“Father, where’s the camera?”
“I don’t know anything about a camera,” Villareal said, and he began rubbing his head and wincing, like it hurt real bad. Theatrical bastard. El Güero hadn’t roughed him up that much, not really.
“You know something about a girl, no? Leonora? Where is she?”
The priest stared at Elvis as if Elvis had said a dirty word. “I have no idea.”
“I thought you guys were friends. You going to deny you know her?”
“I know her.”
“Then where’s she at?”
“It doesn’t mean I keep track of her every movement.”
“Easy, Father. No need to get riled up. We’re dialogating,” Elvis said, trying to sound the way El Mago sounded.
“Dialogating,” the priest said, practically sneering at Elvis.
Elvis didn’t like this fucker’s face, nor the way he was looking at Elvis. Respect. That’s what El Mago said you had to instill. Not fear, respect. Though fear could be an easy shortcut to respect. Elvis didn’t have all night to be talking to the priest; he couldn’t hold his hand and warmly beg him to talk a bit. Not only because El Mago was waiting to hear from them, but because El Güero was standing at the doorway, smirking at Elvis.
Elvis knew that if he did anything wrong that blond dickhead was going to tell El Mago every little detail. He didn’t want to give El Güero the satisfaction. Besides, Villareal had that smug look of a man who has never had the shit properly beaten out of him, and Elvis felt the sudden need to teach him what was what, man of the cloth or not.
Elvis slammed his fist against the priest’s face, hard enough that the priest fell back on the bed with a sharp groan.
“When’s the last time you saw her?” Elvis asked coolly.
The priest groaned, and Elvis repeated the question, curling his fingers into a fist again.
“Tuesday morning,” Villareal said, sitting up again, a hand pressed against his bleeding nose, his eyes glued on Elvis’s fist.
“Go on,” Elvis said.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Everything. What time she was here, how long she stayed, what the hell she was wearing.”
The Antelope had opened a drawer and found a Bible in it, which he was flipping through. The priest looked at him sharply. “Don’t touch that,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”
“Hey,” Elvis said snapping his fingers. The priest turned to him again. “You’re talking to me, not him.”
“My nose is bleeding,” the priest complained.
“Let’s cut him in the belly,” El Güero suggested. “That’ll teach him about bleeding.”
“Damn right,” the Antelope said, nodding.
Of course that would be El Güero’s first suggestion. He probably thought turning the priest into a human pincushion would be a great idea, but that was not what Elvis was aiming for.
“Talk to me.”
“I need to get gauze and rubbing alcohol. I’m bleeding all over the place,” the priest insisted.
“Cut open his gullet,” El Güero said.
“Go look around the living room for the fucking camera,” Elvis ordered, then he turned to the priest. “You can worry about your damn gauze later.”
El Güero snapped his mouth shut, but he didn’t move from the doorway. The priest frowned, looking at his bloody fingers. “She stopped by late Sunday night. I was already asleep when she rang the bell,” he muttered.
“What did she want?”
“Spiritual advice.”
“Go on.”
“Leonora found out something important, something about a politician. She was thinking of talking to a reporter but she was also scared and she was worried it would affect people she knew. She was afraid of the blowback.”
“What politician?”
“She didn’t quite say it, but I suspected Echeverría.”
Echeverría. Motherfucking President Echeverría. Elvis frowned. “What about Echeverría?”
“She didn’t say Echeverría. I suspected Echeverría because she stayed over…she was afraid of going back to her apartment and she stayed over, and Tuesday I heard her talking on the phone with someone and she mentioned the Hawks.”
Elvis could feel the stares of the other men in the room. The Antelope had stopped riffling through drawers and had grown still. El Güero was still standing by the doorway.
“Where’s she now?”
“I told you, I really don’t know. When I realized how scared she was…how messed up this could get…I…I told her she couldn’t stay here anymore. I told her maybe she’d be better off going over to Jackie’s.”
“Who’s ‘Yak’?”
The priest sighed. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, his hands clasped together, looking down at the floor. The priest was young. Elvis didn’t know they could make priests this young. He was used to old men; wrinkled, ancient priests. This one looked like he might be Elvis’s age. Fresh out of the seminary in Monterrey.
Elvis wondered why Villareal hadn’t gone to the Tec like all the other rich little boys there, instead picking the priesthood. Of course Elvis couldn’t be sure the priest was a rich boy, but what he read in the file sure indicated that, and there were all the telltale details in the room. The TV, the silk pajamas, the Italian shoes. Even the way the priest talked. El Mago had taught Elvis to notice stuff like that. Okay. Maybe not rich. Upper middle class. But for sure he hadn’t grown up in a vecindad.
“Jackie. Jacqueline. She’s the leader of Asterisk. It’s an art collective.”
“How could this Jackie help her?”
“Jacqueline…she’s into radical stuff. She advocates for armed struggles and…look, Jacqueline doesn’t leave her house without a gun. She sleeps with it under her pillow and carries it in her purse. If Leonora was going to be safe somewhere, it was with Jackie. At least she has a weapon and I don’t.”
“So she’s with that Jackie then?”
“I’m not…I don’t think she is.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not even supposed to get involved with this kind of shit,” Villareal said, raising his voice.