Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery) Page 7

  “As a matter of fact there were. It wound up caught in the opening of his jacket, sort of wedged into his armpit. And it was a good leather jacket, so it was pretty well protected from the elements. So, yeah, we did manage to lift a couple of partials off it.”

  “And?”

  “And they’re his. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go to court on it because, as I said, they’re only partials. Besides, his prints aren’t on file anywhere. But we found prints that matched what we had on the gun all over his things at home . . . hundreds of them. I don’t know, maybe thousands. On his shoes, his eating utensils, his toothpaste tube, everything. We took prints of his family and the winery staff, and there’s definitely no match there. Our tech guy says the odds are ninety-nine out of a hundred they’re his.”

  “You’re right,” John said. “Good odds, but they wouldn’t cut it in a courtroom.”

  “There’s something that seems a little hinky to me here, Rocco,” Gideon said. “Am I the only one who thinks it a little, shall we say, unusual that the gun stayed with him all the way down and never bounced away anywhere where you couldn’t find it? That lady we looked at today sure did some bouncing, so I presume he did too, since he took the same route.”

  “Well—” Rocco began.

  “And then the gun just happened to end up in the very best possible place to preserve any fingerprints that happened to be on it?”

  Rocco shrugged. “Sometimes we get lucky. It happens.”

  “It happens,” John agreed.

  “Yeah,” said Gideon, but he wasn’t satisfied.

  “Rocco, you got a motive?” John asked.

  “Uh-huh. He thought she was having an affair. This was what you might call an ultratraditional kind of guy, a real dinosaur, and that was all the motive he would’ve needed: she deserved to die, and he couldn’t stand to live. And fossils like him, they don’t do divorce.”

  “And was she?” asked Gideon. “Having an affair?”

  “Who knows? We were satisfied he did it, and he was dead. No reason to follow up. What would be the point? Just make more misery and unhappiness for the family. Enough said, case closed.” He threw a wry glance at Gideon. “Only now along comes the great Skeleton Detective with his gaga theories and screws up the works.”

  “Whoa,” said John, “that’s the first time I ever heard anybody say that about you, Doc.”

  “Well, now, how exactly did I screw up the works? Tell me that. All I did—”

  “All you did was tell us first she fell off the cliff and then she was shot.”

  “Well, I know that complicates things a little—”

  Rocco snorted a laugh. “Nah, not really. This guy shoves his wife off a two-hundred-foot cliff, then he runs down and pops her one, just in case a fall that broke every bone in her body didn’t do the job. Then, instead of killing himself right there and making it easy on himself, he climbs all the way to the top again—this fifty-eight-year-old guy with bad lungs—so he can shoot himself right on the edge, the very same spot, and fall down on top of her. Oh, yeah, nothing wrong with that picture.”

  “Rocco, we’re getting ahead of the story here. All I can tell you for sure is that she was alive when she fell off the cliff, which I know because—”

  “Oh, yeah, I wondered when you were gonna get around to that,” Rocco grumbled

  “—because she was conscious when she fell, and if you’re conscious, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re alive.”

  “Conscious?” Rocco practically shouted. “Damn, Gid . . .” When words failed him he just shook his head.

  “Yes, conscious. Sure. You see—”

  “Hold it, hold it, hold it. What hat did that get pulled out of? Don’t you ever stop? First you know she was alive, now you’re telling me you know she was conscious?”

  He had stopped walking so abruptly that a daydreaming man walking behind him had to stop himself from stumbling into him. Catching himself just before contact, he made an exasperated noise and gave Rocco the finger, a gesture as readily understood in Florence as in New York.

  “Screw you too, pal,” was Rocco’s nonchalant, over-the-shoulder response, in English, before he returned his attention to Gideon. “What are you gonna tell me next, what she was thinking about?” Still shaking his head, he flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

  “Believe me, if I could I would, but all I can tell you is that she was conscious.”

  “Aw, man, give me a break. How the hell can you possibly know something like that?”

  “I know because—”

  Rocco glanced at his watch and did a quick mental calculation. “Nuts, I gotta go if I’m gonna make it back to meet the train. Jesus, Gid, you sure know how to turn a simple case into a, a—” He shook his head and pulled out a business card on which he scribbled something. “This is my cell number, my personal phone. Give me a call later and tell me what you were gonna say, will you? But no mumbo jumbo. If I’m gonna go anywhere with this, I’m gonna need some solid evidence—facts—to convince Captain Conforti. He’s a tough nut to crack.” And then to John: “If you think reopening a closed case is tough in the Feeb, you oughta see the Carabinieri. Don’t forget, red tape was invented right here in Florence. Thank you, Machiavelli.”

  “I’ll call if you want, Rocco,” Gideon said, “but there’s no need to interrupt your evening. I’ll be going over it all in class tomorrow morning. In detail.”

  “Yeah, except I’m not gonna be there. I gotta be in court, available to testify on another case. So call me later? Tonight, I mean?”

  Gideon took the card. “I will.”

  “In an hour would be good. So look: You can cut across the piazza right here. That street on the other side is Via della Scala. Left on that for two blocks and turn right on Via del Moro. The Osteria’s just a block down.” Another look at his watch, a momentary chewing of his lip. “Ah, what the hell, I can go a little more with you. I can always run back to the station.”

  “Or just flag down the first car you see and jump in,” John suggested and growled: “‘Police business.’ That’s what we do in America. Don’t you watch any movies?”

  “Yeah, right. Okay, Gid,” he said as they started across the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, “you know she was conscious because . . . ?”

  “Well, go back to the bones we were looking at this afternoon, to all those fractures. Did you notice any kind of pattern in the damage?”

  That brought roll of the eyes from John. “Oh, honest to God, you can’t just tell us? We really have to do this Socratic thing?”

  “Hey, I’m a professor, John. It’s what I do.”

  “Tell me about it,” John said grumpily.

  “Pattern in the damage . . .” mused Rocco. “Gimme a minute . . . Most of the injuries were to the lower half of her body, is that what you’re driving at?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said John, “her legs were a mess. Her arms weren’t so bad.”

  Gideon nodded. “Correct. More specifically, every single one of the six bones in her legs was broken, whereas not a single one of the six bones in the arms was damaged. And the one foot we have has more splintered bones than I had a chance to count. The pelvis is mashed too. But above the waist, the only injuries are some crushed vertebrae—not fractured, but crushed—and her skull. Well, how would you account for a pattern like that?”

  “She landed on her feet?” John suggested as they started moving again. “I guess.”

  “And you’re right, she landed on her feet, and the fact is that the bodies of dead people—or unconscious people for that matter—don’t do that. If a nonconscious body falls from a great enough height—and two hundred feet is way, way more than enough—then it tends to align itself in the air, so that it lands horizontally. It’s a function of the state of uniform motion of a falling object.”

  “The state of . . . ?” Rocco’s brow furrowed.

  “Not important,” Gideon said dismissively. “Now—”

  “Meaning
he doesn’t know what the hell it means either,” John told Rocco.

  “Pretty much, yes,” Gideon agreed. “Physics never was one of my strong points. But the point I’m making here is: people who are conscious during a fall, they—”

  “Land on their feet.” This from Rocco.

  “Exactly. Well, with some qualifications. If it’s from a low height—ten, twenty feet—they won’t have time to change their alignment, so a lot of times they hit with their hands or forearms, trying to protect their heads. Or suicides might land head down on purpose. Otherwise, yes, they almost always land on their feet. And this one very definitely did. You’re frowning.”

  “Yeah, I’m frowning,” Rocco said. “I got a problem with this.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, you seem awful sure of yourself, but when I listen to the words, what I hear is ‘tends to’ and ‘almost always’ and ‘most often.’ That doesn’t exactly convince the hell out of me, and it wouldn’t convince a court either, you know what I mean?”

  “I do, and it’s a good point. But in this particular case there’s no almost always. I know she landed on her feet . . . and I know it from her skull.”

  John and Rocco puzzled over this—Rocco was talking to himself—as they made their way through the great square that fronted the church’s beautifully maintained façade. The piazza itself, however, had seen better days. For more than three centuries the grand event of the Florentine year, the Palio dei Cocchi, had been held here. Now it was a scruffy lawn area, more sandy dirt than grass, on which they had to pick their way between the young and not-so-young backpackers who sprawled, picnicked, and slept, oblivious to the many pedestrians using it as a shortcut.

  Beside one of the two stone obelisks that had once marked the turning points for Palio’s chariot races, John paused, eyes narrowed, and leveled a finger at Gideon. “I know you, Doc. If you’re waiting for us to go, like, ‘Whoa! How the hell can you tell somebody landed on their feet from their skull?’ forget it.”

  Gideon laughed. “Actually, that would be very much appreciated. I’m not getting paid for this, you know, so how about at least giving me some enjoyment out of it?”

  From Rocco, a threatening growl. “How about just telling us?”

  “You guys sure know how to take the fun out of it, but okay. Do you—”

  “Damn it,” Rocco interrupted, “I really better get out of here. Tell me about it when you call. This is Via del Moro, you turn here. Jesus, Carlotta’s gonna kill me.” He jabbed a finger at Gideon. “No mumbo jumbo. Just facts.” He started off, moving fast.

  “Hey, Rocco!” Gideon called after him.

  Rocco slowed without turning. “What?”

  “So how many carabinieri does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

  Now he turned around and grinned. “Four. One to climb up on the chair and three to turn the chair.”

  SEVEN

  “SO, okay,” John said relatively patiently as they turned the corner. “How do you know from her skull that she landed on her feet?”

  “Well, you remember that basilar ring fracture in her skull?”

  “Where the bottom got all pushed in?”

  “Mm-hm. Well, there aren’t many ways you can cave in the skull base like that, but impacting on your feet after a two-hundred-foot drop is one of them. The force is so great that it not only fractures your lower limbs, it drives the spinal column up into your brain—”

  John grimaced. “Yeesh.”

  “—taking the bottom of the skull partway with it, because the vertebrae are wider than the opening of the foramen magnum. It’s also likely, by the way, to drive the leg bones, the femurs, up into the pelvis and punch holes through it on either side—which also happened here—and to crush and dislocate . . . well, you get the idea.”

  “I do,” John said thoughtfully. “And so you think—tell me if I have this right—in a nutshell, you figure she had to have been shot after she fell and not before, because no way could she be alive, let alone conscious, after taking a .32 ACP slug right through the middle of her head.”

  “Let’s just say it would be highly unusual.”

  “But what could be the point? I still don’t understand that. I mean, okay, say she was alive when she went over the edge, she’d be dead as hell once she hit the bottom, right? All those injuries she had?”

  “Oh, definitely. There would have been massive internal damage, organs torn from their moorings, probably a snapped spine. And the basilar ring fracture alone—”

  “Okay, then, so why shoot her?”

  Gideon shrugged. “John, I honestly don’t have an answer for you, but don’t you think this is all starting to get just a little circular? Anyway”—he pointed over John’s shoulder—“we’re here. Let’s go in.”

  • • •

  L’OSTERIA di Giovanni was in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century palazzo, relatively modest by Florentine standards. Through the modern glass doors they could see a dining room that managed to be both trendy (well-lit, with abstract art on the walls, and widely spaced, white-clothed tables) and yet distinctly Tuscan (honey-colored, roughly plastered walls, red terra-cotta floor tiles, ancient stone accents peeking through the plaster here and there). At this early hour (by Italian standards), there were few diners.

  At the door they were spotted from the rear of the restaurant by a rotund, jolly fellow in a grubby green T-shirt, who came toward them at a trot. This rumpled, convivial personage turned out to be Giovanni himself, who seemed pleased to find that they were Americans, but spoke little English himself and turned them over to the part-Asian hostess. (“This my daughter, Caterina,” he told them.”She speak French too.”) Caterina led them to a table in an interior room. This space was cozier and more traditional—an old copper-hooded fireplace with a family crest, stone pillars anchoring the ceiling arches, tables closer together so it was almost like communal dining. More crowded too, and the noise level suggested the diners had been at it long enough to down a few glasses of wine.

  “Your waiter will be Bruno. I hope you enjoy.”

  Within seconds the busy, balding, smiling Bruno was bobbing at their side—“Buona sera, signori . . .”—setting down ice-frosted flutes of pale, sparkling wine and a fragrant, red-and-white cloth-covered basket. “Complimenti della casa,” he declared. John peeled back the cloth to have a peek. “Chicken McNuggets?” he crowed, as incredulously delighted as a kid finding a live, saddled pony waiting for him in the middle of his backyard.

  The ingratiating smile dropped off Bruno’s face. He drew himself up. “Is no’ Chicken McNug’,” he told John, oozing grievance. “Is coccolini. Special pasta. Fry.”

  “Okay, amico, no problemo. But they look like, mismo like, Chicken McNuggets, chicken mcnuggo, pollo mcnuggeti, that’s all. Capisce?” John’s forays into foreign languages were rare, but when they occurred they were always surprising, usually multilingual, and, at least to Gideon, highly entertaining.

  Bruno stood even taller and frowned even harder. “I speak English. Is no’ necessary—”

  “Grazie, Bruno,” Gideon said. “Sembrano deliziosi.”

  Bruno huffed something and stomped off.

  “Well, they do,” John moped. “What’s the big deal? What’s so terrible about Chicken McNuggets?”

  “Can’t think of a thing. What do these taste like?”

  John tried one and lit up. “Not bad! Greasy, salty, crunchy . . . wow. We better finish ’em before Marti gets here, though,” he said, reaching for another.

  Marti Lau, John’s wife, was a nutritionist at a Seattle hospital, and although she knew better than to try to impose on her husband the same saltless, fatless, sugarless, meatless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele, John, an enthusiastic trencherman, found it more enjoyable to do his cheeseburger-chomping and milkshake-slurping when she wasn’t around. She herself lived by dietary rules almost as stringent (she permitted herself cheese and dairy products—sparingly) as the sup
er-healthy regimen she imposed on her hospital population and looked it: a five-foot-ten beanpole, healthy as a horse, and, other than her dietary strictures, a lively, funny, laid-back woman who was a terrific fit for John.

  Gideon tucked in too and helped the morsel down with a swig of the wine, a fizzy, lemony prosecco. “They are good. I could make a meal of these things.”

  “Probably wouldn’t be the first time somebody did,” John said. He used his fork to pluck another from the rapidly emptying basket and more or less flipped it into his mouth, to be quickly followed by one more. When Bruno bobbed up again with menus, Gideon told him they were waiting for two ladies and would order after they arrived. Bruno’s shoulders lifted and fell with acceptance and resignation, as if Fate itself had decreed that these two difficult americani were to be his burden for tonight.

  “Hey, Bruno,” John called after him, holding up the basket. “We could stand another order, un altro ordero, of these things. My buddy here, mi amigo, has pretty much gobbled them up, tutto.”

  Bruno came back and snatched the basket out of his hand. “Will be cost,” he told them, as if expecting an argument.

  “Va bene, amigo, no problemo,” John told him with an expansive wave, but then turned seriously to Gideon. “Doc, you can see that you’ve got Rocco thinking about getting the whole case reopened, can’t you?”

  “Well, maybe he should. Something’s weird.”

  “Yeah, but you have to understand, it’s not just a question of him going to his boss and saying, ‘We should reopen this case.’ It’s a lot more complicated, a lot dicier, than that.”

  “Dicier? Why?”

  “Because egos are involved, man. When you close a file, especially on a high-profile homicide—in the Carabinieri, or the FBI, or the Podunk PD—a lot of people—prosecutor, judge, the cop that was in charge—have put their reputations on the line by signing off on it, on whatever the conclusions were. Believe me, they are not happy when some underling comes along wanting to open it up again. So Rocco knows he’s probably gonna get crucified when he brings up the idea. If he brings up the idea. He needs some solid ground to stand on.”