4 3
Anyway, upon coming out of church, where she’d attended Holy Mass at midday, she was approached by Signora Collura, who owned a furniture store.
“Signora, tell your husband that the item he was waiting for arrived yesterday.”
“What item?”
“The sofa bed.”
Signora Antonietta thanked her and went home with a drill boring a hole in her head. What did her husband need a sofa bed for? Although her curiosity was eating her alive, she said nothing to Arelio. To make a long story short, that piece of furniture never arrived at their home. Two Sundays later, Signora Antonietta approached the furniture lady.
“You know, the color of the sofa bed clashes with the shade of the wall.”
A shot in the dark, but right on target.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he told me he wanted dark green, the same as the wallpaper.”
The back room of the office was dark green. So that’s where he had the sofa bed delivered, the shameless pig!
On the thirtieth of June that same year—this date, too, forever etched in her memory—she got her first anonymous letter. She had received three in all, between June and September.
“Could I see them?” Montalbano asked.
“I burned them. I don’t keep filth.”
The three anonymous notes, written with letters cut out from newspapers in keeping with the finest tradition, all said the same thing:Your husband Arelio is seeing a Tunisian jade named Karima, known by all to be a whore, three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The woman went there either in the morning or afternoon on those days. Occasionally she would buy cleaning supplies at a shop on the same street, but everyone knew she was meeting Signor Arelio to do lewd things.
“Were you ever able to . . . verify any of this?” the inspector asked tactfully.
“Do you mean did I ever spy on them to see when the trollop was going in and out of my husband’s office?”
“Well, that too.”
“I don’t stoop to such things,” the woman said proudly.
“But I managed just the same. A soiled handkerchief.”
“Lipstick?”
“No,” the widow said with some effort, turning slightly red in the face.
“And a pair of underpants,” she added after a pause, turning even redder.
o o o
When Montalbano and Galluzzo got to Salita Granet, the three shops on that short, sloping street were already closed.
Number 28 was a small building, the ground floor raised three steps up from street level, with two more floors above that. To the side of the main door were three nameplates. The first said: aurelio lapecora, import-export, ground floor; the second: orazio cannatello, notary; the third: angelo bellino, business consultant, top floor. Using the keys Montalbano had taken from Lapecora’s study, they went inside. The front room was a proper office, with a big nineteenth-century desk made of black mahogany, a small secretarial table with a 1940s Olivetti typewriter on it, and four large metal bookcases overflowing with old files. On the desk was a functioning telephone. There were five chairs in the office, but one was broken and overturned in the corner.
In the back room . . . The back room, with its now familiar dark green walls, seemed not to belong to the same apartment. It was sparkling clean, with a large sofa bed, television, telephone extension, stereo system, cocktail trolley with a variety of liqueurs, mini-fridge, and a horrendous female nude, buttocks to the wind, over the couch. Next to the sofa was a small end table with a faux art nouveau lamp on top, its drawer stuffed with condoms of every kind.
“How old was the guy?” Galluzzo asked.
“Sixty-three.”
“Jesus!” said the policeman, giving a whistle of admiration.
The bathroom, like the back room, was dark green and glistening, equipped with built-in blow-dryer, bathtub with shower-hose extension, and full-length mirror.
They returned to the front room, rummaged through the desk’s drawers, opened a few of the files. The most recent correspondence was more than three years old.
They heard some footsteps upstairs, in the office of the notary, Cannatello. The notary wasn’t in, they were told by the secretary, a reed-thin thirtyish young man with a disconsolate expression. He said the late Mr. Lapecora used to come to the office just to pass the time. On the days when he was there, a good-looking Tunisian girl would come to do the cleaning.
Oh, and, he almost forgot, over the last few months Mr. Lapecora had received fairly frequent visits from a nephew, or at least that’s how Mr. Lapecora introduced him the one time the three had met at the front door. He was about thirty, tall, dark, well-dressed, and he drove a metallic gray BMW. He must have spent a lot of time
