Poisonville (24 page)

“I know that very well. And I am not interested in having an unfortunate lunatic sent to prison. I just want justice.”

“That would mean dragging Selvaggia into criminal court as well.”

“Along with her former chauffeur,” I added. “As accomplices to murder.”

He bared his teeth in a grimace. “Even as inexperienced and naïve a lawyer as you would manage to win an acquittal,” he shot back, with an edge. “You would have to give up your alibi, and testimony provided nearly two months after the fact is certainly questionable. And that’s not counting the fact that you would have to find some way of proving that Giovanna’s corpse was inside the Mercedes. Do you think that you could find a prosecutor willing to base an indictment on such a flimsy accusation?”

“Filippo killed her,” I snarled. “Do you want him to get away with it?”

“No. The problem is that, no matter what, Selvaggia cannot be dragged into this.”

“What would you suggest?”

“If he’s guilty, and I repeat, that remains to be seen, we will have him committed to a clinic where he will remain as long as it takes for him to be cured, no longer capable of harming others or himself.”

I stood up. “I’m disgusted,” I said flatly. “All you care about is making sure that Selvaggia is safe.”

“I want to make sure that a respectable individual is not publicly defamed.”

I refrained from commenting on his positive characterization of Selvaggia. I was too demoralized. My father had knocked me down, and I lacked the strength to get back on my feet. Everything he had said was true. Once again, I had misjudged the evidence in my possession. He had offered me the possibility of an out-of-court settlement between families, but I still preferred the kind of justice you get from a court. I didn’t waste my breath telling him so. He would just have laughed in my face.

I took refuge at Carla’s house, and told her everything that had happened. She lit a cigarette and went to the window to smoke, with her back to me.

“Have you looked at the newspaper?” she asked after a while.

“No. I was thinking about other things.”

She picked up the day’s paper from the table and handed it to me. “Threat to the Generational Change of the Guard in Local Corporate Leadership,” was the headline at the top of page one of the business section. Industrial and trade associations in the Northeast were all expressing their concern at the inability of the scions of the leading families to take over the companies their fathers had founded. A noted psychiatrist had been invited to lecture on the topic. According to the psychiatrist, these young people had grown up certain that they would be successful, and now they were unable to deal with the economic downturn.

“The leading families are in crisis. So?” I asked.

“It’s the end of the leading families,” Carla specified. “At least here in town. Neither you nor Filippo will be carrying on the family tradition and your parents are leaving for Romania, taking companies and cash with them.”

“Maybe that’s not such a negative thing,” I commented.

“There’ll be nothing but rubble and garbage left behind.”

I read aloud the last few lines from the interview with the psychiatrist, who announced his optimism—the people of this part of the world were accustomed to rolling up their sleeves and starting over.

“Of course. The legend of the hard-headed, hard-working people of the Northeast,” she said sarcastically. “People like your father and the Contessa did what they wanted to do, and no one is going to ask them to pay.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you shouldn’t be surprised when you find out that Selvaggia isn’t going to be indicted. And that justice will never be done for Giovanna’s murder. Around here, that’s not how things work.”

“Should I just give up?”

She shrugged and didn’t answer.

While I was on my way home, the Contessa’s Mercedes pulled up next to me; she waved to me to stop. I pulled into a store’s parking area and got out of my car. Selvaggia only lowered her window.

“Giovanna was nothing but a little whore and she got what she deserved,” she hissed in a chilly voice.

“Is that why Filippo killed her?” I asked, doing my best to maintain my calm.

“It wasn’t Filippo and I’ve never set foot in that mansion. That night I was at home.”

“I trust you implicitly,” I shot back sarcastically.

“Remember that if I go down, you all come with me. Your father first and foremost.”

The car window slid silently up and the Mercedes moved away.

I was trembling with fury when I got back in my car. I calmed down in a few minutes and tried to think about what had happened. Selvaggia’s furious reaction and her final remark might mean she didn’t feel all that safe after all. Perhaps it was worth trying to find evidence to nail her. After all, I had nothing left to lose.

* * *

At the interdiction hearing, Filippo had answered every question, without hesitation. When he was asked how much he thought Villa Selvaggia might be worth, he had confidently replied, “One euro,” and so on.

His mother could rightly be proud of him. Perhaps she was celebrating in his psychiatrist’s bed.

After leaving the courts building, Filippo went to a hardware store and purchased a length of high-quality rope, the strongest in the store. Then, to make sure he did things right, he went to the only bookshop in town and purchased a handbook on the art of tying knots. And now there he was, sitting in his studio, in the company of his own self-portrait in wax, which seemed to be staring at him indulgently.

While he coiled one end of the rope into an “S,” he saw everything, for the first time, in a different light. His mother, the magistrate, and Professor Moroncini all appeared to him as characters in a farce—each of them playing two roles. At the hearing, they had enacted a sort of macabre ballet. They had overwhelmed him with embarrassed wheedling and coaxing, and he had been reminded of that painting by Edvard Munch in which men and women seem to be moving toward the viewer like so many unsuspecting corpses out for a stroll. They were certainly dead, and yet they continued to strive, contrive, and conspire as if the world had just come into existence, as if nothing had existed before them. They were convinced they were unique, indestructible, and immortal. And yet they thought that the crazy one—the one who was incapable of understanding the difference between right and wrong—was him!

“Start with an ‘S’-shaped length of rope, leaving plenty of extra length extending off the bottom. Keep wrapping tight coils spiraling up the outside until you’re satisfied, then tuck the end of the rope through the top eye,” he read from the manual. He followed the directions closely.

Put an end to it. This was the only possible form of liberty.

At first, he had thought of doing it in the bathtub. But that had seemed to be in poor taste, considering how poor Giovanna had died. And then a hanging was more spectacular, it provided a touch of the artistic. And that was why he had been carefully studying the handbook for the past hour. The book was balanced on his music stand.

He enjoyed reading and rereading the straightforward instructions: “This is a very practical, strong, and secure noose, but may become difficult to untie if pulled hard.” Excellent. It was as if the anonymous author of the manual was perfectly aware of the macabre use to which his instructions would be put and was trying to remain detached, to keep from feeling any involvement in a murder or a suicide. Because that was the obvious use of a noose, or a slipknot, or, of course, a hangman’s knot.

He would certainly have given anything to see his mother’s face when she made the discovery. How would she react to the rebellion of her little puppet? Who would she call? The butler? Visentin? Or would she cut the rope herself? He felt pretty sure that she was capable of doing it. No one was as strong as she was. What about Moroncini? If the professor suddenly found himself without clients, Filippo wouldn’t have minded a bit.

He wrapped one more loop to complete the noose. He slid it up and down along the sliding rope. He widened the noose and slipped his head into it. He slid the noose up until he could feel the rope tighten around his neck. He pulled his head out of the noose, checked the length, and pulled on it several times to test its spring. It was a perfect, nine-loop noose. The classical seven loops suggested in the manual struck him as too few. Nine seemed safer somehow. Now he only had to wait for the right day.

Just then, he realized that his cell phone had been ringing for a while. It must be his mother. These days, she was the only who ever called him. When he picked up the phone, he planned to mute it, but he noticed that there was another number on the display. Curious, he pushed the green button to answer.

* * *

After my run-in with Selvaggia, I felt sure if I wanted to get anywhere, I’d have to take advantage of Filippo’s psychological instability. Without any specific plan, I picked up my cell phone and searched for his name in the phone book.

He answered after an endless series of rings.

“Your mother is going to have you locked up in a lovely clinic, and you won’t get out again until you’re old and senile,” I said in a burst of words.

“I don’t see why she would want to do that,” he replied, unperturbed.

“She and my father want to avoid a trial in criminal court, because she would be found guilty as your accomplice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Have you already forgotten you murdered Giovanna?”

Filippo said nothing. I tried to provoke him further by telling him how he had killed Giovanna in the little suburban house and how his mother had gotten rid of the body.

Filippo huffed in annoyance. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. My mother had me declared incompetent because I told my analyst she was a murderer,” he explained, and then clicked off.

“Filippo said those exact words?” Inspector Mele demanded.

“That’s right,” I answered.

“That makes no sense,” he commented. “And that boy isn’t all there, mentally. They had good reason to have him declared incompetent.”

“Selvaggia hated Giovanna. Maybe she found out that Filippo was sleeping with her, and she went to the mansion after her son left, and then drowned her, with the help of her chauffeur.”

Mele raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “First you tell me it was Filippo, now it was his mother with her chauffeur,” he cried. “The only thing we know for sure is that Giovanna was killed in the mansion and a couple of hours later Lucio saw the Contessa’s Mercedes drive out the front gate.” The inspector flashed a satisfied smile. “By the way, I found the Mercedes,” he announced in a triumphant tone. “The chauffeur had paid a wrecker from Pordenone with a criminal record as long as your arm to demolish it, but instead of crushing the car he kept it. He planned to sell it somewhere outside of the country, but my colleagues found it during a routine check.”

“At last, a little luck,” I commented.

“And that’s not all,” he continued, with even greater satisfaction. “I immediately sent the sergeant from the forensic office to do some tests. He found an entire handprint on a metal surface. It was Giovanna’s. What probably happened is the arm flopped out of the blanket or tarp the body was wrapped in.”

“Then we’ve got them.”

“Let’s just say that this is a substantial step forward,” he replied cautiously. “Enough to indict the chauffeur but not the Contessa. And the Romanian left town some time ago, we’ll never track him down. We have to find a way of linking Selvaggia to the murder.”

“How can we do it?”

“The phone records. For her home phone and her cell phone,” he answered. “If her son called her for help after murdering Giovanna, we’ll find a record of it. It’s not conclusive evidence, but together with the testimony on the car, it would be enough to force the prosecutor to name her as a suspect.”

“But to obtain the phone records, you’d need the authorization of the court, wouldn’t you?” I objected.

“That’s certainly true for me. But not for you . . .”

In the middle of the afternoon of the following day I walked into the men’s room of a multiplex cinema outside Padua for a meeting with a guy who would hand over the Contessa’s phone records. I had no idea who he was. Mele had organized everything. The guy had told me to bring him an envelope with five thousand euros in cash and to forget I had ever seen his face. The signal of recognition was a navy blue scarf hanging out of my overcoat pocket. When I walked in, there were two people washing their hands. A young man and a middle-aged man, about forty, with a buzz cut. I started washing my hands, too. The young man left immediately. The older man dried his hands methodically, waiting for me to do the same. Then he pulled an envelope out of his pocket and extended it. I handed over the cash. He took the time to check the contents of the envelope, and then he left. I walked into a stall, sat down on the toilet, and opened the envelope. It contained two sheets of paper. One was for the phone in Villa Selvaggia, but there were no phone calls between 9
P.M.
and 8:30 the following morning. The records for her cell phone on the other hand showed numerous phone calls until 11
P.M.
Then there was nothing until 3:26
A.M.
When I read the area code I was disappointed at first, because it wasn’t the same as Filippo’s cell phone. Then I focused on the number and it dawned on me. I knew who had killed Giovanna. I punched in the number. The murderer picked up on the fourth ring.

“It was you,” I accused him.

My father said nothing. Then he hung up.

* * *

Selvaggia was having dinner with a Bulgarian businessman. She was about to palm off a collection of old industrial machinery on him. It was all junk, good for scrap and nothing more. In the middle of dinner, Antonio had called to warn her that Francesco had discovered the truth.

How could that have happened? How had he learned the truth? She had never been confronted with an ineluctable sequence of events before. She had always had the time to calculate, control, and manipulate. For the first time, a hint of panic had begun to surge in her chest. It was a horrible sensation; she would have to make sure it didn’t get out of control.