The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  In those days, I was incapable of regarding my life with moderation. Either I considered myself an obscure, invisible functionary, a slave to routine, vegetating monotonously in a post appropriate to my mediocre faculties and limited aspirations, or I was a misunderstood genius, my talent wasted in the tedious exercise of secondary activities suitable for natures less favored than my own. I spent most of my time occupying the first of those two positions. Only rarely did I shift to the second, which I’d have to abandon sooner rather than later, when some brutal disillusion would end my sojourn at that particular oasis. I didn’t know it, but in twenty minutes, my self-esteem was going to be wrecked by one such disastrous purge.

  I started off by telling him about the episode with the photos. First, I described them, and then I showed them to him. I was pleased by the attention he paid to my account. He asked me for details, and I was able to satisfy his curiosity on most points. Báez had always shown great respect for my knowledge of the law. In our conversations, he’d never minded confessing to gaps in his own familiarity with legal matters (which was another reason for me to admire him, given that I regarded my own areas of ignorance as inexcusable shortcomings). On this occasion, I was venturing onto his turf, and yet he gave me the impression that he thought I was doing so for good reason. When I finished showing him the pictures, I told him about the instructions I’d given Morales: the widower was to write to his father-in-law and ask him to find out Isidoro Gómez’s current location. So that his nerves wouldn’t get the better of him, so that he wouldn’t try to carry out some sort of absurd personal revenge, the father-in-law had to limit himself to obtaining the desired information and passing it along to Morales. Colotto’s mission had been such a success, I explained to Báez, that I’d ordered Morales to request a second round of reports from his father-in-law, the information to be gathered from other neighbors and from friends that his daughter and Gómez might have had in common. We’d based the search for the friends on the list of names accompanying the photographs of the famous picnic. As I was preparing to lay out the findings from the second round of reports, which confirmed Gómez’s progressive withdrawal, his apparently precipitous departure for Buenos Aires, and his arrival in the capital a few weeks before the murder, Báez cut me off with a question: “How long ago did the father-in-law pay this visit to the suspect’s mother?”

  Although a little surprised, I started counting the days. Didn’t he want to hear the verified information I was on the brink of revealing to him? Didn’t he want to know that a couple of Gómez’s friends from the barrio had corroborated my theory that the young man had been secretly in love with the victim for years?

  “Ten days, eleven at the most.”

  Báez looked at the antiquated black telephone on his desk. Without a word to me, he picked up the receiver and dialed three digits. When the call was answered, Báez spoke in a murmur: “I need you to come here at once. Yes. By yourself. Thanks.”

  Then he hung up and, as if I’d vanished, immediately began a rapid search of his desk drawers. Soon he extracted a plain notepad with about half its sheets missing and began at once to scribble on it, using big, untidy strokes. He looked like a stern-faced doctor writing me a prescription for who knows what medication. If I hadn’t been so tense, I would have found the image amusing. Before Báez finished, there were two knocks on the door. A senior subofficer entered the room, greeted us, and planted himself next to the desk. Báez soon put down his pencil, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed it to the policeman. “Here you go, Leguizamón. See if you can find this guy. All the information you might be able to use is on that sheet. If you manage to find him, take care—he may be dangerous. Place him under arrest and bring him in. The learned doctor here and I will see what we can get out of him.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear him refer to me as a doctor—he meant a doctor of law, of course—nor was I for a moment tempted to correct him. The police prefer to call all judicial employees of a certain age “doctor”; it’s nothing to get offended about, and the cops are right to do so. I’ve never known any profession whose members are as sensitive about honorific titles as lawyers are. What disturbed me was what Báez said next, as he was dismissing his subordinate: “And be quick about it. If this is the guy we want, I suspect he’s already vanished into thin air.”

  15

  Báez’s words turned me into a pillar of salt. Why was he making such a dire prediction? I remained as calm as I could until the subofficer withdrew, and then, practically yelling, I asked Báez, “What do you mean, ‘vanished into thin air’? Why should he?” The policeman’s pessimism had caught me so off guard that I’d simply taken hold of his last words and repeated them as a question, without so much as a clue to the nature of his objection. Nothing, not even remnants, remained of my desire that Báez should consider me a perceptive man.

  Because he had some respect for me, I suppose, he tried to be judicious in his reply. “Look, Chaparro,” he said, lighting a 43/70 and moving his coffee cup to one side, as if it were an obstacle that might impede the passage of his words to my ears, “if this guy is the one we’re looking for—and based on what you’ve told me, it’s perfectly possible that he is—don’t think he’s going to be so easy to catch. He may be a total son of a bitch, but he doesn’t seem like a hothead who does things on impulse. Not that there’s any lack of those, believe me. We nab lots of hoodlums because they fuck up so bad they might as well pin a sign on their shirts that says, ‘It was me, put my ass in jail.’ But this guy …”

  The policeman stopped talking for a moment, as if evaluating the suspect’s intellectual capacities and coming to the conclusion that they were worthy of respect. He exhaled cigarette smoke from his nose. That dark tobacco was stinking up the place. I felt my mucous membranes getting irritated, but brainless pride kept me from coughing or blinking, as I would have loved to do.

  “The babe he’s crazy about goes off to Buenos Aires. He doesn’t think about following her—he’s not up to that. Or he is, but he needs time before he can leave home.” Báez was formulating his hypothesis as he spoke to me. Along the way, he left gaps to be filled in later, but sometimes he stopped his forward progress and resolved a question with precise arguments. “Anyway, there’s a good chance he’d already declared himself back in Tucumán. And the girl didn’t want to hear it. So he feels enormously humiliated, he wants the earth to swallow him up. I figure that’s why he stays there; he doesn’t hold her back—how could he?—and he doesn’t follow her. Why should he try?”

  Báez seemed to assess his theories for a few moments, and then he went on. “Yes, that’s it. I’m sure he confronted her, and she rejected him so fast he felt like he was on a bungee cord. And so he went into hibernation. But then comes the news that she’s getting married. He’s not ready for that, and he can’t react to it, either. What does that mean, ‘react,’ for this kid? What can he do? He lets time pass. But he’s got nothing going on, and he doesn’t forget her. Just the opposite. He’s in a foul mood all the time. He’s angry. He starts feeling he’s been swindled somehow. How can it be that Liliana’s about to marry some guy from Buenos Aires she just met? What about him? Is he not worth considering? He spends his days thinking about that, just as you told me—or as the kid’s mother told the guy you sent to talk to her. The kid lies in his bed all day, staring at the ceiling. And then, finally, he makes a decision. Or maybe it was made long before. Did he spend months thinking about whether or not he was going to kill her, or did he know he’d kill her from the start, and the delay was just because he was getting up his courage? I have no idea, and I doubt we’ll ever know. In any case, as soon as he’s got everything clear in his mind, he leaves home and takes the Northern Star to Buenos Aires.”

  Báez picked up the telephone and bounced the switch hook up and down a few times. When the same office employee as before put his head inside the door, Báez asked him for more coffee.

  “And you know what? If this kid really
is the guy we’re looking for, I’d bet more than I’ve got that he takes his time getting settled. He looks for a rooming house. He finds a job. And it’s only then that he turns his attention to the girl. For a few days, he hangs around on a street corner close to her place, figuring out what the newlyweds’ routines are. Their outdoor routines, that is, because he can imagine the indoor ones, and they wrench his guts. Sometimes it gets so bad he thinks maybe he should waste them both, the wife and the husband. Can you imagine how a guy must feel when he sees another guy looking happy and contented every morning, and he knows the other guy just got out of bed with the woman he’s crazy for? So he goes back there the morning of the crime. He sees Morales leave, waits five minutes, and walks into the house. The main door’s open all day long, because the workers in Apartment 3 have to keep hauling rubble out of it in a wheelbarrow … Ah, no, that’s bullshit. The workers weren’t there that day. So the guy rings the doorbell, and the girl answers him through the intercom. She’s surprised, sure, but why wouldn’t she let him in? Isn’t he her childhood friend, her pal from the old neighborhood? Haven’t they done lots of things together over the years? She leaves her apartment and goes to open the main door for him. Probably, as she’s turning the key, she remembers the way she had to disappoint him when he declared himself a few years ago, and she feels vaguely guilty. It’s strange of him to drop in on her without calling first, especially considering he wasn’t even at the wedding, but that’s no reason to leave him standing outside the door. She’s wearing her nightdress, we know, but she’s got a dressing gown on over it, so she’s decent. And she’s young. An older woman might have considered it improper to open the door while wearing such an outfit. But the girl’s not that formal. She has no reason to be. As for the guy, the visitor, he doesn’t care what she’s wearing. The important thing is she opens the door. She says, “Isidoro, what a surprise,” and he comes in and gives her a kiss on the cheek. That’s why the neighbor woman doesn’t hear him knock on the apartment door. Liliana goes to open the street door for him, leads him back to her place, and they go inside. Poor girl.”

  Báez puts out his cigarette and seems to hesitate over lighting another one right away. He holds off.

  “Does he arrive with the intention of raping her, or does he just improvise? Once again, I have no idea, but I’m inclined to suppose he’s been chewing over his plan for some time. This boy doesn’t do things without thinking. He’s collecting a debt, nothing more or less. So screwing her against her will right there, on the bedroom floor, is his way of making her pay off an old debt. And strangling her with his own hands is his revenge on her for having spited him and ignored him, for having left him back in the barrio, alone and sad, a laughingstock for friends and enemies alike. I’m only guessing here, but I have a feeling this Isidoro can’t bear to have people laugh at him. That drives him right up the wall.

  “So then? So then it’s over. How long can he have stayed there? Five, ten minutes. He leaves no trace anywhere. There are a few small scratches on the parquet floor around the body—the girl tried to get away from him before her strength gave out—but he even takes the trouble of going over those marks with a cloth he’s found on a shelf, because he wants to be sure to cover all his tracks. (He has no way of knowing that the yahoos of the Federal Police assigned to handle the preliminaries will trample all over the crime scene and destroy any clue that may have escaped him.) He doesn’t wipe the door handle, because he remembers he never touched it. You know why I’m telling you that? So you’ll know what kind of person this kid is. We found fingerprints from both Morales and his wife on the inside and outside doorknobs, but that’s it. Which means that the punk was cool enough, or cynical enough—call it what you like—to go around the apartment with a cloth in his hand, calmly deciding what to wipe down: the floor around the place where he mounted the poor girl, yes; the door handle he remembered not having touched, no. And you know what he did afterward?”

  He stopped talking, as if he’d really asked a question he expected me to answer, but that wasn’t the case. Nor was he showing off. Nothing like that. Báez didn’t waste his intelligence on such foolishness.

  “When I first started working in Homicide, back when I was young and just learning the dance, do you know what I had trouble imagining? Not the crimes in themselves, not even the brutal act of killing someone. I got used to that right away. What I couldn’t figure out was what a murderer does after committing his crime. I don’t mean for the rest of his days, no, but let’s say for the next two or three hours. I imagined all murderers shaking in their boots, horrified by what they’d done, with their memories fixed on the moment when they snuffed out another human being’s life.” Báez snorted and half-smiled, like a man thinking about something funny. “More or less like Dostoyevsky’s young character—you know who I mean?—the one in Crime and Punishment. He feels remorse. He says, ‘I killed the old woman, how can I go on living?’ ” Báez looked at me as if he’d just remembered something. “Sorry, Chaparro, I’m being stupid. You don’t need a lecture from me—I’m sure you’ve read the book. But most of the time, I’m surrounded by brutes, know what I mean? Just to take one example, try to imagine that retard Sicora chatting about literature. Can’t do it, right? Don’t hurt yourself—it’s not possible. Well, anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that guilt and remorse aren’t that common among murderers. Not at all, really. Granted, you find guys so tormented by guilt they could shoot themselves, but lots of others go out to a movie or get a pizza. And I believe this kid, this Gómez, belongs to the second type. Since it’s a Tuesday morning, I’m sure he goes on to work, just like any other weekday. He walks over to the bus stop and waits for the bus. And when he gets off, he buys the latest edition of the Crónica. Why not?”

  This time, Báez pulled out a cigarette and lit it decisively. When I was writing about the fluctuations of my state of mind earlier, I mentioned that I’d arrived for my police interview afloat on a cloud of euphoria. Well, in about twenty minutes, that euphoria had been blown away. Not only did I feel defeated by events, which was a fairly common condition for me, but I also felt guilty. Instead of calling Báez the moment I had the intuition and letting him figure out the best way to close in on the suspect, I’d done everything my own way: I’d let myself be swept along by my spirit of initiative, I’d compelled the poor widower and his poor father-in-law to serve as my flunkies, and I’d made them kick over an ants’ nest for no goddamned good reason.

  In spite of all that, I tried to reassure myself. Couldn’t Báez be exaggerating? And what if Gómez was much stupider than Báez thought? Wasn’t there a good chance the guy had let his guard down over the course of all those months? After all, what proof did Báez have for his hypothesis? Nothing more or less than the account I’d just given him.

  And another thing: Suppose Gómez had nothing to do with the crime? With childish spite, I hoped that the trail leading to him would turn out to be nothing but a mirage. I got to my feet. Báez did likewise, and we shook hands. “I figure we’ll have some news tomorrow,” he said.

  “All right,” I replied, in a tone that might have sounded unnecessarily curt.

  “I’ll call you.”

  I left his office pretty agitated, or at least uneasy, and walked back to the Palace of Justice. Although it was contemptible of me, I was more concerned at that moment about not looking like a bungler than about grabbing the son of a bitch who’d done the crime, whether it was Gómez or some other creep.

  A little before seven o’clock that evening, the telephone in the clerk’s office rang. It was Báez. “Leguizamón’s here with his report.”

  “I’m listening.” My wounded-child attitude was absurd, but I couldn’t shake it. Besides, I wasn’t ready for the call. I’d thought it wouldn’t come until at least the following day.

  “All right. Let’s begin with the bad news. Three days ago, Isidoro Gómez disappeared from the rooming house in Flores where he’d been staying since th
e end of March. ‘Disappeared’ is a figure of speech; he paid what he owed in full and left without giving a forwarding address. Same thing with his job. We located the worksite: a fifteen-story building on Rivadavia Avenue, in the middle of the Caballito barrio. The foreman told Leguizamón that Gómez was a phenomenal kid. Not much for conversation and sometimes unpleasant, but reliable, neat in his work, and sober in his habits. Just a little jewel. But according to the foreman, Gómez came to him a few mornings ago and told him he was going back to Tucumán, because his mother was very sick. The foreman paid him off and told him to come back and see him if he ever returned to Buenos Aires, because he was very satisfied with him.”

  There was a moment of silence. Although I dearly wanted to hurl the typewriter, the pencil holder, the case file I was working on, and the telephone, I bit my lip and waited.

  “And finally, the good news. We can start operating on the assumption that this is our guy, and that he ran because he knew we were tracking him. Leguizamón brought me an outstanding piece of information. The foreman keeps all the workers’ punch cards from the on-site time clock. Gómez worked at that building site for eight months. Want to guess how many times he was late? Two. Once by ten minutes, and once by two and a half hours. You know when that second time was? The day of the crime.”

  “I understand,” I said, the gruffness finally gone from my tone of voice. I’ve never been a bad loser. “I appreciate the information, Báez. I’ll use it to bring the case up to date right away, and I’ll let you know what documents to send me.”

  “All right, Chaparro. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye. And thanks,” I added, as though making amends.

  I was about to hang up when I heard the voice on the other end of the line speaking again. “Ah … one question,” Báez said. He sounded doubtful. “How did you figure this Gómez boy could be our guy? I know the idea came to you when you were looking at the photographs, but what was it in particular that drew your attention to him? Because I’ve got to tell you, Chaparro, that was a fine catch, it really was. You might just have put your finger on the murderer.”