“Yes?” he said, doing the same rigmarole with his nostrils.
“Dr. Angelo Pardo?”
The voice of a woman, fiftyish and stern. “Yes, it’s me.”
“Your voice sounds strange.” “A cold.”
“Ah. I’m a nurse with Dr. Caruana in Fanara. The doctor waited a long time for you yesterday morning, and you didn’t even have the courtesy to inform us you weren’t coming.”
“Please give my apologies to Dr. Caruana, but this cold…I’ll get back in tou—”
He interrupted himself. Wasn’t he taking this a bit too far? How could the dead man he was pretending to be ever get back in touch?
“Hello?” said the nurse.
“I’ll call back as soon as I can. Good day.”
He hung up. An entirely different tone from that used by the unknown man in the first phone call. Very interesting. But would he ever succeed in opening the drawer? He moved his hand carefully, keeping it out of the telephone’s view.
This time he succeeded.
It was stuffed full of papers. Every possible and imagina-ble kind of receipt of the sort that help keep a household running: rent, electricity, gas, telephone, maintenance. But nothing concerning him, Angelo, personally in person, as Catarella would say. Maybe he’d kept the papers and things more directly related to his own life in the middle drawer.
He closed the left-hand drawer, and the telephone rang. Perhaps the phone had realized a bit late that he’d tricked it, and it was now taking revenge.
“Yes?”
Again with nostrils plugged.
“What the hell happened to you, asshole?”
Male voice, fortyish, angry. He was about to respond when the other continued:
“Hold on a second, I’ve got a call on the other line.”
Montalbano pricked his ears but could only hear a confused murmur. Then two words loud and clear:
“Holy shit!”
Then the other hung up. What did it mean? Scumbag and asshole. It was anyone’s guess how a third anonymous caller might define Angelo. At that moment the intercom next to the front door rang. The inspector went and buzzed open the door downstairs. It was Fazio and Catarella.
“Ahh, Chief, Chief! Fazio tol’ me you was needin’ me poissonally in poisson!”
He was all sweaty and excited by the high honor the inspector was bestowing on him by asking him to take part in the investigation.
“Follow me, both of you.”
He led them into the study.
“You, Cat, take that laptop that’s on the desk and see if you can tell me everything it’s got inside. But don’t do it in here; take it into the living room.”
“Can I also take the prinner wit’ me, Chief?”
“Take whatever you need.”
“With Catarella gone, Montalbano filled Fazio in on everything, from his fuckup in leaving Michela alone in Angelo’s apartment to what Elena Sclafani had told him. He also told him about the phone calls. Fazio stood there pensively.
“Tell me again about the second call,” he said after a moment.
Montalbano described the call again.
“Here’s my hypothesis,” said Fazio. “Let’s say the guy who phoned the second time is named Giacomo. This Giacomo doesn’t know that Angelo’s been killed. He calls him up and hears him answer the phone. Giacomo’s angry because he’s been unable to get in touch with Angelo for several days. “When he’s about to start talking to him, he tells him to hold on because he’s got a call on another line. Right?”
“Right.”
“He talks on the other line and somebody tells him something that not only upsets him but makes him break off the conversation. The question is, what did they tell him?”
“That Angelo’s been murdered,” said Montalbano.
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Listen, Fazio, do the newsmen know about the murder yet?”
“Well, something’s been leaking out. But to get back to our discussion, when Giacomo finds out he’s talking to a fake Angelo, he hangs up immediately.”
“The question is, why did he hang up?” said Montalbano. “Here’s a first idea: Let’s say Giacomo’s a man with nothing to hide, an innocent friend from nights of wining and dining and girls. While he’s thinking he’s talking to Angelo, somebody tells him Angelo’s been killed. A real friend would not have hung up. He’d have asked the fake Angelo who he really is and why he was passing himself off as Angelo. So we need a second idea. Which is that Giacomo, as soon as he learns of Angelo’s death, says ‘Holy shit’ and hangs up because he’s afraid of giving himself away if he keeps on talking. So it’s not an innocent friendship, but something shady. And that first phone call also seemed fishy to me.” “What can we do?”
“We can try to find out where the calls came from. See if you can get authorization, and then take it to the phone company. There’s no guarantee it’s going to work, but it’s worth a try.”
“I’ll try right now.”
“Wait, that’s not all. We need to find out everything we can about Angelo Pardo. Based on what Elena Sclafani told me, it seems he was kicked out of the medical association or whatever it’s called. And that’s not the sort of thing that’s done for chickenshit.”
“All right, I see what I can do.”
“Wait. What’s the big hurry? I also want to know the whole life story of Emilio Sclafani, who teaches Greek at theliceoof Montelusa. You’ll find the address in the phone book.”
“All right,” said Fazio, making no more sign of leaving. “Another thing. What about Angelo’s wallet?” “He had it in the back pocket of his jeans. Forensics grabbed it.”
“Did they grab anything else?”
“Yessir. A set of keys and the cell phone that was on the table.”
“Before the day is over, I want those keys, cell phone, and wallet.”
“Fine. Can I go now?”
“No. Try to open the middle drawer of Pardo’s desk. It’s locked. But you have to be able to open and reclose it so that it looks like it hasn’t been touched.”
“That’ll take a little time.”
“You’ve got all the time you want.”
As Fazio started to fiddle around with the drawer, Montalbano went into the living room. Catarella had turned on the laptop and was fiddling around himself.
“Iss rilly difficult, Chief.”
“Why?”
” ‘Cause iss got the lass word.”
Montalbano was befuddled. What, can computers talk now?
“Cat, what the hell are you saying?”
“Iss like diss, Chief: When summon don’t want summon to look at the poissonal tings he got inside, he gives it a lass word.”
Montalbano understood.
“You mean a password?”
“Ain’t dat what I said? And if you don’t got the lass word, y’can’t get in.” “So we’re fucked?”
“Not nicissarily, Chief. He’s gotta have a form wit’ the name ‘n’ sir name o’ the owner, date a boith, name o’ the missus or girlfriend or brother and sister and mother and father, son if you got one, daughter if you got one—”
“All right, I’ll have everything to you today after lunch. Meanwhile take the computer back to the station with you. Who are you going to give the form to?”
“Who’m I sposta give it to, Chief?”
“Cat, you said, ‘He’s gotta have.’ Who’s ‘he’?”
“He’s me, Chief.”
Fazio called him from the study.
5
“I got lucky, Chief. I found a key of my own that seemed like it was made for that lock. Nobody’ll be able to tell that it’s been opened.”
The drawer looked to be in perfect order.
A passport, whose information Montalbano wrote down for Catarella; contracts stating percentages to be earned on products sold; two legal documents from which Montalbano copied down, again for Catarella’s benefit, the names and birth dates of Michela and her mother, whose first name was Assunta; a medical diploma, folded in four, dating from sixteen years ago; a letter from the medical association, from ten years earlier, informing him of his dismissal without explaining how or why; an envelope with a thousand euros in bills of fifty; two mini-albums with photos from a trip to India and another to Russia; three letters from Signora Assunta to her son, in which she complained of her life with Michela and other similar matters—all personal, but all, well, utterly useless to Montalbano. There was even an old declaration concerning the recovery, in the mother’s apartment, of a pistol formerly belonging to Pardo’s father. But there was no trace of the weapon; perhaps Angelo had gotten rid of it.