Murder in Buenos Aires (1/9)

I             The Woman in the Pool

The blonde on the pool float wore nothing but a bikini and Versace cat-eye sunglasses. It could have been a Vogue photo shoot: a bronzed Venus in the center of a universe of luxury. The pinkish dawn emphasized the scene’s saturated hues: the gold of her hair, the crimson of the float, the turquoise of the pool, the white travertine marble pillars, the emerald of the surrounding lawn. As the sun nudged up just a little, her diamond belly-button stud flashed like a star.

Palacio Asti, the premier luxury hotel of Buenos Aires was eerily quiet. The only sounds were the muted shrieks of and wing-flutters of monk parrots in palm trees and the gentle plash of water as Marconi nudged the float towards him using a pool hook. Once he’d brought it to the pool’s edge, the forensics team gathered together to lift the inflatable bier out of the water and then to lay it gently on a tarp. They were solemn, as was usual in the presence of death, but also unnerved by the strangeness of the scene.

Only the coroner seemed perfectly unmoved. Cheerful and businesslike as usual in his initial investigations, he hummed softly as he palped and poked. The others looked around the pristine poolside area but no one really expected to find anything—the pool was as pristine as if it were a CGI drawing come to life.

“Bueno,” said Doc and stood up abruptly. “Rigor mortis has started but not complete.”

“So time of death was about four hours ago?” Marconi asked.

The coroner shrugged.

“There are a few mitigating factors. For one thing she was out on the water all night. It would have been cold. I’d say she died at about one o’clock but don’t quote me on that.”

Marconi nodded and regarded the woman thoughtfully. Against the tarp she looked quite different, not the central figure of a surreal and gorgeous mise en scene but a small, very dead woman, probably in her mid-forties. Up close her hair was lank and her skin already waxy and ashen. Without her sunglasses her sunken eyes gave him an impression of vulnerability. He noticed that she wore a fine gold chain and a crucifix lay in the little hollow between her neck and her clavicle.

“Any visible wounds? Needle marks?”

Doc shook his head with his usual wry smile.

“I want to see what kind of drugs, and how many of them, she ingested,” León said.

Doc nodded.

“Give me twelve hours. Good luck. You’ll need it; it’s going to be a circus. The first reports have already been broadcast on the radio. I heard it on the way over.”

Marconi imagined a crowd of excited journalists at the hotel entrance and shuddered.

“I wish I knew why they think it’s a homicide.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Doc said tersely.

He smiled and touched the detective on the arm before disappearing through the back gate. As usual, Doc had anticipated all eventualities. He’d found a way to avoid the crowd at the entrance and could now make a quick get-away.

Marconi’s phone rang. He peered at the caller ID. ‘B.A. Cleaning Solutions’. Finally.

“What the hell are you doing calling me at this ungodly hour?” croaked a woman’s voice.

“Christina! Good morning. Listen, I need you. Get over to Palacio Asti as soon as possible.”

There was a pause.

“You there?” he said.

“Yes, I’m here, I just had to pinch myself to make sure this isn’t some kind of lurid nightmare. I’ll be right there, darling, I just have to slip into my evening dress and tiara.”

“All right, all right. No need for sarcasm. There’s been a death,” he said. “It’s going to get crazy very fast. I sent a driver over, he should be downstairs now. Can you make it?”

“Oh hell,” she grumbled. “All right.”

“Good, see you soon.”

Twenty minutes later there was a kerfuffle in the hotel lobby. As Marconi rushed in, he saw a tall and immaculately groomed hotel clerk diving for cover behind the reception desk. A short, roly-poly woman in a leopard-print sweatsuit was carefully selecting pinecones from a decorative crystal bowl and hurling them at him whenever he raised his head. With each throw the large gold hoops that hung from her earlobes jiggled vigorously.

“Madam, I—ow! Warn you that I have been instructed not to allow—please! Stop! Oh, detective inspector, thank goodness. I will need police assistance to—” the clerk stopped speaking in astonishment as the detective embraced the trouble maker and gave her a salutary kiss on the cheek.

“Christina! Qué tal? Thanks for coming,” León smiled.

She pecked his cheek peremptorily then pointed over at the clerk.

“That boludo wasn’t going to let me in. I told him over and over again that the police had called me here but he wouldn’t listen. Kept saying something about having orders not to admit the press. Do I look like the press? Idiot.” She glared at the clerk, who flinched.

“He probably thought you were a journalist posing as a cop so you could get the first pictures.”

“Right, that reminds me. The first pictures of what? What am I doing here?.”

He put a finger over his lips and steered her towards the elevator. He waited until the door closed before talking.

“Do you know who Lola Graf is?” he murmured.

“Do I…? Are you saying Lola Graf is the--? Me estás cargando?” Christina squealed, jabbing him in the chest, making him wince with pain. “So she was murdered?”

“Shhhhh, keep your voice down,” he hissed. “We don’t know yet. But it’s possible. Meanwhile, I have no idea who this woman is. Any chance you could fill me in?”

“You really have your head in the sand, don’t you,” she looked at him affectionately.

“I can’t know everything,” he muttered, embarrassed.

“OK. Lola Graf made her name in the nineties as a model, party girl and actress. There was a scandal in 2002 when she was involved in a car accident where a foreign couple was killed. She spent a ridiculously short time in jail and laid low for a while. Then she got religion and her image was rehabilitated, at which point she started ‘influencing’. She’s had more plastic surgery than you’ve had steak dinners and apart from that is probably the world’s biggest exhibitionist. The women’s mags love her because she’s constantly updating her body parts and love life. Last year it was the striker for Atlético, this year it was the Minister of the Economy. Rumour has it she’s even been secretly seeing a man of the cloth. Seriously, does none of this ring a bell?”

León shook his head.

“Well there’s something else. Lola Graf has been on TV practically nonstop for three weeks claiming she has a list of names. Her story is that there’s a secret pedophile ring operating in the city and that some of the members are famous porteños. Some people have suggested that it’s a publicity stunt, after all she’s an over-the-top drama queen. Others think it’s real. She keeps threatening and promising to make the names public, but for some reason she’s been holding back. Get this: today was the day she was going to read out the names live on TikTok.”

“Which is not going to happen now,” Marconi said wryly. “OK, now I see why they wanted homicide on this. Well, well, well…”

“How did it happen?” She asked.

“We don’t know yet. At four o’clock this morning my boss got an anonymous call—a man’s voice—saying that Lola Graf had been murdered. We got here at four-thirty and she was out floating on the pool, dead sure enough. Murdered…who knows? We’ve managed to get her out to the forensics lab. Meanwhile, when the forensics team got to her hotel room, they found it a complete mess—suitcase ransacked, drawers overturned, pillows and mattress slashed…It seems that someone went over it with a fine-toothed comb. Her cellphone was missing and who knows what else. Forensics took fingerprints and photographs of the mess. They took her hairbrush to get samples of her hair. Otherwise the room looks pretty much as it did when we found it. What I want you to do is a quick once-over before everyone wakes up.”

“What exactly am I looking for?”

“Something interesting. You’re good at finding things, or at seeing what’s missing. Remember when you found that painting stolen from the National Museum of Fine Arts? And the fingertip? The necklace that led you to solve the murder of Eduardo De Angelis? Admit it, you have a knack for these things. It’s like dogs can hear tones inaudible to the human ear, you find clues invisible to the ordinary human eye.”

“A dog, eh? Thanks I guess. Anyway, those times I just got lucky. I’m not promising anything.”

“Understood. Here’s her room. I’m going to leave you thirty minutes, max. Bueño?”

“Bueño,” Christina sighed.

The hotel room was just as much of a disaster area as León described.

“Que quilombo!” she breathed.

Christina felt melancholy looking at it. The poor woman: neither property nor her person had been respected. There was a pile of clothes and shoes on the unmade bed. Someone had tipped her suitcase out and rifled through her stuff. There was a pile of makeup on the dressing table, some jewellery poured out next to it. It reminded her of her daughter’s room whenever she’d just left to go rushing out to a party. An odd scent hung in the air—some fresh, sharp combination of fruit and herbs. And there was another smell too, medicinal…Eucalyptus?

Christina decided to approach the work much as she would any other cleaning job. She put on a pair of vinyl gloves and murmured a prayer to St. Zita of Lucca, the patron saint of household chores. Then she opened the curtains. The sun spilled in and lit up the room.

She decided to attack the dressing table first. With a feeling of performing a kind of end-of-life ritual, she carefully handled the makeup tools and placed them in Lola’s toiletry bag. Nothing unusual there: mascara, eyelash curlers, foundation, lipstick. Once everything was neatly stowed, she opened the drawer of the dresser to make sure there was nothing there. She found a hand-written letter that read as follows:

Dear Lola,

I’m so thrilled you could come this evening. As a small ’thank-you’, please accept this basket of ‘Kueyen’ organic beauty products. In Mapuche mythology, Kueyen is the beautiful goddess of the moon, the queen of the Wangulén, who are gentle and kind female spirits that manifest themselves as stars in the night sky. It is said that a particularly virtuous Mapuche woman may become a star-spirit after her passing…

Each hand-crafted cosmetic contains the essential oils of plants known for their medicinal and aromatic qualities that are native to beautiful Argentina. Inside, you will find:

· ‘Cuyen’ (moon) —moisturizing body patches for relaxation and radiance

· ‘Viravira’ (life herb) —a beauty bar containing the traditional cleanser used by indigenous women Quillaja saponaria (soapbark)

· ‘Piren’ (snow) body lotion—an intensive moisturizer for delicate skin scented with ispinku (sweetwood)

· ‘Sayi’ (fruit ) eau de parfum—with whitebrush, quellen (strawberry) and muburucuya (native passionfruit)

I hope you enjoy these wonderful products that celebrate our South American heritage. Of course, feel free to share the news of this unique line of beauty products with your friends and followers.

Your friend,

Sandra

Christina had seen ads for Kueyen on billboards and on the sides of buses. She vaguely wondered what ludicrous pricetags were ordinarily attached to all these creams and lotions. This Sandra seemed to know Lola slightly but she didn’t write as if she were a close friend. Christina looked around for the gift basket but couldn’t see it anywhere. She checked the wastepaper basket but that was empty too.

Once the makeup was put away, Christina addressed the pile of clothes on the bed. Lola’s clothes were expensive and showy, reminding Christina of theatrical costumes. She picked up a dress that was light green and diaphanous, and methodically folded and stowed it in the case.

The repetitive motion of folding the clothes set Christina in one of her laundry trances. She tried to imagine Lola’s final evening. Why had she come here in the first place? Who’d invited her? How well had she known the other guests? Had this Sandra Lopez been present at the party? How sad that no one had had the courage to stay with her in her last moments. For all her followers on social media, Lola had died, it seemed, completely alone.

Social media. Something occurred to her. She took out her cellphone and searched for Lola Graf’s TikTok account. Sure enough, there were two videos Lola had uploaded the previous evening.

In the first video, posted at 10.15 pm, Lola had been sitting in this very room wearing that same green dress enthusing about the gift basket she’d just received. It was the usual thing—a soft advertisement presented as a chat to friends. She included a sped-up montage showing herself applying each cosmetic. The final shot showed her in the ‘After’ phase, smiling and refreshed with that trademark beautiful big smile.

In the next video her smile was diminished—a little wistful and crooked. Her face was serious and she looked tired. Her mascara was blurred a little, as if she’d been crying, her pupils were contracted and her speech was slurred a little. The time stamp was 11.00pm.

“Hey you guys. So. [sigh] I just want to let you know that tomorrow is the day I’ve chosen for the Big Announcement. It’s been really hard but I decided to wait two weeks to let those who know what they’ve done come forward and admit what they did was wrong, to show…you know, that they have some humanity. But no one, no one has come forward. [She picks up the black notebook and holds it in front of the camera.] To those criminals, I just want to say, I know who you are, your name is in here. I saw one of you tonight and tomorrow the whole world will know what you’ve done. But you wanna know the truth? None of that matters. Why? Because God already knows what you’ve done and some day you’ll have to answer to Him. OK? Think about it. Make things right for the victims. Hasta mañana.

Christina slapped her forehead and muttered, “Qué estúpida era, esto muy peligroso!”

She sent the link to both videos to Marconi. In all likelihood the clips would be all over the TV news anyway, but it was worth alerting him, he was such an ostrich when it came to social media.

Christina wondered where that black book was now. No doubt that was what whoever had ransacked the room had been looking for. Had they found it?

Christina finished packing everything in the suitcase and started stage two: looking around for small objects that may have been missed. Under the dresser she found a tiny piece of foil. She brought it up to her nose and realized that this was the source of the eucalyptus scent she’d noticed earlier. It seemed to be part of the moisturizing patch she’d seen in Lola’s first TikTok video. Carefully, she put it on the dresser next to the letter.

She finished the search and looked with satisfaction on the order she had created out of chaos.

Something was nagging in the back of her mind, something to do with the second video. Christina watched it again and zoomed in on Lola’s face. She made a screengrab and saved the image to her phone.

When a knock at the door came she put her hand to her heart.

“Dios mío, León! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“So what did you find?” he said.

“The main thing is what I didn’t find,” she shrugged. “There should have been a gift basket and a black book in this room. I don’t suppose your guys found anything like that?”

Leon shook his head.

“Another thing,” she said, bringing up the screenshot on her phone. “Look at Lola’s pupils here. They’re tiny. I think she must have been drugged.”

León looked around as if he were afraid they were being overheard.

“Come with me,” he said, taking her by the elbow.

He led her along to what was apparently a banquet room, judging by its enormous size and the gleaming bain-maries lined up along a counter against one wall. He shut and locked the door and led Christina to a table in the middle of the empty room.

“Here’s the situation,” he said. “Lola was at party of celebrities here last night. A-listers: a footballer, two models, an actress, a millionaire, a scientist. It was a very intimate affair—only seven people.”

“What was the occasion?”

“A dinner celebrating the engagement of Diego Sosa to Sandra Lopez, a model and successful entrepreneur. I know Sosa plays Striker for CABA but do you know how would he have known Lola Graf?”

Christina laughed.

“Diego Sosa is Lola’s ex-boyfriend! Sandra Lopez gave Lola the gift basket. This was in Lola’s drawer.”

Christina handed him the handwritten note.

“So there was Lola, her ex and his beautiful successful young fiancée,” she mused. “That seems fairly awkward. Who else was there?”

“Francesco Giordano.”

“He’s—” Christina began.

Marconi held up a hand.

“You don’t have to tell me who he is. I read the newspapers if not the entertainment pages. Giordano is a tech billionaire, sleaze extraordinare, hated by millions. His date for the night was Juliet Harris.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Her I know about,” he said, pleased. “There was an article on her in Clarìn the other week. She’s only twenty-three but already a brilliant scientist—a former Rhodes scholar who studied chemistry at Oxford and got involved with prize-winning medical research work. It's an interesting story. She was orphaned as a little kid and ended up being adopted by a scientist couple. They recognized her talent early on.”

“How does she fit in with this crowd?”

“She’s a friend of Sandra’s from their Oxford days. Then there’s Kristina Ocampo the actress.”

“K.O? Really? She’s practically the biggest actress in Hollywood right now!”

“Yes. She came with one Martín Gaviscon, who I don’t know from Adam.”

"Comes from one of B.A.’s richest families. He's a champion polo player and male model. Extremely hot.”

“If you say so,” he shrugged.

Christina frowned.

“Doesn’t it seem to you that Lola was the odd-woman out?”

“In what way?” Marconi asked.

“It doesn’t seem like she knew Sandra very well and even if she was on friendly terms with her ex, the others seem somehow not her kind of people. She’s a public figure but she’s not exactly an A-list celebrity or a brainiac like the others.”

“So…?”

“So I can’t help thinking of that English nursery rhyme: ‘“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,’” Christina mused. “I really wonder if the party was a pretext for her assassination.”

“That's assuming she was assassinated,” León said, “It could have been an accidental overdose.”

“So just a coincidence that she was about to destroy some big careers?” she asked skeptically.

Marconi pursed his lips and nodded shortly.

“It’s better to assume the worst.” He looked at his watch. “Ah, the suspects will be up and about by now. I’d better break the news to them.”

“You’re ruling out the hotel staff?”

“Oh no, I’m not ruling out anybody. But my colleagues are dealing with the staff and I get to talk to the bold and the beautiful,” he grinned half-heartedly. In fact, he felt very weary and unenthusiastic. “By the way, I’ve booked you a room here at the hotel. I want you to stick around for the next couple of days.”

“But I’m booked up with cleaning clients!”

“Cancel them.”

“I like that! Easy for you to say. That’s my livelihood.”

“We’re going to pay you a consultancy fee—by the hour.”

“Oh,” Christina was stumped. “Well, after all my glands have been acting up a bit lately.” She touched the sides of her neck gingerly. "I may be able to get someone to fill in for me this week."

Read part two here: Murder in Buenos Aires (part two) (ten-minute-mysteries.ghost.io)