Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

I found all this out during our first few nights together in the attic, when she spoke nonstop until the early hours of the morning, weaving together the disconnected episodes of her epic. On a particularly chilly night, she recounted to me the events around her husband Greg’s death. She spoke at length and candidly, and somehow we got into the Gothic scene about her friend Corina and the broomstick. She mentioned that event, but as with others was somewhat oblique around the topic of Sleepy Joe’s participation in it, as if she wanted to lessen his guilt, so I had to remain alert and insist that she make certain things clearer, that she couldn’t invent things because I knew more about all of this than she thought. I told her that I had taped together the manuscript she had ripped to pieces in Central Park, and so that I knew well the horrific actions that Sleepy Joe was capable of, like the abusive interrogation he had submitted her to and the death of her dog. María Paz’s response was to stop the story cold, and since then she has not told me about anything else in her past, as if the instinct had dried up, or she preferred to forget the content of those sections. We talk to each other a lot, but always sidestepping certain issues and keeping the conversation at surface level. She is allowed to ask me about heaven and earth, but I can’t ask her anything.

I see her floating in a state of grace and innocence, a nymph in the woods, or maybe more like a lily, a fawn, an odalisque. Too many things have happened to her, very serious things in a short span of time, so it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to torment herself by unraveling the treacherous twists of fate. It is almost as if she has gone into hibernation to regain her strengths and get ready for what is to come. Truth is I don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it either. But at the same time, I am terrified of what she still may be keeping from me.

While she sleeps beside me, I remain awake thinking about it all, as fucking insomniac as they come. I sense her sweet breath and soft snoring, and I ask myself who this woman is who is so full of darkness and secrets. One night recently, I tapped her on the shoulder because I needed to know the answer to one question right then.

“Have you been lying to me?” I said.

“You have to believe me, Mr. Rose,” she said half-asleep.

“Why? Tell me why I have to…”

“Because when people tell you things, you should believe them,” she said, and curled herself up tighter than before and fell back asleep. I couldn’t help but think about her twisted relationship with her brother-in-law/lover. I have compiled a list of character traits and habits for him, such as sleeping during the day, visiting brothels, his obsession with María Paz, his taste for spicy candy, the useless purchases from infomercials, and, above all, the performance of bloody rituals. I have read that while bloodless rituals are at core symbolic or figurative, the bloody ones necessitate the spilling of blood of a sacrificial victim. With the exception of bullfights in Hispanic cultures, or of such things as fight clubs and ultimate fighting tournaments, this kind of bloodletting as spectacle is rare in the West, because people are horrified and disgusted by blood and can only deal with it on the screen, where it doesn’t hurt, stain, or infect. The peculiar thing about Sleepy Joe is the leap backward, the primitive, brutal ritual. And so, little by little I have begun to understand a few things. The problem is that my investigation is typically amateurish, and in reality it just follows a method I found in a blog that I came upon by chance in serial form called Killing Me Softly . That’s why I thought it would be better to get a more qualified opinion, so one day I left María Paz alone in the attic to head to New York, supposedly to hand in a manuscript to Ming, my editor, but in truth to ask him about Sleepy Joe, whom he didn’t know and hadn’t even heard of. But he asked how he could possibly help in gathering the information I required.

The fact is Ming collects everything and is an expert in a thousand things, the more bizarre the better. He’s an expert, for example, on the many varieties of caviar, ancient African bridal gear, and a sumptuous and fierce species of warriors called betta fish. But of all his obsessions, the one that he devotes the most time to is noir comics. Along with being an editor of one of them, Ming owns an astonishing collection of volumes on the occult that he has found all over the world. And folks who are expert on this subject are expert on the subject of murderers.

Neo-noir comics, originally inspired by Frank Miller’s Sin City , and frequently printed in black and white, is a bristling and electrifying genre, as if on amphetamines, generally misogynous and eschatological and centered on sadistic, disgusting, maniacal crimes, with decadent and vicious detectives.

It’s not my genre, of course: my suicide poet and his girl are little sisters of the blind compared with the freaks that appear in noir. I told Ming more or less what I already knew of Sleepy Joe, his habits of burning and destroying on a massive scale, the dice on the eyes of a dead ex, the ritual with a broomstick involving Corina, the ritual with a knife involving his dead brother, the bone-chilling event with the dog.

“He doesn’t sound like a big-time murderer,” Ming told me, “more or less a small-time killer, timid, unsure. At least for now, although maybe he may yet do more terrible things.

“His ceremonial executions are crude, but whatever they lack in finesse, they make up for in conviction,” Ming continued. “For now, he threatens and assaults but does not kill, or he kills animals but not humans. Although things may escalate depending on what is propelling him. There must be a touch of necrophilia. It’s possible that he nailed the corpse of the dog to the wall after it was dead.”

“Which means he tortures cadavers?” I asked.

“I don’t think he sees it as torture, more like purification or glorification. Perhaps he makes his peace with the dead through the ritual. It could be how he asks forgiveness, as in how he sliced the corpse of his brother with a knife, a brother with whom he identified. Greg, the older brother, his idol, possibly the only person who cared for him and worried about him. Sleepy Joe must have adored him.”

“Yeah, he adored him, but snatched his wife. Some love.”

“There you go. He adored him up to a point. Look closely at the details: it was a pure instance of substitution; when he took the wife, he put himself in the shoes of his brother, he became the brother, and made María Paz the ardent object of his desires. When María Paz didn’t want anything else to do with him, she stripped him of very fundamental things, castrated him when she rejected him sexually, negated the identification with the brother, and to top it off he believed she took his money. He must have felt as if he had been skinned alive, anyone would have felt as such. He beat her but did not kill her because that would be the end of his desideratum, and he’s no idiot. But he beat her almost to death, and began to destroy the beings she loves. She is left with nothing and no one. You understand. That’s the message he is sending her: ‘The only person you have in this world is me.’ You have not told me that she is with you now, but I imagine she might be. If so, be very careful. You are getting directly in the path of Sleepy Joe, a complicated individual.”

“Can you sketch me an outline of his modus operandi?” I asked.

“Fuck, Jack the Ripper had a modus operandi; this bastard barely knows where he is heading,” Ming said.

At that point, I told him about the Eagles case and that I thought Sleepy Joe was the culprit.