The Dead Women of Juarez (19 page)

“I don’t want to disturb you,” Enrique said.

“You aren’t disturbing me. How did you know I was here? Did that
pendejo
Garcia send you?”

“Captain Garcia doesn’t know where I am. I took the day off.”

Enrique stood awkwardly by the door. Sevilla watched him until the heat of the cigarette nibbled at his fingertips. He put the butt out on the sole of his shoe. Enrique Palencia looked as though he had slept in his clothes not one night, but maybe two.

“You know, I can put up with almost all of it,” Sevilla told Enrique at last. “The things we do… I’ve done worse in my time. And I helped when old cops, wise cops, did terrible things to get at the truth. I’ve smelled the blood. I’ve had it on my hands. Now it’s your turn.”

The young cop didn’t answer. He moved into the kitchenette, crunching over broken glass and shattered dinnerware. He looked in the refrigerator where even the shelves were yanked loose. When he chanced a look in Sevilla’s direction, he never met his eyes.

Finally there was nothing else to inspect. Enrique stood with his hands awkwardly as his sides. Only then did he look Sevilla in the face. He was sweating. “I didn’t do that to him,” he said. “But I know who did.”

“
I
know who did,” Sevilla replied. “Oscar Garcia doesn’t believe anything he’s told if he hasn’t broken a bone to hear it.”

Enrique Palencia was silent.

“You were the one who called me,” Sevilla said.

“Yes.”

“You left the note.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to tell me why?”

“I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“You stood beside Garcia,” Sevilla said. “You didn’t tell him
no
. You didn’t tell him
stop
. How many times has it been?”

“You said yourself you’ve done the same,” Enrique returned.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Time doesn’t change anything.”

To this Sevilla could only nod.

Enrique was quiet a while. “It was too much.”

“It is too much,” Sevilla agreed. “Thank you. Now come and sit down.”

Sevilla waited while Enrique salvaged another half-shredded couch cushion. They sat at opposite ends of the little divan. Sevilla put another cigarette between his lips and offered Enrique one. Sevilla saw Enrique’s hands shake when he lit up.

They passed the time smoking without talking and after a while Enrique’s hands steadied. “It wasn’t enough to turn Estéban Salazar into a cripple, but he had to do the same to Kelly?” Sevilla asked then.

“No,” Enrique said. “He didn’t have any questions. That was why I couldn’t go with him. He made fun of me, but I wouldn’t do that.”

“He went to kill him,” Sevilla said. “Just like that? Of his own accord?”

“I don’t know. He went away for his dinner break and didn’t come back for a long time. I thought he’d gone home, but then he called and said he wanted me to stay late. He showed up after shift change.
He told me what he was going to do. ‘If he won’t talk, he won’t talk,’ he said. ‘What does it matter when we know he did it?’”

Sevilla considered using his shoe to stub out his cigarette again. He ground the butt into the carpet instead. It would have to be replaced anyway. Enrique sat with his own butt cradled in two hands across his knees, slumped forward and staring into the rising smoke as if memory were there. He said nothing else.

“Why tell me these things?” Sevilla asked.

Enrique stirred. He dropped his butt on the floor reluctantly, crushed it with hesitation. He spoke to his empty hands. “Captain Garcia said the American was your friend.”

Sevilla didn’t correct him. He was unsure what Kelly was to him. Once he’d told Kelly he respected him and that was true. Now Kelly was…

“You think that makes a difference?” Sevilla said. “All cops have friends. We don’t tell tales on each other.”

“I’m not telling tales!” Enrique returned. He looked up sharply and his back went tense. Sevilla saw anger and hurt in the young cop’s eyes. “This is what happened!”

“I believe you. Calm down,” Sevilla said, and he put his hands up. “But people will wonder why you come to me, friend or no friend. Ask Garcia and he’ll tell you that I deal with
narcos
and junkies, not killers. Why not go to Señora Quintero? Take it to the Procuraduría. Someone might even give you a medal for your honesty. But I doubt it.”

“This is a waste of time.”

Enrique moved to rise. Sevilla stopped him with a hand. “I didn’t say it was a waste of time. I only want to know why you care. Why you came to me.”

The tension fled from Enrique and he slumped back into the ruined couch. He put his hand over his eyes and breathed deeply and for a moment Sevilla thought that
now
he cried, but when the hand came away the young cop’s eyes were dry.

“Why did you come to me?” Sevilla asked again.

“I thought… I don’t know. I thought you would understand.”

“About Garcia.”

“About all of it. I didn’t join the police force to beat confessions out of innocent people. Because I don’t believe they did it. The American and Salazar. I don’t believe it.”

Sevilla nodded slowly. “And you think you and I, we can find out the truth when everyone else can’t?”

“I don’t know. Do you think so?”

Sevilla spread his hands. “You aren’t the only one without answers.”

“The way Garcia talks about you, I know he is jealous of you. He says they let you do your work without interfering. He says we could do so much more if the higher-ups simply got out of our way.”

“And let you get on with torturing people?”

Enrique looked at his shoes. “Yes.”

“Nobody with a conscience should be forced to work with La Bestia. You should count yourself lucky you still have one. He could have torn it out of you and ground it up. Then you wouldn’t have come to me, except maybe as a tool. A spy.”

“I’m not a spy.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I’ve already told you enough that there could be charges against Garcia. People turn a blind eye, but that’s only because no one speaks up. I could say something. Like you said, I was there.”

“Do you think anyone would believe you?”

“I wouldn’t know until I tried.”

“The mere fact that you would even think to put yourself through that says you’re either a fool or a romantic. Why should I burden myself with either?”

“You’ll need help.”

“What sort of help?” Sevilla asked.

“You are on the outside. I’m on the inside. You want a spy? I can be that for you.”

“To what benefit to yourself? There’s no glory here.”

“There’s no glory in beating a man’s head in, either.”

“It’s possible no one will even care,” Sevilla said. “You know how it is on the streets of Juárez these days. People are dying everywhere. Even the police aren’t safe. One more woman dies, this is nothing new.”

“What are you saying?”

“That is a very good question.”

“This is right,” Enrique said. “I want to do what’s right.”

“Now I
know
you’re a romantic. You might be useful, after all.”

“K
ELLY KEPT A NOTEBOOK, A
spiral
cuaderno
with a red cover. I’ve seen it here before, by the telephone,” Sevilla told Enrique. “It must have been collected. We’ll want to have a look at it.”

Enrique nosed around the shattered kitchenette, poking into cabinets with broken doors and occasionally lifting some ruined dinnerware with his toe to peer beneath. Sevilla felt the tension radiating from the young man, saw it in the way his shoulders hunched even when he played at being nonchalant. Enrique would have made a terrible boxer; he allowed too much of his mind to show in his body.

“You’ll need to get it,” Sevilla said.

“What’s in it?” Enrique asked.

“Kelly kept his life in that notebook: his accounts, his telephone numbers, his appointments. I have some things copied, but nothing so recent as could help us now. I want to see what he wrote during the time when Paloma died.”

For a moment Enrique disappeared into the bedroom. When he reemerged, he shook his head. “I’ve never heard of a drug addict who kept records before. No records that make sense, anyway.”

Sevilla rose from the couch. He felt his expression sour despite himself and he turned his face from Enrique. He did not want to show his mind, too. “If you think Kelly is just some American junkie, then why bother with him at all? Let them say he did it with Estéban and it all goes away. What’s one more dead woman
on the pile? It’s not like there’s not a hundred other things to worry about.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Understand this, then: I know Kelly. I spent a long time watching him, grooming him. The people who put this in motion against him, they saw him as a foreigner, a stranger. Foreigners have no one who knows them for who they are. These people, they didn’t expect someone like me. They thought Kelly was easy to make look guilty.”

“He was.”

Sevilla shook his head. “For some.”

“Even you,” Enrique insisted.

“At first,” Sevilla said, “but that was because I only listened with my head, and not my heart. What kind of men are we if we forget our hearts?”

S
EVILLA WAITED TEN MINUTES AFTER
Enrique was gone before leaving Kelly’s apartment. He went to his car and fished under the seat until his hand settled on the paper-wrapped neck of another bottle of Johnnie Walker. The temptation for a drink, even this early in the day, was strong, but Sevilla knew one swallow would lead to another and another until he was too spent even to drive.

The bottle went back where it came from. Two bottles in two days would be too much to excuse. Many men his age lived inside a glass of alcohol, their wits dulling as they aged into dust. Sevilla had never wanted to be such a man, not now and not before, and so the whisky would stay where it was for at least another day. Perhaps he’d forget about it and it would be a week before his thirst reminded him of what would make it all better.

He drove and while he drove he thought about Enrique Palencia.

Mostly Sevilla knew Enrique from Captain Garcia’s shadow. When state police worked with city police on drug-related matters there were often bodies involved. The
narcos
of the south honed their bloody-mindedness in Mexico City, the
narcos
of the west in Tijuana. Murder, not only drugs, was their major export. This they sold to their countrymen as eagerly as they dispensed to the Americans. Garcia was the sort of policeman Ciudad Juárez valued today: one whose expertise lay not in teasing apart layers of an investigation but in rendering them up in pieces.

Enrique lacked the hardness and flatness of Garcia, but these things would come in time. Juárez was a hard wind off the desert. Heat and sand and sheer force cut stone and sliced away the soft parts of a man until there was nothing left but sharp edges and an underlying brittleness that an unexpected blow could shatter. Garcia was expert with such blows.

Sevilla stopped at a light and watched a cluster of school-age girls dash across the walk from one curb to the next. A woman, maybe a teacher, followed them. Some carried boxes for lunch and the sight of these made Sevilla hungry. Eating was better than drinking himself into a stupor in the front seat of his car.

He drove a while longer, tracing a path that was half familiar from his time with Kelly and from the years before. In the early days when he was still getting to know Kelly, Sevilla walked the pavement well behind the man, observing but never from too close. Kelly had a wandering spirit and he was not afraid to go where the other Americans never went. At first this was because he was still in the grip of an addiction, but eventually because he had a taste for the city and its people. Sevilla thought Kelly might have made a good cop if things were very different.

Storefronts Sevilla recognized began to populate the streets. He knew a restaurant that served a hearty lunch for very little, a workingman’s place, and he navigated there without having to watch the street signs. Unconsciously he put his hand on the seat beside him, half-expecting to feel human warmth, but there was no one with him. This was not
their
drive anymore, but
his
drive.

He ate chicken and rice and tortillas in the shade of a faded orange awning. People passed his table close enough to touch and conversation bubbled up from the seats around him. From time to time Sevilla’s attention wandered to the offices across the street, the little dentist’s and the open door on the second floor.

Enrique would be back at the central station by now. It might take an hour or more for him to find Kelly’s notebook even if the rest went smoothly. Likely they wouldn’t meet again until tonight,
and even then they would have to be careful who saw them and what they were doing. Much as Sevilla would have to be careful when he finished his meal and crossed the street.

He left coins on the table for the young woman who cleaned up, wiped his mouth on his handkerchief and went back out into the sun. The weather took no holiday and offered no respite. Sevilla wilted in his suit. The temptation was always there to switch to something lighter, breezier, but the suit was important to him.

A suit was Sevilla’s armor. Like his badge and identification, it was also a shield. When people saw a man in a suit, they reacted differently, behaved differently and sometimes told more than they wanted to tell by virtue of their discomfiture. Even when the temperature climbed to over a hundred, Sevilla wore a suit because after all this time he couldn’t do his work without it.

Crossing the street, Sevilla reached the switchbacked steps and climbed them one at a time. The sun felt like a weight across his shoulders. This place had a familiar smell about it that prompted unwelcome memories. He shoved them aside, and by the time he reached the door of Mujeres Sin Voces he was composed fully.

The sound of hunt-and-peck typing came from inside. Sevilla rapped on the door frame and then peered through. A slight breeze followed him through the doorway and stirred the flyers on the walls. The woman at the desk stopped her work. For a moment Sevilla saw Paloma Salazar’s face. This was where they first met.