A Murder Most Literate

by Jefferson Bonar

  “Assistant?” Armada asked, shocked. There was another player in this drama. How had he not heard of this assistant before now?

  Teo smiled. “Oh…you didn’t know, did you? Not doing your job very well then, constable. Mixing powder is too much work for just one man. You need help. And Gregorio had it.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Don’t know. Gregorio mentioned him a few times but never told me his name. He just said he had the boy do all the heavy lifting, as he was getting too old for it.”

  Someone young, Armada thought. Like a student.

  “Where did he do this mixing?”

  “Don’t know. He made sure of that. Nobody knew except that assistant.”

  Armada grumbled to himself. Where to start with tracking down the mysterious assistant without a name or anything to go by? Why did the clues sometimes have to be so hard to follow?

  “Augh! It’s not like it matters now. They’ve taken everything. And they’re going to hang me, aren’t they?”

  Teo’s eyes softened as he stared through the window, as if what little sunlight filtered on to his face through the bars was the only thing keeping him alive now.

  “Most likely,” Armada said trying to turn away from his own problems now, which seemed so petty compared with what Teo was faced with. He found himself feeling bad for the man. It was obvious he’d gotten it wrong. Teo was no killer. And despite this, he was going to suffer a killer’s fate. His past seemed a chain around his neck every bit as much as Armada’s. He could see it, now that the prospect of death hung over Teo’s head. The tough personality he exuded of the criminal capable of anything was but a mask, meant to cover the face of the frightened man Armada was gazing upon now.

  “Well…don’t cry too hard for me,” Teo said with a smug grin. “I’ve done things in my life that…well…I probably deserve my fate. I’m not afraid. I haven’t been afraid of dying since I was in the army. I was injured once, you know. Stabbed by a Frenchman, right through the chest. It was during a battle, so no one could stop fighting to help me. There was a lot of blood. I remember thinking of my mother, of my pueblo, of everyone back home who loved me who would mourn my death. I even tried to picture my own funeral. Can you imagine? What a tonto, I was. What a conceited tonto.”

  “But you survived,” Armada said.

  “By some miracle of God, yes. I was unconscious for a while, though. A few hours maybe. It was getting dark when I woke up on that battlefield. The fighting was over. My company had already fled. I never saw them again. I just got up and walked away. All thoughts of my mother, my family, my pueblo…they just seemed to fade away with the sun that evening. I couldn’t face returning to them. I wasn’t that man anymore.”

  Teo broke away from the window for a moment to face Armada.

  “Since then, I’ve done a lot of things no one should be proud of. I’ve stolen, I’ve cheated, I’ve lied. But despite my sins, there is someone who will miss me when I’m gone. My mule, Lucia. She has been with me through it all. She’s helped me run from trouble countless times. I owe her my life. And there is no one to take care of her now. Please…look after her….”

  “Of course,” Armada said, not sure what he was agreeing to. He hated mules. They had only ever shown him contempt and rarely had any interest in doing what was asked of them. He hadn’t thought it possible for a someone to feel real affection for one. Especially someone like Teo.

  “Buenas tardes, Teo,” Armada said, standing up. Teo had a lot of reckoning with his life to do, and he didn’t want to waste what little time the man had left to do so.

  Teo didn’t acknowledge him but instead returned to gazing out the window, soaking in as much sun as he could before it disappeared from his cell later in the afternoon.

  As Armada turned to go, he found one last detail sticking in his mind.

  “Out of curiosity, where were you hiding this serpentine you stole?”

  “Under the Roman Bridge. There are bits under the arches where bricks are missing. It’s easy to hide things there.”

  “How did you learn of those?”

  “Gregorio. He told me about them.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The smell made Armada realise how long it had been since he’d eaten. It was cooked meat and a floury odour, hinting at some kind of dough or pastry to go with it. Armada hadn’t eaten anything except a bit of bread loaf for breakfast, which had been so many hours ago. It was a bad habit of his, not eating when his mind was working. There were times when he resented his body’s constant need to consume food. It was a distraction from the real work he was here to do.

  But resenting it didn’t make the emptiness in the pit of his stomach go away. He needed food, and there would be no way for him not turn down an offer to join the family for supper should he receive one.

  There was no other way. Armada knocked on the door and it was answered by a startled Elvira.

  “Constable….”

  “I apologise for interrupting. I had a few more questions about your husband’s death that I wanted to ask you. I hope I haven’t come at a bad time.”

  “Well…no. Please come in. Join us for supper, we’re just about to eat.”

  Armada came in and felt bad for interrupting what had been a family meal. The wide eyes of three young girls looked up at him, the oldest somewhere around ten years old. They had been playing in the corner of the house with a bit of paper, attempting to draw flowers and crowns with a small bit of coal they’d been given.

  In the kitchen, an older woman in maid’s clothes was sweating over a fire pit, which was the source of the smell of cooking meat. Next to her was a large metal pan where pastry was being heated.

  “We were going to have some hornazo, if you’d like to join us.”

  Armada knew what he was there to do. This was hardly a social call. But he was just too damn hungry to turn it down.

  “Thank you.”

  Armada felt it rude to jump into his interrogation. He was joining this family for supper, so he could hardly begin by reminding them of the horrific death of their father. As such, he joined the girls in their drawing and helped them to get the jewels of the crown just right before cutting out the paper and folding it into some kind of crown.

  It felt odd, playing with children like this. He hoped they didn’t think he was intruding upon territory their father used to inhabit. Did Gregorio ever play with his children like this? Or was he perpetually focused on his work, shouting at them to be quiet?

  Despite his reservations, Armada found himself able to relax with the girls after a while. He was attempting to trace out a tiara fit for a queen when they were told supper was ready.

  Armada then joined the family at the large wooden table as the maid laid out the food, along with the dishes and everything else they would need.

  For the first ten minutes or so, as everyone dove into the food, nothing was said. It was strange. Armada hadn’t come here looking for a taste of Gregorio’s family life, but here he was, living it for a little while. He wondered how it was Gregorio had justified in his mind the danger he had put everyone with the work he’d been doing. It would have been so easy for this family to have been punished much more harshly if his secret had come out while he was alive.

  Finally, his hunger satiated and a bit of wine having been drunk, Armada realised he needed to get to the point of his visit.

  “I wanted to ask if your husband ever went anywhere without telling you. Did he ever disappear off unexpectedly? Or return from work late on a regular basis?”

  “I’m sorry, Constable. My husband was very punctual,” Elvira said, trying to keep her voice composed. The death of her husband was still raw, and she seemed nervous at showing it to him. She wore the traditional black dress of a woman in mourning, although it wasn’t strictly a rule. But Armada could sense that appearances were important to Elvira, so these sorts of codes of conducts were strictly followed in this house.

  “Did anyone ever spot
him in a strange place? Perhaps a neighbour saw him in a part of the city they didn’t expect?”

  “I get the sense you aren’t asking what you came to ask me, Constable. Now, I have a long night of helping these children to bed, so I’d appreciate if you got to the point.”

  Elvira’s stern tone startled everyone, and the room suddenly went very quiet.

  Armada realised she was right. He needed to come out and ask his real question. He just wished he didn’t have to do it in front of the victim’s three daughters, most of whom were too young to understand what was happening, anyway.

  Armada sighed, then reached into a pocket inside his waistcoat and produced the key he’d gotten from Enrique.

  He placed it on the table.

  “What does this key go to?” Armada asked.

  “I don’t know,” Elvira said confidently. “Why do you think I would know?”

  “Because it was your husband’s. And I have a feeling I know what it opens. I just need to know where it is.”

  “You’re being vague again, Constable. Please, just say what you mean.”

  Another glance to the three girls, who had gotten distracted by tugging at each other’s dresses, eager to return to the games of crowns and tiaras they’d been playing before.

  Elvira made no move to shield them from what could be revealed. Armada didn’t feel right about it, but ultimately, they were Elvira’s children, not his own. She had to be the one to make such decisions.

  “Señora Cordoba, I have evidence your husband was mixing serpentine and selling it to Portuguese independence fighters just north of the city. Now, I’m guessing he didn’t do this mixing here in the house. He would have needed a workshop. Somewhere secure that isn’t easily found. I have no doubt that this key unlocks your husband’s workshop, but I don’t know where it is. And I think it would be better if I found it before the city authorities did, if either of us hold any hope of finding his killer.”

  Elvira stared at him for a long, tense moment. Armada was grateful the children had already stopped listening and filled the tense silence with the sound of their perpetual giggling and arguing over who got to use the scissors next.

  Elvira seemed unmoved by them, however. She stared down at the key with an angry glare.

  “So that’s what it’s for…,” she whispered. She picked up the key and studied it. “He kept this in his pocket for years. Never let it out of his sight. Not for a moment. He once yelled at me for asking him what it was for. He told me it was a good luck charm, nothing else, and that I wasn’t to ever touch it again. I’ve never seen him so protective of anything, not even his own daughters.”

  Elvira turned toward Armada and handed him the key.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Constable. And I’d prefer if I never saw that damned thing again.”

  Armada took the key back, feeling foolish. This whole evening had been wasted. All he’d really accomplished is ruining supper for the Cordoba family. Had they not been through enough?

  Armada quickly took his leave and was back out in the night air after some vague promises to return to help the girls with their cut-outs someday again soon. Lying to innocent children seemed the perfect way to round off the evening.

  Armada decided not to return to his accommodation immediately, but instead took a walk around the city as it prepared itself for night. There were still a lot of candles and lamps burning, making it easy to see as he wandered the streets, having no clear destination in mind. Much like his cases, sometimes.

  His mind eventually came around to this mysterious assistant. That was where he had to start. It had to be someone young. Possibly one of his students. Could Aurelio have been working for Gregorio more closely than he’d let on?

  Enrique, perhaps? Was he perhaps lying about how he found the key? It would make sense. To blackmail someone with such an item, you have to know just how valuable it really is, and Armada didn’t quite believe Enrique’s story about how he worked that out. Plus, there was the added bonus that with Gregorio killed, he would not only get to keep the three hundred ducats he’d stolen, but probably win the election, as well.

  Perhaps the blackmail went wrong. Gregorio could have agreed to pay the ransom ,and when Enrique arrived to collect, a scuffle ensued that ended up with Gregorio stabbed.

  But that wasn’t likely. The corregidor had described the crime scene in detail in his letter to the Holy Brotherhood:

  Blood everywhere. It was like a wild beast had been let loose. Not just their body, but their soul. The rage was palpable in the air. You could smell it, feel it fill your lungs with icy tendrils that wormed their way into your soul. Nothing in that office hadn’t been sullied by the violence unleashed that night. I have never been so close to evil as I have that morning I saw Gregorio’s body for the last time.

  Gregorio had been bleeding to death while fending off his attacker. The killer had kept at it, stabbing away, spreading the blood everywhere and making sure Gregorio was dead before fleeing the scene. He hadn’t gone to Gregorio’s office that night for something as petty as money. He’d gone there for vengeance.

  The letter from the corregidor returned to his thoughts. It hadn’t been necessary for Arturo to go into that much detail. It was poetic, how he described the state of Gregorio Cordoba’s body: exactly how it was positioned, where the pools of blood lay below his fingertips, even devoting an entire paragraph to the expression left on Gregorio’s face. Mouth agape, his neck hanging over the edge of the desk at such an odd angle as to make him look inhuman, and the cold dead eyes staring off toward an unseen horizon, as if suddenly aware of the horrors beyond in the moment before death.

  Armada hadn’t sensed such a poet’s soul in his first meeting with Arturo. What was it about seeing Gregorio’s office that had brought it out in him? Was Arturo even aware of what he’d written?

  What if…?

  Armada was already racing back to the university. It was tenuous, and the thoughts were still unformed in his mind. So many things still didn’t make sense. He ran the risk of being embarrassed tonight. But he was willing to risk it if it meant making a bit more sense of this puzzling case.

  Soon, Armada was beating on the door of an office, inside which he could see candlelight still flickering under the door.

  The door flung open to Arturo, who stared at him with tired eyes, still holding the quill pen he’d just been writing with and looking quite annoyed.

  “Armada. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m glad I was able to catch you, corregidor. I had a few questions about this case I was hoping you could help me with.”

  “It’s nearly ten o’clock, Constable. I’d like to get home to my wife at some point.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  Arturo let out a long sigh and let Armada into his office, lit by a single, half-burned candle on the desk next to a stack of papers that he had been attempting to clear.

  “Why keep Gregorio Cordoba on if he was such a terrible professor?”

  “What? Who told you he was terrible?”

  “You did. You said he was rarely here, neglecting his students and his workload in order to take frequent trips to Madrid. You sounded almost angry.”

  Arturo rolled his eyes. “I was, but it’s hardly anything new. It’s how things work in university these days. You think Gregorio was the only one to do that? Most of our art faculty rarely steps foot on this campus any more. And any time one of our law professors show any kind of promise, the Cámara come along and offer them a seat on the Royal Council, or a judgeship, or a corregidor post somewhere. It’s what us letrados dream of. And it’s very lucrative, believe me. But it means most of our senior professors have been with us less than two years. Gregorio was just looking for something better, that’s all. Everyone is.”

  “How did he get his job initially?”

  “Same way everyone else does—an oposición. He didn’t give the best one, but he had a rapport with the students who were th
ere. He could connect with them, make them laugh. Sometimes, that’s more important than knowing your material, which I admit he wasn’t the best at.”

  “But you ultimately have to approve his appointment.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you? Surely there were more qualified candidates you could have pushed for at the time.”

  Arturo lowered his shoulders in resignation. He meandered around behind his desk and refilled his glass of sherry, then poured another for Armada. Arturo swirled his sherry around in his glass for a moment, considering it, before speaking.

  “Loyalty, I guess. We went to school together, in Valladolid. I’ve known that man a long time.”

  “Which means you knew what kind of a professor he would be.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “So why appoint him? Did he pay you?”

  “Of course not! Loyalty isn’t something you buy, it’s something you earn!”

  Armada took his sherry, but it seemed hypocritical to drink it, although it smelled so nice. It had been ages since he’d had a drop.

  “Was there another reason, perhaps?”

  “What? What are you getting at?”

  “I’m wondering if Gregorio was already in the business of making gunpowder when he arrived at this university.”

  Arturo went quiet, his face half-hidden on the edge of the flickering shadows in the room. His silence told Armada everything.

  “I heard rumours. That was all.”

  “Yet you approved his appointment anyway, despite the trouble his activities could cause for the university. Very loyal, indeed.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That loyalty wasn’t the only reason you took him on. I am suggesting that you possibly became a participant in his business and you both used his job as a junior professor here as a cover.”

  “I had nothing to do with that!” Arturo yelled, jumping to his feet. “They were just rumours! And because he was my friend, I assumed they weren’t true. He assured me they weren’t!”

  “So, you asked him about it?”