Every Bitter Thing (19 page)

Chapter Thirty

K
LOPPERS WAS A SLIGHT
man with a hollow chest and stooped shoulders, the antithesis of a healthy farmer. When he caught sight of the pistol in Samantha's hand, his eyes bulged.

“There's no need for that,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Step back.”

Kloppers swallowed and moved out of the doorway. His mother was standing a meter behind him.

“Hello, Senhora Kloppers,” Arnaldo said. “Nice try.”

Greetje Kloppers sniffed. She didn't look frightened; she looked angry.

“Where's the kid?” Samantha said.

That got a rise out of Greetje. “You leave him alone! He didn't do anything.”

“Please,
Moeder
,” Kloppers said. “Don't make them angry. You can't help me now, you can only hurt yourself.”

“Where's the kid?” Samantha repeated.

“Jan's in the bedroom at the end of that hallway,” Kloppers said. “He's hiding in a closet. Please let my mother fetch him. I don't want you to frighten him any more than he already is.”

“Who else is in the house?”

“No one.”

Samantha nodded, put her Glock back in her shoulder bag, and took out a pair of handcuffs.

“Are you going to use those on me?” Kloppers said.

“Who else would they be for? Turn around.”

But he didn't. Maybe, Arnaldo thought, he wasn't quite the wimp he appeared to be.

“I don't want my son to see me in handcuffs,” he said. “I'm perfectly willing to let you use them after you've taken me away. Not now.”

“I really don't care if you're willing or not,” Samantha said. “You're going to wear them. Turn around.”

“Hang on just a minute,” Arnaldo said. “I don't know about you, Samantha, but I'm beginning to wonder if we've got the right guy.”

“Oh, you've got the right guy,” Kloppers said. “I admit it. I'm guilty, and I know you're going to take me away. But I'm not a violent man, and I'd really appreciate it if you didn't use those handcuffs.”

“Now I'm confused,” Arnaldo said. “You say you're guilty, and in the next breath you tell us you're not a violent man. What, exactly, are you guilty of?”

“Shut up, Nunes, and get out of my way.”

“No, Samantha, this time
you
shut up. Tell me, Kloppers. What did you do?”

Their prisoner looked from one to the other in confusion.

And then he told them.

O
N THE
way back to Hector's office, with Samantha still fuming on her side of the front seat, Arnaldo called Silva.

“We found Kloppers and his kid. It's a dead end.”

“You kill Samantha yet?”

“Not yet. Any time now. I'm still devising the most painful method.”

“If Kloppers was a dead end, who's he hiding from?”

“His ex-wife.”

“Tell.”

“She's American, a wholesale flower buyer in Florida. Marnix is an office drone who used to work in Holambra's export division. They met at some flower show. A year later, they're married. A year after that, Jan comes along. A year after that, she's throwing dishes at Marnix's head. According to him, he never laid a hand on her, but she used to beat him up a couple of times a week. He moved out.”

“Two sides to every story, especially in divorce cases.”

“True. But I believe his side.”

“Why?”

“I'm getting there; bear with me. He filed for divorce. She got custody of Jan. Marnix claims she only took the kid to spite him. He pays alimony, he pays child support, says he never missed a payment. Five years later, she decides to get married again. Two years after that, she's throwing dishes at the new husband. But he doesn't move out, he hits her back. Then they have a few drinks and make up. Pretty soon, they're drinking and fighting every day.”

“If it's true, it's no environment for a kid.”

“Wait. There's more. The new husband has two kids, and they're both bigger and stronger than Jan is. So while their father is beating up on his mother, the kids are beating up on Marnix's son. Marnix, who goes up there four times a year to spend time with his kid, gets the whole story. Jan wants to move out and come down to Brazil with his father. The ex-wife, who's got more important things in her life than her kid, agrees to let him go. So Marnix goes over to the consulate and gets all the paperwork: a Brazilian passport for Jan and the authorization for him to travel without his mother. Then, just when he thinks the whole thing is settled, a done deal, the ex-wife tells him she wants money.”

“She
what
?”

“She tries to hold Marnix up for money. Tells him he can have the kid, but he'll have to give her fifty thousand dollars.”

“She wanted to sell him his own kid?”

“Uh-huh. And Kloppers said he would have paid it. But he didn't, because he couldn't.”

“And?”

“And she told him to get it from his parents, who she thought were well off.”

“And?”

“And Marnix knew they weren't as well off as all that.”

“So he kidnapped the kid?”

“He did. Took him straight to Miami International and got on the first flight to Brazil. The only thing available was business class, so he maxed out his credit card and bought that.”

“You talk to the kid? Alone?”

“Samantha did. He backs up his old man's story. Says he doesn't want to go back to the States, no way. He loves his grandparents, they love him, and he's having a ball. Here's the clincher, though, the thing that makes me think Marnix is really telling the truth.”

“What?”

“I called Mara Carta and got her to run a check. There's no complaint against Kloppers. He thought there was, but there isn't. So I started thinking why not.”

“Because the mother doesn't really care about getting her son back; she's still hoping to hold Kloppers up for all or part of that fifty grand.”

“That's my guess.”

“If there's no complaint, we're not under any obligation to do anything.”

“I told him that. And I told him to keep away from anybody who isn't from Holambra until we get this thing sorted out.”

“He know anything that throws light on the case?”

“Not a thing. They didn't pay attention to anyone else on the plane. And they were scared until they got off the ground. Once they were in the air, though, the adrenaline rush wore off. They were both exhausted and slept like babies until breakfast time.”

Chapter Thirty-One

F
IFTEEN MINUTES AFTER HANGING
up with Arnaldo, Silva got another call from his friend in Miami.

“You are
so
lucky to have my brilliant expertise at your disposal,” Willis said.

“I have never thought otherwise, Harvey. What have you got for me?”

“Luca Taglia is an old friend of mine. With a name like that, I keep telling him, he should be a
capo
for the mafia. Actually, he works intelligence for the Boston PD. He not only ran Clancy's records, he sent a couple of guys over to the address you fed me, the one from Clancy's visa application.”

“Uh-oh. Sounds like I owe somebody another lunch.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I sent Luca two tickets to a Red Sox game. You're gonna buy me two for the Hurricanes.”

“Gladly.”

“Okay, here's the dope on Clancy. First of all, the priest bit checks out. The address you fed me is a soup kitchen for winos. Clancy lives in a little room at the rear, puts in long days doing God's work. His neighbors say he's a really good guy. The records say he's never had a brush with the law. The diocese says he's been doing his current work for three years. His credit cards say that when he got to Brazil, he spent a night in a hotel in São Paulo. Then he moved on from there and spent another night in a hotel in Palmas, wherever the hell that is.”

“Up north. Capital of the state of Tocantins.”

“Whatever. Then he went to Miracema, again wherever the hell that is, and spent another night. While he was in this Miracema place, he used the same credit card to take money from an ATM. He did it three times, took the maximum he could get every time.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing. That's it.”

“Strange.”

“Taglia thought so too. So he decided to dig a little deeper. He went over for a personal conversation with the people at the diocese. They refused to talk.”

“Refused?”

“Refused. It's their right.”

“How about Clancy's family?”

“They don't want to talk about him either.”

“They don't want to talk about their own son?”

“Taglia sent two of his best men over there. The Clancys serve tea. Tea, mind you, not coffee. Mom and Dad are from the old country. They have shamrocks and leprechauns all over the place. Dad's wearing a ring from the Ancient Order of Hibernians.”

“The what?”

“Skip it. It has no significance to the case, only a bit of local color. Mom's got a crucifix around her neck. There's a portrait of the Virgin Mary on one wall, a portrait of the Pope on another—”

“All right, all right, I get the picture.”

“Okay. So their son Dennis, they tell Taglia's boys, is the youngest of four. The cops tell them they know their son is in Brazil, and they want to know what he's doing down there. Ma and Pa Clancy look at each other. Then Pa Clancy says, ‘We don't want to talk about it.' Just like that. ‘Whaddya mean?' Taglia's boys say. ‘Whaddya mean you don't want to talk about it?' ‘Just that,' Pa Clancy says. ‘We don't want to talk about it.' And that was it.”

“That was it?”

“Yup. They kept dishing up the tea, but they refused to say anything more about Dennis.”

Silva scratched his head. He couldn't think of anything to say other than “Huh.”

“Huh is right,” Willis said. “You get any information on Dennis, you let me know, okay? Because now I'm curious.”

“A
LL RIGHT
, how about this then?” Fabio Pessoa snapped, making an adjustment to his sketch.

Pessoa, the Federal Police's forensic artist, and Rocha, the opera buff from the motel, were seated side by side at a battered wooden table. The table was in a conference room adjoining Hector's office.

“Hmmm,” Rocha said, studying the screen on Pessoa's notebook.

“Hmmm, what?” Pessoa said testily. He was running out of patience with this guy.

“Hmmm, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe. Can I go now?”

“No, you can't. If
that
”—he pointed to the screen—“doesn't look like Eudoxia, we're gonna keep at this until we got a face that does.”

Rocha shook his head. “Waste of time. I go to a family reunion, I keep my wife next to me all the time.”

“And that's relevant to what we're doing here because?”

“She's like, ‘You remember Cousin Carlos, don't you?' She's like, ‘Hello, Carolina,' saying ‘Carolina' so I'll get it. She has to feed me clues all the time so I won't embarrass her. I have no memory for faces.”

“You know what? You're absolutely right.”

Behind them, the door opened. Both of them turned their heads.

“Any progress?” Silva said.

Pessoa shook his head. “The guy's hopeless,” he said.

“Hopeless is you,” Rocha said.

“Hopeless is unacceptable,” Silva said. “I need a likeness.” He turned to Pessoa. “What else can you suggest?”

“Photos. We're going to look at photos.”

“No, we're not,” Rocha said. “You can't make me. I'm sick of this whole business. I want to go home.”

“Tell me one thing,” Silva said. “Would you recognize Eudoxia if she was standing in front of you?”

“Sure. Eudoxia? I see her twice a week at least.”

“Okay,” Silva said.

“Okay what?”

“Go home.”

Rocha raised a suspicious eyebrow.

“How come?”

“Because that's where we're going to pick you up at eight o'clock this evening. And you'd goddamned well better be there.”

R
OCHA WAS
. They decided to try the area around the Jockey Club first and got lucky immediately.

“That one right there,” Rocha said, pointing to a tall dark-skinned figure in a miniskirt, a platinum wig, and high heels.

He sounded surprised it had been so easy.

Hector dropped Gonçalves three hundred meters up the street, well beyond the long line of girls and maybe-not-girls. Then he took a left turn and circled the block. As soon as he was out of sight of the flesh market, he pulled over to the curb, hopped out, and Silva took the wheel. Rocha moved to the front.

Minutes later, they had Eudoxia in a box. The Jockey Club's high concrete wall was behind her. A continuous string of gated houses lined the opposite side of the street. The cross streets were cut off by Gonçalves and Hector, who were converging on Eudoxia from either side.

Certain now that their prey couldn't flee in any direction, Silva pulled the car up in front of her. Hector arrived and gripped the transvestite by the arm. Gonçalves, still panting from his run, opened the back door of the car. They were about to push her into the backseat when Eudoxia screamed.

Eudoxia's colleagues reacted immediately. Cans of pepper spray were produced. So were cell phones. One woman, a brunette in shorts, took a little nickel-plated semiautomatic out of her handbag and pointed it at Hector. “Let her go, you filho da puta,” she said.

Rocha cowered down in the seat and covered his head. Silva got out from behind the wheel. Shielded by the car, he rested the butt of his Glock on the roof and pointed it at the brunette. His weapon was at least twice the size of hers.

The shouting stopped. No one wanted to attract the attention of the man with the gun, but no one wanted to back down either. Into the silence, Silva said, “We're federal cops. We need Eudoxia to help us with our inquiries.”

“If you're cops,” the whore with the pistol said, lowering her arm, “you've got to show us ID.” The uncertainty in her voice telegraphed that the threat, from her direction at least, was over.

“Yeah, show us ID,” someone else shouted.

And then they were all shouting it. “ID, ID, ID.”

Without taking his aim off the woman with the pistol, Silva used his left hand to produce his gold badge. He held it up, high, so all the whores could see it.

“Show them your badges,” he said to his companions.

Hector and Gonçalves held theirs over their heads, slowly rotating their wrists so people pressing around them could have a look.

Two tough-looking guys appeared from nowhere and pushed their way to the front of the crowd. One of them, an oaf with a short forehead and a single gold earring, waved at Silva as if they were old friends.

“I know this guy,” he said, lifting his voice so the crowd could hear. “He is what he says he is, and I don't want any trouble with him. Anybody who doesn't back off is going to have trouble with
me
.”

The brunette put her pistol away, took a few steps backward, turned, and ran. Prostitution isn't a crime in Brazil. Being a transvestite isn't a crime either. But carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is.

Silva nodded his thanks to the thug with the earring and got a nod in return. Then he put his Glock away and got back behind the wheel.

Eudoxia's identity card identified her as Alvaro Moura, twenty-seven years old, male, one meter sixty-two in height, seventy-seven kilos, black hair, brown eyes, and a native of Caxias, a town in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

He was still one meter sixty-two, but he'd adopted a Carioca accent, looked a good deal older than twenty-seven, had put on weight since he'd gotten his card, and was using green contact lenses. Under the platinum wig, his hair had been tinted to a dirty blond.

He was high on adrenaline and crack, so before interrogating him, they put him under a cold shower and plied him with coffee.

When Moura finally started talking, he was well-spoken and seemed to have total recall of the events. He'd been standing in front of the Jockey, he said, for quite a while when he'd spotted Mansur.

“That was his name, huh? Luis Mansur? Told me he was Raul Chiesa, but, hell, who am I to talk, right? Far as I'm concerned, anybody can call themselves anything they want. What's in a name, anyway?”

“A rose by any other….” Arnaldo said.

“What?”

“Ignore him,” Silva said. “The rest of us do.”

“Hey!” Arnaldo said.

Silva kept his eyes on Moura. “How long were you out there trolling before he picked you up?” he said.

“More than an hour. And I had to piss like a stallion. That's the first thing I did when I got to the motel. Good thing he wasn't one of those guys who gets his jollies from watching girls peeing. I couldn't have stopped him. He was much bigger than me, and the bathroom door was flimsy.”

“He still thought you were a woman at this point?”

“Must have.”

“Why ‘must have'?”

“The way he was talking dirty while we were in the car. It was sorta … explicit. And I kept thinking
brother, have I got a surprise for you
.”

“So you went into the bathroom, and….”

“And I was sitting on the toilet when I heard knocking on the door. Not the bathroom door, the door we'd both come in by. I figured it had to be that asshole from the gate, the one who was with you when you picked me up, figured there might be something wrong with the john's credit card or something. Anyway, I'd already flushed and was turning around to wash my hands when I heard him open the door. Not the bathroom door, the one to the room.”

“‘Him' being your customer?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

“And then there was a sound.”

“What kind of a sound?”

“Hard to describe.”

“Try.”

“Sort of halfway between a pop and a spit.”

Silva took that to be a silenced pistol.

“And then,” Moura said, “the john, what's his name again?”

“Mansur.”

“Mansur starts to scream, but he doesn't finish it because it's cut off by this other noise.”

“What kind of a noise?”

“Like a crunch, but squishier. Maybe like a hard splat.”

“What did you do then?”