became drowsy and fell into a heavy sleep. This was why, they said, they hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual that happened in and around the garage. They couldn’t even remember Bishop Gerardi returning in his white VW Golf.
El Chino Iván, who had not grown accustomed to lying on the hard pavement, exposed to the elements, was usually a restless sleeper, but that night, he said, soon after partaking of the purportedly drugged leftovers from Marco Tulio’s plastic bag, he fell into a deep sleep that was undisturbed until six in the morning, when police and investigators from the prosecutors’ office roused him. That was when El Chino Iván would describe his own encounter with the no-longer-shirtless man. After he’d gone back to Don Mike’s for his forgotten cigarettes—he said that Don Mike handed them to him through the now lowered gates—and was headed back into the park, he came on the same half-naked man he had spotted talking to Rubén Chanax minutes before, except now the stranger was wearing a shirt that El Chino Iván described as light beige with light brown checks. According to El Chino Iván, the stranger said, “Compadre, sell me a cigarette.” El Chino Iván handed him two cigarettes, and the stranger gave him a one-quetzal bill, worth about fifteen cents (El Chino Iván later turned the bill over to the police), and said, “Buena onda, gracias”—roughly, “Cool, dude, thanks.” Then he left again, this time heading out of the park and down Sixth Avenue, in the direction of the presidential residence.
The question of whether it was really only a few minutes, or quite a bit longer, between the moment when El Chino Iván turned back for his cigarettes and the time when he returned to the park, would come to obsess ODHA’s investigating attorney, Mario Domingo. It was one of many nagging, seemingly small mysteries related to the crime, and one that Mario Domingo would not solve, at least to his own satisfaction, for another five years.
Rubén Chanax said that he hadn’t partaken of the allegedly spiked food and drink. He and El Chino Iván lay down to sleep in their usual space in front of the garage, and when the man from Eventos Católicos arrived that night, before eleven, to bring the indigents their meals, he rose to receive his, quickly devoured it, and went back to sleep. The man from Eventos Católicos said later that the only unusual thing he noticed that night, apart from how soundly the bolitos were sleeping, was that the light inside the garage was on.
Don Mike, whose real name is Miguel Angel Hércules Garcia, and who was thought by park locals to be an informer, had little to say about the events of the night of the murder. He would claim, in his first statements, that he had closed his shop before nine-thirty, and that El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito had been inside earlier, watching the movie. He claimed not to know anyone who went by Rubén Chanax’s nickname, El Colocho, but he said it was possible that, if he saw such a person, he would recognize him. Later Don Mike would refuse to say very much more to investigators and certainly not to journalists. Whenever any of the latter came to his shop to talk, he would withdraw into the back room.
The bolitos El Monstruo Jorge and Pablo el Loquito didn’t seem to have anything useful to communicate to investigators about that night either. But no one will ever be able to discover if it was simpy alcohol and drugs that erased whatever memories they might have had or if simple fear played a role. Within just a few years the two indigents, like virtually all of the other bolitos who were sleeping outside the parish house on that Sunday night—with the exception of Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván—would be dead.
USUALLY, ON ARRIVING back at the San Sebastian parish house on Sunday nights after his dinner with his family, Bishop Gerardi would phone Juana Sanabria, the parish administrator and his longtime close friend, to let her know that he had arrived safely. On Saturday nights, Bishop Gerardi customarily dined with Juana Sanabria and her teenage daughter in their home, and then they would watch a movie starring Cantinflas, the classic Mexican comedian, on television. Perhaps nobody was closer to Bishop Gerardi than Juana Sanabria and her daughter. But sometimes Bishop Gerardi forgot to call, so when ten o’clock passed that Sunday without any message, Juana Sanabria at first tried to reassure herself that there was no reason to worry. She couldn’t restrain her anxiety, however, and, at ten-thirty she phoned the parish house. For the next hour or so, Juana Sanabria said, she phoned every fifteen minutes, and then, worried about disturbing Father Mario, she gave up.
For a long time it was generally believed that Juana Sanabria had called the bishop’s private line, in his bedroom, which was why, according to Father Mario, he couldn’t hear it ringing. But the sacristan said that the telephone in the bishop’s bedroom could be heard throughout the house. Later, Juana Sanabria testified that she had called three different numbers at the parish house that night. She understood the dangers that came with having published the REMHI report, and she’d noticed, that last Saturday night when Bishop Gerardi was in her home, that he was preoccupied, so much so that he hadn’t even stayed for the Cantinflas movie, which always made him laugh. Juana Sanabria would testify that when neither Bishop Gerardi nor anybody else answered any of the parish house phones on Sunday night, she was overcome with fear and foreboding, and began to weep.
At about half past midnight, perhaps somewhat earlier, the front door of the parish house opened and Father Mario stepped out in his bathrobe and pajamas. Rubén Chanax told investigators later that morning that the priest called out to the row of sleeping bolitos: “Muchá”—which can be short for muchacho, or muchacha, or, as in this case, the plural of those (boys, or youths)—“did any of you see who came in or went out?” One of the bolitos, who was known as El Pitti, and who liked to drink only lethal quimicazo and so had forgone the presumably spiked beer, answered, “Don’t worry, Father, Monseñor went in a while ago.”
Rubén Chanax said that he got up from his blanket and approached Father Mario and told him that he’d seen a muchacho come out of the garage and that this muchacho had been naked from the waist up. According to Chanax, the priest said, “Ah, then stay here, because I’ve phoned the police.” Chanax’s many subsequent testimonies would never vary regarding what he told the priest, but the first police investigators dispatched to the scene of the murder would report Father Mario’s own account of that moment following his discovery of the body in the garage: “He went to the parish house door, interrogating the ‘bolitos’ who slept in the external part, to the right of the garage, if they had seen anyone coming in or out, the interrogated answering in the negative.” Two days later, in a declaration given to the special prosecutor assigned to the case, the priest would again give the impression that the bolitos had answered by saying they had seen nothing unusual, leaving Chanax out of his account. But Father Mario’s two subsequent declarations, on May 15 and on July 22, would coincide, at least in that one respect, with Chanax’s.
Father Mario later told investigators that he had spent Sunday afternoon, after the midday Mass, in his bedroom, watching television and dining on his favorite food, fried chicken delivered from Pollo Campero, a popular fast-food chain. After the evening Mass, he took his eleven-year-old German shepherd, Baloo, for a brief walk in the park. A female parishioner who’d attended the Mass asked to speak with him, and he brought the dog inside and went back and spoke to the woman for about ten minutes. At about that time, the choir members who’d sung in the evening Mass left the church. Back in his bedroom, Father Mario changed into his pajamas at his usual hour, around seven-thirty, 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,
