My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron Page A

athletic club in a provincial town going to get all that money? How could Burdisso’s suffocation be explained if the well, as first reported, was dry? Why didn’t Burdisso call for help with his cell phone if it was found beside his body in the well? And who is compromised by the calls recorded by the cell phone, Burdisso or his murderers? Were the calls made before or after his fall into the well? Once again, who would want to kill some sort of Faulknerian fool, poorer than a church mouse, in a town where his disappearance would be noticed immediately, a town where, moreover, many people would know who Burdisso was, what he had done and who was with him in his final hours?

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    An article on June 27 by Claudio Berón, a journalist for
La Capital de *osario
, answered—to the extent that these things can be answered—some of these questions. I read it hastily:
    Finally, after three weeks of intense investigations, the crime of Alberto Burdisso of El Treból was resolved. Burdisso, the 60-year-old man who […] and whose cadaver was […]. Gisela Córdoba, Gabriel Córdoba—her brother, Juan Huck and Marcos Brochero remained in custody charged with homicide. The motive, according to court sources, could be that they wanted Burdisso to sign a document leaving his house in Córdoba’s name, and when he refused they decided to kill him. After weighing various hypotheses, Criminal Judge Eladio García, who headed the investigation, decided to charge the four suspects and […]. The Commissioner of the 18th Regional Unit, Jorge Gómez, also worked on the investigation, mobilizing the Forensics Department of Rosario and Santa Fe, the canine division, which participated in the search for the body, and finally the Special Operations Troop (TOE). […] It seems that Córdoba maintained a relationship with Huck whileat the same time saying that she was Burdisso’s girlfriend. Huck and Córdoba seem to have taken the victim under false pretenses to the well where he was found. Brochero, Córdoba’s legal spouse, would have later hidden the cadaver.
    […] The disappearance of Alberto José Burdisso shocked the city from the first moment […] he missed work on June 2, a fact […] also his debit card was found in the cash machine of Banco Nación, which had “swallowed” it the previous Saturday. […] In addition, and as was repeatedly mentioned during the days he remained missing, he spent his money on women of easy virtue. […] The worry and the conjectures about his […] These demands grew so insistent that on Monday, June 16, fifteen days after his disappearance, a demonstration was organized to ask for an escalation of police efforts to find Burdisso. On that occasion, close to a thousand […] and they signed a list of demands to request that Judge García consider the case a murder investigation.
    Finally, the body was found on the 20th of this month. It was in a well on the property of a derelict home, some seven kilometers northeast of the city center. Around ten, after three hours of searching, a squadron of Volunteer Firemen discovered the body in an advanced state of decomposition at the bottom of the well, currently dry. As was published in
La Capital
in their edition of the 21st, the body was covered with rubble, corrugatedmetal sheets and branches, so the police ruled out a suicide or an accident.
    The investigators arrived on the scene after a call from a hunter, who reported the day before that he had detected a strong odor in the area around the well. When they removed the cadaver—work that had to be done with pulleys and a tripod—they verified that it was wearing a shirt from the club. Other characteristics of the body, such as the large scar on the torso, led them to presume that it was the missing man. Nevertheless, this was confirmed a day later, when the body was subjected to an autopsy. […] determined that the man had been in the early stages of asphyxia and had suffered hard blows to the head,