Requiem for a Killer by Paulo Levy

certificate
somewhere?”
    “I don’t know where it is. In fact, I never
saw my son carrying any document, or wallet, or anything.”
    “Can you tell me which city he was born
in?”
    “Aiuruoca.”
    Dornelas mentally filed this information
away. But as soon as he thought of the bureaucracy he would be up
against to obtain the certificate from a small town in another
state he became extremely disheartened. He would get the birth
certificate no earlier than thirty days from now, if he were lucky.
A simple way to avoid this torment would be for the precinct to
have the money to test the corpse and the old lady for DNA in order
to prove they were mother and son. The lab at the Criminalistics
Institute would have the results in a couple of hours, a few days
at most. But that was treatment only afforded to celebrities.
    “Thank you. What about dental records, or a
recent photo?”
    Maria das Graças interrupted.
    “Nothin’, Inspector. Not recent or old. Only
the one I showed you on the wall. He didn’t let anybody take his
picture. He’d leave here really early in the morning wearing dark
glasses and a cap so no one would recognize him. And he only came
back late at night, the same way. If anyone took a picture of him,
I never saw it.”
    This information matched the evidence in the
files. All the pictures they had didn’t show much because they had
either been taken in the dark, with no flash, or because he was
always partially hidden by his clothes.
    “Where did he work?”
    “In a shack in the middle of the island,
nothin’ but a dark hole. I don’t know where it is, never been
there. I only know that he’d lock himself in that shack in the
middle of that stinkin’ marsh all day long, seein’ his clients and
doin’ his business and leave late at night.”
    Maria das Graças’ voice was heavy with
contempt. She went on:
    “He didn’t always come home. A lotta times
he slept somewhere else. My mom and me never knew if he was
sleepin’ somewhere else or if he was already dead. We only breathed
easy again when he’d finally show up.”
    “May I use the bathroom?”
    “Sure,” she replied, getting up and turning
around behind her chair.
    Dornelas followed her through the door that
connected the living room to a simple kitchen. In the middle of it
were the table and two chairs belonging to the set. The light from
a louvered window was shining down on a small sink holding dirty
dishes and an empty dish drainer. On one side was a beaten-up
refrigerator. On the other, a four-burner stove with two pots on
top of unlit burners next to a closed aluminum door. ‘The old
lady and the dog probably came in through there,’ he thought to
himself.
    The dog never left him on the few steps he’d
taken from the couch, still sniffing away at his pant leg.
    From the kitchen they went through another
doorway that opened onto a tiny hall with three doors. The one on
the right was closed. The bathroom door in front of him was open.
Through the left one, to the bedroom, Dornelas could see the feet
of an unmade double bed and an open and messy closet; women’s
clothes on the bed, hanging on the closet doors and on hangers gave
the setting a surreal hue.
    “Is this your room?”
    “Yes,” she said, embarrassed.
    “May I go in?”
    “Don’t mind the mess.”
    “Don’t worry.”
    Dornelas followed Maria das Graças into the
bedroom.
    “According to what you told me this is the
bed you were in with Raimundo Tavares, correct?”
    “That’s right,” answered Maria das Graças,
rolling her hands up in her apron. Dornelas hadn’t expected her to
react with genuine embarrassment.
    On the other side of the bed, half a meter
away, there was a window with two sliding wings, both open. The
ornaments on the wrought iron grate, commonly found in construction
material stores, were different from those on the doors of the
house and on the kitchen window. Below the window bricks were still
visible down to the floor. They hadn’t