The dogs of Rome cab-1

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “Great.” He still needed a name, but he wanted to give her space. “Tell me, who’s the record-keeper here? You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Names of members, subscriptions, mailing lists, that kind of thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else do you do?”

  “Campaign news, press relations, arrangements with printers for publication of posters and flyers.”

  “Are you responsible for the money side of things?”

  “No, that was Arturo. And Chiara.”

  “Chiara’s your colleague. Right? I’m betting she’s been here longer than you. Bet she’s older than you, too. Am I right?”

  Old enough to know better than to come running into the office first thing in the morning to get questioned aggressively by police, he thought.

  “Yes. She and Arturo handled the money. She’s in London now, at a conference for the RSPCA. She left on Wednesday.”

  “What’s the RSPCA?”

  Federica scrunched up her face as if she had difficulty remembering, but it turned out she was trying to get her English pronunciation right: “The Real Society for the Preventing of Animals Cruelty,” she said.

  “Got you,” said Blume. “You’ve no complaints about the way you’re treated?”

  “We believe in what we do here. They were completely honest with me about everything. At least, everything to do with money.”

  “Where do you keep the files?”

  She pointed to her computer.

  “All of them in there?”

  “We upload to the computer in Milan. Some stuff gets printed out, but we never use the printed-out stuff.”

  “Where is it?”

  She got up, walked over to a wall, and pulled open a white sliding door to reveal yet more fat green Oxford binders, neatly arranged alphabetically.

  “Member lists, invoices, utilities, campaigns, press cuttings,” she explained. “But it’s better organized on the computer.”

  “What did Clemente use his office for?”

  “Working.”

  “Working means different things to different people. Did he file, type on the computer, write with a pen, make calls, meet people, drink coffee, play Internet games?”

  “Arturo was hopeless with computers. He never used his. He didn’t even have a mobile phone.”

  “So what did he do all day?”

  “He wasn’t here all that much. Especially since he started that documentary thing. He’d write out campaign projects, get me to put them into flow-charts, PowerPoint, that sort of thing. He made phone calls, received visitors.”

  “What documentary?”

  “On TV. Against dog fights.”

  “OK,” said Blume. “What sort of visitors?”

  “Usually people who wanted to donate, become members, offer voluntary work.”

  “Including the woman we were talking about?”

  She looked at him almost with a pout, as if he had no right to return to the same uncomfortable theme of a few minutes ago.

  “Well?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know this is hard for you, but you won’t have to talk about this to anyone other than me,” said Blume.

  It was a lie. If her evidence turned out to be important, she’d find herself telling it several times to the investigating magistrate, the preliminary judge, about ten more policemen, a court judge, and finally the press. “How do you know they were having an affair?”

  “I never said they were.”

  “But we already know it. Don’t worry about what you said, just tell me how you knew.”

  She stared at the desk.

  “This is nothing to do with you,” said Blume. “I just need to know how you could tell, just so…” He searched for a convincing bluff, but came up empty-handed. “Just so we can be sure,” he said briskly.

  She stared at her desk, and spoke to it accusingly, “The way they moved, looked at each other. Also, she was pretty open about it.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “No.” This time she made no silent head movements.

  “Is her name on the records here?” Blume leaned forward and patted the computer monitor.

  “Yes. She was a big donor.”

  “Find the name in there, will you?” Blume stood up and went behind her to look at the screen. It showed a spreadsheet scrolled down to the last few names. The cursor was blinking beside a name. Manuela Innocenzi, she had joined LAV six months previously.

  “That her?”

  A sad nod.

  Blume found a piece of paper and pen and took down the address and telephone number.

  “Great. You’ve been a lot of help. I think you should just close up and go home now.”

  “The office opens in about three hours. I may as well stay.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be opening it today, will you?”

  “Animals continue to suffer,” she said. “Our office will stay open.”

  “Humans suffer more,” said Blume. “And this is a secondary scene, so the investigating magistrate will probably have it sealed off.”

  He saw he was beginning to antagonize her, which he did not want. Not yet.

  “These files on the dog fighting,” he tapped the folder in his hand. “Did you prepare them, collate them, whatever?”

  “No. Not those ones.”

  “Did the other girl, Chiara, do it?”

  “No. They’re not from here. They have no reference number. All our files have LAV reference numbers. Nothing gets filed till it has a number, and we get the number from the computer. That way the computer has at least a trace of all hard copies.”

  “So what are these?”

  “They must just be his own files. Just notes.”

  “But they’re not from this office?” Blume turned the beige folder in his hands. It was the same kind magistrates used, the same kind Clemente had had in his study.

  “Maybe he wrote them here. They’re not in the system yet, that’s all. He’d have to give me them first, then I’d organize, assign numbers to them.”

  “You’d copy out his long hand?”

  “Only if he asked me to. Sometimes I’d just scan handwritten notes, but not often. Usually he’d do most of it on the computer, even though he found it hard. He isn’t like a boss who expects his secretary to do everything.”

  “I see. So these were his personal notes? They were a draft or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he did them at home?”

  “Maybe. He does a lot of stuff at home.”

  “Can you remember seeing them on his desk? On Thursday, before he left?”

  She thought for a while, then said, “No. I don’t think they were there. Like I said, he keeps his desk clean. He brings stuff back and forth from his house. He goes around with a backpack all the time. I mean he used to.”

  “A backpack?”

  “A gray one. He bicycles to work. It is the best way to carry things.”

  Cycling in Rome, thought Blume. Another good way to get killed.

  9

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 4:15 A.M.

  Ignoring the protests of the secretary, who had evidently pictured herself left tragically alone overnight in the office, Blume obliged her to leave the building with him. He called in a patrol car and had her taken home, and he asked for someone to be sent over to control access to the office until the magistrate decided what needed to be done. But he did not see it as a repository of evidence, and did not wait to see when, or if, someone arrived.

  What interested him more, far more, was the person Clemente had been in bed with. And the possibility that D’Amico was trying to fuck up his investigation. It was time to find out for sure.

  Blume drove through the city, still mostly asleep under a milky gray predawn sky, but with fruit and vegetable markets and early morning bars already opening. It took him just twenty minutes to get back to the crime scene at Monteverde.

  The porter was
not in his cabin, but the gate to the courtyard was open. When he reached the door of Block C, he pulled out the aluminium Yale key D’Amico had given him and opened the front door. He extracted the key from the keyhole, allowed the door to swing closed again, then gave it a hard push with the flat of his hand. It resisted. He used his shoulder, and with a sharp click the door burst open. Blume held the door open with one foot and examined it. The strike plate was bent and recessed into the woodwork where the latch connected with the jamb. The faceplate on the door was also bent. They looked as if they had been like that for years. Getting by the porter and into Block C did not pose much of a problem. Nothing about getting into the building required planning.

  Carrying the file folder from Clemente’s office, Blume made his way up to the third floor. A young policeman stood in front of the door. His efforts to set a wide-awake look on his face gave him the panicked air of a child being found out in a lie. Blume showed his ID.

  “When did you come on duty?”

  “Midnight, sir.”

  “Who was here before you?”

  “When I arrived, there was no one here.”

  “Figures,” said Blume.

  Taped crookedly to the door was a typed notice prohibiting entry pursuant to Article 354 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Police tape was stretched in an X from cornice to threshold, and in five lateral strips from jamb to jamb. Blume peeled back as little as he could, put the H-shaped key into the deadbolt. It opened after one turn. He stepped inside the dead man’s apartment and turned on the light.

  The first thing he did was look at the space from which the corpse had been removed. The rusty stains in the wooden floor showed where the body had lain. Blume stooped down and looked. He considered the thin strands of red and brown on the wall. The white and blue strings set out by the technicians to fix the source to the third dimension ran down the wall, across the floor. Wispy red and brown lines marked the white wall, like a Schifano canvas. Thin-edged weapon, right-handed assailant. The blood patterns strongly suggested the assailant had been standing more or less in the middle of the hall. He had cleaned himself up in the bathroom, leaving traces of himself everywhere. He must also have changed his clothes, carried the dirty ones out in a bag. Probably the bag he took from the study. The one the secretary said Clemente used to bring to the office?

  The towels by the door had gone to the lab for examination. Blume stepped back down the hall to where he estimated they had been, and thought about the towels.

  The killer had placed them there because he thought the blood might run under the door. Someone who watched horror flicks or played video games might think like that. If the killer was someone who watched those movies and thought he’d have a go at it in real life, then Clemente was just a random victim.

  Blume did not like the idea of total randomness. Yet he did not believe there was anything professional or political in the murder, either. The truth lay somewhere in between.

  The shopping box had gone to the labs along with its contents. Food for a dead man. The killer had used his knife to open the box, Blume was sure of it. And then, on impulse, he had stolen chocolate paste and peanut butter, kids’ food. He had left the house with a bag of some sort, since he had to hide his bloody clothes. He had probably stolen the wallet.

  The uniformed officers yesterday had reported that the neighbors next door were away on holiday, as were those above, and the one below worked all day in his store on the other side of town. When Clemente was killed, there had been only two other apartments in the building with people in them. The one on the top floor, where the delivery boy had gone with another box, and one on the ground floor. A girl had been playing the piano as Clemente was knifed to death.

  Blume returned to the study and, as he had done exactly twelve hours earlier, slid open the dangerously heavy top door of Clemente’s filing cabinet and thumbed his way to the back files under A. He pulled out Al-lergie, Animalisti, and Alleva, and dropped them on the desk, then dropped the file he had picked up from Clemente’s office on top. The file folders were identical. Some of the handwritten notes in the folder from the office seemed to continue in the Alleva file on the desk.

  It was quite the worst case of evidence planting he had experienced for some time. He almost felt embarrassed for D’Amico. It did not reflect well on himself either: D’Amico had been his pupil.

  Blume gathered all the papers he could find with the name Alleva on them, returned to his car, and drove across the city again to his apartment, getting snarled in morning traffic toward the end.

  His original plan had been to sleep for an hour, but he slept for four and was woken by his cell phone ringing.

  “Where are you, Commissioner?” said Gallone’s voice. “You are already a quarter of an hour late for the coordination meeting.”

  “I was just in the middle of a… I am in the middle of something. It’s important. I didn’t have a chance to phone,” said Blume.

  “Where are you now?”

  Blume looked at his bedroom clock. Jesus. How had that happened? “I’d prefer not to talk now. I’ll tell you later, sir.”

  “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “Nothing. I just have to keep it down. The person I’m interviewing, a C.I., is a bit cagey. I need to hang up now.”

  “Who’s your C.I., Blume?”

  “That’s confidential, sir.”

  “You don’t have any confidential informants. That’s what Paoloni does. Where are you?”

  “I really had better go. I’ll explain later.” Blume hung up. He got out of the bed and suddenly the floor seemed to tilt. He sat down quickly again as wave after wave of nausea rolled over him. He had skipped dinner. Ever since he was a kid, skipping a meal had sent him into some sort of glycemic crisis. His mother used to worry about it and had been about to bring him to the doctor when she got back from the short break with his father. The day after, as he had sat in the wreckage of an abandoned teenage party, a policewoman sitting on the sofa opposite him, the doctor’s secretary had called up and spoken in icy tones about there being no excuse for skipping appointments. So he had never gone back to the doctor.

  Every year, he underwent an obligatory medical, during which he folded his arms over his chest and spoke in monosyllables. The previous year, the doctor had taken out a beak-shaped metal instrument and pressed a piece of fat from his flank between the blades.

  Doctors.

  After some toast and an apple, he felt a bit better. He had always had problems oversleeping. Once he was down, he was out. He had to skip the coordination meeting, but he’d make it up with an investigative breakthrough. But first… he fell back asleep.

  10

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 11:15 A.M.

  At eleven fifteen, showered, gelled, fresh, and reinvigorated, Alec Blume walked out of his apartment block, properly dressed in beige chinos and a soft, dark blue cotton shirt with an ample breast pocket containing his notebook, pen, and phone. He wore heavy Clark casuals and carried a leather briefcase, still supple thanks to his careful application of Leather Balm with Atom Wax once a month. It was a wide and deep bag, large enough for the art books his father used to carry in it. He carried no weapon.

  Blume decided to go straight to visit this Manuela Innocenzi that the secretary had fingered. If she was the person in bed with Clemente before his murder, she might have a lot to tell, and he would drag her in for questioning.

  He plugged his phone into the cigar lighter below the dashboard to recharge, and phoned the office. He expected the youthful, bright voice of Ferrucci to answer. Instead he got Zambotto.

  “Cristian? It that you? What are you doing answering phones?”

  “It was ringing.”

  Blume explained where he was going.

  “Manuela Innocenzi?” said Zambotto. “Some name.”

  “What do you mean some name?” asked Blume, beginning to see the answer as he asked the question.

  “You know, Innocenzi,” s
aid Zambotto.

  “Innocenzi, as in… Innocenzi?” said Blume. It had not even entered his thoughts, yet it had been the first thing Zambotto’s anvil-like mind had come up with.

  “No way.”

  “OK. No, then,” said Zambotto.

  Blume felt butterflies in his stomach, a feeling he used to get in school and during his presentations at university. It was the bad-dream feeling of being visibly stupid in front of other people. Innocenzi was the name of the clan that controlled the entire south and southwest of Rome, most of the Agro Romano to Fiumicino and Ostia, with pockets of influence in the Agro Pontino, Foggia, Circeo, Latina, even Campania.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and switched on his hazard lights.

  “No way,” he said.

  Zambotto seemed to have hung up.

  “No,” repeated Blume. “It’s just a coincidence of surnames.”

  Zambotto was still there. “Innocenzi has a daughter. No wife, no brothers or sisters. Just the daughter.”

  “Not one that sleeps with a do-gooder like Clemente. They’d never move in the same circles.”

  “What have circles got to do with people fucking?” said Zambotto.

  “Innocenzi’s a pretty common name,” said Blume.

  Zambotto seemed to be considering the idea. Eventually he said, “I can’t think of anyone I know called Innocenzi except for that bastard. You want, I can ask Ferrucci. He’s good at research. He’ll be here in a minute.”

  Blume hesitated, then pulled out the piece of paper he had copied out in Clemente’s office earlier and read off the address to Zambotto.

  “OK. Tell Paoloni, tell Ferrucci, but let’s keep this close. It’s probably nothing. As for this woman, I’ll go there myself now. You give this address to Ferrucci, check it out together, then call me immediately. It’s probably only a coincidence.”

  “In some ways, it’d be pretty good if it wasn’t,” said Zambotto.