Antonio Manzini - A Cold Death

“Who do you think is barricaded, Italo? Come on, let’s not talk bullshit.” And he strode in.

They walked through the sliding door and found themselves in the living room. Italo headed for the kitchen. The deputy police chief continued down the hallway and took a look in the bedroom. The bed was unmade. He kept walking. At the end of the hall was another room. The door was shut. Italo caught up with Rocco just as his hand closed around the door handle. “No one in the kitchen. The place is a mess, but no one’s there. It looks like a tornado hit it.”

Rocco nodded, then threw open the door.

Darkness.

The wooden blinds were lowered, and it was impossible to make out anything in the shadows. But the deputy police chief caught a whiff of something ugly. Sickly sweet, with hints of puke and piss. He found the light switch and flipped it on. A bright glare lit up the room for a second. Then a short circuit knocked out the power as a handful of sparks showered down through the dark like so many party streamers. The room was plunged back into shadow. But that flare of electric light, like a photographer’s camera flash, had seared a hair-raising image into the deputy police chief’s retina. “Shit! Italo, call the main switchboard. And tell them to get Fumagalli right over here.”

“Dr. Fumagalli? The medical examiner? Why? What is it? Rocco, what did you see?”

“Just do what I told you!”

Italo backed a few steps out into the hallway, pulled out his cell phone, and did his best to punch in the main number for the hospital, but with the Beretta in his hand, it was no simple matter.

Rocco groped his way forward and ventured in warily, one hand on the wall.

His fingers brushed the edge of a bookshelf, then the wall again, then the corner of the room. He ran his hand over the wallpaper, pushed the curtain aside, and finally grasped the strap to raise the wooden roller blind. He gripped hard and gave it a first hard tug. Slowly the gray light of day filtered into the room. From below. As he hoisted the blind, the light first covered the floor, revealing an overturned step stool. With the second tug, daylight illuminated a pair of dangling bare feet; with the third, two legs, a pair of arms dangling alongside the body; and finally, once the roller blind was fully raised, the scene appeared before his eyes in all its macabre squalor. The woman was hanging from the lamp hook on the ceiling by a slender cable. Her head slumped forward, her chin rested against her chest, while her curly chestnut hair covered her face. There was a stain on the hardwood floor.

“Oh Madonna.” The words came out of Italo’s mouth like a hiss, as he stood there with his phone pressed to his ear.

“Call Fumagalli, I told you,” said Rocco. He moved away from the window and walked over to the woman’s body. Her bony, skinny feet reminded him of the feet of a Christ on the cross. Pale, faintly greenish. All that was missing were the nail holes; otherwise those feet could have come straight out of a painting by Grünewald. The knees were scraped, like the knees of a little girl coming home from her first bicycle ride. She wore a nightgown. Sea green. One of the shoulder straps had torn free. The stitching had come unraveled under the armpit and a small gap revealed a patch of flesh and the rib cage beneath. Rocco avoided looking her in the face. He turned on his heel and left the room. As he went past Officer Pierron, he grabbed the packet of Chesterfields out of his pocket and yanked out a smoke, just as Italo finally managed to get the hospital on the phone. “This is Officer Pierron … put me through to Fumagalli. It’s urgent.”

“Come smoke a cigarette, Italo; otherwise the sight will get etched into your retinas and you won’t be able to see anything else for the next two weeks.”

Italo followed Rocco like a robot, the cell phone in his left hand, his pistol in his right. “And holster your piece,” Rocco added. “Who the fuck are you planning to shoot, anyway?”

Esther Baudo and her husband were the subject of every framed photograph arranged on the top of an upright piano. There was a wedding picture, pictures on a beach, pictures under a palm tree, and even a picture in front of the Colosseum. In a single glance Rocco saw it had been taken from the corner of Via Capo d’Africa, where there was a seafood restaurant that he and Marina inevitably chose when they had something to celebrate. The last time—and it had been more than five years ago—was when they’d completed the purchase of the penthouse in Monteverde Vecchio. Esther Baudo was smiling in every picture. But only with her mouth. Never with her eyes. Her eyes were always lackluster, dead, dark, and deep, never sparkling with laughter. Not even on the day of her wedding.

Her husband was just the opposite. He always smiled into the lens. Happily. The hair had vanished from the top of his cranium and now adorned only the sides of his head. White, straight teeth gleamed in his small, rosebud mouth. He had small jug ears.

Rocco left the living room and went to look at the kitchen. Right at the threshold of the kitchen door was a shattered cell phone. He picked it up. The screen was chipped, the battery was missing, and who could even say where the SIM chip had wound up. Then he looked around the rest of the room. Italo was right. The place really was a mess. It looked like a herd of buffalo had trampled through. The ground was a crazy hodgepodge of boxes, tin cans, packages of pasta, silverware, and a bread knife. He placed the shattered cell phone on the marble countertop, next to a plastic scale.

He turned to look toward the room at the end of the hall: the den. And slowly, inexorably pulled toward it, as if by a magnet, he walked back to it. The woman still hung there. Rocco was tempted to lower her to the ground. To see her dangling there like a butchered animal was more than he could take. He bit his lip and stepped closer. The first thing that caught his eye was the swollen face. It was puffy, with a split lip from which the blood had flowed. One eye was open, staring; the other was shut and swollen to the size of a plum. The cable around her neck was a metal clothesline. The woman had run it over the hook that held up the ceiling lamp and then anchored it to the floor, tying it to the foot of an armoire. Like a ten-foot guywire, to make sure it would support the weight. Actually, though, it hadn’t—her weight had torn loose the electric wiring and caused a short circuit. There was a stool lying on the floor. A three-legged stool, like a piano stool. When it overturned, the cushion had torn loose. Maybe Esther kicked it in the last instant of her life, when she made up her mind that her time on this planet Earth had come to its logical conclusion. The skin on her neck was pale, but not around her throat. There a purple band ran, a little less than an inch across. Purple like the stain on the hardwood floor.

“It’s the third damned suicide this month,” said the medical examiner from behind him, snorting in annoyance. Rocco didn’t even bother turning around, and both men, faithful to the routine they’d developed over the months, exchanged no greeting.

“Who found her? You?”

Schiavone nodded. Alberto stepped closer and stood, surveying the body. They looked like a pair of tourists visiting MoMA, admiring an art installation.

“A woman, about thirty-five, probable cause of death strangulation,” said the doctor. Rocco nodded: “And they gave you a medical degree for that?”

“I’m just kidding.”

“How can you kid about this?”

“With the work I do, if you can’t kid around, you’re done for,” and Alberto tilted his head toward the corpse.

Rocco asked, “Are you going to take the corpse down?”

“I’d say so … I’ll wait for a couple of your people and then we’ll take her down.”