The Salati Case (18 page)

I got up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to have a chat with Sandro.’

It wasn’t hard to find where the city’s only Alessandro Tonin lived. I watched the flat for over an hour before a man came out.

I recognised him from the photographs. Facial hair in thin lines, long hair, expensive clothes.

I followed him to a hairdresser’s salon, one of the spacious, expensive salons in the city centre.

I watched from outside and saw him hand over his coat and bag to a girl. He sat himself down to read a magazine.

I looked up at the 1950s board above the shop. I called Pagine Gialle and asked for the number of the place. They gave me the number immediately. I dialled it and saw a girl pick up the phone. She had a short white coat and coffee-coloured tights.

‘Can I help?’

‘I’m an investigator,’ I said. ‘I’m standing outside your salon. The man who just walked in, the guy with long curls, he’s under investigation. He just handed you his bag and jacket. I’m going to walk into your salon in thirty seconds. I’m going to show you my badge and you’re going to take me to the cloakroom. You understand?’

‘You sure do talk quick,’ she said in a whisper.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sveva.’

‘Sveva? OK,’ I hung up and walked between cars.

She smiled at me as I walked in.

‘Hello stranger,’ she said as if she were greeting an old friend. I looked at her legs as she led me to the back of the salon.

‘In here,’ she said as we went through two doors. She led me into a small cloakroom. We were pushed close together by the shoulders of the clients’ thick coats. ‘First show me your badge,’ she said.

I pulled out my licence.

‘But you’re private.’

‘Same thing. Still trying to keep scum off the streets.’

She looked at me with a come-on smile. ‘You’ve got me into a cupboard under false pretences. You don’t even look like an investigator.’

‘You wanted a trilby and a magnifying glass?’

‘No, it’s just you look so normal.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, not sure it was a compliment. At least it was an improvement on comments about my swollen face. ‘Show me his bag.’

‘What’s he done?’ She passed me a leather shoulder bag and ripped off a sticker.

I pulled out his diary and spun the pages. I looked at dates and appointments but nothing stood out. A set of keys were in there.

‘How long’s he in for?’ I asked the girl.

‘He’s having highlights. Could be an hour.’

‘Highlights?’ I shook my head. The guy was one of the peacocks. ‘Is there a back way out?’

She nodded and opened the door to the cloakroom. ‘Out there.’

I put the keys in my pocket and walked out the back. There was a dirty white door that looked out on to a courtyard car park. I followed the driveway back to the main road and went to the key cutters in Via Sauro.

‘I need the whole bunch done. I’ve got fifty for you if you can do it in ten minutes.’

The man looked up at me like he wasn’t used to being rushed. But he took the keys and fixed the first one into his vice. He pressed a button and the large metal box began to whine. Metallic dust flew off. Once the new key was done, the man went back over it, his hand rising and falling with the contours of the key’s canines. He put the key by the counter and started with the next one.

Once he had done all eight he lined them up on the counter. I picked them up and compared them to the originals. The only difference was that the old were cold, the new warm. I blew a bit of dust off them.

‘That’ll be fifty euros,’ the man said, proud of his profession.

‘Thank you.’ I put the note on the counter.

I retraced my steps and let myself in the back door to the salon. I went into the cloakroom where a girl I hadn’t seen before was hanging a coat. She looked shocked to see me.

‘Sveva around?’ I asked.

She relaxed and said she was out front. I dropped the keys back into Sandro’s bag and walked out the front way. The smell changed as I opened the door back into the salon. It smelt of expensive soap. The music was on loud, though you could only just hear it above the drone of driers.

Sandro had rectangles of aluminium foil in his hair. He was reading a magazine. Even in this bright light his tan looked dark and perfect. He had cold, blue eyes.

I walked past him and nodded at the girl I had seen before.

‘Ciao cara,’ I said to Sveva as I walked out the door.

I walked over to Umberto Salati’s block of flats on Via Pestalozzi. The carabinieri cordon had gone now and I could stroll up to the outside gate without being stopped. I took out the eight keys and tried them one by one.

‘What are you doing?’

I straightened up and saw a man watching me. ‘I’m trying to get these keys to work,’ I said.

The man looked at me with suspicion. ‘Who are you?’

I evaded the question. ‘I found a bunch of keys near here. I heard on the news that Umberto Salati’s had been lost, so I thought I would just check here to see if they were his.’

‘You found a bunch of keys? Let me have a look.’

I didn’t pass them over. ‘Listen, friend, I’ve been hired by the family to work out what really went on here.’ It was stretching the truth only a little bit. The man seemed nonplussed, so I pulled out my ID.

The man stepped back and watched me trying the keys one by one. ‘Mind if I try the inside door?’ I asked, expecting the man to click open the outer gate. But he stood his ground, and asked to look at the keys. I couldn’t see the harm and handed them over. The man looked at them one by one.

‘None of these are ours,’ he said. ‘Try if you like.’

He pulled the gate open and I walked up to the main door. I tried all the keys but none of them worked.

I straightened up and looked at the man again. He had the sort of face that looked distrustful.

‘Who lives on the ground floor this side of the building?’ I asked casually.

‘That’ll be the Veronesi.’

‘Are they in?’

‘They’re always in. If you want to talk to them though, I suggest you go back outside and ring their bell.’

I nodded at the man and walked back outside to the main gate. I found the Veronesi name on the buzzer. I pressed the button and an elderly voice came on.

I explained that I needed to ask him a couple of questions. The gate clicked open. By the time I was back at the inner door there was a short, bald man in slippers opening it for me.

‘Come in. You’ll want to know about the night Salati died? There’s nothing I haven’t already said to the police and the press. We came home early, ate, watched television and went to bed. Salati is five floors up. We very rarely saw him.’

‘On good terms?’

‘Formal niceties, nothing else.’

He had led me into a dark flat. It was in the shade of trees and balconies and felt claustrophobic. But its doors opened on to the small garden outside where Salati had been found dead. The man’s wife was sitting on one of the armchairs.

‘Anything else about that night?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But you heard him hit the ground?’

The man looked at his wife and shook his head.

‘You’re deep sleepers?’

‘No, we’re not. But we didn’t hear him …’ The woman trailed off, not wanting to describe what had happened.

‘What did you hear?’

‘Nothing. The rain was so loud you could barely hear anything anyway.’

The woman interrupted him. ‘We heard the cat tinkling around outside.’

‘How can you hear a cat?’

The man thumbed at his wife. ‘She’s a bird-lover and doesn’t like old Jemima killing the birds. So she put a small bell on her collar to warn them off.’

‘And that’s all you heard? The rain and the cat?’

They both nodded.

I thanked them and walked back towards the porter’s cabin at the entrance of the condominium. I don’t know much about cats, because I don’t like them. They’re too feline for my liking, which is kind of the point of cats, I guess. But I know they don’t tend to go for a stroll in the rain. I don’t suppose the old couple were lying about what they heard. They were just interpreting it wrong.

The porter wasn’t around, so I walked to the top of the building. Salati’s flat was the last one at the end of the staircase. The door was locked and there was still police tape across the entrance.

I walked down a floor. There were four doors leading into separate flats. Presumably they all had Salati above them. I rang one bell after another but the first three didn’t answer. Only the last one gave me any joy.

I introduced myself. The old woman wrapped her cardigan around herself more tightly when she heard I was investigating the death of Salati. She didn’t want to talk, she said, she knew nothing about it.

I tried to talk quietly, to see how her hearing was, but she picked up on everything I said, so she seemed safe enough. I couldn’t see a hearing aid wrapped around her ear at all.

‘What did you hear that night?’ I asked her.

‘I heard him go out,’ she said curtly. ‘I heard his intercom sound, and out he went.’

‘What sort of time?’

‘I have no idea. It was late though. I was going to bed.’

‘What time’s that?’

‘Nine-thirty.’

‘How long was he out for?’

‘Five minutes or so.’

‘So he came back five minutes later?’

‘I heard the door open again.’

‘And you heard him?’

She looked like she was unsure. ‘No, I didn’t. But I heard the door open.’

‘Don’t you usually hear his footsteps above you?’

‘Always, every one. He wore expensive shoes and liked to hear the heels.’

‘But you didn’t hear him walking around?’

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Wasn’t that unusual?’

‘I suppose so.’ She looked at me with a frown. ‘The other thing I heard was him pulling up his shutters.’

‘Opening a window?’

‘I didn’t hear that, just the shutters.’

I thanked her and walked down the stairs.

It was beginning to fit together slowly. If someone had whacked Umberto Salati outside, they had come up and opened the shutters. I assumed they had opened the windows as well, though they wouldn’t have made any noise. What the old woman had heard wasn’t her neighbour upstairs — she didn’t hear the usual heavy footsteps of an overweight man in his expensive shoes — it was his murderer.

My phone was going again. I put it to my ear and heard that superior tone again. ‘Castagnetti? It’s Crespi.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’m awaiting your report.’

‘Yes,’ I said slowly. It wasn’t due until Monday and even then I doubted I would have anything to say. As far as I’m concerned, deadlines are like hurdles. There to be avoided, nothing else.

‘The heirs of Silvia Salati’s estate are anxious that you …’

‘Which heirs are left?’ I interrupted. I felt impatient and Crespi was the best person to take it out on. ‘This case has proved crooked from the start.’

‘How so?’

‘I was under-briefed by you. Nothing you gave me last week prepared me for this.’

‘I thought that was your job.’

‘I’m an investigator, not a shit-stirrer. This was all shit and someone’s been using me as a spoon.’

‘I see it every day. The report?’

‘Monday morning,’ I sighed. I would have to write something. ‘Though it may take longer.’

‘I need it for Monday.’

‘What’s the rush?’

‘I surely don’t need to remind you of economic realities. It takes months to disinvest a deceased person’s …’

‘I get it. People want money. Who’s been pushing?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Who wants everything wrapped up so quick?’

‘I’m employed to get things done. I don’t need people to press me, I press myself.’

‘I’m sure you do. Let me ask you something else, Crespi. Have you got a way in to title deeds to houses, real estate records, that sort of stuff?’

‘I can commission searches, certainly.’

‘At this time of day?’

‘It’s Friday evening.’

‘Let me give you some addresses and you could call one of your powerful friends.’

‘I don’t have powerful friends.’

‘And I don’t have toes. Come on, Crespi.’

‘The only channels for that kind of thing at this time of day are the forces of order. They could find out with the click of a mouse.’

‘And you can’t?’

‘I couldn’t do anything until Monday.’

I gave him every address I had been to in the previous few days: the Tonin household, Sandro’s flat, the di Pietro place out in Rimini, Roberta’s joint in Traversetolo, Umberto’s loft apartment. It was another long shot, but it needed doing. Whoever had got to Riccardo had almost certainly got to his money too. I wanted to know who was spending big in the months after his disappearance.

‘I’ll be round your office on Monday morning,’ I said. ‘You’ll have everything by then?’

He grunted.

I started walking home. My whole body was aching. My ribs and right hand still hurt from the beating at the Hotel Palace. Every time I raised my voice above a whisper my ribcage seemed to protest.

I was in a foul mood. I wasn’t getting anywhere and I felt like smashing something.

I’ve changed the way I deal with moods. When I was younger I used to walk in a straight line on busy pavements, bumping people off it. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I was older. That’s when I started dealing with my little furies by attempting to drown them in
nocino
and
mirto
and any other digestif that would rot me from the inside. All that happened was that I got drunk and the furies got bigger, so I gave it up.

Nowadays I like to think I don’t get black moods, but it’s not true. I’m more serene on the outside, but inside I still get steamed up. The cost of serenity is deep bouts of lethargy when I can’t even see the point of getting off the sofa.

I can’t see the point because I know that cases like this are never conclusive. There are hints which a jury can accept or reject, but even when hints approach certainty, the courts can still be perverse. But at the moment I didn’t even have many hints.