The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

Author:Eduardo Sacheri [Sacheri, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary
ISBN: 1590514505
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

20

When I had him in front of me, the suspicion that I’d built a skyscraper out of thin air returned. Could this kid with the placid expression and the relaxed stance, as if the fact that his hands were manacled behind his back affected him little or not at all—could this kid be guilty of murder?

After spending two or three days almost motionless and practically incommunicado, sick from eating jail rations and disgusted with being dirty and nervous and cooped up in a cell, many people in custody are pictures of distress, their faces marked by forced submission to the capricious will of others.

Not Isidoro Antonio Gómez. Naturally, he bore signs of the confinement he’d been in since the previous Monday: the rancid odor of unwashed human flesh, the incipient beard, the sneakers with no shoelaces. There was, moreover, the cast on his right hand, plus the greenish bruise above his right eyebrow, souvenirs of his scrimmage with the bellicose conductor on the Sarmiento Line.

I was consumed with doubt. Could someone who knew himself to be guilty of murder remain so calm? Maybe he hadn’t even been told why he’d been arrested and brought to the Palace of Justice for questioning, which meant there was still a possibility that he thought all this was a mere procedure, however overdone, a consequence of his having ridden a train without a ticket and fought with the person in charge of curtailing such behavior. No, I thought; he was clearly an intelligent guy, so he must have known he was there for some other reason. But if he was guilty, how to explain why he’d let himself get involved in such an outrageous scene? I concluded that he was either innocent or a thoroughly callous son of a bitch.

My head was spinning at a thousand revolutions per minute. If he was innocent, why had he gone into hiding in late 1968? And if he was guilty, why had he acted with such egregious stupidity that he got himself arrested?

When I’d arrived at the clerk’s office that Tuesday, the day after Gómez’s detention, the news was already waiting for me, and Báez himself had confirmed it over the telephone. We’d agreed to let the guy marinate for two more days, until Thursday, mostly to give me time to figure out how I was going to go about getting a statement out of him, and also so I could discuss the case at length with Sandoval. No one else who worked with me had half his powers of discernment.

During the previous three years in the court, few things had changed. We’d been able to get the wretched Clerk Pérez off our backs—he’d been promoted to public defender—but losing our boss that way had left a bitter taste, because it appeared to confirm our belief that a certain level of congenital stupidity, such as the kind he displayed like a flag, could augur a meteoric ascent in the juristic hierarchy. As for His Honor, Judge Fortuna Lacalle, we hadn’t been so lucky.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.