The Night Watchman

by Richard Zimler

  ‘If talking to the minister will reassure you,’ I told her, ‘then you—’

  Ripping away her button, she threw it against the wall. It ricocheted to the ground and tap-danced across the floor.

  ‘I know I’m intruding,’ I said, ‘but if we don’t get this over now, I’ll have to come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Great idea, come back tomorrow!’

  ‘If I do, you won’t be able to stay here today or tonight. This is a crime scene.’

  ‘You think you can kick me out of my own house?’ she said with huffing outrage.

  ‘Senhora Coutinho, that is exactly what I’m trying to avoid,’ I assured her.

  Her contemptuous laugh opened an ache in my gut, and I took a step back from her in my mind. ‘If you want,’ I said, careful to keep my true feelings out of my voice, ‘call the minister and tell him you don’t want me here.’

  I offered her my phone, but she turned it down and showed me a withering look.

  ‘If you’ll sit down and answer my questions,’ I continued, ‘I promise to try to get this over with quickly.’

  Pushing past me, she retrieved a black glass ashtray from the counter, stubbed out her cigarette vengefully and sat down at the kitchen table. She showed Luci and me a bored look. We sat down opposite her.

  Sprinklers was what Fonseca and I called the victims’ wives who sobbed through their first interrogation in order to convince us they were innocent. Senhora Coutinho was what we referred to as a dry well.

  After lighting another cigarette, she took too quick a gulp of whisky and had a coughing fit. Watching her struggle for breath, I realized she’d get soused today and pass out in bed, probably under the belief that her loss would seem slightly less horrific in the morning. When I repeated my previous question, she replied, ‘I was at our beach house. Sandi, our daughter, can vouch for that. And we also had a house guest – an old buddy of Pedro’s from Paris – Jean Morel. We spent the day together.’

  I asked for his number and she gave it to me without consulting her phone, adding in an annoyed tone, ‘That’s right, Inspector, I know Jean’s number by heart!’

  ‘Which means exactly what?’ I asked, though I’d already caught the general design of the garden of earthly delights she was about to describe to me.

  ‘My husband knew all about Jean and me,’ she snapped, ‘so you can spare me your show of moral indignation.’

  ‘I’m rarely sufficiently sure of myself to be morally indignant about anything,’ I said, hoping I might win back her good graces.

  As though she hadn’t heard me, she said, ‘Pedro and I haven’t been intimate in years. And he liked Jean. They’re old friends . . . were old friends.’

  She’d obviously needed to make that point right away, which gave me the idea that – despite her seeming ease – the angles of their triangle might have been painfully sharp on occasion. ‘And when did Mr Morel get to Portugal?’ I asked.

  ‘A week ago.’

  ‘Was he in Lisbon yesterday?’

  She rolled her eyes at my implication. ‘Jean is a furry little lamb. Besides, he flew off yesterday to Paris.’

  This time she read my mind correctly and added, ‘His flight left from Faro, Inspector, not Lisbon.’

  ‘Does he smoke?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but as far as I know, that isn’t yet considered a felony.’ She took a long, defiant drag on her cigarette to emphasize her point. She had powerful lungs.

  ‘Does he smoke Gauloise Blonde?’ I asked.

  She flinched; I seemed to have knocked her off the comfortable stoop in her mind. I explained about the cigarette butts we’d found.

  ‘But Jean . . . I’m sure he left from Faro,’ she told me, staring off into her doubts as if they were accumulating fast. ‘He . . . he wouldn’t have come back to Lisbon.’

  Something in her stammer seemed artificial, and it occurred to me then that she was indeed putting on a performance, and doing her best to incriminate her boyfriend.

  There were truths about ourselves that we only acknowledged when someone was trying to trick us; watching Senhora Coutinho gaze off as though needing to figure out what her best strategy to fool me might be, I realized that I was not very forgiving by nature.

  ‘Oh, I get it now,’ she said, as if she’d been silly not to understand earlier, and with false delight she said, ‘One of Pedro’s lady friends must have decided to visit him.’

  Before I could ask if she knew any of their names, a slender, teenaged girl stepped inside.

  Sandra had a drawn face and big, darkly shadowed eye sockets. Her thick blonde hair, clipped way too short, tufted up at spiky angles. She was wearing a man’s cardigan sweater, powder blue with a white collar, with frayed, sagging elbows. It hung down to her knees. I guessed it still held her father’s scent. She wore rose pink Converse sneakers with bright yellow laces and purple socks. She looked like a good athlete. And like a boy.

  It seemed impossible that she was the demure girl nearing womanhood whom I’d seen in the victim’s favourite photos. I started to introduce myself, but she cut me off. ‘Someone went into my room!’ she told her mother hotly, ‘and whoever it was took off my sheets and looked through my drawers!’

  ‘That was me,’ I said.

  Her eyes opened wide with rage. I looked to Senhora Coutinho for help, but she was gazing out of the back window again. She was extraordinarily good at not helping.

  ‘We were searching for evidence,’ I told the girl. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Luci cleared her throat and said, ‘I’ll help you put on fresh sheets.’

  ‘I DON’T WANT FRESH ONES!’ the girl shrieked, and so loudly that it raised gooseflesh on my arms.

  Senhora Coutinho drizzled Scotch into her glass with practised ease. Watching her, a latch of panic opened in my chest and made me realize that my Valium was wearing off. ‘I’m investigating what happened to your father,’ I told Sandra. I took out the turquoise ring that Gabriel had found, and offered it to her. ‘This must be yours.’

  ‘You had no right to take that from my bed,’ she told me, her voice fading to a frail whisper. She looked at me with a desolate expression. ‘My dad . . . he always told me you can’t just take other people’s things.’

  ‘I apologize,’ I said.

  Sandra closed her fist around her ring and faced her mother. Her need for forgiveness – and her fear that she no longer deserved it – hunched her shoulders, but her mother wouldn’t look at her.

  There’s cruelty in this house, I thought. And Senhora Coutinho doesn’t mind my being aware of it. Maybe that’s precisely what she wants me to understand without having to say it.

  ‘Sandra, is that sweater your dad’s?’ I asked gently, unwilling to venture on to more serious matters just yet.

  ‘Yeah, it was his favourite,’ she replied timidly. ‘Mine, too.’

  The glistening of a butterfly brooch pinned to her collar – red and blue enamel – caught my attention. ‘And where did you get such a pretty butterfly brooch?’

  ‘Oh this . . .’ She turned her collar around and shrugged as if to diminish its importance. ‘It was a gift from my parents. For my last birthday. Except . . . except it sometimes doesn’t look like a butterfly to me any more.’

  ‘What else could it be?’

  She showed me a lost face. ‘I don’t have any idea.’

  She seemed to need me to know that her father’s death had changed the shape of everything in her life – had taken away the meaning of even small objects.

  ‘Maybe we could talk a bit about your ring now,’ I said. I wanted to ask her why she had hidden it but she thrust her hands over her face and broke down into tears.

  Luci took a step toward her. ‘I’ll help you make your bed, if you—’

  ‘Get away from my daughter!’ Senhora Coutinho yelled, rushing around the table. When she pressed her lips to the top of Sandi’s head, the girl threw her arms around her and hung on as if she were being swept out to sea.
>
  It was an amazing thing to watch a teenaged girl weep, to cede to what she’d been struggling against, as if I were observing how the world would overwhelm all of us if we ever let our guard down. Susana managed to get her daughter to stop crying with whispered endearments. I gazed away from their intimacy. Luci gave me a long look that I took to mean, I didn’t expect it to get this bad so soon.

  ‘Come on, baby, you need to rest,’ Senhora Coutinho told Sandi. She dried the girl’s eyes with a tissue, smiling encouragingly.

  Sandi hugged her hands around her belly as though she’d been abandoned. ‘I’ll never see Dad again, will I?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Sssshhh. We’ll talk upstairs after I get you into bed.’ Senhora Coutinho took her daughter’s arm.

  ‘Mom, where did the bullet hit dad? Was it . . . in the back?’

  ‘Oh, Sandi, why would you want to know something like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, it seems important.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  ‘I’ll never have a chance now to tell him I’m sorry. It’s all my fault, Mom!’

  Senhora Coutinho gripped both her daughter’s hands. ‘Listen to me!’ she said fiercely. ‘What’s happened has nothing to do with you!’

  ‘If I’d have been nicer to him, then—’

  ‘Daddy knew you loved him,’ Senhora Coutinho cut in, her voice trembling. ‘That’s all that counts.’

  Sandi turned to me as her mother led her from the room. Taking off her brooch, she laid it on the countertop near the door. To me and Luci, she said, ‘If you take something away, you have to leave something behind in its place.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that’s what my dad always told me.’

  ‘And why are you telling me now?’

  ‘Because you’re investigating his death. You ought to know everything.’

  Senhora Coutinho draped her arm over her daughter’s shoulder and led her away. I imagined that many things her father had told Sandi would pulse with hidden significance over the coming weeks. But the question for now was, what had she taken for which she was leaving behind her brooch?

  After they’d left the room, Luci’s eyes closed tight. She was pale, and her chin trembled.

  ‘It’s been a long day, and it’s time you went home,’ I told her.

  I wasn’t just being easy on a new recruit; I badly needed some time alone. I quashed Luci’s protests by making my suggestion an order.

  At the door, I told her to call headquarters on her way home and have someone check that Morel had been on one of the flights from Lisbon to Paris the day before.

  Back in the kitchen, the silence in the house seemed too expectant – as if waiting for me to understand things I couldn’t possibly know yet – so I cut a Valium through its centre and downed half. Senhora Coutinho swept into the room a few minutes later, barefoot, in a winged blue caftan with golden tracery embroidered on the collar. Her lipstick was pale pink and her honey-coloured hair was brushed into luscious swirls. Her earrings were shimmering black pearls the size of hazelnuts. She looked as though she’d made herself ready for paparazzi.

  As she poured herself another whisky, her cell phone rang. She checked to see who it was, frowning nastily, then shut it off and stuffed it deep into her handbag. ‘Bad news gets around quickly,’ she told me disapprovingly. She sat down opposite me with a theatrical sigh and took a long sip of her Scotch.

  ‘Is your daughter okay?’ I asked.

  She picked at the sponge cake. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what okay could possibly mean at this point.’

  ‘I’m curious as to why she’d need to apologize to your husband.’

  Senhora Coutinho lifted her eyebrows and gazed at me haughtily. ‘Is that really any of your business?’

  ‘I very much want to find out who killed your husband, and asking inconvenient questions is usually part of the process.’

  ‘The process?’ she asked, as if I’d said something absurd.

  ‘The wrong word, perhaps. My Portuguese isn’t perfect, as I’m sure you noticed.’

  ‘Are you American or English?’

  ‘American.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘New York is my favourite city in the world!’ she announced.

  ‘I’ve never been,’ I told her.

  ‘No? Shame. Look, Monroe, teenagers get crazy ideas. And she’s been rude to both Pedro and me of late. Besides, we all have regrets when a loved one dies.’ She shook her head dejectedly. ‘We think of all we could have done better.’

  ‘Very true,’ I agreed.

  Senhora Coutinho sat up straight and stared at me with her head tilted, as if I were so odd that she might only be able to figure me out from a cockeyed angle. ‘So what is it you regret, Inspector?’

  Censoring my real reply, I said, ‘Very little, these days. Regret has never taken me anywhere I wanted to go.’

  I felt too clever as soon as I said that, but that was the reply I’d settled on long ago, when Ana and I first started dating.

  Senhora Coutinho nodded bitterly, as though what I’d told her confirmed her own doubts about the possibility of redemption. Sensing a window of opportunity, I said, ‘I’ll need to have your full cooperation to solve this case.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re going to keep asking me difficult questions?’ she asked, and her grimace seemed a request for me to treat her more gently than I might otherwise have.

  ‘I’m betting you called Jean Morel after you helped your daughter into bed. That’s okay with me, but I have to know what he told you.’

  She reached for her cigarettes and tapped one out. ‘I didn’t call him,’ she said, as if she’d expected more of me.

  ‘Senhora Coutinho, you’re not as good an actress as you might think,’ I said, but I was bluffing, since I hadn’t been able to read her expression.

  She squinted at me as if measuring me for a noose.

  ‘If you didn’t call Morel to find out if he flew back from Faro or Lisbon,’ I continued, ‘then you should have. I certainly would have.’

  ‘Your effort to be understanding just makes things worse, Monroe. It’s far too American for my taste.’

  As she stood up, I said, ‘I don’t want to quarrel with you. I’m no good at it. At the first sign of an argument, I run and hide.’ When she gazed at me sceptically, I added, ‘I’m a very fast runner, Senhora Coutinho.’

  She laughed with a touch of admiration – as if I’d disarmed her adroitly – and said in apologetic tone, ‘You might find this hard to believe after how I’ve spoken to you, but I don’t like quarrelling either. Probably because I generally lose.’ She stuck a cigarette in her lips and let it dangle. ‘I’ve learned how to run pretty fast myself, Inspector.’ With a trace of the bitter humour that I now recognized as a key part of her personality, she added, ‘Though Pedro and Sandi were even faster, and usually managed to catch me.’

  She wants me to know it had been two against one in this family, I thought. ‘So what did Morel tell you?’ I asked.

  She lit her cigarette. In an impressive exhale of smoke, she said, ‘He drove to Lisbon to talk to Pedro on Friday morning, early, and that when he left this house, my husband was very much alive.’

  ‘What time did he leave?’

  ‘Around ten thirty. There was a TAP flight to Paris at eleven forty and he was on it.’

  ‘And what did he and your husband talk about?’

  After a moment’s hesitation, she reached for a chair. ‘It’s very simple,’ she said. ‘A few months ago, I told Pedro I wanted a divorce, but he convinced me to wait until Sandi turned eighteen. He was adamant about not hurting her any more than she already was.’

  ‘Did your husband often get adamant?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘Did he often show his temper?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone show their temper on occasion?’

 
‘But not everyone makes enemies because of it. Judging from what’s happened, he made a bad one.’

  ‘Look, life wasn’t as rosy as I implied before. Pedro and I felt trapped in our marriage sometimes. Once, after his hollering at me got out of hand, even Sandi told me – in confidence, of course – that it might be a good idea for us to separate. But in this particular case, as soon as I agreed to wait for a divorce, he became friendly again. He wasn’t like me – he could change moods in an instant and be incredibly sure of himself.’ She shrugged, as if she was resigned to her husband being a creature she’d never fathom. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘Jean told me that he drove to Lisbon yesterday morning to ask him to reconsider – to allow us to divorce, I mean. It was a spur of the moment thing.’ In a voice pierced by regret, she added, ‘Jean is in love with me, Monroe. He tells me it’s the first time he’s ever really fallen in love. And get this, he’s sixty-two!’ She rolled her eyes as if it were madness. ‘But he didn’t want us to get a divorce right away only because of his feelings about me. He felt strongly that Sandi was faring badly because we were staying together. He’s her godfather, and very attached to her.’

  ‘How did Pedro react to his suggestion?’

  ‘Once again, he argued against a separation.’

  ‘So Morel and he quarrelled.’

  Annoyance sneaked back into her expression. ‘Yes, but like I said, when Jean left here, Pedro was very much alive.’

  ‘Did your daughter know about your affair with Morel?’

  Senhora Coutinho glowered at me. ‘I thought you said you liked to avoid quarrels?’

  ‘I do, but I want to solve this case.’

  ‘You get paid even if you don’t find out who killed Pedro,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘That’s true,’ I told her, ‘but you deserve to know what happened to your husband.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Everyone deserves to know why bad things happen.’

  She flashed me a probing look. ‘Though you never found out.’

  That remark evidenced such awareness of the little clues I’d dropped that it changed all I felt about her. And embarrassed me, as well, for I’d failed to see the true shape of what was taking place between us until now.