Ripper

  The police had spent decades fighting Latino street gangs in the Bay Area. There were the Norteños, by far the most numerous, whose gang color was red and who had the letter N tattooed on their arms; the Sureños—of which Hugo Domínguez was a member—who favored blue and had the letter M; the Border Brothers, mercenary killers who wore black; and the fearsome Mafia Mexicana—La eMe—who trafficked in drugs, prostitution, and guns from behind bars. The Latino gangs fought turf wars among themselves and with black and Asian gangs; they robbed, raped, dealt drugs, terrified the local populace, and openly defied authority in a never-ending war. For an alarming number of young men, the gangs became a substitute family that offered protection and a sense of identity, and they were the only means of survival in jail, where prisoners divided along ethnic lines. Having served their sentence, gang members were deported back to the countries they had come from, where they would join other gangs with links to the United States, and so, over time, the trade in drugs and guns had become a business with no borders.

  Hugo Domínguez had undergone the necessary initiation to become a member of the Sureños, a brutal “beat in” that had left him with several broken ribs. He had a scar on his back from a knife wound and another from a superficial bullet wound on one arm. He had been arrested several times, and was sent to a juvenile detention center at fifteen; when he was seventeen, Bob had managed to save him from being sent to an adult prison, where he would have had ample opportunity to refine his criminal skills.

  Despite his record, the deputy chief doubted Hugo was capable of a crime as contrived and as far from his turf as the murder of Rachel Rosen. He could not dismiss the possibility, though: the judge was notorious for handing down long prison sentences to the juvenile gang members who appeared before her. More than one of those sentenced by her had threatened revenge, and it was possible that Hugo had been entrusted with the task as part of his initiation.

  Keenly aware of the strategic value of making a suspect wait, Bob did not even glance at Hugo when he came in, but focused on the chips and guacamole and talked to the women as though this were a social occasion. He asked the teenage girl when the baby was due, who the father was, and whether she had been going to prenatal classes, then chatted about the past with Noemí and Alicia, told a couple of stories, and drank another glass of horchata while the three children, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watched him with the steady gazes of old men and Petra tried to hurry him along with impatient glances. Hugo Domínguez pretended to be reading text messages on his cell phone, but beads of sweat were rolling down his face.

  Finally the deputy chief broached the subject everyone wanted to hear about. Noemí told him she had known Rachel Rosen for eight years, and that in the early days she had cleaned the judge’s apartment. Later, after Noemí and her sister had set up the company Atomic Cinderellas, the judge had canceled the service because she was not prepared to allow strangers into her house. Noemí had forgotten all about her, but then suddenly Rachel Rosen called.

  “I am very organized when it comes to my clients,” Noemí said. “I wrote down the exact date when we started cleaning for her again. Señora Rosen haggled over the price, but eventually we came to an agreement. It was more than a year before she was prepared to give us a key and go out of the apartment when the Cinderellas came to clean. She was fussy, and really suspicious, so we always sent the same women, who knew about the judge’s quirks.”

  “But they didn’t go to her apartment last Friday—it was you and your sister,” said Bob.

  “Because she was two months behind with her payments. Invoices are issued twice a month, and she’d owed us since the beginning of December,” said Alicia. “We went to tell her that we couldn’t go to work there any more because, besides being late on her payments, she treated the staff badly.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t allow them to open her fridge, for example, or use the toilets in the apartment—she thought she might catch some disease. Before she sent a check, she would call to complain that there were dust balls under the bed, rust in the dishwasher, a stain on the rug—she was always finding fault. One time a small cup got broken, and she claimed it was an antique and charged us a hundred bucks. She collected little glass figurines we weren’t allowed to touch.”

  “One arrived for her on Wednesday,” said the deputy chief.

  “It must have been a special delivery. Sometimes she’d get them from the Internet or from antique dealers, but the ones from her subscription always came at the end of the month in a box printed with the name of the company.”

  “Swarovski?” suggested Bob.

  “That’s it.”

  While Petra recorded and took notes, Noemí and Alicia showed Bob their client list, their accounts, and the office where they kept the keys to the various houses they cleaned, keys that they gave only to their oldest and most trusted employees.

  “We have the only key to Señora Rosen’s place,” said Alicia.

  “But everyone has access to that office.”

  “I never touched those keys!” Hugo Domínguez exploded, unable to contain himself any longer.

  “I see you’re a member of the Sureños,” said Bob, looking him up and down and noting the blue bandanna around his neck. His sisters, it seemed, had not succeeded in persuading him to remove it. “Everyone respects you now, Hugo, though not exactly for your fucking accomplishments. No one dares to disrespect you now, right? Wrong! I dare!”

  “What do you want with me, you fucking pig?”

  “You can thank your mother that I didn’t drag you down to the precinct to question you, because my guys don’t exactly go easy on jerks like you. You’re going to give me a minute-by-minute account of what you did from last Tuesday afternoon until noon on Wednesday.”

  “This is about that old bitch, right, the one who got merked? I don’t know her name, and I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Answer my question!”

  “I was in Santa Rosa.”

  “It’s true,” Noemí interrupted. “He didn’t come home that night.”

  “Anyone see you in Santa Rosa? What were you doing there?”

  “How do I know if anyone saw me? I don’t take no notice of that shit. I went for a walk.”

  “You need to come up with a better alibi than that, Hugo,” the deputy chief warned, “unless you want to land a murder charge.”

  Monday, 13

  Petra Horr cropped her hair short like a boy, never used makeup and always wore the same clothes: boots, black trousers, and a white cotton shirt, and in winter a thick sweatshirt with some rock band logo on the back. Her two concessions to fashion were her hair, dyed so it looked like a foxtail, and the lurid nail polish she wore on her fingernails and toenails, which she kept clipped short because she practiced martial arts. She was in her cubicle painting her nails fluorescent yellow when Elsa Domínguez showed up, dressed in a pair of high heels and an antique fur necklet as though on her way to mass, asking for the deputy chief. Suppressing a sigh of boredom, Petra explained that the boss was out on a case and would probably not be back that afternoon.

  More than ever in recent weeks, Petra’s job seemed to her to consist of covering up for Bob, who would disappear while on duty, offering only the most implausible of excuses. But for him to do it on a Monday, thought Petra, really was the limit. She could not keep count of the number of women Bob had been infatuated with in the time she had known him—it would have been a tedious, pointless task—but she reckoned it must be between twelve and fifteen a year. That made one woman every twenty-eight days, if her arithmetic was correct. He was not particularly discriminating in such matters, and any woman who winked at him could turn his head, but before Ayani appeared on the scene he had not yet counted murder suspects among his girlfriends, and certainly no one capable of distracting him from his work. Though he may have had serious flaws as a lover, thought Petra, as a cop Bob had always been above reproach: not for nothing had
he risen through the ranks so quickly.

  The young assistant saw Ayani the way one might an iguana—exotic, fascinating, dangerous. She could see how some people might be taken in by the woman, but for the deputy chief of the homicide detail of the Personal Crimes Division—who had not only reason enough to be suspicious of her but enough evidence to arrest her—it was unforgivable. And right now, while Elsa Domínguez sat in her office crumpling a sheet of paper, the deputy chief was with Ayani, probably in the very bed that, a month ago, she had shared with her late husband. Petra assumed Bob did not keep secrets from her, partly because he was careless, and partly because he was vain: he liked her to know about his conquests. But if this was an attempt to make her jealous, Petra thought, blowing on her fingernails, he was wasting his time.

  “Is there anything I can do to help, Elsa?”

  “It’s about Hugo, my son. You met him the other day—”

  “Sure, I remember. What’s the matter with him?”

  “Hugo has had his problems in the past, señorita, I won’t deny it,” admitted Elsa. “But he has never been violent. This attitude he puts on, with the gold chains and the tattoos, it’s a fad, nothing more. Why do they think he’s a suspect?” She brushed away a tear.

  “Among other reasons, because he’s a member of a gang with a vicious reputation, he had access to the key to Rachel Rosen’s place, and he has no alibi.”

  “No what?”

  “No alibi. Your son can’t prove that he was in Santa Rosa on the night of the murder.”

  “But he wasn’t there—that’s why he can’t prove he was.”

  Petra Horr put the bottle of nail polish in a desk drawer and picked up a notepad and pencil.

  “Where was he? A convincing alibi could keep your son out of prison, Elsa.”

  “Better he should go to prison than that they kill him, I think.”

  “Who’s going to kill him? Tell me what Hugo’s got himself mixed up in, Elsa. He selling drugs?”

  “No, no . . . well, only marijuana and some of that crystal stuff. Hugo was involved in something else on Tuesday, but he can’t say anything about that. You know what these people would do to a snitch?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “You don’t realize what these people are capable of!”

  “Calm down, Elsa, let’s try to help your son.”

  “Hugo won’t say anything, señorita, but I will. But no one can know that this information came from me, otherwise they won’t just kill my Hugo, they’ll kill our whole family.”

  The assistant showed Elsa into Bob’s office, where they would have a little more privacy, then went to the vending machine down the corridor, returning with two coffees, and sat down to listen to the woman’s confession. Twenty minutes later, when Elsa Domínguez had left, she called Bob on his cell phone.

  “Sorry to interrupt the crucial interrogation of a suspect, chief,” she announced, “but I think maybe you should throw some clothes on and get back here now. I’ve got news.”

  Tuesday, 14

  Alan Keller fell ill within twenty-four hours of breaking up with Indiana, and spent the next two weeks with his stomach in knots, suffering a crippling bout of diarrhea like one that had hit him years earlier, after a trip to Peru—when he thought he had been cursed by the Incas for buying pre-Columbian artifacts on the black market and smuggling them out of the country. He canceled all his social engagements, and he was unable either to write his review of the exhibition at the Legion of Honor—The Cult of Beauty in the Victorian Era—or to say his good-byes to Geneviève van Houte before she headed off to Milan for Fashion Week. He lost nine pounds, and now he looked emaciated rather than just thin. The only things his stomach could tolerate were chicken soup and Jell-O. He could barely walk, and his nights were plagued by insomnia if he did not take sleeping tablets, and by hideous nightmares if he did.

  The pills left him in a deathlike state: he imagined himself imprisoned in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, which he had seen in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The painting had fascinated him as a boy, and he knew it in minute detail, as it had been the subject of one of his finest articles for American Art. He saw himself surrounded by the fantastical creatures conjured up by the Dutch painter, copulating with animals under the cruel gaze of Indiana, tortured with tridents by his banker, slowly devoured by his siblings, pitilessly mocked by Geneviève, foundering in excrement and spitting scorpions. Even when the sleeping pills wore off and he managed to wake up, images from the dream would haunt him all day. He had no trouble interpreting them—their meaning was obvious—but understanding them did not free him from their clutches.

  A hundred times he found himself clutching the phone, on the point of calling Indiana, knowing she would rush to help him—not because she had forgiven him or because she loved him, but simply out of her compulsion to help anyone in need. He resisted the temptation. He was no longer sure of anything, not even that he had loved her. This physical pain he accepted as a purge, an expiation, utterly disgusted with himself, with his aversion to taking risks, his emotional detachment, and his egotism. Alone and unable to consult his therapist—who was on a pilgrimage to the ancient Zen monasteries of Japan—Keller did much soul-searching, and came to the conclusion that he had squandered fifty-five years of his life on trivialities, never truly committing himself to anything or anyone. He had frittered away his youth without developing any emotional maturity, and even now he was navel-gazing like a petulant child when already his body had begun inexorably to sag. How much time did he have left? He had already burned up his best years, and even if there were thirty more to come, they would inevitably trace a slow decline.

  Eventually, the combination of antidepressants, tranquilizers, painkillers, antibiotics, and chicken soup had its effect, and he began to recover. He was still unsteady on his feet and had a permanent aftertaste like rotten eggs in his mouth when he found himself summoned by his family “to make decisions,” as they put it, a message that boded ill, since his family never consulted him about anything. It coincided with Valentine’s Day, a day that, for the past four years, he had spent with Indiana; now he found that he had no one to share it with. The summons, he assumed, concerned his recent debts, rumors of which had probably reached his family. Although he had done it in secret, his brother knew that Alan had sent the Botero paintings to the Marlborough Gallery in New York to sell. He needed money; this was why he had had his jade pieces valued, only to discover that they were worth much less than he had paid for them. About his ill-gotten Inca artifacts, meanwhile, there was nothing to be said: it would be too dangerous to try and sell them.

  The family meeting took place in his brother Mark’s office, on the top floor of a building in the heart of the financial district. With its sweeping views of the bay, the office was a sanctuary, its sturdy furniture, shaggy area rugs, and framed engravings of Greek columns symbolizing the marmoreal solidity of this law practice, which charged $1,000 an hour. His family sat around an ostentatiously polished mahogany table: his father, Philip Keller, a shadow of the dictatorial patriarch he had once been, shriveled and unsteady but dressed like the captain of a yacht, his skin a map of liver spots; his mother, Flora, her gold bracelets tinkling interminably, wearing a look of perpetual surprise fashioned by plastic surgery, a pair of patent leather trousers, and an Hermès scarf to disguise her wrinkled neck; his sister, Lucille, elegant and slender, her face as gaunt as an Afghan hound’s, accompanied by her husband, a lugubrious imbecile who only ever opened his mouth to agree; and finally Mark, upon whose hippopotamine shoulders rested the heavy burden of the Keller dynasty.

  Alan knew perfectly well that his elder brother despised him: Alan was tall and handsome, with a luxuriant head of hair streaked with gray; he was charming and sophisticated, attractive to women, while the unfortunate Mark had been cursed with the ghastly genes of some remote ancestor. For all these reasons Mark hated his brother, but above all because while he ha
d spent his whole life working like a dog to add to the family patrimony, the only thing Alan had ever done—as Mark was wont to accuse him on occasion—was bleed the family white.

  The vast office was filled with the smell of pine air freshener mingled with the lingering scent of Madame Keller’s Prada perfume, a combination that made Alan, who was still convalescing, faintly queasy. To quell any doubts about his status in the family, Mark occupied a high-backed chair at the head of the table, various folders laid out in front of him, while everyone else sat on rather less imposing chairs on either side. It occurred to Alan that time, money, and power had only served to heighten his brother’s simian traits, something that no tailor, however talented, could disguise. Mark was the natural heir to many generations of men blessed with financial acuity and emotional myopia, whose ruthlessness and lack of scruples were etched onto their faces in permanent expressions of ill-tempered arrogance.

  As a boy, when he had trembled before his father and still admired his big brother, Alan had wanted to be like them, but this desire had faded in his teens as soon as he realized he was of a different—and more noble—mettle. Some years ago, during a lavish party to celebrate Flora Keller’s seventieth birthday, taking advantage of the fact that his mother had drunk more than she should, Alan had dared to ask her whether Philip Keller really was his father. “I can say for certain that you’re not adopted,” his mother had replied between hiccups and stifled giggles, “but I can’t remember who your real father is.”