Читать книгу One Life - David Lida - Страница 14

BAD COP, WORSE COP

He is thick with solid muscle, a body so dense that Esperanza thinks he might burst out of his stiff sky-blue shirt like el increíble Hulk. Two days ago he told her his name was Shepherd. He leans toward her so his face is a couple of inches from hers. Veins pulsate at his temples: he may whisper or he may scream. She can smell the pharmaceutical cologne mixed with his sweat, the chemical grease with which he tames his wavy hair into submission, the tobacco on his breath. There are pocks and pores in his sallow skin, red veins in his hazel eyes. His right eyebrow twitches. He needs a shave.

“How did you kill the baby?” he says. He speaks as if the question had occurred to him suddenly, as if he hadn’t asked her 162 times over the past forty-eight hours.

Bobby, who is translating as well as transcribing the conversation, repeats the question in Spanish.

“I don’t remember,” she says in the tiniest of voices. Did he think she would say something else this time?

Shepherd’s partner sits across from Esperanza. Shepherd introduced him to her as the Blob. Jelly-bellied and bullet-headed, he executes a two-fingered drum roll on top of the table. Esperanza registers him as Louisiana brown: a café au lait moreno who can’t speak Spanish.

Straightening his body, pulling up his pants, snorting, Shepherd nods his head. “‘I don’t remember,’” he says, looking at his partner.

“She don’t remember,” says the Blob.

“You think she don’t remember?” he asks.

“She says she don’t remember,” says the Blob. He snickers and scratches his dome.

“You know what? I’m sick of hearing that she don’t remember.” Shepherd stares at Esperanza with boiling eyes. His hair is so black it is almost blue, like a character from a comic book. Bobby neither renders nor records the policemen’s patter.

They are in a tiny room with a scratched Formica table, four plastic folding chairs, and a mildewed gray rug that smells of heavy Payless shoes and the pavement they’ve beaten. Shepherd leans in until he’s an inch away from her eardrum and yells at the top of his voice, “How did you kill that fucking baby?” As a consequence of all of his screaming, Esperanza has a ringing in her ears that won’t go away. The Blob slams the flat of his hand on the table in front of her body, in case further emphasis is needed.

“¿Cómo mató al bebé?” drones Bobby.

“Tell them I don’t remember,” Esperanza says to Bobby. There are tears in her eyes. When they picked her up two days ago, she was drenched from the pounding rain. She has a fever. No matter how many times they scream in her ear or slam the table, it doesn’t get any easier. When is this going to end? When will they finally kill her?

“She doesn’t remember,” repeats Bobby.

Shepherd begins to pace the room in a slow circle. “Oh, man,” he says.

The Blob cracks his knuckles. “You having fun yet?” he asks.

“You think this is my idea of fun, you perverted Congolese boy humper?” asks Shepherd. “I’m a family man. How can you say sick shit like that?” He says to Bobby, “Tell her I got a three-year-old and an eight-year-old and I want to go home and see my kids.”

When Bobby translates Shepherd’s assertion, Esperanza thinks of tiny Yesenia, blue, cold, gruesomely disfigured, stiff as a baseball bat. She wraps her arms around her torso and weeps.

“Shit, we lost her again,” says the Blob. “Earth to Esperanza,” he yells, smacking his palm on the table to retrieve her attention.

“I’m supposed to feel sorry for her?” asks Shepherd to the air. He looks at her with disgust. “Sick bitch kills her baby and what’s she want me to do? Call up the social work squad? Take her out for a steak and a mojito?”

“She don’t have to remember,” says the Blob. “She says she done it. She came and got us. We can let the lawyers figure out the rest of it. Why don’t we let a sleeping dog lay the fuck up? It’s been two days.”

“She remembers how she killed the fucking baby,” says Shepherd. “Man, that kid was destroyed—burned, battered, and boiled. How can you do that to a fucking baby and not remember?”

“It’s been two motherfucking days! She’s a nutcase. If she remembered, don’t you think she would’ve given it up by now?”

Sniffling, Esperanza runs a hand up her sleeve and scratches her upper arm. Her legs and torso also itch. It’s as if the atmosphere were full of invisible fleas. When Shepherd and the Blob leave her alone, she curls up under the table and sleeps. She has been given no food or water since her arrest. She has not been allowed to make a phone call. She was advised of her rights to remain silent and to a lawyer. The first option went right over her head and Esperanza knows only rich people can pay for lawyers. “Rights” are, in any case, an abstract concept. She vaguely remembers hearing about them in school, but has no idea how they pertain to her.

“I’d rather give it back to the DA in a neat package,” says Shepherd. One of these days I’d like to get a promotion.”

“I say she would’ve given it up by now,” says the Blob. He smiles at Esperanza, gives her the once-over. “She sure is fine, though. Mmm-mmm. Too bad that shit’s going to go to waste on the goddamn lock-in.” He narrows his eyes and says to her, “La bonita.” He knows the words because they are painted on the side of a truck from which some enterprising Mexicans have sold tacos on a nearby side street for the past couple of years, since their work on the cleanup crews after the hurricane dried up. Then he adds to Bobby: “Kind of on the skinny side, though.”

“I like them like that,” offers the interpreter. It has been a long time since such a fetching suspect washed ashore in Plaquegoula Parish. She is tall, large-boned but slender, with caramel skin, wide eyes, and enormous lashes. Bobby imagines himself in a savage embrace with her, his fingers clutching the long wavy hair, kissing the wide mouth with its generous lips, now taut with fear. He doesn’t recall ever seeing hands that size on a woman. She could cup a basketball in her palm. And although she’s thin, she’s got a shape. Everything is big about her: the eyes, the teeth, the fingers, even the tatas. Especially the tatas.

Shepherd leans in toward Esperanza once again, inches from her face. “Listen,” he says. “Play ball with me and they’ll feel sorry for you. They’ll give you manslaughter or something. They’ll cut you a deal and you won’t get nothing but fifteen for the baby. You’ll be in and out in eight and a half, maybe less. By that time you’ll be what, thirty? Thirty-five? You’ll still be young enough to have you another one if you wanted it. Hell, you could have two or three.” Bobby more or less translates these words of encouragement for Esperanza. “But if you don’t cooperate, you know what’s going to happen to you? We don’t fuck around in America, baby. Sure as shit we give you the lethal injection.” His patience wearing thin, Shepherd listens to Bobby mumble his words in Spanish. “You know about the lethal injection, don’t you?” Shepherd asks. “We stick that shit in your arm and your insides will broil like a crown roast in a slow oven.” He opens his jacket and removes a needle and syringe from the inside pocket. He holds the apparatus in the palm of his hand while staring Esperanza in the eye.

She is exhausted, having only slept fitfully under the table. Her skin is burning. She looks at Shepherd and then in Bobby’s eyes.

“Tell him to give it to me now,” she spits out in Spanish.

“What?” Bobby asks.

“Tell him to kill me now.” If that is going to be her fate, santísima virgen, then let’s get it over and done with.

“What’s she saying?” asks Shepherd.

“She says she’s ready for that lethal injection right now. She wants you to give it to her.”

“Ah, shit,” says Shepherd. “Fucking refried fruitcake.”

The Blob begins to laugh. “Go on, bro. She got her arm stuck out and everything.”

Shepherd shakes his head. “They must grow them Tootsie Fruits and Brazil nuts in her part of Mexico,” he says.

The Blob stands up and slaps his partner on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “Excuse us for a minute,” he says. “We have something important to discuss.” He pulls Shepherd out the door by the arm. It’s almost one in the afternoon. Outside the police station in the blistering heat, they light up Marlboros.

“What do you want for lunch? You want to go to Subway again?” asks the Blob.

“How about some of those spicy wings at Popeyes?” asks Shepherd. “Or we could go downtown to the Piggly Wiggly and get the stuffed peppers.”

“Whatever,” says the Blob. “One thing’s for sure. I ain’t eating off of no Mexican taco truck. That greasy shit will give you a heart attack. A Mexican’s hungry enough he’ll eat his own donkey. You think they call them burritos for nothing?”

Bobby—gray hair side-parted, round shoulders, a loose shirt and a striped tie fraying at the knot—offers Esperanza a weak smile. He would like to say something consoling. If anyone is going to relieve her, it’s him, especially now that they’re alone. They don’t play good cop, bad cop in Plaquegoula Parish. They play bad cop, worse cop. Dirty Harry would be the compassionate one around here. But what can he say? “Everything is going to be all right?” Nothing is going to be all right for this baby doll. Besides, the minute he opens his maw to say something nice to a woman, he gets in trouble. He’s living in the house of one of his exes, paying her a fat rent, while shelling out three mouths’ worth of child support to the other. If it weren’t for his personal payroll he wouldn’t be working for these creepy cops any longer.

Esperanza shivers. He thinks about getting the jacket out of his locker and putting it over her shoulders. Shepherd and the Blob would never let him live it down.

The Blob opens the door and finds Esperanza and Bobby sitting in silence. He takes his seat in front of her and stares. She sees the perspiration that has formed on his scalp and brow in pear-shaped droplets. She can hear him wheezing.

“You look like a princess,” he says finally, adding, “La bonita.”

He leans toward her with an outstretched arm. She jerks her head away before he caresses her cheek with the back of his hand.