“No, Sir, and I can tell you why, please follow me.” She walked outside her apartment and reached one particular spot in front of the apartment of Claudio. “See here—there’s an irregularity in the floor. Every time someone comes and goes from their apartment, it sounds like a loud clang in my apartment. I would have noticed if he’d left the house.”
Maurizio placed his foot on that spot but couldn’t find anything that could have confirmed what she was telling him.
Understanding his skepticism, knowing she was telling the truth, she pursed her lips. “Go inside my apartment and close the door,” she said. “Go to whatever room you like, even in the kitchen, which is the farthest room from here.”
Maurizio hesitated for a second.
“Just go, I will walk about here, and you’ll hear, I’m not imagining things!” she pushed Maurizio toward her apartment.
Squaring his shoulders, he walked inside and closed the door. With uncertainty, he walked to the kitchen and waited for something to happen. When he felt convinced, she was simply making up things to cover the fact that her purpose in life after retirement became spying on whatever happened in that condo, a creaking noise came to his ears. Indeed, it was something clearly audible. It sounded as if the pipes or whatever else for the matter, were bending and banging against the floor surface.
I’d be damned! This is definitely something as loud as an alarm, it doesn’t indeed go unheard, he thought.
Walking to the door, he opened and glanced at Berenice. “You were right, I could distinctly hear the clanging when you were walking there.”
“Yes. I have tried, God-only-knows, how many times to raise the attention of the administration of the condominium on this problem. They never cared about it or came to inspect the problem,” she grunted, disappointed. “Whatever the matter, this is the reason why I can clearly say Luciano didn’t leave home after his father.”
“Could it be that he left when you were asleep?” He didn’t want to doubt everything she said, but he had to make sure the information he gathered was as accurate as possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the murder. He needed to place every player in a defined place to mark those who possibly could have been in the exact same spot with a weapon willing to kill Claudio.
“Detective, at my age, my sleep is as light as a feather. I get easily awakened, and that noise is certainly something able to break my sleep.”
“Well, thank you, for now, that was enough, if I need anything...”
“...You will let me know,” she continued his sentence with a giggle. “I’m at your full availability.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Moretti, and have a nice day.” He turned to walk back in the direction of Claudio’s apartment, ready to tell Leonardo the news.
CHAPTER 10
That day, Madlen’s thoughts turned to the reading of the testament. This was the first time that she could get her hands on a substantial inheritance and wondered whether there would be any problem getting the insurance settlement, since Claudio was murdered.
The ringing of her telephone brought her back from her contemplations and a smile appeared on her face when she recognized the telephone number of Irina.
“Hello darling, how are you doing?” she answered, relieved not to be left alone with her thoughts.
“Everything is fine here, I called to see how you are managing with all that is going on. “
“I’m still confused, today. Yesterday there was the reading of the testament. I was surprised to be invited and perhaps I should have sent someone to represent me. It hadn’t been easy to be in the same room with Claudio’s ex-wife,” Shaking her head she walked to the living room, where she sat on the couch to get more comfortable. “I fully understand her hostility, but it wasn’t because of me that their marriage didn’t work out. If it weren’t me, it most probably would have been someone else. Claudio was looking for a companion, and he was already considering divorcing her when I met him.”
She raised a hand to her forehead, feeling the unavoidable sense of guilt for having ruined someone else’s family.
“Mom, it wasn’t your fault, but why were you invited?” She pretended not to know the reason for the invitation, although Luciano informed her about it. She considered it important to have her mother convinced that she was still in Hungary.
“Apparently, Claudio subscribed a life insurance, and I was one of the beneficiaries. I am still shocked about it, but now I’ll need to understand the bureaucratic steps to get the funds. I expect a long battle as there’s a murder involved and its release might get blocked by the Police until the case is solved,” she guessed, fearing she would never get her share.
“How much is the allotment you are supposed to get?” Irina wondered after a short pause, if there would have been a better way to ask this.
Nervously biting her lower lip, walking around the room at her father’s home, Irina’s heart started to race.
“It’s a lot of money, thirty million Euros— can you imagine?” Madlen wasn’t sure she knew how to spell that amount of money.
“Holy Shit!” Irina exclaimed aloud. She was aware of the testament being in her favor, but she didn’t know the exact amount granted to her.
“Luciano, Claudio’s son, had the same sum with another life insurance, moreover he got half of the firm his father was running. The other half went to his wife, as he said they had built it to succeed together, so he wanted to include her in the testament too.” Madlen looked around and listened to her voice resounding in the apartment, and its emptiness
