Читать книгу Crocodile Tears - Mercedes Rosende - Страница 11

45

VII

Captain Lima opens the file, leafs through it absent-mindedly, takes another sip of the coffee that is already somewhat bitter by this point in the afternoon, reads a few paragraphs here and there, sighs or yawns. Lost in other thoughts, she turns a couple of pages, raises her gaze and looks outside at the vista of soot-covered walls beyond her office window, thinks about her journey home, the walk along cold dark streets, tries to recall the contents of her fridge. She lowers her gaze and strives to concentrate on the case, to continue with her reading: interrogations, psychiatric evaluations, lists of phone calls, statements, police reports, fingerprint analyses, photographs, paper, paper and more paper.

This wasn’t what Captain Leonilda Lima had expected when she joined the force, this wasn’t the life she wanted but, well, we never get the life we want. Back in the beginning there had been hopes, desires, dreams gradually left by the wayside, projects that came to nothing, but life never turns out like we imagine and the captain, now a little past forty, has known that for a while, even if it doesn’t stop her hankering after what she’s never had.

She’s not exactly pretty. She has a slight squint and her wavy hair never seems to be quite where it should be, but what is a pretty woman, anyway, other than a bundle of ideas and preconceptions? She is beautiful in her own way, with 46her lazy dark eyes and their yellow flecks that gleam like those of a cat, and her somewhat unruly hair which moves as if it has a will of its own. Apart from that, her body is normal, standard size, no obvious defects. In other words, she would be considered pretty or almost pretty if our tastes weren’t conditioned by such unrealistic aesthetic standards.

This life is not the one she imagined, and she seeks comfort in her work, the language of the reports makes her feel in her element, protected, calm. Words like suspect, accused, crime, victim, corpse, firearm, sharp implement and exit wound shelter her with their familiarity, make her feel useful, needed, make her think she’s doing what needs to be done.

She likes wading through this paperwork, sprinkled with technical terms and acronyms; in this familiar bureaucracy she feels like the tarnished but honest heroine of a moral fable, the mediocre woman who has to hack her way through the maze to reach the tower of the evil wizard and bring him to justice. Leonilda Lima may feel disillusioned, may have witnessed plenty of acts and attitudes that make her feel disappointed with life and even with her profession (and she will surely witness more), but she believes in Justice. With a capital J.

On her third coffee, she finally manages to concentrate. She goes back to the beginning and reads the first reports, simple sentences full of terms she recognizes, hints she decodes, questions that challenge her to find an answer. You might imagine the specific details of each case would disturb her routine because they require her to think about everything each time, but although she feels pleasure at recognizing those words and she loves her routines, Captain Leonilda Lima prefers to avoid procedures which, through repetition, become mechanical and 47devoid of intelligence. Yes, she loves the routine of her work, but she focuses all her faculties on what she does and exercises a degree of independent judgement, a fact that will be of no little importance for the reader’s future comprehension of this story.

She reads late into the night, takes notes, organizes her thoughts using the standard techniques and a few tricks she has invented herself and, by the time the clock has passed ten, she has an overview of the case and has even come up with a plan to take the investigation forward.

The captain is no longer in the grip of the bad mood that descended when she was given this minor case, an affair which until yesterday had been in the hands of Captain Leonardo Borda, who suffers from chronic haemorrhoids and has been admitted for surgery first thing tomorrow morning. Also gone is the disappointment she felt at not being assigned the case of the killer nurses, those angels of death at Maciel Hospital who appear to have been responsible for helping dozens of patients, perhaps even hundreds, into the afterlife. This evening she has been getting to grips with the murder of Juan Carlos Lencina, alias the Candyman, an inmate of Santiago Vázquez Prison, and she now feels the familiar enthusiasm as she tackles a file that, so far, is just a question, an accumulation of facts with no apparent logic or explanation, to which she will have to find a solution or acknowledge failure and admit she has been defeated by a superior mind.

She turns to the next page in search of photos, reports, statements, evidence; she sees that a brutal murder has been committed, that there is a blade that has not been found and, above all, there are too many complications in play. A mind, Leonilda thinks, in the end there’s just one mind in 48which the idea of any crime appears for the first time. And she has to find that person: that’s her job, identifying the real culprit hiding behind all this verbiage.

The captain looks at the photos taken at the scene. A cell, bunk beds, a corpse punctured by stab wounds, mattresses, floor and walls dyed red: quite simply, a bloodbath. She reviews the victim’s record and sees he has no known profession; he appears to have supported himself by picking pockets on buses, mugging old ladies, stealing things when the owner was looking the other way. Nothing special. She doesn’t have the sense that the corpse in this photograph was that of a big-league gangster; rather, this mass of bloody flesh looks like it belongs to a petty criminal.

Leonilda thinks she sees rage and perhaps evil in this case, a chicken thief who was stabbed to death in a cell packed with men who supposedly were asleep, an act as risky as it was savage, an act without apparent justification, one which would have needed a whole rosary of complicity for the perpetrator to get away with it.

Leonilda asks herself why a man like this could have met with such a violent death. Jealousy, money, envy, revenge, sex. Rage.