Blood Tango Page 5

  One of Hernán’s biggest worries was what Claudia and her father would say to the investigator. Some people were taking the recent relaxation of the state of siege as a signal that the citizenry was safe from repression. But Hernán knew that if Claudia or old Gregorio said anything too controversial, they would wind up on somebody’s list of subversives.

  When Claudia got into the car, she saw the worry in Hernán’s glance and mistook it for annoyance. He was getting fed up with her uncontrolled outpouring of grief. She did not want to irritate him further, but she wound up spending the entire ride from their apartment to her shop recounting her relationship with the dead child: a story Hernán knew, but that she could not stop herself from repeating. “I thought I was helping her,” she said for the tenth time that morning. She stared out the window and relived the shock and disbelief of receiving the horrendous news that had come before the break of light.

  A telephone call at that hour never brings good tidings. When they jumped out of bed and ran for the phone in the parlor, they both had imagined the call would be for him. Some political crisis required coverage—there had certainly been enough of that lately. She let him pick it up. When he said, “It’s for you,” and handed her the phone, she could not imagine who it was. Her father lived in a small apartment on the floor just below them. It could not be him. He did not have a phone. The shop? A fire? But it was worse. So terribly worse. Neither of them had slept for the rest of the night.

  Sitting in the car, she rubbed her eyes with her soaked linen handkerchief and again went over the day, a little more than six months ago, when she had taken Luz Garmendia under her wing.

  Almost daily, from the window of her third-floor apartment she had seen the tiny and timid girl of fifteen bringing lunch to that brute of a gardener, her lover Lázaro Torres. He repeatedly abused the child, spitting on the food she had prepared, calling it shit, and flinging it in her face. If he did such nasty things in public, Claudia did not even want to imagine what he did to her in private.

  She had discussed Torres’s behavior with her father, who then wanted to talk to the gardener. She could not allow that. The frail old man was no match for the muscular Torres. Gregorio had told her what the neighbors were saying: that the girl Luz had run away from a brutal father. “This is the problem of parents being unkind to children,” her father had said. “The children get used to it and expect to be abused all their lives. They never learn to stand up for themselves.”

  Out of fear, Claudia had kept her peace with the situation until she could no longer stand the thought of the girl’s suffering. One day, she decided she must intervene. She waited at home until noontime, watching out the window until Luz approached, delivering her lover’s lunch. Claudia quickly went down the stairs as if she were in hurry to get to work and secretly handed Luz a slip of paper as she passed the girl on the sidewalk in front of the building. She did not look back, but she heard the child presenting her bastard boyfriend with another disdained lunch. Later that day, Luz called the number on the paper. Claudia invited her to the shop, gave her a job, and found her a decent place to live. She had felt so happy with herself, so self-satisfied that she had rescued the girl. Now Luz was dead, and Claudia was certain that if she had let the girl be, she might still be alive. She also knew it was probably Lázaro Torres who had killed her.

  As Hernán pulled his old Ford coupe up to the curb in front of the shop, he took her hand and kissed her damp palm before she got out of the car. “I’ll try not to be too late,” he said. “When my editor called this morning, he told me Perón has left town. If he just keeps going, it could be the end of him, but the situation is heating up in other ways. I promise I’ll do my best.”

  She leaned across the seat and kissed him. The apology in his eyes told her clearly what his words belied, that the political events would keep him from her on the day she needed him most. But she knew that La Prensa, his newspaper, would be one of the first to be suppressed if events turned out the way his worst nightmares warned him they might. And the facts of Argentina’s past and present told them both that they probably would. She was as passionate about her work as he was about his, but his was serious. She made expensive dresses; he reported and recorded events that would become history. He loved her. She knew he did. But he was going to do his duty and leave her with her grief.

  She touched his face and slipped out of the car. “Phone me at the paper,” he called out the window as she crossed the narrow cement sidewalk. A glance at the tiles in the shop’s doorway turned her stomach. She ran though the showroom, past a strange man who stood with her father in the workroom, and into the bathroom in the rear of the store. She slammed the door behind her and vomited into the toilet.

  The small tiles in front had been just like these on the floor of this bathroom, small black-and-white hexagons. But those at the front door were now a pinkish brown. Luz’s blood, the blood of that poor dead child, had been cleaned away by she knew not whom, but the stain of death remained on her doorstep. She retched again and did not stop until her stomach was completely empty.

  She rinsed her mouth and looked at her face in the mirror, so pale she hardly recognized her own withdrawn, shocked countenance. She took a compact from her purse and patted a useless layer of pressed powder onto the dark streaks under her eyes, left by sleeplessness and guilt.

  She took off her hat, fluffed her hair out of habit, and unwound her long gray silk scarf from her neck. In the workroom, she held out her hand to the stocky, fit-looking man in the dark pin-striped suit standing next to her father. He was, as she knew he must be, the detective who had called and described the dead girl. He must also have been up all night, but unlike her looked only a little the worse for wear. Then again, he was younger than she, by close to twenty years, she guessed. “I am so sorry for your trouble,” he said. “My name is Roberto Leary.” She saw the Irish in his good looks and the Latin in his sad, dark eyes.

  Her father kissed her and held her hand. “I looked at his credentials,” he said. “They are in order.”

  “Has Pilar arrived?” she asked her father.

  “She called to say she would be a little late.” He looked at his watch. “She will be here in a few minutes.”

  “Papa, would you go across to the Boston and ask them to bring us a tray of coffees? Get one for Pilar, too.”

  When her father had gone, she and the detective pulled up chairs around the high cutting table. Leary put his brown fedora under his seat and took out a notepad. “I am afraid I have to ask you a lot of questions,” he said.

  “Yes, I imagined you would. I have been thinking about her since you called and how this could have happened.”

  “I have, too,” Leary said to the proprietress of Chez Claudia. She was, as he had expected, an elegant woman: early, maybe middle forties, but still statuesque and vital, though obviously exhausted. He started as he always did with witnesses, by asking a few lead-up questions about how long she had owned the shop and where she lived—meant just to get her used to answering his inquiries. She had started to tell him how Luz Garmendia came to be working for her when a fine-featured girl of about twenty or so came in through the back door from the alley behind the stores. She was sleek and curvaceous, but she also looked shocked and tired. Her eyes were as red as her lipstick.

  “This is Pilar Borelli,” Claudia Robles said. “She is my seamstress. I called her early this morning and told her the terrible news.” The girl put her hat and jacket on a clothes tree near the back door and took a chair without saying a word.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” Leary said. He offered her his hand, which she took for only a second. “From all I have been able to find out in the house where Luz Garmendia lived, you two were probably the ones who knew the dead girl best.”

  “If you don’t count her father and her ex-lover,” Señora Robles said.

  “We have not been able to locate them yet. We talked to her grandmother early this morning. She identified t
he body,” he said. He did not tell them that the old lady had never dropped a tear or shown even a hint of grief. “Evidently Torres, her former boyfriend, and her father both have the habit of going on benders, even on a Wednesday. But my men will find them.” He said the last with more confidence than he felt. The frequent demonstrations for or against Perón, and the underworld activity, which always spiked during moments of instability, would take all attention away from this investigation into the murder, however brutal, of an obscure girl. Only a police-force outsider such as himself could be spared for this unimportant task. He had played the only card he had to get this overtime approved—that the murderer probably had been after the actress Eva Duarte.

  Claudia continued answering his rather innocuous questions until her father came back, followed by a waiter from the café carrying a tray of demitasse cups and a sugar bowl. Once the waiter left, Leary downed a coffee and opened his notepad. He watched Pilar put two spoons of sugar into her cup and stir and stir. He shook his attention from the mesmerizing motion of the seamstress’s hand twirling the spoon and proceeded to ask them to tell him about the dead girl and her habits. Like most witnesses, they also told him who they thought might have killed the girl. The reasons were all emotional, of course, but they fit with the facts of this case. Six stab wounds were too many for a simple robbery or a coldhearted assassination.

  Claudia watched the detective scrawl his notes with his stub of a pencil that looked as if it had been sharpened with a penknife. She lit a cigarette and only half listened to Pilar tell him about her friendship with Luz. The seamstress described the dead girl as an innocent, which was accurate despite what moralizers about female virtue might think of a girl still in her teens who ran away with a man nearly twice her age.

  Claudia smashed out her cigarette in the ashtray next to her empty coffee cup and looked down at the sketch pad in front of her. While Pilar was giving her evidence to the pleasant-faced policeman, Claudia the modista had absentmindedly drawn a design for widow’s weeds. She put down her pencil.

  Leary looked up from his notes. “Don’t you think it’s possible,” he asked, “that whoever killed Luz did it because he mistook her for Evita Duarte?”

  Claudia shuddered. If that was true, she was doubly guilty for having connected the impressionable girl with the actress in the first place. Leary proceeded to ask Pilar a lot of questions about Luz’s desire to be mistaken for the actress and the green dress she had on when she died.

  Guilt washed over Claudia again. Less than a week ago she had caught Luz, right here in the shop, in her attempt to remake herself into the actress. Claudia had been in a hurry to get everything ready for her best customer’s fitting that morning. Evita had ordered a special outfit to wear for Juan Perón’s fiftieth-birthday lunch, and Claudia had designed a lovely ensemble of dark red with white polka dots—gorgeous Italian silk that complemented Evita’s perfect, pale skin. Claudia had arrived at the shop early that sunny morning to check over the dress and also a matching set of beige satin shirt and trousers. Evita had been expected at ten thirty.

  Claudia had entered from the bright street and her eyes had a hard time adjusting. She had thought she saw Evita already there an hour before she was expected, admiring herself in the triple mirror. Claudia rubbed her eyes and looked again at the figure in slacks and shirt.

  The woman on the beige-carpeted pedestal turned and faced her. It was Luz, her shop assistant, not her best customer. Until last Saturday, even from the rear Luz’s brown hair would have given her away.

  The startled girl shouted, “Señora Robles!”

  “What are you doing sporting that hairdo?” Claudia had demanded. Luz’s now-blond hair and its style and her makeup as well mimicked the actress’s. With that hairdo, those arched eyebrows, and that dark red shade of lipstick, clearly the girl wanted to be mistaken for Evita.

  On closer inspection, the quality of the dye job was a dead giveaway, as was the lack of subtlety in the application of the eyebrow pencil. Nor did Luz have Evita’s large, piercing eyes or delicate nose, and no one else had the actress’s luminous complexion. But in Evita’s clothing, appearing in this place that Evita frequented, it was easy to mistake Luz for the mistress of Juan Perón.

  “I—I—” Luz did not finish the sentence.

  Never imagining that a teenage girl playing dress-up could be putting herself in mortal danger, Claudia had done nothing more than point to her watch and warn Luz about the time. “She’ll be here in half an hour. Take off those clothes and that makeup and redo your hair. She likes you to model her outfits before she takes them home, but I doubt she will be pleased if she sees you trying to turn yourself into her. Get going.”

  Luz had stepped down and disappeared into the dressing room. She had greeted the actress that day as a blond, but with her hair pulled back into a tight chignon. If Evita had noticed the change in the girl’s hair color, she had not remarked on it. That was the day the actress had given Luz the green dress in which she had met her death, and Claudia knew she herself was to blame.

  If this detective’s theory was true, Claudia thought, she could have saved Luz’s life by making her change her hair back to its natural color and putting a stop to her masquerade. While Leary continued to question Pilar, Claudia looked into her empty coffee cup and forced herself not to light another cigarette. Why hadn’t she done more to save that poor child?

  Guilt also gnawed at Pilar. She answered the handsome detective’s questions and insisted in her heart that it was Luz’s father who had killed her.

  “If you ask me…” she started to say. But she swallowed her words. Who was she to tell a policeman anything? She was afraid of knowing what she did. She did not want to give evidence. In Buenos Aires, people who gave evidence in a killing too often wound up dead themselves. Knowing who had killed Luz would not bring her back.

  A fleeting smile brought out the boyishness of Detective Leary’s looks, but it quickly disappeared. He regarded her with his policeman’s mask. “You were about to say?”

  She could not resist the expectation in his eyes. “Her father,” she whispered, because she had to say something.

  “Her father what?” Leary demanded.

  “She was always afraid he would find out where she lived or where she worked. She said he would drag her back home by her hair.”

  Leary imagined what it would be like to run his fingers through the pretty seamstress’s shiny black hair. “You were the last one to see her alive. Did you see anyone in the street that night as you were leaving here?”

  He saw fear flash in the girl’s dark eyes. She was hiding something, or she was implicated somehow. Those delicate hands that apparently were so skillful in creating outrageously expensive gowns didn’t look as if they could have plunged a knife into the body of another human being. He could imagine them guiding silk under the needle of her sewing machine. He could imagine the skin on her arms feeling like the silk she sewed.

  He dragged his mind from where it wanted to go and focused on her boss. “Why was the girl dressed up to look like Eva Duarte?” This was the crux of his thinking. He, Franco, and Estrada, even the girl’s grandmother looking at her dead body, had at first glance mistaken her for the actress. Perón was the most hated man in Argentina, and though he had already resigned by the time the girl was killed, the murderer may still have been trying to get at the colonel by murdering his mistress.

  Leary reminded them of his theory. “What do you think?” he asked them directly. “Could the murderer have mistaken her for the actress? It was not quite dark at the hour when she was killed, but the day was cloudy, and this street is narrow. Is it conceivable that the actress would be here at that hour?”

  Señora Robles said, “Yes.”

  Pilar Borelli said, “No.”

  Both of them had spoken too quickly and vehemently.

  The old man grunted. Leary turned to him. “Who do you think did it?”

  “I have no idea, but Peró
n has been the target of all that hatred pouring out in demonstrations.” He pointed to the newspaper on the table in front of him. “The public outcry against him has gotten worse in the last month or two. I also hate him, but not for the reason anyone else does.” His voice was definite, his face determined.

  Gregorio Robles had to be seventy if he was a day. He didn’t look like any murderer Leary had ever heard of. “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “He went for young girls. I have a daughter. I cannot imagine such a man. His last mistress before Eva Duarte was only fourteen years old. He took her out in public and introduced her as his niece. He disgusts me for that.”

  The señora and Pilar looked dismayed. Leary couldn’t tell if they were shocked by the old man’s revelation or by the fact that he had brought it up. Saying such a thing to some policemen could get even a seventy-five-year-old arrested. Leary wasn’t that kind of cop. But they didn’t know that. He had heard those rumors about Perón. A guy on the force talked about it all the time, made jokes about how only a man with an undersized male member would be a cradle robber. That cop told a story of having been on a detail once, escorting a group of Croatian immigrants from the port to Perón’s office. The colonel’s little “niece” had been in the minister’s outer office, dressed like a schoolgirl, sitting in a big chair where her feet didn’t even reach the floor. Of course, that story came out when the higher-ups, all former Federals, were not around. It would not do for any of them to be caught laughing about their ultimate boss being a pervert. Ordinary grunts on the city police force were no safer from the goon squads than were the citizens at large.