The Black Minutes

15

He was supposed to arrive on the first flight, but he couldn’t be found anywhere. Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, the most famous detective in Latin America, couldn’t be one of the guys in cowboy hats with piteado boots and jeans or one of the oil workers in dark sunglasses or one of the bronze-tanned businesspeople in short sleeves waiting to claim their baggage.
From the moment Dr. Quiroz Cuarón agreed to assist them, Chief García’s office was stirred with unusual energy. They had let Torres Sabinas know, so that he would authorize the expenses, and Lolita had reserved a plane ticket for the first flight in on Thursday. The doctor was to arrive around eight o’clock. He had to go through the neighboring city of Tampico, a few minutes north of Paracuán.
When there were only a half dozen travelers left in the reception area, Vicente noticed an elderly man drinking a cup of coffee at a bar nearby. The elderly man waved him over.
“Are you Lieutenant Rivera’s nephew?”
“I was on the first flight,” he said, “it’s strange you didn’t see me arrive.” He was wearing a double-breasted blue suit and an impeccable white shirt, and he smelled of lotion from six feet away. He was carrying a small leather suitcase and a medium-sized wooden trunk with labels from a recent trip through Portugal and Turkey. “Careful with that. The contents are very fragile.”
He must have been about seventy years old, but he didn’t look it. Rangel noticed he wasn’t carrying a gun, and he asked himself if he might be accustomed to having bodyguards, like some very important officials. He carried a book in his hand: The Psychology of Crime by David Abrahamsen.
As they went outside to the car, a wave of heat assaulted them. Rangel explained the chief’s reasons for not being able to welcome him, and he thanked him for agreeing to come. The doctor nodded. “Poor García, those idiots are always ordering him around.” After he settled down inside the patrol car, he didn’t say another word.
The city seemed to be a huge mirage. It was hot, and the air coming through the windows did nothing to cool them down. As they got onto the main avenue, by the Hotel Posada del Rey, they passed a considerable crowd waiting for the bus. The detective glanced briefly in the rearview mirror: they were carrying picket signs. When they came to the Beneficencia Espa?ola, they ran into another large group. They must be members of the PRI, he thought, marching in support of President Echavarreta.
As they passed in front of the normal school, they saw a third crowd, which was getting ready to march with a loudspeaker and signs. As he turned down a steep street, he strained to hear what they were saying. Where the street ended, they could see the Río Pánico and its loading and unloading area.
They went in through the back door and walked up to the second floor, where the doctor settled into the chief’s office.
“To start,” said the specialist, “I’d like to read the report.”
Lolita handed him a photocopy. As soon as Rangel was sure that the secretary was attending to the visitor, he ran to see what the chief’s nephew was doing. He found Romero reading the Treatise on Criminology by Dr. Quiroz Cuarón in an armchair next to the coffeemaker.
“What’s up, Vicente? What time does the conference start?”
“I’ll let you know. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got everything I need right here.”
Rangel had promised to invite Rodrigo to the meetings with the doctor, as long as he didn’t insist on going to the airport.
“All right,” the nephew had said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna get ready, I’m gonna read his complete works.”
As he turned away, Rangel wrinkled his nose. For a moment, just for a moment, he could swear he smelled a sickly-sweet smell around the kid, a smell he had gotten a whiff of before, during previous investigations, a tobacco scent . . . or Cannabis indica. But no, that’s not possible, he told himself, it’s the chief’s nephew—and we’re at police headquarters.
“I’ll wait here,” said the boy, and concentrated on his reading.
When he got back, Quiroz Cuarón’s suitcase and trunk were on one side of the table, but he couldn’t see the criminologist anywhere.
“And the doctor?”
The secretary motioned toward the door at the end of the hallway, and Rangel went to look for the expert.
He was quite active for someone over seventy years old. As Rangel was checking in with the nephew, the doctor had underlined the first few pages of the photocopies. Rangel hurried to review them. The doctor had made notes with a color pencil. On first impression, the inscriptions seemed to trace out a diagram—or, rather, a drawing of an equation. Sometimes he crossed out a line with an X, sometimes he put a check next to a sentence or marked it with a square root sign. And in one place he had drawn a circle around a word, with a line from it down to the bottom of the page, where he had written a number of indecipherable symbols, of which Rangel could only recognize the question marks. He had drawn a map by hand of the city’s principal avenues, indicating the two schools and the locations where they found the two bodies with arrows. He doesn’t waste any time, Rangel said to himself, and went to look for him in Ramírez’s office.
As soon as he entered, a smell like the chemicals used to clean pools filled his nose. The tiny size of the cubicle, ten by sixteen feet, was evidence of the chief’s lack of interest in the analysis of evidence. Ramírez moved around very nervously as he pulled together the materials requested by Quiroz Cuarón. The doctor asked if he could examine the evidence collected around the bodies. The forensic expert held out a plastic bag, sealed with Scotch tape.
“How large was the perimeter you studied?”
“About six feet, at the most ten feet, doctor.”
The old man poured the contents out onto a white sheet of paper and began to separate them with tweezers. There was grass, cigarette butts, wads of gum, popsicle wrappers, bags with leftover fried food, and other wrappers from candy sold in front of schools. For a few minutes, the doctor worked in silence. When he lifted his head, he acknowledged Rangel.
“This is complete chaos. We have to hurry, I don’t have a lot of time. Two days, at the most. I can’t be here any longer.”
Before Rangel could respond, loud noises rose up from the street, growing louder by the second. Rangel looked out the window at a violent crowd carrying picket signs.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s a protest, doctor. Going by the signs, the Professors’ Union must have organized it.”
According to El Mercurio, there were two thousand people, all demanding quick justice. They were asking for Chief García and the mayor of Madera to be dismissed from office. They alleged they were conspiring with the killer. From the second story, Rangel looked at the variety of inflammatory signs that made reference to Barbosa and to Chief García.
The doctor shook his head. “Same as always. It’s already started. Rangel, take me to the crime scenes.”
Rangel drove Dr. Quiroz Cuarón to the Colegio Angloamericano where Karla Cevallos had studied. They turned at the corner so the doctor could examine the entrances without getting out of the car. Afterward they went to see El Palmar. When they pulled up to the lagoon, they noticed two groups of teenagers were getting ready to go waterskiing. Rangel asked him if he wanted to check out the islet, and the doctor said yes. In the Regatta Club, they gave them a boat and a driver. Once they got close to the island, the doctor jumped out with an agility unexpected for his age, and a huge crow appeared in the reeds. The old man scared it off by throwing a rock at it and shook his head. As quickly as he could, Rangel crossed through the police line, which was marked with four branches, and answered the doctor’s questions as well as he could. The doctor asked for very specific details about the conditions in which they found the body. Rangel responded acceptably, thanks to his having read El Travolta’s report.
“What did they find here?”
When they were investigating on the islet, Rangel explained, the only thing they found was a footprint in the mud. The doctor stressed that the remains of both victims were found in plastic trash bags. He asked if the two girls were from the same social class, and Rangel explained the first girl went to a private school and was middle class, while the second girl was the daughter of Pemex workers. The specialist commented that the islet was not the ideal place to hide a dead body.
“It’s very close to where they rent the boats. . . . The killer ran the risk of being discovered because so many people pass by here. I guess you’ve already interviewed the security guard at the club, but we should enlarge the perimeter of the crime scene to the entire shore of the lagoon and interview the fishermen one by one. Most likely, he didn’t rent a boat at the Regatta Club. Probably, he started far away. But in that case, why would he want to leave the body here where he risked being discovered?”
Immediately, they went to Public School Number Five and the old man asked him to drive around the block, without getting out of the car. Afterward, they headed to the Bar León, where Rangel parked in such a way that he was able to show the doctor the entryway to the alley, where the killer would have had to enter to drop off the girl’s body. The doctor didn’t want to get out of the car.
“I know this area. It’s not necessary.” He wrote something down in his tiny notebook. “OK, I’m done for the day.”
When Rangel went to drop him off at the hotel, the doctor asked, “Can you take me to Tampico? I have to make two visits.”
They went to the old railroad station, and the doctor got out. “I have a strange tradition,” he explained.
They walked to the old manager’s offices and the doctor looked at the inside through a dusty window. There was a rusted metal desk and a chair thrown on the ground. Ever since they had closed this train station, trash and spiderwebs had taken over. Rangel knew the visit was very important for Dr. Quiroz Cuarón. The rumor was that his father had been killed in that office sixty years before. One of his employees got in an argument with him and shot him in the back. The doctor was fourteen years old when it happened. An uncle went to pick up the boy from school and explained that someone had assaulted his father. The doctor said he had never been able to forget the impression caused by the visit to his first crime scene, seeing his father’s desk covered with blood and his papers strewn everywhere.
“I remember as if it were yesterday. It was a cloudy day. Even before my uncle arrived to pick me up from school, I had a feeling that something was wrong. Imagine: you get to your father’s office and suddenly he isn’t there. In that moment, my career began.”
The doctor broke off a branch from a tree with his foot and kicked it toward the street. It made Rangel think about a gardener accustomed to stubbornly clearing weeds and dead leaves from the same land.
“Now, the cemetery in Paracuán. Let’s go see your uncle.”
They stopped in front of the gray headstone. Ivy was starting to grow over it. Damn, Rangel said to himself, it’s obvious I’ve totally neglected my duties, I should come here more often.
The inscription was simple:
MIGUEL RIVERA GONZáLEZ
1900–1975
DETECTIVE
YOUR RELATIVES AND FRIENDS REMEMBER YOU
The widow had insisted on inlaying a black-and-white photo of his uncle in a suit and tie, standing with one boot on the bumper of a Ford.
“Look at that!” the old man exclaimed. “I was sure I’d never see your uncle again, and now there he is, just like I remember him.”
The photo must have been from the fifties. In the picture, Rivera looked thin but his expression was friendly.
“So what do you think, Miguel? Are you going to help us solve this case?”
The doctor didn’t notice, but a wind gust rustled the ivy.
A moment later the doctor asked, “Is the bar at the Hotel Inglaterra still there?”