The two sheets of sandpaper had turned into grind-stones.
“Elena killed him!”
Her chest had become a bellows. Then all at once the woman fell backwards, hitting her head against the armchair and rebounding forcefully before collapsing in a swoon.
Covered in sweat from the scene he’d just witnessed, Montalbano went out of the living room, saw a door ajar, realized it was the bathroom, went in, wet a towel, returned to the living room, knelt beside Michela, and began wiping her face with the towel. By now it had become a habit. Slowly the woman began to come to. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was cover herself with the dressing gown.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes. Forgive me.”
She had amazing powers of recovery. She stood up.
“I’m going to go have a drink of water.”
She returned and sat back down, calm and cool, as though she hadn’t just had an uncontrollable, frightful bout of rage verging on an epileptic fit.
“Did you know that Monday evening your brother and Elena were supposed to meet?”
“Yes, Angelo called to tell me.”
“Elena says that meeting never took place.” “What was her story?”
“She said she went out, but after she got in the car, she decided not to go to their rendezvous. She wanted to see if she could break off with your brother once and for all.”
“And you believe that?”
“She has an alibi, which I’ve checked out.”
It was another whopping lie, but he didn’t want her flying into a rage if some journalist happened to mention Elena’s name.
“Surely it’s false.”
“You mentioned that Angelo used to buy Elena expensive gifts.”
“It’s true. Do you think her husband, with the salary he has, can afford to buy her the kind of car she drives?”
“So if that’s the way it was, what motive would Elena have had for killing him?”
“Inspector, it was Angelo who wanted to end the relationship. He couldn’t take it any longer. She tormented him with her jealousy. Angelo told me she once wrote to him threatening to kill him.”
“She sent him a letter?”
“Two or three, as far as that goes.”
“Do you have these letters?”
“No.”
“We didn’t find any letters from Elena in your brother’s apartment.”
“Angelo must have thrown them away.”
“I think I’ve inconvenienced you too long,” said Montalbano, standing up.
Michela also stood up. She suddenly looked exhausted. Putting her hand over her forehead as if from extreme fatigue, she teetered slightly.
“One last thing,” said the inspector. “Did your brother like popular songs?”
“He listened to them now and then.”
“But there was no appliance for listening to music in his apartment.”
“He didn’t listen to music at home, in fact.” “Where did he, then?”
“In his car, during his business trips. It kept him company. He had many CDs.”
7
Michela said her brother’s garage was the first one on the left. It had two locks, one on the left and one on the right-hand side of the rolling metal door. It didn’t take the inspector long to find the correct key in the set he’d brought with him.
He opened the locks, then slipped a smaller key in another lock on the wall beside the rolling door, turned it, and the door began slowly to rise, too slowly for the inspector’s curiosity. When it had opened all the way, Montalbano went in and immediately found the light switch. The fluorescent light was bright, the garage spacious and in perfect order. Casting a quick glance around, the inspector ascertained that there was no strongbox in the garage and no place in which to hide one.
The car was a rather late-model Mercedes, one of those that are usually rented along with a driver. In the compartment in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats were some ten music CDs. In the glove compartment, the car’s documents and a number of road maps. Just to be sure, he also looked in the trunk, which was sparkling clean: spare tire, jack, red warning triangle.
A little disappointed, Montalbano repeated in reverse the whole complicated procedure he’d gone through to open the garage, then got back in his car and headed to Marinella.
It was nine-fifteen in the evening, but he didn’t feel hungry. He took off his clothes, slipped on a shirt and a pair of jeans, and, barefoot, went out to the veranda and onto the beach.
The moonlight was so faint that the lights inside his house shone as brightly as if each room were illuminated not by lamps but by movie floods. Reaching the water’s edge, he stood there a few minutes, with the sea splashing over his feet and the cool rising up through his body to his head.
Out on the horizon, the glow of a few scattered jack-lights. From far away, a plaintive female voice called twice:
“Stefanu! Stefanu!”
Lazily, a dog answered.
Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress,swiiissshhh,and carried away,glugluglug,Elena Sclafani and her beauty, while Michela Pardo’s tits, belly, arched body, and eyes likewise disappeared. Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should have remained was Inspector Montalbano—a kind of abstract function, the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved. But as he was telling himself this, he knew perfectly well that he could never pull it off.
Back in the house, he opened the refrigerator. Adelina must have come down with an acute form of vegetarianism. Caponata and a sublime pasticcio of artichokes and spinach.
He set the table on the veranda and wolfed down the caponata as the pasticcio was heating up. Then he reveled in the pasticcio. After clearing the table, he went and got Angelo’s wallet from the plastic bag. Turning it upside down and sticking his fingers inside the different compartments, he emptied it out. Identity card. Driver’s license. Taxpayer code number. Credit card from the Banca dell’Isola(Can’t you see you’re losing it? Why didn’t you look in the wallet straightaway? You would have spared yourself the embarrassment with Michela.)Two calling cards, one belonging to a Dr. Benedetto Mammuccari, a surgeon from Palma; the other to one Valentina Bonito, a midwife from Fanara. Three postage stamps, two for the standard rate and one for priority mail. A photo of Elena in a topless bathing suit. Two hundred fifty euros in bills of fifty. The receipt from a full tank of gasoline. Enough. Stop right there.
All obvious, all normal. Too obvious, too normal for a man who was found shot in the face with his willy hanging out, whatever the purpose he’d used it for. It was still hanging out, after all. Okay, getting caught with your dick exposed no longer shocked anyone nowadays, and there had even been an honorable member of Parliament, later to become a high charge of the state, who’d shown his to one and all in a photo printed in a number of glossy magazines. Okay. But it was the two things together—the whacking and the exposure—that made the case peculiar.
Or constituted the peculiarities of the case. Or, better yet, the whacking and the whack-off. Engrossed in these sorts of complex variations on the theme as he was putting everything back in the wallet, the inspector, when he got to the bills of fifty, suddenly stopped.