Once the guards had taken Gelmi away again, Maione and Ricciardi remained in silence for a few minutes. Then the brigadier murmured, as if speaking to himself: “Certainly, they’re all still actors, and what they say might turn out to be a big fat performance. And then this one in particular is talented and renowned, even though in the recent past, as I was telling you, he’d started to fade a bit from the public view; that said, it sounded to me like he was being sincere.”
Ricciardi stood up and went to the window.
“What we know for sure, as your good friend Garzo would say, is that he pulled the trigger, and he did it in front of a theater full of witnesses. And he can’t explain how anyone else could have placed a real bullet in amongst the blanks.”
The brigadier, as was always the case when he was at his most intense concentration, looked as if he was about to fall asleep.
“That’s not all. Whoever did it would have to have been something of an expert, in order to know exactly where in the clip the bullet needed to be inserted. I examined the pistol myself, Commissa’. There were still two cartridges in the magazine, both of them blanks, just like the other three that had been fired before the shot that killed poor Fedora. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
Ricciardi half turned around.
“Yes, unless we consider that there might have been an error in calculation and that the real target might have been the young actor, that Pio Romano. This hypothesis should be checked out, too, don’t you think?”
“Anything is possible. Maybe the bullet wound up in among the others by accident, and it was just a tragic twist of fate. Or else we’re just wasting our breath, and Gelmi really was the murderer. By the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but when we asked him if his wife loved him, Gelmi was pretty evasive.”
His superior officer nodded.
“It seemed that way to me, too. More than evasive, though, he seemed to be on the defensive, as if he were offering a response to some kind of gossip. Maybe we should talk to someone else from the troupe to get a better understanding. And there’s one other thing: the bullet was fired with remarkable precision. When you’re acting, it’s hard to aim so accurately. The doctor told us that the woman died instantly, didn’t he?”
Maione rubbed his chin.
“Yes, even though he hasn’t yet given us the autopsy results. Maybe I should swing by the hospital before heading home to see what he can tell me. In any case, there was a substantial age difference between the two of them. Marra wasn’t yet thirty-five, and Gelmi is well over fifty. I’m sure that gratitude and affection are wonderful things, but a woman like her, married to an older man, must have faced considerable temptation.”
Ricciardi turned back to look out the window. He reflected for a little while before talking again.
“It all points back to the Teatro Splendor and the troupe of actors. Let’s admit, if for no other reason than sheer logic, that Gelmi really was exploited by some mastermind and never planned out cold-blooded, premeditated murder. In that case, either someone took the pistol after he loaded it and replaced a blank with a live shell, carefully counting the number of shots that would be fired before the fatal one, or else they did it immediately before the gun was used, during the second performance.”
Maione was perplexed.
“What difference would it make, Commissa’? Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
“In such an elaborate plan, every detail is important; the margin of error must be reduced to a minimum. All that is needed is for the gun to jam, or Gelmi to make a mistake, or for his hand to shake, or sweat blur his vision, and the next thing you know the real bullet has killed or wounded the actor Romano, or it plows into the painted backdrop, or it gives Fedora nothing more than a flesh wound. And maybe that explains why the third and final performance was ruled out: he would have been tired, he could have missed the target, he might already have wasted one of the previous shots, thus altering the order of the bullets. What we need to understand, then, is why they didn’t choose the first performance.”
Maione shook his head in astonishment.
“Mamma mia, Commissa’, then that imbecile Garzo is right when he says that, if you want to understand criminals, you need to think like them! Still, and forgive me for saying so, if I were Gelmi and I’d murdered my wife, I’d be hoping that we would reason exactly this way.”
Ricciardi twisted his lips in a grimace.
“Maybe we should just stop worrying about it now, and put Gelmi on trial for murder. After all, he did fire the fatal shot. Still, I’d be in favor of going to take a walk, just a quick walk, around the backstage of the Teatro Splendor, to see how the show works and how the actors move from their dressing rooms to the stage, as well as to hear what they have to say about the relationship between husband and wife. That way, we can put our consciences at ease, what do you say?”
The brigadier broke into a broad smile.
“That’d be great, Commissa’. I really love the theater. As a young man, before the disaster took me,” and here he raised his hand with the wedding ring, “I went to the theater regularly. I even dreamed of becoming an actor myself, so I could kiss all the actresses. Let’s go to the theater. That way we can set our minds and our consciences at ease.”