Shutter(64)

“Anyone who is anyone in this rotten little metropolis!” Philip pulled up to the front door. He pointed his manicured finger at me. “Don’t make trouble.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m here to work.”

The Benavidez mansion was gigantic, rising three stories above the sand and sagebrush, a perfect brown stucco that blended into the surrounding land. It was like a ranch house, except for the addition of a stucco skyscraper with cobalt blue windowpanes.

I sat in corners and stairwells, just inside doorways and right in front of windows. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns. The men had platinum cufflinks and the woman wore huge diamond rings that dug deeply into their flesh. Voices blended into a muffled drone, with the occasional whoop of fake laughter. I recognized people from the police department—the chief of police and county sheriff were there. Politicians, city and state officials, and local celebrities stood around sipping wine and picking finger food from silver platters. It was lovely. I took picture after picture of smiling faces, hands shaking, deals being made, promises being broken. After four hours, I had taken almost 1,500 photographs. A dollar a photo, I guess.

I caught sight of a spark through the window—a cigarette being lit. I let my addiction lure me out to the balcony.

“Excuse me, but can I get a cigarette from you? I’ll pay you.” I held out a dollar. The man just shook his head and handed me one. It was flat, as if it had been in his pocket all day. The man took a long drag off his stogie and stubbed it out in one of Mrs. Benavidez’s glazed ceramic flowerpots. He smiled as he turned and went back inside, leaving me alone.

I enjoyed the night air in the silence of the canyon. I was almost done with the cigarette when a voice carried up from below me, hushed but clear as day, every word echoing in the high walls. Down by the temporary valet, away from the party, more voices began to gather.

“Who the fuck told you that it would be okay to add him?”

“Not here, man. This is not the place.”

I hunched over the railing to take a peek. From what I could tell, there seemed to be three men dressed in tuxedos. Something about their body language, the way they stood together, felt dangerous. The sun was setting, so it was impossible to see their faces, but I had seen Martin Garcia’s silhouette at enough crime scenes to recognize it anywhere. I’d spent four blissful hours not thinking about Erma Singleton, but now everything Armenta had told me came back to me in a rush.

“I don’t care. I’m not going to be screwed on this.” It was Garcia’s voice. I was sure of it. “You said it was taken care of.”

My heart pounding, I moved to grab my camera and telephoto lens. I peered back over the balcony, focusing on their faces. Garcia finally turned toward me, and I filled the frame with his face. I laid my finger on the shutter release, taking shot after shot of his face, then pulling out to get everyone else in there with him.

The men began to walk away, heading toward their cars. I took one last wide shot with all of them together.

It was that very moment that I saw it all happen: Garcia, at his car door, took four quick steps back toward one of the other men and shot him the back of the head. Even though he had a silencer, the hiss and thud of that man’s life force filled the air. My auto shutter just kept clicking, breaking every second into its own frame of what was unfolding below. As I leaned dangerously far out on the balcony, my camera slipped from my hand, the flash hitting the railing and lighting up the entryway like a flare.

I hauled myself back up, my skin scraping against the stucco. There was no way they hadn’t noticed the flash. I collected my gear in a hurry and headed toward the exit.

Philip spotted me and cut across the room. “Are we having a problem? It’s not quite eleven o’clock.” He tapped his watch.

“Philip, I need to leave right now.” I was panicked. I started to look for a place to hide in case they came looking for me before I managed to escape the house.

“Okay. Rita. What’s going on?”

“Let me borrow your car. I have to get out of here,” I pleaded.

“My car?” Philip shook his head. “You know I’m not going to let you take the car.”

I gave up and left him without a goodbye. I was out of breath by the time I made it to the bottom of the stairs. I slowly opened the huge oak door and stepped outside. No one was there. My head spinning, I searched the asphalt where I’d seen the cars parked just minutes before. I didn’t know where they had put the body. I didn’t see any blood. No cars. No Garcia.

I looked up into the dark sky to the balcony where I’d just perched and wondered what had happened. Had I imagined the whole scene? Was it one of Erma’s vivid dreams?

I ducked into the shadows of the Benavidez’s garage to fumble through my bags for my phone. That is when the man sat up from where he was dumped in the bushes, his face an explosion of flesh and blood.

The man turned and saw me ogling. “Did you see that? Did you see what just happened?”

I caught a better look of his wound. The gunshot had left a sizable star-shaped hole right at the bottom of his eye socket. The flesh was popped open like a blossom, the center filled with the white cloudy fluid of his now-deflated eyeball. The empty eye sack rested on top of his cheekbone like heavy, wrinkled skin. I stared in stunned silence, finally finding my phone at the bottom of my camera bag.