Caldo Del Cielo, Chapt. 1...

"Divided, we flounder,
United we flounder..."
- Leonides Paredes

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
The Paz Files

BOCA GRANDE, Texas - Estela Monteagudo took the witness stand and let it all out: Yes, she had been the mayor's mistress and, yes, she had tied up his wife and, yes, she had pulled tight on the rope around her neck and, yes, she and El Alcalde had made passionate love afterward. "There is nothing to be ashamed of," she told the jury. "It's how this town operates. The mayor would tell me he'd scratch my back if I scratched his balls. I was in no position to complain."

She wasn't; that was true. Estela Monteagudo had seen here sister, Elena, shot and killed by one of her lovers, a man who told police he'd simply tired of her ceaseless requests for child support. Estela had not been in such a fix, but hers was a story with a load of similarities. She was more than ready to spill the beans on El Alcalde. Ten weeks in the can did that to a woman, she said, looking straight at the jury foreman, a balding Mexican with a fat mustache she knew as Balde "El Panteon" Hernandez, caretaker of the local cemetery. Balde's father, she also knew, had led a gang of middle-aged drug pushers until his arrest ten years earlier. The Boca Grande Herald had nicknamed him El Mocoso because of a strange penchant for cleaning his nostrils with the sleeves of his shirts.

Balde Hernandez would convict her in a second. She knew that. But this morning, it was not Estela on trial. She was answering questions from the prosecutor looking to hang the mayor for the murder of his wife. Estela had seen her charges dropped after agreeing to finger El Alcalde. Now, as the questions came, she fielded each of them after taking a deep breadth, after thinking things over a bit and after she'd stare at the mayor seated quietly at the defense table.

How did the day unfold?

"He bought the rope at Walmart and dropped it off at my house and said he'd pick me up at sundown," she went on. "Then, when we got to his house, he went in and turned all the lights out. I thought I heard a scream and then I went into the house and both of us tackled the bitch and then he put her face-down while I looped the rope around her neck."

Did she say anything during all this, the prosecutor asked.

"No, she just looked stupid," Estela said in reply. "You know, like she knew she was about to, uh, kick the bucket."

Gasps that rose from people seated in the courtroom made her take a hand and run it through her blonde hair. Estela's hair was really dark brown, but the mayor, she had said in an interview with a local blogger, liked her to go blondie.

"And what were you going to get for your troubles, Miss Monteagudo?" the prosecutor asked next. "Did the mayor promise you anything."

Estela could stil remember his words, of praise and of loyalty.

"He said he would put me up for city commissioner and that he would pay women to collect votes for me," she answered. "He said I would win, no question about it. He said he knew enough people in town to guarantee it, and that I would become rich through my new connections."

"What were doing before the mayor met you?"

"I worked at the bordello," Estela said, matter-of-factly. "The bar over on Central Boulevard and next to La Ultima Cumbia Nursing Home. - you know the area?"

Matilde Rodriguez, the mayor's now-deceased wife, had gone down fighting, and it was a clump of Estela's hair police found in her hands that had led to Estela's quick arrest. That and a few other clues left at the scene, one main one being the plastic bag in which the mayor had carried the killing rope into the house, the same bag that contained a receipt of the purchase, a receipt that included his name and credit card number. The mayor, Jose Maria Leticia Rodriguez, had clammed-up after his arrest and left his defense in the hands of flamboyant attorney Elpidio Virgilio Plata, a lawyer better known by his nickname of "El Dedo," earned after many flingings of the bird to reporters forever hounding him at the courthouse.

"Do you remember," the prosecutor continued. "if the defendant got, or seemed to get - any pleasure from killing his wife? What I mean is, was he laughing or expressing anything you interpreted as glee as the two of you choked the life out of Matilde Rodriguez?"

Estela Monteagudo sat back in the witness stand chair, inhaling deeply before speaking.

"He was happy doing it, yes," she told him. "He pulled on the rope tighter and tighter. I thought his wife's neck veins were going to burst. The look in that woman's eyes still haunts me. Her eyes were like two glass balls coming out of their sockets. It was a crazy scene, but I could tell the mayor was doing something he wanted to do. Oh, and he also took off one of her shoes and hit her on the head with it. I thought that was ridiculous."

"Then what happened, Ms. Monteagudo?"

"Well, when his wife looked dead, he told me to undress and he made love to me on the bed with his wife on the floor," she shot back. "It was crazy, man. I couldn't get into it, but he finished and we got dressed again. I don't think it was making love, like he said in the newspaper. How do you make love with a dead woman on the floor?"

"And after that, what did you do next?"

"We went into the kitchen and he opened a can of chicken and rice soup and we ate that..."

[To be cont'd]

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