Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “And there’s a difference?” someone finally asked.

  “Ah, well, there we have—”

  One of the two women, a polizeihauptkommissarin from Vienna, lifted her hand. “Professor, I regret to interrupt, but we run a bit late. Already it is four hours twenty, and there are five o’clock section meetings for some among us, so—”

  “So we’d better wrap up right now. All right,” he said, “go ahead and get the remains back in the carton—carefully—and we’ll head back to Florence. We’ll finish this up tomorrow morning.”

  Rocco was frowning hard. “Wait, wait, wait, at least tell us—”

  Gideon shook his head. “Tomorrow.” He was a longtime believer in the Creed of the Artful Professor:

  Always leave ’em wanting more.

  SIX

  ROCCO, John, and Gideon all drove back to Florence in different vehicles; the same ones they’d come in, but when the cars pulled into the Carabinieri parking lot alongside the Great Cloister, Rocco was waiting for him. He was still scowling. “Listen, Gid, I can’t figure out what to make of what you were telling us back there. If the shot didn’t kill her, what did?” This was the second time that Rocco had called him Gid, and Gideon resisted the impulse to ask him to knock it off. For whatever reason—he didn’t know himself—it annoyed him to be addressed by diminutives or nicknames—he liked his own full name—and he didn’t hesitate to say so. He had only one friend, none other than John Lau himself, who was granted the privilege. John had been calling him Doc since the day they’d met, and Gideon had had no choice but to go along with it. Gid was even worse than Doc, but somehow, coming out of Rocco’s mouth, it couldn’t have been more natural. It fitted with his brash, wise-guy manner in a way that the prissier Gideon wouldn’t have. So now there were two who were allowed to get away with it. He was mellowing with age.

  “The fall is what killed her,” he said.

  “The fall?” The scowl deepened. “The fall?”

  “The fall.”

  “But . . . I don’t get it. The cop from Gibraltar, Clive, he said the bullet would have killed her then and there, and you agreed with him. I agree with him, for that matter.”

  “I do agree with him. A .32, back to front, right smack through the middle of the head? It should have killed her, it would have killed her—well, it would have if she hadn’t already been dead.”

  “What do you mean, already dead?” John had come up behind them. “Why shoot her if she was already dead? And how do you know that, anyway?”

  Rocco was equally bewildered. “Gid, stop messing with us, will you? What exactly are you telling us here?”

  “What I’m telling you, Rocco . . . John . . . is that the fall came first, then the bullet. She was already dead—from the fall—when he shot her.”

  Rocco, hands spread, looked to one side, then the other, as if searching for someone to explain it to him, but no luck. “Gid, she fell sixty meters—that’d be, uh . . .”

  “Almost two hundred feet.”

  “Yeah, two hundred feet. That’s a lot of feet. So what the hell would be the point of shooting her after that?”

  “Beats me, Rocco.”

  “Take a guess,” John said.

  “All right, all I can think of would be that he was taking out some insurance. He wasn’t positive that the fall had done it, so he came down and finished the job. Administered a coup de grace. That’s all I can think of, but I have to say I’m not real confident about it, considering that she fell off the equivalent of a twenty-story building onto a rocky surface and must have looked it. But it fits the facts. Sort of.”

  Rocco was suddenly irritated. “Okay, tell me something, Mr. Expert—”

  “That’s Doctor Expert to you, buddy.”

  Rocco was unmollified. “How the hell do you know which came first? I mean, I swear to God . . . you ‘experts’ . . . that’s just the kind of thing . . .” He jerked his head, muttering to himself.

  “Fun, isn’t it?” John said, grinning. “I always love when he does this.”

  “Well, good for you. I don’t.”

  “Rocco, what are you getting worked up about?” Gideon asked. “Does it really make any difference exactly when he shot her? Obviously, it doesn’t change the outcome.”

  “Yeah, it makes a difference. It’s weird, it’s inconsistent, it’s . . . well, it’s a loose end, it doesn’t fit.”

  Gideon laughed. “If you ever run into a murder case where everything’s consistent with everything else—no conflicting eyewitness testimony, no loose ends, no ambiguities, no unanswered questions—please let me know, will you? We’ll write it up for the journals.”

  “You can say that again,” John agreed.

  But Rocco stuck to his guns. “It doesn’t make sense to shoot someone if they already fell off a goddamn mountain. That alone throws the scenario our guys put together out of whack, and it worries me. If it’s true. It should worry me. What kind of a cop would I be if it didn’t?” Meaningful pause. “If it’s true.”

  Gideon considered himself well and deservedly rebuked. “Rocco, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been treating this as a class exercise, no more. I kind of forgot it’s a real case with real human beings.”

  “Oh, it’s a real case, all right. And there’s one other minor little point. If . . .” He sighed. “John, you keep checking your watch. What, I’m boring you guys? You gotta be somewhere?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, we do,” John said. “We’re supposed to meet our wives for dinner at six, and we don’t know how far the restaurant is from here. We don’t even know where the hell it is, exactly.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “Umm . . .”

  “L’Osteria di Giovanni,” Gideon said. “Do you know it?”

  “Yeah, it’s a ten-minute walk from here. A good place. Come on, I’ll walk you over partway. We can talk while we walk.”

  “Sure,” Gideon said, “but listen, if you’re free, why don’t you join us for dinner while you’re at it?”

  “Hey, I’d love to,” Rocco said, his testiness of a moment ago gone as abruptly as it had come, “but I can’t. I have to pick up my wife back at the train station at six-twenty. Come on, it’s this way, down Via degli Avelli.”

  Florence’s Via degli Avelli—the Street of the Tombs—is not the gloomy passageway the name suggests. In fact, it is one of the city’s livelier, trendier thoroughfares, with wall-to-wall restaurants, sidewalk cafés, and upscale hotels lining one side of it. The other side, however, runs for more than a hundred yards along the outer wall of Santa Maria Novella’s narrow, old cemetery. This wall consists of a long row of twenty-foot-high, horizontally striped, Moorish stone arches that protect upscale wall-to-wall shelters of a different sort: the ornate, aboveground stone burial vaults of Florence’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century elite, all bearing intricately carved reliefs of their family crests and insignias of rank.

  Rocco gestured at them as they walked past. “Bet there’d be some bones in those things that’d perk your interest.”

  Gideon laughed. “I bet there would. So what’s this other minor little point, Rocco?”

  “Only that he fell off the cliff too—after shooting himself up there—so he must’ve been twice as dead as she was when he hit the bottom, right? Which would have made it a little hard for him to administer that coup de grâce down below, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He shot himself at the top?” Gideon echoed, frowning. “No, you’re right, that complicates things. How sure are you that it worked that way, that he didn’t kill himself down below, after he shot her?”

  “Pretty sure, considering that he left most of his skull up there, with some of the rest of it scattered along the way down, while he was bouncing off the rocks. Our guys took most of a day picking them out of the cliff. His skeleton was every bit as busted up as hers was. He took one hell of a fall too, no question.”

  “That’s puzzling,” Gideon said. “It would seem to me
an he shoved her off the cliff, then climbed down and shot her just to make sure she was well and truly dead, then climbed all the way up again—two hundred feet—shot himself, and then fell off the cliff too. How would you explain that?”

  “How would I explain it? Sheesh, you came up with it, how would you explain it?”

  “Yeah, how would you explain it?” John contributed, but then he came up with a question of his own. “What’s that cliff like, Rocco? I mean, is it really, like, a cliff—straight up and down—or more like sort of a hill?”

  “Well, I guess it’s not technically a cliff. You can get up it without a rope and pitons, if that’s what you mean, but it sure as hell isn’t what anybody would call a hill. I mean, I made it to the top okay myself, but there were some dicey spots along the way. I had to use my hands a lot, and I was breathing pretty hard by the time I got there.”

  “So how likely would it be,” Gideon asked, “that a man of Pietro’s age—”

  “Almost sixty,” said Rocco. “And, from what I understand, he wasn’t in the greatest shape in the world. A whole lot of years working in those damp wine cellars had screwed up his lungs.”

  “So it wouldn’t be too likely, would it, that he’d climb back up a cliff like that unless he had some really good reason? Since he could have just shot himself right down there with her.”

  “That’s the way I see it,” said Rocco.

  They walked a few paces, heads down, thinking, and then Gideon said: “Could there be anything special about that particular cliff? Does it have any kind of history or reputation? You know, is it a place people come to commit suicide? Lovers’ Point, Suicide Mountain, something like that?”

  “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “Well, maybe it had some special significance, some personal significance—emotional, symbolic—to them. Could that be?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Rocco said with a shrug. “I guess that could be.”

  Gideon laughed. He didn’t think much of the idea either. “All right, tell me this: How did you establish that he killed her? How do you know it wasn’t the other way around? She killed him and then shot herself?”

  “How could she? According to you, she was already dead from the fall when she was shot. Pretty damn hard to shoot yourself in the head when you’re dead.”

  “Never mind ‘according to me.’ How did you establish it in the first place, during the investigation?”

  “Oh God, a lot of things. First, the way she was shot: back of the head, execution style. You saw that in the class. The bullet entered in the lower back part of her skull and then ran slightly upward, hitting the inside of her skull pretty much in the middle of her forehead. Which—as I’m sure I don’t have to tell either of you guys—is the path you get if the victim was kneeling, with her head bowed. Well, how many suicides have you run into where the person shot himself in the back of the head that way? Not many.”

  “No,” Gideon said, “but there are some who do.”

  “That’s true,” John said. “In fact, you can’t come up with any part of the head that some suicide hasn’t shot himself in: the nose, the eye, the ear, the top of the head, the back of the head, the teeth . . . almost any part of the body, in fact: the crotch, the armpit—”

  “Well, you guys are lucky,” Rocco said. “You get to look at a lot more gunshot deaths than we do over here, so I can’t argue with you. But I’ve seen a few suicides and I never saw one that did it back- to-front. I mean, why would they? It’s harder. It can’t happen very often.”

  “Well, yeah,” John agreed, “that’s so . . .”

  “Yes, it is,” said Gideon, “and your execution-style killing idea was pretty good thinking at the time, but—well, sorry, but it’s not correct. She was already dead when she was shot.”

  “Yeah, so you keep saying.” Rocco rolled his eyes. “Jesus, did we get anything right?” His hand flew up. “Don’t answer that.”

  “Well, it’s understandable. You didn’t know then what you know now—that she fell off that cliff first, before—”

  “No, you know that. I don’t know that, and I’m waiting to hear something that convinces me. I mean, no offence, Gid, I know you’re this great expert and everything, but I need a little more than your word here.”

  “Give me a minute, Rocco, I’ll get there. But for the moment just assume I’m right. Now think about it. Here’s this woman. She’s just taken this horrendous fall. She’s about as dead as she can get. Half her bones are broken. Now, for whatever reason, he wants to shoot her. So how—”

  Rocco held up his hand again. “Yeah, I see the problem. How is he supposed to get her into a kneeling position?”

  “That’s it. What he did do, I’m guessing, was to shoot her where she lay, right on the ground. Prone. Not execution-style at all. The bullet trajectory would have been exactly the same.”

  John hunched his shoulders. “I’d say that’s a pretty good guess.”

  “Thanks, but it’s actually more than a guess. Remember this afternoon, when I tossed out a couple of reasons why the bullet might not have made it all the way through her skull? Well, there was another reason I didn’t mention, because I didn’t want to muddy the waters at the time—”

  “But now you do,” Rocco grumbled.

  “I’m a scientist, Rocco. I have to say what I find.”

  “That’s what he always says when he does this,” John said cheerfully. “Every single damn time.”

  “Okay, so what’s this other reason?” Rocco asked reluctantly.

  “It’s something that happens when the spot where the bullet would ordinarily exit is up against something firm, so that the bone is shored up and kept from exploding outward. So the bullet can’t get out either, and it just bounces off and stays inside.”

  Rocco nodded his acceptance.

  “So if I’m right and she was lying facedown on the ground, and he just leaned over and plugged her, then the earth, or rock, or whatever that was under her head would have kept the bullet from exiting.”

  “Well, she was laying on her stomach, all right. Oh boy, I’m starting to think maybe we’re going to have to reopen this whole can of worms after all.” He shut his eyes. “God help me.”

  “What about the husband?” Gideon asked. “How was he shot? Was it compatible with suicide?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re on safe ground there. Couldn’t have been more compatible. Right out of the books. The classic spot for a handgun suicide.” He raised his left hand and jabbed his forefinger at his temple. “Bang. And please, don’t give me any more crap about shooting yourself in the armpit. You know damn well this is where they do it nine times out of ten.”

  “I don’t know about your statistics,” Gideon said, “but generally speaking, yes.”

  “And righties shoot themselves in the right side of the head and lefties shoot themselves in the left side of the head—”

  “But not always,” John put in.

  “Oh, come on, you guys, give me a break. What, it’s only ninety-five percent of the time?”

  Gideon had to smile. There had been a recent study of just this question, based on an examination of confirmed suicides. The answer: 95 percent.

  “And he was shot straight through the left temple,” Rocco continued. “Wanna guess whether he was a lefty or a righty?”

  Gideon laughed. “Well . . . this is just a hunch here, but I’m going to take a chance and guess he was a lefty.”

  “Bingo. Okay, your turn, Mr. Expert—pardon me, Dr. Expert. Now you’re gonna go ahead and tell me what’s wrong with our theory—why he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, right?”

  “Hey, Rocco,” John said approvingly, “you’re a quick learner.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Gideon said. “You’re right. Sounds like a suicide to me.”

  Rocco staggered and clapped a hand to his heart. “I’m shocked . . . shocked.” They stopped walking to let Rocco draw a Marlboro fro
m a pack with his lips and apply a lighter to it.

  “Rocco,” Gideon said, “what were the other things that made you so sure he killed her and not the other way around? You said a minute ago that there were a lot of them.”

  “Well, two of them, anyway,” Rocco said in a choked, constricted voice while he pulled in his first lungful of smoke. He held it there a moment with his eyes closed and then let it out in a long hoosh. “The other thing was the way their bodies were lying—hers right up against this big rock and his up against hers, which means she would have had to come down first, so how could she have killed him?”

  “Well, what about this?” John asked as they began walking again. “Someone else killed them both and tried to make it look like a murder-suicide. You know, rearranged the bodies and all.”

  Rocco took two meditative drags. “Look, John, anything’s possible, but there’s just nothing, nothing at all, that points in that direction.” And then, in a muttered afterthought, “Until today, anyway.”

  John shrugged. “Okay.” He didn’t think the idea held water either.

  “You didn’t come up with any other suspects?” Gideon asked. “At all?”

  Rocco bristled. “What do you mean, ‘at all?’ Like we didn’t do a thorough enough investigation or something?” But on reconsidering his words he cooled down. “Well, we didn’t, that’s true. We didn’t do a whole lot of searching. I mean, sure, we interviewed his family, the people who knew him best, and we looked into things, but it was all so obvious. . . . Hell, it seemed obvious. . . . The facts spoke for themselves, you know? He killed her and then he killed himself. Why would we go hunting for other suspects?”

  “Yes, I can see that it would have seemed like a waste of money and manpower.”

  “Anyway, no, there weren’t any other viable suspects. Oh, wait, there was one other thing: we found the gun. It came down the cliff with him, and it was his, all right. A wartime Beretta. Had it for forever.”

  “Any prints?” John said, then jerked his head. “No, what am I talking about? There wouldn’t be, not after all that time out in the weather.”