The passage of time had worsened the malaise that had come to him with his discovery in the shed.
“I’m becoming a pain in the neck,” the captain mused. “Who knows where I get this inappropriate squeamishness from?”
Before going into the morgue, he stopped to smoke in the open air. A breeze had sprung up and the palm tree standing guard outside the anodized aluminum entrance was trembling with the change in the weather and the chewing of the red palm weevil. The parasite was attracted in particular by damaged trees and it laid its eggs in existing cuts in the trunk and the fronds. There it ate its fill and awaited its metamorphosis. No cure seemed possible.
The captain looked around and considered how the structure had deteriorated: the questions asked by surviving family members in flat, bewildered voices; the medicinal smells that refused to be confined by mere walls.
The parasite was not alone in its gnawing away at life.
Dr. Grimaldi was talking with a few of his colleagues. He saw Martusciello and came over.
“My how you’ve aged, Captain.”
“And a very fine day to you too. Tell me about Vialdi.” The doctor stipulated conditions: what he had to say was confidential. Malanò was pressuring him to have the results, but he still needed time to do some further exams and studies. He’d provide hypotheses only to certain cops, the ones who wouldn’t insist on dictating the words he wrote.
“Tell me, but let’s step outside, I need a cigarette.”
“Hadn’t you quit? Hold on, I’ll get my own and we can go smoke outdoors.”
The two men went off to a courtyard in the back that offered a panorama of closed windows, air-conditioning vents, and dangling cables: one electrical cable was preventing a shoe from completing its plunge to earth.
“So in Vialdi’s body, I found traces of Lorazepam, a powerful sedative, and Propofol, a widely used anesthetic, intravenously injected. All the same, the levels of concentration of the drugs administered wouldn’t be sufficient to explain the singer’s death, which definitely was the result of a myocardial infarction. There is no doubt about that. In other words, the poison that Malanò is looking for, I was unable to find. Now, because it is unlikely, as our mutual acquaintance reminds me with suffocating frequency, that someone who is experiencing the first symptoms of a heart attack is going to choose not to hurry to the hospital and instead sneak into the stadium, crouch down in one of the goalposts, and start sucking on a blade of grass, I find myself in the position of having to search for something that is quite unwilling to be found. My first hypothesis is that someone injected a pharmaceutical that I just can’t seem to identify. The second is that therefore a heart attack was simulated. The third is that only someone who knows their stuff would be capable of making such a complete fool of me.”
“The number three is a genuine persecution. Forgive my simple village idiot ways, but couldn’t it be that the killer simply was spared half the work by a weak heart? Vialdi must not have had a very sound ticker, cocaine’ll do a number on you.”
“Sure, maybe so, it’s another theory, and perhaps the most likely one, but I don’t include conjecture in my clinical reports. So let me get back to work.”
“Not long ago I took a little excursion over to the old Italsider infirmary.”
“I enjoyed working there. Memories embellish even asbestos.”