Requiem for a Killer (21 page)

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

D
ornelas 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.