Carla hesitated. She leaned against the balcony’s wrought iron rail, idly observing a silver Polo parked half on the curb below. Did she want a sleuth partner? The past few days had been part nightmare, part adventure, horrible but oddly exciting, with an edge of unreality that must come from being on her own in a foreign country.
On the other hand—Carla glanced at Natália, who was consulting her wristwatch—I speak no Portuguese. I’ll have a better chance getting into that corridor with someone who knows the language. “Maybe an hour from now,” she told her neighbor. “First I have to take care of some business at an antique shop.”
Natália’s face fell. “I cannot go so soon. Today I make Manuel a special lunch. And tonight we go out to dinner. Is our anniversary.”
“We can go this afternoon,” Carla said, warming, now, to the idea of an ally who could help her poke around Costa’s building. “Maybe two o’clock?” she suggested. “We could meet in front of the souvenir shop.”
“Two-thirty, is better.”
“Two-thirty, then,” Carla agreed, and they went back inside.
Patting Carla’s arm, Natália said, “You make good cafezinho. If you like, one day I show you how to make broa.”
“I would love that! I’ve been trying some Portuguese recipes, but broa looks complicated.”
“Is nothing.” Natália flicked the air with her hand.
At the door, Carla thought to say, “Happy Anniversary, I hope your Manuel takes you someplace special.”
“We are going to Restaurante Centurium.”
“Good choice!” Restaurante Centurium belonged to the elegant Hotel Bracara Augusta, a hotel with a Roman theme, including pillars at the entrance from the lobby into the restaurant, and an ancient, historic well inside the restaurant.
After closing the door, Carla limped back to the kitchen to do a quick wash-up. She had thought of wearing flats today, but, strangely, the stilettos were more comfortable, once she had cut portions of a dish towel and made a folded pad to put under her left heel.
Just walk slowly.
The day looked newly promising as she gathered her purse, put her camera and cell phone inside, and set off for the antique store.
Chapter Seventeen – An Expedition
At Antiguidades do Minho, Carla found the owner on a rickety chair at the back of the store cleaning an oil painting with bread crumbs. He rotated the wad of bread gently, his knobby knuckles bulging from arthritis. The gilt on the wide, ornate frame was chipped, but Carla could see that a beautiful cityscape underlay the grime.
He propped the painting against another chair, his smile turning his face into a web of wrinkles. “Your mirror is wrapped up and ready for your person from Porto. When do they come?”
“Saturday, when they pick up the paintings from tonight’s auction,” Carla said, as they walked to the front of the store, the proprietor’s wiry torso swaying from side to side above his bowed legs.
After she paid him, there was time for a bite of lunch before meeting Natália. She walked quickly to Tasquinha Dom Ferreira, a traditional family style restaurant a few doors away, and ordered sardinhas fritas com arroz de feijão—fried sardines and rice with beans. While she waited for her order, Carla took a small notebook from her handbag and pen to sketch out her imagined layout of the souvenir shop. She hadn’t been inside, but since the entrance was at the sharp corner, the door to the outside corridor had to be in the longer wall opposite. The corridor was probably a holding area for deliveries and a place for garbage cans that would be put on the street for later pick-up. She hadn’t really noticed when she glanced out Costa’s office window.
Carla tried to picture herself browsing around the souvenir shop, sidling over to the door, asking innocently, “Where does this lead?” Or maybe Natália could ask in Portuguese. Either way, though, what was their excuse for wanting to go into the corridor? She doubted they could just walk through the shop the way her imagined culprit would.
The question still pricked at her as she walked along Rua Dos Chãos to the shop where Natália was waiting outside the open door. A small sign in the window read Loja de Presentes de Torres.
Natália had added a gauzy, red-flowered scarf, looped in casual swirls around her neck. Her dark eyes shone with anticipation. “We are ready, yes?”
“We need a plan.” Carla glanced at the café across from Costa’s shop, remembering that Senhora Gonzaga seemed to notice a lot of what went on. She sidled closer to the open doorway to stay out of sight, and peered inside the souvenir shop.
Inside, at a counter against the side wall to the right, the proprietor, tall and angular with a long, thin face was showing a fold-out collection of postcards to a young, cherubic-looking man in Bermudas. Behind the owner, a door led to what must be the shop’s inventory. Directly across from Carla, light poured through the glass pane of a door exactly where she had sketched it. So far, her idea was feasible.
“Maybe you could look around the shop while I buy postcards,” Carla said to Natália in a low voice. “Or ask the owner about something you don’t see in the shop, so that he has to go to back and check.”
“I have better idea,” Natália said. “I will explain you are American reporter. You are writing report for magazine about shops in Braga. Many buildings here have much history. You want to write the history of his shop.”
Carla gave her a thumbs-up. “That’s great!” She took out her notebook, turning the page with her sketch. “I do write about Braga on my blog. Tell him I want to interview him.”
“He will like magazine better than blog. It sounds more famous.”
Carla shook her head. “Then I’ll have to make up a phony magazine name, and he’d want to see the article. This way, I can give him my card and write a post he really can read—if he knows English and if he's online. With a shop, though, he should be,” she added. Still, Costa hadn’t had a website for his shop. Not one she could find, anyway. But the idea of writing about Loja de Presentes de Torres appealed to her. Why not a post about a quaint souvenir shop? With a pang, she remembered she had wanted to write about Costa’s wine shop before she found him dead behind his counter.
“Okay,” Natália said amiably. “I tell him you have famous blog people read all over the world.”
Hold that happy thought, kiddo.
They entered as the cherubic-looking customer left. The owner gave them a wide smile, showing nicotine-stained teeth. Carla drifted around the shop while Natália engaged him in conversation. The usual tourist items littered display shelves and racks: statues of the Sé Catedral, scarves, baskets, ashtrays, thimbles, ceramic roosters, bookmarks, calendars with scenes of Braga. A woman with dark, rippled hair gazed at a display of refrigerator magnets. A twenty-something guy twirled a rack with maps and guidebooks. A man with a cigar fingered a ceramic mug showing a picture of a rooster.
Carla jotted down perfunctory notes to include in an introductory paragraph, then focused on the shop’s arched ceiling, weathered stone walls, angled corners, and tiled floors. The architecture would matter more than souvenirs to potential clients interested in classical lines and old-world charm.
While she was considering taking a photograph of the bronze, hand-shaped doorknob on the door to the corridor, the proprietor came around his counter with Natália, who said, “Senhor Torres is happy you will write about his shop.”
There was a stir of interest from the other customers, then they went back to perusing merchandise.
“I speak some English,” Senhor Torres told Carla. Looking around proudly, he said, “This is the oldest shop in Braga.”
Perfect! “How old is it?” she asked. Aided by Natália’s translations, Carla took notes, as Senhor Torres expanded into the shop’s history, including the large inscribed stone in the side wall that had been taken from ruins of the older city’s castle wall.
“There are many such stones in buildings all over our city.”
After writing this down, Carla let her gla
nce drift to the door in the far wall. “Does that go outside?” she asked, hoping she sounded curious and not merely stupid, since clearly it did.
He nodded. “Go outside and take a look. I must . . ..” he nodded at the man with the cigar who had taken the ceramic mug to the counter.
She and Natália went out onto the rectangular patio. Garbage bags propped neatly against Torres’s wall and stacked boxes from a recent delivery confirmed her earlier guess. Across from her, Senhor Costa’s wall, painted the same bright blue of the tiles in the front façade, was bare of bags or boxes. A rose bush in a pot to one side of the office door was unfurling white petals, and dark pink geraniums bloomed in a pot on the other side.
So Senhor Costa liked flowers. For some reason that brought a sting to Carla’s eyes. She blinked it away, took her camera from her purse, and began snapping pictures—Senhor Torres’s wall, the green-framed doorway to his shop, the street gates at each end. Near the gate at one end, two wrought-iron chairs flanked a glass-topped table.
She moved to Costa’s doorway and window, hoping Senhor Torres wouldn’t wonder, if he came out, at her change of subject matter. Natália had stooped to daintily pick up something with her fingernails from the threshold of Costa’s door. She wrapped it in a handkerchief and put in her purse, flaring her eyes at Carla like someone from a spy movie.
Carla walked over and peered in Costa’s window. The office looked much as she remembered it—magazines and envelopes were still in tidy stacks on his rectangular desk. The computer was gone, though, along with the folder stuffed with papers. The police must have taken them to headquarters to examine at leisure. His door to the wine cellar was closed, as was the door to the store. An empty room with no clues that she could discern.
At least she knew her suspicions about one thing were true. The corridor was easily accessible.
Senhor Torres’s reflection appeared behind her in the window pane, like a shimmery ghost, the corners of his mouth turned down. “The owner was my friend,” he said quietly. “Someone killed him for expensive bottle of Port. The police say the case was smashed to pieces.”
Carla turned, taking in the pouches under Torres’s eyes, his slumped shoulders. For a moment, she thought of telling him she had found the body, then decided it would make her story about a blog post too coincidental. Instead, she asked, “Did you see anything when it happened? Hear anything?”
“I didn’t see or hear nothing until the police came. And then so many customers came in to ask what has happened, because the street is closed. I couldn’t tell them nothing.” He shook his head. “I had to read the newspaper the next day.”
For a man who spoke “some English,” Senhor Torres was pretty fluent. “It must be terrible to lose a friend that way,” Carla said.
“Yes,” he murmured. He waved a finger toward the table and chairs by the gate. “In the evening, we would close our shops and sit there and have glass of Port and talk before I went home. My friend had too many worries.”
Too many worries? Carla regarded the chairs, then adjusted the wrist strap on her camera. As if only idly interested, she asked, “What kind of worries?”
“He wanted to leave Braga. He wanted to go to Brazil, but he could not.”
Wow, that’s a new wrinkle. Carla made her voice incredulous. “Who would want to leave a beautiful city like Braga?”
Natália had composed her face into an expression of polite interest, but her posture signaled high alert.
Senhor Torres gave Carla a warm smile. “I am glad you like our city.” He sighed, then. “My friend wanted to get away from things. Many things.”
Like O Lobo and Walsh hunting him down for the duke’s bottle, maybe?
Senhor Torres cupped his hands around his elbows and rocked back on his heels. “‘Francisco,’ he told me many times, ‘Francisco, I could disappear in Brazil, but for my niece. My sister depend on me that I watch over her. I cannot go nowhere.’”
“Por que o Brasil?” Natália asked. “Brazil is dangerous country,” she told Carla.
Senhor Torres cocked his head. “Ele tinha um monte de dinheiro.” He rubbed his fingers and thumb together. To Carla he said, “You see, he had very much money. You can live well in Brazil with money. And Brazil is very big. If you change your name, no one can find you.”
“Why did he want to disappear?” Why did he want to change his name?
“He have . . . had . . . bad relation with his wife.”
What a wonderful gossip Senhor Torres was! This was more than Carla had hoped for. She wondered if he had shared any of this with the police.
“I tell him, ‘Go, Roberto! Go to Brazil. I will look after your niece.’ But he say to me, ‘No, it is more than look after her. I have to keep money for her to finish her university program.’ You see, the niece is very smart student,” Torres explained, “and this is her first year.”
A flurry of questions rose in Carla’s mind, all of them questions she couldn’t ask: How much money? Money from gambling? Black market? Blackmail? Did he ever mention Paulo?
Natália, like a hound on the scent, said in a voice that dripped sympathy, “Seria solitário a desaparecer sozinhos . . ..” To Carla she explained, “It would be lonely to disappear all alone.”
Senhor Torres’s lip curled in a confidential smile. “My friend would not be all alone. You see . . .,” He opened his palms as if to lay out a scenario for them, but a woman’s high, clear voice called from inside the shop, “Hello? Hello! Anybody here?”
Senhor Torres dropped his hands. “Perdoe-me.” He indicated the door with a jerk of his head, his face conveying his disappointment at not finishing his story, then motioned them to follow him inside, where two elderly women waited at the counter. The earlier customers were gone.
Carla gave Senhor Torres her card, underlining her website with her fingernail. “You can read my blog post about your shop next week.”
Outside, she took a picture of the shop’s entrance. Inside, Senhor Torres was behind the counter again, leaning forward, his elbows propped on it as he showed her card to the two women.
Natália said, “We can go to that café and talk.”
Senhora Gonzaga’s café? I don’t think so. “The owner is the woman I told you about,” Carla said. “I don’t think we should be talking about Senhor Costa under her nose.”
“Under her nose?”
“We shouldn’t talk about him in front of her. I think she had a thing for him,” Carla said.
“Excuse me, can you help me?” The thin American woman Carla had seen Tuesday in Gonzaga’s café came up beside them. She smiled apologetically and waved what Carla recognized as a map of historic Braga. Today she wore blue boyfriend jeans, a coral tee and silver flats. A small camera hung from a strap around her neck.
What horrible sunglasses! They were enormous and round, with wide, white plastic frames.
“Can you tell me where the Bis . . . the Bis-cainhos museum is?” the woman asked, then grimaced. “I’m probably saying it all wrong.”
“You said it well,” Natália offered kindly, but even Carla could tell she hadn’t.
“Go across Praça República,” Carla said, “then turn right on Rua do Souto. Then keep going, and just past the arch take another right. You can’t miss it.”
“You’re from the States!” The woman folded her map, put it in her pocket, and rested her hand on her hip, her expression chatty. “So am I! Nevada. Reno. Tiffany Hill.” She held out her hand to Carla.
On a different afternoon, Carla would have enjoyed pursuing this conversation, but right now she wanted only to discuss the patio area between the two shops and Costa’s desire to go to Brazil. She gave Tiffany’s hand a brief press, then said, “You might want to hurry. They close at five-thirty, and there’s a lot to see.”
“Oh.” Tiffany looked disappointed. “Okay.”
“Especially the gardens,” Carla added, to soften her brush-off. “They really are amazing.”
“I love gardens! Thanks for the tip.”
As they watched her hurry off, Natália asked, “What is ‘have a thing for’? You say the woman in the café have a thing for Senhor Costa.”
“I think she liked him a lot. More than a friend would,” Carla said. “She got strange when I asked questions about him. Let’s go to Jardim de Santa Bárbara to talk. It’ll be private enough.”
A few minutes later, they sat among the hedges and rosebushes. The sun brightened the yellow and purple pansies, not far from where she had sat with Maria Tuesday morning under her shadow’s surveillance, while somehow O Lobo had spied on them.
Carla said, “So, what did we find out?”
“Senhora Costa have much money.” Natália held up one finger. “He want to disappear in Brazil.” Two fingers.
“Running off with a lot of money could explain why someone wanted to kill him. And why he’d want to disappear,” Carla said slowly. Money from con jobs? Wine fraud?
“And he would not be alone,” Natália said, holding up three fingers.
Carla nodded. “Maria said he had another woman.” She wondered again whether Senhora Gonzaga was that very woman. Either way, maybe he planned to dump both her and his wife and run off with some young chick.
“Is like a telenovela.”
“Yeah,” Carla said absently. Who, exactly, did he want to disappear from?
“I find a clue,” Natália said. “A candy wrapper.” She opened her purse and took out a lacy handkerchief. Unfolding it, she showed Carla a shiny gold candy wrapper. “Is evidence.”
“I think Senhor Costa had a sweet tooth,” Carla said. “I found one like that Monday in his office.” She drew in a sharp breath, remembering her trip to the café on Tuesday. Like a replay of a video scene on her smart phone, she saw again Senhora Gonzaga pull a toffee from her pocket, open the gold foil, and pop the candy in her mouth.
A gold foil wrapping just like this one.
“Manuel, he likes candy, too. Most when he worry about something,” Natália said. “I think it relax him to unwrap it. He is telling himself, ‘be calm.’ When I see him unwrap candy, slow and careful, I say, ‘Come, Manuel. Tell me what is worry you.’”
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