UPDATE: Grandmother Angry At Motel Eavesdropper's Lawyer...

By JOSHUA COFFMAN
Special to The Herald-Tribune

MATAMOROS, Mexico - The grandmother of a woman afflicted with the strange desire to overhear adjoining-room conversations in area motels has lashed out at her granddaughter's lawyer, saying he himself has been unfaithful to her and adding that she has proof of the 28-year-old woman's mental disorder.

In a wide-ranging morning conversation at a cafe here, 86-year-old Georgina Guadalupe de Flores (shown in photo above) labeled threats made to this media outlet by the attorney for Maria Nalely Tamez as being "stupid, misguided and toothless."

In a letter to The Herald-Tribune, local Attorney Ishmael Palafox Perez threatened to file a defamation lawsuit on behalf of his client, saying he thought a "disservice" had been done to Ms. Tamez when it published a photograph of her leaning on a motel room's wall.

The woman's grandmother said she reeled at hearing about the lawsuit and decided to come forward to "add fuel to the fire." She said she has evidence that her granddaughter indeed suffers from the bizare addiction. "After she found her then-husband with that pretty woman at the Alligator Motel in Brownsville, Maria Nalely went into a deep depression," the pleasant grandmother told this reporter. "She cried a river, and then I thought she was over the whole thing when she came up to me, laughing, and said, 'I am the one who invented crying-yourself-to-sleep.' But then came the motel visits and they haven't stopped."

The evidence of the affliction, she went on, is in stacks of filings her granddaughter submitted to the court handling her divorce. "Nalely wrote it all down for the judge," the grandma said. "She told of how she rented the motel room next to the one where her husband was with that other woman, about how she put her ear to the wall, and about how she heard every groan and moan. She even said she thought the two fell off the motel bed during sex...and that the woman kept saying 'Give me more! Give me more!' It was pretty graphic, so that lawyer doesn't know what he's talking about."

Indeed, she said Palafox Perez himself had taken her grandaughter to a motel room. The attorney said this about that: "We were there 15 minutes tops, and it was me wanting to know exactly how she'd listened-in on the goings on in the next room. As her lawyer, I needed to know that." The grandmother said it was more like three hours. "I was parked across the street!" she said. "I saw her come out fixing her short skirt, with her hair all-tussled, like she'd been, well, active. He was smoking a cigarette as they walked to the office to drop-off the key. Investigative, my ass. He's a charlatan!"

Maria Nalely Tamez has been incommunicado since this story broke. A telephone call to her apartment rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang, but no one answered...

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[Editor's Note: Free-lance writer Joshua Coffman resides in Matamoros. He is a former middle-manager at a border maquiladora. This is his first article for The Herald-Tribune...]