Silver Nitrate(57)

“Are you nuts or stupid? That driver was listening to every single word we said. I think he recognized me.”

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t. I have a major part coming up. I can’t have people tying me to anything scandalous.”

“Don’t worry, the one who was detained was me, not you.”

“Yes, but I just picked you up.”

“Where were you the night Abel died? I tried beeping you, I tried phoning, I tried knocking and you were not there,” Montserrat said. Her tone of voice was flat, so he replied in an equally flat voice although he knew this would only incense her.

“I was with someone.”

“Fucking someone,” Montserrat said, almost biting into the words.

Tristán’s masterful plan to meet Yolanda for drinks, so he could hand her the CD—to remain friends, to be adults about this breakup—had morphed into a patchy attempt at trying to give their relationship another chance. They had headed to Cuernavaca in her car for a mini-vacation, booking themselves into a cute little hotel. The first twenty-four hours had been fine, then sometime around dinner the second day Tristán had been distracted and morose. He had taken the trip, and he was trying to mend this relationship, partially because he kept thinking about the terror of loneliness and Karina’s death. Normalcy. That’s what he needed. A shot of normalcy.

Yolanda assumed his melancholic mood had something to do with her, and when Tristán assured her that was not the case, she asked what was bothering him so much. Afraid of confessing he was, perhaps, going insane, he’d been evasive and grown more and more irritated. Yolanda lost her temper, they bickered, and in the end Tristán sat at the bus terminal, chain-smoking and waiting to buy a ticket home.

It had been a disaster, the last nail in the coffin of his relationship with Yolanda, and he did not need Montserrat giving him a sermon about it.

“Yeah, I was fucking someone, if you must know,” he said, his tone cool, but with a bite. “I’m allowed to fuck, unless they’ve established a new morality police I haven’t heard about. Screw you, Montserrat. If you can’t get any it doesn’t mean I’ll go without it.”

He didn’t mean to say all of that. The words came tumbling out because of the stress of the last couple of days when he’d been in the panicked position of discovering one of his friends was dead and the other was being held for questioning. Not to mention his catastrophic fight with Yolanda. It was like getting punched three times in the face.

“I don’t care if you fuck a man, a woman, or sign up for a threesome with a set of twins, what I care about is the fact I kept trying to get in touch with you and you simply weren’t there. I needed you to keep an eye on Abel. You are an unreliable—”

“Do you know how much money it cost me to get you out of the slammer? How many favors I pulled?”

There was a chill to the air, and the businesses were starting to pull down their rolling steel shutters. Montserrat stopped in front of a haberdashery and stared at him.

“Well, do you?”

Montserrat did not reply. She started walking again, and he followed her, his voice rising with each step. “You’re wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt with the word ‘Killers’ printed on it and you found Abel’s corpse.”

“So?”

“It’s dumb, my eyes, my love. You might as well have held up a sign that said ‘murder suspect right this way.’?”

Montserrat hated it when Tristán slipped into using endearments during arguments. It had been common in his household growing up, but there was nothing that could fuel her rage more than his passive-aggressive dropping of a sweet word. Especially “my love.”

She shoved him, and he collided with the shuttered front of a shop, his back making a loud thud when it hit the steel.

“Excuse me for panicking. Next time I stumble onto a dead man I’ll wear a suit!”

Montserrat’s hands were pressed against his chest, and she glared up at him before attempting to slide away, but he caught her wrist and held her in place.

“Don’t you remember what happened with that Molinet kid a few months back? They found the maid dead in his house, and they said he’d done it because he was a Satanist. And the proof of his Satanism was that he had a Stephen King collection, a copy of Süskind’s Perfume, and a few heavy metal records in his room.

“Cops always try to pin it on an easy target. I should know,” he added, recalling the fuss after Karina passed away. “Orgy in Cuernavaca ends in deadly crash,” that’s what the newspapers said, and he had never been able to shake off that aura of crime and debauchery from himself.

Montserrat gave him the tiniest nod, looking away from his face. “I was scared, okay? That’s why I’m pissed off. I needed you that night.”

“I know,” he muttered.

The tension between them was dissipating. He hated it when they quarreled. It left him a mess. He never knew how to properly apologize.

“Why were you in Abel’s apartment?” he asked.

“Abel said he was going to die. He had a premonition. Everything seemed fine and then he called me in a panic.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“No. I may be dumb, but I’m not that stupid.”