You see, problem is, there’s this whole world of ‘less popular’ crimes that never make it into the bestsellers, the movies, the TV shows. Crimes that can’t sell, that agents are afraid to touch. They’re the tragic ones, the ones that peel a little too much off the veneer of pretty humanity to be comfortable. Crimes like the couple that kept their children chained to their beds, because they were afraid to let the kids grow up. Or the mother who rattled her baby’s head until it died because she was tired of it crying. Or the high school football coach who lured his quarterback to his house, tied him up in the basement, and cut off his genitalia with a kitchen knife. Or the mother who, discovering her husband had died of a heart attack, took her four kids across the street to a neighbor and returned to blow her brains out the back of her head with a forty-four.
You don’t see these crimes in storybooks. You don’t find them in the soaps, or in the theatres. You find them in your daily life. These are the real crimes that surround us, that we wallow through every day, that we try to forget ever happened.
Take my neighbors for instance.
We lived on the outskirts of Lomas de Chapultepec, in a little neighborhood that twisted and curled beneath the palmettos and ahuehuete, like the coils of a snake. All the houses on our street were low, and flat, built in rigid modernist layers. All except Widow Garcia’s mansion, a two-story colonial monstrosity that overlooked our half of the street.
Every morning, I rose to watch the sun brighten the Eastern sky above the palmettos that bristled in my back yard. I sat on my back patio in pajamas, drinking a cup of cold coffee from the night before, and watched the pink glow of sunrise catch the sky on fire. Widow Garcia was always up. The light in her upper window—we call called it ‘The Tower’ as an ominous joke—was always lit.
Every evening, I made a fresh pot of coffee after dinner and sat on my patio to watch the evening fall until the brightest stars pebbled an indigo sky. The Widow Garcia’s window was always lit then, too.
In the early morning, or evening, I could often make out the glow of distant neighbors’ houses beneath the trees, but I couldn’t see them. We all had these privacy walls, see, twelve-foot stucco monsters that stretched between the houses and delineated the back yards. And that was fine. After Ximena died, I needed privacy.
The only neighbors I really knew were the ones next door: the Delgados.
By some freak whim of neighborhood planning, the Delgados’ house and mine were butted right up next to each other. Only houses in the block like that. The gutters of their roof perched just beyond the dividing stucco wall, so close it felt like I could reach out and grab them from my bedroom window.
Often, in the evening, I could hear them making love. They sounded like they were right there beside me as I drank my coffee and watched the Evening Star brighten. She liked him to speak to her in English. It turned her on, she said. So, whenever I met them in the street, I’d speak to them in English, just to spite him, and to make her uncomfortable.
I didn’t like the Delgados, see. But I liked their daughter.
Manuéla Delgado wasn’t like normal kids. Something messed her up, early on. I never knew what her problem was, but ever since she was a baby Carmen and Javier had to take special care of her. Manuéla couldn’t walk on her own. She couldn’t control her movements. She couldn’t talk, or eat, or go to the bathroom without help. She lived in one of those heavy-duty wheelchairs, that strapped her down and held her head so she couldn’t knock it around.
I remember mowing my front lawn one morning, back when Ximena was alive, and watching Carmen pull into their driveway. Carmen was a little slip of a woman. Thin, with rocking hips and sharp shoulders. She always wore tight clothes and little pencil heels. Men liked that; I always thought she was a bit vulgar.
She got out from the car, and walked around to the special door they’d installed for Manuéla. Carmen was on the phone, talking incessantly. She opened Manuéla’s door, and pulled her wheelchair onto the lift platform to lower her. Manuéla came down slowly, her body twitching back and forth in the chair. Her body twitched, but her eyes were locked onto mom. Carmen talked the whole time, looking out into the air above Mexico City. Never gave the kid a glance.
After Manuéla reached the ground, Carmen pulled her off the lift, still talking, and put the lift back up. Then she closed the door, walked back around the car, and went into the house. Forgot the kid, right where she sat.
Manuéla looked at me. She couldn’t smile, or shrug, or laugh, or even cry. But our eyes met, and she clearly felt something, and shared it with me. I could feel it.
After a moment Carmen came back out and dragged Manuéla into the house.
And it was always like that. To the Delgados, Manuéla was just an unfortunate inconvenience. They’d leave her in the sun a bit too long. Or keep their umbrella over their own heads, leaving Manuéla to the rain, while they pushed her into the house.
And then Manuéla disappeared.
The police talked to all of us, on the street. I told them what I’d seen over the years. They didn’t even bother to write it down. Just thanked me for my time and left. Carmen didn’t cry, when she talked with them. I know. I could hear them over that stucco wall. I heard their whole story.
Apparently, Manuéla would go for ‘walks,’ in her electric wheelchair. Sometimes, she got lost. Carmen and Javier were very upset. They never allowed her to go, of course, but she would go anyway. The day she disappeared, they’d been doing yardwork, and when they turned around, she was just gone. And please, couldn’t the police do anything to find their daughter? They loved her so very much.
Manuéla didn’t have an electric wheelchair. They had to push her everywhere themselves. And I can’t even remember the last time I saw the Delgados do their own yard work.
But the police wrote it all down, and thanked them for their time, too, and left it at that.
It was right around then I started hearing them, making loud love, from their open bedroom window in the evenings as I sat and drank my coffee and listened to the breeze rustle through the palmettos.
After a month, Manuéla was officially declared dead. She hadn’t been found, and she couldn’t survive on her own. And, of course, there was no possibility of foul play… The police assured the Delgados of that.
So, one evening, I knocked on the Delgados door.
Carmen answered. She wore a long, white sweater dress that cut low between her breasts and hugged her hips.
“Hola, Fernando,” she said.
“Hey Carmen,” I said, in English, and smiled.
Javier came around from behind and looked out at me, a chilled cocktail in his hand.
“What can we do for you?” Carmen asked.
“Well, I know where Manuéla went,” I said.
Carmen went as white as her dress, and for a moment I thought she was going to fall. Javier ran to her, and grabbed her by the armpits, and together we helped her back into their kitchen, and had her sit down at the bar.
It was all a bluff, of course, but in that moment, I knew what had happened.
Javier stood, stiffly, beside her. “You’d better explain,” he said.
Carmen looked up quickly, though, before I could say anything. “Please,” she said, “if you know anything, anything at all, please tell us. We miss our baby girl so much.”
She was a good liar, when she tried. The way her bosom heaved with the words, pressing her breasts out towards me, keeping her lips moist, her eyes dark and limpid.
Javier caught on, and immediately nodded his head. “Yes, yes,” he said, “tell us if you know anything.”
So, I said, “I don’t think you understand. I know what you did to her.” They were very still. “I can hear you, see, over that wall. So, I heard you talking.”
Carmen swallowed.
“But, you know,” I said, “just because I know, doesn’t mean I have to remember…”
Javier slowly shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s alright,” I said. “I need new gutters this year. Those will probably cost… fifty-thousand pesos? Sure would be nice to pay for that in cash.”
Carmen stood up, and put a hand on my shoulder. “When were you planning to pay for these gutters?” she asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Well, I hope that works out well for you, Fernando,” she said. “If you do remember anything, about Manuéla, you’ll let us know… first… right?”
“Of course,” I said, and I left.
At that point, I knew. In my heart, they’d killed her. But I didn’t have proof.
Now, you ask, did I need proof? No. The police knew, too, but no amount of ‘proof’ would change their verdict. The only thing that mattered for them were the number of zeroes on the check.
That night, I drank my coffee and watched the stars. For the first time in a month, no sound came from the Delgados house. In the distance, I saw the light from Widow Garcia’s tower. It was still on, but I was beginning to doubt she was in there.
The next morning, I found an envelope filled with bills, stuffed through my mail-slot. Of course, I counted them, and of course, it was fifty-thousand pesos.
I didn’t go to work that day. I sat in my kitchen and smoked a cigar. Ximena had never let me smoke in the house, but I figured I could break the rule just once.
That night, the Delgados made love again, and I heard them from my patio. She spoke to him in English, moaned like a wild animal. So, I went out to my little garden shed, and got a ladder, and climbed the wall.
I put the ladder over to their side when I got to the top: I needed a way to escape, without crossing in front of our houses.
I could hear them, panting and groaning, as I walked up their patio steps and knocked on the sliding glass door.
A light turned on. Javier put his head around the corner in the house, and ducked back quickly. After a moment, he came out, tying a bathrobe around his waist. His bare feet padded across the marble floor.
He started to say something when he opened the door, but I hit him with the hammer fast, and he fell to the floor.
I wanted it to be quick, see, so I could keep from making a mess inside. But he started to wriggle around after he fell. So, I hit him again.
It’s harder to hit a man’s head than you’d think, when he’s lying on the floor, curled into a ball. I had to pull his hands away and strike at the same time. It worked poorly, at first, until I landed a solid blow to his temple. Then his arms began to move in a swimmy sort of way, and I had a clearer shot. Smacked his forehead with the face of the hammer. His head sort of rolled to the side, so I hit it on the side a few times too. The hammer dug through the skin, and on the last hit something snapped, and it went into his face.
I heard something and looked up.
Carmen stood under the pot-light in their hall, naked. Her hands were raised, and she was slightly bent over, frozen where she stood.
I jumped up just as she turned to run, and swung the hammer at her. It hit her back, and she stumbled. She kept on trying to get away, though, so I kicked her over, and put my foot into her stomach. It sank way down, and I put all my weight onto it.
I hit her right in the face. Carmen only took one hit. The hammer sunk down between her eyes, and got stuck on the underside of her upper teeth. A few of them rattled away as I tugged it back out, in fact.
So, I had a mess on my hands.
I dragged their bodies out onto the patio, and dumped them into the grass. After a while, I found their cleaning cabinet. Wasn’t much in there, but I took a bottle of bleach and began working over their floors with paper towels. Took me the better part of an hour to clean it all up. Had to search for a bit to find those teeth I’d knocked out.
It was dead of night when I dragged the bodies out, under the palmettos at the back of their yard. The Tower window glowed in the night, but I couldn’t see The Widow. Still, I tried to work fast, just in case.
I figured they didn’t need a big hole. They were both little people, so I dug four-feet-by-four-feet.
After about twenty minutes, I hit something. Something hard, and contoured. My shovel kept sliding off it, and I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get the blade around it. After fifteen minutes of struggling, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went to get a flashlight.
It was Manuéla. Rather, it was her wheelchair. Manuéla was still strapped inside, her skin blackened and rotted in the dirt. So I uncovered her under the flashlight beam, until the shovel accidentally got caught up in her hair and dragged her head around on her spine, and I had to drop the shovel and throw up.
That was when I noticed the lights. Red and blue, flashing, crackling back and forth across the foliage above me.
I turned and met the police as they came for me around both sides of the house, guns drawn. In the tower, I saw the outline of Widow Garcia. Where was she, when the Delgados buried Manuéla? Of course, she was there, watching. I’m sure they paid for more than just her gutters.
Everything happened quickly after that. The police were praised for solving the murder of the beautiful and tragic Delgado family. Poor Manuéla, cried the news, suffering such a death at the hand of her neighbor. After my wife died, of course, I deteriorated quickly. Everybody on my street agreed. Especially Widow Garcia.
Now I have different neighbors. The man in the cell to my left is called Chug. I don’t think he likes me.
And see, that’s the problem. Here in prison, there’s a whole menu of popular crimes that are reserved for people like me, who get convicted of crimes of the less popular varieties.
I’m sure I won’t last long.
End
Punk Noir Press 