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A woman puts a washing machine in her home.Víctor Sainz

"No hurry. Start at the beginning ”. Commissioner Benavente offers a cigarette to ALP, male, white, 57 years old, divorced, father of two girls, delivery man. ALP does not accept it. You can't smoke indoors and he only drinks fruit juices. He does not know that he is inside a black column and here the curators have a marque certificate so that the smoke gives the atmosphere that tone, cloudy and hazy, of the best films of Lang, Huston or Dymitrick. In addition, a certain complicity with the detainee is created. But ALP doesn't smoke. “Don't you want to?” Benavente suspects that ALP is a weekend cyclist. And mountaineer. A chill runs down her spine. He feels a certain antipathy for that hypothetical personality, hygienic and sporty, of ALP who, stunned, focuses his pupils towards the table lamp.His pupils are a moth about to burn. The image of ALP's eyeballs, liquefied by the effect of electricity, gives Benavente a lot of creepiness. The curator does not like the enlightened: "Disembuche". ALP resorts to the cliché: "I didn't want to, Mr. Commissioner." Benavente remembers the body of MNA, a woman, white, 32 years old, single, with a small son, standing. MNA lay strangled on top of the washing machine in her little apartment, located in a peripheral neighborhood of the city of S. The dead body seemed to suffer convulsions during the spin. Benavente's gaze hardens and the detainee sings, like a goldfinch, without taking his eyes off the light: “It was hell. Every day, Commissioner ... Those noises above my head. The rafters were shaking. I get up at five o'clock to go to work and that crazy woman at three in the morning… ”. TO THEP covers the bags under his eyes with his hands. "At three in the morning what, asshole?" Benavente still remembers the bluish hue of the deceased's lips. ALP raises: "I had to sleep, I had to sleep ...". The commissioner reviews the statements of the neighborhood: “She was a very good girl. She had been a telemarketer. He had cleaned offices. But now he couldn't find anything. I was going to queues. I saved every penny. And it was very clean, very clean, the child always wore nuclear white shirts… ”. The commissioner's hypotheses focused on crime of passion: Benavente was from the old school and did not like the fashion of sexist violence. He turned to ALP again, his eyes lost on the hundred-watt bulb:What kind of relationship did he have with the deceased? I am willing to put myself in his place ... Was he cheating on him with another? She was young and you, the truth, I do not see you as very male

”. ALP, in addition to being a cyclist, must have been a bit of an asshole: “What? I tell him that I get up at five o'clock, I couldn't sleep, those noises of appliances, one night after another, drilled my head. He had told the girl several times that, please, do the laundry at another time, but she didn't see reason, she laughed: 'Do you think that, if I could do the laundry at another time, I would stay? wake up until three o'clock to put on the long program? ”. Then, with the girl definitely turned off in a refrigerator in the morgue, Benavente foresaw a terrifying wave of murders in the working-class neighborhoods. Off-peak hours would be the most dangerous. The commissioner had his light turned on and he checked what time it was in case he had to turn it off.