An Inconsequential Murder (2 page)

How innocent those times seemed now. Smugglers spent a few days locked up while their lawyers bribed them out of jail, and the most dangerous criminals were bank robbers who used rusty .38 caliber guns to shoot at the policemen when and if they arrived on the scene.

Now the drug-crazed young killers of gangs like the Zetas would chop off the heads of a dozen rival gang members or policemen and send pictures to their families. “These times are too violent for an old cop,” said the Director.

He
looked down at the corpse that lay on the gravel by the railroad tracks, arms extended backwards, palms up. The head had been neatly severed by the train.

“
Very little blood,” he said. “The man must have been dead when he was dumped here.”

Fat Gonzalez shrugged. “Probably a drunk, killed by other drunks.”

“
Is that your
professional
opinion?” asked Lombardo derisively. Gonzalez had been brought over from the Municipal Police as “liaison” when the Director had been promoted from there to the Investigations Department of the Public Ministry. He had been the Director’s lackey there and he was his lackey in Investigations. His job was to snitch on any detective that “lost” evidence from a case—especially if that evidence was in the form a pack of $20 bills from a drug smuggler’s stash. Since Lombardo was never assigned to any “lucrative” cases, Gonzalez was never around, but lately he had shown up at the scene of the cases assigned to Lombardo. It was obvious that Gonzalez had been asked to gather enough proof of “professional incompetence” to warrant Lombardo’s dismissal.

“
Where’s the head?” Lombardo asked the Fat Man and blew a large cloud of blue smoke into the cold morning air.

“
Over there,” said Fat Gonzalez, nodding toward a couple of forensic medics that were squatting a dozen meters down the track.

“
Who got here first, Gonzalez?”

“
I did, Jefe,” said Sergeant Pedroza and clicked his heels again. “You see, sir, I was on my way to work at the station, when I, uh, I heard the call; they ordered us here in response to the 060. When I got here, I too thought it was a drunk, or something, and then. I, uh, I.…” The cop was obviously very nervous.

Lombardo
looked at the sergeant. His face was ashen and he kept swallowing hard, probably trying to keep from throwing up. He was just a poor, dumb cop, about Lombardo’s age. His job did not usually involve the nasty business of finding mangled corpses on busy city streets. He was the kind they usually assign to traffic duty on busy street corners or to stand around during public spectacles and gatherings like football games. He was the kind of cop that joined the force 30 years ago when being a policeman was a safe job for an uneducated man. He had spent all of those years supplementing his meager pay with small bribes he took from drivers that committed some small traffic violation or drunks rounded up as they stumbled out of bars after the 2 a.m. closing time. There was a joke that the young cops, fresh from the Academy, said of these old cops: “The only cold, lifeless body he’s ever seen is his wife’s.”

A taxi stopped and the driver leaned out the window to ask,
“Eh, what happened? Another dead narco?”

Lombardo
said, “Please see to it the traffic keeps flowing, Sergeant Pedroza; don’t let them stop to gawk.”

“
Si, Jefe,” said the cop as he clicked his heels and saluted. He was obviously relieved to get away from the corpse and to do what he was used to doing. “Move along,” he said firmly to the taxi driver and he blew his whistle at him.

“
Come on, Fatso,” Lombardo said to Gonzalez. “Let’s see what this charming young man looked like when he was alive.”

“
How do you know he was a young man?” asked the fat cop. His greasy, black hair was combed back over the large head; the light of the early morning sun made his round, dark face shine like polished leather. Lombardo disliked him. He knew nothing of police work. He
was just the Director’s lackey, keeping an eye out for “opportunities” to make a buck, taking the bribes himself so the Director would not be involved. If he had been a soldier in Lombardo’s company when Lombardo was a captain in the U.S. Army, he would have classified him as unfit for infantry duty and would have transferred him to a non-combat job, like a cook or a mail clerk.

“
Didn’t you see his hands?” asked Lombardo, his words accompanied by little puffs of smoke from the Delicado that dangled from his lips. “They are the hands of a young man, a well-educated young man. No calluses, no scars or bruises. Also, he was well dressed. He was no
‘teporocho.’
”

Lombardo used the street slang for the homeless alcoholics that died in the streets of the city by the dozens each year either from cirrhosis or exposure or simply from hunger.

“
OK, so maybe he was not a drunk, but he must have been drinking to wander around at night and fall on the railroad tracks. Anyway, we’re turning him in as a no-name; he didn’t have any identification on him or it was stolen by some of the kids hanging around when the sergeant got here.”

Lombardo ignored the Fat Man’s attempt to sell him on the dead guy being just a drunk killed accidentally by the train—case closed. Lombardo could guess why the Fat Man was eager to get him to agree on that. The judges in the criminal courts were flooded with files of crimes that were pending resolution. Nearly six thousand murder cases had been reported the year before. In places like Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez, or Tijuana it was not unusual to find 20 or 30 corpses on any given night.

The Investigations Department and the Public Ministry itself were “encouraged” to deliver cases for judgment that were practically solved and that the judge could declare closed, so the Fat Man and other snitches were sent on cases by the Director to see if a certain case was susceptible to being closed without much fuss.

“
I don’t think there’s much to this case, eh?” insisted Gonzalez.

Lombardo
’s silence irritated the Fat Man so he said, “The Director sounded pretty pissed off this morning when he called to say you were assigned to the investigation. So, what did you do? You didn’t refuse the little Christmas present again, did you? The one they say narcos sent over?”

They say.
People always used that little formula to justify spreading rumors and innuendo. The latest one said the Gulf Cartel had sent a briefcase full of dollars to the Investigations Department of the Public Ministry and that the money had been spread around so the cops could go on Christmas vacation while the Cartel went about its business undisturbed.

Lombardo
stopped, threw away the cigarette stub, and lit another Delicado.

“
Did the kids take everything?” he asked the Fat Man.

“
Huh? What kids?”

“
You said there were some kids hanging around when the sergeant got here. Did they take anything?”

“
What? From the corpse, you mean? How would I know? We didn’t want to touch anything until you arrived.”

“
Look, you fat bastard. You told that poor, old cop to say that kids were rousting the guy. If you took anything, I mean any goddamned thing, money, a watch, anything, I will see to it you are found among the next batch of narco executions, you understand, you lazy, fat pig? Now go back there and see if there is something in his pockets that will help us identify the victim. Do you understand me?”

Fat Gonzalez wasn’t smiling anymore when he went back to “search” the corpse.

“
I’m sure you’ll ‘find’ something,” Lombardo said. The PM agents looked at Lombardo with a smirk on their faces. “They’re thinking we’re going to mess this up just like we mess everything up,” he said to no one in particular, “and they are probably right.”

He walked over to the two young forensic medics that were preparing the container in which they were going to place the head.

“
Good morning, boys,” he said.

They look
ed up and said, “Good morning, Captain.” They knew him from other cases and he vaguely remembered them, too.

The two young forensic specialists seemed merely boys to him. They usually sent out newly hired people on these unimportant cases. They were probably trainees. There was no swarm from SEMEFO, the forensic services, on this one as there was when the bodies of dead cartel soldiers were found in some field. In those cases, the newspapers needed good photos of the “authorities in action.”

Whenever something especially heinous happened, all the politicians would show up at the scene of the crime to declare their will to fight the lawlessness. “Those responsible for these terrible deeds will be punished to the full extent of the law,” the Prosecutor would tell the press. “We will pursue this matter to the highest level, whoever may fall as a consequence,” the Governor would tell the press. But the press, and the public, and the Prosecutor, and the Governor would forget about it the next day when another brace of corpses was found in a field or in the desert. A week or two later, when an even more atrocious murder scene was discovered the same charade would be repeated.

Lombardo
looked down at the bloody, muddy ball that had once been someone’s head. “The train didn’t kill him, did it?”

“
No,” said one of the boys while placing a plastic bag over the head. “He wasn’t shot or stabbed either. There seem to be pieces of plastic around his neck so he might have been suffocated, or strangled, but there’s not much of his neck left for us to tell at this point,” said one of the boys.

“
I lifted his shirt, Captain. His body looks like he was well worked over. There are plenty of bruises,” said the other boy.

“
Did you guys get a chance to go over the area before that crowd over there trampled all over it?”

“
Yes,” said the one who seemed the older of the two boys. “But there was nothing—no bullet cartridges, no blood, no cigarette butts, nothing. I think he was dumped from a car.”

“
Any tire tracks, footprints?”

“
Nope,” said the boys in unison.

“
Hmm,” said Lombardo puffing at his cigarette and sipping the last of the coffee. He went back to the body and looked at the young man’s hands, turned palms up, like a baby sleeping on its stomach. There were no marks of his having been tied up. “It doesn’t make sense; too clean.” he said aloud.

He came back to where the boys were now putting the head in a container with blue ice bags.

“
Too clean,” he said again.

“
What’s that, Captain?” one of the boys asked.

“
This was not a robbery and this is not the style of the cartels.”

“
What makes you think it was not a robbery, Captain?” asked the other boy.

“
Oh, I have a hunch,” he said and turned to the sound of the Fat Man’s approaching footsteps.

He was smiling again and waving a billfold, shaking it as if he was trying to dry it. “Look what I found in the bushes,” he cackled. “And I found his rings, and watch, and other stuff. They were in those bushes over there.”

“
You’re a great cop, Fatso,” said Lombardo. “I knew you’d find the stuff if anybody could.”

He turned to the boys again.
“How long do you think it will be before you send the body to the SEMEFO?”

“
About an hour. We’ll be putting the body into the ambulance in a few minutes. The Public Ministry people are already writing up the report.”

“
Mm, I guess they’re in a hurry to go get some breakfast,” said Lombardo dragging on his cigarette. “Tell Doctor Figueroa I’ll come by the University Hospital tomorrow.”

He
had always trusted Dr. Figueroa, the Director of SEMEFO’s forensic services. The good doctor would tell him all the things that the body had revealed about how it met its violent death. Dr. Figueroa and his staff were a small island of honesty in a sea of official corruption.

“
I am evidence of the resiliency of the Mexican people,” he told Lombardo once. “No matter how corrupt the political system, how brutal the drug wars get, how much larceny, mayhem, natural disasters, economic crisis, are thrown upon us, we bend and sway but never break as a country.”

“
I don’t know, Doctor,” Lombardo had responded. “There is just so much people can take. Look at the revolutions in France, here in Mexico, and Russia; look at how tough the Jews have gotten and how tough the Arabs are getting. You can push people just so far.”