No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels)

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “And go out in this fucking weather? You’re off your rocker.”

  “It’s raining like a son of a bitch,” said the upholsterer.

  “Who you calling a son of a bitch?” asked the plumber.

  “Suck me,” countered Carlos, displaying a small tack between his two front teeth and pointing with two fingers of one hand at his crotch.

  “Okay, so we flip a coin,” Héctor interrupted them.

  The last soft drink sat impassive and alone on the dust-covered desktop. It seemed to enjoy being the center of attention.

  “Whoever wins the soda goes for coffee,” offered Gilberto as a compromise.

  So that was it. They didn’t want the soda at all. They wanted him to go out for the coffee. Couple of shysters, thought Héctor.

  “I’ll have a café con leche and a couple of sweet rolls,” said the upholsterer.

  Héctor got up and roamed around the room, while Carlos went back to rhythmically tapping small tacks into an overstuffed armchair. He held the tacks in his mouth, transferring them one by one to the magnetized head of his hammer, then tapping them into the wood while he stretched the fabric tight with his other hand. Gilberto the plumber, on break for the last hour, sat watching from Héctor’s worn-out swivel chair, fascinated by the other craftsman’s art.

  “There’ll be cobwebs growing on that chair before I go out in this rain to get coffee for you guys. And anyway, the Chink who runs the place doesn’t let you take out the cups.”

  “That’s because you won’t leave a deposit,” said the plumber.

  Héctor dropped into the leather armchair they’d had since they first moved into the office. The springs bulged, the wood groaned.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you did a little work on this thing?” he asked Carlos.

  “Nope. I’m an anarchist,” said the bearded upholsterer enigmatically.

  Héctor stretched his arms over his head, feeling his fatigue, the sense of protection that the warm office gave him with the storm outside, letting himself go. He lit another cigarette.

  The office consisted of one large room with a scarred wood floor and dirty, cream-colored walls. A topless Meche Carreño looked out from one corner. A photo of Emiliano Zapata (an accusatory stare, on the verge of tears for the country that was slipping from his hands) hung over a dilapidated desk heaped with plumber’s tools and parts, lengths of rusty pipe, broken faucets. Héctor’s desk was surprisingly empty of papers, except for a single old newspaper that did triple duty as address book, notebook, and phone memo pad. El Gallo’s drawing table stood unoccupied, while a random assortment of furniture in various stages of disrepair filled every available bit of remaining space. The floor, unswept for at least a month, was a disaster area of dirt and dust, piles of sawdust, grease, and lumps of furniture stuffing.

  And, outside, the storm. The delicious, driving deluge that would shake him out of this impasse. Break the tie score in this weird opponentless match of the last two days.

  Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a private detective for strange and revolutionary reasons, was a rider on the storm. Or at least that’s what he decided to be on that rainy afternoon. He got up from the chair and announced: “You win. I’ll go get the coffee.”

  “Don’t put yourself out on my account,” said the plumber Gilberto Gómez Letras. “Heavy on the milk, two donuts.”

  “Here we go again,” said Carlos the upholsterer.

  Héctor put a green windbreaker over his sweater and tied the hood tight under his chin. He lit another cigarette.

  “Don’t you ever do any work?” he asked the plumber.

  “I’m, you know, I’m one of them whatchamacallits…”

  “What?”

  “You know, same as him,” he said, pointing at Carlos.

  “Anarchists,” smiled the upholsterer.

  It was raining hard enough to make anyone want to skip work, anarchist or no. Mud on the sidewalk, oily rainbows in the puddles. Passing cars threw huge, arching jets of water over the curb, covering store windows with a brownish torrent that was immediately washed away again by the dense unbroken waves of pounding rain.

  He jumped puddles, dodged a Volkswagen, and hurried through the door of the Chinese restaurant.

  “Don Jelónimo,” he said, imitating the proprietor’s Chinese accent. “Coffee for my two officemates.”

  The Chinaman shot him an unfriendly look. First, because he called him Jelónimo, and second, because he refused to pay a deposit on the coffee cups. Héctor sat in a booth next to a newspaper vendor come in out of the rain. He bought a copy of Ovaciones.

  “Want to go for a ride in the rain?”

  Héctor looked up from the headlines to find the woman with the ponytail standing before him in a bright red slicker, shiny with raindrops. He got up and followed her out, ignoring the Chinaman, who shouted after him to pay for the unclaimed coffee.

  They got into a red Renault. She started the engine without looking at him, and pulled out into the driving rain. The windshield wipers beat crazily back and forth. She turned on the radio. The deejay was explaining the difference between the blues and Dixieland. Then he introduced a piece by Mingus. Héctor looked at her out of the corner of his eye. What was it that connected him so strongly to this woman? They’d known each other for two years, since the beginning of Belascoarán’s career as a detective, when he was hunting down a strangler and she was searching for a spectacular way to die. Their love for each other came and went in waves, and neither of them could ever tell how long each new phase would last. They’d even lived together for brief periods of time, when they were both able to break through the shell of their highly valued solitude. A couple of months earlier, irresistibly attracted to each other’s aura of madness, they’d actually begun to entertain the possibility of a stable relationship. But it was too much for her, and she’d packed up and fled.

  The car turned onto Reforma at Morelos, throwing up a curtain of water on both sides.

  “How’s the rabbit?” she asked suddenly.

  “I like it,” answered Héctor.

  He took a cloth from the glove compartment and tried to wipe the steam off the windshield. The noise of the rain on the roof of the car made a good accompaniment to Mingus. Only a few cars could be seen driving along Reforma; it was as if the rest had been dissolved by the rain.

  “What are you working on these days?”

  “It’s a strange story…a guy dressed up like a Roman soldier in a movie shows up dead in my office bathroom. Then they send me a picture of another corpse, and a plane ticket to New York.”

  She smiled.

  “We’re going to have to stop seeing each other for a while,” she said.

  “We’re going to do what we always do, without ever agreeing on anything, and if we’re lucky it’ll turn out all right in the end,” he said.

  As they rounded the traffic circle at the Ángel de la Independencia, another car swerved in front of the Renault, forcing the woman with the ponytail to cut the wheel sharply, and sending them skidding across the flooded avenue.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, dropping down into second before picking up speed again.

  “Take it easy, I think that was on purpose,” said Héctor, taking out his gun and holding it between his legs.

  “Don’t be paranoid, detective. It’s just some asshole who doesn’t know how to drive in the rain. He wants to show how macho he is. Only problem is he doesn’t know who he’s fooling with.”

  She accelerated behind the other car, made as though she were going to pass on the left, then put her foot to the floor and darted past them on the right side, with her hand on the horn.

  A second later, a bullet shattered the driver’s-side rear window.

  “Who’s paranoid now?” said Héctor.

  “Take it easy, detective, it’s just some macho Mexican trying to get his frustrations out.”

  Héctor tried to look back through the steamed-up rear window. Rain fell on
the back seat.

  “What kind of car were they driving? How many were there?”

  “Two, I think.”

  “Did you see their faces?”

  “You think I could see anything in this rain? It was an old Ford.”

  She pushed the car faster and turned to the left at Sevilla. Héctor turned to see if he could spot the Ford behind them. It followed thirty yards back, a faded yellow Ford.

  “Still there?” she asked.

  “A yellow Ford?”

  “That’s them.”

  She crossed Chapultepec at the yellow light, then pulled over to the side and stopped.

  “What do you want to do, lose them or find them?” she asked.

  “I’d like to follow them.”

  “That’s not going to be easy. They’ll recognize our car.”

  “Then—”

  “Let me at least put a little scare into them,” she said.

  “Oh, swell. Nothing like going for a nice drive on a rainy day.”

  The woman with the ponytail smiled. “You’re the detective. Me, I like to drive. They can cut me off or drive me off the road, but nobody shoots at me.”

  She pulled out just as the light turned green at the intersection behind them, then turned onto Durango, watching for the yellow Ford to appear in her rear-view mirror before picking up speed.

  At Sonora, she slammed on the breaks, skidding, and then pulled into a parking lot. She threw the car into reverse and turned around. At sixty miles per hour she headed the wrong way down Durango straight at the yellow Ford.

  “What the hell are you doing?” shouted Héctor. “We’re going to hit them head on.”

  “How much you want to bet they chicken out first?” she said with a grin. She smashed her foot down on the accelerator pedal even harder.

  The driver of the yellow Ford suddenly saw the Renault speeding toward him. In desperation, he spun the wheel to the side and ran the car onto the median strip and into a palm tree.

  The Renault went by with its horn blaring.

  There were two of them. And they were scared to death, thought Héctor.

  “That’s why I love you. Because you’re crazy,” he said.

  “I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a while.”

  “I could use a good driver like you,” said the detective.

  “Whenever you want.”

  Héctor stretched out his hand and placed it on her leg, her black jeans.

  “It’ll never work out, detective,” she said.

  “Didn’t we know that all along?”

  The woman with the ponytail pointed the car toward the Colonia Roma. It was around eleven at night when the red Renault stopped in front of Héctor’s office. The detective caressed her face once and got out.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come and sleep at my place?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got some stuff to do here, and later on I’ve got to go over to the Fuente de Venus.”

  She smiled. It had stopped raining. The street was full of puddles and mud and wet newspapers.

  Héctor went up in the elevator, thinking that he’d never made it back with the donuts and coffee. They’d never let him live it down, either.

  El Gallo was at work at his drawing table.

  “Did Gilberto and Carlos go home?”

  “They left you a note under that bottle of soda.”

  The note said that the bottle had been poisoned with “the stuff plumbers use to unclog drains.”

  Héctor took the bottle and opened it with the barrel of his .45.

  “Very cool,” said El Gallo, with admiration.

  Héctor drank the soda with gusto.

  “Have you ever driven at seventy-five miles an hour the wrong way down a street head on at another car?”

  “What did the other car do?”

  “Swerved into a palm tree.”

  “They must have been shitting in their pants.”

  “Well, I couldn’t exactly see from where I was sitting, but I’d say it’d be a good bet they had their assholes shrunk up to about this big,” said the detective, holding up his hand to make a tiny space between his index finger and his thumb.

  He kicked off his shoes and went over to the window. The street was deserted.

  “If I go to sleep, will you wake me up when you leave in the morning?”

  “Is six o’clock all right?”

  “Perfect,” said the detective, collapsing into the armchair.

  So now they wanted to kill him too, or at least scare him off. And he’d never made it back with the coffee and donuts for Gilberto and Carlos, and she drives better than the Rodríguez brothers ever did—before they crashed—he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Six

  An Intimate Portrait of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne’s Three Officemates

  First examine the neighborhood

  before you choose your dwelling.

  —Chinese Proverb

  BASIC FACTS

  Gilberto Gómez Letras has the unpleasant habit of picking his nose with the little finger of his right hand. Since his hands are usually covered with grease, he carries the mark of his vice on his cheek.

  Carlos Vargas, the upholsterer, made First Communion three times, because “each time they gave you a suit and a pair of shoes.”

  When El Gallo Villareal was fifteen, he had a girlfriend who died in the same plane crash that killed Institutional Revolutionary Party chairman Carlos Madrazo and the tennis star Rafael Osuna.

  Gilberto was expelled from the third grade (at the Aquiles Serdán School in the Colonia Álamos) for stealing the faucet handles from the girls’ rest room and the toilet floats from the faculty rest room.

  For two full years Carlos the upholsterer lived surrounded by television sets, car stereos, washing machines, console stereos, and refrigerators, all bought from door-to-door salesmen on the installment plan. He didn’t have any furniture, but his house was full of electrical appliances and gadgets, “so as not to feel any worse off than the next son of a bitch.”

  Sometimes (on rainy afternoons) El Gallo takes in a triple feature at some small neighborhood movie house, preferably Tarzan films or Westerns. He doesn’t buy any sandwiches or popcorn or soda, he just sits there and watches the whole six and a half hours without ever taking his eyes off the screen.

  Gilberto was born in Michoacán and came to live in Mexico City when he was six.

  Carlos Vargas was born in Mexico City, in the Colonia Morelos, near Tepito.

  El Gallo was born in Chihuahua and came to Mexico City for the first time when he received a scholarship to study engineering at the Politécnico.

  Famous Sayings

  If they’re going to suck me off tomorrow, they might as well go ahead and suck me off today. —Carlos Vargas

  Any rational evaluation of the future efficiency of the work in question must not fail to consider the fact that the supervising engineer was eating a chicken and mole sandwich when he drew up the original plans; the resulting dark stain (see grid 161-b) is without a doubt the reason why the toilets frequently overflow in the Colonia Aviación Civil. —Javier Villareal, civil engineer (from a report that once cost him his job)

  The best taquerías are always run by guys who get laid a lot. Don’t ask me why, some things you just can’t explain. —Gilberto Gómez Letras

  Guadalajara en un llano, and around here we just take it in the rear. —Carlos Vargas

  I’d better do it the way I told you because that’s the way I thought it, and I only think things once, because afterward they just kind of slip my mind. —Gilberto Gómez Letras (from a telephone conversation with a customer about a broken pipe)

  Lucky for you I’m as slow as I am. Otherwise I’d already have been married, gotten divorced, turned queer, gone straight again, and remarried. —Javier Villareal (from a conversation with his girlfriend)

  To succeed in life you don’t necessarily have to have a big dick. But you do
need some decent clothes, for instance. —Gilberto Gómez Letras

  Basic Facts

  When Gilberto picks his nose, he turns his finger back and forth in a circular motion, with a certain expertise peculiar to the task. The result of his labors is then rolled into a ball and flicked into a corner of the room.

  Carlos Vargas has pictures from each of his three first Communions.

  El Gallo Villareal still has a letter from his girlfriend from when he was fifteen, the one in the plane crash.

  Gilberto keeps his money in a giant piggy bank shaped like a professional wrestler. When he fills up three of them, he plans to buy himself a piece of land out by El Molinito. This is the third time he’s started saving, after first winning the wrestler-piggy banks at a local street fair. The other two times he had to break them open before he’d filled all three. The first time was to pay for his mother’s funeral, and the second time was when he ran off to Veracruz for a week with a couple of prostitutes. The wrestler (with yellow mask and cape) sits on top of his television set, where his children treat it with a greater reverence than the various religious images with which it shares that pedestal.

  A year ago Carlos Vargas tried to get a job at the Ford auto plant near Mexico City. He’d heard that they paid a good wage in the seat upholstery section, and he was attracted by the security of a steady job, the benefits, and the idea of a whole factoryful of workers (sometimes he gets bored working alone). And he was excited about the chance to do some union organizing. He passed all the tests, but he couldn’t fool the company psychologist, who detected in him something out of the ordinary: a mixture of stubborn nonconformism and authentic professional pride. He couldn’t picture him as a docile cog on the assembly line, so he decided to reject his application, even though there was no objective reason to do so.

  El Gallo Villareal has a sweet roll and a soda pop for breakfast every day. For El Gallo, the introduction of canned soda pop was an extraordinary technological advance, allowing him to eat his breakfast while he walks home from work. He leaves the office around seven in the morning and walks the streets of the city center with a bagful of sweet rolls in one hand and a can of Pepsi in the other. He likes to stop in front of the twin churches of La Santa Veracruz, where he finishes his breakfast surrounded by pigeons. He gives the crumbs to the pigeons and then takes the bus home to the Colonia San Rafael.