His first view of the living room revealed that he was alone. He started to drag himself toward the kitchen to try to reach a knife. With his mouth taped shut, he couldn’t conceive of a way to open the silverware drawer; he tried to remember if he had left a knife on top of the counter (inside the sink wouldn’t do him any good). After moving around a few pieces of furniture and stopping a few times to rest and catch his breath, he managed to cross the threshold of the kitchen and make it to the counter. He got back on his knees and examined the counter. It was perfectly clean. The handles on the drawers were little metal balls; there wasn’t the slightest chance that he could open them. Even on his knees, he could do no more than slide his back along the counter, and the tips of his fingers still wouldn’t reach the handles. He looked around for something that could cut the duct tape. The most useful thing he saw was a box of matches. He quickly abandoned the idea of using these, not wanting to set fire to his shirt and himself. He tried to remove the tape from his mouth by scraping it against the counter and then against the bottom of the oven. He cut his face, but the tape held firm.
He dragged himself back to the living room and managed to jerk the stereo plug out of the wall. He crossed the living room again and stuck his ear against the door to try to hear if there was anyone on the stairs or in the hallway. Each movement took him longer than the previous and left him more exhausted. After resting for a few minutes, he began beating his body against the door, in the hopes that somebody would hear it. The cast-iron door from the building to the street was heavy, and every time someone closed it he could hear the noise. He took each slam as his cue to beat at the apartment door. He repeated the procedure countless times, until he grew convinced that it would work only when someone was on his floor, where there was only one other apartment. While waiting for his neighbor to arrive, and between bangs on the downstairs door, he knocked the phone onto the floor and tried to dial. But since his hands were tied behind his back, he couldn’t hear anything, even when, after great effort and numerous attempts, he managed to dial the three-digit number for the police. He could hear someone’s voice, but he couldn’t make any audible, much less comprehensible, sound. Since he wasn’t in an American movie, the attempt ended with a click on the other end of the line. It occurred to him that if he could open the French windows in the living room he could make it onto the balcony; someone would surely notice him and come to his rescue. But the window stayed shut. Any more radical efforts would put his life in danger, and he was determined to save it.
He leaned his body against the door, keeping his ear to the ground in order to hear any noises from inside the building, and felt the slow passage of time. After his attempt to get help over the phone, he had managed to replace the receiver. The phone rang three times at intervals of approximately one hour. He heard Kika’s voice all three times. He occasionally had to turn his body to change sides; the forced position of his arms and legs made his whole body ache. He tried to breathe slowly and steadily; the last thing he wanted with his mouth taped shut was a respiratory attack brought on by sheer nervousness.
He thought about the man. A professional from out of town, paid for his services? That could be the only explanation for his carelessness about revealing his identity. If not, he would have killed his victim once the job was done. Espinosa was sure he wasn’t an opportunist; he was too calm and efficient to be anything other than a pro. And he was as strong as a gorilla. He thought about the attack on Vieira. He thought about the death of the boy. He thought about Kika. He thought about Clodoaldo. What was the man looking for? Apparently, he hadn’t disturbed anything in the apartment. Everything was as usual, and there were no open drawers or closets. If the man had been looking for something in the apartment, it had to be too big to fit into drawers and closets. Unless he was looking not for a thing but a person, which would explain why he had waited for Espinosa to return, supposing that Espinosa and the other person would come back together. If that was the case, why hadn’t he asked him any questions? Maybe because he didn’t want to give away the identity of the object of his search. As Espinosa was wondering about these different possibilities, he shifted his body painfully, pausing whenever he heard sounds outside the door.
When his next-door neighbor finally rang the bell in response to the strange noises at the door, he was met only with more scratching and guttural noises and called the police, who in less than fifteen minutes broke down the door and rescued Officer Espinosa of the Twelfth Precinct. He would have preferred to be freed by colleagues from his own station, but he couldn’t be choosy.
His saviors were still there when the two detectives from his team arrived. They waited for everyone to leave, including the residents of the building who had been attracted by the commotion and the noise of the door being broken down. Espinosa thanked his neighbor from the bottom of his heart and closed the door as best he could.
“Damn, Espinosa, what happened? What happened to your face?”
“Nothing. I did it myself when I was trying to take off the duct tape.”
“What duct tape?”
“The guy tied me up with cord and duct tape.”
“What guy? What was he doing inside your apartment?”
“That’s what I’d love to know. Can I offer you some coffee while I tell you what happened?”
Espinosa went to the kitchen, happy to be able to do it on his two feet rather than by dragging his body. He put some coffee in the machine. While all three of them had a cup, Espinosa related the story from the moment in the station when he’d realized that the apartment window was open.
“I have no doubt that he waited for me to leave in the morning to come into the apartment. What I don’t know is what he expected to find here. And I don’t know how he managed to get in. Neither the door downstairs nor this door showed any signs of being forced.”
His two colleagues asked for permission to examine the apartment. The phone rang. It was Kika. Espinosa told her what happened and said he’d have to double up her security for a few days.
“How many days?”
“I don’t know. Until the weekend. Maybe more, maybe less.”
“Am I going to be able to show my pictures on the Avenida Atlantica?”
“The ideal would be to avoid unnecessary risks.”
“What if I think it’s necessary?”
“Then I would have to agree.”
The two detectives found nothing that indicated the man’s presence in the apartment, except the remaining duct tape and nylon cord. They said their farewells, postponing the investigation till the morning, by which time they would have written up a report.
While he was showering, Espinosa thought about what had happened, adding nothing to the reflections from the hours when he was bound and gagged and waiting for help.
The yellowish light from the old lamp shade brightened the room as he stretched out on the sofa, and every part of his body began to ache. He felt a different pain in his legs and arms than in his shoulders and neck. Even though he’d let hot water fall on his neck for more than half an hour, it still felt like a plank. The windows were wide open, and the clarity of the night allowed him to pick out the silhouettes of the distant hills. He rubbed a cold beer can across his forehead—a gesture he’d seen in countless films, but which in his case only gave him a wet forehead. He didn’t drink the whole beer; it had warmed up while he was gazing out the window.
The guy was looking for someone he’d thought would be with Espinosa. That was the only explanation for his behavior. The most far-fetched hypothesis was Kika; the most plausible was Clodoaldo. He’d probably been on the lookout since that morning. He’d seen Espinosa leave and seen Clodoaldo with him, but he hadn’t seen where Clodoaldo had come from. He must have imagined that Clodoaldo had been with Espinosa to begin with. He’d seen the two leave together in the car and had taken advantage of their absence to get into the apartment and wait, knowing that the policeman didn’t drive to the station. He surely
wasn’t interested in Espinosa. It’d be easy to get to him (as in fact he’d proven). He was after somebody slippery, somebody who had information precious enough to justify invading a policeman’s apartment and tying him up at gunpoint. Espinosa found himself wondering whether the two detectives had examined the apartment in order to find some clue left by the interloper—or in order to remove any traces of his presence.
Clodoaldo had been watching the building on the Avenida Copacabana for several days and was following someone, in addition to, as he said, being followed himself. He was aware of how much danger the dead boy had been in, so much so that he had given him Espinosa’s phone number. Maybe the kid had passed along some information; the man had killed the boy and now was after Clodoaldo.
It was too early to go to sleep. He hadn’t had lunch or dinner, and since he didn’t feel like warming up something from the freezer, he went out to eat. On the street, though the stores were already closed, lots of people were carrying bags laden with gifts. Only five days until Christmas.
The body was down at the Forensic Institute and hadn’t been claimed. The news reached Espinosa through Vieira.
“Espinosa, they found the son of a bitch—dead.”
“Which one?”
“The one with my wallet. My I.D. was on him, so they called me … wanting to know if I was the dead guy. Shit, Espinosa, the police are subtle.”
“How did they know it was him?”
“They didn’t. They just found my I.D. on him.”
The story wasn’t quite so simple. Over the course of the day, Espinosa learned that the body of a white man between thirty and thirty-five had been found a few days earlier in some bushes near the Lagoon of Marapendi in Barra da Tijuca. The victim had been tortured before being shot to death. Near the body they had found a billfold, with no money and nothing to identify the dead man. After two weeks, the Sixteenth Precinct, in Barra da Tijuca, had received a plastic I.D. holder discovered on a dirt road near where the body had been found. It was Officer Vieira’s. They remembered the unidentified body picked up two weeks before and concluded that it could be Vieira.
Though there was no one to identify the body, Espinosa had no doubt that it was the same man the boy said he’d followed through the streets of Copacabana. This confirmed his suspicion that he wasn’t the one who had killed the boy: he had already been dead for more than a week when the boy’s head was dashed against the rock in Leme. He thought of the man in his apartment.
The autopsy report made it clear that the man had been tortured so much that he would have confessed to anything, things he knew and things he didn’t. Espinosa wondered what they wanted to learn from him and what he had said. It started to make sense, the deaths of the boys and the hunt for Clodoaldo. Not having anything to offer his torturers, the man had passed the buck. The first boy had been murdered because the killer was in a hurry to eliminate the witness; getting the wrong kid didn’t really matter, from an operational perspective. It was a simple accident; the only downside was that now he’d have to kill the right one: something else to do. The murderer went after the right boy, found him, and smashed his head in. A cheap, primitive way to kill. He must have thought that bullets were only for grown-ups. Espinosa’s biggest worry was how many other names the wallet snatcher would have given up in his desperation to please his torturers. He himself could be among them, and so could Kika.
From the station, he called and left a message for her. Detective Maldonado was assigned to protect her at night, while she was showing her pictures on the sidewalk of the Avenida Atlântica. Espinosa was a little skeptical about the effectiveness of such protection; a man who could get into a police officer’s apartment and tie him up would not be much put out by a young and inexperienced detective. But for now that was all he had.
Vieira hadn’t completely recovered from the attack and still couldn’t drive. Espinosa took him to Barra da Tijuca to pick up his I.D. Since it was a magnificent sunny morning, he took the Avenida Niemeyer. The view that the seaside highway provided of the intense green ocean and the almost purple blue of the sky more than compensated for any annoyance he may have felt at having to drive Vieira. Despite his wounded mouth, Vieira managed to yap during the whole drive, jumping from one subject to another, punctuating every transition with a commentary on the landscape, but without making a single reference to Flor.
On the brown envelope they were handed in the lobby of the Barra station, several phone numbers had been jotted down; all were crossed off except the last one, Vieira’s, which had been circled.
“I think it’s the first time a dead man has ever come by to pick up his I.D.,” said Vieira, joking with the officer on duty.
“Sorry about the call, Officer, but we had to verify it.”
“Of course, buddy. I’m happy not to be that body in the morgue.”
They talked for more than an hour, discussing new cases and reminiscing about old exploits.
On the way back, in possession of his identification, Vieira was just as chatty, though a little more confident. That’s when he mentioned Flor.
“What do you think about Flor?”
For Espinosa, the question sounded ambiguous. Not that Vieira was being sneaky: that wasn’t his style. But what did he want his opinion about? About Flor the woman, or the Flor mixed up in the investigation?
“I think she’s a beautiful woman.”
“Damn, Espinosa, waking up in the morning with that woman by my side is like winning the lottery every day.”
“The problem is the price of the ticket.”
“What the fuck … the fuck do you mean by that?”
“I mean that as long as Magali’s death hasn’t been put to rest, your lovely inheritance is tainted by a murder case in which you are the only suspect, which, in the eyes of other people, may spoil your relationship with Flor.”
“Espinosa, other people can fuck themselves with their opinions.”
“ ‘Other people,’ Vieira, is a nice way of saying the law. Don’t forget that in the eyes of the law you and Flor are the only suspects.”
“I can’t believe that you, my friend, are telling me this.”
“I’m telling you precisely because I’m your friend.”
Even though he was driving, Espinosa could still see Vieira shrivel up and grow older. The scars from his wounds grew clearer, and the almost imperceptible tremor in the hand resting on his leg caught Espinosa’s peripheral vision.
“Why did you go to her apartment?”
“Because, in case you’re forgetting, I’m investigating Magali’s death.”
“So why didn’t you call her down to the station?”
“I did. And she showed up both times. Once with her lawyer.” It was a way to get the story on the lawyer.
“Lawyer? What fucking lawyer?”
“I don’t remember his name, but he was a young, pretty efficient guy.” Espinosa was sorry about adding the “young”; it wasn’t necessary now that he already knew what he wanted to find out: that the lawyer hadn’t been Vieira’s work.
“But what fucking lawyer are you talking about? Flor doesn’t have a lawyer. I’m her lawyer. What’s the little shit’s name?”
“I don’t remember. I know he was really young, but that in spite of that defended his client brilliantly.”
“And why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“Because I thought you knew. Don’t worry about it. It was only a routine procedure.”
“Was going to her apartment also just a routine procedure?” Viera asked harshly.
“Certainly. I needed to find out if any of the keys in Magali’s apartment matched Flor’s door and vice versa, and I had to do it on site.”
He had opted for the tunnel on the way back instead of taking the Avenida Niemeyer. The conversation continued inside the tunnel, their faces weakly lit by the lights embedded in the walls.
“Listen, Vieira. I’m not against you, and I’m not competing with you for Flor’
s affections, which are entirely focused on you.”
“Fine … don’t worry about it…. The attack’s made me a little paranoid. I don’t want you to think I’m happy as a clam with a new woman. I liked Magali a lot; she was my partner and knew me better than even Maria Zilda. She took care of me, and I took care of her. She protected me when I had too much to drink, and I protected her when she felt threatened. In spite of Flor’s beauty and youth, I miss Magali…. I think about her every day.”
When the car left the tunnel, they were blinded by the midday sun. They didn’t say a word until arriving at Vieira’s building.
Espinosa spent part of the afternoon in the morgue at the Forensic Institute. The description Kika and the boy had given perfectly matched the body pulled out from a drawer. It was his first sighting of the man he’d spent almost a month trying to find, and the vision was far from pleasant. If anyone cared to, the face could be recognized, but the rest of the body had been pretty badly used. The torturers hadn’t been concerned with hiding the dead man’s identity; it even seemed they’d made a point of leaving the face and hands intact enough to make the body identifiable, a sort of message “to whom it may concern.” Espinosa was certain that only in the last moments before his death had the man realized what he was dying for … if he had still been in a state to realize anything. It was the fourth cadaver in the series that had begun with Magali, and Espinosa had the mournful feeling that it wouldn’t be the last.
At the station, no response from Kika to his message. Maldonado had gone out early, concerned about protecting Kika on her way to the Avenida Atlântica. At five-thirty, he called Espinosa from the street.
December Heat Page 17