by David Hewson
‘Perhaps it wasn’t a record, perhaps it was something valuable.’
‘No. I looked in the other drawers. Somebody’s been through them too, looking. You can tell, the way the papers get messed up. There’s even a few spots of blood in them too. Understandable in the circumstances.’
Menéndez shook his head. None of it made sense.
‘Wait,’ said the cop. ‘These old files. Sometimes they trap things behind the back. I got that tip from an office guy once.’
He reached into the empty drawer, unlocked something from the top, then slowly rolled the whole thing out of the frame. Underneath was a small army of dustballs, several paper clips, a pen top . . . and a single piece of paper. Menéndez picked it up and looked at it. Maria came over and stared over his shoulder. It was a list of company names. Beside each was a sum. They were quite large sums. There were no dates.
‘Donations?’ she asked.
‘Who knows? You recognize any of these names?’
She shook her head. ‘They don’t exactly sound like multinationals.’
‘No,’ said Menéndez, then folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket. She looked at him curiously. His face gave nothing away. He asked, ‘Did the woman who found him say anything?’
‘Not that you’d want to put too much weight on. A real gentleman, Mr Castañeda, she says. Why’d anybody want to do such a thing? Why’d they ever?’
Menéndez gestured to the filing cabinet. ‘Take that to the station when they’ve got the body out of here. I want every membership record checked against possible connections with the Angel Brothers, records of sex offenders, and anything serious to do with the ring. Get some of the night team working on it. I want a report in the morning.’
‘Sure.’
‘You know where I am if you need me.’
The three of them went downstairs.
‘Lieutenant?’ One of the plain-clothes detectives came up to them, a stained handkerchief in his hand. ‘Looks like the guy wore some kind of disguise. There are traces of make-up, what looks like hair, in the washbasin.’
Torrillo took his notebook out of his jacket pocket, found the page, scribbled out the name and then tore off the new page. ‘Run a check on this, will you?’
‘Sure, Bear,’ the man said, then walked outside to find the car. The three of them were left alone in a corner of the office, set apart from the officers who scurried around the building.
Maria felt their sad, depressed silence.
‘You really think it was him? The one we saw?’
‘The one I frisked? The one whose ID I looked at?’ Torrillo stared glumly out of the window. ‘We’ll soon know.’
‘The timing looks right,’ said Menéndez.
She tried to remember, to rebuild what had happened as if it was a photograph, something that could be recaptured and printed to film. She tried, and she knew they were right.
‘He didn’t mean to frighten me,’ she said. ‘He was leaning on the door because he was thinking about what he was going to do. He was distracted.’ She thought again. ‘His face was too red. His moustache, his beard was too . . . too black.’
‘This is my fault,’ said Menéndez. ‘I’ll deal with the consequences.’
‘But, but . . .’ She struggled for the words. ‘You mean, he came here to kill Castañeda, got interrupted by us and still went ahead with it?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Torrillo.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t thrown by the fact the police were here. By being interrupted like that.’
‘Intelligence, confidence, impulsiveness, lack of remorse, guilt or shame, as far as one can judge.’ Menéndez counted the points. ‘An absence of automatic responses for anticipatory fear or apprehension, callous . . .’
‘They teach you these things?’ asked Maria.
‘No, but a police officer can still read books. The same books as a criminologist, I imagine. I read somewhere once that fifteen, maybe twenty per cent of all crime is related to psychopathy, and that the figure is much larger for violent crimes. Perhaps we should learn more about it, as a matter of course.’
Maria tried to remember what she had read years ago. This was theory. Of late she had been concerned with the practice of criminology, not its dogma. ‘Does this really fit the facts?’
‘Yes,’ said Menéndez, and she was surprised by the firmness in his voice. ‘It fits exactly.’
‘But does it help?’
He wondered. ‘The signs are that this is the work of someone with psychopathic tendencies. We should check the records to look for connections, talk to the hospitals. But in a way it’s somewhat depressing.’
‘How?’
‘For a policeman the principal problem with psychopathic behaviour is that it doesn’t stem from any underlying emotional disturbance. You can’t profile these people according to their behaviour unless you apprehend them when they are committing a crime. They may hold down a respectable job, go to an office each day, have polite, occasionally strained, but always distant relations with those they know. Not that they know many very well, of course. And they believe they are completely normal when they kill too. Justified in what they do. That makes our job harder.’
Torrillo stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and let out a long sigh. ‘What the lieutenant is trying to say is that when we catch people it’s usually because we know they’re driving a red Panda, or they beat up their wife, or they’re carrying something they shouldn’t. We can detect our way there eventually, but we need a little help. Tell those guys out there we’re looking for some ordinary Joe who just happens to hate his fellow man, hates him to the occasional point of killing, and you run the risk of looking at a room full of cops shrugging their shoulders and saying: What is this shit? We hate our fellow man and get grumpy too sometimes. This is the city.’
‘You’re off duty now, Sergeant,’ Menéndez said. ‘Let’s see how this looks in the light of day.’
Torrillo grunted and looked at the floor. Maria waited.
‘It’s not a painting,’ she said.
Menéndez looked at her and she wished his face was more open, more legible.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Angels. He went to such lengths to make it look like the painting. It was as if it was more than a simple killing. Something symbolic. But here, it’s just a killing. Deliberate. It’s different somehow. I don’t know how, but it’s different.’
He thought about it. ‘There was time with the Angels. He had no time here.’
She couldn’t argue with him. ‘I understand that.’
‘It’s the same person. It has to be. No one could copy-cat to that kind of detail.’
‘You’re right.’
She said it in a way that meant, he knew, the opposite.
‘The ears,’ she murmured. ‘Quemada made a good point.’
‘Which was?’
‘What does he do with the other ones? Are they a trophy? As if he was a matador too? Or . . .’
That idea didn’t work for her, yet she was lost for any other explanation.
‘In the morning,’ said Menéndez, ‘I’d like you to visit Cristina Lucena and ask her – ask her outright – what happened in La Soledad. She may tell you. I know she will not tell me. I’ll send a car for you. The driver will wait outside the hospital.’
‘I’m a civilian. Anything she tells me is meaningless in law. You have to come too.’
‘That would be pointless. If she’s going to talk, she’ll talk to a woman, and not a policewoman at that. Besides . . . there are other things to do.’
One of the detectives returned with a note. ‘That ID’s no good, Lieutenant. Reported stolen two months ago. Belongs to some bus driver. It’s in the book. We checked with his neighbours. He’s on holiday with his wife and kids in Mallorca.’
Torrillo grunted. Menéndez left and they followed him.
Outside, the night was warm and humid. They walked ou
t of the square with its three iron crosses, leaving the subdued, gawking crowd behind.
‘Lieutenant?’
He opened the car door for her.
‘I want you to know that I won’t put down any of these details in my report. It’s not my job to pass judgement on this investigation.’
‘I told you. I take responsibility for what happens when I’m in charge. I’ll tell the captain the same thing. You should write what you want. There’s nothing to hide here. I shall make everything clear in my own reports. Don’t feel you need protect me or Torrillo.’
She felt like pinching herself. ‘That’s not what I meant. I just wanted to say . . . that I don’t think you need blame yourself.’
‘Ask me tomorrow.’
Menéndez drove her home in silence, walked her to the door of the house, watched as she went in and waited until he heard the door bolted. She went straight upstairs, rifled through the bookcases in the living room, chose five different titles, went to the bedroom and threw them on the bed. She took off her jacket and let it fall on the bed, then picked up the first book. It was called The Mask of Sanity.
SIXTEEN
The man wore a Zapata moustache and a red satin dress cut just above the knee. He was way overweight in the kind of way that thin people become overweight when they can’t stop themselves. Hairy, tanned legs poked out of the bottom of the dress and ended in brown patent-leather shoes. He was about forty years old and smoked a cigar that emitted bursts of acrid smoke every time he puffed on it. In the little room in the downtrodden corner of the city where the sex shops operated behind blacked-out windows the atmosphere reeked of tobacco, sweat and amyl nitrate.
Quemada and Velasco looked at their interviewee, then looked at each other. They were not happy.
‘I’m a businessman. That’s all. You got no need to hassle me. I know my rights.’
The trouble was, when they tried to imagine Felipe Ordóñez without the dress, he looked exactly like someone who did know his rights. A lawyer, a civil servant, someone from the bus company.
‘No one’s trying to hassle you, Señor Ordóñez.’ Velasco tried to make his voice sound as reasonable as he could. He thought he was doing quite well, all things taken into consideration. Velasco felt like shit. His sinuses were starting to congeal into some kind of mucous mess. The weather was making them worse. Inwardly he had a growing conviction that he had hay fever, Chinese flu and typhus coming on simultaneously. His face was a sickly parchment colour, the colour of the old books he liked to peer at in the museum when he wanted to waste a couple of hours’ duty on a dead day. And all the outside world could see was someone sniffing. He sweated inside his polyester suit, feeling more uncomfortable by the minute, and tried very hard to be as reasonable as he could.
‘We’re not here to interview you about what you do. We’re just trying to get some information on people you might know. People who have met with some very unfortunate happenings, that’s all.’
‘I’m a businessman. This is all legit. You go down the companies office, look at the forms. I pay taxes, more than you do probably.’
‘We’re not arguing with you, sir,’ said Quemada, staring at the pictures on the wall. They were of young men in a variety of poses: wearing jock straps, reclining on a beach, pouting for the camera. He didn’t like looking at them, but he liked looking at Felipe Ordóñez even less. It was the frock that did it. ‘All we’re trying to do is find out if you fixed up a date for these two people who got killed. There’s nothing personal here. We’re talking to everyone in your line of business. Nothing specific. We’d just like you to cooperate.’
Ordóñez looked as if he was trying to make his face match the colour of the dress. He was getting angry.
‘I do not – Jesus, the ignominy of it! – I do not fix dates.’
Quemada picked up a colour brochure on the desk. It bore the name and address of the office they were in. The cover was a photograph showing a group of young men on the beach. They were tanned, lithe, muscular, grinning for the camera. Underneath it said, ‘Abraxas Introductions: Select Partners for Select Males’.
He waved around the brochure and asked, ‘So what you do for these guys then? Sell them tickets to the opera? Rounds of golf? I mean. What are we talking about here? Charity work?’
Ordóñez put down the cigar. A little tic appeared above his right eye and the man prodded at it with a fat forefinger. Quemada and Velasco looked at each other. This was someone who had been rousted before and didn’t like it. This was someone they could bend.
When Ordóñez finished poking at his eye and had got the tic a little under control he said, ‘I run a contacts agency. You know what that means?’
‘Do we look stupid?’ asked Quemada.
‘Jesus!’ Ordóñez sat down hard on a metal-framed office chair behind the desk. ‘Why can’t you leave us alone? Why do I get this two, three times a month? Is it money you want?’
Quemada looked him in the face and said, ‘You’re offering us money? I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that, ’cos if I did we’d be taking you down now. What I want you to do, Señor Ordóñez, is listen to what we’ve been saying to you. We’re not interested in what you do here. We don’t care if you’ve got chicken, goats, sheep on your books. We’re just interested in who’s been seeing the Angel Brothers. Tell us that and we’re gone, and believe me that can’t happen a moment too soon for us, either.’
‘I never supplied any names to the Angel Brothers.’
They didn’t say anything for a while and watched him sweat.
Finally Quemada waved the brochure at him again. ‘You’re the second biggest gay agency in town, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And there’s only three of you agencies operating, like, legit. Right?’
‘Yes. But a lot of people don’t use agencies. Look at the personal ads in the papers. Plenty of business there.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe that’s the case. But we’ve been to see both your rivals and we’ve seen their books. They didn’t give us all this shit. We know the Angel Brothers didn’t use them, or if they did, they didn’t keep any record at all of it.’
‘Which we think is unlikely,’ added Velasco, ‘seeing as how some of the names on the books they did show us in the end could have filled the front page of El Diario for several weeks on end. So we figure it most unlikely they kept a separate, private list, for people like the Angels who didn’t make any secret about which way they buttoned their pants.’
‘Which suggests,’ Quemada went on, ‘that if the other two guys say they never spoke to the Angel Brothers, then maybe they spoke to you. Or maybe they didn’t. Either way, we’d just like to know and – excuse us if it seems rude – we’d like you to prove it when you say you never gave them any names. There’s a nice little personal computer over there. You got no big filing cabinets. My guess is all you got to do is sit there, call up some program or something, then type in the word “Angel” and just show us something don’t come up.’
‘Yeah,’ said Velasco. ‘That would do it.’
The man in the dress shot a glance at them, then at the computer. He stayed put in the chair and rolled it over on its wheels to the side of the desk where the PC sat. The move had the familiar, easy casualness of a secretary working her way around the office. Quemada shook his head. Ordóñez didn’t spend his time oiling the bodies of suntanned youths, like the brochure promised. He punched keys on an office PC like any secretarial temp.
Ordóñez rolled the mouse around to bring the screen to life. When it did he pointed at a little folder, opened it, clicked. The computer paused for a moment, then the window changed and a form came on the screen that looked like an address book. There were spaces for first and last names, addresses, a postal code, telephone number, fax number.
‘There. You want to try for yourself, Officers?’ Ordóñez glowered at them. He was moist around the eyes.
‘Naw,’ said Quemada. ‘You type it
in.’
Ordóñez’s fingers flashed over the keys with the speed of a touch typist. The word ‘Angel’ appeared in the name field.
‘OK?’
‘OK,’ said Quemada.
He slapped the return key, the PC whirred for a moment, then the message ‘Name not found’ appeared in the centre of the screen.
‘Satisfied?’ said Ordóñez, not looking at them.
‘Señor Ordóñez,’ said Velasco.
The man continued to play with the PC, pushing the mouse around, closing windows.
‘Señ or Ordó ñez, will you look at me, for God’s sake?’
Velasco could feel his throat going as the volume rose and a broad, dull line of pain was starting to make its way from one temple to the other.
Ordóñez brushed his eyes with his sleeve and turned to them.
‘Do I look as if I have shit between my ears? Huh?’
Velasco pushed him out of the way and started to run the mouse around the desk.
‘Huh? My kid has this stuff at home. Sometimes I use it too. Do I look like I’m stupid? You resent the fact we look at you thinking: Who’s this weirdo in the red dress? Let me tell you something. I resent the fact that I come through the door and you think: Here’s some cop, must have shit between the ears. Look. Look here. This is what I’m talking about.’
Velasco had leaned over, quit the application Ordóñez had opened, gone to another folder on the desktop, opened that and was looking at an icon named ‘Customer Database’.
‘What you were showing us, that was just some shit you use to keep names and addresses, case you want to write letters or something. If you want to run a business you don’t use this crap. You want to record times and places and money. You know that word, Señor Ordóñez? Money. Stuff you get from people you call “customers”. Like this.’
He double-clicked on the icon, the computer clicked and whirred, a new application started. Some text appeared on the screen with the instruction ‘Type password’.
