Death in Veracruz Read Free Page B

they were after,” Rojano stated with conviction.
    â€œThey weren’t after Malerva?”
    â€œThey claimed they were, but the ones they made sure were dead were the Garabitos, not Malerva.”
    â€œYou’re saying that because of the shots to the head?” I asked.
    â€œI say it because they were executed,” Rojano replied.
    Acts of bloodshed have a peculiar kind of loquacity. I’d seen it often as a police reporter. People get run over minus their socks but with their shoes still on, shots penetrate a lung but cause only minor hemorrhaging, suicides who fire a .45 at their forehead wake up at home the next morning with a new part in their hair. There was no reason for the Garabitos’ head wounds not to follow the coarse logic of bullets.
    â€œThat’s what happens when people get caught in a crossfire,” I started to say.
    â€œWhat crossfire?” Rojano insisted heatedly.
    â€œYou said there was a shootout, and these people got caught in the crossfire.”
    â€œThat’s what the witnesses said,” Rojano noted. “What I said was that Malerva was unarmed. What’s more, the Garabitos were also unarmed. So the question then becomes
which of the victims fired?
The Garabito kid? His mother? The woman with the food stall? Her daughter? Prospero Tlamatl? The unidentified guy? Tlamatl and the unidentified guy don’t have twenty pesos in their pockets between them. Can you imagine them with pistols in their waistbands?”
    What I needed to do was not to imagine them but to follow Rojano’s logic. “So according to you, what happened?” I asked.
    â€œThe same thing that happened the following month in Altotonga,” Rojano said as he reached for the second file.
    He unwrapped the (purple) crepe paper and spreadthe file’s contents over the desktop. It was a collection of newspaper clippings that explained how a drunk had fired into the crowd in Altotonga during the festival in honor of the town’s patron saint on July 22, 1974. He wounded five and killed two before fleeing, Rojano explained, growing increasingly agitated. “He’d fired at least a dozen times because he hit twelve targets,” Rojano declared. “Unheard of marksmanship for a drunk.”
    â€œHe fled almost four blocks, and the mounted police who supposedly gave chase couldn’t catch up with him. At the very least he was a surprisingly fast drunk,” Rojano surmised, “and they didn’t catch him later either.”
    He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and dried the sweat from his lips and cheeks.
    â€œSo what happened?” I asked.
    â€œWhat didn’t happen. Read on.”
    He handed me the autopsy reports on the cadavers. Certain passages were carefully underlined in red. In stilted coroner’s prose, the documents described the deaths of: Manuel Llaca, age 29, by shots from a .38 caliber pistol that struck him in the right groin area, the rib cage, and the left shoulder; and of the widow Mercedes Gonzalez de Martín , age sixty-four, from wounds to the abdomen, left arm, right gluteus and left temple (the latter enclosed in a double red circle). The report went on to detail the wounds inflicted on the other five casualties.
    â€œCount the shots,” Rojano said. “Twelve shots counted one by one.”
    I asked about the shots.
    â€œThey show the same pattern as in Papantla,” Rojano said, drying his hands with the kerchief. “Shooting breaks out, several people get killed, but only one gets the finishing shot to the head.”
    â€œThe woman shot in the head?”
    â€œThe woman they made sure was dead, yes.”
    â€œWhat makes you think they’re the same?”
    â€œLook at the circumstances,” Rojano started to say. The facade of domestic tranquility was cracking, and his habitual vehemence began to show through. “A drunk fires twelve shots from a .38 revolver, kills two, and