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

  “Like these,” John said, surveying the shattered bones on the table. “Clean breaks, almost all of them. But with Nola, a lot of them were those . . . what was it, green-twig fractures.”

  “Green-stick,” Gideon said. “Right. Conclusion: unlike Nola, who was alive—whose bones were still moist, living tissue when she went off that cliff—”

  “Alive and conscious,” Rocco added.

  “—Pietro was already dead. And not only dead, but thoroughly dead. Long enough for his bones to start to dry out.”

  “But what about these?” John asked, indicating a couple of ribs that had clear green-stick fractures, and two similar ones in the sacrum.

  “Well, that’s why I said ‘long enough for his bones to start to dry out.’ It doesn’t happen all at once. And as to which ones dry first and which don’t, there are a million variables. In the case of these green-stick ones—the sacrum, the eleventh and twelfth ribs—they’re all in the body’s core, the area most thickly covered with fat and muscle and other tissue—clothing too—so they’d stay moist longer and be protected from drying. The other bones would dry out faster. So the same fall could very well have produced dry-stick fractures in some of the bones and green-stick fractures in others. Which is exactly what I think happened.”

  “Hey, Doc, let me ask you something else,” John said. “When you say he had to have been dead long enough for the bones to start drying out, how long would that be?

  Gideon sighed. “Maybe one of you ought to write this down. What we’re talking about here are weeks.”

  Rocco’s expression was pained. “Oh, please . . .”

  “Weeks,” repeated Gideon. “Look, he left home for his cabin on, what was it, September first, right?”

  Rocco nodded.

  “Okay, so we know he was definitely alive then. And we’re assuming that the two of them got thrown off the cliff a month later, on October 1, when she came to pick him up.”

  “It’s a pretty safe assumption,” Rocco said. “She left her aunt’s that morning, but she didn’t show up—neither of them showed up—at Villa Antica that afternoon.”

  Gideon nodded. “Well, I tell you, how long it takes for human bone to dry out is extremely variable. It depends on temperature, humidity, the health of the victim, what he was wearing—”

  “Here we go again,” said John.

  “No,” Gideon said firmly. “Here we do not go again. I will say—and I’m willing to go on the record with this—that Pietro Cubbiddu had to have been dead a minimum of two weeks, and most likely more, when he was shot and his body thrown off that cliff. And my guess—which I’m not quite willing to go on the record with—is that it had to have been closer to four weeks than to two. In other words, not very long after he arrived at the cabin, sometime in that first week or so of September.”

  “Which would have made it kind of hard for him to kill Nola in October,” John observed with a baffled frown.

  No one said anything for a few seconds, and then Rocco asked: “So exactly what the hell do we think did happen?”

  “Don’t look at me,” John said with a shake of his head. “I’m more lost than I was before he started.”

  “I don’t have an answer to that either,” said Gideon, “but it does seem to me there are some pretty interesting threads you can pull out of the circumstances as we now understand them, Rocco. However it worked—and whatever was behind it—the killer had to be there waiting when Nola arrived, to make it look as if Pietro killed her.”

  “Which means he had to know when she was coming,” John said. “The exact day she’d show up at the cabin. Which must mean we’re not talking about a whole hell of a lot of people. I mean, how many people would know something like that?”

  Rocco was nodding along with him. “Right. And then who would even know where the cabin was? The family kept that to themselves. Pietro insisted on being left alone up there. Even they weren’t welcome during that one month. He kept a cell phone for emergencies, and that was all the contact he wanted with the outside world. So . . . I think maybe—if we reopened the case—we’d be looking at the family itself and any really close confidantes. That would be the place to start, anyway.”

  “So that would include . . . ?” Gideon asked.

  “The sons, of course—Franco, Luca, Nico . . . and Cesare, naturally . . . and Luca’s wife, Linda, I guess. And the lawyer, Quadrelli; he’s in on everything.” He’d been counting the names on his fingers as he said them, and he was on the first finger of the second hand. “Six in all. And probably some of the employees. But not a whole lot of people, at least to start with. It’s doable. You got any tips for me?”

  That was Gideon’s cue to tell him about Cesare, and about the aborted Humboldt-Schlager deal. He half expected Rocco to flare up again, but he was uncharacteristically grateful instead. “You guys have been a huge help. I want to thank you. It’s obvious we screwed up the first time around, and you opened up my eyes.”

  “I appreciate that. And if there’s any other way I can help, just ask,” Gideon said.

  “Me too,” John said. “Count me in.”

  Rocco smiled. “Yeah? What are the two of you doing right now?”

  “Not a lot,” John said hopefully. He’d been getting a little bored with life in Figline.

  “Good. Let’s drive back up to Florence. I’m gonna have to get my boss to agree to it, and I don’t think I can do it without you guys there to help me explain. Captain Conforti’s a tough nut to crack. He’s a very smart guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also a bureaucrat, and he hates it when things aren’t nice and neat. He also doesn’t like it when you tell him he got something wrong.”

  “Who does?” said Gideon.

  SIXTEEN

  BUT Captain Conforti proved to be a surprisingly easy nut to crack. After an unpromising start, twenty minutes was all it took. He’d made no secret of being displeased when they entered his office, which was much like Rocco’s in its unadorned functionality but three times the size and with solid walls, a real door, and two tall windows looking out on the street. The first thing he did was to glare silently at Rocco until Rocco figured out what he was driving at and responded with a jaunty, casual salute that didn’t do much to ease things. The second thing, once introductions had been made, was to declare that only twice in his career had he been party to reopening a closed case, and both times the results had been legal and political disasters. And the third was to ask Rocco just what it was that was supposed to be so different about this particular case that would make him even consider doing it again.

  “What’s different, captain, is that this gentleman”—he gestured at Gideon—“showed up on the scene and didn’t waste any time telling us everything we got wrong.”

  “Which was everything,” John said with an amiable smile.

  “Just about,” Rocco agreed, as Conforti’s expression darkened more with every word.

  But almost as soon as Rocco turned things over to Gideon, things improved. Conforti, a steely, distinguished, gray-haired man in his fifties, self-assured to the point of intimidation, proved to be an excellent and intelligent listener. Since the captain had little English and they were speaking in Italian, Rocco furnished the correct terms when Gideon couldn’t come up with them. John sat, silent and patient, his Italian nowhere near up to following the conversation. Conforti’s few interruptions consisted of brief, piercing questions. There was no argument on his part, no further defensiveness.

  “You’re right,” he said as Gideon finished. “Given what you’ve found, the findings we arrived at earlier are not supportable. I will see the public prosecutor this afternoon. Damn it.” The prospect had done nothing to improve his mood.

  “I’ll be glad to refer you to the relevant forensic literature, if you think it would help,” Gideon said.

  Conforti produced his first thin smile. “We have heard of you, Professor Oliver, even here in Tuscany. The word of the Skeleton Detective”—il detective de
lle ossa—“is all the support I need.”

  Modestly, Gideon dipped his chin.

  “You will lead the reopened investigation, of course, Tenente.”

  “Thank you, sir. With your permission, I’ll take Maresciallo Martignetti as my second.”

  “Approved.”

  “I believe one of the first things I’d like to do is inform the Cubbiddus that we are reopening the case and begin our interrogations. If you don’t object, I’d like to do that this afternoon.”

  Conforti nodded, then stood up. The others immediately followed suit. The conference was over. There was a round of handshaking. “I have a suggestion for the second thing you might do,” the captain said to Rocco as all four men moved toward the door.

  “What would that be?”

  The corners of Conforti’s mouth turned down—there were better ways to respond to the “suggestion” of a senior officer—but he went on without comment. “I would send a few people up to the cliff top tomorrow morning, see if they can find the bullet, the one that shot signor Cubbiddu. It would be nice to have that, don’t you think? The one that was never found.”

  “Sure, but we already went over the area pretty thoroughly, captain. Checked every tree trunk for fifty meters around, scoured the ground—”

  “But you didn’t dig in the ground, Tenente. I suggest you scrape the soil down a few centimeters, say three or four. Not for fifty meters around, but perhaps for two meters surrounding the area where the skull fragments were found. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Rocco looked uncertain “Ah . . . dig?”

  “Dig, Tenente,” said Conforti with the smallest of sighs. He went on with a slow, grinding show of patience. “We now know that signor Cubbiddu was already dead when shot, no? Therefore don’t you think it is reasonable to assume that he, like signora Cubbiddu, might also have been lying down at the time, with his head against the ground?”

  “Mm, I don’t think so. If he had been, wouldn’t the ground have shored up his skull and prevented the bullet from exiting—as with signora Cubbiddu?” He looked to Gideon for support.

  “Not necessarily in his case, Rocco,” Gideon said. “The captain’s making a good point. Remember, his skull would have been more dried out than hers, and much more likely to break and let the bullet out, regardless of what it was up against—as opposed to hers, which more readily ‘dented’—the reverse depressed fracture.”

  “That is exactly correct,” said Conforti with the sort of approval one might give to a clever student, as if Gideon were reciting something he’d just learned from him, instead of the other way around. “So wouldn’t the most likely path of the bullet be straight down into the soil . . . rather than into the trunk of some nearby tree?”

  “That might be a good idea, Captain. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll send a couple of men up there first thing in the morning. Anything else on your mind?”

  Another sigh from Conforti, this one louder and longer. “No, Tenente,” he said with a long-suffering smile, “that is all.” After one more round of handshaking at the door, the door was closed behind them.

  • • •

  “WELL, you’re right,” Gideon said as they trotted down the stone stairway, their clacking footsteps echoing off the old walls. “He’s a smart guy. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me.”

  “You mean about digging in the ground for the bullet? You mean you hadn’t thought of that?” Rocco mimed surprise. “Hell, I thought of it a long time ago. I was just making the old guy feel like he was being helpful.”

  Gideon looked at him from under a raised eyebrow.

  “I wonder what you guys are talking about,” John said. “The last thing I understood was buongiorno.”

  “We’ll fill you in on the way,” Gideon said. “We’re heading back to the villa.”

  “All of us?” John asked, meaning Rocco too?

  “All of us,” Rocco said. “I’m driving you. You’re going to be seeing a lot of me over the next few days.”

  They were halfway down the steps when they heard someone hurrying after them. They looked back to see Captain Conforti, brandishing something in his hand. “Here,” he said, speaking English now, a little out of breath. “For you. I forget. Is a gift for to remember us.” And he happily handed John and Gideon each a blue-and-red (the Carabinieri colors) plastic ballpoint pen with www.carabinieri.it on the clip and 112, Italy’s version of the 911 emergency number, on the barrel. “Please.”

  Gideon appreciated the gesture. “Thank you very much, Captain.”

  “Muchas grazie, mon capitán,” said John grandly.

  SEVENTEEN

  IF Rocco was right about there being a surplus of bureaucratic red tape in the Carabinieri, it certainly didn’t show in the way they handled the reopening of the Cubbiddu case. On the drive down to Figline, no more than fifteen minutes after they’d left Conforti’s office, Rocco got a call from Cosima, the captain’s secretary, telling him that the new investigation had been provisionally approved. Did the lieutenant want her to call Villa Antica and inform them that he would like them to make themselves available for a meeting shortly; at, say, two o’clock? Would he like her to contact Maresciallo Martignetti to tell him to be there as well?

  The answers were yes and yes, so that when they arrived a few minutes before two, having stopped for panini at a dreary roadside café, the Cubbiddus were already waiting for them in the frescoed sitting room (decorated with faux eighteenth-century depictions of the villa and its rolling green vineyards—which hadn’t been planted until the twentieth) of Franco’s suite. They sat, singly and in pairs, on slender, elegant, flute-legged Louis XVI armchairs and settees. They all knew the meeting concerned Pietro and Nola, but none of them had any idea of what to expect, including Martignetti, who was in a corner, a little away from the others, with a pad and pen at the ready on his lap. Franco and Nico shared a settee, as did Luca and Linda. The Cubbiddu’s lawyer, Severo Quadrelli, was twiddling his thumbs, prudently seated in the only chair really suited to his heft: a so-called tub chair, a wide, substantial object built along the lines of a half barrel set atop short, thick legs. A sort of chair version of the man himself.

  Antonio Martignetti was seated against a wall and partially hidden by an ornate, eighteenth-century ceramic heating stove. During the drive, Rocco had told them that Martignetti was a trusted associate, among whose many virtues were fluency in English and skill at shorthand. Rocco went directly to him and squatted on his haunches to confer briefly. Then he stepped out to the middle of the tapestry-carpeted floor and greeted the rest. He was friendly enough—he knew them all—but got quickly down to business.

  “Dr. Oliver will carry the main part of this, so to make it easier for him, we’ll do it in English. Is that a problem for anyone?”

  Quadrelli lifted a hand. “Well . . .”

  “If there is difficulty at any time, signor Quadrelli, simply say so, and we’ll translate. Is that satisfactory?”

  It was, and Rocco continued. “Let me come right to the point. Your meddlesome pal there”—he pointed at Gideon—“has convinced us that we had it all wrong. It didn’t happen the way we thought it did.” He waited a few seconds for dramatic effect. “Your father didn’t kill anyone, and certainly not your stepmother. We are therefore reopening the investigation into their deaths.”

  “Great!” Luca said.

  Nico pumped his fist. “Right on.”

  Franco said nothing but looked pleased.

  “This is terrific news, Rocco,” Nico said. “But what changed your mind? Is it what Gideon told us about yesterday—that babbo would have had to climb back up the cliff, and you didn’t think—”

  “No, there’s more to it than that now. Gid, would you take it from here, please? Tell them what you found.”

  He went to lean against a wall to make room for Gideon at the center (and to observe the people in attendance), but Gideon spoke from his chair, giving them a fairly thorough description of what
his examination of Pietro’s remains that morning had added to the picture he’d drawn for them the day before: mainly that Pietro, having preceded Nola in death by several weeks, could hardly be guilty of her murder. There were questions, of course, and he answered them as factually as he could but refrained from getting into anything deeper than necessary, which Rocco had earlier asked him to do. Predictably, this satisfied no one.

  The last question came from Luca. “Okay, one thing I don’t quite get—”

  “Only one?” Nico said. “You’re way ahead of me.”

  Me too, Gideon thought.

  “Okay, so what was it that killed him?” Luca continued. “You said—I think you said—he was shot and thrown off the cliff weeks after he was dead, but what killed him in the first place? Did you find any, what do you call them, the causes of death on the bones?”

  “Not so far, no,” Gideon answered, and explained a little more about the green-stick fractures and how they might or might not be perimortem. “But John and I will be heading back over to the funeral home to see if we can’t find something more definitive.”

  “Oh, you mean I’m invited along?” John asked. “That’s great, it’s been hours since anybody told me to shut up or get the hell out of their face.”

  Quadrelli, who had been growing restless, got to his feet. “If you will excuse me, lieutenant, I must make a telephone call.”