17 Stone Angels (35 page)

“What about his wife?”

A flash of knowing bitterness. “You are young, Susana, but when you reach my altitude of life, you will understand that a man who was struggling, like Robert, is susceptible to that sort of thing.”

“But how did that get him in trouble with the police?”

“You see, the police control the prostitutes here, either through the pimps, or directly. This Frenchwoman belonged to the police. She saw Robert simply as a way to get money, but as happens sometimes, I'm told, Robert began to want to save her from her chosen occupation.” She pulled her mouth to the side. “He was half-retarded in that aspect. He threatened to expose the
policeman, and the policeman decided to get rid of him. After, of course, they mounted a little sham of an investigation, but in Buenos Aires . . .'She puffed some air and looked at the ceiling.

“Do you know what policeman this was?”

Her eyes widened. “
Chica
, if I knew, he would already be in jail! I know this much only because Robert confessed it to me in the course of our creative sessions. I felt sorry to see him go down that path.”

“But if Waterbury needed money himself, how much could this prostitute get out of him?”

“Maybe it was not so much . . .” The Señora's face filled with disdain. “But for that pretentious little whore, enough.”

“And do you know where I might find this woman?”

The question seemed to strike Teresa Castex the wrong way, and she retreated into a suspicious silence for a moment. “Why do you ask that?”

With a nervous little jump of her hands that felt like a huge gesture: “Oh . . . For more background. The ambiance of the book.” Teresa became pleasant again in a less casual way. “I understand. But let's talk about the book. Do you have the manuscript with you?”

She felt a slight vertigo. “I don't. You see, our trade division decided to go ahead with the book last week, and since I was already in Chile on other business they had to send it by courier. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten lost somewhere between here and New York.”

The older woman gave a smile that seemed uncomfortably wide. “But my husband owns the delivery service! Just give me the receipt and we'll have it by tomorrow morning!”

“Great!” Athena said. “I'll give it to you before we leave.” She hurried ahead. “I haven't seen the manuscript, but evidently he had finished about one hundred and fifty pages.”

“Tell me where he left off. I didn't see him for almost a week before he was killed, and from what you say he made great progress.”

Athena hesitated for a moment. According to Fabian, the book had traced the relationship between a billionaire and his wife as he climbed the ladder of corruption to the top. But Fabian had said a lot of things. Teresa Castex was watching her with an ominously encouraging grin.

“Well. . .As you know, the book was tracing the career of a businessman and his wife. He was a bit, I would say, opportunistic.” She went as far as
Fabian's version allowed, watching Teresa Castex's face for some indication of her success but encountering only the same pleasant attentiveness. “And at the part we left off, there was some issue of bribes paid to the government . . . It was meanelusive.”

Teresa Castex didn't lose her faint smile. “Who are you?”

“I don't understand your question.”

Teresa Castex shook her head. “That's not what our book was about at all! Our book was about corrupt police who try to blackmail a businessman. They want to make him a bed for the murder of a journalist and a writer, and they even hire a whore to come in and try to trick his wife. But the ending is thus: the woman is an amateur! She can't even tell the right story, and the wife knows she is a liar and a whore! That's what our book was about! It's realistic, no?”

Athena felt her mouth drawing outwards to a stupid grin, reacting without will to Teresa Castex's false cordiality.

“So comic! Who do you work for? Ovejo? AmiBank? Or do you work directly for RapidMail? They are so jealous that an Argentine might own the business they think should belong to them!” She stood up to leave, and Athena noticed a large man in a dark suit and sunglasses coming towards them.

“You disgust me!” Castex went on. “You'll do anything to get at my husband! No lie is too low! Why do you come to me when you're the ones who killed him!” She snatched the books off the table, then picked up the waterglass and dumped it into Athena's lap. There was a shock of icy cold, and then Athena felt the moisture running down her legs.

“And for your information, I am a writer on my own merits! I do not need Robert Waterbury to authenticate me!” Now she picked up the other glass of water, but before she could empty it Athena sprang to her feet and grabbed her hand.

“Excuse me,” she said in a low, venomous English. “You must have mistaken me for your fucking doormat!”

“Your mother's cunt!” the other woman murmured in Spanish.

Athena twisted the glass from her hand and flung the water into Teresa's face with such force that it splattered the two files of tables behind her. She saw the water dripping from the Señora's make-up, heard the complaints of the patrons behind her, then felt herself knocked off her feet by a wall of dark cloth. She tripped over her chair and clattered into a brass flower pot that
banged to the floor like a clash of cymbals ringing in the final note of a symphony. Teresa Castex was standing above her beside her bodyguard, shaking her finger. “You people killed him! You killed Robert to make a bed,
puta
, and you can write that in your report!” She stared after them as they stepped out into the sunlight.

When they were gone a waiter came over and brushed the soil off her career-girl outfit. From behind her she heard someone make a hissing cat sound, and the low laughter of men. She was soaking wet and speckled with potting soil. Her lie had been uncovered, and in almost every way her little
operativo
had been a failure. But as she left the gilded walls of the Tortoni her mind had suddenly opened to a possibility that felt lurid and monstrous, yet oddly plausible in a cold, corporate way: Waterbury's killer had been working for AmiBank.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

C
omisario Fortunato, meanwhile, was settling in to what promised to be a very bad day. He had told Fabian by telephone to come to his office at nine in the morning, but the Inspector hadn't shown. When he'd picked up the morning paper Pelegrini's name appeared across the front page in large letters across from a photo of Berenski's grieving widow. Below it, in a sidebar, the phrase “Pelegrini also implicated in murder of North American.” After that came the FBI.

Agents Castro and Foshee coursed across the threshold like two blocks of fabric topped with wooden faces. A federal comisario from Central accompanied them. The Federales had sold it as an inter-agency liaison session, but Fortunato knew at the first handshake that it was an interrogation. He ordered the requisite coffees and forced himself into his expression of solicitous calm.

“You're ahead of us on this investigation, Comisario Fortunato, so I want to ask you some questions that you probably know the answers to.”

“At your orders,” Fortunato answered.

They started out with the usual simple queries: how long had he been a police officer, what divisions had he worked in? Stupidities about the case they could know from reading the
expediente
. They were casual about it, but he knew the method. They wanted to see what gestures and vocal
inflections he used when he told the truth. After they established that, they began to heat it up a bit.

“The victim was found with handcuffs of the same sort used by the Buenos Aires police,” the older agent, Castro, said in his Caribbean-tinged Spanish. “Moreover, the fatal bullet, according to the coroner, was a nine millimeter round, a round which is used by the police. Did you ever investigate the possibility that there might have been police involvement in this case?”

“
Bien
,” Fortunato began. He knew not to raise his hands to his face, or to look sideways as he spoke. But to interject a little word like
bien
to buy time, that was a mistake. Better to answer directly, without evidence of thinking too much. “That of the handcuffs and the bullet certainly raised our suspicions, but at the same time there are other sets of handcuffs and other nine millimeter pistols in the hands of non-police. We did a survey of private security companies in the capital and found eight firms that use this variety of handcuffs.”

“I didn't see that survey in the
diligencias
,” Castro said.

Fortunato made a puzzled expression. “It should be there. If not, I'll get you a copy.”

The federal comisario came to his aid. “Sometimes that happens,” he explained to the Northamericans.

They didn't seem convinced but they didn't press it, so Fortunato continued. “One also can't ignore that these cuffs also end up in the hands of people who have nothing to do with law enforcement. I don't think that the presence of the cuffs necessarily indicates the police.” He swallowed. “It's a similar case with the nine millimeter shell. The victim had been wounded four times with a .32 caliber round, a cheap pistol used very much by common delinquents here in Buenos Aires, and as you pointed out, finished with the nine millimeter, which also circulates among the criminal element. The Astra nine millimeter used by Enrique Boguso is in wide circulation, as well as those of the marks Llama, Smith and Wesson, Ruger, Beretta, Browning and many others.” The men were listening without expression, and Fortunato grew more confident in his story. This was the one piece of evidence he had sealed perfectly. “For the doubts, we did a ballistics test and, as it turned out, the bullet matched the Astra nine millimeter that the suspect Boguso indicated to us as the murder weapon.

“I saw those tests,” Castro said, “but there was a problem with them. Some of the pictures of the bullet don't match the bullet that's in evidence now.”

Fortunato wrinkled his brows. Had they found a set of the original pictures in a file somewhere, or were they bluffing him? “You don't say! I haven't heard anything about that.”

“Haven't you been leading this investigation?”

The two hard-cop faces stared back at him, men who had a lifetime of experience separating lies from truth. “Of course, but one has to assume that the
expediente
is intact. If the evidence has been compromised, I'll look into it immediately. But I can assure you that when the evidence left my office, everything was completely in order.”

The FBI men didn't answer, merely stared at him. Finally Agent Castro spoke. “The coroner's report showed a piece of paper in the victim's pocket with a phone number registered to Carlo Pelegrini. And yet your investigation made no effort to trace that number. Why not?”

Fortunato reached up and scratched his forehead. A bad move. Very bad. “Of course we traced it. But as you well know, surrounding any murder are a mountain of clues, many of which have nothing to do with the murder itself. We knew about the Pelegrini phone number -”

“It's not in the
expediente
,” the younger gringo said.

“You are correct, Agent Foshee, and the reason is thus: the police must follow the instructions of the judge in mounting an investigation. Sometimes, though, to save time, we do things outside of the judge's strict orders, and these results may be found in our files, though perhaps not in the
expediente
itself. In the case of the phone number, we had reliable information that Enrique Boguso committed the crime, and during the course of questioning, Boguso confessed. Now, he has changed his story, and thus the matter of the telephone number assumes new importance. As we go on deepening the investigation—”

The senior agent interrupted with his annoying rudeness. “Can you think of a reason why Boguso would change his story so suddenly?”

“None. This was a very recent and surprising turn and I have not yet had the chance to question the suspect about his change. As you know, San Justo has no scarcity of crimes to investigate, and the Waterbury murder, being already more than four months old, must take its place behind those that are a bit fresher.” He decided to poke back. “To be honest, Señor Castro,
it's only recently that the Federales and the FBI have taken an interest in the case, for reasons that remain a bit mysterious to me.”

Castro didn't answer. The session dragged on for a few more questions, then died out in a round of cardboard handshakes. They were lying, so was he, and everyone knew it but said nothing. It was a matter of respecting each other's professionalism.

Alone in his office again, Fortunato's mind swarmed with a dozen strat egies for fending them off. He would need to conduct a survey of private security companies in Buenos Aires and forge a trace of Pelegrini's phone number as if it had been done months ago. He would need to check the photos of the bullet in all copies of the
expediente
that he could locate. But couldn't the Federales find out easily that the surveys and the traces had been ordered that very day? Didn't they have their own copies of the
expediente
? No, he thought, sinking into his chair and running his hands along his scalp to soothe his brain. No, it was impossible. Once the journalists got involved, and the inevitable beatings by the police, Boguso's story would crumble, and the investigation would begin again with a new ferocity. And someone would talk, because people like Vasquez or Domingo always had to brag, and youngsters like that hippy driver, Onda, to confess their wonderment. No, only Bianco could save him now. Or Pelegrini.