‘Wow – beautiful!’ I exclaimed ‘Where’d you find them?’
‘An abandoned lot just down the street from the hospital. Two old men were living there, in a makeshift hut, but they gave me permission to pick them.’
When he held them under my nose, I took a luxurious sniff.
‘Ana just called me to say that things are good again between you,’ he said in a pleased voice.
‘Yeah, thanks for helping.’
After he’d hunted down a vase – blue glass – and put the flowers on my night table, and while he was washing his hands in the sink in my room, I gave him a rundown of all my misgivings about seeing a therapist. Saving the worst for last, I said, ‘I’ll never solve another case without Gabriel.’
‘Who said he’s got to disappear?’
‘Ernie, any therapist I have is going to want to make me normal.’
He laughed. ‘Hank, I hate to break this to you,’ he said, still giggling, ‘but you shouldn’t hold out much hope of reaching the planet Normal. It’s in a distant galaxy, and no one in our family has actually ever caught a glimpse of it.’ He sat on the end of my bed and looked at me purposefully. ‘My guess is that your therapist is going to want you to integrate G.’
‘Jesus, Ernie, what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I asked.
He picked up one of my mangoes and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’m not entirely sure, but Darth Vader used to talk about integração all the time. I think it’s a way of accepting even the strangest things about yourself.’
When Ernie was in high school, we nicknamed his psychiatrist Darth Vader because he had a bass voice and absolutely no sense of humour.
‘Look,’ he said, as though I was being unnecessarily difficult, ‘you just have to tell your therapist what you want and what you don’t want.’
‘Could I do that?’
‘You’re supposed to do that, you moron!’
While I was trying to figure out if he was telling me the truth, Luci called.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she told me, ‘Coutinho’s flash drive isn’t where you said it would be.’
‘It’s not in my file of the robbery in Estoril?’
‘No. I took everything out to check. I also looked through the other pending cases.’
‘Shit!’ I threw off my covers.
‘Who could have taken it?’ Luci asked.
‘One of our dear colleagues!’ I said angrily. ‘Who else has access to my files?’
‘Stealing evidence would get an officer fired, wouldn’t it?’ she asked.
‘I’d have thought so – at least, until recently,’ I said.
‘This case has changed your mind?’
‘If the cop were well connected, or important to someone in the government . . .’ I let the rest of my implication go unspoken.
‘Still, it has to be a cop willing to risk an internal investigation – maybe someone who wanted to hush up a bribe he took from Coutinho. Or that a good friend of his took. Or is my way of thinking crazy, sir?’
‘No, it’s not crazy. But the thing is, a cop could probably go on leading a pretty good life after a bribery charge, but it would ruin him forever if he were accused of statutory rape.’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘I think there might have been incriminating photos on the flash drive. Or, more to the point, whoever took it out of my files has been worried that that’s what it contained.’
‘What kind of incriminating photos?’
‘Of Coutinho with young girls. And with friends of his. Maria Dias led me to believe he got off on looking at himself in a mirror while having sex. And when he was still married to her mother, she found an incriminating photo of him. I get the feeling he used his camera a lot.’
‘So a colleague of ours is protecting Coutinho’s reputation?’
‘More likely he’s protecting the reputation of someone who’s still alive – someone who’d have to get out of the country in a hurry if the pictures were made public.’
‘But you found only vacation photos on the flash drive, and a list of possible bribes.’
‘I must have missed a hidden file. Damn it! I should have had Joaquim go through it. Though, like I said, it may be that whoever had it stolen isn’t sure what’s on it and wanted to play it safe.’
‘So what do we do now, sir?’
I didn’t reply. I was thinking about how Sottomayor had mentioned to me that Coutinho had made bank transfers from his wife’s account. So it seemed possible that he might have also sent emails about his sexual escapades from her computer, as well – and just possibly with some damaging photos as attachments. Whoever received them might even have been in the photos – and been warned by Coutinho where to find his flash drive in an emergency.
I told Luci that I needed to speak to Susana Coutinho and would call her back. On the ninth ring, Morel picked up. He asked right away about my health, which touched me, but underneath everything I said to him about myself sat the heavy dread of knowing that I couldn’t put off any longer telling him about Sandi being molested by her father. ‘Have any of my colleagues called to tell you about the evidence we turned up on Sandi and her father?’ I began.
‘No, all we are told is that you are shot.’
When I gave him the news, he said in an incensed voice that Coutinho could never have hurt his daughter – and that it was unethical for me to denigrate such a good and caring father after his death.
‘Our techs did the test twice to make sure the blood under Sandi’s fingernails was her father’s,’ I replied. ‘Sandi tried to fight him off at your house and failed. Coutinho raped his daughter at your house. And what happened there explains everything she did after Easter, too – why she chopped her hair off, why she started starving herself . . . It even explains why Coutinho was so keen on not separating from Susana.’
‘If what you say is true, then she—’
‘It is true!’ I interrupted. ‘And Sandi couldn’t live with what had happened.’
I decided not to tell him that Sandi had been pregnant. The shock of that might set him against me, I thought. Or maybe I just hadn’t the will to destroy the little that was left of the life he and Susana had tried to make together. When I asked him if he’d tell her about Sandi being molested, he said, ‘I’ll have to. Though I don’t know if she’ll understand what I’m saying.’ He explained that Susana was still being tranquillized by her doctor.
‘Do you think she might be able to talk with me for a minute?’ I asked. ‘I have a less disturbing subject I need to discuss with her.’
‘She wouldn’t make any sense at all,’ he said morosely.
‘Okay, just tell me if she owns a computer.’
‘No, she hates them.’
‘Does she have some kind of other device from which she sends emails? Or on which another person might have stored some files without her knowing it? An iPad, for instance.’
‘No, she owns nothing like that.’
‘I find it hard to believe she never uses a computer.’
‘She uses Sandi’s portable when she needs a computer.’
‘Her laptop?’
‘That’s right.’
After hanging up, I asked Ernie to help me sit up, but as he guided my leg over the sheet, the pain made me shudder.
‘I think you ought to just lie back,’ my brother said.
‘For fuck’s sake, Ernie, just help me do what I need to do!’
Once I was seated on the edge of the bed, I called Luci back and told her to rush over to the evidence room used by our computer techs.
‘Good news!’ she told me on calling me back. ‘Joaquim has Sandi’s computer.’
She passed the phone to him. ‘Listen, Monroe, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to look through the girl’s files yet, but with you out it didn’t seem like a rush. The good news is I’m done with her dad’s computer. But there was nothing I could find on it about bribes.’
‘Do you have the girl’s l
aptop with you now?’
‘It’s right in front of me.’
‘Turn it on. I first want you to look for a file of photos. It’s probably deeply hidden. To open it, you might even need a password.’
‘What kind of photos am I looking for?’ he asked.
‘Old men with teenaged girls.’
‘What are they doing in these photos?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘Everything you wouldn’t want them to be doing.’
‘You can’t really think that a fourteen-year-old kept porn photos on her computer.’
‘I think her father hid them there. Safest place in the world. No one would ever look on her laptop. No one would even suspect – not even Sandi.’
‘It might take a while to locate them.’
‘Joaquim, you need to find them right now. With me out of action, this case is going to get so fucking lost it will never be found again.’
‘I’ll do my best, though . . . oh, shit!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Just a second . . .’ After maybe a minute, Joaquim came back on the line. ‘We have a problem, Monroe. I need you to hang on a little while longer.’
As I counted the seconds passing, Joaquim let go with a string of curses. ‘We’re screwed!’ he told me when he got back on the line. ‘The hard disk must have crashed!’
‘Just now?’
‘No. Somebody must have crashed it on purpose sometime after it was brought here.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t already blank when it reached you?’
‘I’m positive. I opened it to take a quick look. And now everything is gone.’
‘Is crashing a disk easy to do?’
‘Monroe, everything on a computer is easy to do if you know how to do it!’
‘Are you absolutely sure all the files are gone?’
‘That’s what I was checking. There’s nothing left. Whoever did this fucked us good, Monroe.’
‘Where did you keep the computer?’
‘In my office.’
‘Under lock and key?’
‘No, in that cabinet I have – you’ve seen it.’
‘Joaquim, have the laptop dusted for fingerprints – every last key – and then call me back with the results.’
Ana arrived with the kids a few minutes later. Jorge skipped over to me and showed me the drawing he’d made of a loose-limbed stick figure with blue scratches for eyes (me) inside a giant yellow square (the hospital), with pink pterodactyls guarding the roof (seagulls). I gave him kisses of praise and tried in vain to stop thinking about Sandi’s laptop. He and Nati then set up the fold-up table covered with green felt that my in-laws had lent them. Ernie fetched more chairs. Once seated, my boys started on their jigsaw puzzle of the island of Manhattan as seen from space.
Watching them, I thought, This is why I survived; this is what my life is about; this is what I will remember when I’m old. And yet hopelessness pursued me all morning. Near noon, Joaquim called to tell me that the only fingerprints he’d discovered belonged to Sandi and her parents. From the position of her father’s prints, it appeared that he had carried her laptop with him on more than one occasion.
‘I’m really sorry, Monroe,’ he said. ‘I screwed up, didn’t I?’
‘It’s not your fault. Whoever wanted to keep us from discovering the photos would have had his police accomplice smash any lock you’d used.’
Fonseca, Sudoku and Quintela visited late that afternoon. Ernie and Ana took the kids for a walk to give them a chance to talk with me. To divert us from my debilitated state, we ended up making fun of the politicians in our government.
My colleagues concentrated the full force of their ridicule on the deputy prime minister; the news had just come out that he’d earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations at Lisbon’s Lusófona University in only one year instead of the usual three. He’d taken only four courses instead of the usual thirty-six. University administrators – some of them friends and colleagues in his political party – gave him credit for ‘life experience’ in thirty-two classes.
We ended up making a list of life experiences and courses for which he’d been given equivalencies:
For eating Chinese food on two occasions at the Mandarim Restaurant in the Estoril Casino, he had received credit for Asian history and culture.
For seeing the DVD of Avatar with his nephews, he’d passed both Game Theory and Computer Science.
For driving to work at the National Assembly in his Mercedes CLS . . .
Stepping back from our banter for a moment, I realized I’d have preferred a minute of silence – from everyone in Portugal – as a form of protest against the kind of corruption and influence-peddling that had brought him to power. Or a candlelit march down the Avenida da Liberdade – a funeral ceremony for the small but hopeful democracy we’d thought that Portugal would one day become.
And I realized, too, that our filtering system was badly broken: instead of weeding out the most unscrupulous people, our political system allowed them to rise to the top.
Just before my colleagues left, I asked them to keep watch over Luci for me and let me know if she was having trouble with Romão. Once I was alone again, I began to wonder if the person who had had me shot was another of the provincial go-getters in fancy suits who now ran our country. And if he lived so high up that I’d never be able to bring him down.
That evening, after my family went home, a surprising guest appeared in my doorway. It was after visiting hours, almost nine p.m., but he told me that he’d been able to get past the ‘guard dogs’ at reception because he was good friends with the Director of Surgery, who often played golf with him and the head of the Bank of Portugal at the . . .
Sottomayor proved himself a terrible namedropper that evening, but I didn’t mind. It seemed just one more of his aristocratic flourishes – the verbal equivalent of the red and yellow paisley cravat tied so elegantly around his neck.
He’d brought along an assortment of Godiva truffles the size of a Monopoly box. ‘We should make sure to eat extra sugar and fat when we are feeling vulnerable,’ he said, which was so opposite the advice I’d received from Ana and Ernie that I had a good laugh.
After opening the box, he tilted it to show me the impressive selection.
‘Take one,’ I encouraged.
‘Dare I?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows like a rogue.
When I nodded, he popped a dark one in his mouth. He chewed with a side-to-side motion, like a sheep. Feigning a swoon, he said, ‘I lucked out, it’s whisky-flavoured!’
He put the rest of the box on my night table and sat down in the chair by my bed. He scratched his chin and shrugged as though lost for a purpose, so I told him that hospitals were a bore and that he was under no obligation to stay. To my surprise, he wagged a finger at me and said in a concerned tone, ‘I absolutely insist that you be more careful with yourself! You gave us all quite a scare.’
It was comforting to hear his worry on my behalf, though I didn’t entirely believe it. It was as though we both agreed to participate in a harmless little farce intended to make us feel that the world still valued consideration and good manners. A man who lived in the tower was being kind to one of the little people. No one could blame him for such an act of generosity, not even me.
‘I’ll do my best to stay away from bullets from now on,’ I told him.
‘And I don’t want you going to the Cayman Islands or anywhere else that’s far from home. I retract my offer to pay your airfare.’
‘Duly noted.’
‘How long are you going to be out of commission?’
‘A few months. I’ll need physical therapy after I leave – I’m told I may have a limp for quite some time, maybe forever. I’ve got muscle damage, and my anklebone may never be quite as reliable as it used to be.’
He grimaced. ‘I find that there’s an atmosphere of predatory violence on the streets of Lisbon these days,’ he said. ‘Hav
e you been to the Rossio at night of late? The young men walking around there look as if they’d slit your throat for fifty cents.’
I told him that our most recent statistics indicated that our murder rate had fallen over the past year, and that he was probably reacting to the obsession of television news reporters with violent crime, but he waved off my recitation of the figures and told me, ‘I have something more important to tell you. In fact, that’s why I’ve come.’
Leaning back and crossing his legs, he told me about an operation he’d had for skin cancer in Zurich seven years earlier. On regaining consciousness after the procedure, he’d taken one look around at the sixteen vases of roses and chrysanthemums in his room – ‘My rather-too-easily impressed eldest son had counted them for me!’ – and realized he was stuck in a life he hated. ‘The day I was discharged from the hospital,’ he continued, ‘I told my wife I wanted a divorce and I moved into my office. We’d been married twenty-eight years, Chief Inspector. And though these past seven years without her have been the happiest of my life, I know now that I needn’t have bothered separating from her.’
He eyed me in a way that made it clear he wanted me to ask why, which – ever eager to please my visitors – I did. To my surprise, I found it pleasant and comforting to do what he wanted – like having a good role in an entertaining play.
‘I needn’t have bothered, because my darling wife had fallen out of love with me years earlier,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t give a damn if I slept around. But people can be perverse animals, so when I asked for a divorce, she swore to me that she’d make my life a misery. She ended up taking me for quite a bit more than the half of everything she might have been entitled do. And she told all our friends that I’d abused her emotionally. I wasn’t sure what that even meant, but our friends were. Many of them have never spoken to me again, and, additionally, I had to listen to the insufferable lectures of my two lamentably moralistic children. Still, her lies cost her badly,’ he added, smiling mischievously, as though he were a little boy who’d got away with murder. ‘I kept her in the courts for nearly four years. She ended up going through hell!’
My expression must have given away what I was thinking. Pointing his cane at me, he said, ‘You’d have thought I was Colonel Gaddafi from the way she described me to the judge. It was shameful!’ Lowering his cane, he took a calming breath and said in a contrite voice, ‘Though you’re quite right, I should have behaved more nobly. In any case, what I mean to say is, don’t make any big decisions until you’ve been out of the hospital for at least a couple of months. Give yourself time. Relax. Forget about the important issues in life. Don’t concern yourself with who’s winning and who’s losing in this sad little country of ours. There are obviously some very dangerous and violent men out there who don’t mind hurting good police officers like you. So enjoy your kids. Fly to Madeira and work on your tan. Let your colleagues deal with the bad guys.’
The Night Watchman Page 36
