Game for Five (15 page)

Pause, a drag on his cigarette.

“So, for no reason, a few other things occurred to me. The first thing that occurred to me was that he was the person who had determined the time of the girl's death as being between eleven and one—as luck would have it, a period of time for which he had an alibi—and there was nothing else to tell us it was true. It occurred to me that anyone could send a text pretending it was from Alina if he had his cell phone on, all he needed was opposable thumbs. It occurred to me that the ‘boyfriend' Alina had been having a steady relationship with, the ‘boyfriend' she wouldn't even tell her best friend about, was a boy only in our heads, and that we'd never even considered the possibility that he might be a man in his fifties. And it occurred to me that the doctor had played a game of
briscola
with all of us, lying about the time of death, and that he'd also played a game with Bruno Messa, sending him a message pretending to be Alina, asking him out for dinner.”

“Right,” Aldo said, as if to say carry on, we're all ears.

“The reason that trick was so effective was that Alina had phoned a friend earlier to say she was going out with her secret friend. And of course the reason she kept it secret, as you all know now, was that it wasn't exactly easy for her to say she was sleeping with a man of fifty, especially a friend of the family.”

Massimo extinguished his cigarette and poured himself another glass of iced tea. He looked for a moment at the glass, which was misting up with the cold, then took a particularly satisfied sip.

“Anyway, as you know, I reconstructed the evening in the following way: Alina goes to the doctor's house. He's alone because his wife's at the spa. She spends the end of the afternoon there, she even puts on a pair of slippers belonging to the doctor's wife, probably because she had just come out of the shower. She calls her friend, then . . . then what happens happens. It's about eight: the doctor sends a text to Bruno Messa, supposedly from Alina, inviting him to dinner. Then he gets dressed, takes Alina's body, and loads it in the trunk of the girl's car. Later, in the same car, which is the same color as his, the doctor goes to the Calvellis' party. That way, he gives himself a cast-iron alibi: about a hundred people see him in a very specific place and for quite a long period of time. It's highly unlikely that anyone will notice he isn't in his own car, and he doesn't want anyone coming along after he's hidden the body and taking down his license number anywhere near the parking lot. In any case, the doctor is well known among his wife's idle friends as a bit of a character, and nobody will find it strange that he came to the party in a wretched Clio, instead of his Jaguar. Couldn't he have put her in the trunk later? I don't know, maybe he was afraid that someone might come back and see him, maybe the housekeeper, whereas about nine he was definitely on his own, his son was out, and the garden of the house is quite leafy, it's impossible to look inside. So, after four, when he leaves the party, he goes straight to the parking lot, puts the girl in the trash can, then leaves the car there, the reason being that it's gotten stuck and he can't move it. I don't know if he'd planned to leave it somewhere else later. Anyway, from a technical point of view it's a perfect murder. The next day he'll say that the girl died four hours later than she actually did, and the police will take the hint. The doctor doesn't even appear on the list of suspects.”

“So why . . . ” Pilade said, sprawling on his chair with his belly bulging and his pants up to his sternum, butting into the speech at just the right moment, like a consummate actor, to give the narrator the right support. “What did he expect from a girl like her?”

Massimo opened his arms wide. “What can I tell you? I think Dr. Carli was really in love with Alina, and had even planned to tell his wife everything. To start a new life. Then you find that the person you wanted to start that new life with is pregnant. She tells you calmly, and maybe she even tells you the child is yours. Of course. Except that you had a vasectomy a few years ago, and being a doctor apart from anything else, you know that means there's no way you can have children.
Ergo
, from one moment to the next, you know she's been cheating on you in a big way, and the girl you've thought of as a perfect prospect for a wife is transformed into a snake woman, or a pig woman, or a combination thereof. Not only has she cheated on you, she's cheated on you with someone you consider a pimple on the asshole of the world, or someone else of the same kind. Both to be eliminated. Her physically and him legally. He must have thought that text was a stroke of genius, and in fact it wasn't a bad idea. He put the police on the wrong track for a few days, even though it wouldn't have held up. Sooner or later, Bruno Messa would have talked, it's always better to confess to daddy that you snort coke than that you strangle girls. When the matter of the murderer's height emerged, that was another big stroke of luck for him, and I was the one to give it to him. P.G., who was tall and definitely suspicious and had an alibi that literally scared the shit out of him, seemed a perfect fit. If I think about it now, I could kick myself.”

“Well, nobody can say you haven't made up for it,” Aldo said. “The thing that really struck me was the way you managed to find the evidence. Without that, there's no way we'd be talking here now. Fusco wouldn't even have listened to you. In fact, he'd probably have accused you of being P.G.'s accomplice and put you in jail along with his friend the pharmacist.”

Massimo nodded, and started on another croissant.

He thought again about his visit to Arianna Costa, when he had told her that he knew what had happened. He had started with the evidence: the videocassette from the closed-circuit TV cameras in the garden of the Villa Calvelli-Sturani, which he'd had made from the original that very evening, a few minutes earlier, by a friend who worked in the company that handled security at the villa. He had seen again for the tenth time the images showing Doctor Carli arriving at the party in a Clio with the same license number as Alina's and skillfully parking the car, images which in their black and white banality transformed the doctor from a close friend always ready with a quip into a murderer. In a second, he had seen Arianna's face lose all the detachment and poise she had developed in her life, her eyes pitch black beneath the make-up through lack of sleep, looking at the TV set as we might look at our own house collapsing, with a question on our lips we cannot even formulate, because we already know the answer and it's too painful. Afterwards, she had walked Massimo to the door, without looking him in the face, and Massimo had been surprised not to see her cry. Probably, Massimo thought—stupidly given the circumstances—she'll cry tomorrow. Tonight she may manage to get some sleep.

Many people have been crucial to this book.
I thank Serena Carlesi and Fiodor Sorrentino for persuading me to finish it and helping it to achieve its definite form.

I thank Walter Forli for his invaluable help with questions of forensic medicine and for having lent part of his name to one of the characters.

I thank Piergiorgio, Virgilio, Serena, Mimmo, Letizia, Paola, Francesco, Federico, Gherardo, Giacomo, Rino, Piero, Vittorio, Liana, my father and mother and all those who read it when it was still young and had not yet been taken up by a publisher, and told me they liked it.

I thank the Marquis and Marchioness Antinori, the Count and Countess Barbi, the Duke of Salaparuta and their other colleagues for contributing to my imagination and fluency of writing.

Last but not least, I thank Samantha, whose patience and intelligence improved the book considerably, and improved the author even more.

 

Pisa, August 12, 2003, near midnight

Marco Malvaldi was born in Pisa in 1974.
Game for Five
is the first in the Bar Lume series, featuring Massimo the Barman and the four elderly sleuths. He is the winner of both the Isola d'Elba Award and the Castiglioncello Prize for his crime novels.