A Window in Copacabana

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  “Did he work or was he working on any case that could have left him open to a revenge killing?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Any declared enemies?”

  “I don’t think so. He was a nice guy; he had good relationships with his colleagues.”

  “Well, in any case, thank you. Don’t hesitate to call me if there’s anything you need.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Welber arrived forty minutes later.

  “Nobody knows anything, nobody saw anything, and the guy in charge of the park had never seen Silveira. You’d think he died of a heart attack and not a shot in the head. Some people even said he might have been a victim of a stray bullet.”

  “Maybe, but it strayed right into his head.”

  “Did you talk to the Third Precinct?”

  “I did. According to them, Silveira was an exemplary cop, friendly with all his colleagues. In my opinion, if he was so exemplary and beloved, he’s not being mourned very loudly. Up until now, nobody’s bothered to ask what happened.”

  “And what do you think happened?”

  “We could be dealing with two connected crimes: today’s and Ramos’s murder last week. They have some things in common. First, obviously, both victims were cops. Second, the way the murderer shot them: one fatal shot, no struggle, no confusion. Third, they were both killed in front of other people, which made no difference at all: Ramos was killed in front of his father, who has Alzheimer’s and can’t understand what is happening around him; Silveira was killed in plain view, but nobody saw anything. Same style, same murderer. It’s a good bet.”

  3

  It was a ten-minute walk from the station to his house. When he took the longer route, down the Avenida Copacabana, passing through the Galeria Menescal to pick up a snack, it took a few more minutes. He had the choice of three different cuisines, but his gastronomic options still felt limited: the Arabic place in the Galeria Menescal, the German takeout in the little frozen-foods store near his house, or the Italian, represented in his freezer by some spaghetti and lasagna. That afternoon, because he’d chosen the shorter route, it was going to have to be the spaghetti. He didn’t complain. When he wanted to eat well, he went to a restaurant.

  It was already after seven, it was still light out, and there were plenty of pedestrians on the street. He hadn’t walked more than two blocks before he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard his name. It took him a few seconds to recognize the face and remember the name of the detective, who had just been transferred to his precinct.

  “Nestor.”

  “I’m sorry if I surprised you, sir.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “I’m sorry to come after you on the street.”

  “No problem. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Officer. I mean, these murders, two colleagues, Ramos and Silveira …”

  “… and you’re scared.”

  “It’s not that I’m scared. I haven’t done anything to make anyone want to kill me.”

  “Did the two who died do anything?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but they must have, or it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “No need for us to stand here in the middle of the sidewalk. Walk me two blocks and tell me what’s worrying you.”

  “It’s not that I’m worried, Officer, but there’s a rumor going around that we haven’t seen the end of it…. Two guys have already died, and I think more people are going to get killed.”

  “Who says more people are going to get killed?”

  “Nobody in particular, just rumors—people are saying it on the phone.”

  “So you mean someone’s trying to spread the rumor, and it seems to be working.”

  They paused in front of a newspaper kiosk, and as he scanned the magazine covers, Espinosa tried to figure out why Nestor had approached him. The detective seemed to be reciting a text he’d already rehearsed. It wasn’t so much what he was saying but the fact that he’d approached Espinosa on the street; that was significant. Espinosa knew almost nothing about the detective, just what was recorded in his file. The man seemed to feel personally endangered, even though he was trying to act nonchalant. He wasn’t a very good actor. If he was, in fact, feeling threatened, he must know why the other two had died, but he obviously wasn’t going to blurt it out here and now. Espinosa paid for the two magazines he’d selected and resumed walking.

  “Why do you think the two murders are connected?”

  “I don’t think it, sir; I’m absolutely sure of it.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Officer, I’ve been on the force for almost twenty years. I know a hit when I see one.”

  “What do you know about the two cops who died?”

  “Almost nothing. I knew one of them by sight; we’d spoken on the phone once. The other one I’d seen around a couple of times when I was working on robberies.”

  “Did you make friends with either of them?”

  “Ramos and I worked at the same station for a while. We were colleagues, but I wouldn’t call him a friend.”

  “Did you ever see him afterward?”

  “No. After I was transferred I ran into him occasionally.”

  “Right. So you think they’re going to kill more cops?”

  “It’s what they’re saying. We have to find out who the nut is who’s doing this.”

  “Do you think the guy’s a nut?”

  “He’s got to be. Someone who goes around killing cops has got to be crazy.”

  “I’m not sure…. I think the murderer is too efficient and careful to be crazy.”

  “But you agree that we’ve got to find the guy as soon as possible?”

  “Of course. At least before my number comes up.”

  “Sir …”

  “Just kidding. I don’t think two murders is enough to draw any conclusions. It could just be a coincidence.”

  “Officer, I just want to say that I’m there for anything you need…. After all, they were our colleagues.”

  “Thanks, I know I can count on you.”

  “Good night, Chief.”

  “Good night, Nestor.”

  Espinosa was struck by how quickly day turned into night in the Rio de Janeiro summer. There was no transition; the director of the scene suddenly dropped the curtain. The phenomenon of dusk was so short-lived that it could be observed only at precisely the right time, on precisely the right beach. And the walk from the station to the Peixoto District wasn’t exactly the right beach. By the time he reached Peixoto, it had started getting dark. He crossed the square in the direction of his building.

  Despite its name, the Peixoto District wasn’t really a separate neighborhood but a rectangle, four hundred meters by two hundred, formed by two main streets and two small cross streets, with a square in the middle. As in a medieval city, the buildings formed a kind of protective wall separating it from the rest of Copacabana. Most of the buildings were only three or four stories high and dated from a time when there was no need for elevators or garages, only a certain taste for French windows opening onto little balconies. Espinosa’s apartment was on the third floor of one of these buildings, facing the square.

  He opened the living room blinds to let some air in, stuck the frozen pasta in the microwave, sat down on the sofa, looked out at the square, and awaited the three beeps signaling that his dinner was ready.

  An hour after he finished eating, he was still thinking about Nestor. What had he really been trying to say? Espinosa barely knew him, and the little that he’d seen in Nestor’s dossier was neither to his credit nor to his detriment.

  He dedicated the following two hours to examining a book that, along with a few hundred others, he’d inherited from his grandmother. Every once in a while his grandmother had felt the need to purge some of the thousands of books piled in two rooms of her apartment, and these were destined for the apartment of her grandson, who had also inherited her habit of stockpiling book
s. Their styles were different: hers were anarchic piles, his orderly stacks against the wall. They shared a disdain for shelving.

  He’d liked the book’s title, Phantom Lady, and admired its perfect condition, miraculously conserved since 1942. His knowledge of English was passable, better for reading than for conversation. He hadn’t recognized the author’s name, William Irish, until he’d learned somewhere else that William Irish was the pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich. He liked the title of the first chapter, “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution.” An author who began a book announcing that someone would be murdered within a hundred and fifty days, and whose following chapters built up to “A Day After the Execution,” was worth reading.

  The next morning, the rumor about the cop murderer had flown around the station, and was now a source of concern for Inspector Ramiro, chief of the detectives in the Twelfth Precinct.

  “Two murders don’t make a series,” Espinosa repeated to Ramiro.

  “I know, sir, but the guys are worried.”

  “There’s not even necessarily a connection.”

  “Sir, you know as well as I do that these murders are connected, and that more are on the way.”

  “Yesterday Nestor sought me out on the street. He thinks the same thing.”

  “Which Nestor, the one from this precinct?”

  “That’s right. He wanted to know what I thought about it, and he accosted me as I was walking home.”

  “Why didn’t he talk to you here at the station?”

  “Probably because he didn’t want people to know he was concerned.”

  “Approaching you on the street shows that he is.”

  “He offered his help in the investigation.”

  “Everyone wants to help.”

  “They must think it will protect them.”

  After the inspector left, Espinosa got out his notes on the two murders and listened to what he’d recorded on his little Dictaphone. Not much. In fact, almost nothing. At the scene of the first murder, no one could describe the person who’d come into the building pushing the wheelchair. A few witnesses had said the person was a female nurse; others, a male nurse. The witnesses said that they’d noticed the old man and the wheelchair but not the person accompanying them. Besides, they’d all agreed, the landlord never fixed the light bulbs in the hall.

  “We live in the dark—it’s surprising more people don’t get murdered—but I’m sure the person with them was a man,” the lady who’d ridden the elevator with the wheelchair declared.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because of his height. I was squished into the elevator in order to make room. Three people, besides the wheelchair with the man in it. It was easy to see that the nurse was a man.”

  “And can you tell us if he was black or white?”

  “Let me think…. He was black … black and big.”

  “Besides tall, as you already said.”

  “Well, maybe he wasn’t all that tall,” the lady answered.

  “And maybe not so black,” Espinosa completed.

  “Sir, people can get confused with the lights out in the building.”

  “But you’re sure it wasn’t a tall woman?”

  “Only if it was a very tall woman.”

  She hadn’t seen the nurse, male or female, leave the building. The possibility that someone could provide a description of the murderer was extremely remote. The only actual witness to the crime had Alzheimer’s. The cops who’d arrived on the scene first had found a card in a clear plastic envelope in the old man’s pocket. There was a contact name, address, and phone number. The phone number was the victim’s. The old man and the dead cop were father and son. The apartment was used for the policeman’s professional meetings, according to the doorman and the management.

  Welber had managed to learn that the detective and his father met once a week, always in the apartment. The old man liked to talk, but the stories he told and the people he discussed had no basis in reality. He didn’t recognize anyone and couldn’t remember names, and apparently he had no idea that the man he saw regularly was his son. He was a widower and lived in a building on the same block as his son. He was taken care of by visiting nurses—women generally—who stayed for twenty-four hours at a time.

  Welber also learned that on the afternoon of the murder, two hours before the end of the shift, the woman who’d accompanied the old man had been relieved early. She’d been very grateful for her colleague’s generosity.

  “Her colleague? Man or woman?” Espinosa asked.

  “Right…. Well, you know …”

  “Know what?”

  “Not so much of a man …”

  “Gay?”

  “You can usually tell, right?”

  “But aren’t all the nurses women?”

  “No, not at all, there are men and women … and lots of homosexuals. Some clients prefer them because they’re as strong as men and as gentle as women.”

  Welber had asked the woman, “What does he look like?”

  “He’s got blond, shoulder-length hair, a blond mustache, big thick glasses, light eyes, green or blue…. Taller than I am, and I think he’s got a little beer belly…. A little bucktoothed, so he talks a little funny. But a lot of queers tend to talk like that, right?”

  “You didn’t know that he was going to replace you?”

  “We don’t always know. I don’t think I know half the people who work there. The agency has a lot of turnover.”

  The nursing service knew no one by that description.

  The second crime had been committed even more out in the open than the first, yet no one could provide the slightest detail about the murderer. In both cases, maximum visibility meant maximum blindness. The forensic people hadn’t turned up anything at either scene.

  The information relating to the second murder shared one detail with the first: both victims were mediocre policemen who hadn’t stood out in any way. Their dossiers might as well have been blank, even though they had been on the force for years. They’d transferred precincts often, so they hadn’t made many friends on the force. There was another coincidence. Their residential addresses were both in Copacabana: Ramos’s was the scene of his murder, and Silveira’s was located only a block from the Praça do Lido, where he’d been shot. Yet nothing Welber had learned suggested that the men had actually lived in these apartments. Doormen, management, and neighbors agreed that both were discreet people who never caused any problems and received few visitors, two or three friends at most. Sometimes their girlfriends showed up, but only rarely, though almost all of their meetings included a woman. “Important detail,” Welber added in the oral report he gave Espinosa. “No one, at either address, knew that they were cops. They identified themselves as traveling salesmen, which explained why they were rarely home. They kept their private lives as obscure as their professional ones.”

  “That’s pretty efficient,” Espinosa remarked to Welber as they left the building to go to lunch.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because nobody can work anywhere for twenty years, even with frequent transfers, without anybody noticing them, unless they’re trying to be invisible.”

  “Why do you think they didn’t want to be noticed?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but we’ll find out.”

  “After we find somewhere to eat, of course.”

  “Right.”

  “As long as it’s not McDonald’s.”

  “Of course.”

  “Seated, not standing.”

  “Fine.”

  “My girlfriend says I can’t keep eating in a hurry, standing at a counter, and that fast food is fattening and has a lot of cholesterol.”

  “She’s right. She’s taking good care of you. Soon she’ll be taking care of you full-time.”

  It wasn’t easy for Welber to find Ramos’s mistress. Maria Rita hadn’t attended the funeral or the wake; the woman who mourned him was his wife, of whose existence
nobody had been aware. From the police, only the official representatives, including Espinosa and Welber, were present. Maria Rita was discovered days later via Ramos’s phone bill, which included regular calls to her number.

  The same story emerged a week later, when they located Silveira’s mistress, Aparecida. The similarity in the details was striking: same kind of apartment, same kind of lover, same secretive lifestyle. Ramos and Silveira had led twin lives, and had shared twin deaths.

  4

  In three days, there had been no murders in the precinct, only a frustrated bank robbery, two attempted hotel burglaries (one assailant wounded), and a few dozen petty crimes, several of which included tourists. No progress had been made on the investigation of the murdered policemen.

  It was already after seven on Friday night when Espinosa decided to head home. He selected the shortest route; he wasn’t interested in doing anything on the way. A misty rain was falling, which made people walk faster or hover beneath awnings. He planned to take a bath and have dinner somewhere pleasant; he didn’t feel like warming something up and doing the dishes. The streetlights were already on; Espinosa attributed the feeling that he was being followed to recent events, and to the eerie twilight. He remembered how Nestor had approached him at almost precisely the same place. He walked a little farther and stopped at the same kiosk where he had paused with the detective; he looked around, examined the magazines for a while in order to see if any of the other pedestrians lingered, but nobody struck him as suspicious. He continued on his way.

  The choice of a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro in summertime is influenced as much by the quality of the food as by the quality of the air-conditioning. The small Italian place where he had lunch on Saturdays satisfied on both counts, and the owner was always friendly. He’d long since grown used to eating alone. Instead of talking, he observed the people around him, without attracting their attention. He’d choose someone at one of the neighboring tables and speculate on what their life had been like, gauging their clothing, the way they spoke, or the person they were with. It was a good exercise, but it didn’t lead to any absolute knowledge, since he had no way to follow up. Without any objective criteria, however, he knew when he was close and when he was stumped. Depending on the occasion, he sometimes invented fantastically detailed biographies. Sometimes he practiced on himself. Occasionally he spun these stories out so far that he lost any connection with the original person, and they lost their identity completely.