You're so puffed up about it, you don't see how most of the time it doesn't work. Poor, innocent dark-skinned people are sent to prison while rich, white, guilty old men walk free." She made a vulgar gesture.
"I shit on your judicial system! Do you understand, Lieutenant Janek? I puke upon it! And anyway"-she worked to control her breathing-"I am sure Mendoza killed her." Tania shrugged. "Not that it mattered. They were both pieces of crap. What did I care?
And who would have believed me anyway? When I came down here I went to see a friend of my father's, a lawyer. He told me I did the right thing, that the way things work up in gringoland, I could have been convicted with Mendoza as an accessory." She laughed. "You make people's beds, pick up their dirty underwear, scrub shit crust off their toilet seats, and you're supposed to care! They were rich, foul, vulgar people. Far as I'm concerned, they got what they deserved!"
Tirade finished, Tania sat back, then stiffly crossed her arms. The message was clear: That's how Ifeel and to hell with what you or anybody thinks.
Janek called a break. Tania-passionate, educated and articulate-was not what he had expected. He turned off the tape recorder, Luis cracked a little joke, the three of them laughed, then Tania went into the kitchen to prepare tea. While they waited, Luis asked Janek about the Metaxas letter.
"What is it, Frank? Why is it so important?" Janek explained that Gus Metaxas was a failed Greek- American boxer, nicknamed "the Animal," who had allegedly been one of several boxers from Pinelli's Gym who engaged in paid sexual encounters with the Mendozas.
Three weeks into the investigation, Metaxas, who lived in a cheap hotel room near Penn Station, was found dead in his bloody bath water of self-inflicted cuts across his wrists. On his bedroom dresser was a suicide note, written in what police experts testified was his hand. In his note Metaxas wrote that he had been hired by Tania Figueras to have a sexual assignation with Edith Mendoza the day of her murder, and that the night before, at a private meeting, Jake Mendoza had paid him twenty-five hundred dollars to beat his wife to death. Twenty-five hundred more was to be paid after the deed was done. Metaxas had killed himself, he wrote, out of remorse for his awful crime.
"Was there supporting evidence?" "Plenty," Janek said. "Metaxas's mother, who lived in Chicago, received a money order for five thousand dollars mailed the day of Gus's suicide. Since everyone knew Gus was broke, his possession of that much cash supported his story. Then there was the testimony of his best friend and sparring partner, a Cuban-American fighter named Rudolfo Peiia. Peha testified Gus had confessed the whole thing several days before he took his final bath."
"Sounds convincing," Luis said.
"It was, although the defense tried to laugh it off. They had their own theory-that we, the cops, forced Metaxas to write the note and kill himself, that we provided the five thousand dollars for the money order and pressured Pefia to give false testimony. The jury didn't believe that, so Mendoza got convicted."
"And then-?"
"Then what, Luis?" "Tania said something about a forgery."
Janek exhaled. "That came up a couple years later. A high-ranking officer named Dakin, chief of our Department of Internal Affairs, brought in some evidence he claimed snowea that the defense theory of a police conspiracy might have been correct after all. There was a departmental hearing. In effect, my old partner, who'd headed the Mendoza investigation, went on trial. I acted as his defense counsel under a special provision whereby one officer may call upon another, rather than an attorney, to manage his defense. We successfully rebutted Dakin's so-called evidence.
After that Dakin resigned. But from then on the case was tainted.
Worse, it split our department. There're still people, including many cops, who think we fabricated the evidence against Mendoza because we couldn't make a legitimate case."
"You don't believe that?"
"I try to keep an open mind."
"That's why you came to Cuba?"
Janek nodded. "Trouble is, if Tania's telling the truth, then something was very wrong."
After they drank their tea and the examination resumed, Tania dropped her second bombshell of the morning: Edith Mendoza, she said, had not been blackmailed by the murdered cop, Clury; rather, Edith had hired Clury to gather evidence against Jake.
"She hated her husband. She told me many times. She found him disgusting and wanted a divorce. But she wanted a big financial settlement, too. So she hired this detective, Clury, who had done investigative work for Mr.
Mendoza. She paid him to collect embarrassing material about Mendoza, so she could force Mendoza into a good settlement."
"How did Clury get hold of the sex photos?"
"Mrs. Mendoza gave them to him."
"You're certain?" "She told me so."
"You didn't note any of this down?" Tania smiled. "I didn't keep a diary, if that's what you're asking."
"Did you know Carl Washington?"
Her mouth tightened. "Yes."
"Did you arrange meetings between the Mendozas and the boxers?"
Tania looked extremely uncomfortable, but she answered. "Three of them.
Washington, Royalton and Peiia. But not Metaxas, or that other man-what was his name?"
"Tate."
Tania nodded. "I never met him and never paid him.
Not him or Metaxas. The others-well, I did what Mrs. Mendoza told me.
She explained that the games were to Mr. Mendoza's taste, not hers, and that he forced her to join in. She told me Clury had placed a hidden camera in the studio, and that she went along with Mendoza's pleasures in order to get pictures to embarrass him."
"So, there wasn't any blackmail?"
Tania laughed. She looked relieved that they were done talking about her complicity.
"That was so stupid! I kept reading that people thought Clury was blackmailing the Mendozas, when actually it was Mrs. Mendoza who was going to blackmail her husband. The money she paid Clury was for his investigation." She turned solemn, met Janek's eyes. She wanted to convince him. "I think Mendoza found out what she was up to. I think he had his wife killed and Clury, too. I can't prove it. But I can tell you I didn't have anything to do with Metaxas. Never! So, if he's the one killed Mrs. Mendoza, it wasn't the way it said in that note… Janek spent the rest of the morning trying to tear apart her story. He asked long, complicated, sympathetically phrased questions, then short, jabbing queries designed to confuse and/or unnerve her. He pressed her on specific details, and, when she claimed she couldn't remember them, demanded to know why her memory was so selective. He forced her to separate what she knew from what she thought. He helped her to finesse her worst inconsistencies and attacked those portions of her account about which she seemed most certain. He complimented her on her composure and needled her for her disloyalty to her mistress. He was kind and cruel, subjecting her to glances of skepticism, snarls of ridicule and, when, suddenly, she dropped her head and began to weep, nods of humane compassion. In the end he thought that she had stood up well, that her story, as he forced her to refine it, was credible and that the lapses in it were justified by the passage of time. In short-he believed her.
"I have never witnessed such an examination," Luis said as they descended the stairs of the house. "You are a master of interrogation, Frank."
Janek shrugged. "Shucks..
Luis looked at him, admiration clouded by confusion. "What is this 'shucks'?"
"It means I can't handle compliments." He looked at Luis. "What do you say I buy you lunch?"
They drove to an oceanfront restaurant a few miles east of Havana, where, at Janek's insistence, they ordered lobsters. They were the only customers. While they waited, Janek asked Luis what Tania did at the Ministry of Finance.
"She's an economist."
"Does she have a degree?" Luis nodded, "And she calls herself a bureaucrat."
"She is a modest woman."
Janek smiled. "A hard woman. A modest woman. A maid who arranged sex parties, now turned government economist. You know what I'd call her, Luis? I'd call her a very interesting woman."
When the lobsters arrived, Janek was amazed. Their tails were so large they literally fanned out of their shells. They were delicious, too.
"This is the sweetest, most tender lobster I ever ate," Janek said.