Requiem for a Killer (9 page)

Maria das Graças lowered her eyes, looking
for her next words on the floor. She lifted her head and stared at
the inspector before continuing.

“My mom and dad met in Minas Gerais. He was
a mechanic. Just before I was born a pal at work convinced him to
move with all of us to São Paulo to work in an auto factory.

The story of Maria das Graças’ family
emerged sadly and painfully, as if it were coming out of an old,
dusty trunk that she kept locked in her heart.

“Once he was in the auto industry it was
easy for my dad to get mixed up in the union, the worst thing he
coulda done” – she covered her face with her hands and began
sobbing quietly. “The military dictatorship killed my dad. I never
knew him, not even in a picture.”

Dornelas watched her silently. She lowered
her hands and dried her moist eyes with the corner of her
apron.

“After that,” she went on, “my mom brought
us here, far away from all that stuff. And we’ve been here ever
since… and now this thing with my brother…”

Dornelas heard the sound of a door banging
open in the kitchen and the pitter-patter of little paws moving
quickly over the cement floor. A spotted mutt appeared wagging his
tail. He went straight for Dornelas who, while the dog nuzzled his
head in the inspector’s pant leg, patted him unalarmed. And then he
heard footsteps dragging painfully along the kitchen floor.

It took a while for a wrinkled old woman to
come through the door into the room. Her hair was as white and as
sparse as a cloud, her skin dry and transparent like a papyrus
sheet of paper, barely hiding the bluish veins visible on her
shins, arms and temples. They looked like ivy winding around a
piece of wood. Dornelas got up and put his hand out.

“Nice to meet you. My name is Joaquim
Dornelas. I’m a police inspector.”

“Good morning, Inspector,” said the old
lady, ignoring his outstretched hand and crossing the room toward
the door, which she opened wide.

“I hate this door always being closed. It’s
such a small house. I feel cooped up in here,” said the old
lady.

She turned to Dornelas.

“Are you who’s taking care of Dindinho?”

“In a way, yes,” he answered awkwardly.

“What do you mean, ‘in a way’?”

‘
Crooks are all the same,’
thought
Dornelas.
‘They all have a mother who’s not only willing to
forgive them, but who more often than not deny their child’s guilt
to their death bed, even if he had committed war crimes.’
Out
of respect for her Dornelas didn’t want to get right to the point.
But he couldn’t dodge the question either.

“The only way I can, finding the person who
killed him.”

“What did you say?” replied the old lady,
cupping her hand around her left ear. Dornelas noticed the hearing
device stuck in it.

“Finding the person who killed him,” he
repeated in a loud voice.

“Oh, I see,” she said in a sad but resigned
voice.

Maria das Graças got up and went to the
kitchen. She returned with another chair that she placed next to
the first.

The old lady sat down.

“I’m tired of so much death in this family,
Inspector,” she said sorrowfully. “I’m seventy-eight. I’ve lived
too long. I’m tired of seeing the people I love being torn out of
my life. That’s the way it was with my husband. And now my son.
Enough suffering!”

She stretched out an arm and grabbed her
daughter’s hands that were clasped in her lap. Maria das Graças had
lowered her eyes. Dornelas felt like giving her an affectionate
hug, but this was neither the time nor the place. He sat back down
on the couch and gave his full attention to the old lady.

“My son had a black heart, Inspector. He was
born with it and he died with it. It’s silly to think we choose
what we do in life. It’s life that chooses what we do, where we go.
My son was born a drug dealer. His fate was sealed in the cradle.
When we moved here and that drug gang crossed his path, I knew
right away that sooner or later someone from the police was going
to come through that door and tell me he was dead. We know. A
mother knows. It can’t be explained, you understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“The only happiness I had was that he lasted
longer than I expected. May he rest in peace. Hallelujah!” The old
woman raised her arms, gazed up at the ceiling, lowered her head
and was silent. Maria das Graças did the same thing. Dornelas
didn’t know what he should do, caught in the embarrassing silence.
He didn’t want to seem indifferent to their pain, but he had a job
to do.

“Could I ask you some questions, please?” he
asked cautiously.

The old lady sighed and nodded in
agreement.

“Okay then,” he said as he settled on the
couch. “Do you have any document with a photograph of your son, or
with his fingerprints?”

Mother and daughter looked at each other
doubtfully.

“As far as I know my brother never had an
official ID card,” said Maria das Graças.

“But his birth was recorded as soon as he
was born, in Minas Gerais,” the old lady completed.

He knew that there are no fingerprints on
birth certificates, but with any luck there should be footprints of
the newly-born, which, at this point, would be a big step forward
for Dornelas. As thin a thread as it was, this could be the first
and only concrete indication that it was José Aristodemo dos Anjos
who belonged to the corpse on Dr. Dulce Neves’ table.

“Would you have his birth certificate
somewhere?”

“I don’t know where it is. In fact, I never
saw my son carrying any document, or wallet, or anything.”

“Can you tell me which city he was born
in?”

“Aiuruoca.”

Dornelas mentally filed this information
away. But as soon as he thought of the bureaucracy he would be up
against to obtain the certificate from a small town in another
state he became extremely disheartened. He would get the birth
certificate no earlier than thirty days from now, if he were lucky.
A simple way to avoid this torment would be for the precinct to
have the money to test the corpse and the old lady for DNA in order
to prove they were mother and son. The lab at the Criminalistics
Institute would have the results in a couple of hours, a few days
at most. But that was treatment only afforded to celebrities.

“Thank you. What about dental records, or a
recent photo?”

Maria das Graças interrupted.

“Nothin’, Inspector. Not recent or old. Only
the one I showed you on the wall. He didn’t let anybody take his
picture. He’d leave here really early in the morning wearing dark
glasses and a cap so no one would recognize him. And he only came
back late at night, the same way. If anyone took a picture of him,
I never saw it.”

This information matched the evidence in the
files. All the pictures they had didn’t show much because they had
either been taken in the dark, with no flash, or because he was
always partially hidden by his clothes.

“Where did he work?”

“In a shack in the middle of the island,
nothin’ but a dark hole. I don’t know where it is, never been
there. I only know that he’d lock himself in that shack in the
middle of that stinkin’ marsh all day long, seein’ his clients and
doin’ his business and leave late at night.”

Maria das Graças’ voice was heavy with
contempt. She went on:

“He didn’t always come home. A lotta times
he slept somewhere else. My mom and me never knew if he was
sleepin’ somewhere else or if he was already dead. We only breathed
easy again when he’d finally show up.”

“May I use the bathroom?”

“Sure,” she replied, getting up and turning
around behind her chair.

Dornelas followed her through the door that
connected the living room to a simple kitchen. In the middle of it
were the table and two chairs belonging to the set. The light from
a louvered window was shining down on a small sink holding dirty
dishes and an empty dish drainer. On one side was a beaten-up
refrigerator. On the other, a four-burner stove with two pots on
top of unlit burners next to a closed aluminum door.
‘The old
lady and the dog probably came in through there,’
he thought to
himself.

The dog never left him on the few steps he’d
taken from the couch, still sniffing away at his pant leg.

From the kitchen they went through another
doorway that opened onto a tiny hall with three doors. The one on
the right was closed. The bathroom door in front of him was open.
Through the left one, to the bedroom, Dornelas could see the feet
of an unmade double bed and an open and messy closet; women’s
clothes on the bed, hanging on the closet doors and on hangers gave
the setting a surreal hue.

“Is this your room?”

“Yes,” she said, embarrassed.

“May I go in?”

“Don’t mind the mess.”

“Don’t worry.”

Dornelas followed Maria das Graças into the
bedroom.

“According to what you told me this is the
bed you were in with Raimundo Tavares, correct?”

“That’s right,” answered Maria das Graças,
rolling her hands up in her apron. Dornelas hadn’t expected her to
react with genuine embarrassment.

On the other side of the bed, half a meter
away, there was a window with two sliding wings, both open. The
ornaments on the wrought iron grate, commonly found in construction
material stores, were different from those on the doors of the
house and on the kitchen window. Below the window bricks were still
visible down to the floor. They hadn’t been plastered, spackled and
painted like the rest of the wall. The smell of bricks and cement
he had noticed when entering the house was stronger here.

“Did you remodel in here recently?”

“Just yesterday, Inspector. There was a door
there that my clients came in and out of without needin’ to go
through the house. My brother didn’t much like my work. So I
thought it’d be better if he and my clients didn’t bump into each
other. That’s the reason for the door.”

“So why did you close it?”

“I got scared. I didn’t feel safe havin’ an
entrance straight from the street to my bed.” She squirmed where
she stood. “And you know, Inspector, even though I do what I do
deep down I’m really a family girl. I want my clients to feel
comfortable in my house, my life. I may rent out my body, but I
don’t sell my soul.”

This Maria das Graças was incredible. As if
the mysteries of the universe were not enough, life now presented
him with a prostitute who had principles and morals. Dornelas liked
the woman.

“What does your mother think of your
work?”

“As long as there’s a roof over our heads,
food on the table and I don’t harm anyone, she couldn’t care less
what I do.”

“What do you mean by harm anyone?”

“Inspector, prostitution’s been around for a
mighty long time but nobody accepts us openly. When I say harm
anyone I’m sayin’ that the profession is looked at around here as a
threat to marriages and steady relationships.”

“And isn’t that true?”

“No way. In fact, you might even say we’re
like glue what keeps people together and society workin’. But
nobody wants to see it that way. They all like to pretend like
there’s nothin’ hiding under the rug, down below the surface. But
you more than most know that the real world is below the
surface.”

“Are you trying to say that you’re a social
worker, that without prostitution society would fall apart?”

“I’m sayin’ it would break up. And you cops
would have a real hard time pickin’ up the pieces.”

“Isn’t that a little pretentious on your
part?”

“Maybe. But there’s one thing I do know:
human beings can’t handle monogamy. At first a man wants to be with
one woman, just the one. He swears he’ll love her forever and
everythin’ is peachy-keen. Then after a while he starts to turn
around walkin’ down the street, lookin’ at all the asses on all the
hot girls goin’ by, and dreams of getting them all between the
sheets. When he gets back home and can’t get his wife to do half
the things he’s been thinkin’ about, whose bed do you think he goes
to? And if he can’t take out his frustrations in the warm body of a
woman who hugs him and stands by him, he drinks, he kills, he does
all sortsa bad things.”

“Remember you’re talking to a police
inspector.”

“I know that. But before bein’ a police
inspector, you’re a man.”

“Well put.”

“But don’t think women are any different.
They want a man around to help raise the kids and pay the bills.
But when the lights are turned off and she wants a man inside her,
it’s ain’t always the cock of the husband snoring beside her that
she’s thinkin’ of. Monogamy’s fine and dandy in front of a priest
or at a weddin’, but it’s often a livin’ hell in everyday life for
a couple. Are you married?”

“I was until a short while ago.”

“So you know what I’m talkin’ about.”

Dornelas knew, but kept his mouth shut. He
didn’t want to pursue the subject. The pain from the separation was
still intense and he didn’t want to take off his police inspector
mask and let show how vulnerable the abandoned man was. Maria das
Graças was a practical woman, too practical, and it scared him.

“Can you show me your brother’s room?” he
asked, in an attempt to change the subject.

Maria das Graças left the room, took two
steps and unlocked and opened the door to her brother’s room. He
was faced with an inverted copy of her own, only with men’s clothes
scattered around, and much less of them.

“If I remember right, you were in your room
with your client, with the door closed when the house was broken
into. In your statement you said your brother was asleep,
correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Did they grab him here in the bedroom or in
the living room?”

“In the living room. When they knocked on
the door he went to answer it. I was busy, you know...”