The Black Minutes

10

The police department was a hundred years old in the year of the the Jackal case, and for twenty-nine of those years, Chief García had been in charge. The first case anyone remembered happened in the second half of the nineteenth century: the murder of a wealthy rancher in his own mansion. Since at that time there was no police force, the port’s mayor decided to hire two notorious but very respected bounty hunters to find the people responsible: Mr. Mariano Vela and Mr. Aurelio Santos, also known as Vela and Santos. Beginning in the thirties, Miguel Rivera was on their trail. He was the real brains of the office, the real director of the department for four long decades. Chief García was more like a politician than a detective. Even if he didn’t share his predecessors’ talents, there was no doubt he was born to lead and to stand up to pressure. Staying in his position for so long had been due in large part to his alliances with the governors and to his knack for identifying good agents, who ended up taking on all the weight of the investigations. That’s what happened with Miguel Rivera and then with Wong, the Evangelist, Taboada—El Travolta, who in reality only worked as a team with El Chaneque—and, of course, with Vicente Rangel.
This last one was drawing spirals on a blank paper when a pack of Faros fell onto his desk.
“Sorry for being late, but I had to go all the way to the avenue.
Do you need anything else?”
There was no one in sight. The rest of his colleagues had gone to lunch, so Rangel motioned for Romero to keep the change and offered him a cigarette.
“Did you see Taboada eating?”
“Of course I did: he was in the Rose Garden, talking with Professor Edelmiro.”
“Edelmiro Morales?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why would I be wrong?”
Professor Edelmiro was the leader of the Professors’ Union for the entire region.
“Who else was with him? Cruz?”
“Mr. Cruz, no. Some other people I don’t know, and Mr. Chávez.”
“All right,” said Rangel, “get me a cup of coffee.”
It seemed strange to him that El Travolta would be seen with Professor Edelmiro. He rolled this news around in his head for a few minutes. Then he reviewed his notes from the Bar León, until he had his first hunch. Hmm, he said to himself, before I make any moves, I have to find more evidence. If I want to arrest that guy, I’ve got to come around the back way, so he doesn’t have a chance to retaliate. He wanted to light a cigarette, but the lighter slipped out of his grip: F*ck. His hands were all chapped and he was losing feeling. If he kept up like this, they were gonna start bleeding again.
At 4:30, he saw Chief García come back and then go into his office. Lolita went in, too, her heels clicking behind him. “Sir, they called from City Hall—” And she closed the door.
Still worried about the possibility that the suspect would complain to the chief, Rangel stood up and looked out the window toward the docks. Twenty minutes later he saw El Travolta pull up. The fat guy parked his patrol car and took out a handcuffed man, a person he knew. No shit, he said to himself. Taboada had arrested the Prophet. The Prophet was an ice-cream vendor who waited for his clients in front of schools, like everyone in his line of business. F*cking Taboada, now I know what you’re trying to do. And he stood up. From that moment on, things between Rangel and El Travolta were headed on the wrong track.
On El Chicote’s battery-powered radio, an announcer gave the weather: “Button up if you’re going outside, my friends. The weather’s cloudy and getting cloudier, with the possibility of rain tonight. You know how the city gets before a storm: the fog comes in, no visibility at all, hot as hell, and you gotta turn on the fans just to breathe. If you gotta drive your car and you don’t have air-conditioning, bring along an oxygen tank. . . . You are listening to La Cotorra, and next up is Rigo Tovar and Las Jaibas del Valle.” F*ck, Rangel said to himself and switched the station.
As he was walking in front of the chief’s office, García called him in.
“Rangel, come here a minute.”
He showed him a reddish paper. It was a flyer printed on news-print, with the logo of Cola Drinks.
“Salim found them blowing around in the street.”
The headline said, A KILLER AMONG US. The flyer reproduced the photo of Karla Cevallos’s body, taken from El Mercurio, and on one side there was an image of a smiling John Williams Jr., with a wineglass in his hand, at a party with friends. For the flyer’s author, there was no doubt that the murderer was young Williams. It even called him Jack the Ripper. The article said: The same day that the second girl was violently killed, Mr. Jack Williams, Jr. was seen in the Bar León. The officers let him leave and Chief García didn’t mention his name in the press conference. How do you explain that? The flyer reasoned it through: For the murderer to go unpunished, he has to be extremely powerful; Jack Williams is such a man and he was at the scene of the crime, so he must be the guilty one. Everyone knows El Junior has exotic habits, and the police don’t go after him for anything. How long are they going to protect the Jackal? At the end, the flyer suggested it was even possible that the Jackal was dissolving his victims at the family-owned bottling plant. More than one person had found strange things floating in their cola.
“Do you have something to do with this?” The chief stared at him for an eternity. His look could have taken X-rays, but Rangel didn’t move a hair. “I’m asking you a question.”
“You know I don’t.”
He was sure the chief thought he was responsible. That’s what I get for asking around to find out if the chief was meeting with Jack Williams. He watched as his boss tore up the reddish paper and threw it in the trash can.
“Don’t get mixed up in this one, Rangel.”
When he got back to his desk, El Travolta was getting up.
“What’s happening, Taboada?” Fatwolf asked him. “How’d it go?”
“F*cking great.”
El Chicote and the other officers turned to look.
“You got him?”
But El Travolta didn’t answer. He sat down at his desk and typed with two fingers, while he smoked a cigarette. Then he called El Chaneque on the phone and he brought him the Prophet. The prisoner had a black eye and his shirt was torn.
“F*cking Taboada: that’s him?” Fatwolf gloated.
“He already confessed.”
Everyone was consumed with excitement about the reward, except Vicente Rangel. Fatwolf slapped Taboada on the back, El Chicote congratulated him loudly and immediately followed up saying that an officer about to write a report would probably want a cup of coffee. Taboada agreed and motioned to Romero, who ran out, hurrying, to get the drinks.
“What do you think?” Wong asked, and tossed Rangel the papers.
Rangel picked up the document and read the first page. Taboada whined, “F*ck, that’s none of your damn business.” And when Vicente stood up, he stared at him.
Rangel walked over to a file cabinet, pulled out a notebook, and checked a list of crossed-out names. After a minute, he lifted up his head and concluded, “This isn’t the one.”
“What?”
“I said this isn’t the one. It’s not possible.”
El Travolta moved toward his desk. “Who the f*ck made you the motherf*cking judge and jury?”
El Chaneque stood next to Rangel’s desk and stuck his hand in his pocket. The people working at nearby desks stood up discreetly. On another occasion, Rangel had seen Chávez pull out brass knuckles from that pocket, and even though he was dying to take him on, he realized the best idea was to avoid this fight. He was in a really bad spot, stuck between the desk and the wall, with the fat guy in front and El Chaneque behind, so he adopted a more conciliatory tone.
“Look, Taboada, calm down a little. I’m just saying this isn’t the one.”
“Prove it.”
Rangel noticed out of the corner of his eye that Chief García had entered the room, behind Taboada’s back, so he was emboldened a little and showed the fat guy the list of prisoners from the month before.
“Is this your signature?”
Taboada didn’t answer.
“This is your signature. This vato was sleeping in a cell from the thirteenth to the twenty-first. You yourself picked him up for being drunk. He can’t be the murderer.”
El Travolta trembled with anger. When he started to add something, he saw the chief’s icy stare.
“Taboada,” said the chief, “I want to talk to you.”
Now he’d really f*cked it up, Rangel thought. El Travolta left without looking at Vicente. The rest of their colleagues toiled conscientiously on their paperwork. Only El Chaneque stared at him resentfully.
Vicente decided to respond. “What the hell? What do you want, a*shole?”
But El Chaneque just stared at him and went back to the main entrance.
When El Travolta came out from his discussion with the chief, Romero offered him the coffee—“Here you go, chief”—but the fat guy hit the tray and the liquid spilled out onto the madrina’s clothes. As Romero dried himself off, El Chicote said to him, “Don’t take it the wrong way, Blind Man; they’re just joking. Jokes are a fact of life around here.”
Rangel went down to supervise the release of El Profeta and ran into Wong.
“What you did was right. Cruz and I are going to get a drink at the Cherokee, if you want to come.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’ve got a lot to do.”
* * *
He took people’s crime reports on the phone until 10:30 at night. There arrived a moment when the entire city seemed suspect to him, and he was thinking along those lines when in walked Congressman Tobías Wolffer. “Good afternoon,” said the politician. Rangel saw him go into the office of Chief García and realized that the majority of his coworkers were almost salivating, waiting for the next money delivery. To everyone’s surprise, the expensively dressed congressman pointed to him, before leaving, and the chief called him into his office. When Rangel went in, the chief was facing away from him.
“The congressman left this for you. He said you did a really good job with his family. Keep it up, Vicente. Don’t get distracted by the bullshit.”
There was an overstuffed envelope on the desk, an envelope with the logo of the Professors’ Union. The congressman was an advisor of theirs. The chief offered him the package and Rangel left without saying anything. Once at his desk, he saw that it was a considerable amount. He left a third of the money in the envelope and put the rest in his pockets. Wolffer was repugnant to him, but nothing could be done about it.
When it was eleven, he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. Since his shift had ended hours before, he announced he was leaving and went down to look for his car. As he made his way through the first floor, he ran into the Blind Man, who was coming out of the bathroom with the stain on his shirt. Rangel got his attention and threw him the envelope.
“For the coffees,” he said to him, making sure no one else could hear, and left before the Blind Man was able to respond. His gofer stood there, like an abused dog who couldn’t understand kindness.
El Chicote was in the parking lot. Rangel wanted to give him a piece of his mind: Why’d you do that? How could you do that? Why ruin all the time he put into the investigation?
“What’s the deal, Chicote?” Rangel asked. “Were you in on it, too? How much were they going to give you?”
El Chicote was stunned. He didn’t say another word. The Blind Man came up to him, holding the envelope’s contents tightly, and said, “Jokes. Jokes are a fact of life at headquarters.”