Fifteen minutes after hanging up with Arnaldo, Silva got another call from his friend in Miami.
“You are so lucky to have my brilliant expertise at your disposal,” Willis said.
“I have never thought otherwise, Harvey. What have you got for me?”
“Luca Taglia is an old friend of mine. With a name like that, I keep telling him, he should be a capo for the mafia. Actually, he works intelligence for the Boston PD. He not only ran Clancy’s records, he sent a couple of guys over to the address you fed me, the one from Clancy’s visa application.”
“Uh-oh. Sounds like I owe somebody another lunch.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I sent Luca two tickets to a Red Sox game. You’re gonna buy me two for the Hurricanes.”
“Gladly.”
“Okay, here’s the dope on Clancy. First of all, the priest bit checks out. The address you fed me is a soup kitchen for winos. Clancy lives in a little room at the rear, puts in long days doing God’s work. His neighbors say he’s a really good guy. The records say he’s never had a brush with the law. The diocese says he’s been doing his current work for three years. His credit cards say that when he got to Brazil, he spent a night in a hotel in Sao Paulo. Then he moved on from there and spent another night in a hotel in Palmas, wherever the hell that is.”
“Up north. Capital of the state of Tocantins.”
“Whatever. Then he went to Miracema, again wherever the hell that is, and spent another night. While he was in this Miracema place, he used the same credit card to take money from an ATM. He did it three times, took the maximum he could get every time.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing. That’s it.”
“Strange.”
“Taglia thought so too. So he decided to dig a little deeper. He went over for a personal conversation with the people at the diocese. They refused to talk.”
“Refused?”
“Refused. It’s their right.”
“How about Clancy’s family?”
“They don’t want to talk about him either.”
“They don’t want to talk about their own son?”
“Taglia sent two of his best men over there. The Clancys serve tea. Tea, mind you, not coffee. Mom and Dad are from the old country. They have shamrocks and leprechauns all over the place. Dad’s wearing a ring from the Ancient Order of Hibernians.”
“The what?”
“Skip it. It has no significance to the case, only a bit of local color. Mom’s got a crucifix around her neck. There’s a portrait of the Virgin Mary on one wall, a portrait of the Pope on another-”
“All right, all right, I get the picture.”
“Okay. So their son Dennis, they tell Taglia’s boys, is the youngest of four. The cops tell them they know their son is in Brazil, and they want to know what he’s doing down there. Ma and Pa Clancy look at each other. Then Pa Clancy says, ‘We don’t want to talk about it.’ Just like that. ‘Whaddya mean?’ Taglia’s boys say. ‘Whaddya mean you don’t want to talk about it?’ ‘Just that,’ Pa Clancy says. ‘We don’t want to talk about it.’ And that was it.”
“That was it?”
“Yup. They kept dishing up the tea, but they refused to say anything more about Dennis.”
Silva scratched his head. He couldn’t think of anything to say other than “Huh.”
“Huh is right,” Willis said. “You get any information on Dennis, you let me know, okay? Because now I’m curious.”
“All right, how about this then?” Fabio Pessoa snapped, making an adjustment to his sketch.
Pessoa, the Federal Police’s forensic artist, and Rocha, the opera buff from the motel, were seated side by side at a battered wooden table. The table was in a conference room adjoining Hector’s office.
“Hmmm,” Rocha said, studying the screen on Pessoa’s notebook.
“Hmmm, what?” Pessoa said testily. He was running out of patience with this guy.
“Hmmm, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe. Can I go now?”
“No, you can’t. If that ”-he pointed to the screen-“doesn’t look like Eudoxia, we’re gonna keep at this until we got a face that does.”
Rocha shook his head. “Waste of time. I go to a family reunion, I keep my wife next to me all the time.”
“And that’s relevant to what we’re doing here because?”
“She’s like, ‘You remember Cousin Carlos, don’t you?’ She’s like, ‘Hello, Carolina,’ saying ‘Carolina’ so I’ll get it. She has to feed me clues all the time so I won’t embarrass her. I have no memory for faces.”
“You know what? You’re absolutely right.”
Behind them, the door opened. Both of them turned their heads.
“Any progress?” Silva said.
Pessoa shook his head. “The guy’s hopeless,” he said.
“Hopeless is you,” Rocha said.
“Hopeless is unacceptable,” Silva said. “I need a likeness.” He turned to Pessoa. “What else can you suggest?”
“Photos. We’re going to look at photos.”
“No, we’re not,” Rocha said. “You can’t make me. I’m sick of this whole business. I want to go home.”
“Tell me one thing,” Silva said. “Would you recognize Eudoxia if she was standing in front of you?”
“Sure. Eudoxia? I see her twice a week at least.”
“Okay,” Silva said.
“Okay what?”
“Go home.”
Rocha raised a suspicious eyebrow.
“How come?”
“Because that’s where we’re going to pick you up at eight o’clock this evening. And you’d goddamned well better be there.”
Rocha was. They decided to try the area around the Jockey Club first and got lucky immediately.
“That one right there,” Rocha said, pointing to a tall dark-skinned figure in a miniskirt, a platinum wig, and high heels.
He sounded surprised it had been so easy.
Hector dropped Goncalves three hundred meters up the street, well beyond the long line of girls and maybe-not-girls. Then he took a left turn and circled the block. As soon as he was out of sight of the flesh market, he pulled over to the curb, hopped out, and Silva took the wheel. Rocha moved to the front.
Minutes later, they had Eudoxia in a box. The Jockey Club’s high concrete wall was behind her. A continuous string of gated houses lined the opposite side of the street. The cross streets were cut off by Goncalves and Hector, who were converging on Eudoxia from either side.
Certain now that their prey couldn’t flee in any direction, Silva pulled the car up in front of her. Hector arrived and gripped the transvestite by the arm. Goncalves, still panting from his run, opened the back door of the car. They were about to push her into the backseat when Eudoxia screamed.
Eudoxia’s colleagues reacted immediately. Cans of pepper spray were produced. So were cell phones. One woman, a brunette in shorts, took a little nickel-plated semiautomatic out of her handbag and pointed it at Hector. “Let her go, you filho da puta,” she said.
Rocha cowered down in the seat and covered his head. Silva got out from behind the wheel. Shielded by the car, he rested the butt of his Glock on the roof and pointed it at the brunette. His weapon was at least twice the size of hers.
The shouting stopped. No one wanted to attract the attention of the man with the gun, but no one wanted to back down either. Into the silence, Silva said, “We’re federal cops. We need Eudoxia to help us with our inquiries.”
“If you’re cops,” the whore with the pistol said, lowering her arm, “you’ve got to show us ID.” The uncertainty in her voice telegraphed that the threat, from her direction at least, was over.
“Yeah, show us ID,” someone else shouted.
And then they were all shouting it. “ID, ID, ID.”
Without taking his aim off the woman with the pistol, Silva used his left hand to produce his gold badge. He held it up, high, so all the whores could see it.
“Show them your badges,” he said to his companions.
Hector and Goncalves held theirs over their heads, slowly rotating their wrists so people pressing around them could have a look.
Two tough-looking guys appeared from nowhere and pushed their way to the front of the crowd. One of them, an oaf with a short forehead and a single gold earring, waved at Silva as if they were old friends.
“I know this guy,” he said, lifting his voice so the crowd could hear. “He is what he says he is, and I don’t want any trouble with him. Anybody who doesn’t back off is going to have trouble with me.”
The brunette put her pistol away, took a few steps backward, turned, and ran. Prostitution isn’t a crime in Brazil. Being a transvestite isn’t a crime either. But carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is.
Silva nodded his thanks to the thug with the earring and got a nod in return. Then he put his Glock away and got back behind the wheel.
Eudoxia’s identity card identified her as Alvaro Moura, twenty-seven years old, male, one meter sixty-two in height, seventy-seven kilos, black hair, brown eyes, and a native of Caxias, a town in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
He was still one meter sixty-two, but he’d adopted a Carioca accent, looked a good deal older than twenty-seven, had put on weight since he’d gotten his card, and was using green contact lenses. Under the platinum wig, his hair had been tinted to a dirty blond.
He was high on adrenaline and crack, so before interrogating him, they put him under a cold shower and plied him with coffee.
When Moura finally started talking, he was well-spoken and seemed to have total recall of the events. He’d been standing in front of the Jockey, he said, for quite a while when he’d spotted Mansur.
“That was his name, huh? Luis Mansur? Told me he was Raul Chiesa, but, hell, who am I to talk, right? Far as I’m concerned, anybody can call themselves anything they want. What’s in a name, anyway?”
“A rose by any other…” Arnaldo said.
“What?”
“Ignore him,” Silva said. “The rest of us do.”
“Hey!” Arnaldo said.
Silva kept his eyes on Moura. “How long were you out there trolling before he picked you up?” he said.
“More than an hour. And I had to piss like a stallion. That’s the first thing I did when I got to the motel. Good thing he wasn’t one of those guys who gets his jollies from watching girls peeing. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was much bigger than me, and the bathroom door was flimsy.”
“He still thought you were a woman at this point?”
“Must have.”
“Why ‘must have’?”
“The way he was talking dirty while we were in the car. It was sorta… explicit. And I kept thinking brother, have I got a surprise for you.”
“So you went into the bathroom, and…”
“And I was sitting on the toilet when I heard knocking on the door. Not the bathroom door, the door we’d both come in by. I figured it had to be that asshole from the gate, the one who was with you when you picked me up, figured there might be something wrong with the john’s credit card or something. Anyway, I’d already flushed and was turning around to wash my hands when I heard him open the door. Not the bathroom door, the one to the room.”
“‘Him’ being your customer?”
“Yeah.”
“And then?”
“And then there was a sound.”
“What kind of a sound?”
“Hard to describe.”
“Try.”
“Sort of halfway between a pop and a spit.”
Silva took that to be a silenced pistol.
“And then,” Moura said, “the john, what’s his name again?”
“Mansur.”
“Mansur starts to scream, but he doesn’t finish it because it’s cut off by this other noise.”
“What kind of a noise?”
“Like a crunch, but squishier. Maybe like a hard splat.”
“What did you do then?”
“I bent over and looked through the keyhole.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t see Mansur, and I couldn’t see the person who’d come in. But by that time, I was convinced that someone was beating him.”
“Why? Why were you convinced?”
“The sounds. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Like that. They went on and on.”
“No voices?”
“The john screamed a couple of times, begged whoever was doing it to stop.”
“And before that?”
“He said something when he first opened the door, and the person outside said something back, but I couldn’t hear what it was.”
“Can you remember Mansur’s words?”
“He said, ‘What the fuck is it?’ or something like that. He wasn’t at all polite.”
“How about the voice of the person who knocked on the door. Any accent? Any speech defect?”
“I told you. I couldn’t hear him.”
“What did you do then?”
“I got the hell out of there, that’s what! I grabbed my shoes and purse, climbed through the bathroom window, jumped the wall in back, ran down to the road, and hightailed it back to town.”
“How? How did you get back to town?”
“Stuck my leg out and my thumb in the air and hitchhiked. The guy who picked me up was interested in a program, but my head was all fucked up by what had happened. I gave him a quick blow job, and he dropped me where I could get a taxi.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Me? Call the police? Just because somebody got beat up? Get real.”
“When did you find out Mansur was dead?”
“When I got up this afternoon. I saw it on the news.”
“And you still elected not to come forward?”
Moura squirmed in his chair.
“No,” he said. “You got it all wrong.”
“How so?”
“A beating is one thing. Murder? That’s like, like really serious. I was going to do it. I was going to talk to the cops first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Sure you were,” Silva said.
“You don’t have to take that tone with me, Chief Inspector. I’m not a criminal. You may disapprove of my lifestyle, but what I do isn’t illegal, and I’d never, ever hurt anyone.”
Moura was indignant, and if he wasn’t sincere, he was a damned good actor.