The Poisoned Pawn (9 page)

“Perhaps the killer believed the old woman cursed him and murdered her to stop his bad luck,” Ramirez mused aloud. “He may have believed she was engaged in such matters, if that was the rumour around here. Particularly if the police believed it themselves.”

“You don’t believe in witchcraft, Inspector?”

“No,” said Ramirez. He thought the
houngans
were charlatans. “You?”

“I used to. The problem in a small place like El Gabriel is that many still do. And sometimes what people fear is more important to them than the truth. After Zoila’s murder, even innocent activities by the
santeros
, like dancing, took on sinister connotations. Before long, everyone, including the judges, reacted to their superstitions instead of looking at the facts.”

“Facts don’t lie,” Ramirez said.

He tried to think back to what his grandmother had told him about
brujería
.

“The
brujos
, they make dolls, little man. They put a person’s hair in them, or a piece of their clothing, parts of their fingernails. Maybe a tooth. They turn into bats or birds, sometimes cats. They can put poison in someone’s food or hide charms in
their room and no one knows what they do, no one sees them. You be careful if there’s a cat in the bedroom, Ricky. You watch out. And don’t you never kill a bat, you. You kill something without knowing what you do, you end up destroying not just that but yourself. Bad things, they come around.”

“I studied
brujería
when I took criminology at the University of Havana,” said Ramirez. “There was a textbook we had to read. By Fernando Ortiz, the famous academic. He said the
brujos
weren’t dangerous at all, that it became part of a race struggle between Africans and other Cubans.”

“Fernando Ortiz? I didn’t know he was a professor. He’s been in the courtroom every day, listening to our arguments, making notes. He told me during a recess that the judges were biased, that the prosecution had exaggerated the evidence against the
brujos
.”

“Ortiz? It must be someone else. Fernando Ortiz has been dead for decades. Castro read his book when he was a law student; that’s why we have laws against racism. But it’s an interesting point you raise. Someone may well have staked that old woman through the heart if they thought she was involved in black magic.”

Although if she was, thought Ramirez, that was a dangerous thing to do.

“It could have been a
curandero
who did this,” said Latapier.

A
curandero
was a witch-hunter, supposedly able to remove a curse for a price.

Yes, it could have been a
curandero
, thought Ramirez. One who offered to use his supernatural powers to rid someone of a curse and then concluded that plunging a fish knife through someone’s heart was a more efficient way of removing the problem. But that wouldn’t explain the deaths of the two little girls.

“What is the name of the man who was convicted of Zoila’s murder, Juan? The man whose appeal will be heard this week?”

“Domingo Bocourt was the principal suspect. He was charged
with two others. What bothers me is that the only information implicating him and his friends came from the local mayor. He started to blame Bocourt before the police investigation was even completed. That makes me suspicious. I think he knows who killed these girls and is lying to protect them.”

Ramirez was impressed. It was easy to convict the guilty. Convicting the innocent was far more difficult.

The door to the old woman’s apartment creaked open as soon as they knocked on it. The frame had rotted through. Dozens of cloth dolls stared at the two detectives. They were stacked on the narrow bed, the wooden chairs, the small kitchen table.

Angela Aranas had collected ceramic saints and statues of Yemayá, the black Virgin Mary; they were scattered everywhere. Seashells littered the dusty plank floor.

A large black doll resembling Chango slumped in a corner. It had multiple strands of red and white beads around its neck.

“See here? Shells. She either believed in divination,” said Latapier, pointing to the floor, “or someone else predicted her future.”

“It would have been a very short session,” said Ramirez.

Latapier sat down on one of the wooden chairs.

“Do you believe in Santería, Inspector?”

“As much as I believe in any religion. Why do you ask?”

“A true believer would never leave Chango lying on the floor. The Santería believe that Chango will kill you if you disrespect him.”

Ramirez doubted that Chango had the time to take out his rage over such minor infractions. But then again, petty crime was the lifeblood of the Cuban justice system.

“Then maybe Chango killed her,” said Ramirez.

He walked over to the table and picked up one of the dolls.
It was small and handmade, with a smiling, happy face and carefully stitched clothes. The others were the same, crafted from scraps of fabric. Only the Chango doll sported the angry face of the warrior.

“These aren’t voodoo dolls,” said Ramirez. “They’re toys. Perhaps she intended to donate them to a school. Or to a government daycare.”

“Or perhaps,” Latapier said, entering the kitchen area, “she was planning to send them to an orphanage. Look.” He pointed to a piece of brown paper tacked to the wall.

It was a drawing of children playing in a yard. A little girl smiled from a wheelchair. Another leaned on crutches. At the bottom, an inscription: “El orfanato, Viñales.” A child’s drawing, the caption added by an adult.

“You could be right,” Ramirez said. He walked back into the living space, far too small to be considered a separate room, and looked more closely at the shells lying on the floor. “A Santería initiate would never treat objects like this with such disrespect.”

Latapier thought for a minute. “Suppose Señora Aranas wasn’t involved in Santería, then. What if someone killed her and tried to make it appear that she was? Shaved her head and dressed her in white clothes after she was dead. They could have thrown the Chango doll and the shells into her apartment. That would explain the lack of blood on her clothing and the general disarray here.”

“But why would someone want to make us think she was involved in the black arts?”

“To lead the investigation down a false trail. That has to be it,” Latapier said, frowning. “Why else stab a knife into someone who’s already dead? They must have done that to hide the true cause of death. Does your pathologist know what killed the victim?”

“No,” said Ramirez. “But he’s working on it. I agree with you, Juan, that things may not be all they appear. I’m leaving the country tomorrow for a few days. I’ll assign this file to one of my detectives, Fernando Espinoza. He can start questioning her neighbours, and see if the orphanage in Viñales has any more information. Where can he reach you if he finds out anything related to your file?”

“I could be difficult to find, what with court, but I have to come back to Havana on Saturday morning to pick up a relative.”

“Good. I’ll be back by then. Why don’t you track me down then.”

Ramirez called the switchboard and asked to be patched through to Detective Espinoza.

“We’re at Señora Aranas’s address, Fernando. Have a patrol car bring you over. You’ll need to secure the scene until Dr. Apiro’s team arrives. Bring something to nail the door shut when they’re done. And some yellow tape, if you can find any.”

They waited in Ramirez’s car, the doors open to ease the stifling heat, until a patrol car pulled up in front of the building, discharging the young detective. Ramirez got out to give him instructions. Then he drove the El Gabriel detective back to headquarters and said goodbye.

He looked at his watch. It was almost 7
P.M.
No wonder he was hungry.

As he drove home, Ramirez wondered if his instincts were right. Could a child’s drawing hold the key to three brutal murders?

SIXTEEN

Mike Ellis jumped when the alarm rang. He pulled a pillow over his head and groaned. He pounded the top of the clock radio to make it stop, but the noise continued. He finally realized it was someone persistently ringing the front doorbell.

What the hell?
He looked at the time. Almost noon. Drunk, he’d slept in again.

So much for his plans to join Alcoholics Anonymous. He hadn’t been sober since O’Malley showed up on his doorstep. He thought about ignoring his visitor, but whoever it was wasn’t going away.

Ellis staggered to his feet and wrapped a bath towel around his waist. He opened the front door a few inches, trying to keep the frigid air outside. He blinked back the bright glare from an overnight snowfall.

A woman with a stiff helmet of blonde hair stood on his front step, a man behind her. She stepped forward, firmly pressing the palm of her hand against the door to keep him from slamming it in her face.

“Yes?” he asked, irritated. It was too fucking cold to have
Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door. He thought about dropping the towel, wondered if that would make them go away.

“Detective Ellis? I have a few questions for you. My name is Jennifer White. Can I come in, please? It’s freezing out here.”

Ellis looked up and down the street. There was a white media van parked in front of his house. Several cars idled nearby. A man lifted a large camera onto his shoulder and began filming. Car doors quickly opened and shut.

“Look, there he is.”

A gaggle of reporters jumped over the glittering snowbanks, calling out questions.

“Detective Ellis, how did you do it?”

“What do you have to say about your mother-in-law’s accusations?”

“Why did you poison your wife?”

“Any comment on today’s story?”

“Oh my God, look at his face.”

Ellis grabbed the rolled-up newspaper on the front step and slammed the door, hard. He pulled the living room drapes tightly closed.

The light on his answering machine blinked with at least a dozen messages. He hadn’t even heard the phone ring, he’d been so drunk. He skipped through them. Requests for interviews. CBC. CTV. Global.

The story was in the City News section. “Distraught Mother Claims Daughter Poisoned by Detective Husband.” At first he thought it said “Defective Husband.” He had to read the story a few times before the full import of the allegations hit him.

Shit, shit, shit.

There was a picture of him and Hillary on their wedding day. Hillary in white, model-thin, barely recovered from her
anorexia. Mike smiling, pretending to be happy, his face the way it was before the shooting.

Damn June
. He skimmed through the story, trying to focus, desperately trying to sober up. He stumbled into the kitchen and downed a glass of tap water and a couple of Aspirins.

His telephone rang again. He let the answering machine pick up and was about to disconnect the line when he heard who it was.

Ellis snatched up the phone. “I have a bunch of reporters standing on my doorstep, Celia. And a television van parked across the street. Do you know what the hell is going on?”

“Oh, shit, Mike. I was calling to give you a heads-up. Your mother-in-law was here yesterday making crazy allegations. We had no idea she’d go running to the press. O’Malley was in my office a few minutes ago. He’s absolutely furious they’d report this bullshit. Those were his exact words.”

“I never laid a hand on Hillary,” said Ellis. Which was almost completely true.

“I know. Listen, O’Malley’s going to send a patrol car over to keep the media away from your door. We can’t make them go away altogether—freedom of the press and all that. But leave this to us to deal with, okay? And stay calm. O’Malley doesn’t believe a word of it. Even the story in the paper is sympathetic to you, if you read it carefully. The reporter describes June as completely overwrought. They’re treading a fine line between reporting and defamation, and they know it. But at least they didn’t put the story on the front page. That means they probably don’t believe it themselves.”

“Then why report this crap at all?” said Ellis. He threw the paper in the garbage bin.

“That’s what news is like these days, Mike. Anything to sell papers. They’ll print a retraction eventually, I’m sure. It just won’t be on the front page.”

“A fat lot of good that will do.”

“I agree. But there’s nothing we can do: the story’s out. Mike, why is your mother-in-law doing this to you?”

“I don’t know,” Ellis said. He thought of the joke about the guy who made a Freudian slip at a dinner with his in-laws. Instead of saying “pass the salt,” he said, “you’ve ruined my fucking life.”

Ellis sighed. “Stressed out, I guess. They’ve had a hard couple of years. A new Superstore opened just down the road from their drugstore. It has a pharmacy. That took away a lot of their business. They’re in their seventies, and they’re about to lose everything. And June’s always been a bit of a drama queen. Hillary told me a few things about her childhood. If it wasn’t for Walter, I don’t know what she would have done. A super nice guy, but you know the type. Browbeaten. Mild-mannered. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Hillary described her mother, on the other hand, as a woman who once stood on the gravel driveway and threw rocks at her young daughter’s back when she tried to walk away from an argument.

“Oh, you’re charming enough,” she told Hillary repeatedly, forcing her to sit in the kitchen while she ranted, “but no one will ever really love you. With your looks, men will just use you and throw you away. That’s what men are like. Even your father will say one thing and do something else. Men lie all the time, understand? All of them. And you’re just like your father. Two peas in a pod.”

Hillary was eleven years old.

“I used to plot ways to kill her,” Hillary had confided in her husband. “I even thought of using rat poison. They always kept glass bottles full of it below the kitchen sink. But I was smart enough to know I’d get caught. I left home when I was
fifteen. I wasn’t going to let my mother destroy the rest of my life, too.”

Ellis had felt sorry for his wife; so conflicted with guilt. Children were supposed to love their parents, but how was a daughter supposed to react when her own mother hated her?