The Potter's Field

Two words you let float around inside you, not wanting to clarify their relationship to each other. Because, if you did, you wouldn’t at all like what you saw. Namely, that Mimì Augello and Dolores Alfano are in cahoots, and conspiring to do something.

Let me try to clarify. There is no doubt that Mimì and Dolores are lovers and that they meet at the house of Pecorini the butcher. Taking a rough guess, their relationship must have begun in September, a few days after Giovanni Alfano was supposed to have boarded his ship.

Who initiated the love affair? Mimì? Or was it Dolores? This is an important point, even if it doesn’t make much substantive difference. I’ll try to explain a little better by backtracking.

From the moment the stranger’s body was found at

’u critaru,

Mimì started insisting that I assign the investigation to him.

Why that particular investigation? The answer might be: because it’s the only important case we have on our hands at the moment.

This explanation holds up until I discover, with near certainty, that the

critaru

corpse has a first and last name: Giovanni Alfano. Who happens to be Dolores’s missing husband. This changes things radically, and raises some unfortunately inevitable questions, which I shall now submit to you, spacing them sufficiently apart to put each into proper relief.

–Did Mimì know that sooner or later I would identify the body as belonging to his mistress’s husband?

–If so, how did Mimì know the body was Giovanni Alfano’s before we connected the

critaru

corpse with Dolores?

–Is Mimì being pressured or sexually blackmailed by Dolores to have the investigation assigned to him?

–Is it possible Mimì is pressuring me against his own will, because he can’t or doesn’t know how to say no to Dolores?

–Have the two been having terrible quarrels because of this? It would appear they have, based on the scene that Fabio Giacchetti witnessed.

–Who could have told Mimì that the corpse in the

critaru

was his mistress’s husband? It could only have been Dolores.

–Did Dolores therefore know that her husband not only didn’t take ship, but had been murdered?

–Why, after the body was discovered, did Dolores come to the police station? There can only be one answer: Because she wants to lead me, through skillful, intelligent manipulation, to the conclusion that the murder victim is her husband.

–She also wants to lead me to another inevitable conclusion: that the person who murdered Giovanni is Balduccio Sinagra.