The funicular that carried them back down toward the center of town was populated by a different crowd than the one that had taken them up into the hills. Now, for the most part, the passengers consisted of well dressed young men out to have themselves a good time in fashionable bars and clubs.
Maione turned to Ricciardi, pensively: “Well, then, Commissa’, now we have another hypothetical tosser of professors out of windows: the secret boyfriend of the lovely Sisinella.”
Ricciardi looked out at the darkness of the tunnel through the carriage window.
“I don’t know. I wonder what interest the young man might have. After all, Luongo’s economic welfare came in handy for him too.”
Maione replied, somberly: “What about jealousy, Commissa’? Can you imagine the thought of your woman with another man? Someone else’s hands on her skin, someone else’s eyes seeing her . . . the way that they shouldn’t, someone else’s ears hearing certain words? Jealousy’s a nasty beast, Commissa’. A big nasty beast.”
Maione’s tone of voice, more than his actual words, made Ricciardi turn to look at the brigadier.
“Certainly, I can imagine it. But jealousy, my dear Raffaele, needs to have some basis in reality. There should be evidence, the same as in the work we do. This Cortese met Sisinella after the professor, not before him. Now, let’s go ahead and imagine that he had decided to get rid of him, that he wanted to put an end to the girl’s relationship with Iovine, benefits or no benefits. All they’d have needed to say to the professor was that he could have his apartment, his furniture, and his jewelry back, and they could have gone on their merry way, couldn’t they? What could the professor have said to them? They even had the tools to blackmail him by telling his wife and everyone at the university that the professor had such a young lover. They could have ruined him. Why kill him? It doesn’t make sense.”
Maione insisted: “What about a burst of rage, Commissa’? Maybe Cortese had gone to tell the professor exactly that, and the other man insulted him or refused to let the girl go; so he threw him out the window.”
“Certainly, it’s possible. But given the condition of the room and the marks on Iovine’s body, that doesn’t add up to me. If you have a fight like that, you raise your voice, you break things: you don’t just grab someone and throw him straight out the window. No one heard a thing, we didn’t find anything out of place, the victim had no marks on his body, aside from the scratches on his back and the marks on his neck where the murderer grabbed him. Does it strike you that there could have been a struggle?”
Maione shrugged his shoulders: “There are still too many things we don’t know. But what fits best with the picture you’re painting, Commissa’, is someone who went there expressly to kill him, someone like the Wolf, who’d sworn he would, or the guy from the clinic, who wrote that letter. The sad thing is that, as usual, the deeper you dig the more people you find with a good reason to want someone dead. What a mess humanity is.”
It was dark by the time they got back to headquarters. The next day was Sunday, their day off. Maione offered to continue questioning witnesses but Ricciardi said no: “I don’t think that’s necessary, Raffaele. Neither one, the Wolf nor the doctor, has any interest in running away, it would amount to a confession. Let’s start up again Monday; maybe we can meet and talk it over first. I’m going by the office now to organize some papers and then I’ll head home. You go ahead, and put your mind at rest.”
The brigadier headed off reluctantly. Ricciardi was thinking about his strange demeanor when the policeman standing watch at the front entrance came over to him, agitatedly: “Buonasera, Commissa’. You need to head over urgently to Pellegrini Hospital. They’ve already called three times.”