Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery) Read online

  “Whoa,” John said. “You’re saying you think this guy killed the two of them?”

  “No, I’m nowhere near there. Not yet, anyway. All I’m saying is that Rocco said that one reason they were so sure that Pietro did it was that everything pointed to him and nothing at all pointed to anybody else. They didn’t have any other viable suspects. Any suspects at all. Well, wouldn’t you say Cesare would be a viable suspect? Pietro was about to cut him out of his will.”

  “So why would he kill Nola? Christ, she was his mother, wasn’t she?”

  “And you never heard of anybody killing his mother before.”

  “Well, okay, that’s a point. But why would he kill her?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “What about the fact that it was Pietro’s gun?”

  “John, I still don’t like it that that gun just happened to stay with him while he was falling two hundred feet and bouncing off rocks all the way.”

  “So you’re still on about that.”

  “Yes, I am. It just doesn’t sit right. You know that suicides generally don’t hang on to the gun. A lot more likely for it to get flung five or six feet away than to stay in his hand.”

  “Well, actually, you got me thinking about that, and I came up with a perfectly good reason it didn’t happen this time.”

  “Which is?”

  “Cadaveric spasm,” John announced brightly, referring to the rare bodily reaction in which a kind of rigor mortis sets in instantly (rather than several hours later), locking the muscles into whatever position they were in at the moment of death. In that case, if a gun had been grasped in one’s hand to shoot oneself, it would conceivably continue to be gripped so rigidly that it would be hard to pry or jar it out of the death clasp. “It happens,” he added when he saw Gideon’s dubious expression.

  “That’s so, it happens, and I suppose it also happens a gun can get stuck in a jacket in such a way that any fingerprints that might be on it are still going to be there a year later—not that I’ve ever seen it personally, of course.”

  “Well, no, me neither,” John agreed. “But it could happen, right?”

  “Sure, but what would you say the odds are of both things happening together? Cadaveric spasm, and then the leather-jacket thing.”

  “Not great,” admitted John. He held up his beer bottle. “Hey, you know, this isn’t bad. Hoppy, malty. Citrusy, is that a word?” Of the two of them, John was the beer authority.

  The waiter came back with their pizzas. John looked at his with a sigh. “I’m in hog heaven.” The pizza was thick with prosciutto, ham, pepperoni, and mortadella. And a few chunks of artichoke for the health-minded. Gideon’s looked terrific too, a plain marinara sauce, no cheese, covered with mussels and clams in their shells, shrimp, and crabmeat.

  “Well,” Gideon said, cutting into his, “maybe it’ll all become clearer tomorrow.”

  “Boy,” John said, “will you look at all this bacon?”

  “It’s prosciutto.”

  “You call it prosciutto, I call it bacon,” John sang happily. “Let’s call the whole thing off.”

  ELEVEN

  IN the morning, Gideon and John had to get started for Florence before the attendees’ buffet breakfast had been laid out, but they found the kitchen, begged some caffe latte from Maria, and took them out to the garden to drink, which they did, John wrapped in moody silence. “Okay, I think I’m probably capable of walking now,” he said after he’d gone back for and drunk his second giant cupful, but with a dirty look at Gideon. He still hadn’t forgiven him. “Only don’t expect me to talk.”

  Considering that it was a workday, they thought they’d be better off avoiding the morning traffic into Florence, so they walked to the Figline train station to catch the 7:11 on its way from Rome to Florence, which showed up in Figline bang on time. Except for the signs in Italian, it might have been a morning commuter train in any American city: reasonably clean, rows of seats all facing the same direction (as opposed to European-style separate compartments), serious, suited businessmen reading Il Corriere Fiorentino or Milano Finanza, fashionably dressed young women applying the final touches to their hair or makeup, and a few sulky, slouching teenagers coming in for a day in the city and up to no good.

  John ordered an espresso in a plastic cup from a vendor who worked his way up the aisle, and it seemed to finally do the trick. “Okay, you can talk to me now.”

  But by then they were already pulling into Florence’s Santa Maria Novella train station exactly at 7:39, as scheduled, and all Gideon said was, “I guess Mussolini really did get the trains to run on time.”

  “Yeah, sure, except when they have a strike,” a man behind him muttered in good American English. “But no sweat, that’s only once or twice a week or so. Have a nice day.”

  As Rocco had told them, it took about ten minutes to get to Borgo Ognissanti, a narrow street of somber, gray, two-and-three story palazzos that cut diagonally through the city. Carabinieri headquarters was in one of these, a few doors down from the equally gray and somber façade of the thirteenth-century All Saints Church, which had given the street its name. They walked by the headquarters building twice before spotting the inconspicuous CARABINIERI COMANDO PROVINCIALE plaque beside the tall, double-doored entry. Like most of the entrances to these old palazzos, it was big enough to admit a good-sized coach, and it opened not into the interior of the building but into a courtyard. A couple of steps into the courtyard there was a roofed corridor, in which a uniformed young carabiniere sat behind a counter and in front of a switchboard.

  He looked up with a smile. “Signori?”

  When Gideon told him they were there to see Tenente Gardella, he said a few words into a telephone and a minute later a heavy, studded wooden door creaked open a few feet away, and out popped Rocco, resplendent in a smart, tailored uniform of dark blue, with epaulets, medals, ribbons, and collar tabs on the jacket and crisp red stripes running down the sides of the trousers.

  “Whoa, look at you,” John said. “You’re beautiful. Jeez, I wish they dressed us like that in the Bureau.”

  “Believe me, you don’t,” Rocco said. “So come on up.” Moving at a trot, he led them up two flights of stone steps and into his office, the kind of office that any mid-level cop anywhere in the world might have. Not an office, per se, but a twelve-by-twelve space enclosed by three fabric-covered, shoulder-high partitions, the open side facing out into a bullpen area of desks for the less lofty. Rocco’s office had no ornaments of any kind, and the furniture—a two-drawer file cabinet, a desk, a desk chair, and two visitors’ chairs—was all stainless steel and vinyl. The only books were a few procedural manuals and volumes of legal code that leaned crookedly between a pair of inexpensive metal bookends on top of the file cabinet.

  Rocco sat behind his desk and motioned John and Gideon into the visitors’ chairs. “Got it right here,” he said, poking through the clutter on his desktop. “Somewhere. Ah. Here. I was able to get away with making a couple of copies. You can’t take them with you, though.”

  He pushed copies of Pietro’s autopsy report across the desk, leaned back, and waited.

  John glanced only briefly at his before tossing it back down with a snort. “This isn’t gonna mean too much to me, Rocco. Wouldn’t mean much to me even if it were in English. Can I get a cup of coffee somewhere in here while the doc does his shtick?”

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll take you. I could use one myself. What about you, Gid?”

  “Um . . . no.” Already, he was absorbed.

  “We’ll be back in a minute.”

  They were out the door and halfway through the bullpen before Gideon even nodded. “Take your time,” he mumbled, or at least he meant to.

  Autopsies of skeletal remains that are performed by forensic anthropologists are generally detailed and lengthy. When done by pathologists, however, they tend to be on the sketchy side, to put it mildly. It isn’t that that pathologists are by nature less thorough or obs
ervant than anthropologists; it’s a matter of where their interests and education lie, and the less soft tissue and fewer organs that are present, the less interested they are, and the less informed. Naturally enough, it works the other way around as well. Give Gideon a kidney or a liver or a lung to report on, and he wouldn’t have much to say.

  This particular report, having been performed by a medico named Bosco, consisted of only a page and a half. He hadn’t even bothered to record all of the bones that were found, only the ones that had suffered damage, and even there, the trauma were merely listed in the most general way and not described at all. (“Multiple fractures of the left scapula, the left humerus, etc.”) It certainly supported Rocco’s statement that Pietro was as every bit as “busted up” as Nola, but it was nowhere near the detail Gideon would have liked. Dr. Bosco had, however, extended himself when it came to the presumptive cause of death. An oval, beveled hole, a ballistic entrance wound, had been found in the left temporal bone. On the opposite side of the skull, another larger difetto—the equivalent bland, undisturbing term defect would have been used in English—had been left where sizeable parts of the right temporal, sphenoid, and parietal bones had been blown away. Pretty much the entire right half of the cranium was gone. Bosco’s conclusion, like Rocco’s—and Gideon’s—was that Pietro had been shot, left to right, behind the eyes and almost straight across the head . . . a typical left-hander’s suicide by handgun, as Rocco had pointed out.

  In addition to the left scapula and humerus, the other postcranial traumas were fractures of seven of the twelve ribs (sides and rib-numbers not specified), the bones of the left arm and forearm—radius and ulna—the sacrum, eight of the twelve thoracic vertebrae, and four of the five lumbars.

  “Huh,” Gideon muttered to himself. “Almost totally axial. Except for the left shoulder and arm, the appendicular skeleton is undamaged.”

  “Come again?” said Rocco. He and John had returned without Gideon’s noticing and were in their chairs sipping black coffee from tiny, espresso-sized cardboard cups.

  “I was just remarking that the axial skeleton is all broken up, but the appendicular skeleton is hardly touched. Just the one arm.”

  “We heard you, Doc,” John said. “We just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, right, sorry. Axial skeleton, the bones that form the central axis of the body.”

  “The spine,” Rocco said.

  “Yes, the vertebral column. Plus the skull and the ribs. The center pole of the body, more or less. Eighty bones in all.”

  “And the appendicular skeleton, those are, like, the appendages?” By way of illustration, John waved his arms around.

  “Right, arms, legs, collarbones, scapulas. And the pelvis. The things that kind of hang off the central axis.”

  “Uh-huh. And?” John made a go-ahead motion.

  “And what?” Gideon said.

  “Aren’t you now going to tell us how many bones the appendicular skeleton has?”

  “No. Well, all right. The usual count is a hundred and twenty-six, if you insist.”

  “Thank you, I feel better. More complete, you know what I mean?”

  Gideon spotted a third tiny cup of coffee on the desk. “Hey, is that for me?”

  “Yup,” Rocco said. “You said you didn’t want it, but we figured you’d take it if we brought it.”

  “I’ll take it if you don’t want it,” John said.

  “No, thank you, I can deal with it.” He downed the three ounces in a couple of swallows that lit him up. He shuddered pleasurably. “Thank you. Now I feel more complete. Okay. Now, you remember how Nola had all those broken bones in her legs, but hardly any above the waist, other than some vertebrae, and none at all in her arms?”

  “Sort of,” John said. “Which proved she was conscious when she fell, right? Because she landed on her feet.”

  “‘Proved’ is maybe putting it a little strongly, but yes, that’s right. But Pietro, you see, is almost the exact opposite: no broken bones at all below the hips, and—with the exception of the left arm and shoulder—no fractures to his appendicular skeleton.”

  “So he didn’t land on his feet?”

  “Correct. He landed flat on his back; well, apparently partly on his left side, it looks like. That would have been when the arm was broken. But legs, feet . . . all undamaged.”

  “Meaning he was probably not conscious when he fell.” This from Rocco after a moment’s processing.

  “Correct.”

  “O . . . kay,” John said thoughtfully. “So what does that tell us?

  “Not much, I’m afraid, when you come down to it. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t really change anything; it just confirms what we thought before—that Pietro, unlike Nola, was dead before he fell. But we already knew that because the skull fragments found on site showed that he blew half his head off up at the top.” He sighed.

  “Well, what did you expect to find?”

  “Who knows? I guess I was hoping for something a little more definitive, something that might lead in a constructive direction as to what really happened up there. I just cannot buy the idea of his climbing down the cliff to shoot her after her fall, and then huffing all the way back up to the top to kill himself. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. You said that yourself, Rocco, and it’s true.”

  They sat mulling this over for a little while, and then Gideon abruptly shook his head. “Nope, it’s too weird. I tell you what, Rocco: I don’t think Pietro killed her at all. I think you’ve got a double murder here.”

  “But that wouldn’t explain—” Rocco began.

  “There’s a lot it doesn’t explain,” said Gideon. “But it does give us a credible answer to the question of why Pietro would have shot her down at the bottom and then climbed up to the top to shoot himself.”

  “The answer being that he didn’t, is that what you mean?”

  “Exactly. Someone else killed them both.”

  John nodded. “Seems like a possibility to me.”

  They both looked at Rocco. His response came only after taking in and letting out two long breaths. “Well, it doesn’t to me. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s possible but, let me tell you, you don’t start a reinvestigation because something’s possible. You need a lot more than that. Like a little evidence, for instance? You need someplace to start.”

  “Would a few plausible suspects help?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘plausible.’” But he didn’t look optimistic.

  Gideon told him about the once-imminent sale to Humboldt-Schlager and what it would have meant to the Cubbiddu sons, and about Cesare and how Pietro had been on the verge of cutting him out of his will. Rocco listened, but it didn’t make him any more receptive. “I appreciate all your help with this, I really do, and—who knows, maybe there’s something to it. But I’m sorry, it’s just not enough to get this thing reopened.”

  John agreed with him. “If it was my case, I’d have to say the same, Doc. Just because some other guy might have some possible motive . . . that’s not grounds for committing your resources to a formal investigation. But,” and he slowly shook his head, “something’s sure screwy about the way it stands now.”

  “Nobody’s arguing with you there,” Rocco said.

  “All right, let me introduce another possibility,” said Gideon. “Another possible scenario.”

  Rocco lifted and eyebrow. “Could I stop you?”

  “Not a chance,” John said.

  “Well, I was thinking about the vendetta angle,” Gideon said. “Both families were upset with the two of them for getting married. Maybe this was the result. And then it was covered up to look like a suicide.”

  “They were married twenty-five years ago,” Rocco said. “Why wait till now?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know where they were,” John suggested.

  “Nah. Look, I wondered about that myself at first, but that’s not the way vendettas work. They don’t cover up
their assassinations. They want people to know who did it and why. And in Barbagia—I looked into this, see?—the standard finish is to shotgun the victims in the face, so the family can’t even have the satisfaction of saying good-bye to them in an open casket.”

  “Nice people,” John said. “Salt of the earth.”

  “Anyway,” Rocco said, stifling a yawn, “it’s all worth thinking about, but it’s not enough to go on. Regardless of how weird the situation was—Pietro shooting her after she fell, then climbing back up to shoot himself—it’s still where the evidence points. Mostly.”

  “Well, we tried,” Gideon said. “Look, Rocco, I really think the family has a right to know what I’ve come up with, even if it doesn’t add up to anything solid. It just doesn’t feel right to keep it from them. I mean, living there, seeing them every day—I feel like some kind of sneak. And who knows? Maybe when they hear about it they’ll come up with something more.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that, but okay, sure. I wouldn’t have any right to stop you anyway. And if they do come up with anything useful, let me know, will you? I’m keeping an open mind here. I just need more.”

  • • •

  “KIND of a waste of time, wasn’t it?” Gideon said on their walk back toward the station.

  “You’re telling me,” John grumbled. “And for that you got me up in the middle of the night.”

  “John, I really don’t think six thirty qualifies as the middle of the night. I understand some people regularly get up at that time.”

  “Yeah, but not on purpose. I should still be sleeping. This really messes up my twenty-four-hour biological clock, you know?”

  “Gosh, pal, I’m really sorry. How can I ever make it up to you?”

  John stopped and looked up and down the street. “Well, you could buy me a breakfast panini in that bar over there. That’d be a start.” But as they headed toward the café-bar, he stopped again, looking worried. “Or should I have said panino? I mean, God forbid I should get it wrong.”

  “Tell you what,” Gideon said. “How about if I buy you two of them? That will make the grammatical niceties moot.”