Requiem for a Killer (5 page)

“Can you give me a name?”

Maria das Graças was struggling in her seat.
It looked like she was losing her breath, and was trying to get it
back.

“Right now, off the top of my head, nobody,”
she squeaked in reply.

Dornelas fell silent. Stuck in his chair,
motionless, he looked inward and instinctively confirmed the
conclusion he was arriving at: that she was lying shamelessly.
Sensing the distrust in the air, Maria das Graças grabbed her purse
and stood up, wanting to end the conversation.

“I want your client’s name.”

The woman fell into the chair again like a
sack of potatoes.

“Client-professional confidentiality
Inspector, if you know what I mean.”

“I can arrest you right now for obstruction
of justice. What do you think of that?”

She showed no surprise at the possibility,
but since she had to get back to work, she opened her purse, took
out her cell phone and pushed a few numbers.

“Here it is, Raimundo Tavares. Can you write
it down?”

Dornelas picked up a pen and paper; as soon
as he saw the name on the little screen he remembered having heard
or read about him someplace. He wrote everything down,
intrigued.

“Please, you gotta be discreet. He’s
married.”

“I have no intention of discussing the
reasons why he hired your services, which I’m sure are of great
value.”

Maria das Graças brightened up. The smile
and the twinkle in her eyes came back.

“Tell me one last thing: did your brother
have a nickname?”

“That’s easy. He was always Dindinho at
home.”

“And on the street?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You’ve never heard of White Powder
Joe?”

“I have, but I never thought it had anything
to do with my brother.”

Dornelas let out a resigned sigh.

“Okay, here’s what you’re going to do: take
my card and call me if you hear anything.”

She put the card in her purse.

“I’ll take you to the clerk’s office so he
can take your statement.”

It was going to take Hildebrando, the man in
charge of the sector, the whole night to write down that story.

“And thank you for coming in. Where do I
find you if I need to talk to you?”

She smiled provocatively, opened her purse,
took out a violet-colored card and gave it to Dornelas.

“Twenty-four hours a day, Inspector.
Hablo español
. I get by in English. I’m available to travel.
All you gotta do is call,” she said, batting her eyelids like the
children’s kissing- butterfly game his daughter used to play with
him.

*

Dornelas went back to his office with
Solano, Lotufo and Caparrós right behind him. They had been so
taken by Maria das Graças that all three of them squeezed together
in the doorway to see who would get in first. After a long day his
investigators’ Three Stooges nonsense amused him and made him think
how much he enjoyed working with them. It was a close-knit team
that had built a very respectable record of solved crimes; one that
would be worthy of envy in much bigger cities.

“So who is she?” implored Solano, in a
conspiratorial tone.

“The dead guy’s sister,” said Dornelas,
sitting down in his chair.

“No kidding. And who was he?”

“Exactly what I was going to ask. Were you
able to identify him?”

Solano scowled as he sulkily dropped his
eyes to the floor.

“Not yet. There’s no record of him on file
around here. He must have come from somewhere else. I’m still
looking.”

Differently than in many capital cities
around the country, where the records system had already made great
advances into the IT era, Palmyra was still dragging itself out of
the industrial revolution, with yellowed index cards and records
done by typewriter.

With just a hint of meanness – there was no
poison drooling down his chin yet – Dornelas slowly took a pencil
out of the drawer, picked up a notebook next to the phone and
slowly began scribbling something. The other three watched him like
chicks waiting for their mother to shove a worm down their throats.
He lifted the notebook up and showed them what he had written on
it: José Aristodemo dos Anjos.

A questioning look remained on all three
faces.

“White Powder Joe?”

“You’re shitting me, Inspector,” exclaimed
Lotufo, throwing his hands up.

“I already knew it before talking to her.
Councilman Nildo Borges told me.”

The three of them came closer to the desk.
Solano and Lotufo took the chairs, with Caparrós standing behind
them.

“And how did he know?” asked Solano.

“That’s what I don’t get. He says a
constituent told him. It appears that José Aristodemo dos Anjos, or
White Powder Joe, or Dindinho – his family nickname according to
his sister – was killed in a drug war. But one thing’s for sure: if
he were a nobody, a councilman and his supposed sister would not
have shown up so quickly to identify him and tell us how he
died.”

Silence followed for several seconds. Then
Lotufo’s eyes lit up as he ran to his office and ricocheted back
like a bullet with a slip of paper in his hands.

“Did you say José Aristodemo dos Anjos,
sir?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I found a record of that name at the
hospital. The guy had an A1c test yesterday afternoon.”

“In plain language, for God’s sake!”

“It’s a test that measures the level of
glycated hemoglobin.”

Dornelas remained in the dark. Lotufo
continued:

“It’s how you measure the average amount of
sugar found in the blood for up to three months before you take a
blood sugar test. The blood sugar test only tells you the glucose
level on the day the blood was collected.”

A bright light went on in Dornelas’ head, so
bright that Lotufo was able to read his mind.

“That’s right Inspector. The man was a
diabetic.”

In a flash Dornelas grabbed the phone.

“Marilda, call Dr. Dulce, please.”

“Right away, Inspector.”

While waiting for Marilda to put the call
through, Dornelas gave his deputies orders to comb through the
pasts of both Nildo Borges and Marina Rivera, and to immediately
send the syringe found by Maria das Graças to the crime lab
people.

“I want this Raimundo Tavares guy here in
the precinct first thing in the morning.”

The phone rang. Dornelas put it on speaker
phone so everyone could hear.

“Inspector, Dr. Dulce.”

“Put her through.”

“Joaquim, my love, is tonight the night
you’re going to take me out to dinner?”

His mind, spinning frantically, smashed full
steam into a concrete wall; in a flash Dornelas ripped the phone
off the hook, disconnecting the conference call.

Dulce Neves, the Chief Medical Examiner at
the morgue, nurtured an ill-concealed passion for him ever since
Dornelas had gotten married. When she heard of his separation she
could hardly contain her joy. It didn’t take her long to offer a
friendly, and affectionate, shoulder to lean on, which was politely
declined.

“Nine o’clock, at Vito’s bar?” replied an
embarrassed Dornelas.

“Nine-thirty. I have to finish up with this
stiff you sent me and go home to shower and put on some clean
clothes.”

“Okay. I’ll see you then.”

He hung up. His men had watched the scene
dumbfounded.

“Is today the day you’re going to go through
Dr. Dulce’s autopsy?” asked Solano ironically. He was close enough
to Dornelas to be able to poke fun at him.

Scowling, Dornelas stood up, got his cell
phone from the desk and put it in his pocket.

“And one more thing: anyone says even one
word to the press, I’m going to ship him to Rio with a foot up his
ass.”

The three looked at him like dogs that had
just been beaten by their owner.

He left.

*

“What time is low tide?” the Inspector asked
his friend, an experienced fisherman who lived on Monkey Island and
owned an old, beat-up fishing boat. The name of the boat was Janua.
Whenever he could Dornelas would go fishing with him to catch
anchovies and barracudas outside the bay.

“This time of the year, around eight,”
answered Claudio.

“Is five o’clock good for you?”

“Up to you, Inspector.”

They shook hands and Dornelas went home.

Chapter 5

I
t was after eight
when Dornelas turned the key and heard Lupi whining on the other
side of the door. By now the hem of the sofa would be drenched, no
doubt about that.

He dropped his keys on the hall table and
turned on his answering machine to hear his ex-wife’s voice
complaining about something he didn’t want to know about; he cut it
off while she was going on about support payments, or at least
that’s what it sounded like.

He picked up the phone and called her house.
It was worth the risk of having to listen to the sermon once again
just to be able to speak to his children, Roberta and Luciano, aged
twelve and ten. On the second ring an electronic voice instructed
him to leave a message. He hung up.

He poured himself a glass of
cachaça
aged in the miniature
jequitibá rosa
wood barrel, with the
wooden tap and copper bands, that he had inherited from his
grandfather, and dropped onto the couch.

The dog had his head on his lap. Neither
Lupi’s pee nor his anxiety about having dinner with Dulce Neves
could keep him from nestling into the cushions and immediately
slipping into a deep sleep.

*

Around ten he felt something crawling up his
left leg, a cockroach, or maybe a spider, and he jumped off the
couch flaying wildly around as if he were part of an electrifying
circus act. It took him a while to realize that his cell phone was
vibrating non-stop in his pants pocket.

Embarrassed and feeling like an idiot for
the show he’d put on luckily – only seen by the dog – he answered
it.

“You’re a shithead, Dornelas,” said Dulce
Neves scornfully on the other end of the line.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Order the
grilled fish for me.”

He hung up and, still woozy, banged into the
doorframe with his shoulder on the way out.

*

“You look beautiful,” Dornelas said rather
lamely to Dulce after greeting her with a kiss on the cheek and
sitting down across from her at the restaurant.

“Thank you,” she replied sweetly. “I ordered
a grilled fillet of sole with broccoli cooked in garlic and olive
oil for you.”

“Perfect, thank you. And I’m sorry for being
late, it’s been a helluva day. I didn’t sleep well last night and
this crime today is going to keep me working overtime...”

Dornelas didn’t want to go straight to the
point by asking questions about the crime for fear she might not
want to answer. The best thing to do was to throw out the bait bit
by bit, get her to start nibbling around the edges until she got
hooked.

“It’s been a long time since we last saw
each other,” she said, resting her chin on her hands and looking at
him tenderly.

“Centuries, by my count,” Dornelas answered
looking over her shoulder at the TV in the corner of the bar.

“You were still married.”

“I think so,” he mumbled, eyes on the
screen.

She had lost his attention.

“Are you all right?” she added, trying to
get it back.

“Getting along.”

“How’s life as a bachelor?”

“Hmmm.”

“If you want to watch TV just say so and
I’ll leave.”

“The soap is down to the last few episodes.
It’s going to wind up at the end of the week and I want to know who
killed the big shot and took off with the money!”

“You watch the soaps now, Joaquim?”

“There’s not much to do at night when you’re
a single man like myself.”

“If it’s action and excitement you’re
looking for, maybe I can help.”

There she was trying to seduce him again.
Out of consideration and respect for his friend it was time for
Dornelas to come clean about his feelings, even if it meant running
the risk of Dulce getting offended and leaving.

“I really appreciate that, but I’m just not
ready to enter into another relationship. Not yet, anyway. My
marriage didn’t end well and I miss my children terribly. I want to
hug them day and night and they’re not around. It doesn’t mean I
don’t care for you, just that now’s not the right time. I’m really
sorry.”

His words, frank and direct, ended Dulce’s
pipe dream with Dornelas but introduced the chance for a kind of
relationship she hadn’t expected. As a woman who dealt daily with
the rawness of life and death, Dulce was able to take the blow with
dignity.

“Thank you for being candid with me,” she
said unhappily. “You want to know the cause of death for the corpse
you sent me, right?”

Dornelas felt like he was standing naked in
a public square. Shamed down to his bones, he didn’t even have the
gall to nod his head.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked, hoping
to get out of the embarrassing situation.

“White, please.”

Given his ham-handed behavior he felt he
deserved to do penance; offering her a good bottle of wine was the
least he could do. He called the waiter and asked for the wine
list, then chose the grape, the year and the brand – keeping his
wallet in mind – and added two bottles of mineral water. Glancing
at the TV for the last time, he turned his attention to Dulce.

“The man was diabetic, Joaquim, that’s why
he died. But what’s weird is that I found a very high dose of
insulin in his blood, enough to knock over a horse. With the excess
of insulin, all his glucose vanished and he went into a
hypoglycemic coma, identical to an alcoholic coma. His state of
unconsciousness was so deep that his brain activity was paralyzed,
leaving him with only his breathing and circulation functioning.
Without a glucose shot in the vein he passed from this world to a
better one.”