“Was he murdered?”
The Cosentinos spread their hands apart again. The widow teetered, but kept her footing.
The people at their windows and balconies therefore witnessed a scene that could only have been a disappointment: Mrs. Lapècora walking between Mr. and Mrs. Cosentino and speaking calmly. She was explaining in great detail the operation that her sister had just undergone in Fiacca.
In the dark as to these developments, Officer Gallo, upon hearing the elevator stop at his floor at seven thirty-five, stood up from the stair on which he’d been sitting, reviewing what he was supposed to say to the unhappy woman, and took a step forward. The elevator door opened and a man got out.
“Giuseppe Cosentino’s the name. Seeing as how Mrs.
Lapècora is going to have to wait, I’m putting her up at my place. Please inform the inspector. I live on the sixth floor.”
o o o
The Lapècora apartment was in perfect order. Living–dining room, bedroom, study, kitchen, and bath, nothing out of place. On the desk in the study lay the wallet of the deceased, with all his documents and one hundred thousand lire. Therefore—Montalbano said to himself—Aurelio Lapècora had got dressed to go somewhere he wouldn’t need identification, credit, or money. He sat down in the chair behind the desk and opened the drawers, one after the other. In the first drawer on the left he found stamps, old envelopes with aurelio lapècora inc. importazione-esportazione printed on the back, pencils, ballpoint pens, erasers, outdated stamps, and two sets of keys. The widow explained that one set was for the house and the other for the office. In the drawer below this one, there were only some yellowed letters bound together with string. The first drawer on the right held a surprise: a brand-new Beretta with two reserve car-tridge clips and five boxes of ammunition. Mr. Lapècora, if he’d wanted to, could have carried out a massacre. The last drawer contained lightbulbs, razor blades, rolls of string, and rubber bands.p>
The inspector told Galluzzo, who had replaced Gallo, to bring the weapon and ammunition to headquarters.
“Then check to see if the pistol was registered.” A smell of stale perfume, burnt straw in color, hung aggressively in the air of the study, even though the inspector, upon entering, had thrown the window wide open.
The widow had gone and sat in an armchair in the living room. She seemed utterly indifferent, as if sitting in a railway station waiting room, awaiting her train.
Montalbano also sat down in an armchair, and at that moment the doorbell rang. Signora Antonietta instinctively started to get up, but the inspector stopped her with a gesture.
“Galluzzo, go see who it is.”
The door was opened, they heard some whispering, and the policeman returned.
“There’s somebody who lives on the sixth floor says he wants to talk to you. Says he’s a security guard.” Cosentino had put on his uniform; he was on his way to work.
“Sorry to disturb you, but seeing as how something just occurred to me—”
“What is it?”
“You see, after she got off the bus, Signora Antonietta, when she found out her husband was dead, asked us if he’d been murdered. Now, if somebody came to me and told me my wife was dead, I might think of the different ways she could have died, but I would never imagine she’d been murdered. Unless I’d considered the possibility beforehand. I’m not sure if that’s clear . . .” “It’s perfectly clear. Thank you,” said Montalbano.
He went back in the living room. Mrs. Lapècora looked as if she’d been embalmed.
“Do you have any children, signora?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“One son.”
“Does he live here?”
“No.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-two.”
“He should be informed.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Gong. End of the first round. When they resumed, the widow took the initiative.
“Was he shot?”
“No.”
“Strangled?”
“No.”
“Then how did they manage to kill him in an elevator?”
“With a knife.”
“A kitchen knife?”
“Probably.”
The woman got up and went into the kitchen. The inspector heard her open and close a drawer. She returned and sat back down.
“Nothing missing here.”
The inspector went on the counterattack.
“Why did you think the knife might be yours?”
“Just a thought.”
“What did your husband do yesterday?”
“He did what he did every Wednesday. He went to his office. He used to go there Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
“What was his schedule?”
“He’d go from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon, then he’d come home for lunch, take a little nap, go back to work at three-thirty and stay there till six-thirty.” “What would he do at home?”
“He’d sit down in front of the television and not move.”
“And on the days when he didn’t go to the office?”
“Same thing, he’d sit in front of the TV.”
“So this morning, today being a Thursday, your husband should have stayed home.”
“That’s right.”
“Instead he got dressed to go out.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you have any idea where he was going?”
“He didn’t tell me anything.”
“When you left the house, was your husband awake or asleep?”
“Asleep.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that, as soon as you went out, your husband suddenly woke up, got dressed in a hurry, and—”
“He might have got a phone call.”
A clear point in the widow’s favor.
“Did your husband still have many business relationships?”
“Business? He shut down the business years ago.”
“So why did he keep going regularly to the office?”
“Whenever I asked him, he’d say he went to watch the flies. That’s what he’d say.”
“Would you say that after your husband came home from the office yesterday, nothing out of the ordinary happened?”
“Nothing. At least till nine o’clock in the evening.”
“What happened at nine o’clock in the evening?”
“I took two Tavors. And I slept so soundly that the building could have collapsed on top of me and I still wouldn’t have woken up.”
“So if Mr. Lapècora had received a phone call or visitor after nine o’clock, you wouldn’t have known.”
“Of course not.”
“Did your husband have any enemies?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Any friends?”
“One. Cavaliere Pandolfo. They used to phone each other on Tuesdays and then go and chat at the Caffè Albanese.”
“Have you any suspicions as to who might have—” She interrupted him.
“Suspicions, no. Certainty, yes.”
Montalbano leapt out of the armchair. Galluzzo said
“Shit!” but in a soft voice.
“And who would that be?”
“Who would that be, Inspector? His mistress, that’s who.
Her name’s Karima, with a K. She’s Tunisian. They used to meet at the office, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The slut would go there pretending she was the cleaning woman.”
4 3
h2> The first Sunday of the previous year had fallen on the fifth, the widow said, and that fateful date remained forever etched in her mind.
Anyway, upon coming out of church, where she’d attended Holy Mass at midday, she was approached by Signora Collura, who owned a furniture store.
“Signora, tell your husband that th
e item he was waiting for arrived yesterday.”
“What item?”
“The sofa bed.”
Signora Antonietta thanked her and went home with a drill boring a hole in her head. What did her husband need a sofa bed for? Although her curiosity was eating her alive, she said nothing to Arelio. To make a long story short, that piece of furniture never arrived at their home. Two Sundays later, Signora Antonietta approached the furniture lady.
“You know, the color of the sofa bed clashes with the shade of the wall.”
A shot in the dark, but right on target.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he told me he wanted dark green, the same as the wallpaper.”
The back room of the office was dark green. So that’s where he had the sofa bed delivered, the shameless pig!
On the thirtieth of June that same year—this date, too, forever etched in her memory—she got her first anonymous letter. She had received three in all, between June and September.
“Could I see them?” Montalbano asked.
“I burned them. I don’t keep filth.”
The three anonymous notes, written with letters cut out from newspapers in keeping with the finest tradition, all said the same thing:Your husband Arelio is seeing a Tunisian jade named Karima, known by all to be a whore, three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The woman went there either in the morning or afternoon on those days. Occasionally she would buy cleaning supplies at a shop on the same street, but everyone knew she was meeting Signor Arelio to do lewd things.
“Were you ever able to . . . verify any of this?” the inspector asked tactfully.
“Do you mean did I ever spy on them to see when the trollop was going in and out of my husband’s office?”
“Well, that too.”
“I don’t stoop to such things,” the woman said proudly.
“But I managed just the same. A soiled handkerchief.”
“Lipstick?”
“No,” the widow said with some effort, turning slightly red in the face.
“And a pair of underpants,” she added after a pause, turning even redder.
o o o
When Montalbano and Galluzzo got to Salita Granet, the three shops on that short, sloping street were already closed.
Number 28 was a small building, the ground floor raised three steps up from street level, with two more floors above that. To the side of the main door were three nameplates. The first said: aurelio lapècora, import-export, ground floor; the second: orazio cannatello, notary; the third: angelo bellino, business consultant, top floor. Using the keys Montalbano had taken from Lapècora’s study, they went inside. The front room was a proper office, with a big nineteenth-century desk made of black mahogany, a small secretarial table with a 1940s Olivetti typewriter on it, and four large metal bookcases overflowing with old files. On the desk was a functioning telephone. There were five chairs in the office, but one was broken and overturned in the corner.
In the back room . . . The back room, with its now familiar dark green walls, seemed not to belong to the same apartment. It was sparkling clean, with a large sofa bed, television, telephone extension, stereo system, cocktail trolley with a variety of liqueurs, mini-fridge, and a horrendous female nude, buttocks to the wind, over the couch. Next to the sofa was a small end table with a faux art nouveau lamp on top, its drawer stuffed with condoms of every kind.
“How old was the guy?” Galluzzo asked.
“Sixty-three.”
“Jesus!” said the policeman, giving a whistle of admiration.
The bathroom, like the back room, was dark green and glistening, equipped with built-in blow-dryer, bathtub with shower-hose extension, and full-length mirror.
They returned to the front room, rummaged through the desk’s drawers, opened a few of the files. The most recent correspondence was more than three years old.
They heard some footsteps upstairs, in the office of the notary, Cannatello. The notary wasn’t in, they were told by the secretary, a reed-thin thirtyish young man with a disconsolate expression. He said the late Mr. Lapècora used to come to the office just to pass the time. On the days when he was there, a good-looking Tunisian girl would come to do the cleaning.
Oh, and, he almost forgot, over the last few months Mr. Lapècora had received fairly frequent visits from a nephew, or at least that’s how Mr. Lapècora introduced him the one time the three had met at the front door. He was about thirty, tall, dark, well-dressed, and he drove a metallic gray BMW. He must have spent a lot of time abroad, this nephew, because he spoke with an odd sort of accent. No, he couldn’t remember anything about the BMW’s license plate, hadn’t paid any notice.
Suddenly the thin young man assumed the expression of somebody looking at the ruins of his home after an earth-quake. He said he had a precise opinion about this crime.
“And what would that be?” asked Montalbano.
It could only have been the usual young lowlife looking for money to feed his drug habit.
They went back downstairs, where Montalbano called Mrs. Lapècora from the office phone.
“Excuse me, but why didn’t you tell me you have a nephew?”
“Because we don’t.”
o o o
“Let’s go back to the office,” Montalbano said when they were just around the corner from headquarters. Galluzzo didn’t dare ask why. In the bathroom of the dark green room, the inspector buried his nose in the towel, breathed deeply, then started riffling through the little cupboard beside the sink. He found a small bottle of perfume, brand-name Volupté, and handed it to Galluzzo.
“Here, put some of this on.”
“Where?”
“Up your ass,” came the inevitable reply.
Galluzzo dabbed a drop of Volupté on his cheek, and Montalbano stuck his nose next to it and inhaled. That was it: the very same scent, the color of burnt straw, that he’d smelled in Lapècora’s study. Wanting to be absolutely certain, he repeated the gesture.
Galluzzo smiled.
“Uh, Chief, if anybody saw us . . . who knows what they’d think?”
The inspector didn’t answer, but walked over to the phone.
“Hello, signora? Sorry to disturb you again. Did your husband use any kind of perfume or cologne? No? Okay, thanks.”
o o o
Galluzzo came into Montalbano’s office.
“Lapècora’s Beretta was registered on the eighth of De-cember of last year. Since he didn’t have a license to carry a gun, he was only allowed to keep it at home.” Something, the inspector thought, must have been troubling him around that time, if he decided to buy a gun.
“What are we going to do with the pistol?”
“We’ll keep it here. Listen, Gallù, here are the keys to the office. I want you to go there early tomorrow morning, let yourself in, and wait there. Try not to let anyone see you.
If the Tunisian girl hasn’t found out what happened, she should show up tomorrow according to schedule, since it’s Friday.”
Galluzzo grimaced.
“It’s unlikely she hasn’t heard.”
“Why? Who would have told her?”
It looked to the inspector as if Galluzzo was desperately trying to back out.
“I don’t know . . . Word gets out . . .”
“Ah, and I don’t suppose you said anything to your brother-in-law the reporter? Because if you did—”
“Inspector, I swear, I haven’t told him anything.” Montalbano believed him. Galluzzo wasn’t the type to tell a boldfaced lie.
“Well, you’re going to Lapècora’s office anyway.”
o o o
“Montalbano? This is Jacomuzzi. I wanted to notify you of our test results.”
“Oh God, Jacomù, wait a second, my heart is racing.
God, what excitement! . . . There, I’m a little calmer now.
Please ‘notify’ me, as you put it in your peerless bureau-cratese.”
“Aside from the fact that you’re an i
ncurable asshole, the cigarette butt was a common stub of Nazionale without filter; there was nothing abnormal in the dust we collected from the floor of the elevator, and as for the little piece of wood—” “It was only a kitchen match.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m speechless, breathless—in fact, I think I’m about to have a heart attack! You’ve delivered the murderer to me!”
“Go fuck yourself, Montalbano.”
“It’d still be better than listening to you. What did he have in his pockets?”
“A handkerchief and a set of keys.”
“And what can you tell me about the knife?”
“A kitchen knife, very used. Between the blade and the handle we found a fish scale.”
“Didn’t you pursue that any further? Was it a mullet scale or a cod scale? Keep investigating, don’t leave me hanging!”
“What is wrong with you anyway?”
“Jacomù, try to use your brains a little. If we were in the Sahara desert and you came to me and said you’d found a fish scale on a knife that had been used to kill a tourist, then the thing might, I say might, mean something. But what the fuck could it possibly mean in a town like Vigàta, where out of twenty thousand inhabitants, nineteenthousandninehun-dredandseventy eat fish all the time?” “And why don’t the other thirty?” asked Jacomuzzi, stunned and curious.
“Because they’re newborn babies.”
o o o
“Hello? Montalbano here. Could I please speak with Dr.
Pasquano?”
“Please hold.”
He had just enough time to start singing: E te lo vojo dì i>
che sò stato io . . .
“Hello, Inspector? The doctor’s very sorry, but he’s performing an autopsy on the two men found goat-tied in Costabianca. But he said to tell you that as far as your murder victim is concerned, the man was bursting with health and would have lived to be a hundred if somebody hadn’t killed him first. A single stab wound, dealt with a firm hand. The incident occurred between seven and eight o’clock this morning. D’you need anything else?”
o o o
In the fridge he found some pasta with broccoli, which he put in the oven to warm up. As a second course, Adelina had made him some roulades of tuna. Figuring he’d had a light lunch, he felt obliged to eat everything. Then he turned on the television and tuned in to the Free Channel, a good local station where his red-haired, Red-sympathizing friend Nicolò Zito worked. Zito was commenting on the killing of the Tunisian aboard the Santopadre as the camera zoomed in on the bullet-riddled wheelhouse and on a dark stain in the wood that was probably blood. All of a sudden Jacomuzzi appeared, kneeling down and looking at something through a magnifying glass.
The Snack Thief Page 4
