Xulia looked back at him. Despite herself, her mouth curled into a grin. She broke into giggles that set the rest of them laughing too.
Encouraged by their reaction, Antía continued. “No, honest, the cuffs on his pants were so long they were dragging on the ground; so he took my stapler.” She raised an admonishing finger, a gesture that was for all the world like her father’s. “Without permission! And he tried to fix them and wound up stapling his pants to his ankle.”
They enjoyed their dessert, along with other tales of Alex’s misadventures. Laura served coffee and an aromatic local brandy. Manuel caught sight of a restrained smile playing across Nogueira’s lips beneath the mustache as he sat at ease at the head of the table. He admired Laura’s orchestration of the dinner, the way she urged each of them to participate, the way she handled the tensions with the husband she’d been tormenting but whom Manuel was sure she still loved.
“We can get together sometime if you like,” Manuel said to Xulia. “I can suggest some titles that’ll be a good deal more interesting to a future writer than my novels. But more than anything, you have to set your own goals.” Xulia was enchanted by his offer, especially when she noticed her father’s skeptical expression. “We all go through a bad spell from time to time. We get distracted or sometimes we just can’t concentrate, and we get the feeling there’s no reason to go on.” Manuel kept an eye on both Xulia and her father, hearing his own voice as if that reminder were coming from somewhere far away—with valid advice he’d forgotten in the rush and confusion of recent days.
“You see?” Xulia said to her father.
Manuel completed the thought. “Above all, we must keep those bad times from becoming a way of life.”
Nogueira replied to his daughter. “You see?”
Xulia looked at her father. She nodded.
It was two in the morning when Manuel said farewell to Laura and Xulia at the front door.
Antía lay curled up on the sofa with Café. Manuel called the dog and saw him hesitate, reluctant to leave. The reason wasn’t hard to guess.
Thick mists had settled in the cold night air, considerably lowering the temperature and transforming the streetlights along the road into swirling presences, like a holy company of whirling dervishes stationed mournful along the road. The prospect of lonely solitude that night made him yearn to turn back to that welcoming home. He wanted another coffee at the big table, another warm farewell embrace from Laura. She had easily extracted from him a promise to return.
Nogueira had gone ahead of him. He was waiting where Manuel had parked his car in one of the orange pools of light. Manuel placed Café on the backseat and fished álvaro’s thick jacket out of the back. He put it on, for he had a feeling he was in for a discussion that might take a while. Nogueira hadn’t escorted him to the car just as a courtesy.
Manuel was the first one to speak. “Thanks for the invitation.”
Nogueira looked back at his house, barely visible through the mist. Manuel knew he was checking to make sure his wife wasn’t watching. The lieutenant lit the cigarette he’d been wanting for hours. He took a hefty drag. The smoke he exhaled rose in blue swirls into the cold Ribeira Sacra night, so laden with humidity and the odor of the distant river.
Nogueira nodded without taking the cigarette from his lips. He waved away Manuel’s words.
Manuel looked him straight in the eye. “Laura is charming.”
The lieutenant took another deep pull and blew the smoke out in a sharp gust above their heads, watching Manuel all the while. “Drop it,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything, Nogueira—”
“Just drop it.”
Manuel inhaled the night air and then let it out in a long slow sigh. “As you like. But thanks anyway. It was a very pleasant dinner.”
Nogueira nodded, content with his success.
But Manuel hadn’t given up yet. “I wouldn’t get too worried about a girl who reads thirty-five books a year. I think she knows what she’s doing. She inherited her mother’s intelligence and her father’s balls.”
Nogueira turned to look out at the street. His expression was as grave as ever when he turned back, but Manuel was sure he’d smiled.
The officer took an envelope from the inside pocket of his overcoat. “These are the documents you gave me. We’re lucky álvaro kept all of his receipts. We were able to chart a relatively good map of his movements on the last day.”
Manuel nodded. The receipts were for the cash purchases álvaro had preferred to make instead of charging expenses to a card where they could be tracked. Like the second telephone and the portable GPS navigation device, they provided clues that were proof, or maybe just evidence, of his intention to cover his tracks.
“We knew from his call records that he telephoned the seminary at 11:32 a.m., and we estimate it took him half an hour to get there. There’s a receipt from the service station in San Xoan, printed at 12:35; he probably stopped there after leaving the monastery. It’s a shame this isn’t an official investigation. This was only a week ago, and we could still get the video surveillance from the gas station. The cashier would probably remember the car, since it would stand out around here. Almost everyone buying gasoline there is a local, and he’d remember an outsider. That wouldn’t prove that he’d been to the seminary, though. As long as the prior denies it, it’s still his word against our hypothesis.”
Nogueira handed him the envelope. “These were with the papers you gave us. Something to do with the winery. Nothing to do with the investigation, and maybe the executor needs them for the business.”
Manuel slipped them out of the envelope, glanced through them, and put them away. “Why is the prior lying?”
Nogueira gave him an appreciative look and seemed to reflect for a couple of seconds. “The reason the prior is lying, the reason his sister is lying, too, the reason people lie at all—your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes a lie conceals a crime; sometimes it’s a cry for help; sometimes it’s an attempt to cover up something so stupid it’s too embarrassing to admit.” He looked out into the darkness. “But we’ve got plenty of reason to be suspicious: the white paint left on the dent in álvaro’s vehicle, plus the damage to the front of the white pickup. And the fact that it’s ten days later and no one’s taken it to a garage for repair. His desire to keep it out of sight bothers me; so does all that shit about the nephew.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe the kid took any money. He’s a junkie, and of course junkies steal. Leaving a wallet where he can get at it is an open invitation. But the facts are that álvaro phoned both the nephew and the prior, and it’s almost a sure thing that álvaro was at the seminary to discuss something we don’t know about.” He looked Manuel straight in the eye. “That something was important enough to be the first thing he went to deal with as soon as he arrived from Madrid on an unscheduled visit.”
The weight of that evidence forced Manuel to agree. Nogueira lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, and continued the narrative, enumerating events on his fingers. “A few hours afterward the prior turns up shrieking like a banshee at the sister’s house where the nephew lives; the kid told a friend he’s got his hands on something that could set him up good, but now he’s so scared he doesn’t stick his nose outside even though his uncle is screaming, ‘This could be the end of me.’ The prior leaves, To?ino gets into his car and disappears. And all of this on the day álvaro was murdered.”
Nogueira fell silent. Manuel could almost hear the sparks as the neurons in the brain within that deceptively bullish head worked on the puzzle.
“What are you thinking?” Manuel asked.
“The only thing I can say is that this is getting more and more complicated. There has to be a loose thread somewhere. One we can use to start to pick it all apart.”
“On the phone you said you’d had an idea.”