A Small Death in lisbon (22 page)

'Nothing said here has to go further than this room,' I said.

'Dad says you're Homicide. I haven't killed anyone so I'm cool,' she said, cracking her gum at us.

'Have you spoken to any members of your band since it broke up on Wednesday night?' I asked.

That opener made it look as if there was plenty more ammunition in the magazine and I could see the implications fidgeting behind her eyes.

'No, I haven't. There wasn't much point.'

'Was that the last time you saw Catarina?'

'Yes it was,' she said. 'Has something happened to her?'

'Why do you ask?'

'Anything could have happened to her.'

'Any reason?' asked Carlos.

'She looks innocent enough, doesn't she?'

'The blonde hair and blue eyes, you mean.'

She cracked her gum again, and brought one of her Doc Martens up on to the edge of the chair.

'Go on, Teresa,' I said, 'tell us what you thought of Catarina.'

'She was badly fucked-up in the head.'

'What does that mean? Crazy, neurotic, drugged-out?'

'I don't think she's even sixteen, is she?'

'That's right.'

'You might find some thirty-year-old
putas
with her experience but I...'

'I hope this isn't cat talk, Teresa.'

'It's guys' talk. Go out on the campus and ask.'

'You didn't like her.'

'No.'

'Did you envy her?'

'Envy?'

'Her voice, for instance.' She snorted.

'The fact that guys went for her.'

'I told you, she was no better than a
puta.'

'What about Bruno and Valentim?'

'What about them?'

'Just answer the question,' said Carlos.

'Where is it?'

'The band,' I said, trying to steady Carlos who didn't seem to like this one either, 'how did the band break up?'

'I didn't like the music any more.'

'I meant, how. Did you all have a row and split in different directions? Did some of you side with others...'

'I don't know what they did. I met up with a friend in the Bairro Alto.'

'That wasn't the saxophonist was it?' I asked, and she went still.

'No, it wasn't,' she said it so quietly we had to lean in.

'What else does he do apart from play the saxophone?'

She didn't answer. Her hand was up by her mouth, and a thumbnail between her teeth.

'This saxophonist ... is he your lecturer at the university?'

She nodded. Fat tears formed in her purple eye make-up. She studied her knee.

'You weren't with him the night the band bust up?'

She shook her purple head.

'Did you see him?' I asked.

Her eyes closed and purple tears eased down her face.

'Maybe you saw him with Catarina Oliveira later that night?'

'She stole him,' she blurted along with some snot. 'She stole him from me.'

'Is that why Narcotics got a phone call about a university lecturer manufacturing and supplying Ecstasy?'

She sprang out of the chair and grabbed some tissues from her father's desk and smeared her face around so she looked as if she'd taken a heavy beating.

'Where were you last night?'

'In the Alfama at the
festa.'

'When?'

'I was here most of the afternoon working in my room ... friends picked me up about seven o'clock.'

I told her to write down the names and phone numbers of her friends.

'You still haven't told me what's happened to Catarina,' she said.

'She was murdered last night.'

'
I
didn't do anything to her,' she said quickly, the pen hovering.

'Do you think either Valentim or Bruno were involved with her sexually?'

'I'm sure Valentim was ... he found her. Not Bruno. He was scared of Valentim.'

'Found her?'

'Heard her voice, brought her into the band.'

'So why do you think they were having sex?'

'That was Catarina's way.'

'But you never saw anything that confirmed it?'

She looked up to see how the truth would go down.

'No,' she said. 'I didn't see anything.'

We got up to leave.

'You're not going to tell the drug squad about my phone call,' she said.

'If your lecturer's innocent I am,' I said. 'Is he?'

She shook her head.

'Are you?'

'They're trying to say I lab-assisted for him but I didn't.'

'What about supplying?'

'No,' she said, her mouth clamped shut.

'Catarina had traces of E in her blood the day she died.'

'Not from me.
I
didn't give her anything.'

'What about Valentim or Bruno?'

'No,' she said, a terse, hard, rock-sure lie.

I gave her a long look which she couldn't hold. She was thinking how she could salvage something from the situation, how she could make me like her. The unpopular girl. The fraud. The conservative playing in purple and black.

'If you wanted to understand Catarina,' she said, 'you had to hear her sing. She had a direct line to pain.'

We drove through an empty Lisbon on the first hot Saturday afternoon of the summer. We went straight down the normally clogged arterial avenues through Campo Grande to Saldanha, to the huge roundabout at Marqués de Pombal and on to Largo do Rato which baked silently in the heat. Carlos was talking like a man with a mouthful of nails who couldn't spit enough of them out.

'The world can do without
chatas
like Teresa Carvalho,' he said. 'Little
senhorinha rica
with no personality, playing at being a grunge artist but all the time nurturing and cultivating those piss-weak, middle-class Salazarist values. She's the kind who's always had what she's wanted and when she can't get it, because she's too much of a
chata,
she makes sure nobody else can have it. She rats on people to save her own ass. She's a liar. She checks you all the time to make sure she's telling you what you want to hear. She dumps on her lecturer, trashes Catarina and then she gives us...' he put on a whiny voice, '"If you wanted to understand Catarina, you had to hear her sing, she had a direct line to pain," and you can bet that she didn't think that up herself. Gah! They're all the same.'

'Who?'

'Middle-class girls. Nothing to them. Chickens without giblets.'

'Was Catarina a chicken without giblets?'

'She must have had more to her than the rest put together ... which is why they're all queueing up to shit on her and tell us what a little
puta
she was, but so far we haven't met anybody associated with her who's worth more than five
tostoes.'

'So you
do
want to find her killer?'

'Yes I do. Anything wrong with that?'

'Just checking.'

'But if she was a
chata
like Teresa Carvalho...'

'As a matter of interest, do you like black people?' I asked.

He checked to see which side of the field I was coming from.

'I'm not racially prejudiced, if that's what you mean,' he said slowly.

'But if you had a daughter and she wanted to marry a black guy...?'

'Maybe that should be my question to you.'

'I wouldn't like it,' I said. 'There ... you found me out.'

'The good old racist Portuguese policeman.'

'That doesn't mean I think that black people are all criminals,' I said. 'I lived in Africa, I know Africans, and a lot of them I liked. What it means is that there are plenty of people out there who are racially prejudiced and I wouldn't want my daughter to have to face any of that if she didn't have to.'

The dark gardens of the Jardim da Estrela slipped by looking cool and soporific. I cut up by the side of the Basilica and climbed the hill up to Lapa. This is embassy land, an old money haven overlooking the docks of Alcântara, probably so the rich could see their money coming in. We parked in a central square outside an old apartment block with a view over an old and decrepit
palácio
which had scaffolding around it and a building licence from the town hall on the front gate.

We rang the bell. No answer. A gardener hacked away at some undergrowth on the other side of the railings.

'That's the Palácio do Conde dos Olivais,' I said to Carlos. 'It's been locked up and in ruins since I can remember.'

'Looks like they're doing it up.'

I shouted over to the gardener, an old dark-skinned guy with a face like a mule. He stopped work and leaned against the railing and removed the cigarette from his mouth that had gone out some time ago.

'It's going to be a bordello,' he said.

'Is that right?'

'You know what you need for a good bordello?'

'Nice girls, perhaps.'

'Plenty of rooms. This place is perfect,' he said and set off on an asthmatic laugh. He wiped his face off with a soiled rag. 'No. It's going to be one of those exclusive clubs for rich people with too few ideas on how to spend all that money they've got under their mattresses.'

Carlos grunted a laugh and rang the bell again. No answer. The gardener relit his cigarette.

'This is where the Nazis lived in the war,' he said. 'Then the Americans took it over when they lost.'

'It's a big place for a club.'

'They're serious people ... the rich. That's what they tell me anyway.'

We got an answer. A very faint one. A spindly female voice too frail to comprehend. She let us in on the fifth explanation. We walked up the stairs to the second floor. A woman in a thick green cardigan and a tweed skirt answered the door. She'd forgotten who we were already and when we re-explained she said she hadn't called the police, that nothing had happened. She began to close the door with a shaky Parkinson's hand.

'It's OK, Mum,' said a voice behind her. 'They're here to talk to me. It's nothing to worry about.'

'I sent the maid out for something ... and they always come when she's out, and I have to get up and answer the bell, and I can never hear anything from that...'

'It's OK, Mum. She'll be back soon.'

We followed the woman who shuffled into the living room on her son's arm. The walls were floor-to-ceiling with books and the air space was mostly taken up with racks of drawings, paintings, sketches and watercolours. The boy sat the woman down at a table which had a large diameter glass on it and a decanter of what might have been tawny port.

The boy, in regulation T-shirt and jeans, took us into another room. He had long straight dark hair parted in the middle and a sad face with a limited range of expression. His mouth barely opened when he spoke. The walls of this room were covered in more drawings and sketches, none of them framed.

'Who's the artist?' asked Carlos.

'My mother was a gallerist ... this is what's left of her stock.'

'She looks sick.'

'She is.'

'Have you spoken to Valentim?'

'He called.'

'When did you last have sex with Catarina?' I asked, and Carlos flinched as if he'd have to answer the question.

Bruno stepped back and brushed his hair over his shoulders with his two hands flapping like a startled bird.

'What!' he said, his mouth opening two millimetres more than a clam's, which was a Munch's '
Scream,
' for him.

'You heard.'

'I wasn't...'

'Teresa Carvalho says you were. You, Valentim and half the university.'

He looked broken already, as if he was a spider wearing his skeleton on the outside. Valentim might have prepared him for something but not this. He swallowed.

'We don't want to hear Valentim's script either,' I said. 'This is a murder investigation so if I think for two seconds that you're lying and obstructing the course of justice, I'll take you down to the
tacos
for the weekend. Have you ever been there before?'

'No.'

'Do you know what they are?'

No answer.

'Pimps, prostitutes, druggies, drunks, pushers, pickpockets and other assorted punks too violent to be allowed home. No daylight. No fresh air. Pig slop for food. I'll do it to you, Bruno. The maid will look after your mother, so I won't feel bad about that. So, forget Valentim ... and let's have it.'

He stood by the window and his head slid round to look over the
palácio
to the patch of the River Tagus visible through the trees. It didn't look as if he was going to have to do too much thinking.

'Friday lunchtime,' he said to the windowpane. 'Where?'

'The Pensáo Nuno ... it's near the Praça da Alegria somewhere.'

'What time?'

'Between one and two.'

'Were drugs involved?'

Bruno came away from the window and sat on the bed. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and spoke to the floor. 'We took a tab of E each and smoked a joint.'

'Who supplied?' He didn't answer.

'We're not doing anybody for possession or supply of drugs,' I said. 'I just want to have the picture straight in my head. I want to see every minute of that day clearly as if it were my own. Was it Teresa Carvalho?'

'Valentim,' he said.

'Valentim was there as well?' asked Carlos. The boy nodded to the floor.

'The two of you were there together ... having sex with the girl?' Bruno gripped his forehead trying to squeeze the memory out. 'How did this happen?'

'Valentim said she was into it.'

'Was that true?'

He opened his hands and shrugged. 'So which of you sodomized her?' I asked. He coughed, a half sob, half retch. He wrapped his hands over his head and leaned over in the plane-crash position as if expecting some terrible impact.

Saturday, 13th June 199–, Odivelas, Lisbon, Portugal

I dropped Carlos and Bruno off at the PJ building in Rua Gomes Freire so that Carlos could take down his statement, and went back to Odivelas to pick up Valentim.

There were a few things different about Valentim's apartment block. Life had moved on a centimetre, there were different TV programmes raging, techno music ricocheted down the stairwell, heat came off the walls as if the building was running a fever.

The tick answered the door and turned without a word. He delivered the same passing knock on Valentim's door and went into the kitchen where he picked up an open bottle of Sagres.