Dorfmann shrugged.
“Nine?”
Dorfmann looked very doubtful. That was as good as he would get.
Dorfmann turned away and pulled off a pair of latex gloves, picked up a clipboard, and made a slight flourish with his hand to emphasize that he was signing off on the case already. “Lividity on back, buttocks. I don’t think anyone moved the body. This seems to be where he died. If you want pinpoint accuracy about the time, it will be up to you or your dandy friend to give me some markers.”
Blume was looking at the towels over by the door.
A photographer in a white jump suit stooped and took a shot of the box of groceries, against which he had propped a photographic scale ruler.
Blume noticed that he was alternating between an ordinary thirty-five mm Canon and a digital Nikon SLR. He removed the ruler and took two more shots of the box, once with the ordinary camera and once with the digital.
Then he turned on Clemente’s halogen lights overhead and repeated the process. He was doing a conscientious job.
“Get those towels over there. Photograph them, I mean,” said Blume.
The photographer looked Blume up and down, assessing his authority, then scowled and continued to photograph the box. Blume went for the friendly angle.
He said, “I’ve got a Coolpix. It’s only a small Coolpix. Wouldn’t be much good here, I suppose.”
The photographer stood up and stared at him, then, without a word, returned to his job.
Blume dismissed a fleeting image of himself plunging his cheap little Coolpix down the photographer’s throat. The technicians were moving through the apartment in white suits, acting under their own orders and initiative. He stopped one, asked for and got a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. He had left his own in the car. Everything was going very smoothly.
“My mentor and master,” declared a voice in a Neapolitan accent.
Blume lifted his gaze from the stained body on the floor, which did not have a name yet, and turned around to see Nando D’Amico, resplendent in a golden silk suit, step through the front door, breaking another strand of tape.
“Close your vowels, Nando. You’ll never make it into the political elite till you learn to close those Camorra vowels,” said Blume.
“Elocution lessons from a non-EU immigrant. The shame of it,” said D’Amico. “But of course, you are from the deep north. Superior to every last Leghista in Lombardy.”
“So are you. We’re the same rank now.”
“So we are. We’ll have to do something about that. Now here’s a fact not a lot of people know,” said D’Amico. “Naples is slightly north of New York. Check it out next time you’re near a globe.”
“My people were from Seattle.”
“Where’s that?”
“Far away from here. Listen Nando, what are you here for? Who’s been assigned?”
“You.”
“And you are here because…?”
“The departmental top dog himself sent me. He said the dead guy was important. I reminded him I no longer run a murder team and told him I needed a superior officer.”
Blume said, “I am not your superior anymore.”
“I meant morally.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About half an hour.” He held up a hand as if in admonishment to objections Blume had not yet made. “I am here in an official representative capacity, not as a detective. That needs to be made clear.”
“Gallone is here, too.”
“Yes, all those atheists who doubted his existence look like fools now, don’t they?” He made a show of looking around. “But he seems to have dematerialized again.”
“I see a Violent Crime Analysis Unit doing plenty of good work, policeman outside, a medical examiner finishing up his job. It looks to me like we are already under the direction of an investigating magistrate, am I right?”
“Yes. Public Minister Filippo Principe.”
“That means I was informed late,” said Blume.
“That happens. Happened when we were partners, too.”
“How long were you here before me? Be precise.”
“Forty minutes.”
“The forensic team was here already?”
“About five minutes after that.”
“Did you enter the apartment?”
“What, am I under suspicion?”
“Well, did you?”
“In the company of Gallone and the first reporting officer, yes. The door was open. The wife had opened it.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t here when I arrived.”
“Weird, isn’t it? You, a representative from the Ministry, and Gallone of all people, being the first to arrive.”
“After the patrol unit, you mean. All I know is I was sent, and I arrived. If there was a delay finding you, it’s hardly my fault.”
“OK,” said Blume.
D’Amico plucked at his tie. “I forgot how aggressive you get.”
“I’m not being aggressive,” said Blume, and patted him on the shoulder. “And I’m happy to hear the investigation is under Principe’s control. I like him. He’ll give us room. He listens, thinks.”
“Except he’s not here,” said D’Amico.
“He’ll get here. He knows it’s best to let the forensic team work the scene first before he sees for himself.”
“If you say so,” said D’Amico.
“I do, Nando. Where were you just now?”
“Getting these keys duplicated.” D’Amico held out and jingled a bunch of keys in front of Blume.
“Those are the keys to this place?”
“Yes. They were on the shelf there, near the door. The technicians gave me permission. Seems like, despite their complaining, they’ve got plenty of other material here.”
“Meaning?”
“Fingerprints, footprints, saliva, hairs. The killer, whoever he was, left traces of himself everywhere. We may even have footprints. That is to say, bare feet.”
Blume looked at the corpse in the hall. Paoloni had put on latex gloves and seemed to be intent on pulling back the lips of a stab wound in the head. “The bare footprints will be his.”
“Not unless he got up and walked about in his own blood, which he could have done, but it doesn’t seem likely. Also, they are small footprints,” said D’Amico.
“A woman’s?”
“Who knows?” D’Amico shrugged. “Here, want a key?” he offered Blume a large H-shaped key for the qua druple deadbolt lock to the front door beside which they were standing. “I didn’t bother getting copies of the key to the front gate. But this one”-he handed Blume a blue aluminium Yale key-“opens the front door to the building. Not that you’ll need it.”
“Why?”
“It’s not secure. Just give it a shove, it opens by itself.”
Blume took the key anyway.
D’Amico reached over and switched off the lights in the hall. His shining suit and white shirt seemed to dim slightly, but his tanned, handsome face continued to glow.
Blume had several questions. He picked an easy one.
“That cardboard box there?”
“It’s full of groceries from the SMA supermarket. Apparently Arturo Clemente here bought them himself yesterday evening, and ordered a delivery for this morning.”
D’Amico pinched the top of his trousers to make sure the crease was still sharp. Blume wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Arturo Clemente’s the name of the victim?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So what? You think the grocery boy killed him?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said D’Amico. He checked a wafer-thin watch, straightened his shirt cuffs. “We get the grocery boy, leave him with Commissioner Zambotto for an hour, we’ll have the case resolved before supper. That would be nice.”
D’Amico snapped open a shell-shaped mobile that he must have been already holding in his hand, found the
number he was looking for, and held the phone to his ear. With his free hand, he smoothed his shining black hair and murmured into it. A technician down the hall cursed and dropped a cyanoacrylate fuming wand. One of his colleagues, who was stretching a cat’s cradle of threads from bloodstains on the floor back to the corpse, laughed. Paoloni, who was sketching the scene in a notebook, joined in.
D’Amico was nine years Blume’s junior and for five years had been two ranks below him. In those days, he had been a neat young man in clean shoes and a polo shirt. Every time he went up a level, he upgraded his clothes style. If he ever made questore, he’d have to dress like Louis XIV.
D’Amico clapped his cell phone shut without saying who it was, but announced: “It seems we have a Political murder on our hands.”
Blume looked at the bloodied body in the loose bathrobe. He noted the splatter patterns on the wall and floor, the cardboard box and the packet of Weetabix visible on top. He said, “It doesn’t look very political to me.”
“Well it is-which explains why Gallone was here.”
“Explains why you are here, too,” said Blume. “That’s a politician?”
“No. He was an animal rights activist of some sort. It’s his wife who’s the politician. She’s also the one who found him. She made the call at 16.05.”
“The forensics complained you had been looking through the apartment already,” said Blume.
“I looked in, is all. Gallone was with me. He’s still my superior, so I did what he wanted.”
“What party? The wife I mean.”
“The Greens,” said D’Amico.
“So we’re looking for an environmentally unfriendly errand boy.”
D’Amico smoothed his hair and looked doubtful. “We can’t rule out anything. On my way back from the hardware store with the keys, I had a chat with the porter. I must have been with him when you arrived. The porter says he saw nothing.”
Blume stayed silent.
D’Amico continued, “He doesn’t strike me as being a very reliable witness. Judging from his breath, either he was drinking in his cabin, or he had just spent some time in a bar.”
“The porter is going to be defensive as well as eager to please. He’ll be trying to give the sort of answers he thinks you want to hear,” said Blume, unable to break his teaching habit.
“He has already been doing some finger-pointing at various residents.”
“He could be right. We’re going to have to check up on them, too.”
“Gallone has been appointing uniforms for the house-to-house visits. He’s suspended leave, called in for a few extra recruits from around town.”
“Gallone the coordinator. That’s new, too,” said Blume.
D’Amico slid his hand into his jacket, and from his inside pocket extracted four sheets of paper, neatly folded and stapled together. He thumbed through the sheets, then handed them to Blume.
“This is a list of all the residents in this and the other three buildings in the complex.”
Blume glanced through the pages. “Some of the names are circled.”
“Those are the ones about whom the porter has grave misgivings. He circled them himself.”
Blume turned to the next page. “There are more names circled than not.”
“He is a very suspicious porter.”
Blume said, “How can he sleep at night being surrounded by so many murderous residents? Little wonder the poor man drinks. And you, you’ve been very busy for someone sent to represent the Ministry.”
D’Amico looked offended. “I was just trying to be useful.”
“You entered the crime scene, spoke to the medical examiner, had keys duplicated, and spoke to the porter. Either you’re a judicial investigator or you’re not,” said Blume. “You were once, now you’re not. From now on, you stay here at the doorway.”
“Fine,” said D’Amico.
Blume walked toward the body in the middle of the corridor. The photographer had vanished into the adjoining rooms.
“I got the impression from the medical examiner that this has nothing to do with queers, despite the bathrobe,” said D’Amico from his post by the door.
“Despite the knife, too,” said Blume. “Knives are surrogates, remember?”
“You think it could be sexual?”
“Could be anything. Except I trust Dorfmann. His autopsy will tell for sure.”
A technician walked out of the victim’s study, carrying a plastic-wrapped computer. They would find out more about Arturo Clemente when they pried into his files, followed the trail he had left all over the Internet like an unwitting snail.
Paoloni was examining the shelves along the corridor. The technicians had moved away from the area immediately around the body. Blume waved at one of them and asked for permission to explore. The technician shrugged, nodded.
Paoloni shuffled over and stood beside Blume, looking more like a snitch with privileges than a law enforcer.
“OK, let’s start. Beppe, you finished your sketch?”
Paoloni showed it to Blume. It looked like it had been done by an ungifted five-year-old, but it included measurements, and would do until the technicians supplied their version.
“Slight grazing on the knuckles,” said Blume. “Dorfmann might be able to tell us more, but it looks like he didn’t manage to put up much of a struggle.”
Paoloni asked, “What do you think? The killer was handy with his weapon?”
“Not necessarily. The victim looks as if he wasn’t expecting this.”
“I think that, too. He didn’t know what hit him,” said Paoloni.
“I wonder did he know who hit him,” said Blume.
“No sign of forced entry,” said Paoloni. “Someone delivered the groceries and someone killed him before he had time to put them away. Makes sense to presume it was the same person.”
They stared in silence at the corpse for a while longer. Paoloni said, “I see the assailant being alone.”
“I agree.”
“If there had been a second person, he would have gripped the victim in some way, pinned him down, tied him up. Something that we would be able to see.”
“Yes,” said Blume. “Two people come at you with knives, you run, barricade yourself in a room. Maybe not get very far, but at least some of the wounds would be in your back. This guy looks like he thought he was in with a fighting chance. Stabbed in the front of the body each time. What do you make of those towels over by the front door?”
Paoloni pushed his thumb into his nostril to show he was thinking.
Eventually he said, “No idea. Like the killer wanted to clean up or something, but then didn’t bother. One was streaked, like he cleaned the blade on it. The others are clean.”
Blume said, “It’s as if he wanted to stem the flow of the blood, like he was scared it would run under the door.”
Paoloni made a dismissive click with his tongue, tilted his chin up, and said, “It would never have run that far once the heart had stopped beating.”
“Maybe our killer didn’t know that,” said Blume. “Which would make him a first-timer.”
Blume went over and looked at the towels. They were pure white and fluffy. He thought of his own towels, multicolored strips of sandpaper. Two of the towels were still folded and pristine; one stained as if something had been wiped on it, as Paoloni had said. A third had been unfolded then rolled into a snake shape and left near the door.
“Nice towels,” offered D’Amico, who was standing near to the door. “By the way, I forgot to mention, the wife spoke to the victim at ten thirty this morning. On the phone. From Padua.”
“You forgot to tell me?”
“The Holy Ghost knows this already. He was the one who told me. He got it from the wife.”
“Did you tell Dorfmann?”
“No, I just heard, like I said.”
“Phone Dorfmann now. Tell him you’re the dandy one, and you’ve got a marker for him.”
“The dandy o
ne?”
“Yes.”
Blume went back to Paoloni at the body. “Can we roll him over?”
They rolled Clemente’s body over. There were no wounds behind, but Dorfmann would have said if there were. As Blume had expected, Clemente’s bathrobe had soaked up most of the blood.
“Not much blood,” said Paoloni. “Considering. His heartbeat must have slowed down pretty quick.”
Blume turned around as he felt a presence behind him.
Inspector Cristian Zambotto had arrived, heaving and gasping and cursing after his trip up the stairs. Zambotto was dangerously overweight and had flat black hair that stopped suddenly somewhere high up on the middle of his head, leaving room for a wide rim of pocked skin that eventually merged with his thick neck.
After D’Amico left to pursue a political career, Blume’s team was split up and Zambotto was assigned to him. Blume did not know much about Zambotto except that he almost never contributed anything to anyone’s conversation, as if at some point in his life, Zambotto had decided it was too difficult to turn calories into words.
“Cristian, spend about half an hour here, OK? Get the scene into your head. Then I want you to find out who delivered those groceries, and bring him, or them, in for questioning. I want to be able to leave here, go interview the suspect. Take backup if you need it.”
“Right,” said Zambotto.
“Paoloni, take a few minutes here, then catch up with me in whatever room I’m in, OK?”
Paoloni nodded.
“Then you can go back and requestion the people in the apartment block. I want you to draw up a timeline using the reports from the police officers that Gallone appears to have assigned. We have a ten thirty call from the wife, an estimated time of death not long after, and now we need to find out about when these groceries were delivered. Also, you’ll be doing the paperwork on this.”
Paoloni gave him a dirty look.
“You can get Ferrucci to help you.”
“Oh, great,” said Paoloni.
“Why, you’d prefer to do the paperwork with Zambotto?” Blume looked at Paoloni, who shook his head quickly, more as a warning to Blume not to forget that Zambotto was still standing there. “Yeah, I thought so.”
Paoloni was making life hell for an officer-class graduate called Marco Ferrucci, but Blume saw a lot of raw talent in the young man. He figured Paoloni did, too, which might explain why he was so intent on humiliating him. Ferrucci had the potential to outshine them all.
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