The Secret in Their Eyes (6 page)

It was a day in late August, and I was sitting in my corner of the court offices, finishing the paperwork for a prison release.

Although I was well aware that the moment for removing the Morales file from the active docket was close at hand, I tried to postpone that step by employing the oldest and most futile method I knew: I put the case out of my mind. And therefore, because of my ineffective resistance and the ineluctable circumstances, my little games of denial and procrastination were brought to a halt, suddenly and punctually, when the moment arrived.

I noticed that Clerk Pérez was approaching with a case file in his hand. He dropped the dossier on the glass top of my desk, where it landed with a weak splat. Before he turned around and went back to his office, he said, “I’m leaving the Palermo murder with you so you can dismiss it.”

In the jargon of our profession, “leaving the murder with me” meant that he wanted me to write up a decision; Palermo was the barrio where the crime had been
committed. Since we had no suspects, we couldn’t identify the case, as we usually did, by the defendants’ names; and when Pérez told me to “dismiss it,” he was referring to the precise nature of the decision he expected me to produce. With no positive leads after three months of investigation and with no evidence that would allow us to proceed in any direction, he was requesting that I write a recommendation to seal the file. End of the line. Goodbye to the case. A thousand times I’d written up such decisions or, for simpler cases, ordered my subordinates to do so. But I balked at this one, because as far as I was concerned, this case wasn’t about the Palermo murder, it was about the death of Ricardo Agustín Morales’s wife, and I’d resolved to help him as much as possible. And up to that moment, the truth was I hadn’t been able to do very much.

I put aside the papers I’d been working on and pulled the blue dossier closer. “Liliana Emma Colotto,” I read. “Homicide.” I leafed through the pages; their contents were pretty predictable. The initial police report, with the statement of the first officer to arrive at the crime scene after the neighbor called the police. The description of the discovery of the body. The medical examiners’ application to perform an autopsy. The note attesting to the notification of the examining magistrate’s court, namely me. Me receiving the news, half asleep on the wide desk in the judge’s office, with that prick Romano
jumping around me and celebrating. The statements Báez collected from the witnesses. The photographs of the crime scene. I quickly flipped past those; nevertheless, in one of the shots, taken from a point to the right of the victim’s body, I thought I recognized, very close to her hand, the tip of my shoe. I paged through the autopsy very fast—those descriptions turned my stomach—but I lingered over the examiners’ conclusions.

Rape … death by strangulation … and that third conclusion? I hadn’t paid attention to it when we’d first received the autopsy report, some weeks before. Although it didn’t seem possible, the case was apparently capable of intensifying grief even further from beyond the grave. Suddenly anxious, I continued looking through the file, but it appeared to contain no more new information. I came to the brutal charade Romano and Sicora had conducted with the innocent workers: two scanty pages of “spontaneous confessions” beaten out of those poor guys by that pig Sicora. After that, there was my formal complaint to the Appellate Court, accusing Romano and Sicora of illegal coercion and abuse and requesting that a medical examiner assess the injuries suffered by the two arrestees.

I thought of Romano, as I did every time I passed his empty desk. Right after I filed my complaint, disciplinary proceedings had begun, and he’d been provisionally suspended from his duties. At first, I’d been afraid that
his staff might bear me a grudge for turning him in; at the end of the day, we all worked for the same court. But my relations with them remained so cordial that I was moved to wonder whether they might not be secretly grateful to me for having gotten their loutish boss off their backs. I returned to the few pages left in the file. The remand of the case from the police to the examining magistrate’s court. The statements taken in our offices from the same witnesses, who limited themselves to verifying what they’d already said. And finally, a supplementary autopsy report (on the results of some visceral examination that added nothing and which, in any case, I was too apprehensive to do more than skim).

On the back of the last page, there was a note in Pérez’s handwriting, dated that same day. Following Judge Fortuna Lacalle’s express instructions, Clerk Pérez had written, “Any case submitted by the police but containing no named suspects or perpetrators must be removed from the active docket within two months, or three at the most.” Had the judge upheld that principle because he was methodical, that would have been one thing; but no, he upheld it because he was mediocre. His real motto was “The fewer cases, the better.” That was the reason behind his mania for shelving cases as soon as possible when no suspects had been found, no matter whether the crime was theft or murder.

I imagined the next step. I would put a sheet of letterhead paper in the typewriter, select the approved heading for such a document, and type up a decision of some ten lines, prescribing a stay of proceedings in the case, citing the lack of suspects, and recommending that the police continue their investigations in order to identify the guilty parties. That last part served to keep up appearances; in practice, the document was the dossier’s death certificate, and the case would be archived forever.

I looked though the whole file again. Although Fortuna was a fraud and Romano a suck-up, they were, goddamn it, right. I turned to the autopsy and reviewed its conclusions one more time. I wondered if Morales knew what they were; I figured he didn’t. I thought about his young, beautiful wife. Young, beautiful, raped, dead, and left on their bedroom floor.

I had to tell him what was in the autopsy report. I was certain that the young man’s heart held an immense capacity for grief, but not much room for deception. Nevertheless, to inform him of what I’d learned and at the same time to reveal that the case was closed, consigned to the archives, seemed excessively cruel; I thought the knowledge might be too great for him to bear.

I took out an eraser from the top drawer of my desk and neatly erased the date written in the margin of the last page. Then, with the slightly faltering delicacy of
one who imitates another’s handwriting, I changed the date so that the case would remain active for three more months. I stood up and put the file on a shelf where, as I knew from experience, no one would lay a finger on it for decades unless I gave an explicit order to the contrary. Neither the judge nor the clerk would ask any questions about that case. I returned to my desk and spent a long time gnawing the cap of a ballpoint pen and wondering what would be the best way to explain to Morales that his wife, at the time of her rape and murder, was almost two months pregnant.

C
haparro knows he’ll regret ringing her up, but the possibility of hearing her voice, like everything that has to do with her, attracts him with an irresistible force. And so he gets closer and closer to making the call and regrets it every step of the way, from the moment the notion occurs to him until the moment he hears her pick up the phone.

He starts his approach by telling himself that he needs certain pieces of information contained in the legal proceedings. Does he really need them? At first his answer is yes, because after thirty years, many minor details (places, dates, the precise sequence of events) remain in his memory as little more than a faint blur. But, he immediately objects, such precision is obsessive and disproportionate. Does it really matter whether the case was inactive for five months or six? He’s not submitting evidence for a preventive detention; he’s narrating a tragedy in which he had the dubious honor of serving as both witness and protagonist. So much strict attention to detail is, therefore, unnecessary. But this admirably balanced line of reasoning does nothing to diminish
his obstinate desire to review the case. Two days pass, days during which he barely manages to draft a couple of useless pages, before he’s able to admit to himself that the idea of looking over the case file captivates him only because it offers an unobjectionable, crystal-clear excuse for visiting Irene.

She knows—he’s told her himself—that he’s “writing a book.” Fine. After the passage of so much time, it’s only natural that a writer would want to check a few details. Terrific. The case is stored in the General Archive, in the basement of the Palace of Justice. What better means of facilitating Chaparro’s access to the old dossier could there be than an informal call from the examining magistrate of the court that handled the case in the first place? An unbeatable ploy. It would give him an opportunity to have coffee with Irene and play the part of a writer engaged in his research. Irene likes the project he’s embarked on, and she becomes still more beautiful whenever she’s discussing something she feels enthusiastic about. On the whole, therefore, the perfect excuse. So why does it make him so nervous, and why does he hold back whenever he’s on the point of calling her? Precisely because of that, because it’s all a pretext. It’s basically that simple. However he looks at it, the whole thing’s an alibi for spending time with her. And Chaparro quails before the smallest possibility of exposing his feelings to the woman he loves.

He knows the people who run the archive. Most of them entered the Judiciary after he did. If he presents himself at the reception counter and asks to see a case file, they’re highly unlikely to refuse him. And even if they do, he can always ask young García, the current clerk, to make a call from the court and smooth the way for him. So what sense does it make to ask Irene for help?

Well, none at all, except that he’d get to spend five minutes alone with her, protected by an unimpeachable excuse. Without such a screen, he can’t. Even though he wants to, it’s impossible. He’s terrified by the thought that the fire in his guts might be visible from the outside, that he might garble his words or get the shakes or break out in a cold sweat.

His embarrassment is ridiculous. They are, after all, both adults. Why not simply tell her the truth? Why not visit her in her office, without a pretext, and let her know how he feels? They’re grown-ups. A few hints should be enough, some courtly gesture that would serve to demonstrate his interest, and Irene could imagine the rest.

Why can’t he do that? Because it’s simply out of the question. Because Chaparro has spent so many years keeping his feelings to himself he’d rather carry them to the grave than blurt out some awkward declaration, some sweetened, easily digestible version of what’s in his heart. He can’t just show up and remark, as naturally as can be, “Look, Irene, I wanted you to know that
I’ve been crazy about you for three decades, including some less intense periods during the many years when we didn’t work together.”

Chaparro roams like an automaton from the kitchen to the dining room and back. He opens and closes the refrigerator fifty times. Even though sooner or later, in the course of almost every pass, he stops in front of his desk, he’s so wrapped up in his dilemma that he can’t see those scattered pages for what, despite his fatalistic predictions, they are: the embryo of his damned book.

For the hundredth time, he looks at the telephone, as though the thing could help him decide to act. Suddenly, he takes two steps toward it, and his heartbeat accelerates. He regrets what he’s going to do before he’s dialed the third digit, but he forges ahead, because he’s resolved to fulfill his desire, and at the same time, he rues the decision. He feels, in short, the mixture of cynicism and hope that’s the hallmark of his life.

He dials the direct line to her office. He’s not the least interested in letting any of his former coworkers learn about this call. After the third ring, someone picks up the phone.

“Hello?” It’s Irene’s voice. Not for the first time, Chaparro’s surprised by this almost imperceptible sign of independence from convention in the woman he adores. At the beginning of their tenure in the vast Palace of Justice, all new employees copy their colleagues and use
the bureaucratic formula for answering the telephone: the words “Court” or “Clerk’s office,” spoken in a monotone, and followed, when one is in a friendly mood, by “Good day.” Not Irene.

Ever since her first day of work in the Judiciary, Irene has chosen to initiate her telephone conversations with that warm, familiar “Hello?” as if she were waiting for a call from her grandma. Chaparro knows this, because he was her first boss. He’d just been promoted to deputy when Irene started working in the clerk’s office as an intern. He would later come to feel some regret for having decided, when they were first being introduced, not to speak to her in the familiar
vos
form. He’d been brought up to have the greatest respect for women, even very young ones, even those who might walk up to him, extend a hand, and greet him with a laconic “It’s a pleasure.” His reply had sounded quite formal: “How do you do, Miss? Good to have you with us.” At the time, Chaparro was twenty-eight, ten years older than his new employee, and he was convinced that a boss always had to keep the hierarchical rankings clear in dealing with his subordinates. He’d hesitated a little when he looked into her eyes, because the girl looked back at him so intently, so penetratingly, that it was as if his own eyes had been struck by two well-aimed, jet-black beams. He broke the impasse by immediately releasing the hand she’d given him and instructing a secretary to describe the young
intern’s basic duties to her. As their court was on call and overwhelmed with work, they’d assigned the girl to answer the telephone. After her fourth or fifth “Hello?” Chaparro had deemed it proper to explain to her, from the heights of his juridical experience, that it would be infinitely more practical to answer incoming calls by saying, “Clerk’s Office 19,” thus sparing the caller the time required to overcome his surprise at such eccentricity and to verify whether he’d actually reached the court. Well before the conclusion of his discourse, Chaparro had started feeling like an idiot, although he wasn’t sure whether that was because of the intrinsic stupidity of his counsel or because of Irene’s demurely amused expression as she listened to him go on. Nonetheless, she nodded a few times, as if accepting his suggestion. Three minutes later, however, when the telephone rang again, she answered with a “Hello?” as informal and unjuridical as all the previous ones. There was no temerity in her voice, nor did it convey the slightest defiance. Maybe that was why Chaparro couldn’t get angry at her and considered the matter closed.

All her life, Irene has answered the phone like that, and so she does on this August day, thirty years after their first meeting, when Chaparro stops pacing around his house and circling the telephone and picking up the receiver and putting it down again who knows how many times and finally decides—since he can no longer
avoid acting, which is the point he generally reaches before any important decision—to call her at her office and hears the “Hello?” that makes his heart leap in his chest.