whatever?”
“No. Not those ones.”
“Did the other girl, Chiara, do it?”
“No. They’re not from here. They have no reference number. All our files have LAV reference numbers. Nothing gets filed till it has a number, and we get the number from the computer. That way the computer has at least a trace of all hard copies.”
“So what are these?”
“They must just be his own files. Just notes.”
“But they’re not from this office?” Blume turned the beige folder in his hands. It was the same kind magistrates used, the same kind Clemente had had in his study.
“Maybe he wrote them here. They’re not in the system yet, that’s all. He’d have to give me them first, then I’d organize, assign numbers to them.”
“You’d copy out his long hand?”
“Only if he asked me to. Sometimes I’d just scan handwritten notes, but not often. Usually he’d do most of it on the computer, even though he found it hard. He isn’t like a boss who expects his secretary to do everything.”
“I see. So these were his personal notes? They were a draft or something?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he did them at home?”
“Maybe. He does a lot of stuff at home.”
“Can you remember seeing them on his desk? On Thursday, before he left?”
She thought for a while, then said, “No. I don’t think they were there. Like I said, he keeps his desk clean. He brings stuff back and forth from his house. He goes around with a backpack all the time. I mean he used to.”
“A backpack?”
“A gray one. He bicycles to work. It is the best way to carry things.”
Cycling in Rome, thought Blume. Another good way to get killed.
9
SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 4:15 A.M.
Ignoring the protests of the secretary, who had evidently pictured herself left tragically alone overnight in the office, Blume obliged her to leave the building with him. He called in a patrol car and had her taken home, and he asked for someone to be sent over to control access to the office until the magistrate decided what needed to be done. But he did not see it as a repository of evidence, and did not wait to see when, or if, someone arrived.
What interested him more, far more, was the person Clemente had been in bed with. And the possibility that D’Amico was trying to fuck up his investigation. It was time to find out for sure.
Blume drove through the city, still mostly asleep under a milky gray predawn sky, but with fruit and vegetable markets and early morning bars already opening. It took him just twenty minutes to get back to the crime scene at Monteverde.
The porter was not in his cabin, but the gate to the courtyard was open. When he reached the door of Block C, he pulled out the aluminium Yale key D’Amico had given him and opened the front door. He extracted the key from the keyhole, allowed the door to swing closed again, then gave it a hard push with the flat of his hand. It resisted. He used his shoulder, and with a sharp click the door burst open. Blume held the door open with one foot and examined it. The strike plate was bent and recessed into the woodwork where the latch connected with the jamb. The faceplate on the door was also bent. They looked as if they had been like that for years. Getting by the porter and into Block C did not pose much of a problem. Nothing about getting into the building required planning.
Carrying the file folder from Clemente’s office, Blume made his way up to the third floor. A young policeman stood in front of the door. His efforts to set a wide-awake look on his face gave him the panicked air of a child being found out in a lie. Blume showed his ID.
“When did you come on duty?”
“Midnight, sir.”
“Who was here before you?”
“When I arrived, there was no one here.”
“Figures,” said Blume.
Taped crookedly to the door was a typed notice prohibiting entry pursuant to Article 354 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Police tape was stretched in an X from cornice to threshold, and in five lateral strips from jamb to jamb. Blume peeled back as little as he could, put the H-shaped key into the deadbolt. It opened after one turn. He stepped inside the dead man’s apartment and turned on the light.
The first thing he did was look at the space from which the corpse had been removed. The rusty stains in the wooden floor showed where the body had lain. Blume stooped down and looked. He considered the thin strands of red and brown on the wall. The white and blue strings set out by the technicians to fix the source to the third dimension ran down the wall, across the floor. Wispy red and brown lines marked the white wall, like a Schifano canvas. Thin-edged weapon, right-handed assailant. The blood patterns strongly suggested the assailant had been standing more or less in the middle of the hall. He had cleaned himself up in the bathroom, leaving traces of himself everywhere. He must also have changed his clothes, carried the dirty ones out in a bag. Probably the bag he took from the study. The one the secretary said Clemente used to bring to the office?
The towels by the door had gone to the lab for examination. Blume stepped back down the hall to where he estimated they had been, and thought about the towels.
The killer had placed them there because he thought the blood might run under the door. Someone who watched horror flicks or played video games might think like that. If the killer was someone who watched those movies and thought he’d have a go at it in real life, then Clemente was just a random victim.
Blume did not like the idea of total randomness. Yet he did not believe there was anything professional or political in the murder, either. The truth lay somewhere in between.
The shopping box had gone to the labs along with its contents. Food for a dead man. The killer had used his knife to open the box, Blume was sure of it. And then, on impulse, he had stolen chocolate paste and peanut butter, kids’ food. He had left the house with a bag of some sort, since he had to hide his bloody clothes. He had probably stolen the wallet.
The uniformed officers yesterday had reported that the neighbors next door were away on holiday, as were those above, and the one below worked all day in his store on the other side of town. When Clemente was killed, there had been only two other apartments in the building with people in them. The one on the top floor, where the delivery boy had gone with another box, and one on the ground floor. A girl had been playing the piano as Clemente was knifed to death.
Blume returned to the study and, as he had done exactly twelve hours earlier, slid open the dangerously heavy top door of Clemente’s filing cabinet and thumbed his way to the back files under A. He pulled out Al-lergie, Animalisti, and Alleva, and dropped them on the desk, then dropped the file he had picked up from Clemente’s office on top. The file folders were identical. Some of the handwritten notes in the folder from the office seemed to continue in the Alleva file on the desk.
It was quite the worst case of evidence planting he had experienced for some time. He almost felt embarrassed for D’Amico. It did not reflect well on himself either: D’Amico had been his pupil.
Blume gathered all the papers he could find with the name Alleva on them, returned to his car, and drove across the city again to his apartment, getting snarled in morning traffic toward the end.
His original plan had been to sleep for an hour, but he slept for four and was woken by his cell phone ringing.
“Where are you, Commissioner?” said Gallone’s voice. “You are already a quarter of an hour late for the coordination meeting.”
