Every Bitter Thing Read online

  “Mom? Where are you? Mom? For God’s sake, Mom, pick up the phone.” Some indistinguishable words were growled in the background. “Mom, they say I have to be quick. It’s like this: they opened my backpack when I was coming through Customs. There were pills in there, drugs, they said. And now they say I need a lawyer, but I didn’t do anything. I swear. Those pills weren’t mine. They weren’t—”

  The boy’s plea came to an abrupt end followed by a beep.

  Aline pushed another button and scoffed, “Drugs! My Junior with drugs!”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “I never believed it! Not for a moment. I still don’t.”

  “What kind of drugs?” he asked quietly.

  “Ecstasy.”

  A drug teenagers favored. Hector had seen kids as young as twelve using the stuff. Junior might well have been carrying it; in fact, Hector couldn’t think of any other reason why the boy might have been arrested. But he wasn’t about to say that to his overwrought mother.

  Aline Arriaga walked to the windowsill, picked up a picture frame, and handed it to him.

  “Junior,” she said.

  Julio Arriaga—Junior—a good-looking kid with his mother’s black hair and a lopsided smile, wore a gray shirt with blue piping. A baseball bat, gripped in one hand, was resting on his shoulder.

  “His last photo,” she said, “taken in Florida. Julio sent it.”

  “His father lives there?”

  “I already told you that.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. You did.”

  “And I live here, but not for long. I want to get out of this country, wanted to get out even before what happened to Junior … happened. Julio’s saving money. He’s going to send for me.”

  “I’d like to speak to him,” Hector said.

  “Julio? Why? Why do you want to talk to Julio?”

  “He took your son to the airport, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he might have spoken to one of the other passengers, seen something that would be significant for our investigation.”

  “Julio moved recently. I don’t have his new phone number.”

  “An address perhaps?”

  “I don’t have an address either. I’ll have to get back to you.”

  She wasn’t meeting his eyes. And there was something else, too. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. He suddenly had the feeling she wanted to get rid of him. He looked back at the photo in his hands, made a point of admiring it. “A handsome young man,” he said.

  The tactic was successful.

  “Sit right there,” she said. “I have lots more.”

  She went into another room and, seconds later, came back with a thick album.

  She put the heavy book on his lap and took a seat next to him. “This one,” she said, “was taken on the same day as that one.” She pointed to the picture in the frame.

  Junior was looking over his shoulder. There was a baseball cap on his head, a number on the back of his shirt. She started leafing through the pages, going slowly, so he could admire the pictures. “Up there, in the United States, they called him Jule.

  Julio wasn’t ‘cool’ enough; neither was Junior.” She paused at a photo that took up a full page. “That’s his father,” she said, tapping the image with her forefinger.

  Julio wore combat fatigues and looked every inch the soldier: lean, hard, not the sort you’d like to tangle with.

  “That was taken about four years ago,” she said, “in Manaus. Before Manaus, we were in Belo Horizonte, and before that it was Porto Alegre. We spent two winters there. Do you have any idea how cold it gets in Porto Alegre in the winter? That was some change, I’m telling you, Porto Alegre to Manaus.”

  Hector leaned in for a closer look. Julio was turned slightly away from the camera, and his shoulder patch was clearly visible: CIGS.

  CIGS is the acronym for the Centro de Instrução de Guerra na Selva, the Brazilian army’s elite training corps for jungle fighting. They were the best of the best, a unit exclusively composed of career men.

  Hector felt his pulse quicken. “Why did Julio leave the army?”

  Again, she avoided his eyes. “It was a problem with one of his officers.”

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  Can’t, or won’t, Hector thought.

  “When he was here for Junior’s funeral, did—”

  “Julio didn’t come to Junior’s funeral,” she interrupted quickly.

  “No?”

  “No. He … doesn’t have a work visa for the States. He’s there illegally.”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “If he leaves, they won’t let him back in. Then I’d never get out of here either. And what would have been the point? To see Junior’s body in a box? To see the box being put in the ground? Junior wasn’t here any more. Junior was gone.”

  But his grieving mother wasn’t. And a husband who loved her wouldn’t let her go through the funeral alone. Or would he?

  A tear dropped from her cheek. She took a paper handkerchief from a box on the coffee table, dried the photo, and blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said.

  More to calm her than for any other reason, Hector said, “Tell me about that day. Did you go to the airport to meet your son?”

  “I always went to the airport to meet him. Sometimes I had to take a day off to do it, but I always went. First, I’d call to make sure the flight was on time. We have two flights a day, both in the morning. He was on the early one. It arrived just a little after six.”

  “So you called to check the flight’s arrival time….”

  “And I took the shuttle to the airport. When I’m on my own, I use the company shuttle. It doesn’t cost anything, and it’s convenient. One of them leaves every hour, day and night. I stood waiting for him to clear Customs, waited for two and a half hours after the flight landed. By that time I was frantic. I went to the TAB counter and spoke to a woman I know. She has a pass.”

  “A pass?”

  “You need a pass to get into the Customs area. She came back and told me they’d taken him away.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I called my answering machine to see if he’d left a message. He had. You heard it.”

  “He didn’t say where he was calling from, did he?”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t.”

  “And next?”

  “I opened the yellow pages, looked for criminal lawyers.”

  “And picked the lawyer with the biggest ad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dudu Fonseca?”

  She raised her head and looked at him. “You know him?”

  Hector nodded. Not every cop in São Paulo knew Dudu Fonseca, but those who did hated his guts.

  “I got him on the second try. It was just after nine. He asked for ten thousand. A ‘nonrefundable retainer,’ he called it.”

  “You paid him ten thousand?”

  She hung her head. “I was desperate. Over the telephone he told me he’d only take cash. I went to the bank and got it. Then I went to his office. The first thing he asked me was if I’d brought the money. I said I had. He told me to give it to him, and I did. Then he made one telephone call. One telephone call. He put it on his speakerphone so I could hear the whole thing. Whoever he called, and I have no idea who it was, told him my son had been in a shower at the Fifteenth Delegacia, the one out near Guarulhos. He’d fallen. That was the story. He’d fallen when he was in the shower, and he’d hit his head, and it had killed him. Fonseca just sat there, saying uh-huh, uh-huh. They’re telling him my son is dead and he’s saying uh-huh, uh-huh.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t even know how the call ended. I’d broken down by that time; I was crying my eyes out. That didn’t affect him either. He sat there looking at me like an ugly toad. It must happen to him all the time, people getting hysterical in his office.”

 
“I expect it does,” Hector said. “How about your money?”

  “He kept it. All of it. It was nonrefundable, like he said. I really didn’t care. For years, Julio and I have been saving for Junior’s education, and Junior wasn’t going to need it any more. I left Fonseca’s office in … oh, I don’t know … a kind of trance, and I took a cab to the Fifteenth Delegacia to see my baby. They’d stretched him out on the floor in a storage room, a storage room, and covered him with a sheet of black plastic. They’d closed his eyes, stuffed cotton wads into his nose and ears. He looked fine from the front, like he was sleeping. But there was a horrible wound here.” She put her hand to the back of her head. “I couldn’t see how anyone could get a wound like that from a fall. I told them that. They said he must have hit it on one of the fixtures.”

  “They hadn’t bandaged the wound?”

  “No, there was no bandage, nothing. And his body was already cold. Finally, an ambulance showed up. The paramedics were the only ones who showed me any kind of sympathy at all. One was a man. He said he was sorry it had taken them so long, but they had to give priority to the people they could help. The woman looked at me, looked at Junior, and started to cry. She hugged me before she left.”

  “And then?”

  “They brought him to the Instituto Médico Legal. It took them three days to release his body. God knows why. The story didn’t change. They’re still saying he fell. Lots of his friends came to the funeral, almost his whole class from school. He had sixty-three people in all.”

  “And no one, at any time, suggested that what happened might have been anything other than an accident?”

  Aline gave him a bitter look. “No one, at any time,” she said. “The cops in that delegacia must have thought I was really stupid, that I’d never read about the sort of things that happen in jails, that I never picked up a newspaper. Afterward, after the funeral, I went back to the place where they’d been holding him. The delegado didn’t want to see me.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Sergio Bittencourt, that’s the little bastard’s name. He tried to sneak out the back door.”

  “He what?”

  “I’d been crying. There was a sergeant, an older man, not like a policeman at all. He kept giving me paper handkerchiefs, offering me coffee. Then another policeman came in and whispered something in the sergeant’s ear. As soon as he left, the sergeant said the delegado had gone out the back door and was on the way to his car. The car was a gray sedan. Bittencourt was wearing a brown suit. If I was quick, I could catch him in the parking lot, but I wasn’t to tell the delegado he’d told me that. I took off like a shot.”

  “And you caught up with Bittencourt?”

  She nodded. “I got between him and his car. When he spotted me, he looked like he’d just taken a mouthful of sour milk, then he turned solicitous.”

  “And what, exactly, did he tell you?”

  “He said there were two dozen men taking their showers along with Junior, but no one saw him fall. Can you believe that? Two dozen men in the same shower, and no one saw him fall?”

  “No,” Hector said. “I can’t.”

  “Bittencourt said he was looking into it, he said he was questioning everyone. He promised he’d get back to me.”

  “And did he? Did he get back to you?”

  She paused for a moment. “No,” she finally said.

  And that’s something else she isn’t telling me, Hector thought.

  “I think I’ve troubled you enough,” he said.

  “Wait,” she said. “You’ll be looking closely into everything that happened on that flight, correct?”

  “Correct, Senhora.”

  “If, in the course of your investigation, you happen to discover who planted those drugs on my boy, will you tell me?”

  “Senhora, I—”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe every word Junior said. It’s not that, but … well, there’s always a bit of doubt, isn’t there? It would set my mind at rest to know that he didn’t lie to me.”

  She was staring into his eyes. There was something manic about her look. “Will you?” she said. “Will you do it?”

  Hector nodded. What harm could it do?

  She continued to search his eyes. “I have your word?”

  “You have my word,” he said.

  “Good,” she said and got up to lead him to the door.

  THERE WAS a padaria just across the street from Aline’s apartment building. Hector went in, sat down at the zinc-covered counter, and ordered a cachaça neat. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. If the girl behind the counter thought it was early to be drinking straight cane spirit, she didn’t show it.

  Hector had surreptitiously switched off his mobile phone while Aline was showing him the pictures. Now he turned it on. He intended to call his uncle, but the phone rang before he could hit the speed dial.

  Haraldo Gonçalves’s name was on the caller ID.

  The conversation that ensued prompted Hector to order another cachaça. He was still sipping it when the phone rang once again.

  “Why couldn’t I reach you?” Silva asked.

  “I switched my phone off.”

  “Why?”

  Hector told him about his disturbing conversation with the bereaved mother.

  Silva was silent for a moment. He knew what it meant to lose a child. Then he said, “Completely different MO.”

  “And it happened in a jail,” Hector said. “No way it could be connected.”

  “Maybe not. But the boy was in that cabin with the others, and that’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. Did you hear about the flight attendant, Bruna Nascimento?”

  “Just now. Babyface called.”

  “Call him back. Tell him to turn around, go to international arrivals and try to talk to the customs agents who nailed the kid.”

  “How about Bittencourt? That delegado?”

  “Take him yourself. He’s liable to pull rank with Gonçalves. And don’t call him first. Surprise him.”

  Hector looked at his watch. “Not even noon. I should catch him easy.”

  “Who did the autopsy on the Arriaga boy?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out.”

  “From Gilda?”

  “From Gilda. I’ll call her straightaway. That it?”

  “No. One more thing: call Mara and ask her to see what she can find out about the kid’s father.”

  “You think—”

  “I don’t think anything. I’d just like to know.”

  The guy behind the counter picked up Hector’s glass and gave him a questioning look. Hector shook his head and pointed at the coffee pot.

  Chapter Seventeen

  LUIS MANSUR’S FIRST PHONE call from the Federal Police initially provoked curiosity, then irritation.

  A woman who identified herself as Senhorita Mara Carta asked if he was the Luis Mansur who’d flown from Miami to São Paulo on the twenty-second of November.

  “Yes,” he’d said. “What’s this all about?”

  “That was on TAB flight 8101, is that correct?”

  “Yes. Why do you want to know?”

  “Are you acquainted with a man called Juan Rivas, or a man called Jonas Palhares, or a man called Victor Neves?”

  “No. And why the fuck are you asking?”

  She sniffed. “I’ve given you no cause to be offensive, Senhor Mansur. I’m just doing my job. Did you make the acquaintance of any of the other passengers on that flight?”

  “What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?”

  “No, Senhor, it’s the Federal Police, and I advise you to answer the question.”

  “I never speak to people on airplanes.”

  That was not, strictly speaking, true. The two times Mansur had been seated next to an attractive woman, he’d tried very hard to strike up a conversation.

  “If you didn’t speak to anyone,” the voice on the line went on, “what did you do on that flight?”

 
This was really too much. Mansur was tempted to hang up on her, but it was the Federal Police.

  “What does anybody do on a flight? I had a drink. I ate my dinner. I watched a movie. Then I put on a sleeping mask, stuck in some earplugs, and slept all the way to São Paulo.

  Now, I want to know—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “That’s all for the moment. Someone will be contacting you soon.”

  She hung up, without so much as a thank you.

  Bitch!

  Mansur had interpreted “soon” as sometime within the coming days. But the second call came less than an hour later, and at a most inconvenient time. He was in the process of firing Jamile Bastos and had made it clear to Rosa, his secretary, that he was not to be disturbed. But he hadn’t locked the door to his office and that, in retrospect, proved to be a mistake.

  Jamile possessed an ample bosom and very long legs. Mansur had made a play for her, and she’d brushed him off. He wasn’t about to let her get away with this simply because she showed up on time and was good at her job. She was a single mother with two children to feed. She had obligations. She should have known better.

  He’d been expecting tears, got them, and was handing Jamile a third paper handkerchief when Rosa barged in without waiting for a response to her knock. Luis raised his chin and glared at her, expecting her to back out again. But she didn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath, closed the door behind her, and came over to whisper in his ear.

  “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, Senhor Mansur, but I have a chief inspector from the Federal Police on the line. I told him you weren’t to be disturbed, but he insisted. He says it’s vital he speak to you.”

  Mansur was about to tell his secretary that the federal cop could wait until he was damned good and ready to call him back. But at that moment, Jamile rose to her feet, called him a canalha, and stormed out, the tears still running down her cheeks. He’d been only seconds away from explaining, in detail, exactly what she had to do to keep her job, and he had a full erection. The cop’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

  “What’s this cop’s name?” he snarled.