“Judge Magalhães brought Chaney to Paraíso?”
“That’s right.”
“And you forget to mention it?”
“Don’t shout,” Wilson said reprovingly. “This connection isn’t all that good as it is. I forgot, that’s all. A few other things happened on the way to the phone booth, like Valaderes’ body being found, remember? Anyway,” he added. “Judge Magalhães is not — on my word as a seer and prophet — involved in this thing at all. In any way. I guarantee.”
“Or my money back, eh? Look, Wilson,” Da Silva said with a patience that was beginning to ebb, “let’s go back to basics, shall we? Somebody brought those men to Paraíso. To be killed. You now tell me that your old friend, the judge, did just that; that he was responsible for Chaney going up there. What do you need? A written confession?”
Wilson shook his head; it served to illustrate his attitude and also to free a few drops of sweat from his brow.
“Zé — listen. Forget your death squad theory as far as the judge is concerned. In fact, forget it altogether. I’ll go back to an old question of mine: Is Paraíso so short of bad boys that they have to import them as targets for their death squad?”
“And I’ll go back to an old question of mine,” Da Silva said stubbornly. “Were those men killed? With the same gun? Did they have signs around their necks? Were they criminals? Do death squads specialize in eliminating criminals? Had the men been robbed? Is there—”
“Hold it!” Wilson said firmly. “That’s six questions, not one. You owe me five.”
“Well? Ask them!”
Wilson sighed a bit helplessly. “I guess I’ll have to take a rain check. I can’t think of any at the moment...”
Chapter 7
Captain José Da Silva hung up the telephone and swung his chair to stare from the window of his office on an upper floor of a building in the Rua Dom Manuel in Rio de Janeiro. Before him the beauty of Guanabara Bay spread itself, from the Santos Dumont airport to the rocky walls of Sugar Loaf; a small car crept bravely along the spiderlike cables toward the summit; an ocean liner, one of the last of the breed and proud of it, steamed majestically into the harbor. It was all quite picturesque, but the captain saw none of it. One more death in Paraíso — one more victim of the Death Squad up there. But was it one more link in a chain building toward eventual conviction of someone; or just one more hurtle in the path? It was one thing to chide Wilson for his faith in Judge Magalhães, but Da Silva knew Wilson and knew how rarely the American erred in his evaluation of people.
The captain sighed and returned to the telephone, dialing an internal number. The telephone was answered at once. The captain instructed his assistant, Lieutenant Perreira, to appear before him without stopping to read a book or have a cafezinho, and Perreira, knowing the captain well, was at the side of the desk almost before the captain had hung up.
“Sir?”
“There’s been another Death Squad killing at Paraíso,” Da Silva said quietly without looking up. He studied the notes he had taken. “Supposedly a talent agent. Lived at the Miracopa Palace, apartment 614. He also had an office in the Edifício Rio Branco, number 867.” He looked up at last. “You know the building?”
“Yes, sir. It’s that round-faced building on the corner of the Rio Branco and the Avenida Presidente Wilson.” Perreira was writing in his notebook, a bulky affair; Da Silva had always wondered how the lieutenant ever got it into his pocket. Perreira paused and looked up. “The building’s half-empty now, but some of the movie distribution companies still have offices there and some of the airlines have their offices on the street level in the building.”
Da Silva never questioned where Perreira got his facts; the lieutenant seemed to collect trivia with remarkable ease, and most of it came in handy more often than not. Which is what it took to be a good investigator, Da Silva thought — luck in the trivia you remembered.
“That’s the place. I want everything you can find out about the man. Why did he go to Paraíso in the first place? He was found this morning, but it seems he was killed last night. When did he leave Rio? Did he leave alone? What business did he have there? And — very important — I want to know if he really was a talent agent, whatever that’s supposed to be, or if he was in one of the rackets, which is what I suspect if he’s to follow the formula.” He stared at his assistant. “Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Perreira said, scribbling madly.
“And quickly.”
“Yes, sir.” Perreira finally got it all down. He looked up. “His name, sir?”
Da Silva referred to his notes again. “Valadares. Joaquim Saldanha Valadares. Age about forty—”
“Valadares? Joaquim Valadares?”
Da Silva looked up in surprise. “You know him?”
“If there aren’t two men named Joaquim Saldanha Valadares,” Perreira said with satisfaction — although whether the satisfaction was because he knew the name or because the man was dead was not certain — “then I sure do know that filho de mae! Or at least I know who he is. I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person.” Perreira rubbed one heavy fist against his tattered notebook, indicating how much he would have liked to have met the man, preferably in a dark alley.
“So who is he?”
“When I was in Vice,” Perreira said, “we had a dozen leads to that one, but we could never prove anything. As far as I know the filho was never even arrested, let alone convicted. So Valadares is dead!”
“Yes, he’s dead,” Da Silva said with a patience he was beginning to lose. “So who is he?”
“He is — or was — the biggest cafetão in Brazil,” Perreira said. “Houses in every major city in the country, all run out of Rio; girls from Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina — and not just from South America. And they were high-class places — none of this cheap ten-cruzeiro stuff. He was also cute. We’d close an apartment in the Rua Rainha Elizabeth in the morning, and he’d have the same girls working out of an apartment in the Barrata Ribeiro the same afternoon and manage to get word to the clientele, too. Organized! I have to give him credit for that.”
“He was organized,” Da Silva said dryly. “Somebody disorganized him last night.” He looked at Perreira with a touch of satisfaction. “So that makes four out of the five who were bad boys. Let Mr. Wilson argue against a death squad with those statistics!” He drummed his fingers on the desk while Perreira waited patiently; at last the captain looked up. “Perreira, can you think of any reason why Valadares would go up to Paraíso?” One reason came to him by himself. “Did he have a place up there?”
“You mean with girls, sir? I don’t know, but probably.”
“Well, I’ll get Wilson working on that angle the next time I speak to him. It’ll give him something to do with his time, rather than kicking dirt.” He grinned at the thought, and then straightened his face. “Well, forget about checking on Valadares; I’ll do whatever needs to be done now that we know who he was. How were you doing on Chaney when I called you in?”
Perreira went back to his notebook, flipping pages.
“Here it is, sir,” he said. “Well, he didn’t speak Portuguese, so it’s a good thing they speak English at the Beira Mar. Nobody at the hotel knows anything about his business; he was pretty much of a loner—”
“What about phone calls?”
“A few, but no toll calls, sir.” He shrugged. “And the Beira Mar isn’t a hotel where the operator listens in on calls, sir.”