“Show them your badges,” he said to his companions.
Hector and Goncalves held theirs over their heads, slowly rotating their wrists so people pressing around them could have a look.
Two tough-looking guys appeared from nowhere and pushed their way to the front of the crowd. One of them, an oaf with a short forehead and a single gold earring, waved at Silva as if they were old friends.
“I know this guy,” he said, lifting his voice so the crowd could hear. “He is what he says he is, and I don’t want any trouble with him. Anybody who doesn’t back off is going to have trouble with me.”
The brunette put her pistol away, took a few steps backward, turned, and ran. Prostitution isn’t a crime in Brazil. Being a transvestite isn’t a crime either. But carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is.
Silva nodded his thanks to the thug with the earring and got a nod in return. Then he put his Glock away and got back behind the wheel.
Eudoxia’s identity card identified her as Alvaro Moura, twenty-seven years old, male, one meter sixty-two in height, seventy-seven kilos, black hair, brown eyes, and a native of Caxias, a town in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
He was still one meter sixty-two, but he’d adopted a Carioca accent, looked a good deal older than twenty-seven, had put on weight since he’d gotten his card, and was using green contact lenses. Under the platinum wig, his hair had been tinted to a dirty blond.
He was high on adrenaline and crack, so before interrogating him, they put him under a cold shower and plied him with coffee.
When Moura finally started talking, he was well-spoken and seemed to have total recall of the events. He’d been standing in front of the Jockey, he said, for quite a while when he’d spotted Mansur.
“That was his name, huh? Luis Mansur? Told me he was Raul Chiesa, but, hell, who am I to talk, right? Far as I’m concerned, anybody can call themselves anything they want. What’s in a name, anyway?”
“A rose by any other…” Arnaldo said.
“What?”
“Ignore him,” Silva said. “The rest of us do.”
“Hey!” Arnaldo said.
Silva kept his eyes on Moura. “How long were you out there trolling before he picked you up?” he said.
“More than an hour. And I had to piss like a stallion. That’s the first thing I did when I got to the motel. Good thing he wasn’t one of those guys who gets his jollies from watching girls peeing. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was much bigger than me, and the bathroom door was flimsy.”
“He still thought you were a woman at this point?”
“Must have.”
“Why ‘must have’?”
“The way he was talking dirty while we were in the car. It was sorta… explicit. And I kept thinking brother, have I got a surprise for you.”
“So you went into the bathroom, and…”
“And I was sitting on the toilet when I heard knocking on the door. Not the bathroom door, the door we’d both come in by. I figured it had to be that asshole from the gate, the one who was with you when you picked me up, figured there might be something wrong with the john’s credit card or something. Anyway, I’d already flushed and was turning around to wash my hands when I heard him open the door. Not the bathroom door, the one to the room.”
“‘Him’ being your customer?”
“Yeah.”
“And then?”
“And then there was a sound.”
“What kind of a sound?”
“Hard to describe.”
“Try.”
“Sort of halfway between a pop and a spit.”
Silva took that to be a silenced pistol.
“And then,” Moura said, “the john, what’s his name again?”
“Mansur.”
“Mansur starts to scream, but he doesn’t finish it because it’s cut off by this other noise.”
“What kind of a noise?”
“Like a crunch, but squishier. Maybe like a hard splat.”
“What did you do then?”
“I bent over and looked through the keyhole.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t see Mansur, and I couldn’t see the person who’d come in. But by that time, I was convinced that someone was beating him.”
“Why? Why were you convinced?”
“The sounds. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Like that. They went on and on.”
“No voices?”
“The john screamed a couple of times, begged whoever was doing it to stop.”
“And before that?”
“He said something when he first opened the door, and the person outside said something back, but I couldn’t hear what it was.”
“Can you remember Mansur’s words?”
“He said, ‘What the fuck is it?’ or something like that. He wasn’t at all polite.”
“How about the voice of the person who knocked on the door. Any accent? Any speech defect?”
“I told you. I couldn’t hear him.”
“What did you do then?”
“I got the hell out of there, that’s what! I grabbed my shoes and purse, climbed through the bathroom window, jumped the wall in back, ran down to the road, and hightailed it back to town.”
“How? How did you get back to town?”
“Stuck my leg out and my thumb in the air and hitchhiked. The guy who picked me up was interested in a program, but my head was all fucked up by what had happened. I gave him a quick blow job, and he dropped me where I could get a taxi.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Me? Call the police? Just because somebody got beat up? Get real.”
“When did you find out Mansur was dead?”
“When I got up this afternoon. I saw it on the news.”
“And you still elected not to come forward?”
Moura squirmed in his chair.
“No,” he said. “You got it all wrong.”
“How so?”
“A beating is one thing. Murder? That’s like, like really serious. I was going to do it. I was going to talk to the cops first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Sure you were,” Silva said.
“You don’t have to take that tone with me, Chief Inspector. I’m not a criminal. You may disapprove of my lifestyle, but what I do isn’t illegal, and I’d never, ever hurt anyone.”
Moura was indignant, and if he wasn’t sincere, he was a damned good actor.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When the video disc arrived from Miami, Goncalves was at Guarulhos airport waiting for it. It was almost two in the morning by then, but Mainardi and Caetano were there, too, working the midnight to eight shift. By two thirty, they were all huddled in front of a television screen.
“Nope,” Mainardi said, after the first group of passengers filed by the camera.
“I backed it up to the previous flight,” Goncalves said. A new group of travelers started passing in review. “This is it. Pay attention.”
Half a minute later, Mainardi sat bolt upright in his chair.
Goncalves reacted by freezing the image.
Caetano put his finger on the screen, pointing out a man with a brown birthmark on his cheek. “Motta,” he said.
The image was sharp and clear, ideal for lifting a photo. Goncalves made a note of the timecode so he could locate it again with ease. “All right,” he said, “now let’s find the priest.”
Silva, anxious to see the video, got up at six in the morning. By seven, he was at the Sao Paulo field office, where a yawning Goncalves was waiting for him.
“You look like you could use some sleep.”
“I’ll get my second wind any time now,” Goncalves said.
Silva believed it. Goncalves, he knew, could spend an entire night clubbing and put in a full day thereafter.
“Ah, youth,” he said.
“Practice too,” Goncalves said.
Silva rubbed his hands in anticipation. “All right,” he said, “let’s get to it. Who’s first?”
“Motta.”
“Play it.”
Goncalves did, freezing the image as he’d done with the Customs agents.
“I had time before you got in,” he said, “so I lifted the best frame. No hits on the database.”