The Crocodile (21 page)

At the sound of his uttering her first name, Piras felt a clutch at her stomach. It was the first time in many—far too many—years that she’d felt any such feeling. She put off her examination of that feeling to a time when she wasn’t so busy, and focused on the topic currently under discussion.

“
O.K.
, I agree. Right now, squeezing a confession out of Rinaldi would only take up precious time and might trigger some disagreeable intervention from on high. It turns out that even the DA’s wife is one of his patients, or so I’m told. But tell me this: what gives you the feeling that the Crocodile might kill again?”

Lojacono sketched a vague gesture with one hand. “More than anything else, it’s a matter of timing. You said yourself that much less time passed between the second and third murders than between the first and the second. Given his technique, which is clearly based on constant surveillance, shortening his lead time means an enormous increase in the level of risk. Why should he increase his risk, unless he has something else in mind? If I understand anything about the way this suspect thinks, we should expect another murder. And, unless it’s the last in the series, I expect the interval to be even shorter.”

They sat there for a long time, looking at each other. Piras ran a hand through her hair and started toying with the ends of one lock of it. Hard as he tried not to, Lojacono found this irresistible.

“I have to admit, it kind of scares me how clearly you can see into the Crocodile’s head; it almost seems as if you’re in touch with him, somehow. But you’re right: we need to figure out De Matteis’s role. That is if it turns out that she’s the murderer’s target and not, say, the girl’s father, or her grandfather, or her best friend. We’re groping in the dark here, and we have been since the very beginning in this case.”

Lojacono smiled. “Well then, we’re due a little luck, aren’t we? I’m going to go question the signora.”

Piras stood up. “No, I’d better go see De Matteis; she might refuse to speak to a policeman. She might stir up some trouble in high places, which is something you can’t afford. And for once, I want to smell the smoke of battle. After all, we are pursuing this line of inquiry together, aren’t we? Or are you trying to hog all the glory for yourself?”

*

Letizia went to the Crime Reporting Office at San Gaetano. It had been no easy matter to make the decision to go there, but in the end she’d managed to work up the courage.

Night after night she’d waited for Lojacono to show up at the trattoria. The corner table had sat empty, even when there was a line of customers on the waiting list outside, getting drenched in the rain. She’d waited for him, at first curious, then annoyed, with a slight stab of jealousy, and, in the end, with a shade of genuine concern. She went on serving tables, accepting compliments for her spectacular ragu and graciously batting away the misplaced gallantry of her male clientele, but deep down there was a growing sense of apprehension for her new friend’s welfare.

He lives alone, she mused. If he had a heart attack, who would even notice? Certainly not his co-workers who, from what he told me, barely speak to him at all. Nor his wife, in a faraway city—his contact with her is only sporadic and thorny. And much less his daughter, whom he hasn’t spoken to in almost a year. He has no one. Except for me.

Little by little, the thought grew more pressing. In the end, she decided to go and find out.

She didn’t know where he lived. Lojacono had always been very vague on that topic and she would never have dared to ask such a bold question outright. Over there, he would say, waving his hand airily towards the trattoria’s front door. One of the thousands of lights burning in the night. Too little information to think of trying to hunt it down. And she could hardly ask around the neighborhood without fanning the flames of gossip, something for which she felt no need or desire. That left only the police station.

She’d made a tray of pastries, purely to avoid showing up empty-handed: small
pastiera
ricotta cakes. It was the right season for them, and she remembered the night she’d offered him a slice of
pastiera
. At first he was skeptical, saying that no pastries could rival the ones from Sicily, but once he took a bite, a look of surprise had come over his face, gradually fading into a reverie of enchantment. In the end, he’d asked for a second slice.

She crossed the courtyard, feeling the eyes of the policeman on duty at the front entrance on her back the whole way. She climbed the steps that led upstairs and followed the signs to the office where she knew Lojacono had been assigned. In the office there were two desks, one of them unoccupied. At the other desk sat a small man with thick-lensed glasses. The minute he saw her, his face lit up.

“
Prego
, signora,
prego
. Come right in. Was there something you needed?”

She walked into the office hesitantly. “I was looking for Inspector Lojacono. Is he not here?”

The man’s disappointment was obvious. “No, he’s not. I’m Sergeant Giuffrè, his colleague. If I can be helpful in any way . . .”

Letizia stepped closer. The man was courteous, and perhaps he could provide her with some information.

“My name is Letizia and I own the trattoria in the Via San Giuseppe, not far from here. Pepp—uh, Inspector Lojacono always dines with us in the evening. Since he hasn’t been around in a few days, well, we, that is, the staff and I, we were a little worried. The young people wondered if he was sick, or if . . . uh, that is . . . whether he might have had to leave town because of something that happened back home, where his family lives?”

Giuffrè knew the way the world worked, and to some extent he knew women as well. It didn’t take him much more than a fraction of a second to figure out that the concerns of the restaurant staff were all concentrated in the person now standing before him.

“No, signora, you can all rest easy at the restaurant. Lojacono is fine, he hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s working on a case right now, and it’s taking all his time. He’s working hard, that’s all, and most of the day he’s not in the office at all.”

Letizia nodded, both reassured and puzzled. Finally she screwed up her courage and asked, “A case? Are you sure? It’s just that, you see, he told me . . . he told us that he wasn’t supposed to work . . . that is, he wasn’t assigned to investigative work. In fact, he said that he was strictly relegated to office work.”

The sergeant’s curiosity was piqued. Such a good-looking woman, not only attractive but also the owner of a restaurant that everyone was talking about, one of the few fashionable establishments in that part of town. And she was so unmistakably smitten with Lojacono, a man who was always threadbare and rumpled and had a personality that was as prickly as a cactus. There’s no explaining it: women are an unfathomable mystery and that’s a fact, he decided.

“Well, he told you the truth, signo’. But then what happened is that, in this particular case, he turned out to be the only one with any idea of how to proceed. Of course, he and I did talk it over, and I have to say, all modesty aside, the most important insights probably came from yours truly. However it happened, the prosecutor in charge decided to bring him in on the investigation directly and she summoned him to police headquarters. And that’s where he’s been ever since, practically full-time.”

Letizia took in this new information, once again with mixed feelings: Peppuccio was finally back doing the kind of work he felt he’d been born to do, and she knew that he had missed it much more than he’d ever been willing to admit. But now he was in close contact with that female prosecutor, the one about whom he had said: “she’s not just pretty, she also knows what she’s doing.”

She felt an urgent need to leave and hurry back to the safety and tranquility of her trattoria.

“I understand. Well, if you’d be so kind, please tell him that I dropped by when you talk to him.”

She turned on her heel, took a few steps, then stopped and came back.

“Actually, forget about it entirely. Don’t tell him anything about me coming by. Ah, these are for you, thanks again and
arrivederci
.”

She fled, leaving Giuffrè behind her, openmouthed at the unexpected and twofold gift of a tray of pastries and the sight of a marvelous derriere disappearing into the distance at a trot.

The mansion block where De Matteis lived was part of an elegant complex in the most exclusive quarter of the city. As Piras rode along the tree-lined streets, designed to ensure that the flats were shaded by leafy foliage, she reflected on the fact that isolation and privacy might sometimes be to the detriment of security, as the facts had made so sadly clear.

It was an observation she’d already had occasion to make when she’d participated in the forensic investigation of the scene of Giada’s murder. Lots of greenery, lights that illuminated only the sidewalks, a large dark area where a recently built swimming pool awaited its summertime inauguration: dozens of places where a wrongdoer could lurk in hiding.

As her driver approached the front door where the girl had been murdered, Piras thought about the sound of De Matteis’s voice on the phone when she had called her to ask for a meeting: metallic and distant. She felt as if she were talking to an answering machine. She was almost tempted to think that the woman didn’t care a damn about what was going on around her, including the investigation into her daughter’s murder.

She spoke her name into the buzzer and went upstairs to the second floor. A black woman in a checked dress and white apron opened the door and ushered her into a large living room. One of the walls was glass from floor to ceiling, offering a spectacular panoramic view.

Even on a grey day like this one, tormented by a relentless rain of varying intensity, the sea, the mountain, the peninsula, and the island, whose silhouette was reminiscent of the profile of a woman’s face with her hair cascading down, were a canvas whose beauty clutched at the heart and took your breath away. Piras thought to herself, as she had many times before, that the city looked out at that landscape with a certain impatience: the way an old and unsightly woman might open an armoire and gaze at the dress, now yellowed with age, that she’d worn to her debutante ball.

De Matteis walked in, saying goodbye to someone on the phone and making no secret of her annoyance as she ended the conversation.

“Excuse me, dottoressa. One of my so-called girlfriends, who keep persecuting me with their fake comforting phone calls. All they really want is a little gossip to trade during their hour-long chat fests. I know, I’ve done it myself: car crashes, divorces, bankruptcies, cheating husbands and wives. Always the same dance, as long as there’s some nugget worth sharing. Please, make yourself comfortable.”

Piras took a seat on the sofa, facing De Matteis, who had sat down in an armchair. She was no longer wearing dark glasses and Piras could finally scrutinize her gaze, but it didn’t do a lot of good: the woman’s eyes were completely devoid of expression.

“Signora, you may well be wondering what else we have to say to each other after our initial meeting in police headquarters, and why I asked to see you at your home. The reason is simple, and I’ll come right to the point: I am here to ask for your help. We have a new development that might possibly bring us close to a solution, and you may be able to provide us with some crucial information.”

De Matteis heaved a sigh. “Dottoressa, I’m so tired. No, it’s not only that I’m tired. It’s that I don’t care anymore. My heart is dead. I wake up, I get dressed, I keep everything in order, as you can see, the apartment, my help. I fill my days, I talk to my accountant, I supervise the charitable activities of the foundation named after my father. I use every minute of my day, to try to fill up the space . . . the space that’s been left empty. I always try to have something to do. But if I look inside myself, I find nothing. If I look up, peer beyond the next urgent thing, the practical nature of whatever I’m doing, there’s nothing left. I have to watch out because if I stop and ask myself the reason, the motive for doing all this, then my only option is to put an end to it all, there and then.”

Piras understood perfectly. She remembered the days and weeks that followed Carlo’s death as if in a dream, a life lived through a mist of fog; she could clearly recall how unreal it felt to do a thousand trivial daily things while constantly bearing that immense burden in one’s heart.

“Believe me, I have some idea of what you’re going through. I went through a loss of this kind many years ago, and I can remember the feeling very well. But we’ve got a murderer to catch. And we need your help to catch him.”

De Matteis grimaced. “I really don’t see what help I can provide. You see, in the past several days I’ve thought deeply, and I’ve discovered a terrible truth about myself: I’ve lived my life based on two emotions, which, when all is said and done, were two faces of a single emotion. Love for my daughter, and hatred for her father. The two things that sustained me; my only two topics of conversation. Giada’s education and upbringing, my responsibility for seeing to that alone; and my constant resentment towards this man who humiliated me as a woman and as a mother, abandoning us to flee to another country in the company of a cheap prostitute. Now, suddenly, I’ve lost everything. My daughter, and my pride in watching her grow up to be beautiful, caring, sensitive, and intelligent; and paradoxically, at the same time, her father, whom I no longer have any reason to loathe. I not only lost my daughter, dottoressa, I also lost myself, the person I’ve been until now. So let me tell you, I am deeply indifferent to anything you might be about to tell me, believe me.”

Piras smiled sadly. “I asked to see you here, in your home, for a specific reason, aside from the fact that this is an informal meeting. Let’s call it my womanly wiles. A hostess in her own home cannot simply turn and walk out of the door the way you did at police headquarters; here, in your own living room, you’re obliged to hear me out. And I do have something to tell you.”