrugged, and could tell by the way he held his mouth, looking for words, that I was so far behind him here that he didn’t even know where to start.

  “Look,” he said, finally, reaching for my sunglasses, as if they were what was slowing me down.

  I stopped his hand before he could even come close, looked where wanted me to: a vase, on the counter.

  “What’s it doing there?” he whispered, leading me like he always had.

  “Sitting,” I said.

  “Nothing,” he corrected, “it’s doing nothing, Marta. Seem a little out of place?”

  I turned from the vase back to the sink, the disposal.

  “You’re saying it had roses in it?”

  He nodded, bit his lower lip.

  “It’s how he got in,” he said. “Y’know, landshark, flowers, all that?”

  I shrugged, didn’t not buy it, but knew too that we were just tech support here, that it was a trap trying to solve the crime, trying to see the big picture, lying to yourself that the key was locked in whatever you could comb up from the carpet, dust off the front door. It was bigger than that, always. A puzzle for Homicide, not Forensics.

  At some level, Nate had to know this.

  On the surface, though, he was blind to it. Smiling so big his cheeks were narrowing his field of vision.

  Instead of explaining any of this to him, I catalogued the kitchen without really meaning to. The pans, the spoons on nails, the two burners on the stove that got used the most, the low spot in the linoleum by the door where water would probably stand. The refrigerator.

  Centered on the freezer door, magnets at the top two corners, was another snapshot. A guy I took to be Sebby Walker, and, in front of him, his arms loose around her neck, Jennifer Rice.

  We could have been sisters, the kind boys would confuse.

  “What?” Nate said, suddenly beside me, his hand to the small of my back. “You know her?”

  I shook my head no, only looked away from the snapshot when a man behind us laughed, as if to himself.

  I tracked over to him—a fifty-something detective barely taller than me, cracking a sunflower seed shell in his mouth, the effort pulling his whole face down to it.

  “Detective Madrone,” Nate said, doing the introductions—him to me—“Marta Villarreal.”

  Madrone shrugged it off, my name. Said instead, “Godder’s… helper. That the departmental term these days?”

  I just stared at him, not sure how to respond. This was why he’d been laughing, though.

  “Where is he anyway?” he said, stepping in, eyeballing all the counters at once. Settling back on me.

  “Gone,” I said, and left it at that.

  Ten minutes la
ter I was on the back porch with Nate. I rolled the latex from my left hand, looking at my fingers. We were waiting for the CSU van to roll up, take over. Waiting for whoever Madrone was calling from the ME’s office to sign the death investigation papers, let us—somebody—start processing Jennifer Rice.

  It didn’t matter that we’d been the first ones there, Nate and me. We were nobody; less.

  Without Richard to hold me by the elbow, guide me through the crime scene, I wasn’t even supposed to have been in the house, really. Seeing Jennifer Rice had been a breach of procedure.

  Still, Madrone had told us, he’d be willing to let all that slide if I’d just get Richard on the horn.

  In response, I’d asked him if it was sharp, this horn.

  Madrone looked at me like he’d looked at the counter earlier: as a thing to study. Finally, he said, “Got a mouth on you there, don’t you?” To show what he meant, he reached out with the back of the thick index finger of his right hand, touched my tender lower lip.

  I jerked my head to the side, spit the smell of his hand away.

  Madrone shrugged, smiling to himself, eyes flat like a lizard’s, and said, “You’d learn to like it.” Before I could think of anything to say back that wouldn’t get me fired, arrested, or shot, he left us with the rose petals in the garbage disposal. I watched him until he was gone.

  “It always like this, you think?” I asked Nate.

  “You’re common property,” Nate said, already shrugging off the explanation—that it wasn’t what he thought. “To Homicide, I mean.”

  “Because I’m CSU?” I said, trying to follow. “Or because I don’t have a dick?”

  “Specifically because you don’t have one, I’d guess…” Nate said, then hissed a smile through his teeth, started in on the disposal again, passing me the flashlight. It was still warm from his mouth. As he dug with his tweezers and probe, he told me how this Homicide-orientation ride I was on with Richard was supposed to have been Madrone’s, he’d heard. That it had meant a hundred extra bucks a month for him, plus ‘benefits.’