The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman Read Free Book Online Page B

and went to the parish house kitchen to take medicine for a severe migraine condition. In the kitchen he spoke briefly to Margarita López, the cook, and to the sacristan, Antonio Izaguirre. Usually Margarita López, after serving breakfast, had Sundays off and went to spend the day with her family, but on this Sunday, because of a bad chest cold, she had stayed in the parish house. She and the sacristan shared an evening meal and Margarita López retired to her bed. Around eight-thirty, the sacristan went home. Father Mario fed Baloo, washed up, sat down at his computer, and logged on to the Internet. At about twenty minutes before ten, he said, he turned on the air conditioner and watched television in bed. (In later statements, he would say he was wearing headphones.) A Spanish television show that he wanted to see was on at ten-thirty. He watched the news, but drifted off to sleep, he calculated, at around ten-twenty. He woke half an hour later, turned off the television and lights, and went back to sleep.
    At around midnight, Father Mario said, he turned over in bed and was awakened by a light shining through the glass pane over his bedroom door. “Maybe you turn over in bed,” he explained during that first statement to prosecutors in the parish house two days after the murder, “and
púchica”
—the inoffensive, popular version of another common though more vulgar exclamation:
puta
! (whore)—“what’s going on, and then I said, what’s going on, and I got up, right, and I went to turn off the light and I said to myself, Monseñor forgot to turn off the light again.” Bishop Gerardi was supposed to turn off the light in the corridor when he got home. But when Father Mario went out, leaving Baloo behind in his room, he saw that more lights were on at the end of the corridor. “And that,” he said, “seemed strange to me.” The corridor, about thirty feet long, ran the length of the house, from the bedrooms of Father Mario and the bishop, past two small patios, the kitchen, and the cook’s bedroom, directly into the garage, which is in an open area at the end of the house that connects tothe church. The priest continued: “But look,
licenciado”
—the proper form of address for a lawyer—“sometimes, maybe because of the affection you feel for someone, you don’t want to believe that the dead person is that person, right, and so in the first place, like I told you, I didn’t recognize him, you saw how he was, right, he was unrecognizable, so I didn’t recognize him, and with so many
bolitos
here coming inside …”
    When Father Mario stepped into the garage, he found Bishop Gerardi lying on his back in a pool of blood between the Toyota Corolla and the wall. His mouth was open and his brutally battered face was covered with blood. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his hands, “his
manitas
,” said Father Mario to the investigators from the prosecutors’ office two days later, “his little hands were, I don’t know how they were but yes, right, his little hands were how you saw them, he had them like this”—crossed at the wrists and resting on his chest—“and that did seem strange to me, the way he had them crossed, just the way you saw him, that’s how I found him, and also, the sweater was there.” Near a water tank in the garage, a blue sweatshirt had been left on the floor. A triangular concrete paving stone lay not far from the body and some blood. There was blood everywhere.
    Father Mario said that he thought, “Maybe there was a fight here inside, and one of the
bolitos
died.” He said that he then went back down the corridor to the front door of the parish house, which was double-locked as always, and he unlocked it and stepped out and that was when he “asked the
bolitos
if they’d seen anything, some fight, some argument or anything, and