Water-Blue Eyes (3 page)

‘Perhaps that’s exactly what he had it for,’ answered Caldas tersely.

The inspector glanced again at the body, still tied to the
bed with his horribly bruised genitals exposed. It was an undignified death for a musician with an interest in
philosophy.
He put the thick volume on the night table and picked up the other one:
The
Terracotta
Dog
by Andrea Camilleri.

Nor were these two the only books in the room. On the wall opposite the door there were several packed bookshelves. Caldas remembered his father, who always said you can know a man from what he reads and what he drinks. He was
surprised
to find almost exclusively crime novels on the
musician’
s shelves: Montalbán, Ellroy, Chandler, Hammett …

‘The order of last night’s events seems clear.’ Guzmán Barrio was thinking out loud, as he carried on examining Reigosa’s inert body. ‘A few drinks in the living room, then they came down to the bedroom, had sex and, when this guy was at his most trusting, his lover tied him up, gagged him and murdered him. I wonder why they didn’t do it in a simpler way. This,’ he said, gesturing towards Reigosa’s
gruesome
stomach, ‘whatever it was they did, must have been a lot more difficult, more dramatic.’

‘You can’t really mean he screwed with that?’ put in Estévez, pointing with his hand to the dead man’s minute penis.

‘Rafael, do me a favour, will you, go and see what you can find in the living room,’ asked Caldas, pointing him in the direction of the door.

But once Estévez disappeared up the stairs, Caldas turned towards the doctor and asked: ‘Guzmán, do you actually think he had intercourse?’ He knew this would open the most important line of inquiry.

The doctor shook his head in an ambiguous manner,
making
a movement that didn’t quite mean yes or no.

‘I cannot be sure, but on a first examination it seems possible. At least I don’t think we should rule it out, in spite of what the member looks like now. In any case, I need to carry out a complete post-mortem before I can confirm it
either way. Why don’t you drop by tomorrow? Today we can’t reject any possibility,’ he concluded.

As yet, Guzmán Barrio hadn’t found any signs of violence besides the obvious ones in the genital area and the wrists. The doctor ascribed only the former to the murderer. Like Caldas, he believed the chafing round the wrists had been produced by Reigosa in a desperate attempt to free himself.

Guzmán Barrio believed that what they had there was a crime of passion: all the clues pointed that way. There wasn’t any disturbance in the room, as is often the case following a fight, and this lent weight to the theory that the dead man had not been forcibly tied up. The inspector thought Reigosa knew the murderer, or at least that the murderer had not aroused any suspicions in him. It seemed logical to assume that he wouldn’t have let himself be tied up if he had sensed any danger.

‘Will you have anything by morning?’ asked Caldas impatiently.

‘Can you make it noon?’

The inspector moved closer to the night table and looked at the photograph on it. He prised apart the wooden frame and took the picture out. Reigosa was smiling and fondly holding his saxophone, as if they were a couple of teenage lovers. It was a black-and-white picture, and the dead musician’s nearly transparent blue eyes came out in a very light grey.

‘Guzmán, I’m taking this with me,’ he said, slipping the picture into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Before leaving the downstairs floor, Leo went to take a look at the bathroom. It was all done up in white marble, with expensive-looking taps and a large hydrotherapy bath. The towels, white too, were clean and neatly piled. Thinking it was no small luxury for a jazz-club musician, he left for the living room. If there were any hairs on the floor, a trace of urine in the toilet or any other clue that might help them identify the killer, it would not go unnoticed by the
methodical
work of forensics.

On the top floor, Estévez was looking out of the window. Clara Barcia had moved on to the carpet in her systematic search for clues. She had turned all the lights on and divided the room into squares marked off with pieces of string. The evidence found in each of them was put into plastic bags and labelled accordingly.

Caldas noticed the glasses on the coffee table. The drinks bore out the theory that Luis Reigosa had been with someone he knew, or at least with someone who hadn’t taken him by surprise. He bent down to sniff one of the glasses, and clearly recognised the dry, penetrating smell of gin. He checked the rim to see if there were any lip marks and immediately made out some faint traces of lipstick.

‘Have you checked for prints on the bottles?’ he asked the forensics officer.

‘They are all in the kitchen, inspector,’ she replied, nodding.

Leo Caldas looked around. The kitchen was nowhere to be seen.

‘It’s here,’ said Clara Barcia as she stood up. She opened a sliding door that Caldas had believed to be a cupboard, and a tiny kitchen appeared. ‘They’re called compact kitchens. They’re all right if you don’t cook much, as they take up little space, clearly.’

Caldas moved towards it, but Clara Barcia stopped him.

‘I’m sorry, inspector. There are quite a few prints in there I haven’t had time to check yet.’

‘Of course,’ he said, moving away to allow Clara to close the door. He knew how meticulous she was when it came to inspecting hot spots at a crime scene, so he didn’t mind his curiosity being checked by an officer of lower rank. On the contrary, he was glad he could count on Clara Barcia’s
expertise
for this investigation. He valued her powers of
observation
and her infinite patience in hunting the tiniest pieces of evidence.

The inspector drew near the saxophones hanging on the
wall. The oldest of them was the one Reigosa was holding in the picture he now had in his pocket. Caldas stroked its cold metal hump with the back of his hand, as if offering it his condolences.

In the living room, hundreds of CDs, almost all of jazz, were stacked up on five shelves. The top shelf featured female vocalists, while the three others housed an admirable collection entirely devoted to the saxophone. Among many unknown names, the inspector recognised some he was quite familiar with, such as Sonny Rollins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker. On the bottom shelf were dozens of scores. Leo Caldas picked one at random, which turned out to be
Stella
by
Starlight
for tenor sax, by Victor Young. He knew the piece, and had it at home in a version by Stan Getz.

Although he couldn’t read music, he flicked through the score, poring over the symbols curling on the lines of the stave, and hummed the melody to himself. He remembered with a touch of nostalgia the Sunday afternoons Alba had christened ‘of music and letters’, during which some of these very musicians had kept them company as Alba and he, dressed only in their pyjamas, read lying on the sofa.

‘Have you seen the CDs, chief?’ asked Estévez, still
standing
in front of the window.

Caldas nodded.

‘Our friend of the tiny fried penis must have been a bit queer, don’t you think?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Don’t get me wrong, chief. I’m not bothered who people choose to sleep with. This is a free country.’

‘No need to make excuses,’ said the inspector, encouraging him to go on.

‘But you only need to take a look at all those funny CDs, the paintings right there or the one over the bed to guess this guy was a friend of Dorothy’s.’

‘Just because of that it doesn’t mean …’

‘Just because of that?’ repeated Estévez. ‘What did you expect, chief, a poster with a young lad in the buff?’

The inspector realised his subordinate had not seen the lipstick traces on the glasses, but he chose to keep silent rather than contradict him, as he saw Officer Barcia casting wary glances at Estévez.

‘Drop it, Rafael,’ he muttered, sensing that if he let Estévez take this line of reasoning any further, there would be even more gossip about him at the station.

Clara Barcia finished scrutinising one of the squares marked on the carpet and moved on to the next, the nearest one to the hi-fi. When she bent down, she flicked a switch without meaning to, and a warm woman’s voice suddenly filled every corner of the room.

The young officer looked in vain for the switch to stop the music.

‘Sorry, so sorry,’ she said, blushing a little for her clumsiness.

‘You can leave it on, it’s fine by me,’ replied Caldas,
reassuring
her that it didn’t matter at all.

‘What is this?’ growled Estévez.

‘Billie Holliday,’ said the inspector as he walked over to the hi-fi and turned up the volume. Clara smiled and kneeled back down within her square of carpet marked off with pieces of string.

Estévez went back to the window and looked at the landscape that had allowed him to forget the dead man’s genitals for a moment.

‘Do you know what I like best about this high-rise, inspector?’

‘That you can’t see the high-rise from here?’ replied Caldas, without coming close to the window.

Estévez remained silent, and Billie Holliday moaned once again.

Caldas was walking down the pavement of Príncipe Street, which bore hardly any trace of its earlier hustle and bustle. The shops were now closed, and there was barely anyone about. Most people had abandoned this part of town and, taking advantage of the wonderful May evening, had chosen the boulevard by the sea for their evening stroll.

The inspector was on his way back from the city police station, in the town City Hall, where he had presented the officer on duty with a file containing the catalogue of
complaints
, addresses and telephone numbers which he had
collected
at the radio station. He had asked Estévez not to wait for him. He preferred to walk home. He liked the city at night, when he could hear his footsteps rhythmically resounding on the pavement, and when the smell of trees prevailed over the exhaust smoke of cars. Besides, the empty streets were ideal for going over the inspection at the
high-rise
on Toralla Island. From the moment he’d left Reigosa’s place he’d had the nagging feeling that he had missed
something
. Unable to put his finger on it for now, he followed the bend to the right in Príncipe Street, only ten or twelve steps after its start. He reached a square closed off by a one-storey stone house.

The stone façade had a Galician emigrant drawn on it, one of the many whom poverty had forced into exile, like the ones portrayed by the artist Daniel Alfonso Rodríguez Castelao in his illustrations. Beneath it, there were words once uttered by Castelao himself: ‘I’ll be back when Galicia is free’. He had died in Buenos Aires.

The door and the two windows were made of wood and painted green. A few cast-iron letters, which had been
screwed into the stone, formed a word in a childish
handwriting
: ‘Eligio’.

Leo Caldas pushed the door open.

Since Eligio had taken charge of the bar several decades before, its rustic walls had given shelter to the intellectual cream of the town. The staff of the
Pueblo
Gallego
newspaper
, which was to be found only a few metres away, had led the way, attracted by the excellent house wines. And, little by little, lawyers, literati, poets, painters and politicians had come to place themselves near the cast-iron stove of the establishment.

Sitting in a corner, Lugrís had drawn medusas, seahorses and ships which seemed sunk in the marble table. And a few of his colleagues, long on talent but short on funds, had left their legacies painted on the walls, thus linking them forever with Galician twentieth-century art. Some painters had done this as a sign of friendship; others as payment for the mugs – there were no glasses here – that they had drunk on credit.

Near the oak casks stacked on the uneven floor,
conversations
had taken place between Álvaro Cunqueiro, Castroviejo, Blanco Amor and other eminent men. Their table talk was an oasis of distinction in the industrial greyness which back then was expanding to the four corners of the town.

The writer Borobó, in one of his chronicles, had dreamed up a fable about the end of the halcyon days. Apparently the Lord, who of course knew that salmon had become extinct in Galician rivers, had invited Don Álvaro to dine at a higher table. Unable to resist a freebie, the usual crowd had come along with the great writer. And to lubricate the banquet they had requested wine from on high. The story goes that Eligio, with so many friends at the party, had no other option than to go and pour it himself. The details after that are not clear, and Eligio certainly never came back to tell his version, but it is said he didn’t go up in the best of moods.

In any case, with Eligio in heaven, the bar passed to his
son-in-law, Carlos, without any trouble and without losing any of the former owner’s spirit or the enlightened
atmosphere
it had acquired in Eligio’s lifetime. True, the wine no longer cured you of the flu, but the culprits were the
winemakers
of the area rather than the soul of the place. The mugs were still white china, and the benches the same strong wood as always. A series of small riveted plaques
memorialised
the eminent regulars.

It had gone twelve when the inspector checked his mobile. He realised it had been some time since he had received a call that made him rush out into the night. Then he asked for another mug of wine.