Blood-drenched Beard

Ah. One more thing. A girl was killed in Paulo Lopes a few weeks ago. Strangled. Her face was mutilated. Do you know which case I mean?

Yep. They caught the guy.

Did they? Who was it?

A neighbor. I don’t remember his name. He’s locked up. Why?

I read about it in the paper and just remembered it. Just curious.

He confessed. An acquaintance of the family. He’d already been seen with the daughter.

Did he say why he killed her like that?

Apparently he was in love with her. She wasn’t interested.

Is he normal or a whacko?

The officer looks as if he is about to laugh and shrugs.

He thanks him and leaves with his bike and Beta.

He returns home on foot, pushing his bike through the streets skirting Capivaras Lagoon. The light from the lampposts gives an oily yellow hue to the carpet of water moss that covers almost the entire surface of the polluted lagoon. A cloud of mosquitoes hovers over a small rotting warehouse. Huge dogs start to emerge from the vegetation on an empty lot, and he hooks his finger under Beta’s collar as a precaution. Several members of the pack are purebreds, Rottweilers, German shepherds, or mixed breeds in which he recognizes the features of collies and Labradors. They are all filthy and lean, with tongues hanging out, fur bristling with sweat and cold, trotting through the night with no apparent destiny as if following a ghostly leader. They are a common sight in the town, large dogs abandoned by vacationers who live hundreds of miles away. They seem haunted, as if they can’t fully stifle the instinct to search for home.

• • •

He notices that his front door isn’t locked, which is something he doesn’t usually forget to do. From the door he can see almost the entire apartment, and at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any sign of forced entry. He looks at the position of the cushions on the sofas, the pamphlets on the table, the two magazines on the counter next to his dirty dishes. His wetsuit, which is worth hundreds of reais and is, perhaps, the item of greatest interest to a thief, is still hanging on the clothesline in the laundry area. The folder where he keeps four hundred U.S. dollars and eight hundred reais in cash, among magnetic bank cards and personal documents, remains under the silverware tray in a kitchen drawer. He locks the door from the inside, keeps the shutters closed, sets out food and water for the dog, and goes to have a shower.

Later he sits on the sofa for a while, looking at his cell phone. He tops up his credits with a recharge voucher and dials a number.

Gonçalo?

His old school friend starts in with the usual interrogation about why he felt compelled to move to the coast out of the blue, but he quickly cuts him off. He asks Gonçalo if he is still working as a reporter for the newspaper Zero Hora. He says he is looking for any information at all about his grandfather’s death and tells him everything he knows: the year, the story about the unsolved murder at the dance, and the jumbled details that his dad told him about his move to Garopaba in the late sixties.

Man, are you really okay?

Listen, Gonça. Dad came here at the time and said he’d spoken to a police chief from Laguna who had supposedly come to look into the matter. But the folk here know fuck all, and no one at the police station is going to help me. The subject is taboo here, and I still don’t get why.

That’s going to be tricky. Didn’t your father have a death certificate?

No.

If that’s really what happened and a police chief actually did go to oversee the case, he must have started an inquest. But imagine the guy arriving, in 1967, in a fishing village that had just become a separate municipality, to deal with a murder without a culprit. To deal with a case of community justice. The only neutral witnesses were most likely hippies, and they were probably licking the sand, high on mushrooms. Or maybe the guy didn’t even start an inquest, or didn’t go to the trouble of finding a culprit. It was the people’s justice, period. That kind of thing used to happen a lot in small towns and still does. And even if he did conduct an inquest, I bet it’s sitting in some dead archive somewhere.

Okay, but is there a way to find out?

Look, I’ll talk to a friend of mine, a source in the Department of Justice. Maybe he’ll have a suggestion. I’ll get back to you, okay?

He washes the three days’ worth of dirty dishes piled up in the sink and then looks for something to eat. He hasn’t been shopping in days and doesn’t find anything nourishing in the kitchen except for a packet of peeled shrimp in the freezer. He thaws it and cooks the shrimp in salted water for a few minutes. He squeezes lime over them and eats them with the remains of a packet of crackers. He is doing the dishes again when his cell phone rings.

Hey, Gonça.

Hi. I talked to the guy.

What’d he say?