The Devil’s Redhead

south toward the river.

The hotel lay beyond a range of treeless hills, and every hundred yards a torch decorated with flowers and gold and white bunting stood at the roadside. The rain had extinguished all but a handful of the torch flames, and the waterlogged bouquets sagged.

The El Parador was a massive hacienda in the Mission style. A searchlight stationed in the parking light scoured the low clouds with its beam. Music echoed festively from the hotel’s bright interior. Abatangelo pulled into a parking lot crowded with limousines and directed the car into an isolated space on the periphery that would be easy to find when it came time to leave. He killed the motor, reached behind his seat for his camera and asked Waxman to retrieve several rolls of film he’d stored in the glove compartment. “Ready or not,” he said, opening the door. They crossed the distance from the car to the hotel portico on a run and shook off the rain once safely inside.

Upon stepping beyond the lobby doors, they entered an extravagant chaos of white-clad revelers, celebratory ornament and antiquarian decor. Abatangelo likened the effect as half Porfirian Gothic, half an acid-laced reverie of Frida Kahlo giving birth to a zoo.

Gold and white bunting, like that tied to the roadside torches, hung in long coiling festoons from every wall. As many as a hundred pinatas, fashioned from a rainbow of bright feathery paper- donkeys, elephants, clowns, angels, gauchos, a princess, a bandit, a whale, sombreros, cacti- hung by ribbons at various heights from the vaulted lobby ceiling. Beneath them as many as four dozen children, varying in age from four to sixteen and dressed in white tuxedos and brocaded gowns, wandered blindfolded, bearing sticks, to the cheers and proddings of manic adults- women crying out and clapping, men holding bottles of Chanaco and bellowing praise.

Absent the decorations, the hotel’s design was simple and vaguely monastic. The floor was fashioned of sandstone palavers; archways connected the various rooms; the white plaster walls were accented with quatrefoils, wood beams and ironwork of medieval severity. Heavy wood doors were fitted with yellow quarreled glass.

Off to the side on a dais, a full mariachi band struck up a song called “El Sueno” with a fanfare of brass arpeggios. The air was thick with the smell of cigars and orchids and cafe de olla. A pyramid of champagne glasses had been erected at the center of a long white table, behind which sat ice chests filled with bottles of Dom Perignon. Atop a second table, a cut-glass punch bowl was attended by a servant in white livery, stirring with a ladle a pink concoction swimming with orange slices and melting ice. Further into the room, white-clothed tables bore platters of Oaxacan fare, meats roasted with lime and pasilla chile, tlayudas made with blue corn tortillas, squash blossom soup with purslane leaves and masa.

Beyond the main desk a chapel of sorts had been erected, fashioned of two symmetrical flanks of folding chairs and a temporary altar. A statue of the Blessed Mother, on a pedestal mounted with roses, stood in modest serenity off to the left. Two altar boys sat by themselves beyond the statue, a plate of food on the chair between them. They still wore their cassocks and surplices and, after checking to see who might be watching, drank fast and hard from a bottle of beer.

Waxman and Abatangelo made their way through the crowd, negotiating the maze of ficus trees, maidenhair ferns and palmetto palms the party’s mastermind had inserted to perfect the tropical mise-en-scene. Beneath the escalator to the mezzanine, young girls sporting pink tiaras and dressed like bridesmaids sat in phone booths with glasses of punch and accepted the doting attention of boys. Damas and caballeros: fifteen couples in all, one boy and one girl for each year of Larissa Moreira’s life.

Waxman and Abatangelo were halfway up the escalator when the mariachi band abruptly broke off its tune and launched into a distinctive fanfare. The crowd erupted in a riotous cheer. Rolando Moreira, fresh from his speech, made his entrance, waving to one and all. Bodyguards stood to either side.

Even from such a distance, Abatangelo gained a distinctive impression about the man. He had a vigorous balding portliness, the sort one associated with sybaritic wealth; his features were strong and handsome, a classic jaw, a sculpted moustache, lively eyes. For all this there was something irresolute about him, as though his life was a continuous act of seductive self-deceit. A patrician song-and-dance man.

“Can you get a good shot from the mezzanine?” Waxman asked, but Abatangelo had already removed his lens cap and positioned himself along the brass rail, facing the entrance. Armed with a 28-150 mm zoom, he engaged the long end of the lens to get as much of a close-up as he could.

The mariachi band broke into a waltz and the crowd entreated Don Rolando to come down and dance with his daughter. With a flourish, the father removed his overcoat, revealing a white tuxedo with tails, a red carnation dotting his lapel. This elicited even greater enthusiasm from the crowd. Don Rolando spread his arms, searching the crowd for his daughter, and shortly, through a divide in the revelers amid taunting whispers, Larissa Moreira made way toward her father.

She was a tall, awkward girl, similar in features to her mother, who sat in a circle of aunts and matrons at the far end of the lobby. The mother wore a modest gown of yellow watered silk, with a broad red-ribboned sash. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a mantilla in the old style, and she regarded her daughter’s advance toward her husband with a demeanor of bemused retreat.

The women in her circle shared her attitude of reserve, each woman smiling to convey respect, not indulgence. The priest who’d served the quinceanera Mass sat with them, a slender, fresh-faced man with thinning hair, still wearing his vestments and nursing a glass of the children’s punch. Clustered together on a sofa and a semicircle of folding chairs, and surrounded by presents not yet opened, the dona and her entourage and the lone priest formed a tight-knit pocket of forbearing sobriety.

Larissa Moreira reached the edge of the crowd, stepped forward to the dais that formed the lobby entrance and offered a reverent if ungainly curtsy to her father. Her gown was hooped and frilled, the brocaded bodice tight and sequined, with puffed sleeves erupting from the shoulders like wings. She wore a gold tiara in her auburn hair. Her father extended both hands to her and descended, took her in his arms and, to the sighs and cheers of the crowd, commenced the traditional waltz.

“Pops and Pookie cut a rug,” Abatangelo remarked to Waxman as he rewound his first roll of film. “Should provide some contrast to the shots we took of Frank.”

“I don’t see him,” Waxman responded, surveying the crowd.

“He’s right there.”

“No, I mean Facio,” Waxman said. “The security chief. I don’t see him.”

The father-daughter waltz came to a triumphant end, another round of cheers erupted and Don Rolando led his daughter to where her mother was seated. It was time to open presents.

A handful of reporters, the group who’d covered Moreira’s speech, straggled in, shaking off the rain. One of them consulted a bellman, who promptly pointed upward to the mezzanine. Following the direction of his hand, Abatangelo spotted the entrance of the mezzanine lounge.

“Let’s head in to the bar, Wax. Your friends in the press, maybe they’ll have something to tell us.”

Abatangelo led him inside and took a seat in the nearest booth. Waxman approached the bar and ordered two coffees. The bartender, an old obrero who sang to himself, nodded his acknowledgment of the order. Waxman returned to the booth, checking his watch, and shortly the bartender arrived, delivering their coffees. Humming, he waved off their money and turned back to the bar. Waxman poured in his cream and watched it cloud as the reporters from Moreira’s speech trounced noisily into the lounge. There were two women and three men, none of them older than thirty. Waxman eyed them with interest.

“You see the woman at the head of the pack,” Waxman whispered to Abatangelo. “Her name is Eloise Beaulieu. Or at least that’s the name she uses for attribution. She used to be a movie reviewer for one of the trashier weeklies in town.” The woman was speaking loud and fast, gathering everyone forward to the bar, squirming her hips onto a stool and ordering margaritas for all. “Excuse me a minute,” Waxman said. He left Abatangelo in the booth.

As Waxman approached the bar, the identities of the others came to him. The second woman, a plump assertive type with short-cropped hair, wrote an op-ed column for a Contra Costa daily. Her name was Gayle something, she catered to right-leaning libertarian views. Two of the men were stringers he knew from parties here and there, Smathers and Koch were their names; the third man, from what Waxman was able to overhear on approach, was named Holleran and had come down from Sacramento. Intent on their margaritas, they did not see Waxman closing from behind. One of the stringers, the one named Smathers, said, “You realize, Bing Crosby is the