Read an Excerpt
Death in Precinct Puerto Rico
Book Two
By Steven Torres St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Steven Torres
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8187-3
CHAPTER 1
After giving birth to a healthy, nine-pound boy, and spending a night of rest in the city hospital in Comerio, Elena Maldonado called Luis Gonzalo, the sheriff of Angustias. She would need a ride home, she explained to him, and Gonzalo told her over the phone that she did not need to say anymore. He would be there when she was discharged that afternoon.
"What are you going to do?" his wife Mari asked when he had finished reassuring Elena about how little trouble the whole thing would be and finally put down the phone.
"What do you mean, 'What are you going to do?' I'm going to take her home. What else should I do?"
"Can't you bring her here?" Mari asked.
"Where?"
"Here."
"Here? How am I going to bring her here? She has a home, a husband ..."
"He's a monster," Mari said emphatically. In her mind, a monster had nothing like the rights that a true husband should expect.
"True, we don't have to like him. ..."
"He beats her."
"She married him. She remains married. ..."
"He. Beats. Her," Mari repeated as though explaining something to a child.
"She should get a divorce."
"She should kill him," Mari answered.
"I don't see —"
"Stab him in his sleep."
It was clear that Mari had given the idea more than casual thought.
"Okay, Mari. You win. Still, I have to take her to her house. If she wants to file for divorce, I'll take her straight to Maria Garcia. I'll even pay the fee to file the forms, okay?"
Mari muttered something and gave her husband a stare that would have caused him to check himself for bleeding had he not been an expert in her various moods.
He dressed into his civilian clothes, got into his car and drove off to the Angustias station house just off the town's plaza.
Like other towns in Puerto Rico, Angustias had been built around a central plaza, complete with fountain, trees, and benches. Unlike many of the larger towns (and which towns were not larger than Angustias?) the plaza had maintained its importance through the centuries. The Roman Catholic church still stood on one side, and the alcaldia still faced it across the plaza. Both buildings were still used for their original purposes. The townspeople still congregated on the plaza for saints' festivals, fiestas patronales, and they ate their lunch there.
Inside the station house, Gonzalo's senior deputy Hector Pareda was taking lunch with his partner. Gonzalo was experimenting with a new schedule so that it was Gonzalo and his partner, Wilfrido Vargas, who were supposed to relieve Hector and Anibal Gomez at two in the afternoon.
"Hey chief!" Gomez yelled out, as Gonzalo entered the station house. He had adopted the annoying habit of referring to Gonzalo as anything but Gonzalo or sheriff.
Gonzalo smiled wanly. There was no breaking people out of this habit once they had become infected. Hector certainly had proven incurable.
"I'm going over to pick up Elena Maldonado. She gave birth yesterday. Wilfrido will relieve you guys, but he might need a little help. Anyway, I might be back in time ..."
"When's her checkout time?" Hector asked.
"At one."
"That's plenty of time."
The way Hector drove an hour might be enough to cross the entire island.
"Well, there are always delays ..."
"Just flash your badge, chief!" Gomez yelled again. Though Gonzalo was only a yard away from him, Gomez was a bit hyperactive and had a tendency to speak louder than strictly necessary.
"Yeah, well, just give Wilfrido whatever help he needs if I don't get back in time."
The deputies agreed, and the sheriff left the station house. It was a little after noon when Gonzalo climbed back into his car and started out for the hospital in Comerio.
The road from Angustias to Comerio is downhill and filled with tight curves so that it somewhat resembles a skier's slalom course or perhaps a snake slithering its way among bushes and tree trunks. Especially high in the hills, there is a dense canopy of vines and branches covering parts of the road so that daylight sometimes looks like twilight and twilight like the night. The effect of the sun and blue sky peeping through the dark green of this canopy can be mesmerizing, and Gonzalo remembered that he had been called to this road several times because nonnatives driving through had paid more attention to their peekaboo game with the sky than to the road ahead of them.
At the hospital in Comerio, Gonzalo approached the front desk, explained his cause and was lead to Elena's room on the first floor by an orderly with a large grin.
"I'm not the father," Gonzalo told the young man.
The young man nodded and raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, seeming to suggest that he knew better.
The orderly swung the door open.
"There's your baby," he announced.
"I'm not the father." Gonzalo tried again, but the orderly merely tilted his head back a fraction and broadened his grin as if to reassure the sheriff that the secret was safe.
In the room, the mother was nursing her child. Gonzalo reminded himself that he had seen the same scene a dozen times before and that it was a completely natural act. He still would rather have been elsewhere at that moment.
"Do you want me to come back?" he asked looking at the floor.
"Why?" Elena asked.
Gonzalo could think of no good reply. Instead, he nodded and bowed his way out of the room as though complying with some unsaid order. He stood in the hall, watching the clock strike out five minutes.
Elena Maldonado was young but carried a tired look with her everywhere. Her struggle with life had been great in her twenty or so years, and it had taken its toll on her thin frame and face. Her body bore scars of fights with her husband and before that her father. It was said that she had the spirit to fight back for a while but never enough body to hurt the men who attacked her. Her punches had always only been enough to enrage them further. Gonzalo had never seen her fight her attackers. He had twice found her in a heap in a corner of her cement home and had once found her pinned under the weight of her husband, covering her face with her arms while he pummeled her. He had never seen her fight back. Nor had he ever seen a mark on the men who had beaten her.
Still, even Doña Carmen, a woman whose word he had respected all his life, insisted that Elena was capable of putting up a fight. Standing in the hallway of the Comerio hospital, Gonzalo thought of this claim. Having just seen her looking so tired and drawn, it seemed impossible that she could ever present a threat to any man. Even to his deputy Gomez who was nothing more than five feet tall and probably only a dozen pounds over a hundred in weight.
When he reentered the room, Elena was standing, putting the baby back into its bassinet.
"Can I help you with that?" Gonzalo asked, but there was nothing to help with.
"Maybe you can carry my bag?" Elena offered.
"Sure."
Gonzalo was nervous without any real reason, and he was anxious to have something to do. He led her through the paperwork and out the door of the hospital. He made sure the baby's car seat was properly strapped in on the backseat, reassuring Elena that her child would be fine without her during the ride though she hadn't said anything about being separated from the child.
Gonzalo drove back to Angustias slowly. He wanted the time to think of what to say to his young passenger. He really did want to advise her to divorce her husband, but as an officer of the law, it wasn't his place to do so. In any event, he knew Elena as a young woman who had not finished high school and never held a job. Her husband worked only erratically, but he did usually pay the bills. With a child, it would be doubly difficult for her to leave the man who beat her. The sheriff did not know how to approach the topic, and he did not know whether the topic should be approached at all.
"I need to go to Maria Garcia's house for a few minutes before you take me home," Elena whispered, staring straight ahead.
Maria Garcia was one of three lawyers living in Angustias. The other two were old and had given up trying to compete with Ms. Garcia. Garcia handled contract law and most of the real estate transactions in Angustias now passed through her hands. She also handled divorces.
Gonzalo wanted to ask about this stop at the lawyer's house, but he decided to keep quiet and focus on the road.
Maria Garcia had moved to Angustias after getting a law degree from a New York university. She was young and beautiful and worked very hard with a professional manner that her clients appreciated but which baffled her rival lawyers. To them, lawsuits just normally took years and hundreds of billable hours, and they could see no reason to inform clients of the boring details of a suit that could decide whether they were rich or bankrupt. To them, there was no point in explaining the contracts they had their clients sign. Maria Garcia worked differently, making sure the client was informed of every step and understood each step as it was taken. This won her accounts that the other two lawyers had long split between themselves.
At the time of Elena's visit, Ms. Garcia was in her mid-thirties. Her Nuyorican accent was still noticeable, but then she spoke so quickly, it would have been hard to understand her no matter what accent she had. Her house was one of those built more than a century before along the perimeter of the town's plaza. There were only a few larger or more prestigious in Angustias, and no one doubted Ms. Garcia had the means to have done better.
Gonzalo parked outside and shut off the car. Elena climbed out of the car and walked as quickly as she could toward Garcia's front door. She gave the sheriff no guarantee that she would only be few minutes, nor did she take her newborn. Gonzalo was left to pray that the mother made it back before the baby awoke from its sleeping peace.
A few minutes later, Elena was walking out of the lawyer's house. Maria Garcia stood at the door; she made eye contact with the sheriff in his car, but was poker-faced. As Elena settled back into the passenger seat, she folded a stapled set of papers into quarters and stuffed it into her baby bag. Gonzalo started up his car and drove on, headed to Elena's house.
After a few minutes of silence and as they neared her driveway, the sheriff spoke.
"Are you in any trouble?" he asked. He spoke slowly, not wanting to startle either of his passengers, and he gave only the slightest glance in Elena's direction.
She looked straight ahead and said nothing, leaving Gonzalo to fill the silence that grew unbearable to him.
"I might be able to help ... I mean, maybe there is something I can ... I mean, I know a lot of people, and if you're having ..."
"I'm getting a divorce," Elena said. Apparently the noise of Gonzalo's fumblings had grown unbearable to her.
"I've had enough of Marcos." She continued: "He's not a good man. You know what he does. I'm not going to raise a child that sees me afraid everyday, that sees me beaten every week."
The sheriff pulled into the driveway and turned off the car engine. Before unbuckling his seat belt, he made a quick survey of the Maldonado home. It was a one-floor cinder-block home with a roof of corrugated zinc. Most of the outside had been painted pink; the rest had been neglected altogether. The nearest neighbor was at least a hundred yards further down the road, around a slight bend. The house sat at the head of the acres Marcos owned and occasionally worked. At the moment, it had a forlorn look of abandonment, almost as though it were struggling to be a farm but the untamed nature around it was too much. Weeds and vines encroached.
"Something wrong?" Elena asked.
"No." Gonzalo unbuckled his seat belt but made no move to open his door.
"I was just wondering if it was you who decided to paint the house pink. Pink doesn't match my vision of Marcos."
"Marcos picked it."
"Maybe he thought he was pleasing you?" Gonzalo tried. Now that the marriage was nearing its end, he felt a need to salvage at least one happy moment from what he knew to be an unmitigated disaster of a union.
"Maybe he thought that," Elena replied. "Marcos never asked me what I wanted. He usually just wants the cheapest. Marcos wants to please Marcos."
With that, Elena got out of the car, and Gonzalo followed suit. Together they retrieved the baby from the backseat. Elena took hold of the car seat, but Gonzalo didn't release it.
"Have you told Marcos of your plans?"
"Is it your business?" Elena asked. This was the first clear sign of defiance Gonzalo had ever noticed in her.
"Given his past behavior, there is a good chance he'll react violently whenever you tell him. That makes it my business. Have you told him?"
"No. When the paperwork's done, I'll tell him and walk out the door to my parents' house."
Gonzalo still wouldn't let go of the car seat.
"Promise me one thing. Don't tell him when you're alone with him. Make sure there are plenty of people nearby. Big people. Tell him in the plaza or in the church."
"Don't worry about me. Marcos can't do anything worse to me than he's already done. I'm too tough for him. That makes him even angrier. He can't kill me."
"Don't be foolish, Elena. The difference between him beating you and him killing you is you hitting your head on a rock when you fall."
"Then I won't tell him when I'm near any rocks," she answered.
Gonzalo let go of the car seat and escorted Elena to the door of Maldonado home. The door was already unlocked, and Elena pushed it in.
Marcos was sprawled on the sofa that dominated the front room. He was sound asleep. Gonzalo quickly counted seven empty cans of beer and one half-finished pint of Bacardi. He gave Marcos a shake, but Marcos's brain had been switched off by alcohol, and it wouldn't be coming on again any time soon.
Gonzalo looked to the new mother, and she shrugged.
"Celebrating," she said.
Elena had the baby out of its car seat, and it was awake in her arms, its eyes squinted shut, its entire face marked with a confused frown. It seemed to be trying to decide whether crying was the appropriate response to being awake. Gonzalo knew it was a matter of time, no more than seconds, before the child realized it had no other options.
"Here's my card," he said, pulling one from his wallet.
"Just put it on the table," Elena said as the baby started to cry and she started to pull up her shirt, oblivious to Gonzalo's squeamishness.
Gonzalo did as he was told and went to the door. He stopped and asked without turning,
"What's the child's name?"
"I haven't decided yet," Elena said.
The baby quieted quickly, and Gonzalo knew it had found what it was looking for. He left the house and sat in his car a minute or two savoring the stillness coming from the Maldonado home. Then he went home to change into his uniform and drove to work.
CHAPTER 2
Mari bombarded her husband with questions as soon as he came in, but he was in a rush to get to work, and he had almost no useful information. He didn't know the size and weight of the child, and there was not yet a name. He could tell her it was a boy, but there was little to say about the father's reaction. He decided not to mention the planned divorce as he knew it would keep him away from his work.
"I've got to get to work, Mari. We'll talk all about it when I get a chance to call you from the station house." He gave Mari a hurried kiss and left for work before she could get a hold of him.
By the time Gonzalo got to the precinct, it was 2:30, and the building was empty. There was no note on the desk, no message on the bulletin board, so the sheriff of Angustias was left to wonder what emergency had called his deputies away. He decided to wander out to the plaza. It being Saturday, there were no schoolchildren to shepherd home and there were only a few people occupying the benches.
"Did they catch him?" Justino Marquez asked. Justino was near to a hundred years of age and had taken the same seat in the plaza each weekend for decades.
"Catch who?" Gonzalo asked, hoping for useful information about his officers' whereabouts.
"Well, you're the sheriff. You tell me."
"Don Justino. Did my deputies tell you where they were going?"
"They didn't say anything to me," Don Justino said. He turned his face away from Gonzalo as if to prove his disinterest in the entire matter.
"Did you overhear anything? Please. It could be very important." This was a game Gonzalo didn't appreciate, but he knew that Don Justino had long ago reached an age when day-to-day activities might begin to seem petty.
"Colmado Ruiz," the old man said, still not bothering to face the sheriff.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Death in Precinct Puerto Rico by Steven Torres. Copyright © 2003 Steven Torres. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
