The Overnight Kidnapper Read online

  “Tell me why you think so.”

  “One morning, when I was in his office, Signor Virduzzo got a phone call from a client. I think this person may have told him he ran into Silvana somewhere in Bonfiglio’s company, because Virduzzo got very upset and asked what restaurant he’d seen them in and on what day. He angrily repeated Bonfiglio’s name several times out loud. He’d turned pale as a corpse and ordered me to leave the room. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him lose his temper. I, naturally—”

  “Thank you, you’ve been very kind,” said Montalbano, suddenly standing up.

  Both Fazio and Rita Cutaja looked at him in bewilderment. But the inspector was already heading for the door.

  Back at the station, Augello was still waiting for them, even though it was already ten p.m.

  “Virduzzo called,” he said.

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to talk to you. He says he’s available and that you can call him at home at any hour of the day.”

  “How did he seem? Upset? Was he crying?”

  “No, he was neither upset nor crying, but his voice was cracking a little.”

  “Okay. See you here tomorrow morning at nine.”

  18

  Montalbano was left alone at the office. He needed to think things over a little, without anyone around.

  The question was the following: Should he act on what his instinct was telling him, or should he play entirely by the rules and keep Platania and Laspina the lawyer informed of his moves?

  And what if his hunch proved to be yet another in a long string of mistakes made since the start of the investigation?

  Would Platania overlook it as if it was nothing, or would he demand that he be replaced?

  Because there was no hiding the fact that he’d gotten the culprit wrong; he’d become fixated on Bonfiglio as the culprit and charged full speed ahead, dragging the prosecutor along with him. And now that he was going to have to backtrack and point the finger at someone else, he could only imagine how much evidence and reconfirmation of the evidence Platania would demand before making any moves.

  But the hunch was the only thing which, if confirmed, would lead straight to the killer.

  And this raised the classic question: Was the game—which wasn’t a game at all—worth the candle?

  The answer came without hesitation.

  Yes, it was.

  He got up. The officer at the switchboard wished him a good night, and the inspector went out, got in his car, and drove off.

  Fifteen minutes later he was pulling up outside the Bonfiglio’s building.

  He got out of the car. The main door was closed and locked. He looked at his watch: ten-forty.

  Too late, perhaps, to call on anyone unannounced.

  But since he was already there . . .

  He pressed the buzzer. There was no answer. It was unlikely Bonfiglio was out. More likely he still had a fever and had gone to bed. Montalbano pressed the buzzer again, and held it down a long time.

  Finally Bonfiglio’s voice rang out in a tone somewhere between surprised and irritated:

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Montalbano.”

  He imagined the man’s shock, confusion, bewilderment, even fear. Bonfiglio quite likely imagined the inspector had come to arrest him.

  “What . . . what do you want?”

  “Could I please come up?”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want to talk to you in person, man to man, and above all without witnesses.”

  Bonfiglio made one last attempt to resist.

  “I was just going to bed. I’m still sick and—”

  “Signor Bonfiglio, I beg you. I know it’s inconvenient, but I’ll only take five minutes of your time.”

  Montalbano heard the click of the door latch unlocking. He pushed the door open and went in.

  Stopping in front of the row of mailboxes, he opened Bonfiglio’s, found an electric bill inside, put it back, and went upstairs.

  Bonfiglio was waiting for him outside the open door to his apartment. He shook his hand and showed him into the living room. Montalbano noticed that Bonfiglio’s face was even sallower than before, and that he had big bags under his eyes.

  In fact he now looked older than his age. Was it possible he had more white hair on his head than that same morning? He sat down opposite the inspector and looked at him questioningly, without opening his mouth.

  “Thank you for letting me in. As I said, and am keen to repeat, I’m here in my role as a police inspector, but not—”

  “—not in an official capacity. I got that.”

  “I also wanted to tell you that I made a mistake.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I thought you were guilty.”

  “And now you don’t anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Did something happen to make you change your mind?”

  “Nothing new.”

  “So what was it?”

  “I remembered something you said.”

  “Everything I’ve said is true.”

  “You’re right. Even when you said you were sorry to wish all those terrible things on Silvana, you were speaking the truth.”

  “But if you think I—”

  “The problem is that there’s true and true,” Montalbano said, interrupting him. “The truth of your regret for wishing terrible things on her served its purpose, which was to hide the truth of your regret for the terrible things actually done.”

  “But you just finished saying you consider me innocent!”

  “That’s not quite right. I never said you were innocent, I said I didn’t think you were guilty, of double murder.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “There’s a huge difference. As you know perfectly well.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Perhaps you don’t realize how serious the legal consequences of your position may be.”

  “Legal consequences?!”

  “Yes. And don’t try to bluff me. This is hardly a poker game. There’s no way out of this for you: You’ll be charged with either incitement to murder or aiding and abetting. The second is less serious than the first. And I bet you haven’t even talked about it with your lawyer.”

  “Talked about what?! What should I have told him?”

  “Still at it? You’re disappointing me. I’m sorry, but I thought you would be a little quicker to realize that I was trying to get you out of this. But since you have no intention of cooperating, I guess I’ll just have to ask Prosecutor Platania for authorization to request your telephone records.”

  This time it was Montalbano who was bluffing. It was anybody’s guess whether it would even be possible to get his phone records, but Bonfiglio swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  “All right,” he said.

  “You called Virduzzo?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “The same day I found out Silvana was with Marcello in Lanzarote.”

  “What was the date?”

  “The twentieth or twenty-first of August, I don’t remember.”

  “Did you call from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him it was you calling?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  Bonfiglio shook his head.

  “Bah . . . At this point in time I couldn’t even say why.”

  “Go ahead and try.”

  “Maybe because I was furious for having been deceived. Maybe I just wanted to vent my anger and scream; maybe I wanted Virduzzo to know the truth and punish Silvana however he could, may
be by firing her or making life difficult for her . . .”

  “How did Virduzzo react?”

  “He didn’t. He said nothing. He just sat there and listened, so that at one point I thought we had been cut off and started yelling, ‘Hello! Hello!’ but he just said, ‘I’m still here.’”

  “Who hung up first?”

  “He did. At a certain point he interrupted me and said icily, ‘Thank you for this information,’ and then hung up.”

  Bonfiglio ran his hands over his face, took a deep breath, and looked the inspector in the eye.

  “You must believe me,” he said, “when I say that at no time did I ever think that my phone call could . . . I haven’t been able to sleep for many nights . . .”

  “I do believe you.”

  “There’s something else I wanted to tell you. If I failed to mention that phone call during the interrogation, it was not because I was afraid of being charged with incitement to murder, as you assumed, but because I thought I wouldn’t be believed, especially by you, who seemed so convinced of my guilt. Between me saying I’d called Virduzzo and Virduzzo denying he received any phone calls, you would have believed Virduzzo. And if I’d started yelling that Virduzzo had put the letter under the bed to set me up, you wouldn’t have believed that, either. You’d already condemned me. You’d stopped being a policeman and made yourself judge. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” the inspector admitted wearily.

  * * *

  Since he’d already come this far, he thought while pulling up at home, he might as well go all the way. Going all the way meant sitting out on the veranda, duly equipped with whisky and cigarettes, and brainstorming, on an empty stomach, about what moves to make next. He had no evidence against Virduzzo, and it was going to be next to impossible to find any.

  The only solution was to trick him into making a false move. To flush him out into the open.

  But how?

  He thought about this very hard for half an hour, without coming up with an answer.

  A dark mood descended on him. The only thing to do was to go to bed, in the hope that he would have a clear head the following morning and manage to come up with a solution.

  But in fact it was as he was brushing his teeth and looking at himself in the mirror that the thing to do appeared before his eyes in the glass, as sharp and clear as if it had been written on a blackboard.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock the following morning, after getting dressed to the nines and drinking two big mugs of coffee, he dialed the phone number for Virduzzo’s home.

  An elderly woman answered the phone.

  “This is Inspector Montalbano, police. I would like to speak with Signor Virduzzo.”

  “I’ll go and get him.”

  “Good morning, Inspector. You beat me to it. I was waiting till nine o’clock to call you at your office. To tell you the truth, I was expecting you to inform me that my Silvana had been found.”

  Montalbano felt bewildered. The last thing he expected was to hear Virduzzo speaking in a steady, confident voice, with no trace of sorrow, whether genuine or fake. He immediately decided to follow him down the same path.

  “If you want to hear me speak, then I’ll be waiting for you at ten-thirty.”

  “That’s fine with me. You’ll have to tell me how I should proceed.”

  “In regard to what?”

  “In regard to formally accusing Giorgio Bonfiglio with double murder. Anyway, I’m told in town that he’s already been issued a notice of investigation.”

  Well, well. So the bastard was trying to pull a fast one by turning the tables!

  “Have you got any proof?”

  “Proof, no. But he gave himself away.”

  “How?”

  “You certainly must know that my Silvana left this Bonfiglio because she fell in love with a guy named Di Carlo.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Do you also know that Silvana and Di Carlo spent the month of August together in Lanzarote?”

  “Yes, I know that, too.”

  “But what you don’t know is that Bonfiglio called me up in a rage to tell me that Silvana and Di Carlo were spending their vacation together. He was foaming at the mouth, insanely jealous, and said that he would kill them both with his bare hands.”

  “I’m sorry, but why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

  “But, Inspector! Have you forgotten how many of our appointments were postponed? That was exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, and maybe, if I’d been able to, my Silvana would still be alive!”

  “All right, I’ll be waiting for you,” said the inspector, cutting the conversation short.

  * * *

  As soon as he got to the office, Montalbano summoned Augello and Fazio to bring them up to speed on the situation.

  “With this move,” he concluded, “Virduzzo is trying to throw the murder charge onto Bonfiglio’s shoulders. It’s an intelligent plan, conceived immediately after getting Bonfiglio’s phone call, worked out down to the finest details, and applied with extreme cold-bloodedness. Just think, he kidnaps two young women to throw us off the scent, even before he’s killed Silvana and Di Carlo. But since news of the kidnappings does not reach the public, once he’s killed the two lovers, he carries out a third kidnapping, and this time the word gets out and makes some noise. And just to give you some idea of this killer’s cold lucidity, don’t forget that he calls me up to cancel an appointment at the very moment he has an abducted, unconscious Luigia Jacono on his hands. All the while he’s waiting for Bonfiglio to come back from Palermo, verifies his whereabouts with a phone call, goes into his building, and takes a letter addressed to him. Then he kills the two lovers, after which he sets fire to Di Carlo’s store and sets the stage to make it look like Di Carlo has gone missing. And he does all this even while remaining in contact with me, claiming he wants to talk to me. If he’d succeeded in doing so, he would have told me how worried he was that he hadn’t seen Silvana for some time and that he was afraid Bonfiglio might have harmed her in some way. And now he comes out with this charge against Bonfiglio.”

  “Maybe it’s time to inform Prosecutor Platania of all this,” said Fazio.

  “I have another idea,” said Montalbano. “We have one hour before Virduzzo shows up here. Fazio, I need a uniform from one of those private nighttime security agencies for one of our policemen to put on. Now, let me explain how this is supposed to play out.”

  * * *

  Montalbano did not remember Virduzzo having looked the way he did that day.

  Not that his physical appearance had changed that much. The wrinkles on his face were deeper, perhaps, but there was something quite different in his attitude. If, on the first occasion, his manner of speaking and moving seemed to belong to someone unsure of himself and insecure, now everything about him seemed to express self-assurance and decisiveness. He was dressed entirely in black, as used to be the custom in times of deep mourning.

  Fazio was present for the encounter. Virduzzo shook both their hands and sat down opposite the inspector.

  “My most heartfelt condolences,” said Montalbano.

  “Thank you. I would have expected you to phone me before talking on television.”

  “You’re right, but there was no time. After our phone call of last night, are you still of a mind to accuse Giorgio Bonfiglio of the murder of your . . . your . . . What should I call her?”

  Virduzzo’s mouth twisted into a painful grimace.

  “My daughter. I had adopted her, for all intents and purposes.”

  “. . . For the murder of your daughter Silvana and her boyfriend?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind. On the contrary.”

  “How did you hear the news that the body had been found?”

  “My housekeeper told me
, after she’d heard it on television. I was already in bed. I’ve been rather unwell these days.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you can’t understand. What really drives me crazy is that if I’d been able to convey to you, Inspector, my fears that Bonfiglio might react in a murderous fashion, we would certainly have averted this horror.”

  “Yes, it’s quite unfortunate . . . Did your housekeeper tell you where we found her?”

  “Yes. That rascal threw her into the dump like some—”

  “Had Silvana informed you of her engagement with Di Carlo?”

  “Of course. Even if that wasn’t exactly how it went.”

  “Oh? And so how did it go?”

  “Well, last April, I think it was, I happened by chance to learn about my daughter’s relationship with Bonfiglio. Who I knew was a womanizer and, more importantly, almost as old as me. I made it clear to Silvana that I strongly disapproved. We had a rather heated argument. Then, in late May or early June, she told me out of the blue that she had broken up with Bonfiglio and felt like she needed a long rest. I was so happy to hear of these new developments that I offered her a two-month vacation at my expense. And so she left for Tenerife on the first of July. On the second of August she called me to tell me she was in Lanzarote and had met by chance a young man from Vigàta, of all places, whom I was sure to like. She told me his name and added that he owned an electronics store . . . For the first time in her life, she seemed truly happy to me.”

  “Were you able to meet with Silvana after she got back?”

  “No, because she phoned me the very evening she got back—I think it was August the thirty-first—to tell me she wouldn’t be coming into the office because she wanted to spend a few more days away from Vigàta with her boyfriend.”

  “Did your housekeeper tell you that a night watchman whose job is to surveil the dump to prevent any illegal dumping of toxic wastes saw the killer’s face as he was getting rid of Silvana’s body?”

  For a few seconds Virduzzo visibly held his breath and hesitated before answering.