“Not letting our discovery of Japichinu’s body become official. That’s what Balduccio wanted: for us to be the ones to discover it, which would have provided him with an alibi.You see, he was expecting me to inform the judge that he’d intended for us to capture his grandson safe and sound.”
“After Fazio explained things to us,” Mimi resumed, “we reached the same conclusion as you, that is, that it was Balduccio who had his grandson killed. But why?”
“At the moment it’s not clear. But something’ll come out sooner or later. As far as we’re concerned, the whole business ends here.”
The door flew open, crashing against the wall with such force that the windows rattled. Everybody jumped. Naturally, it was Catarella.
“Oh Chief! Chief! Cicco de Cicco called just now! He made the development! An’ it worked! I wrote the number down on this piece a paper here. He made me repeat it to him five times!”
He set a half-sheet of squared notebook paper on the inspector’s desk and said:
“Beg your pardon ‘bout the door.”
He went out. And reclosed the door so hard that a crack in the paint near the handle widened slightly.
Montalbano read the license-plate number and looked at Fazio.
“You got Nene Sanfilippo’s license-plate number within reach?”
“Which car? The Punto or the Duetto?”
Augello pricked up his ears.
“The Punto.”
“That one I know by heart: BA 927 GG.”
“They correspond,” said Mimi. “But what does it mean? Would you explain?”
Montalbano explained, telling them how he’d found out about the postal passbook and the money on deposit; how, following up on what Mimi himself had suggested to him, he’d studied the photos from the excursion to Tindari and discovered that a Fiat Punto had been riding on the bus’s rear bumper; and how he’d brought the photo to the Montelusa forensics lab to have them enlarge it. The whole time the inspector was speaking, Augello maintained a suspicious expression.
“You already knew,” he said.
“I already knew what?”
“That the car following behind the bus was Sanfilippo’s. You knew it before Catarella gave you that slip of paper.”
“Yes,” the inspector admitted.
“And how did you know?”
“I had an intuition,” he said instead.
Augello let it drop.
“This means,” he said, “that the Griffo and Sanfilippo murders are closely connected.”
“We can’t say that yet,” the inspector disagreed. “The only thing we know for sure is that Sanfilippo’s car was following the bus the Griffos were in.”
“Beba even said he kept turning around to look at the road. Apparently he wanted to make sure Sanfilippo’s car was still behind them.”
“Right. Which tells us that there was a connection between Sanfilippo and the Griffos. But we have to stop there. Maybe Sanfilippo did pick them up in his car on the drive back, at the last stop before Vigata.”
“Don’t forget that Beba said it was Alfonso Griffo himself who asked the driver to make that extra stop. Which means they must have planned it together beforehand.”
“Right again. But this does not allow us to conclude that Sanfilippo killed the Griffos himself, or that he in turn was shot as a consequence of the Griffos’ murders. The infidelity hypothesis still holds.”
“When are you going to see Ingrid?”
“Tomorrow evening. But you, tomorrow morning, try to gather some information on Eugenio Ignazio Ingro, the transplant doctor. I’m not interested in what the papers have to say, but in the other stuff, the whispers.”
“I’ve got somebody, a friend in Montelusa, who knows him pretty well. I’ll find some excuse to pay him a visit.”
“But, Mimi, I’m warning you: kid gloves. It should be the furthest thing from everyone’s mind that we might be interested in the doctor and his cherished consort, Vanya Titulescu.”
Mimi; offended, pulled a frown.
“Do you take me for some kind of idiot?”
The moment he opened the refrigerator, he saw it.
