At Close Quarters (21 page)

Cupido turned to look at the sea, which was growing dark and mysterious, and throwing his questions back at him. He had come this far in his investigation and found nothing. Violeta held no key. Cupido had confirmed that Olmedo and Manuel had never met, that all they had in common was their violent deaths. Dead men with women who mourned them. Gabriela was old enough to come through Olmedo’s demise unscathed, but Violeta would always remember Manuel. And that might not be ideal, because no doubt boys her age looked for cheerful, outgoing companions, not someone already touched and indelibly marked by tragedy. For love to be eternal, it had to be tragic, he thought, his eyes lost in that watery horizon where shadows were drawing near. For love to remain intact in memory, it had to end before turning into routine, tedium and small unforgettable offences. Cupido saw himself a few months before with Lucía. No one had heard him talk about her or utter her name again, and now he wondered whether his stubborn silence did not reveal precisely how much he missed her.

He cast away those thoughts and concentrated on Olmedo. It was possibly the most complex case he’d ever encountered, because it had all the difficulties of several investigations rolled into one: the ambiguity of a death that he couldn’t even say hadn’t been suicide; a variation of the locked-room enigma; a hermetic environment for the prying detective; a client who regrets having hired him and fires him, further complicating matters; the lack of any certainties to rely on; the useless passage of time, while the likelihood of finding new information seems ever more remote.

Twice – before talking with Gabriela and Violeta – he’d decided to give up if he didn’t find anything conclusive. He hadn’t, so he should accept defeat and bow out. A detective hired to solve someone’s problem can be a great help; a detective fired that carries on with the investigation against his employer’s wishes becomes an offence, giving rise to the same kind of suspicion as someone who tries to overhear a private conversation by standing too close. He was not disappointed in Marina; he understood her reasons. He’d believed her when she told him that her decision had nothing to do with his methods, but with a change of heart about the cause of death and her inability to withstand the emotional pressure. It wasn’t, then, something personal, but in any case he didn’t rent out his good manners – only his time, his work and his intelligence to solve enigmas. And also his honesty, even if at times some clients might not only not ask for it, but ask for the opposite of it. The fact that he hadn’t managed to discern a solution might perhaps mean that the mystery didn’t exist. In that case, the only decent thing to do was take a rest, without anxiety or guilt.

And yet, he couldn’t do it. Every night in bed, the unfinished
investigation
came back to haunt him and remind him of his failure, lodging itself in his mind like a splinter under the skin. He would go over his hunches, build hypotheses that later would be toppled by some piece of information, examine again the words of
everyone
to whom Olmedo might have opened the door. But he never managed to put in order a coherent sequence – motive,
opportunity
and execution – that might account for a homicide. If that was what it was, someone was lying and he couldn’t uncover the lie.

‘Leave it,’ said Alkalino one afternoon when, coming out of his room, he saw the detective sitting at the table, with a notebook and a pen in his hand, rereading his notes and disparate jottings. When he saw Cupido’s gesture of disagreement, he added: ‘If you still haven’t found the answer, perhaps the questions doesn’t exist.’

‘And that question would be “Who killed Olmedo”?’

‘Yes. Why not accept it was suicide and, therefore, that it’s absurd to investigate what never happened?’

Cupido thought a few moments before answering.

‘Apart from some details that don’t fit together, the best reason is that the profile I’ve got of Olmedo is incompatible with that of a man who points a gun at his chest and pulls the trigger.’

‘I don’t think it’s that strange. How else would an officer commit suicide if not by shooting himself? As you once said: no pills, ropes or jumping into the void. A military man has a gun and knows how to use it and where to point it so as not to miss.’

‘I don’t mean the
modus operandi
. I mean the act itself.’

‘But why do you care so much about Olmedo? You didn’t know him when he was alive,’ he said, and Cupido guessed what he meant:
You’ve seen his picture but not the flesh of his face; you’ve heard the words others tell you he uttered, but not his real voice; you’ve read he died of a shot, but you haven’t seen the weapon or his blood, not even the corpse
. ‘Even if you managed to prove you’re right, now you’ve been fired I don’t even think his daughter would pay you what you agreed at the start.’

‘It’s not the money. At this point, the money is the least of my concerns. It’s the need to know the answer to a question I’ve asked myself many times. Whether it was murder or suicide is incidental.’

‘Incidental?’

‘What matters is to know the truth,’ he repeated a few seconds later, remembering that a few days before Alkalino had said something similar. He hadn’t paid attention then, but now he saw that his friend’s talk had not been in vain. ‘Don’t you mind leaving things unfinished?’

‘I’ve left a lot of things unfinished … and sometimes I was glad to do so. I didn’t like where some people ended up when they got to the end.’

Cupido knew what he meant: his dalliance with heroin back in the days when no one knew of the hell concealed in its dazzling mirages.

‘You may be right, but …’

‘You mean you’ll carry on investigating?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even if you said you’d quit if nothing came of the talks with Gabriela and Violeta.’

‘In spite of what I said back then. Sometimes it’s not so bad to recognise one cannot keep one’s promises.’

‘If that’s your decision, you can count on me.’

‘Well, have a shave and put some new clothes on. We’re going to the gym in a few minutes.’

Alkalino looked at him with a glint of alarm in his small dark eyes.

‘To work out?’

‘No, no, you won’t have to lift any weights or pedal on an exercise bike.’

‘Bramante?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Everyone who might be involved in the death of Olmedo said they were alone that evening. But he said he was at the gym. Vigour and Beauty,’ he said. ‘Let’s check that out.’

The large premises of the gym were on a lower-ground floor. An inner wall with a swinging door split it into two areas. To one side was the office, as a sign over a door indicated. The exercise machines were situated here and there, in clusters, among the big columns of the building. In two rows of exercise bikes about twenty men and women pedalled in unison. Facing them on another bike – it all looked like a military formation – a trainer dressed in a tight T-shirt, leggings and legwarmers set the pace, which most cyclists struggled to follow, their tongues hanging out.

There were also weight-lifting machines, equipment to work on arms and legs, boards, rails attached to the walls and hanging from the ceiling, rings where the clients exercised, breathing strenuously after each series, and feeling their sweaty muscles to check their hardness or their excess fat to gauge whether they were burning enough calories. Some faced a large mirror that took up a whole wall, lending the place the appearance, emphasised by the leggings and shorts, of a ballroom.

There were clients of all ages, but most were between thirty and fifty: men and women who tried to maintain the muscle tone lost by age and improve their looks for the imminent summer, during which they might do what they hadn’t dared do the one before. Among those who trained in groups or in pairs an obvious empathy existed born of common effort and the well-being brought about by active endorphins. But Cupido also noticed a kind of social awkwardness in the room: lads hardened by their job as deliverymen and bureaucrats alternated with rich women dressed in highly expensive designer clothes – hair bands, leotards,
trainers. And yet, at both extremes of that mixture of society the same desire to improve one’s looks showed through – a desire to temper one’s muscles and tighten one’s skin and offer one’s body to the world free of fat and cellulite, apt for consumption.

Alkalino noticed a trainer who was placing weights on a machine as he asked the woman sitting on it:

‘Is that okay?’

The woman tried to bring her arms together, but it was too heavy.

‘A little less,’ she asked.

They approached. The man was almost repellently muscular. His face and enormous naked arms conveyed no information other than the suggestion that they could do harm. Cupido asked to see the owner or the manager. The trainer glanced at him and pointed vaguely to the office, near the door to the second room, as he said:

‘Galayo? I saw him leave a while ago. If he’s come back he must be in there.’

He seemed too interested in his client to accompany them, and so they made their own way to the office. Cupido knocked on the door and, when nobody answered, opened it slightly. It was a medium-sized office, lit only by the light from the gym room coming in through the venetian blinds of a large window. The owner had decorated it in bad taste, with lots of pictures of body-builders and diplomas for his participation in conferences and courses. The furniture consisted of a filing cabinet, several chairs and a desk with a computer purring on top of it.

Cupido closed the door, and they went to look for the manager in the second room, where the fluorescent tubes gave off a harsher light. There were fewer clients, mostly men, who seemed to be training on their own without the need of advice. They looked with curiosity at Cupido and Alkalino’s streetwear, which looked a little out of place. Everyone there was muscular, excessively so, and each exercise was as much a display of strength as a form of training, the ostentation of someone who knows that a muscle is
always a deterrent, even in repose. Four men of about thirty were taking a break and, sitting on the carpet, spoke with low voices in a language that sounded like Russian. They had big tattoos in red and blue ink, and shaved heads. They looked as if they had just got out of prison. At the back, two young men had hitched their feet to a bar fixed to the ceiling and, hanging down, lifted their torsos to touch their feet in what appeared to be a
competition
to see who could do the most in the shortest space of time. The effort made their faces and ram-like necks red, and their muscles seemed to creak as they tensed up. Then they stopped and stretched, letting their overexerted hearts rest, their
breathing
stabilise, watching over their movements as methodically as if they were giving birth.

A sour smell of chemical sweat reached Cupid and Alkalino as a weightlifter started stretching near them. Cupido saw Alkalino’s head rise a little as his nose tensed up and sniffed the air. He must have thought the same as Cupido, as he suddenly said:

‘I can stand the smell of sweat, but this … It smells like we’re in the back room of a pharmacy.’

They returned to the first room. The girl on the bike was still pushing the group, and the trainer, oblivious to them, was timing the woman’s pulse with a chronometer.

‘I’m going in,’ said Cupido pointing to the office. ‘I’ll need three or four minutes.’

‘I think I can create a diversion if need be,’ replied Alkalino.

Alkalino wandered off among the machines. When no one was looking the detective slipped into the office and closed the door. He went over to the computer, moved the mouse and the screen came to life. On the logo of the gym, a V and B interwoven in a tacky design, he soon found the file with the attendance register. Standing over the keyboard, he clicked on it and a chart opened showing the hours of the day and the clients’ names. An X in the box marked a member’s attendance at a class. He searched for the 16th of April. The window took a moment to open, but he soon found the name: García Bramante, José. The slots corresponding
to the evening Olmedo had died were empty, no X. He looked at the schedules for several days and saw that Bramante attended regularly on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays – yet on that occasion he’d been absent.

Two bells rang barely a second apart: first the phone, trilling on the desk, and then, louder, a second one in the room. Splitting apart two slats of the blinds he saw the trainer leave the client and start walking towards the office. Then, at the back of the room, he saw Alkalino bending down to pick up a bar with weights and, as if he didn’t know what was behind him, turning around and
crashing
against a mirror, shattering it. All faces turned towards him and looked at the floor bestrewn with shards. The trainer stopped in his tracks, looked back and hesitated for a couple of seconds, long enough for the phone to stop ringing. Then he turned on his heels with an expression of annoyance on his face as
Alkalino
, who had bent down to put the bar on the floor, stood up and showed a bloodied hand. The trainer approached him and said a few angry words while pointing to the mirror, but then seemed to agree to take him to the restroom, where the first-aid kit must be. By then, Cupido had turned on the printer. As the page printed, he exited the attendance register and looked for Bramante’s personal card, which confirmed he hadn’t been at the gym at all on the 16th.

He picked up the sheet of paper, turned the printer off and shut down the programme. Through the blind, he checked no one was looking and he left the office. After closing the door he saw the trainer, back from the restroom, walking straight over to him, as if he had guessed the clumsy diversion Cupido and Alkalino had devised and was angry for not having dealt with it properly. His voice was clearly threatening when he asked, looking at the closed door of the office:

‘Are you looking for something? Why don’t you go and help your friend?’

Alkalino reappeared in the background, next to the cycle trainer, who was smiling at some of his comments as she picked up the shards. His hand was thickly bandaged.

‘I think you’re right,’ replied Cupido. ‘I’ll take him to casualty to have that wound checked before he bleeds to death. I won’t be able to wait for the manager.’

The trainer blocked his way.

‘Hang on a minute. It’s two hundred euros.’

‘What?’

‘The mirror. Your friend said you’d pay.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s not that much,’ he accepted.

They left and Cupido inquired about Alkalino’s wound, but it was just a superficial cut that required no further care. As they were going up the stairs to the street, he told him.

‘Bramante didn’t come to the gym that evening. He never misses a Monday, except that one.’

‘And yet, he said he did. He must have felt pretty certain that the owner would back him up.’

‘Did you notice the clients in the second room?’

‘How could I not? Each of them takes up half a wall. And that smell …’

‘Rivers of testosterone and steroids. Bramante cannot not know about that.’

‘Do you mean that he too …?’

‘From the way he looks, I’d say he does. And if he turns a blind eye, being in the military, why wouldn’t he be able to ask the owner to back him up, no questions asked?’

‘To say he was at the gym that evening?’

‘At the very least, to forget he wasn’t … It’s just a hypothesis, but we can’t rule it out until we find a better explanation. What’s certain is that Bramante wasn’t here when Olmedo died.’

García Bramante cut the engine, grabbed the key and leaned to the right to pick up the bag in which he carried his shoes and sportswear. At that moment, on the other side of the street, he saw the tall detective who had asked him questions about Olmedo on the day of the last pledge of allegiance. He was coming out of the gym, accompanied by a short dark man, who looked rather jumpy and
had a bandaged hand. Neither was wearing sportswear or carrying anything in which to put it, so he understood they had not gone to the gym to do exercise. They walked down the street, chatting. Bramante felt apprehensive.

It wasn’t fear. He was an army man, felt the support of the army behind him, and had nothing to fear from a private detective who did not belong to the State Security Forces and was not legally
authorised
to carry out an official investigation. That could only be decided by a judge faced with evidence of some sort. And there wouldn’t be any. He trusted Galayo. Galayo had assured him he would change the attendance sheet, and that if anyone asked, he’d say Bramante had been at the gym on the evening of the 16th. I scratch your back and you scratch mine. So it wasn’t fear. It was the apprehension of imagining that his posting to Afghanistan might be in any way delayed if he was obliged to answer the kinds of questions posed by people like the detective. At times, when he heard them utter those long sentences of theirs, he felt like cutting their tongues off!