Crimes and Misdemeanors: Tales of Mystery and Imagination

By José Talleyrand Rodríguez

1598. In the city of Amsterdam, a Flemish engraver and cartographer creates a map showing a marvelous land located in the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Guiana. A land tremendously rich in natural resources and filled with many legends. To get the attention of the public, the cartographer elaborates his map mixing solid facts and fantasy. Explorers from Europe fight to own a piece of Guiana. Four hundred years later, men, who bought the message sent by the Flemish engraver, are destroying the Amazon rainforests. 2017. A clever man in New York City earns a fortune working in the advertisement industry. Playing with signs, he sells tobacco and political fantasies. Man is the superior species but the Devil seems to be everywhere, living and flowing with the passions of human beings, touching everything that we do. What is the best way to survive in a world filled with all kind of crimes and misdemeanors? A shifter has found a “perfect” approach: See, swallow, think, piss, shoot and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palibrio
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506527222

José Talleyrand Rodríguez

José Talleyrand Rodríguez was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He has received graduate degrees from Universidad Simón Bolívar, Indiana University and SUNY Stony Brook performing research in science, literature and cultural studies. In recent years he has published two novels, Sirena en Do Menor and Caballo Negro en Tierra de Gracia, and two books of short stories, Amores, Canciones, Estrellas y Pistolas and Crimes and Misdemeanors: Tales of Mystery and Imagination. A lover of classic noir and modern Latin American literature who likes to examine phenomena associated with social injustice. He currently lives in the United States somewhere near New York City.

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Copyright © 2018 by José Talleyrand Rodríguez.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2018912910

ISBN:                Hardcover                    978-1-5065-2721-5

                   Softcover                            978-1-5065-2723-9

                           eBook                         978-1-5065-2722-2

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Rev. date: 11/05/2018

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CONTENTS

Two Dead, One Night, One White Ghost.

Signs (Naturaleza Muerta)

I Love You, Therefore I am

Ride with the Devil

Fluids

Where Angels Fall

Methamphetamine

Bang Bang a Taxman Shot Him Down (The Strange Life of Monsieur Ĝee)

René

TWO DEAD, ONE

NIGHT, ONE

WHITE GHOST.

Three o’clock in the morning. In a park of the city of San Andrés, surrounded by the dark of the night, a man walks to clear his head. He has drunk too much liquor in a nearby bar. The fresh air of the night gives him new life while his eyes marble at the multiple shadows draw by the weak light of a quarter-moon partially covered by clouds. The trees melt forming a black entity that defies any interpretation. A thousand and one geometrical shapes seem to play in the dark teasing his imagination. In a side of the park, under an oak tree, the man sees a small vehicle which moves with a rhythmic pattern. The movement of the car catches his attention. He hesitates. Should he go and examine the interior of the car? From that distance the man barely can see the back of the automobile. Smiling he walks several steps and stops. His eyes try to cut through the darkness generated by the oak tree. In the shadows there is a white figure looking through the front windshield of the vehicle. The man makes the sign of the Holy Cross over his head and upper body. Paralyzed by fear he hears a sensual moan emitted by a woman in a rapture of pleasure. The sound lasts only a few of seconds. Suddenly a car door burst open and two half naked bodies get out from the vehicle rushing towards the nearest street.

- I’ll never forgive you this one! – complains a young woman.

- Don’t give me that crap – replies a young man. Fear? You were in heaven!

- Maybe … But hell I don’t want to be burnt by La Blanca.

The man sees the mad dash of the two youths. By instinct his right hand moves towards his waist extracting a Magnum Baby Eagle pistol. In a matter of seconds the pistol fires four 9 mm bullets towards the figure in white. Nothing. Hidden in the shadows the figure does not move. Horrified the man turns around and starts a desperate race following the two youths. He feels that his life is in serious danger. The man does not dare to look back, he has the certainty that a supernatural being is hunting to do a kill. In front of him, the young woman asks for help to her companion, she does not want to be alone. The young man ignores her plea and accelerates his frantic pace moving away from the girl. Sobbing. The man hears how the young woman begins to cry and his fear increases even more. He is the last person in the group of runners, the first target to be caught by the ghostly creature. Desperate the man tries to run faster but his body does not respond. The effort is already brutal. He almost cannot breath, all his muscles are at the limit, his body may collapse over the street. There is only one way out: To stay alive the man must face the spectral being. His right hand firmly grabs the Magnum Baby Eagle. The pistol magazine still contains six bullets. He may have a chance. Making a supreme effort to control his fear, the man stops, and turns around … What he sees leaves him perplexed. There is nothing. The street is totally empty.

It is in the news. The white ghost has been sighted again. La Blanca: The spectral figure of a woman dressed with a long white tunic who walks through the empty lots and alleys of San Andrés at nights. A joke? Not really. Three persons saw her yesterday in a park. It is a nightmare embedded deep into our lives. The spirit has been a habitant of the city for more than two hundred years. Since colonial times her legend has lived among us. According to popular beliefs, La Blanca punishes sinners by burning them in a fire of desire. An exterminating angel that nobody wants to see, because we all have something to hide, and this spirit has an uncanny ability to detect our faults. She is a projection of our conscience that can kill us. This time the white ghost seems to be really mad. Nine persons have been killed, seven men and two women, in a relatively short period of eighteen months. The dead were found in the outskirts of the city, in parks and motel rooms, all with third-degree burns. Criminals and perverts have been removed from this land, no one weeps for them, now we are living in a better world. But is the white ghost responsible for all these killings? Most people would give an affirmative answer to this question, yet I am skeptical. I have seen too many bad or weird things in this earth. Through history, human beings have shown that they can kill and burn. You don’t need a ghost to that atrocity.

More than sixty years ago, at the end of 1949, when I was only twenty-six years old, I had to deal with two killings and the myth of La Blanca. It was an odd experience. Two men died under mysterious circumstances and I still wonder who or what did the killings. At that time I was a junior officer in the Police Department of San Andrés. A rising star. Three years earlier the Mayor of the city had decided to modernize the police force. The Second World War was over and some politicians were trying new approaches to improve our future in Latin America. San Andrés was a small size city of 60000 habitants located at the junction of two main roads in the mountains of La Sierra. A prosperous town dedicated to the trade of cattle and agricultural products. In the eyes of the Mayor, the leading city of La Sierra needed to step into the twentieth century embracing the concept of progress and moving away from old superstitions. The people of San Andrés welcomed the improvement in public services, approved the higher level of the education taught in local schools, and enjoyed a more efficient railroad system, but they did not forget the myth of La Blanca. For them the white ghost was still walking through dark streets and empty lots in the city. Science can be used to fight superstition. In the Mayor’s plans for modernizing the Police Department, it was essential the creation of a scientific unit. No more empirical investigation of violent crimes. Thus, in March of 1947, taking advantage of a Good Neighbor treaty between the United States and my country, I was sent to New York City to study the multiple links of detective work with forensic medicine and toxicology. This was an eye-opening adventure. The Police Force of New York City was at the forefront in the use of forensic medicine to solve crimes. I learned a lot in this field, however, I also noticed a curious thing. In neighborhoods of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, urban legends with ghosts were very popular. Marvels like the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge could coexist with spectral bodies that had fantastic powers and the ability to hurt human beings in multiple ways.

After living a year in the United States, I returned to San Andrés and established a modest scientific unit in the Police Department. Initially the unit consisted of a Siamese cat and three men. The cat, Amadeus, operated on its own free will. One day the animal appeared in my office and, without previous training, displayed an amazing talent for police investigations. Several members of the Police Department claimed that Amadeus was the reincarnation of an officer who died while preventing a robbery in a horse race track. Working directly under my supervision was a veteran detective, a mestizo of Wahiro blood, named Carlos Arazipani, who loved hard-boiled fiction. Carlos was living in a dream. He was almost thirty years older than me, with an excellent knowledge of the streets and surroundings of San Andrés, and wrote a long letter to the Chief of Police requesting admission into the scientific unit. Well, to be honest, I have to say that Carlos, Amadeus and Fernando Torrealba were the only beings in the whole city that showed an interest in working for the unit. Fernando Torrealba was a medical doctor in the Central Hospital of San Andrés. When I told him of my visit to the New York City Police Force, Fernando confessed to be a fervent admirer of the work done by Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler in forensic science. The four of us worked a couple of minor cases and gained some recognition after identifying the two kidnappers and killers of a sixteen-year old boy. In a clever way a jealous husband eliminated the lover of his wife. The murderer was aiming for a perfect killing but we uncovered his deeds. A sordid crime of passion that did not involve any ghost or supernatural spirit. After that case, the fifth and final member of our scientific unit arrived: Hannah Merbold-Ramírez.

In 1949 there was only one woman doing field work in the Police Department of San Andrés. Hannah was special in many aspects. A good-looking woman of medium size, a real survivor, who could do her job in an efficient way without threatening the male population of the Department. Her parents were natives of Germany and Chile. The father was a Bavarian chemist who met the mother, the daughter of a retired Chilean diplomat, at the end of the First World War in Munich. The two married and Hannah was born. The family moved to Dresden where the father got a position teaching in a university. He became an expert in toxicology and mentored his daughter in this area. Hannah’s parents died in an air raid during the Second War World. In February of 1945, the Allied Forces launched a massive air attack over the city of Dresden, using high explosive and incendiary bombs, killing thousands and thousands of civilians. From a distance, six kilometers away from the center of the city, Hannah watched with impotency the fire that consumed the lives of her father and mother. The tragedy left a profound mark in her soul. Life in post-war Germany was very difficult for a single woman. A good friend told Hannah of a job in a Police Department of a small city in Latin America. Somebody in the other side of the Atlantic Ocean was looking for an expert toxicologist. Hannah sent a telegram and mailed her papers applying for the position. In San Andrés, the Mayor of the city and the Chief of Police did not feel comfortable with the sex of the applicant, but they had a unique opportunity to hire a well-trained German scientist who was fluent in Spanish. A German toxicologist! Their new scientific unit could gain instant credibility. Hannah got the job. She integrated very fast into our unit. The woman had an excellent hand for dealing with Amadeus and was perfect as a bridge between the forensic work of Fernando and the detective work of Carlos and me. After seeing a lot of violence and misery in the war she blossomed as a human being. In addition to her job in the unit, she taught chemistry to high-school students in San Andrés and developed a research program to extract medicinal drugs and toxins from plants growing in the mountains and valleys of La Sierra.

Our first case as a full unit showed us the complex interactions of the local politicians with the outside world. For them the white ghost was just a minor distraction. The evening of a holiday a travelling salesman died in one of the best bordellos of the city. Las Mariposas was the name of the brothel, a place owned by Gustavo and Constanza Echegaray, brother and sister, immigrants who came as refugees of the Spanish Civil war. The Echegarays had excellent relations with the rich and powerful of San Andrés. One of their customers, Eugenio Sanchez-Valbuena, a travelling salesman, entered into a room with a young prostitute and forty-six minutes later he was dead of a heart attack. Extreme sexual activity was the initial cause of death. After examining the corpse in the morgue, Fernando and Hannah noticed a rare gesture in the face of the dead man and an anomalous expansion in the muscles of his body. They found traces of a powerful toxin in the internal organs. The man had been murdered. In a flashback Hannah remembered the contents of an old article describing toxins used by security agencies of the Soviet Union to eliminate enemies of the state. One of the toxins remained in a latent state inside the body until the victim performed extreme exercise while having sex. It was a convenient way to eliminate an enemy and tarnish his reputation. Machiavellian! Were Soviet agents operating in our city? Carlos and I started to make questions through the telephone lines and on the streets of San Andrés. From 1941 to 1949, four customers of Las Mariposas died of extreme sexual activity. Forensic records indicated that all the dead men exhibited the same physical peculiarities found in the corpse of Eugenio Sanchez-Valbuena. Through the years the owners of Las Mariposas manipulated public opinion and kept everything quiet. They attributed the deaths to the sexual appetite of the prostitutes working in Las Mariposas. A lie that covered the killings and helped to bring new male customers. True macho men were always willing to prove themselves by having a night with the girls at Las Mariposas.

In the course of our investigation we found that Eugenio Sanchez-Valbuena was not a travelling salesman, his real name was Omar López, a union leader and a member of the Communist Party who was not obeying the orders coming from Moscow. For political reasons he had to disappear. Yes, Soviet agents were operating in San Andrés! I ordered the detention of Gustavo and Constanza Echegaray. They were interrogated in a cell of the Police Department by Carlos and two of his friends. Did things get rough? Our plan was to give the suspects a Latin American version of two-very-bad-cops and one-good-cop, but it was not necessary. The killers had important friends located in strategic places. They could confess the truth behind the crimes and then negotiate with us their way out. Gustavo Echegaray requested my presence. In a flat voice, without any trace of emotion, the man gave me a condensed view of his life and explained his secret activities in San Andrés. Gustavo and Constanza Echegaray were born in the south of Spain in a region with large land estates and extremely poor peasants, Andalucia. Since a young age they were members of the Communist Party. At the start of the Spanish Civil war, in July of 1936, they supported the democratically elected government against the rebel forces led by General Francisco Franco. The war was a sad affair. Hitler and Mussolini sent arms and troops to support Franco and his rebels while the main democratic governments of the Western hemisphere ignored the plea for help of the legal authorities in Spain. Only the Soviet Union helped them, but that help had a price, the communists tried to control the central government. Many young Spaniards travelled to the Soviet Union to be indoctrinated as soldiers, bureaucrats and secret police. That trip changed their lives. Gustavo and Constanza Echegaray were assigned the secret task of killing men or women in the Spanish central government who did not follow the orders coming from Moscow. They were quite busy towards the end of the civil war. The triumph of Francisco Franco in 1939 forced them to move to Latin America as war refugees. They were assigned a new mission by their masters in Moscow. For Josef Stalin the communist organizations in Latin America were corrupted by sympathizers of Leon Trotsky or by local leaders who had their own ideas on how to carry out political revolutions. All those individuals had to be eliminated. The methodology followed by Gustavo and Constanza Echegaray to kill their victims was developed in Russia and tested in countries of Eastern Europe by security agencies of the Soviet Union. A top-notch bordello like Las Mariposas could be used to attract and eliminate enemies and also as a center to collect information about the political life of La Sierra. It was a diabolic scheme. Carlos interrupted the confession of Gustavo Echegaray. ‘La Blanca should burn you and send your damned soul to hell’ was his verdict. He was not joking. I said nothing. My brain was trying to understand the behavior of the two scumbags sat in front of me.

The Echegarays lost the typical feelings of a human being when they fully committed their lives to a perverse political cause. Then, the harsh realities of the political arena hit them. Constanza Echegaray told us how both Soviet agents lost their faith in the communist systems of the world. They did not like the paranoiac behavior of Josef Stalin after the conclusion of the Second War World. Many soldiers and agents who had contributed to the triumph of the Soviet Union were killed or sent to Siberia without any explanation. As Soviet agents the Echegarays were expendable. No good! They decided to offer their services to the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States. At that time, the recently created CIA needed informers in Latin America. The Agency took the Echegarays as double agents. They kept their routine work with the Russians and from time to time passed information to the Americans on the moves of communist organizations. These two rats were getting money from Moscow and Washington. And from San Andrés too! The operation of Las Mariposas was a very lucrative business. All the rich males in the city loved that bordello. Time to negotiate. Gustavo Echegaray mentioned the good relations between the governments of the United States and my country. He gave me the name of a person in the American Embassy that I ‘needed to contact to clear up our little misunderstanding.’ I did not move. The brother and sister exchanged glances. They had a second route to escape justice. In a relaxed manner the male owner of Las Mariposas described some details of the way in which he operated the brothel. To maximize customer satisfaction, he had this ‘small brown notebook’ in which he wrote the names of the most important clients and their sexual preferences. The contents of the ‘small brown notebook’ could land in the pages of a famous tabloid in San Andrés provoking a big scandal. He got me with that one. I knew that the main benefactor of the scientific unit, the Mayor of the city, enjoyed the favors of the ladies in Las Mariposas. I pulled out from the case and gave that tortuous affair to the Chief of Police. Two days after my interrogation, the Echegarays packed their bags and moved away from San Andrés. ‘A matter of national security’ commented the Chief of Police. The investigation of the scientific unit had jeopardized the strength of their cover. The Echegarays opened a new bordello in a city located more than three hundred kilometers from San Andrés. A place where people had never heard about death by extreme sexual activity.

The incident at Las Mariposas taught me a basic fact: The scientific unit had the necessary skills to unravel the exact causes behind sophisticated crimes but in this world justice is a matter of beliefs. Science can point towards the truth but this may not be enough to defeat ignorance or to overcome political manipulation. I was still adapting to this basic fact of life when the myth of La Blanca hit me with the power of an express train. At the sunrise of a cold Sunday in November of 1949, my father and I were in a mountain lake near San Andrés trout fishing. My father was a true believer of early-morning fishing and he convinced me to go along in an excursion to a lake where ‘trout jumped from the water begging to be caught.’ Using his Willys station wagon it was easy to reach the mountain lake. We arrived around 6 a.m. and one hour later our fishing bags were half filled with decent looking trout. In a nice morning, with a blue sky and fresh air, we were competing to see who could catch the biggest fish. My father was clearly ahead in the competition. He had caught an extraordinarily long trout and was already bragging of the kisses that he would get from my mother as the winner of the contest. I was trying my best but for some strange reason only short or medium size trout were biting my fishing hook. Suddenly we saw an old woman rushing through the road that bordered the lake. Her eyes detected the Willys station wagon of my father parked near the road. She turned and came running towards us. I recognized her. Two weeks earlier she and her husband had visited the San Andrés Police Station asking for directions on how to reach a log cabin located in the area around the lake. Both of them were artists and had rented the cabin for living there while doing landscape paintings of valleys and mountains in La Sierra. In a desperate voice the old woman yelled: ‘You have to help him …Come please, he is dying!’ She wanted to use my father’s station wagon. We stopped our contest, in a flash loaded the fishing rods and trout in the back of the Willys, and jumped into the station wagon with the woman. Once on the road, she guided us for almost two kilometers until we found a horse and a group of men. A youth and an old man, the husband of the woman, were walking at the sides of the animal. The horse was pulling a stretcher loaded with an injured person. My father stopped the station wagon and I stepped out to examine the person lying on the stretcher. A robust young man in his early twenties. He was in very bad shape, almost dead. Blood was coming out from his mouth and ears. He displayed cuts and bruises all over his body. ‘Fell off a cliff’ mentioned somebody. The young man needed immediate medical attention. With care we accommodated him in the back of the station wagon and rushed towards the Central Hospital of San Andrés.

The Willys made the fifteen-kilometer trip in less than ten minutes. It was Sunday morning and there was little traffic in the streets of the city. At the Hospital, two nurses and a doctor took the injured young man into the emergency room. We waited in a hall inside the main building of the health center. The youth and the old couple were very excited. In a polite manner I started an interrogation. I just could not think of anything else to calm their nerves. Talking can have a therapeutic effect. I got some good answers to my questions. That day the Police Department launched a full investigation of the case. The injured person was Matías Salazar. A neighbor from El Pedrallo, a small town located at twelve kilometers from San Andrés. Matías was a womanizer and the bully of the town. A violent young man born in a well-to-do family who did not work and claimed to be a Mexican charro like Jorge Negrete or Pedro Infante. He was a good singer with a bad attitude. This muchacho alegre went around serenading women without paying attention to their social class or civil status. Many husbands hated him. Two of them devised a plan to make Matías look like a fool. He would be the laughingstock of the town. The Saturday night before the accident, after heavy drinking in a canteen of El Pedrallo, they mentioned to Matías the arrival of a very beautiful young woman. This fantastic creature was living in a mountain cabin just three kilometers away from town. The very beautiful young woman was married to a sissy, an effeminate man who did not deserve her. She needed a real man. Matías decided to pay a visit to the belle in distress. He and one of his friends jumped on their horses and headed for the log cabin occupied by the two visiting artists. In reality, there was no belle, just an old woman painting landscapes and living without bothering anybody. In the original plan, after giving his serenade to an old woman, Matías would look like a fool. Simple! But things went wrong. When devising this clever plan, nobody took into consideration the presence of a ferocious dog and the intervention of a mischievous ghost.

Matías and his friend arrived at the log cabin of the artists around 2 a.m. They tied their horses under a group of trees to operate within the shadows draw by the weak light of a quarter-moon partially covered by clouds. The two young singers drank a little bit of tequila to sharpen their voices and proceeded to fine-tune their guitars. Then, the notes and first verses of Cielito Lindo floated in the air of the night. The music woke up three beings inside the cabin: The two artists and their dog, a half breed animal born of crossing a wolf and a German shepherd. They did not understand what was going on. The dog abandoned the cabin to investigate. Matías and his friend were singing the chorus of the song … Ay, ay, ay, ay canta y no llores porque cantando se alegran Cielito Lindo los corazones … When the dog jumped over them. It was a vicious attack. The attack took the two singers by surprise. Did the dog belong to