At Close Quarters (7 page)

‘Do you know the San Marcial base, here in the city?’

‘Yes.’

‘My father had just written a report, commissioned by the
Ministry
of Defence, suggesting it should be closed. On the morning of the day he died he presented his results to his colleagues. As you can imagine, some of them will be affected if the base disappears. I mean, he made himself enemies.’

‘Who?’

‘That morning he mentioned two names: Bramante and Ucha,’ she said, and then continued explaining. ‘But the last thing the army wants is for public opinion or the press to suspect that one of its own men killed him out of revenge or because of internal conflicts. To them … murder,’ the word sounded strange in her mouth, as if she’d just discovered it and was uttering it for the first time, ‘is worse than suicide. It would damage an institution whose public image is always fragile. They’d want to stick to the suicide version even if it weren’t true.’

‘And you don’t believe it is?’

‘No, I don’t. I spoke to my father that morning, before he went to the base. He stopped by my house, as he wanted me to sign some documents he needed to take to the bank; he was changing the account holder’s name. All seemed normal, like any other day. He wasn’t depressed or ill. I can’t imagine him putting a gun to his chest and pulling the trigger,’ she said in a broken voice. She searched through her bag and took out a tissue to wipe her eyes. On her left wrist a beautiful bracelet made of gold links shone for a moment.

Cupido waited a few moments. He understood her reluctance to accept that version. He sometimes thought of assisted death and imagined himself in old age, alone and tormented by an
incurable disease, asking someone to leave some painless poison at hand, maybe on his night table. But everything about suicide seemed more problematic. Suicide contaminates everyone close to the victim, family and friends, with a dose of remorse. It makes them ask themselves what they could have done to avoid the rope, or the gas, or the water, or the gunshot in the chest. And no one wants to take the blame: ‘Someone else killed him, I had nothing to do with his death, there was nothing I could have done to avoid it,’ were always the most comforting answers.

‘Had he received any threats?’

‘Not personally. He knew his work wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but he didn’t seem worried about that, he considered it a natural
consequence
of his profession. The only precaution he took … the only thing he was afraid of was an attack. Some time ago, his name had appeared on a terrorist organisation’s target list, and for that reason he always carried a gun. But personal enemies, no, he was not afraid of them. Or of any other kind of aggression. I mean, a soldier knows how to defend himself from a common thief. But there’s something else that’s not quite clear,’ she said, screwing her eyes.

‘Yes?’

‘The weapon he … it wasn’t his regulation gun.’

‘Tell me slowly, from the beginning. Tell me all you can
remember
, in detail,’ he asked. He knew recollection could be capricious, and that memories don’t surface in the same way when one speaks of a recent event or of something that took place a while ago. With time details may be forgotten, but previously unnoticed patterns appear.

Cupido picked up a pencil and opened a simple spiral
notebook
. He used a new one for every investigation. He jotted down the known events and whatever facts he came to find, and also all kinds of details and circumstances – weather, place and landscape, anecdotes, professions and so on – which didn’t immediately fit into the investigation. Yet he was very careful not to run ahead of himself with a hypothesis. He disliked rushing things, preferred ideas to settle bit by bit, so he could slowly interpret the meaning
of every piece of information. By hurrying one risked overlooking what was important, or destroying evidence without finding
anything
useful, like the treasure hunter who, assuming the beeping of the metal detector signals gold, digs into the ground damaging valuable material, only to find a rusty horseshoe. From the moment an investigation started, patience was of the essence, patience to analyse what the victim was like, and who his enemies might be; to deduce at what moment the word ‘murder’ had rolled off someone’s tongue and in what way that person had savoured its bittersweet taste, their lips no longer refusing to utter it; to imagine the hand that later searched for the appropriate weapon, and held it, while a pair of eyes looked at the clock and measured time; to find the place where the murderer hid and retraced his steps as he fled the scene. Cupido saved a page for each of those involved, and slowly filled it with information about their personalities and emotions, the way they looked and what their relationship with the victim was. It was there, in those pages, in the way each person acted, in their feelings of love, hatred or indifference, in the reactions to simple facts that eventually Cupido found the key to the mystery. Experience had taught him that only when he had managed to define those portraits which emerged from the shadows did the narrative hang together; moreover, he could never understand it unless he understood the protagonists, so that both elements – narrative and characters – cast light on one another, and in the end both truths converged: the objective,
incontrovertible
truth of facts, and that other truth, no less untameable, of
feelings
. When that hadn’t been the case, when he had only scratched the surface of places, actions, and people’s movements, the
investigation
ended in failure, in an absurd, hectic segue of comings and goings, routine questions and fruitless answers. To centre oneself on alibis was like coming into possession of tools and then being incapable of building anything with them. Such tools were
essential
, yes, but useless if not used correctly. That’s why Cupido asked about a person’s relationship with the victim rather than where he was on such and such a day at such and such a time.

‘That evening I rang my father up, like any other day,’ the woman started saying. ‘It was half past eight. I checked it several times in the phone memory, and the time fits with what forensics have established: that he died between eight and nine. The phone rang a few times before he picked it up. He said he couldn’t speak to me at that moment, as there was someone with him, though he didn’t say who. Then he said he’d call me back later. When he didn’t, I rang him back at eleven. He didn’t answer and I thought he might have gone out, on his own or with a colleague, as in the morning he’d had that meeting I told you about.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wasn’t worried yet. But the next day, after taking my son to the bus stop, I tried again. As he wasn’t answering I rang his mobile. It was turned off or out of reach, and I imagined he must still be busy with that business of closing down the base. I began to get worried at noon, when I still couldn’t reach him. I called his office and they told me he hadn’t come to work, they assumed he was ill. It was then that I began to suspect that something was wrong, as he didn’t normally miss a day of work, not even to be with Gabriela.’

‘Who’s Gabriela?’ interrupted Cupido.

‘The woman he’d been seeing for a few months.’

The detective wrote down the name in his notebook, but before he could ask, she answered his next question.

‘My mother died four years ago, while she was undergoing plastic surgery. In theory, it should have been a simple operation, but there were complications with the anaesthetic and she never came round. Since then, my father had barely shown any
interest
in a woman, until he met Gabriela. He fell in love with her. He never told me so in so many words, but he couldn’t hide how much he wanted to make her happy. I mean, in that respect, he didn’t have any reason to take his own life either. I don’t think he felt lonely.’

Cupido nodded slightly as he looked at her hands: she was wearing a ring on each, but neither was a wedding ring. That didn’t mean he should assume anything about her marital status, as he
knew some married people who didn’t wear rings, but then he remembered that, when she had rung and they arranged to meet an hour later, she’d mentioned something about needing to get someone to mind her children. He’d have to ask her about that too.

‘I think Gabriela reminded my father of what he went through four years ago: the same grief and emptiness when you
unexpectedly
lose someone in your family.’

‘Did she lose her husband?’

‘No, much worse – her son. Her only son, a teenager. My father suffered a lot when he lost my mother, but one day, talking about Gabriela, he told me her experience was the more painful, the wound deeper, more difficult to come to terms with. Because, in a way, he said, you can find a substitute for your partner, someone who might compensate for the person you’ve lost. But not for a son, a son can never be replaced. I asked him, jokingly, if he loved me more than my mother. He refused to compare us and simply answered that he had really loved her, but now he also loved Gabriela.’

‘How did he die, her son?’

‘In a terrible, absurd accident. He was fifteen. It seems it was the result of teenage bravado. He and two friends were walking down the street and started goading one of those dangerous dogs, a pit bull, I think, that was behind a fence. The owners were out, and the dog got furious and ended up jumping over the fence and attacking them. By the time the police got there and shot it, the boy was already dead.’

‘I see. Back to your father’s case, did you call Gabriela that morning to see if he was with her?’

‘I did, although I knew the previous night they hadn’t seen each other. They had both been at my place in the morning and I heard them say they wouldn’t meet that evening. Then my father left for work. And Gabriela and I went over to Samuel’s.’

‘Samuel?’

‘My boyfriend. The previous day he had invited Gabriela and me to his house to pick up some plants and cuttings he’d prepared
for us. He has a small garden, but a very pretty one. And in the evening I rang Gabriela to discuss how we’d arranged the plants. Samuel had been to her house to give her a hand. That’s how I also know my father did not go out with her that night.’

‘You were saying before that, by noon the following day, you started feeling something must be wrong,’ said Cupido, putting her narrative in order.

‘Yes, and I decided to go over to his house. I’ve got a set of keys. So I opened the door …’

‘Sorry to interrupt again.’

‘No, please.’

‘Has anyone else got a set of keys?’

‘Aurora, only Aurora.’

‘And she is?’

‘The cleaning lady. She has my complete trust. My father had hired her for both houses, as she’s Rosco’s wife, and Rosco is a street-sweeper form his neighbourhood. My father liked to know the people around him, needed to feel in control of his surroundings. I used to tell him it was a military obsession, seeing danger where there isn’t any. In any case, Aurora didn’t have her keys that day.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I had them. She works two days a week for us, Mondays and Thursdays. First she cleans my father’s house, and when she’s done she comes to mine. It’s a good arrangement, because she organises herself and splits her time according to what she needs to do at one place or the other. That Monday she was at his house first and then came to mine. She keeps all the keys on the same key ring, and when she finished cleaning, she closed the door behind her and left them inside. She collected them the following Thursday. So no one could have used her keys on Monday afternoon to go into my father’s house.’

‘All right. Please go on.’

‘I was saying I opened the door and called out “Dad, Dad” because the house looked strange. Everything was tidy, but too
tidy. Once in the living room I started noticing the details: the remote control was on top of the TV, where Aurora always leaves it, as if it hadn’t been touched the day before, and the cushions were perfectly arranged. I went into the kitchen and saw only one coffee cup in the sink. Just one cup, although the previous evening my father had had a visitor. And if he’d had dinner or breakfast at home, there should at least have been a plate, a knife. The door to the bedroom was open, and I could see the bed was made, not simply with the covers pulled up as he sometimes did when he was in a hurry. It seemed that he had spent the night out, hadn’t been back since the previous evening, when we’d spoken on the phone and he’d told me he’d call back later. I opened the door to his study and it was then that I saw him. He was sitting in his chair, slumped over his desk. I remember thinking he’d suffered a heart attack or something like that, but then I saw a large bloodstain at his feet, on the light-coloured carpet. I ran to help him, although I already knew he was dead. The way he stayed still – it was too heavy, too silent. From that moment on I don’t remember precisely what I did, but I do know I lifted him slightly to feel his chest for a
heart-beat
, thinking about doing resuscitation as I’ve seen it done so many times on TV, and that’s where the wound was, the blood already darkened and dry. At the centre of the desk, by his hand, was one of his cards with only two words written on it. Here,’ she said, showing him an ivory-coloured card.