The Night Watchman (12 page)

At the door, I told her to call headquarters on her way home and have someone check that Morel had been on one of the flights from Lisbon to Paris the day before.

Back in the kitchen, the silence in the house seemed too expectant – as if waiting for me to understand things I couldn’t possibly know yet – so I cut a Valium through its centre and downed half. Senhora Coutinho swept into the room a few minutes later, barefoot, in a winged blue caftan with golden tracery embroidered on the collar. Her lipstick was pale pink and her honey-coloured hair was brushed into luscious swirls. Her earrings were shimmering black pearls the size of hazelnuts. She looked as though she’d made herself ready for paparazzi.

As she poured herself another whisky, her cell phone rang. She checked to see who it was, frowning nastily, then shut it off and stuffed it deep into her handbag. ‘Bad news gets around quickly,’ she told me disapprovingly. She sat down opposite me with a theatrical sigh and took a long sip of her Scotch.

‘Is your daughter okay?’ I asked.

She picked at the sponge cake. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what
okay
could possibly mean at this point.’

‘I’m curious as to why she’d need to apologize to your husband.’

Senhora Coutinho lifted her eyebrows and gazed at me haughtily. ‘Is that really any of your business?’

‘I very much want to find out who killed your husband, and asking inconvenient questions is usually part of the process.’

‘The
process?’
she asked, as if I’d said something absurd.

‘The wrong word, perhaps. My Portuguese isn’t perfect, as I’m sure you noticed.’

‘Are you American or English?’

‘American.’

Her eyes lit up. ‘New York is my favourite city in the world!’ she announced.

‘I’ve never been,’ I told her.

‘No? Shame. Look, Monroe, teenagers get crazy ideas. And she’s been rude to both Pedro and me of late. Besides, we all have regrets when a loved one dies.’ She shook her head dejectedly. ‘We think of all we could have done better.’

‘Very true,’ I agreed.

Senhora Coutinho sat up straight and stared at me with her head tilted, as if I were so odd that she might only be able to figure me out from a cockeyed angle. ‘So what is it you regret, Inspector?’

Censoring my real reply, I said, ‘Very little, these days. Regret has never taken me anywhere I wanted to go.’

I felt too clever as soon as I said that, but that was the reply I’d settled on long ago, when Ana and I first started dating.

Senhora Coutinho nodded bitterly, as though what I’d told her confirmed her own doubts about the possibility of redemption. Sensing a window of opportunity, I said, ‘I’ll need to have your full cooperation to solve this case.’

‘Why do I get the feeling you’re going to keep asking me difficult questions?’ she asked, and her grimace seemed a request for me to treat her more gently than I might otherwise have.

‘I’m betting you called Jean Morel after you helped your daughter into bed. That’s okay with me, but I have to know what he told you.’

She reached for her cigarettes and tapped one out. ‘I didn’t call him,’ she said, as if she’d expected more of me.

‘Senhora Coutinho, you’re not as good an actress as you might think,’ I said, but I was bluffing, since I hadn’t been able to read her expression.

She squinted at me as if measuring me for a noose.

‘If you didn’t call Morel to find out if he flew back from Faro or Lisbon,’ I continued, ‘then you should have. I certainly would have.’

‘Your effort to be understanding just makes things worse, Monroe. It’s
far
too American for my taste.’

As she stood up, I said, ‘I don’t want to quarrel with you. I’m no good at it. At the first sign of an argument, I run and hide.’ When she gazed at me sceptically, I added, ‘I’m a very fast runner, Senhora Coutinho.’

She laughed with a touch of admiration – as if I’d disarmed her adroitly – and said in apologetic tone, ‘You might find this hard to believe after how I’ve spoken to you, but I don’t like quarrelling either. Probably because I generally lose.’ She stuck a cigarette in her lips and let it dangle. ‘I’ve learned how to run pretty fast myself, Inspector.’ With a trace of the bitter humour that I now recognized as a key part of her personality, she added, ‘Though Pedro and Sandi were even faster, and usually managed to catch me.’

She wants me to know it had been two against one in this family,
I thought. ‘So what did Morel tell you?’ I asked.

She lit her cigarette. In an impressive exhale of smoke, she said, ‘He drove to Lisbon to talk to Pedro on Friday morning, early, and that when he left this house, my husband was very much alive.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘Around ten thirty. There was a TAP flight to Paris at eleven forty and he was on it.’

‘And what did he and your husband talk about?’

After a moment’s hesitation, she reached for a chair. ‘It’s very simple,’ she said. ‘A few months ago, I told Pedro I wanted a divorce, but he convinced me to wait until Sandi turned eighteen. He was adamant about not hurting her any more than she already was.’

‘Did your husband often get adamant?’

‘I don’t understand the question.’

‘Did he often show his temper?’

‘Doesn’t everyone show their temper on occasion?’

‘But not everyone makes enemies because of it. Judging from what’s happened, he made a bad one.’

‘Look, life wasn’t as rosy as I implied before. Pedro and I felt trapped in our marriage sometimes. Once, after his hollering at me got out of hand, even Sandi told me – in confidence, of course – that it might be a good idea for us to separate. But in this particular case, as soon as I agreed to wait for a divorce, he became friendly again. He wasn’t like me – he could change moods in an instant and be incredibly sure of himself.’ She shrugged, as if she was resigned to her husband being a creature she’d never fathom. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘Jean told me that he drove to Lisbon yesterday morning to ask him to reconsider – to allow us to divorce, I mean. It was a spur of the moment thing.’ In a voice pierced by regret, she added, ‘Jean is in love with me, Monroe. He tells me it’s the first time he’s ever really fallen in love. And get this, he’s sixty-two!’ She rolled her eyes as if it were madness. ‘But he didn’t want us to get a divorce right away only because of his feelings about me. He felt strongly that Sandi was faring badly because we were staying together. He’s her godfather, and very attached to her.’

‘How did Pedro react to his suggestion?’

‘Once again, he argued against a separation.’

‘So Morel and he quarrelled.’

Annoyance sneaked back into her expression. ‘Yes, but like I said, when Jean left here, Pedro was very much alive.’

‘Did your daughter know about your affair with Morel?’

Senhora Coutinho glowered at me. ‘I thought you said you liked to avoid quarrels?’

‘I do, but I want to solve this case.’

‘You get paid even if you don’t find out who killed Pedro,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘That’s true,’ I told her, ‘but you deserve to know what happened to your husband.’

‘Why?’

‘Everyone deserves to know why bad things happen.’

She flashed me a probing look. ‘Though you never found out.’

That remark evidenced such awareness of the little clues I’d dropped that it changed all I felt about her. And embarrassed me, as well, for I’d failed to see the true shape of what was taking place between us until now.

‘No, I never really found out,’ I admitted.

‘And you don’t always find the killers you’re after, do you?’

Thinking of Moura, I said, ‘For better or worse, this isn’t TV.’

‘I’ve been aware of that for a long time,’ she said, with a disgusted little laugh. ‘Look, Inspector, I had no idea Jean intended to come here or I’d have stopped him.’

‘Did he say whether anyone else was here when he spoke to your husband?’

‘He didn’t mention it.’

I told Senhora Coutinho I wanted her to get Morel on the phone. After she explained to him who I was, she put me on the line. His English was pretty good. He confirmed that he’d met Coutinho at his home the day before, at just after ten in the morning, having driven up from the Algarve in his rental car. Pedro hadn’t seemed nervous or ill at ease. He’d left without winning any concessions. He had no idea whether a girlfriend of Coutinho’s might have been hiding in the house while they spoke.

Morel confirmed that he’d caught the TAP Air Portugal flight to Paris at eleven forty. He added that he’d called his old friend from Lisbon Airport to apologize for provoking a quarrel, but Coutinho’s phone had been off. He tried again on reaching Paris but was still unable to reach him.

Was Morel devious enough to have called a dead man twice in order to throw a future police inquiry off the track?

I told him I wanted him to come to Lisbon as soon as possible, and he said he’d already booked a TAP Air Portugal flight for the next morning. He was scheduled to arrive in Lisbon at 12.45 p.m. On hanging up, I asked Senhora Coutinho if she knew where her husband’s cell phones might be. She was picking a hole in the sponge cake with sloppy hand movements. ‘If they weren’t with him or on his desk in the library, I haven’t a clue,’ she told me. ‘Haven’t you found them?’

‘No, the murderer seems to have taken them.’

‘The murderer . . .’ Tears squeezed through her lashes. After wiping her eyes, she jiggled her head, as though to make light of her grief, and smiled, an effort that seemed quietly heroic.

‘I think you should drink something other than whisky,’ I told her.

‘And
I
think your wife must tell you fairly often to keep your opinions to yourself!’ she declared, but with good humour in her expression.

When I admitted that she was right, she said, ‘At this point, Inspector Monroe, I believe you’re expected to give the grieving widow a few words of comfort.’

‘Maybe you should call up a good friend as soon as I leave and ask her to stay with you.’

‘If I had a good friend, I’d do just that.’

‘There has to be someone you trust.’

‘Christ, Monroe! Haven’t you figured out yet that when people learn what it is you most need, they do their best
not
to provide you with it? Look, what if Jean and I are telling the truth?’ A new possibility made her start, then hold her head in her hands. ‘Oh, God – and what if Sandi keeps thinking she’s responsible?’

Bent over her fears for her daughter, she began to cry silently. I went to the window. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the ash curling on her cigarette. In profile, she seemed older – and to have just understood that she’d been carried too far away from all she’d ever dreamed of for herself to ever make it back to where she wanted to be.

As for me, while I watched Nero snoozing under the palm tree, I realized – in contrast – that I didn’t want to be anywhere else. That might have seemed a strange conclusion to have reached, but I’d noticed before that I felt most at home when speaking to people at the worst moment of their lives. They seemed real to me then in a way they almost never otherwise did. Maybe it was even the most important reason I’d become a cop.

I sat down opposite her again. Her face – lost and helpless – moved me to speak. ‘My mother died in a car accident when I was eleven,’ I told her.

I surprised myself with that admission; in fact, it didn’t seem to have come from me.

She nodded, as though hoping I’d say more.

‘There are days, even now,’ I told her, ‘when I still can’t believe it. I’ll be walking down the street and the finality of it – and how it has determined the whole rest of my life – will stop me dead in my tracks. So you see, the truth is I’m the last person in the world who could give you advice on how to get past a trauma like this.’

‘And yet you went on with your life.’

‘I didn’t have a choice. I had a younger brother.’

‘And I’ve got Sandi. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It wasn’t my intent, but it’s probably what I
would
say if I were to risk offering you any advice.’

‘Life has so often been a disappointment,’ she observed. ‘And when it hasn’t been a disappointment, Monroe, it’s been even worse.’ Holding my glance – as if to say
watch this! –
she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and wiped off her lipstick, creating pink streaks across her cheek.

As she took off her earrings, time seemed to come to a halt, because I saw so clearly that she needed me to know that she’d never again be the same person she was before her husband’s death. Tossing them to me, she said, ‘Give them to your wife.’ With a wry smile, she added, ‘She deserves a present now and again for putting up with you!’

I set them down on the table. The black pearls were slightly oval, like small dark eggs. ‘We’ll just keep them here for now,’ I said.

‘Avoid a quarrel, like a good boy, and put them in your pocket.’

I did as she asked, though I decided to keep them at my office in case she wanted them back in a week or two.

‘Gosh, how I hated lipstick when I was a girl!’ Senhora Coutinho told me. ‘Took me years to get used to it.’ She laughed in a reckless burst and joined her hands in prayer. ‘May Susana Coutinho rest in peace. Long live Susana Lencastre.’ She toasted her transformation back into the woman she’d been before marriage with her glass raised high. ‘Which reminds me, Monroe, aren’t I supposed to identify my husband?’

‘Senhora Grimault identified him. But I can make arrangements for you to see the body when you feel up to it.’

She breathed in sharply. ‘The body . . . God, that sounds awful!’

‘I’m afraid the other possibilities sound even worse.’

She held up her hand to stop me from telling her what they were, though that hadn’t been my intention. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever believe what’s happened unless I see Pedro.’ She looked toward the wall tiles. At length, she asked, ‘Was there a lot of blood?’ She spoke as though from very far away.

‘I’m afraid so, where the bullet entered.’ I patted my gut.

‘And that Japanese writing on the wall, was that made with Pedro’s . . .?’