Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Rose. You can’t torture yourself like that. If it were only so simple. Like I said, I did some investigating. Cleve died on a secondary road that ran parallel to I-80. It was raining that afternoon, and he was about an hour and a half away from Chica—”

“I’m very well aware of all that,” Rose cut him off. “It was raining and Cleve lost control of his bike and ran completely off the road.”

“I was told your son was a very experienced driver who would have known how to deal with water from the sky. The thing is that it’s not certain if the accident happened because the pavement was slick or because he was run off. Think about it, he could have even lost control of the bike as he was trying to lose a pursuer. He might have noticed that someone was following him,” Buttons said. “But it’s impossible to know for sure because there were no witnesses, no radar guns, no criminal investigation. The only two entities involved in the case after the accident were the highway patrol and the paramedics, and the autopsy concluded that it was an immediate death due to the blunt trauma caused after having lost control of the motorcycle because of a combination of the excessive speed and the wet road. It is well known that rain greatly increases the chances of a rider losing control of a motorcycle, so they don’t usually think twice about assigning blame in such cases, and they are almost always ruled accidents. In Cleve’s case, they didn’t tape off the area or preserve the integrity of the crime scene; they stepped all over the ground, littered it with cigarette butts, and decided to forgo tests without even considering connections… because it was never considered a criminal investigation.”

“There was no crime. And stop chewing on that button, it makes an irritating noise.”

“Not a problem,” Buttons said, spitting out the button. “They did not follow guidelines with regard to keeping the scene, but they took pictures, lots of pictures. I downloaded them to my Mac. Do you want to take a look? Maybe you should have a drink first. Are you ready? Look at this one. You can see the body exactly as it was found. There are cuts where he was struck by the thorns.”

“Of course he was cut by the thorns,” Rose said, barely looking at the images on the screen. “I’m going to beg something of you, Buttons, don’t make me relive these events if you don’t have something worthwhile to add.”

“Fair enough, so let’s move slowly. Look at this one; Cleve’s not wearing his helmet, it rolled somewhere below.”

“Why are you torturing me with this nonsense? He’s not wearing a helmet because it came off during the fall.”

“Or someone took it off.”

“For what purpose? Not to steal it, they left it right there. It came off; it’s not a very complicated mystery.”

“It’s a great helmet. A half helmet with a full face shield of excellent quality and double straps into double buckles. You can see that if I magnify the image. One of these helmets doesn’t just come off, and your son was not one to ride with it unstrapped, especially if it was raining. I think, after the accident, somebody took the helmet off.”

“He could have taken it off himself.” Rose clutched both hands to the side of his head. “If he didn’t die right away, he could have pulled it off. He always complained it was too tight.”

“Possibly; there’s a lot we don’t know, too many things. But let’s go back to the thorn cuts. Look at this, on his forehead, there are nineteen little cuts, almost equidistant and almost in a straight line. And now take a look at the acacia branch right next to his body. You see how it’s bent? If we increase the magnification to three hundred, we can see that at some point that branch had both ends tied together.”

“In a circle?”

“Or a crown. And now look what happens when we use Photoshop,” Buttons said, moving the piece of the branch and putting over Cleve’s forehead on the screen. “You see it? The thorns of the branch are a precise match with the cuts. If we had that branch here, there would be blood on it.”

“A crown of thorns,” Rose, who had grown very pale, said.

“Are you okay, sir? I’m sorry, breathe, lie down. Wait up, I think I should get you that drink after all,” Buttons said, and when he returned with two whiskeys, Rose had gotten up. He was no longer faint and the concerned expression on his face had vanished. Unlike before, he seemed frighteningly calm.

“Let me ask you just a couple of questions. Just respond yes or no. My son did not kill himself in that accident, he was murdered.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Yes or no, Buttons.”

“Yes.”

“And they tortured him.”

“I think they took off his helmet to press that crown of thorns on his head.”

“Was he still alive?”

“Impossible to know. But I would guess he wasn’t. The fall most likely killed him and the crown of thorns was later. A ritual or something, we’re still investigating. While you walked your dog, Mr. Rose, I took a walk around the property. I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I had to. I called Eagles’s widow. Her number was on the bags of dog food. She told me some things. And then I rummaged in the attic. The attic was Cleve’s room? That was pretty clear. I found some women’s clothes, some makeup.”

“So what if my son had girlfriends, or friends, who came to visit?”

“They had name tags on them that suggested they could have belonged to María Paz. But wait, that’s not all. Outside, in a clearing in the woods behind the house, there is a wooden cross. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you ever seen it? But maybe the point of it is to remain unseen, in fact, to go unnoticed, a makeshift cross. You could say that it is just two sticks tied together with twine. Well, I assumed it could be signaling a grave or something like that, and I dug around a bit. But all I found was this box, one of those that could be used for ashes, and also this.” Buttons reached out and handed Rose a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon soiled and eaten by fungus. “What I want you to be keenly aware of, Mr. Rose, is that danger is near, that it has been lurking right outside. Maybe it has even snuck into the house.”

Rose scrutinized the bronze medal on one side and the other.

“I think I know where we can find María Paz,” Rose said.

Here I am, Mr. Rose, out of Manninpox but still wandering through America, “saltando matones,” as they say. That was one of Bolivia’s many Colombian expressions, leaping over bramble patches. I have never talked like this, but as time passes, I am beginning to sound more and more like her. Saltando matones, indeed, because matones are exactly what I am trying to avoid, but not in the sense that it is used in the expression of brambles or thickets, but in the other sense of the word, which also means thugs and killers. In spite of it all, I still sit down to do my homework for you, as if to keep you updated, Mr. Rose. As if it is certain that I will no doubt see you again one day and turn all these pages in, so you can add them to the manuscript that I sent you from Manninpox. As you can see, I have not forgotten about you. It hasn’t been easy. To survive, I mean, since getting out of jail. I didn’t dare return to my apartment right away because of everything that had happened there. My whole being shrank at the mere thought of returning to that place, but I had to go look for Hero. I decided to make rounds in the neighborhood first, fearing what I would find there, or more to the point, who I would find there. I was not ready to come face-to-face with Sleepy Joe. I strolled by a few times first, getting closer and closer to our building, but not too close, to see if I could get news from someone. About Hero, you know. The first thing I had to do was figure out where my dog was. I sensed that people were pointing me out: There she goes, look, that’s the one they just let out of jail, the one who murdered her husband, who was fucking her brother-in-law, all that and who knows what other gossip. Fortunately, a neighbor did have news about Hero, good news. She told me that the cops had turned him over to an animal protection organization, so that perhaps I could get him back one day if I ever got out. Had they taken pity on Hero because he was lame? Maybe they had heard that he was a war hero, and this world is not so far gone that it’d let a decorated patriot starve to death.