Detective Valentín distantly puffed out cigarette smoke and swallowed coffee, tasting neither. This was her last case. That had no taste either. She listened to the hot rain drumming on the roof of her car and looked down at Ciudad Cabral, a city put together like a child in hand-me-downs. It was home to one million souls, living either in elegant old colonias in the centre, or in the sundry slums shoved up against the surrounding mountains.
And it was to these slums that Valentín had been called so often down the years. People lived on top of each other, voices carried. The smell of cooking mixed in with dog shit, laughter with fucking, birdsong with the screams of women. It was a city within a city, all colourful breeze blocks, crooked satellites, simple dirt floors. Murders here were rarely planned, customarily a moment of male jealousy erupting, like oil spitting from a hot pan. Those cases were solved in a day. But Valentín knew already: today’s case would not be one of those.
As her eyes passed over the never-ending tin roofs tinkling in the morning rain, she realized she wouldn’t be coming back here again.
At the end of the street a child schlepped a massive bundle of recyclables on his back. Across from him a chubby woman was opening up her salon for the day. Reggaetón poured out of a bakery’s window. For Valentín, somehow seeing these little shacks for the last time was seeing them for the first time.
Today’s dawn was colourless. In the distance, by the highway leading out of the city, she could make out words on a billboard:
NOS GUSTA HACER TRABAJO LIMPIO
We like to do clean work
Valentín didn’t know what the slogan was referring to. Not that it mattered. There was nothing that could be sold to her anymore. She sighed and glanced at the passenger seat, half expecting to see Morel dozing. But of course the seat was empty. Morel would not be a passenger in this car again. With difficulty, she sipped her coffee and wondered how long it had been so hard to swallow liquids. Closing her eyes, she heard his voice.
Not a good sign, Vali. You need rest.
‘And what about talking with my dead partner?’ Her voice was stale with a slight lisp. ‘Is that a good sign?’
You know what they say. To the dead the grave, to the living the pleasure.
She laughed. ‘Always the pendejo, Morel. Even now.’
Pendejo or not, I’ll be seeing you soon.
Valentín opened her eyes and forced some painkillers down with coffee. She had no answer for that.
Someone knocked at the window now. A young man in a grey raincoat stood there, shouting something over the downpour. Valentín wound down the window.
‘Ma’am. I’m Sub-Inspector Velasco.’
She opened the door to Morel’s side. ‘My replacement.’
Velasco got in and swept the rain from his hair. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You want a bachita?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
She lit up. ‘Where you from?’
He seemed surprised by the question. ‘The south.’
‘There’s a lot of south.’
‘Minatitlán.’
‘You must know what they call this kind of rain, then.’
‘No?’
‘Wives’ rain. The kind that annoys you for the whole day.’
Velasco forced laughter. ‘That’s a good one,’ he mumbled down into his papers. He pretended to read them while Valentín listened to the rain.
‘Tell me something, Velasco. Why are you here?’
He looked at her, puzzled. ‘The homicide.’
‘No, I mean in general. You could have been a lion tamer. You could have been a sailor.’
‘Well.’ He shrugged. ‘Because of the insecurity. I wanted to help.’
That was the ubiquitous word for it: la inseguridad. The media used it for mass murders, mutilations, any imaginable human monstrosity. But that was like calling the Hanging Gardens of Babylon quaint. On TV the other night a controversial news panellist had used the phrase ‘Our president’s narcotheatre’ – it felt right to Valentín. Everything was for show now, even murder.
At last, the door of the house on the corner opened and the Science Division guy emerged in white scrubs and a hairnet. Squinting through the rain, he gave Valentín the thumbs-up then ambled away. A murder like this might have been news in another city, another country. But here it would be just another shitty little footnote in the vastness of whatever this reality was being called now.
Valentín stubbed out her cigarette and slung her coffee out the window. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The rain was lashing down on this sloping street lined with stacks of human shoeboxes. Rubble, smashed furniture and syringes collected in alleyways. Cacti plumed out of empty lots and abandoned building sites. The only billboards here advertised Christian ministries or Coca-Cola.
‘What’s for breakfast, Velasco?’
‘Victim is early seventies. No job listed.’
The crime scene itself was little more than a cement hutch. On the wall there were various Madonna icons and prints of Christ: the Agony in the Garden, the Temptation in the Desert. Velasco took Valentín through, noting little details, eager to impress. In the front room he delicately pointed to the corpse with the end of his pen. ‘Cause of death is –’
‘One too many holes. I can count, you know.’ Valentín looked down at the dead sack of a man.
‘I heard about you,’ Velasco admitted. ‘But I didn’t think you’d be the joking type.’
She grunted her reply. Of course he had heard about her. The woman. Everybody had heard about her. There was no denying she was old school – police via the military. She was just moving up when President Zedillo passed the law to create the Policía Federal back in ’99. For Valentín it had been throwing a lasso on a shooting star. Throughout, she’d suffered insults, slights and come-ons, but none of it got in her way. They’re just afraid of you, Chamaca. That’s what her father had said. They don’t like their geniuses to wear skirts.
Valentín tried not to think too much about him anymore. She didn’t do well with feelings. After all, a father like that had been a blessing and a curse – that much love and wisdom set a high bar. Long ago she had realized normal men were not compatible with high bars.
Valentín looked over at Velasco, who was gently lifting fingers with pencils and peering under tables with the delicacy of a proctologist on his first day. There was a time she would have treated him like the shit on her shoe just on principle. So obviously the collegiate type, so obviously from money.
In the last two decades she had met only one man who’d been more than shrugged shoulders – Morel. He had been a strange man, pudgy yet slender limbs, black hair but reddish whiskers, constant laughter despite having the darkest world view she’d ever encountered. Valentín hated him at first: his stupid jokes, his habit of spitting nails in the car. But years had passed and somewhere along the way she began to look forward to the jokes, even found herself shaking her head affectionately as she picked out little nail clippings from her car.
Morel had never saved her life. He’d never been much of a cop. But she had come to depend on him. Probably more than depend, despite their love affairs always fizzling out. Luis Morel had been a good man, whether or not anybody else saw it. Whether or not his ethics had wavered in the year before his murder. Now he was just a voice in her head.
Conscious of being observed, Velasco looked up at her. Valentín wondered what he saw. Her mental image was of herself at around thirty – a dark, buxom woman with perennially short hair, quick to wink, with green eyes thanks to a Scandinavian grandmother. But now her skin was pale, her eyes sunken. Her clothes hung off her. She probably wouldn’t bother the scales at anything over fifty kilograms.
‘A friend discovered him this morning,’ Velasco offered. ‘Landlord said it doesn’t look like anything was taken. Not that there’d be much to take.’
‘The killer was here for him.’ She nodded at the old man. He was face down, his eyes half open. The last thing he would have seen before the bullets shattered through his brain was his own dirty floor. ‘No witnesses, I’ll wager.’
‘No, ma’am. Which I find hard to believe. Two gunshots and somehow nobody hears anything through these walls?’
‘Close-knit barrio doesn’t want to talk to the chota. Big shock.’
Suddenly, Valentín was violently gasping for air, her collar sagging with sweat, her headache threatening to floor her. She staggered outside and gripped a road sign, grateful for the rain on her face.
It had started with vomiting. Trouble swallowing. White patches on her gums. She ignored it, of course, but the work medical had been unavoidable. The test results had no interest in her career. The old man would be her last case and Velasco’s first. That was life: inauspicious beginnings, inauspicious endings.
Valentín took refuge under some stray metal sheeting and lit up, protecting the small flame against the wind. Her drag was deep but she registered no nicotine hit. Hers was a body which no longer experienced pleasures, a gum with the flavour chewed out.
Velasco sat next to her. ‘You okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘I think there could be something out back. When you’re ready.’
She followed him to a back lot sprinkled with chicken shit. The tyre tracks were clear – thick, unmissable impressions. Valentín hunched over them, running two fingers through the warm wet mud. They were losing their shape in the rain. Same as me, she thought.
The tyre tracks headed north. The killer left the city. Valentín didn’t know his name but she could picture him. The designer T-shirt, the SUV, the cellphone – all of it would exhibit his standing. Especially here. In this place, his wealth would have told everyone that he was a man to be respectfully left alone. A man who was connected. A man who was just here to do a job. Maybe he winked at the younger boys who marvelled at his truck, one day hoping to be like him.
The socioeconomic theories modulated but, the way Valentín saw it, wanting to get out was wanting to get out. And there would never be a Bible passage fiery enough, or a prison sentence long enough, to deter that. Politicians talked of the narco groups as though they were simple criminal gangs, using black-and-white language. But those groups were made up of brothers. Cousins. Childhood friends. Of course they committed atrocities. She saw those every other day in Ciudad Cabral. But the slums saw the other side of them too. Covering the cost of a funeral for a widow too poor to pay. Schools built on their money. Handing out rice and water after earthquakes. They even threw festivals.
So when situations like the dead old man arose threats were not required. The consequences were clear. Even so, Sicarios would openly kill in broad daylight, then turn to the crowd and say: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you know how this works. The closed mouth catches no flies.’
Valentín pulled her coat tighter around her body. She was cold all the time now, the chill deep in her bones. From here, she could see the corpse through the side door. Nobody would open their mouth for him. This was a city where nobody honked their horns. Most nights, the streets were empty. Every other door had a black ribbon tied to it. The sight of another one appearing overnight shocked nobody.
As for the old man, Valentín already knew nobody would pay for him. Nobody would demand justice. Certainly not her.
‘Velasco!’ she called. ‘I’m heading back to the station now.’
He nodded, concern in his eyes. Valentín wanted to wish him good luck. She wanted to warn him about the whispers in his ear that would soon come. She wanted to tell him to only ever keep his hands in his own pockets. To steer clear of the path she had taken.
Instead, she just nodded at the body. ‘Good luck with him.’ She smiled wryly. ‘And the rest of them.’
Outside, the first few state police officers had arrived on the scene and were reluctantly cordoning off the area. A small crowd had gathered at the police tape. Detective Valentín knew from experience they would not stay long.