The Beggar's Opera (12 page)

Apiro turned to speak to Ramirez as if they were of equal height, although he was not much larger than the child on the gurney. “There is some swelling on the contrecoup side of the brain, the opposite side from the trauma, where the brain banged against the skull following impact.”

“Is that how he died?”

“Patience, Ricardo. Patience. The skull was fractured in several places: a large hematoma marks the spot of the fatal wound. The boy was either struck or fell. Did he fall from a building? Something one or two storeys high?”

Ramirez checked his notebook. “His body was found in the Caleta de San Lázaro, on the same side of the seaway where you
first saw it. Slightly east of Principe. As you know, all the buildings are across the street. So I doubt it.”

“He was on the sidewalk when I arrived this morning,” said Apiro. “Soaking wet. I assumed he had been found in the ocean. No rooftop swimming pools for Cuban boys in Havana, after all. But was he on the rocks or in the water?”

“Señor Rivero saw the body floating and pulled it up the rocks. Another man helped him.”

“Hmmm.” Apiro’s deft hands probed the glossy white surface of the brain. He climbed down from his stepladder and took the brain to a scale on a filing cabinet on the other side of the room. After he weighed it, he removed his gloves to make a few notes and then walked back to the body.

He moved the ladder then clambered up on it again so that his short body rested against the gurney. He pulled his gloves back on, and prodded the boy’s body in different places. He turned it towards him and scrutinized the child’s hips, his back, his buttocks, and the palms of his hands. A few minutes passed as the doctor continued his slow examination, then he offered up his opinion.

“The seawall is only a metre or two above the rocks all along the Malecón. It is possible that the boy died of a fall there, but unlikely. The degree of force — the shattering of the skull — is greater than one would expect to find. Also, the injury is to the left side of the skull. Most people fall forward or backward, but rarely sideways. When they fall, they usually put their arms out in front of them to break the fall or land on their knees. The rocks on the shore are sharp, but this child has no abrasions on his hands or his knees, just scrapes on his side from being hauled up the rocks.”

“A blow, then?”

“Perhaps.” Apiro pointed with his gloved index finger to the
skull. “There is a coup injury on the left side of the brain. The fracture is discrete. Not caused by a flat surface but by something narrow, with a round circumference. About the width of a piece of rebar. But the contrecoup injury is there as well as the coup injury. You understand what that means?”

Ramirez nodded. A contrecoup injury resulted from the brain bouncing against the opposite side of the skull after an impact. A coup injury was consistent with blunt force; a contrecoup with a fall.

“Could he have been struck with something on the head and fallen afterwards, accounting for both injuries?”

“Possibly,” Apiro acknowledged. “Either someone hit the boy on the side of his head and he fell, or he fell sideways from a fairly good height against such an object, and then hit the ground. Was there a metal post anywhere near the body? Something along the wall or nearby, perhaps submerged in the water?”

“No,” Ramirez said. “I saw nothing like that.”

“I think based on what I’ve seen so far that you can be sure he was killed elsewhere and that his body was taken to the Malecón. Whether that points to someone’s guilt, I leave to you to determine, but usually when there is an accident, people call for an ambulance or the police rather than moving the body and tossing it in the ocean.”

“The body was moved?”

“He was dead in the water.” Apiro laughed the staccato laugh that increased in frequency, as did his little puns and jokes, the worse the facts of the case. The cackle of a night gull. “Yes, he was already dead. He wasn’t moved for a few hours. There is some pooling of blood, see here?”

Apiro pushed the boy’s body over. He again showed Ramirez the wide bluish-purple areas on the boy’s back that Ramirez had mistaken earlier for bruising.

“Tissues begin to leak fluid soon after death, Ricardo. If a body is lying flat, the fluid collects, thanks to gravity. These marks indicate the body was left in one position on a hard surface for a few hours.”

“Will there be any blood at the place where he was actually killed? What are we looking for?”

“Very little. The skull is an amazing thing. Nature designed it to protect the brain. Unless there is a crushing injury — like a compound fracture, for example where a head is squashed by a truck — there often isn’t any blood at all. This is a depressed skull fracture. The cranial bone is depressed towards the brain, but there’s no wound to the skin. The bleeding was all inside the boy’s skull. His left eardrum shattered on impact, but that would leave only small drops of blood, if anything at all.”

“If he was killed somewhere else,” Ramirez mused, “how did the Rohypnol capsule end up in Señor Ellis’s hotel room? I suppose he could have picked it up and put it in his pocket so that he wouldn’t leave it behind at the crime scene. Maybe it fell out when he was getting undressed. But I’m still trying to figure out how he smuggled the boy into his room.”

“I can’t answer that question,” Apiro said. “But you’re right. The doormen would never let a boy like this, a boy who begged, into that hotel. Not if they saw him, anyway. They normally won’t let such a boy even stand near a tourist hotel without threatening to call the police. And then there is the matter of getting the body from the hotel to the Malecón. Based on the forensic evidence, it looks like the boy was raped in the hotel room but died somewhere else and was put in the water much later.”

“Cause of death, Hector?”

“Probably a blow to the head with a narrow pipe, post, or club. An inch to an inch and a half in diameter. Perhaps it even was a piece of rebar.”

“Did he die instantly?” asked Ramirez. “And how do you know he wasn’t alive when he was thrown in the water?”

“Ah, no signs of drowning, look.” Apiro climbed on the table, nearly straddling the body. He pushed hard on the boy’s chest. Nothing happened.

“You see? In a drowning victim, there is always some foam left in the lungs. The presence of foam doesn’t prove drowning; it can be present after electrocution and other types of heart failure as well. The difference is that, in a drowning, if you remove all the foam and then compress the chest, there is always a bit more that comes out. So no drowning. And yes, to answer your other question, the boy died within seconds of his head injury. There was very little swelling in the brain.”

The doctor climbed down his stepladder and sat on a nearby stool. He knew Ramirez preferred to sit when he was standing, and appreciated Ramirez’s courtesy. But when they both sat, they had an equality that nature denied them.

“Thank God for that, at least,” Ramirez remarked. “That he died quickly. How long was the body in the ocean?”

“From the amount of rigour, perhaps five or six hours. No more. That should help you with your timeline.”

“Still under the influence of that drug when he died?”

“Yes and no. Rohypnol is relatively short-lived in its acute effects, but as I mentioned, its residual effects linger. For the first four to six hours, the boy would have been almost comatose. After that, awake but clumsy. Later on, still dizzy, but conscious and alert. I would guess he was drugged around 7
P.M.
or thereabouts. I think he died sometime between 10
P.M.
and midnight on Christmas Eve.”

“You found batteries for your calculator?”

“Yes,” Apiro smiled. “Sanchez took some from a camera in the exhibit room for me. There was no film for it anyway.” Apiro
had long ago accepted thievery as a necessary part of his job. “Metabolism stops at the time of death, Ricardo, so the levels of the drug remain static. If he was alive any later than that, the amount of Rohypnol in his blood would have been lower. So I think he probably died towards the end of that two-hour range, closer to midnight. But that’s just a guess. I could be off by an hour or more either way.”

“Anything else?”

The doctor dipped his head. “Yes. As you saw, the boy’s anus had fresh abrasions. But there is also a laceration that has healed. It extends beyond the anal mucosa into the perianal skin. A second injury, perhaps a week old. We find an injury that serious in less than ten percent of the children with positive findings of sexual abuse. The overwhelming majority of those, I am sorry to say, are girls. I have only ever seen one fissure like it on a boy in my career. Perhaps because boys are more likely to fight back.”

A terribly sad reality, thought Ramirez. He intended to teach Estella to kick, to gouge, to scream. But also to run.

“What does that mean, Hector? That the boy was raped before?”

“At least once. With sufficient force to tear his rectum. With the first injury, he would have bled immediately and every time he had a bowel movement for several days. That is why it can take so long for such injuries to heal.”

“Señor Ellis and his wife arrived in Cuba a week ago. He could have raped the boy before, too. We’ll have to question the boy’s family and the children he played with to see if any of them noticed Señor Ellis with the child. When will you have a written report for me?”

“I still have combings, oral and perianal swabs, and dry mounts that I need to test. And I want to run DNA tests on the samples we have collected. We are low on the chemicals we need;
I am trying to locate more. But as I said, I’m quite sure that the semen samples in the exhibits all came from the same person. That is about all I can tell you for now.”

“That’s more than enough for my purposes. This is a bad one, Hector. Vicious.” Ramirez shook his head. “That could be my son on your table.”

“Yes, it is a very bad one, my friend.” Apiro looked at Ramirez. “May I give you some advice?”

“Of course.”

“I suspect other boys may have been sexually abused by the same man as well. The men who do such things are pedophiles. They do not prey on just one child. Perhaps that is where you might wish to continue your investigation.”

“I’ll speak to Ronita and get her advice. But we will have to be discreet,” Ramirez said, a sombre expression on his face. If he wasn’t careful, there could be serious political repercussions. A pedophile ring in Havana wasn’t something the Minister of the Interior would want to hear about. It would not be good for tourism, at least not the kind Castro still hoped to attract.

The rest of the autopsy would be routine, Apiro assured Ramirez. Mostly weighing organs and labelling exhibits. There was no need for him to stay.

That was good. Ramirez had other things to do to meet his filing deadline. As well as the unpleasant task of notifying the Montenegro family of the death of their young son.

TWENTY - FOUR

A line of laundry swayed on a string hung between a post shoring up the balcony and a curved balustrade. Most of the brightcoloured clothing belonged to children. Small socks and shorts stirred like flower petals. Down the street, a woman washed her clothes in a bucket and wrung them out before hanging them carefully on a similar stretch of line.

The Montenegros lived on a numbered
calle
in the heart of the slums, in one of the more decrepit of the three-storey buildings that lined the streets. Ramirez stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the decaying exterior. Different colours of paint had been stripped away by the corrosive effects of the salt air, leaving the walls a mixture of peeling layers of turquoise, yellow, and pink, much like a child’s gumball. Entire walls had collapsed on the third floor, which looked like it was held up by little more than hope.

The Americans had developed a bomb that killed people but left buildings standing. Havana must have been the test ground for the failed prototype, thought Ramirez. The Cuban people are still standing, but all our buildings are falling down.

The Montenegros’ flat was on the second floor. Ramirez
climbed the single flight of rickety stairs and knocked on their apartment door. The dead man walked close behind.

A woman opened the door with an expectant look that quickly turned to fear. Ramirez could tell she knew instantly who he was. Nonetheless, he showed the trembling woman his badge.

“May I come in?”

She opened the door slowly. The dead man wiped his feet on the floor as if to enter, but Ramirez gave him a look. He walked back down the stairs, dejected.

The apartment Ramirez entered had two rooms. It was very clean, furnished with a bed that doubled as a couch, a table, and some wooden chairs. Sheets were nailed across the windows in place of curtains. There was an icebox, which Ramirez was sure contained neither ice nor food.

“Are you Señora Montenegro?”

“Yes?”

“May I ask if Señor Montenegro is at home?”

“My husband died several years ago. You are here about my son.” She began to cry, anticipating the truth. Two small girls pressed against her skirt as Ramirez expressed his deepest sympathies for her loss. “Is he dead, my Arturo?” she demanded, wringing her hands.

“I’m sorry. He was found in the waters off the Malecón by a fisherman early this morning.”

As he watched tears stream down her face, Ramirez decided to let her think the boy had drowned. He could explain the misunderstanding later. On this Christmas Day, he did not have the heart to tell her how coldly her son was murdered.

“When did you last see him, Señora?”

“Noon yesterday. Christmas Eve. He didn’t come home last night.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A yellow shirt and red shorts with white diamonds. An old pair of blue running shoes with white soles. Size two. A little big for him. Is there any chance you have the wrong boy? Perhaps Arturo is staying with a friend. Is it possible you have the wrong child?” She grabbed Ramirez by the shoulders and shook him, weeping. “You must have the wrong boy.”

“I am very sorry, Señora, but the boy we found was wearing red shorts with a white diamond pattern.”