by Jerold Last
We first met Vincent Romero in The Surreal Killer. He’s cropped up in several stories and novels since then. His background as a former covert operative for the CIA in South America makes him an interesting, tough, and highly skilled character, which earns him a recurring role in this series. His history allows the story to touch on the political and economic changes in Brazil, the largest country in the region, even within the space constraints of the “quickie”. The slightly spooky gymnasium and the hint of the supernatural is far from my usual hard-boiled genre, but was a lot of fun to play with. So, without further introduction, imagine the appropriate spooky supernatural music in the background as Roger and we visit “The Haunted Gymnasium”.
The Haunted Gymnasium
By Jerold Last
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1.An invitation to Fortaleza
Chapter 2.The haunted gymnasium
Chapter 3.Questioning the suspects
Chapter 4.Back to the gym for a workout
Chapter 1.An invitation to Fortaleza
I was at my bi-weekly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu workout when Sam Clark approached me somewhat hesitantly. Clearly he had something on his mind and wasn’t sure how to ask it. Sam had the characteristic deadpan expression of the professional lawyer, excellent for playing poker but impossible to read his true feelings.
“Roger, how would you and your associates like to take a paid vacation in Fortaleza, Brazil and get paid double your usual fees in addition?”
“Maybe I need to hear a little more before I answer, Sam.”
Sam had a surprised look on his face. He'd obviously expected a greedier, more positive, response from me. “About half a dozen of us are planning to visit the famous gym in Fortaleza where the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu experts helped to invent the martial art for a couple of days. Rumor has it that the old gym is haunted, even though it’s still in active use. The deal is, we’ll only have permission to use it overnight, and there’s supposed to be a curse on anyone who uses the gym under those conditions. I thought we might hedge our bets a little bit and bring a few bodyguards, just in case. What do you think?”
“This sounds like the makings of an urban legend. Why would anyone think the gym is haunted? Did they find some dead bodies there or did something strange happen?"
Sam Clark shrugged and rolled his eyes. "Beats me. I don't know the history."
"Still sounds hokey to me, but I’ll get back to you on this tomorrow. Is that OK?”
“I guess it’ll have to be. Thanks for thinking it over, whatever you decide.”
I've studied martial arts pretty much my entire adult life, starting with my first job as a policeman in Los Angeles more that a decade ago. My initial choice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a martial art was for self-defense, and I've stayed with it as a regular exercise regimen through my black belt as a great way to stay in shape. I've often fantasized a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Jiu-Jitsu School in Fortaleza, as have many Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu students, and there was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity.
One of the reasons that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has become so strongly associated with mixed martial arts is that once the combatants are on the ground, generally the one with the most training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will win the fight. For example, Royce Gracie went undefeated for nearly 7 years as a professional mixed martial arts fighter. His skills in ground fighting played a major role in his success. On the other hand, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training does not emphasize striking techniques, boxing, kicking, and other ways of damaging your opponent while both of you are vertical. So current participants in mixed martial arts tend to cross-train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with karate, boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, and judo. I've also worked hard on my skills in karate and judo.
Suzanne was too busy to get away on short notice and needed our nanny Bruce to look after our son Robert, which left just Vincent Romero and me to take the very long trip from Los Angeles to Fortaleza. It would be about 5,777 air miles from Los Angeles to Fortaleza if there were a direct flight. But of course, there isn’t. You have to fly by way of Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, which only takes you about 3,000 additional miles out of the way and requires an extra overnight stay in both directions. Brazil is a very big country, and Fortaleza is way up in the northeast on the Atlantic coast, between 3 and 4 degrees latitude south of the equator. It will be one of the venue cities for the 2014 FIFA Soccer World Cup, which Brazil will host.
So that’s how Vincent, five Jiu-Jitsu enthusiasts including Sam Clark, and I got to stand over Russ Pardo’s dead body lying on a mat with his neck broken several days later in the old Jiu-Jitsu gym at 4 AM. The rest of our group consisted of Ellen Pardo the new widow, Bill Holmes, Jeff Cortland, and Arnie Schwartz. And, whatever ghosts might be present haunting the old gym.
Even at 4 in the morning the gymnasium was very hot and very humid, just like everywhere else in Fortaleza. The city did not perceptibly cool off after sunset; the nights were as hot and humid as the days. Doors and windows were kept open for ventilation so the temperature inside the gym was the same as outside. The ceiling fans on the second floor moved the air a little bit to give the illusion of a breeze, but there was no air conditioning and no cooling in the large gymnasium. The first floor didn't even have fans and thus didn’t even pretend to move the air, which is why everyone worked out upstairs.
"I'll call the cops," volunteered Vincent, who surprised me by being pretty fluent in Portuguese on the phone.
He responded to my raised eyebrows with, "I did some work in Brazil back when I was with the CIA," he explained to me when we had a bit of privacy.
The police arrived and interviewed us individually. The detective in charge, Lt. Coelho, noted the many stamps from other Mercosur countries in Vincent's and my passports, got us together, and asked both of us what we did for a living that brought us to South America. I explained that we were private detectives back home and gave him the names and contact information for a couple of high ranking policemen from Paraguay and Uruguay who could vouch for us. I also told him that I had been a homicide detective on the Los Angeles police force before I became a private detective.
A couple of phone calls later Lt. Coelho suggested that since we knew everybody in the group and had apparently not done a great job of guarding Russ Pardo's body while it was alive, we might want to help him with the investigation. We made a date to meet for lunch at noon at a restaurant a few blocks from our hotel where the others weren't likely to see us together. He finally sent the group back to the hotel with an admonition not to leave town pending the coroner's findings about accident or murder.
Chapter 2.The haunted gymnasium
Fortaleza is situated just a few hundred miles to the north of the easternmost point in the Americas, so it is less than 2,000 miles from Cape Verde, one of the major locations from which the early Spanish explorers sailed westward from Europe. Thus, it is a very old city. Fortaleza (fortress in Portuguese) was discovered in 1500, just 8 years after Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World, by Spanish explorers. Eventually, Spain traded what is now Brazil to Portugal for the rights to what is now almost everything else in South and Central America. Portugal built the fortress (and the town around it) that gave the city its name in 1603, seventeen years before the Pilgrims landed near Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It's now a city of more than 3 million population and the capital of Ceara State.
The average annual temperature is 80oF, with little variation from month to month. Relative humidity averages 77%, also with little variation from month to month. The rainy season runs from January to June. July to December is dry (with respect to precipitation), but the humidity remains high. A constant wind blowing in from the ocean helps to make the climate bearable, but it is always tropically hot and humid. It's a good climate for swimming and the beach, not so good a climate for anything else.
After a hot and humid walk, we met Lt. Coelho for lunch at a churrascaria, which served the typical beef cooked over an o
pen fire coated with generous amounts of salt, sliced to order by the server, and selections from a buffet of side dishes including regional foods like tapioca and Baiao-de-dois (a risotto cooked with beans and cheese), and typical Brazilian dishes like rice and beans and feijoada. Fresh tropical fruits and juices, Brazilian coffee, and several other dishes I didn't recognize filled the buffet tables.
Lt. Coelho, who was 40-ish, medium sized, wore a trimmed goatee, and was in pretty good shape, made it clear that this lunch was on us as he enthusiastically dove into his heaping platter.
"Call me Joao, and with your permission I'll call you Roger and Vincent," he said in very good English through a mouthful of food.
"Good," I thought, "we're all going to be friends here."
Between mouthfuls Joao began talking. "This is a real treat for me since I can't afford a place like this on my police salary. Thank you. Now, let me give you a little background. Mr. Pardo died of a broken neck, as you know. He also suffered a broken arm and showed other signs of losing a Jiu-Jitsu match to his killer. Do you know anything about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?"
"I have a medium grade black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu," I replied.
"Very good," he said, absent-mindedly stroking his goatee while he was thinking and talking. "So, let me tell you a little history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu here in Fortaleza and the legend of the haunted gymnasium. As you probably know Jiu-Jitsu came from Japan to Brazil in 1914 via Mitsuyo Maeda. The Gracie family, especially Helio Gracie, popularized the form that is now called Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. This form has become very popular worldwide as it serves as the basis for fighting on the ground in Mixed Martial Arts and other forms of Ultimate Fighting.
A few more strokes of the goatee preceded, "Joint locks and chokeholds are typically used to force submission. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu stresses self-defense and victory by submission of one's opponent over strikes that inflict damage as is typical, for example, in Karate. The theory is that once you are both on the ground, leverage and technique will allow a smaller combatant to defeat a larger and stronger opponent by taking away the advantages of superior reach and more powerful strikes. One of the benefits of emphasizing submission over strikes is that it allows training at full speed and full power, which facilitates the transition to competition.
Joao chewed a few pieces of steak thoughtfully and continued. "Helio Gracie challenged experts in all branches of judo and other martial arts to submission-based matches and won most of them as he popularized the sport. One of his rare losses was to Masahiko Kimura in 1951. Kimura forced him to submit via a painful arm lock, which is now a recognized technique used in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and has become part of the basis of our local legend. The legend is that Kimura felt that as the popularity and importance of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu grew worldwide in the 1990s he was not given enough credit or compensation for his victory. He died a bitter man. His ghost is said to haunt the Jiu-Jitsu Gymnasium here in Fortaleza. The ghost will fight to the death anyone he can find alone in the gym at night. There have been several men killed in the gym in the same way as Russ Pardo over the last 20 years. All have somehow been alone in the gym late at night, all have shown signs of being in a fight, all have died of a broken neck, and all of them have also had a dislocated shoulder, almost certainly caused by a Kimura arm lock.
"Now, please tell me, how did Mr. Pardo end up by himself downstairs in the gym last night when he was part of a group of six Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fans and had two bodyguards supposedly watching him as well?"
"To be perfectly honest with you Joao, we don't know. We asked everyone to stay together in the large gymnasium of the second floor of the building when we got there around midnight, since there was plenty of room for everyone to spar or work out in that area. But we had no way to enforce our request. Vincent and I moved around a lot, and we tried to cover both ends of the second floor as much of the time as we could. People wandered around continually. All of the bathrooms were downstairs and it was cooler downstairs. We can't account for where anybody actually was for large blocks of time last night. What I'd like to do is to interview everybody who was there to see if anybody gives a sparring partner an alibi for the critical times. That could help us eliminate a suspect or two from the group who couldn't have killed Russ Pardo when nobody was watching them."
More stroking of Joao's goatee accompanied the next couple of questions. "Do you know whether there was anybody in this group who had argued with or hurt Mr. Pardo, either here or back in Los Angeles?"
"No, but that's another question we should ask everybody in the group."
Joao ate several spoonfuls of a sweet dessert and appeared to be lost in his thoughts. “Something else you might want to ask about, or better yet try to get someone to volunteer the information without prompting, is whether there were any physical manifestations in the gymnasium at about the time Mr. Pardo died. We have withheld several pieces of information in relation to the prior murders from the press so we can weed out any false confessions. One of the things we’ve withheld is that whenever there has been an episode of mysterious death in the gym that fits the profile of Kimura’s ghost, it is invariably accompanied by the lights on the lower floor of the gym flickering and a brief sense of being surrounded by a wave of cool air.”
We tossed a few more random ideas around, but nobody had any worth repeating. Eventually lunch was over and we separated. Joao, one of the ranking homicide detectives in a big city of 3 million people, would work on the dozen other homicide cases he was investigating while we would question everyone in our group. We'd meet again to discuss our progress on the case over drinks at 7 PM.
Chapter 3.Questioning the suspects
I explained to our group that Lt. Coelho was doing us a big favor by letting Vincent and I do the interviews of all of the Americans involved, based upon my former experience as a homicide detective. We would create the paper trail he needed for his file in a series of friendly discussions of what happened. Hopefully, in return he would allow us all to go home on our scheduled flight. Their only job would be to give us some time, answer all of our questions as fully and honestly as possible, and promise to cooperate as much as reasonably possible in any ongoing investigation.
We interviewed the five Americans one by one in our hotel room, the easiest place to get some privacy. The large hotel room was set up with a kitchenette in the far corner of the room, with a small table that had four chairs for eating breakfast around its rectangular shape. Vincent and I sat in two of the chairs, with whoever we were questioning sitting across the long axis of the table from me. With the room air conditioning blowing full blast, it was a pretty comfortable arrangement, a far cry from the traditional third degree interrogation under a hot lamp in a tiny room with a one-way mirror.
Our first interview was with Ellen Pardo, the victim's wife. Ellen was in her 30s, an active participant in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu so in excellent shape physically, about 5'8" tall, dark hair worn in a ponytail with long bangs across her forehead that she frequently touched to keep out of her eyes, and very attractive. She had worked with her husband Russ' investment and wealth management company as the head of their Information Technology Division and was an expert in computer networks and programming. She did not appear to be incapacitated by her recent loss and answered readily when I asked her a question. However, she looked and acted a bit guilty, with a deer in the headlights look when I looked directly into her eyes. Ellen appeared to be worried, or even frightened, about the questions we were going to ask her.
"Like all of the other Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu aficionados, I've dreamed of coming here to Fortaleza for pretty much my entire adult life. When Sam suggested that we take a few days to come down to Brazil, Russ and I jumped at the chance. Even after Russ' death I'm still looking forward to tonight's mini-tournament. With a little bit of luck I should finish second or third in our little group. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and none of us is going to let what happened to Russ ruin it for the rest of us. There'll be p
lenty of time to mourn his loss when we get back home to California."
"I assume you knew everyone else in the group from our dojo, but did you or Russ socialize with any of them apart from Jiu-Jitsu training and competitions?"
Ellen reached for her bangs and pushed them out of the way. "Sam and Jeff both used our firm for their investment and wealth management needs. They were Russ' clients, but we'd both see them and their wives socially on a pretty regular basis. Russ hosted elegant parties pretty frequently where his regular clients were encouraged to bring prospects for Russ to recruit as new clients. We also interacted with Arnie's and Bill's families socially because our sons are all classmates at the local Montessori School."