Graveyard Samba (Devil Barnett Detective Series Book 4) Read online

  “Help ,help, help,” he tried to say as he moved forward. Duncan’s vision was blurred and the loss of blood was sending him into shock.

  But no one offered help. Only vacant, surprised and horrified expressions met him as he staggered among them, wild-eyed like a slaughtered animal. The man driving the 774 bus marked Madureira didn’t help either. Duncan’s body collided with the oncoming bus and flew into the wooden cart of an ice cream vendor who had just complained to a customer that today had been a boring day. The bus driver along with almost everyone who saw what had just happened gathered around for a look. All their eyes told the same story. The naked white man lying in the middle of Avenida Ministro Edgard Romero with the metal chair chained to his arm was as dead as he was ever going to be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was really enjoying myself and feeling on top of my game. I was on vacation in Rio de Janeiro. The past six months in New York had been tough going and I was ready to relax.

  “This place is something else ain’t it, brother?” Johnny Ray Slim said, as we looked out the window at the picturesque view from the hotel balcony onto Flamingo beach.

  “You can say that again,” I said.

  Johnny Ray Slim and I had come to Brazil to attend the annual Sao Paulo Free Jazz Festival. We both were big jazz fans. After spending a week at the festival, we decided to spend another week in Rio seeing the sights and enjoying the weather. The temperature was in the high 80’s and it was the end of September. A couple of Johnny Ray’s musician friends had invited us to a barbecue on the beach that night.

  “I’m glad you came on this trip, man, otherwise a couple times I would have been lost with the language thing,” Johnny Ray said.

  “I’m glad, too,” I smiled.

  “Man, if I spoke the lingo like you I might not ever go back home. I’ve never seen so many beautiful women in one place in my life,” Johnny Ray grinned.

  During our stay in Brazil I had been using my knowledge of Spanish to help me along when people spoke in Portuguese. With both languages being Latin-based there were a lot of similarities. I could figure a lot of the Portuguese out as long as people didn’t speak too quickly. I walked out of the Copacabana Palace Hotel which from the outside was all white top to bottom. At the sidewalk, I turned left and walked along the avenue opposite the beach front watching the day come to life; expensive shops lined the sidewalks where half-naked bodies strolled in the morning sunshine. The yellow and blue streaked clouds moved gracefully across the pale blue sky above the ocean’s horizon, while the golden sun crawled lazily over the peaks of Sugar Loaf. The scene reminded me of the kind of majestic look and feeling reminiscent of a 16th century religious painting.

  I walked past Stern’s Jewelers, and Maxim’s Pizzaria to the corner of Rua Siquiera Campos, crossed the road and bought some coconut water from a street vender, and then took a seat under an umbrella to watch the world go by for the next two hours. As I sat looking out into the rolling ocean, a growing uneasiness rode towards me on wave after wave, forming a shadowy cloud over my thoughts. I was hoping the blazing Brazilian sunshine could burn it away.

  I was using all of my willpower to pretend I was alright but I wasn’t, not really. The trouble was Sonia. She was the reason, more or less, that I had come here in the first place. Emotional escape. We had broken up many times before, but this time had been different. The other times had been filled with doubts, tears and heated arguments, but this time our breakup had a finality that left my soul feeling as desolate and still as a grave. Sonia and I had sat down and talked about it.

  The ultimate it . . .

  That thing . . . that always surfaced sooner or later as the deal breaker.

  That thing . . . that part of me I somehow was never able to answer to her satisfaction.

  My dichotomy . . . my duality . . . my alter ego with a life of its own made frequent appearances as a detective who went out into the streets of Harlem, into the nebulous haze of uncertainly, not knowing if he would ever return to become the husband to her and a father to Maria and Marissa, her twelve year old twin daughters.

  She had decided she couldn’t be loyal to a man who walked out of her life to face some unknown calamity on any given day, leaving her with the debilitating fear he would never walk through the door again. She was right; it wasn’t fair to her or her daughters who had come to see me as their father figure. It hurt all the more because to me they had become the family I had always wanted but never had during the fifteen years I worked for the CIA. And even though I didn’t want to admit it, she deserved better. In a desperate attempt to put a Band-Aid over our hemorrhaging situation, I promised her I just needed time and would phase out what we both agreed was a compulsive part of my life . . . eventually. But I guess something in my tone betrayed me and my fidelity to that perilous part of my soul. Sonia described it as my addiction to danger. And though I know she was right, I would have given anything for it to have been otherwise—I was missing Sonia and her daughters more than I ever imagined I could have.

  I spent a lot of the rest of the day alone walking along the beach, buying presents from beach vendors and enjoying the sun while Johnny Ray hung out in the Hotel bar chatting up the tourist women. I hadn’t taken time to clear my head in a long time, and this was just what the Doctor ordered. I napped in the afternoon and had dinner with Johnny Ray at 5:30, then watched a soccer game on the TV.

  When 9:24 rolled around, I was getting ready for the party. Johnny Ray and I were meeting his friends in the hotel lobby at 9:30. I was a little early. Johnny Ray was entertaining a young lady in his room and hadn’t come down yet.

  “Mr. Barnett?” the desk clerk at the hotel said.

  “Yes.”

  “Telephone, sir.”

  I took the phone in the hotel lobby.

  “Dev, it’s me, Jim,” a familiar voice came on the line.

  It was the voice of Jim Frazier. Jim Frazier had been my partner when I worked in the CIA. He was not only a fine agent but was also one of my best friends. On a couple of occasions he had saved my life and on a couple of occasions I had returned the favor. Need I say more?

  “This is a surprise,” I said.

  “Christine gave me the number where you were staying and believe me, if there was any other way I would not have made this call. I know you’re on vacation,” Jim Frazier said.

  “No problem, what’s up?”

  “I need someone there to arrange to have a body shipped back to the States.

  “A body?”

  “Yeah it’s just a matter of paperwork, but someone needs to be there to do it. This morning I have just been assigned to go to Europe on something urgent, otherwise I would have flown to Rio myself, but I gotta go. You know how things can get here.”

  “I do, no problem. Who is it?”

  “A journalist. Investigative reporter who was murdered down there. A guy named Duncan Lamont.”

  “Was he a close friend?”

  “Not really, I wish he could have been though, because he was my brother.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The small clump of clouds slid slowly across the blue-black star-filled sky and revealed the half moon hiding behind it. The man named Henique was standing by an old truck parked in the small rural clearing that served as the pick up point for his cargo. The only thing visible from the glow of the moonlight was the lone dilapidated brick shack the old priest called his secret church. Funnily enough even though it didn’t resemble a church in any way, Henique had come to think of the shack as a church, too. Mostly because inside the shack there were lots of church-like things like, crucifixes and statues of Jesús and Mary as well as the pair of old priests who lived and worked there with homeless children. Henique breathed in the freshness of the warm night and checked his watch again. It was nearly 4:30 in the morning. He was anxious to get moving before the big trucks carrying produce to different parts of the country could gag the motorways. Henique was thinking how if he made good time durin
g the morning hours he just might make it back to Rio in time to see the football game on TV. He strained his neck over the hood of the battered truck towards the small church in the distance. Though it was still dark, he could see activity in the front of the church from the light spilling out the church’s open doorway.

  His cargo was moving from the church into the tiny courtyard, speaking in hushed and anxious tones among themselves. He couldn’t see any of the faces clearly but the shape of their slim silhouettes told him they were all children between the ages of about ten and fifteen years. Henique could pretty much guess their ages from having six children of his own, all between the ages of five and seventeen. There were about twenty children in all.

  Henique rolled a cigarette and listened as the cargo was being prepared for their journey, a journey he had taken many times before. Henique knew the drill, so he knew it wouldn’t be long now before he’d be on the road. To pass the next few minutes, he leaned against the door of the truck and smoked while listening to the faint words of familiar conversations between the priest and the children carried on the nocturnal breeze.

  “Where are we going, Father?” asked a small voice full of anxiety.

  “Don’t worry my child, God will protect you,” said an older man’s voice.

  The elderly priest moved among the clumps of children huddled and glued together by vulnerability and unfortunate circumstance. He smiled through a weather-beaten face with twinkling tired eyes as he lovingly patted the older children on their heads and made the sign of the cross in the air above them and hugged the younger ones close to him as if he might be directly passing a sense of God’s own security with each touch.

  “What is the name of this place we’re going to, Father?” one girl who looked about thirteen with freckles and a crooked smile asked.

  “To a place where people will take care of you,” the priest answered, offering a reassuring smile.

  “Will we ever see you again, Father?” a small blond boy wanted to know.

  “Will you come to visit us?” a plump girl with rotten teeth asked.

  The priest answered their questions with only a sad-eyed smile. He couldn’t lie but neither could he tell the whole truth—mostly because he was in the healing, not the breaking hearts, business.

  The truth was that he didn’t know what the future would hold for any of them but he only hoped and wanted to believe their lives would be better than their pasts had been.

  “My father won’t find me, will he? He’ll kill me like he killed my mother if he does,” a big-boned awkward boy explained with tears streaming down his face.

  “No Ivan, your father will never hurt you again. Where you’re going you’ll be safe,” the priest assured.

  “Why can’t we stay here with you, Father? We’ll work. We can grow our own food,” someone else said.

  “Be brave now, all of you must be brave.” The Father’s voice was slightly more stern to inspire confidence but still with the kind of loving tone one would associate with a grandfather talking to his own grandchildren.

  The children looked at each other and tried to cling to the hope they had been given during the two weeks they had spent with Father Leandro at his makeshift clandestine orphanage located deep in the countryside. For the past fourteen and a half days, he had been their savior on earth.

  “May God go with each one of you and may you find the goodness God meant for you to enjoy when he brought you into this world,” Father Leandro said making the sign of the cross again in the air. “Now it is time to go,” he said.

  The elderly priest turned towards the shadows and a tall, slim clean-shaven middle-aged man called Joao, who was wearing a dark suit, stepped into view. The priest walked over to meet him. They exchanged words at a volume too low to be understood by anyone else. Joao nodded his head to the priest’s words and moved gently towards the children with his arm extended in a gesture of offering assistance.

  “Go with him, he is a friend,” the priest told the children.

  The children reluctantly obeyed.

  They all watched the face of Joao as he gently helped them one by one climb up onto the back the old battered truck. When the last of the children had climbed aboard, Joao locked the gate of the truck, pulled a tarpaulin over the metal frame to cover his cargo and then turned towards the priest who was standing alone in the distance.

  “May God bless you, Father,” he said and walked towards the passenger side of the truck and climbed inside. Henique, who was already in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and slowly pulled the truck away from the lonely churchyard. Father Leandro watched with tears welling up in his eyes.

  As the old truck struggled along the narrow dirt road and melted into the dark warm Brazilian night, Father Leandro made the sign of the cross once again, only this time in the direction of the moving shadows.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Detective Arlindo Vianna adjusted the reading glasses on his nose and took a closer look at the sheaf of photographs on his desk and then began to leaf through them. All children, all between the ages of eight and sixteen and all missing.

  These photographs were not just of ordinary children. Not children kidnapped by an estranged and angry parent looking for revenge, or disillusioned with family life who decided upon an adventure. These children were all presumed dead or soon would be. Vianna was a smart cop with twelve years on the Rio police force and lots of street experience. When he had worked in missing persons, he had a record for coming up with the goods, shattering the statistics of any previous detective. Some say he had a gift. Maybe he did. Gift or no, he knew his business. He gazed at the young faces full of the hopelessness and dismay a life of poverty can engender. There were twelve photos. Five girls and seven boys. Eight were missing from an orphanage, three from a juvenile criminal facility and two from private foster care.

  “Talk to me, Vianna,” said a husky voice.

  Vianna looked up into the face of his boss, Chief of Detectives Milton Passador.

  “About?”

  “About life, about love, about man’s inhumanity to man perhaps. About anything you think might give me the answers I need to pass on to the commission in the interest of making the planet a safer place for mankind, my fine friend,” Passador said.

  Milton Passador, in addition to being a good detective, was a natural ham. Sometimes he amused himself and confounded others by being purposely obtuse and ambiguous. And at other times in answer to straightforward questions, he would respond with a quotation or a passage from some poem or book. Not to show he was clever or extremely literate, but rather to bring a bit of levity to the day to day monotony of the shit he encountered during his twenty years as a cop in Rio de Janeiro. On more than a few occasions when a bit tipsy, he had remarked he wished he’d had the courage as a young man to follow his dreams of becoming an actor.

  Passador slid his slender lanky frame onto the corner of the metal desk Vianna occupied, lit a cigarette and then extended his long legs in the fashion of a cat stretching. Passador locked eyes with his subordinate and flashed a joyless smile that was further marred by a huge gap in his upper row of teeth.

  “You know and I know that if we don’t get some answers soon, we could have people from the department as well as the media snooping around and opening up a shitbox full of old business that we all would be better off forgetting.”

  Vianna just grimaced and nodded. He knew exactly what his boss meant and furthermore he agreed.

  What Passador was alluding to was an investigation three years before. The media had gotten some video footage of some policemen in Rio beating and rounding up gangs of street children who were attacking and robbing tourists near Copacabana Beach.

  The media then linked that story to another one in Bahia where the police were called to deal with some unruly street kids. Unfortunately, instead of some of the kids ending up in police custody they ended up in a mass grave that was discovered and also filmed. Political pressure
initiated a massive internal investigation that made the Spanish Inquisition look like a picnic by comparison. As a result, their entire detective unit in Rio had been suspended for a month without pay and ten good cops lost their jobs. Three even did jail time. All because the powers that be needed a scapegoat. Which was ironic because the directive to stop the streets kids terrorizing the tourists by any means available came from the powers that be in the first place. What made it worse was that the media reported that Passador’s thirty-five year old nephew Palmerio had been involved. Involved and exposed. Involved because he had been a cop on the force and was one of those unlucky three who had landed in jail, and exposed because jail is no place to nurse a two hundred dollar a day heroin monkey hanging on your back, which is what Palmerio was carrying when he was arrested. In a deal to get drugs and an incarceration period of only two months, and probation, Palmerio wrote a series of articles which he sold to the newspapers. According to Palmerio, the police department had nurtured a plot to kill kids all over Brazil in an effort to clear the streets and bring in more tourists and the directive came straight from the top. Though it was not true, it made headlines and got public opinion firmly against the police. Being a loyal and a good cop, Passador found his nephew’s transgression unforgivable and he made it no secret he had not spoken to him in the three years since the publication of the damaging articles.

  Vianna looked at his watch. It was 8:35. Still early in the day.

  “I got these photos at five yesterday evening and by seven o’clock, I had the word to my people on the street. I know this is priority,” Vianna said.

  “Ummm hummm,” Passador mused laconically as his gaze swept over the faded beige walls and cluttered metal desks and what seemed like miles and miles of ugly gray filing cabinets. Passador clicked his teeth and continued, “You’re not going to like this, but I’ve got to say it anyway. If you don’t give me something concrete on this thing in three days, I’m going to be forced to give you some help.”