“They think a corrupt cop is something funny,” he said. “They like to play up cops who kill and get killed. They’re motherfuckers, those directors that line their pockets talking about spilled blood when they wouldn’t even know what it smells like.”
“What does it smell like?”
“It’s metallic. And sometimes it emits steam, because it still contains some of the heat of the life that has escaped the deceased’s body.”
But what I was telling you about, Mr. Rose, is that working for the anticrime unit made Greg value prostitutes. He told me they were his strongest allies, because they were the only ones who knew everything that was happening on the streets, the ones who knew the goings-on and snares of the underworld best. That’s why he valued them. But of course he’d not have wanted to fall into their clutches. Greg had too high a regard for the sacrament of marriage. He went the whole Catholic route with his first wife, and repeated the process with me. I guess he thought that because Latinas were so Catholic, we would be less likely to cheat on him. Something like that, or maybe he was affected by having grown up in a Latino neighborhood. Of course, with me he made a mistake, not because I cheated on him, although not from lack of wanting to.
Let me stop there, because I’m lying. I did cheat on Greg, Mr. Rose. I cheated on him in a bad way. Even though it hurts, I have to tell you the truth, because if I omit that fact, you’re not going to understand the mess that followed. I slept with my brother-in-law. And not once, but a thousand times. There you have it. It’s out. I’ve said it. Now you know why I doubted Corina’s story, that whole thing about the rape? Because I knew how the man handled himself when it came to sex, knew it by heart, and I didn’t have any complaints — just the opposite; that wasn’t a problem. But the whole situation was bad, sleeping with two brothers, terrible idea. And now you understand why I wanted Sleepy Joe and Cori to hit it off? I needed to rid myself of him, Mr. Rose. Get him off me, toss him from my bed forever, before the shit hit the fan. All this adultery mess was beginning to weigh on me. I lived terrified that my husband would catch us, and that was the least of it; the worst part was that the guilt was eating me alive. But I couldn’t do anything by myself, I went soft just seeing my good old brother-in-law, my will and my conviction vanished as soon as that boy walked through the doors of my house. I also didn’t dare tell anyone. The best thing I could come up with was to pawn off my lover on my friend, my best friend, as if asking her without saying anything, Cori, free me from this mess, you take him. But apparently that was a big mistake, a major screwup on my part, and as I should have known, it turned out bad for everyone. First, Corina comes with the rape story, the broomstick, all that horror. But how was I supposed to believe her when I knew Sleepy Joe’s sexual habits so well? Me and my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law and I. We were obviously not playing some kids’ game; it was full-fledged sex, hot stuff, twenty-one and older, full-frontal nudity, no-holds-barred pornography, whatever you want to call it, every position and transgression, anything you can imagine. But in spite of his tantrums and horrible temper, our sexual relations always remained within the bounds of human rights, so to speak, and whatever violence there was, it was consensual and moderate.
The blind date with Cori sent Sleepy Joe into a frenzy and let loose some lunacy that had been previously kept in check. Greg told me months later that this was exactly what they were talking about in Slovak at the restaurant. Joe was accusing his brother of disrespecting him, the insult, the indignity, and who knows what else. “What do you think I am?” he screamed at Greg, with me and Cori sitting right there having no idea what the quarrel was about. “What do you think I am? Your little whore?” he screamed at Greg. “You think you can just pawn me off on anyone? Huh? Tell me to my face, brother. Is that what you think of me?” He made quite a little scene. My poor Greg who had to put up with it. Fortunately, they were quarreling in Slovak; that left me and Cori with our gin and tonics out of the loop. It would be too late before I found that Joe had felt stung and humiliated by the whole episode. I imagine he didn’t feel it was right that I, his lover, would dispose of him by hawking him off on someone else. I’d have liked to have given Cori a heads-up about this, asked for forgiveness, talked about these things openly, confess my dirty little scheme. But she had already left for Chalatenango and hadn’t left an address. Maybe mistreating Cori was Sleepy Joe’s way of getting back at me, his revenge, which was much harsher than the offense, as could be expected from Sleepy Joe, who doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you knock out a single one of his teeth he will punch out all of yours and poke your eyes out with a pencil. But there’s still one more question. Why such an indirect way of letting me know that he was hurt? Pride probably, and probably because that’s just the way he is, Sleepy Joe, full of resentments and coded messages.
From the first day I got into this whole adultery mess, I was looking for a way to end it. Think of it, Mr. Rose, as if you shot two arrows in completely different directions. That was me, trapped in infidelity and at the same time detesting it. I wanted to cut loose but I couldn’t; the more I tried the tighter the bindings became. And my passion for my brother-in-law grew with my regret. At the beginning, I wanted to end the affair with Joe because of Greg, the fear that Greg would find out; Greg’s explosion, if he were ever to find out; the end of our marriage; the loss of the green card; the fight to the death between brothers; the final judgment. But after what happened with Corina, my main reason for ending it with Joe was because of Joe, who had always inspired a bit of fear in me; after Corina, that fear became panic. Because I knew well what my dear brother-in-law was like in the sack, and I could attest for that, but I also knew about his more perverse side. He was Catholic, after all.
If Greg made a mistake with me it was that in the end I wasn’t very Catholic, and even less faithful. The complete opposite of his first wife, who I know almost nothing about because he never talked about her. I only knew that she had worn the ring of white gold that had belonged to her mother-in-law, and that Greg gave to me, with the cubic zirconia, on the day of our engagement, the very same one that they confiscated from me when they put me in here, and they haven’t given it back. Not that I need it. That piece wasn’t all mine, it had passed through a lot of hands before it got to me.
What else can I tell you about, what other clues may have foretold the tragic outcome? Well, there were weapons in the house, but what ex-cop doesn’t have weapons in the house? A few pistols, or revolvers or whatever, I don’t know the difference, never touched them, never even noticed them. Greg kept them well oiled and they were his pride and joy, because according to him the department had granted them to him. He used to leaf through weapons catalogs and subscribed to various magazines that he read in the bathroom, but not Playboy or Penthouse or anything like that, my Greg became aroused by other things. He locked himself up in the bathroom with Soldier of Fortune, the bible of mercenaries, or with Corrections Today, the essential source for the discovery of prison-security innovations. I know because he showed them to me, he wanted to share his passion with me, because in the end that was his world, the souvenirs of his profession, remembrances of his youth. Everyone has his stuff. And I respected it because Greg was a good man. Let’s say a man whose love for me was insecure, over the top, the kind of love an older man has for a much younger woman. He spoiled me as if I were his daughter, and I let myself be spoiled, although the excessive affection was a bit suffocating. In previous relationships with men my own age I had come to know plenty of insolence, and Greg’s love felt like an oasis. After he died, if he is in fact dead, I came to realize that living with him had been a privilege, because he was the only man who truly loved me or who still loves me, if he happens to be alive. Except for that whole nonsense that I told you about with Q & A, his outburst about that movie, I never once fought with Greg. Things went well from the moment we married until the night of his fifty-seventh birthday.