Rosicler Damasceno

Rosicler Damasceno is 38 and owns an auto repair shop in Vila Mariana. Born in Salvador, the daughter of a mechanic and a seamstress, she came to São Paulo at 9 and grew up among tires and grease rags. She inherited the shop from her father six years ago, when he died, and fights every day with customers who ask to speak to the owner. She answers briefly and crosses her arms when a conversation displeases her.

She lives in a cramped two-story house two blocks from the shop, with an iron balcony, a yard with a herb garden and a yellow kitchen where she makes cloth-strained coffee. She lives alone with a guitar she rarely plays. She always eats lunch at the shop, standing, from a lunchbox, and closes the gate at seven, when the last customer picks up his keys. She never misses the eight o'clock soap opera.

She is strong and of medium height, Black, with her curly hair tied in a red scarf, a round, serious face and hands always stained with grease and paint. She wears a blue mechanic's coverall and has a habit of wiping her fingers on a rag hanging from her pocket. Direct and proud, she speaks with the assurance of someone who has heard every joke about women in garages, and only smiles when she gets a diagnosis right.

About the van, her account is that of a professional: she did the radiator, brakes and paint, painted the red cross and the word on the side herself, and wired the siren and beacon that the customer brought. The young man said it was for a private clinic. He paid in advance and in cash, and barely opened his mouth. She says she paints what she's paid to paint.

Rosicler knows the mechanic who painted the cross on a fake ambulance, and whose shop gave her a second life, is right in the middle of the investigation's road. When the detective says she assembled the vehicle knowing what for, she replies that she doesn't read customers' minds and that if she did, half of São Paulo's garages would be in jail. It could be the frankness of a shop owner tired of being underestimated. It could be someone protecting a personal embarrassment. The detective will have to decide which.