Carlo Cava’s office was shrouded in silence. Something about the way he had said that it was he who had discovered the Varricchio girl had left the two policemen perplexed. Finally, Alex spoke.
“But where did you first see her? Did someone introduce her to you, did you meet in a public establishment?”
Cava continued gazing out the window, as if he expected to see someone arrive.
“I certainly don’t think we frequented the same establishments, no. I just spotted her on the street.”
“So, do you usually pick up your models on the street? Do you notice a woman out for a walk and just strike up a conversation?”
With some visible effort, the man tore his eyes away from the desolate panorama outside the window and focused them on Alex’s face in a chilly stare.
“I get it. A person like you, officer, would think that way. You churn through the slime of everyday life. You deal with the worst aspects of ordinary people. You’re not accustomed to seeking out grace and beauty. I’m very sorry for you.”
Lojacono was about to weigh in, but his partner beat him to it.
“Sure, sure, I get it. Beauty, grace, and all the other bullshit you care to throw into the mix. You saw a young woman who was pretty, or beautiful, out walking down the street. She had a nice ass and you stopped her. That’s what happened, truth be told.”
Lojacono practically jumped in his seat. Here we go again, he said to himself. Usually, Alex was much more relaxed and balanced in the way she interviewed people. This newly aggressive edge he was seeing in his partner was not only rather unprofessional, it was also harmful to their investigations. It might lead Cava to clam up. He wasn’t a suspect, and the information he was providing was invaluable. Lojacono did his best to get the conversation back on track.
“Where did it happen? And did you talk her into it?”
Cava continued to stare at Alex, his eyes inexpressive behind the lenses of his eyeglasses.
“Her ass. Staring at her ass. What an exquisite expression, officer. The same expression that her boyfriend used, according to what Grazia told me, when she told him about our meeting. Evidently, you and the boyfriend share a similar mentality.” He turned to speak to Lojacono. “It was on Via Filangieri, Lieutenant. A young woman like any other, with a pair of earbuds, listening to music, and wearing absolutely ordinary clothing. Usually my eyes simply slide over people of that sort as if they didn’t exist. Leaving aside how nice the ass may or may not be.”
“Then what attracted you to her? Her earbuds?” Alex replied sarcastically.
Lojacono shot her a glare. Cava went on as if he hadn’t even heard her.
“Because she stood out from all those girls like a princess among commoners. That was her unique quality. She looked like the only individual in color in a black-and-white movie. I was in my car and I pulled over and double-parked: I couldn’t begin to describe the mayhem that ensued. I persuaded her to come get an espresso with me and we talked. I explained the way we worked at the agency, she told me that at the moment she was neither studying nor working, and that if it was a clean, honest line of work she’d be glad to consider it. And she gave me her details, her phone number and email address.”
“That’s it? That’s all? Didn’t you do a photo test?” Alex insisted, looking at him stubbornly, as if trying to convince him to turn his head in her direction.
“Of course, we did a photo test. One of our photographers took a few shots of her so we could market her to our clients, and we asked her to walk in a pair of high heels. Sometimes they can’t even cover a yard in high heels, accustomed as they are to those miserable canvas shoes.”
“And how did it go?”
“She was perfect. It seemed as if she’d never done anything else, all her life long. She was born to be looked at by other people. I hadn’t seen anything like it, not in years and years. The photographer was practically weeping in gratitude.”
“What about the payment? Did you come to an agreement in advance?”
Cava shook his head..
“She refused to talk about money until I told her that one of our clients wanted her for the swimsuit campaign, which in fact starts in the fall. It was the first client we had shown her book. He chose her, straight as an arrow, out of at least thirty candidates.”
“And at that point?”
“I offered her a steady contract at substantial fees, one of those agreements that the other girls, even the ones who were established professionals, would gladly have chopped off a finger to get. She had tremendous potential, and as soon as the competition saw the photos from the first shoot, they’d be falling all over each other to try to steal her away from me. I figured the best thing would be to lock her up tight, as the phrase goes. Her reaction, though, wasn’t at all what I expected.”
Lojacono thought about the drafty apartment with the broken ceramic tile and the poorly functioning electric heater. The patched blanket that he’d seen on the young woman’s bed, next to her dead body.
“So what did she do? Ask for more? Demand a higher fee?”
“No, the opposite. She told me that she preferred not to take on long-term commitments. She was terrified at the thought of what her boyfriend would say, and she told me about him. She even told me that she intended, sooner or later, to get married and have children. Things that the other girls were always careful not to admit, since they know that I’d fire them if I heard that.”
Alex spoke up.
“But you didn’t fire her.”
“No, I didn’t fire her. And you know why I didn’t, officer? Because I knew I’d never find another one like her. That’s why. Moreover, she asked me for a pittance compared to what I’d have been willing to pay her. A sort of flat fee, for the swimsuit campaign and two runway presentations.”
“How much?” asked Lojacono.
“Thirty-seven hundred euros. Not four thousand, not thirty-five hundred. Thirty-seven hundred. Exact, to the penny. And then she told me that that was all she needed.”
It really was strange, they had to admit it.
Cava seemed to be painfully amused by the memory of the episode. Then he stood up, went over to a shelf, confidently pulled out one of the file boxes without the slightest hesitation, came back to the desk, and opened it, turning it around then so the two cops could see.
In the photographs was Grazia Varricchio.
Alex and Lojacono had seen her dead, a battered body sprawled on a rumpled bedcover, and they’d seen her in snapshots from the beach, smiling cheerfully into the lens of a camera held perhaps by her brother, or maybe by her boyfriend. They knew that she was pretty. But to look at her in the pictures that lay before them now was to look at a completely different person. A woman who emanated an extraordinary force of personality, capable of blotting out everything that surrounded her by her mere presence.
There were fifty or so shots, in black and white and in color. In them, Grazia appeared in a variety of outfits: a long formal dress, jeans and top, an ample country-style skirt and a straw hat. In five explosive portraits, she lay, half-naked, on an unmade bed, barely covered by the hems of the sheet. In some shots she was serious, in others sweet, on the verge of tears, feline, angry. Her deep dark eyes, her pouting mouth, her impertinent nose, the perfect oval of her face were all musical instruments being played in a duet of model and photographer. The light flowed around that lithe body with the discretion of a devoted handmaiden.
“Now you understand,” said Cava. “That young woman had the world in the palm of her hand. We wouldn’t have been able to hold on to her for long. My agency is the leader in southern Italy, but Grazia had much greater potential than anything we could offer. In two years, no more, she’d be on the covers of the most important international fashion magazines. She’d be working on the sets of the world’s finest photographers, and then she’d be cast in movies. That’s why I almost burst out laughing when she asked me for thirty-seven hundred euros.”
Lojacono nodded.
“So you gave it to her.”
“Right away, and in cash. In exchange, I asked her for exclusive rights for a year, and she agreed. She said that, after all, she wasn’t planning to work any longer than a year.”
Alex couldn’t seem to tear her eyes away from a photograph in which Grazia, lying on a bed, gazed into the lens with a languid, satisfied expression, as if she’d just finished having sex. She was wonderful.
“And you didn’t ask her why? Why she wanted to stop after doing just one shoot? It doesn’t make any sense, does it, Lojacono? Either you don’t do any, or else . . . ”
Cava looked out the window again. He seemed to be chasing after a memory. Then he turned back.
“Of course, I asked her. I was looking at an extraordinary opportunity, the kind that come once in a lifetime, and I’d found her, all by myself. Do you think I was about to let that opportunity slip through my fingers?”
Lojacono’s almond-shaped eyes had taken on their usual inscrutable expression.
“So what did the young woman say?”
“That if she did it again, someone would kill her.”
Out in the street, the terrible cold didn’t keep the cops from exchanging their initial impressions of the meeting they’d just finished.
Alex was grim.
“I don’t like this guy Cava. A woman tells you that she can’t take any more pictures or someone will kill her, and you don’t even ask who and why? I don’t believe this story, the idea that he didn’t know what to say.”
Lojacono was walking with his hands in his pockets and his head tucked low in the lapels of his overcoat.
“If she really had said it to him in the tone of voice that he described, gazing into his eyes . . . You heard him, he admitted himself that he had fallen under the spell of this young woman. And at the same time, he hardly strikes me as the kind of guy who would have taken it upon himself to protect her. He’s not a man of action.”
“I don’t understand why you’re standing up for him. He’s just a damned sex maniac, even though he puts on all those airs like some two-bit aesthete. I’d dig a little deeper on him.”
“Di Nardo, excuse me if I say it, but it strikes me that you’re a little biased against that man. When all is said and done, he’s been very useful to us. Let’s focus on the facts, instead. As of now, the only person we know has actually raised his hands against the Varricchio girl is her boyfriend, our good old friend Nick Trash, or whatever he tells people to call him. Then there’s the matter of their father. We need to figure out whether it was really him arguing with Biagio the night before.”
As they got into the car, Alex shivered, and wondered why it was colder in the car than outside in the open air.
“It’s probably the way you say, but I insist, Cava isn’t telling it straight. For that matter, he’s admitted it: he had the goose that laid the golden egg in his grip, and he didn’t want to let her get away. Plus, what do you think of that strange sum? Thirty-seven hundred euros. Why was the young woman in such a hurry? Why did she need that money?”
Lojacono slowly pulled out of the parking spot.
“Yes, that’s something we need to get to the bottom of. But if you’re thinking of some financial motive, it seems inadequate as a motive for the murder of two people. Instead we need to figure out whether her brother had talked with anyone about anything and whether he was aware of Grazia’s personal situation and her boyfriend and all. Tomorrow, let’s go to the university. And let’s hope that we get some results from the forensic squad.”
That last observation brought Alex’s mind back to her date with Rosaria the next day. She coughed, trying to cover up her embarrassment.
“About tomorrow, by the way, congratulations on having parked your daughter so adroitly at the trattoria. I don’t think there are any meetings or depositions planned for that evening. So you have plans of some other sort, eh, Lojacono?”
Lojacono was clearly uncomfortable.
“No, it’s just that I have certain friends coming into town: just going out for a pizza with the guys. But I don’t want to leave Marinella at home all alone.”
Alex snickered.
“Sure, of course. Anyway, you do understand that the Signora Letizia is sweet on you, right?”
“Oh, come on, we’re just friends! You’re not one of those people who don’t believe in friendship between a man and a woman, are you? Letizia and I have known each other since I moved here. Don’t be silly, there’s never been anything between us.”
“I don’t say there can’t be such thing as a friendship. I’m just saying she has a big fat crush on you. Believe me, a woman understands certain things in a flash. So look out, that’s all I’m telling you: she strikes me as a decent person, it would be a pity to make her suffer.”
“Thanks a lot. It’s a full-service police station, I’ll say that for the Pizzofalcone precinct: it even supplies advice to the lovelorn. Saints, poets, and navigators, forget about the Bastards.”
The young woman laughed.
“For sure, Aragona ought to be here for this. He thinks of himself as a satanic policeman, you can just imagine how angry he’d be to be described as a saint. By the way, I wonder what he and Romano are getting up to with that case of the young girl. I plan to ask him.”