Dying Gasp cims-4

by Leighton Gage

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “ I haven’t seen it myself,” Nelson Sampaio said, shifting his telephone to his other ear, “and after the deputado’s description of the contents, I’m quite sure I don’t want to.” He was referring to the videotape Claudia Andrade had sent to Roberto Malan. “He called me within a few minutes of looking at it,” the director went on. “I have to tell you, Mario, his comportment was most… extraordinary.”

  “Extraordinary?”

  “You’d expect him to be distraught, right? Break down, release some of the sadness he must be feeling. But he didn’t. All he did was to threaten and bluster.”

  “Threaten?” Silva said.

  “And bluster,” Sampaio said. “He wants your head, Mario. He said it was your fault. He said you failed. He’s going after our budget allocations, told me that if I didn’t get rid of you immediately, he’d cut everything to the bone. It’s his committee, Mario. He’s a powerful man. He can do that.”

  The director paused.

  Silva didn’t say anything.

  After a second or two, the director continued, “I like you, Mario, I really do. And I don’t blame you for what happened to the girl, but he does.”

  “Hmm,” Silva said.

  “You’ve got to understand my position, Mario. It would be wrong to prejudice the whole organization just because of one man. You’ve got to think like a team player here.”

  “You want me to resign?”

  Sampaio sighed.

  “I think it would be best for all concerned,” he said.

  “Tell him I want to see him.”

  “What?”

  “Tell Malan I want to see him.”

  “See him?”

  “I’ll do a quick in and out. I’ll come down there on Wednesday night, see him the following morning, and return in the early afternoon.”

  “Wednesday, as in the day after tomorrow Wednesday?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s an important man, Mario. You can’t expect him to adjust his schedule on such short notice.”

  “That’s why I’m giving him until Thursday morning. Tell him it’s in his best interest.”

  “That sounds like an ultimatum.”

  “Let him take it any way he likes.”

  The director was a worrywart, but he was a politician, and he wasn’t stupid.

  “You’ve got something on him, haven’t you?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. All right. Thursday morning. I’ll tell him, but I’m warning you: as far as Malan is concerned, the issue is already resolved.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Silva said.

  Bento Rosario was getting desperate. The sun was approaching its zenith. The heat was intolerable. His water bottle was empty. The comfort he got from being in the shade of the bushes was offset by the fact that those same bushes blocked the breeze from the river. Worst of all, Bento was now convinced that one of the cab drivers wasn’t a cab driver at all.

  When, five times, the man’s vehicle had come to the head of the rank, he’d driven off without a passenger. And each time, after a short interval, he’d returned to join the end of the queue.

  The other drivers were as aware of this strange behavior as Bento was. They weren’t treating him as one of their own. No one had exchanged a word with him in all the time he’d been there, which was almost as long as Bento had been hiding in the bushes.

  The man was wearing a jacket, and who the hell would wear a jacket in a place as hot as Manaus? That alone was suspicious. And something else boded ill: the driver’s eyes were fastened on the front door of the hotel. He was watching it like a cat watches a mousehole. is watch.

  It was a little past one.

  “I’m not gonna eat another damned fish,” Arnaldo said. “And I’m not going to eat anything that tastes like fish.”

  “Which means you’re either on your way to the airport, or you’re going to starve,” Silva said.

  “Which means neither,” Arnaldo said. “I am going to get a steak.”

  Silva and Hector looked at him.

  “While you people,” Arnaldo said, “confined your conversations with Lefkowitz to DNA testing and suchlike, I got him aside and questioned him about something of real importance.”

  “Food?” Silva said.

  “Food,” Arnaldo confirmed. “There is a restaurant in this culinary desert owned and operated by a Gaucho.”

  Gauchos were people from the State of Rio Grande do Sul, and the State of Rio Grande do Sul was famous for its beef.

  “This restaurant,” Arnaldo continued, “is less than ten minutes from here. The owner flies his steaks up from Porto Alegre. According to Lefkowitz, they are untainted by fish.” “Lead us to this marvel,” Silva said.

  The heat outside hit them like a Turkish bath. Arnaldo went over to speak to the valet. Hector reached for his sunglasses. Silva, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, was the first to see a figure scuttle out from under the shrubbery and head toward them at a dead run.

  He was a thin young man in dark shorts and a T-shirt, wearing tennis shoes, and carrying what appeared to be an empty water bottle. One of the cab drivers caught sight of him, got out of his car and put a hand under his jacket, a move that attracted the attention of the federal cops. All three of them reached for their weapons. The driver took in the situation, got back into his cab and took off down the drive with a screech of rubber.

  By that time, the young man was in front of them, panting from the effort. He reached out a hand and took Silva by the wrist.

  “You’re Silva, aren’t you?” he said. Then, without waiting for an answer, “You people have gotta help me.”

  Bento Rosario started talking right there on the street. He was still talking when they were shown to a table in the Recanto Gaucho, the restaurant suggested by Lefkowitz. He paused long enough to drink an entire bottle of mineral water, asked for another, and continued his story.

  The three federal cops nursed glasses of beer. Silva and Hector sat where they could keep on eye on the entrance. Arnaldo chose the other side of the table, next to Bento, and covered the door leading to the kitchen.

  Bento finally took a break to scan the menu. He ran his finger down the offerings and frowned.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with this place? They don’t serve fish.”

  From the restaurant, they went directly to Manaus’s sole federal magistrate, a man by the name of Rosenblatt. After being sworn to secrecy, and listening to Bento Rosario’s story, Judge Rosenblatt issued a fistful of warrants and wished them good luck. He too was no fan of the chief’s.

  Silva told Arnaldo to call Brasilia from the judge’s chambers.

  “Get Gloria up here,” he said. “We can’t do this alone. We’re going to need her.”

  Gloria Sarmento, a woman who, according to Arnaldo, had “more balls than a pool table,” headed ERR1, one of the federal police’s elite hostage rescue teams.

  “Gloria isn’t going to like it,” Arnaldo said. “She hates Manaus.”

  “Tell her to bring six of her people,” Silva said. “We shouldn’t need any more than that.”

  “Which six?” Arnaldo said.

  “Let her choose.”

  “No, no, no,” Arnaldo said. “What if she brings Diogo Carmo?”

  Diogo Carmo was one of those people who couldn’t finish a story. You’d meet Diogo in the hallway and he’d say something like, “On the way into the office this morning I stopped off for coffee, and speaking of coffee, have you ever bought coffee at that little shop down among the warehouses in Santos? Oh, yeah, Santos, that reminds me, how about that game between Santos and Sao Paulo last Thursday? You know, Thursday, the same day…”

  And so on and so forth. He drove his colleagues nuts.

  Silva considered for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Gloria won’t bring him,” he said. “Diogo has the same effect on Gloria a
s he does on everybody else.”

  “Gloria,” Arnaldo said, “might get so pissed off about coming to Manaus that she’d pick Diogo just to-”

  “I get the point,” Silva said. “Tell her not to include Diogo.”

  From Judge Rosenblatt’s chambers, they went directly to the municipal dock, where they rented a boat. They told the owner/captain to moor the vessel in the mouth of an out-ofthe-way tributary, turn on the air-conditioning, and leave them alone in the cabin.

  While Hector took a handwritten statement from Bento, Silva made calls from his cell phone. One of them was to the reception desk at the Hotel Tropical. There’d been two calls from Chief Pinto and one from Silva’s wife, Irene. He ignored the messages from the chief and was lucky to catch Irene still relatively sober. He told her to expect him the following evening in Brasilia.

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said. “We’ll share a cocktail when you’re safely home.”

  “Don’t start without me,” he said.

  At eleven o’clock that night, the three federal cops took the boat back to the municipal dock. They left Bento aboard and packed themselves into a cab for a quick trip to the airport. Gloria and her people arrived on time, aboard the 11:30 P.M. flight from Brasilia. It took three more cabs to carry the personnel and equipment. Thirty minutes later, they arrived at the headquarters building of Manaus’s Municipal Police.

  Silva assigned men to oversee the operations of the switchboard operator and the radio dispatcher, then assembled the rest of the small nighttime staff. He identified himself, showed his credentials, and waved a paper.

  “This,” he said, “is a search warrant for this building and these”-he waved two other papers-“are arrest warrants for Chief Pinto and Coimbra, the guy who runs the archives. Under no circumstances are you to attempt to contact them. Nobody leaves the building. All calls, incoming and outgoing, are going to be monitored. Turn in your cell phones to the little lady with the big gun and line up to submit yourselves to a body search, men on this side, women over there.”

  His listeners were more accustomed to pushing people around than being pushed, but they did it. An examination of Alberto Coimbra’s desk revealed no list of what might have been protected felons. They moved on to Pinto’s office, where the search for any kind of incriminating evidence proved equally disappointing.

  “Only one more chance,” Silva said. “Where the hell is Lefkowitz?”

  “Here, Chief Inspector,” Lefkowitz said, coming in through the doorway, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. One of Gloria’s men had commandeered a police car and picked him up at home. They’d made record time in getting there.

  “I seem to recall you tap telephones,” Silva said. “Are you any good at it?”

  “I’m a virtuoso.”

  “Good. I want you to tap the chief’s.”

  “His home?”

  “His home.”

  “Got a warrant?”

  “I do.” Silva showed it to him.

  Lefkowitz grinned. “It’ll be a pleasure,” he said.

  “When you’re finished there,” Silva said, “go to Coimbra’s place and do the same thing. Here’s his address. Arnaldo will meet you there. Hector, take Enrique and follow Lefkowitz to the chief’s home. Keep an ear glued to his calls. If he gives you probable cause, break in and slap the cuffs on him. If he sticks his nose out the door, and you think he’s going to make a break, do the same.”

  Coimbra, a bachelor who lived alone, was awakened from a sound sleep by the pounding on his door. He grabbed the phone next to his bed and made a desperate call to the chief.

  The chief’s wife and two kids were in Rio, visiting his mother-in-law. The woman next to him in the king-sized bed was the maid. She picked up the telephone and handed it to him.

  “Chief?”

  “Coimbra? It’s three-ten in the fucking morning. What’s so import-”

  “The federals are pounding my door.”

  The maid slipped her hand down from Pinto’s stomach to his groin. Angrily, he brushed it away.

  “Merda! Where’s your copy of the list?”

  “Under my mattress. I brought it home after Carvalho missed his shot at Rosario.”

  “Destroy it. Now!”

  And Coimbra would have, if Arnaldo hadn’t put the earphone aside and broken down his door.

  The chief’s first outgoing call was to a Sargento Carvalho, but all he did was to ask him for a telephone number, which he promptly called. It turned out to be the cell phone of Carvalho’s boss, Tenente Jordao. “What the hell’s going on?” The chief was getting angrier by the minute. “Did I give you an order to kill those goddamned federals, or didn’t I?”

  “Sorry, Chief, but we can’t kill them if we can’t find them. They left their hotel at lunchtime and never came back.”

  “Go to Coimbra’s place. He says they’re there, pounding on his door.”

  “Merda. They must be tooled up for an assault. I’ve only got two men with me.”

  “So get some more,” the chief said and slammed down the phone.

  The tap bore additional fruit. Calls provided links to two more of the chief’s accomplices. He berated the first one for having allowed Bento Rosario to fall into the hands of the federal cops.

  “You saw him, for Christ’s sake. You saw what he was doing. All you had to do was to shoot the bastard.”

  “I told you, Chief, there were three of them, and they all-”

  “I haven’t got time for this. Get your stuff together and get out of there. If Rosario recognized you, they’ll be at your place next. Hell, they might be on their way over there right now.”

  Pinto was locking his front door, when he heard the rustle of leaves. Hector stepped out of the samambaia ferns that lined the path.

  “ Bom dia, Chief,” he said, “You’re up early.”

  “Yeah, I am. Not that it’s any of your business. What do you want?”

  Hector crossed his arms. He wasn’t holding a gun.

  “To arrest you,” he said.

  “On what charge?”

  “Racketeering.”

  “You’ll never make it stick.”

  “Oh, I think we will.”

  The chief’s hand dropped to the revolver on his belt.

  Enrique, behind him, said, “Thumb and forefinger, Chief. Just the thumb and forefinger. Then hold it up so I can grab it.”

  The chief closed his thumb and forefinger around the butt of his Taurus. Then, in a last gesture of defiance, he tossed it into the bushes.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  There were two cell blocks in Manaus’s delegacia central: a larger one, with ten cells divided equally on either side of a concrete corridor, and a smaller one, with two. The smaller block was on the second floor and reserved for female prisoners. The female cells were depressing and damp, but they were five-star accommodations when compared with the cells down in the basement. There, an area originally designed to hold a maximum of forty prisoners held almost two hundred men. They had to sleep in shifts, because there wasn’t room for all of them to lie down at once.

  The light, the little there was, came from five fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the corridor. At one time, there’d been lights inside the cells as well, but after the bulbs had been smashed half a dozen times the warders had given up replacing them.

  The prisoners were expected to clean their own cells, which they never did. The place was a dim paradise for vermin. The plumbing had long since given up the ghost, and the inmates were reduced to using buckets for human waste. The smell of unwashed bodies mingled with the rank odors of urine and excrement.

  Arnaldo, to whom Pinto had been entrusted, pushed the chief through the door at the head of the corridor and followed along behind him, jangling a ring of keys as he went. The chief was still in uniform and his arrival was greeted by grim silence until the prisoners realized that his hands were cuffed behind his back. Then the jeering broke out.

  “
Who wants to share a cell with him?” Arnaldo said, taking a position in the center of the corridor, just out of reach of groping hands.

  Everyone did, but one voice, deeper than the others, cut through the rest.

  “Put that fresh piece of meat in here.”

  The man who owned the voice stepped forward into the dim light. His shaved and tattooed head towered above the shoulders of every other man in his cell.

  “Friend of the chief’s, are you?” Arnaldo said.

  The man gripped the bars with hands the size of hams. His smile was pearly white against his dark skin.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me and the chief, we go back a long way,”

  “Get me out of here,” Pinto croaked.

  “Give me a good reason why I should,” Arnaldo said.

  “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “That’s a good reason,” Arnaldo said.

  While the chief and Coimbra were giving their statements, and falling all over each other in an attempt to shift blame, Silva dispatched Gloria’s team to find and bring in the men Pinto had called just prior to his arrest.

  When Sargento Carvalho and Tenente Jordao found out that the chief and Coimbra were cooperating, they entered into the spirit of the thing. They talked about the bribes being paid to the mayor and the governor. They talked about their involvement in the drug trade. They talked about the traffic in underage girls and confirmed that the felons on the list taken from Coimbra had been paying for protection. Silva went from interrogation room to interrogation room, letting the confessions ring like music in his ears.

  There was only one false note, one area of dissonance: not a single member of the chorus had any information about the current whereabouts of the woman they’d known as Carla Antunes.

  The three federal cops went from the delegacia central to The Goat’s boate. By the time they got there, it was half an hour after sunrise.