“Normally he slept lightly. His eyes would pop open if I made the slightest noise. But now that you’ve made me think back on it, that morning he didn’t hear the alarm. In fact, he must have had a bit of a cold, a stuffed-up nose, because he started snoring, which he hardly ever did.” A terrible actor, poor old Lapècora. But it worked, at least that time.
“Go on.”
“I got up, picked up the clothes I’d put on that chair over there, and went into the bathroom.”
“Let’s move.”
Embarrassed, the woman led the way. When they were in the bathroom, Signora Antonietta, looking at the floor, asked:
“Do I have to do everything?”
“Of course not. You were dressed when you came out of the bathroom, correct?”
“Yes, fully dressed, that’s how I always do it.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went into the dining room.”
Having learned her lesson by now, she walked towards the dining room, followed by the inspector.
“I picked up my purse, which I’d prepared on this couch the night before, then I opened the door and went out on the landing.”
“Are you sure you locked the door behind you when you went out?”
“Absolutely certain. I called the elevator—”
“That’ll be enough, thank you. What time was it, do you remember?”
“Six twenty-five. I was late, actually, so late that I started running.”
“What was the snag?”
The woman gave him a questioning look.
“For what reason were you running late? Let me put it another way. If someone knows he has to go somewhere the next morning, he usually sets the alarm clock, calculating the amount of time it will take to—” Signora Antonietta smiled.
“A callus on my foot was hurting,” she said. “I put on some ointment, wrapped it up, and lost some time I hadn’t figured on.”
“Thanks again, and sorry for the disturbance. Good-bye.”
“Wait! Where are you going? Are you leaving?”
“Oh, yes, of course. You had something to tell me.”
“Sit down a minute.”
Montalbano did as she said. In any case, he’d found out what he wanted to know: that is, the widow Lapècora had not entered the study, where Karima almost certainly had been hiding.
“As you can see,” the woman began, “I’m getting ready to leave. As soon as I can give Arelio a proper funeral, I’m going away.”
“Where will you go, signora?”
“To stay with my sister. She has a big house, and she’s sick, as you know. I’ll never set foot inVigàta again, even after I’m dead.”
“Why not go live with your son?”
“I don’t want to inconvenience him. And I don’t get along with his wife, who spends money like water while my poor son is always complaining that he can’t make ends meet. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that, when I was going through some old stuff I don’t need anymore and want to throw away, I found the envelope the first anonymous letter came in. I thought I’d burned it, but I must have destroyed only the letter. And since you seemed particularly interested . . .” The address had been typed.
“May I keep this?”
“Of course. Well, that’s all.”
She stood up, as did the inspector, but then she went over to the sideboard, picked up a letter that was lying on it, and shook it at Montalbano.
“Look at this, Inspector. Arelio’s been dead barely two days and already I have to start paying the debts he ran up with his filthy little arrangements. Just yesterday I received—apparently the post office already knows he was killed—I received two bills from the office. One for electricity: two hundred twenty thousand lire! And one for the phone: three hundred eighty thousand! But he wasn’t the one using the phone, you know. Who would he ever call anyway? It was that Tunisian whore who was phoning, that’s for sure, probably calling her family in Tunisia. Then this morning, this came. God only knows what kinds of ideas that dirty slut put into my idiot husband’s head!” So compassionate, the widow Antonietta Lapècora, née Palmisano. The envelope had no stamp on it; it had been hand-delivered. Montalbano decided not to show too much curiosity, only as much as was necessary.
“When was this brought here?”
“This morning, as I said. A bill for one hundred seventy-seven thousand lire, from the Mulone printing works. Incidentally, Inspector, could you give me back the keys to the office?” “Do you need them right away?”
“Right this instant, I guess not. But I’d like to start showing it to people who might be interested in buying it. I want to sell the apartment too. I’ve already figured that the funeral alone is going to cost me over five million lire between one thing and the next.” Like mother, like son.
“With the proceeds from the office and the apartment,” said Montalbano in a fit of malice, “you could pay for twenty funerals.”
o o o
Empedocle Mulone, owner of the print shop, said yes, the late Mr. Lapècora had indeed ordered some stationery with slightly different letterhead from the old one. Signor Arelio had been coming to him for twenty years, and they were friends.
“How was it different?”
“It said ‘Import-Export’ instead of ‘Importazione-Esportazione.’ But I advised him against it.”
“He shouldn’t have made the change?”
“I didn’t mean the letterhead, but the idea of restarting the business. He’d already been retired about five years, but things are different now. Businesses are failing. It’s a bad time.
And you know what he did, instead of thanking me for the advice? He got pissed off. He said he read the newspapers and watched TV, and so he knew what the situation was.”
“Did you send the package with the printed matter to his home or his office?”
“He asked me to send it to the office, and that’s what I did, on one of the weekdays when he was there. I don’t remember the exact date, but if you want—”
“Never mind.”
“The bill, on the other hand, I sent to the missus, since I guess Mr. Lapècora can’t very well make it to the office now, can he?”
And he laughed.
o o o
“Here’s your espresso, Inspector,” said the barman at the Caffè Albanese.
“Totò, listen. Did Mr. Lapècora sometimes come here with his friends?”
“Sure! Every Tuesday. They’d talk and play cards. Always the same group.”
“Give me their names.”
“All right. Let’s see: Pandolfo, the accountant—”
“Wait. Give me the phone book.”
“No need to call him on the phone. He’s the elderly gentleman sitting at that table over there, eating an ice.” Montalbano took his demitasse and went over to the accountant.
“May I sit down?”
“Absolutely, Inspector.”
“Thanks. Do we know each other?”
“You don’t know me, sir, but I know you.”
“Mr. Pandolfo, did you play cards with the deceased very often?”
“Often? We played every Tuesday. Because, you see, every Monday,Wednesday, and—”
“—Friday he was at the office,” said Montalbano, completing the now familiar refrain.
“What would you like to know?”
“Why did Mr. Lapècora decide to go back into business?”
Pandolfo looked sincerely surprised.
“Go back into business? When did he ever do that? He never talked about it with us. But we all knew he went to the office out of habit, just to pass the time.”
“Did he ever mention the maid, a certain Karima, who used to come and clean the office?”
There was a darting of the eyes, an imperceptible hesitation that would have gone unnoticed had Montalbano not been keeping the man squarely in his sights.
“The man had no reason to tell me about his cleaning woman.”
“Did you know Lapècora well?”
“Whom can you say you know well? Some thirty years ago when I lived in Montelusa, I had a friend, a smart man, bright, witty, sharp, sensible. He had it all. And he was generous, too, a real angel. If anyone was in need, they could have anything he owned. Then one evening his sister left her baby boy with him, not six months old. He was supposed to look after him for two hours or so, maximum. As soon as the sister left, the guy picked up a knife, chopped the baby up and boiled him in a pot with a sprig of parsley and a clove of garlic. I’m not kidding, you know. I’d been with the man that same day, and he’d been the same as always, smart, polite. So, to get back to poor old Lapècora, yeah, I knew him, all right, enough to see that he’d really changed over the last two years.”