Law of Return (25 page)

“Not as interesting as your findings, Sergeant,” Tejada’s voice was dry. “I think Arroyo had a Swiss bank account.”

Hernández looked startled. “Why? What did you find in San Sebastián, sir?”

Tejada rapidly summarized his search of Arroyo’s house, and his discovery of the little address book. “I can’t prove it though,” he finished as they reached the door of his office. “And I can’t think of any connection to Rivera.”

The sergeant frowned, and shut the door as Tejada dropped into the chair behind his desk. “So, say that Arroyo was converting currency. Do you think anyone knew about it?”

Tejada hesitated. Then he gestured to the sergeant to be seated. “Would you confide a secret like that to anyone, Hernández?” he asked quietly.

Hernández hesitated. “Probably not. Well, not to anyone I wasn’t close to.”

“You’re happily married, aren’t you?” the lieutenant observed, lowering his voice even more. “Suppose you had a brother-in-law whose financial judgement you trusted?”

“I might tell him, I suppose,” the sergeant said carefully. “But I’d have to be sure that he wouldn’t object to anything illegal.”

Tejada jabbed a pencil into the blotter on the desk. “But how much of a risk would it be?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral. “After all, supposing your brother-in-law did object? Would he be willing to involve his sister in scandal by denouncing you?”

The sergeant winced. “Murder is illegal too, sir,” he pointed out.

“I know it.”

The two officers’ eyes met. “How much of this is guesswork, sir?” Hernández asked.

“A lot,” Tejada admitted. “I just wondered if it was guesswork that made sense.”

“The captain will have a fit,” the sergeant observed.

Tejada nodded. “I know. I’d prefer Rivera myself. I wish the other didn’t make more sense.”

Hernández nodded, looking glum. Then he said, “What do you want to do about Rivera, sir?”

Tejada glanced at his watch. It was just past nine. “Pick him up this evening,” he ordered. “I don’t know if he killed Arroyo, but he lied to an officer pursuing a murder investigation. That’s enough for an arrest.”

“Yes, sir.” Hernández sounded approving. “Do you want to send someone now, sir? Or wait until later?”

“Midnight, I think,” the lieutenant said, after considering a moment. “I want to catch him at home. Bring a car. Oh, and Hernández?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t wake me up,” Tejada said firmly. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

The sergeant looked amused. “I’ll make sure Corporal Jiménez doesn’t confuse his orders, sir,” he said.

“Thanks,” Tejada said, with real gratitude. “I want this taken care of. But I . . . haven’t gotten much sleep lately.”

“Yes, Lieutenant. At your orders.”

“Dismissed.” Hernández stood, and turned to leave. Tejada jabbed at the blotter a few more times and then said suddenly, “Would you tell your wife?”

“Tell her what?” the sergeant turned, looking puzzled.

“If you were . . . I don’t know . . . doing anything illegal.”

Hernández considered. “I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine really.” He smiled briefly. “After all, sir, I’m a guardia. Bit embarrassing to break the law, in our job.”

“But if you did?”

Hernández was surprised by the lieutenant’s tone. Then he remembered that his superior was unmarried. “She’d probably find out anyway,” he explained. “Very hard to live with a woman and keep secrets from her.”

The sergeant left to organize Tomás Rivera’s arrest, wondering if Lieutenant Tejada was considering Señora Otero as a possible suspect in her husband’s murder. Lieutenant Tejada hastily reviewed the towering piles of paper on his desk, ate dinner, and went to bed, where he lay awake until well past midnight, pondering the advisability of confiding information about illegality to a woman. He had reached no satisfactory answer the next morning, when he started work, but when Corporal Jiménez entered, swelling with self-satisfaction at a task successfully accomplished, the lieutenant was grateful for the distraction.

“Rivera’s down in the cells, sir,” Jiménez reported. “We brought him in last night, a little after midnight.”

“Well done, Corporal,” Tejada said, since Jiménez obviously expected him to say something.

“His family did an awful lot of caterwauling,” the young man reported, looking vaguely dissatisfied. “Not like Señora Otero at all. One of the kids woke up and started crying and then his wife went into hysterics, and we had to pull them apart, and he was damn near hysterical too until we got him into the car and cuffed. And even then Gómez had to smack him to make him stop whimpering.”

“It sounds as if you handled the situation admirably, Corporal,” Tejada said patiently.

“Thank you, sir.” Jiménez smiled for a moment, and then the worried look returned. “It wasn’t like what I thought it would be though.”

“Suppose you bring him down to one of the interrogation rooms now,” the lieutenant suggested gently, ignoring his junior’s faint frown. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Yes, sir.” Jiménez saluted, and left. Tejada collected the notes he had made on the Arroyo case and headed down to the interrogation rooms. Jiménez was waiting for him, along with his prisoner.

The doctor did not look well. He was in shirtsleeves, and Tejada guessed that the guardias had not waited for him to dress fully when they arrested him the night before. A purple bruise across one cheekbone showed where Guardia Gómez had administered his cure for hysteria. Rivera was radiating fear. Tejada took the seat behind the little table in the room without speaking. Then he deliberately spread out his notes and consulted them. Then he raised his eyes to inspect the prisoner. “I don’t like people who lie to me,” he said finally.

“Lieutenant?” Dr. Rivera’s voice was a croak.

The lieutenant consulted the notes on his desk again. “You told me you were never close to Manuel Arroyo Díaz,” he said. “I have your exact words here: ‘He belonged to a different generation, a different profession, a different class.’ You said you’d never been friends.”

“And that’s true.” Rivera was white-faced.

“Odd.” Tejada ran a finger down the yellowing sheet of paper Sergeant Hernández had pulled from Arroyo’s old file. “According to our records, Arroyo visited you after the petition was signed. On August 4, 1936, at three p.m. And again on August eleventh, and again on August eighteenth. August twenty-fifth, September first, September eighth. . . . We seem to have a pattern here, Doctor.”

Rivera shuddered. “I hadn’t seen Arroyo in years, Lieutenant. I swear to you. . . .”

“Why did you lie about your connection with him?”

“I didn’t. I—”

“Jiménez,” Tejada interrupted, with a slight gesture.

The corporal, who had been standing behind Rivera, snaked an arm around the prisoner’s neck, and jerked backwards, gently applying pressure to the doctor’s windpipe.

“Don’t lie to me,” Tejada said mildly as Rivera struggled and gasped for breath. He made another gesture, and Jiménez relaxed his grip slightly, still keeping one arm around the doctor’s neck. Rivera was sweating. It was difficult to tell in the artificial light, but Tejada thought that the doctor’s skin had a yellowish tinge. He drew a few rasping breaths but said nothing. One of Elena’s friends, Tejada thought. Someone she trusts . . . someone she cares for. “Do you know the effect of electricity on the human nervous system, Doctor?” he said, and took pleasure in watching Rivera’s face go slack-jawed with horror. “The Guardia Civil have been experimenting with the process. Perhaps you’d be interested in a demonstration?”

“No.” The word was a whisper.

“What was your connection with Arroyo?”

“He consulted me professionally. For a few months only,” Rivera said, eyes on the ground.

Of course! The lieutenant thought, with a rush of relief. A bookkeeper! And someone Arroyo could trust absolutely! Thank God it’s not Otero. He wouldn’t have anything to do with this, of course! I must have been insane. “And exactly what did he require your financial expertise for?” he asked happily, sure that he was moving into the final phase of questioning.

“My what?” Rivera sounded genuinely bewildered.

“You said he consulted you as a bookkeeper, man,” Tejada snapped. “What did he want to know?”

Rivera stiffened and shot Tejada a look of pure hatred. “I said he consulted me
professionally
. I’m a doctor, not a bookkeeper, Lieutenant.” His voice was shaking with something other than fear now.

Tejada was about to make a stinging retort about such an obvious attempt to mislead him, but then he looked at the dates in his notes. Rivera had started working for his brother-in-law in the autumn of 1936, shortly
after
the visits from Arroyo had ceased. And Arroyo, the lieutenant realized, would have been far more of an expert at international finance than a fledgling bookkeeper who had come to it as a second career. But why would Rivera see the need to hide the fact that he had treated Arroyo as a patient? “What did he require of your medical expertise, then?” he asked, still menacing, but also puzzled.

“He was an analysand.”

“A what?” Tejada frowned over the unfamiliar word.

“One who undergoes analysis, Lieutenant.” Rivera spoke dryly.

“Analysis of what?” Tejada demanded, thoroughly confused. “You mean blood samples and things like that? Did he have some health problem that he didn’t want generally known?”

“Psychoanalysis, Lieutenant,” the doctor explained wearily. “It’s sometimes called the ‘talking cure.’ It was pioneered in Vienna, about forty years ago. The theory is basically that a patient can be cured of his neuroses by exposing their unconscious basis.”

Tejada frowned, puzzled. “You’re saying that Arroyo was crazy?”

“Not necessarily.” Old pedagogical instincts were strong in Rivera, despite the situation at hand. It had been a long time since anyone had been interested in the daily subjects of his former life. “Neurosis is frequently partially defined by the patient. That is, if the patient feels that he has a problem, then the problem must be said to exist.”

“Arroyo thought he was crazy?” The lieutenant translated uncertainly, after a moment. Behind Rivera, Jiménez rolled his eyes, and tapped one temple expressively.

“Trauma or extreme grief can sometimes trigger neurotic symptoms,” Rivera said dryly. “At the time, Arroyo was rather traumatized. He had difficulty sleeping, or so he said. And he claimed to be suicidal.”

Tejada was intrigued by the doctor’s careful circumlocutions. “You didn’t believe him?” he asked.

Rivera hesitated. Behind him, Jiménez raised one hand and then dropped it again, after a hasty gesture from Tejada. “I was not the ideal analyst for Professsor Arroyo,” the doctor said finally. “I didn’t trust my own judgment in his case.”

“Why not?”

“The analyst is supposed to be detached. Preferably an utter stranger. I was not a total stranger, nor was I at all detached from what was happening to Arroyo. I may have been too close to be objective.”

Rivera’s answer seemed reasonably clear and plausible, but Tejada had the nagging feeling that the doctor was concealing something. He returned to the one definite charge he had against Rivera. “You didn’t mention this when questioned earlier.”

“I felt that Arroyo’s privacy should be protected.” There was definitely a false note there.

“You were arrested,” Tejada pointed out. “You spent a night in prison; he had been murdered and couldn’t be harmed by disclosure, and yet you kept it secret. Don’t insult my intelligence, Doctor.”

“The relationship between analyst and analysand—”

“Bullshit,” Tejada interjected. “You practically admitted earlier that you didn’t think anything was the matter with Arroyo.” He suddenly heard what he was saying and added, with inspiration, “That was why you didn’t say anything, wasn’t it? Arroyo wasn’t really sick, and you knew it and he knew it. The visits were a cover for something else, weren’t they?”

Rivera frowned at the floor. Jiménez lightly touched his shoulder, and the doctor raised his head. “I didn’t say anything because I have some pride,” he spat, his eyes suddenly tear-filled. “I had nothing in ’36, Lieutenant! Nothing! And Arroyo knew it! He invented the illness to give me a patient! Why do you think he was cured as soon as Ramón hired me? I took his charity because I have a family, but I didn’t broadcast it to the world! Are you happy?”