The Bottom of Your Heart by Maurizio de Giovanni

Author:Maurizio de Giovanni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

XXXIX

On the way back, they chose to cut inland; the route was a little longer but less packed with people, horses, and wheeled carts. Maione was the first to speak: “Commissa’, if you ask me, these two aren’t telling it straight. In practical terms they’d have been ruined, if the boy hadn’t had this stroke of good luck, so to speak, with the professor’s death. Because the professor, if I’m understanding this correctly, would have gone on flunking him, now and forever.”

Ricciardi agreed: “Right. If he couldn’t pass that exam, he’d never have gotten his degree, he’d never have been able to take the place of his dying father, and the partners would have forced him out of the clinic.”

Maione wasn’t done: “Apart from the exam, it seems to me that the dying doctor had other motives for wanting his old colleague dead. The man had ruined his life by writing that anonymous letter.”

The commissario wasn’t entirely convinced.

“All quite true. And what’s more the sheer bulk of the son lines up with the size of the man that the goldsmith told us about. Still, I have to wonder: what sense does it make to send a threatening letter and then proceed to do something like that? It amounts to a confession before the fact. What’s more, why take revenge after more than twenty years? It doesn’t add up. It’s one thing to die and leave your son unemployed, it’s another to send him to prison for the rest of his life.”

The brigadier wasn’t willing to dismiss his theory: “Maybe it just wasn’t premeditated, Commissa’. Maybe the son just went to have a talk with the professor, and since he showed no signs of changing his mind, he picked him up and threw him out the window. And the father, lying on his sickbed, found himself with a murder to cover up.”

“That could be. Anything could be. Did you notice that one of the son’s shoulders is lower than the other? The jeweler might have noticed that detail. It’s worth having another talk with him. In any case, first I want to meet Peppino the Wolf, and go see the professor’s widow again; I’d like to figure out whether she knew about little Sisinella.”

Maione mulled over the idea. Then he said: “That’s a possible lead, too, Commissa’. If a guy finds out that his wife . . . No, sorry, if a wife finds out that her husband is cheating on her, who can say what she might be capable of doing. But the lady was over at her cousins’ place in the same apartment building, with her son, and I doubt she has the strength to throw anyone out a window.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking about it that way. It wasn’t the wife, that’s for sure; I was thinking about Sisinella and her new boyfriend. I want to understand whether she might have taken any initiative on her own, such as going to call on the professor. As for Signora Iovine, I wonder if she might have noticed some change in her husband’s mood.

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