Against the Wind (36 page)

The door to the house opens. A man comes out. He’s short, compact, Hispanic. Dapper comes to mind. He looks like a well-bred horseplayer, his shoes shined to a high gloss, the crease in his trousers razor-sharp. His steel-gray slicked-back hair is the only giveaway that he’s in his mid-fifties, not a decade and a half younger. He walks to us, formally shakes Mary Lou’s hand.

“You got here fast.” His voice is accentless, deep for a small man. Authoritative.

He’s a cop. He looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him.

“Victor Mercado, Will Alexander,” Mary Lou says, making the introduction.

“I hear you’re a hell of a cook,” I say, not bothering to mask the sarcasm.

His face creases in a wry smile. “I’ve got something good cooked up for you. Please come inside.”

The living room is tiny, but immaculate. A large black-velvet painting of Elvis hangs over the sofa. I glance over at Mary Lou. She’s tense. What the hell is all this?

Mercado opens a bedroom door off the hallway.

“Come in, please,” he says.

A moment passes; then a trembling Rita Gomez shuffles into the room. She looks at me for a brief moment, then averts her eyes.

I don’t know who’s shaking more, her or me.

“Sit down,” Mercado instructs her, indicating the sofa.

She sits. Her hands are balled up in tight fists. I turn to Mary Lou, who’s grinning broadly.

“Victor used to run the FBI office in San Antonio,” she informs me. “Now he runs the best P.I. firm in the southwest. We met a couple of years ago on an investigation,” she continues, “he’s been helpful to me from time to time … not only in Texas but Santa Fe and just about all over.”

“I got tired of the bureaucratic bullshit,” Mercado explains. “And the money’s a hell of a lot better.”

I must have seen him in Santa Fe once or twice; that’s why he looked familiar. I look from him to Mary Lou; could she have slept with him? Immediately, I check that thought. She doesn’t do that—I do, it’s my inadequacy I’m projecting. He’s helping her for the right reasons. Jesus I’m lame sometimes.

Mary Lou glances at her watch.

“I’ve really got to run.” She gives me a quick peck on the cheek. “Call me when you get back.” She smiles. “Now maybe you’ll believe me.

She’s out the door before I can ask what or how or why. She’s given me this incredible gift and she won’t even stay for a proper thank-you.

I turn to Mercado.

“How … ?”

“I figured she’d have to talk to someone in Santa Fe,” he explains, glancing at Rita, who’s sitting forlornly on the edge of the sofa. “Loneliness, desperation. Whatever. Fear. I came up to your neck of the woods, checked out the situation, and took the liberty of shall we say intercepting a few phone lines that seemed likely. The routine kind of stuff you learn in the bureau.”

“Isn’t that … irregular?” I ask.

“Mary Lou’s a good person,” he says straight-forwardly. “It was important to her. Sometimes you have to cut a few corners.”

She did this all for me. Mary Lou.

“I’ll wait outside,” Mercado says circumspectly.

He closes the door behind him, leaving the two of us alone.

I stand there, waiting. Finally Rita Gomez looks up at me.

“They said I wouldn’t have to see nobody. Ever again. That’s what they told me. They promised me to my face.” Her voice is low, barely a whisper, like she’s talking to herself, remembering what they told her, as if in saying the words it would make them so.

“Who?” I prod. “Who told you that?”

“You know who.”

“No, I don’t.” I think I do, I’m pretty sure, but I want her to say.

“They said I wouldn’t see nobody connected with any of this once it was over. That I’d never have to say nothing about it ever again. They promised,” she whimpers, almost crying.

“The police.”

She nods, her head barely moving.

“Gomez. And the other one. What’s-his-name. Sanchez.”

She nods again.

“And the other one,” she says.

“Which other one?” I’m confused; as far as I ever knew, they were the only cops who ever dealt with her.

“The one with the food all over his shirt and tie. The one picks his teeth right in front of you. Who did the talking in the courtroom.”

Moseby.

“The D.A.,” I say. “The assistant D.A.”

“Yeh. Him.”

“What about Robertson?” I ask. “The regular D.A.”

“Who?”

“The other man in the courtroom who did the talking. Besides the judge.”

“Him. No.”

“So it was just the three of them … who made you these promises. Nobody else.”

“Yeh.” She nods her head, almost as if bowing in prayer.

“The ones who got your confession.”

She looks at me as if to ask ‘what could I do?’

“It was me or them, they said. They said they already had plenty of proof and if I didn’t admit it was them bikers it would be me up there being tried for the murder with them. As an accessory to the murder. Of Richard.”

They took her to a cabin up in the mountains. It was the only cabin anywhere around, you couldn’t see anything from it. It was a long drive, several hours, she asked how come we’re going up here, what’s wrong with questioning me in Santa Fe, they said so nobody will bother you, upset you.

She was still feeling kind of weak from the bleeding and she was hungry so she told them she wanted something to eat and then she wanted to sleep for awhile so one of them went out and got her some chili and Cokes and they all ate chili and she drank a couple Cokes and they had beer and she had to go to the bathroom and she was embarrassed to tell them for some reason, maybe because of the bleeding, so she held on until she couldn’t anymore so finally she asked could she go? And they said sure so they let her go to the bathroom and they told her to take a shower while she was in there, so she took a shower and later on, a couple days later, she discovered a peephole into the bathroom where they’d been watching her shower. By then there was so much other stuff going on it didn’t matter, they saw her tits, her swollen pussy, so what? They must be pretty hard up if that turned them on.

So she came out of the shower that first time and they had a bunch of pictures spread out on the table, what passed for the kitchen table, and they told her to look at them carefully. It was a bunch of pictures of Richard, all fucked up. Real sick shit, they tried to make her look at them but she couldn’t, the pictures made her want to puke, she ran into the bathroom and puked, they were so disgusting. So then after she came out they told her what had happened to Richard, all the stuff that she talked about at the grand jury and then at the trial, was in these pictures. That was how she found out what had happened to Richard, the first time, for real. Because she hadn’t seen it happen. She said she did, at the grand jury and later at the trial, but she didn’t.

So after she puked up all the chili and Coke and washed her mouth out, they were nice to her, the cops, wasn’t that awful about poor Richard, all that kind of dialogue, then they said to her how did it happen? So she said what do you mean? So they said to her up there in the mountains, when you were up there with Richard and the bikers, how did it happen, what happened first, what happened second, who raped you first, who raped you second, who raped Richard first, who raped him second, and so on, who actually knifed him first, who cut his dick off. Everything that happened.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told them. Like her rape, she told them about that, everything she could remember, which as she talked about it was just about everything, then how they dumped her off finally and raped her a couple more times and then took off. It scared her to talk about it but she did, and the more she talked about it the more she hated the bikers, she’d been able to not think about it, like it didn’t happen, but talking about it made it for real, that it did happen, she knew it did, she couldn’t say it didn’t. But anything about Richard, she couldn’t say about that, because it didn’t happen.

So then they looked at her kind of funny, like maybe they didn’t believe her or something, so they said you were up there with them when they killed Richard and cut his dick off and stuck it in his mouth, and she told them she wasn’t, she just wasn’t.

So then they said again she was, and she said again she wasn’t, and they looked at her funny again, and they told her to go to bed, to get some sleep, she was tired from what had happened to her, the rape and the hospital and all, and they would talk to her again in the morning. It was true, she was tired from all that, she went into one of the bedrooms (there were two) and fell asleep without even getting out of her clothes that’s how tired she was. Later she found out they had a peephole into that bedroom, too, so they were probably watching her get dressed and undressed. She didn’t care; plenty of men had watched her get undressed, it was no big deal to her. She heard them talking and getting beers out of the fridge and the next thing she knew it was the next morning and her mouth tasted like shit from puking the night before and they gave her coffee and sweet rolls and a new toothbrush and toothpaste and toilet articles they’d bought for her. Nice things, like a lady’d picked them out.

Then they showed her the pictures again and made her look at them for a long time, real good. They told her how it happened, how they figured it had happened, the same story she told the grand jury later, and she kept telling them it didn’t happen that way, she didn’t know how it happened because she wasn’t there. So then they said okay let’s start back at the beginning. Did you know the victim Richard Bartless? Yes, she told them. She knew him, she’d already said that she knew him, she wasn’t arguing that. Okay, so did you ever go to the bar with him? Yes, again. No problem so far. Did you meet the bikers there that night? Yes. And did they take you up to the mountains and rape you? Yes. And bring you back to the motel? Yes. Where Richard was also living at the time, next door to you? Yes. By now she could see where it was going. And Richard came into your room and tried to stop them from hurting you? No, she’d told them, that’s where it stops being true, being what I know, what happened to me. They just kept going on: and they tied him up and took both of you back to the mountains. No. And they fucked him up the ass, going on questioning her like she was saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no.’ And they took this knife and got it hot in the fire and stabbed him dozens of times. No. Just keeping on asking, like it’s ‘yes.’ And cut off his dick and stuck it in his mouth. No. And shot him in the head. No. And threw the body over the edge and took you back to the motel and talked about killing you or not and finally not killing you. No part and yes part. And leaving, riding away, leaving you there, swearing you to secrecy. Yes.

So they did that and had some coffee (she had a Coke) and then they started over again, the same thing, from the beginning. The same questions, the same answers. She had to go to the bathroom again and she asked ‘Could I’ and they said no, not yet. She was ready to burst and she told them, she had to go, she couldn’t hold it no longer, she was going to pee on the floor, which would have embarrassed her worse than any of the other stuff, being raped or anything, she didn’t know why but she didn’t want to pee on the floor in front of these cops. So finally one of them, the nicer one, Gomez, says you can go, but listen, he tells her, when you come back we’re gonna ask you these questions again, and we want you to start telling the truth.

After lunch a third man joined them. Moseby. He told her who he was, how sorry he was for what had happened to her, that he was going to help her. That made her feel good until he started talking to her about what the detectives had been talking to her about, the murder and how she’d been up there and had seen it. So she told him the same thing she’d told them, that maybe it happened the way they said it did but she didn’t know because she wasn’t there, she didn’t see it.

That got him mad. He called her a liar, a whore, a slut, told her if she kept on lying like this he wouldn’t have no choice but to arrest her and charge her with covering up the crime, being an accessory to it. That scared the shit out of her but what could she do? She’d always been told not to lie about something to the police and here were the police telling her to lie.

They talked to her all afternoon and night, she was bone-tired, being raped and bleeding had sapped her strength, she had to go to sleep, but they wouldn’t let her. They talked to her all night long, in shifts, the cops and Moseby taking naps, spelling each other, keeping her awake, prodding her when she started to nod off, making her drink coffee, which she didn’t like, and Cokes, not letting her go to the bathroom until she practically peed in her pants, taunting her about that, keeping her up all night long and the next day, until her brain was fried, she couldn’t hardly talk, didn’t know what she was saying. They kept asking her the same questions, over and over. Finally she passed out from exhaustion.

That was in the afternoon and when she woke up it was dark again. She was lying in bed, naked. Someone had undressed her. Fucked her for all she knew, there was fresh Kotex covering her pussy, fresh blood. It could have been from being so tired, but the bleeding had pretty much stopped, so she figured someone had been doing something to her while she was passed out. It didn’t matter; all she wanted was for it to be over. But she was still afraid to lie; she thought they might be tricking her, that if she did say ‘yes’ to the questions she’d been saying ‘no’ to they’d arrest her for lying, that it was all a trick to get her to lie so they could arrest her for something. So she didn’t know what to do.

They came into her room and told her to get dressed again, it was the same clothes she’d been wearing, the only clothes she had up there, they were getting rank, she didn’t want to put them back on but she did, she didn’t have any choice. She came back into the living room and there was another man there, a fourth man, and there was a machine on the kitchen table. They told her to sit down at the table next to the machine and they put a strap on her arm from the machine, which was a lie-detector machine, they told her. They told her they were going to ask her the questions again, and the machine would tell if she was lying or not.