Ricciardi headed for the little side room where by now the brigadier had arrived with Vincenzo Ventrone, the merchant of sacred art Lily had covered for.
The conversation with Coppola and the sorrowful tale the man told had left him baffled. Other times in the past he’d questioned brutal murderers who had so successfully buried their own guilt that they had convinced themselves that they hadn’t committed the crime, even when confronted with unmistakable evidence. And the younger brother’s declaration of innocence, when no one had accused Giuseppe of the murder, had sounded like an unasked-for justification dictated by a worried mind. And after all, this was a man who, by his own admission, had a certain familiarity with violence, and so the extent of his emotional involvement made it easy to imagine a disproportionate reaction if the woman had turned down his proposal of marriage.
Then again, the man’s despair, his huge and overwhelming grief, could not have been concocted out of whole cloth. Giuseppe Coppola really had been madly in love with Maria Rosaria Cennamo, aka Viper.
Maione was standing by the door: in his sleepy expression and his relaxed features, Ricciardi recognized the brigadier’s very particular way of disguising his anger.
“Commissa’, buongiorno. The gentleman, here, is . . .”
The gentleman shot to his feet as if he were spring-loaded. His rain-drenched jacket, his dripping hair, his sopping hat, and his sagging mustache all gave a touch of the ridiculous to the man’s angry expression, as he ground his teeth and bugged out his eyes.
“At last a sentient being, at least I hope so: Signore, you owe me not one but a great many explanations. A brute of a uniformed policeman knocks at dawn on the door of a more than respectable family, a family with friends, let me make this perfectly clear, in very high places, and this oversized gorilla practically yanks me out of my bed where, incidentally, I lie quite unwell, and he conveys me by force, I insist: by force! and where? Where? No less than to police headquarters! Like some common two-bit street criminal, like some robber or pickpocket, like a burglar, like an . . .”
Ricciardi, who stood, arms folded across his chest, waiting for the tirade to run out of steam, chose this moment of indecisiveness to intervene.
“. . . like an individual who is about to be indicted for gross insult of an officer of the law and taken to a cell.”
The phrase, uttered in a soft, almost inaudible voice, had the effect of a further spray of cold water on Vincenzo Ventrone, proprietor of the award-winning company of the same name.
The man—short, smartly dressed, and in his early fifties—lost his swagger.
“I, I . . . but how . . . I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect to anyone, but surely you understand that . . . in other words, a poor citizen is asleep in his bed on a rainy morning, getting over the flu . . . and all of a sudden he’s in police headquarters, talking to . . . with whom do I have the honor of speaking, Signore?”
In the face of this hasty about-face, Ricciardi showed a smidgen of mercy.
“Commissario Ricciardi, of the mobile squad. The gentleman who, at my orders, came to ask you this morning if you’d be willing to come to this office for a conversation is Brigadier Maione, and you owe it to his delicacy of feeling and his professional courtesy that the matter was conducted with such discretion: if it had been up to me and in accordance with the dictates of ordinary procedure, we’d have come to your residence by car and with an escort of two additional police officers. That’s standard practice, when the crime in question is homicide.”
Maione adored it when Ricciardi talked that way.
Ventrone blinked and turned pale as a sheet. Then he said:
“I beg your pardon. I had no idea. May I sit down? I don’t feel at all well.”
Ricciardi gestured and sat down himself.
“As you well know, yesterday at the brothel known as Il Paradiso, in Via Chiaia, one of the working girls was murdered. The name of the murdered girl is Maria Rosaria Cennamo.”
Ventrone murmured:
“As I well know, did you say? I don’t know anything. And I certainly don’t know this woman, what did you say her name was? Cennamo? In fact, I don’t know anyone by that name.”
Ricciardi didn’t budge by so much as an inch.
“Ventrone, let’s not play hide-and-seek. I would not advise you to follow this line, because it won’t take you anywhere good, but rather directly to a criminal trial for withholding evidence, during the course of which a great deal of information would come out, information which, I’m sure, would be quite damaging both to your reputation and that of your family; that is, if we don’t decide to bring other, far more serious charges. The stage name, shall we say, of this young lady was Viper. Does that mean anything to you?”
The man’s head dropped as if the commissario had clubbed him. He muttered an incomprehensible word or two, coughed, ran a handkerchief over his face and then, finally, replied in a low voice:
“Viper. Yes, I know her. And I appeal to your discretion, to the fact that we’re all men of the world here today, and beg you to promise me that what we say here in this room will remain confidential.”
Ricciardi wasn’t in the business of offering discounts.
“That’s not a promise I’m able to make. If the things you tell us have any direct bearing on the investigation, they’ll have to be made public. But I can certainly assure you of our utmost personal discretion.”
Ventrone nodded. That was already something.
“I patronize the place, yes. A man, after a lifetime of work, has the right to a little enjoyment. And I, sadly, became a widower at far too young an age. And I met this woman, Viper, in fact, who showed . . . initiative, and plenty of it. And we had a lot of fun together. And as far as that goes, I paid, and generously. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything wrong with that, no?”
Maione broke in:
“No, there’s nothing wrong with going to whores. But murdering people is quite another matter.”
The man protested loudly:
“I haven’t murdered anyone, why, how dare you?”
Ricciardi gave him a level look.
“According to our information, you were the woman’s last client. Another prostitute, Bianca Palumbo aka Lily, did her best to cover for you by claiming to have found the corpse herself, but we forced her to admit she was lying. Why would she have covered for you?”
Ventrone seemed stunned by what Ricciardi had just told him. He hesitated, then made up his mind to speak.
“Really? I certainly couldn’t say. Lily is . . . sometimes I go to her, when Viper is otherwise engaged. I imagine that she was just looking out for me. But I wasn’t Viper’s last client: whoever killed her was. I paid for my time, I walked into the room, and I found the door ajar: inside, Viper was sprawled on her back on the bed, with a pillow over her face. I assumed that she was playing some sort of prank, you understand, sometimes we play games. I moved the pillow and I saw . . . I saw that she wasn’t playing, anyway.”
Maione drove in:
“Then what did you do?”
“Then I ran out of the room without touching anything else, and I called for help.”
“Who was the first to respond?”
“The first was Lily, who came out of her bedroom with a man who’d been with her and was just leaving. She came over to me and took me to see Madame Yvonne. Then they both urged me to leave in a hurry, to avoid gossip and scandal.”
Ricciardi shook his head.
“That wasn’t a good decision, as you can see for yourself. Tell me exactly what you saw in Viper’s room.”
Ventrone concentrated, and described a setting that substantially matched what Ricciardi had found in his inspection.
“Were you aware of the fact that Viper had received an offer to leave that line of work? That another man had asked her to marry him?”
Maione looked at the commissario in surprise. Ventrone heaved a loud sigh and shrugged.
“Yes, I’d heard. The other girls and Madame were talking of nothing else, and had been for the past few days. But she would never have accepted.”
“And why are you so sure of that?”
“Simple: she liked the life she led there. The money, the luxury, and even the fun, the cheerful surroundings. And the men, of course, she liked them a lot. Believe me, I knew her well.”
Disgusting though he might be, Ventrone seemed quite certain of what he was saying.
The commissario asked another question:
“One more thing. What do you mean when you say: ‘sometimes we play games’?”
The merchant blushed to the roots of his hair.
“Commissario, everyone has his own personal tastes. I just enjoy . . . let me say this, I try to spice up my pastimes, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with it, that’s why men go to certain places, no? Sometimes, with Viper, we’d play innocently, she’d be the schoolmistress and punish me. As a joke, of course. And I’d react, also in play, and spank her. She had a . . . well, she was beautiful, as you know.”
Maione and Ricciardi would have been very happy to throw that man in prison, but they realized they lacked the grounds.
The commissario stood up.
“You’re free to go. You are not to leave town and you are to remain available for further questioning. And for the time being, you are forbidden to patronize Il Paradiso.”