The Mystery of the Three Orchids

by Augusto De Angelis

  “Oh, you’ve told me enough, Madame Firmino. Absolutely enough, although you haven’t talked to me about your designs. Is Signora Cristiana also a designer?”

  Dolores smiled. She knew all too well how little Cristiana designed, and clearly what bad taste she had in clothing.

  “Only one style, dear Inspector, and only two colours: tomato-red and first-Communion-blue; and when she happened to see a painting by Fragonard in Paris, you’ve no idea of the full skirts, long sleeves, scoop-neck corsets and on top of all that a gauzy scarf…”

  “A bit outdated, yes?”

  “Oh, no—it’s a style one could still launch, provided it was updated, along with oneself. But as far as other people’s clothes are concerned, Cristiana’s stuck in a rut.”

  “But she must at least have some competence in constructing them?”

  “Ask Marta about it. She’s had to plead with her not to set foot in the atelier.”

  “I see. She’s interested in fashion as an industry. She’s got good business sense.”

  Madame Firmino’s smile was the picture of spite. “No, she’s not lacking business sense.”

  De Vincenzi got up. “When did you last see Valerio today?”

  “I don’t think I actually saw him, but I heard him. I heard his annoying whistle, which almost always preceded him as he came through the corridor my room’s on.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Oh, God, Inspector! I didn’t look at my watch. But it must have been after two-thirty, because I came up to my room at two-thirty to dedicate myself to my treatment.”

  Cristiana had discovered the body just before four. De Vincenzi saw a piece of white paper on the rosewood table. He picked it up and held it out to Madame Firmino with a gold pencil he took from his waistcoat pocket.

  “May I ask you to draw a design for me?”

  She looked at him, astonished.

  “A dress design?”

  “I’m not asking that much. I just need you to draw me a plan of the third floor of this building.”

  “Oh.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged her shoulders. Setting the paper on the small table, she covered it rapidly with lines first, then words.

  “You could have had anyone draw this for you… so it might as well have been me.”

  De Vincenzi studied the paper.

  “Thank you for writing down what each room is used for. It’s all perfectly clear, except for this last room.” He pointed to a rectangle near the stairway at the end of the corridor.

  “Oh, that! It’s the room we call the ‘museum of horrors’. I was the one to christen it. That’s where the mannequins are kept for all our usual clients.”

  “Excuse me, Madame Firmino, but I don’t understand.”

  “Well, in order to work confidently and without troubling our clients to try things on too often, Marta orders a mannequin to a lady’s measurements when she uses us regularly. It’s a perfect replica of her body in wood and horsehair. Just imagine, Inspector, what horrors are kept in that room!”

  10

  “Surprise?”

  “I knew I’d see you again fairly soon.”

  “Intuition?”

  “Anna was here before you!”

  “Deduction, then.”

  Silence. The man removed his spectacles.

  “I have never known why spectacles, especially gold-rimmed ones, manage to give someone an air of respectability.” Cristiana was now in complete control of herself. “Over there, too, you fooled yourself into thinking that your appearance was perfectly respectable. No one fell for it—apart from me.”

  Russell P. Sage smiled disappointedly. “As it happens, the G-men were at my heels! But here it’s another story. Here I’m John Bolton, a rich industrialist from Chicago, and I have no intention of robbing any banks. I’m developing an idea for starting up a toy factory.”

  “Just like in Portland.”

  He interrupted her with a wave of his hand. “Quiet! The Ultra Products Company is over. I won’t be making any more toy animals or tin soldiers. Different strokes for different folks… I’m dreaming of some little cars… they’ll be master-pieces. I’ll make the children of this country happy when I produce them in series. The market will be flooded with Bolton automobiles.”

  Cristiana stiffened. “What do you want from me?”

  “Oh, nothing you can’t give me. I want your love.”

  Cristiana laughed, a vibrant, tinny laugh that was hard on the ears. “You’ve killed off any possibility of my loving you, Russell.”

  “I’m not trying to gloss over what I did to you, Ileana. I shouldn’t have got carried away.”

  “You think that’s your only fault?”

  “Of course! I didn’t have the right to drag you into my mess and you did well to get away while you could. You were very perceptive when you said that the break-in at the Caledonia National Bank in Danville would be my last exploit and that I’d be appearing in court in Rutland.” His voice suddenly dropped, but the words hammered on. “But you shouldn’t have lost your faith in me, Ileana. I gave you too much for you to doubt me.” He’d grown excited. “Oh, no, you shouldn’t have been hoping you’d never see me again!”

  Cristiana pursed her lips.

  “There’s nothing left to say. Not a thing more I can do for you, Russell Sage! You can’t get me back, even if there is a body lying under my bedspread.”

  Russell followed her gaze and noted the dishevelled bed, with a dead man’s feet sticking out from under the damask.

  “Is that why the police are here? And just when I came up here to help you!”

  He watched her. His face had turned dark and a vein near the birthmark on his forehead was pulsing and bulging. As he studied her, he drummed the fingers of one hand on the opposite fist. He appeared to be working hard at his reflections. All at once he shook himself.

  “A trap, eh?”

  He looked at her again, but this time in admiration. “You are a force to be reckoned with! I didn’t appreciate you as I should have.” He put his spectacles back on. “I’m not worried about your telling the police who John Bolton really is. It would be too dangerous for you, and actually not at all for me. I’ll leave this building calmly, Ileana. But we’ll see each other again.”

  He backed up to the door, taking small steps and staring at her. Suddenly he darted into the corridor and headed confidently for the service stairs, which he descended quickly and lightly, arriving at the first floor without anyone hearing his tread. A short time later he arrived in the showrooms just as the loudspeaker was announcing the thirty-seventh outfit in the Cristiana O’Brian collection.

  Cristiana remained motionless, staring at the door through which Russell had escaped. His sudden flight had surprised her. She’d been prepared to stand up to him, for a struggle, but everything had ended before it had begun. Well, his escape had been logical, an impressive example of quick thinking. Staying in that room and risking being surprised by the police would have been like confessing he’d killed Valerio.

  But who had put the body on her bed? How had Russell known where to find her room and how to reach her without being seen by anyone? Was it possible that this wasn’t his first time here? Her thoughts were confused. She had the sense that events around her had been taking shape over the last three hours, joining up and fusing into one giant bullet travelling through space like lightning—one that would inevitably hit her and explode in a horrendous uproar as it hit the ground. An uproar and a disaster that would sink her.

  She jumped at a slight squeak. Immediately she turned to the wall with the wardrobe and dresser, since the sound seemed to be coming from that side of the room. The wardrobe doors looked to be only partially closed. Had she left them like that? She didn’t have time to answer her own question before they opened to reveal Prospero O’Lary.

  “You were in there!”

  The little man climbed over the lower panel and emerged from his hiding place. He b
reathed a sigh of relief and adjusted the waist of his frock coat.

  “Why did he go off so quickly?”

  “He saw the body.”

  “Oremus” seemed perplexed.

  “Of course,” he burbled. Then, more clearly: “He didn’t kill Valerio!”

  “That’s what he wants me to believe, in any case. How did he find my room?”

  “You’re forgetting that Russell knew how to rob a bank in broad daylight.” He started for the door. “I must go back downstairs, and you’d do well to come down yourself. This room will be swarming with police before long. That inspector’s way of doing things makes me uneasy—and the body even more so.”

  Cristiana watched him go. She heard his steps receding down the corridor as far as the lift, which opened and closed with its characteristic clatter. No. She would not go down. She looked at the orchid, then at the dresser and wardrobe. How ready Prospero O’Lary had been with his hiding place…

  “Will you allow me to come in, Signora?”

  Cristiana jumped like a startled panther.

  “Ah, is it you, Inspector? You frightened me. Please, come in. Come in, of course.”

  De Vincenzi entered with an officer. Another could be seen in the corridor, looking with intense curiosity at one of the eight herms.

  “Until the investigating magistrate comes and gives the authorization for the removal of the body, I’ll have to put someone on guard in this room. Since all the necessities will be taken care of by this evening, you can provisionally go to your office, Signora.”

  A smile crinkled Cristiana’s lips. “I was rather wondering why you hadn’t already searched this room!”

  “Do you think it would have been helpful if I had? Objects rarely speak in a criminal investigation, at least in the way most people mean. I never follow tracks or material clues. And that’s why I’m so often mistaken!” he added, smiling at her cordially.

  Cristiana looked about.

  “I’d ask you only not to mess things up too much. My room won’t thank you.”

  “I’ll content myself with speaking to your maid instead, Signora. Would you have her come up if she’s here?”

  “Well of course she’s here, Inspector! The service rooms and kitchen are on the second floor. I’ll go and tell her.”

  She started to leave and the officer stepped aside to let her by, but she stopped at the threshold.

  “Inspector, what precautions do you take against suspects here in Italy?”

  “None, or almost none, Signora O’Brian. We’re happy to wait until our suspicions are shown to be valid.”

  “Hmm. So you won’t even have me watched?”

  “Do you think you’re under suspicion?”

  “Well, you see, I’m the only one who could’ve had any reason to kill Valerio. That boy was becoming troublesome.”

  “If everyone who had some reason to kill really did kill, the ground would be strewn with bodies! Sometimes, the real killer does nothing but carry out someone else’s desires… or those of many others, Signora. As for having you watched, I don’t feel it’s necessary. In any case, it won’t be possible for you to leave the building.”

  The woman gave him one last look.

  “I never thought the police in Italy had such… novel methods.”

  “Do my methods really seem so novel to you?”

  “More than that, they seem dangerous. Goodbye, Inspector!”

  “Don’t be so sure, Signora,” De Vincenzi said without irony. To his officer, he indicated one of the armchairs.

  “Have a seat.”

  The man sat down. He was young, chubby and well groomed. He lifted his coat tails before sitting down.

  “Is this the crime scene, sir?”

  De Vincenzi began looking around; the wardrobe caught his attention.

  “Call it the scene of the crime if you like.”

  “I don’t see a body, sir.”

  “If you move you’ll be touching it. You’re sitting in front of it.”

  The officer turned round. He saw the bump made by the body under the bedspread, blushed and stood up at once. Smiling awkwardly at De Vincenzi, who was watching him kindly, he moved away from the bed and went to sit in a chair near the door, some way away.

  “Are you afraid of the dead?”

  “They give me the creeps, sir.”

  “It’s the living who give me the creeps! You’ll notice that with time.” He opened the wardrobe and looked inside for a moment.

  “For example, look at this. Someone—alive—has been in this wardrobe, and he didn’t even bother to put the clothes back in their place!”

  11

  In Cristiana’s wardrobe De Vincenzi discovered nothing other than lots of clothes and all kinds of lingerie. He saw the board sticking out a few centimetres from the back, which had to be a shelf. It was empty. Yet “Oremus”’s presence and movements through the clothes were obvious. Still, De Vincenzi couldn’t draw from that any more than he’d stated: someone had hidden in that wardrobe, but he didn’t know who. He supposed it could have been the murderer, and then almost immediately rejected that idea since it didn’t square with his conviction that the crime had been committed outside of that room. The killer wouldn’t have lingered in the room after putting the body on the bed, thinking it convenient to hide in the wardrobe. They might, if they’d been startled by the sound of approaching steps—Cristiana’s, for example. But in that case they’d still be there amongst the clothes, since the room had been full of people ever since. Had it? What about when Cristiana had been lying in a faint on the floor—alone?

  De Vincenzi shrugged. It was one of those questions logic couldn’t resolve and which, even if resolved, wouldn’t help him. The fact that someone had hidden in the wardrobe was significant in itself, as an identifying feature, and he actually needed to gather as many of these clues as he could in order to reconstruct the picture of the crime. Why, if it wasn’t true, would Cristiana O’Brian have said that the flower hadn’t been there before the body, and that she’d come across it when she’d made the macabre discovery of the body?

  He sighed. How could one distinguish truth from false-hood in a woman’s statements, and how could one find logic in her words and actions? Surely the whole story revolved around Cristiana.

  “Don’t leave here!”

  The officer had been following De Vincenzi’s movements in the room, and he nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t worry about the body. The dead are harmless.”

  “I hope so, sir!”

  De Vincenzi smiled and lifted the latch on the door between the wardrobe and the fireplace: it was the bathroom, a vast room with blue majolica on the walls and shining with nickel-plate and porcelain. The strong scent of creams, cologne and lavender lingered and enveloped him, warm, acrid and sweet. He recalled another observation he’d made previously: taste and smell are two senses that work in sympathy, because odours can offend the palate no less than the nostrils. But the reflection did nothing to dampen the irritation he felt in that heavy, humid air. A third sense immediately came into play, commanding all his attention. He saw something that interested him and induced him to cross the bathroom in order to reach the door opposite the one he’d entered.

  A white-painted door, with a shiny handle and a small bolt. He bent down to look at the bolt, a short cylinder of nickel-plated steel that slid into rings fixed on two metal plaques screwed to wooden double doors. In order for the doors to open—both sides swung into the bathroom—the bolt had to be left off the latch. And that fancy gadget was shown to be of no practical use; it hung miserably from one the doors, attached to the wood only by a couple of loose screws. One of the two plaques—the one with the rings—lay on the floor in front of the doors. To all appearances, someone had forced the door and broken the latch in order to come through.

  De Vincenzi lowered the bolt and pulled both doors towards him. The room he looked into was the very one he�
�d been seeking, the one he’d hoped to visit from the moment Madame Firmino had drawn the plan of the third floor for him, indicating this room as the “museum of horrors”. The room was wide and rectangular, and the light coming from two windows immediately revealed its strange and grotesque contents. The bodies of Cristiana O’Brian’s clients were lined up against the walls. Each mannequin was covered in grey canvas, and had on its breast a piece of paper bearing a name. Each balanced on a wooden foot with three pegs. There were all types: large, small, thin, bloated, with jutting breasts, lopsided shoulders, rounded stomachs—a horrifying anatomical display. And all those bodies, uniformly nude and grey, were missing their heads.

  Other than the door leading to Cristiana’s bathroom, the room had one that opened on the corridor; it must have been the one commonly used to enter it. At first, De Vincenzi walked slowly between the decapitated bodies, but he began to speed up. This inspection seemed macabre to him. He’d got as far as the end of the longest wall when he spotted an overturned mannequin and was compelled to stop. It was the only one in the row like that and clearly must have been bumped—either by accident or on purpose—to make it fall. He then noticed that the two on either side of it had been moved, and one of them was now leaning against the wall, with two of its foot pegs off the ground.

  There had been a disturbance in that place, some kind of violent movement. Someone fleeing, who’d tripped and fallen on the mannequins, or an actual struggle: Valerio against his attacker? Had the young man been strangled in there, perhaps surprised from behind, grabbed by the throat, thrown about and beaten, first against the mannequin, which naturally fell over, and then against the wall?

  De Vincenzi looked around at the floor and saw something shiny. He bent over to pick it up. A golden medallion, on one side of which were engraved the words: San Siro Dog Track and on the other a date: 8th February 1938—SVI E.F. The ring from which it had hung was twisted open.

  He put the medallion in his pocket and hurriedly left the “museum of horrors”. It would be easy for him to find out whether the object had belonged to Valerio and to make up his mind once and for all. But until then, he was sure that the crime had been committed in that room and that only later was the body taken to Cristiana’s room—by someone who’d had to force open the double doors of the bathroom by breaking the lock. And this “someone” could only be someone from the building, since they knew the layout and people’s movements far too well.