Free Tequila Blue by Rolo Diez Page A

“What we’ve got to worry about are the complications in the Jones case. He had friends in his embassy, and they are pressing for the case to be closed. Whether it’s cleared up or not, they want it closed. There are questions of reputation and cross-border relations involved. We’re the DO here, not illiterate patrolmen. That means we’re supposed to use our heads. Justice has never been an exact science, Officer. It’s all about relations between people and between countries, and higher interests that have to be treated with caution. Don’t forget NAFTA and the foreign debt.”
    We carried on like this for a few more minutes, playing verbal ping-pong, swapping promises andthreats of blackmail until the Commander gave me three days to wrap the case up, told me to give him a daily report and asked if I needed anything.
    â€œYes, I do,” I said. “I want Estela Lopez de Jones’s phone tapped, I want a twenty-four-hour watch on her house, and four men in two cars to tail people.”
    The boss returned to his speciality: adopting a funereal look and saying “no”. He blathered on about austerity, budgets and multitasking and ended by saying I knew what to do about the phone tapping, and “talk to someone in the office about the tailing”.
    Frankly, the Mexican police is run by fools. How can anyone work in conditions like that?

Chapter eleven
    Bucareli is a tough, ugly, dirty, polluted, noisy neighbourhood. The day cholera breaks out in Mexico City, it will start in Bucareli, among all the bums and stray dogs, the hordes of rats and mountains of waste paper. But with Bucareli, what you see is what you get. In spite of all the preserved colonial lanes of Coyoacan, all the shopping malls being built in the four corners of the capital, all the fake European nooks and crannies invented for the tourists, Mexico City is a rough place. There’s little room in Bucareli for daydreamers, and a cop is unlikely to forget what he’s there for.
    By my second tequila I had the case solved. The key was a blonde woman who could switch easily to being a blond man. Everyone knows the best place to hide a tree is in a forest. And hadn’t we had a blonde woman in front of our faces the whole time? And didn’t that woman have a difficult relationship with Jones? Hadn’t I seen with my own eyes – with these eyes that devour women – how she could put up her hair in a bun? She could do exactly the same wearing the collar of a leather jacket turned up . . . the man at the hotel said he had seen a transvestite. But, apart from the amazing facility witnesses have to transformmulattoes into Negroes, Peruvians into Japanese, a transvestite is simply a man imitating a woman – and isn’t it easy to confuse a man who imitates a woman and a woman imitating a man? Estela Lopez de Jones had been clever. She had done her number in a cheap hotel, and counted on people following their normal line of thinking and being unable to link a decent woman with a hotel used by prostitutes, allowing her to create the illusion that there was someone else involved. Then she transformed this other woman into a man, leaving the narrow logic of any observer in a spin. Her motives were hatred and greed. Hatred, because of what the accountant told me, but I didn’t pass on to the Commander; greed because if that son of a bitch gringo was going around snuffing people and filming it, the only possible explanation was that someone was paying at the very least a million greenbacks for each of those “emotional hits”. Somewhere, perhaps in a Swiss bank, there must be a deposit in Jones’s name that would allow anyone not to have to worry about working ever again.
    Not bad going for a shop assistant in a cheap store. My job was to catch her.
    I called in at several bars before I found him. Sitting with a plateful of pork tacos and a mamey juice, Silver Bullet looked