A middle-aged man sitting behind the desk rose when the superintendent and Aragon entered and immediately took Aragon’s picture with a Polaroid camera. The pictures he’d already taken were scattered on the desk in front of him. They seemed to be mainly various angles of the disarray in the room.
The superintendent said, “I assume you don’t mind having your picture taken.”
“That depends on what you’re going to do with it.”
“I may keep it in my wallet. Then again, I may not. Let’s see how it turned out... Not bad. Certain physiological characteristics are obscured, others are emphasized. It all balances out, wouldn’t you say?”
The superintendent held up the picture and Aragon glanced at it. He hardly recognized himself. The young man in the picture looked confident, almost cocky. He didn’t feel either.
“You may have deduced, Mr. Aragon, that someone paid a call on Magistrate Hernandez while he was working. He liked to catch up on his work at night whenever possible so he could spend more of the daylight hours with his children... Obviously the call wasn’t a friendly one, or at least it didn’t end up that way. Kindly remove your spectacles. I believe Ganso here would like another shot.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Of course not.”
He removed his spectacles. The second picture showed a little more of the truth. He looked scared. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with all this. I told you, I just arrived in town.”
“But you have been here before in our city?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I... well, at the beginning of the week. I left Thursday afternoon.”
“This is only Saturday afternoon. What made you leave and come back so soon?”
“I received word at my office that Magistrate Hernandez might have news of someone I’ve been searching for on behalf of a client. I’m a lawyer.”
“So? The last man I arrested was a lawyer. His interpretation of the law didn’t quite coincide with mine.” The superintendent went and stood by the window with the view of the front entrance. “Presumably your client has a name.”
“That’s privileged information.”
“In your country, yes. In mine, no. It’s one of the basic differences in our legal systems. Now, the name of your client, please.”
“Gilda Grace Decker.”
“And she hired you to find someone who also has a name.”
“Byron James Lockwood, her former husband.”
“How does Magistrate Hernandez fit into all this?”
“Lockwood was serving time in the Quarry for a real estate swindle and Hernandez was responsible for his release three years ago. No one has seen Lockwood since.”
“Perhaps,” the superintendent said dryly, “Mr. Lockwood doesn’t wish to be seen.”
“It’s possible.”
“It is, then, possible that he took steps to make sure he is not seen?”
“What kind of steps?”
“He may have come here to the house, for instance, to destroy some records pertaining to him. That would have been stupid enough, he being an ex-convict and the magistrate an important person. But what followed was surely the ultimate in stupidity... Step over here for a minute. I want you to see something.”
Aragon went to the window. Some people were coming out of the front door, three men, a stout woman, heavily veiled, leaning on the arm of a fourth man, and half a dozen children ranging in age from five to midteens. The woman and the man escorting her got into the first limousine, and the children into the second. The rest of the group entered the Jensen and all the cars began moving slowly down the driveway.
“See those people,” the superintendent said. “Where do you think they are going?”
“I don’t know.”
“How are they dressed?”
“In black.”
“Like mourners, would you say?”
“Yes.”
“Where would they be going, dressed like mourners?”
“To a funeral,” Aragon said.
Eighteen
For the next three hours Aragon answered questions, many of them repetitious: What was he doing in Rio Seco? What was he actually doing? What was he really actually doing? Who was Lockwood? Had he ever met him? What kind of man was he?
“It’s unlikely he could have committed any crime of violence,” Aragon said. “He was, by all accounts, a very gentle person.”
“A lot of gentle persons go into the Quarry and come out not so gentle. You speak of yesterday, I must think of now and tomorrow. Lockwood could be a changed man. You agree?”
“Yes.” I agree again. This time it’s real.
“As you can see” — the superintendent pointed to the table with the opened bottle of wine and the two glasses — “Hernandez was preparing to offer his visitor a drink. Which indicates that either he was a friend or he had come on a friendly mission such as bringing Hernandez something, a gift, say.”
“Say a mordida.”
“All right, a mordida. I don’t like the word but it is a fact of life so we’ll use it. Certainly we can assume that Hernandez was expecting someone, if not this particular person, because he left the gate open and no one is on duty in the gatehouse at night except on special occasions. So the caller arrived. Let’s call him Lockwood.”
“Let’s not.”
“Very well — Mr. Mordida, then. How’s that?”
“Better.”
“Mr. Mordida drove up to the house and Hernandez let him in. It was obviously an informal visit. Hernandez was wearing a paisley print robe over white silk pajamas. He brought Mr. Mordida here into the office and opened a bottle of wine. Up to this point the meeting was amicable. What happened to change it, I don’t know. The children and servants occupy another wing of the house and most of them were sleeping. Mrs. Hernandez heard nothing, no car driving up, no sounds of quarreling or of the office being ransacked. This isn’t surprising, since the adobe walls are a foot thick and she was in the bedroom watching television. Shortly after ten o’clock she came to say good night to her husband and found him dead and the room looking like this. She telephoned the doctor, who in turn called me. I came right out with Ganso, my photographer, and several other men. I’ve been on duty ever since, both here and at the hospital where Hernandez’s body was taken to determine the cause of death. There were no marks on him, he gave every evidence of having died naturally of a heart attack or a stroke. Except for the condition of the room, we might have left it at that. Would you like to see some of the pictures Ganso took of the body?”
“Not particularly.”
“Ganso likes to take pictures of everything. No one ever looks at them, which is a shame because the film is expensive. Are you sure you—?”
“I’m sure.”
“Very well, I’ll proceed. When Hernandez’s robe was removed at the hospital I noticed a very small spot of blood on the back of his pajama top. It seemed a peculiar place for a bloodstain. If it had been on the front it could have passed as the result of a shaving nick or even a dribble of red wine which, as you can see, Hernandez fancied. After I drew the doctor’s attention to the spot he examined Hernandez’s back very carefully and found, under the left shoulder blade, a puncture wound made by an extremely thin sharp instrument, something in the nature of an icepick. But I don’t believe it was an icepick. You see the forced-air opener still in the cork of the wine bottle over there? I think before it was inserted in the cork, it was inserted in Hernandez. The wound was so small that the skin closed over it almost immediately and all the bleeding, except for that one drop, took place internally. Death occurred fairly quickly, since the weapon penetrated the heart and the pressure of blood in the pericardial sac caused the heart to stop beating. I’m not a medical expert, I’m merely repeating roughly what the doctor told me. Whoever struck the blow was either very lucky or very skillful.”