She tried to wriggle free. “Let me go. You got the answer to your question about your ‘little’ murder. You’ve taken me home. You’re done with me, so let me go.” She twisted again to get free.
Part of him wanted to comply, but another part, about halfway between his gonads and his heart, would not let him. “Please,” he said, “you are so smart about so many things, I thought you would understand. I was lying to a suspect. Cops do that all the time. I have not lied to you. I swear I haven’t.”
She let her arm go limp. There was pain in her face but a tiny glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“Please,” he said, “get some things—clothes, whatever you are going to need, so we can go home.”
She looked him in the eye. He had no idea what she was thinking. “Wait for me here,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.” She did not smile.
He hoped he could trust her to come back. If she were one of his sisters, she could take hours deciding which shoes to pack. He wanted to talk to her more about Puglisi, find out how sure she was that Tulio was not the man she had seen the night Luz died. But he knew better than to bring that up before he had made love to her again. If she came back.
* * *
That afternoon, some minor worker demonstrations broke out in plazas around the city: along the Avenida 9 de Julio, in the Plaza de los Congressos, and in front of the old Cabildo, the Colonial seat of government across the Plaza de Mayo from the Casa Rosada. Prowling on the outskirts of a group circling the enormous equestrian statue of San Martín in the plaza named for him, Evita met a young man, sitting on a stone bench, who, like her, was observing the unionists as they called for “Perón, Perón!” The young man had an analytical look in his intense dark eyes as he took in the scene. Evita approached him, and he looked quizzically at her, as if he was afraid to show that he recognized her. She sat next to him, smiled, and said, “Hello. My name is Eva Duarte.”
He said her name in unison with her. They laughed. “I know your face,” he said. “My girlfriend reads Guinón, the movie magazine. It sometimes has your picture on the cover.” He extended his hand to her. “My name is Juan Jiménez.”
She felt a bit wary. “Are you a student?” The vast majority of students despised Perón.
“No, I am twenty-three; I’m a teacher.”
She gestured toward the workers, many of them in shirtsleeves. She and Perón called them descamisados, but they were not really shirtless. Hatless, jacketless, some of them, but not really shirtless. “What do you think of all this?”
“I think that the teachers need a union,” he said earnestly. “We are badly paid. We get no pensions and no respect from anyone in the government, hardly from our own students.”
She gestured to the demonstrators again. “If these laborers don’t get what they are chanting for, there will be no hope for the unions that already exist. I can’t imagine the army or the oligarchy favoring a new one for teachers.”
He nodded. “I think you are right.” He looked longingly at the young men circling the plaza, as if he wanted brothers.
Evita looked over her shoulder. Jorge Webber had parked the car at the bottom of a flight of stone steps that led from the park to the street below. He was leaning against it and reading the newspaper. She turned to Juan Jiménez. Juan was an important name for her. Her father, her brother, Perón—all were named Juan. Her mother was Juana. “Juan,” she said, using the familiar address, “help me get them what they want, what we all need.” Perón had said it: the day they arrested him at Tres Bocas, that if the descamisados rose up to support him, nothing could stop them. She saw a way, a very quiet way, to get them to do that.
“How can I help?” Jiménez’s voice was confused but energized.
“Just wait here a moment.”
She went down the stairs to Jorge. “Please,” she said, “I need you to go to the modista and pick up a suit I asked her to make for me.”
He looked at her, incredulous. “A new dress? Now?”
She felt like slapping him. “This is important, whether you think so or not. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that will be the most important day of my life. I have to look the part when the time comes. If I am going to achieve my goal, I must do something very important right now. And I need you to do what I asked. Is that clear?”
He folded his newspaper and got into the car.
She went back to Juan Jiménez on the bench. “We have to tell them,” she said. “Each of them needs to bring their brothers tomorrow.”
She moved toward the men circling the grand monument to the liberator of Argentina. She could not make speeches to the union leaders, especially knowing that so many of them thought her a puta because she lived with a man who was not her husband. But now she had found her way. And this young man could help her. He stood up and followed her. She rubbed her sweaty palms on her skirt and held a hand out as she approached one worker, just one, who looked at her expectantly as she walked toward him. He took her hand very briefly and gently. “Listen,” she said, speaking to the one man, alone. “Tomorrow, you must come back, and you must bring ten others with you, and tell them to bring ten people. Everyone needs to tell ten people to bring ten people. And if that doesn’t force them to free Perón, the next day everyone needs to bring ten more people who will tell another ten people to bring ten people.”
Jiménez watched her urge a couple of others, and soon he was also speaking to the men, one to one. And soon they were gathering around him and around her and listening and talking to one another. There was no shouting. No more chants of “Perón. Perón.” Just talking, almost whispering the message. Tell ten more. Tell them to bring ten more.
* * *
When she came out of her tiny apartment, Pilar looked into Leary’s sexy red car and saw him asleep. She carried her little cardboard suitcase with her favorite clothing, the things she had made herself with remnants Señora Claudia had let her take. She opened the door with trepidation. He woke up instantly and grinned at her. “That didn’t take long.”
She put her head inside the car. “I’m sorry I was cranky,” she said. “I am not used to—”
He reached out and put his fingers gently on her lips. “Let’s just go home,” he said.
She flashed him that irresistible smile and put her valise in the backseat and closed the door.
He started the car. “My sister Emilia would have taken until nightfall to pack her clothes.” He shifted the Pontiac into Reverse.
“I don’t have that much to choose from.” She knew he would be angry when she told him where she needed to go. She bit her lip and spit it out: “I got a call from Señora Claudia. I have to go to the shop. She has a job for me to do.”
“What? Oh, come on. Who is buying dresses on a day like today?”
“It was an order the customer gave us two weeks ago. We promised it for tomorrow. The lady is going to a baptism over the weekend in Montevideo. She’s coming in for a fitting, and I will have to make some adjustments.”
Baptism, my ass, Leary thought. He figured the customer was Eva Duarte. “My guess is that the lady in question is leaving the country for more than just the weekend.”
“I have to go,” she said. “I can’t lose my job. We have so little work these days. We have to cater to the customers we still have left.”
He drove directly to the shop. As a policeman he could drive on Florida, though the street was closed to traffic during store hours. Not that it mattered today, when no one was shopping except for that dame going to a “baptism,” who would probably stay away for the rest of her life. Which might be a good thing all around. When Leary had first gotten involved with this investigation he had not thought deeply about the political implications of what was going on in Argentina. He hated being part of the Federals because they were more like part of the army, keeping the fat cats in power. And it turned his stomach that he might be assigned to arrest people whose only crime was not agreeing with the generals. But he had
always heard from the men on the force that Perón was good to the workingman. He had thought of the colonel as more or less a good guy. But now he was not so sure. In fact, not sure at all.
When he pulled up in front of the shop, he took her hand. “While you are here I am going to headquarters. Tell me again. You are absolutely sure the guy you saw outside the shop that night was not Puglisi?”
“Positive.” She had her other hand on the door handle. Her eyes were clouded with fear.
He had still not found the bastard who’d killed Luz. He had promised to keep Pilar safe. He was desperate to keep her safe. He slipped across the seat toward her and put his arm around her waist and kissed her with all his heart. “Stay here,” he said. “When you are ready to leave, do not leave the shop. Wait here. I will pick you up. Okay? You must not go out alone.”
She put both arms around his neck and kissed him hungrily. She took his breath away.
“Promise me, you will do as I said.”
“Yes,” she said and held him close for a minute, her face buried against his chest.
A faint tinkling of a bell sounded behind her as a man in a chauffeur’s uniform—gray jacket with pewter buttons, matching jodhpurs, and tall black boots—came out of the shop, carrying a woman’s suit on a hanger. As he put on his black peaked cap, he glanced in at them and then turned and walked away toward the corner of Córdoba. He looked familiar.
Pilar still had her arms around Leary and tried to kiss him again. “What is it?” she asked. Her eyes searched his.
He couldn’t remember where he had seen that man. He was dressed like twenty or thirty other drivers in the city. “Nothing.” He kissed her. “Go in. But don’t come out unless you are with me. Promise?”
“I already promised. I won’t.”
She gave him her full sunny smile, the one he’d seen when he told her he wanted to introduce her to his mother. There were words for how that smile made him feel, but he didn’t tell them to her. Not yet. He kissed her one more time and watched her cross the sidewalk and go into the shop. She was beautiful from the back.
Then he drove to the end of the block to see if he could find the chauffeur with the lady’s suit. The street was deserted except for an ordinary gray Chevrolet sedan pulling away, not the kind of car that came with a uniformed driver. Leary wanted to follow it, just in case, but this was where his car was a liability. You could never use one this red, with this much chrome, with big white-walled tires, to follow anyone. A cop needed a nondescript car for that. He squelched his hunch and let the Chevy get away. He had no reason to think anything of the man in the jodhpurs.
Then, on his way back to headquarters, it hit him where he had seen the man. He was Eva Duarte and Juan Perón’s chauffeur. On a hunch, Leary drove to their apartment house on Posadas, and when he arrived, he saw the same man carrying the suit into the building. He guessed then that the lady who was going to the baptism was not Evita, after all. Whatever Pilar had gone into the shop to sew, it couldn’t be what Perón’s chauffeur had already picked up. He was not sure what to make of all this. He let it sit in the back of his mind and went back to the police station.
When he got there, he called the dress shop and made sure that Pilar was still there. He got Claudia Robles on the phone. She, of course, wanted to know whether they had arrested Torres.
Leary wanted to believe Torres was the murderer. And that the flashy man Pilar had seen was not involved. But his niggling doubts would not give up the notion that the murder had something to do with Luz’s impersonating Eva Duarte. He made Claudia Robles promise not to let Pilar out of her sight.
He went to find Estrada and Franco. To his amazement, they had Torres in custody. “The owner of a bar near his house told us he roots for the Juniors, and he doesn’t have a radio. He always goes to the bar to listen to the games. He bets on them. The Juniors had a big match with Tucumán. Franco and I showed up just as the match was ending. There he was, drunk as a skunk.”
“His team lost,” Rudolfo Franco added and beamed, so proud that such a thought had come into his pea brain.
Leary patted him on the back. “Keep thinking like that and they’ll force you to become a detective, Rudi.”
Estrada laughed. “Maybe him, but not me, Robo. I don’t want it. Detectives don’t get time and a half for overtime.” It was a fact Leary knew well.
He went down to the basement of the building, where they held prisoners in cells adjacent to the morgue. One of the tortures the suspects were forced to endure was the nasty smell of formaldehyde in the police headquarters’ nether regions.
Leary got the guards to put Torres in an interrogation room and went in to talk to him. No one had questioned him yet, which didn’t surprise Leary. Men could be kept in this tomb for months before anyone paid any attention. It was one of the things the people were calling for: the return to constitutional government that would force the cops to behave. Leary had to admit they had a point.
Torres looked like shit and carried its perfume as well. He was big and stocky. There was nothing about him that said “gardener,” except that his forearms and face were tanned from working in the sun. It was hard to believe that this thug spent his time pruning rosebushes. Leary did not bother to introduce himself. “Do you know why you are here?” he asked.
“Yeah, I stabbed that bastard Garmendia.”
Leary was taken aback. He had never been able to get any suspect to confess to anything. This was too easy. “I see. Why did you kill him?”
Torres coughed for a full minute before he could say anything. The man’s breath gave Leary a hard lesson in where the shit smell was coming from. “You got a ciggy?” Torres asked.
“I don’t smoke,” Leary said.
Torres smirked as if Leary had said, I’m a sissy.
“I’ll get you one,” Leary said. “Tell me first, why did you kill Garmendia?”
Torres blew out another dog breath. “Because he killed Luz, and the son of a bitch had the balls to accuse me of doing it.”
“How do you know Garmendia killed her?” Leary asked.
“She told me.”
Leary could not hide his surprise. “When did she tell you that?”
Torres coughed for another forty-five seconds. “She said it a million times. From when she was a baby, her bastard father was always telling her, ‘I’ll kill you if you shit your pants again.’ ‘I’ll kill you if cry.’ ‘I’ll kill you if—’ Fuck. He told her he would kill her for blinking when he didn’t want her to.”
Leary nodded. “I see. But if he was saying that for sixteen years, what makes you think he actually did it this time?”
Torres just sat there and looked at Leary as if he thought him stupid.
Leary left him for a minute and bummed a cigarette and a match from the guard at the door. Once Torres had lit up and taken a couple of deep drags, Leary asked him again, “Why do you think he killed her at this point?”
“Because she ran away from home. He killed her now because he found her. And the son of a bitch would not tell the truth about it, even when I had my knife at this throat. I told him I was going to kill him anyway, so he might as well admit it.”
“And he didn’t.”
“No!” Torres shouted. “And he pissed me off so bad I stabbed him for that. He killed her.”
None of this sounded right to Leary. “How do I know it wasn’t you who killed her? How do I know he didn’t come after you because you killed her? When he accused you, you killed him and left him in your petunias.”
“Pansies,” Torres said indignantly. “I hate fucking petunias.”
Leary nearly laughed in his face. “Yes, well, Garmendia came after you. He must have thought you killed his daughter. Otherwise, why would he have come looking for a younger, stronger man? He had to know he was taking his life in his hands by accusing you. Why would he have done that if he had murdered her?”
Torres took one long, last drag on the cigarette before he dropped the t
iny butt on the cement floor and ground it out with his gardener’s boot. “Well, if he didn’t kill her, then who did?”
“You?”
“I killed her fucking father for saying that.” Torres jumped out of his chair and went for Leary’s throat. Leary smacked him down and called out for the guard, who was in the room in a second. “Take him back to his cell.”
Leary went back to his desk to fill out the paperwork charging Torres with the murder of Miguel Garmendia. He stopped short of putting Luz’s name on the list of his victims. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to trust Lázaro Torres, but Leary was pretty sure he had not killed Luz. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t an actor. An artless jerk like him could never have given such a convincing performance. Leary was reversing the carbon paper and getting ready to fill out the back of the form when Pilar called to say she was ready to leave the shop.
“I am coming right now. Stay where you are.”
“Señora Claudia is staying with me. She said you asked her to.”
“I did.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
Trusting was not his problem, but it was hers, probably for good reason, he thought. He would prove to her she could rely on him. “Just stay in,” he said.
“I am making myself a silk nightgown while I wait,” she said and giggled.
“You aren’t going to need it,” he said. The men in the squad room gave him a dirty look when he laughed into the phone. He rolled the form into the typewriter, left it there, and went to get his girl.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17
Colonel Miguel Angel Mazza had spent the chilly, damp wee hours of Wednesday morning presenting an old chest X-ray to a navy doctor, pretending it had just been taken. “This proves,” he argued, “that Perón needs immediate medical attention.”
What Mazza and Perón understood very well was that the seventeenth was the day when they had to make their move. The unions pro and not-so-pro Perón had called for a general strike on the eighteenth. If that took place, it would dilute the attention of the populace by calling for all manner of reforms. What Perón and his adherents needed was a manifestation in support of Perón and no one and nothing else. If it was ever to happen, it had to be today.
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