The Night Watchman Read online

  ‘Four things you need to know for now, Monroe,’ he said in a quick, businesslike voice. ‘One – we found cigarette butts in the ashtrays here in the living room and in the vic’s bedroom – four Marlboro Lights and two Gauloise Blondes down here, one more Marlboro in the bedroom. No lipstick stains on any of them. We’ve already collected them. Two – there’s a bloody footprint on Coutinho’s shirt. Three—’

  ‘Hold on,’ I cut in. ‘Is the footprint complete enough to identify the shoe?’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve got it photographed. Three – I found some slivers of plastic and what look like tiny bits of sponge on the carpet here. I’ve got samples.’

  ‘A silencer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, a soda bottle with cut-up sponges would be my guess. Four, we found—’

  ‘Does that really work?’ Luci interrupted.

  ‘Yeah, but only for small-calibre firearms. Which is point number four: we found the bullet casing – nine-calibre – and the slug itself. Exited Coutinho’s back and lodged in the wall near the staircase. Bruno has them.’ He read my mind and cut off my next question. ‘He’s upstairs, hunting for more dinosaur tracks.’

  ‘Bloody footprints,’ I explained to Luci.

  ‘Bruno is Bruno Vaz,’ Fonseca added. ‘A cassette player, so watch what you say.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re going too fast for me,’ Luci told him apologetically.

  ‘He’s PC,’ Fonseca explained, meaning a member of the Portuguese Communist Party. ‘If you talk about politics, he turns on the tape.’ He circled his finger in a loop and began to snore.

  ‘Has Sudoku taken a look at the body yet?’ I asked.

  Sudoku was our biomedical expert and a whiz at the Japanese number puzzles. His real name was João Ferreira.

  ‘Sudoku is home with a cold, poor boy, but Bruno and I have everything under control.’ Fonseca edged towards me and added in a whisper, ‘The vic had a guest in his bed last night. And a hundred euros says she’s responsible for this mess. Fifty more that she’s from France and smokes Gauloise Blondes.’

  ‘Sorry, Ana has cut off my betting allowance,’ I told him. ‘She doesn’t like Godzilla and King Kong going hungry. Has Dr Zydowicz arrived yet?’

  ‘Is he joining the festivities today? Christ, it’s going to be the fucking United Nations around here!’

  ‘Exactly. Did you take photos of the Asian writing on the wall?’

  ‘Absorutery,’ Fonseca replied, imitating a respectful Japanese bow.

  I moaned at his bad taste, which only made him burst out laughing.

  ‘When you’ve finished having so much fun,’ I said, ‘email me your key photos. Was the writing done in blood?’

  ‘Yeah, and we’ve got a sample. It’ll turn out to be the vic’s, most likely.’

  ‘How long has he been dead?’

  ‘Eighteen to twenty-four hours – taking into account that it’s a sauna in here and that he’s decomposing at warp nine.’

  When I asked if he’d recovered the victim’s cell phone, he told me they’d looked in all the obvious places and hadn’t spotted it. ‘A hundred bucks says the murderer grabbed it,’ he said to Luci.

  ‘I get the feeling it would be a mistake to bet against you,’ she told him.

  ‘Smart girl you got here!’ he told me, and he winked suggestively at her.

  ‘Smart inspector,’ I warned him, pleased to be able both to needle him and make a serious point.

  ‘Oh, come on, Monroe, you know I meant no offence.’ To Luci, he said, ‘Sorry. It’s just that you’re new to the job and what . . . fourteen years old?’

  She pointed her index finger up.

  ‘Eighteen? Twenty?’

  Fonseca’s childlike enthusiasm made Luci grin. ‘Twenty-seven,’ she replied.

  ‘Well, next to this grumpy old donkey,’ he said, jabbing his thumb towards me, ‘you look like a teenager . . . Oh, guess what I did, Monroe!’ he added, and without waiting for my response, he exclaimed, ‘I photographed every page in the vic’s address book!’

  ‘Why’d you do that?’

  ‘The Case of the Missing Mercedes.’

  It was a famous fuck-up. Back in 1984, a Portuguese ambassador was arrested for having crashed his car into a former business partner just outside the man’s house in Benfica. The suspect’s Mercedes was impounded, of course, so the photographer on the scene didn’t bother taking shots of the dented and bloodstained fender, or much of anything else. At least, that’s what he told his superiors, though everybody later suspected he’d been bribed. Unfortunately, the car went missing that very afternoon. With no Mercedes and no pictures, and some exchanges of cash at the Justice Ministry, the ambassador didn’t even have to face trial. Now and again I still come across his fat, self-satisfied face in the Público, Ana’s newspaper of choice. He’s become a fervent Catholic in his old age and pontificates against adoption by same-sex couples and medically assisted procreation. Presumably, he’ll bribe his way into heaven.

  ‘Good work,’ I told Fonseca. ‘Where’s the address book itself?’

  ‘Waiting for you on the first floor – on the desk in the library. You know what else, Monroe? Coutinho was a four-minister man!’

  I whistled to make him happy.

  ‘He’s got the cell phones for four ministers in his address book,’ Fonseca explained to Luci, beaming. ‘A new Lisbon record!’ He wiped a big drop of perspiration from his chin with a bravado swipe. ‘I have a hunch we’ll find more goodies in his computer – maybe the numbers of his Swiss bank accounts! Anyone feel like a trip to Zurich?’

  ‘Where’d you find his computer?’ I asked.

  ‘Also on the desk in his library. A MacBook Air. Sweet! We sent it off to Joaquim.’

  Joaquim was the senior computer specialist in our technological office. ‘So what’s next for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Nicki and I have a date with the vic’s bedroom.’ He pressed his lips to the shutter of his camera. He was performing for Luci.

  To take his spotlight off her, I said, ‘Inspector Pires, see if you can turn up a cell phone in a bathroom or some other unlikely place. I’ll be in the library.’

  Despite Fonseca’s having taken photos of every page, I wanted to have the address book in my possession before doing anything else, so I climbed up the stairs behind him, instructing him along the way not to discuss the murder with his wife or kids.

  Happily, he’d already put the air conditioner on in the library. The walls were wood panelled, their shelves packed with books from floor to ceiling. Everything was in perfect order except for a French–Farsi dictionary shoved in horizontally on a bottom shelf near the desk.

  At the front of the room was a locked, glass-fronted case containing antique editions of classical French authors such as Zola and Stendhal. Coutinho’s CDs were there, too – mostly Piaf, Polnareff, Aznavour and other popular French singers from the 1960s and 1970s. His small classical music section was almost all Erik Satie and Claude Debussy.

  The desk was a dark, ponderous antique, with lion’s-paw feet. The address book sat next to a sleek black telephone. It was suede, and the exact same shade of green as the leaves of the junipers that used to grow on our ranch. Coutinho had neat, compact handwriting, though his capital S and G were ornamented with florid curlicues. Ana would have said that he probably startled those around him with occasional flourishes of exuberance.

  I found the entries for the four ministers right away; they were written in the G section, under the heading Governo: José Pedro Aguiar Branco, National Defence; Miguel Macedo, Internal Administration; Paula Teixeira da Cruz, Justice; and Miguel Relvas, Parliamentary Affairs. Jumping around from A to Z, I also discovered the cell phone numbers for António Amorim, the chief executive officer of our biggest cork exporter; Mariza, the renowned fado singer; and Fernando Gomes, the former mayor of Porto. He also had the cell phones for several important contacts in France, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  On the wall
above the desk was a framed magazine cover: the victim featured in Exame, standing in front of his red Alfa Romeo sports car, looking confident and gentlemanly – but with a twinkle of mischief in his eye, too, as if to show the reader that he wasn’t yet too old to sneak out of the house at 2 a.m. and race his car down the Avenida da Liberdade at a hundred miles an hour – a favourite pastime for the failed Formula One drivers in our city. The flashy car on the cover seemed his way of letting us know he was a secret risk-taker. And unashamed of making huge profits in a bankrupt country.

  The tagline on the magazine cover read: Steering Clear of the Economic Crisis. It was hard not to dislike him and the editors, especially because my pay had been cut by about twenty per cent over the last two years.

  Below the cover were six framed watercolours of a small girl – naked and exuberant. They were executed with the broad, sweeping strokes of Oriental calligraphy. In the most striking, she was racing across a beach, her arms thrust out in front of her, as if she were chasing after her own potential for joy.

  The victim’s blue linen trousers were folded over the seat of an armchair in his bedroom. A fat leather wallet – stuffed with nearly four hundred euros in bills – was in the right front pocket. A gold Dunhill lighter and silver keychain with the Alfa Romeo insignia were in the left. On the night table was a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights and a jade-coloured, celadon ashtray. Coutinho – or someone in the family – clearly had an interest in China or Japan, which gave me the idea that the killer might very well have forced him to paint the Asian writing on the wall with his own blood.

  Photos of the victim’s wife and daughter crowded one corner of the desk. They were blonde and pretty and, in one particularly evocative shot, taken at the beach, both of them had the same bemused, impatient-with-the-photographer look. It must have been an old source of family irritation and amusement that Coutinho took too long to focus.

  Back downstairs, I found Pires studying the paintings in the living room.

  ‘Paula Rego is too famous for even an uneducated burglar to pass up,’ she told me. She pointed to a drawing of the poet Fernando Pessoa reading a spread newspaper. ‘And that one is by Julio Almeida, an up-and-coming artist who’s getting a lot of press lately. It’s got to be worth a few thousand euros at the very least.’

  ‘Which means that if our man was a burglar, he was obviously after something he considered more valuable.’

  ‘What do you think it might be?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe business plans that hadn’t yet been made public. Or bids on public projects. Listen, did you find a cell phone?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  I tested Coutinho’s keys on the front door. The second one worked. We theorized that he’d heard noises while dressing and made his way downstairs to investigate. Judging from the height of the bullet hole in the wall, he’d been shot standing. Three knee-prints in the white rug indicated that he’d crawled towards the wall of paintings.

  ‘He edged towards his killer to beg for his life,’ I suggested, thinking of what I’d do in the same situation. ‘Or maybe he hoped he still had enough strength left to lunge forward and tackle him.’ As I voiced my speculations, the meat stench of the body hit me. We’d need to open every window in the house or . . . ‘Luci, see if you can get the air conditioner going,’ I said. I’d noticed it on entering the room and pointed above the antique map of Europe on a side wall. ‘If not, we’re going to have to wear masks.’

  While she fiddled with the controls, I knelt next to the body, my hand over my mouth and nose. The bloody footprint stamped on the wing of the shirt indicated the pattern of the shoe sole: slender ribbing intersecting at a boomerang shape. Lifting up the fabric with the tip of my pen, I discovered a dark bruise above Coutinho’s ribs. Just then, the hum of the air conditioner started up and the cool air brushed its fingertips at the back of my neck.

  ‘You’re a life-saver,’ I told Luci as she stepped towards me. I gestured towards the body. ‘Two assailants, I’d guess. One tied the rope around his wrists and stuffed the gag in his mouth while the other held the gun.’

  ‘Or the murderer made him tie the gag on himself,’ she observed, ‘then tightened it and moved on to his wrists.’ Gazing at the victim, she added in a solemn voice, ‘Sensing he wasn’t going to make it, he lowered his head any way it fell and let death take him.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I’d say it’s more likely that the murderer kicked him hard to take the fight out of him.’ I showed her the bruise on the side of his chest. ‘Some people wake up every morning eager to hurt somebody, Luci. Unfortunately for us, they don’t wear any special sign. They’re the chemistry teacher who looks like Harry Potter and the carpenter who sings country music ballads while weeding his vegetable garden.’

  I hadn’t intended to mention my dad, but references to him occasionally popped out of me without warning.

  While I was examining the surgical scars behind Coutinho’s ears, David Zydowicz, the medical inspector, shuffled into the room. His droopy, heavily hooded eyes opened wide with pleasure when he spotted me, but they betrayed weariness as well. He’d aged a lot in the two months since his heart attack. I’d visited him twice in the hospital. His walk had become a fragile balancing act.

  ‘Checking to see if he washed properly?’ David asked in his Brazilian singsong. He was from São Paulo and Jewish. His father had survived Treblinka. David had had his Dad’s prison-camp number tattooed on his own forearm in solidarity, which was the most moving testament to filial love I’d ever heard.

  ‘He was a friend of Catherine Deneuve,’ I told him – our slang for anyone who’d had a face-lift.

  He shuffled closer. ‘But not such a good friend,’ he noted, flapping his bony hands. ‘I could do better blindfolded.’ Taking out his latex gloves, he said, ‘Just after I left the hospital, I decided to get a few collagen shots myself.’

  ‘But your wrinkles have always given you classic good looks,’ I protested.

  He snorted. ‘I was talking about my ass, Henrique.’ He patted his behind. ‘My wife says it’s become a balloon with all the air let out. Nothing to hold onto any longer.’

  We shared a laugh meant to ease the oddness of his being so diminished. He leaned over the body and sniffed. ‘Four,’ he said; he gave stenches a rating from one – barely noticeable – to ten, a rating he’d never given out because it was the stink of Hitler and his cronies rotting away in Gehenna, the Jewish hell. ‘After I get a good look at him, I’ll clean him up a bit.’

  While David pressed on an ache in his lower back, I introduced him to Luci. Squinting, he focused a beam of masculine delight on her face. Even in his debilitated state, his libido was dancing a samba.

  To come to her rescue again, I reached into my shirt pocket for Moura’s foil. ‘This may have a trace of cyanide on it,’ I told him. ‘How about disposing of it for me?’

  He grabbed it in a tissue and tucked it in the pocket of his smock. ‘Where’d you get cyanide, son?’ he asked.

  ‘From a suspect who killed himself this morning. It’s been one hell of a day.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it,’ he said, patting my arm.

  Turning to Luci, I said, ‘Time for us to interview the housekeeper.’

  Senhora Grimault was an elderly, sparrowish woman with her hair clasped in a tight grey bun and the big knobby hands of a peasant. Her earrings were golden hearts, and she smelled pleasantly of lavender perfume. When we stepped inside, she was pouring steaming milk into her coffee cup. She looked up at us with an eager, curious, intelligent face. I trusted her right away.

  After we’d finished the introductions, I asked if she was French, and she told me she was from Braga, but that her husband was from Rouen. With hopeful eyes, she asked us to sample her homemade sponge cake, but my gut wasn’t up to the challenge. Luci thanked her but also said no, citing her need to keep fit, but I insisted that she eat half a slice so as not to disappoint our host.

  The kitchen was all stainles
s steel and white marble, except for the wall beneath the cupboards, which was ornamented with centuries-old Portuguese tiles forming blue and yellow geometric patterns. A village church had obviously been plundered.

  Senhora Grimault asked me to fetch a plate for Luci from a high shelf, and for a few seconds I was fifteen again, and happy to be needed by Aunt Olivia around the house.

  When we were all comfortably seated, I asked, ‘So how long have you worked for the Coutinho family, senhora?’

  ‘Nearly four years. Just after Dr Coutinho moved back to Portugal, he hired me.’ She explained that he’d wanted a housekeeper who could speak French, then, tearing up, volunteered that Senhora Coutinho was sure to take her husband’s death very hard. As for the daughter, she predicted a long period of silent suffering. When I asked why, she told me that Sandra and her father both tended to hide their emotions. She added that they were also both workaholics, reinforcing her point by telling me that Coutinho returned to Lisbon once or twice a week over the summer to supervise building sites. For the moment, I chose not to mention that infidelity might have been the real reason he came to the city so often.

  Unfortunately, she had no idea who the visitor was who had smoked two Gauloise Blondes. ‘Inspector,’ she said, giving me a weighty look, ‘you think the murderer was here last night and talked for a while with Dr Coutinho, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s possible, senhora, but between you and me, I doubt it. Anyone as careful as the killer we’re dealing with had to know the butts could be used as evidence. More likely they were left by a friend – and very possibly the last person to see your employer alive.’

  Senhora Grimault told me she’d arrived at precisely four minutes past ten in the morning and let herself in with her key. She’d neither seen nor heard anything odd. She explained that during the family’s summer vacation in the Algarve she came to the house twice a week to air it out, dust a bit and water the house plants. The garden itself had an automatic watering system. She’d brought along a sponge cake because she’d been told a few days earlier by Susana – in a phone call – that Dr Coutinho would be back in Lisbon for a couple of days. He had a sweet tooth and she prided herself on her baking.