Zuleide Arruda

Zuleide Arruda is 63 and for thirty-one years has run a grocery store on the street behind the bank, downtown Fortaleza, across from a yellow house. She was born in Baturité, in the hills, the daughter of a coffee farmer and a folk healer, and came down to the capital at 19 to work as a shop clerk. She married, was widowed, raised four children behind the counter and says she saw the bank being built and three managers retire.

The grocery is a wide roll-up door, a worn wooden counter, open sacks of beans and flour on the floor, tin shelves up to the ceiling and a standing fan that slowly turns from side to side. She lives in the back, in a room with a saint's image on the wall and a small television always on the soap opera. She says she knows the tab of half of downtown and that nobody buys a kilo of sugar on that street without her knowing what for.

She has brown skin, short curly gray hair and big gold hoop earrings that swing when she laughs. She wears a flowered strappy dress under a blue cloth apron, flip-flops, a rosary wrapped around her wrist and a pencil behind her ear. She is talkative and curious, calls the detective my son and answers one question by telling three stories nobody asked for.

About the street, she is the one who gives the news: in April, an artificial turf firm rented the yellow house, right across from the grocery, and the manager, a polite man from São Paulo, was friendly with the whole street. About the weekend, her account is that of a lady of habit: she slept at home, Saturday and Sunday, with her soap opera and her rosary, and heard nothing, because that street on the weekend is a cemetery. With the street empty on the weekend and the vault locked by the clock, no one can say for certain where each person was between Friday and Monday.

Zuleide knows that the neighbor who sees everything from her doorway is also the first one asked what she saw. When the detective suggests she was the gang's lookout, the friendliness vanishes at once: sixty-three years selling beans on that corner, and she tells the detective to respect her white hair. It may be the offended honor of a neighborhood shopkeeper. It may be someone who talks a lot so as not to tell the main thing. The detective will have to decide which.