Authors: Roberto Bolaño
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary Collections, #Mystery & Detective, #Mexico, #Caribbean & Latin American, #Cold Cases (Criminal Investigation), #Crime, #Literary, #Young Women, #Missing Persons, #General, #Women
The
show with Florita Almada and the women from the WSDP was seen by many people.
Elvira Campos, the director of the Santa Teresa psychiatric hospital, saw it
and mentioned it to Juan de Dios
who hadn't seen it. Don Pedro Rengifo, Lalo Cura's old boss, who almost never
left his ranch outside of Santa Teresa, saw it too, but he didn't discuss it
with anyone, even though his right-hand man, Pat O'Bannion, was sitting next to
him. El Tequila, one of Klaus Haas's friends, saw it in the Santa Teresa
penitentiary and mentioned it to Haas, but Haas shrugged it off. It doesn't
matter what those old bitches say or think, he said. The killer keeps killing
and I'm locked up.
That's
an
incontrovertible fact. Someone should consider
that
and draw
conclusions.
That
same night, in bed in his cell, Haas said: the killer is on the outside and I'm
on the inside. But someone worse than me and worse than the killer is coming to
this motherfucking city. Do you hear his footsteps getting closer? Do you hear
them? Shut the fuck up,
guero,
said
Farfan from his cot. Haas was quiet.
The first week of April the
body of another dead woman was found on the open ground east of the old rail
sheds. The dead woman had no identification on her except for a card without a
photograph certifying her as a worker at the maquiladora Dutch&Rhodes, in
the name of Sagrario Baeza Lopez. She had been stabbed several times, and
evidence of rape was present. She was approximately twenty years old. When the
police visited the offices of Dutch&Rhodes, it turned out that Sagrario
Baeza Lopez was alive. Upon being questioned, she stated that she didn't know
the dead woman, had never even seen her before. She'd lost her card at least
six months ago. And, finally, she led an orderly life, devoted to her job and
her family, with whom she lived in Colonia Carranza, and she'd never had
trouble with the law, which was confirmed by some of her coworkers. And in
fact, a record was found in the Dutch&Rhodes files of the exact date when
Sagrario Baeza had been issued a new card, with the warning to be more careful
and not lose it again. What was the dead woman doing with someone else's work
ID? wondered Inspector Efrain Bustelo. For a few days the Dutch&Rhodes
employees were questioned, in case the dead woman was another worker at the
company, but the women who'd left didn't match the dead woman's physical
description. Three workers, ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty, had
chosen to cross over into the
States
been fired for trying to start a union. The case was quietly closed.
The
last week in April another dead woman was found. According to the medical
examiner, before she died she had been beaten all over. The cause of death,
however, was strangulation and a fracture of the hyoid bone. The body was found
in the desert, some fifty yards from a secondary road that headed east, toward
the mountains, in a place where it wasn't unusual to see small drug planes
land. The case was handled by Angel Fernandez. The dead woman wasn't carrying
identification and her disappearance hadn't been reported at any Santa Teresa
police station. Her picture wasn't published in the papers, even though the
police supplied photographs of her mutilated face to
El Heraldo
and
La
Trihuna de Santa Teresa.
In May 1996, no more bodies of
women were found. Lalo Cura took part in an auto theft investigation, which
ended in five arrests. Epifanio Galindo went to visit Haas in prison. Their
conversation was brief. The mayor of Santa Teresa announced to the press that
the city could relax, the killer was behind bars and the subsequent killings of
women were the work of common criminals. Juan de Dios
robbery. In two days he apprehended the guilty parties. In the Santa Teresa
penitentiary a twenty-one-year-old prisoner held in preventive custody
committed suicide. The American consul Conan Mitchell went hunting at a ranch
owned by businessman Conrado Padilla in the foothills of the Sierra. Also
present were his friends, university rector Pablo Negrete and banker Juan
Salazar Crespo, and a third individual no one knew, a fat, short man with red
hair, named Rene Alvarado, who didn't spend a single day hunting with them
because he said guns made him nervous and what's more he had a heart condition.
This Rene Alvarado was from
morning, when they went out to hunt, Alvarado wrapped himself up in a blanket
and sat on the terrace, facing the mountains, always with a book.
In June a dancer at the bar El
Pelicano was killed. According to eyewitnesses, she was in the lounge, dancing
half clothed, when her husband, Julian Centeno, came in, and without exchanging
a word with the victim, fired four bullets into her. The dancer, known as Paula
or Paulina, although at other bars in Santa Teresa she went by the name Norma,
collapsed and never recovered consciousness, although two of the other dancers
tried to revive her. By the time the ambulance appeared she was dead. The case
was handled by Inspector Ortiz Rebolledo. Before dawn he was at Julian
Centeno's residence, which was deserted and exhibited clear signs of a hasty
flight. Julian Centeno was forty-eight, and the dancer, according to the girls
she worked with, was no more than twenty-three. He was from
to
few years ago. According to the dancer herself, they were legally married. At
first, no one could say what Paula or Paulina's last name was. At her small,
sparsely furnished apartment at 79 Calle Lorenzo Covarrubias in Colonia
Madero-Norte, no documents were found that might clear up the identity of the
victim. There was a chance Centeno had burned them, but Ortiz Rebolledo
inclined toward the possibility that the woman called Paulina had lived the
last few years without a single document testifying to her existence, which
wasn't uncommon among showgirls and whores with no fixed address. But a fax
from the Mexico City Police Identification Bureau informed them that Paulina's
real name was Paula Sanchez Garces. Her record showed that she had been
arrested several times for prostitution, a line of work she seemed to have
pursued from the age of fifteen. According to her friends at El Pelicano, the
victim had recently fallen in love with a client, a man they knew only by his
first name, and she was planning to leave Centeno to live with him. The search
for Centeno was fruitless.
A few days after the murder of
Paula Sanchez Garces, the body of a girl of about seventeen, five foot seven,
long hair, and slight build, appeared by the Casas Negras highway. She had been
stabbed three times, and there were abrasions on her wrists and ankles and
marks on her neck. The cause of death, according to the medical examiner, was
one of the stab wounds. She was dressed in a red T-shirt, white bra, black
panties, and red high heels. She wasn't wearing pants or a skirt. After vaginal
and anal swabs were taken, it was concluded that the victim had been raped.
Later, one of the medical examiner's assistants discovered that the shoes the
victim was wearing were at least two sizes too big for her. No identification
of any kind was found, and the case was closed.
At
the end of June, the body of another woman, approximately twenty-one, was found
on the way out of Colonia El Cerezal, near the Pueblo Azul highway. The body
was literally riddled with knife wounds. Later the medical examiner would count
twenty-seven, superficial and severe. The day after the discovery of the body,
the parents of Ana Hernandez Cecilio, seventeen, visited the police station and
identified the dead woman as their daughter, who had disappeared a week before.
Three days later, however, when the presumed Ana Hernandez Cecilio had already
been buried in the Santa Teresa cemetery, the real Ana Hernandez Cecilio showed
up at the police station, saying she had run away with
her
boyfriend. The two of them still lived in Santa Teresa, in Colonia San
Bartolome, and both worked at a maquiladora in Arsenio Farrell industrial park.
Ana Hernandez's parents corroborated their daughter's statement. Then an
exhumation order was issued for the body found on the Pueblo Azul highway and
the investigation continued, under the direction of Inspector Juan de Dios
Angel Fernandez and Epifanio Galindo of the Santa Teresa police. The latter
occupied himself walking around Colonia Maytorena and Colonia Cerezal,
accompanied by an old shopkeeper who had been a policeman. That was how he
learned that a man named Arturo Olivarez had been abandoned by his wife. The
strange thing was that the woman hadn't taken her children, a two-year-old boy
and a girl just a few months old. While they were following other leads,
Epifanio asked the ex-cop shopkeeper to keep him informed of Olivarez's
movements. This led to the discovery that the suspect was occasionally visited
by a man by the name of
who turned out to be a first cousin of Olivarez.
side of Santa Teresa and had no known occupation. Until a month ago, he had
hardly ever been seen in Colonia Maytorena.
witnesses were found who said they had seen him come home with bloodstains on
his shirt. The witnesses were
neighbors, and they weren't on the best of terms with him.
for the dogfights held in a few yards in Colonia Aurora. Juan de Dios
didn't find anything to implicate him directly in the killing of the woman
discovered by the Pueblo Azul highway. They asked a cop who kept fighting dogs
whether he knew
The cop said he did. They assigned him to watch
that lately
someone, said Angel Fernandez. They shadowed
his cousin. Epifanio Galindo shadowed Olivarez. He discovered that he was
selling off the house's furnishings. Olivarez plans to skip town, said
Epifanio. On Sundays Olivarez played soccer with a neighborhood team. The
soccer field was on a lot near the Pueblo Azul highway. When Olivarez saw the
policemen approaching, two in plain clothes and three in uniform, he stopped
playing and waited for them on the field, as if it were a mental space that
would protect him from harm. Epifanio asked him his name and handcuffed him.
Olivarez didn't put up a fight. The other players and some thirty spectators
watching the match were paralyzed. The silence, Epifanio would tell Lalo Cura
that night, was total. The policeman pointed to the desert that stretched off
on the other side of the road and asked if he had killed her there or at home.
It was there, said Olivarez. The children were with the wife of a friend of
Olivarez's, who watched them on Sundays when he played soccer. Did you do it
alone or did your cousin help? He helped, said Olivarez, but not much.
Every life, Epifanio said that
night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That
depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo
Cura. Say you're shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don't hear
the motherfucker come up behind you, then you're off to the next world, no
pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the
back of the head?
The
dead woman's name was Erica Mendoza. She was the mother of two young children.
She was twenty-one. Her husband, Arturo Olivarez, was a jealous man and often
hit her. The night Olivarez decided to kill her he was drunk and his cousin was
with him. They were watching a soccer game on TV and talking about sports and women.
Erica Mendoza wasn't watching TV because she was cooking. The children were
asleep. Suddenly Olivarez stood up, got a knife, and asked his cousin to come
with him. The two of them led Erica to the other side of the Pueblo Azul
highway. According to Olivarez, she didn't protest at first. Then they made
their way into the desert and proceeded to rape her. First Olivarez raped her.
Then he ordered his cousin to rape her too, which his cousin refused to do at
first. Olivarez's manner, however, convinced him that opposition could be
fatal. After the two of them had raped her, Olivarez attacked his wife with the
knife, stabbing her over and over. Then, with their hands, they dug a hole,
inadequate by any measure, and that was where they left the body. On the way
back to the house, Segovia was afraid Olivarez would come after him or the
children, but it was as if Olivarez had been freed of a weight and he seemed
relaxed, or at least as relaxed as the circumstances permitted. They went back
to watching TV
and then they had dinner and three hours
later
forty-five minutes to Colonia Madero, where he waited half an hour for the
Avenida Madero-Avenida Carranza bus. He got off in Colonia Carranza and walked
north, crossing Colonia
was a straight shot to where he lived in Colonia San Bartolome. All in all,
more than four hours. By the time he got home the sun had come up, although
since it was Sunday there weren't many people on the streets. The happy ending
of the Erica Mendoza case earned the Santa Teresa police a modicum of trust in
the media.