Ricciardi hadn’t blinked.
“That’s fine, Dottore. That’s how you want me to address you, isn’t it? You reject your name and title, but not the privileges that go with them. If you choose to threaten me like this, it must mean that you feel threatened. What is it that’s threatening you, in that case? Can your highly placed friends protect you from murder charges, too?”
Ettore laughed with gusto, his head thrown back, hands on his hips.
“You’re just fabulous, with your dunderheaded stubbornness. I didn’t kill that bitch. I already told you that. I should have, but not now; ten years ago, I should have killed her. It wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.”
“And yet, the spectacle you put on the day of the funeral had the air of a public statement of some kind. And you never miss an opportunity to vent all your hatred for her. Why would you do that, other than to point suspicion away from you? And this refusal to say where you were, the other night; is your secret so unspeakable that you’d prefer to risk standing trial for murder?”
Ettore was caught off guard. His expression shifted, from sunny to serious, almost grief-stricken. His mouth twitched, as if he were about to speak, once, then twice. Then he looked Ricciardi in the eye.
“A murder trial? Prison? Those are mere trifles. I’d rather die than tell you where I was. And not because I’m hiding something about myself, let me make that point very clearly. It’s that. . there are other people. I can’t, and I don’t want to make choices for these other people, that’s all. And so I won’t tell you where I was that night. Not now, not ever.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“I don’t think you understand. We don’t have any other suspects who admit so openly that they hated the duchess. Whoever might come under suspicion, whoever we might accuse of the murder, would be sure to defend themselves by pointing at you.”
Ettore shrugged.
“And I’ll defend myself too, using the weapons that I possess. You have no idea of who that woman was. You can really have no idea. It could have been anyone, starting from her chief lover, or any of the hundred other lovers that she certainly took. She must have driven the journalist crazy; she played with him the way a cat toys with a mouse. That’s what she did with the old man, until she finally destroyed him.”
“But you won’t tell me where you were, or what you were doing. You force me to investigate, you understand that. I’m not the kind of person you can throw a scare into. Nothing can scare me.”
Ettore seemed baffled.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go ahead and investigate, if you think you must. For my part, I can only defend. . the choices of the people who were with me. My own choices-I have no need to defend them. And don’t worry: I won’t use my name and my title. Neither for good nor for evil.”
Maione didn’t ask Ricciardi where he’d gone, all alone. Very simply, he assumed that if the commissario had wanted to, he would have told him about it. He only hoped that the man wasn’t getting himself into trouble: they were dealing with dangerous people on this case. He felt as if he were walking across a minefield.
“Commissa’, we’re ready. How shall we travel, when we go to call on the Capeces, by car? The address is above the Parco Margherita, in the Rione Amedeo. It’s quite a distance, in this heat.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“No, grazie. I’d like to go on living for another three, maybe four years. I don’t drive, and if you drive the car we’ll be coming back pulled by the duchess’s eight horses. No, but I would like you to call the newspaper and alert Capece. It wouldn’t be right for us to show up at his apartment without letting him know. And if you ask me, it’s better for us to see him where he lives. We’ll be able to understand a little more about him.”
Maione, who considered himself to be a first-rate driver, looked hurt.
“Commissa’, you just don’t want to let go of this idea you have about the way I drive. Sure, we might have hit a lamppost once or twice, but that doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t know how to drive. All the same, if that’s how you want it, that’s how it will be. Shall I make the call?”
The brigadier knew that Ricciardi didn’t like to talk on the telephone. The commissario felt as if he wasn’t reading the other person’s thoughts if he couldn’t look them in the face; and it had always given him an unpleasant impression, that soulless, black, Bakelite contraption that talked.
“Yes, go ahead. And one more thing: go change your clothes. I don’t want to knock at the door of perfectly respectable people, who are no doubt already having a hard time keeping up appearances with their neighbors, in uniform as if we were there to arrest some perpetrator.”
Lucia looked out the window at her husband, as he walked down the vicolo toward Via Toledo, dressed in civilian clothing. She was worried: he’d come home at an unusual hour, in a bad mood, and then he’d gone to change, washing up hurriedly in the kitchen sink, practically without a word to her. And it was clearly Lucia he had it in for; in fact, he’d tenderly caressed the children when they ran to greet him.
She asked him why on earth he was home at this hour. He’d told her, without looking her in the eye, that he had to do some plainclothes work and he needed his dark brown suit: had it been pressed? Of course it had been pressed, she’d replied, stung by the insinuation. And you’ll find a clean shirt in the drawer, scented of lavender, fresh and sweet-smelling. As if I’d leave your things in a mess.
He hadn’t said a word; just went to get changed. He came out of the bedroom looking fancy, with a faraway look in his eye. She asked him if he wanted something to eat, seeing how it was past lunchtime, maybe a little of the fruit that she’d bought from Ciruzzo that very morning. He’d given her a cold hard stare and then, with a chilly, “No, grazie,” he’d said goodbye with a brusque peck on the cheek and headed back out.
Lucia was bewildered, lost. Raffaele changing his clothes in the middle of the day, Raffaele coming home to wash up, pat his face with cologne, and go back out in civilian attire, and especially Raffaele refusing an offer of food. She felt a stabbing pain behind her stomach and placed her hand on her abdomen: indigestion, she decided.
But she was wrong.
Ricciardi walked along next to a well-dressed, silent Maione. He’d even tried asking him whether something had happened to him, but the brigadier’s expression made it easy to guess that he was in no mood for conversation. Actually, everything was conspiring to spoil the large policeman’s mood: the heat, the stubborn insistence of his superior officer that they walk to where they were going, the dark brown jacket that he could barely button in spite of his nutritional sacrifices, and the picture, which he couldn’t get out of his mind, of his wife going to buy fruit from the cursed, albeit award-winning purveyors of fruits and vegetables, Ciruzzo Di Stasio and Sons. Homicidal impulses alternated with the certainty of an imminent fainting spell, due variously to the heat or the hunger, or a combination of the two. He felt something like a contraction behind his stomach and, as he walked, he raised his hand to his sternum. There, he thought, the onset of a myocardial infarction.
But he was wrong.
For his part, Ricciardi was thinking. Capece and his pistol on the one hand, Ettore and his stonewalling on the other. And the possibility of an armed burglary gone wrong, or of a third man who had not yet made his public entrance onto the stage of the duchess’s life: just who, for instance, had seen her home, that night? Witnesses had seen her leave the theater alone, but there was no reason not to think that she might have met someone afterwards: the dizzy chaos of the festa would have concealed unusual visitors from sight, in all likelihood.