Gigi Goldoni owed people money. Like Billy Bob said, somebody owes you, you don’t just show up and shoot him. You talk to him. You negotiate. He makes a token payment to show good faith, and you wait. What else can you do? You’re hoping luck will come his way and he’ll pay you what he owes. Then maybe one day you get tired of waiting. You decide it’s time to do something about it.
Maybe that’s what happened. There were plenty of suckers stuck with shares even Gigi couldn’t sell. I remembered a few of them, from a shareholder meeting at the Villa one night. And the names? There was a library somewhere in Lugano. Maybe they had a file, a clipping from the good old days that could help me put names to the faces.
I trundled down the stairs and found Renata in the kitchen. She had thrown on a bathrobe but hadn’t stopped to look in a mirror. She was feeding her children, the baby girl in a high chair, applesauce all over her face. The boy, a little older, sat on the floor, playing with little yellow bricks, building walls. She had a family now. Must have got started right after I left.
I dropped to a crouch beside the boy. “What are you building?”
“Castle,” he said. I picked up a brick. He grabbed it from my hand.
“Pete,” said Renata. She didn’t look up. “You must forget what I said.”
I stood up, stooped and leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. A bruise had blossomed around an eye and closed it. I blew a hard breath. “Bastard.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say anything. Just go. Go home, Pete. Leave us alone.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“Good.” She raised her sore eyes and looked into mine. “Promise me, Pete.”
I nodded and raised a finger to my lips. I would not say a word.
“Sarge around?”
She shook her head. “He left early.” She wiped a soft rag across her daughter’s mouth. The boy stuck a finger in his nose and cackled. Renata pulled the finger out and lifted the little girl into her arms.
“Did he say where he was going?”
She shot a look at me. “No.”
“You can’t let him slap you around, Renata.”
She nodded. The look in her eyes said she knew that already but hadn’t found a way to make him stop. “I made coffee.”
There were ways to put an end to that kind of thing. Renata was smart. She would find a way. Maybe she already had.
Sarge’s mother appeared, took over the kids and carried them away. Renata followed and came back with coffee, poured it and slipped quietly into a chair. “What do you want?”
“I’m chasing a story,” I said, and leaned across the table to look into her eyes. Dark eyes, shot with pain. “I always knew Sarge did Gigi’s books,” I said, “but last night the grappa in him talked and he told me how it worked. Cash for shares, shares for cash.”
Her eyes flared wide. “What took you so long?”
“I’m slow,” I said. “But I need some names. Investors.”
“I can’t give you any names.”
“How much did Gigi owe you?”
Her gaze dropped to the floor.
“You think Sarge had something to do with it?”
She knew what I meant. The fear again. “Please, Pete. Just go home. Leave us alone.”
“Who was it, Renata?”
She stood up, shivering, shaking her head. “Please, that’s all I know.” She pressed her lips together. “He frightens me.”
“Sarge? Or somebody else?”
“Go home.”
I bent to kiss her cheek. She pulled away. “The children, Pete. They’re not stupid. They see everything. And they talk.”
“So do I.”
She didn’t answer. I leaned in again and kissed her bruise, straightened up and said, “I’ll come by later to pick up my things.” I walked away to the door.
“Don’t,” she moaned. “Don’t come back.”
I shut the door behind me.
Billy Bob’s maroon Merc took me back up the lakefront road to Lugano. It wasn’t a long drive and traffic was light. Across the lake the casino sat like a tombstone, damp and cold. I felt the night come back, a memory of me and Gigi at the roulette wheel. He had a system, he said. Forget the numbers, you just play the colors, black calls black, red calls red, and you double your bet each time you lose. If zero comes up after black, you bet on red and vice versa. He showed me, stood by my side while I made a few bets. Then I made a mistake and was just about to double the bet when his hand flew out and he grabbed my wrist and said Stop. Now. Walk away from the table.
Maybe that’s what he did. Played and lost and lost again and decided to walk away from it all.
Birdcall. The whippoorwill. I flicked a look at the screen and punched a button. “Hey, Stazz. What’s up?”
“I had heart attack at border.” Her voice was still a few degrees below zero.
“What, they stop you?”
“No. I took the road to border but guards were searching cars. I turn back to Lugano.”
“What you do with the briefcase?”
“Don’t worry. Safe.”
“Sure, baby, but where is it? We need to open it.”
“Call me when you have good plan.” She hung up.
Ten minutes later I heard the bird again. I took the call but had to slam the phone down and grab the wheel as the Merc took the curve a little too fast.
“Pete?” Anastasia, calling out to me. She called again, louder. “Pete? Are you there?”
I picked up. “Sorry. I’m in the car.”
“Johnny wants to talk.”
“Johnny can wait. Got a question for you.”
“Hang.” She put me on hold. Johnny’s kid Mario had programmed the music. Industrial noise with a stuttering beat, guaranteed to drive me crazy. I set the phone on the seat beside me and drifted off into plans for the day.
A few minutes later I heard her yelling and snatched the phone from the seat. “Sorry, Stazz. You ready?”
“At your service, Mr. Pescatore.”
“Get on the net and do a search for Gigi Goldoni, his investors. And while you’re at it, see if you can find out who owns the casino, the one in Campione.”
“Campione.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Campione own the casino. It is not private.”
“Oh. OK, so forget it.” A Porsche whizzed past, crowding the center line. I jammed a hand on the horn. “Another thing.”
“Pete! Are you all right? What happen?”
“Nothing, Stazz. I’m fine. Listen, what kind of handguns the Swiss army use?”
“SIG Sauer P220 series, 9 millimeter.”
“That was fast.”
“Johnny talked to Switzerland.”
“Yeah? So do me a favor, tell Johnny you got America on the line.”
I heard mumbling in the background before he came on and said hello with a cough. When the hacking was done he said, “I got a couple things.”
“SIG Sauer, by any chance?”
“For example. That’s what killed your friend Goldoni. Swiss crime scene guys are on it. Matter of time before they trace it.”
“Registered owner is a man named Sergio Ungaretti. Goldoni’s accountant.”
“You know that for sure?”
“He told me and the cops he lost track of it. But I hear Gigi owed him a boatload of money.”
“You think—“
“The bean-counter did it? No clue, Johnny. And it’s too soon to guess.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line while he chewed on a cigar, lit up and wheezed.
“What else you got, boss?”
“I hear the doc’s heading up to the lab this weekend. For the autopsy.”
“What, the guy from Varese?” I slowed for another curve and swerved as an Alfa Romeo flew by. “Already?”
“It’s the same guy they called to the scene when they found him and he already said it was suicide. If it comes back official, the cops drop the c
ase and your friend's six feet under.” Johnny coughed again.
“So, what, you killing the story?”
“Hell no, Pete. It’s just—we need a good angle and we don’t have much time.” He broke for another cough and came back with instructions. “If I’m right, you need to go to the funeral. See who shows up.”
“Right. Hang on. Stoplights.” I slowed to a stop at the lights and sat staring out at the lake. Choppy. A wind in from the east. The lights changed and I picked up the phone again as the Hotel Royale flowed by on the left. “Hey, Johnny? You got the Shark back, right?”
“Yeah, but what’s with the bolshie? She’s been spitting fire all morning.”
“How should I know?” I thought about it. “Maybe she woke up in the wrong bed.”
I hung up and swung around the corner and up into the parking garage, let the Merc roll down the spiral ramp and wheeled around into an empty slot. Then I popped the trunk, pocketed the keys and climbed the stairs back up to the world.
Twenty minutes later I walked in the door of the public library. Stairs took me up to a cool, well-lit room where they kept old copies of the local papers.
“They will all be on the internet soon,” said a woman at the counter. White hair, blue-gray suit, a stone dragon crumbling into dust. “In a year or two we will close.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “And what will you do with all this?” I swept an arm around the room, taking in her universe and everything in it.
A hand flew up to her lips. “Shshshsh!” In a whisper she added, “How may I help you?”
I leaned toward her and whispered back, “I’m a gourmet chef and I need to go through the Corriere, the local food section. I’m told there are wonderful local recipes that make good use of sbrinz.”
The librarian nodded, warily.
“Risotto, for instance,“ I said, pushing on. “Quiche, cheeseburgers, that sort of thing. Is there an index? Otherwise, you know, it takes forever to find what you need.”
The woman looked over her spectacles at me. I could hear her bullshit radar beeping and saw the little blue lights flashing in her eyes. “Follow me.”
She pressed her lips into a thin smile, turned and walked off. I trailed her over brown linoleum into a room filled with gray metal filing cabinets and two or three tables with microfilm readers. They had the Corriere del Ticino going all the way back to the nineteen forties. Far enough, I figured.
I worked through the index until I found the name of the company Gigi rode to an IPO. I wrote down the reference and spooled through the films. There—a photograph. Gigi in the middle, Billy Bob on his left, Tommy O’Sullivan on his right. With them stood the kid who had founded the company, bald and happy. They were standing outside the NASDAQ exchange. Tommy had a bottle of champagne in his fist and was grinning like an idiot, drunk with riches. And there, just behind Gigi and the kid, stood a man who looked like Dr. Zhivago. Silver hair greased and plastered back from his forehead, dark glasses, square jaw.
It was him, and I knew him. He was one of Gigi’s big-shot investors and had come to a meeting at the Villa Sofia. We’d poured millions into high-flying start-ups, and it was my job to serve up the party line. Zhivago asked what each one was worth and what I thought their chances were, so I said we had a few nags on the track, but the others were true blue thoroughbreds, bound for glory, every one.
He looked right through me. I wasn’t lying, not exactly, but Zhivago was a gambler and he knew the odds. He just smiled and turned away. It was the smile that got to me. There was no trace of warmth or amusement, just a row of bad teeth and a flash of gold.
I surfaced from the past and spent another hour with the microfilm. I found a clip I hadn’t seen, a puff piece on the start-ups in Gigi’s portfolio. And Gigi himself. Lugano’s leading business angel. A brief note stated he’d been named a director of PharLap Properties, Vanuatu. Where the hell was that? I made a note of the name, turned off the viewer and found my own way out.
Sarge’s line was busy so I picked up a paper and stopped for coffee at the pizzeria down the street from his office. The barman saw me and said, “Corretto?”
I nodded and climbed up on a stool. He turned to the espresso machine and reached for a bottle on the shelf above him. I thumbed a text to Anastasia, put down the phone and opened the paper. Gigi had drifted off the front page in favor of a story about the big Swiss banks caught up in a battle to keep their secrets safe. The waiter set the coffee on the bar in front of me, slid me the sugar and the bottle of grappa.
“Thanks,” I said. “Do you cook?”
“I work the bar.”
“At home, I mean. Do you cook for yourself, for your friends. Your girlfriend.”
“Once in a while.” He didn’t seem to mind me nosing around. “Why?”
“I need a recipe for sbrinz.”
“Easy. Risotto.”
“I need something a little more challenging.”
“It’s not good for much else.” He poured another splash of grappa into my cup, shrugged and turned away to wash and dry the glasses.
I sat there sipping and reading my notes, waiting for the story to write itself. An hour or so later I gave up and walked out.
Sarge’s office was just down the street. I found the name on a metal plate screwed into the brick wall beside the door, leaned on ‘Ungaretti’ and got no answer. After a while it came to me. Sarge didn’t work there anymore. He worked at a bank.
I called his new number. He was still tied up and asked if I could wait in the bar.
Which is where she found me.
Eight
Julia was born in the north of England, somewhere up near the border with Scotland. She’d trained as a nurse in Newcastle, gone south to London and run off to Switzerland in her early twenties. Walked in off the street one day, said hello to Gigi and never left.
I met her the day I showed up to work at the Villa Sofia. She gave me the keys to the Alfa Romeo, introduced the investment guys and set me up with an office and a coffee mug. She was blonde, slim and fluttery as a bird. She sat at her desk just outside Gigi’s office, chirping on the phone and chatting with all who came her way.
Now she tore off a scarf as she pushed in the door, nodded when I waved and trudged up to the bar. She was dressed in black, her skin pale, her green eyes darker than I’d remembered. No make-up, no attempt to hide the wreckage.
“Julia.” I gave her a hug.
“Sarge told me I’d find you here.”
“I was hoping you’d call.”
“I did, Pete.”
I dug out my phone. Two missed calls. “Sorry. Deaf to the world, I guess.”
“Come on, I’m starving.” She offered a sad smile. “I’ll fix something to eat and we’ll talk.”
“Deal. Got a question for you.
”Later.”
I followed her outside and took her arm as she led the way to a spinach-colored Mini that had seen better days. I sat back and listened to the engine while she drove. Smooth, quiet, calming.
After a while I said, “Where’s home, Jules? I’ve forgotten.”
“Paradiso.”
“Not bad. Nice view?”
“Yes.” She wheeled around a corner. “You must have been round.”
A memory rose to the surface and rolled over. I was standing on a balcony, a drink in my hand, looking through a clutch of tall pines to the lake and the gray-green mountains in the distance. Eva was over in the corner with Gigi, close to him. Too close. His hand on her arm, whispering something in her ear.
“Can’t recall just now. I’ll know when I see it.” I dropped the memory back in the lake and watched it sink into the dark. “Can I ask you something?”
She wasn’t listening. “I’m sure you were there. I remember. It was Gigi’s birthday, Eva came with you.”
“Did she.” The memory rose to the surface again. I looked away.
Julia waited. I said nothing more. She was still with Gigi. “I can’t believe he�
�s gone. I keep hearing his voice.”
“He was always a motor-mouth, why stop now?”
“For God’s sake, Pete. Gigi’s dead. It’s a not a joke.” Jules snatched her purse. “There’s a packet of ciggies in there. Light one for me, would you?”
I took the bag, dug out the cigarettes and a lighter, lit up and held it out for her.
“Forgive me. It’s just... I don’t know what I’ll do without him.” She reached for the cigarette and placed it on her lip. After a while she crushed the butt in the ashtray, slammed it shut and said, “You can ask me that question now.”
“You sure?”
“The police have been round, I’ve had a chance to rehearse the answers.”
I felt a soft laugh erupt from my throat. “Let’s hear them.”
“It’s true, we were lovers. We were due to have dinner together that night. I stayed late at the office, then drove to his place. He didn’t answer when I rang at the door, so I let myself in, and ... “ She faltered and fell silent.
“Gigi’s place?”
She let a moment pass. “His. Ours. Gigi bought it, of course, but I was there every night.” She turned sharply into a street heading up the hill. “It’s not far from here. I used to walk, in summer.”
“So you let yourself in. Where was he?”
“Where I found him, is that what you mean? In the kitchen.”
“The kitchen?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Seems like a strange place—“
“For what—murder?” She mimed a request for another cigarette. “Or do you really think he killed himself?”
“No idea. But that’s the word. Newspapers, cops. I guess everybody’s waiting on the autopsy.”
“Of course, but you knew him, Pete. Would Gigi take his own life?”
I thought about it. “Doesn’t seem like the type, I’ll give you that.” I lit another cigarette and handed it to her. “But what if he did? Can you think of a reason?”
“No.”
“Have you talked to Aida?”
Julia flinched and hissed around the cigarette, “I never speak to her. Nor she to me.” She shifted down and slid around a corner. “I don’t blame her. In her shoes I’d hate me as well. But she’s gone, Pete. She lives alone, in a world all her own. Gigi put her in a clinic in St. Moritz.”
Suicide Italian Style (Crime Made in Italy Book 1) Page 6