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responded, providing another round of long details in Portuguese. He was being very talkative now, enjoying the gossip, and it occurred to me that Alberto might be useful to have around. I’d get Lili to hire him on for the duration.
    “Yes, the American was here on that evening,” Alberto relayed. “He has arrived a few minutes after nine o’clock.”
    “How does he remember the time so well?”
    “Because the girl, she was waiting for him. She had been arranged to arrive at nine o’clock.”
    “How long did she stay after Grimes arrived?”
    “Not long,” Alberto answered without referring to the old man, having by now elicited the whole story out of him. “Five minutes only.” He made his face into a shrug.
    “Five minutes?”
    “Sim.”
    “Was she that good or that ugly?” I said, which gave Alberto a good laugh. He translated for the old man, who managed something approaching a smile.
    “No, senhor,” Alberto explained. “The reason she has left was because the second lady comes.”
    “Second lady?”
    “Sim.” Alberto beamed.
    “Who was the second lady?”
    “This gentleman thinks that maybe she is the wife of the American.”
    “Why does he think that?”
    “Because the first girl—the hooker—she has run away in such a big hurry when the second lady comes. And then, a few moment later, the second lady is run away, too, and not looking very happy. Then the American, he comes after, putting on his clothes while he runs out the door. And, after…he don’t come back.” Alberto pantomimed the action of a car sailing over a cliff and hitting with a splash.
    This was getting interesting. I reached for my wallet again, held it in my hand without cracking it. “Ask him if he spoke to the second woman,” I said to Alberto.
    “Yes,” the old man said, eyeing up the billfold and dropping the pretense of a language barrier. “I speak her.”
    “In what language?”
    “She speak Portuguese.”
    “She was Portuguese?” I asked, surprised.
    The old man frowned and shook his head. “She speak a bad Portuguese. She German.”
    I showed him the photo of Eva Lange. It was small and grainy and fifteen years out of date, but he dutifully studied it, holding it a couple of inches from his face and squinting hard, before returning it.
    “He say it could be this lady, but it could be not,” Alberto explained. “He say she has a kind of red hair.”
    I put the photo away and extracted another ten from my wallet. “I want to see the hooker that Grimes saw that night. Can you arrange it?”
    The old man closed his eyes, meaning if enough currency appearedwhen they opened, he could. I removed two more notes, held all three in front of his face.
    “The Hotel Palacio,” I said. “Midnight.”
    The old man nodded, so I folded the bills over and stuffed them into his shirt pocket.
    It looked like the search for Eva Lange might be over before it started. I wondered how I’d tell Lili that her overpaid private eye had, in all likelihood, driven her childhood friend over a hundred-foot cliff into the sea.
    I decided to wait until I had a little more to go on.

CHAPTER 3
    “When’s low tide?” I asked Alberto as we pulled onto the coast road heading toward Estoril.
    “Oh, it comes, I think, about one hour ago,” he replied, checking the sun’s position in the sky.
    “Are we going anywhere near this Boca do Inferno?”
    “O Boca? Yes, she is very close the hotel.”
    “Okay, let’s have a look.”
    Alberto nodded and settled in behind the wheel. Maybe he sensed that I wanted quiet or maybe he was just talked out, but either way I was grateful for the lull. I smoked and stared out the window as the car rattled along the road heading out of the city, hugging the Rio Tejo until it disappeared into the deep blue waters of the Atlantic. We skirted a wide, sandy beach, empty but for a couple of old fishermen hauling the day’s catch out of a brightly painted wooden skiff, then the road sloped upward,