Havana Best Friends (6 page)

The IML experts would carry out the on-site inspection of the body, take it to the morgue, gather whatever evidence was on it, perform the autopsy, and help in trying to identify who it was, so the LCC people just eyed the corpse from a distance before taking photographs and measuring distances.

The IML’s white Mercedes-Benz meat wagon arrived at 7:49 a.m. Three men and a woman in white smocks, olive-green trousers, and lace-up black boots got out, shook hands with the cops, exchanged a few words. Captain Trujillo seemed especially delighted to see Dr. Bárbara Valverde, an attractive, thirty-three-year-old, dark-skinned black pathologist. She learned from him the few known facts, then pulled out an aluminium scene case from the back of the van, opened it, passed around latex gloves and plasticized paper booties to her assistants, slipped on a pair of gloves, a surgical mask, and booties. She closed the case, approached the corpse, swatted away the flies, put the case down, and crouched by it. The body lay prone, face supported on the left cheek, both arms at the sides, legs slightly bent to the right. Down the street, senior citizens gaping behind the police line frowned and murmured in confusion. A woman examining a dead man? She a necrophiliac or what? The younger voyeurs pooh-poohed them into silence.

The first thing the pathologist noticed was the lump at the base of the neck. She ran her index and middle fingers over it,
feeling the dislocated vertebrae. Then she spotted the laceration on the right temple and her fingertips detected comminuted fractures of the temporal bone. There were low-velocity stains of blood on the sidewalk, underneath the left corner of the mouth, probably coming from split lips and teeth loosened when he hit the cement.

“Let’s turn him over,” Dr. Valverde said.

Rigor mortis was almost complete. She held the head in her hands while her assistants turned the body. Bills folded in half fell from a pants pocket. One of the assistants whistled. The pathologist reopened the scene case and reached for a pair of tweezers, which she used to pick up the bills and drop them into a transparent plastic evidence bag.

Dr. Valverde frowned when she noticed the bite marks on the neck. She studied them for a while under a magnifying glass.

“Osvaldo, get on the radio and ask Graciela to call the odontologist and tell him to come to the institute. There are indentations to cast here.”

The tallest assistant marched to the van. The other was measuring temperature and humidity.

She inspected the lacerated temple under the magnifying glass before swabbing nostrils, mouth, and ears, and depositing each swab into separate evidence bags, which she labelled with a marker. She swabbed the blood on the sidewalk as well, then palpated the top of the head, the rib cage, thighs, legs, and ankles before closing the scene case and rising to her feet.

“What have we got here, Dr. Valverde?” Captain Trujillo asked. He stood a few feet from her, legs spread apart, right elbow resting on his holster, a lighted cigarette cupped in his left hand. The pathologist suspected he had catnapped in his uniform: his
light-grey long-sleeved shirt and blue pants showed dozens of creases and wrinkles. She admitted to herself that he was attractive in an unprepossessing but rather virile way. He tried to establish a non-professional rapport every time they worked together, but Félix was too young for her – and married. She lifted the case and, followed by the captain, took it back to the van, then yanked her gloves off.

“What we’ve got here is a broken neck, a severe blow to the right temple, lacerated lips and chin, loose teeth, bite marks on the neck.”

“Time estimate?”

“Preliminary. Between four and eight hours.”

“You planning on doing the autopsy immediately?”

“Yeah. I’m on the six-to-two shift.”

“Then I’ll drop by, or send someone later on, to collect his things and take them to the LCC. If the identity card is missing, will you have a ten-print card ready for me?”

“Lift him up, comrades,” Dr. Valverde told her assistants. The two men slid a stretcher out from the van. She followed them with her eyes.

“Doctor?” said Trujillo, realizing that she hadn’t been listening.

“Sorry, Félix.”

“Will you have a ten-print card ready for me if the stiff wasn’t carrying his identity card?”

“Sure.” After a pause she added, “Dollar bills fell from his pocket.”

“So I noticed.”

“The one on top looked like a fifty.”

“Is that so?”

“But when I palpated him I didn’t feel a wallet. And his left wrist has a pale band, like a watch strap, but there’s no watch.”

Captain Trujillo had a crush on Dr. Valverde because she had a perfect body and her face was out of this world. She was competent and bright too, and he liked that. “So, your reasoning is whoever kills for a watch, a wallet, and a pair of shoes searches all the pockets.”

“Right.”

The captain took a puff on his cigarette and mulled this over as the stretcher was slid into the van. The driver turned the ignition, the attendants stripped off their gloves.

“I’m thinking sex, sodomy maybe,” the pathologist added. “That might explain the bites. I’ll check for evidence of intercourse. But if he didn’t have sex in the last twelve hours, you’ll have a tough nut to crack: a killer who bites without sexual motivation and steals valuables but leaves cash behind. Pretty weird, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I guess so. See you in a while, Doc.”

“Not before noon, Félix. Not before noon.”

The Institute of Legal Medicine, on Boyeros between Calzada del Cerro and 26th Street, is a two-storey prefab building hidden from view by a psychiatric clinic and big laurel trees. Before its experts located, exhumed, and identified the remains of Ché Guevara and his men in Bolivia, it claimed the dubious distinction of being the least known of Havana’s public institutions.

Back at the institute, Dr. Valverde had a buttered bun and a glass of orange juice for breakfast, followed by a cup of espresso. Next she smoked a cigarette in the hallway, standing by one of
several ugly aluminium ashtrays. She dropped the butt in it before marching to the locker room to step into a gown, don sleeve protectors, shoe covers, a surgical cap, a face shield, and three pairs of latex gloves.

The autopsy suite had four tables, an efficient air-conditioning and ventilation system, and the standard paraphernalia of Stryker saws, a source lamp with a fibre-optic attachment, multiband ultraviolet lamps, surgical and magnifying lamps, pans, clamps, forceps, scalpels, sinks, hoses, and buckets. On the tiled walls, cabinets and cupboards of all sizes, plus light boxes for X-rays.

The body was on a gurney to the right of table number three, where Dr. Valverde’s two assistants sat, legs dangling, face shields lifted to avoid fogging them up while chatting about last night’s baseball game at the Latin American Stadium. On table number one, another team was examining a twenty-five-year-old woman who had died at home, possibly from a heart attack. Osvaldo handed Dr. Valverde a mike that she clipped to her gown. René pressed the Record button.

The assistants lifted the body on to the autopsy table, then broke the rigor mortis in the arms and legs. Dr. Valverde first collected hair and substances from under the fingernails. The cadaver was then undressed and the pockets searched. Four cocaine fixes, a key ring with five keys, a half-full packet of cigarettes, a lighter, a handkerchief, and nine coins were found and put into evidence bags. After dipping the dead man’s hands in a pan of warm water for a few minutes, Osvaldo dried them, then inked each finger, rolled them onto a ten-print card. All the evidence that had to be sent to the Central Laboratory of Criminology was ready.

The body was measured and weighed, its temperature taken. René photographed the neck, temple, and bite marks – with
Osvaldo holding a ruler as a scale – as Dr. Valverde inspected the injuries again, this time under a fluorescent magnifying lamp. The odontologist, a short, bearded man, arrived. He joked for a couple of minutes before taking the bite impressions.

When he was done, the pathologist carefully checked and swabbed the cadaver’s knees, elbows, the underside of the arms, penis, and scrotum. She had it turned over and examined the back, buttocks, and anus, then swabbed the rectum for seminal fluid. Next, she put on tinted glasses, ordered the lights turned off, and used the fibre-optic attachment of the source lamp to look for the fluorescence, which semen, blood, saliva, and urine display under its high-intensity beam.

An hour and a half had passed. Without a word, Dr. Valverde unclipped the mike. René stopped the recorder and the team moved to a corner. They yanked off their third pair of gloves and had a smoke while discussing the postmortem’s next stage. They agreed that it would bear little relation to the cause of death, but it had to be done anyhow.

Again wearing the mike, the pathologist ran her scalpel from the clavicles to the sternum, down to the pelvis, then removed the breastplate of ribs. After thirty minutes of work the major organs had been extracted. All were within normal limits. The dead man’s lungs revealed that he had been a heavy smoker. Half-digested beef, plantains, rice, and red beans were identified in the stomach. Dr. Valverde adjusted a surgical lamp to stare at the fractured vertebrae and the injured spinal cord. She sighed, asked for the Stryker saw to start working on the skull, then decided against it. An X-ray of the right temporal bone would be enough. The job was completed three hours and ten minutes after it began. René tied a tag reading “Unknown man 4” to the cadaver’s
toe prior to wheeling him to a sliding drawer in the cold room.

Dr. Valverde showered and changed in the locker room, then hurried to the nearly deserted cafeteria to have lunch. The menu for the day was rice, scrambled eggs, sweet potato, and boiled string beans. She sat at an empty table, feeling tired. Then she spotted Captain Trujillo at the doorway, craning his neck in search of her. She waved at him.

“You had lunch?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Want to?”

Hesitatingly. “Can I? I assumed this was for IML people only.”

“It is, but let’s see.”

She talked to the man in charge, Trujillo shelled out fifty cents, then advanced to the food counter. Dr. Valverde was halfway through her lunch when he shoved back the chair facing her.

“Hey, thanks. I’m famished,” he said.

“Least I could do. This is going begging anyway.”

“Well, yeah, but something is better than nothing. When I get back to my mess hall there might be nothing left.”

“Enjoy it then.”

Trujillo gobbled his food and they finished simultaneously. Then they went into the hallway. She offered her packet of Populares. He took one, then clicked his lighter for her. Both inhaled deeply.

“No ID, no sexual intercourse, was killed around midnight,” she said.

Trujillo tilted his head. “Anything else?” he asked.

“What appears to be four fixes of cocaine,” she replied between gusts of smoke.

Trujillo frowned and they smoked in silence for a minute or two. In the last seventy-two hours he had slept twelve, hadn’t changed clothes for the last two days, had been reprimanded by the colonel for skipping the last three Party-cell meetings, so he was in no mood to get involved in a complicated murder case. But he knew better than to suggest to Major Pena to pass the buck to someone else. The homicide had been reported during his shift, thirty-seven minutes before he was to go off duty. Just his luck. If only it had been a crime of passion. One of those open-and-shut cases where the killer is found sobbing by the body, hanging by the neck in the vicinity, or hiding at his or her parents’.

“Well, Doc, I’ll collect the ten-print and his things now, take them to the LCC. Please send the autopsy report as soon as possible.”

“Sure. I don’t envy you, Captain. This is a tricky one.”

“As if I didn’t know. Thanks for everything. Changing the subject, I’m stressed out, you’re probably stressed out too, would you … catch a movie or have dinner with me one of these nights?”

The pathologist gave him a disapproving look. “Félix, are you coming on to me? What’s the matter with you guys?”

“Take it easy. I just thought you might want to. Somebody said you’re divorced. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. But you’re not. Give me a break, will you, Félix?”

Trujillo inclined his head and blushed slightly. How had she found out he was married? “Okay. I’m sorry. I apologize. Are you mad at me?”

“No, I’m not. Got to make my watch report. Take care.”
At a quarter past two, the inked fingerprint card was optically read by the LCC computer. The key features of the general pattern and local details provided a listing of candidates, ranked by a comparison algorithm. On-line, the fingerprint examiner asked for seventy-two cards from the national registry and started the long screening process. At 7:50 that evening, he dialled the DTI’s number and asked for Trujillo. He had to wait while the captain left his bed in the communal dormitory for senior officers, relieved himself, splashed water on his face, and, feeling reasonably alert at last, ambled to the phone on the duty officer’s desk.