December Heat

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  The apartment wasn’t much more than a room with a little kitchen and a bathroom, with the added luxury of a shower with an aluminum-frame door. In addition to the closet, there was an old dresser made of wood and pink marble with a little beveled mirror; on the shelf was an enormous variety of glass bottles, jars, boxes. A peacock feather was stuck between the mirror and the backboard. In the corner next to the window, there was a clothes rack with purses, hats, necklaces, and colorful neckerchiefs. There was also a little bergère in need of new upholstery; on the wall, two reproductions of famous paintings; and, occupying the majority of the space, a big cast-iron bed, upon which rested Magali, entirely nude, save for the plastic bag over her head. Her arms were tied to the headboard with articles of clothing (the dresser drawers were open and had been rummaged through), and her legs were tied together with a big silk scarf that had itself been attached to the foot of the bed with a leather belt.

  From the threshold of the door, the man looked at the bed, perplexed; at Espinosa; at the bed again; at Espinosa again; until he heard the question:

  “Is that your girlfriend?” Espinosa had to repeat the question, which he did while moving closer to his old colleague and touching his arm.

  “Is that your girlfriend, Vieira?”

  “Damn it, Espinosa, of course it is … you already knew that when you asked me on the phone. Who was the son of a bitch who did this?”

  “We don’t know. The night doorman had gone out when she got back last night; everyone in the building has their own key to the entrance. The neighbors didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary; no screams or sounds of a struggle. In any case, there are no marks on her body. It looks like she let herself be tied up without resisting, and the bag must have been put on her head without her having time to scream. The body was found less than an hour ago by a friend who had the key to the apartment and who thought it was funny that she hadn’t answered the phone all day, even though they had lunch plans. Nobody’s touched anything. The doorman said that you had come looking for her, that you left a note for her, and that your car is parked almost directly in front of the building, unlocked.”

  Espinosa spoke as if he were making a report. He didn’t usually talk so mechanically, especially in front of somebody he respected. The two of them were alone in the apartment.

  “Sorry, Vieira. I could have warned you, but the only thing I knew was that you two had gone out last night. The lab tests haven’t come back yet; we don’t know if she was drugged before being killed, but I found this on the floor of your car.” He showed a little plastic lid. “It’s the top of a can of Mace that was sitting next to your car key on the bedside table.”

  “What are you thinking? That I did this?” The ex-cop’s voice was filled with suffering and indignation. “Espinosa, I’m an old man, and I’m not rich; this girl was one of the few joys I had left.”

  Espinosa had known Vieira for a few years; they had worked together in the same precinct, long enough for him to know that Vieira had never been a violent cop. He had bad manners and used a lot of obscenities and was perfectly at home dealing with all kinds of undesirables, but he had never been one to beat people up, and he wasn’t corrupt. Espinosa couldn’t see him pulling off a crime like this.

  “Did you know her friends? Any ideas about who could have done this?”

  “Magali, originally called Lucimar, was a hooker; anyone could have done this. She thought she owed me something. A little more than two years ago, before I retired, I got rid of a violent pimp who was stealing her money, and she wanted to return the favor. There was real affection between us. What happened here doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “I didn’t think it did, but I needed to talk to you.” After a brief pause, still somewhat uncomfortably, Espinosa asked, “Where were you last night, and what time did you get home? I’m going to need that information.”

  “I know. That’s where the fuckup is. I don’t have the slightest idea what I did or where I was; I only know that I was out with Magali. I must have had too much to drink. I got up this morning around noon. I was in my bed, wearing the clothes I had on last night. Or at least almost. I was missing my underwear, and my wallet had disappeared. I’m pretty sure that we went to a restaurant where we go a lot; I could be confusing the days, but it’s easy enough to find out. The Mace was a present from me. I don’t know how it ended up in my car. Actually, I don’t know how my car ended up here. She probably dropped me off at home and drove over here. That’s happened before. She was a good driver and never got drunk. Thanks to her I could drink.”

  Vieira looked at the bed for a few seconds, in silence, his face twisted in pain.

  “And one more thing, Espinosa. The belt tied to her legs is mine, and I was wearing it last night.”

  It was after two in the morning when they left the building and went to the station to make their statements. Vieira was wide awake, and all the external signs indicated that he would stay that way until he could shed some light on the shadows of the previous night. He knew that officially he was a suspect. In any case, as far as he could tell, he was the only one. But that didn’t bother him as much as the fact that he couldn’t remember a damned thing. What if, in a moment of insanity, he had murdered Magali? But even in that absurd event, he wouldn’t have killed her like that; he would have killed her passionately. If he’d had any reason to kill Magali, and he couldn’t imagine any, he could only picture entering the apartment and firing quickly and repeatedly, so she wouldn’t have to suffer. Suffocating someone with a plastic bag, though clean and quiet, inflicts a lot of pain. What did the son of a bitch do after sticking the bag over her head? Did he sit on the bergère and watch as she turned red? Imagining the scene on the way to the station, he shivered slightly while recalling the feeling of the cheap brocade of Magali’s armchair on his arm. He had sat in that chair dozens of times while she got ready to go out or tried on a new dress for him to admire. He was certain, however, that he had not been sitting there for that final scene.

  What he couldn’t understand was how the belt he had been wearing last night ended up in Magali’s room. He could explain away everything but that.

  Back at the station, the statements were taken bureaucratically. The morning temperature was pleasant, and the sky soon began to clear up. He was tired, emotionally exhausted, sad about the death of his friend and lover, frightened at himself. The car was being examined; he walked home. He hoped that over the course of the three or four kilometers some image would come to him, and that he could find a twenty-four-hour stand to buy a sandwich down on the beach. He ate a hot dog with coconut milk, which didn’t go together very well. He reached home without any reliable recollections, his head full of ghosts. Sitting on his bed, he felt like crying.

  He slept in fear. It would have been better never to have picked up the wallet. It would have been even better never to have seen the wallet fall from the man’s pocket. The money guaranteed him food for many days, but he didn’t like one bit the fact that it had come from the wallet of a cop; that complicated things. When they wanted to, they could track down anything. All the guy would have to do was return to that restaurant, question the waiter, the doorman, the parking attendant, and the latter would recall where the car was parked, right in front of the cardboard box where a street kid slept. If anyone was guilty, it was clearly him.

  He slept in fear of the cops and the thief. He was more scared of the cops, or whoever did their dirty work. He didn’t think it would do much good to seek protection with other kids; when they wanted to liquidate one of them, they liquidated all of them. Street kids were all the same. And besides, if he wasn’t being chased by the police, there was always the risk of some lowlife getting wind of all the money he was carrying; he hated beggars and winos more than the cops. It was safer to sleep in a different place every night. He didn’t want to leave the district. It was his territory and he knew every inch of it; he knew where to go to get out of the rain and the cold,
where to get food and clothes, where to swap things, where to take a bath, and where to go to the bathroom. Copacabana was his workplace; he spent a lot more time wandering its streets than at his own house in a distant slum, where he went once a month to contribute the money he picked up (not always in the most honest way) on his travels. He would leave the area around the Avenida Atlântica for a few days; a week should be enough. No one would spend any more time than that looking for a wallet.

  He found a place protected from the street by a newspaper kiosk; someone driving by in a car wouldn’t be able to spot him. He didn’t like to sleep by himself—he felt exposed and didn’t have much chance of escaping attackers—but for a few days he’d have to manage. The night was pretty warm; he lay down under the awning, took a little wrapped-up piece of bread from his pocket, and began eating it slowly.

  He rose before dawn; he hadn’t slept more than three hours. He rubbed his eyes, peed next to the curb, patted his shorts to confirm that the money was still there, and looked around to see if anyone was nearby. On the sidewalk, right near the place where he’d slept, he managed to pry open, with the help of a piece of wire, the iron cover of an electricity box measuring about fifty centimeters square. He removed a few pieces of clothing—shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes—he had stuck there the night before and put everything in a plastic bag before replacing the cover of the box. He stuck the wire into a smaller box a few feet from the first. If he was going to spend a few days away, it was best to bring some clothes.

  It was still too early to get his hands on any breakfast. He went back beneath the awning. He had about two hours before people started to appear on the sidewalk. He rested his head on the plastic bag and thought about the man emerging drunk from the restaurant the night before. He kept his eyes open until dawn, when the street began to receive its daily serving of pedestrians.

  It was Saturday, and the beach crowd got going early. The first to arrive (and the last to leave) were the slum-dwellers, who wanted to have as much time as possible because they could come to the beach only on the weekend, and the weather wasn’t always so nice.

  When the movement started to pick up, he got up and looked for a little bar. Breakfast wasn’t a problem; in Copacabana people usually had their coffee in the nearest bar or bakery. All he had to do was wait for the right moment to slide between two people and order bread and coffee with milk. The money he had hidden in his shorts was enough for lots of breads and coffees, but that was no reason to pay for something that other people could buy for him. His strategy was to eat whenever he could.

  He didn’t drink every day, but once he started he didn’t stop. He was a fun kind of drunk: he talked, told jokes, laughed, sang. He was never mean or violent. At most, he became slightly annoying. So he got drunk every once in a while, trusting in his good nature. He wasn’t an alcoholic. Magali had been his companion and protector for the last couple of years. He liked her. She was caring; she looked after his money, shielded him from dubious hangers-on, and dropped him off at his house at the end of the adventure. When they went out to dinner, it wasn’t with the hooker Magali; it was with Lucimar. Why would he have killed her? They had gotten in countless arguments, but they were just shouting matches, not real fights. The biggest misunderstanding they’d ever had was when she’d tried to pay him that first time. “Damn it, Magali, that’s the reason I got rid of that pimp, and now you’re trying to give me money?” Magali had cried, pure tenderness. “Magali wasn’t something you killed; Magali was something you’d plant to see if more would grow,” he said in his deposition. Now he could do only two things for her: give her a decent funeral and track down the son of a bitch who killed her. The first wasn’t a problem; as soon as they released the body he would take care of the burial. The second was a little more problematic: he had lost his police I.D., which he had hung on to even after retirement, and he couldn’t get another one. That made him even more dependent on Espinosa. And policemen didn’t usually like ex-cops sticking their noses into their investigations.

  Sunday afternoon. Like everyone who lives alone, Vieira knew that it was the worst day of the week, and the afternoon was the worst part of it. When he’d become a widower, he’d thought that weekends would become more tolerable; he could stay home, like now, in shorts, slippers, and a T-shirt, deciding between putting on the air-conditioning or opening the window, without his wife complaining about his choice. She hadn’t been a bad person, Maria Zilda, but she had been insufferably annoying. She’d probably died because she couldn’t stand to be around herself anymore. The fact was, weekends hadn’t improved. For other reasons, to be sure. But at that moment Vieira wasn’t thinking about his wife, he was thinking about recent events, about Friday night. He thought, since he could no longer remember. He even wondered if his amnesia was caused only by alcohol. His words from the deposition kept coming back to him. “Magali wasn’t something you killed, Magali was something you’d plant to see if more would grow.” Wasn’t that exactly what he was trying to do? Bury Magali? His head began to ache; confused images, like fragments of a dream, began to flash like paparazzi lights around a celebrity. He felt dizzy, nauseous; he ran to the bathroom and puked.

  He was scared. He had often been scared in all kinds of different situations, but now it was different: the threat was much closer and he couldn’t make out exactly what it was. He didn’t vomit because he’d been drinking; he hadn’t touched liquor since Friday night. Nor had he eaten today, but he wasn’t hungry. He looked for something in the fridge, but found only a few bottles of water (some empty, some almost) and a carton of sour milk. He made instant coffee, even though he knew that on an empty stomach it would only add heartburn to the list of his discomforts. He turned on the television, but there were no movies on; Sunday television was shitty. He went out to take a walk through Ipanema. On the corner of Praça General Osório he managed to eat a sandwich, which he washed down with some orange juice. The crafts fair in the square was enough to distract him for an hour, no more. He went back to the apartment at the end of the afternoon. The final and most melancholy part of the weekend had begun. He was about to go down to the street again, just to wander, when the phone rang.

  “Vieira?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Florinda.”

  “Florinda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “…?”

  “Flor, Magali’s friend. We had dinner once together.”

  “Right … Flor …” He vaguely remembered a black girl who looked almost Thai, with a slender figure and firm muscles, who had gone out with them a few months ago.

  “Vieira, I’m sad and scared.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Magali’s building. I came by to pick up some things I’d loaned her but I couldn’t get into the apartment. I’m really scared. I had your number so I called. Could you come over?”

  “Flor … I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Flor had everything to succeed in the profession—beauty, sensuality, and charm—in just the right proportions. She had managed to stay independent thanks to her contacts from a job she’d had at city hall. She’d never understood exactly what she was supposed to be doing, so with time she ended up using the job (or function; she was never sure which) for her own benefit. She recruited her clients but didn’t overdo it: she kept their number modest and didn’t crowd her schedule. She didn’t earn a fortune, but when she added this money to her income from the city, she pieced together enough to guarantee more than her mere survival. She lived a few blocks from Magali, in a mixed residential and commercial building, very convenient for her line of work. When they met, she still hadn’t turned twenty-five, but she knew the ropes; her first classes had been in the streets of Recife, before she moved to Rio de Janeiro as a maid in the service of a family with considerable estates in Pernambuco. She’d been fourteen at the time, but she was no virgin. The boss didn’t take long to recognize (and get a taste of) Flor’s charms and the ne
ed to bring her to Rio “to take care of Junior.” Not long after the move, the boss’s wife figured out that Florinda wasn’t only taking care of Junior and kicked her out. The boss felt sorry for the poor girl, who couldn’t just sit on the street and beg—”And besides, she’s a minor, we’re responsible for her”—and arranged a place for her to live and a job to support herself. Without the wife knowing, of course, and without anyone doubting that she was of legal age. From that day on, Flor was on the street only by her own choice, or at her other job. The friendship with Magali had begun while waiting in line at the supermarket. Magali, just as she was about to pay, realized she had left her wallet at home. Flor offered to loan her the money—it wasn’t much—without accepting the I.D. card the other woman insisted on leaving as a guarantee. Just after she got home, she received a visit from her new friend, paying her debt and bringing a bouquet of violets. “Flowers for a flower.” They became sisters.