The Thief of Venice by Jane Langton Read Free Book Online

Sensa.
    The letter looked useful somehow. What could he do with it? Lovingly Henchard fingered the check, but he couldn't possibly cash it. That would be madness.

    Getting up, he began exploring the rest of the house. It was a handsome place, tastefully furnished with country cupboards and Biedermeier chairs. In Signora Costanza's bedroom he rummaged in the bureau drawers. And there, to his flabbergasted delight, he found among the underwear— eccolo! —a handgun of precisely the same make and model as his own. "Un modello molto popolare," the dealer in the Milanese gunshop had told him. "Anche io, ho la stessa pistola." The dealer had the same gun himself!
    It lay there like a miracle among the brassieres and panties. Surely the woman had handled it—her prints must be all over it. Reverently he picked it up with a pair of the silken panties and wondered how to make use of this stroke of luck. What if he were to make this man's death look like a suicide? It was wonderful what you could learn from television—you just squeezed the dead fingers around the grip of the gun, and there you were.
    But did he actually want a suicide? What if he made it look as if the man's own wife had killed him?
    The more he thought about it, the better he liked it. The gun already bore the wife's fingerprints. He would take away his own identical piece, the one that had actually done the deed, and leave hers in its place, a weapon of the same caliber using the same cartridges, covered all over with her own prints. What's more—Henchard laughed out loud—she had run away! It would look highly suspicious. And what about her bank account! She had withdrawn all the money from her bank account! Better and better!
    Carrying the signora's gun still safely wrapped in her panties, Henchard went back downstairs. Stepping over the body of Lorenzo Costanza, he went to the window and peered out, looking for a place to deposit the weapon. It had to be just right. It mustn't be so well hidden that it would not be found immediately, but on the other hand it mustn't seem planted on purpose. It should look as though the woman in her emotional distress and in a fever of guilty remorse had tossed it away and fled.
    All the houses along this pleasant street in the sestiere of San Polo had little front gardens. This one was just right. Henchard opened the window softly and dropped the woman's weapon into the ground cover below.
    Closing the window, he wondered what else he could do to incriminate the lady. Her departure must look like a hasty retreat. He went upstairs again to her bedroom and examined the wardrobe. It was nearly empty. Obviously she had already taken away most of her clothes.
    Artfully Henchard took a few pieces of her leftover underwear from the drawer in which he had found the weapon, threw them on the bed, and scattered more on the floor.
    He was almost ready to go. There was only one thing more.
    In the kitchen he found a box of matches. Henchard scratched a match against the side of the box and held the flame under the envelope that contained the certified check and Lucia's farewell note. It flared up. When it was nearly consumed, he dropped it in the sink, blew on his scorched fingers, and washed the ashes down the drain.
    Before leaving the house he went back to the room where the body lay. In his surgical practice Henchard had seen many anesthetized men and women, and all of them had shown this same helpless look. They had been transformed from lively, upright, intelligent beings into logs of wood. If they were Henchard's patients they woke up and resumed their active selves, at least for a while—obviously some were doomed. But this log of wood was stone dead. It would never rise again.
    In the city of Plymouth, where Henchard had been raised, his mother had been a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and always there had been a heavy emphasis on the necessity to separate oneself from evil, to avoid every possible contact with sin. Of