Free An Inconsequential Murder by Rodolfo Peña

at “The Church”
     
    As the taxi ma de its way slowly up Manuel L. Barragán Avenue, Lombardo turned on his cell phone and it dinged telling him he had a text message. It read “ A las siete vamos a rezar a la iglesia, jajaja. ” The message was from his geek friend telling him he was going to be at a bar called La Iglesia (the church). “At seven we’ll be praying in church,” it said. Lombardo told the taxi driver to forget about going to the Public Ministry building and to take him to that bar instead.
     
    This silly custom of giving bars cute names such as “The Office,” “The Union Hall,” “The Factory,” and so on was started in Monterrey during the seventies. Men thought it was clever to say to the wife, “I am going to ‘The Office,’” as if women were too dumb to catch on that they were really going to a bar.
     
    Lombardo had never liked Monterrey. To him, it wasn’t a classy city; it had no style, no character such as cities like Guadalajara or Querétaro, which he preferred.
     
    After being transferred here, he had tried to quit the Public Ministry and get a job in a private security firm.
     
    On a cold December morning he had stood across the street from the Cervecería del Norte, the brewery where he was going to be interviewed for a position as a security guard. The traffic on University Avenue had been incessant, and the steady drizzle mixed with the smog and dust to form a sticky, ugly paste on the pavement. A smokey, dilapidated bus, rushing over the numerous potholes had splashed mud on his trousers.
     
    T he interview had not gone well so he took the afternoon bus to Nuevo Laredo to visit his parents. When he told his father that he wanted to quit his job but was having trouble finding another one, his father invited him to have a beer. In the bar they met one of his father’s friends. The man had a son who worked for the newly formed Investigations Department of the Public Ministry. They were looking for people; he had asked Lombardo if he would like for him to call his son and arrange an interview. Lombardo had objected and said he had quit the Public Ministry because he didn’t like the work, but his father’s friend insisted that this was different. According to his son this was a regular police investigation unit not a catch-all like the Public Ministry that was full of thugs and “lawyers” with shady credentials.
     
    He had agreed to go back to Monterrey for an interview with the Investigations Department and that’s how he had come to have this job that he liked in a city that he did not like.
     
    Although he disliked Monterrey’s materialistic, money-focused attitude intensely, he had come to like some of its people, especially the kind of people that lived in his neighborhood. So, he had come to accept things because, as he had said once, quoting someone or other, humans are forever accepting a compromise between the ideal and the possible. If we didn’t, life would be unbearable.
     
    Once out of the cab, and as he walked the length of the small plaza in front of the bar, he finally called the Director.
     
    “ Where the hell have you been?” asked the charming man.
     
    “ I have been questioning people.”
     
    “ Listen, Lombardo, wrap this up quickly. Gonzalez said it was probably a mugging by drunks or drug addicts, so write a report to that effect and just wrap it up, ok?”
     
    “ I don’t think it was a robbery.”
     
    “ What?”
     
    “ I said, I don’t think it was a robbery, or that he was killed by drunks or drug-crazed ‘ teporochos ’ or hippies or what have you.”
     
    “ Look, I have been getting calls from the Dean of the University, from the Governor, and who knows who else, and they all want to spare the University any embarrassing publicity or scandal, so, just take it easy, make like you carried out an investigation, and wrap it up, understand?”
     
    “ Yeah, I understand,” he said, “I understand all right. See you,