Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He shook his head, trying to wake up. For the last two hours he’d been sweeping the same place over and over, slower and slower. His black hair was lank on his forehead, greasy from the fluorescents.

  I was sitting in a steel chair by Jennifer Rice’s drawer. It was pulled out halfway. Last night I’d gone to sleep staring at her, at the lids of her eyes, her eyelashes, still so perfect. Tried to picture a brush fine enough to paint them—probably made from eyelashes itself—then woke some amount of time later, to Davidson’s broom clattering down, then again to the rumbling of the ancient phone on the wall. Davidson told me once he’d stuffed a tissue into the phone’s bell because it was so loud, and, down here, you didn’t want loud, because loud woke sleeping things up. And everybody down here was asleep.

  Now, he hung the phone up gingerly then ran his fingers through his hair, looked at them.

  “You did good on that report,” I told him, for the second time.

  He shrugged, was signing his name on the sign-out sheet, the pen loose in his hand. When he was done he looked up, to the ceiling—the floor of the first floor of the station—and raised his thumb and index finger to his lips, inhaling between it. Asking me for the thousandth time.

  For the thousandth time, I didn’t answer, just fake-punched him in the stomach. He folded around it, carried the shape of my fist with him out the door, into his night.

  I went back to Jennifer Rice.

  She still had her scrubs on. If I touched them it would break the chain of evidence. And, because it had happened in Trevana’s morgue, he would come looking for me. Because I was supposed to know better; he was supposed to have taught me better. So I sat in my chair and studied her. With her clothes on, the only thing I could tell that Davidson had missed was what no guy would have noticed: her lips and hair.

  The thing about her hair was that it was still crinkled from a day or two in a braid. Meaning her killer had unbraided it, needed it out, which suggested what could pretty much be assumed: that the killer was male, staging his visuals in order to get off. Like a fourteen-year-old boy standing magazines up around him on the bed, or—or Richard. In a wholly dark room, he couldn’t even get hard.

  The thing about Jennifer Rice’s lips made less sense: their texture and color was wrong. The color could be explained by purpura, I thought—little capillaries bursting under the skin, due to some sort of trauma while she’d been alive. Except the trauma would had to have been so even. Impossibly even. Meaning it wasn’t blunt force, or even a hard kiss. Chemicals, maybe. Chemicals could explain the texture. Why her lips weren’t really lips anymore but molds of lips, almost. Like they had a clear shell—the glass blower breathing in, once.

  Worse than anything, I wanted to scrape them, have someone with authority run the sample through the chromatograph, get a chemical composition.

  Not without Trevana signing off on it, though.

  And he still had four hours to get to the morgue.

  I went up to the third floor, Richard’s desk, the chair he’d salvaged for me so I could sit to the side instead of straight across from him, like a suspect.

  I checked my cell phone for messages. For Richard. He wasn’t there.

  Four hours. On a Sunday. The deputy coroner stopped off at church probably, to pass the plate.

  I looked east, to the idea of Ascarate. Said it in my head: that it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Twenty minutes later I was at Walker and Alameda, at the drive-through of Casa Chorizo. The place my father went instead of church. It was across from the Naked Harem. Within walking distance of his house on Pecos, just off Delta, by the skeleton of the Ascarate Abierto—the drive-in. It was a flea market now, the fences tall because once they’d had to be, to keep people from lining up on the street to watch the movie for free.

  Home.

  Chorizo’s too. As a girl, I’d sat there with my father from seven—when they opened—until nine forty-five, when my mother picked me up, her hair perfect for Mass. Perfect under her scarf.

  I smiled to myself, seeing something I never had before: that her sheer scarves weren’t all that different from the tortillas of Chorizo’s breakfast burritos, which were transparent with grease, pretty much. It didn’t matter. The goatcheese soaked through the bloody eggs was what held it all together anyway. The girl in the apron kept them stacked like cordwood by the drive-through window, for those people who needed one more thing to confess, one more thing to rise in the back of their throat when the priest settled the wafer down onto their tongue.

  Every time I came here, I told myself it was the last time. Sitting two cars back, I said it again, looked in my rearview to just leave already but was already hemmed in by a man alone in his truck.

  From two cars back, I couldn’t see into the dining area, where all the old men sat. Where my father would be. Ignacio.

  It was what I’d called him all through high school, to remind him I wasn’t his.

  This was after what he’d done to me my freshman year.

  It wasn’t sex or violence or anything TV like that, just him and me in the kitchen. A sheet, a pair of his scissors. Both of us crying.

  It had been 1995. The year you didn’t want to have long, Mexican hair, because it was in fashion: all the dead girls out in the desert were wearing it. Someone in Ciudad Juarez had been taking the prettiest of the maquiladora girls off the buses, or the streets, then leaving them out in Lomas de Poleo a month or two later, in each other’s clothes. Terrible things done to them, the kind of things that turned their deaths into a kindness, a tender gesture made with a blade, a ball peen hammer, a propane torch. A car.

  At the time, a councilman or somebody had said that with the atrocities committed against these women, El Paso was losing its innocence. But this was El Paso. We had been born into sin, pretty much. Blood on our hands before we even knew what blood was. Going to Mass each Sunday to try to wash it off.

  But the girls. Las Muertas de Juarez.

  Back then there had been fifty, maybe. In America, that would have been enough, an epidemic, a massacre, but in Chihuahua the women worked for three dollars a day and didn’t have running water, so didn’t matter. Except to their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, the people who had to tend the graves.

  For El Paso, though, it was like a movie, a drive-in screen we could see from the border highway, just not hear. The image washed out like everything in Juarez, the Lote Bravo Rapist always walking away from another body, anonymous, invisible. Hiding behind a badge, maybe, or in numbers, or up here even, in America, where movies get solved, go over.

  But Juarez wasn’t a movie. The killings hadn’t stopped.

  By some counts, there were already four hundred women dead. By other counts—ones that compared signatures, similar things done to or with the girls, and discounted the narcotrafico murders as best they could—it was just over a hundred.

  And my father, he saw it coming, I think. Maybe because he’d been born there, in some adobe place that didn’t even exist anymore, or was only there between shimmers of heat, or maybe it was something different he had, something denied my generation because we didn’t stand outside at night, facing south, listening.

  Because I didn’t have any hips—a thing the killer seemed to like: slender, Anglo-shaped girls wrapped in brown skin—my father did what he could. To my hair.

  I hadn’t talked a full sentence to him again until two years ago, my twenty-first birthday. I hadn’t talked to him until I could take my bandanna off, let my new hair billow down, look through it at him, show him how alive I was, how little I needed him. It took prenatal vitamins and beer and raw eggs and horse shampoo to get it long again, though. And all the words I swallowed. How safe I’d felt that first year. How, when my father had lowered the cold scissors to my neck, called me mija and mijita and told me he was doing this because he loved me, how I’d swayed my back as far forward as I could, because that was another thing we knew by then: that some of the dead girls i
n Lomas de Poleo had had upside down Vs carved small across their lower backs.

  I hated him and loved him and on my twenty-first birthday asked couldn’t he have just bleached my hair?

  He’d shrugged his old man shoulders, spit and said, “Your skin, too?”

  Mostly I hated him.

  A minute and a half later, one car closer to Chorizo’s drive-through window, there he was with the rest of them, his crudo toothpick angling down from the corner of his mouth in place of the cigarettes he’d given up for Mom before she left. That was eighteen months ago. She lived with her sister in Las Vegas now. The one in New Mexico. It wasn’t a divorce, wasn’t anything I could understand, but I didn’t have to either, because they didn’t count, weren’t family, weren’t blood.

  He hadn’t shaved, but neither had any of the other men. Like them, his camisa was Western, longsleeve, cotton, the pearl snaps from another decade. And the individuals hairs on his chin, they were white, because the young don’t have to adopt, are still hunching over each other after the late show, trying to have their own. He was tall, too, like fathers should be, like I imagined my real father was, when I let myself get that far—past my birth-mother. The family they would have been for the live girl I could have been. Not the one fascinated with blood-absorption rate for packed earth in late July versus blood-absorption rate for that same packed earth in December, but the girl who flew kites and ran everywhere. The one who wasn’t me, who hadn’t grown up dead, a shadow of what might have been.

  That kind of girl would have never let Richard in. Would have never stayed after class the day he came to detail for the twelve students in Procedures the relationship between the homicide detective and his CSU support, and kept doing that thing with the collar of his sports jacket, like he was trying to get away from it; like it wasn’t his.

  The lie I told myself at the time was that I just wanted to know if it was his, the jacket. That it was an investigation, practice. That it was harmless.

  The lie I told myself after that was that he was temporary, fun, too old.

  Next was that I could leave whenever I wanted, and then it was that I really wanted to, and then I just stopped trusting myself. Told myself it was love. That love can be like this too.

  But my father. He sat his end of the bench in the slow, implacable way old men named Ignacio do, the only way they can: like they were born to it.

  Fifteen years ago I was there with him, sitting straight so as not to catch any secondhand grease on my church dress. Maybe that was why I’d fallen into the forensic science courses, even: because I knew some of it had gotten on me, in the fabric of my dress, and I wanted to see it.

  The man alone in his truck behind me honked gently, the contact points of his horn barely making a circuit, as if he were afraid to break the Sunday morning silence.

  I nodded, eased forward, and just held my finger up for the girl in the apron—one, please. There were no menus on Sunday mornings at Chorizo’s, no options. It was just a question of how many.

  The girl in the apron nodded, held it out in the palm of her hand, and I took it, cradled it onto the seat beside me, the foil warm around it, and, for the second time caught the reflection of the man alone in his truck behind me. He was looking into the common area of Chorizo’s too, and I lied to myself that he was asking a version of what I always asked, here: if, that day my father cut all my hair off, if he knew what it was going to do to us, me and him, would he have still done it? if he knew that that would be the safe falling from the sky that broke the camel’s back?

  I held my three dollars out the window to the girl, made myself not look into Chorizo’s one last time, afraid of seeing myself there, the live part of me, her back impossibly straight, but then the radio I had on my dash gave me away.

  Whoever’d checked it out last had left it rolled over to full volume. It spoke my name through my open window, past the girl in the apron, across the wallowed-out counter, and my father looked up. I nodded acknowledgement to him, at the coincidence of this, of us, being here, at the same time, in a place as big as El Paso, a summer as long as this, then pulled away easy, the mike to my mouth.

  It was Mitch Trevana, three hours early.

  “Church isn’t over yet,” I said, my burrito rolling into the backrest of the passenger seat. “What are you doing there?”

  “Your job,” he said back.

  I was thinking about buckling it in, the burrito. About going back to Chorizo’s.

  “Mitch—”

  “I just want to double-check,” he said, his voice trailing off, as if he were reading something. “Do you know if Hector took this—this…”

  “Jennifer Rice.”

  “Do you remember if he took her temperature in the ear, or rectally?”

  “I was having a disciplinary moment about then,” I said. “Why?”

  “I thought you were first on the scene.”

  “Nate was.”

  “But, usually—”

  “You haven’t heard,” I said. “Detective Godder’s on vacation this weekend.”

  Trevana digested this. Knew it meant I had no authority, had just signed that one form, in case the prosecutor needed it.

  “Why does her body temperature matter?” I asked.

  “Because when my assistants screw the pooch, I’m the one the brass brings the litter of puppies to.”

  “It was his first time.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe his last, too. He transposed the numbers in her body temp. Now it’s on every copy in the department.”

  “We can’t all be perfect like you,” I told him. “Maybe he’s dyslexic.”

  “Or careless.”

  I was turning, trying to remember I was driving.

  “Listen, Mitch—”

  “Eighty-six degrees?” Trevana interrupted.

  I breathed out through my nose: Davidson had transposed the numbers. Sixty-eight would be more like it. Not quite room temp, but closet temp, maybe. Eighty-six at noon would put her post-mortem interval down in the single digits, just an hour or two before we got there yesterday morning.

  “Listen,” I said. “He was there when you weren’t, okay?”

  The lane I was in suddenly became the curb everybody was parked against until Monday. I cut left, the burrito rolling, radio falling, life almost ending.

  “There’s more,” Trevana said.

  I closed my eyes, drove back to the station for it.

  I parked in Richard’s slot in the parking garage, tried to go in the coroner’s new door, the big heavy one for oblong deliveries, but it was locked and nobody was answering the call button, and the keypad was just a square of numbers to me. Meaning I would have to go upstairs to get to the basement. El Paso PD in action.

  Madrone caught me as I was walking past all the coke machines.

  “So?” he said.

  He could have been talking about a hundred different things: where Richard was, or wasn’t; what the weather was going to be like; how my burrito had been.

  I crumpled the greasy paper and waited for the rest of the question.

  He was just looking at me.

  “Yeah?” I said, finally.

  “Same clothes,” he said, nodding.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks for pointing that out, sir.”

  He shrugged, said he was a detective. It was his job. But, too, he’d heard the sir, I could tell. How I’d said it. It made him smile, look over my shoulder, down the hall.

  “Think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here, Villarreal,” he said.

  I nodded, almost didn’t say anything—didn’t want to mess up his apology—but then tried to beat him to it: “I know we… me and Richard. That we stole the whole training period thing. I’m sorry for that, really.”

  Madrone had already had his mouth open, his words prepared. Hearing me, he smiled instead. Shook his head slowly, side to side.

  “I guess you’ve been through her locker,” he said.

  Jennifer Rice
.

  “Monday,” I told him. “She’s in private healthcare, I think, and I don’t have a warrant.”

  “You don’t need a warrant for the victim’s belongings. If she’s dead.”

  “I can’t even get anybody on the phone.”

  “You think I’m being hard on you,” Madrone said, finally getting back to it.

  “I don’t think you’ve been utilizing my training, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  He cracked something between his teeth I hadn’t known was there, then sucked out its middle.

  “Godder said you were… that he picked you out for a reason, anyway.”

  “He picked me because I’m good.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Madrone said too quickly, and I looked away. Had walked right into it.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, stepping to the side to get around him, “I’ll get back to you about her locker Monday. Soon as I find out where it is.”

  Madrone stepped aside too, making it into a grand gesture.

  When I was three coke machines down though, he said something to me in a normal voice.

  I angled my head to try to catch the last part.

  He waited for me to turn around.

  “Tried to catch you yesterday,” he said, too much sincerity in his voice for it to be real. “After your big TV spot.”

  I looked away, to the side. Counted green buttons, red buttons, and then came back to him.

  “She’s not a nurse, is she?”

  Madrone laughed through his teeth, clapped loudly behind me, and I walked away.

  Downstairs, Trevana had his copy of Jennifer Rice’s file fanned out on the second autopsy table, because the light was better there than in his office. There weren’t any windows.

  I announced myself by dropping my burrito paper in the trashcan.

  Trevana looked up.

  He was slick bald. Rumor was it was from touching his hair with formaldehyde hands for years, when he’d been pioneering forensic anthropology down in Austin. Other than that he didn’t look anything like the fifty-whatever he was. Maybe he’d seen the black cottage cheese insides of enough overweight people that it woke him up early three times a week, pointed him down the jogging path. The kind of run you wake up only at the end of. Too, though, Richard had told me once that pedophiles were invariably skinny. For an accidental moment I tried to imagine what it would be like to have Trevana’s hand under my shirt, after he’d been touching the dead all day, but then he was Richard, his palm just as cold, just as rough, and I was looking away, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.