Needle in a Haystack (13 page)

Lascano heads towards the girl hidden away in the “office”. The voice of the carpenter booms out over his shoulder.

She looks lovely and he’s ready to promise her anything.

The street is empty. They quickly get out of the car, cross the road and pull down the crime-scene tape stuck across the green door to Tony Ventura’s bordello.

Lascano follows her up the stairs to the room with the false socket.

Lascano opens his eyes, Eva’s hand waves the two wads of dollar bills.

Lascano crosses the road, squeezes his cigarette butt between thumb and forefinger and tosses it into the little stream running in the gutter. The doorman is a tight-lipped country boy who immediately recognizes Lascano as a policeman. Lascano’s just as quick to work out the porter is an ex-con, but he decides not to question him for now. Perro walks past and they pointedly ignore each other, monitoring one another all the while. The building is silent. Lascano gets in the lift. The grill jams when he tries to draw it shut. There’s a small triangular chink of something stuck in the groove, stopping it from sliding smoothly. He bends down to pick up the offending item. It’s a little piece of perforated plastic with the quarter part of a hole, evidently the fixing for a screw. He’s pretty sure it belongs to the handle of a gun. He puts it in his pocket. He tries the grill again and, much to his satisfaction, it slides shut with ease.

While Horacio turns to shut the door, Lascano takes the Polaroid out of his pocket and holds it up, ready to observe Horacio’s reaction.

Keeping his hands in his pockets to be sure not to touch anything, Lascano explores the office, which seems to be a bit too tidy. Something tells him it’s not normally like this. On top of the desk is a chequebook for the Banco de Crédito Comercial
.
He notices that the corner of the desk is splintered and that the damage seems recent because the laceration sprouts hairs of fresh wood. On the wall there’s a black stain that someone has tried to clean up. Lascano would like to confirm it’s still damp but Horacio’s watching him like a hawk so he resists the temptation. He walks past Horacio in silence. The curtain rail has fallen down and a shred of cloth hangs from it.

By the time he leaves, Lascano’s convinced Elías was killed in the Bitermans’ office. There’s no sign of Horacio having been in a struggle, and in any case he seems too faint-hearted for murder, but Lascano has no doubt the brother was instigator, brains or accomplice. As ever, the question is:
Who benefited from this death? Horacio. But there’s someone else involved and I have to find out who before putting the pressure on little brother.
These are Lascano’s thoughts as he waits for the lift, when he hears a noise to his side. He pretends to cough and with a quick glimpse catches the neighbour’s eyes at the little window of the peephole. When he starts to walk over, the shutter closes with a bang. He can see the shadow of feet at the bottom of the door as he knocks lightly with his knuckles. He smiles. The door opens immediately, revealing a woman around seventy years old, tiny but strong and tense. Her hard hands hold a brand new dishcloth. She smells of bleach, is wearing a pinafore and has slippers on her feet. She looks like she’s stepped straight out of a detergent commercial.

Lascano flashes his badge.

It’s a space much like the Bitermans’. The whole flat speaks of an owner obsessed with cleaning. Everything gleams. Through the door opening to the bedroom
Lascano sees the television covered with a plastic sheet. It has a glass cockerel on top that predicts the weather by changing colour. The floor shines. It’s easy to guess that a pristine façade hides a mortally boring life, but in spite of this, or maybe precisely because of it, the place is very soothing.

Marraco’s office is on the sixth floor of the courthouse and is reached via an intricate labyrinth of corridors lined with shelves packed with files. Lascano’s convinced that justice almost always gets lost somewhere in this sea of papers that come and go like the tides: deadlines, conclusions, official letters, certificates, notifications, notice orders, pigeon hole memos, public prosecutor permits, counsellor permits, days that go by, files that grow thicker, lawyers that issue more and more writs, documents, evidence, court orders, expert opinions, proceedings and more proceedings, until nobody can remember why the whole thing started in the first place, or nobody is left with the will to read through three or four hundred pages. Criminals with the means to hire a skilled lawyer end up going free. The ones who lack the resources end up counting the days to their release dates, learning the error of their ways doing time at “the school”, as inmates call Devoto prison, because you learn a lot there.

The judge is showing an office junior how to log the writs in a case file, like those on the racks behind them. He’s a lad around seventeen years old, a law student working for free in order to get a foot on the judicial
ladder. Lively and curious, he quickly gives Lascano the once over. Lascano likes the look of the kid. A bond forms between them right away. Lascano sits down opposite the judge and, while they chat, he admires the precise movements of the youngster, itemizing and amending.

Marraco asks the office boy to bring him the file. The judge opens it, flicks through a few pages and then points at a line of text with his finger.