Every Bitter Thing cims-4

by Leighton Gage

  “‘Him’ being your customer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  “And then there was a sound.”

  “What kind of a sound?”

  “Hard to describe.”

  “Try.”

  “Sort of halfway between a pop and a spit.”

  Silva took that to be a silenced pistol.

  “And then,” Moura said, “the john, what’s his name again?”

  “Mansur.”

  “Mansur starts to scream, but he doesn’t finish it because it’s cut off by this other noise.”

  “What kind of a noise?”

  “Like a crunch, but squishier. Maybe like a hard splat.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I bent over and looked through the keyhole.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. I couldn’t see Mansur, and I couldn’t see the person who’d come in. But by that time, I was convinced that someone was beating him.”

  “Why? Why were you convinced?”

  “The sounds. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Like that. They went on and on.”

  “No voices?”

  “The john screamed a couple of times, begged whoever was doing it to stop.”

  “And before that?”

  “He said something when he first opened the door, and the person outside said something back, but I couldn’t hear what it was.”

  “Can you remember Mansur’s words?”

  “He said, ‘What the fuck is it?’ or something like that. He wasn’t at all polite.”

  “How about the voice of the person who knocked on the door. Any accent? Any speech defect?”

  “I told you. I couldn’t hear him.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I got the hell out of there, that’s what! I grabbed my shoes and purse, climbed through the bathroom window, jumped the wall in back, ran down to the road, and hightailed it back to town.”

  “How? How did you get back to town?”

  “Stuck my leg out and my thumb in the air and hitchhiked. The guy who picked me up was interested in a program, but my head was all fucked up by what had happened. I gave him a quick blow job, and he dropped me where I could get a taxi.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Me? Call the police? Just because somebody got beat up? Get real.”

  “When did you find out Mansur was dead?”

  “When I got up this afternoon. I saw it on the news.”

  “And you still elected not to come forward?”

  Moura squirmed in his chair.

  “No,” he said. “You got it all wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “A beating is one thing. Murder? That’s like, like really serious. I was going to do it. I was going to talk to the cops first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure you were,” Silva said.

  “You don’t have to take that tone with me, Chief Inspector. I’m not a criminal. You may disapprove of my lifestyle, but what I do isn’t illegal, and I’d never, ever hurt anyone.”

  Moura was indignant, and if he wasn’t sincere, he was a damned good actor.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  When the video disc arrived from Miami, Goncalves was at Guarulhos airport waiting for it. It was almost two in the morning by then, but Mainardi and Caetano were there, too, working the midnight to eight shift. By two thirty, they were all huddled in front of a television screen.

  “Nope,” Mainardi said, after the first group of passengers filed by the camera.

  “I backed it up to the previous flight,” Goncalves said. A new group of travelers started passing in review. “This is it. Pay attention.”

  Half a minute later, Mainardi sat bolt upright in his chair.

  Goncalves reacted by freezing the image.

  Caetano put his finger on the screen, pointing out a man with a brown birthmark on his cheek. “Motta,” he said.

  The image was sharp and clear, ideal for lifting a photo. Goncalves made a note of the timecode so he could locate it again with ease. “All right,” he said, “now let’s find the priest.”

  Silva, anxious to see the video, got up at six in the morning. By seven, he was at the Sao Paulo field office, where a yawning Goncalves was waiting for him.

  “You look like you could use some sleep.”

  “I’ll get my second wind any time now,” Goncalves said.

  Silva believed it. Goncalves, he knew, could spend an entire night clubbing and put in a full day thereafter.

  “Ah, youth,” he said.

  “Practice too,” Goncalves said.

  Silva rubbed his hands in anticipation. “All right,” he said, “let’s get to it. Who’s first?”

  “Motta.”

  “Play it.”

  Goncalves did, freezing the image as he’d done with the Customs agents.

  “I had time before you got in,” he said, “so I lifted the best frame. No hits on the database.”

  “Damn. You put it in circulation?”

  Goncalves nodded. “Every border control point, every field office, and every delegacia.”

  “Good. Who’s next?”

  “The kid.” He unfroze the image. They watched in silence for a while, then: “There. That’s him.”

  “Doesn’t look nervous at all,” Silva said. “Why did they pick on him?”

  “One of them took a dislike to him,” Goncalves said.

  “Just that? No good reason at all?”

  “No good reason at all.”

  Silva ran a hand through his hair. “Canalhas,” he said. “Where’s the priest?”

  “Coming up. I didn’t bother with the timecodes. All the business-class people boarded together. It’s just as fast to let it run.”

  They went through an eerie parade of the dead: Juan Rivas, Professor Paulo Cruz, Victor Neves, Jonas Palhares, Luis Mansur, and then…

  “Clancy,” Goncalves said.

  The priest was a handsome man, young, with an open face, dressed entirely in black. A sweater was draped over his shoulders; a small valise was clutched in his right hand.

  “You give him the same treatment?” Silva asked.

  “Same treatment. The e-mails went out about two hours ago.”

  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” Silva said.

  They got lucky.

  The first call came in at three minutes past nine and by then Hector was there to take it. The call was from a delegado in Santo Andre, a satellite town southeast of the capital.

  “You one of the guys who’s looking for Abilio Sacca?”

  “Who?” Hector said.

  “You got him tagged as Darcy Motta, but that’s wrong. His name is Abilio Sacca. I got a rap sheet on him as long as my arm. Better yet, I got his ass in a cell. All you gotta do is come over here and pick him up.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Got something to write with?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Avenida Duque de Caxias, 384, in Santo Andre. It’s a gray building. You’ll be able to park right in front. Ask for me. In case you didn’t get it the first time, the name’s Carillo, with two l’s. I’m the delegado titular.”

  “With two l’s. Got it. I really appreciate the call, Delegado.”

  “Don’t mention it. You have something on him you can make stick? I got enough problems in this district without Abilio Sacca running around loose.”

  Fifteen minutes later another call came in. This one was routed to Goncalves.

  “Agent Goncalves? Ricardo Vasco speaking. I’m the day manager at the Hotel Gloria. You dropped by a while back-”

  “Yes, Senhor Vasco. I remember you.”

  “The guest you asked about? Dennis Clancy?”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s back. He and his wife just checked in.”

  “His wife? Clancy is a priest!”

  “Yes, I know. Distressing, isn’t it? I regret to say it happens quite often.”r />
  “Tell your people to stay away from the room. Where will I find you?”

  “At the reception desk.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Goncalves hung up and dialed Hector’s extension. Silva answered.

  “Don’t go alone,” Silva said when Goncalves finished talking.

  “You don’t want to be in on the bust?”

  “Hector and I have a line on Darcy Motta. We’re going to Santo Andre. Take Arnaldo and bring in the priest.”

  In the days when the Avenida Ipiranga was the jewel of Sao Paulo’s thoroughfares, the Hotel Gloria was the jewel of the Avenida Ipiranga.

  But those days were long gone.

  The lobby still boasted silver-plated chandeliers and faux-Aubusson carpeting, but brass had begun to shine through the silver and the carpeting had worn thin.

  The Gloria’s restaurant had never managed to find quite the right chef or maitre. It had closed for renovation in the late eighties. More than two decades later, it was still closed, and the renovation was no further along than the sign on the door. Management put up a new one every six months (sooner if someone swiped it), to sustain the illusion of a future reopening.

  All the rooms in the Gloria were, with one exception, small. Smaller, certainly, than they should have been in a hotel that charged the prices the Gloria did. The exception was the private suite designed for the owner’s personal use. That particular accommodation occupied the entire top floor of the hotel and featured an open-air terrace as big as a parking lot. Their first look at that terrace never failed to engender squeals of delight from the impressionable young ladies the owner had been fond of entertaining there. And that, of course, had been the purpose behind its construction in the first place.

  When the owner died in the early seventies, the suite had been taken over by a personality whose real name was Meyer Katz, but whom all of Brazil knew as Bobo.

  The television program that made Bobo a household name billed itself as a talent hunt. But in reality, performers were chosen not because they had talent, but because they lacked it. Bobo, dressed in a clown suit and a stovepipe hat with a flower pinned to it, would receive them with great fanfare and give them a big buildup. Then they’d sing, or dance, or tell jokes, or do whatever they thought they could do well-and generally did very badly-until the studio audience would begin to groan and boo. At that point Bobo, feigning surprise and disappointment, would squeeze the rubber bulb on his horn. Honk. Honk. Honk. And the unfortunate performers would be forcibly removed from the stage with a long hook resembling a shepherd’s crook. The mere sight of that crook creeping in from offstage was enough to throw the five hundred people in the studio audience, and millions more watching throughout the country, into paroxysms of laughter.

  Add to the formula the occasional performer who introduced an element of surprise by demonstrating true talent, add seven scantily clad women who danced to canned music, and you had a recipe that made Bobo a household name for a generation.

  And things might have gone on for still another generation if fate hadn’t cancelled Bobo’s act. One night, returning from dinner with one of the more lissome of his dancers, Brazil’s most famous clown had had a fatal heart attack. He collapsed and expired right there in the Gloria’s lobby.

  This lent cachet to the hotel where he’d lived and died. Many were the tourists who wanted to spend a night in the same place Bobo had spent his nights. And many were the tourists who wanted to see the spot where he’d breathed his last.

  The widow of the Gloria’s original builder, the woman who’d become the hotel’s sole proprietress, recognized that Bobo’s fading fame wouldn’t sustain the place forever. But at the moment it still did.

  And thus it was that the Hotel Gloria went on, providing small, relatively clean, overpriced rooms at an occupancy rate that sometimes exceeded eighty percent.

  The two cops followed each other through the revolving doors, skirted the easel with the black-bordered photo of Bobo, and headed for the hotel’s reception desk.

  Ricardo Vasco, as promised, was there to meet them. He was a white-haired gentleman in his mid-sixties, somber and thin. Goncalves introduced Arnaldo. Arnaldo took the lead.

  “We appreciate your call, Senhor Vasco.”

  “I’m pleased to be of service. You don’t intend to take Senhor Clancy and his wife out of here in handcuffs, do you?”

  “Hopefully not.”

  Vasco looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear it. It wouldn’t be a scene we’d relish. Such things have a way of upsetting the guests.”

  “You sound like it’s happened before.”

  Vasco smiled a sad smile. “The Gloria has been here a long time. For that matter, so have I.”

  “Where’s our man?”

  “Sixth floor. Room 666.”

  “Six sixty-six,” Goncalves said. “But that-”

  “Is the number of the beast,” Vasco said. “Yes, I’ve heard that one before. Silly, isn’t it?”

  But Goncalves didn’t think it was silly at all. He was already turning pale.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Abilio Sacca’s criminal history was such that it would have caused even the most dedicated of social workers to throw up her hands in defeat.

  Still only forty-two, Sacca had a criminal record going back thirty-three years, more than two thirds of them spent behind bars. First arrest: age nine. Shoplifting. Charges dismissed. First conviction: age eleven. Armed robbery. It was Sacca’s debut in that particular specialty-and his last performance in it.

  He’d the misfortune to choose a plainclotheswoman for his victim. When she’d drawn her gun, the woman reported, the kid had dropped the shard of broken glass he’d been threatening her with and started to cry.

  Since he either didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to, the whereabouts of his parents, Abilio was committed to the FEBEM, a reform school where no reform ever took place. The judge gave him five years, partly to get him off the streets, partly in the hope he’d get an education. The judgment was successful on both counts. It kept him away from honest citizens, and it taught him a great deal about breaking the law.

  It was true that he’d never become a successful criminal, but that stemmed from Abilio’s own shortcomings and had nothing to do with the excellent instruction he’d received from his fellow delinquents. He was a pathetically bad liar, and he liked people, commendable attributes in an honest citizen but two major drawbacks for a criminal. He was, furthermore, a practicing alcoholic. Of all things in life, he was most fond of getting drunk with a few convivial companions.

  Sao Paulo’s underworld being what it was, it stood to reason that not all of those convivial companions had Abilio’s best interests at heart. Sometimes they were police informers; sometimes, even, cops. That had led to a number of charges, some proven, some not, but Abilio never seemed to learn. Within a week of being released, he would be back in one bar or another, shooting his mouth off all over again.

  Abilio’s most recent arrest hadn’t stemmed from indiscretion, but it had been monumentally stupid all the same. His objective had been a jewelry store, and jewelry stores, because of their alarm systems, were invariably hard targets. A wiser crook would have picked something easier, or would have planned better. A wiser crook wouldn’t have undertaken the enterprise dead drunk. And a wiser crook certainly wouldn’t have chosen a shop where the owner lived upstairs and was known to possess a firearm.

  Sacca’s record contained another indication that he wasn’t among the brightest: other than the time he’d spent at the cost of the state, Sacca had never lived anywhere except in Santo Andre. He was, by now, one of the “usual suspects,” one of the first people the cops would look for whenever a burglary was committed.

  Burglary. Burglary. Burglary. As Silva scanned Sacca’s record the word kept repeating itself. No murders, no assaults, nothing but burglaries.

  And that, Silva thought, was inconsistent with the personality of a mu
rderer. Sacca may not have been good at what he did, but it was a specialty. And that specialty was nonviolent. After his single youthful indiscretion Sacca had never again been accused, or suspected, of threatening someone’s life, much less of taking it.

  Silva studied Sacca’s most recent likeness, the booking photo from the jewelry-store affair. It revealed some things the video hadn’t. Sacca had large brown eyes and rather delicate features. Despite the stain on his cheek, he was a type who would have attracted sexual attention from his fellow prisoners, particularly when he was a younger man. That fact, and a further perusal of Sacca’s sins, strengthened Silva in his conviction that they hadn’t yet found their killer. If Sacca had had a violent turn, he would have fought to protect himself from rape. There would have been a record of fights, maybe even stabbings, in the time he was behind bars. But there was nothing of that nature. On the contrary, the man had, again and again, been given time off for good behavior.

  Of course, it was remotely possible that no one who’d shared prison with him had found Abilio attractive. More likely, Silva thought, he’d had one powerful lover or had been, in the parlance of prisoners, “everybody’s punk.” A man who’d put up with that and not fight back did not seem like a person capable of doling out the hideous damage done to any of the current victims.

  Before they even spoke, Silva had a strong conviction that Abilio Sacca was not his man. That conviction was strengthened when he actually had Sacca seated in front of him.

  Sacca’s eyes were reminiscent of a fawn’s, without a sign of even moderate intellect behind them. And he had a tic, an irregular spasm of the muscles around his right eye.

  Silva found it disturbing, so disturbing that he was having trouble giving Sacca the fish-eyed stare he reserved for felons.

  “Your eye always do that?” he asked, confronting the distraction head-on.

  “Nah. I only get it sometimes,” Sacca said.