Joseph Kanon - Alibi

“By the way,” I said, “ask her if she was there when the son came for the medicine.”

“What medicine?” the nurse said.

“That he sent to Moretti.”

“Why would he send medicine to Moretti? There was no infection.”

I looked at Claudia, my head suddenly light.

“For pain maybe?”

She brushed this away with her hand. “Then? In the war? Who had such medicine? There wasn’t even enough for the ones who were suffering. Moretti hadn’t had any in the hospital-only at first, to take out the bullet. After that, no, he didn’t need any.”

“But Dr. Maglione sent him some,” Claudia said to her. “The boy said so.”

“No, it’s impossible. He didn’t need medicine.”

“He didn’t need medicine?” I said, wanting to be sure.

“No, I told you. Anyway, how could Dr. Maglione do this? The man left in the night. Dr. Maglione didn’t know where he was.”

“No,” I said, following the thought right to the house, “but his son did.”

Carlo Moretti may have been legally adult, but he looked years younger, smooth and wide-eyed, barely adolescent, features that must have given him a useful innocence in his courier days. Now they made him seem childlike, a frightened boy waiting to be taken home.

Rosa was finally allowed to see him that evening, and Cavallini, improbably, allowed me to go with her, maybe as a kind of unofficial watchdog for the Questura. She had brought the new lawyer, and most of the time was spent going over what the police had said to him and what he’d replied. The lawyer took notes. The boy glanced at me from time to time, but his attitude was more bewildered than suspicious-I was no more surprising than anything else that had happened. No, the police had not used any force, just questions. Had they promised him anything? No, but they said a confession meant a more lenient sentence, if it came early, before physical evidence was collected, prints, bloodstains. They wanted to know about his boat. Given Gianni’s probable route on foot, Moretti must already have had it waiting. Where? “They’re looking for witnesses,” Rosa said, “to put you on that boat.” “But surely there was someone who could verify that you hadn’t taken one out,” the lawyer said. “You couldn’t just take a boat.” No, it was easy enough. They weren’t guarded at night. If you did it carefully, you could get out to the lagoon and no one would know. I looked away.

“Did they ask you whether he was dead when you put him in?” I said.

Rosa and the lawyer turned to me.

“Cause of death,” I said. “The official cause was drowning.”

“How do you know this?” the lawyer said, beginning to write on his notepad.

“Cavallini told me when I identified the body. Check the coroner’s report.”

“Yes,” the lawyer said, “it’s an interesting technicality. Maybe useful, the actual cause.”

“What difference does it make?” Moretti said, his voice sullen.

“Listen to me,” Rosa said. “Everything makes a difference. It’s going to be all right.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, looking down.

“We’ve found a witness,” she said. “For that night.”

“You should have told me,” the lawyer said, surprised.

“The man with the umbrella,” Rosa said, still looking directly at Carlo. “You remember, he offered you an umbrella. When you were walking. In front of the Londra Palace. By the statue of Vittorio Emanuele.”

“The man with the umbrella,” Carlo said numbly, not understanding.

“Yes, he remembers the time exactly. How wet you were. If you think, you’ll remember him,” she said, tapping her finger on the table.

He glanced at her in recognition, then shook his head. “It won’t make any difference. It’s what you used to say-don’t get caught. Once they have you-”

“That was different. That was the war,” Rosa said.

Moretti shrugged, all the answer he could manage.

“Talk to him,” Rosa said, pointing to the lawyer. “Every detail. So he can help.”

“To find another technicality?” Moretti said. “What does it matter to them? They’ve already decided. They want to put me in prison.”

“No,” Rosa said, suddenly stern, a kind of slap. “They want to kill you. That’s the punishment.”

He stared at her, his face pale, all the defiance seeping away, then rushing back in a flash of panic as she pushed back her chair and stood. “So talk to him.”

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Talk to him now. He’ll tell you what to say. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She reached over and put her hand on his. “Listen to me. You didn’t kill your father. They did. Do you think I would let them do this to you?”

He lowered his head. “And if it was my fault?”

“I was in that house too. Do I blame you? I blame them. No more. Just talk to him.” She placed her hand now on the lawyer’s shoulder, then motioned for me to get up. “Come,” she said, shooing me away with her. “Too many ears.”

The abruptness of it surprised me, so my question seemed blurted out. “Did he give you the medicine himself, or did someone else?”

Moretti looked at me for a second as if he were readjusting a dial, going back to an earlier program. “He did.”

“So you knew him?”

“No, I’d never met him. But I knew my father had been in the hospital, so I wasn’t surprised.”

“He called you himself?”

“Yes. ‘Come to the hospital. Tell your father I have his medicine’-you know, as if he thought he was at home, in bed. So I went. And he gave me the pills. ‘Does he have any fever?’ he said. No. ‘Tell him one more week with these.’ As if I knew all about it. So I said all right, and I took them and that was that.”

“And you took them to the safe house?” Next to me I felt Rosa stir, annoyed that I was going back over this.

“No, I didn’t know exactly where he was. I thought Verona. But then when he wasn’t there, I tried the house.”

“Was he surprised? To get the medicine?”

“Yes. He said it was nice of the doctor to worry, but he felt fine. Maybe somebody else could use it. It was hard then to get anything, even aspirin. But there was no label on it, so we didn’t know what it was for. How could we use it?”

“No label?”

“No. That’s when I thought, you know, He knows what my father is. He doesn’t want it found-to be connected.”

“Did your father take any?”

“Yes, one, to see what it was. He said he felt the same. It wasn’t the medicine that killed him. Not that way.”

“Not any way,” Rosa said, putting her hand on his arm again. “Are you finished?” she said to me.

“And then you stayed the night?” I said, still trying to make a picture.

“No, never there. Back to Verona.”

“Not Venice?”

“Not with the curfew. I had to leave the house after dark, so there was only enough time to get to Verona.”

“To a safe house there.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d done this before?”

“Many times,” Rosa said. “He was the best.”

“Yes,” Carlo said, “except this time.”

Rosa was still angry when we left the Questura.

“What are you trying to do, make him crazy? You can see he blames himself. And how do we know they followed him? Do they come while he’s there? No. The next morning? No, another day. So who knows? Maybe a tip. Maybe they already knew.”

“Then why did Gianni send his father medicine he didn’t need?”

She looked away, stymied. “A fine thing we did. You know, a boy who blames himself for one thing, sometimes he takes the blame for another. I’ve seen this. A confusion in the mind.” She was quiet for a minute, folding her arms across her chest as if she had caught a chill. “You know that if it’s true, it strengthens Cavallini’s hand. It gives him a case.”