The Night Watchman (7 page)

Vaz told me he’d turned up a host of fingerprints on the refrigerator and cabinets.

‘Any more dinosaur tracks?’ I asked.

‘No. Our man must have either taken off his sneakers or wiped them clean.’

‘The pattern on the sole looked like Converse to me.’

‘Yeah, or knockoffs. As soon as I’ve identified the model, I’ll let you know.’

When he asked me if he could collect the victim’s shirt and tie, I turned to David and he gave me the go-ahead. Using the cheery tone that had become my shield against Vaz’s hostility, I told him, ‘They’re all yours. And his pants are in his bedroom.’

‘Look, Monroe,’ he snarled, ‘I’ve been dealing with evidence since long before you arrived in Portugal. So if you don’t trust me, then just tell me to my face.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said, stunned. ‘What did I do now?’

‘He means you shouldn’t have asked my approval, Henrique,’ David told me wearily.

Did Vaz dislike David for being Brazilian and Jewish? Perhaps all his political ideals had morphed into a mistrust of foreigners. Maybe that’s all they’d ever been.

‘Oh, I see,’ I said, allowing myself an angry frown because it was on David’s behalf. I searched then for some searing warning that would alter everything between Vaz and me, once and for all – I suddenly couldn’t imagine spending another ten years dodging his insults – but came up with nothing. ‘You know, Vaz, solving crimes may be the only thing you and I are really any good at,’ I said instead, relying on the truth. ‘So I suggest we get on with our work before the evidence loses its patience with us.’

Vaz squinted at me, and from experience I knew he was taking aim, so I rushed to add, ‘Your job at the moment is simply to tell me what size sneakers he was wearing.’

‘Forty-three, most likely,’ he said grudgingly, ‘though forty-four is still a possibility, depending on the model.’

To David, I said, ‘Either of those sizes would be pretty large for a Portuguese man.’

‘Yeah, except that young people today are bigger than their parents – better nutrition.’

‘Listen, Monroe,’ Vaz said, as if my conversation with David were wasting his time, ‘what do you say I go through the victim’s car before taking his clothes? Any objections?’

He seemed as anxious as I was to put some distance between us. Or was he trying to provoke me further with his frustrated tone? ‘Do whatever you think best,’ I told him.

‘I’ll give him a hand and take a few photos,’ Fonseca told me. His wink meant he sensed that his colleague might need some calming down.

It only occurred to me when Fonseca turned away from me that Coutinho’s fabulous wealth must have set Vaz off.

After the two Forensics specialists had left for the private garage where the victim parked his car, I told Luci that – while she was out hunting for the killer’s silencer – she should also see if she could turn up any men’s sneakers or a pair of gloves. At the sound of the front door closing behind her, I shivered with relief.

‘Pretty young women make you nervous?’ David asked.

‘Yeah. And fans of Che Guevara. At least, today – that suspect who killed himself shook me up pretty badly. But listen, David, I’d like you to talk something out with me.’

He sat down and joined his hands together in his lap, childlike eagerness in his eyes; he was relieved to be back at work – and to be anywhere at all.

‘The killer must have spotted his shoeprint on the shirt,’ I began, ‘but he didn’t make any effort to wipe it off or smudge it. He knew he could toss away his sneakers in some garbage across town and that we probably wouldn’t find them. But do you think that he might have also been worried that Coutinho would fight back if he tried to take off his shirt?’

‘Dying people can sometimes find extraordinary reserves of strength. Still, if the killer had just waited a few minutes, he could have taken the shirt without any struggle.’

‘Except that he probably didn’t want to risk hanging around. Also, it could have proved harder than he thought to watch a man choke to death.’

‘True.’

‘And one last thing. If the girlfriend wasn’t involved, she might have been hiding in the bedroom the whole time that Coutinho was fighting to stay alive. In that case, after the killer left, she must have slipped out through the front door. And probably re-locked it. Which would mean that the killer didn’t have to have the key, like I’d first thought.’

‘You’ll have to find her to know for sure,’ David observed.

‘She might even have caught a glimpse of who killed her boyfriend,’ I suggested.

‘Or at least heard the man’s voice.’ David glanced down at the body, and I sensed he was thinking about his own near escape from death. At length, he said, ‘Which would also mean she might have been able to save the poor slob’s life – if she’d called 112.’

‘She’d have been scared shitless with the killer still in the house.’

‘But what about afterwards?’ His troubled expression told me he wasn’t willing to let her off the hook so easily.

He stood up and reached again for his aching back. ‘She’ll be desperate to keep her love affair a secret.’ He placed his hand against my chest and gave a little push, as though to make me stand firm. ‘Which means, my boy, that she’s going to do everything she can to prevent you from finding her.’

Coutinho’s dining area was on the ground floor. In the middle of the room was a rectangular mahogany table, large enough to seat twenty. At each end stood a massive, waist-high silver candlestick with sinuous arms and ornamented at the base with scrolled acanthus leaves. Were they from the same church as the kitchen tiles? I was beginning to think that Coutinho had bought an entire Portuguese village.

The door at the back led to the garden, where a thirty-foot-high feathery palm stood guard over a circular wooden deck. In the centre of the scruffy lawn to the side of the deck was a small fishpond, and at the water’s edge stood a proud-looking bronze heron with a minnow raised high in its beak. Behind the lawn, summer had transformed the ancient bougainvillea climbing over the entire length of the back wall into a cascade of ruby petals. Around the base of its gnarled trunk spread a thick jumble of agapanthus spraying their effusive blue pompoms into the air.

I felt the quiet, invisible need for sunlight hiding under all that green. And with it, I sensed my own desire to hold onto the good life I had made for myself.

Gazing over the back wall, I noticed that one of the neighbouring houses was topped by a stained-glass skylight with two of its panes missing. Most of the tile roof had caved in as well.

On returning to the library, I studied the pictures of the victim’s wife and kid. There was one of Coutinho with his arms around his daughter – nuzzling into her neck and tickling her; it softened my opinion of him. Sandi must have been eight or nine years old in the picture, and she was squirming with joyful delight.

In the largest photo, set in a gold frame, the girl’s face was more adult and expressive. She was holding a schoolbook to the camera like a shield, and though she was eyeing the lens as though to appear threatening, she was also about to burst out laughing. Her mom rested her head on the girl’s shoulder and was staring pensively at the lens, and intimately, as well – with the ease of showing one’s true self that comes from great love, it seemed to me. My guess was that Coutinho had blown this one up because of what her devotion meant to him – and maybe, too, because it showed that Sandi was growing up.

Next door, in the master bedroom, a large painting of a powerful centaur – swiftly executed with Coutinho’s slashing brushstrokes – hung above the bed. The centaur’s sleek, vigorous body was black, and his human eyes – the blue of a medieval fresco – were keenly intelligent and strangely wary.
I am watching you,
the mythical creature seemed to be saying. Perhaps Coutinho had painted it as a warning to his wife.

I headed to the top floor of the house, where Sandra had her bedroom. The hallway was stiflingly hot and smelled of overheated dust.

The parquet floor of her room was a minefield of scattered books and CDs. Yet the bed had been made military-school perfect. I suspected that her parents had struck a bargain with her: if she straightened her bed every day, they’d forbid Senhora Grimault from setting foot inside. My wife and I had made a similar accord with our eldest son, Nati.

As I raised the blinds, the slanting light caught the parquet and climbed over the girl’s yellow bedspread towards her matching pillows. The walls and ceiling had been painted black, which seemed a strange choice, but also perfectly in keeping with the poster of a teenage vampire prowling the wall above her desk. He was slavering blood and trying his best to appear sinister, but his film-star pose and Hollywood-perfect hair made his effort seem pointless. A well-worn Persian rug patterned with blue and gold arabesques led from the bed to the dresser, which was a simple, utilitarian design. Above the dresser was a Mexican mirror, with masked Carnival figures – in highly worked silver – prancing around the frame.

Stuffed animals and dolls were propped on the girl’s bed: fourteen stuffed bears, four cats, three Barbies, a Spider-Man action figure and a big-bellied panda with oversized blue eyes. Those gigantic eyes – and her father’s fondness for Japanese culture – made me think the design had originated in a Japanese cartoon. I’d have wagered that her dad had bought it for her.

Beside the bed, seven pairs of colourful sneakers, from midnight blue through electric pink, hung on nails hammered into the wall. A lime-green pair with golden laces was my favourite. Sandra must have liked standing out. I admired her courage.

On a wooden shelf leading from her desk towards the back wall were about 200 CDs, most of them American and English rock. A small glass table below her window was reserved for photos of Nero. He was grey and bouncy-looking. His long pink tongue seemed always to be hanging out.

Sandra had a teenage vampire novel called
Queimada – Burnt
– on her night table, along with three CDs:
Day & Age
by The Killers,
Lungs
by Florence + the Machine and
Let England Shake,
by P J Harvey. I’d heard of Harvey but not the others. Sandra’s alarm clock doubled as a CD player. It was 11.47 a.m.

Struck by the notion that something was missing, I turned in a circle. A dark stain on the belly of her stuffed bear’s belly drew my attention. As I touched it, I sensed someone approaching me from behind. Before I could turn, a blow caught me at the back of my head.

I found myself looking down at my fists, unsure of where I was. My heart was racing and my lips were dry. I was sweating as though I’d made a dash for safety. My mouth tasted of tobacco.

My writing pad was on the floor near my feet. I was seated on Sandra’s bed. Her alarm clock read 12.19. I’d lost just over half an hour.

Only a few moments earlier, I seemed to have taken hold of my brother’s wrist to keep him from falling; we’d been standing on the roof of our home in Colorado.

Closing my eyes, I became certain that the house in my dream wasn’t just in my memory but was a design
of
my memory. The roof and all the rooms below – my bedroom and closet, most of all – were where everything I’d ever experienced was stored. By going up to the roof and taking my brother with me, I was trying to locate events I’d long forgotten – hoping, it now seemed to me, to find moments from the past that would help me solve this case.

As I stood up, I caught sight of the ink on my left hand. Running across my palm and along my thumb was a message from Gabriel:
H: bad memories under girl’s bed. Painting by Almeida in the wrong place. Sneak a peek at the French–Farsi dictionary. Why doesn’t Sandi display any photos of herself?

Under the last line, Gabriel had drawn crossed arrows, an indication that he wanted me again – and soon.

I first received a message on the palm of my left hand when I was eight years old. It was written in blue ink, in crooked, ant-sized letters. I read it while seated on the floral-patterned couch on our wooden porch. The handwriting didn’t look like my mom’s or mine. The message said:
H – Your dad will want to test you and Ernie on Friday. So after school, take Ernie away from the house and don’t return until after dark.

Who could have written it? And how had it been scribbled on my hand without my being aware of it?

Figuring that the writing could get me into trouble with my father, I ran to the rusty faucet at the back of our house and scrubbed it off.

Bigger kids had told me stories of haunted houses by then, and while I was examining the residue of ink on my palm that night – shining my flashlight on it while sitting up under my bed sheet – I came to the conclusion that a ghost had gotten in touch with me. That notion didn’t scare me; the message had been meant to keep me safe, I concluded, and the idea that someone from beyond the grave was watching me made me tingle in that way kids do when they’re embarking on a big – and potentially dangerous – adventure. I started to call him the Spectre because Dad had given me his old comic book collection, and there were several featuring that ghostly superhero.

I don’t know how I formed my ideas about the Spectre, but I came to believe that he was an adult who’d lost his battle with a fatal illness a few years earlier. I decided that he’d been forty-seven years old at the time of his death and had grown up a few miles from our house, at an old abandoned shack I’d passed a hundred times, out on State Road 92.

When he was alive, the Spectre had had an understanding, world-weary face, long hair, and a jangly, tired kind of walk. He had never married or had children.

I decided that he had come back from the dead to help me.

Just before I got his first message, I’d been watching my father yell at Ernie for peeing on his favourite armchair while napping. My brother was four years old then, and Dad’s shouting started him bawling. My heart was drumming because I knew that our father would grab him and shake him until he shut up, and my brother’s body would go all limp, and his eyes would become dull, almost dead. Then the writing appeared on my hand, and I was no longer in the living room. I was seated outside. I felt split in half – as if I were in two places at once.