Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

At the mention of this, Nelson frowned.

“I was trying to be positive,” Henry told me.

Nelson confessed that he was spooked by what had happened the night before. Hopefully that had been the worst of it. Nelson held his hands up, as if to offer proof of his nerves. “Look,” he said, “they’re shaking!”

They were in the Monument District now, with its quiet, smoothly paved streets, its sleek houses shielded by high walls. Nelson turned his attention to the roads, pointing out a few turns ahead. “It’s a tricky part of town.”

“This,” Henry told me when we spoke, “was when I began to notice the station wagon behind us.”

“Did you mention it to the police?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I told the police everything. And they believed nothing. Then again, let’s say a car was following us. What does that prove?”

It was a light blue station wagon, and it had been behind them for a long while now. Henry recalls thinking how strange it was, that he was likely imagining it — a low-speed chase along an otherwise deserted street. They took a turn, and the station wagon followed, just a few car lengths behind.

“Did you see the driver?” I asked.

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

In any case, Henry didn’t mention his suspicion to Nelson, who had enough on his mind; later he saw this as a mistake. Instead he slowed the car to a stop, and kept his eyes on the rearview mirror. The blue station wagon slowed too, and then, almost reluctantly, drove on, past them and off into the neighborhood beyond. Henry and Nelson heard a hot blast of cumbia as the car rolled by.

“Why’d you stop?” Nelson asked.

“That car needed to pass.”

They drove a little farther on, and pulled up in front of the filmmaker’s house. Nelson got out to ring the bell, just as he had the previous morning, and Henry watched. “I saw him rocking back and forth on his feet, looking nervous and pale. Then the door opened. He leaned in, talking to someone I couldn’t see.”

That someone was the filmmaker, who, by his own admission, “was not having a good morning.” Ixta hadn’t come to work, nor had she called. She wasn’t answering her phone, and he was annoyed. When he opened the door, he was expecting to find her, not Nelson.

“I shooed him away,” the filmmaker told me. “I didn’t want him around. He looked terrible. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me. She didn’t come in today, that’s all I told him. He tried to peer past me, as if he thought I might be lying, and at that point … well, I just shut the door in his face.”

Nelson rang the doorbell again, and the scene was repeated, with a little more vehemence. Again the door was shut. This time Nelson ambled back to the car, a little dazed, and told Henry what had happened.

“So what do we do?” Henry asked. He glanced at his watch involuntarily as he asked. It was already past ten. On this particular day, he had his first class in an hour. He needed to get moving. What Henry meant by his question was: Where can I leave you?

“I’ll walk from here,” Nelson said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Nelson didn’t say where he intended to walk. Back to the theater, Henry assumed, though Nelson went to Ixta’s instead. The two friends embraced.

“The next time I saw him,” Henry told me, “was that night on the television news.”

IXTA HAD BEEN WOKENat around five in the morning by a ringing doorbell. It was a policeman. He took a look at her belly, blanched, and asked her to sit. She was still rubbing sleep from her eyes. They sat. The policeman’s voice trembled as he spoke.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” the officer said, then asked if she knew a man named Mindo.

But for a few stray details, her memory of the morning ends there. Mindo, dead. She was already beginning to lose herself to the hysterics that would take over for the next six hours.

The officer meted out in small doses what information he had: the exact location where Mindo’s body was found (four and a half blocks to the west of the Olympic, slumped in a recessed doorway on Garza); the cause of death (bleeding from multiple knife wounds). No wallet, telephone, or identification had been found, so they were treating this death as a robbery and homicide. They’d found her name beneath a drawing Mindo had made in his notebook.

“Did Mindo have any enemies?” the policeman asked. He’d already pulled out a small reporter’s notebook.

“I just remember that nothing he was saying made any sense,” Ixta told me.

“Enemies?” she asked. “Enemies?”

She cursed the policeman and called him a coward, while he tried in vain to calm her down. A neighbor heard the commotion and knocked on the door to find out what was going on. At one point, Ixta passed out. Her mother was summoned. Her brother. A medic. And just like that, the small apartment she’d shared with Mindo was full: more family; cousins; friends of hers; friends of Mindo; and eventually, another policeman, a woman this time. Their shoes piled at the door; a dozen mourners and cops standing around in their socks.

It should be noted that a similar scene was unfolding on the other side of the city, where Mindo’s parents sat before a somber officer, having their lives politely shattered. Mindo’s father, who was almost seventy, didn’t speak for three days afterward. He never recovered from the shock.

One friend of the family put it to me this way: “If their son had died violently at age eighteen, that they might have understood. But to die now? When he’d already escaped?”

Mindo had painted three quarters of the neighborhood’s death murals, which you can still see along the streets that surround his childhood home in the Thousands — bright, colorful, expansive portraits of young men laughing at death. Ignorant of death.

Now he has his own.

According to the reports, Nelson left Ixta’s work in the Monument District, and crossed his city one last time on foot. He went north on the boulevard known colloquially as Huanca (though on most maps it appears under a different name), turned right just past the cathedral, zigzagged through the neighborhoods on the south side of Marina, crossed that broad avenue, then went east, along Brazil, where the cheap, poorly built high-rises were just beginning to go up. He didn’t talk to anyone, or stop anywhere. Some press reports would imply that he was hoping to escape, but wanted to try once more to convince Ixta to come with him. We know this isn’t true. If he were fleeing, would he have walked right into an apartment filled with police?

He arrived just before eleven in the morning and stepped into a horror show. Ixta was in a terrible state, and Nelson’s arrival didn’t make things any better. By then Mindo’s sister had arrived, an emissary from that other world of pain. There was no solidarity. She yelled at Ixta, cursed her, and once she figured out who Nelson was, spat her vitriol at him as well. When Ixta admitted she’d seen Nelson the day before, Mindo’s sister all but demanded they both be arrested. There was even a moment when it appeared this might happen, but in the end no officer wanted to arrest the pregnant woman.

That left Nelson, and nothing could’ve been more convenient. In a city with hundreds of unsolved and frankly unsolvable crimes, the police could hardly believe their luck: a suspect had strolled right in. He looked guilty; his motive was clear.

“Do you know a man named Mindo?” they asked him.

“Sure I do,” Nelson said. “I was with him last night.”

They had their killer.

There would be no mention of the events of T—; none of Rogelio nor Jaime; no attention paid to the possible motives of a provincial thug avenging the death of his mother. All the dots were lying out in the open, waiting to be connected. For the police, and then the prosecutors, and then the judge, it was simply irresistible.