Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “You can come in now, it’s ready.”

  They sat down and ate in silence. When they’d finished, the inspector said:

  “Excellent sauce. Where did you buy it?”

  “I didn’t buy it. I made it myself.”

  “My compliments. Listen, Grazia, I need to ask you a few more things.”

  “Okay.”

  “How were you able to tell that the man was in the doorway—in other words, still inside the house—and that therefore you could still get off a shot at him?”

  She didn’t hesitate.

  “He was running away and his shoes made a lot of noise. I just fired the gun blindly, and whatever happened happened. It never occurred to me I actually hit him.”

  “Why didn’t you follow him outside?”

  “I was afraid he would shoot me first. He had a gun.”

  “A short while ago you said you didn’t know whether the man had a gun in his hand.”

  “But he killed my uncle, didn’t he?” Grazia said resentfully. “Anyway, I didn’t know if I’d a managed to go down the stairs. My legs were shaking.”

  “Okay, so you fired blindly, but you shot him beneath one shoulder blade. He went off and hid and was later found dead from loss of blood about half a kilometer from here. With that gunshot wound, he couldn’t get very far.”

  Grazia turned pale.

  “What are they going to do to me?”

  “They can’t do anything to you.”

  “Did you identify him?”

  “Yes. It was Dindò, the kid from the supermarket.”

  Quite unexpectedly, Grazia gave a hint of a smile.

  “Dindò? I don’t believe it. Come on, tell me. Who was it?”

  “Dindò,” Galluzzo confirmed.

  “Did you know him?” Montalbano asked.

  “Of course I knew him. He used to bring us stuff at least twice a week. But we never got to know each other. Dindò! But why’d he do it? What for? He was just some unhappy jerk! Some poor guy! And I killed him!”

  She started crying desperately. Galluzzo got up and stroked her hair gently.

  Barely able to remain standing, Grazia asked for permission to go and lie down on the bed. Montalbano for his part went upstairs into Piccolo’s office and handed the keys to the wall safe to Galluzzo, who opened it. Inside was only a little cash, not even two hundred thousand lire; a large envelope misshapen from the papers it contained; and a small metal file box that looked like a drawer, full of index cards in alphabetical order. At the top of each card were the first and last names of the client, the date of the loan, the due dates, and the payments received. The loans all involved large sums from fifty million lire on up. The filing cabinet in the room, for its part, contained an infinity of similar cards but for smaller loans, from one hundred thousand lire up to twenty or thirty million. Gerlando Piccolo’s volume of business, so to speak, must have been almost as much as that of a small bank. And the papers in the envelope confirmed this for the inspector: They were all account statements from banks in Vigàta and Montelusa amounting to figures in the billions of lire.

  It didn’t add up.

  “Did they find any money in the clothes Piccolo had taken off before going to bed?”

  “Yessir. Over three hundred thousand lire.”

  “Which Dindò didn’t touch.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have time to.”

  Why did Gerlando Piccolo keep less than two hundred thousand lire in his safe and carry more than three hundred thousand on his person?

  5

  Three days later, the initial findings of the crime lab came in. They’d taken only three days! Enough to give one a heart attack. The bureaucracy, the inspector reflected, is a labyrinth in which lie the blanched bones of millions of files that never had the chance to come out. Fallen to the ground for not having been pushed hard enough, the files are overwhelmed by thousands of famished rats that devour them. He’d glimpsed these rats on occasion as packs of them raced through the file-stuffed cellars of various courthouses. Ever so rarely, and for utterly inexplicable reasons, one file in ten thousand would manage to travel the labyrinth with the speed of an Olympic hundred-meter-dash sprinter and reach its destination. As in the present case. Fingerprints aplenty, belonging to Dindò, whose real name was Salvatore Trupìa, had been found in Gerlando Piccolo’s bedroom; and it was Dindò’s very own blood that had formed the little puddle as he tried to start up his motor scooter after killing ’u zu Giurlanno. The murder weapon had never been found. Most likely Dindò got rid of it while fleeing to his death. And then there were the statements made by Signor Arturo Pastorino, shop owner, who said that while driving down the provincial road at the time the crime had taken place, he’d seen the light in front of Gerlando Piccolo’s house come on and, a second later, a motor scooter speed away from Piccolo’s house and onto the same provincial road, very nearly crashing into Signor Pastorino’s car.

  Grazia repeated her story of that night some ten times to Prosecutor Tommaseo without ever changing so much as a syllable. But for the prosecutor this wasn’t enough.

  “You see, Montalbano, I would like to reenact the event at the scene of the crime. I want that girl to stand naked before me.”

  He was practically foaming at the mouth. But since he caught a glint of irony in the inspector’s glance, he reached for a fig leaf:

  “Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  The reenactment at the scene of the crime brought out nothing new. As for the light that was on in front of Piccolo’s house, which the witness Pastorino had seen, Grazia forcefully maintained that that light was off. The prosecutor called it a negligible detail; the witness probably mistook the motor scooter’s headlight for the light that normally illuminated the area in front of the house.

  Before reaching this conclusion, however, Tommaseo wanted to verify something that he had got into his head at the very start of the case.

  “Signorina, was your uncle a homosexual?”

  Grazia gave a hearty laugh.

  “No, he didn’t go with men. He liked women.”

  “Even in town they say he took advantage of women,” the inspector interjected.

  “Vox populi isn’t always vox Dei!” Tommaseo fulminated. Then, turning back to the girl: “So you would rule that out?”

  “I never saw any of his nighttime visitors.”

  “So you don’t know whether they were men or women?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Therefore you can’t rule out that they might have also been men.”

  “What do you mean, ‘also’?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of bisexuality?” the prosecutor said ironically, licking his bottom lip.

  As far as that went, Montalbano had even heard of trisexuality, quadrisexuality, and so on down the line, but he thought it better to let it slide.

  Grazia, too, let it slide.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said.

  And so the prosecutor had an open road before him.

  “I have two hypotheses,” he declared once he was left alone with the inspector. “The first is that Piccolo had an appointment in the middle of the night with Trupìa, whom he knew from having stuff delivered to his home from the supermarket. At the appointed hour, Piccolo gets up, goes downstairs, opens the front door carefully so as not to wake his niece up, lets Trupìa in, and closes the door but doesn’t lock it. After having relations, the two men quarrel. Perhaps Piccolo doesn’t want to pay Trupìa what he wants. And so the young man loses his head and shoots him, then tries to grab what he can. The brave girl’s unexpected intervention, however, forces him to flee. He manages to open the front door, but is shot by Grazia. And so Trupìa lets himself bleed to death. He can’t go to any hospital, since he would have to explain what happened, which he can’t do because he would then b
e immediately identified as Piccolo’s murderer.”

  He drank half a glass of the bottle of mineral water he’d sent for, then continued.

  “Now for my second hypothesis, which will surely be the more appreciated, given your obstinate refusal to admit that Piccolo was also a homosexual. So, Piccolo has an appointment that night with a woman. He opens the front door for her, brings her upstairs into his room. They have sexual congress. When they’re finished, the woman leaves and Piccolo tells her to be sure to close the door behind her. He’ll lock it as soon as he finds the strength to get out of bed. Apparently the woman has . . . well, never mind. The woman, however, opens the door, lets Trupìa in, and then leaves. Trupìa thinks Piccolo won’t react when he threatens him with a gun, but in fact he makes a move and Trupìa shoots him. And we know what happens next. But now we need to find . . .”

  “Waldo?” the inspector asked in the most serious of tones.

  “What? I didn’t get that,” said Tommaseo, flummoxed.

  “Sorry, I was distracted. You were saying we had to find . . .”

  “The woman who was his accomplice. But how? Where should we look?”

  “It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Montalbano, knowing that clichés have a tendency to impose a full stop heavier than a boulder.

  “Right. Which do you prefer?”

  “Which of what?”

  “My two hypotheses.”

  “The second one.”

  “But the second one forces us to keep the investigation open to look for the mysterious female accomplice!”

  “Then let’s take the first one instead.”

  After all, why bother to waste one’s time and breath on Tommaseo?

  When, years later, he happened to think back on the Piccolo case, he was never able to explain why, that same afternoon, he went to see Dindò’s father. Perhaps it was to ease his conscience of the fact that he’d allowed Tommaseo to write, in the conclusion to his report, that the poor youth “was in the practice of prostituting himself for money.” He’d gotten the father’s address from Aguglia, the supermarket manager, who’d asked him, as soon as he’d seen him:

  “When will I get the scooter back?”

  Reassured that it would be returned to him in the coming days, Signor Aguglia saw fit to express an opinion he had about Dindò.

  “Inspector, with all due respect to law enforcement, this whole business seems fishy to me.”

  “How?”

  “Just to make things clear, I’m talking based on what I’ve been hearing in town. Dindò didn’t go with men or with women. And he wasn’t capable of stealing so much as a toothpick. Here at the supermarket he could take whatever he liked, and yet every time he needed something he would say so and pay for it. He was an honest kid.”

  Dindò’s father’s house was near the port. It was a tiny construction so rickety that one wondered how it ever remained standing without the help of outside supports. The ground floor used to be a large warehouse but was now closed, with a large plank of wood nailed over the doorway. And just in front of the front door leading upstairs was another door, also closed, which led into a space under the staircase. Above, on the first and only floor, lived Antonio Trupìa. Montalbano knocked. A decrepit old man with a hunched back and no teeth, even more rickety than the house, came to the door.

  “Inspector Montalbano, police. Are you the grandfather of Salvatore Trupìa, known as Dindò?”

  “Grandfather? I’m his father.”

  Jesus! So how old was he when he sired Dindò? The old man seemed to realize what the inspector was thinking.

  “I had m’boy Dindò pretty late in life, maybe tha’ss why he came out a little off in the head.”

  The man showed him into a room that was a jumble of filth and disorder and sat him down in a wobbly straw chair.

  “Ya gotta ’scuse me, Isspector, fer receiving you this way. But I’m sick, I’m a widower, I live on the minimum pension, an’ I got no one to help me.”

  “I wanted to know something about Dindò.”

  “An’ what do you want to know, Isspector? Alls I know is they killed ’im. But the history of us poor folk’s never told by us, iss told by them that write in the papers.”

  Deep down, the inspector thought, the man was absolutely right: Lately the journalists were passing themselves off more and more as historians.

  “Why didn’t he want to live anymore in your house? Did you quarrel?”

  “Nah, never! You couldn’t quarrel with Dindò! How do you quarrel with a little kid? No, ’bout four years ago, when he started gettin’ paid at the supermarket, he tol’ me he wanted to go live alone. An’ so I gave him the key to the cubbyhole under the stairs, which belongs to me.”

  “Did you see him often?”

  “Nossir. But if that’s what you wanna know, over the past couple o’ months he’d changed.”

  “How can you say that if you never saw him?”

  “I could hear it. He’d started singing, last couple o’ months.”

  “Singing?”

  “Yessir. At the top of his lungs. In the morning, when he woke up, and in the evening when he came home.”

  “And he never sang before then?”

  “Never.”

  “Listen, I’d like to have a look at his room under the stairs.”

  “Here, take the key.”

  “I’ll bring it back when I’m done.”

  “There’s no need. Just leave it in the door. Nobody comes here anyway.”

  “Would you tell me something? Why was he called Dindò?”

  “He liked the sound of the bells. Whenever they rang, he would go dingdong with his head, rockin’ it from side to side.”

  The cubbyhole under the stairs was about ten feet by ten, with a sloping ceiling and a tiny window about ten inches square and barred, which let in some air but no light. The furnishings consisted of a rusted bedspring with a mattress on top, a blanket riddled with holes, a pillow without a pillowcase, a tiny little table, and a wicker chair. A stack of cardboard boxes served as a dresser. In a sort of recess there was a toilet bowl and a small sink with a continually running faucet. A pigsty, Signor Aguglia had called it. But in fact it was somewhat worse, more like an abandoned prison cell in an underdeveloped country. Dirty socks, underpants, and undershirts, newspaper pages, comic books, and old issues of Topolino covered the floor. The inspector felt heartsick, and decided to close the door and leave. But, as sometimes happened to him, his body refused to obey the order. And so he cleared off the chair and sat down in it. How was it possible that one fine day joy had entered this stinking cell, a happiness so great as to make Dindò, who had never done so before, suddenly start singing at the top of his lungs and not stop until the moment he was shot? Until he was mortally wounded like a bird in flight cut down by a hunter? Again the title of that novel came back to him. He couldn’t see inside that little space under the stairs and would have had to get up and turn on the little lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but he didn’t feel like it. He wanted to stay a little longer in the dark amidst the stench, hoping to coax the answers to his questions from that stench. The first and certainly most important question was: Why had Dindò gone and killed Gerlando Piccolo? That was the kid’s intention when he entered the room in which Piccolo was lying in bed. Everything else, the rifled drawers, the smashed paintings pointing to a breathless search for something to steal, was all theater, stage decor. And somebody’d put a revolver in his hands—Dindò would never have been able to get one on his own—and convinced him that the loan shark deserved to die. And Dindò had done what he’d been talked into doing. And since he was the way he was, when he found himself confronted with Grazia, he hadn’t shot her, which would have been easy as pie, not to mention inevitable, because it had never even remotely occurred to him that the girl might react
or, if he was arrested, could become a damning witness. No, these were all considerations that Dindò’s childlike brain was unable to work out. He’d simply tried to run away, just as someone had told him to do.

  The second question was: How did he get inside the house? The front door showed no signs of having been forced. He’d probably used duplicate keys. But for the keys to be copied, someone would have had to make impressions of them, which meant that there had to be, aside from the niece, someone who could go in and out of the house at will and freely. Who could that be? There was no housekeeper, not even a daytime cleaning lady. Grazia saw to everything. Piccolo’s clients were made to climb the outdoor staircase and had no idea what the house was like inside. And so? Montalbano racked his brains, and soon a figure of a man, with no face or name, began to surface in his head. A person everyone in town was afraid of, and whom Fazio had been unable to identify: the man who used to go and shake down clients for Piccolo. His collector. Now everything began hesitantly to acquire logic and reason, even if it was still ever so faintly outlined.

  He got up to go back to the station, and when moving about in the dark, he ran into the little table and knocked it over. Cursing the saints, he turned on the light and noticed that the little table had a drawer which had come open. Inside was a comic book called Zorno, the Masked Avenger. Zorno? He thumbed through it. It was a porn version of Zorro.

  In the margin of each page, Dindò had written the same word with a red ballpoint: JUSTICE!

  He put the comic in his jacket pocket, turned off the light, and went out.

  Instead of going to the station, he went to Galluzzo’s. When he rang the buzzer, Grazia’s voice answered at once.

  “Who is it?”

  “Montalbano.”

  When the girl opened the door for him, he noticed immediately that she was pale and her eyes were red. At that moment you certainly couldn’t say she was pretty.

  “Are you alone in the house?”

  “Yes. Amelia’s out shopping.”