Blackout

by Dawson, Mark

  Her promotion had come shortly afterwards. It led to a small increase in Josie’s salary, but the extra money had not, so far, made up for the increase in her workload. She left her mother’s place at six in the morning, before Angelo was awake, and returned at eight or nine at night, long after he had gone to sleep. She would eat her dinner in his room, staring at him inside his crib as she ate the meal that her mother had prepared for her.

  “What time will you be home tonight?”

  “Late, I think.”

  “Josie—”

  “It can’t be helped, Mama. There’s been a murder—”

  “There’s always a murder—”

  “And I have to interview the suspect.”

  “Don’t you think you should see your son?”

  “I want to,” she said, her fingers tightening on the wheel as she tried to keep her tone civil. “But he needs me to make a living.”

  “He hasn’t seen you for—”

  “Look, it might not take long. It should be an easy one. This man was asleep in the same room as the victim. It looks like they’d both been drinking. I’ll speak to him. I doubt we’ll be looking for anyone else. Maybe I can be home in time to put him to bed.”

  “Try, anak. He misses you.”

  “I miss him, too.”

  She ended the call and swallowed down on a dry throat. It upset her to think of Angelo. She wanted to be with him, but she had to find the money to raise him, too.

  It was a fifteen-minute drive from the guesthouse in Pasay to Police Station 4 in Pio Del Pilar. The traffic was thick on Bautista Street, and Josie cranked the malfunctioning fan all the way to the max in an attempt to get some cool air into the cabin. She had a lot to do, and she just wanted to get started.

  17

  POLICE STATION 4 was next to the crossroads where Vicente Cruz Street crossed Tuazon. Railway lines crossed the road to the left of the building and there was a hissing and popping lattice of electrical cables and telephone wires overhead. The building itself was small, a white-painted two-storey construction with the window frames and the balcony on the first floor all painted blue. It was surrounded by a low blue wall with taller white railings attached to it, and the entrance was shielded from the sun by a white awning with the words SERBISYONG MAKATOTOHANAN advertising the government radio initiative that was designed to teach the public how to prevent crime. Josie went under the awning and had the same thought that she always had: it was difficult to expect the public to take such measures seriously when there was so much municipal crime and corruption all around them.

  She waved good morning to Gloria, the woman behind the desk who almost single-handedly ensured that the station ran efficiently, and went through into the back.

  Bruno Mendoza was in his office.

  She picked up her pace as she approached the open door, hoping that he might not see her.

  “Josie,” he called out, “could you come in for a moment?”

  Mendoza was Josie’s commanding officer. He was an inspector and had clawed his way up to that rank after a twenty-year career distinguished only by a tenacious desire to advance himself, and in spite of rumours of graft that had never been adequately proven. Everyone knew that he was also involved in the semi-sanctioned police death squads. No one would talk about it openly, but it was an open secret in the locker room. Josie could guess at the membership of the team and knew that they met in the back room of Mendoza’s favourite brothel to discuss their hits. The fact that he was so jolly made the fact of his involvement in something so bloody even more jarring. Mendoza was married, but he had a thing for her, an unfortunate attraction he regularly demonstrated with offers of dinner that she found increasingly difficult to turn down with grace.

  She stepped into the office. “What’s up, Bruno?”

  “You picked up a murder this morning?”

  She nodded.

  “Bad luck.”

  “This isn’t going to be a difficult one.”

  “Go on.”

  “Maid goes into a room, sees a man asleep on the bed and a dead body in the bathroom. There’s booze everywhere. Pretty obvious what happened.”

  “Drunken fight?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s English?”

  “Yes, sir. How do you know that?”

  “I was in the yard when they brought him in.”

  “I’m going to interview him now. Is there anything else?”

  “How’s Angelo?”

  “He’s fine,” she said, suppressing the usual shudder as he fumbled an attempt at intimacy.

  “Are you taking him to the park tomorrow? They’re saying the parade is going to be something special.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t worked out what I’m doing yet.”

  “If you need to leave early, that would be okay.” He shuffled papers. “I’m going to be there. I’d love to meet him.”

  “Let me think about it,” she said, her skin prickling with discomfort.

  “Fine,” Mendoza said, grinning at her. “You do that.”

  “I’d better get in there.”

  “Let me know how it goes.”

  Josie said that she would, left the office and—grateful to be away from him—went to her desk to collect her notes and her voice recorder.

  Manuel Dalisay was waiting for her.

  “How was he?” she asked.

  “Didn’t say a word the whole time.”

  Dalisay had a paper bag of jellybeans and he offered one to Josie.

  She took it and put it into her mouth. “What do you make of him?”

  “Cold,” he said. “I saw him looking at me in the mirror. Dead eyes. Freaked me out.”

  “I’m going to interview him now.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  She started away from the desk and then turned back. “I forgot to ask,” she said. “How was the party?”

  Dalisay and his wife had been struggling to have a child for years, and, in something of a miracle given that Dalisay’s wife was in her early forties, a little girl had finally been born a year ago. They called her Mariel. Yesterday was her first birthday party.

  He smiled. “It was good. I got there late, which didn’t go down well. You remember that shabu lab near Arayat?”

  Josie remembered it well: two trailers off the road to Magalang, east of Route 8, in the middle of nowhere. They had busted it six months earlier.

  “What about it?”

  “We went back yesterday morning. They were using it again. Can you believe it?”

  “The Chinese?”

  He nodded. “The same crew. Eight of ’em this time. We only found out when they blew one of the labs up and the smoke was reported.” He reached down for a jellybean. “Anyway, by the time we’d wrapped that up and got back down to the city I was twenty minutes late. I thought Mary Grace was going to kill me, but the party was so good she forgot all about it. Lucky me, right?”

  “I’m pleased it went well,” Josie said. She reached into the open bag, snagged another candy and popped it into her mouth. She tapped the recorder with her finger and headed to the station’s solitary interrogation room.

  18

  JOSIE LOOKED through the peephole. The room beyond was sparsely furnished, with just a table and two chairs and a bench seat against the far wall. There was a single barred window, and a naked lightbulb above the table flooded the space in harsh white light. The man was sitting at the table. His wrists were cuffed and the chain was attached to a bracket on the table. Josie would have been nervous at the prospect of a solo interrogation when she first started, but she had done so many by now that it had become commonplace. And, in a case like this, it wasn’t as if she would have to be inventive in order to secure a confession. That wasn’t necessary. This interview would be almost entirely administrative.

  She unlocked the door and went inside.

  The man looked up.

  “Hello, sir,” she said.

  He
gave a shallow nod. She looked at him: he had dark hair, a single comma of which uncurled over his forehead. She guessed he was in his mid-forties, with the usual lines and marks at the corners of his eyes, the edges of his mouth and nose. It was his eyes, though, that caught her attention: they were blue, icily cold and dispassionate. Dalisay was right. He was cold. He looked up at her and she had to swallow down a twist of apprehension.

  “You’re English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you speak Filipino?”

  “No.”

  “I can speak English,” she said. She took out her recorder and laid it on the table. “I’m going to use this.”

  He shrugged.

  “What is your name?”

  “John Smith.”

  “I’m Officer Hernandez. I’m in charge of the investigation into what happened at the hotel.”

  Smith nodded, but said nothing.

  “Have you been offered a lawyer?”

  “I don’t want one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  “Suspect confirms with a nod that he is not requesting a lawyer,” she said for the benefit of the recording.

  “What do you do, Mr. Smith?”

  “I’m a cook.”

  “And what are you doing in Manila? Holiday?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I think you should talk to me about what happened.”

  The man looked straight at her but didn’t speak.

  “Mr. Smith?”

  There was an expression of disconsolation on his face. She had interviewed many suspects over the course of her career, and their reactions could be easily categorised: anger from those who knew that they had been caught, slyness from those who thought that they were clever enough to talk their way free, confusion and despair from those who often turned out to be innocent. Smith’s reaction was more akin to confusion, but there was more to it than that.

  “Mr. Smith?”

  “I can’t remember what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can ask me whatever you like. I’ll answer honestly as best I can.”

  “But…?”

  “There are long stretches of yesterday evening that I can’t remember.”

  “So tell me what you do remember. Let’s start with that. Who was the girl?”

  Smith sighed, splayed his fingers on the table and looked down at them. “Her name is Jessica Sanchez.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “We were in a relationship. A long time ago. Years.”

  “So why were you with her last night?”

  “She said that she wanted to speak to me. She said it was important.”

  “About?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You’re not in a position to be selective with the questions you answer, Mr. Smith.”

  He paused and then decided to speak. “She said that she had a child and that the child was mine.”

  “And what did she want? Money?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You didn’t talk about it?”

  “I don’t remember what we talked about.”

  She felt frustration. Smith’s attitude was honest and confronting, all at once. He wasn’t doing himself any favours. “What do you remember?”

  “I remember getting to the hotel, checking in, going to my room. I went to Intramuros and Binondo and then I went back to the hotel. I’d been out all day, so I was hot. I took a shower, listened to music for a little while and then got changed and went out. I was hungry, so I bought kwek kwek from a street vendor and then I went to the bar.”

  “Which bar?”

  “The Lazy Lizard.”

  “In Poblacion?”

  He nodded. “Jessica was there when I got there.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Eight.”

  “And then?”

  “We spoke.”

  “About?”

  “Small talk. Nothing in particular. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time and there was a lot to catch up on.”

  “But not the child?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So you had a drink?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you got drunk.”

  “I don’t remember ordering anything other than orange juice.”

  “There were two empty bottles of vodka in your room, Mr. Smith. Cans of beer, too.”

  “I know. I saw them. I don’t remember buying them.”

  “Are you an alcoholic, Mr. Smith?”

  He stared at her. “Did you find my book?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  “Yes, I am. I haven’t had a drink for several years.”

  “Until last night.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You keep saying that, Mr. Smith. It’s not helping you. Unless you tell me what happened so I can investigate it, I’ll have to fill in the blanks from the evidence. If I do that, you’re going to be charged with murder.”

  Smith paused; Josie could see that he was considering what to say next.

  “When I was drinking,” he said, “I used to have blackouts. They don’t affect everyone who drinks, and those who are affected get them in different ways. I used to get them very badly. I’d wake up in places with no idea how I’d got there. I’d wake up with women and I didn’t know their names. It was embarrassing, and, in the end, it got to be frightening. It was one of the reasons that I stopped drinking.”

  “You think the reason you can’t remember what happened is because you blacked out?”

  “I can’t think of another reason.”

  “I’ll be honest with you. At some point between you meeting Miss Sanchez at eight and the cleaner coming into your room this morning, she was killed. At the moment, Mr. Smith, it looks very bad for you. Unless you can give me another reason why she was found dead in the bathroom while you were asleep, I’m not going to have any choice other than to charge you. Can you do that?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember.”

  “Fine.”

  Josie stood.

  He looked up at her. “What will happen next?”

  “You’ll be moved to a detention facility.”

  “And then?”

  “If you’re charged, you’ll go to trial. For a case like this, you won’t have long to wait. A month, maybe. You’ll need to find a lawyer.”

  “Do I get a phone call?”

  “Who would you like to call?”

  “A friend. I need to tell him what’s happened.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. I’ll speak to someone for you.”

  She slid the chair back beneath the table. The interview had been disconcerting. The man’s attitude confused her: he was open about his memory problems when most would never have admitted to them; he answered her questions with seeming honesty; and, above all, he was fatalistic.

  Josie found that unsettling.

  “I’ll arrange your call,” she said.

  She opened the door, stepped outside, and locked it again.

  Yes, she thought. It was the fatalism that had perturbed her. It was, she realised, as if Smith couldn’t remember what had happened but that he was refusing to give himself the benefit of the doubt. It was almost as if a murder was something that he could consider himself doing.

  19

  MILTON WAS taken from the interview room to a smaller room, where he was photographed and had his fingerprints taken. The officer asked him to undress, and then he was photographed again. They took swabs from his mouth, scraped out the material from beneath his nails and then took blood.

  Milton cooperated without complaint, but it was an intensely uncomfortable experience for a man who had been so used to sliding beneath the surface of things; the last time he had been arrested, the Russian secret service had located him and sent an agent to the Texan
jail where he was being held in order to bail him out. There were people who would have given a lot to know where he was now, especially when he was so compromised. He was travelling under false papers, but that was no guarantee that his anonymity would be maintained. His legal predicament was bad enough, but, beyond that, he was vulnerable in so many other ways.

  They went through his possessions. They took his fake passport, his wallet, the Ronson lighter that his father had given him, his cigarettes and the handful of loose change that he had collected in his pockets.

  He did not protest and, once the formalities of his booking were completed, he was led down into the basement of the building to a holding cell. It was a twenty-by-twenty space with a set of substantial iron bars that divided the room into two. Two cameras had been fixed to the ceiling, their motors buzzing as they panned left and right to take in all of the room. Milton looked through the bars at the collection of men staring back at him. The cage was full to overflowing, with the bench seats around the sides all taken and another ten or so milling around in the centre. The occupants glared with baleful malevolence as his cuffs were removed.

  There were just two officers down here: the man who had brought him down from the custody suite and the officer who was in the basement to watch the detainees. Both men were armed, but neither moved with the caution that would have been prudent; they would have been much more careful if they had an inkling of Milton’s past and the things of which he was capable.

  The custody officer unlocked and opened the cage door.

  Milton saw the butt of his pistol jutting out from his holster and knew how easy it would be to relieve him of the weapon. He felt the prickle of adrenaline, the itch in his palms, but he drew in a breath and allowed the moment to pass.

  This was not the time to make an attempt at leaving. Even if he was able to disarm the two officers, there was a good chance his actions would bring unwelcome attention. The men in the cell would likely make a noise, and then there was the matter of the two cameras overhead. He was in the basement of a police building. If he was compromised, he would have to fight his way out, through the ground floor and then out onto the street.