The Night Watchman (45 page)

‘I don’t want you to.’

‘Of course you do!’

‘You’ve been a part of him since he was eight. I just want you to be kind to him right now. And me. We’ve been through a lot of late.’

‘Who hasn’t? And in any case, I don’t know what
kind
means.’

‘You’ll figure it out. You’re smart.’

It was Gabriel’s turn to laugh.

‘I’m glad you find me entertaining,’ Ana told him.

When G grinned, his eyes took on a handsome depth that seemed to be mine as well. ‘I can see why Hank picked you,’ he said. ‘Go ahead and give therapy a try. Tell Hank he has my blessing – as long as he doesn’t try to get rid of me, that is.’ He winked. ‘I wouldn’t like that one damn bit!’

When Ana first recounted her conversation with G to me, she left out the part where she told him I’d need to see a therapist. After pressing a gentle kiss into my brow, she now said, ‘I want you to start talking with someone professional.’

‘Like a carpenter?’ I asked, stalling.

She rolled her eyes. ‘No, like a psychologist. You’ll have a few months before you get back to work, so you might as well use them usefully. And seeing a therapist will get you out of the house at least once a week.’

‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’

‘Hank, this isn’t a request,’ she said – but gently. ‘I’ll go with you at first, if it will help.’

‘I don’t want to jeopardize Gabriel’s wellbeing. That wouldn’t be fair.’

‘I thought of that. But Gabriel says he doesn’t mind you going.’

‘You asked him?’

‘Well, I figured it concerned him, too. Hank, I think he understands you can’t live under the protection of lies any longer. It’s way too much work. And you’ll end up pushing me and the kids away for good. I’m guessing that sooner or later you’ll figure that out, too.’

After Ana left for home to pick up the kids, and while I was thinking about how therapy might change me, Ernie showed up. He stayed in my doorway, however, his cowboy hat in his right hand, his left hand behind his back. He had a wily glint in his eyes.

‘I hope you didn’t bring me a reptile,’ I said, because he’d once made Mom shriek by presenting her with a baby whip snake that he’d invited to lunch.

‘No, no reptiles this time,’ he said. ‘But I got you these!’ He took out a spindly bouquet of blue and red wildflowers.

His fingers were badly soiled, and I was reminded of how Ernie needed to spend part of every day in a kingdom un-governed by men and women.

‘Wow – beautiful!’ I exclaimed ‘Where’d you find them?’

‘An abandoned lot just down the street from the hospital. Two old men were living there, in a makeshift hut, but they gave me permission to pick them.’

When he held them under my nose, I took a luxurious sniff.

‘Ana just called me to say that things are good again between you,’ he said in a pleased voice.

‘Yeah, thanks for helping.’

After he’d hunted down a vase – blue glass – and put the flowers on my night table, and while he was washing his hands in the sink in my room, I gave him a rundown of all my misgivings about seeing a therapist. Saving the worst for last, I said, ‘I’ll never solve another case without Gabriel.’

‘Who said he’s got to disappear?’

‘Ernie, any therapist I have is going to want to make me normal.’

He laughed. ‘Hank, I hate to break this to you,’ he said, still giggling, ‘but you shouldn’t hold out much hope of reaching the planet Normal. It’s in a distant galaxy, and no one in our family has actually ever caught a glimpse of it.’ He sat on the end of my bed and looked at me purposefully. ‘My guess is that your therapist is going to want you to integrate G.’

‘Jesus, Ernie, what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I asked.

He picked up one of my mangoes and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’m not entirely sure, but Darth Vader used to talk about
integração
all the time. I think it’s a way of accepting even the strangest things about yourself.’

When Ernie was in high school, we nicknamed his psychiatrist Darth Vader because he had a bass voice and absolutely no sense of humour.

‘Look,’ he said, as though I was being unnecessarily difficult, ‘you just have to tell your therapist what you want and what you don’t want.’

‘Could I do that?’

‘You’re
supposed
to do that, you moron!’

While I was trying to figure out if he was telling me the truth, Luci called.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she told me, ‘Coutinho’s flash drive isn’t where you said it would be.’

‘It’s not in my file of the robbery in Estoril?’

‘No. I took everything out to check. I also looked through the other pending cases.’

‘Shit!’ I threw off my covers.

‘Who could have taken it?’ Luci asked.

‘One of our dear colleagues!’ I said angrily. ‘Who else has access to my files?’

‘Stealing evidence would get an officer fired, wouldn’t it?’ she asked.

‘I’d have thought so – at least, until recently,’ I said.

‘This case has changed your mind?’

‘If the cop were well connected, or important to someone in the government . . .’ I let the rest of my implication go unspoken.

‘Still, it has to be a cop willing to risk an internal investigation – maybe someone who wanted to hush up a bribe he took from Coutinho. Or that a good friend of his took. Or is my way of thinking crazy, sir?’

‘No, it’s not crazy. But the thing is, a cop could probably go on leading a pretty good life after a bribery charge, but it would ruin him forever if he were accused of statutory rape.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘I think there might have been incriminating photos on the flash drive. Or, more to the point, whoever took it out of my files has been worried that that’s what it contained.’

‘What kind of incriminating photos?’

‘Of Coutinho with young girls. And with friends of his. Maria Dias led me to believe he got off on looking at himself in a mirror while having sex. And when he was still married to her mother, she found an incriminating photo of him. I get the feeling he used his camera a lot.’

‘So a colleague of ours is protecting Coutinho’s reputation?’

‘More likely he’s protecting the reputation of someone who’s still alive – someone who’d have to get out of the country in a hurry if the pictures were made public.’

‘But you found only vacation photos on the flash drive, and a list of possible bribes.’

‘I must have missed a hidden file. Damn it! I should have had Joaquim go through it. Though, like I said, it may be that whoever had it stolen isn’t sure what’s on it and wanted to play it safe.’

‘So what do we do now, sir?’

I didn’t reply. I was thinking about how Sottomayor had mentioned to me that Coutinho had made bank transfers from his wife’s account. So it seemed possible that he might have also sent emails about his sexual escapades from her computer, as well – and just possibly with some damaging photos as attachments. Whoever received them might even have been in the photos – and been warned by Coutinho where to find his flash drive in an emergency.

I told Luci that I needed to speak to Susana Coutinho and would call her back. On the ninth ring, Morel picked up. He asked right away about my health, which touched me, but underneath everything I said to him about myself sat the heavy dread of knowing that I couldn’t put off any longer telling him about Sandi being molested by her father. ‘Have any of my colleagues called to tell you about the evidence we turned up on Sandi and her father?’ I began.

‘No, all we are told is that you are shot.’

When I gave him the news, he said in an incensed voice that Coutinho could never have hurt his daughter – and that it was unethical for me to denigrate such a good and caring father after his death.

‘Our techs did the test twice to make sure the blood under Sandi’s fingernails was her father’s,’ I replied. ‘Sandi tried to fight him off at your house and failed. Coutinho raped his daughter at your house. And what happened there explains everything she did after Easter, too – why she chopped her hair off, why she started starving herself . . . It even explains why Coutinho was so keen on not separating from Susana.’

‘If what you say is true, then she—’

‘It is true!’ I interrupted. ‘And Sandi couldn’t live with what had happened.’

I decided not to tell him that Sandi had been pregnant. The shock of that might set him against me, I thought. Or maybe I just hadn’t the will to destroy the little that was left of the life he and Susana had tried to make together. When I asked him if he’d tell her about Sandi being molested, he said, ‘I’ll have to. Though I don’t know if she’ll understand what I’m saying.’ He explained that Susana was still being tranquillized by her doctor.

‘Do you think she might be able to talk with me for a minute?’ I asked. ‘I have a less disturbing subject I need to discuss with her.’

‘She wouldn’t make any sense at all,’ he said morosely.

‘Okay, just tell me if she owns a computer.’

‘No, she hates them.’

‘Does she have some kind of other device from which she sends emails? Or on which another person might have stored some files without her knowing it? An iPad, for instance.’

‘No, she owns nothing like that.’

‘I find it hard to believe she never uses a computer.’

‘She uses Sandi’s portable when she needs a computer.’

‘Her laptop?’

‘That’s right.’

After hanging up, I asked Ernie to help me sit up, but as he guided my leg over the sheet, the pain made me shudder.

‘I think you ought to just lie back,’ my brother said.

‘For fuck’s sake, Ernie, just help me do what I need to do!’

Once I was seated on the edge of the bed, I called Luci back and told her to rush over to the evidence room used by our computer techs.

‘Good news!’ she told me on calling me back. ‘Joaquim has Sandi’s computer.’

She passed the phone to him. ‘Listen, Monroe, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to look through the girl’s files yet, but with you out it didn’t seem like a rush. The good news is I’m done with her dad’s computer. But there was nothing I could find on it about bribes.’

‘Do you have the girl’s laptop with you now?’

‘It’s right in front of me.’

‘Turn it on. I first want you to look for a file of photos. It’s probably deeply hidden. To open it, you might even need a password.’

‘What kind of photos am I looking for?’ he asked.

‘Old men with teenaged girls.’

‘What are they doing in these photos?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Everything you wouldn’t want them to be doing.’

‘You can’t really think that a fourteen-year-old kept porn photos on her computer.’

‘I think her father hid them there. Safest place in the world. No one would
ever
look on her laptop. No one would even suspect – not even Sandi.’

‘It might take a while to locate them.’

‘Joaquim, you need to find them right now. With me out of action, this case is going to get so fucking lost it will never be found again.’

‘I’ll do my best, though . . . oh, shit!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just a second . . .’ After maybe a minute, Joaquim came back on the line. ‘We have a problem, Monroe. I need you to hang on a little while longer.’

As I counted the seconds passing, Joaquim let go with a string of curses. ‘We’re screwed!’ he told me when he got back on the line. ‘The hard disk must have crashed!’

‘Just now?’

‘No. Somebody must have crashed it on purpose sometime after it was brought here.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t already blank when it reached you?’

‘I’m positive. I opened it to take a quick look. And now everything is gone.’

‘Is crashing a disk easy to do?’

‘Monroe, everything on a computer is easy to do if you know how to do it!’

‘Are you absolutely sure all the files are gone?’

‘That’s what I was checking. There’s nothing left. Whoever did this fucked us good, Monroe.’

‘Where did you keep the computer?’

‘In my office.’

‘Under lock and key?’

‘No, in that cabinet I have – you’ve seen it.’

‘Joaquim, have the laptop dusted for fingerprints – every last key – and then call me back with the results.’

Ana arrived with the kids a few minutes later. Jorge skipped over to me and showed me the drawing he’d made of a loose-limbed stick figure with blue scratches for eyes (me) inside a giant yellow square (the hospital), with pink pterodactyls guarding the roof (seagulls). I gave him kisses of praise and tried in vain to stop thinking about Sandi’s laptop. He and Nati then set up the fold-up table covered with green felt that my in-laws had lent them. Ernie fetched more chairs. Once seated, my boys started on their jigsaw puzzle of the island of Manhattan as seen from space.

Watching them, I thought,
This is why I survived; this is what my life is about; this is what I will remember when I’m old.
And yet hopelessness pursued me all morning. Near noon, Joaquim called to tell me that the only fingerprints he’d discovered belonged to Sandi and her parents. From the position of her father’s prints, it appeared that he had carried her laptop with him on more than one occasion.

‘I’m really sorry, Monroe,’ he said. ‘I screwed up, didn’t I?’

‘It’s not your fault. Whoever wanted to keep us from discovering the photos would have had his police accomplice smash any lock you’d used.’

Fonseca, Sudoku and Quintela visited late that afternoon. Ernie and Ana took the kids for a walk to give them a chance to talk with me. To divert us from my debilitated state, we ended up making fun of the politicians in our government.

My colleagues concentrated the full force of their ridicule on the deputy prime minister; the news had just come out that he’d earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations at Lisbon’s Lusófona University in only one year instead of the usual three. He’d taken only four courses instead of the usual thirty-six. University administrators – some of them friends and colleagues in his political party – gave him credit for ‘life experience’ in thirty-two classes.

We ended up making a list of life experiences and courses for which he’d been given equivalencies: