The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri Read Free Book Online Page A

speechless. Nevertheless, I was even more deeply surprised when Pedro Romano finished his telephone conversation and told me that the case was solved, showing me a piece of paper with two names written on it and looking at me as if to say,
Here, I’m doing you a favor, though we both know I don’t have to, because it’s your section’s case.
    “Workers,” he said. “In Apartment 3. Doing renovation.”
    Romano evidently thought the telegraphic style he was using, punctuated by theatrical silences, increased the drama of his scoop. I asked myself how such a limited guy had risen to the position of deputy clerk. My answer was that a good marriage works wonders. Romano’s wife wasn’t particularly pretty, or particularly nice, or particularly intelligent. But she was particularly the daughter of an infantry colonel, and in Onganía’s Argentina that was a significant merit. I recalled the sea of green army hats at the wedding, and my annoyance grew.
    “They saw the girl passing. They liked what they saw. They started thinking about it,” Romano continued, moving on from identifying the perpetrators toreconstructing the crime itself. “It was a Tuesday morning. They watched the husband leave early. They got up their courage. Then they acted.”
    Seeing that he insisted on talking like an official telegram, I was on the point of telling him to get the hell away from me. My hopes rose, in vain, when he stopped leaning over my desk, removed his hands from it, and stood up straight. Instead of going away, however, he dropped into the nearest chair. He shifted it closer with a few sudden hip movements, and then, once again, his eyes were level with mine.
    “They went too far and wound up killing her.”
    He stopped talking. Maybe he was waiting for a standing ovation or the flashes of news cameras.
    “Who told you about this?” I asked, immediately guessed the answer, and risked saying it: “Sicora?”
    “Precisely.” Romano’s tone included, for the first time, a very slight trace of doubt. “Why?”
    Should I light into him or should I let it go? I opted for the peaceful choice. Homicide Lieutenant Sicora was a specialist in avoiding work. He hated contacting people, he detested walking the streets, he loathed the essential duties of an investigator. As far as I could tell, all he had in common with Báez were the whites of their eyes. Sicora worked up his hypotheses from his living room and tended to pin homicide raps on the first poor bastards that came along. What really burned my ass, however,wasn’t Sicora; it was that Romano, dimwit extraordinaire, was taking the lieutenant at his word. Sicora was a lout and an idler, and this was a fact known to the very nuns in their goddamned cloisters. How could Romano be unaware of it? And even if he hadn’t heard, he still had the obligation of knowing the proper protocol for conducting a preliminary investigation.
    In spite of all that, I didn’t want to get too overheated. After all, Romano was a colleague, and I’d had enough experience in the Palace of Justice to know that verbal wounds are hard to heal.
    So I changed the direction of my questions a bit: “But look … wasn’t Báez handling the case?”
    My delicacy went unrewarded; Romano answered me with frigid irony. “I don’t think Báez is Spencer Tracy, you know. He can’t take on everything. Don’t you agree?”
    I’d about had my fill of him, and the remains of my patience were sifting away like handfuls of sand. “No, I don’t agree. Especially if the alternative is to let the investigation be led by a brainless lout like Sicora.”
    Although I’d just impugned his source, Romano didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, with the air of one who generously consents to educate another, he grabbed the fingers of his left hand and started enumerating. “There are two of them. Workers. They were doing renovations in the front apartment or the one next to it. They’re not from the neighborhood and