So one fine day, Signora (“excuse me,Signorina”)Michela Pardo appears at the station to tell me she’s had no word of her brother, Angelo, for two days. She says she even went into his apartment, since she has a set of keys, but found everything in order. She comes back the same evening. We go to look at the apartment together. Everything still in order. There’s no trace of any sudden departure. When we’re outside the building, about to say good-bye, it occurs to her that we haven’t checked the room Angelo has on the terrace, having rented both room and terrace. We go back upstairs. The glass door giving onto the terrace is locked. Michela opens it with one of her keys. The door to the little room on the terrace is also locked, but Michela tells me she doesn’t have the key to this one. So I break down the door. And I find …
Stop right there, Montalbano. There’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. This is the part of the story that doesn’t make sense.
What sense is there in Michela’s having only the key to the terrace door, which is completely useless if not accompanied by the key to the former laundry room? If she has copies ofallher brother’s keys, she must also have the one to the room on the terrace. All the more because Angelo used to go there to read or sunbathe, as Michela herself said. He did not go up there to be with his women. What did this mean?
Montalbano noticed that his glass was empty again. He refilled it, stepped off the veranda and onto the sand, and, taking a sip of whisky every few steps, arrived at the water’s edge. The night was dark, but it felt good. The lights of the fishing boats on the horizon line looked like lowlying stars.
He picked up the thread of his argument. If Michela had a key to the little room but told him she didn’t, the lie meant that she wanted him, Montalbano, to break down the door and find Angelo shot dead inside. And this because Michela already knew that her brother’s corpse was in that room. By staging this whole scene, she was trying to make herself appear, to the inspector’s eyes, completely extraneous to the entire event, when in fact she was in it up to her neck.
He returned to the veranda, sat down, poured another whisky. How could things have gone?
Michela says that on Monday, Angelo phoned her to tell her that Elena would be coming over to his place that evening. Thus Michela made herself scarce. But what if, on the other hand, Angelo, seeing that Elena wasn’t coming, and realizing that in fact she wasn’t going to come, called his sister back, and Michela went to see him? Maybe Angelo even told her he was going up to the terrace room to get some air. Then, when Michela showed up, she found her brother murdered. She’s convinced it was Elena, who, having arrived late, had a quarrel with Angelo. Especially since Angelo must have wanted to have sex with the girl, which was all too clear. So she decides to play her ace, to prevent Elena from getting away with it. She locks everything up, goes down into the apartment below, spends the night removing everything that might reveal anything about Angelo’s shady dealings, above all the strongbox, and takes the letters down to the garage, as these will serve as evidence against Elena …
Montalbano heaved a sigh of satisfaction. Michela had all the time in the world to take care of business before reporting her brother missing. And on the night he let her stay in the apartment, she probably slept soundly and happily, since she’d already done everything she needed to do. It was still a colossal boner on his part, but without any immediate consequences.
Yet why was Michela so sure that Angelo was up to something shady? The answer was simple. When she learned that her brother was giving extremely expensive presents to Elena, and then later found out that the money had not been taken from their joint account, she became convinced that Angelo held a secret account somewhere with a great deal of money in it, too much for him to have earned honestly. The story Michela told him, Montalbano, about sales bonuses and providing for the family was a lie. The woman was too smart not to have smelled a rat.
But why had she taken away the strongbox? There was an answer to this, too: because she hadn’t managed to find where the second key was hidden, the one found by Fazio stuck to bottom of the drawer. And then, if you really consider…
The consideration began and ended there. Montalbano’s eyes suddenly started to flutter, and his head dropped. The only thing to be taken into serious consideration was the bed.
He had the misfortune of waking up a few minutes before the alarm rang. He realized that Angelo Pardo’s funeral was that morning. The word “funeral” conjured up thoughts of death…He leapt out of bed, raced into the shower, washed, shaved, had a coffee, and got dressed, all with the frenetic rhythm of a Larry Semon silent film—at one point he could even hear the jaunty chords of a piano accompaniment—then went out of the house and finally regained his normal rhythm as soon as he got in the car and began his drive to Vigata.
Fazio wasn’t at the station, Mimi, summoned by Liguori, had gone to Montelusa, and Catarella was mute, not having yet recovered from the blow dealt him the day before by Pardo’s computer, when all the passwords had suddenly vanished and he had been left standing there gazing at a monitor as empty as the fabled Tartar desert. A morgue, in short.
Around midmorning the first phone call came in. “My dear Inspector, the family all well?” “Excellent, Dr. Lattes.”
“Let’s thank the Blessed Virgin! I wanted to tell you that unfortunately the commissioner can’t see you today. Shall we make it the same time tomorrow?”
“Let’s do indeed, Doctor.”
With thanks to the Blessed Virgin, he’d been spared the sight of Mr. Commissioner’s face for yet another day. Meanwhile, however, he’d become curious to know what his boss wanted to see him about. Certainly nothing important, if he kept postponing with such ease.
Let’s hope he manages to tell me before I retire or he’s transferred,Montalbano thought.
The second call came right after the first. “It’s Lagana, Inspector. My friend Melluso, the one I gave those pages to decipher, Remember?.’
“Of course I remember. Has he succeeded in figuring out how the code works?”
“Not yet. But meanwhile he’s made a discovery that I thought could be important to your investigation.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but I’d like to tell you about it in person.” “How about if I come by around five-thirty this afternoon?” “Fine.”
The third call came at half past noon. “Montalbano? Tommaseo here.” “What is it?”
“Elena Sclafani came in to see me at nine o’clock this morning … My God!”
