Adam's Rib Read Online Free PDF

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 the place.”
    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 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.”
    â€œDr. Fumagalli? The medical examiner? Why? What is it? Rocco, what did you see?”
    â€œJust 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.
    â€œOh Madonna.” The words came out of Italo’s mouth like a hiss, as he stood there with his phone pressed to his ear.
    â€œCall 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 wasmissing 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.”
    â€œCome 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