The verdict from the Forensic Institute was clear: Magali had been asphyxiated by the plastic bag after breathing Mace. There were no marks on her body except those found on her wrists and ankles, and there were no signs of recent sexual intercourse. Putting together the postmortem, the medical report, and his own on-scene observations, Espinosa came up with the following picture: Magali was with someone who had made her breathe the gas while she was sitting or lying on her own bed. Her clothes had been found on the chair; her pants were folded on the seat and her shirt hung from its back; her panties and bra were in the bathroom: a clear indication that none of her clothes had been torn off quickly or violently. Tough to say whether she’d stripped or been stripped before or after she’d been stunned. A cold-blooded murderer could have arranged all her clothes. Once she was undressed, still dazed, her ankles had been bound with a silk scarf and her legs secured to the footboard with Vieira’s belt, while her arms had been tied to the headboard with T-shirts from her dresser drawers. From the way the sheet was twisted, it seemed she’d regained consciousness before dying. The detail of the panties and the bra in the bathroom suggested that Magali had come into the room completely naked, probably after having washed up in preparation for a sexual encounter, or simply to go to sleep. The lack of semen could be due to the use of a condom or to lack of penetration.
Espinosa had heard of cases of men reacting violently to impotence. But this reaction seemed a bit over the top. If a man couldn’t get it up, the most common response was to make excuses. Or, ashamed, he could beat a hasty retreat. In some cases he might even attack the woman, in extreme cases with a knife; but the common denominator was that these were all immediate emotional reactions, timid or enraged, but always in the service of momentary impulses. Whoever had attacked Magali had done so in three distinct stages, and that couldn’t be considered impulsive. The aggressor had applied the gas. He had carefully tied her arms and legs to the bed, then stuck her head into a plastic bag and tied it around her neck. Espinosa couldn’t conceive of this as an out-of-control emotional reaction. It was more like the behavior of a meticulous pervert. It didn’t match Vieira, or at least not the Vieira Espinosa knew.
He preferred not to tell Vieira immediately that his wallet had been located, though not recovered. He wanted to avoid telling him over the phone that it was being used by a Copacabana sleazebag to extort money from drug users, which might inspire him to try to capture the criminal himself, something Espinosa wanted to avoid at all costs. He called in the middle of the morning; Vieira answered panting.
“Espinosa, my man, you’ve caught me at a delicate moment. I’m trying to tie my shoelaces and I’m not sure whether I should lean over or lift my leg. No matter which way I do it I can’t reach my shoes.”
“You could hire a shoelace tier, or wear moccasins. You can buy long-handled shoehorns that are perfect for them.”
“Damn, Espinosa, are you making fun of my age?”
“Not your age, your belly.”
“Shit, I’ve got nothing to say to that. But you didn’t call to talk about my stomach.”
“We found your I.D.”
“No shit, Espinosa! Finally you bring me some good news.”
“Not that good. We found it, but we didn’t get it.”
“What the fuck do you mean? If you found it, why didn’t you get it?”
Espinosa preferred not to explain over the telephone. Since it was almost lunchtime, he suggested they meet at a restaurant near Vieira’s house, a modest establishment known for its rack of lamb. When he got there, Vieira was almost done with a bottle of beer and a plate of appetizers. They ordered more beer and the rack of lamb. After a few comments on the restaurant and the grilled lamb, Espinosa began the story of the wallet, omitting a few details but preserving the essentials. Vieira listened in silence, punctuating the narrative with a few obscenities, until Espinosa got to the part about the street kid being burned while he slept.
“Espinosa, I’ll take care of it. I’ll rip the balls off the son of a bitch.”
“You’re not going to do anything, Vieira. He’s in hiding. If he thinks we’re letting down our guard, he might stop by his apartment to get something, but if he thinks we’re looking for him he’ll vanish forever.”
“What do you suggest?”
“We could use your contacts in the Copacabana underworld.”
“Espinosa, that guy’s new on the scene. Your description doesn’t sound like anybody I know. Don’t forget that I’ve been off duty for more than two years, long enough for new people to show up. But I do know what you call the underworld—even though I consider it as much of a world as any other—and there are a few people in it who owe me some favors.”
“Vieira, I just don’t want you to do anything on your own. Remember that you’re mixed up in an investigation in which you’re a prime murder suspect and that I’m in charge. I don’t want things to get complicated for you … or for me.”
“All right. You want my help but you don’t want me to do anything without your authorization.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. Now tell me something. What the fuck does this all have to do with Magali’s death?”
“At first glance, the events seem to be independent, unrelated. It’s hard to imagine what your dinner at the restaurant, your drunkenness, the loss of your wallet, and Magali’s death could have to do with a man who found your wallet after the boy got rid of it, or with the boy who was killed while sleeping. On the other hand, everyone involved has something in common, though they’re linked only very tenuously. As long as these links are still so tenuous, you remain the only suspect.”
“I’d like to get my I.D. back as soon as possible. I don’t like my name mixed up with drugs and extortion. If you don’t object, I’ll start getting my old contacts involved tonight. You said that the man had women in the square.”
“I’m not sure, based on what the boy and the doormen in his building said, but I think that if he’s not a pimp he’s at least trying to get money off prostitutes.”
“I can find out.”
“Excellent. Then let’s try to find out his name and whether he has another pad. For now, let’s get down to this rack of lamb.”
They didn’t discuss the case further over lunch. After dessert, during coffee, they came up with a simple plan. Neither of them mentioned Flor. Espinosa left Vieira at his door and took the bus to Magali’s apartment. He wanted to check something out before going back to the station. Since he had the key, he went right to the ninth floor, apartment 918. The apartment had still not been emptied; it smelled closed, dead. He went through drawers, boxes, bags, and every inch of the furniture. By the end of the search, he had accumulated almost two dozen keys on the bed, some on key rings, some unattached. Some, obviously old, hadn’t been used in a long time; others had clearly been employed recently. He put them all in a plastic bag and went to Flor’s apartment. The doorman declared, in the tone of a doorman at a posh building, that Dona Flor was at home but didn’t like to be disturbed without a call on the interphone. The police badge resolved this little discrepancy. Once he reached her floor, he had to ring the bell twice, the second time forcefully, before she opened the door. She was wearing a robe that struck a perfect balance between revelation and allusion.
“Officer, what a nice surprise. Please come in. Is this a professional visit?”
“On my part, yes.”
“What a shame—I’m free all afternoon.”
“But I won’t take up more than ten minutes of it.”
“Again, what a shame. If that’s the way you’re going to be, what can I do?”
“I’d just like to clarify one detail. You and Magali were close friends. So close that she left you her man as an inheritance.”
“Officer—”
“Don’t worry, it’s just a clarification and not a value judgment; besides, I’m only repeating your own words. But if you were so close that you had a key to her apartmen
t, I can only guess that she had a key to your apartment.”
“Of course. We had the keys to each other’s apartment, just in case.”
“Right. And I’m sure there was a case.”
“Officer, what are you insinuating?”
“I’m not insinuating anything. I’m being as direct as possible. And to prove it, I’d like to try some of the keys I have in my pocket in your door.”
Before she could say anything, Espinosa removed the little package of keys from his pocket. Flor waited in silence as he tried the keys one by one. Finally, when none of them worked, she said:
“If you’d just asked me, I could have saved you the effort. She didn’t have my key. I took it back the night I found the body.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Why? Picture this. Because I didn’t want to leave the key to my apartment out there.”
“It wasn’t out there. It was in your friend’s house. Besides which, taking something from a crime scene is an obstruction of justice.”
“Listen, Officer. It was the key to my apartment. I didn’t hide anything. I came out and told you that she had a copy. I just took my key back.”
“And can you show me the copy you brought back?”
“It’s somewhere around. I’m not sure where I put it.”
“Try to remember. I’ll wait.”
After searching a minute or two Flor appeared with a key, which she presented with a triumphant air. It opened the door perfectly.
He stayed at the station late, trying to liquidate the mountain of paperwork he had started working through the night before. It seemed to arrive on his desk faster than he could discharge it. It was after seven-thirty when he got home. A message from Kika asked for news of the boy and inquired whether he felt like a pizza and a beer in the Largo do Machado; she asked him to leave her a message either way. Espinosa called and they agreed to meet at nine. The pizzeria, whose awning covered a few dozen tables and spread out across the wide sidewalk, was only about two blocks from where Kika lived. He got there a little before nine. Despite the December heat, a light breeze blew across the square.
Kika, looking especially pretty, walked up the sidewalk, her white T-shirt ending a few inches above and her jeans beginning a few inches below the most enchanting navel Espinosa could recall encountering. He—trying to look more relaxed than usual—wore a short-sleeved sport shirt untucked (the variation allowed him to hide the gun he had attached to his belt). It was their first meeting since the boy disappeared. Though the restaurant had an enclosed, air-conditioned section, they chose the sidewalk. It was clear to Espinosa that she hadn’t proposed the meeting to find out about the kid; she could have done that on the phone. And her selection of a restaurant near her house, far from the scene of Saturday’s events, gave this second meeting a different feel, which was also obvious from her smile, her gaze, the way she moved her hand toward his.
“You don’t look like a cop,” she said, after studying Espinosa’s face.
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
“Sorry. It’s just that, like most people, when I think of cops I think of cave dwellers wearing shirts unbuttoned almost to their belt, hairy chests, thick gold chains, big rings on their fingers, bracelets, manicured nails, and a gruff, low-class voice; and when you opened the door on Saturday night I thought you looked like my art history professor.”
“And your art history professor doesn’t look like a cave-dwelling, hairy-chested, open-shirted …”
“Not at all. He’s almost as good-looking and charming as you.”
It occurred to Espinosa that this was one of the times when a cop should be wearing a bulletproof jacket: a sentence like that, point-blank, was fatal, at least for a nontroglodyte representative of the law. He had to restrain himself from fiddling with the salt shaker and the toothpick dispenser and the bottle of oil and everything else on the table. But women know when they’ve struck to the marrow.
“I’m the one who should be saying things like that to you.”
“And why don’t you?”
“You’re beautiful, infinitely better looking than my professor of legal philosophy, and you have a navel that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt not only that God exists but that he’s a sculptor.”
She beamed with happiness; the waiter brought them back to earth.
The conversation veered off into less personal avenues. After comparing Catete and Copacabana, talking about painting and painters, the question surfaced:
“How did someone like you end up in the police?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked the question, which always sounded pejorative to him, though he knew that in this case it reflected her positive feelings about him. He knew the unedited version would read something like: “How did an honest, decent, well-educated, literate guy like you end up in an indecent, corrupt, stupid institution like the police force?” Despite the inherent compliment of the first part, he didn’t agree with the second. To his mind, the police force was an institution that acted as a border between social order and crime, just like a psychiatric hospital separated and articulated the difference between sanity and madness. The two worlds were not mutually exclusive but contiguous, or even superimposed. Madness and crime did not come from a foreign world but from powers within man himself. Both were our intimates. People could try to ignore them, or they could confront them. As an institution confronting them, the police maintained a dangerous intimacy with crime.
The best response he could muster was: “I went into the police because I wanted to get married.”
“What?”
“That’s right. I was finishing my law degree and was in love with a fellow student. The closest thing I could get to a job was an unpaid internship at a law firm. Then I saw an announcement that the police force was giving priority to people with law degrees. I took the test, got in, joined the force, and got married. The marriage ended a few years later, but I stayed in the police. Just like that.”
“Do you have any children?”
“I have a son, a teenager, who lives in the United States. I get pictures of him at Christmastime. The first ones came with sweet messages on the back, but the more recent ones only have one sentence, the place, and the date.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Maybe for me. For him, I don’t know. Now he’s more American than Brazilian. And you? Have you ever been married?”
“No. And I don’t have any kids. I came close to both, but it wasn’t intense enough to go ahead with. Now I’m not sure if marriage and kids are worth the trouble. Does that sound shocking to you?”
“Not in the least.”
“Great, because if it had it might have ruined my appetite.”
When they left the restaurant, it was almost midnight, and what was left of Espinosa’s reason signaled to him that they’d had enough to drink to render problematic any continuation of the evening’s program. Not that love and alcohol were incompatible, but for a first encounter—and one that neither hoped would be the last—a modicum of sobriety was needed. They had enough sobriety left to walk arm in arm to her building, but not enough to guard against further acts and words. It was better not to risk it. And once more they said farewell with a kiss—much more amorous than the first—and promised to meet again.
Espinosa thought it was best to leave his car in the Largo do Machado and get a taxi home. On the way, he wondered if the excessive alcohol consumption—not something he (or, he thought, she) was prone to—hadn’t been a strategy for avoiding premature complications. It was the most complex, perhaps the only, thought he managed to form before the driver asked which side of Peixoto he wanted. “Drop me at the one closest to my house,” he answered. That was when he realized he was truly drunk.
He got to the station a little later than usual. Chaves, the detective in charge of staying in touch with the doorman of the building on the Avenida Copacabana, came to talk to him.
“Espinosa,
the guy came by in the morning, grabbed a few things, and left; the night doorman said he didn’t let us know because it all happened so fast and he didn’t have time to go out and call.”
“What was he carrying when he left?”
“A travel bag. He didn’t ask the doorman anything and didn’t say where he was going.”
“What time was this?”
“The doorman says it was between two-thirty and three in the morning. Should we go after him? We could get in touch with the rancher who owns the apartment.”
“No. Let’s let him think we’ve forgotten about him. I get the feeling that he doesn’t know who he’s running from. Look, let’s suppose that he kidnapped the boy after chasing him down the Avenida Atlântica. But then let’s say that he stopped there, that he wasn’t worried about the kid anymore, that he just wanted to give him a scare. In that case, he didn’t kidnap or kill the kid. So there wouldn’t be any reason for the police to go after him. He knows someone’s after him, but he doesn’t know who or why.”
“And the boy’s disappearance?” Chaves asked.
“It could have been voluntary. Remember that the hypothesis of kidnapping depends on the boy’s story and the painter’s, who only saw the man from across the street, on a sidewalk full of people. Maybe the man laid off the kid at that very moment, and the rest, the kidnapping, is all a fantasy. The relationship between a street kid and a cop is ambivalent. He could have wondered whether he was really being protected. What would happen after the girl and I went home? Were we going to take him with us? The most we could have done was hand him over to a home for abandoned minors, and that was certainly the last thing in the world he’d want. He preferred to run.”
“Do you really think that’s what happened?”
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