Blood of the Wicked

by Leighton Gage

  “I’ll consider your advice.”

  “Which is another way of saying you won’t take it?”

  The priest had been looking down at his empty glass. Now he looked up and met Silva’s eyes. “Probably not,” he said. “You mentioned Diana’s safe-deposit box. How can he justify breaking into it?”

  “He’s not a fool, Father. He’ll justify it, believe me. What else have you got on him?”

  The priest shook his head. “Nothing. But we know he killed Diana and Lori. It had to be him.”

  “We might know it, but we can’t prove it. He’s a cop. You think he’s going to leave any evidence behind? Forget it. I can already tell you that Diana’s apartment will be as clean as a whistle. He won’t have left a shred of trace evidence.”

  “Oh, dear God. There must be something you can do.”

  “There are several things I can do, but I’d prefer that you don’t hang around while I’m doing them. What’s the real name of that kid, Pipoca? Do you know?”

  Father Brouwer closed his eyes and put his fingers to his lips, thinking about it.

  “He told me, but I . . . no, wait . . . it’s . . . Edson. That’s it: Edson. Edson Souza.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “EDSON SOUZA. I ’LL BE damned!” Hector exclaimed after the priest had gone.

  “And I asked Ferraz to help us find him,” Silva said. “Damn it!”

  “You didn’t tell Ferraz anything he wouldn’t have learned by questioning Diana.”

  Silva thought about it.

  “True,” he said.

  “Maybe Souza didn’t call the bishop about Azevedo’s murder. Maybe he called about Ferraz.”

  “I don’t think—” Silva’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket. “Silva.”

  “I just heard about the Poli girl,” the director began without preamble. “Have you any idea whose daughter she was?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer.

  “Dionisio Poli, that’s who. In addition to about half the land in the State of Parana, he also owns Editora Julho.”

  Editora Julho was the largest magazine publishing combine in the country.

  “Merda!” Silva said.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself. Don’t they murder unknowns in Cascatas?”

  “I’m sorry to say they do. They kill street kids.”

  But the director wasn’t listening. He was talking. “Jesus Christ. A bishop, then Muniz’s son, and now Poli’s daughter. The obituaries in that town are beginning to read like a social column. And now the papers here in Brasilia are beginning to pick up on it. The headlines are bad enough, Mario, but the editorials are going to be even worse. You’ve got to do something. The minister’s watching. He’s watching both of us. We need results and we need them fast.”

  “Yes, Director, I’m aware of that. I’m doing my best.”

  “Any progress?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the director said again, this time with an inflection of disgust. “Call me again at six, as usual.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  “Him again?” Hector asked.

  Silva nodded glumly.

  They sat in silence for a while. A chocolate-skinned woman in a red dress went by, swinging her hips. Hector’s eyes were still fixed on her retreating derriére when he said, “The minute this Pipoca hears about Diana Poli he’s going to panic and try to disappear down some sewer hole.”

  Hector was decidedly not fond of street kids. Less than a month earlier his former girlfriend, Angela Pires, had been brutally slashed by a thirteen-year-old who was trying to steal her wristwatch. The kid had done the job with a piece of window glass. It had taken five stitches to close the wound on her arm, and she’d bear the scar for the rest of her life.

  “With the exception of the sewer-hole part,” Silva said, “I agree with you. Look, there’s Arnaldo.”

  Arnaldo scurried across the street, narrowly avoiding being hit by an oncoming truck loaded with rattling, silver-painted gas canisters. He started talking even before he took the seat Brouwer had vacated.

  “Empty as my bank account,” he said. “Not a damn thing there. Carmen says we owe the bank a hundred-and-fifty reais for a new box. I paid the locksmith. He charged twenty- five reais. I hate to see little guys getting stiffed.”

  “I gather your generosity doesn’t extend to the bank?” Hector said.

  “What generosity? I got a receipt. I’m gonna declare it.”

  “And I’m going to approve it,” Silva said. “Now go back across the street and settle with the bank. We need some friends in this town.”

  Arnaldo shrugged and got up.

  Silva and Hector ordered more coffee.

  “So what’s next?” Hector asked.

  “You and I will look into the league. We’ll go out to that encampment of theirs, the one they set up on Muniz’s fazen-da, and ask a few questions.”

  “You really think they’re going to tell us anything?”

  “Probably not, but we’ve got to start somewhere. The league is as good a place as any.”

  “We were interrupted when the director called. Let’s get back to that. What if Souza went to the bishop about Ferraz, and Ferraz killed the bishop to keep him quiet?”

  “Unlikely. Souza was already talking to Brouwer and Diana Poli. What did he need the bishop for?”

  Hector scratched his head. “Yeah, you’re right. So I guess our first hypothesis is the most likely one. Souza must know who killed Azevedo.”

  “Or thinks he does.”

  “Or thinks he does. Either way, we’ve got to find him before Ferraz does. We’ll leave it to Arnaldo. He excels at that kind of street stuff.”

  The waiter arrived with two cups of espresso. Hector added some sugar from the dispenser and picked up one of the tiny spoons.

  “What do you make of Brouwer?”

  “I’m not sure. Remember Father Angelo?”

  “The old guy you told me about? The one who lives with Brouwer?”

  “Him.” Silva took a sip of his coffee. “He said Brouwer was incapable of spilling innocent blood. That’s the way he put it, “spilling innocent blood.”

  “There’s just one problem with that.”

  “What?”

  Hector drained his cup.

  “Suppose Brouwer doesn’t think the blood he’s spilling is innocent?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE TASK SILVA GAVE him presented Arnaldo with a dilemma: The only people who could help him find a street kid were other street kids. But trying to start a casual conversation with a street kid wouldn’t work. The kid would either clam up or run. And he couldn’t just go out and arrest one. Without some kind of a charge that would stick, even a federal cop couldn’t get away with that. And, besides, where could he take him? Bringing him to Ferraz’s jail would be useless. The kid would be so terrified that he’d never open up. Taking him to the hotel would attract too much attention, and might have fatal consequences if the colonel found out about it.

  Arnaldo considered going to a seedy part of town and flaunting his wristwatch and wallet. But, no, that wouldn’t work either. He was a big guy, so they’d have to set on him in a group or leave him alone. If they left him alone, he’d be wasting his time. If they set on him in a group, he’d have to pull a gun, but then somebody was liable to get hurt.

  Finally, and somewhat reluctantly, he came up with a way to go about it.

  The desk clerk at the Hotel Excelsior, the one who looked like an Indian, frowned when Arnaldo asked him the question. “A boy?” he said. “You want a boy who—”

  Arnaldo didn’t let him finish. “You heard me. And wipe that look off your face. I’m after information, not sex.”

  “Information, huh?” The clerk smirked.

  “Answer the question. Where do they hang out?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea.” The clerk’s smirk was carrying over into his voice.

  “No?�
��

  “No. Now, if it was a girl you wanted—”

  “I told you what I wanted, and I just told you why. And don’t tell me you don’t know, because this is a small town and everybody knows things like that. Don’t make me lose my temper. You won’t like it.”

  The clerk absorbed Arnaldo’s change in attitude, and crumbled.

  “The rumor is that they hang around Republic Square,” he said, lowering his voice even though they were alone in the lobby. “But they’re like tapirs. You don’t see them much in the daytime.”

  Arnaldo thought about it. His first reaction was to go to his room, have a nap, and hit the street after sunset. But, if he did that, Ferraz might find Pipoca first and it would be goodbye Pipoca.

  “Where is this Republic Square?”

  The clerk gave him directions, adding that it was “in the old part of town.”

  Until he got there, Arnaldo figured that “old” was a misnomer. Cascatas wasn’t really old as towns go, but this part of it sure as hell looked old. The square was as dirty and rundown as anyplace you could find in São Paulo, which was almost four hundred years older.

  The clerk at the hotel hadn’t bothered to mention that there was an open-air market in the square every Tuesday and Friday. That was annoying for Arnaldo, but was a good thing for the businesses that surrounded the square. Because if the market vendors hadn’t hosed down the place, as they were doing when he arrived, it might never have been cleaned at all. Unfortunately, the storm drains were mostly blocked with garbage, which meant that the hosing simply served to concentrate the detritus on top of the grates. The air was heavy with the smell of rotted fruit and spoiled fish. The elaborate cast-iron lampposts, once the pride of a new city, were rusting, and in two cases broken off just above the ground. Arnaldo noticed that there was something else about the lampposts: Every single globe was broken. He suspected it had been done on purpose to assure that the square would remain a dark place after sundown.

  The buildings surrounding the square were all of a pattern and all four stories tall. Some of the windows on the upper floors bore signs: a homeopathic doctor, a tarot card reader, and several businesses identified only by their names. At ground level, offices were interspersed with a few shops: One sold herbs, small statues and other artifacts for use in the spiritualist rituals of Candomblé and Macumba, Brazil’s equivalent of voodoo. Another was occupied by an ironmonger. The proprietor had stacked wooden boxes containing horseshoes, and funnels of all sizes, beside his door. The ironmonger was flanked, on one side, by a place heaped with secondhand furniture and, on the other, by a bar.

  The bar had only a handful of clients, all wearing the aprons that identified them as vendors from the market. They were seated around a rusting collapsible table and drinking straight cachaça. An old man with a day’s growth of beard was hovering nearby, making a halfhearted attempt to sell lottery tickets and trying to cadge a drink. One of the men at the table stood up, offered his almost-empty glass to the ticket seller, and strolled off in the direction of his stall. The old man lifted the mouthful of cachaça to his lips and drained it in one gulp.

  The housewives had already bought their fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish and had departed. With the exception of the drinkers, the vendors were packing up. Arnaldo decided to wait it out.

  It didn’t take long.

  Half an hour after he arrived, all vestiges of the market were gone, the bar had closed, and the square was virtually empty. It was almost two o’clock by then and getting into the hottest part of the day. Arnaldo went back to where he’d parked his car, stripped off his tie and threw it on the front seat. He left his jacket on to cover his holster. Then he went back and started trolling, walking around and around the square in a clockwise direction.

  He was beginning to think he was wasting his time when he heard a voice: “Looking for company, senhor?” The voice wasn’t brazen. It was soft, young, almost embarrassed. He looked around for the source and spotted a kid looking at him from the alleyway between two of the crumbling redbrick buildings. The boy might have been a teenager, but Arnaldo doubted it. He looked to be eleven, twelve at the most, and had eyes grown large with hunger. The eyes reminded Arnaldo of a character in one of those Japanese cartoons that his son, Julio, liked to watch on television. A dirty sweatshirt from the PUC hung low over the kid’s faded jeans. The PUC—The Pontifícia Universidade Católica— was one of São Paulo’s institutions of higher learning. The shirt was as close to it as the kid was ever going to get.

  Arnaldo had been offered the bait. Now he snapped at the hook.

  “Sure,” he said. “How much?”

  “Fifty reais,” the kid said.

  “Twenty.”

  You never agreed to give a whore, any kind of a whore, the first price they asked for. They’d think you were crazy, or stupid, or maybe they’d think you were a cop.

  “Forty,” the kid said.

  “Thirty,” Arnaldo said. “And a tip if I like your work.”

  “Where?” the kid said.

  It was broad daylight, so it wasn’t going to happen in the alley. Arnaldo assumed that the kid had a deal with some high-rotation establishment.

  “You got a place?” he asked.

  The kid nodded. “There’s one around the corner. It’s twenty for half an hour.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Follow me,” the kid said. “Not too close.”

  He sashayed out of the alleyway, wriggling his butt in a travesty of someone of the opposite sex and twice his age. Sewn to one of his hip pockets was a crude red heart, cut out of some feltlike material.

  Arnaldo let the kid get about twenty paces ahead and followed. The hotel was a five-minute walk, the building a four-story walkup that looked like it had been constructed to cater to traveling salesmen and had gone downhill from there. The exterior was painted a sickly green.

  The guy behind the counter was young and fat, reading a computer magazine. His light blue shirt had sweat stains from the armpits all the way down to the roll of lard above his belt. He leered at Arnaldo and asked for forty reais.

  “I thought you said twenty,” Arnaldo said to the kid.

  It was the fat guy behind the counter who answered: “Twenty for a half-hour, twenty for the deposit. You clear out of there by two-fifty-five”—he’d already shaved a couple of minutes off the time—“you get twenty back. You’re not gone by three-twenty-five, I come in and pull the kid off your dick.”

  “You take credit cards?”

  “You out of your fucking mind?”

  Arnaldo handed over the forty reais, knowing it would be useless to ask for a receipt, thinking about how he was going to get Silva to reimburse him.

  The guy didn’t even pretend to put the bills into a cash drawer. He just stuck the money in his pocket. Then he reached behind him, took a key from a row of hooks on the wall, and handed it to the kid.

  “Enjoy it,” he said to Arnaldo. “They tell me the kid has a mouth like a vacuum cleaner. Personally, I wouldn’t know. Me, I like girls.”

  “Come on,” the kid said. “It’s this way.”

  He led Arnaldo up a flight of stairs. They walked along a dim hallway lit by a few unfrosted bulbs and came to a door. The kid checked the number on the key against the number of the room, nodded, and turned the knob. The door wasn’t locked. Once they were inside, he stuck the key in the lock and turned it.

  The room’s only furniture was a double bed with thin sheets, gray from many washings. Through an open door, Arnaldo could see the interior of a closet where a few metal hangers hung suspended from a crossbar. There was a rusty sink, but no bathroom. An aluminum ashtray was perched precariously on the windowsill. The place stank of leaky plumbing, mold and old cigarette smoke. There was no air-conditioning.

  “Thirty reais,” the kid said, sticking out his hand.

  Arnaldo reached for his wallet and paid him. The kid put the money in his pocket and started to undress.

  A
rnaldo scanned the room. No mirror, so no two-way glass. Some holes in the wall, but the superficial ones showed plaster, and the deeper ones showed brick. A shade on the window, but it was pulled down. They weren’t being watched.

  The kid was down to his shorts now, and he was staring at Arnaldo.

  “You can hang your stuff in the closet,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself, then. Throw it on the floor for all I care. Or just drop your pants and I’ll do you standing up.”

  “I’m not here for sex. I’m here for information.”

  The kid took an involuntary step backward. “What kind of information?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I want to know about a kid who calls himself Pipoca. His real name is Souza.”

  The kid started scrambling for his clothes. “I don’t know any Pipoca.”

  “No?”

  “No. And no Edson Souza, neither.”

  The kid grabbed his sneakers and made a move for the door. Arnaldo got there first and pulled the key from the lock.

  “Who said his name was Edson?” he said, softly.

  “Caralho,” the kid said, realizing his mistake. “Leave me alone. They know me here. All I got to do is scream.”

  “Go ahead,” Arnaldo said.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead and scream. Let’s see what happens.”

  The kid’s eyes darted toward the window.

  “Long way down,” Arnaldo said, but he glanced that way anyway.

  Which must have been what the kid wanted because suddenly there was a switchblade in his hand. Where he got it from was a mystery. The kid wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of jockey shorts.

  “Drop it,” Arnaldo said.

  But the kid didn’t. Instead, he stretched out his arm and leaped forward, aiming the point at Arnaldo’s gut.

  He’d picked the wrong guy. Arnaldo was skilled in capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. In capoeira, blows are delivered by the feet and they’re stronger than any punch. The agente tried to be as gentle as he could, but the art hadn’t been developed to be gentle; it had been developed to maim and kill. The kid went flying head over heels and wound up in a heap in the corner. On the way, the knife flew out of his hand. Arnaldo retrieved it, snapped it closed and put it in his pocket.