Free The Crocodile by Maurizio de Giovanni Page A

a lot of residents out taking a stroll tonight. Lots of people here have dogs, but by nine o’clock they’re all safe at home, eating dinner.
    I bet it’ll be someone taking their dog out who finds the body.
    Not that it matters, the old man decides.

CHAPTER 22
    Giuffrè rushed into the room, waving a newspaper in the air.
“Hey, Montalba’, did you hear the latest?”
    Lojacono looked up from his book. “Listen, asshole, stop calling me that. I told you already, I find it annoying.”
    The diminutive sergeant shot him an offended look. “Oh, nice manners! You know, I’m the only person in the whole city who even speaks to you. You could try to be a little more considerate, couldn’t you? Anyway, if you’re not interested, go fuck yourself.”
    He turned to leave and Lojacono went back to his reading. Then Giuffrè stopped and spoke again.
    “It’s pity, though. Because if you ask me, the news report I read in this newspaper really might interest you, Inspector Lojacono.”
    Finally hearing himself addressed by his proper name, the inspector swung his feet down from his desktop and shut his book.
    “All right, let’s hear it. Anyway, I know that you won’t leave me in peace until you’ve told me, and this book is unbelievably boring.”
    “I like you better when you play poker against the computer. Maybe you’re frustrated because you always lose, but at least you’re not angry. Anyway, it’s big news. Yesterday, in the Via Manzoni, someone murdered a fourteen-year-old girl.”
    There flashed into Lojacono’s mind, crystal-clear, the final scene of the nightmare that had been persecuting him since the night of the boy’s murder: his daughter hurtling into a car crash.
    “That’s a shame. But it’s not exactly earth-shattering news, is it?”
    “No, of course not. But if you put it together with the fact that since this morning Piras has called Di Vincenzo four times, and that right here,” he said, tapping the newspaper, “they talk about a single bullet to the head, it changes things considerably, don’t you think?”
    Lojacono said nothing for a second, and then replied, “First: how do you know that Piras has called so many times? And second: give me that newspaper.”
    When Giuffrè was especially pleased about something, he swayed back and forth on the tips of his toes. Lojacono found this habit maddening.
    “It’s because Pontolillo, the guy who works in the admin department, has a mouth that’s as loose as my mother-in-law’s left slipper, the way he blabs. This morning, he buttonholed me over by the coffee machine and said she wouldn’t stop calling. In fact, they had started to wonder if there wasn’t a little flirtation developing, except that on the last phone call she was so pissed off that Pontolillo was actually scared. So I put two and two together because, what, you think you’re the only cop in here?”
    Lojacono considered the question. “When I was small, I had an inflatable doll; I think I called it Ercolino, if memory serves. It swayed back and forth exactly the same way you’re doing right now, and I used to rain punches down on its face, to see if I could make it sway even more.”
    Giuffrè stopped short, wearing a baffled expression. “Anyway, this thing is getting big. Read it. The newspaper even draws a link between the two murders. I wonder who their source is. And it mentions the notorious tissues. That’s why Piras was so hopping mad, if you ask me.”
    The article was pretty blistering. The journalist reported the murder of G. D. M., a fourteen-year-old high school student in the better part of town, adding that she’d been killed with a single shot to the head as she was returning home from her violin lesson, around nine o’clock the night before. Nothing had been stolen, apparently. On the ground near the corpse the police had found a number of used tissues, a detail that suggested a connection to the murder of M. L., a sixteen-year-old boy murdered