A Very Venetian Murder

by Haughton Murphy

  “Really?” Frost tightened his grip on the telephone, as if by squeezing it he could make Cavanaugh’s words come faster.

  “Yeah. After we left you, Werth and I had a drink on that porch outside at the Gritti. We had a late appointment with Tony Garrison and his girl—”

  “—you had what?” Reuben asked.

  “We had an appointment with Tony Garrison, to have a farewell nightcap. Garrison was on our side, trying to persuade Baxter to make a deal. We were prepared to extend our stay if Garrison had anything positive to tell us.”

  “You said you saw Baxter,” Reuben said tensely.

  “Yes. While we were sitting there, a gondola took off from next to the hotel. Baxter and some stranger none of us knew were in it.”

  “A man?” Reuben asked.

  “Yeah. A young Italian guy. Anyway, as the boat got out into open water, he saw Garrison and Tabita with us and started shouting. I was sure he was going to capsize the gondola, but his sidekick—the one nobody knew—started petting him, like you would a dog, and he shut up.”

  “What was he shouting?”

  “It was pretty incoherent, but part of it was ‘You’ll get AIDS, Tony, AIDS!”

  “How did Garrison react?”

  “He just looked straight ahead, as if Baxter wasn’t there. Tabita was stroking his arm and trying to keep him calm. Then, when the gondola disappeared, he said to us very quietly, ‘I guess that’s the end of it. You guys don’t want to make a deal with a psycho.’ We didn’t disagree.”

  “How long did Garrison and Tabita stay with you?”

  “Not long. There wasn’t much to be said after that scene. I’d say we broke up around midnight.”

  “Any idea where Garrison went when he left you?”

  “I assume back to the Cipriani.”

  “Baxter was murdered near the Gritti, you know.”

  “Jesus, I never made the connection. But what would have happened to Tabita?”

  “Maybe she helped him.”

  “That’s nuts. We’ve seen a lot of Tony Garrison over the last few months and I’d be amazed if he were a murderer. He’d like to be a tough businessman, or at least make a lot of money, but he’s really a gentle, sweet kid.”

  “Right now the police are pretty interested in the two of them. And Doris Medford, too.”

  “Doris? That’s even more ridiculous,” Cavanaugh said. “From what I read, Baxter was killed sometime early that Friday, the day we left. Isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes. The police think between one and three A.M.”

  A pause followed, one so long Reuben began to wonder if he had been disconnected.

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Frost,” Cavanaugh finally said. “Not for general consumption, and I’d be very grateful if it doesn’t get back to the U.S. of A. To eight-two-five Westchester Boulevard, Scarsdale one-zero-five-eight-three, in particular.”

  “Of course not,” Reuben said.

  “I spent the night Baxter was murdered with Doris Medford in her room at the Bauer Grunwald. From, say, twelve-thirty or twelve-forty-five until around six in the morning. She was not out murdering her old boss during those hours, believe me.”

  “Would you make a statement to that effect?”

  Another pause. “If it’s necessary to get Doris out of trouble, I guess I’d have to. But I’d sure as hell like to keep it out of the papers and out of Scarsdale.”

  “I’ll be as discreet as possible,” Reuben said. “One question. While you were with Ms. Medford, did you have anything to drink?”

  “We were drinking all night from her minibar.”

  “Do you remember what and how much?” “Barely. If I had to guess I’d say Doris had three vodkas—she outdrank me—and I had two Scotches.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Reuben said, itching to call Valier. “I’ll be in touch if the police want anything else.”

  “Keep me posted and I’ll be a very grateful fella.”

  “I have news,” Frost said, when at last he got through to the Commissario.

  “So have I. But you go first.”

  Reuben summarized what he had just been told by Jim Cavanaugh. “If Cavanaugh’s telling the truth, and I have no reason to doubt it, Medford’s in the clear. And, I’d say he’s strengthened the case against Garrison. At least it puts him in the neighborhood at the right time.”

  “Well, I’ve got a piece of information that may or may not fit in with yours,” Valier said. “One of my men found an antique shop this morning, near the Campo Santo Stefano, that sold a pugnale di Venezia the beginning of last week.”

  “Before Baxter was killed.”

  “Yes. The only problem is, the owner says the purchaser was an American serviceman.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “Three reasons. Primo. He spoke English. Secondo. He was black—the fellow’s assumption was that most American soldiers are black. Terzo. He was wearing an American soft cap that said PADRES on it.”

  “That isn’t a serviceman, that’s Tony Garrison!” Reuben shouted into the phone.

  “Son of a gun!”

  “He wears a PADRES cap most of the time.”

  “So it wasn’t a GI, it was Baxter’s assistant.”

  “That’s what it sounds like. Which means, Commissario, you now have the motive, the means and the opportunity. It’s time you arrested Garrison. He’s not il povero fornaretto but Gregg Baxter’s murderer.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Dinner

  “I’m beginning to see the light,” Commissario Valier said to Reuben, who wondered if the detective was about to burst into the Harry James song (“I never cared much for moonlit skies, I never wink back at fireflies …” Frost dimly recalled). Valier said he now agreed with Reuben and would set up Garrison’s arrest as soon as possible.

  “Cynthia and I have been invited out for dinner,” Frost said. “Is there any reason we can’t go? Should I stay around?”

  “No need. To stay around, that is. È finito.”

  Frost was relieved. Despite all he, “Rubes,” had taken something of a liking to Garrison—and to Tabita. He would have found it embarrassing to be present when the young designer was taken away.

  He waited impatiently in the room for Cynthia, who soon returned, wrestling with a package from Jesurum, the fanciest Venetian linen shop.

  “A new tablecloth,” she explained.

  “Well, put it down and let me bring you up to date.” He did just that, ending by saying that “all the pieces fit together rather neatly.”

  “Almost too neatly,” Cynthia said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You have at least two people, Dan Abbott and Jim Cavanaugh, telling you that killing Baxter was not in character for Tony Garrison. I wonder, too. Do you really think a black kid smart enough to avoid the streets and make a promising future for himself would turn to murder? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Murder seldom does, my dear. The evidence is overwhelming.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Cynthia said, sounding unconvinced.

  The Frosts’ dinner invitation was from Emilio Caroldo and Erica Sherrill.

  “Calle Zucchero,” Reuben said as they reached the address on the Zattere where the Caroldo apartment was located. “Sugar Street.”

  “I suppose they unloaded cargoes of sugar here.”

  “I guess. Isn’t sugar one of the million or so things Marco Polo brought back from the East?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Did it ever occur to you how big a fleet he must have had, to transport all his discoveries?”

  With a clank and a crash, the decrepit elevator in the building took off and slowly went up to the sixth floor. Once there, a look around was enough to remind Reuben that Erica Sherrill had told him at the Baxter dinner that she and her husband had redecorated their apartment. It was now startlingly modern. In the living room one faced a black sofa, resting on bright red blocks, stret
ching across an entire wall. He asked her, when she came to greet him, who had designed it and who had painted the enormous canvas mounted behind it.

  “The sofa’s by Ettore Sottsass, as is most everything else,” Dr. Sherrill said. “Surely you’ve heard of him. He’s the eminenza of Memphis, the design group in Milan. The painting’s by Domenico Bianchi, an artist from Rome.”

  “It’s not at all what one expects of an art historian who specializes in the Renaissance,” Reuben said.

  “I see quite enough Renaissance art every working day. That’s why it’s wonderful to come home and find this contemporary interior. For me it’s like jumping into a deliciously warm bath.” Her long chartreuse dress, while more traditional, contrasted well with the sleek decor.

  Reuben ordered a Prosecco from the white-coated waiter and went over to the large window. La marchesa Scamozzi’s view had been a spectacular one, but the Caroldos’ was more so, with a panoramic vista that included three Palladian churches, the Redentore, the Zitelle and San Giorgio.

  “Is magnifique, no?” came a voice behind Reuben in a stage French accent. He turned to face Marianne Wilke, international social gadabout and wife of Martin Wilke, a self-described “private art dealer,” though others were never precisely certain in what he dealt.

  Cynthia Frost, who had a retentive memory for biographical detail, had put together a mental dossier of the Wilkes years earlier, when she and Reuben had first met them at the home of a mutual friend in Paris. They were in large part pretenders. Martin, for example, claimed to be Dutch (they had apartments in Amsterdam and Paris) but was in fact German. “The only Wilke to be in the Netherlands before Martin was his father, who was there with the Nazi occupation forces,” a Parisian journalist had once told the Frosts. Marianne, seemingly French to the core, was an American Army brat who had learned French moving around with her parents; home was technically Omaha, Nebraska, and her maiden name had been Mary Ann Budbane.

  The Frosts often ran across the Wilkes, in one city or another. Despite their reinvention of themselves, they were amiable and always full of delicious stories concerning the rich and famous. And, as Cynthia once said, when the Wilkes were not being amusing, one could always laugh at them.

  Conversation soon turned, inevitably, to the Baxter murder. Reuben kept a low profile, knowing that it would be improper for him even to hint at the impending arrest.

  A mention of the police caused Emilio Caroldo to explode. “The police! The police! Sciocchi! Fools! Il signor Baxter has been dead almost a week, and nothing’s happened. Absolutely nothing.”

  “You can’t blame the police,” Martin Wilke said. “There are so many constraints on them. Not as ridiculous as in your country, Frost, but still many inhibitions, many controls. The police must be permitted methods to get at the truth.”

  “What do you have in mind, Martin—torture?” Erica Sherrill asked. “That fine old Venetian tradition, the camera del tormento, the torture chamber?”

  “No, nothing as extreme as that. But the right to interrogate, to ask questions without apologizing or bringing in lawyers, all that soft-minded nonsense.”

  Reuben thought Wilke hardly sounded the freedom-loving Dutchman he purported to be; other roots were exposed.

  “Let’s see who we’re missing,” Erica Sherrill interrupted. “Melissa Wheeler and Father Glynn. Melissa’s always late, but Father Glynn’s usually early. Do you think he’s saying mass or something?”

  Sherrill’s worries were ended with the arrival, together, of Ms. Wheeler and the priest.

  “Oh, thank God,” Erica said. “Have a drink. We must sit down to dinner. Our cook lives over in Mestre, so she insists that we eat early.”

  While the new arrivals got their drinks, Erica led the others into the dining room, again an ultra-modern space with a black-lacquered table in the center, surrounded by black chairs with bright orange cushions and backs.

  “Sottsass again?” Reuben asked.

  “The table is, yes. The sideboard’s another designer. Alberto Friso. What do you think?”

  The piece in question was painted dark green with a trompe l’oeil orange ribbon, carved from wood, draped across the front.

  “It’s very striking,” Reuben said.

  “That’s probably a diplomatic way of saying you don’t like it.”

  “No, no. I’m partial to modern design, if the truth be known. What you have here is very good. Very good indeed.”

  Dr. Sherrill directed each guest to a seat, putting Reuben at her right. Ms. Wheeler, the newest arrival, was on his other side, with Father Glynn next to her.

  “How’s your Mayor Dinkins?” Erica Sherrill asked Reuben, as she attacked her prosciutto and melon.

  “Surviving. Barely,” he replied.

  “Well, at least he’s not promoting a world’s fair.”

  “That’s what’s happening here, isn’t it?”

  “Was happening. Sense has prevailed. Actually, it wasn’t our mayor that was trying to get the exposition here, but our foreign minister. A fat, vulgar man who dared to argue that the fair would benefit Venice.”

  Reuben tried to keep up his end of the conversation, but his thoughts kept shifting to what was perhaps taking place even now at the Cipriani. Then it dawned on him that l’affare Baxter was over, or about to be. He relaxed, and listened to his hostess with renewed interest.

  “One of the worst aspects of the world’s fair scheme,” Sherrill said, “was that some supposedly cultivated and sophisticated New Yorkers encouraged our foreign minister—gave him a forum, allowed him to peddle his preposterous idea in the States. It was a disgrace.”

  “Erica, don’t forget we both know people in New York who invite Claus von Bülow to dinner,” Reuben said.

  While talking with Dr. Sherrill, Reuben had been aware of a nearly unceasing chatter down the table. It was Father Glynn, who by Reuben’s reckoning had scarcely stopped talking since sitting down. He was not surprised, for he had often overheard the priest at the Cipriani pool, where he had visiting privileges through his hostess, Lady Burbage. Reuben now overheard him explaining his presence in Venice to Ms. Wheeler.

  “Lady Burbage takes a palazzo every September and invites me out for a week. Frightfully kind of her, but that’s what you might expect from a true lady, don’t you agree? She’s twenty-eighth in line of succession to the throne, you know.”

  Reuben knew from occasional encounters that Father Glynn was an enthusiastic monarchist, as knowledgeable about the royal family as the lives of the saints. He was a Benedictine, at a monastery called Stanbrooke Abbey in Worcestershire, and taught in the boys’ school there. Reuben calculated that he might not be disobeying his vow of poverty, since the generous Lady Burbage had surely paid his way to Venice. The vow of silence was something else; he either had not taken one or was in flagrant violation.

  When the second course, spaghetti with a sauce of five cheeses, spaghetti ai cinque formaggi, was served, the priest turned to Marianne Wilke and Reuben quickly took advantage of the opening. He was curious about Ms. Wheeler, whom he had not met before. It turned out that the attractive young woman had first come to La Serenissima to spend her Radcliffe junior year, had fallen in love with it and vowed to return as soon as she could. A recent inheritance from a well-to-do aunt in Boston had made this possible and she had arrived in the early spring with the ambitious goal of writing a novel.

  “Can you have writer’s block before you’ve ever written anything?” she asked. “Or can you get blocked only after you’ve started?”

  “I’ve never thought about it. I don’t know the answer,” Reuben said.

  Ms. Wheeler explained that she had been unable to write a word and so had become interested in environmental issues. She was working as a volunteer with the local UNESCO office.

  “Most of the locals don’t care a damn about what pollution is doing to their city,” she said indignantly. “Nor are they concerned that many of the restoration techniques do more harm
than good, to things like the patina of old stones, for instance. If John Ruskin were writing today, he’d have to call his book The Shards of Venice.

  “The foreigners—mostly the English and the Americans—are the ones who are concerned,” she went on. “The great industriali are happy to live the good life here, but they’re doing nothing, niente, to preserve its beauty.”

  “The government?” Reuben asked.

  Melissa snorted. “Hopeless. A complete tangle, one agency tripping over another. The only consolation is that if there weren’t absolute gridlock, what got done would be worse than nothing at all.”

  Father Glynn interrupted, turning back to Melissa Wheeler and expounding, for no apparent reason, his theory that the length of one’s obituary in the London Times was a highly reliable gauge of eminence. Reuben could not think of a subject that might interest him less, so he quickly resumed talking with Erica Sherrill.

  “We saw Ephraim Miller last night,” Reuben told her. “If I’m not mistaken, we met him for the first time right here at your table.”

  “Dear Ephraim. He’s ageless, don’t you agree? He’s as pink as he was when I first knew him. Probably as pink as when he was a baby.”

  “I agree. He looks very well.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “At la marchesa Scamozzi’s.”

  “Ah yes, Ceil. How is she? We seem to be on the outs with her.”

  “Oh?” Reuben said. He had to wait for an explanation while Erica helped herself from the platter of sliced veal the waiter held at her place.

  “Our trouble was over Luigi Regillo,” Erica said. “I can’t stand that mincing pansy and I’m afraid I’ve let my feelings show.”

  “Pansy?” Reuben said.

  She laughed. “Good Lord, yes. He’s one of the busiest pederasts in Venice, which is saying quite a bit. He thinks he’s leading a secret life, but everyone knows about him.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Poor Ceil. Her first big break was linking up with Gregg Baxter. So what happens now? I’ve heard that his protégé, that black boy, Garrison, can carry on, but do you suppose that’s true?”