IM11 The Wings of the Sphinx (2009) Page 5
He handed the piece of paper to Galluzzo.
“See if you can figure these numbers out. Call the man first, and the woman after.”
While he was waiting, he decided to give Pasquano a ring.
It was barely ten o’clock, but the doctor normally began performing his autopsies around five in the morning.
“Montalbano here. The doctor in?”
“As far as that goes, yes, he’s in.”
It wasn’t an encouraging answer.
“Could you have him come to the phone a minute?”
“You must be kidding.”
“This is Inspector Montalbano. Please call him for me.”
“Inspector, I recognized your voice right away, but to be honest with you, I’m just not up to it. The doctor’s in a really nasty mood today, believe me.”
“Do you know if he’s done the autopsy on the girl we found yesterday?”
“Yes, he has.”
“All right, then, thanks.”
The only solution was to go in person, at the risk of being buried in obscenities by Pasquano and having to dodge a flying scalpel or a few dead body parts.
The telephone rang.
“Inspector, I’ve got Signor Graceffa on the line. That’s his real name, not the way Catarella wrote it. I’ll put him through.”
“Mr. Graceffa? This is Inspector Montalbano. Did you ask for me this morning?”
“Yes. Last night I phoned the Free Channel and Mr. Zito told me to call you.”
“Thanks for calling. What do you have to tell me?”
Silence.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
Matre santa, what had happened? Had the line gone dead? For some mysterious reason, whenever the line went dead as Montalbano was talking, he broke out into a cold sweat and felt like a little boy who had suddenly been orphaned.
“Hello? Hello?” the inspector started yelling.
“I’m here.”
“So why don’t you speak?”
“Iss a delicate matter.”
“Would you rather not discuss it over the phone?”
“No, because any minute now, my niece Concetta’s gonna come back from doing the shopping.”
“I see. Could you come here?”
“Not before noon.”
“All right, I’ll be waiting for you.”
“May I?” asked Augello from the doorway.
“Come in and sit down, Mimì. Did Salvo let you sleep last night?”
“Luckily, yes. But I came in late because Beba had to go to the doctor’s, and so I had look after the kid.”
“What’s wrong with Beba?”
“Woman stuff. Any news?”
“Nothing substantial. But soon there may be a bit of news, though it concerns a different case.”
“Which one?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
He didn’t want to set off the bomb about the sighting of Picarella until Catarella brought back the photo and Fazio was also there.
“Did you see that I asked Zito on the Free Channel to—”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“After the broadcast, a certain Mr. Graceffa called and said he’s coming by in the early afternoon. Some lady also called—”
The phone rang.
“Chief, there’s a lady named Annunziata, not Appuntata.”
“Put her on.”
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough, Inspector. She’s here in person.”
“Then show her into Inspector Augello’s office.”
Mimì gave him a questioning look.
“You listen to what she has to say, Mimì. She saw the broadcast and maybe can help us identify the girl.”
“And where are you going?”
“I’m going to see Pasquano.”
“Look, I’m warning you, this morning my cojones are smoking,” was the doctor’s courteous admonition the moment he saw the inspector.
Montalbano was not impressed and answered in kind. Pasquano became tractable only when one stood up to him.
“And you know what mine are like today? A steam engine.”
“What the heck do you want?”
He had said “heck.” Not “fuck,” not “hell.” Which meant he was really enraged.
“What’s wrong, Doctor?”
“What’s wrong is that last night, at the club, I had a straight flush.”
“That’s good, no?”
“No, because some son of a bitch also had a straight flush. Royal. You understand?”
“Perfectly, Doctor. Did you raise him?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t gamble. You’ll see, tonight you’ll get another chance.”
“Did you come here to console me?”
“I came to—”
“—to talk about the lives of Phoenicopteri?”
“No, if anything, about Lepidoptera.”
“You mean the girl with the butterfly?”
“I do. And it’s a moth.”
“Look, she was definitely under thirty. About twenty-five, I’d say. She was killed by a single gunshot to the face, fired from about ten yards away.”
“So the killer was a good shot?”
“Either a good shot or lucky.”
“The science lab says it was a large-caliber weapon.”
“You don’t need all their science to know that. You only need to take a look at the damage it did. To give you an example, after grazing the left jawbone the bullet blew away half of her upper teeth, which were missing from the body.”
“When was she killed?”
“The murder definitely took place during the night between Saturday and Sunday. Then, the following night, the killer got rid of the body by throwing it into the dump.”
“But why would he hang on to it for all of Sunday?”
“That’s not my concern. It’s yours.”
“Listen, Doctor, were you able to tell if she’d had sexual relations before being killed?”
“If she had, I would have told you already. And I especially would have told Prosecutor Tommaseo, which would have made him very happy.”
“Was she a prostitute?”
“I would also rule that out.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“What, in your opinion, was she doing at the moment she was shot?”
“Go ask the lady with the crystal ball.”
“Let me rephrase that. Was she standing? Lying down? Sitting?”
“Definitely standing. And the person who shot her was behind her.”
“Behind? Didn’t he shoot her in the face?”
“In my opinion the girl turned around to look behind her at the very moment the killer pulled the trigger. Maybe the killer called to her, she turned around, and he shot her.”
Montalbano thought about this for a moment.
“Hurry up with your excogitations,” said the doctor. “I haven’t got all this time to waste.”
“Could the girl have been trying to escape?”
“Very likely, yes.”
“Perhaps from an attempted rape?”
“For that hypothesis you’ll have to check with Prosecutor Tommaseo.”
Pasquano was really surly today.
“Where there any signs of rings on the fingers?”
“She wore one on her left pinkie, not the ring finger. Therefore she wasn’t married. Or perhaps married according to another rite. Or maybe she was married and simply didn’t wear a wedding ring.”
“Any piercing?”
“None.”
“What about the bites on her thigh?”
“Ah, those? Rats as big as puppy dogs.”
“Is that all you can tell me, Doctor?”
“No.”
“Look, Doctor, I haven’t got time to waste, either.”
“I found two things.”
“Do you plan to tell me in monthly installments?”
“I found two little pieces of blac
k wool inside her head.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means? That those pieces of wool were congenital?”
“Maybe it means the bullet passed through something woolen before entering her flesh?”
“You can drop the ‘maybe.’”
“She might have been wearing a turtleneck sweater.”
“Here you can put back the ‘maybe.’”
“And the second thing?”
“The second thing is that I found a little bit of purpurin under the fingernails of both hands.”
“Purpurin?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t repeat what I say, because it makes my balls spin even worse. You heard right: purpurin. Don’t you know what purpurin is?”
“Isn’t it a powder used in gilding?”
“Very good. You’ve passed the test with flying colors. Now get the hell out of here.”
“One last question. Did she have any illnesses?”
“She’d been operated for appendicitis.”
“No, I wanted to know if she had any illness for which she had to take medication.”
“I get it. You’re hoping you can identify her by going ’round to all the pharmacies in Vigàta and Montelusa. Sorry to disappoint you. The girl was in good health. And then some.”
“What do you mean?”
“She had the body of an athlete.”
“Or dancer?”
“Why not? And now, how do I have to tell you to get the fuck out of here?”
“Thank you for your exquisite courtesy, Doctor. I hope you get a royal full house tonight.”
“Against four aces? You really are a bastard.”
5
As he headed back down to Vigàta, it occurred to him that a bullet entering above the jawbone could not have passed through a turtleneck sweater. The trajectory would not allow it. It would be as if the bullet, after grazing the upper part of the collar, had suddenly climbed up a little ladder.
On the other hand, the girl might indeed have been wearing a black scarf wrapped up high, almost far enough to cover her mouth, as one does on certain particularly cold days. In that case, a few threads of wool could have been carried into the wound.
But this hypothesis didn’t hold water, either, since the weather decidedly was not the kind in which one wore wool scarves. Not in Vigàta and environs, at least. Perhaps the girl had put on a scarf for a special occasion. And on what sort of special occasions does one wear a wool scarf? He couldn’t think of any.
And then: Where can one dirty one’s hands with purpurin?
And why was the purpurin under the girl’s fingernails and not on her fingertips, as would have been more logical?
Before he entered Vigàta, the deluge the fisherman had forecast the previous day came pouring down.
He got drenched just walking from the parking lot to the main entrance of the police station.
“Mr. Beniamino Graceffa is here,” Galluzzo informed the inspector as he was shaking the water off of his suit.
“Give me a minute to dry my hair, and then send him in.”
In his office he opened up a file cabinet in which he kept a towel. He rubbed his head with this, then combed his hair. The water that had entered between his shirt and his skin bothered him, however. So he took off his shirt and dried his back, but the moment he put the wet shirt back on, it bothered him even more.
He started cursing the saints. He took his shirt off again and started waving it in the air. At that moment Mimì Augello walked in.
“You practicing for the bullfights?”
“Leave me alone. What did Signora Annunziata say?”
“A load of crap.”
“Meaning?”
“She’s afraid they’re gonna kill her daughter Michela, too, who’s eighteen. She showed me a photograph of her, a real jewel, Salvo.”
“Why’s she afraid her daughter will be killed?”
“Because Michela’s also got a tattoo of a butterfly.”
“The same one as the murdered girl?”
“No. She described it to me, and it’s not the same at all. And hers is tattooed on her left tit.”
“So what did you say to her?”
“First, that if the killers murdered all the girls with butterfly tattoos, it would be a catacomb, as Catarella would say. And, second, to bring her daughter here, so I can carefully examine her tattoo.”
“Have you gone insane?”
“I was just kidding, Salvo! You know something? You used to have a sense of humor.”
“Well, with you, the minute there’s a woman involved, one never knows if you’re kidding or not.”
“You know what I say? It’s better if I leave. Bye, see you after lunch.”
In the doorway appeared a short, rotund man of about seventy with a face so red it looked like a ripe tomato, and beady eyes buried in all the fat.
“May I come in?”
“Please do.”
The man entered, and Montalbano gestured to him to sit down.
“Beniamino Graceffa’s the name.”
He sat down on the edge of a chair.
“I’m retired,” he declared right off the bat, without the inspector having yet asked him anything.
“I’m seventy-two,” he added, after a pause.
He sighed.
“And I’ve been a widower for ten years.”
Montalbano let him talk.
“I got no children.”
The inspector cast him a glance of encouragement.
“I’m looked after by Concetta, one of my sister Carmela’s daughters.”
Pause.
“Last night I was watching television.”
Long pause. Montalbano figured it was perhaps his turn now.
“Did you recognize the tattoo?”
“Exactly the same.”
“Where did you see it?”
Beniamino Graceffa’s beady eyes sparkled. He licked his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“Where do you think I saw it, Inspector?” He gave a little smile and continued. “Behind a girl’s shoulder.”
“Was it in the same place? Near the left shoulder blade?”
“In the exact same place.”
“And where was the girl when you saw the tattoo?”
“Iss a delicate matter.”
“You’ve already said that, Mr. Graceffa.”
“Lemme explain. About five months ago, my niece Concetta told me she couldn’t come help me anymore for a while, seeing as how she had to go to Catania for a temporary job.”
“And so?”
“And so my sister Carmela, who’s afraid to leave me by myself, seeing as how I’ve had two heart attacks, found me a girl, a . . . how do you call ’em these days?”
“Home care assistant.”
“Right. Actually my sister would have preferred an elderly person, but she didn’t find any. And so she brought this Russian girl named Katya to my house.”
“Very young?”
“Twenty-three years old.”
“Pretty?”
Beniamino Graceffa brought the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger of his right hand to his lips and made the sound of a kiss. That said it all.
“Did she sleep at your place?”
“Of course.” He stopped and looked around himself.
“Don’t worry, there’s just me and you here.”
Graceffa leaned forward, towards the inspector.
“I’m still a man, you know.”
“My compliments. Are you trying to tell me that you had relations with this girl?”
Graceffa made a disconsolate face.
“No way, Inspector! It wasn’t possible!”
“Why not?”
“Inspector, one night when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went into her room. But there was nothing doing. I couldn’t convince her, not even when I told her I was willing to spend a lot of money.”
“What did you do then?”
“Inspector, I’m an old-fashioned gentleman, you know! What was I supposed to do? I let it drop.”
“So how were you able to see the tattoo?”
“Inspector, can we talk man to man?”
“Of course.”
“I saw that butterfly three or four times when the girl was taking a bath.”
“Let me get this straight: You were with the girl when she was taking a bath?”
“No, Inspector, sir. She was alone in the bathroom, and I was outside.”
“So how did you . . .”
“I was spying on her.”
“From where?”
“Through the hole.”
“The keyhole?”
“No, sir, you couldn’t see anything through the keyhole, ’cause usually the key was in it and blocked the view.”
“And so?”
“One day, when Katya went out shopping, I took my drill and enlarged a hole that was already there in the door.”
Truly an old-fashioned gentleman.
“And the girl didn’t notice?”
“It’s a very old door.”
“And was this girl blond or brunette?”
“Hair was black as ink.”
“Well, the girl who was killed was blond.”
“So much the better. I’m glad it wasn’t her. Because a man can grow fond of a girl like that.”
“How long was she at your place?”
“One month and twenty-four and a half days.”
Surely he’d been counting, down to the minutes.
“Why did she leave?”
Graceffa sighed.
“My niece Concetta came back.”
“Do you know how long the girl had been in Italy?”
“More than a year.”
“What did she do before working for you?”
“She was a dancer in nightclubs in Salerno and Grosseto.”
“Where was she from?”
“You mean the name of the town in Russia? She told me once, but I forget. If it comes back to me, I’ll give you a call.”
“But didn’t she earn more working as a dancer in nightclubs?”
“She told me she earned a pittance as a home assistant.”
“She never told you why she stopped working as a dancer?”
“She told me once that it wasn’t her own choice, and that it was better for her to stay away for a while.”