Fonseca frowned. “What I did was perfectly legal, Chief Inspector. Judge Miranda was kind enough to stipulate a bond, and my client paid it. As to my charges for the service, that information is strictly confidential. If you want the numbers, you’ll have to subpoena me. Furthermore, I resent the implication-”
“That’s enough, Dudu. Get down off your high horse and tell me exactly what the woman said.”
“She said that an acquaintance of hers, that’s what she called him, an acquaintance, was being held in Santo Andre. She wanted him out. I made a few phone calls. She sat where you’re sitting while I did it. Once I’d analyzed the problem, I gave her a price, my fee plus
… expenses. She opened her purse, took out a roll of banknotes, and started counting them out.”
“What was going through your mind?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tell me the thoughts you had at the time. It doesn’t matter if they were pure speculation. Just tell me.”
Fonseca leaned back in his chair, put his elbows on the armrests, and touched the tips of his fingers together.
“This is a little embarrassing,” he said, “but I’ll be frank with you. When I saw that roll, I thought I should have set a higher fee. I think she would have paid it. I think she would have peeled off every note and given it to me. There was a kind of quiet intensity about the woman. She desperately wanted Sacca released, God knows why. And God knows what they have in common. She was a woman of some class. From my experience of him, he’s an ignorant buffoon.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. That’s the extent of it. I was kicking myself about that money. And now”-Fonseca, with the same difficulty as before, rose from his chair-“you’ll have to excuse me. Please be careful not to let the door hit your asses on the way out.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The scene of Abilio Sacca’s murder was already crawling with reporters. Goncalves wisely kept his lip buttoned until all four of them were within the perimeter of crime-scene tape and away from attentive ears.
“The landlady is a widow,” he said then. “Lives alone, works nights in a hospital. Over there”-he pointed toward the home of the closest neighbor-“we’ve got an old lady. She hasn’t been out of her place in two days, but didn’t see anything, and she didn’t hear anything.”
“Where’s the body?” Silva asked.
“This way.”
Goncalves led them down an alley. Sacca’s place was a tiny freestanding building in the rear of his landlady’s home.
“Built for a maid,” Goncalves said. “There’s just the one room and a bathroom.”
“What’s the landlady’s story?”
“Around ten thirty this morning she went to collect the rent. The door was ajar. He was stretched out in a pool of blood. She didn’t panic. Like I said, she works in a hospital.
Says she’s seen a lot of bodies in her time. She checked his vital signs before she called it in, told the attending officer the paramedics didn’t need to hurry. He’d been dead for hours, she said. The
ME confirms that the death was sometime between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M. ”
“He’s already here?”
“The ME? It’s a she. Gilda Caropreso. Inside.”
Arnaldo glanced at Hector. “You and your girlfriend have to stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will talk.”
“How about Janus Prado?” Silva asked.
“He’s off today, but they always keep him posted on stuff like this. He called me, asked me if you were coming. When I told him you were, he said to have fun and…”
“And what?”
“And to tell Arnaldo Nunes he’s so ugly that when he walks by toilets, they flush.”
Goncalves seemed pleased to be passing the message along.
Gilda Caropreso, very much at ease in a room crowded with men, was wearing yellow jeans and a pale blue blouse. The only concessions to her profession were latex gloves and a pair of plastic booties. She circulated among the newcomers, collecting kisses on her cheeks and giving Hector one on the mouth. Then they all went over and looked down at the body.
Abilio Sacca was a mess.
“I don’t think he got anywhere near his attacker,” Gilda said. “I’ll have a closer look under a microscope, but there doesn’t appear to be anything under his fingernails except dirt. There is, by the way, a lot of that. And the rest of his personal hygiene doesn’t have much to say for it either.”
Silva knelt. Gilda hadn’t been exaggerating when she spoke of Sacca’s hygiene. Close-up, and under the steely smell of blood, the corpse gave a whole new definition to the term “body odor.” He squinted through the plastic bags to have a closer look at the victim’s hands.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Whatever the killer was using, Sacca was trying to fend it off.”
“So ‘it’ didn’t get left behind?”
“No. Hector tells me you have a theory this killer might be the Arriaga boy’s father.”
“Not everyone ascribes to it, but I do.”
“Poor man.”
“Crazy man. If it’s him, he’s killed a lot of innocent people.”
“A man like that belongs in a mental institution, not in a jail.”
“That’s for the courts to decide,” Silva said.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”
“Could the weapon used to beat him have been a baseball bat?” Hector asked with a flash of inspiration.
Silva stood and Gilda knelt for another look. After a while, she said, “Maybe. I’ll check for wood fragments in the wounds. What kind of wood do they use for baseball bats?”
“Ash,” Hector said. “The same wood the English use for cricket bats.”
“How the hell do you know what the English use for cricket bats?” Arnaldo said.
“He comes up with that kind of stuff all the time,” Gilda said. “He’s a repository of totally useless information.”
“And occasionally amazing instances of insight,” Silva said.
“Once the killer got past the hands,” Gilda said, “he concentrated on the head. There’s considerable damage to the forehead, temples, cheekbones, nose, and jaw. There’s also a second and very damaging blow to the crown. That one was probably postmortem, a final whack to make sure he was dead. And before you ask, yes, he was shot. Once. In the lower abdomen.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Julio Arriaga entered the stale-smelling apartment, put the bags of groceries on the kitchen counter and started opening windows.
Inez put one hand on her pregnant belly and another on his arm. “I’ll air the place out,” she said. “You go get the rest of the stuff.”
He came back, lugging the heavy tent, to find she hadn’t opened a single window. She was standing in front of the answering machine.
“You’d better listen to this,” she said.
“What-”
Inez put a finger to her lips and pushed the play button.
The woman who’d recorded the message was speaking in Portuguese, which was a good thing since Julio Arriaga’s English, even after three years in the United States, was still nothing to write home about. When he couldn’t get by in Portuguese, he used Spanish. And why not? Everybody knew you didn’t have to learn English if you lived in South Florida.
Senhor Arriaga, the voice said, my name is Solange Dirceu. I’m calling on behalf of Detective Sergeant Harvey Willis of the Miami-Dade Police Department. It’s most urgent that Detective Willis speak to you. When you get this call, no matter what time of the day or night, please call me on my cell phone to set up an appointment.
She gave him a number and hung up.
“Want to hear it again?” Inez asked, her finger poised above the machine.
Julio looked at his watch. It was almost midnight.
“Leave it for tomorrow,” he said.
“No matter what time of the day or night,” Inez said, quoting verbatim. She’d been a schoolteacher, and she still had a pedagogical bent.
“Oh, hell,” he said, and went to get a pencil to make a note of the number.