When they reached Pala’s office, Lupo and Bruno were already standing outside the front door.
“I’m not going in,” said Dante.
“Sure, don’t worry about it.” Colomba helped him out of the car, a little roughly. “Just remember that Lupo knows who you are, but the rest of the world doesn’t, so do your best not to be noticed.” After a second, she added: “Sorry, I take that back, it’s pointless.”
She went over to join the Carabinieri, who turned around to look at her for a second, briefly interrupting their thunderous pounding on the door.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Colomba said. “What seems to be going on?”
“Nothing, for now. And if you get back in your car and drive away, nothing will happen a minute from now, either,” said Lupo.
“Let’s skip the threatening preamble, shall we, for just this once?” said Colomba.
Lupo pointed at Dante, who was unsuccessfully trying to hoist himself up to the windows by hooking his cane onto the sill. “Your friend … Whatshisface … got me thinking. I checked with Martina’s parents: Pala had been her therapist after a nasty skating accident that was giving her nightmares.”
“That’s a nice coincidence …”
“I just want to have a short talk with him, and see how he reacts. I come in peace, at least for the moment.”
“Too bad he isn’t home.”
“And that he isn’t answering his cell phone, either,” Bruno weighed in.
“Can you trace his phone, CC?” Dante asked from behind, brushing the plaster dust off his jacket.
“Only if we want D’Amore to take him off our hands,” said Colomba. She tried shaking the door, which didn’t budge a quarter of an inch. “It’s armor-plated, you’re not going to be able to kick it down.” She turned to speak to Dante: “Whatshisface, take a look.”
Dante bent down and scrutinized the lock. “It’ll take me ten minutes or so. I won’t break anything. There are no signs of alarms, there’s not a lot of traffic on this street, and people tend to steer clear when they see the Carabinieri.” He looked up. “Which tells us a lot about what people think of you.”
“I can’t do anything of the sort. It’s an abuse of power,” said Lupo.
“Then get back in your green squad car and get out of here,” said Colomba. “Because I frankly don’t give a damn.”
The two Carabinieri exchanged a glance. Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “You decide. After all, I’m retiring soon.”
Lupo sighed. “All right, but if we find any incriminating evidence against Pala, it’s up to me to decide what to do with it.”
“When, and if, that happens, we can talk about it. Whatshisface, chop chop.”
Dante extracted his lock-picking kit and with a SouthOrd “jimmy” checked the inside of the tumbler with both eyes shut, trying to make a mental map of it. He discovered that the security lock had eight pistons arranged along different axes. If you tried to use the classic “bumping” technique used by most burglars—inserting a pick and hitting it to make the pistons open—they’d go out of alignment and the lock would be frozen in place. He would have to move the pistons carefully, one at a time, determining the correct elevation to unblock them.
“What a pain in the ass,” he muttered, spilling a chunk of the ash extending from the tip of the cigarette he clamped between his lips.
“Wait, but who are you, exactly?” Bruno asked.
“Inspector Whatshisface from the French Sureté, mon ami,” Dante said, putting on a Peter Sellers accent and continuing to insert increasingly slender metal picks.
“Go get a box of gloves from the car, would you please,” Lupo said to his partner, sick and tired of that buffoonery.
When Bruno returned, Dante was using ten or so metal picks all at once, orchestrating them in an intricate array with his fingers, even using the fingers of his bad hand. One decisive twist, and the door swung open.
“Voilà,” he said, pushing it all the way open. “Knock yourselves out.” He sat down on the step and put his leather glove back on.
“Aren’t you going in?” Bruno asked as he distributed latex gloves.
“I’ll stay out here on the lookout, in case the cops pull up.”
“Ha ha, you’re so funny,” said Bruno as he walked past him into the front hallway. Dante heard him mutter something that sounded like “slimy spy,” which led him to deduce that Bruno thought he worked for the intelligence services.
The deserted office, illuminated by the big windows, seemed to Colomba subtly different from the other times. Grim, alienating, cold. While Bruno and Lupo were splitting up the rest of the rooms between them, Colomba rummaged through the psychiatrist’s office, where she had certainly shown Pala the worst side of herself. There was nothing that she shouldn’t have expected to find, but when she pushed aside the De Chirico painting that hung over the little couch, Colomba found a safe with a numerical keypad, roughly the size of a television set with a fifty-inch screen. Might Pala have jotted down the combination somewhere in that office?
An instant later, she heard Lupo curse from upstairs, and she raced up the spiral staircase. In terms of style and furnishings, the residential section of the building was similar to the office where Pala received his patients, but three times the size and with all the inevitable signs of private life, duly hidden from the patients: laundry hampers, sandals and slippers, a book lying open on the bedside dresser, a pair of reading glasses. Lupo was squatting down next to Pala’s corpse, which lay sprawled on its back, half-covered by the clean laundry that had spilled down over it.
“Fucking goddamned hell,” said Colomba.
“Don’t go in, I’ve already made enough of a mess as it is,” said Lupo.
“How did he die?”
“I can’t say. There aren’t any evident marks.”
“Wait.” Colomba remembered seeing some trash bags in the ground-floor bathroom. She ran down to get them and put two on her feet. Then she went over to the corpse and cautiously raised one arm.
“He’s already starting to stiffen,” she said. “He’s been dead for at least two hours. Help me out here, I need to turn him on his side.”
“We shouldn’t be messing around with him.”
“I know that. When I count three.”
And so they discovered that there were no marks on his back or shoulders, or on the backs of his legs.
“It looks like a heart attack,” said Colomba. “But I don’t think that’s what it was.”
“Neither do I,” Lupo snapped. “Let’s see what Dr. Tira has to say. Or your friend. By the way, is she all right? I have to say I find her very appealing.”
“Yes, she just got a bad scare.”
Lupo reached the hallway with a single leap. “I’ll report this to dispatching. You and Whatshisface get the hell out of here, because I don’t want to have to explain your presence along with everything else.”
“Are you looking to have the investigation taken out of your hands again? Because that’s exactly what’ll happen the minute this becomes official. The military will arrive and they’ll put everything under judicial seal.”
“That’s what they’ll do eventually, anyway.”
“But we can still make sure that it happens only after we’ve checked that there’s nothing that might prove useful.” Colomba smirked awkwardly in embarrassment. “Dante trusts you, otherwise he would have steered clear of you, and I trust him. But if you want to miss out on the opportunity to understand what’s going on here, go ahead, pick up the phone.”
Lupo nodded. “Okay.” He checked the time on his cell phone. “It’s eight twenty. What time do the patients start arriving, usually?”
“I think at nine, or nine thirty.”
“Bruno!” Lupo shouted.
The veteran carabiniere climbed the stairs, jokingly complaining all the way about the effort, but when he saw the corpse he immediately turned serious. “Sweet Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Is that Pala?”
Lupo nodded. “Move the car and shut the blinds downstairs. Let’s pretend no one’s in here. Then stay here and keep an eye on who comes and who leaves.”
Bruno turned around and started down the stairs, but Colomba managed to ask him: “Would you send me Alberti and Whatshisface, please?”
“Whatshisface …” Bruno muttered. “All right.”
Dante arrived a couple of minutes later, walking with his eyes shut, and in fact he had to let Alberti lead him. He stopped at the door and pulled up his T-shirt to filter the air: Colomba had thrown open the windows, but his sensitive nostrils still didn’t like the smell.
“There’s a dead body and it stinks,” he said, keeping his eyes shut tight.
“It’s Pala,” said Colomba.
“My condolences to one and all. Au revoir.”
Colomba stopped him. “Make an effort.”
Dante took three deep breaths, leaned on his cane, and took a quick circular look around the room, then shut his eyes again. “I looked. Can I go now?”
“No. Did you notice anything?” asked Colomba.
“A fat corpse and the sunlight glistening off a puddle of piss.”
“Aside from that!”
Dante breathed deeply again. “There’s a part of the floor that’s cleaner. And it wasn’t the housekeeper, because it’s too irregular and there are broad patches that haven’t been polished. Downstairs, in contrast, the floor has been beautifully buffed. Maybe the killer cleaned up. How did this torturer of defenseless brains meet his end?”
“There are no signs of violence, but it was painful. It could have been a stroke, or it could have been insulin again,” said Colomba.
“Plausible. I saw that the sheets were all tangled, but are they dirty, too?”
Lupo looked at them carefully. “Not very. A few splashes of vomit.”
“Can you sniff them around the middle?”
Lupo obeyed, at first hesitantly, but then with growing conviction.
“It just smells of detergent or fabric softener. The one with the teddy bear.”
“Try again. Tell me if it smells of sweat or of a human being in general.”
Lupo, patiently, did as he was told. “No.”
“As far as you know, was Pala gay or straight?”
“Do you want me to sniff his butt while I’m at it?” Lupo asked.
“All right, I asked for that.” Blindly, Dante grabbed Alberti’s arm. “Go see if you can find any dirty sheets in the laundry room or in the bathroom,” he said. “If there aren’t any, then the man or woman he was in bed with killed him, and they got rid of the sheets to avoid traces of things like DNA. Hi-ho, trusty steed!” Alberti led him out of the building.
“They’re not going to accept my nose as evidence in court,” said Lupo.
Colomba didn’t answer. She’d suddenly been illuminated by an image: Caterina catching her bullet on the fly.
So do you hunt, too? Colomba had asked her. Not with a rifle, Caterina had replied.
“We need to find the secretary,” said Colomba.