“Merlín, I have to ask you to bury my rabbit for me.”
“What rabbit?”
“The one that’s lying dead on my living room rug.”
“A rabbit rabbit?”
“That’s right.”
“Whatever you say.”
“I might not be back for a few days…If I don’t come back, I want you to have my books on the Spanish Civil War. They’re on the bookshelf in the hallway. I inherited them from my father.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” the old man said, smiling, and waving good-bye with the hammer.
***
He parked the car in the woods, at a place where the pine trees thinned out a bit. He took out his automatic. The sun filtered through the treetops, glinting first off the driver’s-side mirror, then off the bluish metal of the gun. The distant hum of cars on the highway mixed with the trill of a few birds and the soft whistle of wind in the branches. He unlocked the trunk and the lid swung up by itself, squeaking. The hunched form inside appeared to be dead. Héctor took a step back, aimed the gun, and waited. There was no movement.
“I’ll count to ten, then I start shooting.”
The man lay motionless, hunched over, a spot of dry blood at his temple, his mouth open.
“One…two…three…four…five…six…”
“Wait. Just give me a second. I feel like crap.”
He raised himself slowly, supporting his weight on the lip of the trunk.
“My dear Porfirio, you’re in a whole lot of deep shit,” said the detective.
The man stared at him. There was fear in his eyes, but in his mouth, in the hard set of his jaw, there was only the desire to kill.
“First of all, your two friends are dead. I don’t care if I have to kill four or five of you people. You ought to know that by now. One more, it’s all the same to me. If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll probably let you go. I don’t get any thrill out of killing anyone…So you tell me. Are you going to cooperate or do I shoot you?”
The man looked at Héctor’s eyes, then at his gun, and back at his eyes.
“You can only see out of one eye.”
“I lost the other one in the war. But I’m a better shot this way. I don’t have to close my eye when I aim. It’s already closed, so to speak,” answered Héctor.
He was going to have to kill him if he wouldn’t talk. He didn’t give a damn about Agustín Porfirio Olvera. That’s one thing he’d learned over the last two days, that the lives of gunmen working for the forces of evil didn’t mean a thing to him. They might die ugly, with too much blood, but they weren’t worth crying over.
“Where do you work?”
“You already know. I’m a cop on the subway.”
“Who’s your immediate superior?”
“Commander Sánchez.”
“Are you part of the regular city police, or are you separate?”
“Separate. We get our papers through the city, but we work for the subway and the subway pays us.”
“How long have you worked there?”
“Since 1971.”
“Where’re you from?”
He looked at the detective for several seconds. For the first time he didn’t answer right away, as though the question took him by surprise.
“I was born in Pachuca, but we moved to Mexico City when I was a kid.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Married?”
He nodded.
“How many old ladies have you got?”
The man turned his head to the side and started to smile, but he caught himself, and instead brought his hand to the cut on his temple, hoping to win Héctor’s sympathy.
“There used to be this bunch of thugs that worked for the city, they’d drive around in pickup trucks without plates and hassle sidewalk vendors, throw their stuff on the ground, wreck their stands, steal stuff. You worked with them, didn’t you?”
“How’d you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
He looked older than twenty-nine, hardened, his narrow eyes rimmed with bags, his hair greasy.
“How much do you make?”
“Nine grand a month, plus bonuses.”
“What kind of bonuses?”
“For punctuality. And for special jobs.”
“Like what?”
“Like killing you.”
“How much were you supposed to get for that?”
“Twenty grand.”
“Apiece?”
“Between the three of us.”
“Who was paying?”
He didn’t answer. Héctor raised his gun and pointed, first at his chest, then at his left arm. If he didn’t soften him up now, he wouldn’t get any more out of him.
“I’m going to shoot you in the arm to start with. If I can’t soften you up now, I never will, and then I won’t find out what I need to know. If I shoot you in the arm, then the leg, and then if I shoot your toes off, pretty soon you’ll be counting the hairs in your boss’s asshole for me. Here goes…”
“Captain Estrella.”
“Commander Sánchez doesn’t have anything to do with it?”
“Sánchez is new. He’s not one of us.”
“Who’s us?”
“We all went in together in ’71.”
“When? Late summer?”
“Yeah, around then.”
“After the tenth of June.”
“Right.”
“When did they send you out to kill me?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Did you know the ones who got killed over on Bucareli?”
He nodded.
Héctor jumped from question to question without taking time to consider the answers, picking at him here and there, fishing for bits of information, trying to be random enough to keep the man off guard and telling the truth.
“How many of you got jobs as subway cops?”
“Thirty or forty.”
“And the rest?”
“Some of them got work as bodyguards, some of them went into the army, some of them went freelance, some of them went home. Some of them are dead.”
“Who’s behind Captain Estrella?”
“Beats me.”
“Did you train with Zorak?”
“Sure. He was a good guy. Everybody liked him.”
“Who killed Captain Freshie?”
“Must have been the Chink, the one who was with me this morning.”
“Did you know Captain Freshie?”
“He was one of Zorak’s guys.”
“What kind of training did Zorak give you?”
“Just physical fitness stuff. Exercises, martial arts.”
“Who killed Zorak?”
“Beats me.”
“Who killed Zorak’s other two friends, the Roman and the other guy?”
“The Chink. He was always good with a knife…Did you really kill him?”
Héctor nodded. He was getting tired. It almost seemed as though death couldn’t touch either of them, as if they wore their dead men on their chests like devout Catholics wear religious medallions. Just to demonstrate their faith.
“Do you have an office somewhere?”
“Who?”
“The subway police.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the Juanacatlán station. We report to Commander Sánchez in the morning and he tells us what we’re supposed to do.”
“What about Captain Estrella?”
“Him and Barrios, they give us the other jobs, the under-the-table stuff.”
“Does Sánchez know?”
“He ought to. He’s not that dumb.”
“Who got you the subway jobs?”
“Beats me. All they said was to show up at such and such a place on such and such a day, with a couple of photographs and this letter we’re going to give you, and that was it…”
“Did you carry a gun on the tenth of June?”
“Yes.”
“A rifle?”
“No, a pistol.”
“How many people did you shoot?”
“I only fired in the air.”
“When they told you to come after me, what did they say exactly?”
“They said that you’d killed Guzmán and the Panther and that you knew too much, that you could bring the whole thing about the tenth of June out into the open again.”
If he shot him in the leg to immobilize him, he’d bleed to death before anyone found him there in the middle of the Desierto de los Leones. If he let him go, he’d go tell his people things that Héctor didn’t want them to know just yet.
“Take off your clothes, Agustín Porfirio,” instructed the detective, pointing the gun at his head. “I’m going to do you a favor…Don’t worry, I won’t get you pregnant.”
“Go ahead and kill me, just don’t make fun of me,” said the man, as he loosened his wrinkled gray necktie.
***
Mendiola was out, but he’d left a manila envelope on his desk for the detective. Héctor tore the envelope open and sat down to read in the middle of the busy newsroom. Two sports photographers walked by, and a few desks away the entertainment editor flirted with someone on the telephone in a voice much louder than necessary.
The clippings in the envelopes told a simple story: Zorak had been hired by the developers of a new housing subdivision to appear during a special weekend promotion. Zorak was to perform various daredevil stunts and acts of magic, beginning with his arrival by helicopter. He would lower himself from the helicopter by a long cable attached to his wrist, then release the cable thirty feet above the ground and drop onto a pile of sand. The show had been advertised in the newspapers and sound cars had been announcing it for a week in the surrounding neighborhoods; there was a large turnout.
Around noon the helicopter flew into sight. Zorak lowered himself down on the cable but, about five hundred yards from the appointed spot, the helicopter rose violently upward and the cable snapped. Zorak fell at least two hundred feet onto one of the subdivision’s newly paved streets. He was dead by the time the Red Cross paramedics, on hand to treat the occasional case of heat shock, got to him. His wrist was badly abraded.
That was all. The clippings reported that the helicopter had hit an updraft, and the safety mechanism that connected Zorak’s wrist to the cable had broken under the sudden stress.
Héctor replaced the clippings in the envelope and scribbled a note of thanks to Mendiola.
***
He’d left the subway cop tied naked to a tree in the Desierto de los Leones. Now he had to ditch the red car and retrieve his sister’s VW. He called Elisa from a phone booth outside the newspaper and told her where to find her car, and what to say if the police should question her.
He gave her enough time to get to the Colonia Cuauhtémoc, then parked the red car a couple of blocks from the showgirl’s apartment and walked over to Reforma. From there he could see the door to the building and the VW parked where he’d left it. There was a squad car parked in front of the building, but the street itself was quiet and free of onlookers. It had probably been several hours already since they’d carted away the dead men. Elisa arrived in a taxi and got into her car without anyone stopping her. She pulled away from the curb, picked Héctor up at the corner, and he directed her to where he’d left the red car.
“I want you to follow me.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m going to set off some fireworks at the Juanacatlán subway station. Follow me. You’ll see.”
“You get me involved in the weirdest shit, Héctor.”
They drove in their separate cars for ten minutes. Héctor turned on the radio and tried to locate the twelve o’clock news on Radio 1000. He couldn’t get it to come in, and settled instead for a tropical music station, where the great Acerina and his amazing horns laid down some licks that would have turned the National Symphony green with envy.
He left the Circuito Interior and pulled into a gas station, where he bought a gallon of gasoline in a plastic jug.
He drove for another minute and then stopped the red car on Pedro Antonio de los Santos, directly in front of the Juanacatlán station. He splashed the gasoline all over the car’s interior. Elisa waited in the VW a hundred yards farther on. Héctor got out of the car, took a piece of rope left over from the trussing of the subway cop, soaked it in gasoline, and stuck one end into the car’s gas tank. It made a perfect fuse. This done, Héctor lit a cigarette, then touched his lighter to the end of the rope. He barely had time to run ten feet. The flame leaped the length of the gassoaked rope, and two seconds later the street was rocked by the explosion, the car consumed in a tremendous fireball. Héctor was thrown forward by a burst of superheated air filled with bits of burning debris. He raced down the block and jumped into his sister’s car.
“You’re such an extremist, Héctor. What’d you do, soak the whole thing in gasoline?”
“I don’t want to hear it. I almost blew myself up. Can we get out of here?”
Behind them, the burning car was drawing a crowd in front of the station entrance. Elisa pulled into the street.
“What’d you do that for?”
“To let them know that this is for real.”
“That what’s for real?”
“The war between the association of independent detectives and the forces of evil.”
“What’s the association of independent detectives?”
“Me. I’ve had to kill three men in the last two days.”
Elisa looked at him without speaking. Héctor stretched out in the car seat and let his head fall back.
“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.
***
They let him walk right into the studio, no questions asked. It seemed to be common practice to let clients, or those appearing to be clients, into the studio while a shoot was in progress. It was just another aspect of the place’s self-conscious air of sophistication, along with the casual stripteases performed by the models in the most unlikely places: behind a column, in the middle of the floor, in an overstuffed chair. That, and the bizarre accumulation of props that littered the three connecting studios: dismantled television sets, bolts of phosphorescent cloth, a motorcycle with sidecar, a row of plaster busts of Roman proconsuls, the bare skeletons of several wall clocks, a collection of stuffed birds, bottles of vermouth covered in colored wax…
“Let’s see some ass, sweetheart. This is pantyhose, not grape juice.”
“Give me more light here in front.”
“Where’s the wide angle, Rolando?”
“All right, let’s get both of them in there. You, with the tux, here on the left.”
Señorita S—Márgara Duran—had a wonderful pair of legs. (Maybe that was the secret: to advertise pantyhose, a pair of legs; to advertise watches, a beautiful wrist; to advertise sanatoriums for consumptives…) She looked tired. Héctor leaned against a wall and waited near a cluster of spotlights on tripods and stacks of boxes full of airline brochures.
“Rolando, I’m exhausted.”
“Just one more, darling. Got it.”
The woman slouched out of the circle of bright lights and walked toward Héctor.
“Márgara Duran?”
She looked at him curiously. She was only very slightly cross-eyed, and it gave her a certain youthful grace for a woman of around forty.
“I need to talk with you.”
“If you can wait a minute, we can go have coffee in the café on the corner.”
Héctor nodded. The woman started to take off her pantyhose.
“You look kind of tired yourself. You can wait for me there if you want.”
Héctor nodded.
“Go ahead, I’ll be there in ten minutes. Just give me a chance to get this makeup off.”
The café was empty. Three tables and a lunch counter, a few cakes inside a glass case. A handlettered sign on the wall said t
hey served fresh horchata.
Héctor held his head between his hands and returned to his thoughts: the same story as always, another man’s life, another man’s death. Killing. He felt off balance. You were supposed to have certain reactions to death, violent reactions. Human beings weren’t born to go around killing one another. Or were they? The question buried itself between his eyebrows and stayed there.
Did he like it? The power, the taste of power over another man’s life. The crucial accuracy in the moment of squeezing the trigger, his cold-bloodedness, quick reflexes, the unexpected advantage of having only one eye to aim with, oddly making him a better shot than he ever was before. Where had he learned to shoot like that?
“I’m sorry if I made you wait long.”
Héctor raised his head and looked at the woman.
“What would you like to drink?”
“You’ve got a bad eye too.”
“It’s a glass eye.”
“Accident?”
Héctor nodded.
“Who killed Zorak?”
The woman gave him a hard stare and her face changed. The youthful self-confidence of a model worn out after a ten-hour shoot gave way to the tense features of a mature woman exhausted by the brutal effects of the last six years of living.
“Are you a reporter?”
“An independent detective.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not a cop. I don’t buy or sell anything. I work alone. And I need to know because the same people who killed him want to kill me.”
“I know they killed him. I don’t know who did it, but I do know how. I could never prove anything, though. What for? Nobody cares.”
“The newspapers said that his wrist was badly abraded. That shows that it wasn’t a problem with the safety hookup. It was the helicopter…”
“I was there. I saw it happen. Captain Freshie talked with the pilot afterward. He said it was an updraft. But if that’s all it was, then why did they make such a big deal about the bad hook-up?”
“Who’s Captain Freshie?”
“One of my husband’s friends, from Durango. After he became famous, Captain Freshie showed up one day asking for work, and Zorak hired him as his bodyguard.”
“Why did he need a bodyguard?”
The woman didn’t answer.
“What about the old man, Leobardo? And the other one, the guy who owned the nightclub?”
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 9