“Maybe not, but tell me this: had you ever seen her before, blond hair, dark glasses, and all?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“This wasn’t Senhora Batista’s first visit. She had come to me a while back about another man she wanted released.”
“João Girotti?”
One of Fonseca’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Yes. Girotti. How did you know?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to confirm it was Girotti.”
“Well, indeed it was. The felon’s friend, this woman. I don’t understand it.” Fonseca shrugged. “Maybe she has a passion for bad boys.”
“Here’s another name for you, Dudu. Do you remember a woman named Arriaga? Aline Arriaga? Came to you about her son?”
“Yes, of course. Her boy had a fatal … fall. He died in police custody. Doesn’t say much for our law enforcement community, does it? The people who are supposed to be protecting us, I mean.”
“Don’t get snotty with me, Dudu. Just answer the questions. Did Senhora Arriaga look anything like this blond?”
“Senhora Arriaga is a brunette.”
“And the blond, as you pointed out, was wearing a wig. We can, therefore, surmise that her natural hair color was not blond. I ask you again, could Senhora Arriaga have been that blond?”
Fonseca shrugged. “She could have been,” he said, “but there is no way I’d swear to it. So that’s a dead end for you there, Chief Inspector.”
“How much did you charge her for springing Sacca? Something like that must have been expensive, huh? I mean, after all, they had the little punk dead to rights.”
Fonseca frowned. “What I did was perfectly legal, Chief Inspector. Judge Miranda was kind enough to stipulate a bond, and my client paid it. As to my charges for the service, that information is strictly confidential. If you want the numbers, you’ll have to subpoena me. Furthermore, I resent the implication—”
“That’s enough, Dudu. Get down off your high horse and tell me exactly what the woman said.”
“She said that an acquaintance of hers, that’s what she called him, an acquaintance, was being held in Santo André. She wanted him out. I made a few phone calls. She sat where you’re sitting while I did it. Once I’d analyzed the problem, I gave her a price, my fee plus … expenses. She opened her purse, took out a roll of banknotes, and started counting them out.”
“What was going through your mind?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tell me the thoughts you had at the time. It doesn’t matter if they were pure speculation. Just tell me.”
Fonseca leaned back in his chair, put his elbows on the armrests, and touched the tips of his fingers together.
“This is a little embarrassing,” he said, “but I’ll be frank with you. When I saw that roll, I thought I should have set a higher fee. I think she would have paid it. I think she would have peeled off every note and given it to me. There was a kind of quiet intensity about the woman. She desperately wanted Sacca released, God knows why. And God knows what they have in common. She was a woman of some class. From my experience of him, he’s an ignorant buffoon.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. That’s the extent of it. I was kicking myself about that money. And now”—Fonseca, with the same difficulty as before, rose from his chair—“you’ll have to excuse me. Please be careful not to let the door hit your asses on the way out.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
THE SCENE OF ABILIO Sacca’s murder was already crawling with reporters. Gonçalves wisely kept his lip buttoned until all four of them were within the perimeter of crime-scene tape and away from attentive ears.
“The landlady is a widow,” he said then. “Lives alone, works nights in a hospital. Over there”—he pointed toward the home of the closest neighbor—“we’ve got an old lady. She hasn’t been out of her place in two days, but didn’t see anything, and she didn’t hear anything.”
“Where’s the body?” Silva asked.
“This way.”
Gonçalves led them down an alley. Sacca’s place was a tiny freestanding building in the rear of his landlady’s home.
“Built for a maid,” Gonçalves said. “There’s just the one room and a bathroom.”
“What’s the landlady’s story?”
“Around ten thirty this morning she went to collect the rent. The door was ajar. He was stretched out in a pool of blood. She didn’t panic. Like I said, she works in a hospital.
Says she’s seen a lot of bodies in her time. She checked his vital signs before she called it in, told the attending officer the paramedics didn’t need to hurry. He’d been dead for hours, she said. The ME confirms that the death was sometime between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M.”
“He’s already here?”
“The ME? It’s a she. Gilda Caropreso. Inside.”
Arnaldo glanced at Hector. “You and your girlfriend have to stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will talk.”
“How about Janus Prado?” Silva asked.
“He’s off today, but they always keep him posted on stuff like this. He called me, asked me if you were coming. When I told him you were, he said to have fun and….”
“And what?”
“And to tell Arnaldo Nunes he’s so ugly that when he walks by toilets, they flush.”
Gonçalves seemed pleased to be passing the message along.
GILDA CAROPRESO, very much at ease in a room crowded with men, was wearing yellow jeans and a pale blue blouse. The only concessions to her profession were latex gloves and a pair of plastic booties. She circulated among the newcomers, collecting kisses on her cheeks and giving Hector one on the mouth. Then they all went over and looked down at the body.
Abilio Sacca was a mess.
“I don’t think he got anywhere near his attacker,” Gilda said. “I’ll have a closer look under a microscope, but there doesn’t appear to be anything under his fingernails except dirt. There is, by the way, a lot of that. And the rest of his personal hygiene doesn’t have much to say for it either.”
Silva knelt. Gilda hadn’t been exaggerating when she spoke of Sacca’s hygiene. Close-up, and under the steely smell of blood, the corpse gave a whole new definition to the term “body odor.” He squinted through the plastic bags to have a closer look at the victim’s hands.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Whatever the killer was using, Sacca was trying to fend it off.”
“So ‘it’ didn’t get left behind?”
“No. Hector tells me you have a theory this killer might be the Arriaga boy’s father.”
“Not everyone ascribes to it, but I do.”
“Poor man.”
“Crazy man. If it’s him, he’s killed a lot of innocent people.”
“A man like that belongs in a mental institution, not in a jail.”
“That’s for the courts to decide,” Silva said.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”
“Could the weapon used to beat him have been a baseball bat?” Hector asked with a flash of inspiration.
Silva stood and Gilda knelt for another look. After a while, she said, “Maybe. I’ll check for wood fragments in the wounds. What kind of wood do they use for baseball bats?”
“Ash,” Hector said. “The same wood the English use for cricket bats.”
“How the hell do you know what the English use for cricket bats?” Arnaldo said.
“He comes up with that kind of stuff all the time,” Gilda said. “He’s a repository of totally useless information.”
“And occasionally amazing instances of insight,” Silva said.
“Once the killer got past the hands,” Gilda said, “he concentrated on the head. There’s considerable damage to the forehead, temples, cheekbones, nose, and jaw. There’s also a second and very damaging blow to the crown. That one was probably postmortem, a final whack to make sure he was dead. And before you ask, yes
, he was shot. Once. In the lower abdomen.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
JULIO ARRIAGA ENTERED THE stale-smelling apartment, put the bags of groceries on the kitchen counter and started opening windows.
Inez put one hand on her pregnant belly and another on his arm. “I’ll air the place out,” she said. “You go get the rest of the stuff.”
He came back, lugging the heavy tent, to find she hadn’t opened a single window. She was standing in front of the answering machine.
“You’d better listen to this,” she said.
“What—”
Inez put a finger to her lips and pushed the play button.
The woman who’d recorded the message was speaking in Portuguese, which was a good thing since Julio Arriaga’s English, even after three years in the United States, was still nothing to write home about. When he couldn’t get by in Portuguese, he used Spanish. And why not? Everybody knew you didn’t have to learn English if you lived in South Florida.
Senhor Arriaga, the voice said, my name is Solange Dirceu. I’m calling on behalf of Detective Sergeant Harvey Willis of the Miami-Dade Police Department. It’s most urgent that Detective Willis speak to you. When you get this call, no matter what time of the day or night, please call me on my cell phone to set up an appointment.
She gave him a number and hung up.
“Want to hear it again?” Inez asked, her finger poised above the machine.
Julio looked at his watch. It was almost midnight.
“Leave it for tomorrow,” he said.
“No matter what time of the day or night,” Inez said, quoting verbatim. She’d been a schoolteacher, and she still had a pedagogical bent.
“Oh, hell,” he said, and went to get a pencil to make a note of the number.
The following morning, at the appointed hour of nine, Detective Sergeant Willis was on the Arriagas’ doorstep. He was accompanied by some black cop, whose name Julio didn’t catch, and an attractive brunette whose name he did: Solange Dirceu, the woman he’d spoken to the night before.
Julio settled them around the dining table, the only place in the apartment that had enough chairs. Inez, flustered to have three people she didn’t know in her kitchen, served them coffee. After it had been established that his English really wasn’t good, the rest of the interview went through Solange. What Willis told him next caused Julio to sit back in his chair.
“Puta merda,” Julio said.
Solange translated this as “holy cow.” She didn’t approve of Julio’s choice of words.
The entire interview, with Julio’s approval, was recorded on a small device Willis had brought with them. They finished within half an hour and left Julio sitting at his kitchen table, staring at the wall.
“I GOTTA make this quick,” Harvey Willis said, “so I can concentrate on my driving. I’m on I-95, surrounded by crazy Haitians. I even have one sitting next to me in the front seat.”
In the background, over the noise of the traffic, Silva heard Pete André tell Willis that racist honkies like himself had no place among Miami Beach’s Finest.
“It’s about Julio Arriaga,” Willis went on, ignoring his partner.
“He struck again since last we talked,” Silva said. “He killed another passenger.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“What?”
“Julio Arriaga didn’t kill anybody. Julio Arriaga hasn’t been in Brazil. He never left the States.”
“Harvey, are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure. He’s been camping in Chekika.”
“Chekika?”
“It’s in the Everglades. He’s been there for the last two weeks.”
“And he can prove it?”
“He can. You want to camp in there, you gotta get a license. The park rangers come around to stamp it. I saw the license, I saw the stamps, and I just got off the phone with one of the rangers. He remembered Arriaga, said he’s seen him every day for the last two weeks. And I do mean every day. He worked both weekends.”
“Goddamn it. So that’s another dead end.”
“Far from it. Hold on to your seat. Julio says Aline took his pistol when they split. Says he thought long and hard about going down there for his son’s funeral. He really wanted to, but in the end he didn’t. Why not? Because his new wife is pregnant, and he was afraid of what his ex might do to him with that gun. Turns out she blamed everyone for the death of her son, everyone including him.”
“But it’s been months since it all happened—”
“Julio said he talks to Aline’s mother every now and then, said they always got along. The old lady told him Aline is still as bitter as she ever was—and just as angry. According to her, Aline is keeping Junior’s room like a shrine; pictures, votive candles, the whole nine yards. She even puts chocolates on the pillow of his bed. And she does it every single night.”
“So Aline’s insane?”
“‘Crazy’ was the word Julio used. And, oh yeah, Junior owned two baseball bats, wooden ones.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
THEY WENT FOR HER at eight o’clock in the evening. She’d been home for more than an hour by then.
Durval Kallos, one of Hector’s men, was stationed within sight of Aline’s front door. He’d found a convenient bench at a bus stop, and stood up when he saw the brass approaching.
“Evening, Durval,” Hector said. “Who’s in the rear of the building?”
“Serginho, Senhor.”
“Your radios working?” Silva asked.
“Sim, Senhor.”
“We’re going to take her. You stay here, tell Serginho to stay there. Neither one of you is to leave his post for any reason. If she comes out of that door, and we’re not with her, bring her down.”
Durval looked shocked. “Use my gun, Senhor?”
Silva nodded. “The only way she’s going to get out of there alone is to shoot her way out. And she’ll be looking to shoot you.”
“You’re certain, then? Certain she’s the one we’re looking for?”
“Not a hundred percent. More like ninety-nine.”
“How many security guards covering the building?” Arnaldo said.
Durval pointed with his chin. “Just those two over there, the fat one and the thin one.”
The other four cops turned to look.
“Like Laurel and Hardy,” Gonçalves said.
Hector snapped his fingers. “I knew that fat guy reminded me of somebody.”
The rent-a-cop who came to meet them was the fat one. Silva held up his warrant card for inspection. The guard studied it carefully before he opened the gate.
“You’ve seen my name,” Silva said. “What’s yours?”
“Virgilio, Chief Inspector. Virgilio Ycaza.”
“Okay, Virgilio, listen up. We’re going to arrest Senhora Aline Arriaga. You’re going to help.”
Virgilio looked mystified. “The four of you need help? With her? But she’s just a little thing. No taller than that.”
Virgilio held a hand below his double chin.
“It’s not muscle we need, Virgilio. Come along. I’ll explain on the way.”
Halfway to the front door, Virgilio waddling next to Silva, they were intercepted by the other guard.
“What’s going on?”
“They’re federal cops,” Virgilio said. “They’re going to arrest Senhora Arriaga.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“Maybe nothing,” Silva said. “Maybe she killed eight people.”
The thin guard blinked, looked at his companion, back at Silva. “Why?” he said. “Why would she do a thing like that?”
“Revenge,” Silva said.
“For her son?”
Silva nodded.
“He was nice kid,” the thin guard said. “But eight people?”
“Six of whom didn’t have a damned thing to do with it,” Silva said. He pointed to the Taurus .38 lodged in a holster suspended from the guard’s belt. “You know how
to use that?”
“We’re Policia Militar,” the man said and stood up a little straighter. “Both of us are.”
Silva had suspected as much. Most rent-a-cops were moonlighting policemen. If you were in the ranks, it was a stretch to live on your salary.
“Good,” he said. “You stay here and cover the stairwell. If she comes down, tell her to lie down with her face to the floor. If she doesn’t, or if she tries to get up, shoot her.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
The guard’s face paled. His hand went to the butt of his gun.
“And me?” Virgilio asked.
“You’re coming with us.”
In the elevator, Silva explained what he wanted Virgilio to do: “You ring her bell. You tell her you’ve got a delivery. When she opens the door, you step back. Not left. Not right. Back. Leave the rest to us.”
Virgilio swallowed.
“We don’t deliver packages,” he said. “People pick them up downstairs.”
“This time, you decided to do her a favor. She knows you, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, Senhor. She knows me.”
“So there’s no reason for her to suspect anything. She’ll probably think you’re after a tip.”
The elevator stopped on Aline’s floor. All of them stepped out. Virgilio lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if she asks to see it through the peephole? The package, I mean.”
“Then it will mean she’s suspicious.”
“What if she is? What if she starts shooting through the door?”
Every Bitter Thing Page 23