by Paulo Levy
“When?”
“A little while ago. I came to her house to talk to her and found her on the bathroom floor, still breathing.”
All of a sudden he heard a loud bang downstairs. ‘The door,’ he thought.
“Hold on a second.”
Dornelas dropped his cell phone in the sink and ran to the window. He lifted the lace curtain from the window and saw no one. He decided to open the sash and leaned out. A figure rounding the corner was all he saw. He slammed the sash closed, ran to the staircase and stopped. If he left Marina alone in her current state she would surely die. He decided to wait. He ran back to get his cell phone.
“You still there?” he asked Solano.
“Yeah. What happened?”
“Whoever did this just got away. I couldn’t see who it was.”
“Shit.”
“Get over here and call forensics. I’m going to wait for the ambulance.”
He hung up.
While he waited he stroked her hair and said in a soft voice:
“Oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
*
“How’s she doing, doctor?” Dornelas asked the physician who had treated Marina as soon as she arrived at the hospital.
“Not good. She was strangled long enough to deprive her brain of oxygen... she had a cardiac arrest... she’s alive, but she’s on life support...”
“What does that mean?”
“We did all the tests...”
He paused briefly.
“She’s brain dead, Inspector. I’m very sorry.”
Dornelas wrapped his arms round his shoulders and looked at the floor, totally crushed.
“Give me a minute, please.”
“Take your time,” agreed the doctor.
Feeling a sudden rage, he took his cell phone out of his pocket and punched some numbers.
“Hello.”
“Get over to the hospital immediately.”
“What happened, Inspector?”
“Marina is brain dead.”
There was a long silence before Nildo’s voice came back.
“When? Where?”
“This afternoon. I found her strangled on her bathroom floor.”
“Who could have done such a terrible thing?”
Dornelas didn’t answer. The hand that was holding the cell squeezed it until the sound of plastic cracking could be heard. He needed to vent his rage.
“I need you here. She has no family in the city and the decision to turn off the machines can only be made if authorized by a family member.”
“Her parents are dead. Her brother lives in Miami,” said Nildo, who started sobbing on the other side of the line. “What a tragedy, Inspector.”
“Call him.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
They hung up.
*
It only took twenty minutes for Nildo to materialize in the hospital hallway. His eyes were red and swollen. Dornelas got up to greet him.
“What time did this happen?” asked Nildo.
“A little after noon.”
“At her house?”
The inspector nodded.
“What were you doing there?”
Surprised by the question, it made Dornelas want to grab him by the throat. He restrained himself.
“I went to talk to her about the investigation.”
“What about the investigation?” asked Nildo in a defiant tone.
“I asked to see Peixe Dourado’s books. I suspect there’s a slush fund.”
Dornelas didn’t want to let on that his suspicions extended to drug trafficking and the death of White Powder Joe. That would be an extremely serious accusation and he didn’t have enough concrete evidence to make it. But it was enough to make Nildo laugh out loud.
“That’s ridiculous. Now I understand the reason for your visit to the company!”
He was laughing in an unnatural manner.
“Do you really think I’d do something like that to Marina because of a slush fund?”
He was forced to admit that Nildo had a point there. Slush funds were small potatoes to him. But for Dornelas it was the tip of the iceberg that would lead him to find something much bigger and deeper.
“I don’t think so. But it’s a line of investigation I can’t ignore.”
Nildo’s eyes filled with anger.
“You’re playing with fire, Inspector.”
“Is that a threat?”
Nildo still had no idea Dornelas had a few cards up his sleeve. It was time to show them.
“If you cooperate with my investigation I promise none of this will leak to the press.”
‘Full house’. Nildo backed down and became as soft as butter.
“I’m not responsible for White Powder Joe’s death or for the atrocity done to Marina,” he said as sweetly as the pretty young ladies in noir movies when they hire the charming private eye to find their missing husbands. Dornelas was barely able to choke back his desire to laugh.
“That’s what you say.”
“And it’s the truth.”
“Well, I need more than the truth. I need proof.”
“You’ll get it.”
“When?”
“At the beginning of the week.”
“What day?”
“By Tuesday.”
“Very well. I’ll write a letter to the press containing all the details of the case. It will be kept in a safe place with instructions that it be sent to the newspapers should anything happen to me, or if you should fail to present the proof you promised. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“They shook hands firmly.
“And what about Marina?” asked Nildo.
“The diagnosis is definite: brain dead. Have you called her brother yet?”
“Yes. He’s devastated. He’s catching a plane from Miami to Rio today. He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon. If everything goes as expected she’ll be buried on Monday.”
“May I ask you something very personal, Councilman?”
“Go ahead.”
“What was the true nature of the relationship between the two of you?”
Nildo Borges took a deep breath and his eyes filled with tears.
“A complicated relationship, Inspector. We dated in college, but we broke up when I moved here, right after my father died. She came shortly afterwards. She said she was lost in Rio, that she had no family there, just me. I guess I was friend, lover and father to her. All at the same time. I’m going to miss her very much.”
“And what did your wife think of all this?”
“She was jealous, of course, like any woman in her position would be.”
Dornelas watched him silently; he saw genuine grief in Nildo.
“She’s in room 35.”
“Thank you, Inspector.”
They said goodbye and the inspector went home. He was seriously hurting and needed to rest.
Chapter 15
Dornelas opened the door, entered, closed and locked it and did not stop until he reached the shower, already naked, leaving a trail of wrinkled clothes in his wake from the front door all the way to the upstairs bathroom door. Lupi sniffed them one by one as they fell to the floor.
He leaned on his hands on the shower wall and remained that way, not moving, for a long time with the hot water running down his body. He wanted to isolate himself from the world, to get away from the knife that was stabbing him relentlessly in his soul. He felt like a monster, Marina Rivera’s killer.
“Aren’t you being too hard on me, Inspector?” The image of her in the Cultural Center came back to him like a ghost. Maybe if he hadn’t insisted on forcing her to open her eyes, if he had left her in her naive idealism, her blissful ignorance, she wouldn’t have taken such a great risk and would be alive right now. He recalled her refreshing liveliness when he saw her for the first time in Nildo Borges’ office, a few days before.
Under the running
water, alone, Dornelas squeezed his eyes shut, bared his teeth and began to cry in pain, howling like an animal.
He washed and then rinsed himself slowly, as if time no longer existed, and only got out of the shower when the water began to turn cold, when the boiler had emptied.
Still wet, he yanked the telephone plug out from the wall socket and turned off his cell phone. He poured himself a glass of cachaça and put a CD on the player. He turned off the lights and threw himself on the living room couch as soon as the first notes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the Resurrection Symphony, issued from the speakers.
If he had to suffer, let it hit him all at once.
*
Dornelas woke up cold and in the dark, in a fetal position. He was born again. He didn’t know what time it was but guessed it was very late because there was no sound coming from the street.
He reached out and turned on the lamp on the side table, shading his eyes from the sudden glare, and got up. He went upstairs and put on warm clothes. He was hungry.
Since Neide didn’t work on Saturdays, he opened the refrigerator sure there would be nothing very tempting to eat. He was right. He made a goró, a big one, and quickly gobbled it down. Lupi was watching him with his ears perked up.
“Hungry, huh?”
Getting Lupi’s dish, Dornelas served him a measure of dog food plus two tablespoons of leftover rice he found in the refrigerator. He put the bowl on the floor and waited while Lupi gulped it down. The clock on the microwave said half-past midnight.
He opened the door and locked it behind him as he went out into the street with Lupi at his heels, without a leash – he had put it in his pants’ pocket along with the plastic bag.
A walk would do them both good.
Having no place in particular to go, he decided to retrace his steps from the day he’d found the body in the bay.
The Historical Center was quiet when he entered it, with only one or another couple on the streets. A drunk was lying asleep on a stone step. The stores had already closed up, as had most of the street vendors, who had folded up their stalls and disappeared to God knows where. There was one left, grungy, unkempt, with a week-old beard – a Che Guevara clone – blowing on an Andean flute in front of a little table loaded with tacky handicrafts.
One or two restaurants were still open, most of the tables empty, waiting only for the last customers to pay their checks and leave.
Dornelas went into Santa Tereza Street, passed behind the church, crossed the lawn in the square in front of the Old Jailhouse, climbed up on the seawall at almost the same place he’d jumped from to retrieve the body, and looked out at the ocean. He was back to where it all started, the place where another body had been found and another investigation had begun.
Standing there looking out at the ocean, driven by a sick habit, one that traps a man’s mind in a moment of time, he rubbed his wedding ring with his thumb, the way he had always done. And that’s when he noticed he was still wearing it. He took if off his ring finger and with difficulty read Flavia’s name and the date of their wedding on the inside. Without thinking, he threw it far out into the ocean. Feeling relieved in some strange way he went back home.
He opened the door for Lupi to go in and closed it again. He went back to the street alone. He walked a long way and rang a doorbell. There was no answer. He rang it again and heard a muffled voice coming from inside. He remained silent. The door opened. Her eyes opened wide in surprise.
“May I come in?” asked Dornelas.
“Of course.”
He went in, took her in his arms and kissed her long and tenderly. Without saying a word, he locked the door, picked her up in his arms and took her upstairs to the bedroom. She offered no resistance. On the contrary, compliant, she submitted languidly to him as he gently undressed her under the dim light of a small lamp. He got undressed, held her and kissed her passionately as he lay on top of her on the unmade bed.
“Go slowly with me. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” begged Dulce.
“Me too,” replied Dornelas.
She looked at him, confused.
“But weren’t you married until recently?”
“That’s exactly why.”
Dulce laughed, wrapped her legs around him and opened herself to him.
*
“What do you like for breakfast?” asked Dulce, still naked and already out of bed.
Suddenly possessed by a subconscious desire, Dornelas answered with another question.
“Do you have goró?”
“Cachaça for breakfast? Don’t even think about it!”
He chuckled under the covers, still naked.
“Goró is a porridge made of baby cereal and powdered milk that I’ve eaten ever since I was a child.”
Dulce laughed out loud at the foot of the bed and threw herself on top of him.
“Joaquim Dornelas... a grown man... still eats baby cereal?”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“I’m going to spread around town that the inspector likes baby cereal.”
And they grabbed each other again.
*
Light-hearted and content, Dornelas hit the street and headed home to get a jacket. The sky had the color and look of a sheet of twisted steel. The weather forecast was for rain at any time. He took Lupi for a walk and then called the hospital. Marina Rivera’s condition had remained stable all night and her brother hadn’t yet appeared.
With Sunday free and no hobby to keep him busy, he decided to go by the precinct and pick up the keys to Marina Rivera’s house. He had to take advantage of having access to them while he still could. Now that the forensic examination was done they’d be turned over to Augusto for good the following day.
He unlocked the door and opened it as carefully as he had two days ago, as if he’d gone back in time and Marina was still there. He intended to reconstitute his every move step by step, every detail of his time there that day, up to the assassin’s flight out the front door. And maybe, who knows, find a document or something, anything, about Peixe Dourado that she may have stashed away.
He remembered the cat coming out from behind the TV cabinet as he searched the living room. The door to the patio was closed, the birds chirping in the cage outside. He sat in the same chair in the dining room and visualized the set table.
After going over the facts there was one thing that had escaped him: he had repeated exactly what he’d done when he’d gone up to the bedroom but he never examined the kitchen. It was then that he noticed a white double sliding door in the back of the kitchen with both panels closed. With the white wall tiles all around it, he hadn’t noticed the door on the day of the murder.
Dornelas went up to it, opened one of the panels and saw a small pantry with dishes, glassware, trays and supplies occupying four shelves from floor to ceiling. No doubt this was where the murderer had hidden while he was taking care of Marina upstairs.
He concluded that the killer had come downstairs when he first knocked on the door. That would explain the drops of water on the staircase.
But one thing continued to puzzle him. The door showed no signs of forced entry. Dornelas assumed then that Marina knew the killer; she may even have opened the door for him and gone back upstairs to the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
He went upstairs and entered the bedroom. He turned on the light and saw the cat curled up on the bed. When the cat saw him, it meowed and got down to rub against his legs. Reaching the end of his train of thought, he opened the window, went back to sit on the edge of the bed, picked up the cat and let his imagination run free: in order not to go downstairs and answer the door practically naked, Marina could have opened the window just a little – enough to put her arm through it without being seen from the street with no clothes on – and thrown the house key out the window before returning to the shower.
She almost certainly would have done this thinking it was he, Dornelas, who had arrived. Which meant that it
was either the purest of coincidences or the killer knew he was coming. But why take that much of a risk and commit a crime only few minutes before the inspector’s arrival?
On the other hand, it was highly improbable that the killer would know she was going to talk to the inspector at that exact time unless she had told him about their meeting. It would be useless to ask for her phone records. Going through channels would take weeks and he wanted this all tied up before then.
Then he had an idea.
He put the cat on the bed, searched the room and, not finding what he was looking for, went down to the living room. Marina Rivera, a confirmed single woman, like many single people who don’t spend a lot of time at home, didn’t have a land line telephone in her house, only the cell phone that she always took with her. Dornelas was now looking for that phone – the assassin’s number might well be in it.
But he found nothing; no phone, no number.
He went back up to the bedroom and saw the cell phone on the night table behind a stack of books. He tried turning it on; the battery was dead. He opened the drawer and there was the charger. He stuffed them in his pocket, cell phone and charger, closed the window, grabbed the cat and went downstairs. He opened the door to the patio, took the bird cage off the wall, and closed the door behind him.
Hands full, he locked the front door and headed home. He changed his mind on the way. He knew Lupi would cause an intolerable ruckus as soon as he walked in with a cat under his arm. He changed direction and ten minutes later was knocking on Dulce Neves’ door.
“I have a surprise for you. Two, in fact.”
She looked at him incredulously.
“Joaquim, we only just made love and you’re already moving in?!”
He smiled and kissed her cheek.
They’re Marina Rivera’s pets. I can’t take them to my place. I already have a dog.”
“How long will I have to take care of them?”
“I don’t know yet. What’s the rush?”