Every Bitter Thing cims-4

by Leighton Gage

  “Which was when?”

  “Yesterday. Up to then, we had it down as an accident. We thought the kid fell.”

  “Sure you did. So between the time the kid was killed and yesterday, you did absolutely nothing?”

  “Look, even if I’d suspected something, which I’m not, for one minute, about to admit I did, there wouldn’t have been any point. You know how felons think. Nobody sees anything. Nobody knows anything. Why bother to ask? But now it’s different. Now we’ve got DNA and we’ll be able to nab the son of a bitch. I got no problem with that. It’s what he deserves. No, my problem is different. My problem is I shoulda been kept in the loop. Then I could have filed as murder, instead of accidental death.”

  “The DNA samples, did they get one from everybody?”

  “Everybody who was still here. Some had moved on.”

  “Some? How many?”

  “Two, I think. Yeah, two.”

  “Was one of them a punk by the name of Joao Girotti?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Just answer the question, Sergio.”

  “I don’t remember. I got people going in and out all the time.”

  “And the name doesn’t ring a bell?”

  Bittencourt shook his head.

  “Do me a favor, Sergio. Get me those two names. And while you’re at it, get me their jackets.”

  Bittencourt grunted and picked up his phone. Five minutes later, two folders were on the desk. One was Joao Girotti’s. The other belonged to a man named Ubaldo Spadafora.

  Spadafora’s mug shot showed a mild-looking man with mousy brown hair and moustache. He looked like anything but a hardened criminal. The written material confirmed the visual impression. Spadafora was a bookkeeper, arrested for embezzlement and larceny. It was a first offense. He wouldn’t have spent a single night in jail if his employer hadn’t caught him leaving the office with a briefcase full of cash.

  “This address,” Hector asked, “is it current?”

  Bittencourt shrugged. “It’s the only one I got.”

  “The homicide guys get a copy of this?”

  “They got a copy. But they’re gonna be wasting their time. The guy’s a wimp.”

  “And only real machos rape fifteen-year-old kids, right? I want a copy of this.”

  “Copier’s broken.”

  “Then I’ll borrow it and return it.”

  “You want the other one too?”

  “No. I already have everything I need on Girotti.” Hector stood up. “I might be back,” he said.

  Bittencourt didn’t seem pleased at the prospect.

  Ubaldo Spadafora lived in a small house with a vase of dead flowers on the porch. The bookkeeper opened his front door to find Hector looking down at the dried leaves and stalks. If he was surprised to see someone he didn’t know standing on his doorstep at six o’clock in the evening, he didn’t show it.

  “My wife left when I got home from jail,” he said. “I kept forgetting to water them.”

  Hector looked up. “You normally start a conversation by admitting you’ve been in jail?”

  “I do if the conversation is with a cop. You’re a cop, aren’t you? You look like one.”

  Hector held up his badge.

  “Okay,” Spadafora said with a sigh. “Come on in. You want coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “All I have is instant. It’s not bad if you make it with milk.”

  “Good enough.”

  Spadafora led the way to a small kitchen, where he popped two cups of milk into the microwave. Next, he opened a tin of cookies and began to arrange them in a circular pattern on a plate.

  “They’re not homemade,” he said. “I don’t cook any more. There doesn’t seem much point to it, cooking for one person.”

  “You cooked before?”

  “Serena said she had a full-time job taking care of her garden. She used to grow flowers: no fruits, no vegetables, just flowers. She’d have a fit if she saw it now. Most everything is dead.”

  The microwave beeped. Spadafora removed the two cups, spooned in instant coffee, and began to stir.

  “I’d do the shopping on my way home and then cook dinner. I’d call her away from the TV so she could join us for the meal. Afterwards, she’d go back to her novelas, leave me to do the cleaning up and the rest of the housework.”

  “You had your hands full.”

  “I did. I took care of the kids, too, when she was glued to the TV. But none of it was enough. Serena had her heart set on buying a weekend place at the beach, somewhere near Ubatuba. She loves Ubatuba. Take your cup and come along.”

  “Is that why you stole the money?” Hector asked.

  “I stole it,” Spadafora said, “because she wanted that house, and I wanted to get it for her. Then, when it all went wrong, she left and took the kids. She’s taking this place too. Got a good lawyer, Serena did; cleaned out our bank account to hire him.”

  “No chance that she’ll forgive you, that you can make a fresh start?”

  “You wouldn’t ask that if you knew Serena. Enough about me. Why are you here?”

  “The Arriaga boy. Remember him? The one who died in the shower?”

  “How could I forget? Most brutal thing I ever saw.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Only the aftermath. I was at the other end of the shower room, and I had soap in my eyes. I heard a commotion, washed out the soap, saw him lying on the floor, bleeding from the head.”

  “So you didn’t see him being struck?”

  “No, but I saw the rape. They propped him up on all fours. Two men held his thighs so they wouldn’t collapse. Another pushed the nape of his neck so his head went down to the concrete floor. Then he buggered him.”

  “ Who buggered him? Joao Girotti?”

  Spadafora shook his head.

  “Girotti was in line. He would have been third. Except…”

  “Except what?”

  Spadafora winced, the memory painful. “He never got a chance. Somebody said the guards were coming. Girotti gave it up. He turned around, went under one of the showers, turned on the cold water to get rid of his erection.”

  “So who was it raped the kid?”

  “Castor Salles; Big Castor, they call him. And it’s an apt description. When he saw Arriaga, the first thing he said was, He’s mine. I heard him say it. The boy did too. He backed up against the wall. I went to the other end of the cell and turned my face away. Five minutes later, they were herding us into the shower. Less than five minutes after that, the boy was dead.”

  “You think Delegado Bittencourt is aware of what he’s got in Castor Salles?”

  “How could he not be? You know, before I went to prison, I was against the death penalty. I used to look down my nose at primitive societies that execute people.”

  “Primitive societies, huh? Like the Americans?”

  Spadafora smiled a thin smile before he went on. “But now I think differently. People like Castor Salles, they’re… purely evil.”

  The bookkeeper shivered, as if he could see Big Castor Salles right there in the room with him. Then he looked Hector full in the face. “You’re a cop. You must see people like Salles all the time, primitives with no regard for other people and no respect for human life. What do you think should be done with them?”

  Hector didn’t answer, not because he didn’t have an answer. He did. He had very firm convictions about what, in a land with no death penalty, should be done with animals like Big Castor Salles.

  But he’d never share those convictions with a man like Ubaldo Spadafora.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Gilda’s house keys rattled when she tossed them onto the counter. She hung her purse on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and sank heavily into another.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “people make me sick.”

  Hector had a spare glass waiting. He filled it from the open bottle of Chilean red and handed it to her.
/>   She took a healthy gulp, sighed, and leaned back in her seat. After a moment, she went on.

  “I know you were annoyed when I wouldn’t talk to you,” she said, “but when you called everybody was standing around, waiting for me to cut.”

  “I wasn’t annoyed,” he said, “I just-”

  She continued as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “It was a double autopsy, a married couple, murdered in their bed. They’d been asleep when the killer came in. The husband died instantly, one shot to the temple. His wife took two in the chest. Neither shot hit her heart.”

  She took another sip of wine. For a moment, Hector thought she was finished. But she wasn’t.

  “She must have awoken in pain,” she said, “awoken to see the person who was killing her.”

  Hector put down the spoon he was using to stir the spaghetti sauce and leaned against the sink. “And that was?”

  “Her daughter. Fourteen years old. Because her parents wouldn’t let her go to a party.”

  Gilda took another swallow of wine, put down the glass, and rubbed her eyes. She’d been crying.

  “Where did she get the gun?” Hector asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No. No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

  “It was her father’s. That Arriaga case, the one you called about, that makes me sick too.”

  Hector picked up his spoon. She took a paper towel from the roll and blew her nose.

  “The boy didn’t fall,” she continued. “Not unless they held him on their shoulders so he could fall from a height of at least two and a half meters. There was semen in his rectum. The rape was postmortem.”

  Hector poured himself another glass of wine and sat down.

  “Postmortem? How can you tell?”

  She looked at the sauce bubbling on the stove. “You really want me to tell you that? Before dinner?”

  Hector shook his head. “You didn’t, by any chance, bring me a copy of the autopsy report?”

  “It isn’t finished.”

  “After all this time? Why not?”

  “The mother came to the morgue and wanted to know all the details. Paulo didn’t have the heart to tell her. And he didn’t want her getting her hands on any report. But he wouldn’t falsify it either. So he put off finishing it until the cops could complete their investigation. He told the mother her boy died from a severe cranial trauma, which was true, and he put a sample of the semen out for DNA analysis.”

  “In order to provide evidence for the homicide guys? So they could bust someone before the report became available?”

  “Exactly. But without that report, there was no justification for DNA analysis. Paulo asked the lab to do him a favor. They said they would, but not as a priority.”

  “So it’s still not done?”

  “Oh, it’s done, all right. It arrived the day before yesterday. One rapist only. Paulo briefed the civil police. They’re getting samples from the men who were in the shower with Arriaga.”

  “Has the delegado in charge of the jail been informed?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  Hector topped up his glass. “He reported it as an accident.”

  “He must have known otherwise.”

  Hector got up to stir the sauce. “Probably did, probably saving himself the trouble of investigating. I doubt he would have done it if he’d known there was semen in the kid. He’ll get a reprimand at the very least.”

  “The bastard should be fired.”

  “True. When is Paulo going to finish his damned report?”

  She raised an eyebrow at the adjective. “Paulo will finish it,” she said, “when they identify the rapist. He believes it will bring the mother some degree of closure if she knows that the man responsible for her son’s death is going to pay for it.”

  Hector put down the spoon and returned to his seat. An image of Aline Arriaga’s tear-stained face popped into his mind. There would be no closure for her. Not ever. He took a sip of wine, looking at Gilda over the rim of his glass. “You agree with what Paulo did?”

  Gilda crossed her arms across her chest. “I wasn’t consulted.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you were consulted. I asked you if you agreed.”

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, Hector Costa.”

  He put down his glass. “I’m going to call Paulo right now.”

  “If you pick up that phone,” she said, steel in her voice, “you can sleep on the couch.”

  “Goddamn it, Gilda-”

  “Paulo Couto is a kind, caring man. He did what he did to spare that woman grief. Can you get that through your thick skull?”

  “So you do agree with him.”

  “I’ve had just about enough of this. I didn’t come home to subject myself to an interrogation. Go question some criminal and leave me alone.”

  Gilda got to her feet, stormed into the bedroom, and slammed the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You need anything else?” Rosa asked. Mondays were slow days, and this Monday had been even slower than usual. It was only 7:00 P.M., not late as far as Mansur was concerned, but Rosa was already wearing her tennis shoes, a sure sign that she was on her way out the door.

  Mansur shook his head, didn’t respond when she wished him a good evening, and waited until he heard the ping of the elevator before opening his refrigerator. The damned thing wasn’t big enough for more than a couple of six-packs, and the ice cubes were tiny, tinier still when Rosa didn’t fill the trays as, once again, she hadn’t.

  Mansur gritted his teeth. There was enough ice for three drinks, maybe four. Three drinks was nothing, just enough to get a taste. One more mistake like that, just one more, and he’d fling Rosa out on her ass. That would mean he’d have to hire his third secretary since August, but so what? Secretaries were expendable.

  He harvested what ice there was, twisting the plastic trays, letting it clink into the little crystal bucket with the silver top. Then he fished out a handful, put it in a glass, and wiped the wetness from his hand on the seat of his pants. The tongs were for visitors.

  Mansur kept his whiskey under lock and key; had to, otherwise the cleaners would get at it. One time, he’d found the deep amber of his Black Label watered down to the pale straw of his J amp;B. Right after that, he’d put the lock on the cupboard. He took out a bottle and checked the tiny mark he’d made on the label. The level hadn’t lowered since last time. Thing was, Rosa had a key to that cabinet too-and he really didn’t trust anyone when it came to his whiskey. Or much else, for that matter.

  The whiskey came from Scotland via Paraguay, all smuggled in, all delivered directly to the office. That not only provided him with cheaper alcohol, it also concealed the extent of his consumption from Magda. He knew damned well she wouldn’t give a shit if he drank himself into an early grave, but the money it cost was something else. She’d bitch about that.

  And bitching, when it came right down to it, was about the only thing he did get from Magda. Bitching about where he spent his evenings, bitching about the occasional perfume she smelled on his clothes. Bitch, bitch, bitch-and no sex.

  Magda didn’t drink, either; but Magda could go fuck herself, because he could always find someone to drink with. He could also find women to have sex with, so her attitude on that score didn’t bother him either. The glue that held their marriage together was his hard-earned money. Magda would strip him to his underwear if he gave her half a chance.

  He uncorked the bottle and poured himself a generous dose. Swirling the ice with a forefinger, watching it dissolve, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the desk.

  The door to his office was open and the whiskey bottle in plain sight. The odds were someone would show up before long.

  But no one did. And today, of all days, he had a great story to tell. As he sipped, he tried to put names to the faces on that airplane.

  The uppity stewardess was the first one who came to mind. And as he was thinki
ng about her, he remembered Juan Rivas too. With a name like that, it had to be the arrogant little prick with the dark skin, earring, and moustache. He’d kept the stewardess busy, practically monopolized her. Every time he’d wanted a refill, the little fairy seemed to sense it and get his finger on the call button first. One of the enduring impressions Mansur had of the flight was lots of sucking on ice in otherwise empty glasses.

  And then there was Motta. Motta of the birthmark. Motta, the dumb fuck. Mansur had good reason to remember him. How could he talk to Silva about Motta without getting his ass in a sling? Short answer: he couldn’t. But it really didn’t matter. It wouldn’t change anything, wouldn’t contribute to solving the cop’s case. Motta, that little weasel, didn’t have it in him to kill anybody. No, if anybody on that flight was a murderer, it was the guy who was posing as a priest. A hard case, that one, steely gray eyes, black hair, nose in his book all the time, none of that “love thy neighbor” stuff you’d expect from a clergyman.

  Mansur got up, dropped more ice into his glass-not much left now-and poured another drink. While he was on his feet, he decided to take a stroll around the floor, find some company.

  Emerson Cunha wasn’t at his desk. Cassio Zannoto was, but he didn’t have time for a drink: he was meeting somebody for dinner. That’s the way he said it. Somebody. Not his wife. Not a friend. Not a client. Somebody.

  Which meant he was being discreet. Which meant it was probably somebody who worked in the office. Maybe that new receptionist, the blond. Sneaky bastard, Zannoto. Nice piece of ass, the blond.

  He went back to his office, picked up the phone, and tried calling Gilmar Pedroso down on the second floor.

  No answer.

  His glass was empty again and he refilled it. He drank quickly, cracked the last vestiges of ice between his teeth, locked away the whiskey, and dumped the empty trays on Rosa’s desk along with a nasty note.