Blood Lake (16 page)

I hand over enough money for the five biggest newspapers in town and walk off with my arms stuffed with soggy misinformation.

Back home to
huevos rancheros
with rice and coffee, coffee, coffee. Filomena's brain shifts towards the rational.

I said “towards.”

The two papers from Quito,
Amanecer
and
El Negociante
, don't even report the murder. I guess they have enough crime in the capital not to care about what happens in a swamp four hundred twisted kilometers down the road. And the hometown papers don't do it much justice either.
El Mundo
buries a one-inch item in the police briefs—priest killed in a robbery, a suspect has been arrested. They don't even give his name.
El Despacho
has the only real story, a curious mixture of fact and fantasy:

The Criminal Unit of the Municipal Police reports finding the body of Padre Samuel Campos, at approximately 12:30
A.M.
Sunday morning on the second floor of his parish house. The cook has been arrested, and is being charged with attempting to remove evidence from the crime scene, including a large kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon, and with stealing valuable religious artifacts from the victim, which were found in the
suspect's possession. Police photographed and videotaped the crime scene in order to preserve evidence that might otherwise be quickly lost, and to quell the speculation about a political motivation for the crime.

Cook? Large kitchen knife? Valuable artifacts? He tried to remove evidence from the scene when he was surrounded by all that swamp? And the first thing he does is run out screaming to attract attention?

I've got to speak to Ismaél before I can believe any of this. But first I have to find out where he is being held.

I have to punch the buttons a few times to get a dial tone, then I call the hospital and find out that my friend Carlos has been sent home from the repair shop. Of course they don't have his home number, so I have to get up the nerve to call his precinct, which feels very much like sticking my arm into a wood chipper. But getting shot in the line of duty puts a shining halo around a guy that dims whatever else is going on around him, and five miraculous minutes later I've got my man Carlos on the line.

“Oh, hey, Miss F. Staying out of trouble?”

“I'm trying. And you?”

“Recovering. Slowly.”

“Yeah, it takes a long time. Anything new?”

“Sure. I found what you wanted—that guy Campos's body is in the coroner's lab right where it's supposed to be.”

“Good work, Carlito. And—?”

“And I'll let you know anything else as soon as I hear about it, okay?”

“That's great. Thanks for doing me such a big favor.”

“Uh-huh. I'm all sweetness.”

“So listen, I also want to find out where they're holding the suspect.”

“Man, what's up with you? We have a bad connection or something? Or are you going to tell me why you have to know all this stuff?”

Good question, but I'm still in the trust-no-one stage.

“Because I'm worried that nobody else gives a shit.”

“That's not an answer.”

“I promise I'll give you a better one the next time I see you. Now could you make those calls for me, please?

“Girl, you know I'm not supposed to be using my arm.”

“So don't use your arm. Use some other appendage. Did you see this morning's
El Despacho
?”

“No, my other appendage only reads
El Globo
.”

“It would. It's just that I heard that someone blew up an electrical tower last night about thirty miles northeast of here.”

“Sounds like pretty big news.”

“Yeah, and there's nothing about it in the papers.”

We both sit there listening to the flies buzz.

“All right,” he says. “I'll see what I can dig up. Check back with me in a day or so.”

“Thanks, Carlos.”

“And when you do, I'd rather not know anything about it than have you feed me a load of bullshit and try to tell me it's peaches and cream.”

“Deal.”

My eye falls back to the black words oozing across the rain-soaked newsprint lying face up on the countertop.

Why the hell are the police trying to “quell the speculation about a political motivation” for the murder when that's the most obvious angle? Got an answer for me, Carlos? No, it's never that easy, because that way lies deeper shit than either of us have ever stepped in—shit that I promised I'd warn Padre León about. I check the directories and there's no listing for him or the church, so I call a grocery store in La Chala and ask them to go get Sister Cecilia for me. I wait, the minutes clicking away, worrying that I'll be disconnected, until she picks up and tells me that Padre León doesn't have a phone.

“I figured that out. How do you reach him?”

“You can't. You have to call the pharmacy across the street from the church and leave a message. I've got the number right here—”

“Umm, my message is a little sensitive for that mode of communication. Can't he come to the phone himself?”

“He doesn't like phones. I guess it depends who it is, or if it's urgent.”

“Well, this is pretty freaking urgent. And he'd come to the phone for you, wouldn't he?”

“I suppose so.”

“So why don't you deliver it for me?”

“Hey, Filomena, quit tying up the phone,” Uncle Lucho shouts.

“One more call.”

I tell Sister Cecilia everything she needs to know. Then I rattle the cradle again, get an interprovincial connection and call my cousin Lucho Freire in Cuenca—you know, the insurance risk who plays around with ammonia gas.

“Filomena! A miracle as always,” he says, the line fuzzy with static.

“Same here. How was your trip?”

“I made it back alive. You?”

“Just barely. Have you analyzed the pamphlet yet?”

“Yes. It's a ten percent solution of acidic invective dissolved in a ninety percent concentration of standard jargon-filled propaganda.”

“Very funny. What else can you tell me about it?”

“Sorry,
prima
. All I can tell you is that it's a high-quality oil-based printing ink.”

“On cheap-shit paper.”

“Yeah, there's that. And the poor offset resolution.”

“We knew that already.”

“Sorry, but what do you want me to tell you? I don't think there's a lab in the country that can do the kind of work you want done.”

Hmm. Maybe I should have just taken it to a print shop. “Hello?”

“Yes, Lucho, I'm here. Why don't you just send it back to me as soon as possible?”

“Okay, I'll get it in the afternoon mail.”

“And it'll arrive next July. You better send it express.”

“Express? Do you know how expensive that is?”

“Yes. I'll pay you back when I come to Cuenca, I promise.”

Gee, I seem to be making an awful lot of promises this morning, and right now I need to move forward with the biggest one of them all. One of the last things Padre Samuel told me was that my old comrade Alberto was playing around town with a group called Los Cuervos Rojos. I need to see his wicked smile again, but catching that bird in the act is an after-hours gig, and I've got to knock on a lot of doors today. Besides, there's still one newspaper left on my pile.

El Globo
is a scandal-saturated rag that's printed on butcher paper and uses type O-negative blood for ink. Surely they would leap at the chance to run a story about a dead priest lying in a pool of his own blood. But no—no story, no police photos, nothing—though they did have the foresight to print an unlicensed reproduction of a 1960s
Playboy
centerfold on their front page, no doubt as a public service to those readers who happened to forget during the night that a sexually mature woman generally has two breasts, one on each side, which are best observed if some of her clothes are removed. God bless freedom of the press.

Unsatisfied, I turn back to
El Mundo
, where the story is gradually seeping out that tanks of standing water on the north side of the city are becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and several dozen people have been stricken by a viral fever called dengue. In English it's also known as breakbone fever.

How encouraging.

No cooking gas, no rice, no drinkable water, and now an outbreak of breakbone fever. But I hear the plague of locusts has been put off 'til next year.

I try to sip my empty coffee cup for the third or fourth time, and I realize I need to push the cup aside and thumb through
El Despacho
again, slowly this time, looking for something that caught my eye before. There it is, a tiny item on page five announcing that presidential candidate Hector
Gatillo, the unassuming social studies teacher, will be giving his first major press conference tomorrow morning at the Socialist Unity Party headquarters in the
ciudadela
Aguilera. Could be just the place to talk to some reporters without giving them my life story first.

But first, Alberto the Crow.

I'm scanning the music listings when three shadows fall across my newspaper. I look up. Three men stand at the counter, shoulder to shoulder, dripping with rain and blocking the light. Three dark, unfriendly faces. Well-fed, sure of themselves. They're not from the
barrio
.

Suzie asks them what they want.

“We're taking a poll,” says the one in the middle.

Nobody is carrying a clipboard.

“What kind of poll?” asks Suzie.

“A neighborhood poll,” he answers. “Who are you going to vote for?”

“You mean for president?”

“Yeah.”

Suzie shrugs it off as she reaches into the cooler for a big bottle of Pilsener, saying, “My husband tells me who to vote for.”

She opens the bottle, serves out three full glasses of beer.

They almost reach for the glasses.

“And who does he want you to vote for?”

“Oh, you know, that guy you men all support.”

“You must mean Segundo Canino,” says the one in the middle.

“
That's
the one,” says Suzie, acting as if the name has just popped into her head, even though he's been governor of the province for the past four years.

The three men smile.

“Then you won't mind putting up this poster of our
candidato
, will you?” he says, as the one on his right peels off a red-and-white campaign poster from a thick stack under his arm with a photo of Canino on it and the words ¡segundo
PRESIDENTE
! in eight-inch-high letters.

They pass it through the bars, and Suzie stands it behind the liquor bottles.

No, that's not good enough.

They give her some tape, and Suzie hangs the poster above the counter where the whole neighborhood can see it.

That's better.

The men smile, drain their glasses, and move on to “poll” the auto parts store across the street. Nobody pays for the beer.

“You're going to have to let me borrow that ‘husband' of yours sometime,” I say.

“You're welcome to him,” she promises.

I'm complimenting Suzie on her performance when César returns from his morning mission and we have to help him carry in a
quintal
and a half of rice.

“Seventy-one thousand sucres,” he complains. “How are we supposed to buy it at seven hundred and ten sucres a pound and sell it at three hundred and twenty sucres a pound, with government inspectors coming around seizing the inventory and fining storeowners who sell it for more?”

For once, I don't have a snappy comeback.

Suzie and César agree that they will have to keep the price posted at 320 and sell it for 710 only to people they know, and tell everyone else there's no more rice, sorry. They start measuring out the precious white grain into one-pound sacks while I go back to scanning the papers.

A small black square in the middle of the entertainment pages announces that Los Cuervos Rojos are playing at the Peña Condorito. On a Monday night? That's Guayaquil, where the party never stops.

I waste a couple of hours at the ruins in La Chala, trying to interview a bunch of terminally suspicious people who won't volunteer useful information to outsiders.

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing.”

“Who told you to keep away from the crime scene?”

“Nobody.”

And I can't cut through it all with leading questions like, “How loud were the gunshots?” which would only suck me into a gooey snake pit of hearsay and spurious statements. They all had their radios up too loud, apparently. Maybe I could take a canoe around to the miserable shacks behind the parish house, which are up to their knees in oily water about seventy-five yards out. But not today, I've got too much else to do.