Arnaldo, whose annual salary, after almost thirty years as a federal cop, was considerably less than one hundred thousand Reais, started to cough.
“Sorry,” he said. “Getting a cold.”
“Maybe,” Cintia said, “you should go and get it somewhere else.”
“Could it have been an act directed against the lady herself?” Silva asked. “Someone intent on hurting her?”
“Impossible,” Cintia said. “There’s no one easier to get on with than my future mother-in-law. Everybody loves her, and she loves them right back.”
Not everybody, Silva thought. Not her neighbors, not that postman she was seen talking to. And, if the lady was fond of you, it’s unlikely she’d have had a detective following you around.
“Let’s talk about Senhora Santos’s house keys,” he said. “Did she give keys to people who worked in her home?”
“Sure,” Tico said, “but she was always careful, always changed locks when she changed servants.”
“How often was that?”
Tico shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe three or four times a year?”
“So she had a problem holding on to servants?”
“She had a problem finding good ones,” Cintia said. “Everybody does. Why do you care about her keys?”
“Just reviewing the possibilities.”
“Wasting our time is the way I see it. They told us the kidnappers smashed her kitchen door. So where do keys come into it?”
Silva was running out of patience with the woman.
“I’m not wasting your time, Senhorita Tadesco. I have good reasons for my questions. Now, Tico, do you have any idea how many sets of keys your mother had?”
“Four. She always got four.”
“Four.”
“Uh huh. One for herself, one for the servants, one for us, and an extra one to keep in the house in case someone lost one of the others.”
“You have yours?”
“Why?” Cintia said.
“Senhorita Tadesco, please. Tico, may I see them?”
“I gave them to you,” Tico said to Cintia.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“No? I coulda sworn-”
“You didn’t.”
“Then I got no idea where they are,” he said. “We never used the keys she gave us. We never had to. We only went out there when we knew she’d be home, and we always called before we went.”
Silva took a card out of his wallet, jotted the number of his cell phone on the back and handed the card to Tico. “If you find those keys,” he said, “give me a call.”
Tico took the card, looked at one side of it, then the other.
“You think it’s important?” he asked.
“It might be.”
“Okay, then.”
“The radio people, the ones at Radio Mundo,” Silva said, “knew about your mother’s kidnapping before we did. Any idea how that happened?”
Cintia didn’t give Tico time to answer.
“Her Royal Highness,” she said, “Princess Jacques Jardin.”
“The hairdresser?”
“Stylist, the little bicha calls himself. Stylist or coiffeur. He hates to be called a hairdresser. Juraci was late for an appointment. They couldn’t get her at home, so they tried here.”
“And you were here to take the call?”
“We forwarded calls to my cell phone.”
“Dumbo won’t let me have one during training,” Tico said. “He thinks cell phones are a distraction.”
Danilson “Dumbo” Hoffmann was the coach of the Brazilian national team. Nobody who saw his ears ever had to ask where the nickname came from.
Cintia refused to be sidetracked. “Jardin keeps everybody waiting, but he doesn’t like to wait for anyone. You know how much he charges for a cut? Six hundred Reais, that’s how much, and he’s booked back-to-back. Missing a session with Jardin is like missing a private audience with the Pope. Except the Pope probably doesn’t go ballistic and Jardin does. If you’re ten minutes late, it’s like you insulted him. I did it once and now the little bastard refuses to give me any more appointments.”
“Showing up late really gets his nose out of joint,” Tico said. “Even I know that.”
“And Juraci knew that,” Cintia said. “I started to worry right away. I told Jardin’s secretary I’d check around and call her back. I was still trying to locate her, when the bitch called for a second time.”
“How does this-” Silva started to say.
Cintia interrupted him. “You wanted to know why I think Jardin tipped off the radio people. I was telling you. Do you want to hear it, or not?”
“Please go on.”
“So I was talking to this bitch of a secretary, and before I could get in a word edgewise, she started telling me how pissed off Jardin was and how, if Juraci didn’t have a really, really good reason for not showing up, she couldn’t be a client anymore. Jardin was going to give Juraci another fifteen minutes grace, she said, but only in deference to the fact that she was such a good client, and because he liked her. Two minutes after she hung up, Tico called me with the news that she’d been kidnapped.”
“And how did you get that news?” Silva asked him.
“The kid who runs the website,” Tico said. “He read the email, looked at the photo the kidnappers sent, the one of my Mom holding up the newspaper, and panicked. The note said not to contact the police, said they’d hurt her if I did.”
“I remember.”
“And, to tell you the truth, maybe I wouldn’t have gone to you guys at all if the story hadn’t come out on the radio.”
“Understandable. Go on.”
“The kid knew I was in Curitiba because it’s been all over the sports news, so he decided to try calling the training facility. They wouldn’t let him talk to me, at first. But then he told them what it was about, and they called me in from the field. They still thought it was some kind of hoax, but they didn’t want to run the risk that it wasn’t. And it wasn’t.”
“Tico told me he was going to charter a plane and come to Sao Paulo,” Cintia said. “We agreed to meet here. Then, just after he hung up, the bitch called for a third time. And, to shut her up, I told her.”
“You told Jacques Jardin’s secretary about the ransom note?”
“What did I just say? I blurted it out. I was nervous. So what? It’s done. Jardin was probably talking to the media five minutes after his secretary hung up. He’s like that.”
“Probably all for the best,” Silva said. “The kidnappers must know we’re involved by now, and they seem to have accepted that fact. Who does the website? A kid, you said?”
“My agent’s kid,” Tico said.
“That’s his job? Websites?”
“Nah! He studies during the day, does the sites on the side, mostly at night. He does them for most of his old man’s clients. He does Cintia’s too.”
“These days,” she said, “everybody has to have a website.”
“ I don’t have a website,” Arnaldo said.
“Let me amend that,” she said. “Anybody of any importance has to have a website.”
“Where did you spend last night?” Arnaldo said, his voice taking on an edge.
“Me? What’s that got to do with anything?”
Arnaldo gave Cintia his cop’s stare, perfected by almost three decades of facing down felons.
“At home,” she said, buckling under it. “So?”
“Alone?”
“Of course, alone. I’ve got a part in a novela. I was learning my lines. What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything,” Arnaldo said.
But he was.
Arnaldo Nunes had taken a distinct dislike to Cintia Tadesco.
Chapter Eight
Jacques Jardin had a French accent as round and thick as a great wheel of Camembert. Haraldo Goncalves would undoubtedly accepted it as genuine-had he not discovered, before leaving the office, that Jardin did, indeed, have a rap sheet.
Jardin, the records revealed, had acquired his current name at the age of twenty-seven. Until then, he’d been Giovanni Giordano, the youngest of nine children born to an Italian immigrant couple who’d settled in Sao Paulo’s middle-class bairro of Mooca.
Jardin had never spent any appreciable amount of time in France. He had, however, spent a good deal of time in public toilets. It was the time in those public toilets that had given rise to the aforementioned rap sheet. It registered half a dozen arrests, and two convictions, for indecent exposure.