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
2666 (75 page)
In February Maria de la Luz
Romero died. She was fourteen, and five foot three, with long hair down to her
waist, although she planned to cut it someday soon, as she had revealed to one
of her sisters. She had just started working at EMSA, one of the oldest
maquiladoras in Santa Teresa, which wasn't in any industrial park but in the
middle of Colonia La Preciada, like a melon-colored pyramid, its sacrificial
altar hidden behind smokestacks and two enormous hangar doors though which
workers and trucks entered. Maria de la Luz Romero left home at seven in the
evening, accompanied by some friends who had stopped by for her. She told her
siblings she was going out dancing at La Sonorita, a cheap club on the border
of Colonia San Damian and Colonia Plata, and she would get something to eat
near the club. Her parents were working the night shift and weren't home. Maria
de la Luz did, in fact, eat with her girlfriends, on foot next to a van that
sold tacos and quesadillas, parked across the street from the club. It was
eight when they went in, and the club was full of kids they knew, either
because they worked at EMSA too or because they lived in the neighborhood.
According to one of her friends, Maria de la Luz danced alone, unlike the other
girls, who had boyfriends or acquaintances there. Twice, however, she was
approached by different boys who wanted to buy her a drink or a soda, which
Maria de la Luz refused, the first time because she didn't like the boy and the
second time out of shyness. At eleven-thirty, she left with a friend. Both of
them lived more or less nearby and walking home together was much nicer than
making the trip alone. They parted about five blocks from Maria de la Luz's
house. There her trail vanished. When some of the neighbors who lived along the
final stretch of her walk were questioned, all declared they hadn't heard any
cries, much less a call for help. Her body appeared two days later, by the
Casas Negras highway. She had been raped and hit multiple times in the face. A
few of the blows were particularly violent, and she also exhibited a fracture
of the palatine bone, which was highly unusual for a beating and led the
medical examiner to conjecture (although of course he just as quickly abandoned
the idea) that the car in which Maria de la Luz was picked up had been in an
accident. The cause of death was stab wounds to the torso and neck, which had
pierced both lungs and multiple arteries. The case was handled by Inspector
Juan de Dios
who once again questioned the friends with her at the club, the owner of the
club and some of the bartenders, and the people who lived along the five blocks
Maria de la Luz had walked or tried to walk alone before she was snatched. The
results were disappointing.
•
In
March no dead woman turned up in the city, but in April two appeared just a few
days apart, as did the first complaints about the police, who were incapable
not only of stopping the wave (or incessant drip) of sex crimes but also of
apprehending the killers and restoring peace and quiet to a hardworking city.
The first dead woman was found in a room at Mi Reposo, a hotel in the center of
Santa Teresa. She was under the
bed, wrapped in a sheet,
wearing only a white bra. According to the manager of Mi Reposo, the dead
woman's room was registered to a guest by the name of Alejandro Penalva Brown,
who had taken it three days before and hadn't been seen since. When the
cleaning women and the two clerks were questioned, all were in agreement that
the only glimpse they'd had of the aforementioned Penalva Brown was on the
first day of his stay at the hotel. The cleaning women, meanwhile, swore that
on the second and third day they hadn't found anything under the bed, although
this, according to the police, could easily be a fib to cover up the sloppy job
they did on the rooms. In the hotel registry, Penalva Brown had left an
the
that address. The arms of the dead woman, who was about thirty-five, dark and
solidly built, were covered in needle tracks, so the police delved into the
city's drug scene, without turning up any clues that might lead to the identification
of the body. According to the medical examiner, the cause of death was an
overdose of bad cocaine. The possibility wasn't ruled out that the cocaine had
been supplied by the suspected killer, and that Penalva Brown knew he was
giving her poison. Two weeks later, when all efforts were focused on solving
the second murder, two women appeared at the precinct station, where they
stated that they had known the dead woman. Her name was Sofia Serrano and she
had worked at three maquiladoras and as a waitress, and most recently as a
whore in the vacant lots of Colonia Ciudad Nueva, behind the cemetery. She had
no family in Santa Teresa, just some friends, all of them poor, so her body was
handed over to the
school.
•
The
second dead woman turned up next to a trash can in Colonia Estrella. She had
been raped and strangled. Shortly afterward she was identified as Olga Paredes
Pacheco, twenty-five, salesgirl at a clothing store on Avenida Real, near the
center of the city, single, five foot three, resident of Calle Hermanos
Redondo, in Colonia Ruben Dario, where she lived with her younger sister, Elisa
Paredes Pacheco, both of them well-known in the neighborhood for their warmth,
friendliness, and trustworthiness. Their parents had died five years before,
scarcely two months apart, first their father, of cancer, and then their
mother, of a heart attack, and Olga had taken charge of the household smoothly
and easily. She wasn't known to be dating anyone. Her sister, twenty, was
engaged to be married. Elisa's fiance, a young lawyer recently graduated from
the
the offices of a well-known corporate lawyer, and also possessed an alibi for
the night when it was believed Olga had been kidnapped. Shaken by the death of
his future sister-in-law, he confessed during the (informal) questioning to
which he was subjected to not having the least idea who could wish Olga ill,
let alone want to kill her, and he appeared to be obsessed by the bad luck, the
tragic fate, that, according to him, had beset his fiancee's family, first with
the death of her parents and then the death of her sister. Olga's few friends
confirmed what her sister and the young lawyer had said. Everybody loved her,
she was the kind of woman you didn't often come across in Santa Teresa anymore,
that is, virtuous, true to her word, honest, and responsible. And she knew how
to dress, too, with elegance and good taste. Concerning her taste in clothing
the medical examiner was in agreement. He also discovered something odd about
the body: the skirt she was wearing the night of her death—the skirt in which
she was found—was on backward.
In
May the American consul visited the mayor of Santa Teresa and then, along with
the latter, paid an informal visit to the police chief. The consul's name was
Abraham Mitchell, but his wife and friends called him Conan. He was a tall man,
six foot three, two hundred and thirty pounds, his face lined and his ears
perhaps too big, who loved living in Mexico and camping in the desert and who
intervened personally only in serious matters. In other words, he almost never
had anything to do, except attend parties as his country's representative and
make occasional surreptitious visits, once every two months, along with a few
fellow countrymen of great drinking prowess, to the two most famous
pulquerias
in Santa Teresa. The
disappeared and all available reports indicated that he had last been seen in
Santa Teresa. The police chief wanted to know whether he had been in Santa
Teresa on official business or as a tourist. As a tourist, of course, said the
consul. Well, then, what do you expect me to know? asked Pedro Negrete,
hundreds of tourists come through here every day. The consul reflected for an
instant and ultimately agreed that the police chief was right. Better not to
stir things up, he thought. Still, as a courtesy to the mayor,
who was Pedro Negrete's friend, permission was granted for
the consul or whomever he deemed appropriate to go through the photographs of
unidentified dead bodies found in the city from November 1994 to the present,
and none of the bodies were identified by Rory Campuzano, assistant to the
sheriff, who came from Huntsville for that express purpose. Probably the sheriff
flipped out, said Kurt A. Banks, and killed himself in the desert. Or now he's
living with a transvestite in
said Henderson, the other consular officer. Conan Mitchell frowned and said it
wasn't respectful to talk that way about a
meanwhile, no woman was killed in Santa Teresa and the same was true of June.
But in July two dead women turned up, and the first protests were staged by a
feminist organization, Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace (WSDP), a group
whose headquarters were in
in the yard of an auto repair shop, at the end of Calle Refugio, near the
was nineteen and had been raped and strangled. Her body was found in a car
about to be scrapped. She was dressed in jeans, a low-cut white blouse, and
cowboy boots. Three days later it was learned that she was Paula Garcia
Zapatero, resident of Colonia Lomas del Toro, machine operator at the maquiladora
TECNOSA, born in the state of
She lived with three other women from
and she wasn't known to have a boyfriend, although she'd been involved with two
fellow workers from the same maquiladora. The men were found and questioned for
several days and both could substantiate their alibis, although one of them
ended up in the hospital with nervous shock and three broken ribs. While the
case of Paula Garcia Zapatero was still under investigation, the second dead
woman of July turned up. Her body was found behind some Pemex tanks along the
Casas Negras highway. She was nineteen, thin and dark-skinned, with long black
hair. She had been raped repeatedly, anally and vaginally, according to the
medical examiner, and the presence of multiple hematomas testified to the
excessive violence employed against her. Her body, however, was found fully
clothed, jeans, black panties, panty hose, white bra, white blouse, garments
without a single rip or tear, from which it was deduced that the killer or killers,
after stripping and molesting and killing her, had proceeded to dress her
before dumping her body behind the Pemex tanks. The Paula Garcia Zapatero case
was handled by Inspector Efraih Bustelo of the state judicial police, and the
Rosaura Lopez Santana case was assigned to Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo,
and both cases soon hit a wall, since there were no witnesses or leads.
In August 1995, the bodies of
seven women were found, Florita Almada made her second appearance on
questions. The Tucson cops spoke with the consular officers Kurt A. Banks and
Dick Henderson, since the consul was spending some time at his ranch in Sage,
California, actually a rotting wooden cabin, on the far side of the Ramona
Indian Reservation, while his wife took a few months' break with her sister in
Escondido, near San Diego. There had once been land with the cabin, but the
land was sold by Conan Mitchell's father and all that was left now was a
quarter acre of overgrown yard where Conan Mitchell spent his time shooting
field mice with a Remington 870 Wingmaster and reading cowboy novels and
watching porn videos. When he was bored he would get in his car and go down to
Sage, to the bar, where some of the old men had known him since he was a boy.
At times Conan Mitchell would stare at the old men and think it was impossible
they could remember his childhood so well, since some of them didn't seem much
older than he was. But the old men clattered their false teeth and recalled the
young Abe Mitchell's pranks as if they were occurring before their eyes and
Conan had no choice but to pretend he was laughing too. The truth is, he didn't
have clear memories of his childhood. He remembered his father and his older brother
and sometimes he remembered thunderstorms, but the rain had been somewhere else
he'd lived, not Sage. He'd had the superstition since childhood that he would
die struck by lightning, and he did remember that, although he hadn't told many
people about it, except his wife. The truth is, Conan Mitchell wasn't much of a
talker. That was one of the reasons he liked to live in
transport companies. Mexicans like to talk, but they'd rather not talk to
higher-ups, especially if they're American. This idea, which he'd come up with
himself, though God knows how it had taken shape in his head, soothed him when
he was south of the border. Sometimes, though, and always at his wife's
insistence, he had to spend periods in
which he accepted with resignation. The first few days the change didn't seem
to affect him. Two weeks later, unable to bear the noise (noise directed at him
and requiring answers), he left for Sage, to hole up in his old cabin. When the
Tucson police came to Santa Teresa, Conan had been gone for twenty days, which
the policemen were secretly glad of, because they'd heard talk of his
incompetence. Henderson and Banks acted as guides. The policemen traveled all
over the city, visited bars and clubs, were introduced to Pedro Negrete, with
whom they had a long conversation about drug trafficking, held a meeting with
Inspector Ortiz Rebolledo and Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez, spoke to two
medical examiners from the city morgue, examined some files of nameless bodies
found in the desert, and visited the brothel Internal Affairs, where they each
slept with a whore. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they went away.