Read Online The Night Watchman by Richard Zimler - Free Book Online

they from the same church as the kitchen tiles? I was beginning to think that Coutinho had bought an entire Portuguese village.
    The door at the back led to the garden, where a thirty-foot-high feathery palm stood guard over a circular wooden deck. In the centre of the scruffy lawn to the side of the deck was a small fishpond, and at the water’s edge stood a proud-looking bronze heron with a minnow raised high in its beak. Behind the lawn, summer had transformed the ancient bougainvillea climbing over the entire length of the back wall into a cascade of ruby petals. Around the base of its gnarled trunk spread a thick jumble of agapanthus spraying their effusive blue pompoms into the air.
    I felt the quiet, invisible need for sunlight hiding under all that green. And with it, I sensed my own desire to hold onto the good life I had made for myself.
    Gazing over the back wall, I noticed that one of the neighbouring houses was topped by a stained-glass skylight with two of its panes missing. Most of the tile roof had caved in as well.
    On returning to the library, I studied the pictures of the victim’s wife and kid. There was one of Coutinho with his arms around his daughter – nuzzling into her neck and tickling her; it softened my opinion of him. Sandi must have been eight or nine years old in the picture, and she was squirming with joyful delight.
    In the largest photo, set in a gold frame, the girl’s face was more adult and expressive. She was holding a schoolbook to the camera like a shield, and though she was eyeing the lens as though to appear threatening, she was also about to burst out laughing. Her mom rested her head on the girl’s shoulder and was staring pensively at the lens, and intimately, as well – with the ease of showing one’s true self that comes from great love, it seemed to me. My guess was that Coutinho had blown this one up because of what her devotion meant to him – and maybe, too, because it showed that Sandi was growing up.
    Next door, in the master bedroom, a large painting of a powerful centaur – swiftly executed with Coutinho’s slashing brushstrokes – hung above the bed. The centaur’s sleek, vigorous body was black, and his human eyes – the blue of a medieval fresco – were keenly intelligent and strangely wary. I am watching you, the mythical creature seemed to be saying. Perhaps Coutinho had painted it as a warning to his wife.
    I headed to the top floor of the house, where Sandra had her bedroom. The hallway was stiflingly hot and smelled of overheated dust.
    The parquet floor of her room was a minefield of scattered books and CDs. Yet the bed had been made military-school perfect. I suspected that her parents had struck a bargain with her: if she straightened her bed every day, they’d forbid Senhora Grimault from setting foot inside. My wife and I had made a similar accord with our eldest son, Nati.
    As I raised the blinds, the slanting light caught the parquet and climbed over the girl’s yellow bedspread towards her matching pillows. The walls and ceiling had been painted black, which seemed a strange choice, but also perfectly in keeping with the poster of a teenage vampire prowling the wall above her desk. He was slavering blood and trying his best to appear sinister, but his film-star pose and Hollywood-perfect hair made his effort seem pointless. A well-worn Persian rug patterned with blue and gold arabesques led from the bed to the dresser, which was a simple, utilitarian design. Above the dresser was a Mexican mirror, with masked Carnival figures – in highly worked silver – prancing around the frame.
    Stuffed animals and dolls were propped on the girl’s bed: fourteen stuffed bears, four cats, three Barbies, a Spider-Man action figure and a big-bellied panda with oversized blue eyes. Those gigantic eyes – and her father’s fondness for Japanese culture – made me think the design had originated in a Japanese cartoon. I’d have wagered that her dad had