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

  “Momento,” Vargas told his partner.

  “Nao, agora,” countered Sangalo irritably which meant he wanted to see the package then and there.

  My mind was racing now. Whoever sent the message had clearly meant for me to back off, but maybe this police involvement was checking to see if I had taken the message to heart.

  “Listen, I’m off to New York first thing tomorrow, so as far as getting involved with criminals, you don’t have to worry,” I told the pair of cops.

  “That is good, but if we know you received something tonight and we need to see it,” Sangalo reiterated.

  “Suppose I said I never received anything, then what?”

  “Then we take your gringo ass to jail for obstructing justice,” said Sangalo disgustedly, as he turned the lips on his rat face in a downward motion and looked at me as if I were suddenly smeared in shit.

  I was surprised by the fluency of his English. It flowed easily off his tongue and from his intonation, it seemed like he had spent time in an English speaking environment. I just looked back at him and smiled.

  “If you need to get a search warrant, you can get one, I’m sure,” I said.

  Sangalo took a threatening step forward but I didn’t move. Maybe he saw something in my face that told him he wasn’t going to bully me or throw a punch without getting some thrown back. But whatever it was, he took a step back, shuffled his shoulders and twisted his lips into an even uglier sneer. Vargas looked at his partner and then over at me with a reticent expression. He was aware of the explosive tension between me and his partner.

  I had known lots of Sangalos in my life. Assholes with a badge, a combination more dangerous than gas fumes and lighted matches. I watched him closely as his eyes kept sweeping the room. Sangalo then backed up to the wall beside the door and glared at me out of squinted rat eyes glowing with contempt. With Sangalo now standing behind him and not able to see his face, Vargas winked his left eye. This confirmed to me that Vargas didn’t want his partner to know we had met before. I figured this unexpected visit had been precipitated through the channels of his department and the company of his abrasive partner was a cross he had to bear, at least for this visit.

  “We really need to see anything you might have received,” Vargas said.

  “Yeah, okay.” What the hell, who was I to try and cover up anything? Besides I was leaving in the morning anyway, right?

  I got the box from under the bed and handed it to Vargas without another word. When he opened the box and saw its contents, he automatically pushed it away from his eyes by extending his arms to their maximum length and paled momentarily. Sangalo who had seen the Vargas’ reaction slowly moved within eye range of the package and gingerly looked into the box.

  “Fuck,” said Sangalo, looking up at me as if I was still holding the bloody knife that had done the deed in my hand.

  They both stared at the severed body parts for a moment before Vargas closed it, and reapplied its brown paper wrapping.

  “So you come down here and get yourself involved in some shit. And I thought you fucking gringos were supposed to be so smart.” Sangalo grinned devilishly as he looked at me with the triumphant satisfaction of a hunter who had finally caught an illusive prey that had been evading him.

  I didn’t answer.

  “This has to be cleared up, Mr. Barnett. I hope you don’t mind but I need to ask you to come with us to the station, so we can get an official account of how you came to have this package in your possession,” Vargas said.

  Twenty-five minutes later I was walked into the police station with a sombre faced Vargas and Sangalo who was whistling happily like he had just won a perfecta at the racetrack. I couldn’t tell if I was being set up for a frame or not. Though Vargas didn’t seem like the type, I’m sure it’s what Sangalo would have wanted. But wanting and having is often the difference between heaven and hell, as my grandmother used to say.

  Their boss was the chief of detectives, a middle aged lanky man with dark eyes, thinning hair and a weather worn face named Milton Passador.

  Passador sat on the corner of his desk and stretched his long legs in front of him as he looked down into the box of horrors with a grimace.

  “Send it over to the lab, and see what we can find out,” he said, passing the box back to Vargas. Then he turned to me.

  “We got a call from an informant late last night who told us that the box was being delivered to you. More than that we don’t know. So you tell us the rest.” Passador said to me.

  I told him about the missing dead body I was trying to find, about this guy named Ramón who had offered to help, about the box and the phone call saying if I didn’t back off that I would share Ramón’s fate. But I left out the part about Vargas and the meeting with Ramón beforehand.

  While I was talking, Vargas stood in the corner of the room chewing on a toothpick patiently, while rotating a coin through the thin fingers of his left hand the way I had seen magicians do. Sangalo stood by leaning against a desk with a smirk on his ugly features. He reminded me of a vulture waiting for some sick animal to keel over from exhaustion.

  When I finished, Passador sat in his chair and dropped his head into his chest for a few seconds without speaking.

  “To be honest, we don’t have anything on you that would make you directly responsible for this.”

  “How can you say that? First we get a call saying that a box of body parts is going to be delivered to this fucking guy. The same guy who says he’s innocently sniffing around about a body. If we let him go and something should turn up afterwards, everybody in this department is going to suffer just because we didn’t have the balls to arrest this gringo,” Sangalo exploded.

  Passador looked at Sangalo and sighed, and then he looked over at me again.

  “I think for the moment I need you to stay around, Mr. Barnett. Not because I don’t believe you, but because I need time to talk with my superiors and to also make sure no harm comes to you. We can’t afford an international incident.”

  “So exactly what does that mean?”

  “It means you can’t leave the city. And by the way I will need to keep your passport,” he said.

  Sangalo smiled like a fox that had just breached the hen house fence.

  The look on his face as well as my experience with law enforcement told me there was no need to protest. Almost certainly, the decision about my being kept in Rio had been made even before I arrived. I reached inside my jacket and handed over my passport to the cop.

  “Does this mean I can go back to my hotel now?” I asked.

  “No, if you don’t mind, we need to detain you for a while,” he said.

  “You mean arrest me? Am I a suspect?” I wanted clarity.

  “Not exactly, but we do need to make sure that: one, your story checks out and two, that you come to no harm while you are in Rio. For the moment, I think it’s better if we keep you in police custody; just until we make sure that you’re going to be okay. I hope you understand.”

  I looked at Vargas, whose face was blank and then over at Sangalo whose smirk had grown into an impish grin.

  “We have an area where you can wait comfortably until we can arrange some things,” said Vargas.

  “Anything you need, just let us know,” said Passador as I left the room with Vargas.

  As we turned into the large office Sangalo brushed past.

  “Stupid fucking gringo, you got trouble now, a possible murder charge, yeah?” he grinned maliciously.

  I acted like I ignored the comment, but made a mental note to knock a few of his teeth down his throat if I ever got the chance.

  Vargas walked me down a hallway with dingy mustard-coloured walls then opened the door to a small room at the end of the corridor.

  He locked the door and then went over and opened the window to let in noise from the street. Noise clearly meant to help to blur the words of a conversation.

  “Thank you for not giving me away,” said Vargas in a low whisper.

  “Thanks for nothing, I’m in the shit without a passport and in police custody. The only reason I don’t scream my head off is because I know you would only deny the whole thing, which would make me really look like a crook,” I whispered back.

  “I’m very sorry, but I had to play it this way. As Ramón told you, last night there are people very high up in this department who are involved in this business.”

  “I can believe that, but in the meantime what am I supposed to do?”

  “I am going to try to clear everything up as soon as possible. That will give me more time to try and locate Lamont’s body.”

  I felt like cracking Vargas in the mouth, but instead I said “okay”. It felt like he was my only lifeline back to the real world. Besides what were the alternatives? Maybe get myself framed or killed in South America while doing a favour for a friend, or stay alive a couple more days in Rio and let the police try to come up with something that would put me totally in the clear. If worse came to worst, I figured I could always get a lawyer from the American embassy and then use some old CIA contacts to lean on the local police. Meantime, I decided to play it their way.

  “How long before I walk out of here?” I asked.

  “A day at the most. Passador is working on things.”

  “What kind of man is Passador?”

  Vargas shrugged. “He keeps everything very close. But if he thought you were dangerous or had anything to do with what was in that box, believe me you would be arrested and in a cell right now.”

  “I may as well be in a cell.”

  “I’m sorry about this. Meantime, just try to relax. “I will go back to the hotel and get your things. Then we’ll get you settled into a private room. We use it for big shots who get into troubl
e, maybe get a little too drunk or into something that can be settled without much of a hassle. I’m going to try and speed things up, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Thanks a lot for your South American hospitality,” I said sarcastically as I watched Vargas leave.

  Since I wasn’t strictly confined to my new quarters, for the next two hours I walked around the police station and watched the day to day routine of the policemen. I was trying to pick up how the force here operated differently from those police forces I had known in the States. Though Rio was a major city, the attitude of the policemen seemed more like policemen from some small town in America where the police were in full control. Like they knew where so many bones were buried that they didn’t have to be too hampered with things like a citizen’s civil rights.

  In the space of one hour, I saw a policeman slap a woman in the mouth in front of a whole room of detectives and another man pass a wad of cash to a detective and then walk out of the door. Nobody reacted. Not that the exact same thing didn’t systematically happen in the States. It’s just that back home things were done more in the shadows. My presence was met with the odd passing curious look or nod of the head, but on the whole, no one tried to talk to me. Though I wasn’t physically in a cell, I still felt like a prisoner. Two hours turned into three and then into five and Vargas still had not returned. Meanwhile on the the policemen showed me to my quarters. The one that Vargas had described as “the big shot’s room”. This wasn’t only a room, it was more like a hotel room. There was a TV, a bathroom with a shower, a small fridge and a nice soft double bed. I stretched out on the bed and tried to relax.

  I started to think about all the things that could go wrong, and what I would do about them if they did. I could feel a dull sparking sensation in my brain—like an electric appliance being plugged in. I knew what it was, but I didn’t want to tell myself that’s what it was. Beyond any shadow of a doubt it was my assassin’s instincts starting to yawn and stretch. Waking those old instincts was something I had told myself again and again I didn’t want, so I purposely tried to stop thinking about my situation and think about something else.

  I tried turning my thoughts to how I would spend the next hours maybe even days as a reluctant tourist. When that didn’t work I thought about a book by Walter Mosley I had been reading called The Man in My Basement. It was about a man who paid another man to be locked up in his basement. But that kept bringing me too close to my own reality so I stopped thinking about it. After tossing and turning for a while, I managed to reach into another part of my psyche and conjure up the image of Sonia walking into the room wearing nothing but a smile, a half a world away back in Harlem.

  Good sex, honesty, a steady relationship, a family, the whole package wrapped in love and understanding. Besides that, I had built my jazz bar, The Be Bop Tavern, into one of the most popular bars in Harlem, a really good business. So why in the hell did I still need to go around sticking my nose into situations that could bring me grief? Jim’s words about redemption came back to me.

  He said my detective work was just a way to cleanse my soul. My self-imposed purgatory for all of the killing I had done. He also said that being a detective was a lame excuse for exercising my natural talent for killing. Said I had a kind of natural talent for killing like some guys are born with a talent for sports or music. He also said it was a talent I enjoyed more than I could admit and that’s why I had become so good at it. I of course dismissed it as his pitch to try to get me to rejoin him in the agency. It was easy enough to dismiss his words, but sometimes deep down I wondered how much truth his words really carried. Whether it was true or not, I had made my decision to shut the door on my killing demons forever. I promised myself and hopefully when I was just a little stronger and more sure of myself I could make and keep that promise to Sonia. In the past I had blamed the demons for a lot of my troubles but who did I have to blame now? I could blame Jim for dragging me into this mess or I could blame myself for being too willing to help out a friend. But in the end no matter who I blamed I was still stuck in a Rio police station faced with a possible charge of murder against someone I didn’t even know.

  MMM

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me because I had time on my hands or maybe it just my thoughts going was going to someplace that was familiar and comfortable. I was lying on the bed and thinking back to a few years before in Washington D C. I checked my watch. It was 3:45pm, and I was standing outside the man’s house and watching him go inside. I remembered all the information from the official secret dossier by heart. The man’s name, his position as a trusted government employee, his age, the fact that he lived alone and was homosexual, the name of his steady boyfriend, and most importantly his crime against my government which has caused three of our agents to be caught and tortured. The man inside the house was a double agent. My government had decided that the man was a security risk and therefore had to be terminated. The job fell to me. I walked over to the front door and knocked. Another man—the man’s boyfriend answered. He was young in his early twenties had blond hair and wore thin wire-framed glasses. He saw my gas company uniform as I stepped back to pull out my identification.

  “There’s been a gas leak in this area. So we have to check all the houses in the block to make sure that we’ve sealed it completely and that it’s not leaking into any other houses,” I said holding up the piece of plastic with my photo on it. “I won’t take but a minute.”

  “Who is it?” another man’s voice rang out from somewhere in the house.

  “A man from the gas company checking on a leak in the area,” the blond haired man called back. The young man stepped back as I crossed the threshold with my tool kit in hand.

  When he stepped in front of me and unlocked the basement door, I lifted the lead weighted cosh from under my coat and brought it down across the back on his skull.

  “Uhg,” he grunted as his knees buckled. I stepped forward to catch him before he had a chance to go tumbling down the stairs. I quickly dragged his unconscious body inside the basement door and locked it.

  I ran my mind over the plan of the man’s house as I listened to water running upstairs. I opened my tool kit and took out the pistol with the silencer already attached. I did a quick check downstairs to make sure I wasn’t going to be interrupted, then started to climb the stairs.

  The soles of my shoes were made of rubber and the stairs were carpeted, so my approach was as silent as a mouse pissing on cotton.

  The man was in the bathroom taking off his clothes getting ready to climb into the tub.

  “Robert, please come up as soon as you are done down there,” the man’s voice called out.

  Robert didn’t answer, but I did—with three shots. Two to the head and one to the heart. Two minutes later I was back on the street moving towards my fake gas company van. Then a funny thing happened—I suddenly realized I was dreaming. Or at least it seemed I was. As I started the gas company van I heard this beautiful voice. It was unmistakably a young boy’s tenor voice. Beautifully singing Ave Maria. As I approached the stop sign at the end of the street I saw the boy to whom the voice belonged. He looked like he was maybe eight or nine, a Latino-looking kid, maybe Mexican or Puerto Rican with light brown skin, dark eyes and curly hair. He was shirtless and wearing black walking shorts. But the funny thing was he was walking on his knees. Knees that were oozing blood like a bubbling spring. From the knees downward his legs were missing, but he kept walking on those bloody stumps. Walking and singing Ave Maria just as beautiful as you please.

  “But you can’t do that, you’ve got to get to the hospital,” I called to the boy out of the window. Then the thought flashed through my mind. How ironic, I had just taken one life, now I was going to try and save one.

  “You can’t do that,” my voice called out again. Then I could hear an echo of my own voice saying those same words again and again. “You can’t do that, you can’t do that,” then my voice seemed to merge with another voice and became a woman’s voice.

  “You can’t do that,” the woman’s voice said. “It’s against the law, you know it and I know it.”