The Night Watchman (22 page)

After we’d done the dishes, Ernie fetched his photos of our ranch. He took off his latex gloves, reasoning that his nephew would feel more at ease with him if he looked
a little less deranged,
as he put it to me with a wily grin.

I peeked at the two of them from behind the curtain. Nati sat on the old bench that we’d painted yellow a few years back. Ernie sat in one of his wicker chairs. He let my son flip through the pictures in silence, then talked to him about how we used to look for scorpions on the rim of Black Canyon, and how the hinterlands of Colorado had been our true home. ‘Everything we saw in the wild accepted your dad and me just as we were,’ he said.

‘And your parents didn’t?’ Nati asked.

‘Not our dad.’

‘He yelled bad things at you, didn’t he?’

Ernie gripped his bolo tie – a silver Kokopelli, the trickster god of the American Southwest – and gazed out towards the horizon. ‘He didn’t want to, Nati, but he did.’

Guilt at invading their privacy took hold of me, so I moved to Ernie’s desk and traced my finger around the petals forming our mom’s outlines in his latest painting. When he came back inside, he told me that their talk seemed to go well, then scrubbed his hands at the sink. When he was done, I retrieved my evidence bags and asked him to come for a walk with me.

On the way to his grove of broad, heavy-limbed carob trees, we detoured into the rose garden, and he picked a praying mantis off a leaf. The insect was stick-like and greenish-brown, with long prickly legs and a serene, noble, upright head – the ballet dancer of the invertebrate world. Ernie told me he’d distributed two thousand baby mantises around his garden a month before. He’d ordered them from Spain. They’d devour aphids and other insect pests all summer long. Sometimes they managed to sneak into the house, even into his bed, but he didn’t mind.

Under the shade of the oldest and shaggiest of Ernie’s carob trees, seated together on the green blanket Ernie had brought along, I handed him the bag containing Sandra’s knife and explained about finding it under her bed. His eyes widened with apprehension. ‘Why show it to me, Rico?’

I had a lie prepared. ‘You remember how we used to hide our dinner plates under your bed until we were ready to wash them? I thought maybe you’d have some idea why she’d have hidden the knife.’

He shook his head. I could tell he was keeping something from me. And he knew I knew, which made him fidgety. After a while, he stood up and walked down the lazy hillside toward the dry stream bed where we sometimes found edible mushrooms. I caught up with him while he was searching behind a fallen oak. I showed him the honey dripper. ‘I discovered this, too – tucked into a corner of the girl’s bed.’

‘Why do you care so much what’s wrong with the vic’s daughter?’ he asked.

‘Because she won’t tell me or anyone else about how she’s being threatened or hurt. All she’s got to hold onto is her own silence. And Ernie, you and I both know it isn’t going to be enough to save her.’

When my brother walked off this time, I didn’t follow him. I went back to his house and sat on my futon with our bag of Roman coins on my lap. At that moment, their jangly weight meant to me that the past sometimes sent us messages, and that some of them could change our lives in the present.

Ernie stepped inside a half-hour later. The knees of his trousers were grimy. Had he been praying?

He caught the Roman coin I tossed him and nodded knowingly, as if he knew I’d been communing with lesser gods in my own way.

‘Give me a little while and I’ll tell you what I know,’ he said.

‘Don’t try to trick me,’ Ernie said resentfully. He was kneading a scuffed old baseball in both his hands.

We were seated on his stone patio, under his trellis of kiwi fruit, which were dangling down out of the thick vine like furry brown earrings. Jorge was still snoozing. Nati was reading
Moby Dick
under the shade of an orange tree on the Via Enrico.

‘I’m not trying to trick you!’ I snapped, though I was. ‘I had a flash of memory about you hiding a knife around our room when you were little.’

He tossed me the ball and turned over his left arm to show me his jagged scars. ‘How did you think I got these?’

‘I assumed Dad made them when I wasn’t around.’

‘No, they’re not deep enough for his work.’

He gazed back at his house, apprehensive, the same silent boy with the ever-watchful eyes who fumbled his replies at school and who never trusted words – which was another way of saying that they’d never done him any good. There were moments one was never prepared for, and I sensed this was going to be one of them.

‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ I told him.

‘I started cutting myself when I was a kid,’ he said.

My heart took a sharp dive. ‘With a knife?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Sometimes my chest felt like it would explode. Cutting myself helped.’

‘So it didn’t hurt?’

‘Of course it hurt!’ He kicked his head back and had a good laugh. ‘But when it hurt badly enough, I’d go all numb.’

He held his hands open and jiggled them, so I threw the baseball back to him. ‘How often did you do it?’ I asked.

‘Maybe once a week.’ He tossed the ball high in the air and caught it in one hand.

‘Even when you were real little?’

‘No, only after Dad disappeared. I started worrying that he’d come back and take me away with him, and that you’d never be able to find me.’

‘Do you still cut yourself?’ I asked. My hope that he didn’t was clenched inside me, afraid to breathe.

‘No, never,’ he declared.

I didn’t believe him; he’d spoken too definitively. Still, we had an unspoken agreement not to pursue each other into our hiding places, so I kept quiet. He balanced the ball on top of his shoulder and, leaning slowly to the side, set it rolling down his arm into his hand. It was a trick Dad had taught us and that Ernie had mastered. I was certain he was telling me in the language of our past that he could be just as secretive as I was.

‘Listen, Rico,’ he finally said, ‘have a paediatrician check the daughter’s arms and legs. And in more . . . intimate places, too.’

While I considered what might have made Sandra Coutinho hurt herself, Jorge shouted ‘Dad!’ He was waving from around the side of the house and wearing his pyjamas.

‘Don’t come out here barefoot!’ I hollered back. ‘Change into real clothes!’

He went back inside. Ernie and I pretended to study different areas of the horizon; sometimes our intimacy was too much for us.

Jorge came out in shorts and a T-shirt, wearing his beloved Puma sneakers – red high-tops with blue emblems on the side. My brother asked him to take care not to step on any of the mantises, then sat the boy on his knee so they could play Rodeo Star. Ernie was a wildly bucking stallion named Pillsbury and Jorge a grizzled rodeo veteran named Ferndale Hawkins, which was the name Ernie and I had invented as kids.

Ferndale kept tumbling off and dusting himself off and getting right back on Pillsbury, though he complained that Ernie bucked too hard. My brother whinnied and shook his head to express his disagreement. He made a fine horse.

Watching Jorge jerking up and down, his arms flailing, laughing crazily, I realized he was a tough little guy.

When Ernie and Jorge headed off to see how the olive trees were enjoying the summer, I went back into to the house to make some calls. My cell phone rang just after I turned it on. It was Yosoi Kimura. He had a clipped Japanese accent but his Portuguese was very good. ‘The writing you sent me is the name
Diana,’
he told me.

‘And does the name
Diana
have any special significance in Japanese culture?’

‘Well, it can mean
big hole.
Except that then it would be written with Chinese-style characters. The way it has been written is just a name.’

After thanking Kimura and disconnecting, I turned on my laptop and consulted Fonseca’s photographs of Coutinho’s address book. Two Dianas were listed, one with a Lisbon address, the other in Coimbra. I wrote their full names and phone numbers in my notepad, then called Inspector Quintela.

He told me he had with him a list of the victim’s incoming and outgoing calls over the last two weeks. He checked the numbers I read him and soon confirmed that Coutinho hadn’t spoken with either of the two Dianas. He’d spoken to only two women other than his wife and daughter over the last week: Fernanda Aleixo, his secretary, and an architect named Maria Teresa Sanderson. He’d called Aleixo once on Tuesday and Sanderson twice on Wednesday, the day before he was murdered.

‘How long were the calls to Sanderson?’ I asked.

‘Close to six minutes on the first, and a little more than two on the second.’

‘Her name rings a bell,’ I said.

‘She married into one of the Port wine families. I’m told she gets herself into those god-awful gossip magazines on occasion, just like our dead man.’

‘What else have you found out about her?’

‘So far, all I’ve got is that she was designing a housing project that Coutinho was building along the Sado Estuary.’

‘Isn’t that protected land?’ I questioned.

‘Some of it is – there’s part of it that’s in the Sado Estuary National Reserve.’

‘Do you know if Coutinho’s development is inside the reserve?’

‘No, but wouldn’t that be against the law?’

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘so get a map of its boundaries and another one indicating exactly where the housing project is. Did you get the address of Sanderson’s office, by any chance?’

‘Yeah, it’s here in my notes somewhere.’

He read it to me. It was on the Rua Alexandre Herculano. She could have walked to the Rua do Vale from her office in less than half an hour.

I phoned Sanderson from the porch. As soon as I introduced myself, she said she’d been expecting to hear from the police. Hearing my accent, she switched to English. She told me that she’d done all her schooling in London.

‘So you read about the murder?’ I asked.

‘Yes, this morning. I figured that sooner or later you’d get around to Pedro’s business associates.’

‘Is that all you were to him?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said in an affronted tone.

‘Excuse me for being direct, but were you sleeping with him?’

‘Inspector, I don’t sleep with married men. I made that mistake once when I was young and stupid, and I swore I’d never make it again.’

‘So what did you and the deceased speak about in your last calls?’

‘Fountains.’

‘What kind of fountains?’

‘Decorative ones – for the grounds of the housing project. He told me that wealthy people think they’re classy. Which is true, except that they’re usually too cheap to keep them running properly. Between you and me, it often seems as if people build beautiful things just so they can let them fall apart. Anyway, Pedro and I quarrelled.’

‘Who won?’

‘Here’s a clue – he pays the bills. But I talked him down from four to two.’

‘So is this housing development inside the National Reserve?’

She replied with silence.

‘I’m going to find out sooner or later, so you might as well tell me.’

‘We’ve added an access road that’s just inside the park,’ she admitted grudgingly.

‘That’s it?’

‘And a very small shopping centre.’

I laughed because she said ‘very small’, as if that kept her crime well within the bounds of good taste.

‘Listen, Inspector,’ she said as if I’d offended her, ‘the marshland there had already been compromised by a factory that closed years ago and that was falling apart!’

‘You can explain all that in court,’ I told her.

‘I assure you we obtained all the necessary approvals.’

‘You didn’t get mine!’

‘I’m pretty certain we didn’t need it, Inspector.’

Her condescending retort lit a flare in my chest. ‘Let me explain how a democracy works,’ I said acidly. ‘My taxes pay for the upkeep of public lands. Every foot of every reserve and park in Portugal belongs to me and my wife and every other citizen of this country!’

‘Maybe that line of reasoning makes sense in America, but nothing is going to stop the project here. Pedro has already put in the foundations.’

‘Who signed off on it?’

‘Pedro dealt with the signatures.’

I changed the subject to keep from giving her another angry lecture. She claimed she didn’t know Coutinho well and had never met him outside his office. She’d never spoken to his wife or daughter. She agreed to messenger over the plans for the housing development to my office first thing on Monday morning. Her frustrated and bored tone, which was meant to convince me I was wasting my time, only convinced me I wasn’t.

I called Luci next. She said that Jean Morel seemed genuinely shaken by Coutinho’s murder. He claimed to have never held a gun in his life, and she believed him.

‘What size shoe does he wear?’ I asked.

‘Forty-one. I made him take one of them off and show me, just to be sure.’

Luci added that Morel hadn’t any idea who’d been sleeping with his old friend. He’d spotted no women’s clothing on his last visit to the victim’s house, and he knew nothing about any enemies Pedro Coutinho might have made when he lived in Japan. Coutinho had never spoken to him about anyone named Diana.

Reading carefully from her notes, Luci told me that Morel had identified the painting missing from the living room as a small, unsigned, nineteenth-century portrait of an aristocratic young woman that Coutinho had found in an antique shop in New York City about a year earlier. He said that his friend had fallen in love with the portrait at first sight and bought it on the spot. He wasn’t sure if Sandi had been with her father when he’d purchased it. As for the Almeida drawing, it had been hanging in Coutinho’s library, which meant that I could now be sure that the killer had taken the time to go upstairs.

Had the killer known about the nineteenth-century portrait beforehand and intended to steal it all along? If so, then he’d probably been to the house before.

After Luci had finished reading me her notes, I called Senhora Coutinho. Her cold was worse. In a constricted whisper, she told me that Pedro had never discussed anyone named Diana with her.