The little she had to say immediately resulted in an order to find Reyes. He was located in short order. That day he had not gone off to work, staying in bed to sleep off the effects of his overindulgence. He was taken away without any problem.
At the police station Alma, still trembling with emotion, was able to identify him from among the five men assembled behind the one-way glass. It was very simple, since she had seen him on many occasions. Moreover, to the astonishment of the authorities, Reyes wasted no time in admitting that he was guilty. Amidst curses and complaints, he gave an account of his doomed romance. There had been very few moments of real happiness. He was hopelessly in love with the woman, so he inevitably ended up begging for her attention. And on that night the effects of the alcohol allowed him to say things so terrible that there was no way to take them back. They struggled; he didn’t intend to harm her, but Paula lost her balance and fell over backwards, striking her head on the extended wing of a metallic swan figure on the floor. Her body went limp, dropping into a grotesque position, with a halo of blood beginning to circle her head.
“I knew I had killed her.”
“Did you wipe up the blood with her nightgown?”
“No. I was scared and I left.”
Reyes responded quickly and directly to the questions Lieutenant Adan was asking. Everything he said fitted the scene of the crime except for three points. In his account, Reyes failed to mention the moment when he pulled off the woman’s nightgown. He spoke of seeing a circle of blood by her head, but not of wiping it up, something that had probably been done with the nightgown. And he swore he had not drunk a single drop of liquor there, not even water, despite the evidence present of drinks having been served.
If Adan pressed him on these questions, he looked bewildered, as if he were straining, trying to remember something that had never happened. Adan was unable to understand these blank moments. His colleagues insisted: He was drunk, there was no way his memory could be perfectly clear. If you’ve got a confession, what more do you want? Close the case!
Alma’s testimony was decisive. Besides, the blood found beneath Paula Ortiz’s nails matched Reyes’s blood type. And unmistakeable scratch marks had been found on his arms.
“But I didn’t take off her nightgown,” Reyes insisted.
Adan laid a photograph of the crime scene before Reyes.
“Look at it carefully, and remember what happened.”
“No, I didn’t leave her like that. She was wearing her nightgown; there was blood...”
The photograph showed the torn nightgown alongside the naked body, there had been bloodstains that someone had wiped up.
“That’s not the way I remember it.”
Adan decided not to close the case despite the persuasive evidence that he had. Reyes’s confession would give the prosecution little work. But he saw that there were still pieces missing to fill in the puzzle.
“Come on, Adan,” his assistant said, “we’ve all got plenty of work to do. You’re wasting your time juggling details given by a guy with a poor memory, but who’s already confessed.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Adan replied.
Once again, he asked to hear Reyes’s story. As before, there were no contradictions of what he had already sworn. He simply repeated that when Paula fell to the floor and he saw the blood, he was terrified and left.
As the routine of the investigation played itself out, the police lab specialists examined the two glasses that had been found on a plastic tray on the table next to the body, together with a half-empty bottle of cognac. Doubtless, Reyes’s and the woman’s fingerprints would be found there, even though the former had insisted he hadn’t even had a harmless glass of water. That final scene, he indicated, didn’t lend itself to a friendly toast. On the contrary, Paula had criticized him for being drunk. She ended up saying, “There’s no use talking when you’re like this. Go home.”
If Reyes was lying, it would do him no good, because he had repeatedly said that he understood what he had done, that he should be punished for his crime, whether all of the details fitted or not.
Then astonishing news came from the laboratory: Reyes’s fingerprints were not on the glasses. Paula’s were, however, and another set clear enough to be identified. Someone, Adan considered, must have visited Paula before Reyes did. A check of the other prints revealed the identity of the other person, who turned out to be another friend of hers, a man named “Chapo” Gomez, a taxicab driver who for several weeks had been taking her out for lengthy joyrides. When they brought him in and showed him the evidence, he admitted that he had been in her apartment that night. But it had been after Reyes’s visit; he had crossed paths with Reyes as the other man was driving away from his frustrated encounter with Paula.
The cab driver began to sweat as he related what had happened.
“When she opened the door she was in her nightgown. She had hit her head somehow and was dizzy. I poured her and myself a cognac. She said she had slipped and fallen and cut her head.”
“‘You’re lying,’ I told her. ‘You were with that bastard.’”
Paula had admitted that she had had a very unpleasant scene with Reyes, that he was drunk and when he tried to get her into bed, they had struggled and she fell, hit her head, and lost consciousness. Reyes, she said, must have thought he had killed her. When she came to, he was gone.
Gomez had bought her story and suggested that he take her to bed. Paula had refused, saying she didn’t feel well. She asked him to come the next morning and take her to see a doctor. Her injury was slight, but her head hurt and she was bleeding. Gomez tried to insist. He told her that what had happened with Reyes was probably a lot different from what she had claimed.
For the second time that night Paula was faced with a passionate confrontation. It was the result of her living alone, she realized. She told Gomez she wanted nothing more to do with him. She was going to straighten out her life and find someone who would respect and take care of her. Gomez became outraged. He tore off her nightgown. They insulted each other. She said he was not man enough for her. That was all it took to loosen Paula’s grasp on her desperate situation. No one saw him leave. No one had seen him arrive.
And that was the end of the strange account of the naked woman.
When the lab results were confirmed, Isaac Reyes was notified of his innocence. He could not believe it when Lieutenant Adan said, “Go home.”
The Lost Girl
by Robert Barnard
A recipient of the 2003 Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association, Robert Barnard continues to write at the top of his form. His latest novel to see print in the U.K. is The Killing in Jubilee Terrace (Allison & Busby, January). We have several more of his delightfully acerbic stories in inventory, for publication later this year, including a Mozart story from the series he writes as Bernard Bastable.
“You must be very worried,” said Inspector Paulson.
“Worried? ’Course I’m worried. Worried sick.” The elderly woman picked another Malteser from the bright red bag. “I was always telling her, but it made no difference. Just won’t listen, young people.”