Buried Strangers Read online

  Tanaka hadn’t been in the job a week when a certain Maria Aparecida do Carmo, a prostitute jailed for rolling drunks because she’d grown too old to attract anyone who wasn’t desperate for sex, had been strangled by one of her fellow inmates. The crime occurred at night. None of the women in the cell would admit to having witnessed it. The case wasn’t going to be solved. Ever.

  If Maria Aparecida had been a man, her death probably wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but a female was something else. It was potential news. An enterprising reporter managed to get his hands on a twenty-three-year-old mug shot of Maria Aparecida. She was white, and back then she hadn’t looked half bad.

  Two days after the murder, the photo appeared in the Jornal da Tarde. The accompanying article implied that the policia civil were a bunch of bunglers, incapable of prevent-ing the murders of hot-looking chicks like Maria Aparecida, even within one of their own delegacias.

  Tanaka’s boss, the delegado regional, didn’t like the article one bit. Neither did his boss, the state secretary for public safety.

  The obvious scapegoat was Tanaka.

  He found himself contemplating the possibility of losing the cushy job he’d worked so long and so hard to get. Tanaka knew the bitches were bound to murder another of their number before long, and when they did, it could result in the sudden termination of his flourishing career. He desper-ately sought a solution, however cosmetic, that would keep his superiors off his back.

  He found it, of all places, in his own bathroom. Marcela had left one of her magazines next to the toilet. One morn-ing before work, bereft of other reading material, and faced with the necessity of remaining seated for a while, Tanaka started leafing through an article on household decoration.

  Certain colors, it seemed, could have a soothing effect. Tanaka didn’t quite believe it, but liberal journalists, the only kind who cared about some dead whore, and the ones that proliferated at the Jornal da Tarde, ate up that psychol-ogy stuff. Tanaka’s mind was seldom far from his job, and the idea to paint the female holding cell came to him in a sud-den flash of inspiration. He could already picture the head-line: Caring Policemen Make Inmates’ Lives Better.

  His first problem would be funding the project. He solved it by passing the hat and pressuring all of his subordinates to contribute money for the brushes and the paint.

  He left the choice of color to the prisoners. That was something else the men and women of the press would look kindly upon: treating the inmates with some degree of dig-nity, letting them make up their own minds about the deco-ration of the cage they lived in.

  After some biting, scratching, and hair-pulling, the bitches settled upon shocking pink. It wasn’t on the list of soothing colors mentioned in the magazine article, but Tanaka wasn’t particularly concerned about that.

  The prisoners themselves did the painting. When they were done, Tanaka called in the press. It was a slow news day, and the journalists thought a shocking-pink holding cell was interesting enough to merit pictures and video footage.

  The delegado regional loved it. So did the state secretary for public safety.

  The violence continued, but by the time someone stuck a hairpin through the eye, and into the brain, of a petty thief by the name of Marlene Quadros, the murder of a female prisoner had become old news, and Tanaka’s superiors had other things to worry about. It helped, too, that Marlene Quadros was black and that she was ugly as sin, and always had been, even in her youth.

  IN THE first week of his new posting, Delegado Tanaka had appropriated the largest room in the building as his office. He still had it. It was one flight up, directly above the (now fading) shocking-pink holding cell and beyond the detec-tives’ squad room. And it was to that sanctum Tanaka fled to escape the hostility of his wife.

  Still musing about the outcome of the Corinthians/ Fla-mengo game, and the attendant consequences for the national championship, Tanaka sat down in his chair and started going through paperwork. The third item in the pile caught his eye. He summoned his sergeant, Abilio Lucas, for an ex-planation. Fortunately for Lucas, it was one of the few Friday afternoons he’d elected not to take off.

  “What’s this about a family disappearing from Jardim Tonato?” Tanaka asked, tapping the report with his ball-point pen.

  A jardim, literally garden, usually meant a rather upscale neighborhood with handsome houses set on spacious lots. Jardim Tonato had neither. Jardim Tonato was a favela, a shantytown, a community of self-constructed shacks occu-pied by the poorest of the poor. Unless they happened to live in one, most people didn’t give a damn about what happened in favelas like Jardim Tonato.

  Sergeant Lucas certainly didn’t. He seemed surprised that Tanaka did. Lucas moved closer and Tanaka, a nonsmoker, wrinkled his nose. The sergeant smelled strongly of tobacco.

  “That one, huh?” Lucas said, craning his neck to see the report. “Nothing important, Senhor. Not worth your atten-tion. Four nobodies. A stonemason, his wife, and two daugh-ters. You know how it is with those people. They move around.” He coughed a phlegmy cough.

  “I’ve got some questions for the couple who made the complaint,” Tanaka said.

  The sergeant reached for a cigarette, realized where he was, and returned the pack to his pocket. Lucas wasn’t a street cop. He was an office drone who worked from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Complications on this, the last day of his work week, could lead to overtime and Lucas hated working overtime. As a sergeant, he wasn’t compen-sated for it.

  “What kind of questions, Senhor? Maybe I can—”

  “You can’t,” Tanaka snapped. “Get them both in here, Sergeant.”

  He held out the report.

  Lucas hesitated for a beat before he took it.

  “Tuesday okay, Delegado?”

  “Sooner. This afternoon, if possible. Monday morning at the latest.”

  * * *

  THE COUPLE Tanaka asked Lucas to track down was named Portella, Ernesto and Clarice. Ernesto was a carpenter with no fixed place of work. His wife was a faixineira, a cleaning woman, and divided her days among various clients.

  The Portellas, like their missing friends, lived in Jardim Tonato, and Jardim Tonato, like all favelas, was a place with-out telephones. To be absolutely certain of being able to present the couple by Monday morning, Lucas was going to have to work late, or he was going to have to cut some time out of his weekend.

  He elected to work late.

  By the time the Portellas got home, Lucas had already been waiting for about three hours. It was past 8:00 pm, and he was nervous about being in a favela, no place for a police-man after sunset. He was also royally resentful about the shambles that had been made of his Friday night.

  “About fucking time,” he said.

  “Oh, pardon me for having to earn a living, instead of sit-ting around behind a desk and sucking on government tit,” Ernesto said.

  “You better watch your mouth,” Lucas said, and then, when Ernesto didn’t respond: “My boss wants you people down at his delegacia on Monday morning at seven o’clock sharp.”

  This time it was the woman who gave him some lip.

  “What for?” she said.

  Lucas looked her up and down. She appeared to be the bossy type. If there was one thing he’d learned as a cop, it was you didn’t give people like that any rope. “Fucked if I know,” he said. “Be there.”

  “But we both work—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “Seven am,” he said, “And not a minute later.” He turned his back and walked away before she could say anything else.

  Lucas knew Tanaka wouldn’t be in until nine, but the fucking Portellas, by coming home so late, had trimmed three hours from his Friday night’s drinking.

  And now they were going to suffer for it.

  Chapter Six

  ON MONDAY MORNING, AT six forty-five, Clarice Portella dragged her muttering husband through the front door of Tanaka’s delegacia and approached the corporal behind the desk.


  “I’m Clarice Portella. This is my husband, Ernesto. Sergeant Lucas said—”

  “Yeah,” the corporal said. “He called me. I know all about it. Wait over there.”

  “I told the sergeant. We both work. We—”

  “Over there.”

  Before Ernesto could raise his voice, Clarice grabbed his arm and led him to one of the plastic chairs that lined the wall.

  Lucas showed up at quarter to nine. By that time the cor-poral was fed up with hearing Ernesto’s complaints, and Clarice was livid.

  “Hey, you, Sergeant,” she began, waving a hand to catch his attention.

  “Won’t be much longer,” Lucas said, and strode by with-out breaking his pace.

  AT NINE o’clock, Yoshiro Tanaka bustled through the squad room and opened the door to his office. Lucas was standing by the window.

  Tanaka sniffed the air. “Have you been smoking in here, Sergeant?”

  “No, Delegado.”

  It was a lie and both of them knew it.

  Tanaka went straight to the wastebasket and looked inside. There was no trace of cigarette ash. Lucas was stupid, but not that stupid. Tanaka went to the window. It was one of those that swung out on a hinge, and it was slightly ajar.

  Insufficient evidence.

  “What are you doing in my office, Sergeant?”

  “Waiting for you, Delegado. Those people you wanted to see? They’re outside.”

  “Ah.” The stern look on Tanaka’s face vanished.

  Luca’s curiosity ratcheted up a notch. Tanaka didn’t do anything to satisfy it.

  “Bring them in,” was all he said.

  BUT WE already told everything to the sergeant,” Clarice Portella said a couple of minutes later. She turned and looked at the door behind her, as if she were expecting Lucas to come back and join them.“

  “I’m sure that’s what you think,” Tanaka said.

  The woman was hunger thin, a mulata with bad teeth, far past the age of childbearing. Or maybe not. Favela people, Tanaka thought, always looked older than they were. And they bred like rabbits, which had a way of aging them still further. This one probably had ten kids at home.

  She didn’t look very smart, either. Matter of fact, she looked downright stupid, the way she sat staring at him with her mouth agape. Tanaka figured he’d better spell things out, take it slow and easy.

  “Most people think that,” he said. “Most people think they’ve told us everything after they tell it the first time, but it’s been our experience that—”

  “The sergeant wrote it all down, and then he typed it and we signed it.”

  “I know. I read it.”

  Clarice glanced at the clock on the wall. She wasn’t wear-ing a watch. “Both of us have to get to work,” she said.

  Tanaka smiled, trying to put her at ease. “I’ll be happy to give you a note for your employer—for both your employers,” he corrected himself, shifting his gaze to her husband.

  “A lot of good that’s going to do,” Ernesto Portella said, his tone surly.

  He, too, looked like he needed a good meal. He was wear-ing a beat-up blue cap with the logo of the PCB, Brazil’s Communist Party. The hat was cheap and fraying around the brim, obviously a promotional piece from the last election. Dirty blue jeans and a filthy T-shirt completed his ensemble. The little finger on his left hand was missing, probably sev-ered in some kind of work-related accident. An ugly scar ran from the old wound across the back of his hand and halfway up his bare arm.

  “They pay us by the hour,” he said. “They don’t give a shit if we show up late or not. We’re the ones who suffer, not those fucking capitalist bloodsuckers.”

  Tanaka frowned. Fortunately for Ernesto Portella, mem-bership in the PCB was no longer illegal.

  “You want to do the right thing for your friends, don’t you?” Tanaka asked. “The Lisboas are your friends aren’t they?”

  Clarice nodded her head in agreement. After a moment her husband did, too.

  Tanaka had almost said were your friends.

  Ernesto took a cigarette and a pack of matches out of his breast pocket.

  “No smoking in here,” Tanaka said.

  “Then I’ll go outside.”

  He got up.

  Tanaka slammed a palm down on his desk.

  “No, you won’t,” he said and pointed at the chair. “You’ll sit right there until I tell you you’re free to go.”

  Clarice seemed startled. Ernesto wasn’t as easily intimidated.

  “You can’t—”

  His wife interrupted him. “Ernesto,” she said, “shut up.”

  Ernesto resumed his seat, crossed his arms, and stared out the window.

  Tanaka took up where he’d left off, this time directing himself exclusively to the woman.

  “As I was saying,” he said, “it often helps to go over every-thing again with a different interviewer. Sometimes we pick up small details that didn’t come to light the first time around. And small details can be of great significance. Let’s start again from the beginning. There are four of them, right? The father, Edmundo—”

  “Edmar,” she corrected him.

  Tanaka glanced at the first page of Lucas’s report. He picked up his pen, crossed out Edmundo, and wrote Edmar before continuing.

  “You see? Even policemen make mistakes.”

  “Even policemen,” Ernesto echoed, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Tanaka elected to act as if he hadn’t heard him. “The father, Edmar, the wife, Augusta, and their two daughters, Mari and Julia.”

  “Yes. Mari is Mariana. Everyone calls Julia Juju.”

  “And Edmar Lisboa is a stonemason, is that right?” He looked up from the report and waited for her to nod. When she did, he said, “This job he was offered, how did it come about?”

  “I already told that to Sergeant Lucas.”

  Tanaka sighed. He hadn’t overestimated the woman’s intelligence, or rather lack of it.

  “Senhora Portella, please. Forget Sergeant Lucas. Make believe you’re telling me the story for the first time.”

  “Oh, yes. I see. Well, Edmar was building a wall. A man came up, watched him work and then he said he was looking for a stonemason to work on a fazenda. He was offering good money. He was even offering a house. Edmar liked the coun-try. He was raised in the country. He only came here because he couldn’t get work back home in Pernambuco. You know how it is up there.”

  Pernambuco was a state far to the northeast, tucked in between Bahia and Ceará. Tanaka did, indeed, know how it was up there. Everybody did. No industry, great poverty, some cities with twice as many women as men because of mass migration southward to where the jobs were.

  And that’s why my town is filling up with a bunch of fucking Nordestinos like you and your friends, Tanaka thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he said, “So he took the job? Just like that?” Tanaka snapped his fingers.

  She gave a little jump.

  Not only stupid. Nervous, too.

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “Edmar isn’t like that. He said he’d have to talk to Augusta.”

  “He’s a pussy,” Ernesto said. “Guy has no balls at all. She pushes him around.”

  “Shut up, Ernesto,” she said.

  The way she said it reminded Tanaka of his wife, Marcela.

  Ernesto went back to looking out of the window.

  “So then what?” Tanaka asked, identifying just the least little bit with her husband.

  “The man came to talk to her.”

  “To your friend, Augusta?”

  Clarice nodded.

  “He showed her pictures in a book.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “Of the fazenda.”

  “And she bought the idea?”

  “She what?”

  “She agreed to go?”

  Clarice nodded her head. “She quit her job,” she said, “and Edmar quit his, and the man came to take
them away. That was a week after his first visit. The street was too nar-row to bring the truck up to the house. We had to carry everything down to the corner. Once the truck was loaded, the family went in a van.”

  “So there was a truck and a van?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tanaka made a note. “And that was the last time you saw them?”

  “Last time,” she said.

  “You mentioned a letter.” Tanaka put a forefinger on Sergeant Lucas’s report. “Where is it?”

  “Here.” Clarice opened her purse, took out an envelope, and handed it to him. It was still sealed and quite thick. He bent it back and forth between his fingers.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Augusta worked for Dona Inez Menezes,” Clarice said. “Dona Inez owed Augusta some money. Augusta asked me to send it to her. I bought a postal money order and wrapped some paper around it so it wouldn’t attract attention.”

  Tanaka scrutinized the front of the envelope. There was a stamp in red ink: RETURN TO SENDER.

  “How did you get it?” he asked.

  “Get what, Senhor?”

  This is like pulling teeth, Tanaka thought.

  “This address,” he said.

  He showed her the front of the envelope.

  “Oh. That. The man wrote it for me.”

  “What man?”

  “The same man who got Edmar the job.”

  “And the same man who took the family away?”

  “Yes. He drove the van. He brought another man with him to drive the truck.”

  “Can you remember his name?”

  She closed her eyes and pursed her lips. Tanaka waited, tapping his fingers on the desk. “Roberto . . . Something,” she said at last. “He’s a carioca.”

  It didn’t surprise Tanaka that she could identify the man as a carioca, a native of Rio de Janeiro. He wouldn’t have had to tell her where he was from. She would have heard it, heard all those sibilant s’s that littered the speech of everyone who came from there. As to the name, Roberto, it wasn’t going to help. There were only a few names more common.

  “You’d recognize him? If you saw him again, I mean?”

  Clarice nodded.

  “Me, too,” Ernesto said. “I helped load all of their stuff onto the truck, and some of it was heavy. The lazy bastard just stood there, giving orders. He didn’t lift a finger. Typical fucking carioca.”