“Relax, Papi. Tell me everything. And then repeat the story in front of Hermann and the agent. I’ll be with you the whole time. I got your back. Don’t worry,” he said.
Relax?... How do you get to Jayuya? Take the back road — that’s what my grandpa always said. You get it? I had to make sure that the night manager would have my back, you know. It wasn’t the first time that Security had interrogated me, nor was it the first time that a police detective had questioned me during an investigation. Being interviewed in the manager’s office and being handcuffed and interrogated in a bunker are not the same thing. For the first time, I was the subject in question, and I had to know if this guy was going to have my back. It really fucked with me not knowing for certain that no matter what I said and what happened, the next day I’d head to the bellhop room, punch in, and go to work. That’s how I earn a living, and I couldn’t let any manager get in the way of that. So I had no choice but to tell him.
Her name was Candy, or that’s what she said, you know, and she’d been staying in the Ocean Suites for three days. A blonde with a tight body, one of those rare girls from somewhere in the Southwest US: tall, blond, green eyes. Not more than twenty-five. Always in tropical clothes, but elegant, with a small tattoo of an infinity symbol on her right wrist and an Egyptian cross on her left. A sea of freckles sprinkled across her tits. From the time she stepped through the arch of the main entrance, she was throwing cash around left and right. Thirty bucks for Antonio to go get her luggage, three hundred as an appetizer for the girl at reception to give her an exclusive suite facing the sea. A hundred for Ortiz to bring up her luggage. Come on, the girl, being Southern, was a gravy train. When they dropped off her luggage, she just sat down on the balcony chair and called down to order a bottle of Cristal and some strawberries dipped in chocolate. Fifty bucks for room service, easy.
To top it off, she was nice. She smiled wide, her cheeks pocked with dimples. She strolled all around the terra-cotta marble of the lobby. She inspected the details in the wood, the lights, the assortment of orchids with a captivated expression, like some kind of hippie Indiana Jones — you know the way some women are, the way they act kind of dumb, but then all of a sudden they pull out the whip or put a bullet in you, eyeing you up and down like an aborigine. She talked to whomever she wanted whenever she wanted, guest or employee, it didn’t matter. She asked about everything, from what your job was to how many kids you had, putting on an interested face. It was impossible to tell if she was really paying attention or if she was possessed by the coldest cynicism on the planet.
Something didn’t add up, man. Nobody can be that happy. This was a twenty-something girl, swimming in cash, traveling alone to Puerto Rico, never having been there, not speaking a lick of Spanish. Spending like there’s no tomorrow in the hotel stores, tossing cash around as if she were selling lottery tickets. And later, the evening transforming her into a sports car on the highway of youth. Out all night partying with the waitresses from the lobby, who were in her pocket before nine p.m. the day she arrived. Asking Antonio to bring bags of blow to her room. Who the hell snorts blow on their own like that? Renting a Ferrari to take a spin around Condado. Fuck, not even the old perverts who come down here twice a month do that. I don’t know, brother, but all that craziness didn’t add up for me, it made me look at her funny. The ones with fangs are always smiling, my old man used to say. So much courtesy smells fishy. And she must have noticed the mistrust on my face, because the only person that Candy Smith paid zero fucking attention to was me. What the fuck?
I figured this out on the afternoon of the fourth day of her stay. Three days of working. Three days in which I never got to bring her anything, three days without her even calling me at the bellstand to ask for the newspaper or to have her dirty clothes taken to the laundry. Fuck, I wasn’t able to even take a pencil to that she-devil! Three days of not reaching my quota: a hundred bucks in tips. That’s the minimum I need to be able to cover my bills for my apartment, car, the monthly fee at the school, and child support to my three kids. Three days in which I didn’t even get to fifty. It was mid-September, the hotel was almost empty, and the only gravy train didn’t even look at me by mistake. At one point she passed in front of the bellhop room and I swear on my mother that she stared right through me. But she didn’t smile at me, not even a twitch of her lips to indicate she knew I was there, just the cold look of her green panther eyes. Thirty-four years and I still can’t resist a pair of green eyes.
With all of that, I thought it was mere coincidence that she’d ignored me. Forget it, calm down. It’s just that according to the laws of probability, fucking Candy would have to order something to her room, and I would be first in line to take it to her. Ah, but everything bad comes in bulk all at the same time, my old lady used to say. That afternoon I was first in line. And how could my knees not shake when that tigress appeared in the gallery on the way to the elevators, and suddenly I saw her coming toward me, her humble servant? It nearly gave me a heart attack when she turned to look at me for a few seconds with her feline eyes and then jerked them away. She went past, put something in Ortiz’s hands, and whispered in his ear. I wasn’t about to allow this to continue right in front of me, so I got technicaclass="underline" “That’s mine, it’s my turn.” Ortiz knew it, and made a move as if to give me what he had in his hand, but she stopped him. “Not you, him!” the she-devil said, fixing me with those two backstabbing emeralds. Just like that, she turned and left. Fuck Candy — fuck Jolly Ranchers, Charms, Smarties, Hershey’s, and M&M’s! Fuck your mom’s gofio. That little fucking gringa was guarding me worse than LeBron James, and she just threw a massive block. That night I went home with barely twenty bucks.
The night before she went back to Gringolandia, I showed up with smoke coming out of my ears. I knew that panther was taking off and I’d be left without any gravy. Everyone flaunted the loot they’d mooched off that ridiculous woman, and I was empty-handed. I even went around the lobby with my shirt unbuttoned, that’s how much I wanted to be working that Saturday. I did my rounds. I went to the front desk and saw that less than ten rooms had been filled all afternoon and night. The housekeeping and maintenance boys went up to the presidential suite at seven to watch the Yankees game — they were in first place and the season was ending. “Bring some beers.” I checked in with Security, but there was only one girl working, the same one as always. I went by housekeeping to see if the Colombiana was on that night, but she’d called in sick. A boring shift awaited me, broke and horny. No cash and left hanging. No way.