Curses!

Chapter 17

It wasn't that Javier Marmolejo didn't like Gideon Oliver. Far from it. Oliver was a very likeable man. In 1982, when the naive, semihysterical norteamericanos had threatened to turn the Tlaloc investigation into a farce, it had been his good-humored common sense that had saved the day. More than once, too, but of course he hadn't been el detective de equalities then, and that was the difference.

He was, as Dr. Plumm had pointed out, a famous forensic expert now, not just another harmless anthropologist fooling around in the old cities, and Marmolejo had little patience with famous forensic experts. Oh, he'd learned at the academy about all the wonderful assistance they could provide, these pathologists and toxicologists, anthropologists and odontologists, and he had even seen them prove useful once or twice. All right, more than once or twice. But more often than not, things were more confusing when they got through than when they'd started. Especially with homicides. If someone gave him the choice, he'd throw them all out and make them earn an honest living in the universities.

For Marmolejo, like most policemen, knew that murders didn't get solved in laboratories or under microscopes. When they got solved at all, they solved themselves. The killer confessed or inadvertently pointed the finger at himself, or else one of his friends crawled out from under a rock and did it for him.

It wasn't “clues” that solved murders, it was informants. And the way to flush the bastards out was with old-fashioned police work-methodical, repetitive, and hard on the seat of the pants.

He leaned forward in the thronelike old swivel chair he'd inherited from Colonel Ornelas in 1984, when the crooked old voluptuary had taken the money and run, only days before the well-deserved purge would have caught up with him. With his small brown hands clasped on his lap, Marmolejo looked down at the gleaming wooden desk in front of him.

Inspector Marmolejo was an extremely tidy man. He took pride in the appearance of his desk. There were no notes, or reminders, or lists of telephone numbers slipped under the desk's thick glass top. And on the glass itself, no stacks of files, no manuals, no piles of unread reports. Nothing but whatever he was thinking about at the moment. And at this moment there were two handwritten sheets of business-size Hotel Mayaland stationery perfectly aligned with the front edge of the desk.

He sighed, worked the unlit cigar a little deeper into the corner of his mouth, and slid the sheets closer to him. Gideon Oliver again. A memorandum. He read it for the second time.

To: Inspector Marmolejo

From: Gideon Oliver

Subject: Stanley Ard-Circumstances of Death

I'm afraid Dr. Plumm made a few understandable errors in his analysis of the shooting. This by no means reflects on his general competence, but only on his unfamiliarity with homicides.

Here are my own conclusions:

1. The wound in Ard's forehead is not an exit wound but an entrance wound. Although a gaping hole like this is usually caused by a slug's wobble on the way out, it can also happen once in a while in the case of a contact entrance wound-that is, when the gun is held against the skin as it's fired. What happens is that the muzzle gases have no chance to dissipate in the air, and instead expand immediately under the skin. And when there is bone directly under the skin-the skull, for instance-the gases are forced back against the underside of the skin with great force, often bursting through it and producing a jagged, stellate wound easily confused with an exit wound. (However, laboratory examination of the surrounding skin will usually show some powder residue and burning.)

Sometimes some of the gases make it through the bone to the inside of the skull and expand there, blowing out the weakest parts of the cranium, which are the supraorbital plates, and filling the upper eyelids with blood. Almost certainly, this is what caused Ard's black eyes.

As you know, this is not a typical situation. I misinterpreted it myself until I caught a glimpse of the bone beneath, and saw that the hole in the skull itself was an unmistakable entrance wound-small, round, and neat, with the outer table of the bone quite intact around the rim.

2. If what I'm saying is correct, the interpretation of what happened has to be modified: a) Ard was shot from in front, not from behind. b) The killer was not lying in wait outside the fence, but on the hotel grounds with Ard. There's no reason to think he'd been trying to keep his presence here a secret from Ard or anyone else. c) Because the wound is a contact wound, requiring the killer to have been within arm's length, the killer may well have been someone Ard knew; very possibly someone he was friendly with.

I'm sure you and your staff have reached these conclusions on your own by now, but I thought it would be best to submit something for the record. As to what it all adds up to, that's your job. If I can be of any help, I'd be glad to.

If not, that's fine too.

Marmolejo smiled thinly. Prickly, this Oliver. Well, at least you could understand what he wrote; not like some of them.

He slid the sheets away with a grunt of annoyance. Whoever heard of this expansion-of-gas thing? This was Marmolejo's eighteenth homicide, and he'd never run into it before. And they'd certainly never mentioned it at the academy. As a result he'd initially accepted Plumm's findings. So had Dr. Lopez, the police pathologist, when he'd finally arrived. But that afternoon, after the autopsy, Lopez changed his tune.

That's what made the whole thing so irritating. Oliver was right every step of the way.

He stood and walked to the big window. Immediately below was Merida's colonial Plaza Mayor, a manicured island of greenery lapped on all four sides by the sluggish downtown traffic, most of which seemed to consist of extremely noisy, extremely smelly old trucks and buses.

After the police department clean-up, there had been a scramble for the best of the newly available offices in the Palacio de Gobierno, and to Marmolejo's surprise the heaviest fighting had been for the inside rooms, the ones overlooking the quiet courtyard with its modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit. No one battled him for the colonel's roomy, old-fashioned office on the outside of the building; too much traffic noise, too much traffic stink. But Marmolejo liked the traffic. It stimulated his mind, made him alert and receptive. He'd had enough rustic peace and quiet back in Tzakol to last him for the rest of his life. He even liked the stink from the trucks, as long as it didn't get too bad.

And he could happily get along without the modernistic murals chronicling the rise of the Mexican spirit.

He walked back to the desk, put the memorandum in the to-be-filed box, pulled a fuzzily photocopied sheet out of a drawer, and stared impassively at it. The Curse of Tlaloc. He laid his finger alongside a now-familiar sentence in the middle of the page.

Fourth, the one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth.

Marmolejo didn't believe in curses. Not exactly. He didn't believe that Xecotcavach had come up from the Underworld and pierced Ard's skull. No, that had been a twentieth-century human being with a twentieth-century gun. Nor did he think that it had been Tucumbalam who had personally slipped a little something into the crew's food, or some other Mayan god who'd said “ow” (with a gringo accent) when Oliver hit him in the stomach.

Perhaps Emma Byers, who was writing a book on the curse, and with whom he'd spent thirty bizarre minutes the day before, really believed all these things, but not Marmolejo. Not precisely. What Marmolejo did believe-and what he had learned to keep to himself-was that there were a lot of things in this world that nobody could explain. Not the professors, not the doctors, not the priests. And definitely not Javier Marmolejo.

He couldn't explain the Evil Eye, but he had seen it work. Oh, he had seen it work. And he couldn't explain how it was that his uncle Fano, who had been given up on by the doctors and carried home to die in Tzakol, had not died after all. The family had brought in a curer who had propitiated the winds, given Fano an amulet of wood from the tancazche tree, and called upon Ix Chel, the goddess of health, to help him. And he had recovered. That very night he had stood up on his feet for the first time in weeks, and he had lived. All right, for six or seven months only, but still…

Marmolejo had been just a child, but he had learned something valuable from it. A health official, Dr. Zuniga, had visited the family earlier, when Fano had returned home. With the best of intentions he had explained that rituals were fine in their place, but there was no hope at all for the dying man. What could ceremonies do against bacteria and viruses? The best thing the family could do was to resign themselves and make Fano's last hours comfortable. He would be dead within a very few days.

But when Fano didn't die, Dr. Zuniga's philosophy was undisturbed. Yes, the ritual had been effective, he explained patiently, but not really; not the way they supposed. It had no power of its own. It was all in the mind. Fano had thought it would work, and so it had. That was all. Where, Dr. Zuniga had asked with a smile, was the mystery in that?

Marmolejo had been much impressed. First the doctor had told the relatives that the ceremony couldn't work and why. Then afterward, without blinking an eye, he had told them exactly why it had worked. This he managed to do in a way that showed he had been right both before and after, and the family had been wrong all along. The fact that Fano had recovered, if only for a while, didn't seem to have much to do with it.

It was the young Marmolejo's introduction to the mind of the scientist, and these many years later it was still his key to how their thinking worked: Even when they were wrong they weren't wrong.

Well, Oliver was a lot better than most. And, happily, what he needed from him now was not more of his forensic expertise, but some plain old-fashioned information.

He picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the Hotel Mayaland.

"Hola," he said to the clerk who answered. "Puedo hablar con Senor Oliver?"