Blood of the Wicked

by Leighton Gage

  “Okay,” the colonel said. He picked up a pen and made a note. “Souza, Edson. I’ll get back to you. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, ARNALDO got to the breakfast table first. He was already poking at a cheese omelet when Silva arrived.

  “Look at this thing,” he said. “I told you they couldn’t even boil an egg.”

  “That’s not boiled.”

  “The hell it’s not. It’s boiled in warm oil.”

  Hector joined them five minutes later, his eyes still puffy from sleep. His uncle made a show of looking at his watch.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Hector said, and then to the waiter: “Coffee, black. I’ll have the breakfast buffet.”

  “Good choice,” Arnaldo said, and put down his fork.

  “So, how did it go with Brouwer?” Hector asked. “What did you think of him?”

  As if on cue, the buzz of conversation in the restaurant came to a sudden stop. Heads turned toward the door.

  A tall man in blue jeans and a Landless Workers’ League T-shirt was standing there, scanning the room.

  “Speak of the devil—” Silva said.

  “That’s him?”

  “That’s him.”

  The conversation around them resumed, but something about it had changed. There was tension in the air. Eyes followed Brouwer as he walked toward them and stopped at their table.

  “May I?”

  “Sure. Have a seat,” Silva said, indicating the empty chair. “Padre Anton Brouwer, meet Delegado Hector Costa and Agente Arnaldo Nunes. Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  Hector raised a hand to summon the waiter, who seemed to be the only person in the room who wasn’t looking their way.

  “I’ll go get him,” Arnaldo said, and stood. As he lifted his bulk out of the chair, he did a visual sweep of the room. People started taking a sudden interest in their food.

  Silva raised his eyebrows. “We seem to be attracting quite a bit of attention. Is it you, Father, or the T-shirt?” He pointed to the league logotype emblazoned on the priest’s chest.

  “Both,” Brouwer said. “This isn’t a place for the have-nots. I don’t belong here.”

  Arnaldo came back and caught the priest’s last words. “The waiter thinks so, too,” he said. “Says the other customers aren’t going to like it if you get served. I had to flash a badge at him.”

  “I don’t want to be here any more than they want me to be here,” he said. “But I had to come. Because of this.” He pulled a piece of paper from one of his pockets.

  “What’s that?” Silva said.

  “A letter from Diana Poli to me. Read it.”

  Silva did.

  Anton,

  You were right. It’s one hell of a story, but now that I know what he’s capable of I’m scared to death.

  If anything happens to me, tell the Federal Police to look in my safe-deposit box. It’s at the Itaú Bank, the one on Avenida Neves. And if you call, for God’s sake don’t mention this note. He may have tapped my phone.

  Love,

  D.

  Silva handed the note to Hector. Hector read it and passed it to Arnaldo.

  “Who’s ‘he’?” Silva asked.

  “I’m not sure she’d want me to tell you that.”

  Silva let that one go for the moment. He took the note back from Arnaldo and rustled it. “When did you get this?”

  The waiter arrived with a pot of fresh coffee, put a cup in front of the priest and went away without looking at any of them.

  “It came in this morning’s mail,” Brouwer said. “I called her right away. She didn’t answer the phone at her apartment, so I tried her at the office. She had a meeting set for eight o’clock, but she never arrived.”

  Hector wrapped his napkin around the metal handle of the pot and filled Brouwer’s cup. The priest nodded his thanks and reached for the sugar.

  “She’s punctual? Reliable?” Silva asked.

  “Very. And she has a pager and a cell phone. She’s not responding to either.”

  “You know where she lives?”

  “Yes.”

  Silva pursed his lips. He was getting a bad feeling about this.

  “Finish your coffee, Father. I want you to take us there.”

  THEY TRIED buzzing Diana from the lobby. There was no answer.

  “There’s probably a zelador,” Arnaldo said—a live-in janitor, responsible for keeping the public areas of apartment buildings clean and neat.

  “Go see,” Silva said.

  Arnaldo took the stairs that led down to the garage. A few minutes later they heard two pairs of footsteps coming back up.

  The zelador was a little brown man with a singsong Bahian accent. No, he hadn’t seen Senhorita Diana, not last night, not this morning. No, he didn’t have a key to her apartment, but Cecilia did.

  “Cecilia?”

  “Sim, senhor. Cecilia. Senhorita Diana’s faxineira. She comes to clean. She’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

  “We can’t wait. Come with us. We’re going up.”

  Upstairs, they pounded on the door of the apartment.

  There was no answer.

  Silva put his ear to the door. He heard a faint buzzing, constantly changing in pitch, and recognized it immediately for what it was.

  “Ah, Jesus,” he said to no one in particular. And then, to Arnaldo, “Open it.”

  Arnaldo stepped up to the door and examined it.

  “Steel, in a steel frame,” he said, “it’s gonna be a bitch to break. You want me to call a locksmith?”

  “Wait,” Hector said. First he looked under the welcome mat. Nothing. Then he ran his hand over the top of the doorjamb. A key came tumbling down, tinkled once against the door and wound up on the corridor’s rug.

  “Voila,” he said, and picked it up.

  The steel door had done a good job of isolating the hallway from what was happening inside. The minute Hector cracked it open all of them could smell the stench.

  Arnaldo and Hector exchanged a knowing look. Father Brouwer put his hand to his mouth. Silva turned to the zelador.

  “There’s a dead body in there,” he said.

  “Stinks, doesn’t it?” the zelador asked. He was enjoying it. “I want you to go downstairs and call the State Police. Wait for them out in front and bring them here when they arrive. Understand?”

  “Sure. But—”

  “But nothing. Get moving.”

  The zelador looked at the door to Diana’s apartment, back at Hector, back at the door again, and shrugged. Then he turned and walked reluctantly to the elevator, taking his time about it.

  Silva walked inside, followed by Hector.

  “Let’s go, Padre,” Arnaldo said. “Follow me, hold your nose, and watch where you step.”

  They found the bodies in the office. Someone had switched off the air-conditioning and left the door to the terrace ajar. Diana’s apartment wasn’t just hot, it was stifling. The smell was bad, but the flies were worse. They were everywhere: in the air, on the furniture, the curtains, the walls, the ceilings, the pools of blood on the floor, but mostly on the corpses of the two women.

  Diana was lying on her back with her throat cut. Nearby, a woman with blonde hair was bound upright in a chair. She was naked from the waist down. Her head was tilted forward, and they couldn’t see her wound, but judging by the blood that covered her blouse it was likely she’d been dispatched in the same way.

  “You know her?” Silva asked Brouwer, pointing at the blonde.

  He nodded. “Diana’s friend, Dolores. Diana called her Lori. They lived together.”

  “Look at her hand,” Arnaldo said.

  The other three did.

  Brouwer was the first to speak.

  “There was something they wanted to know,” he said. “They chopped Lori’s fingers off, one by one, until Diana told them. Then they killed them both.”

  Silva rememb
ered the priest’s experience of torture.

  Arnaldo looked at him with admiration. “You could’ve been a cop,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Silva said.

  “You don’t want to wait for the locals?” Hector asked.

  His uncle shook his head. “I want to see what’s in that safe-deposit box,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE BANK MANAGER MUST have been one of the few people in town who wore a suit to work. He was friendly and helpful, but also a fusspot, determined to go through all the formalities.

  “Pardon me for asking, but may I see the warrant?” he said.

  “We don’t have one.” Silva was doing the talking for the four of them.

  “An authorization signed by Senhorita Poli would do just as well,” the manager insisted.

  “We haven’t got that either. This is a special case, Senhor . . .”

  “Junqueira.”

  “Senhor Junqueira. Look, Senhor Junqueira, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Senhorita Poli won’t be signing any authorizations for anyone. Senhorita Poli is dead. Murdered.”

  The manager opened his mouth, reminding Silva of a fish with eyeglasses.

  “Murdered?”

  “All I’m asking you to do is to let us have a look in that box. We’ll do it in your presence. We won’t take anything out or put anything in. You can watch us while we do it.”

  “Murdered. My God. Well, in that case . . .”

  THE WOMAN in charge of the safe-deposit boxes was introduced as Carmen. She had a picture frame on her desk with photos of two little girls who weren’t quite as plump as their mother but who were well on their way.

  She smiled, offered a hand to each of them—Silva, Hector, Arnaldo, and Brouwer—and started gathering chairs from neighboring desks to seat them all.

  “That won’t be necessary, Carmen,” Junqueira said. “The gentlemen are in a hurry. I’ll sign the book,”

  “Sim, senhor,” she said. “And the key?”

  “Ah, yes, the key. I’d forgotten about the key.”

  “What key?” Silva said.

  “There are two keys,” Carmen explained. “We keep one, and the client keeps the other. You need both keys to open a box. We have ours. You need Diana’s.”

  Carmen seemed to be on first-name terms with Diana Poli.

  “And without that key?” Silva asked.

  “We have to drill out the lock. It happens occasionally, people losing their keys.”

  “Drill out the lock?”

  “Yes,” she said brightly. “There’s a locksmith we always use. But I’m sure it won’t be necessary in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you’re policemen, aren’t you?”

  “We are.”

  “Then why don’t you just ask Colonel Ferraz for his?”

  FERRAZ HAD left an authorization, ostensibly signed by Diana and dated a week earlier. Carmen showed it to Silva. It was short and to the point:

  Please allow Colonel Emerson Ferraz, RG 186364682, to access my safe-deposit box, number 3601

  Diana Poli

  RG was the prefix to numbers in a national identity card.

  “When was he here?” Silva asked.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Carmen said, “about an hour after we closed our doors to the public. He just caught me. I’d finished my paperwork, had my purse in my hand, and was on my way out the door.”

  SILVA, HECTOR, and Father Brouwer left Arnaldo to wait for the locksmith and adjourned to a padaria on the other side of the street. They sat on the terrace where the smell of freshly baked bread battled exhaust fumes from the passing traffic.

  Silva and Hector ordered coffee. The priest asked for a mineral water. “I don’t expect there’ll be anything left in that box,” he said.

  “No. I don’t expect there will be,” Silva said. “Now, let me hazard a guess. The man she was referring to in the note was Ferraz, right?”

  The priest looked around before he inclined his head. “That bastard,” he said, softly. It sounded strong, coming from a priest.

  “I think we agree with you there, Father,” Hector said. “What’s going on? And what’s your involvement in all of this?”

  A young girl, probably no more than thirteen, came up from behind Father Brouwer and touched him on the arm. He turned in his chair and studied her pinched face, thin arms, and short, dirty hair. She was wearing a tattered smock, once white, and carrying a baby. Father Brouwer looked from one child to the other, sighed, and reached into the pocket of his jeans. “Buy some milk,” he said.

  The girl nodded, closed her hand around the coin he gave her, and moved off without a word.

  “Dear God,” the priest said, “let that be her little sister and not her daughter.”

  Hector gave him a curious look. “How did you know—”

  “That the baby was a girl?”

  Hector nodded.

  “Her ears were pierced,” Brouwer said. “You asked me what’s going on? Where do I start?”

  “Start with yourself,” Silva said. “How did you get involved in what Diana was doing?”

  “I work with the poor. Not just the league, but anyone who’s poor, anyone who needs help: widows, orphans, the disabled, the indigent, street kids. One of the street kids came to me with a story.”

  “About?”

  “The murders.”

  “The death squad?”

  “It isn’t a death squad.”

  “No? Then why do they make hams out of their victims?”

  “To make people think it is.”

  “Why?”

  “This is a law-and-order town, Chief Inspector, run by rich people and crooked politicians who want clean streets. No matter what they say in public, privately they tend to agree that those kids are a plague that has to be rooted out. Except that rooting them out by giving them homes, work, and food is too much trouble and too expensive. They’d rather see some of them killed and hope the others will take fright and move away.”

  “So there’s a tacit approval of the murder of those children, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes.”

  Father Brouwer picked up his glass and drained it. His hands were trembling slightly, and the glass made a little clinking sound when he put it back on the metal table.

  “So why are they being killed?”

  “Pipoca said—”

  “Pipoca?”

  “The boy who came to talk to me. All of the children have street names. That’s his. Pipoca. He told me the children were murdered because they didn’t pay their debts, not because there was a movement underway to clean up the streets.”

  “Debts?”

  “Drug debts. He said that all of them had to work hard to support their habits and when someone defaulted . . . an example was made.”

  “So instead of cleaning up the town, it’s the other way around. The people doing the killing are forcing the kids to work harder?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that work is prostitution, petty theft, burglaries, assaults. . . .”

  “Yes. All of that.”

  Silva glanced at Hector before he asked the next question. “This Pipoca, does he know who’s behind it? The drugs? The killings?”

  “Emerson Ferraz.”

  “Why didn’t you come to us?”

  “You weren’t here. I didn’t know whom to trust. I have issues with policemen, as you may know. And it isn’t just the policemen in this town who are corrupt. It’s the politicians as well. And that judge, Wilson Cunha. He may not be involved in Ferraz’s business, but he’s certainly in the pocket of the movers and the shakers.”

  “So you discussed it with Diana?”

  “Yes. She’s from a wealthy family, people who own a great deal of land, but she’s always been sympathetic to the needs of the poor. And not just Diana, but her mother and father too. They’ve been regular contributors to our work.”

  Silv
a’s voice took on a harder tone. “And instead of advising you to come to us, as she should have done, she asked you to keep quiet about it so she could write a goddamned newspaper story?”

  “You have to understand,” the priest said, defensively, “that up to then it was all hearsay. The person doing the talking was a street kid. The man he was accusing was a colonel in the State Police. We needed more proof. Diana set out to get it. She interviewed other street kids. She took photographs.”

  “Interviews? Photographs? My God, Padre, street kids will sell their own mothers for a vial of crack. Didn’t it ever occur to you that it was all going to get right back to him?”

  “Of course it did,” the priest said, bristling. “No one knows those poor children better than I do. They’ve been taught to value money above all else, above ethics, morals, friendship, even God. I knew it would get back to Ferraz eventually, but I never thought it would be so soon. I thought we’d have more time and I also thought . . .”

  “Thought what?”

  The priest rested an elbow on the table and covered his eyes with his hand. “Thought . . . no, hoped, they’d recognize what would happen to anyone they informed on, and think twice before doing it.”

  “Then you’re naïve, Father. Naïve. Ferraz is a bastard. You said it, and I believe it, but to them he’s their source of the magic stuff that helps them to forget their misery. You say you know those kids better than anyone? Well, if you do, you’ve been a damned fool.”

  “Keep your voice down, Chief Inspector, and please stop abusing me. I already feel bad enough. I feel responsible for Diana’s death.”

  Silva took a deep breath, then went on in a milder tone. “No, Padre. You’re not. Ferraz is. And I will virtually guarantee you that he’s not finished. If he found out about the safe-deposit box, he found out about you as well. Take my advice and disappear for a while. Get out of town until we get all of this cleared up. He’ll be coming for you next.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m helping the league with the operation they have underway.”

  “Stay away from them. It would be just the excuse that Ferraz needs to shoot you.”