Water-Blue Eyes

by Villar, Domingo

  ‘Only so far,’ replied Caldas.

  A security guard came out of the booth with a notepad in his hand, and asked them where they were going. As soon as Estévez showed his badge, he lifted the barrier and let them through.

  The car cleared the surveillance post and proceeded along a narrow road, passing on one side a long row of cottages and on the other a forest of pine trees, whose smell blended perfectly with the smell of the surrounding sea. Where the road forked, they took the right. They skirted the woods until the enormous high-rise appeared before them, making Estévez whistle in admiration.

  ‘Some skyscraper, inspector. It didn’t look so high from far off.’

  ‘I hope its foundations are good,’ muttered Leo Caldas, who had the conviction that no place was better for setting one’s foot than firm ground.

  Since most of the flats in that marvel of bad taste were occupied only during the summer, the car park was nearly empty. Caldas identified the van of the inspection unit among the few parked cars. It must be quite serious if they were still there. On getting out of the car, Estévez took a closer look at the tower. He had to tilt his head back to see it whole. He whistled again and followed his boss to the lobby of the building.

  There were twenty floors and three wings: north, south and east. Leo Caldas reckoned there must be about ten flats per floor, six hundred of them in total. It must have been too good a real estate deal to deny it planning permission, even if the result was an eyesore.

  He reread his piece of paper: ‘Duplex 17/18, north wing.’

  They followed a sign and entered the lift. Caldas pressed 17. Once out, the inspector went briskly up a short flight of stairs. Estévez followed suit, his footsteps resounding down the hall.

  The door was marked out by a police tape blocking the way. Leo Caldas peeled it off from one side and opened the door. Estévez went in behind his boss, not before fixing the crime scene tape back in place.

  They came into a large room, the front wall of which was taken up by an enormous curtainless window. The iridescent light of the sunset flooded it with reddish colours. It commanded a superb view, this window: the Cíes Islands right in front; one of the shores of the main ría on the left; and, on the right, the Morrazo Peninsula, which jutted out into the sea like a stone gargoyle. Rafael Estévez immediately approached the window the better to appreciate that vista. Caldas did not.

  The living room had two sofas and a glass coffee table. Facing the sofas was a state-of-the-art hi-fi instead of a TV. Caldas realised the several small metal boxes scattered about the corners of the room were loudspeakers. A bookshelf packed with CDs took up the back wall.

  Adorned with a basket of dry flowers on its centre, and surrounded by four high-backed chairs, the dining table was as far as possible from the window. Across from the shelves hung two engravings. One represented a vase painted with love scenes, the other the frieze of a classical edifice. Beside them, hanging on the same wall, were six saxophones.

  Clara Barcia, one of the forensic officers, was in the living room, dusting a couple of glasses for fingerprints.

  ‘Hi, Clara,’ Caldas said, as he approached.

  ‘Good afternoon, inspector,’ she replied, straightening her back. ‘I’m nearly done with the prints.’

  ‘Don’t get up, please,’ said Caldas, matching his words with a gesture, and taking a look around. ‘What have we got here?’

  ‘Murder, inspector. Pretty nasty.’

  Caldas nodded, then said:

  ‘And how’s your work going?’

  ‘I’ve collected quite a few samples,’ she said, pointing to some small evidence bags she’d lined up against the wall, ‘but you never know.’

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘No, initially all four of us came down, but for a while it’s been only Doctor Barrio and me. He’s downstairs in the bedroom. Over here.’

  Clara Barcia put the glass she was examining on the table, stood up and showed them the way down the spiral staircase.

  ‘Are you not coming down, officer?’ she asked Estévez through the wooden steps of the staircase.

  Caldas turned round and saw his subordinate at the living room window taking in the view. He was surprised to find that this implacable officer, who was capable of softening up the toughest thugs, was showing as much appreciation of the landscape as an artist would.

  Estévez took three agile leaps down the stairs and placed himself behind the inspector. Barcia handed a pair of latex gloves to each of them.

  ‘Where’s the corpse?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘In here, on the bed,’ Barcia replied, opening the door to the only bedroom in the flat.

  Rafael Estévez, struggling to ease his huge hands into the gloves, opened his mouth for the first time since he’d come in.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  Find

  The man’s horror-stricken face was a clear indication of the pain he had gone through. His hands were tied to the headboard of the bed with a piece of white cloth, and his naked body was contorted into an unnatural posture. A sheet covered him from the waist down to his feet.

  Leo Caldas frowned in a reflex action, shutting his nostrils to keep at bay the foetid waft of decaying flesh. His face relaxed a moment later, as he realised the corpse was too recent to give off the smell of death.

  Guzmán Barrio, the forensic doctor examining the corpse, turned round when he heard them walk into the room.

  ‘I had to start without you, Leo,’ he said, looking at a watch one could barely make out through his glove.

  ‘I’m sorry, Guzmán. They kept me at the station until the last possible moment. Do you know Rafael Estévez?’ asked Caldas, turning towards his subordinate.

  ‘We’ve seen each other at the station,’ the doctor confirmed.

  ‘How’s the examination going?’ asked Estévez.

  ‘Oh, it’s going.’

  ‘I see,’ said Estévez. Then he added to himself. ‘Why is everyone always so precise round here?’

  Leo Caldas approached the bed and inspected the dead man’s hands, tightly tied to the headboard. They were big but delicate, and due to the lack of blood they’d taken on a bluish shade that contrasted with his pale arms. From the deep marks round his wrists it could be deduced that he had struggled to free himself until pretty much his last breath.

  ‘Do we know who he is?’ he asked.

  It was Clara Barcia who answered.

  ‘Luis Reigosa, thirty-four years old. A native of Breu. He was a professional musician, a saxophonist. Concerts, lessons, and so on … He lived alone, and had been renting this flat for a couple of years.’

  Caldas experienced a familiar unease as he heard the concise biographical details about the man.

  Until he joined the police force, the only dead body Leo Caldas had seen from up close was that of his mother lying in her coffin. He hadn’t even asked to see her, but had agreed to it when someone mentioned it was the last chance to say goodbye. Suddenly he was lifted off the ground, and he found himself in someone’s arms, as if levitating, peering over that dark wooden box in which the inert body of his mother lay wrapped in a shroud. In a state of confusion, he had looked at a face seemingly covered with a strange coat of wax, and in those brief seconds that he remembered as lasting an eternity, a few of his tears had splattered on the glass sealing the coffin. His mother’s sunken eyes were closed, and her pale lips were barely distinguishable from the rest of her face, a colour that was in sharp contrast to the lipstick she had applied even until her last days.

  For years that indelible waxen image had visited his dreams. And he had often remembered his father at the wake, sitting in a corner, his face transfigured with pain yet not shedding one tear.

  At the police academy some time later, when he was still a recruit, he’d often been warned he was bound to find himself faced with a violent death. Caldas had felt scared and expectant of that future personal encounter, as well as uncertain of what his reaction mig
ht be.

  He had soon found out, on one of his first nights on duty, when he and his partner were called to a park where a homeless man had been stabbed to death. Not without surprise, he discovered that seeing the unknown man’s body didn’t shock him at all. He didn’t even hesitate to approach it. And from that first time, dead bodies were to Leo Caldas little more than lost property. When he was at a crime scene, whether a body was still warm or in a state of decay, he effortlessly detached himself from the fact that the remains had once breathed life. He concentrated on gathering the evidence that might help solve the causes of death, on collecting the disparate pieces of the puzzle that he must put together.

  And yet, as soon as he learned the identities of the deceased he felt an inner shudder; for once he knew their names or, however sketchily, certain aspects of their lives, it was as if the actual human beings arrived on the scene of the criminal investigation.

  ‘Did you say he lived alone?’ asked Caldas, who could tell by the state of the body that he hadn’t been dead for long.

  Officer Barcia nodded.

  ‘Who informed us of the death?’ he asked, surprised that the corpse had been found so quickly.

  ‘It was the security guard on the bridge,’ replied Clara Barcia, ‘though the body was actually found by the cleaner. She comes in twice a week. Apparently the poor woman turned up at the sentry box in a state of shock after seeing the body. She had to be sedated, so we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to speak to her. Officer Ferro wrote it all down. He must be at the station writing up the report.’

  Caldas nodded. He was sorry to be late, even more so since the reason was Patrol on the Air.

  ‘When do you reckon he was killed?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Last night,’ replied Barrio. ‘From the body temperature I’d say between seven and twelve last night. But I’m afraid I can’t be more specific until we do the post-mortem.’

  ‘If you don’t need me here, I’ll go back to work,’ said Clara.

  She left the room and disappeared up the spiral staircase. Leo remained still in front of the dead man. He couldn’t stop looking at his open eyes. They were of a very light blue and seemed to be staring at him in horror.

  ‘Do we know how he died?’ asked Rafael Estévez, turning to the doctor.

  ‘Reigosa?’

  ‘No, Lady Di,’ said Rafael, cutting him short.

  ‘Don’t mind him, Guzmán, Rafael is always this polite,’ Leo Caldas put in. ‘In any case, do we know the cause of death?’

  ‘Not the exact cause, but I can assure you this had a lot to do with it,’ he replied, removing the sheet that so far covered the dead man’s abdomen, ‘even if I can’t be more precise for now.’

  ‘Holy fuck, what’s that he’s got there?’ exclaimed Estévez, cupping his testicles and moving away from the body.

  ‘That’s what I was trying to find out when you arrived,’ the doctor said. ‘I still don’t know for sure.’

  The body displayed a huge area of bruised skin. The damage started at his stomach and extended down to his legs. On one of them, the unsettling blackness reached down to the knee. The skin was so shrivelled up that Caldas had the impression that he had a tanned hide before him rather than human skin. He’d never seen anything like it. Judging from Doctor Barrio’s astonished expression, he hadn’t either.

  ‘I’m sorry, doctor, did you say the stiff was called Reigosa?’ asked Estévez, approaching once again to take a closer look.

  ‘Apparently so,’ the doctor conceded.

  ‘And where’s the guy’s dick, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Barrio placed his tissue forceps on a small protuberance at the centre of the grotesque haematoma.

  ‘What do you think the blackest bit is?’

  Estévez pored over the area that the doctor indicated.

  ‘That?’

  The doctor nodded, and Estévez looked at his superior in disbelief.

  ‘Did you see that, inspector – this guy would need a doctor’s forceps even to go and take a leak.’

  Leo Caldas came closer the better to inspect the body. The kinds of bruises he had come across until then gave the impression of tumescence. But if that was a tumescent sex, he didn’t want to imagine the regular size of Reigosa’s penis. It looked like the empty shell of a barnacle: dark and wrinkled. And one could just make out, as black as all the rest, the saxophonist’s testicles. They were the size of raisins, and had the same texture. He turned towards the doctor, as if asking for further information.

  ‘I’m going crazy trying to guess how anyone managed to damage the tissue so badly, but I can’t figure it out. I’ve thought of fire or any other heat source, but then there’s no burning on the skin. See?’ said the doctor as he moved Reigosa’s minute member this way and that. ‘It’s all leathery, in a very strange way. I haven’t found any wounds or blood… I’m beginning to think they poured some kind of abrasive substance on him.’

  ‘The pain must have been excruciating,’ said Caldas, visualising the scene Guzmán Barrio had just presented. ‘And no one heard anything? Even if only a few people live here at this time of year, someone must have heard the screams.’

  Barrio pointed at a piece of tape and a wet white ball placed on the night table beside the bed.

  ‘When we found him, he was gagged with that. They rammed the cotton nearly all the way down his throat, and then sealed his lips with the tape. There’s no way anyone would hear you with that in your mouth.’

  They fell silent as they looked at the dead saxophonist.

  ‘It must have been harrowing. Have you seen his eyes?’ said Doctor Barrio, breaking the silence, as if he were trying to know whether the inspector was as stunned as he.

  Leo Caldas nodded and looked again at those eyes that had moved him from the first moment. Seen close-to they made an even greater impact on him. They revealed the pain to which Reigosa had been subjected with such cruelty – a mute torment, as he hadn’t even been able to scream. He remembered reading words by Camus to the effect that the human being is born, dies and is not happy. He couldn’t know, but he guessed the existence of this man, lying here livid and lifeless, had been like that.

  ‘I’ve never seen eyes like that. Don’t they look unreal?’ asked Caldas as he pointed at Reigosa’s face.

  ‘They do,’ replied Barrio. ‘At first I actually thought they were contacts. But they aren’t. His eyes really were that colour, water-blue.’

  Reigosa’s room was large, clean, filled with the same reddish light as the rest of the flat. On the wall over the bed hung a framed poster, a reproduction of Hopper’s Hotel Room. Caldas remembered the original painting. He’d seen it with Alba at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. He’d been dazzled by the loneliness of the woman sitting on the bed, by her serene beauty and sad mien. In front of the poster, Caldas once again had the impression that the painter, in portraying her in that pink nightdress, with her suitcase half packed, had profaned her intimacy. And he wondered whether they, as Hopper had in his own way, were not violating Reigosa’s.

  The wall opposite the bed was also one big window. It wasn’t as big as the one in the living room, but it commanded similar views. Caldas didn’t go near it.

  On the night table there were two books, one on top of the other. The top one, which had a bookmark inserted among its six hundred-odd pages, was Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Caldas picked it up with a gloved hand and read the name of its author on the back cover: ‘Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Stuttgart, 1770–Berlin, 1831)’.

  Estévez approached from behind.

  ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History,’ he read. ‘You must suffer from insomnia if you can read this kind of stuff in bed without falling asleep. Don’t you think, inspector?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s exactly what he had it for,’ answered Caldas tersely.

  The inspector glanced again at the body, still tied to the bed with his horribly bruised genitals exposed. It was an undignifie
d death for a musician with an interest in philosophy. He put the thick volume on the night table and picked up the other one: The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri.

  Nor were these two the only books in the room. On the wall opposite the door there were several packed bookshelves. Caldas remembered his father, who always said you can know a man from what he reads and what he drinks. He was surprised to find almost exclusively crime novels on the musician’s shelves: Montalbán, Ellroy, Chandler, Hammett …

  ‘The order of last night’s events seems clear.’ Guzmán Barrio was thinking out loud, as he carried on examining Reigosa’s inert body. ‘A few drinks in the living room, then they came down to the bedroom, had sex and, when this guy was at his most trusting, his lover tied him up, gagged him and murdered him. I wonder why they didn’t do it in a simpler way. This,’ he said, gesturing towards Reigosa’s gruesome stomach, ‘whatever it was they did, must have been a lot more difficult, more dramatic.’

  ‘You can’t really mean he screwed with that?’ put in Estévez, pointing with his hand to the dead man’s minute penis.

  ‘Rafael, do me a favour, will you, go and see what you can find in the living room,’ asked Caldas, pointing him in the direction of the door.

  But once Estévez disappeared up the stairs, Caldas turned towards the doctor and asked: ‘Guzmán, do you actually think he had intercourse?’ He knew this would open the most important line of inquiry.

  The doctor shook his head in an ambiguous manner, making a movement that didn’t quite mean yes or no.

  ‘I cannot be sure, but on a first examination it seems possible. At least I don’t think we should rule it out, in spite of what the member looks like now. In any case, I need to carry out a complete post-mortem before I can confirm it either way. Why don’t you drop by tomorrow? Today we can’t reject any possibility,’ he concluded.

  As yet, Guzmán Barrio hadn’t found any signs of violence besides the obvious ones in the genital area and the wrists. The doctor ascribed only the former to the murderer. Like Caldas, he believed the chafing round the wrists had been produced by Reigosa in a desperate attempt to free himself.