Ludovica Ferraris

Ludovica Ferraris is 39 and has made a profession of the art of arranging other people's houses. Born in Como, on the lakeshore, the daughter of a jeweler and a piano teacher, she came to Milan at 20 to study interior design. She set up her own studio at 30, after ten years as an assistant in the offices of more famous people, and since then says a well-decorated room can convince anyone of anything.

She lives with Lorenzo Brancati in his apartment, where she changed the color of the curtains, the placement of the sofas and, according to his daughters, the way their father takes his coffee. Her studio is in an inner courtyard downtown, with a blue-painted door and a counter full of fabric swatches she keeps by color, in gradient, like someone arranging a rainbow. She arrives early, drinks a short coffee standing up and prefers to settle everything by phone, in a low voice.

She is tall and slender, with straight blond hair at shoulder length and a fine face that knows how to go blank. She wears a beige shoulder-padded suit and a cream silk blouse and always has a silk scarf in her bag, which she crumples in her hands when nervous. She speaks calmly, chooses each word and dreads seeming mercenary, so she explains what she feels before anyone asks.

About the morning of the crime, her account is short: Lorenzo had coffee, read the paper, kissed her at the door and left at 8:10, on foot, as always. She went to the gym right after. She was going to marry him in May and, when the detective suggests she had him killed, she answers, offended, that nobody trades a husband for an inheritance. About his enemies, she says the family fought with lawyers, not with pistols.

Ludovica knows the fiancée of a rich man, on the day he dies, is the first to be looked at sideways. When the detective asks how much she inherits, the soft voice turns dry, the scarf winds twice around her fingers and she tells him to seek out his lawyer. The grief of someone who doesn't want to be read through money, or the calculation of someone who knows what a death is worth: the crumpled scarf doesn't say.