Detective Bonita - Chapter One

Detective Bonita and the Unexpected Death of a Very Important Man

Prologue
A child is leaning over the wall of her uncle’s ninth-floor terrace catching rain drops in the palm of her hand. A sudden rip of lightning causes her to glimpse a silver ball, spinning jauntily along the river beside the Jardim de São Bernardo slum towards the heavily fortified borders of her uncle’s condominium in the centre of São Paulo. The river has filled to bursting and is flowing very fast. It must be frightening, she reflects, for the families living in the shacks along its banks, but her attention stays with the ball. She watches, captivated, as it navigates first the upturned root of a tree, then the wrecked, jagged remains of a bridge, finally coming to rest near the rusted rear end of an old pick-up she decides must have been crossing the bridge the very minute it was swept away. Wiping her hand down her dress she studies the ball for a few seconds more then shouts: ‘Look, uncle, there’s a fat man swimming in the river!’ The uncle, who is inside organising cocktails and canapés for his New Year’s Eve party, laughs out loud. A man swimming in the river? Impossible!
‘The Rio Pinheiros is so polluted, querida, no living creature would survive in its smelly, toxic waters! You must have made a mistake!’ And anyway, he thinks to himself, seven weeks of incessant rain have turned the normally stagnant, putrid canal into a torrent which has caused havoc everywhere, even flooding his own underground car park! No one would be swimming now, surely?
‘No,’ insists the little girl. ‘I didn’t make a mistake. There is a man, tio. Look.’ She points to where the Ponte João Dias once crossed the river. Heavy rain and dark strata cover the city like a shroud. Whilst visibility is undoubtedly very poor, he is forced to accept that a human being may be in difficulties in the water. He must act quickly. Placing an index finger on his lips, he whispers to his niece to keep her discovery a secret, excuses himself from the function and makes his way outside.
The rain is now beating down and thunder bolts rupturing the sky cause him to quicken his steps to the boundary of the condominium where he will take a closer look, perhaps even see if there is anything he can do to help. With shoulders hunched he grips a bar of the perimeter fence and peers through. As the waters heave and plunge, he can see the thing straining against its temporary anchor and can see that it is, or at least has been, human. It is a wretched, ghastly sight. There is a thick clump of silver hair, but no face, just gruesome black holes for eyes and the skeletal remains of a jaw fixed in a state of morbid terror. Lightning exposes a swollen, bloated body, and, whilst he feels incapable of looking any longer now, he will recall to the police later, the disquieting memory of a collar and tie stretched around the throat of the corpse.
He turns to walk back to his apartment, stopping briefly to steady himself against a wall and contain his nausea. Perhaps the current will detach the cadaver and float it off downstream? He narrows his eyes before glancing around again. No. It is stuck fast. Damn! He will have to involve the authorities. He uses his mobile phone to contact the São Paulo Military Police, who thank him for the call, they will ask the Fire Brigade to deal with the body. The fizzy Reveillon atmosphere has all but evaporated from his party when he returns; his niece has told everyone about her amazing discovery and the guests are beginning to make their excuses and leave.
When a knock comes to his door, it is not the police, but a very young journalist from the evening Cidade Alerta crime programme. Holding a microphone to his face, she asks if they can film his daughter on the balcony describing exactly what she has seen. No, he replies, it was his niece, not his daughter, and she has gone home with her parents. He declines to give an interview saying he will only talk to the police. The journalist returns an hour later with the bombeiros who have come to remove the body from the water. It will be their eighth today! It isn’t pleasant, they agree, to have something like that spoiling your party on New Year’s Eve!

Seven weeks of endless rain had left Delegada Rita Sofia Bonita de Jesus feeling like moss might grow on the skin of her face if it didn’t feel the warmth of the sun very soon. On New Year’s Day, when first light inched around the shutters of her third floor window, she pulled a fleece over her head and peered out to see if there were any signs of change. She was disappointed.
The colour, definition and cheerfulness normally associated with daybreak in the Largo 13 de Maio, were so diluted, in fact, by the continuing precipitation that Detective Bonita could barely make out the edges or corners of the buildings just across the street. Even the graffiti, which hustled brazenly onto every square centimetre of reachable flat surface in between, looked as though it might be washed away. Dampness meanwhile had seeped through the walls of her apartment. She could smell its clammy presence in the air, feel it clinging to her clothes and shuddered at the sight of green mould leaching down from the ceiling. She wanted to reach up and clean it away but her joints seemed to be as stubborn and stiff as the ventilator which had stopped functioning the day after the rains began; she didn’t want to risk the pain and anyway the fungus would only grow back.

A clatter of hailstones, as hard as glass, had awoken her at three a.m. and she had not been able to get back to sleep. At five she had given up trying and switched on Radio Eldorado to listen to ‘An Eye on the City’ with Geraldo Nunes. Once national headlines (Troops on the Streets of Rio! Bus Hi-Jacked in Espírito Santo! Lula Sworn In for Second Term!) had been despatched, local news comprised little more than the rescue of the son of a supermarket owner from kidnappers in Vila Sonia and gloomy reports from the Centre for the Management of Emergencies on the state of the roads. The weather had all but ruined Reveillon celebrations, said a spokesman. No one could expect a smooth journey back to work tomorrow and every traveller should make allowances for long delays. Detective Bonita yawned.
The River Tietê, which tumbled down from the Serra do Mar to thunder along a monstrously swollen furrow on the northern edge of the city, had caused chaos for drivers trying to enter São Paulo on the Fernão Dias and Ayrton Senna highways. Its tributaries Pinheiros and Tamanduatei, which cut through the West and Central districts respectively, had sent water gushing over ineffectual flood defences to demolish the concrete supports of the Ponte João Dias and completely submerge the 9 de Julho tunnel with all the vehicles and their occupants trapped in a traffic queue inside.
And while she was genuinely saddened to hear about lives claimed by the treacherous downpours (and in particular of the mother who lost two sons in a mud slide on Christmas Day), the absence of the João Dias Bridge across the Rio Pinheiros would, she knew, almost certainly lead to a temporary drop in crime for the Department for Homicide and Protection of Persons 11th District (Santo Amaro). The forced separation of East and West banks was bad news, of course, for law-abiding commuters but it was not good either for the PCC gang leaders in the São Bernardo slum, who liked to send their boys across the bridge to rob the wealthy in their cars and on the pavements of the prosperous East ‘Manhattan’ embankment. As Detective Bonita was, as usual, several agents short of the full complement needed to make a proper and forensic investigation of the forty-odd unsolved murders already on her district’s books from the previous year, she welcomed any slowing down of criminal activity for whatever reason, good or bad.
So she was not pleased at all to receive a call from Captain Antonio Lourenço Limeira, her boss, at seven a.m., demanding that she cancel her leave and go directly to the station as a body had been pulled out of the river in their district which would require her immediate attention.
‘Why, sir? Would that not be a job for the Bombeiros?’
‘Normally, yes, Detective. But you can go to the station today, can’t you? I’m with my family in Rio and so is João Cesar. Eduardo Carlos said he thought he would be around and I’ve arranged for a new agent to start with you tomorrow. She’s good. I met her at a function at the Hyatt Hilton last week. She’s young and… and enthusiastic. And I like her.’
‘‘Her’, sir?’ As a matter of professional honour, Detective Bonita knew, personally, all the women homicide agents in São Paulo Central and she had not heard any gossip about a transfer.
‘‘Her’. Gisele-Thérèse Bueno da Silva. Recently married to Frederico Rocha do Campo.’
‘The Military Police Commander Rocha?’
‘The same. It will be very useful to have her on the team.’ For you, maybe, thought Detective Bonita, switching on the gas to heat some milk for coffee, phone propped on shoulder.
‘You couldn’t describe Commander Rocha as ‘young’, sir,’ she observed. ‘Where did Sra Gisele-Thérèse gain experience as a homicide investigator?’ There was silence.
‘And about the body,’ said Captain Lourenço, ignoring his subordinate’s question and returning to the reason that he had phoned in the first place. ‘It’s not Brazilian. Northern European or North American, they think, but they’re not sure. There’s not so much of the face left but the pathologist said from the poor state of the teeth he would make a guess at English.’
‘Anything else I need to know?’
‘Mmmm – yes. The news of our gringo ­will go out on Cidade Alerta at six. So work out what we’re going to say. And phone me when you get in. Tchau! And Happy New Year!’
A dead foreigner with no face, a military police commander’s new wife wanting to play detective and all of it on Rede Globo tonight. Detective Bonita resolved to break her only New Year Resolution and lit a Fortuna cigarette.
ends