The Black Minutes Read Online Free PDF Page B

fraud at Gulf Insurance?”
    Cabrera tried to avoid it, but the fat man sat down facing them. “I haven’t heard anything about you in the news since then. It’s been quite a while since you were at the press conferences.”
    “The best policeman is an invisible one,” he growled.
    The fat man handed them his business card. “Johnny Guerrero, crime reporter for
El Mercurio
.” He asked if they knew anything about the case.

    Cabrera didn’t say boo, but countered with, “Why don’t you tell us what the rumors are. You must be better informed than I am.”
    “I haven’t got anything for a fact,” Johnny explained. “I think it was the Colombians. They’re squeezing out the local dealers. First they did business with them and learned their routes and contacts into the United States, and now they’re eliminating them, only instead of marijuana, they’re thinking of transporting cocaine. The deceased knew all that, I hear, and maybe he was going to be writing on the subject. What’s your opinion?”
    Cabrera was intent on wiping away the sweat that trickled into his eyes. As much as he tried, the journalist couldn’t get the detective to put forward a different motive for the crime. Cabrera lost interest in the conversation and would have kept answering in monosyllables, when all at once the reporter said something that got his attention.
    “Do you know what Bernardo Blanco was writing about before he died?” Cabrera asked, and he scrutinized Guerrero closely.
    “I haven’t a clue,” the reporter confessed. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said in English. “That’s the key to the crime.”
    Seeing the procession approaching, the journalist got up.
    “Uh-oh, here comes Father Fritz. That priest is crazy, and he can’t stand the sight of me.” And Guerrero walked off in the opposite direction. Cabrera noticed he limped on his left side.
    “Hey,” he asked Columba, “do you know who the blonde was who came in at the end?”
    “The blonde? Cristina González, Bernardo’s ex-girlfriend.”
    By his account, Cristina and the journalist met in San Antonio, when the two were studying there, and were together all through college. Then Bernardo decided to return to his home-town and broke off the relationship. “Why would he do that?”

    “I have no idea.”
    How strange, he thought. If I were in his shoes, I would never have left a good job in San Antonio to come back to this port town. Or left a woman like that.
    “So what have you heard?” Cabrera asked his young colleague. “Was it the dealers who killed him?”
    “I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “Didn’t you hear about the Chato Rambal business?”
    “What was that?”
    “El Chato, of the port cartel. Bernardo interviewed him a year ago, because he was writing a piece about drug trafficking here.”
    According to Columba, El Chato wasn’t at all upset by Bernardo’s article, since it was critical but objective, and from then on Bernardo had become the cartel’s protégé.
    “Once, he was about to be mugged in the market—you know how dangerous it is in Colonia Coralillo—and Bernardo told me the muggers suddenly stopped, their eyes bugging out, and slunk off, all apologetic. When Bernardo turned, a cowboy with a pistol tipped his palm-straw hat and walked away without a word. With protection like that, nobody would get up the nerve to do him any damage. I don’t think it was the dealers.”
    “Who knows, don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe he wrote another article, attacking El Chato.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because Bernardo stopped writing for the paper. Over six months ago.”
    It seemed to him that at the grave site, a small cloud took shape in that section of the cemetery and rose elegantly into the sky.
    “And do you know why he quit?”
    “I couldn’t tell you.”

    “If he wasn’t working for the paper anymore, what was he doing at the port? How was he making a