A Vine in the Blood (3 page)

I
N THE
kitchen, a wooden door leading to the garden had been battered in. Some fragments still hung from the hinges; the remainder, in pieces, was scattered across the white tile floor.

Through a door to his left, open and intact, Hector could see two beds, a wardrobe cupboard and a poster of a rock star. The maids’ quarters, apparently.

Near the sink, the dead women lay side by side, their blood mingled in a common pool.

“One bullet for each,” Lefkowitz said. “Point blank.”

“Yes,” Hector said. “I noticed.”

Hot gases, escaping from the murder weapon’s muzzle, had singed the hair around their wounds. Singeing occurred only when bullets were discharged at very close range.

“Execution style,” Lefkowitz said. “No passion here, nothing spontaneous, very deliberate. Poor things must have been scared to death. Look at that.”

Lefkowitz pointed. The women had been holding hands when they were shot. Their dead fingers were still entwined.

Hector felt a twinge of sympathy. No matter how hard he tried to maintain his objectivity, retain his distance, there were often little details about murder that touched his heart.

“Sisters,” Lefkowitz said, “from Salvador. Their purses and identity cards were in their room. The one on the left was Clara. She’d just turned nineteen.”

The floor around Clara’s body was sprinkled with shards of broken glass. Some were tinged with blood.

“What’s that?”

“It used to be a drinking glass. There are others in that cabinet over there. Intact ones, I mean.”

“She wouldn’t have bled like that if—”

“—her heart wasn’t pumping when she sustained the cuts. And a shot like that would have stopped her heart immediately. So, yes, she was cut before she was shot. See how this part of the pool is more red than brown? There was water in the glass. The blood that flowed into the water got diluted. It wasn’t able to fully coagulate.”

“Is that a dog?”

Hector pointed to a bundle of fur near one of the bodies.

“What’s left of one,” Lefkowitz said. “A toy poodle, a female. They broke her back.”

“Broke her back?”

“Stepped on her. Snapped her spine like a twig.”

“What kind of people do that to a dog?”

“What kind of people shoot young women in the head? In a moment, I’m going to sum it all up. Just one more thing: look at Clara’s face.”

Hector had to drop to one knee to see what Lefkowitz was talking about. He did it from a meter away, to avoid kneeling in the blood.

“Bruises,” he said.

“Pre-mortem, according to Doctor Whatshisname. And none on Clarice. Ready for a reading?”

“Please.”

“Okay. Here’s what I think happened: Clara got up in the early hours of the morning to drink some water. She took a glass out of the cabinet, went to the sink and filled it. The kidnappers came in and startled her. She dropped the glass, and it broke. She screamed, or tried to fight them off, or tried to run, and they hit her. She went down, landing on her back, cutting herself.”

“And her sister …”

“Heard the noise, jumped out of bed and came into the kitchen. Or maybe tried to hide, and the kidnappers found her. The fact that her face isn’t bruised suggests they were able to intimidate her without hitting her. Maybe just looking at what they’d done to Clara was enough. They made Clara get up. They made both of them kneel. And then they shot them in the back of their heads.”

Hector had been visualizing the progression of events and was experiencing a wave of nausea. He paused a beat before asking his next question.

“Which one first?”

“Clara,” Lefkowitz said, without hesitation.

“How can you—”

“Blood spatter analysis.”

“So Clarice knew it was coming?”

“Must have. But not for long.”

“For her sake, I hope you’re right. But why shoot them at all? Why not just tie them up?”

“You want a guess?”

“Tell me.”

“To forestall identification.”

“You think they came in here without masks? That would have been stupid.”

“We already know they’re vicious. What’s to say they’re not stupid? But there’s another possibility.”

“Which is?”

“Maybe they had masks, but hadn’t put them on. Maybe they’d planned to do that
after
they were inside. But then, surprise, surprise, there’s Clara standing in the darkened kitchen.” Hector shook his head. “I don’t buy it,” he said. “She would have heard them; she would have tried to run.”

“Ah, but how about if she
didn’t
hear them?”

“How could she not? They smashed that door over there. That’s how they got in, right?”

“That’s what we’re
supposed
to think.
I
think they smashed it on the way out.”

“What?”

Lefkowitz held up a hand for patience. “Bear with me. Remember that commotion I mentioned? The one the neighbor heard? It was a loud
bang
, and it woke him up. Seconds later, he saw a car driving away. Between the bang, and the driving away, the killers wouldn’t have had time to do anything other than run up the ramp to the street. And, if they’d been lugging an unconscious woman, there wouldn’t even have been time for that. I figure they put her into the car first.”

“You’re saying the very last thing they did was smash the door? And then took off on a run? What would be the sense of that?”

“To make us think they didn’t have a key.”

“But
you
think they did.”

Lefkowitz nodded. “No other explanation computes. Clara had just filled a glass with water; she’d no sooner dropped it than they were on her. She probably started to scream, and that’s when they hit her. She went down on the shards of glass. None of that could have happened if they’d really done what they want us to think they did, which was to get into the house by battering their way through the door.”

“So you think this is an inside job?”

“That’s what I think. If it happened the way
they
want us to think it happened, wouldn’t Clara have taken off like a rabbit? Wouldn’t we have found her body somewhere else?”

Hector was unconvinced.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “They could have gone after her and brought her back here. Any other signs of forced entry?”

“None.” Lefkowitz was emphatic. “All the other doors were locked. So were the windows. The glass in all of them was intact.”

“Maybe they picked the lock.”

“Not
that
lock. It’s virtually pickproof.”

Hector put a finger to his lips and thought about it.

Lefkowitz regarded him in silence.

Finally, Hector said, “Let’s suppose it went down the way you suggest. Wouldn’t Clara have heard a click? Or heard them creeping up behind her?”

“Not if they were quick. Not if Clara was running water in the sink. The sink is stainless steel. Listen.”

Lefkowitz went to the sink and turned on the tap. Under the stream of water, the steel reverberated like a drum. He let it run for a few seconds to make his point.

“I figure it was when she turned off the tap,” he said, “that she heard something. Or maybe she looked up and saw something.”

“With her back to the door?”

“There was a full moon last night. If Doctor Whathisname—”

“Setubal.”

“—Setubal is right about the time they were shot, the moon would have been”—Lefkowitz pointed—“right about there. If anyone opened the door, it would have flooded the kitchen with moonlight. Clara would have noticed, even if she’d been facing the sink.”

That clinched it for Hector. He smiled in admiration.

“Lefkowitz,” he said, “you are
so
good at this stuff.”

“Tell my wife,” Lefkowitz said. “She thinks she’s got all the brains in the family.”

Chapter Four

H
ARALDO
“B
ABYFACE
” G
ONÇALVES
WAS
looking around for a sign that would identify the building—and not finding one.

“You sure this is it?”

“I’m sure,” Arnaldo Nunes said. “I used to come here on Saturdays for lunch.”

“The Argentinean Club for lunch? Why?”

“They serve good meat.”

“They serve good meat in lots of places. But you came here. What’s the real reason?”

Arnaldo mumbled something.

“Can’t hear you,” Gonçalves said. “Speak up.”

Arnaldo turned to face him.

“I said my oldest sister married an Argentinean.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“You poor bastard.”

“I think it was a sex thing. He must have been hung like a bull.”

“She’s still married?”

“She finally came to her senses. But, in the meantime, I went through hell. The wedding was in June of ’78.”

1978 wasn’t the only year Argentina won the World Cup, but it was the first. And it was a year in which Brazil, already a three-time champion, had finished an ignominious third. The defeat still rankled, even for people like Gonçalves who were too young to have experienced it personally.

“Four years it lasted,” Arnaldo said. “Four long years. Every time I saw him he’d rub it in my face.”

“And then she divorced him?”

“No. She stuck with the bastard until 1990. The nineteenth of July. I’ll never forget the date. Soon as I heard about the breakup, I went out to celebrate. It was one of the worst hangovers I ever had, but it was worth it.”

“So what’s with the four years? We didn’t win in ’82. Italy won in ’82.”

Arnaldo looked at him. “You don’t remember what else happened in 1982?”

“Do you know how old I was back then?”

“You knew about ’78. And you knew who won the Cup in ’82.”

“That’s different. That’s
futebol
.”

“The Malvinas happened.”

“Oh, yeah, right. The Malvinas.”

In early April of 1982, General Leopoldo Galtieri, the head of Argentina’s military junta, gave the order to annex the Malvinas, that small group of South Atlantic islands the inhabitants insisted in calling the Falklands. Argentina had long coveted the archipelago, and long claimed sovereignty over it.

Galtieri launched the invasion in an attempt to draw attention from a declining economy at home and to unite the nation in a common cause. In both of those things, he was initially successful.

Margaret Thatcher, the English Prime Minister, first tried diplomacy to oust the invaders. When that failed, she ordered the assembly of a naval task force, and it set out on a stately 8,000-mile voyage of liberation.

“I read about that,” Gonçalves said. “The English kicked the shit out of the Argentineans, right?”

“The English did,” Arnaldo said.

“So that shut your brother-in-law up, I suppose. Come on. Let’s go in there and talk to those people.”

He unfastened his seat belt and opened the door of the car.

“Shut it,” Arnaldo said.

“What?”

“Shut the door. I’m not finished. I’m not telling this story because I enjoy the sound of my voice. I’m telling it for your edification.”

“I didn’t know you knew words like edification.”

“You don’t know a lot of things. Listen and learn.”

“Learn what?”

“About Argentineans.”

“What’s to learn?”

“What’s to learn is why it’s a waste of time being here.”

“I thought the Chief Inspector—”

“Mario doesn’t have any more faith in this little excursion than I do. We’re here because Sampaio wanted us here. Can I go on with the story?”

“Now I’m intrigued. Please do.”

“A couple of weeks after the Argentineans invaded, I’m sitting in that building over there, with my wife, and my sister, and my Argentinean brother-in-law. He’s all puffed up about the great victory to come. I try to point out this is the English he’s talking about, and that there’s a whole damned fleet on the way. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘We’re gonna kick their asses,’ he says.”

“He really thought that?”

“He really did. Oh, he had all sorts of reasons, like long lines of supply, and how the Argentinean Air Force was topnotch, and how they had all these Exocet missiles they bought from the French, and how they were going to use them to sink the entire English fleet, but the point is he
believed
it.”

“And the point of this whole diatribe of yours?”

“This: most Argentineans, not all, but most, have a superiority complex. They always think they’re better than other people, they always think they’re going to win, and they keep on thinking that way right up to the moment they get the shit kicked out of them.”

“That’s crap. You can’t make generalizations like that about an entire people. You, Arnaldo, are a bigot.”

“Am I?”

“Wait. Let me think about where you’re going with this.”

“Go ahead. Think.”

“How’s this? You believe they wouldn’t bother to kidnap
Senhora
Santos to put the Artist’s game off because they’ve got it in their heads they’re going to win anyway? With or without the Artist playing for our side?”

“Bingo.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. It’s beyond all reason. The Artist can run circles around Dieguito Falabella, and he’s the best man they’ve got.”

“You know that, and I know that. But those people in there don’t know that.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I? Let’s go see. This time of the day, they’ll all be in the bar.”