“But she knows? About you, I mean.”
“Gigi said he told her years ago.”
“How did she take it?”
“Badly, I assume.”
“Gigi didn’t say?”
“No. But what could she have done?”
I shrugged. “Leave? File for divorce?”
Julia shook her head and stubbed the cigarette in the ashtray. “She’s Italian, Pete. They never let go.”
“So, what? Shoot him?”
“Is that what you think?” A thin smile creased her face. “Do you think Aida shot him?” A hard edge in her voice.
“I’m just asking.”
“Anyone can pull a trigger.”
“It helps to have a reason.” I tried to picture Aida with a gun. Nothing. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. And Julia?
She threw me a dark look, like she’d read my mind. The car slowed out and drifted to a stop out front of a row of condos thirty yards back from the road. She killed the engine and rolled down the window, blew a long breath of smoke out into the cold.
I left her to her thoughts for a minute or so and then coughed and said, “How about a drink?”
A faint smile appeared. “Yes of course. Sorry.”
We climbed out. I followed her down a concrete walk to a set of glass doors framed in concrete and steel.
She let herself in. “You’re writing something, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. She pushed a button for the elevator.
“It’s what I do.”
The doors opened up. I followed her in. A mirror caught my attention as we rode up in silence. Looking good, Pescatore. Like a tall Al Pacino, a slim Marlon Brando, a youthful De Niro. Right. Lose your gut and ten or twelve years, call yourself a movie star.
“I write about food and wine,” I said.
“I thought someone said watches. Gigi, I think.”
“Correct, “ I said. “Watches, too.” I shot my cuff and showed her a vintage chronograph. “Nice, eh?” It was a fake. I couldn’t afford the real thing. “Patek Philippe.”
A shrug was all I got. The elevator door opened and I followed her down the hall.
“Why are you here, Pete?”
“I heard about Gigi. Couldn’t believe it.”
I took a breath, lowered my eyes and gazed at the floor as I remembered.
It was all about Julia, one of those long, bitter, drunken battles that went on forever into the night. Eva and I, yelling at each other. Don’t lie to me, Pete. You’re screwing Julia. But I wasn’t. Nobody fooled with Gigi’s girl, not even Billy Bob. But Eva didn’t care. She thought it was funny. Julia? Come on, Pete. You can do better. She covered her mouth with one hand and laughed. And you, Eva? Who are you screwing?
“Hello? It’s me, Pete—Julia.” She stopped and let a hand fall gently to my arm. “Remember?”
I snapped back into the present, a dim hallway and a dark wood door. “Of course. Sorry, Jules.”
“Come in. I’ll get us something to drink.”
I followed her in and along the hall to the living room. glass panels made a wall with a view through tall pines out over the city to the lake gone dark and the blackness beyond.
She came back with a tray and a bottle of Sauvignon. I opened it, poured and raised my glass, “May he rest in peace.”
Julia took a sip, turned and settled on the sofa. I sat down beside her. The story spilled easily from her lips.
“We had a date for champagne and a candle-light dinner. He was a wonderful cook, and he wanted to celebrate our future.” A tremor in her voice. “Our love, and our future together.”
“Just the two of you?”
She nodded. “He was happy, Pete. The deal was done, so I was happy, too."
“The deal?”
“Hang on.” She reached for her glass, took a sip, and pushed on. “He left the villa early that night. I stayed on to finish up.”
“What was there to finish?”
“Plans.” A smile flickered and was gone.
“Tell me about them?”
She was quiet, trying to work out what to say me, or maybe how. “It was peculiar. For all the high tech, he could barely type and wrote everything out by hand. I offered to put it on the computer, but he didn’t want that. It was too sensitive, he said. So there was only one copy.”
“One copy of what?”
“The documentation.”
I dug out a pen and my notebook.
She went on. “Names, mostly.”
“What sort of names? Who?” I scribbled a note.
“Even if I told you, they wouldn’t mean anything. They were all cover names. No one knew the real names.”
“Except Gigi, I take it.” I bent over my notebook. “And you.”
“No, not me.” She reached again for her glass and looked away. “Gigi was the only one who knew.”
“Where are they now?”
“I have no idea.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “In the briefcase, I expect. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
“What briefcase is that?”
“Please, Pete. I’m not bright, but I’m not entirely stupid, either.” A sad smile. ”It’s a long story. Shall I make us something to eat? ”
“Sure.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “I hope you like chicken, I have nothing else.”
She led the way to a tiny kitchen. Dark wood panels, gas burners, an oven set in the wall beside a built-in fridge. “I’m sorry, there’s not much room. If you sit right there I’ll give you something to do.”
I slid onto a bench behind a table pushed back in the corner. “Tell me about the briefcase, Jules.”
From the fridge she retrieved a lumpy packet wrapped in plastic and thumped it down in front of me. “Gigi was the only one who could open it.”
“There was only one key?”
She was shaking her head. “There was no key at all. It had a fancy lock, some sort of scanner.”
“Right.” The little glass pane beneath the handle. A fingerprint scanner. One of the start-ups in Gigi’s stable had specialized in biometric security. Fingerprint scans and voice recognition. “Where did he get it?”
A drawer beneath the sink slid open. She found what she wanted and handed it to me. Aluminum, thick blades curving in a sinister smile. Poultry shears.
“Someone gave it to him.” She paused and handed them to me, avoiding my gaze. “He never said who it was.”
I tore open the bag and peeled back the paper. Pink and white flesh. Pale red crest, beak half open, dead eyes staring. Feet, no feathers. I picked up the shears. “Nasty looking piece of equipment.”
A sigh, impatient. “Just cut it up, Pete.”
“Right.” I turned the thing over a couple of times. “Where do I start?”
“Please. Just take it apart. Do you want a knife?” She was peeling and chopping onions on a board. “There’s one in the drawer.”
I shook my head.
“Start at the joints.”
I set to work. I took the head first and placed the neck on the notch in the lower blade. Two handed grip. Crunch. Snip. The head was off.
“Where was it, Jules?” Crunch. Left foot gone. Right foot to follow. “Where did Gigi keep the briefcase?” Crunch.
“In the safe, up on the roof at the Villa Sofia.”
“So it’s true.”
“What?”
“There’s a safe up there?”
“Please, Pete.” She gave me a hard stare from the stove. The onions were browning in a frying pan. “The briefcase is missing. Someone’s taken it.”
I wondered who her sources were. Had she seen Billy Bob? Or was someone else taking an interest? “I hear Billy Bob had it. And then he lost it.”
“Billy Bob?” She was shaking her head. “Why would Billy Bob have it?”
“So maybe someone else took it.”
She threw another dark look my way. I ignored it.
“We know the docs a
re worth something to someone,” I said. I stretched the legs, snipped and separated drumsticks from thighs.
“I should think so.” She lifted her eyes and looked straight into mine.
I held her gaze. “Tell me something I don't know.”
“It isn’t much.”
I had to stand up to split the chest. I clipped it through, scooped out the guts, shuffled to the sink and dumped them in the garbage pail beneath it.
Julia plopped the parts in the frying pan and assembled a salad while she talked. People say the eyes give it all away, but for me it’s always the hands.
Gigi’s lover couldn’t keep hers still.
She took a breath and led me through the story, from the early years to the high-tech start-ups and the IPO that made Gigi’s name. Word got around he could make a man rich, so people came scrambling out of the woodwork, demanding he sell them a piece of the dream. It worked for a while. He sold them shares in one start-up or another, bought them back at a higher price, sold them on to fresh investors. Then the towers came down, the markets crashed and the rushing river of cash froze over.
Gigi hung on a couple years after that, kept on betting, pouring good money in after bad, praying for the windfall that would save us all.
Then Eva died, and Marco with her, drowned in Lake Lugano.
There was nothing left for me after that. I slunk home to Milan to lick my wounds and forgot about Gigi Goldoni. And now he was dead, too.
End of story.
Julia lowered a hand to my arm. “I felt so sorry for you, Pete. He let you go so quickly.”
“We were going down, Jules. I was the first of the rats to jump ship.”
“You didn’t jump, you were pushed. First Eva—” She hesitated, shook her head. “Then Gigi threw you overboard.”
“It’s over now. Everybody knew the good money was gone, and nobody else stayed on for long. Billy Bob, Sarge, Tommy O’Sullivan. Every last one of them ran down the ropes.”
“Not me.” A defiant, sorrowful look in her eyes.
“No. Not you.” I had to give her that. “Why didn’t you leave, Jules?”
She extracted a Swiss pinot grigio from the fridge. “It never occurred to me. I had everything I wanted. Almost.” She sat and sank her gaze into the past.
I twisted the cork out and filled our glasses. “What happened after I left?”
She took a while to surface, then raised her eyes again to mine. “Things got very nasty, very quickly. The investors were desperate to get something back.” Her face darkened. “Anything at all.”
“The shares?” I sampled the wine. Not bad.
“Worth nothing.” She closed her eyes. “They all had them, worthless pieces of paper they were desperate to sell back to him. He’d made so many promises, Pete, but there was nothing left. And he felt so badly about it all. He even sold the house in Sicily so he could give them three or four cents on the dollar.”
“Better than nothing.”
She shook her head. “We couldn’t even pay the rent.” She was staring down tunnels bored through time to an underground vault where Gigi Goldoni was alive and well, cracking jokes and hawking shares. “But he never gave up. You could knock him down a hundred times, he would always bounce back on his feet.”
“That’s true. It was amazing. I saw him in Milan couple weeks ago. Had some brand new deal in the works.”
A long sigh. “He was sure it would save us.”
“The Arabs? Same old story?”
“Arabs? A bitter laugh. “There were never any Arabs.”
“But he made it seem so real, Jules. We were all true believers in Arab money.”
She reached for her glass, took a sip and set it down. “It wasn’t the Arabs, but if the deal had gone through—“ Her voice trailed off.
She was staring out the window into the trees. She surfaced again and busied herself with the chicken and the salad, cut the bread and set it on the table. She sat and we ate and talked about England for a while. She would go back soon, she said, for a visit.
I said I'd thought about going home after Eva died.
“Where’s home, Pete?”
“Good question,” I said. “I grew up in L.A.”
“Yes. I think you told me that once,” she said. “Is there nothing left for you there?”
I shrugged. “Nobody I know. No family. No friends.”
She smiled, absently, waiting for the conversation to work its way around to Gigi again. I cleared the table. She washed. I watched. When we were done I walked her down the hall to the living room. She sank into the sofa and closed her eyes.
“What did Gigi do when you ran out of cash?”
She opened her eyes. “What he always did, Pete. He took risks.”
I followed her gaze to the window. “A gambler at heart.”
“And I loved him for that. He was reckless. In everything.”
“The casinos?”
She bit her lip, nodded.
“How much did he lose?”
“Everything we had left.”
“And then what? Somebody help him out?”
Another slow nod. “Gave him enough to cover his losses. And paid the bills.”
“Who?”
She shook her head.
I pushed on. “What sort of bills?”
“Rent, phones, whatever it took to keep the business going.”
“What business was that, Jules?”
A flash of anger ripped through her face, leaving it flushed and blotchy. “Whatever his benefactor wanted. And please stop pretending you don’t already know. It’s insulting.”
“No offense, Jules, but what do I know? Tell me.”
A passing thought jerked her mouth into a grimace. “We had no choice but to do what he said.”
“To do what who said?”
The look in her eyes grew harder, colder. “He’s a terrible, terrible man.”
Her eyes lost their focus.
“Gigi promised me a future. A treasure house full of diamonds and gold where the two of us would live happily ever after. All he needed—” A wave rolled in. She let it pass, took a breath, swallowed and went on. “All we needed was a little more time.”
I had nothing to add.
“I have to go soon, Pete. Would you like some coffee?” She pushed herself to her feet and wobbled off down the hall.
I hauled myself up out of the sofa and followed her to the kitchen. I slid onto a bench, lowered my head to rest on my arms and shut my eyes.
When I opened them again a cup of coffee sat in front of me, and on the table a thick brown envelope. I pushed back the flap and peered inside. Something yellow. I fished it out. Plastic. Bumps on it. Studs. A little yellow brick. I peered in again. Another one. Two little yellow plastic bricks. Three, four. Seven altogether.
Julia strode into the kitchen. She’d showered and changed and was clipping on earrings. Earrings. I slipped a hand into my jacket pocket. Still there. Still burning.
I picked up a little yellow brick from the table. Lego. I picked up another and pressed them together. “What are these things?”
“Bricks. I found them in his pocket.”
“Did Gigi like to play with toys?”
Her anger flared. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She reached for a yellow plastic brick and fingered it, staring at nothing. “I just—I found him, then I called the police. And then for some reason I went through his pockets.”
“What were you looking for?” I picked up one brick after another and built a yellow chimney.
“I don’t know. I’d never seen them before. They left them here for me to find.” She swept a hand across the table. The chimney flew and crashed into the wall. Yellow bricks tumbled to the floor. “I was out of my mind, Pete. I can’t remember what I did or even what I told the police. I just—can’t.” And finally, a sob. She slumped into a chair, a broken doll. I got up, threw an arm around her shoulder and held her until she ran out of tears.
When sh
e spoke again, her voice was a whisper. “His head, it was awful. His mouth. Open.”
“The gun?”
She blinked, working her way through the question. “What do you mean?”
“Where was it?”
“I don’t remember. In his hand? Yes. I think so. Or on the floor.”
“Which side?”
She closed her eyes. Her hands grew still. “His right. To the right of him.”
“Are you sure?”
She opened her eyes and stared into mine. “Absolutely certain.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you for what, Pete?”
“Gigi was left-handed.”
A soft smile appeared on her lips. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. He was indeed.” A hand on my arm, a squeeze.
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’ve made a mistake. Shot him with the wrong hand.”
“Maybe. Unless—”
The smile turned fierce. “Unless?”
“He chose the wrong hand—on purpose.”
She was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed on mine. “Yes. Of course. A message. That’s it.”
“Message for—“
“I have no idea. For me? The police? You’re the smart one, Pete. You tell me.”
“No clue.”
“It has to mean something to someone.” She shook her head. “I’ll get it.” She stood and walked out.
What, the phone? Then I heard a voice, and Julia’s answer. “He’s in the kitchen.”
Footsteps clumped down the hall. Closer. I stood up.
Nine
“Hey, hey! Look who’s here!” I shot an open hand skywards. “Gimme five, Billy-Boy!”
He slapped it away, grabbed me by the lapels and yanked my face up to his. “Where is it?” he sputtered. “Tell me. Now.”
I broke his grip and pulled away. “Have a seat, buddy. Can I offer you a drink?”
“Shut up, Pete.”
“What’s wrong, bubba? Our lady friend keep you up all night? Ho, ho, ho. Man, were you wasted, or what. You could hardly walk and you were drooling all over her. It was embarrassing.”
Suicide Italian Style (Crime Made in Italy Book 1) Page 7