The Black Minutes

Part II

5

García arranged to meet them at the Restaurant Flamingos. It was a pink-colored place behind the bus station. The chief preferred to have his meetings there, because it had air-conditioning, the waitresses didn’t bother them, and they had enough coffee. Taking advantage of its being open twenty-four hours a day, the officers got there between six and seven in the morning, went to the most discreet corner—the table all the way at the back—and Cruz Trevi?o or Fatwolf took care of clearing out the nearby tables if the people didn’t leave as soon as they saw them arrive.
They were all there: the Professor, Wong, the Bedouin, the Evangelist, Crazyshot, Fatwolf, Cruz Trevi?o, El Travolta, and Chávez. No one bothered them there, but on that day, March 18, 1977, at six in the morning, as they headed to their usual corner, Rangel noticed that a large number of reporters with notepads, tape recorders, and even a TV camera were seated at the tables closest to them. Now what? he said to himself. What are they giving away now? He recognized three local journalists and one who was from Tampico, but he had never seen the others before. There were two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve. They must be from Monterrey or Mexico City, or maybe from San Luis Potosí. One of them, a guy who looked more awake than the others, elbowed his photographer when he recognized Rangel: Get a picture of that guy. Which guy? The one with his hair done like the Beatles.
Oh, shit, what’s up with these guys? he thought; why are they pointing at me? Rangel was completely drained; he’d only slept half an hour the whole night. He needed to drink some coffee fast. He was about to sit down when he heard Crazyshot say “Mamacita” and saw he was talking about La Chilanga, who, out of character, had retired her normal baggy Che T-shirt and was wearing bell-bottoms and a half-open denim blouse. Rangel, who’d never seen her dressed like that before, suddenly didn’t feel so tired anymore; he shamelessly studied the cut of her clothing, which highlighted her tiny waist, and focused on the way her blouse accentuated the shape of her breasts. He was looking for an excuse to get a closer look when he noticed that next to her was a tall young man wearing expensive clothes and poofy, long hair like the Jackson Five. Just a sec, he said to himself, who’s that guy? Jackson Five grabbed La Chilanga by the arm and led her to the reporters’ table. The detective was wondering what kind of relationship she might have with the long-haired guy, when he saw the chief come in. Instantly he knew something had happened, since Lolita was two steps behind him, her high heels clicking.
As soon as the detectives saw the older man, they fell silent. Rangel felt a stiflingly hot wave of air blow into the room. Aw, man, he said to himself, he’s in a bad mood. The chief looked around at everyone and sighed with frustration.
“No reporters and no madrinas,” he said, and most of the crowd left.
Since four or five stragglers had stayed, Fatwolf stood up, dripping with greasy sweat, and got rid of them, pushing them out. He was a really quiet guy. He was always sweating, weighed four hundred pounds, and was five feet nine inches tall. There was just one tuft of black hair on the middle of his head, which he tried to slick back. When he didn’t like something, he didn’t waste time explaining himself; he made himself understood with his fists. When they saw him coming, the rest of the reporters stood up and went into the street. How weird, Rangel said to himself, I wonder how they found out the meeting was here. As La Chilanga left, the detectives focused their eyes on her, and more than one of them stretched out his neck to see her leave.
“Jerks, cabrones, fascists,” she said, “we have a right to information.”
When the young woman was gone, Rangel noticed the chief looking at El Travolta, who took a while to realize it. Finally, the fat guy gestured to Chávez: you’d better go, bro.
The weasel left, but he was upset. His presence had been tolerated at headquarters for the last month, and no one mentioned the fact that he had a criminal record. How strange, thought Rangel, Chávez had been trying to get some recognition for a long time. In the last few days, he’d even heard a rumor that they were going to name him a detective with a badge and everything, but the chief’s attitude made it clear he was going to stay in purgatory a while longer. Nothing you can do about it, thought Rangel, it goes with the territory, my friend.
The chief took the seat farthest away so they couldn’t surprise him from behind, an old habit he’d acquired after spending thirty years on the force and watching a lot of action movies. At a normal meeting, the chief asked each one of them what cases they were working on and what kind of progress they’d managed. He gave some advice, set deadlines for solving cases, and assigned new investigations—from coordinating the investigation of an assault or a violent death to simply sitting in the car and keeping watch on the entrance to the oil refinery or the Cola Drinks plant—and received the corresponding shows of appreciation. Very rarely would he redirect a line of investigation, and the meetings were normally calm. But that day, March 18, was not a normal meeting.
What is it then? Rangel asked himself. First, it occurred to him that the chief was angry about the newspaper’s criticism of police “ineptness.” But that couldn’t be; the chief had heard worse things and wasn’t ruffled before. Maybe he got in a fight with Torres Sabinas? Ever since Licenciado Daniel Torres Sabinas had become mayor of the port, the chief argued with him on a weekly basis. Torres was a young politician, an enemy of Governor Pepe Topete, and he didn’t get along well with the chief. A rumor was going around that they’d set him up as mayor because of his friendship with President Echavarreta. Who knows, he said to himself, Torres Sabinas probably asked him for a report last night and they got pissed again. The chief has never been very diplomatic.
The waitress served eight coffees and a cola drink. As soon as she had left, the chief showed them a color photo: Colegio Froebel, Group 2A. A girl between seven and ten years old, white skin, black hair, dressed in a school uniform.
“This,” he roared, “is a little girl named Lucía Hernández Campillo. She disappeared January fifteenth, and her mother came and reported it. Who took her statement?”
Rangel looked at Wong, but he deflected responsibility by showing his palms: You can search me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Then he looked at the other officers; no one showed any sign of reacting. The chief was irritated, and the silence continued until El Travolta lifted his meaty right hand.
“Oh, you. Why didn’t you follow up on it?”
The ones who had been in his position before knew that was a rhetorical question; there was no answer. There were only two reasons why a report wasn’t provided to the chief: negligence or complicity, and both reasons merited punishment.
“Why didn’t you investigate it? Was it intentional?”
“No, sir. I had a lot of work to take care of, and it got lost on my desk.”
The old man shook his head. “Two months,” he said to El Travolta, “and you didn’t even bring it to my attention. I had to find out from the governor’s assistant at three in the morning.”
The chief was talking about the governor’s right-hand man, Mr. Juan José Churruca, a disreputable man, part of the PRI ruling party mafia, a real snake among snakes. They called him Urraca—magpie—because of his hooked nose and his love of money. Now What does Churruca have to do with all this? Rangel said to himself. The photo flew toward El Travolta.
“Get in touch with the parents today. I’ll expect a report at two.”
“Yes, sir.”
El Travolta leaned over a little, and Rangel noticed he was losing his hair. He almost felt bad for him. Meanwhile, the chief lit his first Raleigh of the day with a disposable lighter. He took a drag and puffed out a thin cloud of dense white smoke that curled around him like a wraith. When the cloud had risen enough, he spoke.
“Is anyone else investigating cases of dead girls I don’t know about?”
The chief looked at them one by one, but no one answered. He waited a prudent amount of time, insistently tapping his cigarette to knock off the ash.
“Lolita, hand out the folders.”
As the officers opened the folders, a murmur spread among them. Rangel was dying to see what was inside, but the supply ran out before reaching him, so he leaned over toward the Evangelist and asked what it was about. The Evangelist opened his file and acted like he was reading it out loud.
“The end of the world is near. Repent and believe in the Gospels.”
“Stop f*cking around, idiot.” Rangel snatched the folder away from him. Ever since he became a Jehovah’s Witness, the Evangelist was unbearable. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t talk about religion with the guys at work.
Behind a photocopy of the report Rangel had written, there was a magazine of the same size with yellow letters and a modern design.
“This,” the chief explained, “arrived at the governor’s personal airplane half an hour ago. It’s the magazine Proceso. We’re in it.”
When a nationally circulated newspaper or magazine criticized something going on in the state, it was normal for the governor to send his people out to buy all the copies to be distributed in the area. That way, the issues that criticized his administration never reached the public.
The contents said, Page 30: “Due to police ineptitude, lunatic’s crimes multiply.” Before Rangel could find page thirty, the Professor whistled and said to him, “Damnit, Rangel, you’re getting famous.”
The magazine had used the photo of Rangel and Dr. Ridaura taken by La Chilanga from the window of the bar just as the detective pointed inside the bathroom stalls. The article was signed by the editorial staff “with reporting from Johnny Guerrero.” F*cking Johnny, he thought, he’s building his career at my expense.
He was still looking over the picture when the chief showed them the front page of La Noticia: GRISLY DISCOVERY DOWNTOWN. They had used the same photo as Proceso and five more shots of the bathroom, with Vicente Rangel in three of them. Holy shit, he thought, now they really screwed me. Just then he noticed a menacing look on El Travolta’s face. The f*cking cabrón was dying of envy. El Travolta loved getting his picture taken. In Rangel’s opinion, the police should always go unnoticed. If it were up to him, there’d be no press conferences or news bulletins, nothing at all. Like his uncle had said, detectives should be invisible.
“But this isn’t the worst of it,” the chief went on. “According to Churruca, reporters from ?Alarma Roja! are on their way.”
?Alarma Roja! was the most widely sold weekly tabloid in the whole country. It had headlines like MACHETE RIGHT IN HIS FACE; HE ATTACKED HIS OWN MOTHER; RESPECTED GRANDMOTHER DISTRIBUTES MARIJUANA. The Ministry of the Interior had closed the paper down several times, but the editor would change the name or the design, and the tabloid would circulate again.
As they looked through the papers in the folders, Chief García took a long drag off his cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke even more dense than the previous one.
“If one of you is leaking information, you won’t have the pleasure of working here much longer. When I find out who it is, you’ll have to leave the state, but first you’ll head to the cell for a while.” The cell was an underground concrete chamber where they interrogated the most stubborn prisoners, a tiny room in the headquarters basement with leaking pipes and no electricity or ventilation. “I’m the only one authorized to speak to the press. I want that to be very clear. I don’t want any more leaks. Understand?” He watched them one by one, as he played with his coffee cup. “OK, men, what do we know for sure?”
He went to take another sip, but the cup was empty.
Because he’d coordinated the investigation, Vicente was in charge of reviewing the facts instead of El Travolta. Everyone was used to El Travolta’s ambiguous way of speaking, so Rangel surprised them with a succinct, elegant, well-organized reconstruction. He quickly reviewed what had been accomplished, laid out the loose ends, and pointed out the contradictions. Unlike El Travolta, who didn’t pay much attention to material evidence, Rangel had found new leads: as he was searching the area behind the bar, he had found a Raleigh cigarette butt. Later, when he compared it to the trash found in El Palmar, he found a second one. Both were bitten around the filter, in a way that revealed the mark of a long sharp canine tooth. “If we add to this the fact that on both occasions the killer used a hunting knife,” he explained, “this allows us to conclude that it is the same individual.”
After finishing his presentation, Vicente examined his coworkers’ faces and decided they were nervous. Ever since they started to work in the port, experience had taught them to solve their cases according to a set of established steps, which included all kinds of abuses. As El Travolta would say, “The best police officer is the most arbitrary.” When he was facing violent thieves, drunken sailors, or guerrilla fighters, what rules could he follow? The easiest thing to do was to locate a subject and arrest him, even if there was no proof: that’s why the police had the option of preventive imprisonment. If the suspect ended up being innocent, he’d be given an apology and that was that. When a poor guy was killed, they’d get together one by one with each person who had last seen him alive, and El Travolta would interrogate the one who’d had issues with the deceased. When money disappeared from a company, they got their hands on the accountant or the person entrusted with the money: one or another of them was always the guilty party. If someone kidnapped a businessman, which happened once or twice a year, they’d interview the relatives and servants, concentrating on the one who had a criminal record. If none of that worked, they’d go to the docks or to the slums at the outskirts of the city, like the much feared Coralillo, where all the state’s lowlifes hid, and get in touch with the snitches or the established criminals. But in the Jackal case, they had no leads, and they didn’t know where to start.
“The little girl went to Public School Number Five, around the corner from the Bar León,” Rangel went on. “That means he caught her in the street and killed her in a separate location, and instead of leaving her at the scene of the crime, he took her to the bar. We haven’t been able to figure out why he needed to put her body there and whether or not he was trying to incriminate the bar manager. There’s no motive and no witnesses; that’s what we have.”
There was a murmur of general restlessness.
The Professor interrupted. “Chief, I’d like to add something.”
“Keep it brief.” They called him the Professor for his tendency to pontificate.
“I spoke with Dr. Gasca, the psychiatrist. She was struck by the fact that, on the one hand, the killer could act with such brutality and then that he could cover up his tracks so perfectly, like we were dealing with two different people. From one angle, he seems to be a lunatic, but from another he’s a very calculating guy.”
“He’s right,” Crazyshot said. “This doesn’t fit together. It could be a group of people.”
“Hell, yeah,” said El Travolta. “Otherwise there’s no way to explain how the killer could have left her in the bar.”
“For now, let’s focus on the evidence we’ve got, the serrated knife and the cigarette,” the chief said.
“The fact is that after attacking he disappears from the port for prolonged periods. It’s probably a sailor,” said El Travolta, “or a traveling agent.”
“Could be. We can’t rule anything out. And you? Did you find anything?” The chief asked the Evangelist. He had gone the whole night without sleep, immersed in the files of neighboring cities, studying the fingerprints found in the bar.
“I didn’t find anything, sir. None of them had a record.”
“What else?” He went back to the Professor.
“Dr. Gasca showed me a report from the LA police department. According to her, this type of”—he checked his notes—“schizoid is affected by the lunar cycle. They’re really calm for part of the month, while the moon is hidden, and start getting more active again when the moon reappears; the level of criminality increases close to twenty percent when the moon is full. The evidence makes it clear that the proximity of the moon influences the tides, women, people with nervous temperaments, and, above all, the mentally ill.”
The chief fidgeted in his seat.
“When’s the full moon?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
The chief’s stomach groaned loudly. Every time he found himself in a delicate situation, the old man’s belly spoke for him.
“OK,” he nodded. “Starting today, we’re going to set up surveillance at the schools, the same system we followed with the insurance company. I want you to be there at the times when school starts and lets out, between eight and nine, and one and two. Lolita has the list that’ll tell you your assignments. One important thing: when you get to the schools, introduce yourselves to the principals. I need them to see you, because the Parents’ Association is getting really upset. Any questions?”
They hadn’t dealt with one delicate matter. Rangel tried to lean on Wong, but he acted like he didn’t notice. I’ve got no other choice, he thought. I’m the one who’s in charge.
“Chief . . .”
“Yes?”
“Do we need to call Jack Williams in?”
The chief stared at him. “Don’t screw around on this one. I already spoke with him, and he doesn’t have any information.”
“And all the time he spent in the bathroom, sir?”
“I dealt with it, Rangel. Don’t try to teach me how to do my job.”
In the silence that followed, the sound of fierce gurgling erupted from the chief’s stomach. Lolita took the opportunity to pass him the latest edition of El Mercurio, and the chief remembered.
“Oh, yeah, one more thing.”
A paid insert announced that an anonymous donor was offering twenty-five thousand dollars to whoever assisted in the apprehension of the murderer.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars! The guy who gets the Jackal is gonna be swimming in dough.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” said Crazyshot.
“That’s a lotta cash,” Wong whispered.
“So now there’s no excuse. Get out in the street and follow the rules. Anything else?”
“Could you help us out with our gas?” Wong had an eight-cylinder.
“There’s no money for that. Rangel, you have anything else to add?”
“No.”
“He’s keeping it to himself,” El Travolta joked.
“Like Serpico,” shot back Cruz Trevi?o.
“What time you got?” The chief asked Lolita.
“Six forty-five.”
Putting out his cigarette, he gave the instructions for the day.
“From now on, we’re going to set up forty-eight hours on duty with twelve hours off: Jarquiel and Salim will start it off.” He pointed to the Professor and the Bedouin. “For the rest of you, it’s your chance to investigate while the tracks are fresh. Jarquiel and Salim, go and visit our friends at the psychiatric hospital.” The chief was referring to sex offenders. “Talk to the doctors, the guards, the nurses. Find out if anyone was released or has been stealing controlled substances: anything that could lead us to the psychopath. When you’re done, go see Dr. Gasca and ask her to get us a profile of the killer. Cruz, check out alibis for the merchants in the area, from the jewelry dealers to the street vendors. Start off with a small perimeter, no more than two blocks, and then expand it. I’m interested in everything: people selling snow cones and popsicles, mailmen—I want you to interview everybody, even the Bible sellers. Get Mena and José to help.” That was Fatwolf and Crazyshot. “Taboada and Rangel, check out the crime reports, and you, Wong, you’re going to make me a list of the regulars at the Bar León. I want you to compare what you find out with Jarquiel’s list. That’ll be it.”
Cruz Trevi?o raised his hand, and Rangel and Taboada glanced at each other.
“Sir, who’s going to be in charge of the investigation?”
The chief couldn’t hide his bad mood. “The guy who’s in charge of sexual crimes, who else? Hurry up. I want you in the office at three o’clock. Lolita?”
“Yes, sir?”
“If the reporters are still there, have them come in. As far as you guys are concerned, this meeting’s over, so get a move on. I want results.”