Tequila Blue

by Rolo Diez

  A hunch led me to Calle Marsella, between Berlin and Dinamarca Streets, to the first floor of a flashy building where Mr and Mrs Accountant lived. With all my suspects disappearing, my week looked as if it might turn out like the guy’s who was hanged on Monday. The cases were different, though. Valadez had reasons to escape and people to escape from. He had to get away from me and Silver Bullet’s pressure for payment. With the accountant it was different. In theory, he had merely been one of Jones’s victims. There were lots of things to clear up, though. I still had to have a real talk with him, on the understanding that it’s the one who controls the money who tends to know the most.

  Mr and Mrs Accountant weren’t there either.

  “They’ve gone,” a neighbour told me. “A removal van came and took all their things.”

  It’s hard not to be in a bad mood when all of a sudden everything turns out badly. I spend the whole day working. I’m given a case in which it’s important to keep tabs on various people, and I’m not even assigned an assistant. I have to pay Silver Bullet out of my own pocket. They talk about austerity but put dozens of cops on guard duty for any bureaucratic politician whose number has come up in this presidency.

  I asked more questions and learned that the Accountants had gone for good. They had left at the crucial moment, just before I was going to consult Mr Accountant on financial matters. I enquired about removal firms in the area and eventually came up with the man who around two the previous afternoon had taken the Accountants’ things to a stall in the La Merced flea market.

  “Why to La Merced?” I asked. “He’s got more class than that. It would have made more sense to take them to somewhere better.”

  “He was in a hurry to sell,” the van driver explained. “I told him he’d be able to offload them there straightaway, and he accepted the idea.”

  “Did he know he wouldn’t get much of a price?”

  “Yes, he knew.”

  La Merced is full of traders, all kinds of meat, vegetables, fruit, endless disposable objects. Then there are all the old dames of the city who come to buy, a shopping basket on each arm. And there are more whores and pickpockets than there are old women buying all the crap.

  When after two hours’ search I found the stall, I was confronted by an Arab from Tabasco with the face of an assassin. Once I had shown him my ID and the butt of my gun, he decided to play ball. He admitted he had le-ga-lly bought a load of furniture from a pale-faced, stupid-looking foreigner. He showed me the receipt : “Received, one million pesos for one load of furniture”, signed with a scribble which, he said, was the le-gal signature of paleface.

  In La Cotorra they serve the best drinks in the Mexican capital. Generous glasses, more the sort you expect at a friend’s house than in a public bar. I sat down to think with a dish of peanuts and a couple of tequilas. The bar was close to where I had to meet Lourdes, and this made the wait more palatable. The Jones case was becoming clearer. There are many reasons for three suspects to disappear on the same day, and none of them is a coincidence. They are all to do with guilt. Those three sons of bitches had done for Jones. The motive had to be money. Which meant that Jones’s business – the real, pornographic business – made a healthy profit. And the essential part of any successful business is the market, the customers. Once you have a captive market, which must have been the case here, it’s easy to organize the rest. The accountant dealt with all that, the invoices and the clients. So why shouldn’t he decide he could take over the business, particularly if a snake like Valadez was tempting him with his contacts, his influence and networks that would mean the two of them could line their pockets with gold? You can get whores just by whistling on any street corner round here, and you can hire someone who can use a camera at the entrance to any TV station. They no longer needed Jones, so between the three of them they got rid of him. Perhaps the man-woman in the hotel was the accountant’s wife, using two blond wigs – one for a man, the other for a woman – to conceal her auburn hair and turn the porter’s head. Perhaps Mrs Accountant went in disguised as a blonde woman and Mr Accountant came out disguised as a transvestite. She went in with Jones and killed him. He came up the service stairs and joined her. Afterwards, he went out the front way, while she sneaked out of the service exit. Then again, perhaps she went in with Jones and Mr Accountant came in with a local whore, and Valadez arrived with another one. Between them, they dispatched Jones. Mr Accountant dressed up as a transvestite and left. They either drugged the two whores or paid them a good wad of banknotes, and Valadez left with Mrs Accountant. There were lots of possibilities, and a detective isn’t meant to play guessing games. A detective is meant to catch the guilty sons of bitches, give them a thorough interrogation and get at the truth.

  I’ve no idea how many glasses the barman served me, but I know he must have been a magician because all of a sudden he made Madonna appear at my table. I’ve no idea either why there are times when it’s impossible to say “no”. And anyway it was already almost eight by now, and it didn’t seem a good idea to turn up for Lourdes looking like an advert for Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Chapter fourteen

  When the taxi travelling along Rio Churubusco crosses La Viga and carries on five hundred yards towards the airport, two dark-coloured cars without licence plates appear, block its path, and force it to a halt. Four men armed with submachine guns and sawn-off shotguns leap out of the cars. They pull Valadez out of the backseat, throw him into one of the cars and speed off. The taxi driver is a statue nobody wastes any time on.

  At six that evening, the accountant and his wife return to their hotel with airline tickets for the night flight to Miami. They go into Room 402, and Mr Accountant comments: “Well, that’s the end of that.” When they hear this the two men hiding in the bathroom grin at each other. Then they burst into the bedroom. They are carrying pistols with silencers.

  Chapter fifteen

  Presenting Beauty to the Beast, I explained to Rosario’s younger sister that for the rest of the day she would be Esmeralda like in the novel, and that my friend had a beautiful spirit. There was nothing untrue in what I said, and the girl’s silence showed how intelligent she was. Her job was to keep the monster happy. Lobster, squid, maguey worms or whatever else he might fancy to eat, the best alcohol and a honeymoon worthy of the Virgin Mary. In other words, whatever he asked for and was up to. “Be a guiding star for him.” Carlos Hernandez knows how to look after his friends, and what that guy had just given him was priceless.

  It’s true that the information was common knowledge among the whores of the Zona Rosa, but now – the most important thing! – the police had got wind of it too. Once upon a time there was a ranch, bought in the name of a gentleman from Los Angeles, whose owner had never been traced. The police searched for his whereabouts for a whole month before giving up. The case was so cold it might almost be called frozen, like the beers my women offer me when they forget to bring them warm, and yet those in charge of it – “I can’t say a word about any of this,” Quasimodo dixit, with a wonderful grin on his lopsided mouth – had evidence that Jones frequently went there, and that every fortnight there would be huge celebrations. Limos, celebrities, females like luxury felines. They would start arriving on the Saturday morning and leave late on Sunday.

  Parties, drugs, pornography: Jones. A well-signposted road. Situations that led to – and here was the mystery – an exit in the bullet hole in the back of the gringo’s head.

  Rosario had told me about the ranch. But now I knew its name and location: a turning off the road to Hidalgo, beyond a rustic wooden arch proclaiming “Rancho El Porvenir”. Which in Jones’s case might just as well have read “The Worms”.

  Quasimodo could not tell me anything because it was not me who was investigating Victoria Ledesma’s death, and since it was being dealt with by another police force I could not get a search warrant which would allow me to raid “El Porvenir”. In any case, it had already been searched by our police colleagues.
Not forgetting the fact that there are useless and blind people – as well as blind people who don’t want to see – the whole world over.

  I needed help to get anywhere, so I went to see the Commander. His opening salvo was to tell me that Valadez was dead, riddled with bullets and dumped at the side of a road, and that Mr and Mrs Accountant were also dead, murdered in their hotel room with shots to the body and head. You need to know the Commander to realize that this news was much more important for my relation to him than for anything to do with the Jones case. I was the slave, he the master – Hernandez-knownothing versus Commanderknowall, Subordinateuseless versus Commanderuseful – showing yet again my inability to find out something which, since I was in charge of the case, I ought to know about better than anyone. The fact that it was he who – sitting comfortably in his chair – could give me the news proved various things, all of them essential: 1) he was the one who had the information and the power; 2) without him I was nobody; 3) therefore it would be best for me to devote the rest of my life to making sure he got his kickbacks; 4) if I did that, he could perhaps bring himself to excuse such monumental slackness; 5) would to God that I could understand some day that the individual is nothing, it’s the institution that is everything. This last point had an equally essential corollary: it was true in my case, in that of Hernandezmisternocount, but not in his, that of Commandermisterbigboss. I smoked my way through an entire cigarette while I deduced all this.

  When he heard my news the Commander looked at me strangely and wanted to know who my sources were. I told him about Estela Lopez de Jones, the accountant and Valadez, and though his poker-face did not slip once, something in the effort he was making to stay calm told me I was entering forbidden territory. When I asked for permission to search the ranch he gave so many excuses, raised so many problems of jurisdiction and proper authority, who was responsible and other kinds of crap, that the only thing I understood was that he didn’t want to see me there. I would have to act on my own.

  The case was beginning to interest me.

  Paying a visit to the ranch secretly all alone one night, going inside with a revolver in my right hand and in the other a dim torch (that’s what they always call them in novels, though to me the word says more about the people carrying them) and exposing myself to getting my very own bullet-hole in the head is what cops do in all the films. What Hernandez did was call Quasimodo and tell him my boss did not seem interested in me nosing round the ranch. Perhaps because his vital juices had all been poured out as libations on erotic altars, my friend was very cautious. “If there’s money involved, there’s danger too.” And he gave his judgement: “Being a poor cop is better than having two quarts of mud in your lungs.” He was right, but so was I. In my defence, I quoted the example of Christopher Columbus, who, if he had been put off by the legends of sea serpents that devoured ships, of the children of darkness lying in wait for him in the Mare Tenebrosum, would have stayed in Madrid playing dominoes and drinking a brandy chaser in his local inn, and nobody would be celebrating him or accusing him of genocide five hundred years after his adventure.

  In the end I managed to convince him. The only drawback was that he didn’t have any jurisdiction or authority to get into the ranch either. He was just the man who ran the Archive. Besides which, he had hardly slept, and was still recovering from the mystic powers of the gypsy Esmeralda. He did, though, know one of the cops investigating Victoria Ledesma’s death, an individual by the name of Arganaraz, who, if there was money in it, would be more than happy to collaborate in the undertaking and earn himself a third of any profits. I had been thinking of keeping seventy per cent for myself and giving thirty to Quasimodo, so such a sudden reduction in my percentage took the wind from my sails. I looked on the bright side when I considered that the protection money I got from Kiko and my protégée was barely enough to keep me in cigarettes, whereas even a third of such a big deal could mean I was no longer poor.

  The next day we had breakfast and swapped card collections. Arganaraz said everyone in the police knew about Jones’s pornography racket, that there was a film everybody had seen, although no one knew what had become of it, in which a whore played Snow White, and the dwarves had done everything apart from fuck her in the eye sockets, that the case had got nowhere because the gringo was protected from high up, the big chiefs, his embassy, and who knows where else. Short-arsed and skinny, a typical Mexican “race of bronze” type, Arganaraz looked so greasy and slippery he could have been in one of those Hollywood films where the Mexicans are always the double-crossers. I told him my theories about the blond assassin, and he doubled up laughing. He and his colleagues had already solved the case. Jones had got above himself and tried to blackmail someone he shouldn’t have. “An untouchable, get it?” He lost out, of course. “You can’t beat an untouchable.” Legally, there was nothing to be done. But whoever found the video-cassettes was onto a fortune. They had searched the ranch until they were tired of it. It was full of French champagne and other imported liquor, which strangely vanished in the course of the investigation; there were immense round beds; waterbeds and others that moved up and down, ideal for fat slugs or those afraid of a heart attack; opposite the largest bed there was a two-way mirror, one of those you can see through from behind and film without being seen. To complete the picture there were all the usual accoutrements in places like these: porno magazines and films, rubber dildos, whips, handcuffs, black leather jackets with metal spikes, everything you could imagine. Regular visitors included important politicians and police chiefs, ambassadors, men and women who spoke English. By sheer chance no one had seen the Pope there. As I listened to him, I was thinking how people find it necessary to exaggerate: no one can describe how they had a coffee without embroidering the story. But even allowing for this, what was left sounded juicy enough, and exactly what I had been expecting.

  “The caretaker knows me and will let me in,” Arganaraz added.

  “Fine, but what are we looking for?” Quasimodo looked at us as though we were behaving oddly, as if we were drunk and forcing him to stay sober. “If they’ve searched the place and taken everything away, what exactly are we after?”

  I seized the opportunity to put Mr Race of Bronze in his place.

  “Jones was killed, and it can’t have been for his failings as a host,” I said. “It’s possible the gringo made a habit of blackmailing his friends, filming them from behind the mirror in not very saintly positions, and that’s why he ended up with a hole in his head. We don’t know, sweetheart. It’s my hunch. But just imagine I’m right. If it is, what we’re looking for is a secret hiding-place where he kept the photos and films. If we find nothing, it’s simply another day wasted. Like all those we spend snoozing in a bar or in the office. And if we find something, we’re made. By the way,” I said, addressing Arganaraz this time, “is the place behind the mirror concealed or visible?”

  “Concealed.” When someone with a double-crosser’s face smiles, it only makes it worse. “It’s a tiny room about five-feet square that you get into via a wardrobe.”

  “That fits,” I said.

  We chatted for a while about the risks of being a blackmailer, the importance of bearing in mind what had happened to the gringo, the accountant and his wife and Valadez, and we agreed if we found any stuff we would take into account both the dangers and the possible price tag. We also tried to shake Quasimodo out of his gloomy mood and make him feel more optimistic about the adventure. “Running an archive means you classify information and draw realistic conclusions from it. Nothing good will come of this for us,” he said. I realized that if we put things off for too long, Quasimodo would find an excuse to back out. So I insisted there was no time like the present, and that a man of action doesn’t spend his life mulling over everything but leaps in and gets what he wants out of it. Arganaraz agreed with everything and was even more enthusiastic than me, talking about the fortune waiting somewhere for those brave enough to grab it, plus other nonsense
you only ever hear on TV, and although his treacherous face still worried me, for the moment I needed him on my side. Quasimodo kept silent, a silence so deep that even without looking at him you could see his scepticism and understand that the habit of spending his life shut up in an archive had, begging his pardon, softened his brain.

  We drank a tequila to help settle our breakfast and set off for the ranch.

  Chapter sixteen

  A few miles before we reached our destination, someone started shooting at us. They were hunting us down from a wood to the left of the road. It was a well-chosen spot, far enough away from the ranch to avoid any relation to it, so that the headlines in the morning newspapers could report our deaths without any link there. For example, “Three policemen die in hail of bullets on side-road.” Or one of us at least, because I was hit in the head and can’t believe I’m still alive. We pulled up on the right and returned their fire flat out on the ground behind the car. Our revolvers were useless at that range, and the bastards took advantage to shoot out all the windows of the Atlantic. (More work for Kiko.) We could hear them laughing and shouting: “You’d better turn back, assholes. We’re going to finish you off. You’ve really messed up this time.” And more words we didn’t catch, because we were busy putting as much distance as possible between us and the source of the shouting and the gunfire. This went on for some time, with them firing and us crawling away as fast as we could, until we came to a gully and threw ourselves down it, commenting on what had happened to us. “We’re fucked.” “They were lying in wait for us.” “Great idea of yours, Carlitos.” “So great they tried to kill us.” “Not to kill us, just scare us off.”

  All of a sudden our debate was interrupted by the explosion of three grenades and flames rising from what once had been my faithful Atlantic. After that we heard the sound of cars racing away. We decided they had all gone, but that it would be better not to try to find out if they’d left anyone behind to check our movements.