The Beggar's Opera (7 page)

FOURTEEN

Inspector Ramirez parked across from the new hotel that sat on prime real estate at the edge of Old Havana on the north side of the beautiful, well-treed Parque Ciudad. He and Detective Sanchez crossed the street. A uniformed doorman let them in through the revolving front door.

The dead man hesitated. It was illegal for Cubans to enter tourist hotels unless they worked there. But there were no laws prohibiting dead or imaginary Cubans from doing anything. Ramirez believed it was one of the few legal restrictions the Cuban government had failed to implement. He expected the amendment any day.

Given that legislative gap, the dead man accompanied the two policemen inside. He stopped to admire the giant Christmas tree that dominated the entry as the two investigators walked to the reception desk.

Ramirez and Sanchez identified themselves to the young woman working at the counter, although it was obvious they were police: Ramirez still wore his uniform. He asked the woman, barely out of her teens, in what room Señor Michael Ellis was staying.

She checked. “Room 612, sir.”

The doorman approached them as they were about to take the elevator up to the sixth floor.

“I overheard you asking about Señor Ellis,” he said. “I was just about to call you. Señor Ellis told me this morning that he lost his wallet last night. He asked me to report it to the police. He has just left the hotel — you’ve missed him by only minutes.”

“Has he checked out?” Ramirez asked and pulled out his notebook.

“Oh, no, sir, he will be back soon, I expect. I recommended the Hotel Machado to him. I think he plans to eat breakfast there.”

“Were you here when he came in last night?” A suggestive question, Ramirez knew. In court, only the judges and lay members on the panel could ask leading questions. As the investigator now, however, he had full freedom as to how he gathered evidence.

“I am always here,” said Miguel Artez sadly, with a small smile. “Yes. I was here when Señor Ellis returned, although he did not mention his wallet to me then. He was quite drunk when he came in. He may not have realized it was lost until this morning.”

“What time was that?” Sanchez asked. “When he came in.”

“Around eleven, I think. Perhaps eleven-thirty. I ended my shift at midnight. Not long before then.”

“Was he alone?” Ramirez inquired.

“I think so.” Artez reflected for a minute. “Yes, definitely. His wife left during my shift yesterday. In the evening. I called a taxi to take her to the airport. I helped her with her luggage.”

“No child with him?”

“No,” said the doorman, surprised. “They were here on their own.”

“Is he staying by himself now?” Sanchez asked.

“Yes, of course. Señora Ellis was a very nice woman,” the doorman emphasized. “Very beautiful. I was sorry when she left Cuba so early, by herself.”

Sanchez took the doorman’s name, address, and date of birth, and recorded them in his notebook. He stepped aside to speak to Ramirez privately.

“I think we should search Señor Ellis’s room before we talk to him. We have enough evidence, with his wallet on the body and that complaint about the children in the park.”

Ramirez considered this. Sanchez was right. Once they had grounds to suspect a crime had been committed, the police could search a state-owned hotel without a warrant. The grounds were not particularly strong but enough to meet the legal test.

Ramirez returned to the reception desk and asked the young woman for a key to Señor Ellis’s hotel room. She handed him a plastic card.

At first, he was not entirely sure what he was supposed to do with it. The only hotels he had stayed in were in Moscow. In those days, a dour key lady had doled out steel keys grudgingly, as if they were cabbages.

Inspector Ramirez and Detective Sanchez walked down the pink hallway with its blue-tiled floor to Room 612. Ramirez rapped on the door; Sanchez drew his gun. When there was no response, Ramirez slid the hotel key up and down in the narrow key slot below the door handle until a green light flashed and the lock clicked.

He opened the door slowly and cautiously let them in, but the room was empty. The dead man followed them inside.

The room was messy; the bed unmade. The drapes were pulled tightly shut. Ramirez turned on the lights and opened the curtains to let the morning light stream through the glass.

Sanchez put his gun away and they both snapped on thin latex gloves. The gloves were made by the same manufacturer in China that produced condoms, with much the same unfortunate effect, given the burgeoning Chinese population. They frequently had holes in them.

“No sign of a wife in this room,” Ramirez commented. The dead man smiled slightly.

Perhaps the ghost was a bachelor, thought Ramirez. The irony of Ramirez’s business was that most murders were domestic. Spouses, lovers, people who cared for each other were most likely to kill each other, but it also meant that someone noticed if a loved one disappeared. A single man could be missing for months before anyone paid attention.
Who are you?

“No,” said Sanchez, and it took Ramirez a moment to realize that Sanchez was speaking to him. “I checked when I was at the airport. Michael and Hillary Ellis arrived on December 18. They were supposed to leave on January 2. The airport records show that she flew back to Ottawa last night on the 9
P.M.
flight. The doorman is right; she left very early. A week early, in fact.”

“What time did you say her flight out was again?”

“Nine o’clock. Twenty-one hundred hours.”

“Hmmm. That
is
interesting.”

Ramirez opened the folding door to the closet in the hallway. It contained a stand on which a single green suitcase rested. He opened it. It was empty but for a single piece of paper. A photocopy of the same passport they’d found in the wallet.

A wall-safe above the suitcase was locked. There was nothing else to see. Ramirez took the photocopy and closed the closet door.

A man’s jacket was slung over a chair beside the wooden desk in the bedroom. A pair of pants lay crumpled on the floor. Ramirez checked the pockets of both, but there was nothing in them.

“Look at this,” Sanchez called out. Ramirez walked over to the opposite side of the room. Sanchez pointed to a broken capsule lying on the carpet near the bed between the wall and the window. The dead man pointed to Sanchez.

“Bag it,” Ramirez instructed.

Sanchez pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, put the capsule inside, and sealed it. He initialled the bag and handed it over. Ramirez put it in his pocket.

He walked into the bathroom and flipped on the light. “Señora Ellis must have left quickly.”

“Why do you say that?” Sanchez asked, puzzled.

Ramirez walked back out. He held up the plastic disk of birth control pills, grinning. “No Cuban woman would go anywhere without these.”

Ramirez saw nothing out of the ordinary in the bathroom. A man’s electric shaver, a small hotel bottle of shampoo, a square of soap.

“So tourists get free soap and shampoo when they stay here,” said Ramirez.

He smelled the soap, thought how much his wife would appreciate scented toiletries instead of the one grey bar of sudless acidic soap she lined up to get once a month as part of their rations.

“Look what I found under the mattress,” Sanchez called from the other room. He flourished several Polaroid photographs along with a CD.

Ramirez looked at the Polaroids and felt sick. They were pictures of a young boy fellating a man; in another, the boy was bent over. The same boy in each shot. He could imagine what was on the CD.

It wasn’t possible to identify the man in any of the pictures; the camera had focused on the boy. But there was no question
about the child’s identity: it was the boy Carlos Rivero had pulled from the water that morning.

The inspector’s cellphone rang. It was the female member of his investigative team, Natasha Delgado, updating him on the results of their canvassing. Once again, his team had done well.

“We found several men on the Malecón who saw a foreigner with a scarred face,” said Delgado. “One remembers seeing him walking with a Cuban boy who wore red shorts, accompanied by a blonde woman. Another said the
extranjero
pushed him after he tried to talk to him, that the foreigner was visibly angry.”

“Good work, Natasha. Get Dr. Apiro and his crew over here right away.” He snapped his cellphone closed. “Treat this as a crime scene,” he instructed Sanchez.

The men walked out into the hall. Ramirez checked that the door was locked. He gave Sanchez the plastic room key and left him standing in the hallway to make sure no one entered.

The dead man stood beside Sanchez. He held his hat over his heart like a mourner at a funeral.

Ramirez took the elevator down to the lobby to wait for Apiro. Once the forensic process began, protocol required that the police turn evidence-gathering over to the forensic team to avoid contamination.

Apiro arrived a few minutes later, his black kit in hand, and Ramirez explained what they had found.

“Thank you, Ricardo. I’ll take over from Detective Sanchez.”

“Tell him I’ll wait for him outside.”

It wasn’t the first time Ramirez had seen photographs like this, but they always disturbed him. He wanted to breathe in some fresh air, get the bitter taste of bile out of his mouth. He tried not to think of his own children.

A few minutes later, Sanchez joined Ramirez on the sidewalk. “I can walk over to the Hotel Machado and bring the suspect back to you for questioning,” he suggested.

“No,” said Ramirez. “Better if we drive. In case he tries to run.”

FIFTEEN

As Mike Ellis waited for the waiter to bring his bill, a short Cuban in an open-necked white shirt with a slightly pockmarked face walked towards his table. A number of heads turned to look. Ellis’s heart skipped. He wondered how the plainclothes officer had found him, until he recalled that Miguel had promised to call the police about his wallet. He forced himself to relax.

“Señor Ellis?”

“Yes?”

“I am Detective Sanchez of the Cuban National Revolutionary Police. You wanted to file a report with us about losing your wallet?

“Yes, I did.”

“We have found it. Will you accompany me to the police station, please?”

“Of course,” Ellis said, and felt some of his tension ease. “That’s great news.”

Ellis left a few pesos on the table to cover his bill along with a generous tip. They walked to a very small blue car parked across the street. Ellis didn’t recognize the make. It had no police markings and the windows were rolled down.

Sanchez opened the door to the back seat. Another man with the light blue-and-grey shirt and dark pants of the Cuban police force sat in the driver’s seat.

The car was far too small for someone of Ellis’s size, and he bumped his head on the door frame as he got in. He winced at the fresh jolt of pain. He lowered his head and folded himself into the car, squeezing his legs behind the front seat until they were bent almost to his chest.

Like police cars everywhere, the doors couldn’t be opened from inside, but in this case it appeared that was due to rust, not protocol.

“I didn’t think the Cuban police would have time on a holiday weekend to look into such a small matter as a lost wallet. That’s very impressive. Thanks. Where did you find it?”

Neither man answered.

Ellis looked out the window as they drove down roads jammed with honking hansom cabs and taxis. They stopped for a red light beside a
camello
, one of the oddly shaped buses made from truck parts and salvaged buses for which Havana was famous. For a second, the large bus, crowded with hundreds of weary Cubans, blocked out the sun.

Ellis ran a hand over his scars, remembering how dark it was when Steve Sloan died in his arms.

Sanchez and Ellis walked up to the second floor of police headquarters. The building was not at all what Ellis expected. Unlike the Soviet-style government buildings he’d seen elsewhere in Havana, it resembled a turreted medieval fortress with a beautiful stone exterior.

Sanchez opened the door to a dark room. He flipped on fluorescent lights, which flickered from time to time. Ellis guessed that the power supply wasn’t particularly reliable. As directed, he sat down on a hard red plastic chair with metal legs.

The room had grey walls with large cracks, but it was cool compared to the blistering heat outside. There was a mirror on the wall. Ellis assumed it was two-way glass like they had in the Rideau Regional Police interview rooms back home so that investigators could watch suspects being questioned without being seen themselves.

Sanchez closed the door. He sat across from Ellis and pulled out a small tape recorder, which he placed on the Formica table between them. He pushed the “record” button.

“We will tape this interview.” He didn’t ask for permission, and Ellis was surprised that a report of a stolen wallet required this much formality.

“This is an interview with Señor Michael Ellis,” Sanchez said into the small microphone. “You are from Canada, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Ellis. “I’m from Ottawa. Ontario.”

“Do you speak Spanish, Señor Ellis?”

“No. Only a few words.”

“Very well. Then we will proceed in English.” Sanchez spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, but his English was very good. “It is Sunday, December 25, 2006. This interview is being conducted by Detective Rodriguez Sanchez of the Major Crimes Unit, Havana Division.”

Sanchez brought out a plastic evidence bag, opened it, and put the contents on the table in front of them. “Is this your wallet?”

It was soaking wet, and there were white salt stains on the brown leather, but Ellis recognized it immediately. “Thank God. Where was it?”

“We found it on a young boy earlier today.” Sanchez waited for Ellis to respond.

“That little bugger,” Ellis exclaimed, and laughed as he realized what happened. It wasn’t the hooker after all. He felt surprisingly
relieved. “He must have lifted it from my pocket. He followed my wife and me around yesterday, begging. After I gave him some money, he hugged me. He must have been a pickpocket. The cab driver warned us to watch out for them. It never occurred to me to look out for a child.”