Tequila Blue (16 page)

“What do you want from me?” he growled.

I stared at him for several moments, applying
the “Hernandez Method”, guaranteed to make anyone nervous.

“Look, Lizard,” I said, very coolly and calmly. “What with the crimes you and your friends have confessed to, plus any unresolved case some cop or other in Copilco decides to pin on you, you're looking at thirty to forty years in prison. Let's say it's thirty and that with good conduct you only have to spend twenty years inside. By the time you get out, you'll be forty-four years old. You'll be a walking ruin, with all your youth spent behind bars. Are you married?”

“. . .”

“I'm asking you whether you're married.”

“Yes.”

“What's going to happen to you wife in those twenty years?”

“. . .”

“You're right, it doesn't bear thinking about. We both know perfectly well what she can expect, husbandless for twenty years . . . If you want to lie to yourself, you can tell yourself every day that it's not your fault. You can tell that to the rapists and murderers you meet in the prison recreation yard. Do you have any children . . . ?”

“. . .”

“Not very talkative, are you?”

“Just one, he's two years old.”

“Congratulations. In five or six years perhaps you'll be able to decorate your cell with a photo of him working as a clown at a set of traffic lights.”

The Lizard clenched his fists, restraining himself
from launching himself at me and strangling me. I'd have liked him to try. I haven't been keeping up with my classes of boxing and karate so it would be good to get some of the rust off by using my hands and feet on a real opponent. But the Lizard was very weak, and his future looked grim enough without adding to it the charge of assaulting a police officer. So he gradually cooled down. Still full of loathing, he was tempted by curiosity and a glimmer of hope. He spat at me:

“Stop playing games! Finish with this shit and tell me what you want!”

“Fine. This is my offer: you get off scot-free in a case of legitimate self-defence. You'll be kept in remand while your case is being heard, and after that you're a free man. We guarantee it won't take more than a year and, of course, the verdict will be in your favour.”

No suspects trust the police, and it's not for me to say whether they're right or not. I wasn't expecting him to be any different. I went on:

“I'll swap all the charges against you, which include two rapes and an attempted murder, as well as a whole string of break-ins, GBHs and damage to property and so on, for a single one which with a few technical adjustments we could call self-defence.”

“Aha, so you're the cop from Copilco with an unresolved case he wants to pin on someone,” the Lizard said with a couple of ironic grins.

“Could be,” I said. “But to you it's worth it. And if it suits both of us, why not take advantage of it?”

“I need all the information.” The Lizard was beginning to feel like a crocodile. “And I still want to talk to my lawyer.”

“Who is your lawyer?”

“My wife is the one who talks to him. So I'll have to tell her, and to do that, you'll have to let me out of solitary.”

I'm a cop. I breakfast on bravado and lunch on psychological pressure. I handed him a pen and paper.

“Write down your lawyer's name. I promise I'll bring him here. You'll get out of solitary just as soon as we make a deal. Does your wife live at the address you gave?”

“Yes. They've already been and wrecked my apartment. You'd better ask – my wife may have been arrested too, and that'll save you a journey.”

“Don't get cute, Lizard. What's your wife's name?”

“Roxana Erika Ibarra.”

*

As I thought, for a female of the species to be adorned with names like that, she couldn't be more than twenty. Roxana Erika was tall and slim, with a beautiful but vulgar face to which a slight cast in one eye added a strange touch. She lived in an apartment in Colonia Doctores which seemed to be overflowing with objects, as the police had strewn everything all over the place in their search.

I had a word with the cop on guard and shut myself in a bedroom to talk to Roxana.

Roxana Erika was a typical neighbourhood girl whose mind had been fed by TV and women's magazines. She had been cast onto the stormy seas of life with few skills to help her. She looked scared, but pleased at the friendly way I introduced myself – very different from that of the other cops who had barked orders at her and even fondled her, completely disrespectful of little Osman Israel asleep in his cot.

Knowing the mother's name, the baby's didn't take me by surprise. I got straight to the point, and a little while later myself, Roxana and Doctor Cuauhtemoc Nava Ordaz were sitting in the dark and dusty hole the lawyer called an office on Calle Venezuela.

I had scarcely opened my mouth before the lawyer demanded guarantees for his client. That gave me the chance to ask if he were new in his profession, and if by chance he knew of anything more flexible than the word of a policeman.

“I want to put an end to this business today,” I told him. “Come with me, and we'll settle the charge sheet in an hour.”

We had no time to take Roxana home, so we left her at a cinema and I promised to return in two hours and tell her how things had gone. I drew the lawyer an outline of the situation. We'd put all the robberies in Copilco onto the Lizard's accomplices. We'd get rid of any statements that might incriminate him as ringleader. To keep the others
happy we'd offer them mitigating circumstances and a lower sentence. If they didn't like the idea (which was hard to imagine), we'd keep interrogating them until they softened up. Luckily, Nava Ordaz was to act as lawyer for all of them, and was happy to do all he could to reach a quick and satisfactory solution. The Lizard would be the man who went into the hotel with Jones. (His dyed yellow hair was useful for something). Jones assaulted him, and the Lizard killed him defending himself. We would invent links between the two men. Jones's wife would swear she knew him. For reasons that belonged to the secret nature of the investigation – reasons linked to the widow's future, to her idea of returning to Colombia in three days, to the scandal she could find herself in . . . in a word, for reasons that had to do with enjoying life with lots of money versus a penniless destiny. It was an easy choice, which I knew had already been made, so I was in a position to assure the lawyer that everything would go smoothly. We would say the Lizard had been Jones's chauffeur and bodyguard. In the hotel, the pair of them would be pretty drunk, they would argue, Jones would pull out a gun, there would be a struggle, then the fatal shot. Finish, kaput, see you later, alligator.

“What about the blonde woman who went into the hotel with Jones?”

“Concentrate on the blond guy who came out. I'll talk to the owner and the manager of the
hotel. A hotel of that sort exists in a legal limbo, and the only guarantee for it to stay open is to be on good terms with the police. I'm sure the manager won't remember too much about a person who ‘stayed in the shadows'.”

I was waiting for the inevitable comment. I wasn't wrong.

“All this is . . . how shall I put it . . . a little extraordinary, Officer. Or at least, shall we say, unusual. Of course, we're all here to help the forces of law and order in any way we can, but we have to tie up certain loose ends . . . ”

The lawyer's drivel was nauseating. I let him finish.

“Just imagine the difficulty of my position! The unexpected problems that could affect my career! I'm not sure I could take this on for my usual fees.”

“There's a middleman.”

“What do you mean?”

“A fence who bought all the things the Lizard and his gang stole.”

“So?”

“My colleagues who were first on the spot took various things as evidence. Fortunately, I have managed to make some arrangements, which you don't need to know the details of, but which in short mean that this man will go free. As from tomorrow, you and I will make sure he pays us his taxes, which we will share out in democratic proportions.”

“How democratic?”

“Don't be in such a hurry, Your Honour. You'll get your cut.”

*

Two hours later, feeling sweaty, exhausted and bittersweet, I signed off and shut the files that I had been drawing up under Nava Ordaz's close scrutiny.

I could feel forty pounds of stress weighing on the back of my neck, screaming for me to have a lengthy shower and a session with any of the Three Marias. One of those when you lie there quite still, watching, while the girl does all the work.

In my hands I had a nicely tied up piece of work; in my mouth I had the taste of a rat that lasted a full week. Too bad. That's the game, and if you want to play it, sometimes you have to clean the toilets. Too big, too many interests for Carlos Hernandez to try to take on windmills. Of course it shouldn't be like that, of course the world is a mess. Nothing new there. Reality is like a low-life bar: you have to be drunk to feel good in it. I'm on the side of change; that's why I vote Cardenas. Some day we'll win, and then . . .

I called the Commander and told him the good news. I made a few vague comments for the sake of the phone spirits and arranged to meet him the next day in the Diplomatico to sort out the details. The Commander was having breakfast with an important official at nine, so he told me to come at half past eight, the asshole!

I picked up Roxana Erika and took her home. I
spared her the intricate details that might have confused her little mind, emphasized the benefits for the Lizard, and told her the case had been resolved satisfactorily and that we would give her economic support, thanks to a thrifty intermediary. I saw no need to tell her that it was the Lizard who had insisted on this help for her.

Roxana Erika started to look at me as if I were the Lone Ranger, and by one of those strange coincidences life sometimes grants us, I also felt an immediate sympathy for her.

I could still feel the pressure on the back of my neck. I looked across at the harmonious angles of Roxana's silhouette, and regretted all that beauty was wasted on marriage to the Lizard. I was soon imagining her going cross-eyed during an orgasm and, almost without noticing it, my hand strayed to her warm knee.

She jumped in her seat, gave me a furious cross-eyed glare and pressed herself again the car door, leaving me with my arm dangling and looking completely ridiculous.

I muttered an apology, and we continued on our way in silence. I was thinking that human beings' reliance on routine would, with time, change her way of looking at me. When I turned up at her apartment on the first of each month bearing an envelope stuffed with money and a doll for her little monster Osman Israel, Roxana Erika would get used to expecting me, perhaps with a touch of anxiety. Then we'd see.

We picked the boy up from a neighbour's
apartment. A woman in housecoat and hair in rollers, who stared at me the whole time with obvious disapproval, putting into her sour stare all the distaste she and her kind feel for forty-year-old cops who invade other people's homes.

When I left them, my neck was still throbbing.

Lourdes came back. I know because Gloria hangs up as soon as she hears my voice, and if my children answer the phone they say “Leave a message, sir; my mother will call you back as soon as she can.” I know because my breakfast beer is either warm or freezing again. I know because my things appear to move around the house with a mind of their own, and I can never find them where I left them, and because my pockets look as though someone's gone through them, and my notebooks seem to have been read over. I know because Carlos and Araceli, who, thanks to the warmth of my paternal influence, behaved impeccably while their mother was taking her vacation, are now once again filling the house with rock'n'roll layabouts, stoned schizophrenics and other wonderful specimens of modern Mexico.

Lourdes came back. This is the second time, and, according to her, there can never be a third. I really admire this woman. I admire the amazing capacity she has to turn any situation that affects both of us into a triumph on her part. I'm fascinated by the way she has of coming back as though she were a queen who, thanks to an over-generous heart, allows herself the luxury of pardoning the
faithless governor of her colonies, despite all the evidence of his heinous crimes. If it were me returning, Lourdes would see to it that I was forced to do so with my head down and my tail between my legs. A repentant and pleading beggar, who she would listen to with the appropriate mistrust and condescension and would forgive little by little, making sure he was first put through repeated scenes of humiliation. The same situation changes its meaning and content radically depending on which of us is the protagonist. Lourdes – who had not been able to prepare so much as a sandwich for her children before casting them into oblivion – comes back and everything is hunky-dory. I have simply to roll out the red carpet, attend to her every desire and modify my bad habits and disorderly way of life, which apparently are the causes threatening our family harmony.