“All by myself.”
“You’re lying. How about you get out of here and let me get back to business? Your welcome just dried up.”
Back at the office, Mara was waiting for them. “That Sa woman knew more than she let on.”
“Sa woman?” Arnaldo said.
“Juraci’s neighbor.”
“Didn’t she already tell all to Hector?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She didn’t want to appear nosy.”
“So you…?”
“Played nosy myself.”
“Watcha mean, played?”
“Shut up, Nunes. You want to hear this or not?”
“We want,” Silva said. “Ignore him.”
“I got her to gossiping.”
“Kindred spirits,” Arnaldo said.
“One more remark like that, Nunes-”
“Let her talk, Arnaldo,” Silva said. “Go on, Mara.”
“After her husband left,” Mara said, “Angela went to an open window and stood behind the curtain.”
“To eavesdrop on the conversation?”
“Uh huh.”
“And then?”
“She heard Juraci call the postman Jose.”
“A name? You got a name?”
“I did.”
“Excellent.”
“It would be,” Arnaldo said. “if the guy’s name was Nicodemos or Lemuel. But Jose? Jose has got to be the most common name in this country.”
“For once,” she said, “you’re right. Statistically, it is. There are one hundred and twenty six postmen in the greater metropolitan area with the name Jose. But I’m going to find us our Jose.”
“How?”
“I had one of my girls go through the post office’s personnel records. She brought me photographs and home addresses of every damned one of the hundred and twenty-six.”
“Which you’re going to show to Senhora Sa?” Silva said.
“Correct.”
“Good. What else are you working on?”
“A girl’s best friend.”
“That would be me,” Arnaldo said.
“That would be the diamonds, Nunes. The words friend and nightmare are not synonyms. On the off-chance they try to sell the stones here in Brazil, I’m getting detailed specifications on the ones the Artist bought.”
“He bought them already?”
“He did, and I’ve got a diamond expert going over them as we speak. We’ll circulate the results to every registered jeweler in the country. If we get lucky, we’ll be on those guys like flies on a big smelly pile of Arnaldo Nuneses.”
“That,” Arnaldo said, “was uncalled for.”
Mara smiled. “I thought you’d like it if I talked dirty.”
Chapter Twenty
When Tarso Mello made a minute adjustment to his Hermes necktie, one of his French cuffs slid back to reveal a gold Rolex. That, Goncalves suspected, was what the adjustment was designed to do-allow him to display his expensive watch.
“As I told you on the telephone,” Mello said haughtily, “I never discuss my clients’ personal lives with anyone.”
“And as I told you,” Goncalves said, “I find that commendable. But, in this specific instance, I’m going to have to insist on your cooperation. What you tell me will be held in the strictest confidence.”
“I don’t propose to tell you anything,” Mello said.
Goncalves leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “How would you like to have your taxes audited?”
Mello blinked. His eyes were a striking shade of blue, but didn’t seem to have much behind them. It took a moment for him to grasp the significance of the non sequitur.
“Are you blackmailing me?” he said.
“Not at all. I asked you a simple question. How would you like to have your taxes audited? Gone over, in fact, with a fine-tooth comb? You think I can’t get a court order to access your bank accounts? Think again.”
“This is preposterous!”
Goncalves shrugged. “The choice is yours. You either talk to me about Cintia Tadesco, or I’m out of here. But I won’t be gone for long, and when I come back, it will be with accountants from the receita federal.”
Mello took in a deep breath and looked out the window, as if something outside had captured his attention. Not likely, as Mello’s office was on the twenty-third floor of a highrise on Avenida Paulista. All the buildings on his block were skyscrapers, and his view didn’t extend any further than the other side of the street.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, sullenly.
“There’s a rumor going around that you have a personal relationship with Cintia Tadesco. True or false?”
“Define personal relationship,” he said.
“That the two of you are lovers.”
Mello met Goncalves’s eyes, broke into a broad grin, and then into an outright laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Goncalves said.
“What’s funny, Agent Goncalves, is that you couldn’t be more misinformed.”
“Couldn’t I?”
“I’m gay, Agent Goncalves, gay and out of the closet since my mother died.”
“My condolences.”
“Condolences? Are you a homophobe?” Mello said it with a straight face, tried to make Goncalves believe his question was a serious one.
Leo Marques had been right. Mello was a very bad actor.
“When did she pass away?” Goncalves said.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but it was at the end of last year.”
“You live alone?”
Mello looked petulant. The interview had taken on overtones of an interrogation. “I live with my partner.”
“Where?”
“Granja Viana.”
Goncalves gave Mello his best suspicious stare. Marques would have been impressed.
“Juraci Santos lives in Granja Viana,” he said.
“A lot of people live in Granja Viana. What’s your point?”
“It wasn’t a point. It was an observation. What’s your partner’s name?”
Mello’s eyes got big. Outrage, maybe. Or fear?
“Edson Campos. Leave him out of it.”
“Why should I?”
“He has nothing to do with my work or my clients. He doesn’t know Cintia. He isn’t even involved in the entertainment industry.”
Mello’s voice had turned shrill. Goncalves decided it was outrage.
“No?”
“No. He’s a veterinary technician.”
“Tell me more about Senhorita Tadesco.”
Taking the spotlight off his partner had an immediate calming effect. Mello seemed to relax.
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you like her?”
“Do I what?”
“Like her. Not as a client. As a person.”
“What’s that got to do with-”
“Just answer the question, Senhor Mello.”
“Like her? Actually, I do.”
“The way I hear it, most people hate her.”
“I’m not most people. I find her candor and singlemindedness refreshing. I don’t hate her a bit, and she knows I don’t. She wouldn’t continue to retain me if I did.”
“How’s her relationship with her prospective mother-in-law?”
“Cintia doesn’t discuss her personal life with me.”
“Never?”
“Never!”
“You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you, Senhor Mello? I don’t like lies.”
“I’m not lying, and I resent the implication that I am.”
“You don’t recall Cintia saying anything to you about Juraci Santos?”
“No.”
“How important to Cintia is her relationship with Tico Santos?”
“Very important. She loves him.”
“How can you possibly be sure?”
“What?”
“If, as you’ve just alleged, Cint
ia doesn’t discuss her personal life with you, how can you be sure she loves Tico?”
“It’s… it’s been in the newspapers, in the magazines.”
“And you believe everything you read in the magazines?”
“I… I…”
Mello’s gape reminded Goncalves of a fish. Goncalves disliked fish.
“He was nervous as hell.” Goncalves was on the street again, calling Silva to report. “I think he’s hiding something, and the dumb bastard isn’t good at it.”
“So you don’t think Mello is particularly intelligent?”
“Hell, no. He’s a dumb fuck. You think it’s true? That part about his being gay?”
“I think it must be. He’d know how easy it would be to check. He even encouraged you to do so.”
“Yeah, that’s true I guess.”
“And if he’s nervous, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s hiding something. Let’s put Mello on the back burner for a minute. Remember that postman?”
“The one Juraci’s neighbors saw her talking to?”
“Correct. The Sa woman has identified him from a photo. Come back to the office. You and Hector are going to pay a visit to the gentleman.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The postman’s name was Jose Afonso Lyra. He lived in Penha, a lower-middle class neighborhood in the northern suburbs. The narrow, one-way streets were unpaved, the signposts few, and Hector and Goncalves had to stop several times for directions. The sun had set by the time they arrived.
The Lyra manse turned out to be a tiny, free-standing house, located on an equally tiny lot and constructed of unpainted concrete blocks. A dim glow shone through the shutters. The front door was ajar. From within, they could hear the audio of Radio Mundo’s third soap opera of the night.
Hector took a picture out of his pocket, a copy lifted from Lyra’s personnel records.
“This is him.”
Goncalves brought the photo close to his face and studied it in the light of a street lamp. “Scrawny little runt like that isn’t going to give us any trouble.”
“No? I ran into a fellow once who was even smaller and scrawnier. He had a shotgun. He killed three cops before they brought him down.”
Goncalves handed the photo back and loosened the Glock in his holster. He kept one hand on the grip, as he followed Hector up the concrete path.
There was no doorbell. Hector balled a fist and rapped on the wood.
“Senhor Lyra?”
There was a rustling from inside, and a skinny scarecrow of a man holding a drinking glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other appeared in the opening. His personnel records from the post office had given his age as forty-two, but he looked older. His only garment was a ragged pair of shorts. Goncalves took his hand off the butt of his gun.
“Who are you guys?” the scarecrow said.
“Federal cops,” Hector said. “Are you Jose Lyra?”
“Yeah, I’m him.” Lyra frowned. “What do you want with me?”
“We want to talk to you about the argument you had with Juraci Santos,” Hector said.
“Ah, crap. What did she tell you? That I was blackmailing her, or some such shit?”
“She didn’t tell us anything,” Hector said. “She’s been kidnapped.”
“Really?” Lyra said raising his eyebrows.
He was either the last person in Brazil who didn’t know what had happened to the Artist’s mother, or he was lying.
“You don’t watch the news?” Goncalves said. “Read the papers?”
“I get home too late for the news, and I get all the reading I want from addresses on envelopes. So she got her ass kidnapped, did she? Hell, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, not even that selfish bitch.”
“Why do you call her that?”
“Because she is. Come on in. Have a drink. I’ll tell you all about it.”
All Lyra had to offer was cachaca, but the cachaca was out of a jug, and it was amber-colored. A jug meant domestically produced; amber that it was aged. Both cops accepted a glass, sipped, made appreciative noises.
“Yeah,” Lyra said, “smooth, isn’t it? Made on a fazenda near Riberao Preto. A friend of mine brings it to me whenever he’s in town. Okay, you asked about Juraci? Well, here it is: she was my sister-in-law.”
“Wait a minute,” Hector said. “Did I hear you right? Did you say sister-in-law?”
Lyra settled back in his chair, as if the story was going to be a long one.
“My first wife’s name was Graca,” he said, “and she was Juraci’s sister. She’d just turned fifteen when she got pregnant. I was six months older. Our parents said we had to get married. We were just kids, used to doing what we were told, so we did. We moved in with my parents. I left school and got a job.”
“And Juraci?”
“Juraci was a year younger than Graca, only fourteen, but she was a woman already, if you know what I mean.”
“Uh huh.”
“She had this long brown hair that hung all the way down to the crack in her ass. I was in love with that hair. Hell, I was in love with her.”
“How about your wife?”
“I was in love with her, too. For a while. But then we lost the kid, and it hurt her, and she didn’t want to screw anymore. Meanwhile, here’s Juraci, giving me the eye every time we go around to her parents’ place for Sunday dinner. I could see she was keen. I heard she’d had a couple of boyfriends, wasn’t a virgin or anything like that, so I went around one day and tried my luck. Her mother and father both worked, but she was still going to school. I knew she got home around three. I told my boss I was sick and went over there.”
Lyra took a final drag on his cigarette, extinguished it, and took a sip of his cachaca.
“And then?” Goncalves prompted.
“It was like she was expecting me. We fucked right there in the front room, her bending over one end of the couch, me standing behind her, looking through a crack in the curtain to make sure nobody walked in on us.”
“So you became your sister-in-law’s lover?”
“Best piece of ass I ever had. The best ever. She’d do everything, let me stick it anywhere. And she loved it! If I forget everything, I won’t forget that. As far as I was concerned, it could have gone on forever.”
“What happened? Did you get caught?”
“No. We never did. But one day, out of a clear blue sky, she told me not to come around anymore. She was tired of me, she said. Later, I found out she had this thing going with some kid at school.”
“How did you find out?”
“She got pregnant, that’s how. You’d think she would have learned, right? I mean after what happened to her sister and all? But no, she went out and got herself pregnant. Stupid, I thought at the time. But Juraci never did stupid stuff, even when she was a teenager, so when I looked back on it later, I got to thinking she did it on purpose.”
“Because she loved him? Because she wanted him to marry her?”
“That’s what I figure. It was good for me in a way, though, because the baby could just as well have been mine.”
“One minute you say she was stupid, and the next you say the kid could have been yours. What’s with that?”
“What’s with that is I broke a condom. I learned my lesson with Graca, and always used them with Juraci, but I never broke one. Only that one time. Never before and never since. The way I figure it, my ex-wife found it in my wallet. And she sure as hell knew I wasn’t using condoms on her. So the bitch stuck a pin through it, or something. She wouldn’t have done it if she’d known it was gonna wind up in her sister. And the fact she never knew was really lucky for me. If she, or her parents, had ever found out who I’d planned to use that condom on, they would have killed me.”
“What happened to the baby?” Hector asked. “Did Juraci have it?”
Lyra was about to take another sip of his cachaca. He took the glass away from his lips and smiled. “You mean you still don’t get it?” he said
.
Comprehension dawned for both cops at the same moment. “Are you telling us the baby was Tico?” Hector said.
Lyra nodded. “You think he looks like me?”
“Frankly?” Hector said. “No.”
Lyra sighed. “No,” he said. “Me neither. Caralho, that boy’s even uglier than I am. But now it’s all these years later, and here’s Juraci giving out that the kid’s father died in an accident, and here’s Rafael-”
“Who’s Rafael?”
“Rafael Souza, the boyfriend she had at school. And here’s Rafael, not stepping up to claim he’s the kid’s old man. And nobody else either. So I figured-”
“Why do you think Rafael didn’t put in a claim to be the father?”
“Probably because he doesn’t think he is. Rafael’s father had a good business, an oficina mechanica. He was well-off, and he didn’t want his son marrying some slut. When Juraci got pregnant, he checked around and discovered a few things.”
“Like what?”
“Juraci was screwing a whole bunch of other guys. At least three, probably more. If any of them knew then what they know now, it would have been different. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be the father of the best striker in the world, right? But back then, nobody wanted to be the husband of a slut, and nobody wanted to assume responsibility for somebody else’s baby. All of them bowed out.”
“And you?”
“Nobody ever found out about me, thank God. Like I said, her parents would have killed me. Well, as to the rest of it-hey, you want another drink?”
“No, thanks,” Hector said.
Lyra turned to Goncalves. “You?”
Goncalves shook his head. “I’m driving,” he said.
“Yeah, okay, where were we?”
“How did it all end?” Hector asked. “What happened to your wife? Your in-laws?”
“My wife died last year. Cancer. She was only forty-one. We never had any more kids. She was scared to death of getting pregnant again. Her parents are dead too, killed in one of those bus crashes on the BR116 when they were going to Parana to visit her brother. I hadn’t seen Juraci in years. Graca wouldn’t have her in the house, said she couldn’t forgive her for what she did to their folks, getting pregnant and all.”
“But Graca got pregnant herself.”
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