LITMIR.BIZ

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      Falcón showed him an empty pair of hands.

      ‘If you didn't take the shots of Marisa and the only reason you had the camera with you was to provide yourself with an alibi for Inés, how come it was at hand for your lover to take photos of herself naked?’

      Calderón stared into the wall for some time until he gradually started chopping the air with his cigarette fingers.

      ‘She told me she went through my jacket pockets. She said: “I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks,”’ said Calderón. ‘They all go through your pockets. That's what women do, Javier. It's part of their training. They're very exigent on details.’

      ‘Did she volunteer that information?’

      ‘No, I asked her.’

      ‘Any reason?’

      ‘I don't know,’ said Calderón. ‘I think I was hunting for my shoes. I was nervous about getting back to my apartment and having a confrontation with Inés. I'd never stayed out all night before. I suppose Marisa's behaviour just struck me as a bit odd.’

      ‘Any thoughts about it now?’

      ‘It's the sort of thing a wife would do … not a lover,’ said Calderón, crushing out the cigarette in the tin-foil ashtray. ‘It's what Inés did when I got home.’

      ‘You're smoking a lot, Esteban.’

      ‘There's nothing else to do, and it calms my nerves.’

      ‘Maybe you should think of an alternative method of calming your nerves.’

      Calderón looked up, suspicious.

      ‘You can keep trying, Javier, but I'm not going to lie down on your couch.’

      ‘What about somebody else's couch?’ said Falcón, flicking over a page in his notebook. ‘Another question about the transcript…’

      Calderón lit a cigarette, belligerently. He inhaled deeply without taking his eyes off Falcón and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth.

      ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I'm listening.’

      ‘Why do you think Marisa told Inspector Jefe Zorrita that she'd met Inés?’

      ‘Zorrita said that dealing with liars was like dealing with children. Marisa tried to lie about it but he broke her down.’

      ‘Zorrita is a dictaphone man, not a note-taker. I've listened to the recording of the interview with Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘If there was one bit of evidence you didn't want in Zorrita's hands it was the fact of Marisa and Inés having met before, and especially the circumstances of that meeting.’

      ‘Probably,’ said Calderón, not that interested in something he didn't regard as a development.

      ‘Zorrita found a witness to that meeting in the Murillo Gardens on 6th June. It wasn't too difficult because, apparently, it was quite a showdown between the two women. The witness said they went at each other like a couple of whores competing for the same patch.’

      ‘Doesn't sound like that witness hung around in very nice places.’

      They smiled at each other with no humour.

      ‘According to this witness, Marisa had the last word,’ said Falcón, flicking through his notebook. ‘She said something along the lines of: “Just remember, Inés, that when he's beating you it's because he's been fucking me so beautifully all night that he can't bear to see your disappointed little face in the morning.” Is that what Marisa told you? Because she didn't happen to mention that to Zorrita.’

      ‘What's your point?’

      ‘First of all, how did Marisa find out that you'd been beating Inés? She didn't have a bruised face. Did you tell her?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Maybe one of the ugly lessons she learnt in her early life in Havana was how to spot an abused woman.’

      ‘Your point, Javier?’ said Calderón, with courtroom lawyer's steel.

      ‘Marisa gave Zorrita the impression that Inés had the upper hand. She mentioned Inés's phrase several times: “La puta con el puro.”’ The whore with the cigar.

      ‘That's what she told me,’ said Calderón, listening hard now.

      ‘Zorrita thought Marisa had told him all that because she was still furious at being shamed by Inés in public, but clearly she wasn't. Marisa crushed Inés. The witness said that Inés went off like “the village cur”. So what was Marisa's purpose in telling Zorrita about that meeting?’

      ‘You think it was calculated,’ said Calderón.

      ‘I listened to the tape. Zorrita only had to prod her a couple of times to get the story out of her. And the story, her version of it, was crucial in redoubling your motive to beat Inés and perhaps take it too far and kill her. Now that would be a story that you'd want to keep out of the investigating officer's mind at all costs.’

      Calderón was smoking so intently that he was making himself dizzy with the nicotine rush.

      ‘My final question to do with the transcript,’ said Falcón. ‘Inspector Jefe Zorrita came to see me some hours after he'd interviewed you. I asked if you'd broken down and confessed, and his answer was: sort of. He admitted that when you refused a lawyer – God knows what you were thinking of at that moment, Esteban – it meant that he could be more brutal with you in the interview. That, combined with the horror of the autopsy revelations, seemed to create doubt in your mind and, Zorrita reckoned, it was then that you believed that you could have done it.’

      ‘I was very confused,’ said Calderón. ‘My hubris was in refusing the lawyer. I was a lawyer. I could handle myself.’

      ‘When Zorrita asked you to describe what happened when you went back to your apartment that night, he said you rendered the events in the form of a film script.’

      ‘I don't remember that.’

      ‘You used the third person singular. You were describing something you'd seen … as if you were out of your body, or behind a camera. It was clear you were in some kind of trance. Didn't your lawyer mention any of this?’

      ‘Maybe he was too embarrassed.’

      ‘There seems to be some confusion about what you saw when you came into the apartment,’ said Falcón.

      ‘My lawyer and I have talked about that.’

      ‘In your film script version, you describe yourself as “annoyed”, because you didn't want to see Inés.’

      ‘I didn't want a confrontation. I wasn't angry, as I had been when Marisa told me about meeting Inés in the Murillo Gardens. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. Those were long days. All the work, followed by media engagements in the evening.’

      Falcón flipped over another page of his notebook.

      ‘What interested me was when you said: “He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was.” What was all that about?’

      ‘Is that a direct quote?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Falcón, putting the dictaphone on the table and pressing ‘play’.

      Calderón listened, transfixed, as the smoke crawled up the valleys of his fingers.

      ‘Is that me?’

      Falcón played it again.

      ‘It doesn't seem that important.’

      ‘I think Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot,’ said Falcón.

      Calderón leapt

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