Hot Sur (52 page)

Rose had nightmares the night that Buttons slept on the sofa in the living room. He went to bed shaken with his revelations, terribly distressed, and awoke at dawn, feeling a bruised resentment all over, as if he had suffered a horrible beating. Rose thought he had dreamed of mutilated bodies. Amid the carnage, a woman let out an irritating harangue that he would have rather not heard, but that had some revelatory meaning. Who was she? Someone he knew, but not well, or well but not completely, simply someone who understood something amid the butchery. He fed Buttons breakfast and drove him to the train station afterward, asking for a couple of days to take in all this new information and assuring him that as soon as he recovered from some of the shock induced by the details he would call him to start looking for María Paz.

He never called Buttons or responded to any of his e-mails and phone calls. He imagined that under orders from Pro Bono, Buttons would begin a parallel search using his own contacts.

“Better that way,” Rose tells me. “Each man in his home, and God in all of them.”

The dream still rattled around in his head. At first, he thought that the woman in the dream could have been Mandra X, but then he realized that it could also have been Edith, his ex-wife. He decided to call her, simply pick up the phone and call her, though he wasn’t sure why. At that point, Edith was still under the impression that Cleve’s death had been an accident, and Rose had no intention of changing that.

“Do you remember that album from the trip to Rome? Do you still have it, by any chance?” he asked her, and she knew immediately that he meant the one with the pictures from the trip to Italy some thirty-five years earlier when they were newlyweds and Cleve had not been born yet.

Edith said she must have had it somewhere in her house, and Rose asked her to send it to him as soon as she could. She agreed to send it without asking why, and that very night, a package from FedEx SameDay arrived at the house in the Catskills.

“Did the album have anything to do with the death of your son?” I ask Rose.

“Well, I was more than anything at that moment obsessed with the tools employed in the Passion of Christ. There was the crux of the matter, just as I had intuited from the first, when I found that old newspaper clipping of the murder of the ex-policeman, confirmed later with the nailing of the dog to the wall, and even more so when Buttons made clear how my son must have died. Yet, there was something missing, and I needed to know the exact list of objects aside from obvious ones, the cross, the nails, and the crown of thorns. Then I remembered our trip, those days with Edith in Rome, and of a specific place we had visited then, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crossed the Tiber toward Castel Sant’Angelo, the antique mausoleum in Adriano. Along the sides of that bridge, on pedestals, there is a series of marble angels sculpted by Bernini and his workshop, and each of those angels holds one of the instruments of the Passion. Of course, I could’ve found the information I was looking for in many places, beginning with Google. Bernini’s representation of the Passion was one of thousands on the topic. But that one in particular was special to me. The Sant’Angelo bridge brought back many memories, both fond and troubling, but intense, perhaps too intense. I think that’s why I became obsessed with looking at that album.”

He thought he would put himself in the shoes of Sleepy Joe to understand how he worked. The first thing he needed to do was to stop hating him, cut off any hate, which is blinding. Rose couldn’t afford blindness, he had to remain vigilant and come to some conclusions. Based on the premise that even the most insane or evil of men has his reasons for doing what he does, Rose could come to know Sleepy Joe’s motivations. He wanted to switch minds with the victimizer, as he had seen Will Graham do with the Tooth Fairy in
Red Dragon
. It sounded childish to put it that way, Rose realized, but he was up to his knees in this thing, completely out of his element, and using horror movies as a guide. He, who knew absolutely nothing of the criminal mind, and who was not a detective or investigator, just a father torn apart by the death of his son.

“And maybe everything was like a child’s game,” he tells me, “except one thing, my conviction to find the criminal. Whatever it was I had to do, I was going to find that man, and I was going to destroy him.”

I am Sleepy Joe, Rose began repeating to himself. He was upstairs, in Cleve’s attic, the place he thought most fitting. I am Sleepy Joe and I’m going to murder this man Cleve. Why? Why am I doing it? One, because I damn well feel like it. I am a thug and go through life doing as I please, or doing nothing, and if I kill someone, it is because I want to and I can. Two, I am going to kill him because he’s getting involved with my girlfriend María Paz. (Pro Bono had mentioned that Cleve and María Paz had been together, and if Pro Bono knew, Sleepy Joe could have known as well.) Cleve and María Paz love each other, or they like each other, or at the least, they’re after each other, and since I suffer from terrible jealousy, I’ll kill him and keep her. How should I kill him? Simple, I’m a trucker and he rides a motorcycle: I have the advantage. Cleve makes things easier when he takes a shortcut through a little-traveled road on the way to Chicago. I tail him, force him to accelerate, sideswipe him with the truck, and he runs off the road and kills himself. Done and over. Wipe off the rival and get away scot-free because there are no witnesses. Up to that point, everything seems rational. Then I put a crown of thorns on his head? That is, I get down from the truck even though it’s raining, run down the side of the road, find the body . . . and I perform this ritual. I have to do the ritual, that’s my thing, justifying my crimes with this mystical element, or the other way around, let the mystical elements lead me to my crimes. I notice the abundance of thorny acacia everywhere and break off a few branches, the ones heavy with thorns. There are nineteen thorns in total. Do I count them one by one, or do I even care? I count them; there are nineteen. Does that number mean anything? It reminds me of the acronym M-19, the name of the guerrilla movement in Colombia when I lived there. So what? I let go of nineteen, I’m interested in associations that Sleepy Joe can make. I’m losing focus; I have to remain in his shoes. I pick that branch of thorny acacia, handle it carefully, making sure the thick, long spines don’t harm me. What about if someone sees my truck? It’s worth the risk. I shape the branch like a crown for my victim. Do I hurt myself by mistake? No. I use gloves, to protect my hands and to not leave fingerprints. (There were, in fact, none, Buttons had confirmed.) I am Sleepy Joe, and I have powerful reasons for doing what I do. Do I punish my victim because I’m jealous? Is this vengeance? No, this is not about jealousy; it’s about something else. I’m not hesitant, that’s not my thing. What I am doing is not grotesque, or lunatic, or absurd. On the contrary, I am enormously pedantic and sure of myself, and my actions are full of transcendental meaning, although no one else may see this. They’re ignorant; I am enlightened. The moment is sublime; I’m the priest and have chosen this man as scapegoat. He’s the object of my ceremony, the Christ figure in this Passion play. The victim shines before my eyes with a sacred radiance that summons his sacrifice. Christ figures are meant to die. I tell myself that their mission is to clean this world that is dirty with sin with their deaths. (Concerning this last point, Rose rereads a portion of María Paz’s manuscript to confirm; she too knew that her brother-in-law was obsessive about ritual cleanliness.) I’m Sleepy Joe again and tremble with fervor; I even get somewhat excited, begin to get an erection. I’m transfixed and hard, the victim calling me, inviting me, he is there for me, offering a submissiveness and willingness that excites me. God’s calling tingles in my balls and demands the execution of the lamb. I obey because I am his prophet, his executor, his angel of death. Yahweh responds and lets me know that he counts on me. Divine punishment will be executed through me, and all the filth in the world will be purified. Shit, this is some big stuff I’m involved in here. I feel such fever that I need to put on the brakes; I can’t come till right at the point of consummation.

That’s it for the Sleepy Joe thing. Could the murder really have taken place like that? There seems to be a lot missing, Rose thought, I’m not getting this, too removed from the real heart of the thing, the blind conviction, a rapture so profound that leads me to torture and kill. This truck driver’s advantage over me is so enormous, in that he defeats me with the simple gift of his faith. He is the one endowed with belief: that makes a huge difference, and tips the scales in his favor. He is very adept at the ritual sequence, vibrantly engaged in each of the stages leading up to the summit of pain. His acts are based on a millennial tradition that is foreign to me. He thinks himself a prophet, while I’m a nobody. He counts on enlightenment, while I heed my hydraulic engineer’s logic. That’s why I’ll never understand him and continue to despise him. “Stay put,” Rose commands himself, “don’t get all scattered.” How does Sleepy Joe work, or I should say torture? In the first instance, knife wounds in the hands, feet, and side, the stigmata of the cross. He inflicts them on his own brother. The nails, much more vile, he reserves for the dog. For Cleve, he reserves the crown and the humiliation of the thorns. In a way he crowns Cleve king, thus must consider him his principal victim, his most significant victory, at least up to now. Or maybe not. Maybe he just improvises according to the circumstances and choses the thorns mainly because they were readily available. The sharp weapon, thorns, nails, all elements toward maximum suffering. Each of the victims has been sacrificed or purified with one of these weapons. Does Sleepy Joe hate his victims? Not necessarily. It could even be the opposite. It seemed that he liked his brother. How does he choose them then? What are the criteria? Maybe the deciding factor isn’t the victim but the act itself. Undoubtedly, the common denominator is María Paz. Unless, that is, the guy went around conducting similar ceremonies on victims that had nothing to do with this case. Buttons and Ming were convinced of his more universal sacrificial tendencies, and there was Corina, María Paz’s Salvadoran friend.

Rose returned to the manuscript, which was his guide, his map, and reread the passages about Corina.

“Open your eyes, María Paz. Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.”

And this:

“‘I think he was praying,’ she told me one of those days.

“‘Praying? Who was praying?’

“‘Your brother-in-law.’

“‘You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?’

“‘During . . . like in a ceremony.’”

But what exactly was it that Sleepy Joe did to Corina, why did he violate her with a broomstick? Rose went down the kitchen to look for a broom. Once in the attic again, he brandished it against an invisible enemy. He worked up a sweat. Or was it a fever? He felt his head burning, as if he had made it through some threshold, and was about to completely break through.

If I were Sleepy Joe, what damage could I do with this? Strike or wield, or even rape, as I did with Corina? I could stick the head of an enemy on a broomstick as if it were a stake. Or pierce it through the victim. A sharp stick. A spear? A long, penetrating spear, prehistoric, frightful. The spear, the mother of all weapons for the Chinese, the blazon of Pallas Athena, the sharpened head made of steel, amber, bronze, and obsidian. Wasn’t Christ’s side pierced with such a spear? Lance, spear, Britney Spears? If I were Sleepy Joe, would I not have penetrated, pierced, violated Britney, Athena, or Corina with this lance, spear, broom? It is an elaborate scheme, but it holds together. If it was really like this, what next? What other techniques of martyrdom did Sleepy Joe’s imagination resort to? Which ones had he employed yet, or not?