The Night Watchman (3 page)

It often infuriated me how Ernie could be so sure we were safe from our father and so insecure about nearly everything else, but for the moment it was what I needed to hear. ‘Remember how he said the worst things real softly?’ I said. ‘To show us how at peace he was with himself and God.’

Ernie drew an alarmed breath. ‘You haven’t told Ana or someone else about what happened to him, have you?’ he asked, thinking he’d figured out more of what was wrong with me. ‘The police back home might still think he didn’t just disappear – that we did something we didn’t do.’

‘I haven’t said a thing. Don’t get so upset.’

‘Tell me what’s happened,’ he said in a gentler voice.

Given Ernie’s history with pills, I didn’t dare mention Moura’s suicide, so I said, ‘A suspect got killed here at headquarters.’

In the slow-passing silence between us, I realized I’d expected Ernie to die on that December day when Dad found him under our porch. Sometimes, when my brother and I didn’t speak for a few days, it even seemed to me as though Dad
had
suffocated him, then or at some other time, and that all of my adult life has been a dream.

‘Stay away from the blood,’ my brother told me now. ‘And look both ways before you cross the street.’

His last advice was our childhood code that meant: be careful at all times. When I agreed, the time came to hang up, but I couldn’t; I was stopped by all that I didn’t dare say but needed to. Most of all, I wanted to tell Ernie that if Dad showed up, I’d kill him – and not only that, but that I’d trained as a cop to be sure that I’d stay calm enough to put a bullet right between his eyes and dispose of his body without anyone finding out.

Pires had picked up all the pens that had scattered across my floor by the time I got back to my office. After thanking her, I went to Director Crespo’s office to explain what had happened with Moura. His impatient, get-on-with-it look disoriented me so badly that I forgot the word for CPR in Portuguese and I had to say it in English. I hated the way I sounded far away and helpless – as if I’d fallen off the edge of the world.

‘Where did he keep the cyanide?’ Crespo asked me when I’d finished my story.

I held up the square of aluminium foil I’d found. ‘In this. He dropped it on the floor.’

‘Careful with that!’ he said, thrusting up his hand. ‘It may still have poison on it.’

While folding the foil in four, I told him I’d ask Forensics to dispose of it. I tucked it in my shirt pocket for safekeeping.

Crespo took a stick of gum from his pack – he’d been trying to give up cigarettes for more than four years, ever since the new legislation against smoking indoors had come into effect. ‘Look, Monroe,’ he said in the overly patient tone he adopted when he was trying not to show how annoyed he was with me, ‘there was nothing you could do. Just write up your report and get on with your day.’ He came around his desk and patted my shoulder. ‘The guy was a nutcase – a total loser. Just forget about him.’

My anger, quick and demanding, made me lean away from him. ‘I don’t see what made him a loser,’ I said.

While chewing greedily on his gum, Crespo sized me up, wondering how honest he could be with me. ‘We all know life sucks half the time, Monroe, but we keep fighting. The losers give up. It’s as simple as that.’

I knew that giving up wasn’t simple at all, but I was afraid I’d shout something rude if I started to argue with him. I told myself that Crespo wasn’t worth the effort to make him understand how many years of despair you needed to suffer in order to find the courage to walk to the end of your life and jump off.

In a conciliatory tone, he said, ‘Look, you aren’t going to win any medals by taking these things personally. Go have a shot of brandy at the Açoriana after you get the paperwork out of the way. You’re white as a sheet.’

‘I don’t drink, sir.’

‘Christ, Monroe, a shot of brandy isn’t drinking, it’s coping!’

I scrubbed my hands and typed up my report. By then, it was almost 11 a.m. Ana would be at her gallery. Liliana, her assistant, answered. When my wife took the line, I told her about Moura. ‘I really fucked up,’ I concluded. ‘I didn’t need to be so clever.’

‘Listen, Hank, if he hid the cyanide, it meant that he decided he was going to take his own life long before he started talking to you.’

She spoke in that no-nonsense voice of hers that’s usually my road out of hell, but not this time. ‘I . . . I identified with him,’ I stammered, and I explained how he’d invented a son to oblige himself do the right thing.

‘Look, he told you he was lucky that you were the one who questioned him,’ she said. ‘So stop blaming yourself.’

Comforting words, but death was still lodged in the pulsing at the back of my head and in the fatal numbness of my hands; the blood and skin remember what the mind forgets.

A Valium might have helped but I tried to avoid taking any medication in the morning. I couldn’t put off going to the Rua do Vale, so I promised Ana I’d do my best to make it home early and grabbed my gun. I reached our parking lot before I realized I’d forgotten my bolo tie and dashed back for it; counting on a three-inch-tall silver bird to keep me safe was idiocy, but Ernie insisted on it.

When I reached our car, Pires was sitting behind the wheel, scanning the movie listings in the
Público.
Hearing me, she looked up. Her eyes were red and glassy. She’d already told me – choking up – that she’d never before watched anyone die..

We didn’t speak. As she navigated through the noisy traffic, her hands gripped the steering wheel as though she’d just learned to drive. The accumulation of opening lines I wanted to try – but didn’t – ended up making me jittery. ‘So, is there anything of interest at the movies?’ I finally asked.

‘Someone told me a new Angelina Jolie movie just came out, but I couldn’t find it.’ In an urgent voice, she added, ‘Listen, sir, I’m really sorry about what happened in there.’

‘You didn’t do anything wrong,’ I told her.

‘If you hadn’t had to come out to talk to me, then it’s possible that—’

‘He’d have taken the cyanide anyway,’ I interrupted, repeating what my wife had told me.

‘Maybe.’ She grimaced.

‘Let’s just get to the crime scene. Nothing we say can change what’s happened.’

‘Okay, sir.’

She seemed resigned to her dissatisfaction, but I must have needed more convincing; as we rumbled down the Calçada do Combro, I said, ‘We all need to tell our story to someone, and once Moura did that, his life stopped making sense.’

Pires took a deep breath and held it. I had the feeling she needed to hold onto a last, unkind thought about herself.

‘Everyone your age seems to think Angelina Jolie is the greatest,’ I told her.

‘And I take it you don’t, sir,’ she replied, clearly as glad as I was to welcome trivialities into our conversation.

‘I watched
Lara Croft
with my wife and kids once. It was like a bad cartoon. She seems like a good person, but I thought she was absolutely terrible in the film.’

‘Acting may not be one of her strong points,’ Pires admitted.

I laughed. A reticent smile crept over her lips – her first since we’d started working together. I realized that Moura’s death had probably changed the shape and scope of everything that would now happen between us.

‘Do you want to hear what the PSP officer on the scene told me about the murder?’ she asked.

‘Good idea.’

She spoke quickly and decisively about the case without having to consult her notes. Impressive. But I was unable to catch most of what she said. When I closed my eyes to ease the throbbing at my temples, she stopped talking.

‘I think you’re going to have to start over,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

She told me that the victim’s name was Pedro Coutinho. He’d been shot in his living room. His body had been discovered about an hour and a quarter earlier by his housekeeper. His wife Susana and daughter Sandra had been on vacation in the Algarve, along with the family dog, a poodle named Nero. They’d closed up the house and left for Lisbon on being informed about the murder.

I watched Pires furtively as she spoke. She had a secretive profile. With her skullcap of black hair and rigid, upright posture, she looked like a flamenco dancer. If I’d have been younger, I’d have asked leading questions in the hopes of getting a glimpse at the mysteries inside her, but I was forty-two and sick of training new inspectors.

Pires went on to tell me that PSP officers on the scene had found Coutinho’s address book in the bottom drawer of the desk in his library, and in it were the cell-phone numbers of a number of ministers. They’d also found an issue of
Ola!
on his night table with a showy story about his family’s vacation in Goa last February. Apparently, he liked being photographed without a shirt, probably to show off his boxer’s build.

Finishing up, Pires told me that the wife and daughter were expected back in Lisbon by mid-afternoon.

‘How old was the victim?’ I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘I forgot to ask that, sir,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘No problem. And how’s Nero holding up?’

‘The poodle?’

‘Yeah.’

She looked at me as if I were mad.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘My wife and kids tell me that I try to be amusing at inappropriate moments, but it’s really just to keep myself afloat.’

I suspected that we wouldn’t make any further attempts at humour, but a little while later she said, ‘I wonder if Nero also goes bare-chested in gossip magazines.’

‘We can hope that he feels confident enough to do so,’ I retorted.

We laughed together – but a bit too wildly, as people do who were aware that the very bad day they were having is about to get worse.

My cell phone rang. It was Mesquita, the deputy head of the Judiciary Police for all of Portugal. ‘All right, listen up, Chief Inspector,’ he told me. ‘I hear you’re on your way to the Rua do Vale. Is that right?’

‘Yes, sir, we’ll be there soon.’

‘Good. Make sure you do everything by the book. And if anything is leaked to the press, I’ll have you strung up by your balls. Understood?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Good. And if you start getting pressured, tell whoever it is to fuck off and call me. I don’t care if it’s the prime minister. Got it?’

He hung up without waiting for my agreement. When I told Pires who had called and that she wasn’t to discuss the case with anyone, she looked at me uneasily.

‘I’m listening,’ I told her.

‘Do you think the victim might have some compromising information on people high up in the government?’

‘I was just warned that the prime minister might ring, so you tell me, Inspector.’

We parked on the Travessa do Alcaide, about a hundred yards from our destination; I always liked a few minutes in the open air before seeing blood. As we walked towards the victim’s home, an ancient wooden trolley shivered past us, with a knot of screaming kids leaning out the side, communing with the God of Danger they still had every right to worship at their age. Trash blew over the cobblestones and a radio blared out news about our never-ending economic crisis. Unemployment was up to 15 per cent, and more than half of those without jobs – 500,000 people – were receiving no government assistance. A recent nationwide poll revealed that 69 per cent of Portuguese college students intended to emigrate after graduating. And our miserable salaries – the lowest in Western Europe – had once again been deemed too high by Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman and a panel of international experts.

On passing a decaying apartment house with a big hole kicked in at the bottom of the door, two thick drops of liquid plopped onto my head. I prayed that one of Lisbon’s bloated pigeons hadn’t used me for target practice again. On looking up, I discovered festive red geraniums gazing down at me from their canary-yellow window box. It seemed encouraging – after all, some of us could still afford flowers and fresh paint. I dried my hair with the handkerchief that I always keep in my back pocket.

The wind smelled of heated pavements, olive oil and yeast. Loosening my bolo tie, I discovered my collar was soaked. ‘All summer long I want rain and my kids want more sun,’ I told Pires. ‘Do you think we’ve hit ninety degrees yet, Inspector?’

‘We passed a pharmacy a few blocks back and the flashing sign said eighty-one.’

‘Only eighty-one? It feels much hotter.’

‘Because there’s no breeze at all.’

‘If I were Raymond Chandler,’ I told her, ‘I think I’d tell you now that men and women do crazy, violent things on hot summer days without any wind. Especially when they lose their jobs and despise their leaders.’

‘Sounds about right,’ she said.

‘Do you read mysteries, Inspector?’ I asked.

‘Yes, sir – mostly the classic American ones. Especially Dickson Carr.’

So she was a woman who enjoyed closed-door detective novels – which probably meant that she liked nothing better than beating the odds.

The crumbling sidewalk was only wide enough for one person at a time, so I had Pires walk ahead of me. She turned back now and again to make sure I hadn’t lost my way or been taken advantage of by another leaky geranium. Her concern reminded me of how I’d always have one eye out for Ernie when we were little.

Pires walked with her hands joined behind her back, leaning slightly forward, as if bent by a heavy locket. It seemed to me that she might have been having continuing doubts about her responsibility for Moura’s death.

‘Listen, Pires,’ I said, taking advantage of a break in the traffic to walk beside her, ‘some of the older cops will wish you’d never joined the force. They may even make fun of you. Just ignore them if you can. The younger men will all come to accept you as a colleague if you hang tough. Come talk to me if you have any big troubles.’

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ she said, but without enthusiasm.

From the urgent way she looked down the street, I could see I’d embarrassed her. Pity a man entering middle age with so little experience of women. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘do you ever go to the beach at Caparica?’

She turned around to face me. ‘Sir?’

‘Moura, our chemistry teacher . . . He used to take his imaginary kid there.’