‘How long were the calls to Sanderson?’ I asked.
‘Close to six minutes on the first, and a little more than two on the second.’
‘Her name rings a bell,’ I said.
‘She married into one of the Port wine families. I’m told she gets herself into those god-awful gossip magazines on occasion, just like our dead man.’
‘What else have you found out about her?’
‘So far, all I’ve got is that she was designing a housing project that Coutinho was building along the Sado Estuary.’
‘Isn’t that protected land?’ I questioned.
‘Some of it is – there’s part of it that’s in the Sado Estuary National Reserve.’
‘Do you know if Coutinho’s development is inside the reserve?’
‘No, but wouldn’t that be against the law?’
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘so get a map of its boundaries and another one indicating exactly where the housing project is. Did you get the address of Sanderson’s office, by any chance?’
‘Yeah, it’s here in my notes somewhere.’
He read it to me. It was on the Rua Alexandre Herculano. She could have walked to the Rua do Vale from her office in less than half an hour.
I phoned Sanderson from the porch. As soon as I introduced myself, she said she’d been expecting to hear from the police. Hearing my accent, she switched to English. She told me that she’d done all her schooling in London.
‘So you read about the murder?’ I asked.
‘Yes, this morning. I figured that sooner or later you’d get around to Pedro’s business associates.’
‘Is that all you were to him?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said in an affronted tone.
‘Excuse me for being direct, but were you sleeping with him?’
‘Inspector, I don’t sleep with married men. I made that mistake once when I was young and stupid, and I swore I’d never make it again.’
‘So what did you and the deceased speak about in your last calls?’
‘Fountains.’
‘What kind of fountains?’
‘Decorative ones – for the grounds of the housing project. He told me that wealthy people think they’re classy. Which is true, except that they’re usually too cheap to keep them running properly. Between you and me, it often seems as if people build beautiful things just so they can let them fall apart. Anyway, Pedro and I quarrelled.’
‘Who won?’
‘Here’s a clue – he pays the bills. But I talked him down from four to two.’
‘So is this housing development inside the National Reserve?’
She replied with silence.
‘I’m going to find out sooner or later, so you might as well tell me.’
‘We’ve added an access road that’s just inside the park,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘That’s it?’
‘And a very small shopping centre.’
I laughed because she said ‘very small’, as if that kept her crime well within the bounds of good taste.
‘Listen, Inspector,’ she said as if I’d offended her, ‘the marshland there had already been compromised by a factory that closed years ago and that was falling apart!’
‘You can explain all that in court,’ I told her.
‘I assure you we obtained all the necessary approvals.’
‘You didn’t get mine!’
‘I’m pretty certain we didn’t need it, Inspector.’
Her condescending retort lit a flare in my chest. ‘Let me explain how a democracy works,’ I said acidly. ‘My taxes pay for the upkeep of public lands. Every foot of every reserve and park in Portugal belongs to me and my wife and every other citizen of this country!’
‘Maybe that line of reasoning makes sense in America, but nothing is going to stop the project here. Pedro has already put in the foundations.’
‘Who signed off on it?’
‘Pedro dealt with the signatures.’
I changed the subject to keep from giving her another angry lecture. She claimed she didn’t know Coutinho well and had never met him outside his office. She’d never spoken to his wife or daughter. She agreed to messenger over the plans for the housing development to my office first thing on Monday morning. Her frustrated and bored tone, which was meant to convince me I was wasting my time, only convinced me I wasn’t.
I called Luci next. She said that Jean Morel seemed genuinely shaken by Coutinho’s murder. He claimed to have never held a gun in his life, and she believed him.
‘What size shoe does he wear?’ I asked.
‘Forty-one. I made him take one of them off and show me, just to be sure.’
Luci added that Morel hadn’t any idea who’d been sleeping with his old friend. He’d spotted no women’s clothing on his last visit to the victim’s house, and he knew nothing about any enemies Pedro Coutinho might have made when he lived in Japan. Coutinho had never spoken to him about anyone named Diana.
Reading carefully from her notes, Luci told me that Morel had identified the painting missing from the living room as a small, unsigned, nineteenth-century portrait of an aristocratic young woman that Coutinho had found in an antique shop in New York City about a year earlier. He said that his friend had fallen in love with the portrait at first sight and bought it on the spot. He wasn’t sure if Sandi had been with her father when he’d purchased it. As for the Almeida drawing, it had been hanging in Coutinho’s library, which meant that I could now be sure that the killer had taken the time to go upstairs.
Had the killer known about the nineteenth-century portrait beforehand and intended to steal it all along? If so, then he’d probably been to the house before.
After Luci had finished reading me her notes, I called Senhora Coutinho. Her cold was worse. In a constricted whisper, she told me that Pedro had never discussed anyone named Diana with her.
She didn’t remember any details about the woman in the portrait that Morel had identified and hadn’t any idea why anyone would steal an anonymous painting.
‘How about Maria Teresa Sanderson?’ I asked. ‘Ever hear of her?’
‘No.’
‘Then tell me about Fernanda Aleixo,’ I said.
‘Christ, you really are lost, aren’t you?’ she said, as though she were losing hope in me. ‘Fernanda is in her fifties, and shaped like a beefsteak tomato, and the woman you’re looking for is younger and cuter than I am, Monroe. Or haven’t you even figured out yet what gets ageing Portuguese men singing in the shower?’
That evening, Jorge had two helpings of our beet and basil risotto, but Nati picked over his food as if I’d poisoned it. Every time I tried speaking to him, he gave me a withering look. Still, at bedtime, he allowed me to wish him goodnight without turning away or groaning. Or pressing delete on me. A minor triumph.
I awoke once in the night needing to pee and discovered the taste of chocolate in my mouth. A sheet of paper was folded in two on my belly. I tiptoed out to the porch and pulled the cord of the Chinese lantern hanging from the ceiling.
Opening the paper, I discovered it had been printed with one of the photographs from Coutinho’s vacation in Phuket over Christmas of 2011: at the left was a crescent-shaped beach bordered by slender palms; at the right, a turquoise sea with a sailboat in the distance. A circle had been drawn in green ink around a bright patch of sky. Inside it were several lines of minute writing, too small to read. The writing seemed to be in the photo itself.
Turning over my hand, I read: H – The tiny red lights ended up giving the game away.
I found my laptop still open on Ernie’s desk. An Arcadia chocolate bar wrapper was scrunched into a ball by the keyboard. Carrying the computer outside, I opened the Phuket file and found the picture G had printed out. It was the nineteenth in the series, and a tight cluster of minute red sparks showed up in the area that he’d circled on the photo. On zooming in a thousand per cent, the lights became a string of numbers, as well as va
lues in euros and dates. The first line read: 8 2 12 5 10 14 6 1 10 10 4 6 11 2 6 – ten thousand euros – June 1. There were twelve such lines.
If they were payoffs – as I guessed – then the numbers were probably coded names.
I opened the file of pictures taken a year before, during Christmas of 2010, when Coutinho and his family had vacationed in London. The nineteenth photo showed Sandi standing outside a clothing shop, shading her eyes from the sun. Above her left shoulder floated a similar cluster of sparks. When enlarged, the list indicated values ranging from four thousand euros up to twenty-two thousand.
On hearing footsteps, I turned around. Ernie pushed open the screen door and shuffled out to me. ‘Hey there, what’s up?’ he asked sleepily.
‘Just finishing some homework.’
‘You sound cheerful.’
‘I think I found what I was looking for.’
Rosie pushed out on the screen door with her nose and padded out to us. She dropped down by my feet with a snuffling sigh.
‘Just lock the door securely behind you when you go to bed,’ my brother told me, and he kissed the top of my head before going back inside. Rosie stayed. She was already snoring softly.
The earliest vacation in the folder was 2000. If I was right, I’d just found Coutinho’s register of bribes for the last twelve years. I’d have to contact a specialist to work on decoding the names.
A few minutes later, while I was checking the list for 2008, the screen door opened again and Nati zombie-walked out in his T-shirt and boxers. ‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Great. Listen, I’ve got a question – how would you paste tiny writing onto a photograph?’
‘You got top secret information you want to conceal?’
‘Not me, the vic.’
He yawned and scratched under his arm. Rosie stepped to him and looked up with a pleading face. As he picked her up, he said, ‘You copy any text you want, outline the area on the photo where you’d like the text to go and then paste it down. How could you not know these things?’
‘I was born eons ago, Nati. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth.’
He waved goodbye.
‘Wait a minute,’ I pleaded in a whisper. ‘Why were you angry at me?’
He turned, unsure of what to say. ‘You didn’t listen to anything I said in the car driving over here.’
‘That’s not true. I remember all about your food fight in the school lunchroom, and the girl who fell asleep and started snoring in your mathematics class, and—’
‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘you hear half of what I say and then you say something you think is amusing. It’s not the same thing as listening.’
‘All right, I’m listening now,’ I replied.
He sat down beside me and told me he was worried about his project on bossa nova music. He’d become muddled in unfamiliar chords and harmonies. He had only until Friday to complete it and every minute away from home was putting him in danger of failing. He had started to panic on the drive here.
Everything has been a potential disaster for this boy since he was five years old, I thought, and I assured him that I knew – by heart – every album recorded by João Gilberto from 1959 till 1977. ‘Son, you’re looking at a true bossa nova expert!’
He didn’t look convinced, so I sang the first bars of ‘Corcovado’ to him softly.
‘Sounds pretty good,’ he said, fighting a smile, not quite ready to give up his anxieties.
I told I’d start helping him the next day, and though he didn’t fall into my arms, as I’d hoped he would, he at least let me walk him back to bed. Once he was tucked in, I stroked his hair so he’d fall asleep knowing I was beside him in my thoughts, but I wasn’t. I was wondering what might have caused Sandi Coutinho to cut herself with her knife – at night, when she was alone. And if Ernie still did.
Chapter 14
I awoke cradling my pillow over my eyes. Sitting up into the soft, slanting light of dawn, I spotted Jorge asleep in my brother’s bed. The two of them had kicked off the sheets. Ernie had spooned up behind my son, his nose buried in the little boy’s soft brown hair, his big, coarse hand curled around his waist. Jorge’s arm hung over the side of the bed, reaching toward Rosie, who was snoring away on her little red rug, her head on her forepaws. The boy was wearing his beloved Tweety Bird pyjamas – big-hearted canaries paddling rowboats across cottony clouds. Ernie was naked except for the beaded Sioux headband he wore to keep his hair in place when the kids were around.
If I’d have become an artist like Ernie, this is what I’d paint,I thought.
Then, a hand seemed to whack me on the head from behind, and a moment later, I was kneeling before Jorge, who was sobbing. We were outside Ernie’s house. My son was naked, and his pyjamas were on the gravel beside him. Nati was pleading with me to stop terrifying his brother. Rosie was snarling at me and barking as if I’d walloped her.
I’d been moved through time and space.
Nati tugged hard on my arm. ‘You’re scaring him, Dad! Leave him alone!’
Standing up, I lifted Jorge into my arms and pressed my lips to his cheek, which was moist with tears. The dog scuttled around me, growling, baring her teeth.
‘Do something about Rosie before she bites me!’ I told Nati.
He snatched her up. As Jorge’s weeping eased, I asked Nati what had happened.
‘You don’t know?’ His face was drawn and hopeless. Rosie wriggled in his arms.
‘No, just tell me.’
‘You grabbed Dingo and you started hollering at him, asking him to tell you what your brother had done to him, and he started crying. You ran outside with him in your arms, and stripped off his pyjamas and examined him all over, and . . .’ Nati, breathless, lost the trail of his words.
‘Okay, I get it,’ I told him. ‘Now, tell me where your uncle is.’
‘In the house.’
The front door was ajar. To Jorge, I said, ‘I’ll be right back. Nati will take care of you and get you dressed again.’
‘No!’ the little boy shouted through his tears. I handed him to my eldest son before my guilt could surround me completely.
Ernie was sitting on the floor between his bed and the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, hidden behind a rosebush. He’d blindfolded his eyes with his hands. He was naked. I closed the front door behind me to keep Rosie out.
‘Hank, don’t come near me!’ he yelled as I approached.
I knelt next to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I shouldn’t have let Jorge climb into my bed!’
Blood was seeping out under his hands and dripping to the floor.
I began hiccupping. It happened sometimes – an overflow of emotions. ‘You’ve hit your head,’ I said, and I started to lift him to his feet but he shoved me so hard I fell on my behind.
Ernie was trembling with rage. I didn’t dare touch him again.
Two men sit together, sensing that all they have – and will ever have – is each other. ‘I need to look at your cut,’ I whispered.
‘No, you might catch something from me!’ he warned.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I could have a bad disease. I could even have HIV.’
‘How could you have HIV?’ I felt the entire world turning around his reply.
‘I’ve been with women.’
‘What women? Where?’
‘In Évora.’
‘Prostitutes?’
He nodded.
‘Did you protect yourself?’
‘Of course, but that’s no guarantee.’
Time slowed to a halt. My body was heavy with the need to remain just where I was. We’d have to keep as still as possible – and not make any noise – if we were going to outlast everything that could go wrong.
Outside, Jorge had started sobbing again. My need to hold him made my hands ache. ‘Nati, bring your brother in here!’ I hollered.
Nati appeared in the doorway. ‘Dingo will be okay,’ he sa
id. ‘I know the drill.’ He spoke with an adult determination I’d never seen in him before. He must have studied how I calmed down his brother without my knowing.
‘Call me if you need help,’ I told him gratefully. ‘I’ll come right out.’
Ernie had started rocking back and forth. I prised his hands from his eyes, which flooded with tears as soon as he saw me, so that mine did, too.
With my brother, it has always been important for me to assume command at the right moment, so I took off my T-shirt, wrapped it around my hand and pressed down hard over his cut. My movements were quick and sure. I should have realized you don’t forget how to care for a wound.
‘Go away!’ Ernie snapped, and he pushed me hard again.
‘I don’t give a damn if I catch what you have!’ I yelled back, and I pressed the palm of my hand over his cut. Ernie shrank away and refused to speak, seeming to back into that closed space inside himself where no one could find him, so I took his blood on my fingertips and painted streaks across my cheek and down my neck onto my chest. ‘Look at me!’ I ordered him. ‘We’re in this together. We always have been and always will be.’
His eyes fluttered close and he went limp in my arms. He might have been six years old again.
‘Nothing is any good in my life unless you’re okay,’ I told him. ‘I wish it could be otherwise, but it can’t be. I’m sure it’s the same for you.’
Summoned back to me by the uncomfortable truth we tried never to voice, he reached out for my hand. Joining through our fingers meant that we had passed another test. At length, I said, ‘You might need a couple of stitches.’
‘I’m not going to the hospital. I’ll sew myself up if I have to.’
‘You don’t know how to do that.’
‘I do. I’ve done it before. You’ve done it before, too.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Still, you know how to do it.’
‘Did I make the gash?’ I asked.
‘No, I banged my head into the wall.’
‘Why?’
‘I saw the way you were inspecting Jorge.’ He showed me a sharp, resentful look.
The Night Watchman Page 18
