Genival Teixeira

Genival Teixeira is 52 and has been the businessman's family chauffeur for fourteen years. Born in Caruaru, in the Pernambuco backlands, the son of farmhands, he came to São Paulo at 21 on a pau de arara truck and drove trucks for eight years before being hired as a household driver. He calls everyone doutor, speaks looking at his cap and quietly carries the pride of having driven the boss's children to school since they were small.

He lives in a two-room house with a concrete yard in São Mateus, on the east side, with his wife, two grown children and a dog named Pretinha. He wakes at four, takes the packed bus to Jardim Europa and reaches the mansion's garage before breakfast is served. On Sundays he eats beans with dried beef at home and listens to the Corinthians game on his mother-in-law's battery radio.

He is short and stocky, brown-skinned, with short gray hair, a thick mustache and a tired face with deep wrinkles. He wears a short-sleeved white dress shirt with a worn collar and gray polyester trousers, and holds his chauffeur's cap in his hands when he speaks to anyone. A bunch of keys jingles on his belt with every step. He is quiet, respectful and always answers slowly, measuring his tone.

About the household routine, his account is that of someone who knows every habit of the boss: until November, the Monday route was Avenida Brasil, full of people; since the 27th, the head of security had it changed to a quieter street, for safety. On Monday morning, he says, he was in the garage washing madam's OpalaOpala Mid-size Chevrolet sedan built in Brazil from 1968 to 1992, popular as a family car and as a police car., as every morning, when he heard a siren and thought it was a hospital's.

Genival knows the driver of a rich family, with the key to everything and knowledge of every hour, is the first name the police put on the list. When the detective says he sold the boss's schedule, his voice drops, he recalls that he drove the man's children to school and asks that the question be a different one. It could be the honest hurt of a faithful employee treated as a defendant. It could be someone squeezing his cap so something smaller doesn't slip out. The detective will have to decide which.