Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery) Page 3

  “Casentino National Park,” Gardella mused. “You think it could be that winery couple, the . . .”

  “The Cubbiddus, yes,” Conforti responded. “Those coordinates, they’re less than half a kilometer from Pietro Cubbiddu’s cabin. A remote and difficult area. I think we may have found them at last.” He proffered another sheet. “A map of the area with the coordinates shown.”

  Gardella studied it, nodding. “You could be right.”

  Conforti scowled. Well, there it was again. You could be right. Technically, there was nothing wrong with what Gardella had said; it was a statement of fact. But “You could be right?” Was this the way to address one’s superior? “I would like you to handle the investigation, Tenente,” Conforti said mildly.

  “Me? Well, who headed up the task force when they first disappeared?”

  “That was the late, unlamented Maresciallo Galli,” the captain said. “But even if he were still among us, I would be assigning the responsibility to you. That is, of course, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  But sarcasm bounced off Gardella like raindrops off a mallard. “All right, no problem. I’ll see that it’s taken care of for you,” he said as if bestowing a favor. “I’ll give it to Martignetti. Tonino’s a good man.” He folded the sheets in two and (without being dismissed) rose to leave.

  “No, I want you to lead the investigation personally,” Conforti said.

  “Me, personally? Why?”

  “Because this may well turn into a high-profile matter.” Was it possible to feel one’s blood pressure rising? Conforti was sure he could sense his arteries tightening. “Because there may be foul play involved. I want a commissioned officer in charge from the beginning, not a maresciallo. I have chosen you.”

  “But I barely know the case. I hardly—”

  “Nevertheless you will be the investigative officer.” He spoke through clenched teeth. His patience continued to fray.

  “But—”

  Conforti glared at him. Had the man ever, even once, accepted an order without a but, an argument, a question? A why? “Tenente!” he said sharply. “I have given you a direct command. I do not wish to be questioned further.”

  “But—”

  “I do not wish to be questioned at all. You will go to the site now. Take Martignetti with you. The crime-scene van is on its way. Representatives of the prosecutor’s office and the medico legale will meet you there. You will give an account to me when you return, even before making out your report. Is all this clear?”

  “Well, sure it’s clear. I just—”

  “Dismissed.”

  “I only—”

  “Dismissed.”

  Gardella, totally unfazed by his captain’s growl, got up with an amiable shrug and made for the door. “You’re the boss. I’m on my way.” He pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway.

  Conforti began to call sharply after him. “On leaving the presence of a superior officer, Tenente, it is customary . . .” Mid-sentence, he threw up his hands. His final muttered words were addressed to the walls.

  “Ah, ma va all’inferno.”

  Ah, the hell with it.

  THREE

  THE city of Florence, like the rest of Tuscany, was slogging its way through another humid, sweltering August, so the prospect of spending the afternoon in the mountains was a welcome one. Rocco Gardella had gratefully changed out of his uniform and now had on light, tan summer jeans, a short-sleeve blue sport shirt, and sockless sandals. Traveling east on SP556 with Rocco driving and the equally casually dressed Martignetti in the passenger seat, it didn’t take long before they were climbing out of the heat haze, through the tiny stone villages of Ponte Biforco and Montemezzano, and up onto the cool, forested, green flanks of Mount Falterona. He turned off the air-conditioning, opened the window at his side, and leaned his head out, lapping up the wind like a dog. This was terrific, and only forty minutes out of Florence. Why didn’t he get up here more often?

  Rocco remembered a little about the Cubbiddus’ disappearance a year earlier, but not much more than what he’d seen in the newspapers. However, Martignetti had pulled the old case and had it on his lap. As they drove he browsed through it, reading the background aloud to Rocco.

  Pietro and Nola Cubbiddu had migrated from Sardinia twenty-five years earlier. In the time since, starting with a half hectare of decrepit vineyard that had produced its last wines fifty years before, they had built one of the largest wineries of the Val d’Arno.

  A year ago, Pietro had been spending a few quiet weeks at his vacation cabin in the Casentinese, and Nola was supposed to have come to pick him up in her car and drive him back home to the villa, but they’d never shown up there. The family had called the police that night. There had been an extensive search of the area over the next few days, which had produced the wife’s parked car not far from the cabin, but nothing else. The investigation that followed had led to dead ends. Today’s telephone call was the first thing that sounded as if it might be a real lead.

  The last few kilometers to the location were on an unmarked road—a pair of ruts, really—that even Rocco’s GPS didn’t know about, and they had to concentrate to keep from wandering off it onto even vaguer pathways. Still, Rocco’s mind was working on the case. It was too early to arrive at any hypotheses, of course—it had yet to be determined whether these were or weren’t the Cubbiddus—but he couldn’t keep a couple of speculations from rattling around his brain. First, whoever they were, he thought that foul play probably was involved. One person falling accidentally to his death from a mountain path; that was possible. But two people? Unless they’d been caught in an avalanche, highly unlikely. Second, and this wasn’t so much a hypothesis as an archaic word that he couldn’t get out of his mind: faida it was in Italian, and though the deadly, senseless—but undeniably romantic—institution was a thing of the past on the mainland, it was still alive and well in the remote, mountainous interior of Sardinia, from which the Cubbiddus had come.

  Vendetta.

  • • •

  THE unique and particular chunk of earth identified by its coordinates as 43.87983, 11.758633 turned out to be a flat rock, most of which was hidden from view at the moment by a smiling fat man sitting cross-legged on it, like a statue of Buddha, with his hands folded in front of his belly. He was chewing contentedly on a stick of red licorice. Beside him was an ancient black physician’s bag, its leather so cracked and peeling it looked like alligator hide.

  “I’d say it’s about time you two got here,” said Melio Bosco, Florence Province’s senior police physician. Bosco, well into his seventies, had first started contracting with the office of the medico legale thirty-seven years ago. Rocco had been two years old at the time.

  “Hello, Melio. Crime-scene crew isn’t here yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “The public prosecutor?”

  “No sign of him. Perhaps he’s gotten lost.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” Martignetti said. In Italy, all police agencies, including the Carabinieri, work under the close supervision of the public prosecutor, commonly referred to as the magistrate. And every one of them chafes at it. The two men were pleased to have their initial look at the scene without having a magistrate looking over their shoulders.

  “So?” Rocco said. “What do we have?”

  “We have the skeletal remains of a man, and we have the skeletal remains of a woman.”

  “And?”

  “And after careful analysis I am ready to certify that they are both deceased.”

  Despite the age difference, the two men had become friends. Like Rocco, Dr. Bosco took the hidebound formalities of the criminal justice bureaucracy with a golf-ball-size grain of salt. And he had a sense of humor, not something in great supply within those precincts.

  Rocco looked around the wooded surroundings. There were a lot of boulders, most of them big. “Which ones are the skeletons behind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that I’d
call them skeletons, exactly. The animals have been at them, you see. Wolves, bears, marmots . . .” He frowned. “Perhaps not marmots. Are marmots carnivores?”

  “I don’t know, Melio. It’s something I’ve always wondered about.”

  “I don’t either.” Dr. Bosco chewed, smiling and inscrutable.

  “Martignetti,” Rocco said, “write this down: ‘Find out if marmots eat meat.’”

  “At once, Tenente, immediately,” Martignetti said, yawning and scratching behind his ear.

  Maresciallo Antonio Martignetti was five years older than Rocco and had been eight years longer in police work. He and Rocco had been working together for two and a half years and over that time had built a comfortable, easygoing relationship. They understood each other.

  “So what do you say, Melio?” Rocco asked. “You planning to tell us where they are?”

  “Do you see that boulder over there, the biggest one, right up against those trees?” He used the licorice stick to direct Rocco’s attention. “Go and look behind it, and see what you see.”

  What they saw was pretty much what you’d expect a couple of corpses to look like after they’d fallen off a cliff, then lain out in the rain, snow, heat, and cold for the better part of a year, in an area well supplied with meat-eaters: two mostly skeletonized, moldy, greenish-brown things with a dissolved, out-of-focus look, as if they were on their way to melding with the soil (which they were), and if the dividing line between earth and bodies had been blurred. Both of them were clad in jeans and leather jackets, much soiled and discolored.

  If the caller was right (and Rocco thought he was), they had fallen from the cliff that towered some sixty or seventy meters above. Apparently, they’d landed on the sloping scree at its base and rolled (or bounced) down a few more meters into some woods until they’d been stopped by the immense boulder, one jammed against the boulder itself, the other jammed against the first. Both were on their faces or what would have been their faces. The one directly up against the rock had its arms and legs splayed out at crazy angles that no living body had ever assumed; the other, pressed close against it, was crumpled up almost into a fetal position. The two of them looked like a couple of moldy old scarecrows tossed onto a refuse pile, torsos caved in and only one foot, shod in an ankle-length boot, visible between them. The body against the boulder had lost its hands too. As for the other, the arms were wedged beneath it, so it was impossible to tell if the hands were there or not. Only about half its skull was still present; the rear half was pretty much an open hole.

  Ligaments and hardened bits of soft tissue could be seen here and there on the bony surfaces of the bodies. They were long past the stench of decomposition, and now emitted a milder and less stomach-turning odor of decay; a musty, mushroomy kind of forest smell that wouldn’t have troubled you, had you not been aware of its source.

  Rocco stood looking at them for a few moments, his hands on his hips. He’d have loved to start poking around in the human wreckage, but—as he’d learned the hard way—better to wait for the crime-scene van and that goddamn ever-present prosecutor before touching anything.

  “You smell something funny?” Martignetti asked.

  “I do,” said Rocco, who hadn’t noticed it until then.

  They walked the ten yards back to the doctor.

  “Hey, Melio,” Martignetti said. “Something smells funny back there.”

  “Is that so? An odor emanating from a couple of rotting corpses? Gentlemen, you amaze me.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Rocco. “No, something else, something sharper. I can still smell it.”

  “You have a good nose. It’s alcohol spray. I thought it best to spray it into the male’s skull.”

  Rocco’s brow wrinkled. “Why?”

  “Because I preferred not to get stung. There’s a wasp’s nest in there, and it was buzzing away.”

  “No kidding. Does that happen very often?”

  “Often enough for me to carry the spray. Sometimes you find a family of mice nesting happily in one. Cute little things. Those, I don’t kill. I always hate to disturb them.”

  Martignetti shrugged. “Live and learn. Something new every day.”

  “Which one’s the man?” Rocco asked.

  “The one with the broken head.”

  As Rocco nodded his response, he caught sight of two vehicles inching their way over the rough gravel toward them: a familiar, boxy blue van and a black, sleek, private sedan. “Here they come.” He peered at the sedan. “Oh Christ, the prosecutor’s office has sent Migliorini. That’s all I needed. What can you tell me before he gets here and starts issuing orders?”

  “Not much, my boy. I didn’t want to disturb the scene before your people were able to have a look. I’ll tell you more after I get the remains to the mortuary, of course, but for now . . .” He stood up and turned so that he faced the cliff wall that rose behind them at about a sixty-degree angle. “From the looks of it, both of them fell from up there.”

  “That’s what the caller thought,” Rocco said. “Me too. That makes three of us.”

  “Four,” said Martignetti, peering upward. “That would be, what, sixty meters?”

  Bosco nodded, sucking on the licorice stick. “Mm, sixty or seventy.”

  “The woman must’ve come down first,” Rocco mused. “Since she was right up against the rock and the man was up against her.”

  “My gracious, nothing much gets by you people does it?”

  Rocco was craning his neck toward the top. “What’s up there? Do you know?”

  “No roads, if that’s what you mean. I picked up a topographical map at the visitor center in Poppi. It indicates that there’s a hiking trail along the rim. The nearest structure would appear to be the Cubbiddu cabin about half a kilometer away.”

  “Any ideas about cause of death?” Rocco asked. “Do we have a homicide here?”

  Slowly, sadly, Bosco shook his head. “Ah, Rocco, you grieve me. You simply cannot keep it straight, can you? You mean ‘manner of death.’ There are an infinite number of causes of death, but homicide is not among them. There are, however, five and only five possibilities as to manner of death: accident, suicide, natural, undetermined . . . and homicide.”

  Rocco rolled his eyes. “Oh, excuse me, signor dottore. Can you offer us any preliminary hypotheses concerning the manner of death of the deceased?”

  “Oh, it’s homicide, all right. But as it happens, I believe I can also supply you with the cause. That blown-apart skull the gentleman has? It was a bullet that did that, entering at the left temple and exploding out the right side. A similar cause for the woman. A clear-cut bullet entry wound in the skull. No exit wound visible now, but I suspect we’ll find one when we clean it up a little. We’ll learn more when we get them on the table and cut their clothes away.”

  “So we’ve got ourselves a double murder here?” Martignetti said.

  “That, or a murder-suicide. Or, for that matter, a double suicide.”

  “I’m guessing double murder,” Rocco said. Vendetta, he was thinking.

  Bosco, Buddha-like on his rock with his hands folded in front of his belly, smiled. “We shall see,” he intoned, “what we shall see. Ah, good afternoon, signor public prosecutor. How nice to see you.”

  • • •

  IN the event, Rocco’s guess turned out to be wrong. Eight days later, the following article appeared in the Val d’Arno’s leading newspaper:

  Corriere di Arezzo, Tuesday, 30 August 2011

  PUBLIC PROSECUTOR ENDS CUBBIDDU INVESTIGATION

  Ending a mystery that has gripped the Val d’Arno for the last month, Deputy Public Prosecutor Giaccomo Migliorini said yesterday that his office had concluded its investigation into the deaths of Villa Antica founder Pietro Cubbiddu and his wife, Nola, whose skeletonized bodies were found in a remote part of the Casentino National Forest on 22 August.

  “It has been established that Cubbiddu killed his wife and then himself,” avvocato Migliorini told assem
bled reporters, reading from prepared notes at the offices of the Public Prosecutor. “This tragic incident took place in September of last year. Since prosecution is obviously impossible, we do not feel that the situation warrants a continuing investigation. Thank you.”

  When questioning followed, additional details came to light. The deceased had each sustained a single gunshot wound to the head. The shootings occurred on a mountainside trail. The bodies then fell some sixty meters to a rocky area below. The weapon involved was a Beretta M1935 semiautomatic pistol, using .32 ACP ammunition. This pistol, which was originally produced for the military, had been in signor Cubbiddu’s possession for many years, and was found under his remains. Signora Cubbiddu, who was also born in Sardinia, had been Cubbiddu’s second wife. They had been married for twenty-five years.

  The Cubbiddu family declined to be interviewed but issued the following joint statement through their Arezzo attorney, Severo Quadrelli: “We appreciate the professionalism shown by the Carabinieri and the public prosecutor in their investigation, and find no fault with their efforts. However, we maintain the unshakable conviction that our beloved father, Pietro Cubbiddu, did not commit these horrible acts.” Cesare Baccaredda Cubbiddu, Nola’s son from her prior marriage, had no comment.

  Motive for the tragedy remained in doubt.

  Well, yes, but in Rocco’s opinion, not a whole lot of doubt. Interviews with the family had made it clear that Pietro suspected Nola of having an affair. For an old-school Roman Catholic Sard like Pietro, what further motive was needed? Being cuckolded would have been unendurable; the most humiliating fate imaginable. And divorce was out of the question. Thus . . .