A Murder of No Consequence

by James Garcia Woods

  Behind him, the phone rang. He crossed the room, and picked it up. ‘Speak to me,’ he said.

  ‘Inspector Ruiz?’ asked a male voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Carlos Méndez Segovia.’

  The man spoke uncertainly, as if not quite convinced of his own identity, and for a second, the name meant nothing to Paco, either. Then he made the connection. Carlos Méndez Segovia was the brother of Mercedes Méndez and, according to Paulina the maid, shared the apartment with his sister and brother-in-law.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Méndez asked.

  ‘Yes. What can I do for you, Señor Méndez?’

  A slight pause. ‘I understand you wish to talk to my sister,’ Méndez continued.

  ‘That is correct,’ Paco said cautiously.

  ‘And she, for her part, is more than willing to co-operate with you in any way she can. When would you like to see her?’

  Now! Several hours ago! ‘I’d like to see her as soon as I can,’ Paco said.

  ‘My . . . my sister wondered whether, instead of her going down to the police station, you could come to the apartment. Would that be possible?’

  Why did he even need to ask? Didn’t he realize that women of Doña Mercedes’ importance simply didn’t report to police stations like ordinary members of the public? Perhaps he was only being polite.

  ‘I could come to the apartment,’ Paco said.

  ‘That’s very good of you. Shall we say, nine o’clock tomorrow morning? If that’s convenient.’

  ‘It’s convenient.’

  ‘And you have the address?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘In that case, we look forward to seeing you then.’

  The line went dead. Paco replaced the receiver in its cradle, walked over to the cabinet, poured himself another brandy, and glanced out of the window again. Cindy Walker’s salon was in darkness, which probably meant she’d given up studying, and gone to bed. He wondered what she looked like naked.

  He returned to his armchair and took a sip of brandy. Méndez’s phone call had been disturbing, and for two very good reasons. The first was that the man was being blindly co-operative. When people learned that the police wished to talk to them, their immediate reaction was to want to know why. Yet Méndez, who had a perfect right to ask what it was all about, hadn’t done so.

  Which led onto the second thing bothering Paco. The dress shop assistant had given his identity card the most cursory of glances, and he had not identified himself at all to Paulina, Doña Mercedes’ maid. So how the hell did Carlos Méndez know that he was the man to ring?

  Chapter Seven

  The water carts had just finished their morning’s work – moving slowly up the narrow streets and spraying the cobbles with their cooling jets – and now, on the tiny wrought-iron balconies, housewives watered the flowers which sprouted from clay plant-pots and old olive-oil tins.

  Paco wound down the window of his 1932 Fiat Balilla – the only thing of any value that he actually owned – and breathed in deeply. He loved the early mornings. In the summer, they were the only time of day when it was really cool, the one short period when the smells of the city – geraniums, horse dung and roasted coffee – were not smothered by the thick, hot air.

  He turned to look at his passenger. ‘You know, Felipe, I should never have left the village,’ he said.

  Fat Felipe cupped his hands over his belly. ‘What’s wrong with the town?’ he asked.

  ‘Life is so much more complicated here than it is in the pueblo. You don’t get many murders in the villages, but when there is one, everybody immediately knows who did it.’

  ‘If Madrid was like that, we’d be out of a job,’ Felipe said philosophically.

  ‘Villages are so straightforward. You have your land, you cultivate it – and that’s all.’

  ‘And you earn twenty-five pesetas a month – and that’s in a good month,’ Felipe pointed out. ‘You couldn’t run a fine car like this on five duros a month.’

  ‘True,’ Paco admitted. ‘But if I still lived in the village, I wouldn’t really need a car, would I?’

  They had been driving up the Paseo de la Castellana, the widest street in Madrid. Now Paco made a right turn, and looking out of his side window, thought how different this area was to his own barrio. Downtown, the apartment blocks looked like dominoes, standing on end and huddled together, with only the occasional side-street to break the monotony. In the Barrio de Salamanca, the buildings were wider and had a sweeping grandeur which was missing from the cramped dwellings in the centre.

  There were other differences, too. Where a downtown block would have a solid wooden door which led into a narrow hallway, these blocks had expensive glass doors through which could be seen plush foyers watched over by uniformed doormen. While a thin layer of plaster and a couple of coats of paint was considered sufficient decoration for the outsides of houses downtown, here the plaster was moulded into elaborate curlicues, flowers and heads, which ran all along the frontage.

  ‘That’s where Calvo Sotelo lives,’ Felipe said, pointing to a block they were just passing.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Paco asked.

  Felipe grinned. ‘I show an interest in politics,’ he said.

  ‘And I don’t,’ Paco agreed.

  He wanted nothing at all to do with any of the factions which were screaming at each other in parliament, or fighting it out on the streets. He was neutral. Yet despite that, the further he drove into the Barrio de Salamanca, the more he felt he was getting deeper and deeper into enemy territory.

  *

  The doorman was dressed in a scarlet uniform, complete with a peaked cap as ostentatious as an admiral’s. He gave the two detectives a sweeping glance, but did not speak.

  Paco produced his warrant card. ‘We’re here to see Doña Mercedes Méndez Segovia,’ he said.

  There were places where showing the card would have had an immediate effect, with everyone rushing around getting the policeman whatever it was he wanted. The doorman in the scarlet uniform merely looked down his nose and said, ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘Yes. For nine o’clock.’

  The doorman shrugged, as if to say that if Doña Mercedes wanted to waste her time talking to policemen, it was no business of his. ‘Go down the corridor and take the first lift,’ he said. ‘The señora and her family live on the third floor.’

  As the two detectives walked down the corridor, Paco felt a knot tightening in his stomach. This was not his territory at all. He was used to investigating cases in seedy bars downtown and in cramped workmen’s blocks to the south of the city. He didn’t like working under these conditions – didn’t like the fact that, though he’d agreed to it, he was having to go and see Mercedes Méndez, instead of telling her to come and see him. Put simply, he resented having to tread on alien ground and, in all probability, playing the game by the other people’s rules. Yet what choice did he have? When you were dealing with important people, you had to be prepared to eat a little shit.

  The lift was almost the size of Paco’s living-room, the fitted blue carpet on the third-floor corridor so thick that Felipe’s heavy boots made virtually no sound.

  ‘How are we going to play this?’ Felipe asked when they reached the door of the apartment. ‘Am I the big, ignorant one again?’

  Paco shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t work. Not with these people.’

  ‘So what will I be?’

  ‘You’ll be quiet,’ Paco said, forcing himself to grin.

  He rang the bell. The door was opened, almost immediately, by a plain girl with a weather-beaten face, dressed in a maid’s uniform. ‘You are the police?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, we are the police,’ Paco confirmed. ‘And who are you? Paulina?’

  The girl nodded, then said. ‘You must follow me.’

  Christ! Paco thought, in this building even the maids think they have the right to order us around.

  Paulina led them thro
ugh the main door and down a long corridor even more plushly carpeted than the one outside. At the end of the corridor, the maid stopped and knocked lightly on an impressive oak door.

  ‘Enter,’ called a woman’s voice from the other side of it.

  The maid opened the door, then stepped aside to let the two policemen go in.

  Paco glanced quickly around him. The room he had just entered was a large one which looked out onto the street, or would have done if the long velvet curtains hadn’t been drawn to exclude the morning sunlight. The sofas – two of them – were covered in velvet, too, as were the armchairs. The largest coffee table Paco had ever seen – made of inlaid teak – dominated the space between the seats. A huge crystal chandelier hung down from the ceiling.

  ‘It’s the police, madam,’ the maid said to a woman who was sitting on one of the sofas.

  So this was Doña Mercedes Méndez Segovia. She was in her late thirties, Paco guessed. Her hair was purest black, her eyes arrogant, her whole expression haughty. She was wearing a long, green silk dress which revealed a firm figure – and probably cost as much as a police inspector earned in a couple of months. Paco found himself taking an instant dislike to her, but even seen through the eyes of prejudice, he had to admit that she was a very handsome woman.

  Doña Mercedes was not alone. Next to her was a man perhaps ten years younger than she was. The overall impression he gave was one of thinness. Thin nose. Thin lips. Thin, artistic hands. His resemblance to the woman was striking, though there was nothing the least effeminate about him. He was there, Paco thought, as a witness; so that if Doña Mercedes wanted to make a complaint later, she would have someone to back her up.

  ‘You can go, Ortega,’ Doña Mercedes told the maid in a voice which was as imperious as her general demeanour. Then she turned to the detectives and said, ‘You may sit down if you wish,’ in just about the same tone.

  Felipe, who never needed that kind of invitation twice, immediately plopped down into one of the armchairs. Paco, at a more leisurely pace, sat down on the second sofa.

  ‘I understand you wish to ask me some questions,’ Doña Mercedes said.

  Instead of answering her, Paco turned his attention to the young man. ‘Am I to take it that you’re Don Carlos?’ he asked.

  The other man jumped slightly. ‘Yes . . . yes, that is correct. I am Carlos Méndez Segovia.’

  ‘And it really was you who phoned me last night?’

  A nod. ‘Correct again.’

  ‘Then perhaps my first question should be to you. How did you know I was the one to call?’

  ‘Señora Umbral phoned . . .’

  ‘Who is Señora Umbral?’

  ‘She owns a dress shop on Alcalá.’

  ‘I see. Go on.’

  ‘She phoned to say that the police had been making enquiries.’ Don Carlos waved his slim hands. ‘Once we knew that, the rest was easy.’

  ‘Easy?’ Paco repeated. ‘In what way?’

  ‘My husband is a man of considerable influence,’ Doña Mercedes interrupted. ‘He simply called the Ministry of the Interior.’

  Which puts you in your place, Ruiz, Paco thought. But aloud, he said, ‘The other thing that puzzled me at the time, Don Carlos, was that you didn’t ask me why I wanted to see Doña Mercedes.’

  ‘But we already knew – and from the same source,’ Don Carlos explained. ‘A woman was found murdered in Retiro Park, yesterday morning. She was wearing a dress which perhaps once belonged to my sister.’

  ‘Almost definitely belonged to her,’ Paco corrected him. He turned to Doña Mercedes. ‘Could you tell me how the dead girl came to acquire the dress?’

  ‘It was a blue dress with a neckline like this, wasn’t it?’ Doña Mercedes asked, tracing a pattern round her own throat with her slim, aristocratic fingers.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Paco agreed.

  ‘Then I have no idea how she got it. I gave it away to the rag-and-bone man some months ago.’

  Paco raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘It was an expensive dress,’ he said. ‘Silk.’

  ‘It was last season’s fashion,’ said Doña Mercedes, managing to lard her words with contempt at the inspector’s ignorance. ‘It, and all the other clothes in the same style, simply had to go.’

  ‘Do you always give away your clothes after only a year?’ Paco asked, pretending not to notice her tone.

  Doña Mercedes shook her head. ‘Not always, no. I have certain items – my riding clothes, for example – which stay in style for much longer than a year. But if you were to look through my wardrobes,’ she continued, making it plain that this was not an invitation, ‘you wouldn’t find many dresses more than a few months old.’

  ‘This rag-and-bone man,’ Paco said. ‘Can you describe him to me?’

  Doña Mercedes laughed, ‘You surely don’t imagine I handed it over to the chatarro myself, do you?’

  ‘Then who . . .?’

  ‘I instructed one of the servants to do it.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I really can’t remember.’

  ‘In that case,’ Paco said, ‘I’ll have to interrogate them all.’

  Doña Mercedes looked outraged at the very suggestion. ‘I cannot possibly permit such a thing,’ she said.

  The knot in Paco’s stomach tightened another couple of twists. She – or her husband – probably could prevent him from talking to the servants if they really wanted to. ‘I’m afraid you don’t have any choice over the question of interrogations, señora,’ he bluffed. ‘A serious crime has been committed and one way or another, I will talk to the servants – even if it takes a judge’s warrant.’

  Brother and sister exchanged the sort of glance that passes between people who know each other so well that they no longer need words to communicate. ‘Surely, if you put your mind to it, you could remember which servant you gave to,’ Don Carlos suggested.

  Doña Mercedes closed her eyes and made a show of searching her memory. ‘I think it was Paulina,’ she said after some seconds had passed. ‘Yes, I am almost sure she was the one. Go and find her, Carlos.’

  Don Carlos sprang to his feet, like an eager office boy. ‘I’ll come with you,’ Paco told him.

  ‘You’ll wait here,’ Doña Mercedes said firmly.

  Don Carlos opened the door and disappeared into the corridor.

  ‘I would offer you some refreshment,’ Doña Mercedes said, coldly and unconvincingly, ‘but I expect that you are eager to finish your work here and be on your way.’

  ‘Quite,’ Paco agreed.

  In the corner of the room was a grandfather clock in a walnut case. Paco fixed his eyes on the large brass pendulum and watched it swing from one side to the other. Click . . . click . . . click. . . .

  A minute passed, then two, then three. ‘Your brother seems to be taking a long time to find the girl,’ Paco said.

  ‘Perhaps he’s trying to calm her down,’ Doña Mercedes suggested.

  ‘And why should he need to do that?’

  Doña Mercedes’ face showed fresh contempt at his apparent naivety. ‘She’s a country girl. Anything that isn’t covered in animal dung frightens her.’

  It was another five minutes before Don Carlos returned. ‘The girl is ready to see you now,’ he said.

  Paco stood up. ‘Where is she?’

  Don Carlos seemed surprised by the question. ‘In the kitchen, of course.’

  Of course! Her room would be too small to contain three people, and, as a mere maid, she couldn’t very well be allowed the use of one of the family rooms, even for something as potentially serious as an interrogation by the police.

  ‘Where is the kitchen?’ Paco asked.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Paco turned to Doña Mercedes. ‘Goodbye, señora.’

  The woman inclined her head, more in a gesture of dismissal than farewell. Felipe forced himself to rise from his comfortable chair, and the two policemen followed the young señorito out of the room.

&nb
sp; Chapter Eight

  The kitchen was a long narrow room. White tiles covered the walls, many of them cracked. The work surfaces were chipped, and the only natural light came from a small window almost at ceiling level. The place was only twenty steps away from the luxurious salon they had just left, yet it was in a different world. But then it didn’t really matter how run-down it looked, Paco thought, because it was only the servants who saw it.

  Paulina was sitting at the table, her elbows on the rough board, her hands clenched together as if in prayer. It was not until Don Carlos touched her lightly on the shoulder that she even looked up.

  ‘These gentlemen wish to ask you their questions now,’ Don Carlos said soothingly. ‘You must answer them truthfully, as I’ve already explained. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the girl replied, her eyes wide with something approaching terror.

  Don Carlos turned to Paco. ‘Do you wish me to stay?’

  ‘That will not be necessary, señor.’

  ‘But when you wish to leave . . .?’

  ‘Paulina will show us out.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing more I can do . . .’

  ‘There isn’t. Thank you, sir.’

  Don Carlos nodded and stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind him. Paco pulled out a chair and sat down opposite the maid. ‘Where are you from, Paulina?’ he asked softly.

  ‘El Soto del Principe,’ the girl said in a whisper.

  Paco smiled. ‘I’m not sure I know exactly where that is,’ he said. ‘Is it a big place, like Madrid?’

  Paulina laughed, as he’d intended her to. ‘No, it’s only a village,’ she said.

  ‘And what does your father do?’

  ‘He has a little land.’

  ‘But not enough to support his entire family, eh?’

  ‘No,’ Paulina agreed. ‘Not enough for that.’

  Paco held out his packet of cigarettes to the girl, and when she shook her head, he lit one up himself. ‘Your mistress told us she instructed you to give some of her clothes away to a rag-and-bone man,’ he said. ‘Is that correct?’