Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) by Rubem Fonseca Read Free Book Online Page A

annex?”
    “You don’t know?” Rosalvo was surprised, but he pretended to be very surprised. “It’s in the São Borja Building, 227 Avenida Rio Branco, right across from the Senate. Very handy. I feel like going there, but they say the madam is a tough old bird, and she’s not going to rat out guys with clout just like that. It’d be good for us to meet one of the whores the senator is screwing.”
    “The senator’s sex life doesn’t interest me.”
    “I don’t like to nose around in anybody’s sex life either. But the senator must be the type of john who gets off on bragging to girls in bed while drinking champagne. Lots of times we get useful information.”
    “You don’t have the slightest notion of ethics, Rosalvo.”
    “Sorry, sir.”
    “What I’m interested in is finding out whether Gomes Aguiar had enemies, problems with partners, that sort of thing. I’m not interested in gossip, much less your ironies.”
    “I don’t argue with you. You’re my boss, and I have the greatest respect for you.”
    Actually, Rosalvo was afraid of the inspector. He was sure that Mattos wasn’t right in the head, the faces he made, that crazy strike he’d tried to promote, that business of going unarmed to investigations, and especially his habit of not taking numbers dough—shit, the guy rode the bus, didn’t even own a car, and yet he turned up his nose at the boodle from the bankrollers. You had to be careful with a man like that.
    “You’re new in the police—not that I’m trying to give you lessons, who am I to do that? It’s just that I’m older, almost an old man of fifty-five, thirty of them in the police. The only thing I’ve learned in all those years is that in a homicide there are just two motives. Sex and power. That’s the crux. People kill only over money and pussy, excuse my French, or both of them together. That’s the way of the world.” Pause. “I have some business to take care of. Do you need me?”
    “That case of the workshop? Did the boy’s father show up?”
    “No, sir. The boy said the old man doesn’t have anybody to take care of the orange grove.”
    In a small automotive repair shop, in a fight, the mechanic Cosme, using a lug wrench, had hit in the head a guy who had left his car for work, killing him. The mechanic, a skinny guy, twenty-two years old, had a huge hematoma over his left eye. The shop belonged to him and his father, a Portuguese who was absent at the time of the fight, at the orange grove the family owned in Nova Iguaçu. A woman, called as a witness, had complicated matters by saying she had seen a guy in a gray shirt hit the victim in the head with something. Cosme, when arrested, was wearing a red shirt.
    “Is the woman back from her trip?”
    “No. I went to her apartment on Friday, and no one knows when she’ll return. She must have that thing you said about seeing everything in gray.”
    “For us to be certain whether the woman is colorblind, it’s necessary to have her vision checked.”
    “Sir, the boy confessed. The woman’s disappeared. The inquest period is ending.”
    “Go to Nova Iguaçu and subpoena the old man to come to the precinct to talk with me. The mother comes here every day to see her son, so does his wife. It’s just the father who doesn’t appear.”
    “He’s taking care of the oranges.”
    “These Portuguese families are very close. For them, not all the oranges in the world matter more than a son.”
    “The grove is, pardon the expression, in the middle of nowhere.”
    “I want the old man here day after tomorrow.”
    “I have to go to the Senate to talk to senator Freitas.”
    “I’ll do that. You’re going to leave here directly for Nova Iguaçu. Now.”
    Cosme had been brought from the holding area and taken to the room where he normally received visits from his wife. The two were sitting, silently holding hands, when the inspector entered. The woman wiped her face, swollen from crying and her eighth-month