By My Hand Read Free Page A

expression on her face, the half-closed eyes, the wide-open mouth. In the puddle of blood, the print of the toe of a heavy boot: someone had come in, but they hadn’t ventured any further, probably the
zampognaro
or even the doorman himself.
    He took a step forward, being careful not to step on the pool of blood, and half-closed the door behind him. He looked around: from the front hall, spacious and elegantly furnished, he could see a sitting room with two armchairs and a low table. He again looked at the corpse, then followed the trajectory of its dull gaze.
    In the opposite corner, some six feet from the woman’s dead body, standing in the dying light of the day, the same woman was smiling in his direction, eyes downcast as she welcomed him to her home with the pleasure of a perfect hostess. She was murmuring:
Hat and gloves?
Her hand was slightly extended, as if to take her visitor’s articles of outerwear and show him in properly, with grace and pleasure.
Hat and gloves?
    Under the smile, from the gaping wound in the throat, sliced open from one ear to the other, blood pumped out in small black waves, dripping unremittingly onto the flowered dress, muddying the woman’s chest horribly.
Hat and gloves?
she kept saying. Ricciardi heaved a sigh.
    He spotted a few black drops far from the corpse, on the floor; they didn’t match up with the direction of the spatters that had hit the wall. Someone had walked away, probably unconcerned about the fact that the weapon used to cut the woman’s throat was still dripping with her blood. He started following the tracks, passing through the sitting room and ending up in the bedroom.
    The sight that greeted him there was overwhelming. The bed was drenched with blood, a horrifying amount of it: the sheets had turned black, the liquid had oozed onto the bedside rug, the light-colored wood headboard was spattered. At the foot of the bed, two long streaks. The murderer had cleaned the blade before leaving the scene.
    At the center of the bed, and of the broad patch of his own blood, lay a man’s corpse. His head was just starting to go bald and he had a drooping salt-and-pepper mustache. He might have been forty years old. The mouth gaped open as if trying to take in one last gulp of air; the hands were clenched in fists at his sides. Ricciardi understood, from the quantity of blood and the absence of visible wounds, that the man had been covered up as he lay dying and that he’d gone on bleeding for a good long while.
    The commissario glimpsed the image of the man on the bed, sitting beside his corpse and bleeding from a countless array of knife wounds. He was reminded of a painting of Saint Sebastian that hung in one of the classrooms of the high school he’d attended; he remembered how often, during the boring sermons he’d been forced to sit through, he’d counted the arrows piercing the martyr’s body, twenty-three to be exact. Judging by the sight of him, Ricciardi felt pretty sure that the man on the bed had rung up a higher total than the Christian martyr.
    He was saying over and over:
I don’t owe a thing, not a thing
. Grim-faced, eyebrows knit, teeth clenched, glaring furiously:
I don’t owe a thing, not a thing
. Ricciardi met the dead man’s glare, then turned his back on all that blood and returned to the front door to let Maione in.
    Â 
    As always, so as not to run the risk of inadvertently moving some important piece of evidence, they held off on performing an in-depth examination of the crime scene until the medical examiner arrived. Leaving an irritated Cesarano at the front door of the apartment, the commissario and the brigadier went downstairs to interview the doorman and the
zampognari
. They’d tried to persuade the three of them to come back upstairs, but without success: nobody was willing to face that scene of mayhem a second time.
    Ferro was having a hard time smoking, his hand was shaking so