‘Shit, shit,’ he repeated as he read it over and over.
‘May I come in, chief?’ interrupted Rafael Estévez.
‘Any news on Freire?’ asked Caldas without lifting his eyes from the dossier.
Estévez shook his head.
‘He hasn’t turned up at the office since the day of our visit.’
The inspector put down the report, steepled his hands and rested his mouth on them.
‘Of course he hasn’t,’ he mumbled. ‘What an idiot I’ve been.’
Caldas stood up, got his jacket and quickly walked out of his office, with his assistant trying hard to keep up.
The two policemen were driving along the waterfront. It was raining hard, and they couldn’t see the road clearly. Although it was only mid-afternoon, the sky was as dark as the sea.
‘What do you mean it wasn’t him?’ asked a disorientated Estévez. ‘But it was you who put all the evidence together to arrest him.’
‘All I’m saying for now is that it might not have been him. There’s that possibility,’ replied Caldas from the passenger seat.
Estévez didn’t understand his sudden change of mind.
‘Would you mind telling me what’s happened to make you think he might be innocent?’
‘You can have smoke without a fire,’ replied Caldas cryptically.
‘I’m sorry, inspector, but I haven’t got my Rosetta Stone with me. Are you going to tell me or are we playing charades again?’
Caldas didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He’d been wrong once before and didn’t intend to be wrong once again. In addition, he knew that thoughts, like wine, needed time to settle. Yet he decided to tell Estévez what was going through his mind.
‘The day Reigosa turned up dead I got a call at the radio. A man said the phrase: “Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance”. It’s a quote from Hegel, which the caller repeated twice, for us to hear it clearly. Every week we get weird calls,’ explained the inspector, ‘so that call wouldn’t have been important at all if there had not been, on Reigosa’s night table, a book by that very same German thinker, Hegel. That book didn’t fit in with the other books Reigosa had at home, which were a lot lighter. And somehow I can’t imagine Reigosa curling up with a volume of nineteenth-century philosophy after a concert.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ replied Estévez. ‘If he didn’t mind sleeping with men, I don’t see what’s wrong with Hegel, to be honest.’
Caldas was too worried to laugh at the joke, and went on expounding his later discoveries, even though he hadn’t intended to open his mouth for the rest of the journey. He realised that thinking out loud helped him select those facts that were really relevant.
‘The volume had a bookmark in it, and on that page someone had underlined a phrase in pencil. I’ve just found out that it was the same phrase that the caller had uttered on air during my show.’ Caldas interrupted the explanation for a moment to get a cigarette. ‘All incoming calls at the radio station are recorded for a while,’ he went on after he lit up. ‘And that particular one had been made from a phone booth in the hall of the Zuriaga Foundation.’
‘And what’s so weird about that?’ interrupted Estévez. ‘I think it explains the case even better. Hegel’s phrase confirms what we knew already – that the doctor wanted to inflict a gruesome punishment on the saxophonist as an act of revenge for his betrayal.’
‘There I don’t agree, Rafa. No one who’s planning to murder someone sows clues all over the place in such a childish way. It all seems too neat, too deliberate,’ said the inspector, winding down the window just a crack to let the smoke out. ‘It can’t be that easy.’
‘Your intuition again, chief. Where I’m from we say that if it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and it goes “quack”, then it is a duck.’
‘It’s not my intuition, can’t you see?’
For a few seconds, the only sound was the patter of the rain on the roof of the car and the screeching swing of the windscreen wipers.
‘What is it I’ve got to see?’ asked Estévez, who was unable to put his finger on what Caldas found so obvious.
‘We followed the lead of the formaldehyde and we came to Dimas Zuriaga in two days‚’ explained the inspector. ‘Everything happened too quickly – there wasn’t enough time for the evidence to mature.’
‘Is that wrong, chief? You should be proud at how quickly we found the murderer. Remember there were two victims. Three, if Freire turns up.’
‘But it would have been more normal for us to get sidetracked until Clara found the phrase in the book.’ This hypothesis was taking shape in the inspector’s mind. ‘And then I would have remembered that those were the same words someone had uttered on the radio show. Do you realise now?’ he asked, looking fixedly at Estévez. Estévez nodded slightly, almost out of duty, and Caldas resumed his speculations.
‘The call had been made from the Zuriaga Foundation, and so we would’ve concentrated our investigation there. With a little time and effort we would’ve found out about Zuriaga and Reigosa’s relationship, because we know from experience that facts cannot remain hidden forever. Sooner or later we would have come to the doctor.’
‘But that line of reasoning, far from exculpating Zuriaga, would incriminate him even more,’ replied Estévez.
‘You don’t get it, Rafa. If the doctor is the murderer as you say, how do you explain that call to the radio station? And how would you account for his leaving the book with that same underlined phrase at Reigosa’s? He might as well have left us a calling card.’
By now Caldas was sure that Hegel’s book did not belong to Reigosa, but had been planted in the bedroom by the murderer, in order to incriminate someone else.
‘There is a possibility, though, that the doctor may have wanted to play cat and mouse with you, inspector. Even if you don’t admit it, you’re someone in this city, same as he is. He may have left clues to test you. He wouldn’t be the first one to do such a thing.’
‘Have you seen Zuriaga’s latest pictures in the papers?’ asked Caldas. ‘He looks completely washed out. Do you think a criminal who likes arm-wrestling with justice looks like that?’
Estévez didn’t reply; he was aware of Zuriaga’s deterioration.
‘He’s resigned to his fate, he’s lowered his arms,’ added Caldas. ‘Hardly the attitude of someone fighting an intellectual battle.’
‘There you’re right,’ conceded Estévez.
‘Now, to return to the book and the call – killers take care to cover up their traces, not to leave any evidence lying around. Whoever planned this mess wanted all clues to point in one direction only, in the direction of Dimas Zuriaga,’ concluded Caldas. ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s all a set-up. By chance I didn’t fall for it, but, for unknown reasons, I’ve ended up exactly where the murderer wanted me to go in the first place – arresting the doctor and accusing him of murder.’
Estévez was not entirely convinced.
‘Are you sure that we’re on the right track now, chief?’
This far in the game, Caldas was no longer concerned about tracks; he simply wanted to arrive at the truth. Only a few hours before, he had no doubts that Zuriaga was guilty; now he was considering the possibility that he might be completely innocent. He had taken the wrong turn at some point during the investigation, but he was prepared to go back to square one and proceed in a different direction.
‘I don’t know if we are,’ replied the inspector. ‘I’m hoping to find Freire, and for him to clarify a couple of things.’
Estévez turned towards his superior.
‘Do you think Freire is alive?’ he asked, as he remembered that a short time ago his boss had assumed that the owner of the little black dog that had bitten his shoes at Riofarma was dead.
‘Orestes was killed in a hurry. They didn’t have time to prepare the crime. It’s been eight days since Freire’s disappearance, too many for a murdered corpse to remain hidden. I�
�m inclined to think that it’s Freire himself who has no intention of coming out into the open,’ said the inspector, his eyes fixed on the road, which was barely visible behind the curtain of rain. ‘Besides, we’ve got all those calls to Zuriaga’s house the days before the murder of Reigosa. Why would Freire need to speak to the doctor so often? Zuriaga had access to formaldehyde without the need to contact the distributor – he just needed to get it from his hospital. I don’t know what he was after, but Freire was not trying to sell a few litres of formaldehyde to the doctor. It was something else.’
‘Have they asked Zuriaga about Freire again?’
‘Zuriaga keeps repeating the same – he doesn’t know a thing about the crimes, doesn’t know Freire, didn’t know who Orestes was, and loved Reigosa deeply,’ enumerated Caldas. ‘He has not altered his declaration one iota in all these days.’
‘And what do you have to say about the latex glove?’ asked Estévez, who, although he had admired his boss’s reasoning, still harboured doubts. ‘Do you think Zuriaga didn’t kill the DJ either?’
Caldas, who had no answer for that, limited himself to a shrug. He knew that the DNA was incontrovertible proof of Orestes Grial’s murder: no judge would absolve Zuriaga of that. However, he still thought the glove didn’t solve the puzzle of Reigosa’s death and Freire’s disappearance. The doctor’s only hope might be hidden in some tiny detail that he, Caldas, had overlooked. The most difficult cases were often solved after a seemingly insignificant point was brought to attention.
Dimas Zuriaga was too shocked to remember, but Caldas trusted that someone near him might have noticed something, however small, that might help to establish his innocence.
Estévez stopped the car before the enormous wooden gate. Caldas raised his collar, got out of the car and, dodging puddles, walked over to the wall and rang the bell.
Under the heavy rain, the inspector waited for an answer.
Gap
The smell of wood panelling suffused the dark living room.
‘You’ve got to make an effort, madam,’ insisted Caldas, asking her to cast her mind back.
‘You can’t come here, after ruining my life, and ask me to make an effort,’ replied the woman, running her words together. ‘How can you be so heartless? My husband is in jail because of you, he’s going to be judged for such gruesome crimes I don’t even want to think about them, and you’ve got the gall to come here and rub it in my face over and over again?’
‘There might be a chance your husband isn’t guilty of all the crimes he’s being accused of.’
‘Of course he’s not, inspector, he’s not guilty at all,’ moaned Mercedes Zuriaga, slumping on to a sofa and bursting into tears.
The policemen stood there, in respectful silence, waiting for her to calm down. They felt awkward confronted with Mrs Zuriaga’s transformation; there was no trace of the elegant woman who had received them so gracefully but a few days before. The house, as if in sympathy, had also gone from constant activity to sombre stillness, from light to darkness.
‘Mrs Zuriaga.’ It was Estévez turn now: ‘Try to remember if Isidro Freire visited your husband. We’re sure they spoke on the phone regularly in the days after the murder. It could be important for your husband.’
‘I’ve already told you I know no Isidro Freire,’ she said, as she wiped the tears away from her puffy eyes. ‘I’ve never monitored Dimas’s calls. I’m not his secretary. I’m Doctor Zuriaga’s wife!’ she added with a flash of dignity.
Estévez nodded. Seeing Zuriaga’s wife in such a state was too much for him. As for Caldas, he knew that opening these wounds would prove very painful, but he wanted no gaps in his inquiry.
‘You must have seen or heard something. Freire sold medical supplies. He phoned your husband several times in the days before our first visit.’ The inspector pressed the point. ‘They must have discussed products, probably formaldehyde. Didn’t you hear anything?’
The woman shook her head.
‘Maybe he was here under a different name,’ added Caldas, trying another approach so as to jog the woman’s memory. In his haste he may have condemned Dimas Zuriaga to a personal hell, but Caldas still wanted to leave the house with some kind of hope for him. ‘Someone must have visited in the last couple of weeks.’
‘Yes, you two. You burst into our house and shattered my husband’s life and mine,’ she paused to take a breath. ‘You’ve destroyed a family. Do you know what that is? Have you any idea what the word family means?’ The woman was once again moaning bitterly, burying her face in her long hands. ‘You’re scum.’
Rafael Estévez offered her a handkerchief as he implored Caldas with his eyes to leave the woman alone. Caldas gave up and placed his card on one of the low tables in that huge living room.
‘It’s OK, Mrs Zuriaga. We’re going back to the station now. I’ll leave my card here. Should you remember anything, do not hesitate to call me.’
‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ said Mercedes Zuriaga, wiping her tears with Estévez’s handkerchief.
‘There’s no need, madam,’ said the officer.
She ignored this reply, stood up and led them down the hallway to the imposing front door.
‘Goodbye, inspector,’ she muttered, offering her hand. ‘I hope I never see you again.’
Mercedes Zuriaga opened the door, and a small dog with curly black fur slipped in.
‘Pipo! Get out of the house right now!’ she shouted.
Officer Estévez, his eyes on stalks, stared at Freire’s little dog, which was once again having a go at his shoelaces.
Caldas turned to the doctor’s wife.
‘Where is Isidro Freire, madam?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ replied the woman, holding the door to let them out. ‘Now, if you please
‘Where?’ asked Caldas again, without budging.
‘Don’t you have any respect for anything?’ she reproached him, once again bursting into tears. ‘I’ve already told you I don’t know who that man is, inspector.’
Leo Caldas was not buying it.
‘You know perfectly well, madam – Isidro Freire is the sales representative from Riofarma, and the owner of that dog,’ he said, pointing to Pipo.
‘That’s not possible,’ she mumbled through her sobs.
‘Enough of this farce!’ ordered Caldas. ‘The doctor may not be an ideal husband, but he’s not a murderer,’ he said, getting closer to her. ‘I think you should come with us to the station, you’ve got a lot to explain.’
Mercedes Zuriaga stopped sobbing, and Caldas saw her fix him with eyes that had suddenly turned as cold as ice.
When, on the way to the car, he asked again about Isidro Freire’s whereabouts, the woman gestured in the direction of the sea.
‘He’s down there on the boat, terrified.’
Caldas asked Estévez to go and fetch him, and Mercedes Zuriaga added with disdain:
‘Another coward, just like Dimas. They’re all cowards.’
Motive
In the course of the interrogation, Mercedes Zuriaga related how, shortly after she and Zuriaga had started courting, she left her job as a nurse to become the famous doctor’s wife, and found herself living in greater splendour than she had ever thought possible.
However, in spite of a good start, the long days Zuriaga spent at the Foundation ended up killing their passion, and soon enough their marriage was reduced to little more than the amicable relationship of two people who simply lived together. Mercedes resigned herself to Dimas’s absences and lack of affection. Even if she had an unfulfilled love life, she still held her husband in deep admiration.
She related how, over their two decades together, she had always respected the fact that the doctor preferred intellectual to physical pleasure. But she started being suspicious when, three years ago, she noticed that he had started taking greater care of his appearance and that, without her even asking, he would make excuses when he came home late from
work. Mercedes thought he might be seeing another woman, and decided to find out if there were grounds for her suspicions. She was amazed to discover, however, that the reason for those excuses was a man: Luis Reigosa, a saxophonist who lived on Toralla Island.
She felt threatened for months, until she realised Dimas was not planning to leave her. She decided to carry on as if nothing had happened: in a way, she had lost her husband a long time before. But she did promise herself she would not be cast aside after so many years of sacrifices.
Once the initial shock had passed, Mercedes started sailing more often, and in this way she met Isidro Freire, a handsome young man who shared her hobby and who, by becoming her lover, had a soothing effect on her frustrations. She even pulled some strings to get him a job at Riofarma, a laboratory near her husband’s hospital.
Time went by until, a few weeks previously, she’d found a compromising email on her husband’s laptop, complete with pictures. Upon reading it she realised there was a chance her husband might be forced to make a choice and abandon her for Reigosa.
Ever since she had learned of her husband’s relationship with the musician, she wondered how she might be able to make it end if she needed to. And she had convinced herself that the best solution would be to eliminate Reigosa and leave circumstantial evidence pointing to Dimas. The murder should look both like a crime of passion and the work of a doctor. One afternoon, lying with her lover on the deck of her boat, she found the perfect method while flicking through Riofarma’s catalogue, and noticing the safety guidelines indicated on one of the products.
Coldly, she explained that her first move had been to follow her husband on one of the days he made a payment to his blackmailer. By then she had decided not to let the extortion ruin her plans. She saw Dimas leave a bag containing the money behind some shrubs, and she hid until a young man, who was none other than Orestes Grial, appeared for the pick-up. She approached him and informed him she knew all about the extortion and could report him to the police at any moment. The man was terrified, and he swore he’d never send the doctor another message in exchange for Mercedes Zuriaga’s silence. He also promised to let her know if anyone ever declared an interest in the doctor or his lover in his presence.
Water-Blue Eyes Page 15
