“This way.”
Goncalves led them down an alley. Sacca’s place was a tiny freestanding building in the rear of his landlady’s home.
“Built for a maid,” Goncalves said. “There’s just the one room and a bathroom.”
“What’s the landlady’s story?”
“Around ten thirty this morning she went to collect the rent. The door was ajar. He was stretched out in a pool of blood. She didn’t panic. Like I said, she works in a hospital.
Says she’s seen a lot of bodies in her time. She checked his vital signs before she called it in, told the attending officer the paramedics didn’t need to hurry. He’d been dead for hours, she said. The
ME confirms that the death was sometime between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M. ”
“He’s already here?”
“The ME? It’s a she. Gilda Caropreso. Inside.”
Arnaldo glanced at Hector. “You and your girlfriend have to stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will talk.”
“How about Janus Prado?” Silva asked.
“He’s off today, but they always keep him posted on stuff like this. He called me, asked me if you were coming. When I told him you were, he said to have fun and…”
“And what?”
“And to tell Arnaldo Nunes he’s so ugly that when he walks by toilets, they flush.”
Goncalves seemed pleased to be passing the message along.
Gilda Caropreso, very much at ease in a room crowded with men, was wearing yellow jeans and a pale blue blouse. The only concessions to her profession were latex gloves and a pair of plastic booties. She circulated among the newcomers, collecting kisses on her cheeks and giving Hector one on the mouth. Then they all went over and looked down at the body.
Abilio Sacca was a mess.
“I don’t think he got anywhere near his attacker,” Gilda said. “I’ll have a closer look under a microscope, but there doesn’t appear to be anything under his fingernails except dirt. There is, by the way, a lot of that. And the rest of his personal hygiene doesn’t have much to say for it either.”
Silva knelt. Gilda hadn’t been exaggerating when she spoke of Sacca’s hygiene. Close-up, and under the steely smell of blood, the corpse gave a whole new definition to the term “body odor.” He squinted through the plastic bags to have a closer look at the victim’s hands.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Indeed,” she said. “Whatever the killer was using, Sacca was trying to fend it off.”
“So ‘it’ didn’t get left behind?”
“No. Hector tells me you have a theory this killer might be the Arriaga boy’s father.”
“Not everyone ascribes to it, but I do.”
“Poor man.”
“Crazy man. If it’s him, he’s killed a lot of innocent people.”
“A man like that belongs in a mental institution, not in a jail.”
“That’s for the courts to decide,” Silva said.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”
“Could the weapon used to beat him have been a baseball bat?” Hector asked with a flash of inspiration.
Silva stood and Gilda knelt for another look. After a while, she said, “Maybe. I’ll check for wood fragments in the wounds. What kind of wood do they use for baseball bats?”
“Ash,” Hector said. “The same wood the English use for cricket bats.”
“How the hell do you know what the English use for cricket bats?” Arnaldo said.
“He comes up with that kind of stuff all the time,” Gilda said. “He’s a repository of totally useless information.”
“And occasionally amazing instances of insight,” Silva said.
“Once the killer got past the hands,” Gilda said, “he concentrated on the head. There’s considerable damage to the forehead, temples, cheekbones, nose, and jaw. There’s also a second and very damaging blow to the crown. That one was probably postmortem, a final whack to make sure he was dead. And before you ask, yes, he was shot. Once. In the lower abdomen.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Julio Arriaga entered the stale-smelling apartment, put the bags of groceries on the kitchen counter and started opening windows.
Inez put one hand on her pregnant belly and another on his arm. “I’ll air the place out,” she said. “You go get the rest of the stuff.”
He came back, lugging the heavy tent, to find she hadn’t opened a single window. She was standing in front of the answering machine.
“You’d better listen to this,” she said.
“What-”
Inez put a finger to her lips and pushed the play button.
The woman who’d recorded the message was speaking in Portuguese, which was a good thing since Julio Arriaga’s English, even after three years in the United States, was still nothing to write home about. When he couldn’t get by in Portuguese, he used Spanish. And why not? Everybody knew you didn’t have to learn English if you lived in South Florida.
Senhor Arriaga, the voice said, my name is Solange Dirceu. I’m calling on behalf of Detective Sergeant Harvey Willis of the Miami-Dade Police Department. It’s most urgent that Detective Willis speak to you. When you get this call, no matter what time of the day or night, please call me on my cell phone to set up an appointment.
She gave him a number and hung up.
“Want to hear it again?” Inez asked, her finger poised above the machine.
Julio looked at his watch. It was almost midnight.
“Leave it for tomorrow,” he said.
“No matter what time of the day or night,” Inez said, quoting verbatim. She’d been a schoolteacher, and she still had a pedagogical bent.
“Oh, hell,” he said, and went to get a pencil to make a note of the number.
The following morning, at the appointed hour of nine, Detective Sergeant Willis was on the Arriagas’ doorstep. He was accompanied by some black cop, whose name Julio didn’t catch, and an attractive brunette whose name he did: Solange Dirceu, the woman he’d spoken to the night before.
Julio settled them around the dining table, the only place in the apartment that had enough chairs. Inez, flustered to have three people she didn’t know in her kitchen, served them coffee. After it had been established that his English really wasn’t good, the rest of the interview went through Solange. What Willis told him next caused Julio to sit back in his chair.
“ Puta merda,” Julio said.
Solange translated this as “holy cow.” She didn’t approve of Julio’s choice of words.
The entire interview, with Julio’s approval, was recorded on a small device Willis had brought with them. They finished within half an hour and left Julio sitting at his kitchen table, staring at the wall.
“I gotta make this quick,” Harvey Willis said, “so I can concentrate on my driving. I’m on I-95, surrounded by crazy Haitians. I even have one sitting next to me in the front seat.”
In the background, over the noise of the traffic, Silva heard Pete Andre tell Willis that racist honkies like himself had no place among Miami Beach’s Finest.
“It’s about Julio Arriaga,” Willis went on, ignoring his partner.
“He struck again since last we talked,” Silva said. “He killed another passenger.”
“No, he didn’t.”
