Winning the Game and Other Stories (10 page)

“B.B.
,” I said, “not even Alekhine could have played so brilliantly.”

“You just played badly,” Berta said.

I was willing to forget Eve, as I had promised Berta, but when I got to Cavalcante Meier's house it was Eve who opened the door, and my enthusiasm returned. I had first gone to his office, where they told me the senator was at home, sick. I had a newspaper in my hand with a story about the death of Marly Moreira. The case was back on page one. Ballistics had proved that Márcio the Suzuki was shot with the same gun that killed Marly. Detective Guedes had said in an interview that a big name was involved and that the police were close to arresting him, whatever the consequences. There was also talk of drug dealing.

“I want to speak with your father.”

“He can't see anyone.”

“It's in his interest. Tell him the police have the letter. Just that.”

She looked at me with her impassive doll's face. Her healthy skin had the appearance of porcelain, rosy cheeks, red lips, bright blue eyes, a luxuriant growing thing in the prime of life. She was like a color slide projected in the air.

“He can't see anyone,” Eve repeated.

“Look, girl, your father's in a bind, and I want to help him. Tell him the police have the letter.”

Cavalcante Meier received me wearing a short red velvet robe. His hair had been carefully combed and oiled, recently.

“The police have the letter,” I said. “They know it was sent to a certain Rodolfo and think you're that Rodolfo. Fortunately the envelope hasn't been found, so they can't prove anything.”

“I tore up the envelope,” he said. “I don't know why I didn't destroy the letter too. I kept it in a drawer in the table by my bed.”

“A banker's failing, keeping documents,” I said.

“I didn't kill Marly. I haven't the faintest idea who did.”

“I'm not sure I believe that. I think it was you.”

“Prove it.”

He looked like Jack Palance, Wilson the gunslinger pulling on his black gloves and saying “Prove it” to Elisha Cook Jr., just before he whipped out his Colt and shot him in the chest, then threw him face down into the mud furrowed by wagon wheels.

“There are a lot of Rodolfos in the world. I can prove I never saw the girl in my life. Do you know where I was at the time the crime was committed? Having dinner with the Governor. He can confirm it. You're a man consumed by envy, aren't you? You hate people who made it in life, who didn't end up as jailhouse lawyers, don't you?”

“I don't hate anyone. I merely feel contempt for scum like you.”

“Then what are you doing here? After money?”

“No, after your daughter.”

Cavalcante Meier raised his hand to hit me. I stopped his hand in midair. His arm had no strength to it. I released his hand. He was a piece of filth, a courtly exploiter of people, sybarite, parasite.

Raul was waiting for me at the office.

“Guedes has been taken off the Marly Moreira case by order of the Commissioner, as of today. He gave interviews against regulations. They think he's bucking for promotion. He's been transferred to a precinct in the sticks. He can't open his trap.”

Guedes wasn't out for promotion. He believed Cavalcante Meier was guilty and wanted to go public before they could cover it up. He believed in the media and in public opinion. Naive, but that kind of person often achieves incredible things.

“So how's it going?” Wexler asked.

“Ah, Leon, I'm in love!”

“Aren't you always? Berta is a nice girl.”

“It's a different one. Senator Cavalcante Meier's daughter.”

“You want to screw every woman in the world,” Wexler said in recrimination.

“That's true.”

It was true. I had the soul of a sultan out of the thousand and one nights; when I was a boy, at least once a month I would fall in love and cry myself to sleep. As an adolescent, I began dedicating my life to screwing. The daughters of friends, the wives of friends, women I knew, and women I didn't know—I screwed everybody. The only one I didn't screw was my mother.

“There's a girl in the outer office who wants to speak to you,” Dona Gertrudes, the secretary, told me. Dona Gertrudes was becoming uglier by the day. She was starting to get a humpback and mustache, and I had the impression that she looked cross-eyed at me, one eye in each direction. A saintly woman. On second thought, was she really?

Eve, in the outer office. We stood there reading each other's expression.

“Do you play chess?” I asked.

“No. Bridge.”

“Will you teach me?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I held myself in check so I wouldn't fly around the room like a June bug.

“It wasn't my father, I know it wasn't.”

“I love you,” I said. “From the first day I met you.” Her look was like a blowtorch.

“I was pretty shaken myself that day.”

We were holding hands when Wexler came into the room.

“Raul is here. I told him you were busy. You want to talk to him?”

“It must be something to do with the Marly case. Yes, I'll talk to him. Wait here,” I told Eve.

I was at the door when Eve said, “Save my father.”

I turned. “You have to help me do that.”

“How?”

“You can begin by not lying to me any more.”

“I won't lie again.”

“What did you say to Márcio the Suzuki at your house? Where did you know him from?”

“Márcio supplied cocaine for my cousin Lilly. But she kicked the habit about six months ago. That day I asked Márcio if Lilly had gone back to snorting, and he said no. I was afraid he was there to bring drugs for her.”

“Where did Lilly get the money to buy the stuff?”

“Daddy gives Lilly anything she asks for. She's the daughter of his brother who died when Lilly was a child. Her mother remarried and wanted nothing to do with her, so Lilly came to live with us when she was eight.”

“Why did you say you know your father didn't kill Marly and Márcio?”

“My father couldn't kill anyone.”

“So it's just a feeling, a simple assumption?”

“Yes,” she said, refusing to meet my eyes.

Raul was pacing back and forth in Wexler's office.

“Guedes says he's going to publicly name the senator as the murderer and that he doesn't care what happens.”

“Guedes is crazy,” I said. “We can't let him make that blunder.”

Raul and I went looking for Guedes. Eve went home. I promised to call her later.

Guedes was at the morgue, talking to a technician friend of his. He was working on his statement to the press.

“Cavalcante Meier didn't do it,” I said.

“Two days ago you didn't know the first thing about the case, now you show up with total insight.”

I told him part of what I knew.

“If it wasn't Cavalcante Meier, who was it?”

“I don't know. Maybe a drug dealer.”

“I went through Marly Moreira's life with a fine-tooth comb. There's not the slightest chance she was involved in dealing drugs. And both were killed by the same person. Your reasoning is full of holes.”

I attempted to defend my point of view. I mentioned Cavalcante Meier's alibi. After all, the testimony of the Governor couldn't be ignored.

“They're all corrupt. Just wait, when the Governor leaves office he'll become a partner in one of Cavalcante Meier's businesses.”

“Guedes, you're going to come out of this looking real bad.”

“It doesn't matter. What've I got to lose—my job? I'm sick of being a cop.”

“Accusing an innocent man is slander; it's a crime.”

“He isn't innocent. I have my proof.” Guedes's eyes blazed with rectitude, justice, integrity, and probity. “Did you know that Senator Cavalcante Meier is the registered owner of a .38 Taurus revolver, the same caliber as the bullets that caused the deaths of Marly and Márcio?”

“Lots of people keep a .38 in their house. When's the press conference?”

“Tomorrow at ten a.m.”

I arrived at the house in Gávea just as night was falling.

“What happened?” Eve asked. “The look on your face—”

“Where's your father?”

“In his bedroom. He's not feeling well.”

“I have to speak to him. It's important.”

I got a surprise when I saw Cavalcante Meier. His hair was uncombed, he hadn't shaved, and his eyes were red, as if he'd been drinking too much, or crying. The look of Jannings, Professor Rath, in
The Blue Angel,
struggling to hide his shame, surprised by the world's incomprehension. Lilly was at his side, her face paler than ever, her skin looking as if it had been whitewashed. She held a purse in her hand. Her black dress heightened her phantasmagoric beauty.

“I did it,” Cavalcante Meier said.

“Daddy!” Eve exclaimed.

Cavalcante Meier didn't ring true. I've been to enough movies to know a bad actor when I see one.

“I did it, I already said I did. Tell your policeman friend to come pick me up. Get out of my house!”

He came toward me as if to attack. Eve held him back.

“Go away, please go away,” Eve begged.

As I left, Lilly went with me. She stopped next to my car.

“Okay if I come along?”

“Sure.”

Lilly sat beside me. I drove slowly through the dark tree-lined gardens and toward the entrance.

“He's lying,” I said. “It must be to protect someone. Maybe Eve.”

Lilly's body began to tremble, but no sound came from her throat. As we passed a lamppost I saw that her face was wet with tears.

“It wasn't him. Or Eve,” Lilly said, so low I could barely make out the words.

So that was it. I already knew the truth, and what the hell good did it do me? Is there really any such thing as guilty and innocent?

“I'm listening, you can begin,” I said.

“I discovered I loved Uncle Rodolfo two years ago, not as an uncle, or father, which is what he'd been to me till then, but as one loves a lover.”

I said nothing. I know when a person is about to bare their soul.

“We've been lovers for six months. He's everything in my life, and I'm everything in his.”

“Is that why you killed Marly?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know?”

“No. I told him today. He tried to protect me. He loves me as much as I love him.”

In the half-darkness of the car she looked like a fluorescent statue bathed in black light.

“I can tell you how it happened.”

“Tell me.”

“My uncle told me he was having problems with a girl he'd had an affair with and who worked for one of his firms. She was threatening to cause a scandal, to tell my aunt everything. My aunt is a very sick woman, and I love her as if she were my mother.”

I had never seen her. Rich families have inviolable secrets, private faces, dark complicities.

“She never leaves her room. There's always a nurse at her side; she could die at any time.”

“Go on.”

“My uncle received the letter, on a Monday I think. Every night, around eleven, I would go to his room, then leave early the next morning before the maids came to straighten up.”

“Did Eve know about this?”

“Yes.”

“Go on,” I said.

“That day Uncle Rodolfo was very nervous. He showed me the letter, said that Marly was crazy, that the scandal could kill Aunt Nora and ruin him politically. Uncle Rodolfo is a very good man, he doesn't deserve anything like that.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Uncle Rodolfo showed me the letter from that Marly woman and then left it on the night table. The next day I took the letter, found that woman's phone number, and called her. I said who I was and that I had a message from Uncle Rodolfo. We arranged a meeting for after office hours. I chose a deserted beach where I swim sometimes. She was arrogant and said to tell Uncle Rodolfo not to treat her like dirt. When the old lady dies, she threatened, that bastard will have to marry me. I had Uncle Rodolfo's revolver in my bag. It only took one shot. She fell forward, moaning. I ran and got my car, found Márcio, and asked him to sell me some coke. I did a few lines at his place, the first time in six months. I was desperate. I dozed off, and Márcio must have gone through my bag and taken the letter while I was asleep. When Uncle Rodolfo told me you were meeting Márcio at Gordon's, I got there first so you wouldn't find him. I made up a story that Uncle Rodolfo had sent the police after him.”

“Please stop calling him uncle.”

“That's what I always called him, and I'm not going to change now. Márcio was furious and went to Uncle Rodolfo's house the next day. You know that part, you saw it all.”

“Not everything.”

“I met Márcio in the garden, when he was leaving. He told me Uncle Rodolfo was going to pay him off, but that he wasn't going to return the letter. I set up a time with him to buy some cocaine; I'd already made up my mind to get him out of the way. Márcio was in an easy chair watching television, already spaced out on coke and whiskey. I went up to him and shot him in the head. I felt nothing, except disgust, as if he were a cockroach.”

“You didn't find the letter. It was in Márcio's pocket.”

“I searched everywhere, but I'd never look in his pocket. Touching him would make me sick,” Lilly said.

“What happened to the money?”

“It was in a suitcase. I took it home. It's in my bedroom closet.”

I stopped the car. She was holding her purse tightly between trembling hands.

“Give that to me,” I said.

“No!” she answered, clutching the bag to her chest.

I tore the bag from her grasp. The Taurus was inside: two-inch barrel, mother-of-pearl handle. Her eyes were a bottomless abyss.