Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

Death of a Good Girl by Carmen Iarrera

Translated from the Italian by Jason Francis McGimsey

Carmen Iarrera is a freelance journalist who writes for radio and television. She is the author of five thriller novels, two of them in collaboration with Italian art critic Federico Zeri. Her many short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines in Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland, France, the Czech Republic, Japan, and the U.S. Three previous Iarrera stories have been published in EQMM, and in 2011 one of the authors stories was chosen by the BBC for a broadcast in honor of the 80th birthday of John Le Carré.

Melina Sardi’s cadaver lay decomposing on the little living room floor. Her arms sprawled open and her right foot, still wearing a red stiletto, stuck out from under the calf of her left leg. Her open white thighs were left exposed by the pink robe amassed around her hips. Her left foot, naked, looked abandoned. Her glassy eyes stared at a little bronze statue lying beside her. A mass of bleached blond hair extended out in a pool of clotted blood around her. Rosa Belli screamed and ran back down the stairs.

“Do you feel better now, Signora?” the commissioner asked politely.

“Yes... I think so. You came right away,” murmured Signora Belli as she lifted her eyes to see him clearer. He was a good-looking young man, thirty-five years old, with dark hair and intensely blue eyes, almost violet. He sat immobile in front of her, with his beautiful hands crossed over his knees as if he had all the time in the world. But his calm pose was contradicted by the intermittent pulsing of a vein in his neck that revealed a contained energy, a tension ready to explode.

He had said to call him D’Orso. Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso.

“Are you able to answer a few questions?”

Signora Rosa stiffened slightly in the old chintz flowered armchair in her sitting room and looked up at the ceiling. “Have they... have they taken her away yet?”

The commissioner looked up at the ceiling too. The girl’s body was surely still up on the next floor, above their heads. He could hear the heavy steps of Officer Sorrento and the rummaging of the lab agents who were examining every square centimeter of the pathetically pretentious living room, taking photos of the stuffed animals strewn about the house and searching the bedroom closet where cheap, gaudy clothes hung orderly next to inexpensive childish dresses.

“They’ve certainly taken her away by now...” he lied. “Would you please go over everything again, from the beginning?”

Signora Rosa nodded her head. “This morning I didn’t hear her come down,” she began. “I hear her every day, when she comes down the stairs in those stilettos, but not this morning. So I started to worry.”

“Why?” asked the commissioner. “Did she always leave at the same time?”

“No.” Signora Rosa squirmed in discomfort. “No, actually... you know how cinema people are, they never have regular schedules...”

“Was she an actress?”

“No... I don’t know,” Signora Rosa stuttered, blushing. “She just said she worked in the movie business.”

The commissioner looked at her perplexed, asking himself why the signora turned so red over such a simple question.

“Let’s go over it again,” he proposed. “Miss Sardi didn’t leave on a regular schedule and so you, not hearing her come down, didn’t have any reason to be alarmed. But, at a certain point, you went upstairs because you were worried. Why?”

Signora Rosa bit her wrinkled lips. “Because of the noises I heard last night, that’s why,” she snapped.

“What kind of noises?” the commissioner asked patiently. He knew from experience that some people were not forthcoming and you had to get things out of them little by little.

“An argument. An argument that woke me up suddenly.”

“What time was that?”

“Around midnight. It sounded like pandemonium. Shouting, things smashing on the floor, then heavy steps running down the stairs and a car squealing off in a hurry.”

“And then what did you do?” asked D’Orso. “Did you go to the window? Did you see anything?”

“No,” murmured Signora Rosa, shaking her head with a guilty air. “How could I have imagined what had happened? I rolled over and went back to sleep, that’s what I did... I had already given my advice to that girl. In vain, apparently. What can I do if people won’t listen to me? I told her that that guy, with his leather jacket and his black car, was up to no good. But Melina told me he was her boyfriend and that he was a producer. Nice boyfriend, I said. In my opinion, the one before was better, the one from her hometown. A good boy. She did nothing but fight with the new one. It certainly wasn’t the first time I had been awakened by these tremendous arguments, you know.”

“What is this boyfriend’s name?” asked the commissioner.

Signora Rosa shook her head.

“Can you describe him to me?”

“I only saw him in passing a couple of times. What can I say? He isn’t tall, he isn’t short, his hair’s not really brown or blond. The only thing that struck me was his, how do you say, vulgar look. Yes, vulgar, that’s it.”

“And do you remember the make or model of his car?”

“I don’t know anything about cars.” Signora Rosa shook her head. “I don’t even recognize the FIATs anymore, they’ve changed so much... but I know that there was some kind of disc with white and blue points on the hood.”

“So it’s a BMW...” murmured the commissioner. “And did you see him last night?”

“That guy? No. To tell you the truth, no. I only thought it was him.”

“I understand,” said the commissioner. “Let’s go back to this morning. This morning you thought about what you had heard and started to worry.”

“Yes, this morning I thought about it and I went to knock on her door. Just to see if she needed anything. No one answered. So I came back here and I got the key.”

“And why did you have the keys to Miss Sardi’s place?”

“She gave them to me when she rented the apartment, just in case. This is a really small building, Signor Commissioner. There’s only her apartment and mine. We don’t have a doorman and in my old age I don’t go out much. I got her mail for her, opened for the electric company... little favors like that. That’s all.”

“Did you see each other often?”

Signora Rosa had the impression there was a flash of sincere curiosity in Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso’s eyes. A curiosity that maybe made him wonder what an old widow like her and a young, vibrant girl who lived, who had lived, above her could ever have to say to one another. But this impression lasted for only a split second and Signora Rosa found herself staring embarrassed into the commissioner’s attentive blue eyes.

“Did you see each other often?” he repeated, with an absolutely professional tone.

“Just a little chitchat when we met on the stairs, or when I took her mail. She seemed like such a good girl... I invited her to lunch a few times, before...”

“Before what?” asked D’Orso, but Signora Rosa blushed again, stammered, and burst into tears.

Really, she hadn’t answered the question, the commissioner thought while gazing out his office window. Before him, beyond the trees and the road, the Coliseum suffered, majestic and indifferent, the carousel of automobiles that went around it to reach the wide boulevard that runs along the ancient Roman Forums. But Tommaso D’Orso didn’t even see it: he had his eyes fixed on the four little buildings just behind it, on the little two-story one with crumbling plaster walls, held up by the walls of the other structures. The apartment where Melina Sardi had been killed.

“I brought you an espresso, Commissioner.” Officer Sorrento’s deep baritone voice made him spin around suddenly. Strange, he hadn’t heard him come in.

“Another espresso. You’re spoiling me.”

The officer looked at his commissioner with affectionate deference and put the miniature mug on his muddled desk. If it were up to him, he would have brought him a slice of pizza too, maybe the hot, steamy white kind studded with coarse salt that the neighborhood bakery made, just like in the olden days. He was sure the commissioner had forgotten to eat lunch, just as he always did when he started investigating a difficult case.

“Some coffee can’t hurt,” he assured him.

Tommaso D’Orso drank his espresso without taking his eyes off Sorrento. He was a strange guy: He was nearing retirement age but was still a noncommissioned officer, even though he had seen all sorts of things and knew more than D’Orso did about the central database in headquarters. But he never complained, as if it was written somewhere that he would never be promoted, as if he had accepted his menial job as support and assistance a long time ago. And he did it the best he could, almost in self-sacrifice, happy to give his modest contribution to justice.

“What did we learn from the fingerprints?” asked D’Orso.

“Other than the girl’s, there are a few from Signora Rosa. She must have left them when she went to see what happened. Then there are another three kinds, all of them probably male. Some are clear. But the ones on the little bronze statue are smudged and useless.”

“What about the information I asked for?” He eyed the file that Sorrento held under his arm.

The officer held it out. “We didn’t manage to find much. We still don’t know where the victim worked. According to what she told Signora Rosa she worked in cinema, but the term is vague and it’s a wide field. Nobody knows her at Cinecittà and we didn’t find a single receipt or bank statement in the house, nothing. We’ll keep looking...”

“Signora Rosa also mentioned a producer, her lover, who was always at the girl’s apartment.”

“The guy with the leather jacket, the black BMW, and a suspicious attitude,” recapitulated Sorrento. “We don’t have anything on him either. We’re looking into the Department of Motor Vehicles records, who knows...”

“We’ve got to find him,” D’Orso affirmed. “His description set off an alarm in my head. I’ve been thinking about it all day. He reminds me of someone I dealt with some time ago. A real delinquent, dangerous, who managed to get off scot-free because he could pay the best lawyers, the ones who know all the loopholes. He should be in jail for corruption and exploitation of minors, at the very least. But who knows where he is... His name was Aldolfo Cini.”

“Adolfo Cini... I’ll check his fingerprints in the database. It won’t take long.”

“Anything else?” asked D’Orso, mindlessly sifting through the contents of the file.

“Yes, sir. Raffaele Conte, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, the one you wanted to interrogate, is waiting outside.”

“Great.” D’Orso closed the file and looked up at Sorrento. “What kind of kid is he?”

He trusted Sorrento’s judgment: Years of experience had sharpened the older man’s profound intuition. He was rarely wrong.

“He’s a good kid,” the officer immediately responded. “He comes from Magliano and works at the night desk at the university. He studies medicine. In my opinion the worst thing he could do would be parking in a no-parking zone, but even that’s not likely, since he doesn’t have a car.”

“Let him in, then.”

Yes, Raffaele Conte had just the air of a good kid. You didn’t need Sorrento’s intuition to see it; a quick glance was enough. He wore jeans, a shirt, and moccasins. He had hesitated while coming into the commissioner’s office but with reverence. Now he was sitting in front of him and looking straight at him with dark eyes still red from crying.

“You were Melina Sardi’s boyfriend, right?” said the commissioner.

“Ex-boyfriend: Melina left me.”

He pronounced the words with a suffering he didn’t try to hide at all and that couldn’t go unnoticed. D’Orso looked upon him with interest. He couldn’t decide yet whether Raffaele Conte suffered because the girl was dead, because she had rejected him... or for some other reason. He settled back into his uncomfortable chair. It was worth it to try to find out.

“Can I ask you why she didn’t want to be with you anymore?” he said kindly.

The kid shrugged. It wasn’t an indifferent gesture, but a defensive one. “You’ve certainly seen the album Melina kept on her coffee table. Do you remember the first picture?”

The commissioner nodded. It was a full-page photo of the girl wearing a bikini and a sash with Miss Something-or-other written on it.

“Ever since that damned day, Melina wasn’t the same. She got it into her head to do films, and the worst part is that she found someone who thought it was a good idea too. She did a couple of little parts... then nothing. So she got more and more frustrated and left our town — we’re from Magliano Sabina — to move here to Rome. And she left me too.”

“Why?”

“She said she had to be free, she had to think about her career, about making it big. She was obsessed.”

“And what did she do in the meantime? For a living, I mean.”

“She worked at wardrobe at Cinecittà, but she made me swear not to tell anyone back home. She was ashamed.”

Tommaso D’Orso wrinkled his eyebrows. Officer Sorrento had told him that nobody at Cinecittà knew her, that she wasn’t on any of the books. But then... how did Melina Sardi make a living?

“Did she see other men?”

Raffaele Conte suddenly sat upright as if someone had whipped him and swallowed hard. The commissioner kept looking at him with an impassable air. Asking that kind of question was his duty, even if sometimes, as in this case, he didn’t like his job at all.

“Yes,” the kid finally answered. “One in particular, a producer, but she never told me his name.”

“A tough guy always dressed in a leather jacket that drives around in a black BMW?”

The boy nodded silently. Tommaso D’Orso took a deep breath. He had to ask him one last question. No, his job wasn’t much fun...

“When did you last see her?”

“Late last night,” the kid answered, shifting around uncomfortably in his chair. “I wanted to go up and talk, to convince her to come back to me. She didn’t even open the door. She came to the window and shouted at me to go away.”

“What time was it?”

“Almost midnight.”

Commissioner D’Orso read the short medical report again. “Time of death estimated around midnight, due to cranial damage and loss of cerebral matter. The body shows contusions and bruising around the arms and face, presumably due to violent blows. Traces of the same matter found on a small bronze statue located near the victim and the shape of the wounds would suggest it was used as the murder weapon.”

He folded the paper and put it back into the file. The report didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.

He sighed and called out for Officer Sorrento.

“Sir?” he answered, materializing at the threshold of the office door and looking at him complacently. He had gone to pull Adolfo Cini’s records and perfectly understood the commissioner’s mood. Adolfo Cini had a file up to here. He exploited, bribed, corrupted minors, dealt drugs, and now he might even be a killer. And he had never done a day in prison.

“The fingerprints match, I just got the results back and was coming to give them to you, but there is no trace of him. It’s like he’s disappeared into thin air. Maybe he’s going under another name.”

“I think so too,” said D’Orso as he ran his fingers through his hair.

“And we still don’t even know what the girl did for a living. She might have been in the oldest profession in the—”

“Come in!” the commissioner nearly yelled. He though he had heard someone knock.

Signora Rosa Belli timorously appeared in the doorway. “May I come in?” she asked in a whisper.

The commissioner welcomed her warmly and pulled up a chair. If she had come all the way here she must have something to say. Any new clue would be welcome.

“Did you remember the name of the guy with the BMW?” he asked her right away, but without any real hope.

“No...” she answered. “I wanted to tell you something else.”

D’Orso encouraged her with a smile. “Go ahead.”

Signora Rosa blushed, wiggled in her chair, and furtively looked over to Officer Sorrento. He and D’Orso exchanged a knowing glance.

“I’ll go look for that file,” Sorrento said, and disappeared. But his departure didn’t help Signora Rosa’s emotional state; she was blushing more and more and even began to sweat. The commissioner looked at her, deep in thought.

“Is what you have to tell me that serious, Signora?”

“Yes... that is, no... I mean... it’s embarrassing, quite embarrassing... but I thought it might help you with your investigation. Deep down, I’m sure Melina was always a good girl at heart...”

Tommaso D’Orso remained silent. Experience had taught him that sometimes saying nothing is the best way to get people to talk.

Signora Rosa Belli wiggled around some more and pulled out a white tissue from her aging purse to dry her forehead. Then she made a long sigh, staring for a moment into the commissioner’s deep blue eyes, and immediately looked down again.

“It was six months ago,” she muttered. “On a Wednesday. You know, in Rome on Wednesday cinemas are half price, so my friend Maria and I usually go. We’re both retired and money is tight...”

The commissioner gave her a look of comprehension that was lost on her grey hair since she had bowed her head as if she didn’t ever want to look up again.

“So, as I was saying,” she began again, mumbling, with her eyes down. “We always go to the cinema on Wednesday and that day, that day the curiosity was too much. Just open the newspaper and you’ll see... We worked up the courage together and we went in... We had to see one before we die, didn’t we? And she was the actress! You can imagine how I felt... my own neighbor, the one I had lunch with... there, on the screen... what shame, what shame...”

“I don’t understand. You knew that Miss Sardi worked in the film industry, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean you don’t understand, Commissioner!?” Signora Rosa exclaimed, looking up all of a sudden. “Melina Sardi made pornographic movies!”

So, thanks to Signora Rosa Belli, who perfectly remembered the title of the film, the plot, and even the director’s name, Commissioner D’Orso finally got his hands on Adolfo Cini, who had become a porn producer under another name.

Now Cini was standing in front of him and looked at him arrogantly.

“Melina was of age, Signor Commissioner. A consenting adult. I’m pretty damn good at keeping my nose clean, don’t you remember?”

Tommaso D’Orso remained impassive, but Officer Sorrento, who was taking the deposition, couldn’t help himself and snorted in disgust. People like him should rot in jail!

“Why do you use a fake name?”

“Fake? No, you’re mistaken. It’s my nom d’art. In my business, people don’t ask for your real name and, anyway, I don’t have any legal problems.”

“Nice business you’re in.”

“Yeah, it’s great. We’re always surrounded by a ton of good little girls. See, I’ve even learned to speak nicely.”

“Good little girls like Melina Sardi?” asked the commissioner without letting Cini’s provocations get to him.

“Exactly. She had talent in her field. She was a real goose with golden eggs...”

“So why did you kill her?”

“Kill her? Me?!” Cini was stunned. “Are you joking?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Cini. We know that you spent a lot of time with her, and we have witnesses who heard you fighting with her the other night and your car screeching off like a rocket. Right at the time of the homicide. Don’t you think that’ll be enough?”

“It’d be enough if I had killed her, but I didn’t. I only smacked her around a bit because she deserved it. I made the mistake of promising her a little part in a normal film and ever since then she wouldn’t leave me alone, she was always busting my balls.”

“And you had no intention of keeping that promise, did you?”

“You’ve got to keep girls like Melina on a leash, Signor Commissioner,” Cini explained as if he were talking to a small child. “Give them the stick one day and the carrot the next. Make them understand who is in control one day and make them promises the next, to keep them calm. And making promises isn’t illegal.”

“But murder is.”

“I’m telling you I didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t have anything to gain from her death. The opposite! I told you she was a goose with golden eggs, didn’t I? Her films earned well. I only gave her a couple of smacks to shut her up and tore that stupid red dress off of her. She only put it on to get a rise out of me. She knew I hated that stupid little red dress.”

Officer Sorrento lifted the pencil from the notebook and looked at the commissioner. Tommaso D’Orso stared at him and clenched his teeth.

Melina Sardi’s body had been discovered with a pink robe on. The shredded red dress was found in her garbage bin.

Commissioner Tommaso D’Orso flipped through the photos of the cadaver for the umpteenth time. But as many times as he flipped through them, the pink robe remained a pink robe.

“Ugly business, Signor Commissioner,” sighed Officer Sorrento.

“Really ugly,” D’Orso answered. “Adolfo Cini isn’t smart enough to make up a story like that in order to look innocent.”

“Yeah,” said Sorrento, slumping down on the chair in front of the desk.

“He’s sly, but too crude to come up with such a plan,” continued D’Orso with an ominous air. “It’s impossible, absolutely impossible that he killed the girl while she was wearing the red dress and then ripped it off and redressed her in the robe, staining it with blood in just the right places, and then screeched off right at the end of the fight only to fake complete ignorance of the facts during an interrogation.”

“You’re sure it’s impossible?” said Sorrento.

The commissioner looked him right in the eyes, understood that they were thinking the same thing, and then shook his head.

“The red dress wasn’t bloody,” he said, resigned. “Plus, the victim was wearing red stiletto shoes. Shoes like that with a robe. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Yup,” said the officer. “It means that after her fight with Cini she took off the ripped-up dress and put on the robe, and she would have certainly put on her slippers if—”

“If the murderer hadn’t arrived,” concluded the commissioner darkly. “Someone she would open the door for late at night, even wearing a robe.”

Officer Sorrento shook his head.

“Go get me Raffaele Conte,” sighed Tommaso D’Orso.

“Yes sir,” answered Sorrento with a hint of hesitation in his voice.

Raffaele Conte’s eyes were even redder than the day before. When the commissioner asked him if he knew about his ex-girlfriend’s profession, he closed them and sighed.

“I found out the other night.” He trembled. “She told me.”

“From the window?” D’Orso interrogated him. Bitter.

“No. You’re right in treating me like this,” the boy answered weakly. “I lied. I was a coward, I was afraid. But it was all so horrible, so... sudden.”

“An instant of rage... dismay over what you learned... you lost your head and grabbed that bronze statue, didn’t you?” Sorrento interjected, charitably.

Raffaele Conte shook his head.

“No, no... that’s not what happened. The other night, after she yelled at me from the window to leave, I stayed below her apartment, waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe just to see her shadow through the window... I don’t know.

I saw that guy go up then. Half an hour later, I saw him come out. I was furious and he had left the door open and took off screeching. So I took advantage of the fact that the door was open and went up and knocked. Melina opened right away. She thought I was that other guy. She was all banged up, she had a black eye and bruises on her arms. I asked her what had happened and she told me to mind my own business and to go away. I told her I wasn’t leaving, because I loved her, that I had never stopped loving her. She laughed in my face. She was hysterical, out of her head. She asked me what I was going to do with a cheap whore who shot porn films. That’s how she said it, with those words. I was shocked, out of breath, I didn’t know how bad things had gotten... but then, then I told her I didn’t care, that I’d take her away, that we could start over, that we could forget the past.”

“And then...” D’Orso encouraged him with a rocky voice.

“Then she got even worse, she was screaming out all the details, horrible details. She wouldn’t stop. It was clear she didn’t want to hurt me but hurt herself. I tried to calm her, but the more I talked, the more she went crazy. She looked like she was possessed, she was moving all jerky... I tried to stop her, to hold her by her arms, but she got loose and all of a sudden... she tripped. She tripped, Signor Commissioner, I swear to God. She fell back and hit her head on the statue. It all happened so suddenly... it’s incredible that someone can die like that...”

He broke down in tears.

“It was an accident,” said Sorrento, convinced.

“I know.” Tommaso D’Orso stared at the chair where, just a few moments ago, the kid had been sitting.

“Even if they believe him, his life is ruined.”

“And if they don’t believe him, they’ll put him away for murder. I know.”

“If we hadn’t noticed what Cini said about the red dress, he’d be in jail by now and the boy would be home licking his wounds... trying to forget.”

“But we did notice, both of us did.”

“If we could at least—” Sorrento started to say dejectedly.

“We can’t,” Tommaso D’Orso interrupted him, running his hands through his hair in a tired gesture. “You know very well we can’t.”

He closed the case file with a deep sigh. It was true that sometimes he didn’t like his job at all. Not at all.