There were nearly as many crime scene technicians inside the house as there’d been reporters outside. Some were taking photographs, some mixing luminol, some dusting for prints. And, in charge of it all, was Lefkowitz, the chief crime scene technichian.
“Brought a few friends, I see,” Hector said, looking around him.
“I brought everybody I’ve got,” Lefkowitz said. “Nobody wants to nail those bastards more than me. I’ve got a bet with a cousin of mine in the States. He actually thinks the Americans are going to get into the quarter-finals.”
“They just might. They almost did last time.”
“The Americans? In the quarter-finals? You’ve got to be kidding. They don’t care about football. Not our kind, anyway.”
Hector wasn’t there to talk about football. He got down to business.
“They took down my car’s number plate when I came through the gate. You’ve probably already thought of this, but….”
“Did we get a copy of the gate records? Yes, we did. And there’s one car we’ve yet to identify. It arrived at 2:00 AM, left at 5:00.”
Hector rubbed his hands. “A lead,” he said. “Thank you, Lefkowitz.”
“The Lefkowitz giveth, and the Lefkowitz taketh away,” Lefkowitz said. “We ran the plate through DETRAN. It doesn’t exist.”
DETRAN was the regulatory body that controlled car registrations in the State of São Paulo.
Hector chose to be optimistic.
“It might be from out of state,” he said.
“The other states are being checked as we speak. Another possibility is that the guard got the number wrong, so we’re also trying partials.”
“Other than the gate I came through—”
“Additional gates? None.”
“Damn! Somebody talk to the neighbors?”
“Franco did.” Letitia Franco, Lettie to her family, was Lefkowitz’s assistant. The crime scene techs in São Paulo seemed to have a thing about calling each other by their last names. “The neighbor over there”—Lefkowitz hooked a thumb over his shoulder—“and the one across the street, didn’t hear, or see, a thing. That one”—he pointed in the direction of the nearest house—“heard some commotion. You’d best have a chat with him.”
“Name?”
“Sá. Rodolfo Sá.”
“What kind of commotion? Screams? Shouts?”
“No screams. No shouts. Just a loud noise. Something else: I think they sedated the victim. We found an empty syringe in her bedroom.”
“Containing?”
“A few drops of a pale yellow fluid. We’re analyzing it.”
“How big is this condominium?”
“You’re thinking house-to-house search?”
“Uh huh.”
“Forget it. It’s huge. It stretches over two municipalities. You’d need a hundred men, and it would take a month.”
“Have you gone through her papers?”
“We have.”
“And?”
“Juraci had a private investigator following the Artist’s girlfriend around.”
“Interesting. Got a name?”
“Prado. Caio Prado. I got an address, too. Rua Augusta, 296, second floor.”
“You find any of his reports?”
“Receipts, mostly. Only one report.”
“Interesting?”
“Boring. But the investigation was ongoing.”
“Who’s the girlfriend?”
“Cintia Tadesco.”
“The model?”
“Actress, she calls herself these days.”
“I saw her in one of the nighttime soaps. She can’t act worth a damn.”
“Who cares? Watch her with the sound off. That’s what I do.”
“She is, I agree, a knockout. A splendid example of womanhood. Drawn to the Artist, no doubt, by his great physical beauty and awesome intellectual capacity.”
“Sarcasm, Hector, does not become you.”
“So I’ve been told. Any indication as to what prompted Juraci to hire Prado?”
“No.”
“Anything else of interest in her papers?”
“A receipt for house keys. Four sets. Made last week by a locksmith named Samuel Arns. He’s got a shop in the strip mall you had to pass in order to get here. We went through this house with a fine-tooth comb and found only three sets. One set was in a drawer in her office. One was in her purse, which the kidnappers left behind. And one was in the purse of one of the maids.”
“And that’s significant because?”
“A theory I have, which I’ll get to in a minute. Let me see. What else did we find? Oh, yeah, the footprint.”
“Footprint?”
“Juraci must have heard them coming. She locked herself in her bedroom. But the door was flimsy. He smashed it with his foot. In doing so, he was kind enough to leave us an impression of his sole and heel.”
“He?”
“No woman has feet that big, not even my wife. Once he was inside, Juraci panicked and lost control of her bladder. We found urine on the rug and on the sheets. We figure he tossed her onto the bed, threw himself on top of her to hold her down, and injected her with whatever was in the syringe.”
“Tossed her? Is the victim a lightweight?”
“Juraci? Hardly. There are pictures of her all over the house. She weighs ninety kilos if she weighs a gram.”
“Big guy, then.”
“Big feet at least. And strong. We recovered a few fibers from the sheets. Looks like he was wearing a wool sweater.”
“Any sign of blood?”
“Not in the bedroom. The kitchen is full of it. That’s where they killed the maids.”
“The bodies are still here?”
“Still here. I’ve got an ambulance on call to bring them to the IML, but I figured you’d want to see them first.”
“You figured right.”
The IML, Instituto Médico Legal, was where São Paulo’s criminal autopsies took place.
“Who will be doing them when they get there?” Hector asked.
“Gilda.”
Gilda Caropreso was an assistant medical examiner—and Hector’s fiancée.
“Did she do the in situ as well?”
“No.”
“Who then?”
“That new guy, Whatshisname.”
“Plinio Setubal. Did he estimate time of death?”
“He did. The same for both. Between four and five this morning.”
“Both. So there are two of them?”
“Brilliant deduction. You a detective?”
Hector ignored the sarcasm. “Shot?”
“Shot. Small bore pistol. A .22 would be my guess. No exit wounds. Come on, I’ll show you.”
IN THE kitchen, a wooden door leading to the garden had been battered in. Some fragments still hung from the hinges; the remainder, in pieces, was scattered across the white tile floor.
Through a door to his left, open and intact, Hector could see two beds, a wardrobe cupboard and a poster of a rock star. The maids’ quarters, apparently.
Near the sink, the dead women lay side by side, their blood mingled in a common pool.
“One bullet for each,” Lefkowitz said. “Point blank.”
“Yes,” Hector said. “I noticed.”
Hot gases, escaping from the murder weapon’s muzzle, had singed the hair around their wounds. Singeing occurred only when bullets were discharged at very close range.
“Execution style,” Lefkowitz said. “No passion here, nothing spontaneous, very deliberate. Poor things must have been scared to death. Look at that.”
Lefkowitz pointed. The women had been holding hands when they were shot. Their dead fingers were still entwined.
Hector felt a twinge of sympathy. No matter how hard he tried to maintain his objectivity, retain his distance, there were often little details about murder that touched his heart.
“Sisters,” Lefkowitz said, “from Salvador. Their purses and identi
ty cards were in their room. The one on the left was Clara. She’d just turned nineteen.”
The floor around Clara’s body was sprinkled with shards of broken glass. Some were tinged with blood.
“What’s that?”
“It used to be a drinking glass. There are others in that cabinet over there. Intact ones, I mean.”
“She wouldn’t have bled like that if—”
“—her heart wasn’t pumping when she sustained the cuts. And a shot like that would have stopped her heart immediately. So, yes, she was cut before she was shot. See how this part of the pool is more red than brown? There was water in the glass. The blood that flowed into the water got diluted. It wasn’t able to fully coagulate.”
“Is that a dog?”
Hector pointed to a bundle of fur near one of the bodies.
“What’s left of one,” Lefkowitz said. “A toy poodle, a female. They broke her back.”
“Broke her back?”
“Stepped on her. Snapped her spine like a twig.”
“What kind of people do that to a dog?”
“What kind of people shoot young women in the head? In a moment, I’m going to sum it all up. Just one more thing: look at Clara’s face.”
Hector had to drop to one knee to see what Lefkowitz was talking about. He did it from a meter away, to avoid kneeling in the blood.
“Bruises,” he said.
“Pre-mortem, according to Doctor Whatshisname. And none on Clarice. Ready for a reading?”
“Please.”
“Okay. Here’s what I think happened: Clara got up in the early hours of the morning to drink some water. She took a glass out of the cabinet, went to the sink and filled it. The kidnappers came in and startled her. She dropped the glass, and it broke. She screamed, or tried to fight them off, or tried to run, and they hit her. She went down, landing on her back, cutting herself.”
“And her sister …”
“Heard the noise, jumped out of bed and came into the kitchen. Or maybe tried to hide, and the kidnappers found her. The fact that her face isn’t bruised suggests they were able to intimidate her without hitting her. Maybe just looking at what they’d done to Clara was enough. They made Clara get up. They made both of them kneel. And then they shot them in the back of their heads.”
Hector had been visualizing the progression of events and was experiencing a wave of nausea. He paused a beat before asking his next question.
“Which one first?”
“Clara,” Lefkowitz said, without hesitation.
“How can you—”
“Blood spatter analysis.”
“So Clarice knew it was coming?”
“Must have. But not for long.”
“For her sake, I hope you’re right. But why shoot them at all? Why not just tie them up?”
“You want a guess?”
“Tell me.”
“To forestall identification.”
“You think they came in here without masks? That would have been stupid.”
“We already know they’re vicious. What’s to say they’re not stupid? But there’s another possibility.”
“Which is?”
“Maybe they had masks, but hadn’t put them on. Maybe they’d planned to do that after they were inside. But then, surprise, surprise, there’s Clara standing in the darkened kitchen.” Hector shook his head. “I don’t buy it,” he said. “She would have heard them; she would have tried to run.”
“Ah, but how about if she didn’t hear them?”
“How could she not? They smashed that door over there. That’s how they got in, right?”
“That’s what we’re supposed to think. I think they smashed it on the way out.”
“What?”
Lefkowitz held up a hand for patience. “Bear with me. Remember that commotion I mentioned? The one the neighbor heard? It was a loud bang, and it woke him up. Seconds later, he saw a car driving away. Between the bang, and the driving away, the killers wouldn’t have had time to do anything other than run up the ramp to the street. And, if they’d been lugging an unconscious woman, there wouldn’t even have been time for that. I figure they put her into the car first.”
“You’re saying the very last thing they did was smash the door? And then took off on a run? What would be the sense of that?”
“To make us think they didn’t have a key.”
“But you think they did.”
Lefkowitz nodded. “No other explanation computes. Clara had just filled a glass with water; she’d no sooner dropped it than they were on her. She probably started to scream, and that’s when they hit her. She went down on the shards of glass. None of that could have happened if they’d really done what they want us to think they did, which was to get into the house by battering their way through the door.”
“So you think this is an inside job?”
“That’s what I think. If it happened the way they want us to think it happened, wouldn’t Clara have taken off like a rabbit? Wouldn’t we have found her body somewhere else?”
Hector was unconvinced.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “They could have gone after her and brought her back here. Any other signs of forced entry?”
“None.” Lefkowitz was emphatic. “All the other doors were locked. So were the windows. The glass in all of them was intact.”
“Maybe they picked the lock.”
“Not that lock. It’s virtually pickproof.”
Hector put a finger to his lips and thought about it.
Lefkowitz regarded him in silence.
Finally, Hector said, “Let’s suppose it went down the way you suggest. Wouldn’t Clara have heard a click? Or heard them creeping up behind her?”
“Not if they were quick. Not if Clara was running water in the sink. The sink is stainless steel. Listen.”
Lefkowitz went to the sink and turned on the tap. Under the stream of water, the steel reverberated like a drum. He let it run for a few seconds to make his point.
“I figure it was when she turned off the tap,” he said, “that she heard something. Or maybe she looked up and saw something.”
“With her back to the door?”
“There was a full moon last night. If Doctor Whathisname—”
“Setubal.”
“—Setubal is right about the time they were shot, the moon would have been”—Lefkowitz pointed—“right about there. If anyone opened the door, it would have flooded the kitchen with moonlight. Clara would have noticed, even if she’d been facing the sink.”
That clinched it for Hector. He smiled in admiration.
“Lefkowitz,” he said, “you are so good at this stuff.”
“Tell my wife,” Lefkowitz said. “She thinks she’s got all the brains in the family.”
Chapter Four
HARALDO “BABYFACE” GONÇALVES WAS looking around for a sign that would identify the building—and not finding one.
“You sure this is it?”
“I’m sure,” Arnaldo Nunes said. “I used to come here on Saturdays for lunch.”
“The Argentinean Club for lunch? Why?”
“They serve good meat.”
“They serve good meat in lots of places. But you came here. What’s the real reason?”
Arnaldo mumbled something.
“Can’t hear you,” Gonçalves said. “Speak up.”
Arnaldo turned to face him.
“I said my oldest sister married an Argentinean.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“You poor bastard.”
“I think it was a sex thing. He must have been hung like a bull.”
“She’s still married?”
“She finally came to her senses. But, in the meantime, I went through hell. The wedding was in June of ’78.”
1978 wasn’t the only year Argentina won the World Cup, but it was the first. And it was a year in which Brazil, already a three-time champion, had finished an ignominious third. The def
eat still rankled, even for people like Gonçalves who were too young to have experienced it personally.
“Four years it lasted,” Arnaldo said. “Four long years. Every time I saw him he’d rub it in my face.”
“And then she divorced him?”
“No. She stuck with the bastard until 1990. The nineteenth of July. I’ll never forget the date. Soon as I heard about the breakup, I went out to celebrate. It was one of the worst hangovers I ever had, but it was worth it.”
“So what’s with the four years? We didn’t win in ’82. Italy won in ’82.”
Arnaldo looked at him. “You don’t remember what else happened in 1982?”
“Do you know how old I was back then?”
“You knew about ’78. And you knew who won the Cup in ’82.”
“That’s different. That’s futebol.”
“The Malvinas happened.”
“Oh, yeah, right. The Malvinas.”
In early April of 1982, General Leopoldo Galtieri, the head of Argentina’s military junta, gave the order to annex the Malvinas, that small group of South Atlantic islands the inhabitants insisted in calling the Falklands. Argentina had long coveted the archipelago, and long claimed sovereignty over it.
Galtieri launched the invasion in an attempt to draw attention from a declining economy at home and to unite the nation in a common cause. In both of those things, he was initially successful.
Margaret Thatcher, the English Prime Minister, first tried diplomacy to oust the invaders. When that failed, she ordered the assembly of a naval task force, and it set out on a stately 8,000-mile voyage of liberation.
“I read about that,” Gonçalves said. “The English kicked the shit out of the Argentineans, right?”
“The English did,” Arnaldo said.
“So that shut your brother-in-law up, I suppose. Come on. Let’s go in there and talk to those people.”
He unfastened his seat belt and opened the door of the car.
“Shut it,” Arnaldo said.
“What?”
“Shut the door. I’m not finished. I’m not telling this story because I enjoy the sound of my voice. I’m telling it for your edification.”
“I didn’t know you knew words like edification.”
“You don’t know a lot of things. Listen and learn.”
“Learn what?”
“About Argentineans.”
A Vine in the Blood Page 2