by David Hewson
He had the papers from the Rinaldi case on his desk, complete with a set of grisly photographs. Falcone waved the reports in their faces.
“Skimpy,” was all he said.
“Sir,” Costa answered, “we’re working on something fuller now. You’ll have it by ten.”
Rossi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Falcone was staring at him and both men knew what his look was saying: So the kid speaks for you now, does he? “You have anything on this Farnese woman?” Falcone asked.
Costa shook his head. “Like what? You mean a record or something?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“She’s clean,” Rossi said. “I ran a check last night. There’s not so much as a speeding ticket.”
Falcone leaned forward and made sure Costa was looking at him. “You have to check these things.”
“I know,” Costa agreed. “I’m sorry.”
“So that’s the story?” Falcone asked. “The old boyfriend killed the new boyfriend and took his own wife along for the ride?”
“Looks like that,” Costa agreed. Falcone shrugged. “It does look like that. I talked to forensics this morning. They couldn’t find a single trace of anyone else in that tower, ground floor or second. Clean as a whistle except for Rinaldi’s prints and the two dead people in there.”
“So what’s the problem?” Costa wondered.
“The problem?” Falcone nodded at Rossi. “Ask him.”
Costa looked at his partner. They still hadn’t made up since the near-quarrel the day before. He respected the big man. He didn’t want this coldness between them. “Luca?” he asked.
Rossi frowned. “The problem is: why? Rinaldi stopped seeing the Farnese woman, what, three, four months ago? Why now?”
“Maybe he only just found out about the Englishman,” Costa suggested. “He heard her talking about how much she liked him and just went crazy.”
Falcone stabbed a finger at him. “Do we know that? It’s not in your report.”
Costa thought back to his conversations with her. “No.”
“We’re going to have to go back to that woman,” Falcone ordered. “Get some detail in all this. Dates. Names. Reasons.”
“Fine.” Costa nodded.
Rossi was looking out of the window now, reaching for a cigarette. He and Falcone had talked beforehand, Costa thought. There could be no other explanation.
“Why did he go to these lengths?” Falcone demanded. “Why skin a man? Why go through this routine of putting his own wife on a chair as if he wanted the Farnese woman to find her alive? And this stuff he wrote on the wall…”
“He was insane,” Costa said firmly. “You’d have to be insane to kill someone like that.”
Falcone snorted. “Too easy. Besides, even if it’s true, do you think there’s no logic behind craziness? It all just spews out for no reason? This man was a university professor. He was intelligent, organized. He was convincing enough for the Englishman to come to him from the airport thinking he was meeting the woman. He managed to get his wife into that tower and string her up. Then he killed the boyfriend, skinned him, went off to the library… Or maybe he did her first, in which case how come the Englishman let himself be strung up after seeing her? Can one person handle all those things? I guess so. But how? In what order? You tell me that. And this Fairchild. He was a big man. He didn’t just hold up his hands and let Rinaldi tie him. What went on there?”
“I know that,” Rossi said. “I talked to Crazy Teresa in the path lab just now. They think there’re traces of some drug, some sedative maybe.”
“What sedative?” Falcone asked. “How’d a university professor come to be walking around with medication to hand just when he feels like skinning someone? If it comes to that, how the hell does a man like that know how to skin someone? And—this is the biggest one for me, the one I keep coming back to— why? Why like this?”
“Miss Farnese is a professor in that area,” Costa suggested. “The quotation on the walls is from some early Christian theologian. Maybe it sounded appropriate.”
“Appropriate?” Falcone repeated, as if it were the most stupid thing he’d ever heard in his life. “You mean he’s saying to her, ”We’re all martyrs to you, bitch. And here’s the proof‘? I don’t get it. What was he hoping to achieve? If he were going to kill her, it would make more sense. But you claim that’s not the case. He just wanted to get her to go, as quickly as possible, to the place he’d left his own wife, still alive. What’s the point?"
Costa looked at Rossi for help. His partner was still staring out of the window, working on the cigarette. It was another hot, cloudless day out there. Nic Costa wondered exactly what it was that Falcone expected of him.
“And you’re wrong,” Falcone continued. “I checked. Rinaldi worked in the same department as Farnese but he didn’t share the same specialty. His field was Roman law, the Curia, all that ancient stuff the Vatican still thinks we should be listening to today.”
“Is that relevant?” Rossi wondered.
“You tell me. I ran through the records. Four months ago Rinaldi was called as an expert witness for some government tribunal looking at the issue of diplomatic immunity for Vatican officials. They want more immunity. We want less. Rinaldi came up with an expert opinion that said they were right, in law, very old law anyway. Where the hell do martyrs come into that?”
“Are you saying, sir, that you think my conclusion’s wrong? That Rinaldi isn’t responsible somehow?”
“Hell no,” Falcone answered immediately. “It’s difficult to see how it could have happened any other way.”
“Well, then what? Isn’t it enough to know Rinaldi did these things? Sometimes we never know why. We just have to accept that.”
Falcone glowered at him. “Not yet we don’t. I’m an inquisitive bastard. It’s what makes me tick. It’s what makes every good cop tick. If you’re not, you never get to know a thing. I want you to answer some of these questions that keep bugging me. I don’t want detectives who think they’re elves in Santa’s workshop going out there, wrapping things up all nicely with all the right ribbons, all the right answers, dropping them on my desk, getting a pat on the head, then looking for some more toys to play with. This job isn’t like that.”
“I know,” Costa replied. “At least I never felt the pat on the head.” Rossi groaned, stabbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another.
Falcone was smiling again. He’d won a response and Costa cursed himself for being so stupid. “You kids,” the inspector laughed. “You’re so sensitive. Listen, Costa, I think you’ve got the right answers. I just don’t like the way you got there. Cutting too many corners. And one more thing,” Falcone added. “I’d like you to listen more. I know we’re into this youth culture thing that says everyone over the age of thirty is a moron…”
“I’m twenty-seven, sir.”
“Yeah, yeah. I wish you looked it sometimes. The point I want to make to you, Costa, is the only way any of us really learns is by watching our elders and betters. Forget all that crap in the police college. All we do for a living is deal with human beings. Human beings who, for the most part, are trying to lie to us, trying to screw us around. This is a people business. You should talk less and listen more, son.”
Costa grimaced. “Sir, I—”
“Shut up,” Falcone ordered. “And here’s another thing. That other stuff he wrote on the wall? St. Ives?”
“Crazy,” Rossi said, starting to become interested.
“Maybe,” Falcone agreed. “But I can tell you what it is. I got someone to look it up.” He stared at a laser printout on the desk and read the words. “As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, Every sack had seven cats, Every cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks and wives, How many were going to St. Ives?”
The two detectives stared at each other, dumbfounded. Costa grabbed the calculator on the desk and started punching. Falcone grinned. “It’s a r
iddle. What’s the answer?” Costa scribbled some figures on his notepad. “Seven wives. Fortynine sacks. Three hundred and forty-three cats. Two thousand four hundred and one kittens. That adds up to two thousand eight hundred.”
He thought of the tiny enclosed room in the tower and the stink of meat in it. “But what the hell does that mean?” The inspector scowled. “It means you don’t understand riddles. And you just wasted a lot of effort not answering the question you were asked. "I met a man with seven wives…" They were all going in the opposite direction. There was just one person going to St. Ives. The narrator. You were looking in the wrong place all along. The obvious isn’t always the right answer."
Nic Costa shook his head. “That’s the kind of game a lunatic would play.”
“And not finish the line?” Falcone asked. “Why would a dead man set an incomplete riddle? Can you tell me that?” There was no ready answer. “I want you to go round to Rinaldi’s home,” Falcone ordered. “We’ve been there already but maybe we missed something. Try to work out what kind of man he was, whether there’s anything to explain this. And try not to piss off Hanrahan again. He’s been on the phone twice to me already. You certainly made an impression there.”
Costa failed to understand the relevance. “Hanrahan? You know him?”
“Oh, we’re just the best of friends.”
Falcone was, Costa hoped, being sarcastic. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
“Now…”
He was out of his seat, standing in front of the window with his back to them, watching the traffic in the street, thinking, or so he wanted them to believe. Another Falcone ritual. The two detectives knew when their time was through.
Rossi led the way out of the room.
Six
The Rinaldis owned a large, restored apartment in a late nineteenth-century block on the Via Mecenate, a residential street by the park which led from the Via Merulana toward the Colosseum. The neighborhood was on the cusp of acceptability. It was only a few minutes’ walk to the smarter, older quarters of the Caelian Hill. Nero’s Golden House lay beneath the parched summer grass about a hundred yards from the entrance to the block.
The apartment was well decorated in a lean, modern style, generously proportioned and quiet, since it gave out onto the vast internal courtyard of the building, not the street in front. Still, Nic Costa was unable to dispel the idea that the Rinaldis were not exactly rolling in money. The Via Merulana was not a place to wander with pleasure at night. It was only a little distant from the squalor of Termini Station.
If he looked closely outside he would see the signs: needles in the gutter, used condoms in doorways. At night the park became a haunt for rent boys. A university professor would prefer to live somewhere else, Costa felt. It was one of those neighborhoods that was always up and coming but never quite got there.
The apartment had been thoroughly searched already. Costa and Rossi studied the preliminary report: a small amount of cannabis, no messages on the answering machine, no incriminating letters, nothing on the cheap desktop computer that sat in the tiny study next to the bedroom. He wondered how Falcone expected them to come up with something new.
Rossi found the Rinaldis’ bank statements tucked into a drawer of the computer desk. Costa’s suspicions were correct. Rinaldi and his wife maintained separate accounts and both were in the red, Stefano Rinaldi’s to the tune of a quarter of a million euros. There were threatening letters from the bank too. Unless the Rinaldis cleared some of their debt, even the modest apartment in the Via Mecenate was in jeopardy of disappearing from beneath them. Was this enough to turn someone like Stefano Rinaldi into a multiple killer? Falcone would never accept such a flimsy idea. Where was the evidence?
Costa made a note to re-interview the neighbors. The preliminary report came up with so little. All the usual comments they got in domestic incidents, stories that painted the victims as a quiet, solitary couple, with few friends. No one had ever seen Mary Rinaldi with a bruised face. No one had heard her complain about the behavior of her husband. They were, it seemed, a bland, childless pair struggling to make ends meet.
Falcone was right: There had to be more. The bank statements and the threats from the bank were symptoms, surely, of some larger malaise in the Rinaldis’ life.
Something else bothered him. Mary Rinaldi didn’t work, the report said. Rinaldi must have earned a decent package at the university. They should have been able to survive. Yet here they were with a sizeable debt outstanding on a mediocre home, fighting to keep their heads above water. Where was the money going? He went back to the bank statements and found the answer: cash. Stefano Rinaldi’s salary from the university amounted to almost six thousand euros a month after deductions. Even with a tidy mortgage, that should have been enough to live on.
The statements told a different story. Rinaldi immediately transferred a quarter into his wife’s bank account, standing payments accounted for a further half, and the rest disappeared in credit card bills and some huge cash withdrawals, sometimes as much as one thousand euros a week.
Nic Costa had been around long enough to understand there were only so many reasons why a man wanted ready money in his hand in this kind of quantity: women, booze and drugs being the main ones. Maybe Sara Farnese had been expensive to maintain, though somehow he doubted that. The woman seemed too independent to rely on someone like Rinaldi for money. Maybe there was someone else now in her place. But if that was the case, why was Rinaldi so furious with Sara that he wanted to kill her current boyfriend? There was always a simpler answer.
While Rossi ran through the answering machine Costa went into the bathroom which was small, covered in mirrors and had just a toilet, a washbasin with a plain cabinet above it and a shower in the corner. He opened the cabinet door and looked inside: a woman’s razor, some headache pills, a packet of laxatives, and two neat rows of white plastic tablet containers from a health store. He read the names: evening primrose oil and ginseng, gingko biloba and selenium. There were eight different preparations in all. One or both of the Rinaldis must have rattled like a pillbox when they went out of the apartment in the morning. Costa picked up the biggest container, the one with evening primrose oil inside, opened it and looked at the round, shiny yellow capsules.
There were only about ten left and they sat on a wad of cotton wool. Gelatin health pills nestled on a soft white bed of fluffiness. He hated cotton wool. The feel of it gave him the same shivers some people get from running their nails up and down a blackboard. It seemed so pointless. They put cotton wool in pill containers only to stop things rattling around and breaking. A flexible gelatin capsule couldn’t break, not easily.
Costa turned the container upside down and emptied the visible contents into the sink. Then he righted it and gently pulled out the cotton wool from the base. Beneath it was a small transparent plastic bag containing white powder. Costa swore at the incompetence of the squad who had made the first search. He took out the bag, unwrapped it, tasted the coke, confirming what it was. The source of the Rinaldis’ cash problem was now apparent.
Perhaps dope would explain Stefano’s excitable state. Except that the autopsy had so far failed to uncover any trace of drugs. Costa swore again. It had to be significant: It was the only thing he’d found so far that was. He returned to the living room and showed the dope to Rossi, who commented, “And these are supposed to be intelligent people? Why do they go around picking up gutter habits like that?”
“No family,” Costa said. It was astonishing how often that factor cropped up in his line of work. Except every dopehead had a kind of family: the person who fulfilled his or her needs. In the case of the middle classes that was usually fixed, regular, like a visit to the doctor.
Those steady withdrawals from the bank each week said as much. Somewhere in the city was the dealer who knew them, a person who, Costa understood, dealt only with professionals, never took risks, and was probably smart too, full of some quick philosophy to justify what he did.
The two of them spent an hour going through the address book in Mary Rinaldi’s bag, phoning every number there, talking to hairdressers and doctors, distant friends and a couple of travel agencies. Any of them could be a supplier but it didn’t feel right. Then they did the same with the names on Rinaldi’s computer, printed off every one, forty in all, mainly academic contacts. The narcotics people could run through the list later and see if any rang a bell.
Rinaldi used the computer a lot. It was full of essays and letters, many to the bank. Costa clicked on the e-mail program, expecting it to be protected by some kind of password. To his surprise it popped up and showed an inbox with three messages, each dated from two days before: one was junk mail, the other an invitation to an academic convention in Florida.
He opened the third and stared at it. The message said, simply, “Money no problem. Be there ten am.” For some reason, the sender’s name and e-mail address had been deleted. But there was a Rome phone number at the bottom of the screen. Rossi looked at him, staggered. “They missed this? Falcone is going to go crazy.”
Costa picked up the phone on the desk and dialed. A woman answered. She said, “Cardinal Denney’s office.”
“Sorry. Wrong number.”
Rossi’s long face wouldn’t leave him alone. “Well?”
“It was the office of someone called Cardinal Denney.”
The big man’s watery eyes grew wide. “Someone called Cardinal Denney?”
“The name means something?” Rossi was heading for the door. “I need a drink. Before one more damn thing. A drink. Now.”
Costa insisted: if they were going to a bar while on duty it would be somewhere he knew. Rossi now glowered at the modest wineglass which was half full of a liquid the color of straw. He sniffed, tasted it, grimaced, then crammed a piece of cheese on some bread and nibbled artlessly, spilling crumbs everywhere.
They sat on tiny stools around a low table in a wine bar Costa sometimes went to. It was near his tiny home in the Campo dei Fiori. The place was quite empty apart from the two cops and a woman who had stopped mopping the floor to serve them.
