“Yeah,” said Amélia, “because he’s still madly in love with you.”
“It wasn’t that. It was like he was being all manly and taking charge. He wasn’t listening just to make me feel better; he started firing questions at me, like really detailed cop questions, like he knew something about it and knew what to do. He was kind of… I don’t know…” She laughed, to take the edge off the word she was about to use—“hot.”
“Oh, my God, I thought I’d never see the day come when you called Nestor Camacho hot.”
“I don’t mean it like holy-shit, head-swivel hot… just like strong. You know what I mean? It made me wonder if maybe—” She cut it off there.
“You think you should have stayed with Nestor?”
“Well, I feel like maybe I took him for granted,” said Magdalena. “I mean, no one else has really been there for me like he has. And when something happens, he’s the one I think of first. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I can’t really say you’ve gone up from there.”
“Yeah, seriously, a perv, then a criminal,” said Magdalena. “I was really going places, wasn’t I.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” said Amélia. “I guess you could do worse than Nestor. He was really good for you. How did you guys leave it?”
“We didn’t really,” said Magdalena. “That’s the weird thing. Just as I really started to feel something for him again, he was practically out of his chair.”
“Typical guy.”
“No, I mean literally. He was like, ‘I gotta go call my partner’ and ran out of there. It was so—what’s the word? Valiant? Like he was going off to fight—oh, I don’t know.”
“Your knight from Hialeah!” said Amélia.
Suddenly they both were looking at the television screen. The pattern of light and shadows had changed abruptly. The Loboloco show had obviously been indoors, in some studio, and the contrast between bright parts of the screen and dark parts was minimal. But now you were outside in a punishing noonday sunlight that made the shadows of a building look like India ink in contrast. It was a courtyard of some three- or four-story building with wraparound terraces—no, interior walkways they were—that projected over the courtyard. Between the floors were big outdoor stairways, and at the foot of one of them what was obviously a person’s body lay sprawled upon the last few stairs at a downward angle, headfirst, beneath some sort of white cloth, the head, too, meaning the person was dead. There were cops standing near it and a barrier, more or less, of yellow crime-scene tape holding back a bunch of mainly old people, quite a few of them leaning on aluminum walkers.
“Hey, turn that up for a second,” said Amélia.
So Magdalena digited the volume up, and the face of a reporter appeared on the screen, a young woman with blond hair. “You ever notice they’re always blondes, even on the Spanish channels?” Amélia said with some irritation. The blonde was holding a microphone and saying, “—and one of the mysteries is that the artist was known in this senior citizens condominium in Hallandale—although he seldom had anything to do with his neighbors—as Mr. Nicolai Kopinsky, and his apartment was apparently some sort of clandestine studio, which he never allowed anyone to enter.”
“Oh, my God!” said Magdalena. “Did she say Hallandale?”
“Yeah, Hallandale.”
“Oh, my God-d-d-d-d-d,” said Magdalena, turning it into a cross between an exclamation and a moan and covering her face with her hands. “That’s what Sergei said on the telephone, ‘Hallandale.�� All the rest of it was in Russian! Oh, my God-d-d-d in Heaven! I’ve gotta call Nestor! I gotta find out what’s going on! Hallandale! Oh, dear God!”
She managed to collect herself long enough to run the few steps to her bedroom and pick up her phone and come back to the living room, where she wouldn’t be alone, and scroll down her contact list to “Nestor.” It began ringing almost immediately, and almost immediately a mechanical voice answered, “—is not available. If you would like to leave a—”
Magdalena looked at Amélia with absolute despair upon her face and said in a tone that suggested the end of the world, “He doesn’t answer.”
As soon as the elevator door opened on the second floor, Cat Posada was right there, waiting for him.
“Officer Camacho?” she said, as if she wasn’t sure exactly who he was. “Follow me. I’ll take you to the Chief’s office.”