Cops Parade Suspects...

By RICARDO KLEMENT
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Nervous city police are reacting in a strange way as they wrestle with the recent murder of local college student Louise Herrera. Today, in yet another baffling turn, the investigation brought still more bizarria: the parading of two suspects dressed in large paper bags. "We're taking the indirect route to solving this case," said Police Chief Charlotte Garcia during a rambling 15-minute press conference held, oddly, near the food court of Sunrise Mall.

"We're trying to flush out the plot," she went on when pressed by story-hungry reporters from neighboring Matamoros, Mexico. "This is more about wanting to let the killer know that we're not playing his or their game."

Why the paper bags, she was asked.

"The city prohibits us from using plastic ones," the chief explained. "You can lap that one on City Commissioner Melissa Zamora. She led the fight against plastic, not that I worry too much about it, cause I'm pro-both. - where were we?"

"Chief," asked one of the disheveled Matamoros writers. "My pregunta is this one - is it true that you have assigned undercover officiales to go underground in Matamoros as a way to perhaps find your missing detective?"

A grumbing of sorts rose from the row of Brownsville reporters and bloggers, one of them saying that was the very question he planned to ask. The chief hemmed and hawed a bit, played with the hem of her blue uniform pants and tore into her reply, "No comment!"

Her detective, Chili Perez, remains missing and has not been seen or heard from for more than a week, since back when the Dallas Cowboys were still in the NFL playoff hunt and before Rick Perry's presidential campaign sunk in an abyss of what the French call ennui. Perez had been named lead detective in the hunt for the killer of the 23-year-old Mss. Herrera, a pretty paleantology student at Texas Southmost College. Theories abound about the murder and about Perez's disappearance. Miss Herrera's horrible death brought a sudden end to charges of rape she had lodged against Paz Files writer Rudolf Von Bulow and the mysterious vanishing of Det. Perez is blamed on operatives of the German Von Bulow who want him off the case.

Asked why she would call a news conference and merely trot out two guys in large paper bags, the chief said she had seen a similar ploy in an old Barnaby Jones episode on TV. The two men in her approach were identified as Policarpio "El Carne Molida" Uribe and Francisco "Mas Chips" Hernandez - two local men who make a living starring in Crimestoppers segments for a variety of Rio Grande Valley police departments. Garcia said the men were paid $25 with the added of permission of decorating their own bag.

The macabre scene was right out of a cheap comedy act, although its end came with an added twist, when local blogger Jerry McHale got into a quick fist fight with a woman reporter from El Bravo, neighboring Matamoros's largest newspaper. Cops who broke up the punch-counterpunch melee declined to arrest either journalist, with Chief Garcia saying she understood tensions were riding high in the wake of the murder and Det. Perez's disappearance.

"Tempers are going to be all over the map," she said, tapping her baton onto the palm of one hand. "That's understandable. We're not here to bring anymore grief to our town." McHale, sporting a quick-sprouting blackeye, issued a threat by saying he would be damned if the Matamoros press was going to lead on this story. The attractively-Catholic female reporter from El Bravo merely blew into her right hand, the one that had put McHale on the food court mat. "This town was Mexican land before it was McHale's country," she told her colleagues.

In gloomy Brownsville, the story has found both critics and believers.

Said hairstylist Elena "La Piernuda" Lucio, "If you ask me, and you are, aren't you, well my feeling is that Louise was killed by the Von Bulow clan and Chili Perez is simply taking a long nap. He was known as Rip Van Perez in middle school, cause he always fell asleep during class."

Seated in the waiting section of the hair salon, Oralia "La Coloreteada" Cavazos threw this out: "The media is making too much out of this. We have husbands out of work and children going without shoes and food, and you're asking me about a woman who was raped after a long, long night of drinking on South Padre Island? Puh-leeeeeeeeese. As for Chili Perez, why did he never get married. Is he Gay? What's up with that?"

The tale is only somewhere in the middle of its eventual unfolding, but, already, this bordertown is tiring of the roll...

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