At that instant, the door began to open slowly. As fast as lightning, calling into play his every reflex, he grabbed his always-near .32 caliber muzzle-loading pistol “Caramuru” with a mother-of-pearl grip, inherited from his grandfather who had been a military policeman in Minas Gerais, and dived under the bed. It was only Dona Marlene from the laundry, bringing his clothes. She hung them in the closet and left as quickly as she had come.
In two minutes Nicky was dressed. He didn’t wear undershorts for two reasons. First, because he didn’t have any. Second, because he found it useless to spend money on an item of clothing that no one would see. He looked at himself in the large mirror in the closet and liked what he saw: sparse black hair swept across the top of his head in an impeccable “comb-over” style to cover his premature baldness. In the comb-over style the individual allows the abundant side strands to grow and brushes them over the scalp. That meticulous engineering takes time, patience, and extreme skill. Nicky Nicola didn’t look like he was thirty-five. No one would have taken him for less than forty. The flaps and flattened pockets of the chauffeur’s shirt pilfered from his uncle were completely hidden by the coat. The black cotton tie didn’t show the coffee stains of the same color. Nicky knew how important one’s appearance is. He brushed dandruff from his shoulders with an indifferent gesture, donned the wide-brimmed hat that had belonged to his father, lit his second Beverly of the day, and went downstairs to the telephone.
“Hello? Hello?” Nicky Nicola at the phone. “Hello? . . . They hung up. You sure it was for me?”
“Yes, it was, a husky voice, a woman,” replied Vitorio.
Strange, thought Nicky, and ordered a mug of coffee with milk along with toasted French bread while ruminating on why a husky-voiced woman who wanted to speak to him had hung up after waiting on the line for forty-five minutes.
Chapter II
The Poisoned Mariola Candy
As soon as Nicky Nicola finished his coffee and toast, he felt like a new man. And that new man wasn’t doing well at all. He needed to lose that habit of wolfing down French bread still hot from the oven. So as not to offend Vitorio, owner of the bar and grocery, Nicola, with the consummate ability acquired thanks to years of training, removed the hidden part of his secret ring and stealthily dumped into a glass the sodium bicarbonate he always carried for such an emergency.
Only after downing the glass in a single gulp did Nicola close his ring again, with an almost imperceptible click. He liked that piece of jewelry. He had inherited it from his grandfather, and it bore interlinked initials. Not his, of course, his grandfather’s. It was a beautiful imitation ring. Obviously, the secret compartment for holding bicarbonate had been adopted by Nicola after he saw a movie about one Lucrezia Borgia, a prostitute who was the daughter of a pope. While the potion was taking effect against his agita, the telephone rang again. Quick as a flash, Nicola ran to answer it. As soon as he heard the hoarse voice of a woman at the other end of the line, the mystery unraveled: the caller was Creusa, a charming dark-skinned maid who worked in an apartment in Lapa. The hoarseness was due to a strong cold, which she rapidly identified as “a grippe that’s going around.” Creusa nervously related that the aunt of Dona Mirtes, her mistress, had died mysteriously in the living room of the apartment. She explained that the dead women was Dona Estefânia, a distinguished public servant in Quixeramobim, in the state of Ceará, who was spending a few vacation days with her niece. There wasn’t the slightest doubt: this was a case for Nicky Nicola.
Hours later, the famous investigator arrived at the address in Lapa. As he headed toward the elevator, Nicola saw reflected on the wall the shadow of a person approaching him from behind. He turned rapidly, with the swiftness of a panther, clutching his deadly nail clipper. His eyes bulged when he saw who was following him: the building’s custodian. Indifferent to the sophisticated appearance of the detective, the custodian made him use the service entrance. Nicola smiled with disdain and showed him his private investigator’s ID.
One minute later he was entering the service elevator.
It does no good to argue with the ignorant, he thought.
On his way through the kitchen, the detective kissed Creusa, filched a piece of coconut candy from the pantry, and proceeded to the living room. The scene before him was distressing: Dona Mirtes was crying in one corner, looking at the body of Dona Estefânia lying on the carpet. He kneeled beside her, and with the skill acquired during years of training began to carefully examine her. After two fruitless hours, he found what he was looking for: in the back of the old woman’s throat, blocking the passage of food, was a piece of the candy known as a mariola. He examined it with his glass—taken from Zé Ferreira’s spectacles while his roommate slept—and his instinct told him the candy was poisoned. To confirm his intuition, he divided the small piece in two and tossed part to the cat that was roaming nearby.
After gobbling it down, the cat jumped violently to one side and fell dead on the floor, its paws sticking up. Nicola congratulated himself for his shrewdness in identifying the poisoned candy, although it brought about a terrible tongue-lashing from Dona Mirtes who, after losing her aunt, had now also lost her pet.
Finally Creusa intervened and succeeded in getting her mistress to hire the investigator to find the killer. Nicola was satisfied. The money would come in handy. It wasn’t every day that he got a case paying 2,500 cruzeiros a week, excluding his transportation expenses and snacks, a sum equivalent to a dollar a day.
Nicky said goodbye to Dona Mirtes, apologized again about the cat, and left by the front door, accompanied by Creusa.
“Whaddaya think?” asked the lovely mulatta in her singular way of speaking.
“I don’t know, I don’t know . . . To me it looks like someone wanted to kill her,” Nicky Nicola replied philosophically.
Chapter III
The Treacherous Elevator
Nicky closed the apartment door after him and with remarkable expertise pushed the button to summon the elevator. Really, the candy had been the causa mortis of his girlfriend’s mistress’s aunt. He had been seeing Creusa for a long time, and when she’d phoned to say a crime had been committed in the house where she had worked as a maid for three years, Nicky hadn’t hesitated: he’d run from the bar and jumped aboard the 230 bus, the line that linked Mooca and Lapa. Unfortunately, at that hour of the morning it was difficult to find a place to sit, but Nicky Nicola was in excellent physical condition when standing up.
Now, upon leaving Dona Mirtes’s apartment, Nicola waited for the elevator that would take him to the routine part of the job: investigating in the bars of the neighborhood to find out in which establishment that lethal delicacy had been acquired.
The elevator finally arrived. Nicola stepped in, turned around to face the door to facilitate exiting, and pushed the button for the ground floor. Some seconds later, the elevator stopped, but there was no door visible. The machine had probably gotten stuck between two floors, and all the detective saw in front of him was an immense concrete wall. His instinct immediately told him that he had fallen into a trap: the killer knew that he intended to take the case and now planned to keep him there, penned in until he starved to death, by placing an Out of Order sign on the door below, causing the residents to use the other elevator. What the killer didn’t know was that Nicola wasn’t easily beaten. There was only one thing to do: scream. Nicky shouted with all the strength of his cigarette-ravaged lungs. He called for help, hammered his fists repeatedly against the elevator. He only stopped when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. With his ever-alert reflexes, Nicky turned. It was the custodian.
“No need to be afraid. You’re not trapped. This elevator has two doors. To get in on the upper floors it’s there, but the exit is back here,” the man said, pointing to a line of people waiting to get on, laughing furtively at the dedicated detective.
Chapter IV
The Noir Series Continues
As soon as Nicola found himself back in
the street, he started asking several questions. He didn’t have an answer to any of them. Who had an interest in the death of Dona Estefânia? She was probably an unbearable old lady. At least that’s what Nicola thought about all old women, except of course his venerable, sweet mother, who had thrown him out of the house thirty years earlier, forcing him to look for work, with a gentle maternal incentive: “Get a job, you bum!”
Would Dona Mirtes, the niece of the deceased, gain anything from her aunt’s death? Not unless she wanted to be free of that intolerable pussycat. He immediately removed the idea from his mind. Ridiculous, he thought. After all, she’s paying me a fortune to investigate. Nicola had a dogged loyalty to his few clients. From that point of departure, his thoughts wandered for a few moments as he pondered whether he should have asked for an advance payment for the investigation. He came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t go over well and went back to reasoning about the case.
Was Creusa, his girl, involved? Probably. She was easily seduced. She usually let her shapely rear end do the thinking for her. Who then? Nicola relit the butt of his Beverly, which had gone out in the corner of his mouth. Okay, what matters now is finding out where the candy came from, he reflected. He walked a bit farther and went into the first bar he encountered. His instinct told him he was on the right track. His instinct and an enormous tray of the same candy he had seen on top of the bar. He went up to the proprietor leaning over the bar, took out his private investigator ID, and said with authority: “Private Investigator Nicky Nicola. You’re gonna have to answer some questions.”
As he brushed off his clothes, lying on the sidewalk outside the bar, Nicola wondered why bar owners and their ilk harbored such antipathy for private investigators. It wasn’t the first time he’d been violently ejected from such an establishment upon stating his noble profession. If not for the years of martial arts he’d learned from movies, watching a Bruce Lee double feature at the Cine Imperial on Rua da Mooca, he could have landed badly and fractured a rib, as had already happened on more than one occasion. But Nicky was not a man to be discouraged by so little. He went back into the bar and warned: “The next time you do something like that, I’m phoning my cousin, who has a brother-in-law who’s the nephew of a friend of a cop!”
It was an old trick of Nicola’s, and the threat had the usual effect: nothing. Immediately the bar owner, who happened to be from Portugal, responded: “Go eat shit! You can call anybody you want to, but if you stick your elbow in my soup again, I’ll toss you out again!”
Nicola examined his jacket at the indicated spot and, seeing the stain, realized what had happened: when he leaned over the counter to show his ID he had inadvertently rested his elbow in the man’s bowl of soup. He apologized, saying he would never do it again, and after a brief conversation to defuse the situation, he began his questions.
“Are you Portuguese?”
“From the day I was born, you nitwit!”
Shrugging off the man’s vulgarity, Nicola continued the awkward interrogation: “Did you by any chance notice anyone buying this candy yesterday?”
“No, but funny that you mention it,” said the bar owner, who as Nicky suspected was named Manuel.
“Funny why, Mr. Manuel?”
“Well, the only person yesterday buying my candy was a Japanese guy, and you know very well that the Japanese hate that type of candy.”
Nicola nodded, despite not knowing that. It was a clue. More than a clue, a lead. Now he needed to find out if there was a Japanese person among Dona Estefânia’s relationships. He thanked Manuel for the valuable information and before leaving went into the bathroom to see if a little soap and water would remove that greenish stain from his jacket.
As soon as he started scrubbing the sleeve, he heard a click on the outside of the door. The external latch had been locked. Nicola tried to open the door but couldn’t. He applied force. The latch resisted. He quickly determined that the enemy must have been following him the whole time. How careless he had been in not searching for a suspicious-looking Japanese guy in his midst. Through the bathroom window he heard a sinister guffaw. He climbed onto the basin to look out onto the street, just in time to see a small Asian man laughing as he pedaled away on a bicycle. He couldn’t make out the guy’s face, but there was a sign on the bike’s frame: Kiwoshi Dry Cleaners.
Nicola jumped for joy, which was a pity. When he jumped he smashed the basin, which broke with immense noise and shattered on the floor. The wrecked pipe sent water spewing to all sides. The noise brought Manuel, who immediately released the stuck outside latch, leaving Nicola free. Well, almost free, he just had to remain in the bar until midnight washing dishes to pay for the basin he had broken.
Chapter V
An Idiotic Mistake
After washing all the plates in Manuel’s bar, Nicola thought it was time to rest. He was wrong. Until he found the address of Kiwoshi Dry Cleaners, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He looked in the bar’s telephone directory, but didn’t see the dry cleaner listed. He looked, first under Cleaners, then under Laundries, followed by Dry Cleaning. The search yielded no results.
“Strange, very strange,” Nicky Nicola thought aloud.
“What’s strange?” asked Manuel, who was drying a glass while watching the detective out of the corner of his eye.
Despite the touchy fact of the bar owner having forced him to wash all the dishes to pay for the damage to the bathroom, Nicola was not a man to hold grudges. The only feeling he had in relation to the bar owner was hate. Even so, he explained: “I can’t find the name Kiwoshi Dry Cleaners in the phone book. But I’m sure that was the name I saw on the bike.”
“Of course you can’t find it. You’re looking in the street listing.”
Nicola managed to control himself. His brilliant and agile mind immediately found a way out of that tiny slip: “I know. I was looking name by name, for the simple reason that you can’t browse the list of subscribers. I can’t imagine how you didn’t pick up on that right away. It’s obvious.”
“And exactly why can’t you browse the list of subscribers?” asked Manuel, intrigued.
“Elementary, my dear Manuel . . .” And he let drop the information like a bomb: “The list of subscribers must be poisoned! Whoever browses it dies!”
Manuel refused to argue with that idiotic theory: “Then why don’t you look in the Yellow Pages?”
Unwittingly, that ignorant bar owner had given Nicola the correct lead. The Yellow Pages, of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Yellow Pages—Kiwoshi was Japanese and therefore yellow too! How impressive the paths of deduction are, thought Nicola.
He quickly found what he was looking for in the Yellow Pages and left the bar with the address of the dry cleaner carefully noted on the greasy paper napkin that served as his to-do list. There was no time to lose. He jumped into the first car that came by and, making use of his credentials, barked at the driver: “Investigator Nicky Nicola. We’re going to this address! Make it quick, it’s a matter of life and death.”
The driver examined Nicola’s business card and immediately threw him out on the street. But the detective wasn’t a man so easily discouraged. He got on the first bus going by and continued his journey. The dry cleaner wasn’t far away: two transfers until the end of the line. That would give him time to review the main items of the case that he had been able to sketch thus far:
1. Dona Estefânia, a teacher on vacation from the state of Ceará, had been eliminated by a poisoned piece of candy.
2. Her niece, Dona Mirtes, had hired him to solve the case.
3. Without meaning to, he had killed Dona Mirtes’s cat to test whether the candy was poisoned.
4. He had been locked in the bathroom of the bar by a Japanese dry cleaner.
Putting all these pieces together, what did he have? The answer was clear: nothing.
To calm himself down, he took from his jacket pocket his special pen with a secret compartment in the ink reservoir where he
always carried a good dose of booze. He unscrewed the rear part of the pen and drank it all down in a single gulp to steady his nerves. That was when he tasted ink flooding his throat.
Next chapter: “The Washable Blue Guffaw.”
Chapter VI
The Washable Blue Guffaw
As soon as Nicola, installed comfortably in the bus, noticed that, instead of drinking the liquor in his secret compartment, he had gulped down all the ink in his Nogueira (an unknown brand he bought from a street vendor), he pretended nothing was awry and tried to play it off. Futilely. A fat lady seated nearby saw the blue liquid coming from his mouth and began screaming: “Conductor, help! There’s a sick man here! He’s vomiting blood!”
There was no way Nicola could convince her that his blood wasn’t blue. The woman went on bellowing, immediately followed by a chorus of people looking in fright at the investigator’s mouth. Several clinical suggestions were offered, the least absurd of which was that the detective was an Indian. Many passengers suggested that it could be contagious and that he ought to be thrown out the window. His sixth sense told him the best solution was to get out then and there. He crossed the vehicle in three agile leaps, crushing the feet of a few passengers, and, pressing his comb against the nape of the driver’s neck, said: “Listen, my friend, there’s no time to explain. It’d be best for you to stop right here and let me off, or my comb will do some real damage to your head.”
São Paulo Noir Page 5