Havana Blue

wideawake face no longer bore that squeaky clean sheen. He no longer smiled automatically and confidently spread light and good vibrations. It seemed he’d put on weight, a sickly purplish fat, and his brown hair urgently required a comb.

“Look who it is,” said the Count, and the forensic doctor pulled the sheet back over him again, like a curtain falling on the last act of a play that lacked emotion or charm.

“Well, if it isn’t my friend the Count,” he said, and the Count thought: He’s blacker than the tar the roads could do with.

Lieutenant Raul Booz smiled, and his white young colt’s teeth brought a shaft of light to the jet-black expanse of his face. Nobody would guarantee he was more than seven feet tall or weighed in at three hundred pounds, but the Count turned into a bag of nerves just looking at him. “How can he be that big and black?” he asked himself as he got up and shook Detective Lieutenant Raul Booz’s hand.

“You already know Sergeant Manuel Palacios, I believe?”

“Yes, of course,” replied Booz, who also smiled at Manolo and settled down on the sofa that filled the space next to a wall in his office. “So you were the one looking for this guy?”

The Count nodded and explained the story behind the disappearance of Rafael Morin Rodriguez.

“Well, I’m going to hand him over to you all sewn up, my friend. It will be the easiest case you’ve ever had. Take a look at this.” And he handed the Count a file that was on the sofa. “There was a hair with capillary tissue under one fingernail. Naturally, it must belong to his killer.”

“And what are the results of the autopsy, Lieutenant?”

“As clear as daylight. He died on the night of the first or early in the morning of the second. Forensics can’t be sure because the cold helped preserve the body, and that’s why nobody knew a corpse was there. He had a fractured second and third cervical vertebra, which pressed down on his spinal cord, and that was what killed him, and his brain was severely banged about, but that wasn’t lethal.”

“But what happened, Lieutenant, what do you reckon?” Manolo interjected, ignoring the file the Count was handing him.

Lieutenant Raul Booz, head of the criminal investigation squad in East Havana, looked at his own fingernails before answering.

“The station in Guanabo got a call last night at about ten saying a strange smell was coming from an empty house in Brisas del Mar and that the back-door lock had been forced. It’s a block of only two houses, one that’s empty in winter, and the one belonging to the woman who called that’s about twenty yards away. The people in Guanabo went to look and found a dead body in the bathroom. All the signs pointed to the man dying when he fell against the bath, but the blow was so hard he can’t just have slipped, Palacios. He was pushed and before that there was a skirmish during which the dead man scratched his murderer and took out the hair we analysed. He’s a white man, in his forties, between five foot four and five foot eight tall and, naturally, black haired… That’s just for starters.”

“And enough to finish on, Lieutenant,” replied the Count.

“But there is a complicating factor. Although the murder was probably not premeditated, something very strange happened afterwards. The murderer stripped his victim and took his clothes away, and there’s no sign of the briefcase or leather bag the dead man must have been carrying before the fight, given the traces of leather on his hands, and it must have weighed a fair amount because he kept passing it from one hand to the other.”

“And any traces of cars or anything like that?”

“Nothing of the sort. The fresh fingerprints belong to the dead man, and are on the broken door, in the kitchen, on an armchair in the living room and in the bathroom. It looks as if he was waiting for someone, almost definitely the murderer. And we combed the surrounding area round about but no sign of the dead man’s clothes or briefcase. But this case is a doddle, don’t you think?”

“And, Booz, how about if we ring you in two hours to confirm that the murderer goes by the name of Rene Maciques?” the Count asked as he stood up and straightened the pistol threatening to leap from his belt.

The Count thought about lighting a cigarette but stopped himself. He preferred to get out his pen and fiddle with its catch. The monotonous sound echoed aggressively in the silence of the cubicle.

“Well, then, Maciques?” Manolo finally asked, and Maciques looked up.

What a chameleon, thought the Count. He was no longer the lively conversationalist of their first encounter or the punctilious librarian they had recorded. A mere day without a shave had been enough to transform the head of office into a potential model tramp, and his shaking hands brought to mind a dire devastating winter.

“He was to blame,” said Maciques, trying to sit straight in his chair. “He was the one behind all this mess when he realized they were going to finger him. I don’t know how everything else happened.”

“I think you do, Maciques,” Manolo insisted.

“It was just a manner of words. I meant I can’t really explain it… He came to see me on the night of the thirtieth and told me the Mitachi people had brought forward their visit and this was going to put him really in it. I never found out what it was, although I can imagine, it must have been to do with money, and he told me he had to leave the country. I told him that was madness, it wasn’t so easy, and he told me it was really easy, that he had ten thousand Cuban pesos and a pile of dollars to pay for a motor launch and I should find him one. That was when he blackmailed me with the bank account and ownership of the car. I still don’t know how he managed to photocopy those papers, but the fact was he had them. Well, no, he’d already planned the car bit: he got it as a present and gave it to me, and naturally I sold it, it was red-hot and I sold it… Then I repeated it was madness and told him he wasn’t playing straight with me, and he replied by telling me to get a launch and forget everything else. And the truth is I didn’t even make a start, for I thought there must be a way to get those papers back.”

“By killing him, Maciques?”

The man shook his head. It was a mechanical reaction but as intense as the way his hands were shaking.

“No, Sergeant, some other way… But to gain time I told him I’d contracted a launch for daybreak on the first, after the party on the thirty-first, I told him, it’s the best time to leave, the skipper’s got permission to go fishing, and we should be in Guanabo at four, and I wish you could have seen him at the party. He was already imagining himself out of Cuba and was more petulant and arrogant than ever, the lousy shit, I tell you, be glad you never met him… I think I should have stopped it all at the start. But you know what fear is? Fear you might lose everything, probably go to prison, never be anybody again? That’s why I did what I did and picked him up at his place after we left the party and drove to Guanabo. Then I parked somewhere by the Veneciana, next to the river, and told him I was going to see the guy, and what I did was to walk to the beach and stay there a while. When I went back and told him it would have to be that night he went mad. I’d never seen him like it before; he called me an asshole and a number of other things, and said I should be grateful he was going, because if he wasn’t, he would put me in it, and a few more choice expressions. Then I drove him to the house. I knew it was always empty in winter, because a friend of mine rented it from the owners in September, and we went in and I told him to wait there till nightfall, that the skipper had told me they’d leave very early, and then I drove back to Havana.”

“And what were you thinking, Maciques?”

“I wasn’t thinking anything. About what I did that night. About going to see him and telling him that everything was ready. It was then I had the idea about taking the briefcase with all the papers and telling him to find his own launch. And do you know what the first thing was he said to me when I arrived? That he’d write to me from Miami and tell me where he’d hidden the photocopies; they were in a safe place and nobody would ever find them. Then I was the one who went crazy. I told him what I’d been thinking about him for quite some time, and he threw a punch at me, really a big slap, his hand open, like that, and hit me here just above my ear and that was when I pushed him and he fell against the side of the bath… And that was all,” said Maciques as his head sunk between his shoulders.

“And it was you who put his Panama allowances and the other things in with the papers at the enterprise?”

“I had to protect myself, didn’t I? Because I suspected he was going to do the dirty on me, and I had to protect myself. The fucking bastard,” he concluded, expending his last drop of vital energy.

“And did you really think you were going to wriggle out of this one, Maciques?” asked the Count as he stood up. For a moment he’d thought that aged defeated man was worthy of pity but only for a very fleeting moment. The