Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

One Confession Too Many by Luis Adrian Betancourt

Translated by Donald A. Yates

Luis Adrian Betancourt is one of Cuba’s best-known crime writers and critics, with many novels and stories in print. His first appearance in translation was “Guilty” (EQMM 3–4/ 04). Here he is with a contemporary police tale; private eye stories do not exist in Cuba, where all sleuthing is done by state agencies!

Sergeant Hector Marcos covered the cold, naked body of the woman in Apartment 5 with a white sheet. Some of the neighbors had told him that she was a little loose, but really a good person. According to others, she was a “decent” person, but a little loose. The “loose” side of Paula Ortiz’s character consisted of the way she dressed, her fondness for parties and dancing, and the fact that she lived alone in an apartment where occasionally she received visits that were considered inappropriate.

The night before, when Alma Corrado was closing her window prior to going to bed, she was not surprised to see a young man rapping at the door of the tenant across the way and calling to her to let him in. At first he seemed to be pleading, then he began to sound threatening. The broad shoulders of Isaac Reyes, one of Paula Ortiz’s not infrequent visitors, were shifting back and forth in the rhythm of a manageable but evident state of drunkenness.

“Come on, baby...” he was saying, together with other words that went from mumbled to slurred. “Don’t get me mad,” he kept repeating. The moment came when Alma thought she should call the police, and she was about to do so when Paula decided to let her friend in. In no time they were yelling at each other at the top of their voices. Even after she closed her window, Alma could hear Paula complaining that her visitor was drunk and that this wasn’t any time for her to be receiving company. Then there was a long silence, suggesting that they had made up. Alma went to bed and thought nothing more about it until the next morning, when she woke up to find her street filled with bystanders, police, journalists, and a vehicle from the coroner’s office. In Paula’s apartment, people were taking photographs, dusting for fingerprints, and a police lieutenant who identified himself as Luis Adan was asking questions and looking for witnesses.

Alma needed to take several sedative pills for her nerves. She was fifty years old, but had never been even remotely associated with anything of a criminal nature. The death of her neighbor was a shock. She could have avoided becoming involved just by not telling what she had seen. Like the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But the image of her friend lying on the floor of her living room, her empty gaze fixed on the ceiling above, compelled her to tell the police what she knew. She trembled as she described the visit of Isaac Reyes at the moment when, ready for bed, she took a last look outside before closing her window.

The little she had to say immediately resulted in an order to find Reyes. He was located in short order. That day he had not gone off to work, staying in bed to sleep off the effects of his overindulgence. He was taken away without any problem.

At the police station Alma, still trembling with emotion, was able to identify him from among the five men assembled behind the one-way glass. It was very simple, since she had seen him on many occasions. Moreover, to the astonishment of the authorities, Reyes wasted no time in admitting that he was guilty. Amidst curses and complaints, he gave an account of his doomed romance. There had been very few moments of real happiness. He was hopelessly in love with the woman, so he inevitably ended up begging for her attention. And on that night the effects of the alcohol allowed him to say things so terrible that there was no way to take them back. They struggled; he didn’t intend to harm her, but Paula lost her balance and fell over backwards, striking her head on the extended wing of a metallic swan figure on the floor. Her body went limp, dropping into a grotesque position, with a halo of blood beginning to circle her head.

“I knew I had killed her.”

“Did you wipe up the blood with her nightgown?”

“No. I was scared and I left.”

Reyes responded quickly and directly to the questions Lieutenant Adan was asking. Everything he said fitted the scene of the crime except for three points. In his account, Reyes failed to mention the moment when he pulled off the woman’s nightgown. He spoke of seeing a circle of blood by her head, but not of wiping it up, something that had probably been done with the nightgown. And he swore he had not drunk a single drop of liquor there, not even water, despite the evidence present of drinks having been served.

If Adan pressed him on these questions, he looked bewildered, as if he were straining, trying to remember something that had never happened. Adan was unable to understand these blank moments. His colleagues insisted: He was drunk, there was no way his memory could be perfectly clear. If you’ve got a confession, what more do you want? Close the case!

Alma’s testimony was decisive. Besides, the blood found beneath Paula Ortiz’s nails matched Reyes’s blood type. And unmistakeable scratch marks had been found on his arms.

“But I didn’t take off her nightgown,” Reyes insisted.

Adan laid a photograph of the crime scene before Reyes.

“Look at it carefully, and remember what happened.”

“No, I didn’t leave her like that. She was wearing her nightgown; there was blood...”

The photograph showed the torn nightgown alongside the naked body, there had been bloodstains that someone had wiped up.

“That’s not the way I remember it.”

Adan decided not to close the case despite the persuasive evidence that he had. Reyes’s confession would give the prosecution little work. But he saw that there were still pieces missing to fill in the puzzle.

“Come on, Adan,” his assistant said, “we’ve all got plenty of work to do. You’re wasting your time juggling details given by a guy with a poor memory, but who’s already confessed.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Adan replied.

Once again, he asked to hear Reyes’s story. As before, there were no contradictions of what he had already sworn. He simply repeated that when Paula fell to the floor and he saw the blood, he was terrified and left.

As the routine of the investigation played itself out, the police lab specialists examined the two glasses that had been found on a plastic tray on the table next to the body, together with a half-empty bottle of cognac. Doubtless, Reyes’s and the woman’s fingerprints would be found there, even though the former had insisted he hadn’t even had a harmless glass of water. That final scene, he indicated, didn’t lend itself to a friendly toast. On the contrary, Paula had criticized him for being drunk. She ended up saying, “There’s no use talking when you’re like this. Go home.”

If Reyes was lying, it would do him no good, because he had repeatedly said that he understood what he had done, that he should be punished for his crime, whether all of the details fitted or not.

Then astonishing news came from the laboratory: Reyes’s fingerprints were not on the glasses. Paula’s were, however, and another set clear enough to be identified. Someone, Adan considered, must have visited Paula before Reyes did. A check of the other prints revealed the identity of the other person, who turned out to be another friend of hers, a man named “Chapo” Gomez, a taxicab driver who for several weeks had been taking her out for lengthy joyrides. When they brought him in and showed him the evidence, he admitted that he had been in her apartment that night. But it had been after Reyes’s visit; he had crossed paths with Reyes as the other man was driving away from his frustrated encounter with Paula.

The cab driver began to sweat as he related what had happened.

“When she opened the door she was in her nightgown. She had hit her head somehow and was dizzy. I poured her and myself a cognac. She said she had slipped and fallen and cut her head.”

“‘You’re lying,’ I told her. ‘You were with that bastard.’”

Paula had admitted that she had had a very unpleasant scene with Reyes, that he was drunk and when he tried to get her into bed, they had struggled and she fell, hit her head, and lost consciousness. Reyes, she said, must have thought he had killed her. When she came to, he was gone.

Gomez had bought her story and suggested that he take her to bed. Paula had refused, saying she didn’t feel well. She asked him to come the next morning and take her to see a doctor. Her injury was slight, but her head hurt and she was bleeding. Gomez tried to insist. He told her that what had happened with Reyes was probably a lot different from what she had claimed.

For the second time that night Paula was faced with a passionate confrontation. It was the result of her living alone, she realized. She told Gomez she wanted nothing more to do with him. She was going to straighten out her life and find someone who would respect and take care of her. Gomez became outraged. He tore off her nightgown. They insulted each other. She said he was not man enough for her. That was all it took to loosen Paula’s grasp on her desperate situation. No one saw him leave. No one had seen him arrive.

And that was the end of the strange account of the naked woman.

When the lab results were confirmed, Isaac Reyes was notified of his innocence. He could not believe it when Lieutenant Adan said, “Go home.”