by Tobias Jones
‘You tell me.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Had you spoken to Salati about your investigations?’
‘Sure.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. In his shop. His assistant was there. I’ve been in regular contact with him ever since Monday.’
‘No sign he had something like this in mind?’
‘None at all. He was a man in mourning, he looked tired, but he wasn’t broken. There’s no way this was suicide. I feel, somehow, like I caused his death …’ I let the sentence hang there, hoping Dall’Aglio would agree to cooperate.
‘Meaning?’
‘You’ll reciprocate?’
‘Don’t I always? Go on, tell me …’
‘It turns out Riccardo, the younger brother, wasn’t quite what he seemed. He was the son of Massimo Tonin, the lawyer. Tonin had an affair with the Salati woman back in the 1970s. I told Salati as much yesterday and he was round there in a shot.’
‘Where?’
‘The Tonin estate.’
‘You tailed him?’
‘Sure.’
‘And you saw him come back?’
‘I saw him get back in his car, the black jeep, and leave the Tonin place. That was the last I saw of him until this morning.’
‘What time did he leave their place?’
I looked at my notebook. ‘Seven thirty-nine. If he went straight home, he would have been there by eight.’
Dall’Aglio was silent. It was probably the best lead they had and I thought I might as well pass on everything. ‘There’s something else. I’ve got a Visa slip for a payment that interests me.’ I read the six numbers out of my notebook. ‘Six Two Two Zero Four Nine. Put a trace on that and let me know.’
‘What is it?’
‘Someone appears to have been impersonating the younger brother. Published a notice of mourning in Monday’s Gazzetta.’
‘You’re sure of this?’
I didn’t reply because there wasn’t any certainty about anything.
‘You’re sure it’s not Riccardo himself?’
‘I would be very surprised. But yeah, it’s just about possible. Trace it.’
‘OK. What else?’
‘That’s it so far.’
Dall’Aglio sighed.
‘You?’ I asked expectantly.
‘Not much yet. The autopsy is due back this afternoon. That’ll tell us more.’
‘Who’s doing it?’
‘I don’t know. One of the regulars. There’s just one thing that worries me at the moment. We haven’t found his keys.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We haven’t got Umberto Salati’s keys. It’s a minor detail and I’m sure they’ll turn up, but for the moment we haven’t found any. Not on his person, and not in his flat.’
I frowned. That was something and Dall’Aglio knew it. He was pretending it was a minor irritant, but they would already have been through the flat with a toothcomb and if they hadn’t found the keys it meant they weren’t there.
‘The keys weren’t on him?’
‘Nothing in his pockets except cigarettes and a lighter.’
I suddenly had something to go on and felt restless. As always, it wasn’t something so much as the absence of something. It didn’t make sense that no keys had been found. It made the whole official narrative of the suicide seem implausible. If Salati had let himself into his flat, where were the keys? If they were in his pocket when he jumped, why weren’t they on him when he was found? If Salati didn’t have his keys, how had he let himself into the flat?
‘It’s definitely murder isn’t it?’
Dall’Aglio gave a non-committal grunt. ‘If so, we have another problem. There was no murder weapon.’
‘Gravity,’ I said. ‘That and the ground.’
‘And the push,’ Dall’Aglio said, as if he was fantasising, imagining people behind Salati, pushing him off the balcony. ‘I can imagine lots of people at his shoulders, itching to give him a nudge. He had enough enemies from what I can work out.’
‘Friends too,’ I said, ‘they’re the real danger.’
‘Bad friends are like beans,’ Dall’Aglio said. ‘They make noise behind your back.’
I laughed. ‘He had more than noise behind him, by the look of it. You’ll let me know about the autopsy and that Visa slip?’
‘Yes, yes.’
I needed to get hold of Salati’s shop assistant. I phoned a friend who had a small clothing boutique the other side of the piazza, on Via Nazario Sauro.
‘It’s Casta,’ I said. ‘You heard about Umberto Salati?’
‘I heard just now. Is it one of your cases?’
‘Not really. I’m investigating something else, but now this has come up. Listen, I wanted to know about Salati’s assistant, Laura. You don’t know her surname by any chance?’
‘Laura? I know her. Cute chick.’
‘A name?’
‘Laura’s all I ever heard her called.’
‘Did they have something going on?’
‘Umberto didn’t employ girls unless something was going
on, if you know what I mean. He liked a high staff turn-over, liked to keep everything fresh.’
‘And you don’t remember her name?’
‘No idea. But I could ask the girl who works here on a Saturday, she would probably know. I’ll call you back.’
The line went dead. I stared out of the window. There were two men playing cards on the steps by the statue of Padre Pio.
The phone started ringing again. ‘Laura Montanari, that’s the name.’
I thanked him and reached for the phone book. There were hundreds of Montanaris. I could have found out which one it was from Dall’Aglio, but I wanted to work on my own. I phoned them one by one until a man came on the phone and started shouting about how the press should leave his daughter alone. That was a decent giveaway.
I wrote down the address and was there within a few minutes.
Her father answered the door.
‘I’ve told you, she’s not making any statement …’ He stopped as he looked at my badge.
‘Who are you?’
‘Private investigator. I need to talk to your daughter. She knows me. I was a friend of Umberto Salati.’
Montanari looked at me with suspicion but opened the door. I walked inside and saw the young girl lying on a sofa. By the high standards of a shop assistant she was dressed down. It looked like she had been crying.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. Her father had left the room. ‘When did you hear?’
‘This morning. When he hadn’t opened up I went round there.’
‘To his?’
‘Sure.’
‘You reported it?’
She nodded. It looked like her eyes were going to overflow again, so I waited.
‘You’ve got keys to his place?’
She looked up to see if her father was in earshot. ‘Sure,’ she said softly.
‘I want to know about his keys. Were they all on one ring?’
‘Big bunch, sure.’
‘Could you describe Umberto’s key-ring to me?’
‘It was one of the free ones from the shop we give to our customers.’
‘Have you got any here?’
‘No. But I could show you …’
‘What’s written on them?’
‘Just the name of the shop, Salati Fashions.’
‘Did he ever forget them?’
‘All the time.’
‘How many times in the last month?’
‘Three or four. He would normally call me just as I was going to bed. He would phone to ask me to let him into his flat. I was never sure whether he really had lost them, or whether it was a ruse to get me round there. That was part of the reason my father didn’t like him. He would call me late at night, and I would have to go round there to let him in, and then usually I would go up and you know …’ Tears fell off her cheeks on to her lap.
&nbs
p; ‘You said your father didn’t like him …’
‘It’s a turn of phrase. He wouldn’t,’ she looked at me incredulous. ‘That’s impossible.’
The thing about the keys still worried me. I knew what I was looking for now, a key-ring with the Salati Fashions logo. I would have to find how many had been handed out as freebies to customers and suppliers. I figured that the fact that Salati was absent-minded meant those keys couldn’t have given access to any secret part of Salati’s empire. No reputation or fortune depended upon them. There would be no confession locked away in some safe. If Salati mislaid his keys all the time, it didn’t seem likely that they led anywhere. Another dead end, I thought.
‘And had he forgotten his keys last night?’ I asked her. ‘Did you let him in last night?’
She shook her head.
‘What was he doing last night?’
‘Nothing. He said he was going home to sleep. He had been shattered since his mother’s illness. He hadn’t stopped for months. He just needed to sleep. That’s what he said.’
‘Who else had keys to his flat?’
She shrugged.
‘Did he have other women?’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Were there other women in his life?’
She looked up at me as if I had insulted her. ‘There was his wife, his mother, if that’s what you mean. They both had the keys to his flat.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because they used to let themselves in to do his laundry, make his bed, that sort of stuff. Less so recently, but when I first got to know him they were always around.’ I shook my head. It always amazed me that grown men couldn’t pull a sheet over a mattress.
*
It was a short drive to Traversetolo where Umberto’s estranged wife Roberta lived. I found her place easily enough and rang the bell on the outside gate. There was no reply so I called the number.
‘Pronto.’
‘Signora, my name’s Castagnetti. I’m a private investigator hired by your late mother-in-law to find her son, Riccardo. Could we talk? I’m outside.’
‘Was it you who rang the bell just now?’
‘Yeah.’
She didn’t say anything. I looked at the condominium. It had long brass letterboxes at the entrance and it looked spacious and calm: there were a couple of armchairs by the porter’s glass lodge with ashtrays on their arms.
‘Ground floor,’ she said.
The door clicked open and I walked in towards the main door. I stopped and looked at the block. It was the standard thing. They’re all the same: six or so stories, a flat on each corner. I once saw an old painting of these kinds of places from way back. Then they had courtyards, communal areas on the inside. The flats were like lines of a square, and in the middle was a well with some chickens or some pigs. It had been beautiful, a perfect design for a sunny country.
But now, in these palazzi, the tiny communal part was on the outside: little patches of scrawny grass between the outer and inner gates, rickety bike racks and bins and curls of dog shit. That was it. You had no shared view. No one ever looked over the centre of the place, only at the fringes, at the cars speeding past.
She came out of a flat to the left as I was going through the inner door. She was a slim, blonde woman. She had a beautiful face with bright eyes. But there was a sadness about her. It looked like it had been with her long before Umberto died.
‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ I said as she showed me in.
‘He was an ex,’ she said, bowing her head slightly as if to acknowledge the condolences. ‘You knew him?’
‘I met him on Monday, as soon as I was hired. When did you last speak to him?’
‘At the funeral on Tuesday.’
‘And you had a cordial relationship?’
‘Friendly enough. We had fewer arguments after separation than we did before, that’s for sure.’
‘Why did you separate?’
‘I don’t think that matters now, do you?’
There was something mechanical about her, as if she was getting by out of habit. I had seen it before, the pride and defiance of a middle-aged woman bringing up children on her own. It was as if she were proving a point all the time, trying to show that she could still be attractive, but in doing so only showed that she had mislaid her spontaneity.
‘He was a good man and a good father,’ she said. ‘He just couldn’t stick to one woman. But he was always generous and warm. That’s what all those girls saw in him, I suppose. He lavished presents on them, the same as he had with me when we met.’
I looked at her. It sounded like a wife trying to show her late husband’s best side, trying to justify his behaviour.
‘He told me that the night his brother went missing, in June 1995, he was with you.’ I looked at her. ‘Can you confirm that?’
‘To be completely honest, I have no memory of where I was that night, but I remember telling police years ago that we were together that evening, and if I said that then, it must have been that way.’
‘But you don’t remember?’
‘Do you remember where you were on a given night fourteen years ago?’
I shrugged. ‘I probably would if it was the night my brother-in-law was murdered.’
She looked at me with disdain.
‘Was there any rancour between the two of them, between Ricky and Umberto?’
‘They didn’t exactly get on. They were competitive.’
‘And what happened between them the year Ricky went missing? In 1995?’
She drew a deep breath.
‘I knew that Umberto had lent him a lot of money. I knew because it meant we couldn’t move house that year. Umberto had found out that he was borrowing money from all and sundry and they had quite an argument.’ She looked at me as if she didn’t want me to get the wrong impression. ‘But he was incapable of … there’s no way he would have ever …’
‘Did his disappearance have an effect on Umberto?’
‘To be honest, he didn’t seem unduly worried at the time. It had happened before. And then, when it became clear Ricky wasn’t coming back, I think Umberto was more concerned about the effect on his mother.’
‘And recently?’
‘I think he changed when he saw Silvia dying. I think he longed to be able to bring news of Ricky to her dying bedside, even if it was only confirmation of what they all feared.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘I inferred it from the way he was speaking to the boys recently.’
‘Your children?’
‘Sure. He was always talking to them about the importance of the family, of looking after your own, of loyalty.’
‘Did he think Ricky was still alive?’
She paused. ‘I don’t think so. I think he knew he was never going to find him. But he was looking for him, trying to work out what had happened.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘What?’
‘That he was investigating Ricky’s disappearance?’
‘Sure. He told me about it at the funeral.’
‘On Tuesday?’
She nodded. ‘We were standing beside each other at the burial and he whispered to me about his desire to sort everything out once and for all. Umberto liked the idea of playing the hero. He felt like he had to avenge those who had insulted his family. He got very worked up when talking about it.’
I listened to her as she spoke. She talked with precision and speed and I imagined she was a strict mother.
‘Have you thought,’ I said slowly, ‘that the reason Umberto was keen to find Ricky was merely this: he wanted his mother’s money and wanted to confirm his brother’s death. He didn’t want to share the jackpot with anyone else.’
She looked at me closely with her eyes almost shut. ‘I thought exactly the same thing. I can’t pretend I didn’t.’
‘And now that Umberto’s dead, it makes a big difference to your family.’
&nb
sp; ‘Finding Ricky?’ She laughed, amused at the optimism.
‘But it does, doesn’t it?’
She stopped laughing and looked at me seriously.
‘It makes a difference financially doesn’t it?’ I said again. ‘Your mother-in-law died and left an estate. Now your husband is dead and your boys might be millionaires.’
‘Sure. Sure it does. It makes a difference to my boys.’
‘If Ricky can be proved to have died prior to Silvia Salati,’ I wanted to make sure she knew the situation, ‘then Umberto inherits the whole of his mother’s estate. And now he’s dead, your children might be very wealthy. If it was the other way round, half of what Umberto was expecting goes up in smoke.’ I paused.
‘Of course it does, I’ve just said it does. Is there anything else you want?’
Her warmth had gone and she was preparing to usher me out.
‘Do you think the two are linked?’ I said, standing my ground.
She was shaking her head nervously, like a horse being badly handled. It was as if she didn’t want to think about the implications.
‘And last night,’ I said, ‘where were you?’
‘I was here, with the children.’
‘Are they in?’
She put a hand on my chest. ‘Keep them out of this. They’re mourning their father.’
I left her there and apologised for the disturbance.
Friday
I was sitting in the bar opposite the carabinieri barracks watching my hands move from force of habit. My thumb and forefinger took the corner of a sugar sachet and shook it before ripping it open and emptying the contents into the piping black coffee. My right hand took up the spoon and stirred it.
Every morning millions of us perform exactly the same gestures learnt from observation. Having a coffee is as ritualistic as taking communion and I couldn’t do it any differently to anyone else.
I stretched over to a next-door table and picked up the morning’s edition of La Gazzetta. Even the news was ritualistic. The way the whole Salati case was reported followed a tried and trusted path: the reporter used the same phrases that are used every time a murder is committed. This was the ‘Salati Giallo’. They never missed a chance to churn out the old giallo label. That word – meaning both ‘yellow’ and ‘thriller’ – makes dark crimes sunlit and exciting. In this charming country, even death is made sumptuous.
