The Night Watchman (11 page)

When I turned my phone back on, two SMSs lit up, the first from my wife:
Drink!
she wrote, since I became dehydrated when I was upset and often ended up with a sore throat. The other was from Ernie:
Dreamed of you last night.

Eased by their concern, I closed my eyes to better feel the breeze playing over my hair and shoulders. The Valium had left me nearly weightless by then, and as I listened to the cars zooming past, Ernie gazed down at me from high up in a cottonwood tree, grinning because he had reached the topmost branch before me. I gave him the thumbs-up sign until fear leapt inside my chest. ‘You might fall!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t move!’

As though he hadn’t heard me, he waved, and, through an alchemy beyond the laws of waking reality, the back and forth movement of his hand became the ringing of my cell phone. It was Fonseca. He told me that Susana and Sandra Coutinho had arrived at their home, and that he’d already obtained a full set of their fingerprints.

Susana Coutinho stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the refrigerator, barefoot, holding a glass of whisky with ice up to her temple. A nearly full bottle of Glenlivet was sitting on the table by the last quarter of Senhora Grimault’s sponge cake. I introduced Luci and myself, but when I reached out my hand, but she made no move to shake it.

‘Tell me where your aspirin is and I’ll get you some,’ I said.

‘Thanks, I just took three,’ she replied in a hoarse voice. She smiled good-naturedly – a very generous gesture under the circumstances – then stepped to the back window and gazed out while standing on her tiptoes. She was blonde and tan – the colour of cinnamon. ‘Just checking on our dog,’ she told me. ‘We only stopped once for him on the car ride up. Poor thing got frantic.’

She wore three golden bangles around her left ankle and a fourth – encrusted with red and yellow gemstones – on her right; India must have been in fashion among the Portuguese jet-set. A grass stain by the back pocket of her shorts convinced me that she’d grabbed the clothes she’d last worn before driving up to Lisbon. When she turned back to me, it was with a pained expression. ‘I’m sorry, but if my headache gets any worse, I’m going to have to lie down.’

Her eyes were silver-green, and they had that lost, weary, impoverished look I nearly always saw in the wives and husbands of murder victims. Either she hadn’t been involved in Coutinho’s death, or she was a standout actress.

She grabbed a pack of Marlboro Lights from a small leather bag dangling from the back of one of the kitchen chairs and lit a cigarette with abrupt gestures. Her cheeks hollowed out dangerously when she drew in on the smoke. After giving her my condolences, I asked where her daughter was.

‘Last I heard, she was upstairs in her room,’ she replied, with a caustic indifference that seemed to imply they’d quarrelled. She swept her uncombed hair off her neck with an irritated hand. Her fingernails were long and scarlet.

Anxious to get the worst question out of the way first, I asked where she had spent the day before. Annoyance twisted her lips, which were cracked and dry, and naked-looking, as though needing lipstick. ‘You don’t have any idea who killed my husband, do you?’ she asked, targeting me with a peeved squint.

And just like that, all the goodwill I’d felt from her was gone.

‘We’ve collected a great deal of evidence,’ I said, choosing my words cautiously, so as not to set her off, ‘but as of yet, we haven’t any firm leads.’

She seemed to take my precise tone as an indication that I was withholding information. ‘My husband was friends with the Minister of Justice!’ she warned me.
‘Very
good friends!’

I kept the harsh replies I thought of to myself, since I saw no point in quarrelling. Also, there was a slim possibility that she meant she could get me extra troops if I needed them, though I had no way of confirming that from her expression; she was looking at the slender collar of her pale-blue blouse and fiddling with a loose button.

‘If talking to the minister will reassure you,’ I told her, ‘then you—’

Ripping away her button, she threw it against the wall. It ricocheted to the ground and tap-danced across the floor.

‘I know I’m intruding,’ I said, ‘but if we don’t get this over now, I’ll have to come back tomorrow.’

‘Great idea, come back tomorrow!’

‘If I do, you won’t be able to stay here today or tonight. This is a crime scene.’

‘You think you can kick me out of my own house?’ she said with huffing outrage.

‘Senhora Coutinho, that is exactly what I’m trying to avoid,’ I assured her.

Her contemptuous laugh opened an ache in my gut, and I took a step back from her in my mind. ‘If you want,’ I said, careful to keep my true feelings out of my voice, ‘call the minister and tell him you don’t want me here.’

I offered her my phone, but she turned it down and showed me a withering look.

‘If you’ll sit down and answer my questions,’ I continued, ‘I promise to try to get this over with quickly.’

Pushing past me, she retrieved a black glass ashtray from the counter, stubbed out her cigarette vengefully and sat down at the kitchen table. She showed Luci and me a bored look. We sat down opposite her.

Sprinklers
was what Fonseca and I called the victims’ wives who sobbed through their first interrogation in order to convince us they were innocent. Senhora Coutinho was what we referred to as a
dry well.

After lighting another cigarette, she took too quick a gulp of whisky and had a coughing fit. Watching her struggle for breath, I realized she’d get soused today and pass out in bed, probably under the belief that her loss would seem slightly less horrific in the morning. When I repeated my previous question, she replied, ‘I was at our beach house. Sandi, our daughter, can vouch for that. And we also had a house guest – an old buddy of Pedro’s from Paris – Jean Morel. We spent the day together.’

I asked for his number and she gave it to me without consulting her phone, adding in an annoyed tone, ‘That’s right, Inspector, I know Jean’s number by heart!’

‘Which means exactly what?’ I asked, though I’d already caught the general design of the garden of earthly delights she was about to describe to me.

‘My husband knew all about Jean and me,’ she snapped, ‘so you can spare me your show of moral indignation.’

‘I’m rarely sufficiently sure of myself to be morally indignant about anything,’ I said, hoping I might win back her good graces.

As though she hadn’t heard me, she said, ‘Pedro and I haven’t been intimate in years. And he liked Jean. They’re old friends . . .
were
old friends.’

She’d obviously needed to make that point right away, which gave me the idea that – despite her seeming ease – the angles of their triangle might have been painfully sharp on occasion. ‘And when did Mr Morel get to Portugal?’ I asked.

‘A week ago.’

‘Was he in Lisbon yesterday?’

She rolled her eyes at my implication. ‘Jean is a furry little lamb. Besides, he flew off yesterday to Paris.’

This time she read my mind correctly and added, ‘His flight left from Faro, Inspector,
not
Lisbon.’

‘Does he smoke?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but as far as I know, that isn’t yet considered a felony.’ She took a long, defiant drag on her cigarette to emphasize her point. She had powerful lungs.

‘Does he smoke Gauloise Blonde?’ I asked.

She flinched; I seemed to have knocked her off the comfortable stoop in her mind. I explained about the cigarette butts we’d found.

‘But Jean . . . I’m sure he left from Faro,’ she told me, staring off into her doubts as if they were accumulating fast. ‘He . . . he wouldn’t have come back to Lisbon.’

Something in her stammer seemed artificial, and it occurred to me then that she was indeed putting on a performance, and doing her best to incriminate her boyfriend.

There were truths about ourselves that we only acknowledged when someone was trying to trick us; watching Senhora Coutinho gaze off as though needing to figure out what her best strategy to fool me might be, I realized that I was not very forgiving by nature.

‘Oh, I get it now,’ she said, as if she’d been silly not to understand earlier, and with false delight she said, ‘One of Pedro’s
lady friends
must have decided to visit him.’

Before I could ask if she knew any of their names, a slender, teenaged girl stepped inside.

Sandra had a drawn face and big, darkly shadowed eye sockets. Her thick blonde hair, clipped way too short, tufted up at spiky angles. She was wearing a man’s cardigan sweater, powder blue with a white collar, with frayed, sagging elbows. It hung down to her knees. I guessed it still held her father’s scent. She wore rose pink Converse sneakers with bright yellow laces and purple socks. She looked like a good athlete. And like a boy.

It seemed impossible that she was the demure girl nearing womanhood whom I’d seen in the victim’s favourite photos. I started to introduce myself, but she cut me off. ‘Someone went into my room!’ she told her mother hotly, ‘and whoever it was took off my sheets and looked through my drawers!’

‘That was me,’ I said.

Her eyes opened wide with rage. I looked to Senhora Coutinho for help, but she was gazing out of the back window again. She was extraordinarily good at not helping.

‘We were searching for evidence,’ I told the girl. ‘I’m sorry.’

Luci cleared her throat and said, ‘I’ll help you put on fresh sheets.’

‘I DON’T WANT FRESH ONES!’ the girl shrieked, and so loudly that it raised gooseflesh on my arms.

Senhora Coutinho drizzled Scotch into her glass with practised ease. Watching her, a latch of panic opened in my chest and made me realize that my Valium was wearing off. ‘I’m investigating what happened to your father,’ I told Sandra. I took out the turquoise ring that Gabriel had found, and offered it to her. ‘This must be yours.’

‘You had no right to take that from my bed,’ she told me, her voice fading to a frail whisper. She looked at me with a desolate expression. ‘My dad . . . he always told me you can’t just take other people’s things.’

‘I apologize,’ I said.

Sandra closed her fist around her ring and faced her mother. Her need for forgiveness – and her fear that she no longer deserved it – hunched her shoulders, but her mother wouldn’t look at her.

There’s cruelty in this house,
I thought.
And Senhora Coutinho doesn’t mind my being aware of it. Maybe that’s precisely what she wants me to understand without having to say it.

‘Sandra, is that sweater your dad’s?’ I asked gently, unwilling to venture on to more serious matters just yet.

‘Yeah, it was his favourite,’ she replied timidly. ‘Mine, too.’

The glistening of a butterfly brooch pinned to her collar – red and blue enamel – caught my attention. ‘And where did you get such a pretty butterfly brooch?’

‘Oh this . . .’ She turned her collar around and shrugged as if to diminish its importance. ‘It was a gift from my parents. For my last birthday. Except . . . except it sometimes doesn’t look like a butterfly to me any more.’

‘What else could it be?’

She showed me a lost face. ‘I don’t have any idea.’

She seemed to need me to know that her father’s death had changed the shape of everything in her life – had taken away the meaning of even small objects.

‘Maybe we could talk a bit about your ring now,’ I said. I wanted to ask her why she had hidden it but she thrust her hands over her face and broke down into tears.

Luci took a step toward her. ‘I’ll help you make your bed, if you—’

‘Get away from my daughter!’ Senhora Coutinho yelled, rushing around the table. When she pressed her lips to the top of Sandi’s head, the girl threw her arms around her and hung on as if she were being swept out to sea.

It was an amazing thing to watch a teenaged girl weep, to cede to what she’d been struggling against, as if I were observing how the world would overwhelm all of us if we ever let our guard down. Susana managed to get her daughter to stop crying with whispered endearments. I gazed away from their intimacy. Luci gave me a long look that I took to mean,
I didn’t expect it to get this bad so soon.

‘Come on, baby, you need to rest,’ Senhora Coutinho told Sandi. She dried the girl’s eyes with a tissue, smiling encouragingly.

Sandi hugged her hands around her belly as though she’d been abandoned. ‘I’ll never see Dad again, will I?’ she asked her mother.

‘Sssshhh. We’ll talk upstairs after I get you into bed.’ Senhora Coutinho took her daughter’s arm.

‘Mom, where did the bullet hit dad? Was it . . . in the back?’

‘Oh, Sandi, why would you want to know something like that?’

‘I don’t know, it seems important.’

‘We’ll talk about it later.’

‘I’ll never have a chance now to tell him I’m sorry. It’s all my fault, Mom!’

Senhora Coutinho gripped both her daughter’s hands. ‘Listen to me!’ she said fiercely. ‘What’s happened has
nothing
to do with you!’

‘If I’d have been nicer to him, then—’

‘Daddy knew you loved him,’ Senhora Coutinho cut in, her voice trembling. ‘That’s all that counts.’

Sandi turned to me as her mother led her from the room. Taking off her brooch, she laid it on the countertop near the door. To me and Luci, she said, ‘If you take something away, you have to leave something behind in its place.’

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

‘Because that’s what my dad always told me.’

‘And why are you telling me now?’

‘Because you’re investigating his death. You ought to know everything.’

Senhora Coutinho draped her arm over her daughter’s shoulder and led her away. I imagined that many things her father had told Sandi would pulse with hidden significance over the coming weeks. But the question for now was, what had she taken for which she was leaving behind her brooch?

After they’d left the room, Luci’s eyes closed tight. She was pale, and her chin trembled.

‘It’s been a long day, and it’s time you went home,’ I told her.

I wasn’t just being easy on a new recruit; I badly needed some time alone. I quashed Luci’s protests by making my suggestion an order.