our, chatting with Mercedes — she’s really nice. At some point, I don’t know when, we started talking about Olga María. Mercedes loved her a lot. She’s been doing our hair for ten years. I don’t understand why you’ve never wanted to give her a try. Anyway, the thing is that while we were talking about Olga María I sensed a change in Mercedes’s voice, a different tone, like there was something she didn’t want to talk about, or like she had something to hide. I was flipping through a magazine. But then I looked up and saw Mercedes in the mirror, and something had changed, she had a completely different expression on her face. She realized that I’d realized. You know what I mean? Something weird was going on. Since I don’t know how to keep things to myself, I asked her what was wrong. She turned her back to me and asked me why I was asking, she said nothing was wrong, other than that she got really sad whenever she thought of Olga María. But sadness wasn’t what I’d seen in her face: she knew something she didn’t want to tell me — that was my intuition, my dear. You know I’m not paranoid. Maybe it struck me so hard because I’d never thought that Mercedes might know something about Olga María’s death: she was only her hairdresser, like she’s mine. The point is, she was anxious to change the subject, and I couldn’t keep insisting, mainly because she had other clients waiting, and one of them was Inés Murillo, who is such a busybody — I don’t like her at all. The whole incident left me with a bad feeling. This terrace is so refreshing. No, my dear, no, thank you, I’ve already had enough coffee. But that’s only the very beginning; the best part happened afterward, when I’d left the beauty salon and was about to get into my car. Can you guess? I had a flat tire. I was mad as hell. Those things always happen to me at the worst possible moments. I was about to go back to Mercedes and call the Automobile Club when this person suddenly appeared: he came right up to me and told me not to worry, he’d change my tire. I was suspicious, as you can imagine. I said, thank you very much, but I don’t want to bother you, I’ll call the Automobile Club, and they’ll send somebody out. The guy was adamant: he told me I would waste more than an hour waiting for the Automobile Club truck to come, he was a member, too, and he’d had a similar experience a few weeks ago. I checked the man out more carefully: he didn’t look like a hooligan, though these days one can never be sure, but also there was a guard with a huge machine gun right across the street at the mall. That’s why I figured I wasn’t risking anything, and there was no question he’d change the tire long before anybody from the Automobile Club showed up. When he saw me hesitating, he took off his blue linen jacket and walked around to the back of the car, then he motioned to me to open the trunk so he could get out the tools and the spare tire. He’s dark, short, he’s got a typical-enough face, but he was wearing khakis and a white Polo shirt and those Bostonian shoes everybody and his brother wears. I told myself he’d just happened to be walking by and he wanted to be chivalrous and maybe ask me out for a date afterward. You know how men are, my dear. We don’t expect them to do something like that for nothing. And I was right. He hadn’t even finished changing the tire when he started staring at me: he had this look of surprise on his face, as if he knew me from somewhere and had just then recognized me. I expected him to come out with something stupid, like those idiots who say, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” but then he asked me if I was Laura Rivera. I stood there staring at him, very serious and not very friendly, I felt like asking him what it was to him who I was, don’t be so nosy, just change the tire, which anyway I’d never even asked him to do, he’s the one who insisted on helping me with who knows what ulterior motives; I even had the urge to tell him to get away from my car immediately, don’t touch it again, or my tires, or my tools, go, get lost now, I’ll call the Automobile Club like I should have from the get-go. I was about to walk over to the security guard and ask him to watch my car very carefully and make sure that man leaves it exactly as it is while I go to Mercedes’s salon to use the phone, I was on the verge of blowing up over the nerve of that dark, fat-lipped dwarf, when he mentioned Olga María. This is what he said: that I was best friends with Doña Olga María de Trabanino, he recognized me from several photos he’d seen at her house, photos Don Mario — that’s what he called him — had been kind enough to show him. The man spoke quickly: he didn’t give me a chance to get a word in edgewise, and I could tell he was trying to make a good impression. It made me furious to think that Marito’s the only person I know who’d even think of going around showing pictures to the first person who asked to see them. Then the man said what a coincidence it was: he was on his way to the beauty salon to interview Mercedes, and here he’d run into me, how fortunate, fate was clearly on his side. That was when I realized who I was dealing with: he had to be that detective Diana hired and Marito told me about. To top it off, his nose looked like a fried egg. I was incensed, it was obvious this guy had been looking for a chance to meet me; I got the feeling there was much more than met the eye behind this supposedly chance encounter. But just then he held out his hand and told me his name was Pepe Pindonga, it was an honor to have this opportunity to meet me, several people had spoken very highly of me. I was about to tell him to get lost, make yourself scarce, but my curiosity got the better of me, my desire to find out why this detective had decided to question Mercedes, so I didn’t send him on his way right then and there. I like this terrace; and if you had a drop of something to drink, now that things have cooled off, it would be fantastic; yes, I’d love a shot of Kahlua. While he was putting the tools away in the trunk and sweating like a pig, I asked him, pretending I was just curious. He told me that one of his hypotheses in the case — that’s what he said, “hypotheses” as if he were Deputy Chief Handal himself — had led him right to this beauty salon I had just left. I wanted to tell him that it seemed like a dirty trick for a phony like him, a charlatan who passes himself off as a private detective, to try to implicate a working woman like Mercedes in Olga María’s murder. But this Pepe Pindonga didn’t let me talk, he was irrepressible, vehement, gesturing wildly, it was like the world was about to come to an end and he had to utter the most amount of words in the least amount of time possible. He told me it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to discuss such a delicate subject there in the parking lot, he would very much like to talk to me in private, try to corroborate some information he had, and he’d be delighted to tell me all about his hypothesis about the beauty salon if I’d accept his invitation to go with him to have a cup of coffee. This Pepe Pindonga doesn’t beat around the bush, my dear; he’s dangerous, he swallows you up, as if he were a hypnotist or a magician. At some point, I don’t know when, he’d gotten into my car and sat down next to me, then he asked me to put the air conditioning on full blast otherwise he’d never stop sweating. The guy is like a machine gun, he doesn’t stop talking, and about any subject whatsoever: he said he loves BMWs, he’s a great admirer of these cars, even though he’s never had one, but at one point in his career as a journalist he worked for a magazine about automobiles, that’s why he knows so much about them and nobody can get anything past him. I had to force him to be quiet so I could ask him where we were going. Mercedes’s beauty salon is in the Balam Quitzé mall, as you know, that’s why he suggested we go to the Hotel El Salvador; that was the nearest place. I wasn’t so sure about it: I didn’t relish the prospect of walking with that guy into a place where I’d probably run into more than one person I knew, but I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go, and I wanted to hear all about the Mercedes connection. This Pepe Pindonga should be a radio announcer instead of a private detective: in that short ride to the hotel he managed to tell me a huge chunk of his life story. During the war he lived in Mexico, where he worked as a reporter for one of the major newspapers there. He told me how one time he came to San Salvador to do a report on the bizarre suicide of a captain in the armed forces, a squalid story that implicated several other officers and resulted in Pepe Pindonga having to make a quick getaway to avoid being killed. That was during the war, according to him. He was telling me all this on our way to the hotel, and I wasn’t paying much attention because all I wanted to know was about Olga María’s case and his hypothesis about Mercedes. But I couldn’t figure out how to make him shut up. He told me he came back to live here a few months after the war ended, when President Cristiani had already surrendered to the terrorists, as papa says. He worked for a while at