December Heat

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “This just complicates things even more. Or adds an element that’s only been in the background. The guy who found your wallet used it to shake down junkies, but he’s no dealer. At least there’s no relation between him and these guys you’re talking about. And so if your thinking is right, these guys have no knowledge of the murdered boys. As violent as they may be, they weren’t responsible for those deaths.”

  “Espinosa, you can’t keep me out of this. Everything you’re investigating has to do with me: Magali’s murder, my I.D., the assault. As happy as I am with Flor, I still want to get the son of a bitch who killed Magali.”

  “Speaking of which, have you managed to remember any fragments of that night?”

  “Nothing. And I don’t think I’m going to. I know you’re skeptical about amnesia, but believe me, Espinosa, no one wishes it hadn’t happened more than me. The only thing worse than my anguish about not being able to say a word about the night Magali was murdered is the nightmare that I could have done it myself. The psychologist who examined me said that pieces of what I forgot could resurface in dreams or even as fragments of scenes, quick flashes, during the day, when I least expect it. But nothing like that has happened.”

  The rest of the lunch was a debate about the benefits of joining forces. They said good-bye at two-forty without having reached an agreement. Espinosa later regretted not paying attention to the food, especially the apple pie.

  In the detectives’ office, he found a note. Vanessa had left a phone number and a message that she’d be free the rest of the night. Espinosa called.

  “Sorry, I think I overreacted the other day. Do you still want to talk?”

  “Certainly. I can come over right away.”

  “All right, but instead of talking outside you’d better come up. My apartment is 803.”

  Unlike Flor, Vanessa received Espinosa wearing normal clothes, as if she were about to go shopping. Both of them knew that this wasn’t usual police procedure; people were supposed to testify at the station, not in witnesses’ apartments, especially not in a studio apartment taken up almost entirely by an ample double bed. But Espinosa still thought that a friendly approach was more likely to pay off. Vanessa was a lot more comfortable, and her distrust had apparently yielded to cooperation.

  “My attitude the other day didn’t help you find my friend’s murderer. I was annoyed that you didn’t trust me.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t trust you. I just asked you what you were doing at the time the crime was committed.”

  “And isn’t that not trusting me?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Fine. What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you have to tell me. Remember that this is a conversation, not a deposition.”

  “Officer, it’s hard to talk with a policeman like I’m talking to a friend. You didn’t come find me just to make friends.”

  “It was to ask for your help.”

  “I only had two friends. Magali was one of them.”

  “Is Flor the other?”

  “I told you before: Flor isn’t my friend, if that’s what you want to know. Magali was friends with both of us, but we’re not friends with each other. We’re acquaintances and live nearby. With Magali it was different. She was a little like my older, more experienced sister. She gave me advice and helped me through tough times. She did the same with Flor.”

  “And where did Magali go when times where tough for her?”

  “She had Vieira.”

  “How was their relationship?”

  “Great. He acts a little boorish, but he’s a good person. He was always very kind to Magali. On the few occasions they fought, he exploded, screamed, cursed God and the world, but after two minutes he’d completely forgotten about it.”

  “Did he ever threaten to kill her at times like that?”

  “Every time. But he threatened Magali the same way he threatened his neighbors, his doorman, me, anyone who was around. Of course, he never laid a hand on either of us except in love.”

  “Who do you think might have killed Magali?”

  “Like I said last time, any client could have done it, or one of those people who kill prostitutes, taxi drivers, beggars, solitary old ladies …”

  “Besides those, who else do you think could have done it?”

  “That’s the worst thing. Besides them I can’t imagine anybody else. Moreover, I can’t imagine who would have done it like that. That’s what scares me and makes me think it must have been a lunatic, because there’s no defense against someone like that, who shows up all nice, sweet, generous, and when you’re least expecting it you’re tied to the bed being cut up, choked, suffocated. What we do to protect ourselves is not open the door to anybody who hasn’t called for an appointment. That way we know they’re coming and notify the doorman. That doesn’t protect us from violence, but it lowers the risk.”

  “Do all of you have phones?”

  “Almost everyone. To keep the costs down, one of us rents the line and, after the phone is installed, extends it to two other people and splits the bill. I divide my phone with two other girls. Magali’s phone is the same as Flor’s. It’s like a shared line.”

  “Do you have any method for answering, since you live in different apartments?”

  “Sort of. Nothing too fixed. The way we do it is that everyone answers on the third ring. The first one who speaks asks the caller who they want to talk to. Depending on what they say, the other two hang up. It’s worked up till now.”

  “So you mean that in Magali’s case, Flor could know about all her calls, and vice versa?”

  “I think so. But Friday was Magali’s night out with Vieira, and Flor knew that.”

  “Could anyone come in and go up at night without the doorman’s noticing?”

  “Certainly. The doorman lives with his wife and daughter in a room at the back of the building. He’s always leaving to take care of something at home. The building has more than a hundred apartments. A lot of people come and go; anyone could slip in with a resident. It’s the same thing if you ring the bell for the doorman—all you have to do is give someone’s name and he lets you in. He rarely bothers to call on the intercom, and even if he did a lot of them don’t work anyway.”

  They were seated at a small table with two chairs beside a window that looked out at a hill behind the building. While he was listening to Vanessa, alias Regina, Espinosa played with a small vase with two plastic daisies in it, the only object on the table besides the plastic tablecloth.

  “Oh my God. I didn’t even offer you a coffee!”

  “Thanks. You’ve already given me a lot today.”

  Espinosa sat awhile looking at the girl, trying to imagine her as a teenager, leaving her hometown in Minas because of some mistake she’d made; once that first mistake was out of the way, why not make some more, somewhere more lucrative? He said his farewells to Vanessa-Regina with the promise that he’d come back for coffee another time.

  His working day was almost over. All he needed was some news from Clodoaldo to round out his satisfying afternoon, but the day ended, back at the station, without a word. Nor did Kika call. The news that wrapped up his day arrived by fax from São Paulo: the police had, at Espinosa’s request, inquired at all the hospitals in that city that performed heart surgery. There were no patients by the name of Elói Azevedo.

  The light was blinking on his answering machine. The phone must have rung during the night or early in the morning, but sleep was more powerful than the ringing, and he hadn’t heard it. It was Clodoaldo. He had called at five in the morning to make an appointment for nine o’clock in the square in front of Espinosa’s building. It was eight now. Espinosa plugged in the coffeemaker, stuck some bread in the toaster, and went downstairs to the lobby to get his paper.

  When he went back downstairs at nine, Clodoaldo was nowhere to be found. He crossed the square diagonally, walking slowly, checking out the benches, almost all occupied by mothers and
nannies. Someone came up from behind and touched his shoulder.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  “Clodoaldo, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  “It almost happened.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know everything, only bits and pieces. Maybe only small ones.”

  “Let’s go find an empty bench.”

  “I’d rather go somewhere else.”

  “Are you being followed?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. For the last few days all I’ve done is follow people. Let’s go somewhere where we can see who’s coming.”

  Espinosa knew how adverse Clodoaldo was to any kind of personal exposure, but he could tell that there was something else bothering him now. They went back to Espinosa’s building and got in his car. They drove aimlessly for a while, long enough to throw off any potential stalker, and parked on the Avenida Atlântica, not far from the place where Clodoaldo met the kids. The morning was cloudy and the beach was deserted. They picked a bench next to the sand, where they could easily be seen but where they could also spot anyone approaching. They sat next to each other, but each turned in a different direction: Espinosa looked out at the sea, while Clodoaldo faced the street. Neither had opened their mouths; the first to speak was Clodoaldo.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to the boy. He refused to accept police protection, including from you. He thought he was betraying something, but he didn’t know what. I suggested that he go spend some time at his mother’s house in the Baixada Fluminense. But he didn’t manage to stay put three days. He’d gotten it in his head that his mission was to follow the man with the wallet. He didn’t think logically, he just followed his whims. The fact is, something about that man had gotten under his skin. Naturally, the guy noticed and turned the tables. Not that he was worried about a street kid following him. He was worried about who was paying the kid to do it. I noticed that the boy wasn’t the only one following the man, but that someone else was after him. It wasn’t too hard to find out that it was someone from the police. The boy also noticed that someone else was interested in the man. That’s when he came and found me, all nervous, and told me that someone had tried to get him. He wasn’t exactly sure who, just that it was someone really big, not the same one as before. I ordered him to hide again and only to come back out when things had calmed down. I myself kept watching the man and made a surprising discovery: besides me and the policeman, there was a big, strong guy, according to one of the doormen, who also wanted to know where the man was. I don’t think those doormen had ever been under so much pressure.

  “Three days later, the boy resurfaced, even more frightened than before. I gave him your number and told him to call you the minute anyone bothered him again. The next day I found out about his death. I would have dropped the whole thing, following people and keeping watch. But I couldn’t get past the sight of that cop walking into the man’s building, looking so right at home, and always leaving looking so happy with himself. Damn, we both know that following someone is one of the most annoying things in the world. So why was that kid always looking so thrilled? To make things even more complicated, on one of the nights I was watching him, I bumped into you on the lookout too, and suddenly I didn’t know who was spying on who, and why. And the final twist came when I noticed that I was being followed as well, and not by the cop, who didn’t look very experienced to me—but by someone who knew how to tail like a professional, so much that I never managed to make an I.D. And I’m pretty sure the guy doesn’t want to meet me to make friends. So there we are.”

  If he hadn’t had such a peaceful expression on his face and spoken so clearly, Clodoaldo’s serious voice would have lent the narrative a sinister tone. But once he finished his story, he looked at Espinosa with the tranquillity of someone at mass.

  “Clodoaldo, what do all these stakeouts and stalkings have to do with the boy’s murder? Why was he killed?”

  “If I knew, I would’ve already told you.”

  “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “As much as he told you.”

  “Everything indicates that the man who was after him wasn’t the same one he was fleeing on the beach, when he sought protection.”

  “For me there’s only one thing that doesn’t make sense. I know street kids well. For the rest of society, they’re not even people. They’re like almost-people, and nobody worries about them, except maybe a couple of nice ladies who give them bread and milk. So why, for no other reason, do two men go after a kid like that and end up killing him?”

  “Because the boy knew something.”

  “But what?”

  “In my opinion, the boy himself didn’t realize he’d discovered something. The way he was killed suggests that someone was trying to get something out of him, or eliminate a witness.”

  They sat quietly for a while, each contemplating a different part of the tableau. On the side Clodoaldo was facing, between the sidewalk and the street, there was the bike path, where someone could approach quickly without being noticed in time. Clodoaldo was fully aware that the idea was paranoid, since nobody could know they were there, but in his experience there was no such thing as paranoia. Then Espinosa turned his body around on the cement bench; they both sat with their backs to the sea. Clodoaldo picked up the conversation again.

  “Today I’m going back to my post to try to identify the guy who’s following me.”

  “Take care. If you need help, call me; if I’m not in, leave a message.”

  They stood up, shaking the sand from their pants. They crossed the two lanes of the Avenida Atlântica and stopped next to the parked car.

  “Do you want me to drop you off somewhere?” Espinosa asked.

  “No thanks, I’m already home.”

  Espinosa and Clodoaldo both agreed that there was no plausible motive for the murders. Neither the world of crime as a whole nor a solitary criminal was so threatened that anyone needed to react by attacking senior citizens and killing children. But the truth was that people were being killed, street kids. Some people might not consider them human beings, but that didn’t mean they went around lighting them on fire while they slept or breaking their heads against rocks.

  Espinosa didn’t head straight to work; he dropped his car off in Peixoto first. He parked in front of his building (one of the privileges of the area), glanced around his apartment, and, as he did every day, walked the three blocks that separated him from his workplace. During the walk, he wrestled with the news that there was no Elói Azevedo in any hospital equipped to carry out cardiac surgery in Sao Paulo. Either Dr. Elói had lied to the foreman, or the foreman had lied to Chaves, or Chaves had lied to Espinosa.

  Chaves was out on the beat. Espinosa, sticking to his decision not to show any special interest in the kid, said nothing about him. Which didn’t stop him from requesting information on Chaves from his former precinct. Of all the people who could be lying, Chaves was the closest both physically and professionally to Espinosa.

  Espinosa’s decision not to make hurried decisions that might only complicate things further made him turn his attention back to Magali’s murder, which, almost a month after it had been committed, was still in mothballs, pushed out of the foreground by the death of the first boy and the attack on Vieira. As for the murder of the first boy, Espinosa had no doubt that it was a case of mistaken identity. The whole picture worried him. However, on that morning, for some reason, something else bothered him, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He thought about Kika. But she wasn’t really a concern; she was more of a happy, promising fantasy. He thought about Flor and Vanessa. They, too, were more fantasies than worries. He finally decided that he was looking for even more problems than he already had. But the decision didn’t change the tension he felt.

  He was about to return his attention to the neglected paperwork when an image flashed through his brain like a lightning bolt. The first time it appeared so quickly that he retained only the intensity
of the experience, unable to identify it. The second time the image was crystal clear: the window of his apartment. That morning, when he’d parked his car in front of his building, after his meeting with Clodoaldo, he had glanced quickly at his apartment before heading to the station. The window was open; he had left it closed. And it wasn’t the cleaning lady’s day.

  PART 5

  Several parts of his body were still aching, and they hurt even more when he bumped into a piece of furniture or when Flor overdid it with her loving caresses. He was worried about his head. Who the fuck beats an old man in the head? It could cause a brain hemorrhage! And the guy who beat him wasn’t fucking around, either. Lucky that …

  “Are you talking to yourself, baby?”

  “Huh?”

  “I asked if you were talking to yourself.”

  “Of course not. Aren’t you here with me?”

  “I am, but you’re in the bedroom and I’m in the bathroom.”

  “But still you heard me.”

  “What were you talking about?”

  “I was asking who the fuck hits an old man in the head. It could cause a hemorrhage.”

  “You’re not an old man and you’re not going to get a hemorrhage. Speaking of which, your friend the cop has been leaving us alone lately.”

  “Speaking of what? About being old or getting a hemorrhage?”

  “About … on that subject. He does like to ruffle feathers.”

  “He’s only doing his job, Flor.”

  “Well, fine. Still, he could lay off a little.”

  “If he laid off any more he’d be tucking me in at night.”

  “I don’t know about you, but he’d certainly like to do that for me.”

  “Why? Did he try something with you?”

  “No. He just has that look about him. Women can always tell with men.”

  Flor had bought Vieira a new belt. He was trying to stick it through the loops at the back of his pants. This was one of the operations that made his collarbone hurt.

  “Flor, have you realized that everything in this story has happened to the wrong people?”