“What did we learn from the fingerprints?” asked D’Orso.
“Other than the girl’s, there are a few from Signora Rosa. She must have left them when she went to see what happened. Then there are another three kinds, all of them probably male. Some are clear. But the ones on the little bronze statue are smudged and useless.”
“What about the information I asked for?” He eyed the file that Sorrento held under his arm.
The officer held it out. “We didn’t manage to find much. We still don’t know where the victim worked. According to what she told Signora Rosa she worked in cinema, but the term is vague and it’s a wide field. Nobody knows her at Cinecittà and we didn’t find a single receipt or bank statement in the house, nothing. We’ll keep looking...”
“Signora Rosa also mentioned a producer, her lover, who was always at the girl’s apartment.”
“The guy with the leather jacket, the black BMW, and a suspicious attitude,” recapitulated Sorrento. “We don’t have anything on him either. We’re looking into the Department of Motor Vehicles records, who knows...”
“We’ve got to find him,” D’Orso affirmed. “His description set off an alarm in my head. I’ve been thinking about it all day. He reminds me of someone I dealt with some time ago. A real delinquent, dangerous, who managed to get off scot-free because he could pay the best lawyers, the ones who know all the loopholes. He should be in jail for corruption and exploitation of minors, at the very least. But who knows where he is... His name was Aldolfo Cini.”
“Adolfo Cini... I’ll check his fingerprints in the database. It won’t take long.”
“Anything else?” asked D’Orso, mindlessly sifting through the contents of the file.
“Yes, sir. Raffaele Conte, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, the one you wanted to interrogate, is waiting outside.”
“Great.” D’Orso closed the file and looked up at Sorrento. “What kind of kid is he?”
He trusted Sorrento’s judgment: Years of experience had sharpened the older man’s profound intuition. He was rarely wrong.
“He’s a good kid,” the officer immediately responded. “He comes from Magliano and works at the night desk at the university. He studies medicine. In my opinion the worst thing he could do would be parking in a no-parking zone, but even that’s not likely, since he doesn’t have a car.”
“Let him in, then.”
Yes, Raffaele Conte had just the air of a good kid. You didn’t need Sorrento’s intuition to see it; a quick glance was enough. He wore jeans, a shirt, and moccasins. He had hesitated while coming into the commissioner’s office but with reverence. Now he was sitting in front of him and looking straight at him with dark eyes still red from crying.
“You were Melina Sardi’s boyfriend, right?” said the commissioner.
“Ex-boyfriend: Melina left me.”
He pronounced the words with a suffering he didn’t try to hide at all and that couldn’t go unnoticed. D’Orso looked upon him with interest. He couldn’t decide yet whether Raffaele Conte suffered because the girl was dead, because she had rejected him... or for some other reason. He settled back into his uncomfortable chair. It was worth it to try to find out.
“Can I ask you why she didn’t want to be with you anymore?” he said kindly.
The kid shrugged. It wasn’t an indifferent gesture, but a defensive one. “You’ve certainly seen the album Melina kept on her coffee table. Do you remember the first picture?”
The commissioner nodded. It was a full-page photo of the girl wearing a bikini and a sash with Miss Something-or-other written on it.
“Ever since that damned day, Melina wasn’t the same. She got it into her head to do films, and the worst part is that she found someone who thought it was a good idea too. She did a couple of little parts... then nothing. So she got more and more frustrated and left our town — we’re from Magliano Sabina — to move here to Rome. And she left me too.”
“Why?”
“She said she had to be free, she had to think about her career, about making it big. She was obsessed.”
“And what did she do in the meantime? For a living, I mean.”
“She worked at wardrobe at Cinecittà, but she made me swear not to tell anyone back home. She was ashamed.”
Tommaso D’Orso wrinkled his eyebrows. Officer Sorrento had told him that nobody at Cinecittà knew her, that she wasn’t on any of the books. But then... how did Melina Sardi make a living?
“Did she see other men?”
Raffaele Conte suddenly sat upright as if someone had whipped him and swallowed hard. The commissioner kept looking at him with an impassable air. Asking that kind of question was his duty, even if sometimes, as in this case, he didn’t like his job at all.
“Yes,” the kid finally answered. “One in particular, a producer, but she never told me his name.”
“A tough guy always dressed in a leather jacket that drives around in a black BMW?”
The boy nodded silently. Tommaso D’Orso took a deep breath. He had to ask him one last question. No, his job wasn’t much fun...
“When did you last see her?”
“Late last night,” the kid answered, shifting around uncomfortably in his chair. “I wanted to go up and talk, to convince her to come back to me. She didn’t even open the door. She came to the window and shouted at me to go away.”
“What time was it?”
“Almost midnight.”
Commissioner D’Orso read the short medical report again. “Time of death estimated around midnight, due to cranial damage and loss of cerebral matter. The body shows contusions and bruising around the arms and face, presumably due to violent blows. Traces of the same matter found on a small bronze statue located near the victim and the shape of the wounds would suggest it was used as the murder weapon.”
He folded the paper and put it back into the file. The report didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.
He sighed and called out for Officer Sorrento.
“Sir?” he answered, materializing at the threshold of the office door and looking at him complacently. He had gone to pull Adolfo Cini’s records and perfectly understood the commissioner’s mood. Adolfo Cini had a file up to here. He exploited, bribed, corrupted minors, dealt drugs, and now he might even be a killer. And he had never done a day in prison.
“The fingerprints match, I just got the results back and was coming to give them to you, but there is no trace of him. It’s like he’s disappeared into thin air. Maybe he’s going under another name.”
“I think so too,” said D’Orso as he ran his fingers through his hair.
“And we still don’t even know what the girl did for a living. She might have been in the oldest profession in the—”
“Come in!” the commissioner nearly yelled. He though he had heard someone knock.
Signora Rosa Belli timorously appeared in the doorway. “May I come in?” she asked in a whisper.
The commissioner welcomed her warmly and pulled up a chair. If she had come all the way here she must have something to say. Any new clue would be welcome.
“Did you remember the name of the guy with the BMW?” he asked her right away, but without any real hope.
“No...” she answered. “I wanted to tell you something else.”
D’Orso encouraged her with a smile. “Go ahead.”
Signora Rosa blushed, wiggled in her chair, and furtively looked over to Officer Sorrento. He and D’Orso exchanged a knowing glance.
“I’ll go look for that file,” Sorrento said, and disappeared. But his departure didn’t help Signora Rosa’s emotional state; she was blushing more and more and even began to sweat. The commissioner looked at her, deep in thought.