Read No One Loves a Policeman for Free Online

widow and daughter at 8:00 that morning. It was also clear that if I ran out of my room shouting there was a dead body in there I would be thrown head-first back in jail, and I would be questioned even less politely. And this time they would not bother to rouse the police doctor from his nice, warm bed.
    I am always upset when young people die. It makes me wonder what I am doing still hanging around, pushing sixty and with a body and ideas that stink to high heaven, unable to instill hope in anyone. I am not even one of those metaphysical gurus that are everywhere these days, the sort who line their pockets writing books and giving talks where they tell you without a qualm that God is in all of us, when it is obvious even to the numbest of skulls that God is not even where he is meant to be, that no-one can find him: he has not even left a note with a clue as to why he has abandoned us like this.

    Lorena had not had the time to become disillusioned with mankind, still less to repent of her sins. A stiletto blade had pierced her bodyjust below her left breast. Somebody had made love to her and then stuck the blade in her like a pin in a voodoo doll. The only sign of violence was the small circle of blood no bigger than the areola of her nipple.
    She was flat on her back. No more than thirty seconds could have passed between pleasure, pain, and nothingness. Her legs were splayed open, but I felt a mean-spirited sense of relief when I realized there was no smell of semen. There is nothing more unpleasant than the scent of another man’s spunk. I suppose it has to do with the sense of having one’s territory invaded; the same feeling a woman has when she sniffs someone else’s perfume on her man.
    Poor little thing, I said to myself as I examined her body for any other wound or mark. Poor little thing.
    I had hardly spoken to her, and she was somehow involved with the people who had stolen my car, but seeing her like that I could not feel angry. She could not run away from me any more as she had done in the restaurant. I was the one who had to get away now. I could not imagine Inspector Ayala looking kindly on my explanation of events, although if he thought about it at all, he would have realized I did not have the time to seduce someone and kill her in the quarter of an hour between me leaving the police station and the discovery of her body. But until the forensic report confirmed this, he would adopt the standard police methods of trying to beat the truth out of me.
    The forensic report, I told myself. Perhaps the doctor could help me. I did not even know his name.
    â€œYou mean Doctor Burgos,” the man on the front desk told me when I asked him if he knew the person who had dropped me off at the hotel. “Who else in Bahía Blanca or anywhere else in all Patagonia would paint a V.W. Polo sky blue?”
    He looked in his address book and wrote a phone number on a piece of paper. He even had time to recommend him.
    â€œHe attended my wife each time she gave birth. Four fillies, one ayear.” He added, confidentially: “And he got us out of a real spot of bother last year. There were twin girls on the way …”
    A forensic doctor and an abortionist.
    I did not see any contradiction there. It seemed to me legitimate to prevent the birth of beings who—as everyone knows—only mess up the environment and not only threaten the future of all the other species but of the planet itself. Seen in this way, an abortionist is only carrying out preventative medicine, and that is highly recommended nowadays as a means of avoiding the astronomical cost of keeping people alive in old age.
    A forensic doctor, on the other hand, is a failed writer. Since he has no imagination, he rummages in people’s stomachs to try to uncover the mysteries of death. It is not for him to discover them—that is the job of theologians and alchemists—but the forensic doctor is clearly (or obscurely) a