“How’d I find out? I had to go out shopping and so I called the elevator, but nothing happened. It wouldn’t come.
I guessed somebody musta left the door open, which these rude people’s always doing ’round here. So I went down on foot and saw the security guard standing guard over the body.
And after I went shopping, I had to climb back up the stairs and I still haven’t caught my breath!”
“So much the better. That way you’ll talk less,” said the elephant.
o o o
the cristofoletti family said the plaque on the door of the third apartment, but no matter how hard the inspector knocked, nobody opened up. He went back to the Cosentino flat and rang the doorbell.
“What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“Do you know if the Cristofoletti family—” Cosentino slapped himself noisily on the forehead.
“I forgot to tell you! With all this business about the dead body, it completely slipped my mind. Mr. and Mrs.
Cristofoletti are both in Montelusa. She, Signora Romilda, that is, had an operation, woman stuff. They should be back tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Montalbano took two steps on the landing, turned around, and knocked again.
“What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“Earlier you said you had experience dealing with dead people. What did you mean?”
“I worked as a nurse for a few years.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
o o o
He went down to the fifth floor, where according to Cosentino the elevator had been waiting with the already murdered Aurelio Lapecora inside. Had he perhaps gone up one flight to meet someone who then knifed him?
“Excuse me, ma’am, I’m Inspector Montalbano.” The young housewife who had come to the door—
about thirty, very attractive but unkempt—put a finger to her lips, her expression complicitous, enjoining him to be quiet.
Montalbano fell silent. What did that gesture mean?
Damn his habit of always going about unarmed! Gingerly the young woman stood aside from the door, and the inspector, on his guard and looking all around him, entered a small study full of books.
“Please speak very softly. If the baby wakes up, that’s the end, we won’t be able to talk. He cries like there’s no tomorrow.”
Montalbano heaved a sigh of relief.
“You already know everything, ma’am, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Gullotta, the lady next door, told me,” the woman said, breathing the words in his ear. The inspector found the situation very arousing.
“So you didn’t see Mr. Lapecora this morning?”
“I haven’t been out of the house yet.”
“Where is your husband?”
“In Fela. He teaches at the middle school there. He leaves every morning at six-fifteen sharp.” He was sorry their encounter had to be so brief. The more he looked at Signora Gulisano—that was the surname on the plaque— the more he liked her. In feminine fashion, she sensed this and smiled.
“Will you stay for a cup of coffee?”
“With pleasure.”
o o o
The little boy who answered the door to the next apartment couldn’t have been more than four years old and was fiercely cockeyed.
“Who are you, stranger?” he asked.
“I’m a policeman,” Montalbano said, smiling, forcing himself to play along.
“You’ll never take me alive,” said the kid, and he shot his water pistol at the inspector, hitting him square in the forehead.
The scuffle that followed was brief, and as the disarmed child started to cry, Montalbano cold-bloodedly squirted him in the face, drenching him.
“What is this? What’s going on here?”
The little angel’s mother, Signora Gullotta, had nothing in common with the young mother next door. As a prelimi-nary measure she slapped her son hard, then she grabbed the water pistol the inspector had let fall to the
