January Justice (17 page)

She smiled at me again. Her teeth were flawlessly straight and perfectly white; her lips were succulently full. She wasn’t as beautiful as Haley, but it was a very close call. “You speak Spanish,” she said, offering her hand. “How nice.”

I took her hand and smiled. She gave one vigorous shake and then released me. “Would you please come this way?”

I followed her into the entry hall. It was darker than I had expected, what with all the sheets of glass I’d seen outside. The floor was a highly polished dark-blue stone of some kind, and the walls seemed to float on either side of us, set off along the bottom as they were by deep reveals.

As Olivia Soto led the way, I admired her black hair hanging in a loose french braid halfway to her waist. Her hips swayed seductively beneath the fabric of her white cotton mariachi slacks, but somehow I got the feeling she was unaware of that. She had the unselfconscious air of a girl next door who has somehow managed to grow up to become a beautiful woman without realizing it.

We stepped from the dark entry into a huge living room flooded with light from a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooked Los Angeles far below.

“Ms. Montes, may I present Mr. Malcolm Cutter?” said Olivia. “Mr. Cutter, this is Doña Elena Montes.”

The woman rose from where she had been sitting and turned to face me. She was blond and barefoot, in a simple white cotton T-shirt and a pair of plain white trousers cut short at calve length. She could have been dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and I would still have recognized the iconic cheekbones, the perfectly sculpted lips, the arched eyebrows, and the flashing eyes that conveyed such passion in her close-ups. She was a small woman, but the proportions were exactly right in all regards. Doña Elena Montes was that rarest of Hollywood stars: an old-fashioned sex symbol in the tradition of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. At a time when nudity clauses were boilerplate in female actors’ contracts, Doña Elena could arouse any male audience while completely clothed from head to toe.

“Mr. Cutter,” she said, approaching me with her hand extended. “What a pleasure.”

She had a professional’s control over her words, speaking English without a trace of an accent, although I knew she had moved to the States only a decade before.

“It’s very good of you to see me,” I replied.

“Not at all. Would you like a drink? I’m having a glass of Chablis.”

“That sounds good, thanks.”

“Olivia, darling, would you please bring a glass for Mr. Cutter, and refresh mine?”

“Certainly,” replied her assistant, who picked up Doña Elena’s nearly empty glass, then left the room.

I turned toward the view. It was breathtaking. The house must have been cantilevered out over a cliff. The canyon floor was at least one hundred feet below the windows, and it fell farther away toward LA from there.

“Magnificent,” I said.

“Yes, isn’t it? I especially love it after dark. The city lights. The stars. It’s like hovering above the planet in a spaceship.”

I was glad it wasn’t after dark, glad I didn’t have to stand there and look down on the same city lights Haley had seen on her fall to the rocks. I shuddered. I turned away from the horrific memory as Olivia Soto came back in with the wine. She refilled Doña Elena’s glass, poured one for me, and then left the room again. The Chablis was excellent.

I said, “Apparently you know my friend Simon.”

“Such a remarkable man.” She gestured toward the seating area and a large white C-shaped sectional surrounding a white pine table covered with expensively printed photography books. She was on the cover of a few of them. “Shall we?”

As we sat I said, “Do you mind if I ask how you know Simon?”

“Didn’t he tell you? He and my husband met each other years ago, when Hector first started working for the State Department.”

“You’re talking about Congressman Montes? Him and Simon, Miss Lane’s butler?”

“Oh, Simon wasn’t a butler back then, of course. I believe Hector said he was with the British Foreign Office, or something like that, when they met. Anyway, Hector needed Simon’s help on some kind of problem in Africa or somewhere, and apparently it worked out well, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since.”

“I had no idea.”

“I know. Hector said it was strange to find out Simon’s been over here working for a movie star.” She leaned toward me suddenly, bending at the waist. I had to work hard to keep from staring down at her world-famous cleavage.

“Say,” she said earnestly, “do you think Simon might consider working for us, now that Haley’s gone?”

The desperate loneliness rose up. Of course the woman had no idea how it was for me to hear her speak of Haley being simply gone, but the severity of the word, the finality, coming as it did without warning… I looked away. I blinked a few times. I breathed in deeply, then breathed out and tried to think of what was excellent and good.

“I know Simon’s looking for a job,” I said. “You might want to call and ask.”

She sat back again. “Oh, that would just be marvelous.”

“Did he tell you why I wanted to come over?”

“He didn’t actually speak to me. He called Hector. But yes, Hector said it’s about Arturo. You’re some sort of investigator, apparently, and you’re looking into Arturo’s murder.”

I said, “Do you mind if we talk about it?”

“Whatever for, after all these years?”

Given her husband’s vehement condemnations of the URNG on Capitol Hill, I had a feeling it would be a mistake to explain that I was there to try to clear them.

I said, “There have been some new developments. But if you’d rather not, I can pursue other avenues.”

Half a dozen slender golden bracelets tinkled on her wrist as she waved her hand between us. “No, no. If Hector thinks we should discuss it, of course we will. I’d do anything to put that whore away.”

“You mean Alejandra Delarosa.”

She nodded, then drank deeply from her wine glass.

I said, “Can you tell me anything about what happened that might help me find her?”

“Nothing I haven’t told everybody else already.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Montes. I know this is painful. But sometimes it helps to hear details directly from the victim.”

She drank deeply again, almost finishing the wine. She swallowed, and I heard the liquid going down. Leaning back against the cushions, she sighed and then said, “All right.”

19

“I was at home,”
said Doña Elena Montes. “I was sitting on the sofa reading, when someone came up behind me and covered my face with some kind of cloth, and then I passed out. The police said they probably used ether. I woke up again in a small room. It was made all of wood. Wood floor, wood walls, wood ceiling. I heard coyotes outside sometimes. And crows. They kept me chained to a hook in the floor beside a mattress. They gave me a bucket for a bathroom, and they fed me once a day. Horrible things from cans. They made me sit in front of a video camera a few times and recite lines. They gave me the lines about an hour ahead of time and told me if I got them wrong, they’d kill me.”

I interrupted. “You keep saying ‘they.’ Was there someone in addition to Alejandra Delarosa?”

“There were men. I never saw their faces.”

“How many?”

“I never saw more than two at a time, but there might have been more outside the room. Maybe they rotated in and out. I couldn’t tell because they all wore masks.”

“And Alejandra Delarosa? Did she wear a mask?”

“Only when she was in the videos. There was no point in it the rest of the time. She knew I’d recognize her anyway.”

“How would you have known it was her?”

“She worked for Arturo for more than a year. I know her voice. The way she walks.”

“The way she walks?”

Doña Elena stood up and walked to the glass and back. Whereas before she had moved with great grace, now she seemed to lunge ahead, as if her feet hurt. “Like that,” she said. “I always wondered if she had bunions or something, but I never asked.” She sat back down.

Of course I knew the real reason Alejandra Delarosa never wore a mask. She hadn’t planned to let Doña Elena live. But there was no reason to explain that, so instead I said, “The things they made you read, were they handwritten?”

“They were printed out on paper, what I was supposed to say, what she was supposed to say, with my name and hers, except of course they called her ‘Comrade X.’ It was like a regular script.”

“That’s strange.”

“Not really. That Alejandra wants to be an actor. I always thought that was why she went to work for Arturo, to get close to me. She wanted me to help her get good parts, the little gold digger.”

I thought Doña Elena was probably just telling herself what she wanted to hear. A woman whose career had been built on her sex appeal might have more difficulty than most with the notion that her husband had bestowed his affections elsewhere. The theory that Delarosa planned to murder Toledo from the start made much more sense to me. But it was remotely possible Delarosa had wanted to get close to Doña Elena. And although it probably had nothing to do with Delarosa’s relationship with the URNG, at least the fact that Delarosa thought of herself as an actor was new information.

I said, “Did you help her get parts?”

“A couple of walk-ons, sure. I know how it feels to want it so bad, and I felt sorry for her. But she isn’t good enough for lines.”

“In the videos on the Internet, was that her standing behind you, in the uniform holding the gun?”

“That’s right.” Doña Elena picked up a small plastic box and pushed a button on it, then said, “I’ll just get Olivia in here for more wine.”

“The Delarosa woman is from Guatemala, isn’t she?”

“Of course. She’s from Cobán.”

“You husband, Arturo, was also from there, wasn’t he?”

“He was the mayor.”

“I’m sorry to have to say this, but I’ve heard he stole a lot of money from the people there.”

“That’s Communist propaganda. Arturo had very little money. He did his best to serve his people, right up until the moment the Communists drove him out.”

“I’ve also heard Alejandra Delarosa thinks your husband was responsible for her father’s death.”

“She did say that, but it wasn’t true. I mean, it may be true her father was among the disappeared, but Arturo certainly had nothing to do with that. He was a dear, gentle man. I kept trying to tell her that the whole time we were up there in that little shack, but she would never listen.”

I thought back to what I had learned during my two tours in Guatemala. I had my doubts that the mayor of a sizable town during the troubles there could have been a gentle man. But again, no good would come from saying so.

“When you were Alejandra’s prisoner, did you really think she’d shoot you?”

Doña Elena looked surprised. “You do know she murdered Arturo right in front of me?”

“I didn’t realize you saw her do it.”

“Yes. Right in front of me. As soon as she saw he had the money.”

“How did you escape?”

Olivia Soto entered the room, carrying a bottle. She said, “More Chablis?”

“Yes, dear,” said Doña Elena.

I watched the younger woman as she served Doña Elena. When she turned to me, I said, “No more for me, thanks. I have to drive.”

Olivia gave me a little smile, and again I felt honored just to witness the event. She was remarkably beautiful. But I sensed the same distance I used to feel around the beautiful people at Haley’s parties. It was as if I were watching the woman’s actions on a screen. Compared to Haley, every other woman lived in only two dimensions.

When Olivia had left the room, Doña Elena said, “Alejandra put the gun to my head right after she shot Arturo, but it didn’t work.”

“The gun misfired?”

“Is that the word? Yes, it misfired. So I fought with her and managed to take it away from her. I used it like a club, and I hit her and she ran.”

“You were still chained to the floor when this happened?”

“No, she had unchained me. I don’t know why.”

“She didn’t say?”

“No.”

“Did she unchain you before or after she murdered your husband?”

“It was before, I think.”

“Where were the other ones? The men?”

“I don’t know.”

“They made you say they were with the URNG. Did you believe that?”

“Of course.”

“Why, ‘of course’?”

“I heard them talking about
la revolución
.” Doña Elena spoke the Spanish words with a mocking tone. “Always
la revolución
this and
la revolución
that, as if their little war was all that matters.”

“Could that have been an act?”

“Why would they put on an act?”

“I don’t know. But you’re sure they were authentic?”

“Oh yes. Everything was very authentic. Including poor Arturo’s brains on the wall.”