Every Bitter Thing

by Leighton Gage

  “Wait,” Silva said. “Slow down. Go back to the beginning. The guy over there drove up to the gate, and he had this girl in the car, and—”

  “No. No! That’s just the point. He didn’t have no girl in the car. He had Eudoxia!”

  “And if Eudoxia isn’t a girl, what is she?”

  “She’s a man, that’s what she is! A whaddayacallit.”

  “Transvestite?”

  “Yeah, a transvestite. Anybody who isn’t a complete asshole, or who isn’t completely smashed, is gonna spot it right away. We got bright lights over there at the entrance. Eudoxia uses lotsa powder on her face, and she shaves close, but you can still see her beard. And that voice of hers! Deep, really deep, not a bass, mind you, but certainly not a tenor, more like a baritone. Hey, you like opera?”

  “You’re saying she doesn’t sound like a woman?”

  “I guess you didn’t hear me the first time, so I’ll say it again: Eudoxia has a voice like an opera singer, a male opera singer. I guess you didn’t hear my question either: you like opera?”

  “Yes, I like opera, but—”

  “Listen to this, then,” Rocha said. And then, to everyone’s amazement, he sang the first stanza of “La donna é mobile.” He could have passed for the Duke of Mantua in a second-rate company, which was still pretty good for a guy who kept the gate in a motel.

  When he finished, there was a slight pattering of applause from everyone, including the two cops who’d been absorbed by the video.

  Basking in the attention, he opened his mouth to continue. Before he could, Silva put a hand on his arm.

  “Very nice,” he said, “but we’re investigating a murder here. Tell me more about this Eudoxia. You’ve obviously seen her before.”

  “Lotsa times,” Rocha said, not pleased to have been cut off in mid-performance. “She hangs out with all those whores near the Jockey Club. It’s like camouflage, being surrounded by real women. It helps fool the guys who pick her up. Mind you, they’re generally drunk or they wouldn’t be taken in so easy. Like I say, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out she’s really a man.”

  “It must be disconcerting when they find out.”

  “It’s funny, that’s what it is. They’re all hot to trot, and they can’t wait to get into the room and get her clothes off. Then, generally about two minutes later, they’re outside again, the guy all red-faced and nervous and Eudoxia with a smile on her face. I guess she makes them pay her in advance. Most whores do. Must be a shock, reaching down between her legs and finding a cock. Sometimes, though, sometimes they stay for a while. Those are the sick bastards. But I didn’t peg the dead guy for one of those. You think she killed him?”

  “Do you?”

  “See? That’s what I can’t figure out. Eudoxia’s weird, but I don’t think she’s violent. One time, a john beat her up pretty bad. He was a single guy, and he didn’t give a damn who found out she’d fooled him. He just wanted to make sure nobody thought he was a fag. He kicked the shit out of her, and then he called us to clean up. Eudoxia was lying there on the floor all black and blue. She’d just curled herself up into a ball and let him beat her. We asked her if she wanted us to call the cops, and she said no, just call a cab. It arrived, and off she went.”

  “Maybe this time she decided to fight back.”

  “Maybe she’d fight back,” Rocha said, “but she’d never do it like that.” He pointed at the body. “Look at that poor bastard.”

  Rocha had a point. Luis Mansur was a mess, every bit as much of a mess as Juan Rivas had been.

  “Who discovered the body?” Silva asked.

  “I did,” Rocha said. “I told you, he only paid for two hours. Part of my job is to make sure nobody gets something for nothing. When he didn’t leave, I came over here. There’s this sign I put on the gate, ‘Back in five minutes,’ it says. If the guy who owns this place wasn’t such a cheapskate, he’d hire somebody else. Friday and Saturday nights I have to work my ass off running between the gate and one chalet or another. The chambermaids won’t do it. They say people give them too much lip. It has to be a man that does it.”

  “The customers complain when you remind them their time is up?”

  “What am I telling you? You speak Portuguese?”

  In fact, Silva’s Portuguese was a good deal better than Rocha’s; but all he said was, “Go on.”

  “People give me lip, I don’t take it personal. I mean, there you are, humping away, and some guy knocks on the door and asks you when you’re gonna be done. I wouldn’t want it happening to me either. Kinda breaks the mood, you know what I mean?”

  “I can imagine,” Silva said dryly. “What happened when you knocked?”

  “No answer. I did it again. Still, no answer. I called out, said I was from the portaria, told the guy his two hours were up. Nothing.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I used my passkey and opened the door.”

  “You do that often? Use your passkey?”

  Rocha shook his head. “Hardly ever. People can get out of this place by climbing over the wall. It’s not so high, comes down to less than two meters where the ground rises out there at the back. But they can’t rent a room unless they drive in with a car, and they can’t get the car out without driving through the gate. Makes no sense to pretend they’re not in the room, so they generally don’t.”

  “What do you normally expect to find?”

  Rocha blinked. “Whaddya mean?”

  “Just what I said. When you use your passkey, and you go in, what do you expect to find?”

  “I expect to find people asleep. Sometimes I get a shot of some hot broad’s crotch. Sometimes I get an earful from her boyfriend, or client, or whatever. I never found a body before.”

  “How about Eudoxia?”

  “What about her?”

  “Where was she?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Was the door to the bathroom closed?”

  Rocha considered for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it was.”

  “But you didn’t look inside?”

  “I took one look at that mess over there and ran off to call the cops. I didn’t even get halfway across the room.”

  Silva turned to Prado. “Any blood in the bathroom?”

  Prado shook his head. “Not a drop,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THE RESIDENTS OF HOLAMBRA were either proud of their heritage or good at setting a tourist trap. Access to the town was through a gate three stories high. The gate was fashioned of red brick and featured Dutch-looking gables. Beyond it towered an even higher structure, a fake windmill housing a café on the ground floor. They went into the café.

  “Town this small,” Arnaldo said, “everybody knows everyone else.”

  “Every now and then,” Samantha said, “you say something that isn’t completely stupid. Let me do the asking. Kloppers, right? Marnix and Jan?”

  “Marnix and Jan were the two on the flight. We drove out here to talk to Marnix’s parents. She’s Greetje, he’s Hans.”

  “Don’t ask them a thing until I get back,” she said and headed directly for the ladies’ room. Arnaldo passed a display selling wooden shoes and took a seat at a table. A woman in pigtails, wearing a starched white cap with wings, came over with a menu.

  “This thing work?” Arnaldo asked, immediately violating Samantha’s instructions and pointing upward.

  The waitress shook her head. “The motor’s broken. Want to eat?”

  “Just coffee, thanks. Motor? The windmill runs on a motor?”

  “Ran,” she said. “For one?”

  “For two.”

  “Milk?”

  “Separately.”

  “We’ve got some nice koekjes,” the woman said, dropping the word without hesitation and with no trace of an accent in her Portuguese. “Speculaas, they’re called, kind of like ginge
rbread, but crispy.”

  “Bring ’em on,” Arnaldo said.

  “These are really good,” Samantha said a few minutes later. She was talking about the speculaas, addressing the lady in pigtails and doing her best to exclude Arnaldo.

  “Want some to go? We sell them by the box.”

  “Bring two boxes and put them on the bill,” Samantha said. “This gentleman is paying.”

  The waitress came back a few minutes later with a bag and the check. Samantha snagged the bag. Arnaldo took out his wallet.

  “Lived here long?” Samantha asked the woman in pigtails.

  “All my life.”

  “I’m looking for a couple, Hans and Gretel Kloppers.”

  “Greetje,” the woman corrected her.

  Arnaldo rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Samantha gave him a dirty look. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. My mistake. Greetje.”

  The woman took a napkin from the table and a pen from her pocket, and started making a map.

  SETUBAL, THE same assistant medical examiner who’d performed the postmortem on Bruna Nascimento, estimated that Mansur’s death had occurred between eight P.M. and midnight. He was struck by the similarity between the two corpses.

  “Shot in just about the same place,” he said, “and, for my money, he used the same club.”

  “Tell me more about this club,” Silva said.

  “Looks to be a little over twice the diameter of a cop’s baton,” Setubal said, “and long enough for him to build up a considerable degree of momentum. An unusual weapon.”

  While the crime-scene people were still giving the motel room a thorough going-over, Prado, Hector, Gonçalves, and Silva left by the back door and set out to examine the grounds.

  The property was roughly rectangular in shape, about three times as deep as it was wide, flanked by a furniture factory and a shop that sold gardening supplies. The rear wall was set flush with that of the buildings on either side. Standing on a little rise, turning around, and peering over the wall to the rear, Silva could see a vacant lot. Beyond it, at the bottom of a steep grade, a dirt road paralleled the highway.

  The cops took Prado’s vehicle, a van that could carry eight, honked their way through the gaggle of reporters, and drove out the main gate. They weren’t followed.

  Two minutes of driving took them to the dirt road. They got out and walked up the hill.

  Against the outside perimeter of the motel’s wall, they found imprints of bare feet.

  “Jumped,” Prado said. “Look, the first impression is deeper than the others.” He followed the footsteps for a few paces, comparing the interval between them to his own. “Running,” he said. “Running like hell.”

  “Could have been Eudoxia,” Silva said.

  Gonçalves was dispatched to follow the footprints. The rest of them moved on. They came to a second set of footprints made by what appeared to be a pair of tennis shoes. The footprints pointed to the wall and then, a little farther on, pointed away again. The closest set was only about a meter from where the barefoot person had crossed.

  “Scuff marks,” Prado said. “He clambered over the wall, and here”—he pointed at two deeper footprints pointing in the opposite direction—“he jumped down on his way out. It rained the day before yesterday. These are fresher than that.”

  “And look at this,” Silva said.

  On the white-painted surface of the wall, directly above the point where the retreating footprints first made contact with the soil, were some reddish-brown drops.

  “Could be blood,” Prado said, leaning in for a closer look. “Could have dripped off the murder weapon.” He picked up his radio and called the chief of the crime-scene techs up at the chalet. “Get down here,” he said after telling her where he was. “We’re going to need casts of footprints, and I want some blood samples lifted. Make sure you aren’t tailed by any reporters.”

  Prado was signing off when Gonçalves came back up the hill, breathing hard from the climb. “Those bare footprints become women’s high heels down at the road,” he said. “Then they move off to the right, toward the city, but I lost them among tire tracks. If I keep going, maybe I can pick them up again.”

  “Try it,” Silva said, not holding out much hope.

  Gonçalves trotted off.

  “And as soon as the techs get here,” Silva continued, “I suggest we follow these.” He pointed down to the other set of retreating footprints.

  “Not very large impressions,” Prado said. “He isn’t a particularly big guy. I think the time has come for you guys to share the things you know and that I still don’t.”

  “Why don’t we follow these first?” Silva said, pointing at the footprints. “Then we’ll go get some coffee?”

  “No, Mario, no coffee. Information.”

  “We’ve unearthed quite a lot. Don’t you want to go somewhere and sit down?”

  “What I want is for you to come clean. One hand washes the other in this business. You, of all people, should know that.”

  “As you wish,” Silva said.

  Fifteen minutes later, when Silva finished talking, Prado said, “All right, let me see if I’ve got this straight. All the victims were on that flight, and killed with the same MO, except for two: the kid, Julio, was on the flight, but he was killed with a different MO; the thug, Girotti wasn’t on the flight, but he still got shot in the lower abdomen and was beaten to a pulp. And the only apparent connection between Girotti and the others is that he shared a cell with the kid.”

  “So it appears,” Silva said.

  “Something happened during that flight,” Prado said, thinking aloud. “Something the murderer did, or said, and wanted to keep secret. The kid was a witness. He told Girotti what it was, so Girotti had to be killed as well.”

  “Someone else has expressed that opinion,” Hector said.

  “Yeah? Who?” Prado asked.

  “Gonçalves.”

  “Babyface? I’m glad you mentioned that name. I got something I want to say about him.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ll come back to that in a minute. You know who I like for this?”

  “Who?” Silva said.

  “The last guy you mentioned, the eleventh passenger.”

  “Motta?”

  “Motta. The stewardess saw him slinking around the cabin, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So he’s the one who had something to hide. He’s a man with a secret.”

  “Maybe he had a secret,” Silva said, “but it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s the killer. I’m not excluding Julio Arriaga, or Clancy, or Kloppers. Arnaldo has gone to Holambra to talk to Kloppers’s parents, and I have people working on the other two.”

  “Arriaga is a long shot. You don’t even know if he’s here in Brazil.”

  “My boss, Sampaio, agrees with you. He thinks it’s a long shot too.”

  “That idiot? Then maybe I should reevaluate.”

  “What did you want to come back to?”

  “Your boy over there”—Prado pointed at Gonçalves, who was climbing the hill again—“went ahead and questioned Lina Godoy before I got to her. They told him I was coming, but he didn’t have the courtesy to wait until I got there. That pisses me off.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, Janus,” Silva said. “He’s young and inexperienced.”

  “Don’t try that one on me, Mario. I know he looks like he’s about twenty, but I also know for a fact that he’s well over thirty.”

  “An ugly rumor,” Silva said. “I can’t imagine who could have started it.”

  GONCALVES HAD been unable to follow the trail of the high heels. The marks from the tennis shoes, they soon discovered, began and ended at a set of tire tracks. The car, quite a small one by the look of it, had been parked for a number of minutes or even hours. The crime techs couldn’t be sure how long, but they did assure Prado it had been removed before dawn, before the sun began to bake the ground. When the dri
ver left the scene, he’d steered into a U-turn. Within three hundred meters, the dirt turned to asphalt and the tracks vanished.

  The area around the chalets was almost entirely paved and provided no further clues. The gardening-supply shop and the furniture factory had both been closed at the time of the murder. Neither one had a night watchman.

  It had been a weeknight, and most of the motel’s guests had already checked out, but not the pair inhabiting the chalet closest to Mansur’s. That particular couple had remained in their room, avoiding the cops and reporters, apparently waiting for an opportunity to leave without being questioned. But the investigation continued, and the reporters stayed on. Eventually, the couple hazarded a discreet departure. At that point, they were detained.

  The woman was wearing stylish clothing. She neither looked nor sounded like a prostitute. Silva also thought she was too old to be a high-class call girl. The man, also welldressed, was driving an Audi. Their national identity cards confirmed that they were who they said they were. They gave the cops separate addresses, both in very good neighborhoods. Reluctant to be questioned, and terse in their responses, they claimed to have heard nothing, seen nothing. The woman kept glancing at her Rolex.

  A husband at home, Silva concluded. And that thought triggered another one. He drew Janus Prado aside.

  “Has anyone spoken to Mansur’s wife?”

  “I sent a man out there about two hours ago,” Prado said. “Should be hearing from him any time now.”

  “Where’s ‘out there’?”

  “Alphaville.”