Mr Cloak snarled, revealing a mouthful of fake fangs. The woman drew back, hands raised, looking less like a mother in terror than an opera singer about to belt her way into an aria from Carmen. The child-stealer flipped his cloak over the little girl and fled, but not before a fellow emerging from one of the street’s many bars hailed him in another hideous Speedy Gonzales accent: ‘Hey Professor Espinoza, where you go’een? Let me buy you a dreenk!’
In the next scene, the mother was brought to the town’s morgue (EL DEPOSITO DE CADAVERES on the frosted glass door), and did the predictable histrionic screaming when the sheet was lifted to reveal her presumably mutilated child. Next came the arrest of the man with the scar, who turned out to be a well-respected educator at a nearby university.
What followed was one of cinema’s shorter trials. The mother testified; so did a couple of guys with Speedy Gonzales accents, including the one who had offered to buy the professor a dreenk; the jury filed out to consider its verdict. Adding a surreal touch to these otherwise predictable proceedings was the appearance of five women in the back row, all dressed in what appeared to be superhero costumes complete with fancy masks. Nobody in the courtroom, including the judge, seemed to find them out of place.
The jury filed back in; Professor Espinoza was convicted of murder most foul; he hung his head and looked guilty. One of the masked women jumped to her feet and declared, ‘Thees ees a miscarritch of justice! Professor Espinoza would never harm a child!’
‘But I saw heem!’ the mother screamed. ‘Thees time you are wrong, Rosita!’
The masked women in the superhero costumes trooped out of the courtroom in their cool boots, and the movie cross-faded to a close-up of a hangman’s noose. The camera drew back to show a scaffold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Professor Espinoza was led up the steps. As the rope was placed around his neck, his gaze fixed on a man in a hooded monk’s robe at the back of the crowd. There was a black bag between the monk’s sandaled feet.
This was a stupid and poorly made movie, but Ralph still felt a prickle run down his arms and covered Jeannie’s hand with his own when she reached for him. He knew exactly what they were going to see next. The monk pushed back his hood to reveal Professor Espinoza’s face, convenient forehead scar and all. He grinned, showing those ridiculous plastic fangs … pointed at his black bag … and laughed.
‘There!’ the real professor screamed from the gallows. ‘There he is, there!’
The crowd turned, but the man with the black bag was gone. Espinoza got his own black bag: a death-hood that was pulled over his head. From beneath it he screamed, ‘The monster, the monster, the mon—’ The trap opened, and he plummeted through.
The next sequence was of the masked superhero women chasing the fake monk over some rooftops, and it was here that Holly pushed pause. ‘Twenty-five years ago, I saw a version with subtitles instead of dubbing,’ she said. ‘What the professor is screaming at the end is El Cuco, El Cuco.’
‘What else?’ Yune murmured. ‘Jesus, I haven’t seen one of those luchadora movies since I was a kid. There must have been a dozen of them.’ He looked around at the others, as if coming out of a dream. ‘Las luchadoras – lady wrestlers. And the star of this one, Rosita, she was famous. You should see her with her mask off, ay caramba.’ He shook his hand, as if he had touched something hot.
‘There weren’t just a dozen, there were at least fifty,’ Holly said quietly. ‘Everyone in Mexico loved las luchadoras. The films were like today’s superhero movies. On a much smaller budget, of course.’
She would like to lecture them on this fascinating (to her, it was) bit of film history, but this was not the time, not with Detective Anderson looking as though he had just taken a big bite of something nasty. Nor would she tell them that she had also loved the luchadora films. They had been played for laughs on the local Cleveland TV station that broadcast Shlock Theater every Saturday night. Holly supposed the local college kids got drunk and tuned in to yuk it up about the poor dubbing and the costumes they no doubt considered hokey, but there had been nothing funny about las luchadoras to the frightened and unhappy high school girl that she had been. Carlotta, Maria, and Rosita were strong, and brave, always helping the poor and downtrodden. Rosita Mu?oz, the most famous, even proudly called herself a cholita, which was how that unhappy high school girl had felt about herself most of the time: a halfbreed. A freak.
‘Most of the Mexican wrestling women movies were retellings of ancient legends. This one is no different. Do you see how it fits what we know about these murders?’
‘Perfectly,’ Bill Samuels said. ‘I’ll give you that. The only problem is that it’s nuts. Out to lunch. If you actually believe in El Cuco, Ms Gibney, then you are el cuckoo.’
Says the man who told me about the disappearing footprints, Ralph thought. He did not believe in El Cuco, but he thought the woman had displayed a lot of guts in showing them the film when she must have known what their reaction would be. He was interested to see how Ms Gibney of Finders Keepers would respond.
‘El Cuco is said to live on the blood and fat of children,’ Holly said, ‘but in the world – our real world – he would survive not just on those things, but on people who think as you do, Mr Samuels. As I suppose you all do. Let me show you one more thing. Just a snippet, I promise.’
She went to chapter nine of the DVD, the second-to-last. The action picked up with one of the luchadoras – Carlotta – cornering the hooded monk in a deserted warehouse. He tried to escape by way of a convenient ladder. Carlotta grabbed him by the back of his billowing robe and tossed him over her shoulder. He did a midair flip and landed on his backside. The hood flew back, revealing a face that was not a face at all, but a lumpy blank. Carlotta screamed as two glowing prongs emerged from where the eyes should have been. They must have had some kind of mystic repelling power, because Carlotta staggered against the wall and held one hand up in front of her luchadora mask, trying to shield herself.
‘Stop it,’ Marcy said. ‘Oh God, please.’
Holly poked her laptop. The image on the screen disappeared, but Ralph could still see it: an optical effect that was prehistoric compared to the CGI stuff you could view in any Cineplex these days, but effective enough if you had heard a certain little girl’s story of the intruder in her bedroom.
‘Do you think that’s what your daughter saw, Mrs Maitland?’ Holly asked. ‘Not exactly, I don’t mean that, but—’
‘Yes. Of course. Straws for eyes. That’s what she said. Straws for eyes.’
11
Ralph stood up. His voice was calm and level. ‘With all due respect, Ms Gibney, and considering your past … uh, exploits … I have no doubt that respect is due, there is no supernatural monster named El Cuco who lives on the blood of children. I’d be the first to admit that this case – the two cases, if they’re linked, and it seems more and more certain that they are – has some very strange elements, but this is a false trail you’re leading us down.’
‘Let her finish,’ Jeannie said. ‘Before you close your mind entirely, for God’s sake let her have her say.’
He saw that his wife’s anger was now on the edge of fury. He understood why, could even sympathize. By refusing to entertain Gibney’s ridiculous story of El Cuco, Jeannie felt he was also refusing to believe what she herself had seen in their kitchen early this morning. And he wanted to believe her, not just because he loved and respected her, but because the man she described fitted Claude Bolton to a T, and he couldn’t explain that. Still, he said the rest, to all of them and especially to Jeannie. He had to. It was the bedrock truth upon which his whole life stood. Yes, there had been maggots in the cantaloupe, but they had gotten in there by some natural means. Not knowing what it was didn’t change that, or negate it.
He said, ‘If we believe in monsters, in the supernatural, how do we believe in anything?’