Here’s another shocking moment from my work-in-progress, VIVA ACAPULCO: Detective Emilia Cruz Book 9.
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Whatever Emilia had expected the mayor to say, it wasn’t this.
“My campaign,” Carlota Montoya Perez repeated. “I gave her an important position. I trusted her and what does she do? Gets herself killed in some empty house in Colonia Progreso. Madre de Dios.”
“Señora, we understand your distress.”
Rodrigo Salazar, the chief of police, resembled a Spanish don come to life from a painting by El Greco. Tall and lean, with a fringe of hair around a bald dome, all he needed was a black cloak and a white ruffled collar instead of a blue uniform heavy with gold braid and the roll of antiacids clutched in his left hand.
“I
highly doubt it.” Carlota threw herself out of the gilt armchair in the elegant reception room, her silvery gown emiting a swirling whisper. Her jet black hair was styled in a sleek French knot, the better to show off large diamond earrings. She strode to the window in a froth of strapless chiffon. “I have devoted my life to this city and this is how my family repays me.”
Reflected in the glass, Carlota’s ageless face was the same image which graced billboards, buses, schools and even litter bins across the city with the sparkling new campaign slogan Viva Acapulco!
It had been more than six hours since discovering the body
of Monica Montoya taped to the chair in the Casa de Plata ground floor apartment. The golden hour was upon them; that stunning interval between twilight and darkness when Acapulco was bathed in a soft haze created by the setting sun’s last bands of color.
Emilia wondered if the mayor’s fundraising event was still going on.
People had probably paid the equivalent of six month’s worth of a police detective’s salary to eat broiled fish and pastel de tres leches with Carlota.
The silence was growing uncomfortable. Both Chief Salazar and Victor Obregon, head of the police union for the state of Guerrero and the mayor's escort to the
campaign event, sat without speaking as Carlota fumed by the window.
Emilia quietly closed the police laptop brought to show pictures of the crime scene. Carlota had shown no squeamishness, nothing besides anger at her ruined dinner and how this would affect her campaign.
Silvio gave a rumbling cough as he sat next to Emilia on an ornate settee. She cut her eyes to him and he lifted a shoulder in a minimal shrug that conveyed his smugness in being politically savvy enough to call the chief of police’s office about the identity of the murder victim, in effect kicking upstairs the gut-chilling ordeal of telling the mayor. Carlota had the justifiable
reputation of killing the messenger.
Silvio’s shrug also gave away his restlessness that they were now trapped in the alcaldía for as long as it took Carlota to figure out how to use her half-sister’s thoughtlessness to win reelection.
Or maybe he was just annoyed that his evening with Mercedes was in the dumpster.
~
Catch up with the Detective Emilia Cruz series:
NARCO NOIR: Detective Emilia Cruz Book
8.
