Hungry Ghosts (18 page)

35

As soon as Inspector Ramirez hung
his jacket on the back of his chair, Detective Fernando Espinoza walked through his doorway.

“Good. You're back.” Espinoza held a piece of paper, grinning. “I wasn't sure if you'd be working again this evening. I think I found something.” The young detective's eyes were rimmed with red from reading through stacks of missing person reports. “There was a woman who disappeared two weeks ago. She was reported missing by her husband on February 16. She's twenty-one. Brown hair, brown eyes. She was wearing silver earrings. Her name is LaNeva Otero.”

Espinoza handed Ramirez the report. “The husband, Juan Otero, gave an address on Pedro Perez, but it's not in the system. And Inspector, I checked our records. Señora Otero received two
cartas de advertencia
last year
.
” The warning letters were given to prostitutes to tell them they could be fined or sent to rehabilitation camps
if they didn't reform. “She was deported to Santiago in January after she was stopped a third time for prostitution.”

“It looks like she came back,” said Ramirez, and reached for his jacket.

Pedro Perez was a well-treed boulevard in Carraguao, not far from the baseball stadium. The Great Stadium del Cerro was known for its grass turf. All the major baseball games in Havana were held there, as well as concerts, soccer matches, even a bullfight once. But its roof was falling apart and the floodlights no longer worked.

Cerro, the neighbourhood around the stadium, was a busy spot for the police, the centre of the local crack cocaine trade as well as prostitution.

Ramirez steered skillfully around huge potholes that threatened to engulf his small car while Espinoza watched for the address. The dead woman sat in the back seat, gripping her cigarette nervously. When they found it, Ramirez parked beside the cracked curb. He and Espinoza climbed out. The dead woman followed.

No laundry hung from the building's windows. No televisions flickered on the balconies. Doors and shutters hung askew. The building looked abandoned.

“Maybe it's been condemned,” said Espinoza, looking up. “If it hasn't, it should be.”

“It and every other building around here,” said Ramirez. “Let's start on the top floor and work our way down. But be careful. We want to come down the stairs, not through them.”

Ramirez, Espinoza, and the ghost walked up the rotted staircase to the third floor. They rapped on each of the scarred doors, making their way down the hallway. No one responded. They moved carefully, avoiding loose floorboards, stepping around gaps. Finally they
knocked on a door that creaked open. A young man peered around the door frame. He was black, perhaps in his twenties, with a flat stomach and strong arms.

“Señor Otero?” said Ramirez. “You filed a missing person report?” He produced his badge.

“Are you here about LaNeva?” the man asked, trembling.

“May we come in?”

Otero nodded, and Ramirez and Espinoza entered the apartment. All the windows were cracked. Ramirez looked around the unit as his eyes adjusted to the light.

There was a stained mattress and pillow lying on the floor. The kitchen was a tiny space with two rickety wooden chairs and a small table on which an ancient television rested. It wasn't plugged in; it was obvious that there was no electricity. A shelf held a battered metal bowl. There were no signs of children, no small clothes, no toys. For that, Ramirez was grateful.

The apartment bore signs of a man unaccustomed to living alone. Dirty clothes littered the floor. A broken mirror hung crookedly on the wall. A framed photograph of a woman lay on the ground, its glass shattered. Ramirez made a mental note of the hole in the wall where he guessed the photograph had hung, about three feet from the mirror.

“May I see your
carnet
?” he asked.

Otero produced his identity card. Ramirez turned it over. The address on the back was for Holguín province instead of Havana. Ramirez didn't comment on this illegality and handed it back. “When was the last time you saw your wife, Señor?”

“On February 15. She left around seven that night to go to work. I reported her missing the following afternoon.”

“Why wait until then?” said Espinoza, pulling his notebook out of his pocket.

“She often stayed out late.” Otero hesitated. “She was sometimes gone overnight.”

“What did she do for a living?” asked Ramirez. He wasn't sure if Otero would answer truthfully. Prostitution within their own families was something Cuban men didn't like to acknowledge. Most were uncomfortable with the idea of women as primary breadwinners, although mothers urged their young daughters to grow up pretty so they could meet foreigners. He thought of his little daughter, Estella, and hoped the day wouldn't come where she'd have to sell her body to strangers to get by. He looked at the ghost; she shrugged her shoulders as if to say it hadn't been her first choice either.

“Is LaNeva all right?” Otero asked. He twisted the bottom of his T-shirt in his fingers.

“Señor, answer the inspector's question,” said Espinoza. “Where did she work?”

Otero took a deep breath. “She was a waitress at El Bosquecito. She didn't tell me much about it. She said she didn't want to get me in trouble if she was arrested.”

“Arrested for what?” said Espinoza.

“This apartment wasn't assigned to anyone. Will you report me? They'll send me back to Holguín. There's no work there.”

The young man had abruptly changed the subject. This caught Ramirez's attention; it was often a sign of guilt.

“We're not concerned with your housing arrangements, Señor,” said Ramirez. “We're here about your wife. Did she have another address in Havana? Somewhere else she might stay?”

Otero shook his head. “No. After we got married, we lived with one of her relatives, but her building was declared dangerous to public health; it was built on top of a garbage dump. We have to be processed to work in Havana, but neither of us can work without a residency card. We heard this building was empty and moved in. We had nowhere else to go; we had no money.”

Ramirez nodded. Regulations required that each resident have a permanent home, but living in a building declared uninhabitable
didn't qualify. The fee for a residency card was one hundred convertible pesos, more for the bribe. That was six months' salary for most Cubans—impossible to obtain if one couldn't work legally.

They must have been desperate, thought Ramirez. Without residency cards, they couldn't get food legally either. The
libreta
, the coupon book that allowed Cubans to purchase rations, could only be used at the bodega that served one's official residence.

The rules were intended to prevent overcrowding, but instead tens of thousands of Cubans who came to Havana looking for work were declared illegal immigrants and deported from their own capital. Otero was clearly afraid of becoming one of them.

“How could her employer pay her if she didn't have a card?” said Espinoza.

Good question, thought Ramirez. And probably the reason LaNeva Otero feared arrest. She would be in more trouble for working illegally than for being a
jinetera
. Working without a residency card was a serious crime.

Otero hesitated. “They didn't give her money. They let her keep the food the tourists left on their plates. That's how we got by.”

“Did she ever bring home fruit?” Ramirez asked.

“Sometimes. Overripe bananas mostly. Once, a pineapple.”

“What about apples?”

Otero shook his head. “I would have remembered that. Why do you ask?”

Ramirez didn't respond. If LaNeva Otero was dead, her husband could be responsible. As an investigator, it was best to keep one's cards close to one's chest in these situations. “Do you have a photograph of your wife, Señor?”

Otero gestured to the picture on the floor. Ramirez bent down and picked it up. He held it in front of him, squinting to see the photograph in the dim light. The dead woman stood beside him. She wiped tears away with her fingers.

From her complexion in the picture, LaNeva Otero appeared
to be
javao
. She was leaning against an old Chevy with raised fins, holding a bouquet of white flowers. She wore a white wedding dress.

The ghost smiled through her tears and shook her head slightly. Ramirez understood: LaNeva was no virgin.

“Can we take this for our investigation?” Ramirez asked. “I promise to return it.”

Otero nodded. “Where is LaNeva? Have you found her?”

“Maybe,” said Ramirez. “But if it is her, Señor Otero, I am afraid we have very bad news.”

The excitement in Detective Espinoza's voice mounted as they drove back to police headquarters. Ramirez kept casting his eyes to the back seat, but there was no sign of the female ghost, and the male ghost had disappeared once Ramirez had banished him at the ministry.

“If she worked at El Bosquecito, she could have met her clients there,” said Espinoza. “It's a popular tourist hangout.”

The Little Forest Bar. It was like the Grimms' fairy tales, thought Ramirez. Everything bad happened in the forest. “We need to be sure it's her this time,” said Ramirez. “Talk to the employees as well as the manager. They're more likely to tell the truth if they find out she's missing. Tell them we're not interested in charging them, only in finding LaNeva alive. If she was there on the fifteenth, we need to know what time she left and if she left alone. And let's make sure she wasn't arrested in a sweep.”

Jineteras
could be jailed for months before anyone knew they were there. Even the police could have a hard time tracking them through the rehabilitation camps.

“I'll check to see if Juan Otero has a criminal record as well,” said Espinoza.

“Good idea,” Ramirez agreed. Most murders were domestic.
People who cared for each other were the most likely to kill each other.

“Shall I have Patrol bring Señor Otero to the morgue to identify the body?”

“I'm not sure anyone can,” said Ramirez, recalling the condition of the remains. “But he might recognize the purse.”

Ramirez dropped Espinoza off at police headquarters and drove home. He parked his car down the street from his apartment and stopped at a food stall for a
cucurucho
. It was a treat made from coconut, orange, papaya, and honey; the first thing he'd eaten all day.

Ramirez wished Francesca was home to cook him a late dinner. She could make rice and beans taste special. She could make even plantains delicious, sometimes thinly slicing the green ones and frying them into wafers, or mashing the black, ripe ones and serving them with crispy pork rinds.

She prepared punched plantains—
plátanos a puñetazos—
by smashing them hard with the side of her fist before she returned them to the stove. The thought of his wife's unbridled aggression towards harmless vegetables made Ramirez smile.