A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XV

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Odivelas, Lisbon, Portugal I dropped Carlos and Bruno off at the PJ building in Rua Gomes Freire so that Carlos could take down his statement, and went back to Odivelas to pick up Valentim.

There were a few things different about Valentim's apartment block. Life had moved on a centimetre, there were different TV programmes raging, techno music ricocheted down the stairwell, heat came off the walls as if the building was running a fever.

The tick answered the door and turned without a word. He delivered the same passing knock on Valentim's door and went into the kitchen where he picked up an open bottle of Sagres.

'Police,' he shouted over the bottle-top and began chugging beer.

Valentim's mother appeared in the door frame. I hammered on the cardboard door until Valentim tore it open.

'We're leaving,' I said. 'You won't need anything.'

'Where are you taking him?' said the mother, screechy now.

'Lisbon.'

'What's he done?' she asked, bouncing off the door frame, coming down the corridor at me.

The tick stayed in the kitchen, sipping beer, spreading his weak moustache with a forefinger and thumb, looking well-pleased.

'He's going to help us with our enquiries into the murder of a young girl.'

'Murder?' she said, moving to embrace him as if he'd been condemned already.

'Let's go,' he said, turning away from her.

We got in the car. Valentim rested an elbow on the window ledge, and played drum solos on the roof with his fingers as we drove back into town in the highest heat of the day.

'Where's your father?' I asked.

'He pulled out years ago, I don't remember him.'

'How old were you.'

'Too small to remember.'

'You did all right to get to university.'

'Not if you look at the chatos in my class.'

'How do you like your mother?'

'She's my mother… that's it.'

'How old is she?'

'What do you think?'

'I don't know. It's difficult to say…'

'With all the make-up?'

'The guy she's with looks young.'

'She's thirty-seven. OK?'

'But do you like her?'

He stopped tapping on the roof.

'Where did they find you?' he asked. 'Winged on the motorway?'

'I'm one of the few people you'll meet in my world with an interest in other human beings… but that doesn't mean I'm sweet all the time. Now tell me what you think of your mother.'

'This is shit,' he said, enunciating each word with precision. 'You're the one reading psychology at university.' He sighed, bored to his hair roots.

'I think my mother's a beautiful person with a strong moral and ethical purpose, profoundly concerned with…'

'You've answered the question,' I said. 'Now… do you have a girlfriend at the moment?'

'No.'

'You've had girlfriends?'

'Occasionally. Temporarily.'

'What attracted you to these girls?'

'Do you write for Cosmopolitan in your spare time?'

'It's either this or the elbow in the face.'

'The girls always came to me. '

'All that highly-charged magnetism of yours.'

'I was stating a fact. I did not pursue them. They came to me.'

'What sort of girls?'

'Middle-class girls from well-off families who wanted to be different, who wanted to be cool, who wanted to have a go with someone who wasn't a trussed-up jerk with a mobile phone that never rang.'

'But you were too strong for them. Too rich. No. Wrong word. Too gamey.'

'They're not real people, Inspector. They're just kids dressing up.'

'And Catarina… was she like that?'

He nodded and smirked as if he'd seen my thread.

'You're forgetting something,' he said. 'Catarina was never my girlfriend.'

'But it was interesting wasn't it,' I said, 'because you found her.'

'Found her?'

'Discovered her voice. Brought her into the band. You pursued her. She didn't come to you.'

'That doesn't mean she was…'

'But it was different wasn't it?'

He drummed on the roof again.

I had a small fight to get into the PJ building with the policeman on the door who knew me well, but didn't believe who I was until I showed him some ID with my bearded self on it. Was this the start of a good old-fashioned identity crisis?

I left Valentim at the front desk and went upstairs to find Carlos and Bruno sitting in my office, both silent. I read the statement and told Bruno to sign it.

'Did Valentim have an arrangement to see Catarina after school on Friday?'

'She always went back to Cascais on Fridays.'

'Did you see Valentim on Friday night?'

'Yes. We met up in Alcantara around ten o'clock.'

'What was he doing between two and ten o'clock?'

'I don't know.'

'Was he agitated when you saw him?'

'No.'

'Teresa said Catarina had been promiscuous around the university. Is that true?'

'Not if Teresa said it. That would not be reliable.'

'She says she saw Catarina with her chemistry lecturer in the Bairro Alto later on Wednesday night after the band bust up.'

'I wouldn't know.'

'Where did you go after the band meeting?'

'Home. I worked late on a paper I had to deliver on Thursday morning.'

'And Valentim and Catarina?'

'I left them in that bar, Toca, in the Bairro Alto.'

We went to the stairs and I told him to wait five minutes before he went home. Carlos and I took Valentim to the Pensao Nuno which was on Rua da Gloria, a narrow road that ran between the Praca da Alegria and the funicular from Restauradores up to the Bairro Alto. There weren't many hookers around in the street at this time of day. A few older and sadder ones looked out of the bar windows sitting over coffee. Valentim's face in the rear view was straight out of the mould, solid.

The reception was on the second floor of a four-storey nineteenth-century building with a tiled facade up to the first-floor balcony. The staircase was wide, wooden and musty with a strip of blue lino up the middle. A guy in his sixties was standing behind the reception bar, a newspaper in front of him, his finger on his tongue. A strip of neon lighting on the wall above his grey head lit cobwebs and other high grime. He was unshaven and smoked a cigarette unconsciously. He looked as if he had been fat and then lost it and been left with useless folds of skin that sagged in his shirt.

He glanced up at us, and I saw it in his eyes that he knew he was looking at two policemen and a suspect.

He stood up straight and put a hand under his armpit. He ran a thumbnail through the brisdes below his bottom lip. The smoke made him close an eye. His skin looked grey as if ingrained by dust from some previous work such as mining.

'Are you Nuno?' I asked.

'He's dead.'

'Who are you?'

'Jorge.'

'You run this place?'

He smoked and nodded.

'I know who you are,' he said.

'So you don't need to see any ID.'

'You can still show it to me.'

We laid our cards out. He inspected them closely without touching.

'You look better without,' he said to me.

'You know this kid?' I asked.

Jorge's eyes went sleepy in his head as if he was a python who'd eaten a horse and was finding the hooves difficult to digest. He smoked some more, stubbed out the cigarette with a grimace and showed us a set of yellow teeth that hadn't met floss.

'You're going to tell me he's been here before and I'm going to have to believe you but…' he trailed off, took out his reservations book and flicked through empty pages.

'Maybe you should get the "rooms by the hour" edition out.'

'If they occupy…'

'We want to take a look at a room on the top floor. Are they all free?'

'If they're locked they're occupied.'

'Are you busy?' I asked, and Jorge made some calculations. 'I'm going into every room, locked or not.'

He hitched his trousers and slid out from behind the bar. He was wearing flip-flops and his yellow toenails, thick as tile, matched his teeth. I followed the dead skin on his crusty heels up to the top floor.

'How many rooms up here?'

'Four,' he said, economical now that the stairs were taking his puff.

At the top he coughed himself to a tremulous silence and spat into a handkerchief.

'Well?' he said, waving a finger at Valentim.

'Don't ask me,' said Valentim. 'I don't know what I'm doing here.'

'You remember what I said about the elbow in the face?' I asked.

'You heard that?' he said to Jorge. 'That was a threat.'

'I don't see you. I don't hear him,' said Jorge. 'All my senses got worn down years ago.'

Valentim looked at one of the doors and Jorge opened it up with a flourish from his hand like a nineteenth-century doorman.

Inside Valentim took up a position on the other side of the bed from me. Carlos sat on a sciatic chair by the door which he'd just closed. I washed my hands in the sink, looked at Valentim in the mirror and dabbed my face cool with wet palms. I shook my hands dry, straightened my tie and took my jacket off. It was hot in the room even with the shutters closed.

'Let's have it, Valentim.'

'You know what happened.'

'So now, suddenly, you know why yoy're here,' I said. 'But I want to hear it from you. You set it up. You told Bruno that Catarina liked this sort of thing. You tell it your way.'

'She said she wanted to try it… but only with someone she knew.'

'She said that? She made the proposal to you. A fifteen-year-old to a twenty-one-year-old?'

'Twenty-two,' he said, and waited two beats. 'That's made you think, hasn't it, Inspector?'

'That your mother was fifteen when she had you? So what? That's not three in a bed. That's a young girl's mistake.'

The hate came across the room in slivers from the boy who'd started life as a mistake. He dropped his head and when it came back up again his eyes were smiling.

'Maybe girls are older these days,' he said. 'You wouldn't know, Inspector.'

'I have a daughter… not much older than Catarina.'

'And you know what runs through her perfect virginal head?'

'It's not three in a bed.'

'You must have talked about it to be that certain.'

'Shut up,' I said, feeling my lid boiling.

'At least you must know that girls aren't so confused these days… about what they want.'

'What did they used to think they wanted?' asked Carlos, rescuing me.

'Romance.'

'And now?'

'Now they know that sex can happen without love and they're interested in it,' said Valentim. 'I'm not a pre-revolutionary kid like the Inspector. I wasn't spoon-fed Catholicism, Salazarist family values, no women in the workplace, no tits and bums on the street…'

'If this is a justification,' said Carlos, 'get to it.'

'It's not a justification, just an opinion as to why girls these days, a girl like Catarina, who was not by any means a virgin, could make the proposal she did, and also why the Inspector should doubt it.'

'Why is it that the next generation always believe they invented sex.'

'Not invented it, just revolutionized it.'

I had a trickle of sweat at the back of my neck inching under the collar, ready to careen down my spine. Valentim, like the best mango fly in Guinea, was getting under my skin.

'So what was it that you heard in Catarina's voice that made you run after her?'

'Talent.'

'There must have been something else for the great Valentim, who's always pursued by girls, to go running after…'

'She had blonde hair and blue eyes. That's not a common Portuguese look. I was interested in something different.'

Silence for some time. Valentim raised his eyebrows.

'I want you to think about that question a little more while you tell us what happened in this room. You're clever enough to do that, aren't you?'

'Where do you want me to start?'

'When did you take the drugs?'

'As soon as we got in here. Bruno had a joint. We smoked it. I had some pills. We took a tab each. E… to save you from asking.'

'Where did you get the E?'

'Off the street.'

'Not Teresa,' I said.

'Well, I'm sure Teresa has been helpful to you in your enquiries already so I'll give her to you. Yes, Teresa supplied.'

'What effect did the E have?' asked Carlos.

'It makes you uninhibited, in love with the ones you love.'

'So you end up fucking yourself,' said Carlos, happy with that resolution.

'Maybe you would, agente,' said Valentim.

'Does the room look the same now as it did yesterday?'

'That chair was ten centimetres to the right,' he said.

Silence, while I rolled up my sleeve to bare a brown-skinned, pointed elbow.

'OK, OK,' he said, holding up his hands, 'we moved the bed.'

'Show us.'

He manoeuvred the bed in front of the mirror.

'Your idea?'

'She said she wanted to see herself.'

'Did she?'

'See herself?'

'Did she say that that was what she wanted?'

'I just told you.'

'I'm having trouble believing you.'

He shrugged.

'Carry on.'

'We took our clothes off.'

'How did that happen?'

'We took our shoes off first, like good little boys.'

That got Carlos off his chair, thin-lipped with rage.

' Eh pa,' said Valentim, ' calma.'

'Did you strip her?' I asked.

'She was naked by the time we'd moved the bed.'

'Now she's running the show.'

'I told you it was her idea,' he said. 'She knelt in the middle of the bed. She told Bruno to kneel in front and me behind. She told me to use a condom. She had to work on Bruno… he was nervous. I put on the condom and that was it.'

'You forgot something.'

'I don't think so.'

'The lubricant.'

'She didn't need any.'

'I believe it's normally used to sodomize someone and the pathologist said there were traces of it in her rectum.'

'I did not sodomize her. No way. That is not my kind of thing at all.'

'That's not what Bruno said.'

'What did he say?' said Valentim. 'Tell me what he said.'

I nodded at Carlos who leafed through his copy of Bruno's statement. He read:

'…she masturbated me and sucked my penis while Valentim had sex with her from behind. I did not penetrate her vaginally nor anally and I did not ejaculate.'

'That doesn't mean I sodomized her… and I didn't. What Bruno says is true. He was nervous, and I did have sex with her, and I was behind her, but I penetrated her vagina. You can use your famous elbow on me all you like, Inspector, but I won't say anything different.'

'So how do you explain the pathologist's report?'

Silence while Valentim shifted the swag of his heavy hair and passed a finger across his forehead. He flicked a hank of sweat on to the floor.

'There must have been somebody else,' he said.

'When did you leave here?'

'Around two o'clock.'

'Bruno says he went home and you walked off towards the funicular with Catarina.'

'That's true.'

'Where did you go?'

'We walked down to Avenida da Liberdade and took a 45 bus. She got off at Saldanha to go back to school. I stayed on until Campo Grande and went to the Biblioteca Nacional.'

'How long did you spend there?'

'I was there until well after seven. Plenty of people saw me.'

'Have you got a car?'

'You're joking, Inspector.'

'Have you got access to one?'

'My mother's boyfriend has one. Do you think he'd lend it to me?'

'Let's go back to my first question about why you took Catarina into the band.'

'I told you.'

'What was special about her, Valentim? What did she have that particularly interested you?'

He licked his lips which had dried on him. He didn't seem to have any spit.

'She wasn't a happy girl was she, Valentim?'

'Happy?' he asked, sneering, as if this was a questionable state.

'Did you like that, Valentim? Did you like a bit of vulnerability to work with, some real suffering to get your teeth into?'

'Next you'll be telling me I hate my mother,' he said, on the end of a high-pitched laugh. 'Do they teach Freud at police college now?'

'Ask agente Pinto, I haven't been in police college for some time,' I said. 'I wouldn't be needing Freud anyway, after eighteen years talking to people like you.'

He looked at Carlos sniffing for a softer target.

'Have you got any bullshit for me, agente?'

'You're not a nice guy,' said Carlos, quietly on the end of a direct look.

'If you were a nice guy,' I said, 'and a fifteen-year-old girl proposed three in a bed with some sodomy thrown in…'

'I did not sodomize her!' he shouted.

'…you wouldn't go ahead with it, would you? You'd think there was something wrong with the girl. You're a psychology student. You'd know that it wasn't normal behaviour. If you were a nice guy you'd help the girl. Talk to her parents. Get her some therapy. But you're not, are you, Valentim? You're a piece of shit. You look at someone like that and think: I can use that. I can abuse that… and it'll make me feel better.'

'And all because I didn't say I loved my mother… you're a radical, Inspector. You're a fucking radical.'

'But that's why you arranged this little rendezvous yesterday wasn't it, Valentim? To bring Catarina down to your own level, suck her into your own swamp. Now all I've got to find out is whether you wanted to take it one step further and kill the girl.'

'Then you've got a lot of work ahead of you.'

'In the meantime you can spend the weekend in the tacos… see if that refreshes your memory. And I'll get a search warrant for your room.'

Valentim ran a thumb and forefinger down his nose and flicked the sweat on the floor. He shook his head and I saw that he was worried and not about spending a few nights in the tacos.