“Really,” I insisted when I saw his look, “my friend never once went with a woman in his entire life.”
“Well, he obviously decided to go with one at his death, he nearly left it too late to try,” he replied in a bad-tempered, dismissive tone. He lit each cigarette, low in tar and nicotine, with the butt of the previous one. “Just what are you trying to tell me? I find a guy who’s been skewered by the husband or pimp of the wife or whore he took home with him to suck him off, and you tell me he was a fairy. Come on,” he said.
“Is that how you explain it? A husband or a pimp? And why the hell would a pimp do that?”
“You don’t know, eh, well, you don’t know much, then. Anyone can go a little crazy sometimes. They send their women off and then go mad thinking about what they’ll be doing with the client. And then they lash out and kill someone, some of them are very sentimental, I can tell you. It seems like an open-and-shut case to me, so don’t come to me with these stories of yours, there wasn’t even anything stolen, apart from her clothes, he was obviously a bit of a fetishist this pimp. The only thing we don’t know is who the stupid woman was, and we probably never will. No papers, no clothes, she looks like a Latino to me, there’s probably no record of her anywhere, the only one who’ll know anything about her is the one who speared her.”
“I’m telling you that there’s no way my friend would have picked up a tart.” The police are always intimidating, we end up talking to them the way they talk to us in order to ingratiate ourselves, and they talk like members of the underworld.
“Do you want to make work for me? Do you want me to have to go into those gay dives where men slow-dance together, and get my bum felt up, when the woman involved is nothing but a whore? Come off it. I’m not going to lose time or sleep over that. If your friend really did only fancy men, then you tell me what happened. And even if he did fancy men, on the night in question he obviously decided to get himself a whore, there can’t be much doubt about that, sheer chance, most unfortunate. I couldn’t give a damn what he did on every other night of his life, he could have been screwing his own grandfather for all I care.” Now it was my turn to look at him reproachfully, but not in the least sarcastically. He might have to deal with things like that every day, but I didn’t, and it was my best friend he was talking about. He was a tall, rather burly man with receding hair and somnolent eyes which, from time to time, seemed to wake up as if in the middle of a bad dream, flashing into sudden life before returning to their apparent sleepy state. He understood and added in a more patient, conciliatory tone: “Go on, then, you tell me what you think happened, give me your version of events.”
“I don’t know,” I said, defeated. “But, as I said, it looks like a set-up to me. You should check it out, it’s your job.”
Inspector Gómez Alday duly questioned the unscrupulous publisher with whom Dorta had had a drink in Chicote, he had turned up there with his wife, the three of them left at about two in the morning and went their separate ways. The waiters, who knew Dorta by sight and by name, confirmed the time. They bumped into another friend of mine, though only an acquaintance of Dorta’s, who goes by the name of Ruibérriz de Torres, but he had only stopped to talk with them for five minutes at most, until the two women he was waiting for arrived. He saw them leave at about two o’clock as well, by the revolving doors, he waved to them, he said the publisher was a dimwit but that the wife was very nice, Dorta had hardly said a word, which was odd. The couple caught a taxi in Gran Vía and went back to their hotel, they admitted feeling alarmed when Dorta said that he would walk, he told them he was going on to somewhere else nearby, and they watched as he headed off up the street towards the Telefónica or Callao, along streets rife with a fauna that terrified them, being from Barcelona, they wouldn’t have walked half a block. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
At the hotel, just a routine enquiry, they confirmed the arrival time of the publisher and his wife, around a quarter past two: a bit ridiculous really, the publisher may have been unscrupulous, but he would never have gone that far. Dorta was killed between five and six, as was his last, unlikely pick-up. Independently, I asked the few friends of Dorta whom I knew slightly, friends he went partying with and friends from gay bars, none of them had met up with him that night in any of his usual hang-outs, “le tour en rose” as he used to call it. They in turn asked waiters who worked in the various bars, no one had seen him, and it did seem odd that he hadn’t been to any of those places that night. Perhaps it had been a special night in all respects. Perhaps he had unexpectedly got entangled with some different people who hung out in different places. Perhaps they had kidnapped him and forced him to go with his kidnappers to his apartment. But they hadn’t taken anything, although someone had made off with the woman’s clothes, and she perhaps was one of the gang. The spear-thrower. I didn’t know what to think and so I thought absurd things. Perhaps Gómez Alday was right, perhaps he had decided to pick up an inexperienced, desperate whore, an immigrant in need of money, with a husband who wouldn’t approve and would be suspicious. A question of bad luck, very bad luck.
The inspector showed me the photos which I merely glanced at. Apart from those showing the whole scene, there were a couple of close-ups of each corpse, what in the cinema is known as a close-medium shot. The woman’s breasts were definitively soft, shapely and provocative, but nonetheless soft, sight and touch become fused in the end, we men sometimes look at something as if we were touching it, and this can sometimes cause offence. Despite the screwed-up eyes and the look of pain you could see that she was pretty, although you can never be sure with a naked woman, you have to see her dressed as well, beaches are of little use in that respect. Her nostrils were flared, she had a small round chin and a long neck. I glanced only quickly at the six or seven photos, but I nevertheless asked Gómez Alday if I could have a copy of the close-up of the woman; he gave me a surprised, distrustful look, as if he had uncovered some abnormality in me.
“Why do you want it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, lost. And I really didn’t, it wasn’t that I wanted to study it any further just then, a blood-stained body, a wound, the thick eyelashes, the pained expression, the soft, dead breasts, it was hardly a pleasant sight. But I thought I would like to have it perhaps in order to look at it later, in a few years’ time, after all, apart from the murderer, she was the last person to have seen Dorta alive. And she had seen him at very close quarters. “It interests me.” It was a feeble, not to say, grotesque argument.