The Night Watchman (14 page)

I told her that I had no more questions for now and that it was time for me to leave, but she said, ‘No, please, I need you to tell me how the murderer hurt Pedro – before I see him. I want to be prepared.’ My reticence must have shown, because she added, ‘I can handle it.’

I sat with her at the kitchen table. ‘Your husband was bound and gagged,’ I began. ‘Unfortunately, the gag was tied so tightly that he wasn’t able to get enough air. And . . .’

As I explained the rest of what the killer had done to her husband, she faced the wall, her hands clasped together in her lap, her eyes dull, entranced by the immense proportions of this death. And certain – it seemed to me – that this was the worst thing that could ever happen to her. Though, in hindsight, it seems just possible that she had already caught a glimpse of much worse to come.

It seemed possible that Coutinho had discussed his sexual conquests with Rui Sottomayor, his childhood friend and accountant, so on my taxi ride home, I decided to give him a call. This was the first he’d heard of his old friend’s murder, and in a failing voice he told me he’d have to phone me back. When he did, he said that Coutinho hadn’t told him the name of any of his girlfriends, and that he hadn’t seemed ill at ease the last time they’d spoken, which had been two days earlier, on Wednesday. Sottomayor denied knowing anything about any bribes the victim may have made. When I informed him – exaggerating a bit – that Susana Coutinho had assured me he would give me names and figures, he told me coolly, ‘I’m afraid she’s overestimated my intimacy with her husband’s business dealings.’

To pressure him, I told him to be at my office on Monday morning at ten sharp, and to be prepared for extensive questioning. I figured that if he worried all weekend about being interrogated, he might give up the name of at least one minor official whom Coutinho had bribed, and from there I could work my way up.

I next called Inspector Quintela, followed by Fonseca and Luci. Quintela told me that a couple of hours earlier he’d sent our report about the murder to Bruno Cerveira in the State Prosecutor’s Office. Fonseca agreed to stop by Senhora Coutinho’s house the next day to get Morel’s DNA. He already knew, however, that the stain in Sandra’s stuffed panda was indeed blood, but not the victim’s. He promised to have all our evidence processed by mid-afternoon on Monday. Luci told me that Morel had indeed been on the TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Paris that he’d indicated. She’d also learned that he’d called the victim’s cell phone twice that day, just as he’d said. I’d have to watch over my kids the next afternoon – while Ana was at her gallery – so Luci agreed to go to Senhora Coutinho’s house early the next afternoon to question Morel. We went over what I wanted her to ask the Frenchman a couple of times. Next, David Zydowicz confirmed that Coutinho had choked to death. He pinpointed the time of his demise to between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. the previous day. One bullet had entered his gut and exited his back without damaging any major organs. The deep bruise over his chest was from a kick so violent that it had fractured a rib. The contusion on his back indicated that the murderer had stomped on him, pressing him face-down to the living room rug; one of its white fibres had got stuck in his right eyelash. David promised to perform a full autopsy the next morning, but didn’t expect to turn up anything else of interest.

I’d saved the call I dreaded for last and made it as soon as the taxi dropped me at home. Vaz told me that he’d be able to give me the brand of sneaker that had made the bloody imprint on the victim’s shirt only on Tuesday afternoon. His icy tone made it clear that he’d recovered the full, malignant, senseless scope of his dislike for me.

A dry feeling of sadness swept through me as soon as I entered my apartment building. My head felt encased in thick glass; I’d taken too much Valium.

I sat on the shabby staircase with my hand muffling my mouth, hoping that none of our neighbours would hear me descending into purposeless grief. Remembering Moura’s dull, unseeing eyes, I thought,
A crack opened in me the moment he died.

As I stood up, I envisioned Ana’s chilly reaction to my telling her I’d be putting in a few hours on the case tomorrow; after having my salary slashed by the government in the fall of 2011, she’d made me promise not to work weekends.

When I finally made it upstairs, our front door seemed like a prop on a stage, just as everything waiting for me on the other side – for the husband and father I’d learned to become – seemed fake.

As I stepped inside, Jorge, my seven-year-old, ran to me, belting out the theme song from
American Dad,
‘Gee it’s good to say, good morning U.S.A.!’

Since realizing a few months earlier that I grew up in Colorado, he delights in every mention of America, even the ones in cartoons.

Jorge crashed into my belly; he adores having an impact. I probably would too if I was only three feet tall. I gasped; holding his hummingbird quickness in my arms was like being rescued. In a clear moment of revelation, I felt how his little body was being shaped by the unstoppable will to grow.

He was barefoot, since we didn’t permit shoes in the house, and his right big toe had been painted with red, white and blue stripes. ‘Great design!’ I told him, pointing.

‘Mom did it!’

Ana was hunched over her computer at her desk in the living room, sloppy-sexy in her pink camisole and grey sweatpants, concentrating hard, a yellow pencil clamped in her mouth. She’d tied her shoulder-length brown hair into a ponytail, except for the bright purple lock over her left ear that she’d dyed on the day she’d turned forty and usually let hang free.

I knew not to interrupt, and so did Jorge, so we held hands and waited. When he started wriggling, I asked him to please not wet himself, and he dashed to the bathroom. Ana waved me over.

The touch of her hands and lips brought me feelings of gratitude so overwhelming that I had no defence against them. And, just like that, my life seemed my own again.

‘I’ll put the spaghetti on in a minute,’ she said. ‘The chestnut soup is already done.’

‘Chestnut soup?’

‘It’s from Leonardo.’

‘Are you sure it’s edible?’ I asked, grimacing like a gargoyle for full comic effect; Ana had been trying out recipes from
Leonardo da Vinci’s Kitchen Notebooks
lately, and her previous creation – Lemon and Orange Soup – had defeated everyone but Jorge, who’d mixed in a heaping tablespoon of honey and slurped it up as a syrupy dessert.

‘Don’t start!’ she warned me with her finger wagging, since becoming indignant was her half of our private vaudeville act. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

I looked at my watch. ‘Nearly seven. So how’s the writing going?’ I asked; she was in the third year of her PhD thesis about violence against transsexuals.

‘I spoke on the phone today with Gena.’

Gena had been nearly beaten to death in Brooklyn a few months earlier, by two men who’d attacked her as she walked to the Public Library. She had been born in Pistoia, Italy, in 1972, though she grew up in Miami.

‘She better?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, and she just visited her parents in Florida for the first time since the attack. They didn’t ask her to stay over, so she had to get a room in a motel.’

‘I wonder why she still tries to convince them to accept her.’

‘She wonders the same thing!’ Ana jerked her head back and eyed me sceptically. ‘You don’t look so bad,’ she noted.

‘Most people are good at faking illness; I’m good at faking being just fine.’

I took her hair out of the ponytail and breathed in on its warm scent.

Batting me away playfully, she said, ‘Let me proofread a little more, and then I’ll let you sniff me anywhere you want, Chief Inspector.’

I found Jorge finishing up in the bathroom. Eager to tell me about his art class at school, he turned around too soon and hosed down the wall and the cuff of my pants with a last, giddy arc. ‘Hold on there, Mr Fireman!’ I told him. I swivelled him back around and aimed his final drops into the toilet. A minute later, while I was mopping up his pee with paper towels, he ran back into the bathroom to show me the drawings he’d made that afternoon: three houses, all leaning to the left, as they always do, as if gale-force winds were always blowing in his head. And none of them had a roof. The one I liked best had what looked like a fox standing in the doorway and wearing a giant cowboy hat.

‘Who’s the fox?’ I asked.

‘The what?’

‘The
raposa,’
I explained; my son knew animal names better in Portuguese.

‘That’s not a
raposa!
That’s Ernie!’ he said, as if it were obvious. Had he already figured out that my six-foot-two-inch-tall brother was a wily little creature of the forest at heart?

I washed my face with cold water and took off my bolo tie and wristwatch. On the dining table, I discovered a rejection letter from one of the twenty-one Portuguese art galleries to which I’d sent photographs of my brother’s paintings two months earlier. I crushed it in a tight ball and tossed it in the garbage.

Upstairs, I changed into boxer shorts. I found Nati lying on his belly in bed, bare-chested, wearing the Wile E. Coyote boxer shorts I’d bought him for his thirteenth birthday, reading an old hardback. The fan on his dresser was lifting up his long, whip-like bangs of silky brown hair and tossing them over his forehead, but he didn’t seem to notice. He looked like a boy on a solemn journey to himself.

As soon as he heard me, he slammed the cover of his book closed.

‘Pornography?’ I asked.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Not funny, Dad.’

‘Are you accepting visitors?’ I asked.

‘Sure, but don’t mess anything up.’

Felt pens in rainbow colours were scattered across his rug, his blanket was nested on the floor and an apple core was sitting on his pillow, but he wasn’t making a joke.

‘Bad day?’ he asked, and as I sat down, he turned on his side to face me, leaning his head on his hand.

‘I hit the jackpot – a suicide
and
a murder, and a tormented teen to top it off. How about you? Grandma Vera commit any crimes against humanity today?’

‘Almost. She took us to the café at the Gulbenkian Museum and pretended she was feeling faint from the heat so we wouldn’t have to wait in line.’ Nati imitated his grandmother, complete with a trembling hand over her heaving breast. He spoke in her heavily accented, nearly indecipherable Portuguese; she and her husband had emigrated to Portugal from Buenos Aires in 1978. Ana had been eight years old.

‘Did you have the avocado mousse?’ I asked.

‘Two portions. And don’t you dare tell Mom!’

It was another one of our running gags that her mother tried to limit our intake of sweets and we sneaked them on the sly. The avocado mousse at the Gulbenkian café was number one on our list of favourite Lisbon desserts.

I lay my head next to Nati’s and resisted the urge to kiss him, since he’d become finicky of late about too much physical affection. It was reassuring to feel his breathing on me – Nathaniel John Monroe, the boy who’d made me a father. We have always understood each other, and even when we quarrelled – which was fairly frequently of late – we never seemed to forget we were on the same team. Illusion or miracle?

He picked at my eyebrows. He likes how some white hairs have sprouted amidst the brown. I imagined I was a small animal in his care, which brought up the question: would it be boring or wonderful to be reincarnated as a hamster? I decided to ask him.

‘A real snooze,’ he replied authoritatively. ‘Binky had a gerbil once. All it did was eat and sniff around and take dumps all over its cage. And it dropped dead after only a year. Hamsters must be the same.’

Binky was Nati’s best friend. Her parents were from Goa.

‘Listen, Nati, a hamster’s nose is orders of magnitude more sensitive than ours,’ I pointed out. ‘Every second offers them a universe of scents worth investigating.’

‘Are you aware that when you talk about animals you sound like a brochure?’

‘I need to take you to Colorado sometime – to see the squirrels and prairie dogs and eagles. And the turkeys! The wild turkeys alone are worth the price of admission.’ I began making the squeaky-scratchy noises that baby turkeys make. Being touched by Nati can make me very silly.

‘You want a back rub, don’t you?’ he questioned.

That hadn’t been on my mind, but I accepted gratefully. While I slipped out of my shirt, he put his book on his night table upside-down, but I saw that it was a novel I’d recommended to him about a year earlier,
Moby Dick.
Having to sneak a look at the title made me feel right at home; my mother had been a secretive reader, too.

Nati scooted up behind me and kneaded my shoulders. Tennis lessons had given him powerful hands. Closing my eyes with an appreciative moan, I pictured him as a newborn, snoozing face-down on my belly. My son’s trust in me – despite his naked and perfect fragility – meant that I’d arrived at the finish line of a race that I’d been running for nearly thirty years. I could finally stop running.

‘You think that one day you’ll want to press delete every time you see me?’ I asked.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The murdered man’s daughter presses an imaginary delete button whenever her mother tries to talk to her,’ I explained.

‘I make no promises, Dad, but I’ll try not to erase you in front of other people,’ he replied dryly.

‘Very kind of you,’ I said in a sarcastic voice, but I knew I had only myself to blame for his sense of humour. ‘Ever see a stuffed panda with big blue eyes, vaguely Japanese-looking?’ I asked. ‘There was one at the murder scene.’

‘No, but I’ll Google it for you later, if you want.’

‘And why would a really pretty fourteen-year-old girl cut her hair to look like a boy?’

‘The victim’s daughter again?’ he asked.

I groaned ‘yes’ as he pressed hard at the knots in my shoulders.

‘Maybe she’s a lesbo,’ he said cheerfully.

We were speaking English, as I always do when I’m alone with my kids, but Nati used the word
fufa
in Portuguese. I turned around and shot him a questioning look.