‘You know what? The murder victim might not even be your wife.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. Nobody has officially identified the body, and none of the people who’ve seen it actually knew her when she was alive. When we’ve finished here, I’ll talk to the pathologist about identifying her. How long do you plan on staying?’
‘Two, three days at the most. I want to take Michela back to Bologna.’
‘Doctor, I’m going to ask you a question, and I won’t ask you again. Where were you Wednesday evening, and what were you doing?’
‘Wednesday? I was at the hospital, operating late into the night’
‘You were telling me about your marriage.’
‘Yes. Well, I met Michela three years ago. Her brother, who lives in New York now, had a rather severe compound fracture in his foot and she brought him to the hospital. I liked her at once. She was very beautiful, but what struck me most was her character. She was always ready to see the bright side of things. She lost both her parents before the age of fifteen and was brought up by an uncle who one day saw fit to rape her. To make a long story short she was desperate to find a place to live.
For years she was the mistress of an industrialist but he eventually disposed of her with a tidy sum of money that helped her get along for .a while. Michela could have had any man she wanted, but basically, it humiliated her to be a kept woman.’
‘Did you ask Michela to become your mistress, and she refused?’
For the first time, a hint of a smile appeared on Emanuele Licalzi’s impassive face.
‘You re on the wrong track entirely. Inspector. Oh, by the way, Michela told me she’d bought a bottle-green Twingo to get around town. Do you know what’s become of it?’
It had an accident.’
‘Michela never did know how to drive.’
‘Your wife was entirely without fault in this case. The car was properly parked in front of the drive to the house and somebody ran into it.’
‘And how do you know this?’
It was us, the police, who ran into it. At the time, however, we still didn’t know–’
‘What an odd story.’
‘I’ll tell it to you sometime. Anyhow, it was the accident that led us to discover the body.’
‘Do you think I could have the car back?’
‘I don’t see any reason why not.’
‘I could resell it to somebody in Vigata who deals in used cars, don’t you think?’
Montalbano didn’t answer.
He didn’t give a shit about what happened to the car.
‘That’s the house there on the right, isn’t it? I think I recognize it from the photograph.’
‘That’s it.’
Dr Licalzi executed an elegant manoeuvre, pulled up in front of the drive, got out of the car, and stood looking at the house with the detached curiosity of a sightseer.
‘Nice. What did we come here for?’
‘I don’t really know, truth be told,’ Montalbano said grumpily. Dr Licalzi knew how to get on his nerves. He decided to shake him up a little.
‘You know, some people think it was Maurizio Di Blasi, the son of your cousin the engineer, who killed your wife.’
‘Really.’ I don’t know him.
When I came here two and a half years ago, he was in Palermo for his studies.
I’m told the poor boy’s a half-wit.’
So there.
‘Shall we go inside?’
‘Wait, I don’t want to forget.’
He opened the boot of the car, took out the elegant suitcase that was inside, and removed a large envelope from it.
‘The photos of Michela.’
Montalbano slipped it in his jacket pocket. As he was doing this, the doctor extracted a bunch of keys from his own pocket,
‘Are those to the house?’
Yes. I knew where Michela kept them at our place in Bologna. They’re the extra set,’
Now I’m going to start kicking the guy, thought the inspector.
‘You never finished telling me why your marriage was as convenient for you as it was for your wife.’
‘Well, it was convenient for Michela because she was marrying a rich man, even if he was thirty years older, and it was convenient for me because it put to rest certain rumours that were threatening to harm me at a crucial moment of my career. People had started saying I’d become a homosexual, since nobody’d seen me socially with a woman for more than ten years.’
‘And was it true you no longer frequented women?’
‘Why would I, Inspector? At age fifty I became impotent. Irreversibly.’
EIGHT
‘Nice’ said Dr Licalzi again after having a look around the living room.
Didn’t he know how to say anything else?
‘Here’s the kitchen’ the inspector said, adding, ‘Eat in.’
All of a sudden he felt enraged at himself. How did that ‘eat in’ slip out? What was it supposed to mean? He felt like an estate agent showing a house to a prospective client.
‘Next to it is the bathroom. Go and have a look yourself’ he said rudely.
The doctor didn’t notice, or pretended not to notice, the tone of voice. He opened the bathroom door, stuck his head in for the briefest of peeks and reclosed it.
‘Nice.’
Montalbano felt his hands trembling. He distinctly saw the newspaper headline:
POLICE INSPECTOR GOES SUDDENLY BERSERK, ATTACKS HUSBAND OF MURDER VICTIM.
‘Upstairs there’s a small guest room, a large bathroom and the main bedroom. Go up.’
The doctor obeyed.
Montalbano remained downstairs in the living room, lit a cigarette, and took the envelope of photographs of Michela out of his pocket. Gorgeous. Her face, which he had only seen distorted in pain and horror, had a smiling, open expression.
Finishing his cigarette, he realized the doctor hadn’t come back down.
‘Dr Licalzi?’
No answer. He bounded up the stairs. The doctor was standing in a corner of the bedroom, hands covering his face, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.
The inspector was mystified. This was the last reaction he would have expected. He went up to Licalzi and put a hand on his back.
‘Try to be brave.’
The doctor shrugged him off with an almost childish gesture and kept on weeping, face hidden in his hands. ‘Poor Michela! Poor Michela!’
It wasn’t put on. The tears, the sorrowful voice, were real.
Montalbano took him firmly by the arm. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’
The doctor let himself be led, moving away without looking at the bed, the shredded, bloodstained sheet.
He was a physician, and he knew what Michela must have felt during her last moments alive. But if Licalzi was a physician, Montalbano was a policeman, and as soon as he saw him in tears, he knew the man would no longer be able to maintain the mask of indifference he’d put on. The armour of detachment he customarily wore, perhaps to compensate for the disgrace of impotence, had fallen apart,