Holy Guacamole!

We found the pool hall, but there was no Manny Diaz in an apartment above it. The proprietor downstairs and, evidently, the owner of the building said Manny had moved in with his wife and three children several months ago. He gave us an address in the Lower Valley. We found that too, although I feared for my car’s suspension on the pot-holed and, ultimately, unpaved road.

“Cold front coming in,” Luz remarked as we opened an iron gate and walked up to the door. She was right; the temperature had dropped perceptibly, and sunshine was intermittent rather than continuous, as I’d come to expect during 99 percent of the daylight hours. Mr. Diaz’s house was painted a deep blue green and had bars on every window and door. No doubt hit men needed extra security. I could hear the sound of children’s voices behind the house and had to wonder how much danger they were in because of their father’s profession.

“We’re looking for Manny Diaz,” Luz said to the woman who answered the door and peered at us suspiciously from between the intervening bars.

I was horrified, not only to be identified as a woman who wanted her husband killed, but at the wife’s easy admission of her husband’s business. Didn’t she realize that we might be the police? Luz had been the police.

“Well, you’re out of luck. Manny took off for Mexico Monday. Thought the cops was after him. And I’ll tell you, if he figures he’s coming back here when the heat’s off, he’s wrong. I’ll kick his ass right off the doorstep. I don’t need his customers and the cops showing up at my door. I got kids, an’ only one of ’em’s Manny’s. An’ he ain’t my husband. I never married him in church or nothin’. I’m too smart for that. I’m takin’ a computer course at the community college, an’ I got my eye on a new man. Me an’ my kids will do just fine without that pendejo.”

“Tell you what? You want the name of some other pendejo to kill off your old man, you gonna hafta ask someone else. I’m out of the hits-for-hire business.”

“It means stupid prick. Pendejo means stupid prick. Spanish or English, don’t matter. That’s what it means, and that’s what Manny was, a stupid prick.”

“Okay, if we’re through with the language lesson,” said Luz, “I got a question for you. Manny had a talk with Boris Ignatenko Saturday night. You know what that was about?”

“He didn’t kill no one. There was a guy makin’ book and sellin’ dope at Brazen Babes. Which wouldn’t make no difference to Boris. I know Boris. I used to dance there before I had the third kid, Manny Junior. But the guy wasn’t kickin’ back Boris’s share of the profits. So Manny beat the crap out of him. It was a lesson. Know what I mean? Don’t fuck with Boris. That was the message.”

“Nah, Manny caught him comin’ out of the can in some bar on Texas Sunday night, dragged him into an alley, an’ broke all his ribs an’ whatever. Guy recognized Manny and swore he’d set the cops on him, so Manny left him there, hopin’ he’d die. Then he thought about it all night. Woke up the damn kids about three times bitching about his bad luck the guy had made him and Boris didn’t want the guy killed. So he took off Monday morning. Good riddance, I say.”

“What do you care, anyway? You act like a cop, but she don’t look like no cop.” Manny’s ex pointed at me. “Since when are cops helpin’ gringo women hire hits. Some new battered-wife protection deal? If it is, gimme your card. I had a few guys beat me up. Manny included.”

Luz shrugged. “Hard to tell. Probably not. He must have had a car, and I didn’t see one in the yard. But then he could have gone straight out of Brazen Babes Saturday night, walked into Gubenko’s house, and taken him out. Be nice if we had a witness. For sure, we gotta go see Boris tonight.”

“For sure, I’ve got to go home and get some sleep,” I said wearily. “What time do you want me to pick you up? Definitely not before ten.”

“What we need,” said Luz, who didn’t seem to care about my state of sleep deprivation, “is a new suspect, or someone to break Boris’s alibi.” I drove, and she grumbled to herself. “You notice anything in the paper about some guy beat up in an alley downtown?”

I didn’t remember. There were so many stories of violence in the paper and on TV then; it wasn’t likely I would. In Africa and the Middle East people were killing each other off by the thousands. A few broken bones in an El Paso alley wouldn’t be a big story. Which is a sad comment on our time. We’re becoming desensitized. I wondered about people in the Middle Ages. Those had certainly been violent times. But, with no newspapers and TV, they wouldn’t have known what was happening forty miles away, and by the time they realized what was happening in their own areas, they were either dead or running for their lives. Medieval people probably didn’t live long enough to become desensitized.

“Terrific. That’s going to be a big help in finding out who killed the Russian opera guy. Not that I miss him. He was a real noisy SOB. Say, maybe those two students of his killed him. With one on either side of the pillow, that would work.”

“They were taking their clothes off in public when it happened,” I replied. “They worked until four. Didn’t you hear what Marcus said?”

“They are a distasteful lot, aren’t they?” We were quiet for a moment, thinking about the people we’d interviewed just lately. “Since we’re in the Lower Valley, we could visit one of the missions. That might be uplifting,” I suggested.

“You’re kidding, right? Uplifting? The Spaniards and their priests just about killed off the Indians—took their land, turned them into slaves, made ’em wear clothes in hot weather, worked ’em to death or killed them with smallpox, cut off their hands when they rebelled. You didn’t know that with all your history reading? Now we want to put up the world’s biggest statue of Don Juan de Onate and his horse. Figure that out.”

I sighed. “I do know about Spanish treatment of the Indians, but you evidently don’t know that Onate was born in Mexico—Zacatecas. His father was a Spaniard, but his mother was a direct descendant of Montezuma. What could be more Mexican? As for violence, both the sides were violent. The Aztecs ate their victims after cutting their hearts out.”

There was silence for a mile or so as I bumped over the unpaved road, and then the pot-holed road, toward I-10. “By the way, did you know that Ysleta used to be the county seat?” I couldn’t help asking. We were passing a sign directing us to the Ysleta Mission. “The people from El Paso hired Mexicans to cross the river and vote, so El Paso won the county seat by fraud.”

“Nah,” she said. “Just a woman short on sleep and long on bum knees. That smelly goop of your husband’s isn’t half as good at killing pain as my hot-chile salve, and don’t, for Christ’s sake, start telling me about the Aztecs and chile.”

Carolyn