Seven Spanish Angels

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “You could have told me about the Yanez stuff,” I said. I was in the doorway to the kitchen, balancing coffee. He was bent over the coffee table, alphabetizing.

  He lowered his head. “That’s what you want to talk about?”

  I didn’t say anything, just stood there, a smile almost on my face.

  Richard saw it, thinned his lips.

  “It was him, Marta,” he said, “God. I’m sorry he didn’t leave a signed confession, or make videotapes. ‘The Nate Files,’ whatever.”

  When I still just stared, Richard started on a different pile of papers, keeping his hands busy. Finally said what I already knew: “They found the rubbers at his house.”

  It was the closest thing we had to physical evidence, linking Nate to the Spanish Angel murders.

  “I was with him when he bought them,” I said.

  “You were with him when he bought some.”

  I turned sideways, to lean against the doorframe. Press the back of my head into it. Close my eyes. Already, with nobody knowing, I’d been back to the drugstore where we’d found the Durex Avantis. Both pharmacists were old men, their shirts buttoned all the way to the turkey flesh under their jaws. I hadn’t asked either of them about prophylactics. And, according to Madrone, as far as any official reports were concerned, as lead detective he had never been told about any possible latex-sensitivity which could have narrowed his suspect field. Either Nate had been keeping that secret, hoarding it for some big reveal, when he used it to finger somebody, or it had just been meant for me.

  Too, there was no record of Nate being called to Jennifer Rice’s house that first morning. He had just shown up as if he belonged, long before the news crews started telling El Paso about it, then, almost immediately, found rose petals in an unlikely place. It made him look competent, ahead of the game.

  He was, though, that was the thing.

  But, too, I knew him better than they did. How funny it would have been to him to make a game of leading me along to clue after clue, practically telling me with each one that it was him. How much he probably felt he deserved that kind of fun, after banging his head into the walls of the crime lab for two years. How justified it must have felt to involve himself in a series of crime scenes, since nobody else was going to. Then set himself up as the hero, the savior, the one who figured it all out. Who set it up to look like he’d figured it all out anyway.

  If it was him, then there wouldn’t be any physical evidence, either, ever. Because he had been trained on crime scenes.

  And the garage doors, there was still no proof of that. No open/close logs. Just his certainty that the Yanez remote was out there. Not because he had evidence, but because, logically, it was so elegant. And maybe because the last person to have been in contact with the remote was the man who was beating me up on a regular basis. Setting Richard up would have made Nate a hero twice over—he’d be stopping the murders and pulling me from a brutal relationship.

  It all made sense.

  And now he was dead, one of his roses on the bench seat of my car, the petals turning black at the edges.

  I opened my eyes; Richard was talking to me.

  “You don’t drink coffee,” he was saying, nodding to my cup. “It’s an adult drink.”

  “I grew up a lot the last few days,” I told him.

  He smiled some, indulging me.

  “Tastes like shit, too,” I added, and he smiled bigger. “You know I’m not her,” I said then, an easy tone for a hard subject: Reyna Cruz. “Her or CC.” I nodded to the table, the photographs, a lost gesture: “…any of them, either.”

  Richard nodded, kept nodding.

  “Or those—” I started, taking a hot drink. “Those solderas.”

  The three dead soldiers he carried with him always.

  “You’re Monica Martina,” he said, finally. Not Villarreal, not Ramos. Just Monica Martina.

  I listened to it over and over.

  We ate separate lunches in separate rooms at different times, but it was hard, an effort. We each washed our own dishes so the other wouldn’t have to.

  I laid back down afterward, exhausted.

  On the street corners for the last couple of days, the men and boys had been hawking chupacabra gear. Somewhere they’d gotten a high school photograph of Nate. Now his graduation picture was on the front of t-shirts—the killer, in embryonic form, trying not to smile. He was going to be a legend; the merchandising was already in place.

  At seven-thirty, when the day was almost over, my Frankenstein phone rumbled. That was all it did anymore. I hadn’t fixed it all. The call was Madrone. He needed me to sign something down at the station.

  “Today?” I said.

  “Today,” he said back.

  I dressed in my bedroom, the door closed, and counted all the red lines in 7:41. It was an easy number.

  Madrone was waiting for me in the parking garage. He stepped on his menthol when I pulled up alongside.

  “What am I signing?” I said.

  He pinched his slacks up over his thighs, squatted down to the open window of my car, both his elbows hooked on the top of the door. “Nothing,” he said, watching a patrolman walk down the ramp to his personal car. Then he came back to me, said, “It’s about Godder. Tell him to answer his damn phone.”

  “He doesn’t have it,” I said.

  Madrone chewed his lips, studied my gauges, his face closer to mine than I wanted.

  “I just—” he said, then shrugged it off. “They filed on him this morning. KVIA.”

  For Liz P.’s cameraman, the Channel 7 martyr. She was giving him the closing credits each night. And taking donations, for the medical bills.

  I shook my head. “You’re coming to get him, aren’t you?”

  Madrone nodded.

  “How long?”

  “Tomorrow. Make sure he’s home.”

  I closed my eyes, swallowed.

  “It doesn’t matter that we—that it’s over?”

  “You survived,” Madrone said, “when you probably shouldn’t have. I’ll give you that, Villarreal.”

  “But it would have been nice to have somebody for the D.A. to prosecute.”

  Madrone pursed his lips out. “There’s still a lot of questions. A lot we can’t really ask now, see?”

  I was looking at the gauges too now.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Keep him there. He’ll know. And—and I don’t even know if I would.”

  Madrone laughed deep in his throat. “Consider it an act of love, Villarreal. Turning him in for real this time. Because… you know him better than the rest of us, I think. You really think he’s going to go quietly?”

  I looked out the passenger window, heard what he was saying: that Richard would go down in a hail of gunfire, if he went down at all. That he would die in the news, not in a cell.

  “That all?” I said, my voice cracking.

  Madrone stood, patting the roof of my car twice, and I pulled out wiping my eyes and just followed my headlights into dusk, up and down Rim Road then finally out onto the loud red asphalt of McKelligon Canyon. At the end of the road, the amphitheatre, I turned my car off and listened to the night. Watched two boys unloading a truck into the kitchen. When one of them stopped, pointed me out to the other one, I coasted back down into the city, found myself on Tays again, in front of Jennifer Rice’s dark house, the two-story angel filling my whole windshield.

  I stood, walked to it, then looked behind me, thought again of cinnamon rolls, the panadería down by St. Vrain. Walked down 6th not to them so much as to the memory of them. Of standing in the road with my father when I still thought he was my father, holding his hand, waiting for a train to come huffing down the street, for him to keep me safe from it.

  Instead, now, it was the tiendita, the same clerk behind the counter.

  I pushed the door in, leaving my fingerprints on the glass, and counted the lines of the cigarette display clo
ck without meaning to. 8:12. Thirteen. I couldn’t uncount them.

  “Servicio,” I said to the clerk, nodding ahead to the restroom.

  “Policia…” he said back with the same inflection, raising a cuarto in a brown bag to me, then called out that I still had to buy something, puta.

  I stopped, looked to him about that.

  He shrugged, raised his bottle again.

  I went back to the genderless stall, sat there studying the men’s bathroom. Finally settled on the condom dispenser. Rose to it.

  There were twelve variations for twelve amounts of pleasure, fifty cents each. Not counting her, someone had scratched into the white enamel.

  The last variation was Durex Avanti, in the purple package. Single-serve.

  I didn’t buy it, backed out into the hall. Told myself they were probably all over town like that, that I wouldn’t know, wasn’t male.

  But, too, this was so close to Jennifer Rice’s.

  And, if I were looking for a condom that would go down a girl’s throat the easiest, then, of the twelve, it would be the Durex. The others all had bumps and ribs, nubbly little stimulators down at the base. Chemicals to make them glow, dye to make them fun, reservoir tips that were supposed to reveal a picture or secret message when filled.

  I walked back out into the hall then, on automatic, as if just touching everything just to be sure it was real, felt my way up and down the aisles of the tiendita, and it was all there: superglue, a precision funnel with a quarter-inch spout, one bottle of rust remover, the rest not restocked yet.

  I set it down on the counter.

  “¿Es todo?” the clerk said, then, when I couldn’t talk, “Twelve ninety-nine.”

  For too long I only stared at him, then looked to the side, the street, then down from it to the window, the flyer I knew was going to be there. Pink paper with a faded black cross, the words Exegamos Justicía printed above. For the dead women of Juarez. Just below the flyer, rack after rack of stroke material, the girls all looking out over their band of dark plastic or brown paper.

  The clerk laughed in his throat, seeing me see the girls.

  This wasn’t the panadería anymore.

  The clerk said it again, asking me if this was all. I looked down to the rust remover, nodded.

  Instead of twelve ninety-nine, he rang up fifteen-fifty-two.

  “Por el video,” he said, putting my small can of rust remover in a cavernous bag.

  “What tape?” I said, looking in the bag.

  In answer, the clerk reached up, tapped the security camera. Said, in Spanish, to replace the one that other police wanted.

  “Which police?” I said, both my hands to the counter now.

  The clerk shrugged, pulled a newspaper from the stack in front of me, and paged through to an inset of Madrone. Held his finger there. I looked from it to the street again. Remembered Madrone standing outside the tiendita instead of coming in with me. Standing outside in the heat.

  “What was on it?” I asked the clerk.

  He lifted his chin to the rack of porn under the window, said, in English, “I tell him not to take it back there…”

  Back there was the restroom. To servicio himself a bit, in private.

  I touched the headshot of Madrone. “Him?”

  The clerk dug under the counter for the Sunday paper. Opened it until he got to the headshots of everybody involved in the Chihuahita Shoot-Out: me, Richard, Nate, Davidson, and, off to the side again, Madrone.

  The clerk smiled, held his finger down to the paper.

  Moments later, I looked: Davidson.

  He was sitting in the back of Rosa’s eating chips. I’d told him eleven-thirty, but he was early. Watched me feel my way through the tables, his eyes flicking to me then away.

  I was wearing a bandanna now, black with white print. Like high school, when I’d been trying to grow my hair back. I’d had to go back into the tiendita for it. The clerk had just stared at me, let me have it gratis. After everything else I’d bought. Because he knew, maybe, that the twenty minutes I’d spent in his unisex bathroom had been evenly divided between throwing up into the chrome drain and fixing my hair.

  “Chola girl,” Davidson said about the bandanna, pushing a chair out for me with his foot.

  I started to say something, couldn’t. Sat.

  The waitress, seeing me there, eased over, lighting a candle on her way with a book of matches she had in her apron. She held the smoking match while Davidson ordered for us—number thirteen and number fifteen.

  I smiled a polite smile, arranged my napkin over my lap, my hands trembling. I felt like if I opened my mouth it would spill blood, until I had no more.

  “What?” Davidson said. “Another one?”

  I shook my head no, not that.

  Davidson waited until I could listen again.

  “Marta?” he said, and I looked up, straight enough at him that he looked away, and I saw it, a little: he was embarrassed. This was awkward for him, sitting at a table with me. Our second date.

  “Hector,” I said back, the only word I could manage, and brought my tiendita bag from the floor, sat it in my lap after he’d seen where it was from. Arranged the items on the table one by one, like entering them into evidence. When I was done, all the superglue and funnels and Durex stacked between us, he just shrugged.

  “Thanks, I guess,” he said, picking up the rust remover, rolling it around in his hand to read the label. “You needing something fixed, or what?”

  I nodded.

  Davidson shrugged, touched the superglue I’d bought. The polyurethane rubbers. He looked from them up to me, said, “Thought you and bad boy were back together again?”

  “You—” I said.

  It was all I could do.

  Davidson nodded, watching my eyes hard now, the web between his thumb and forefinger spread across his mouth.

  “Me…” he said, following my lead, waiting for the rest.

  I closed my eyes.

  Davidson touched my hand. I drew away, nearly fell from my chair.

  “I think,” he said, softly, “maybe that you’re like, seeing shit where shit’s not there. It’s over, Marta. They’re even saying it on TV.”

  I shook my head no.

  He picked up the rust remover. “You could have found this anywhere.”

  And the funnel, the superglue. The rest.

  But I hadn’t. “You were there,” I finally managed.

  Davidson nodded, his lips pursed, and looked hard for a flash at something across Rosa’s: a patrolman, silhouetted in the door for an instant. He was in tactical gear, had nine friends.

  Davidson smiled, seeing them. Came back to me.

  “You want me to tell you it’s all coincidence,” he said.

  Again, I nodded.

  The patrolmen-in-training lined past the register, took a long table by the wall.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was there that night. Buying some, y ‘know, controversial art. That Madrone dick, he knows already. That’s all it was. Nothing, qué no?”

  “No,” I said, looking right at him.

  He tried looking back, couldn’t. Just sat back then forward again, stretching his eyes open with his palms.

  “I wish you wouldn’t have called me tonight,” he said, weaker.

  I opened my mouth three times before I could say it: “I would have—” I started, half-unsure where I was going. “I think… I would have died for you, Hector. Let Nate shoot me instead of you.”

  “Would you still?” he said.

  “Die for you?”

  A nod, just one.

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked.

  He smiled.

  “What will your parents think?” I asked.

  He smiled, said in his best Walt Cleaver-voice, “The Davidsons, Berry and Marcia?”

  “Your parents, Hector.”

  His face lost its smile for a moment.

  “They’re not my parents,” he said, lifting the funnel, lo
oking at it from all angles. “And no, they won’t believe it.”

  “Neither would—did I. Until…”

  Until you were sitting here, waiting.

  Davidson shrugged, his face animated again. “That’s kind of the idea, I guess.”

  I tried to say something back but had no voice. Davidson winced a little, just with his face, his eyes. Like it hurt to see me hurt.

  “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “It’s not like you weren’t supposed to—to figure it all out.”

  I just stared at him.

  He smiled again, then leaned in, asked in a whisper, “What gave it away, though?” His eyes narrowed in anticipation.

  “…the bathroom at the tiendita. It sells the—the Durex.”

  Davidson shook his head, disgusted. Balled his napkin up and threw it at the chip bowl but got it back, straightened it out perfect on the table. “You mean if I would have put my quarters in, just bought the rest of them all up…?”

  I looked away, tracked the bartender from bottle to bottle. Ate a chip, didn’t taste it. “You were the only one I could trust,” I said, looking at him in pieces. “The only one—”

  “You should watch more Columbo, think? Or Matlock.” He was animated now. “Andy Griffith’s got it figured out. Whoever keeps offering him information, shit. That’s your guy, Martina.”

  Martina.

  “This isn’t TV, though,” I said.

  “Every night at six and ten.”

  I looked down and our enchiladas came.

  “Comerse,” Davidson said. All around us, that’s what people were doing.

  “Why don’t I start screaming right now?” I asked, taking my fork. “Why don’t I—shoot you, stab you, something?”

  Davidson dabbed his mouth with the napkin.

  “Because you—I don’t know if you could hurt me, even. And you want to know, probably. Not how—that’s all there, you can figure it out if you want. Time cards, cameras, phone logs, all that. I was doing it before my shift, usually. Mitch never checked how fast one of those shitty rubbers lasts in a stomach—but fuck it, right?” He smiled, proud. “I even drove that one who lived by you around in your car some.”

  I pictured it—Jessica Bueno-Vasquez in my passenger seat, her mouth taped with clear tape so she would just look quiet, not kidnapped.