Murphy's Law

by Lisa Marie Rice

  It was as if Kane’s death had freed her to be herself, to be who she was meant to be.

  Faith lifted her head and closed her eyes, delighted with the warm, fragrant sunshine, the gorgeous Certosa, the warm welcome she’d received. A brand new chapter in her life. She drew in a deep breath and strode swiftly into her future, walking right into a man instead.

  “Faith!”

  “Tim!”

  Her former lover held her by the arms, face pale with shock. If her life had been a book, Tim Gresham would be the chapter on bad sex.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” He sounded stunned.

  She stepped back. “I could say the same thing.” She peered at him closely. “Weren’t you too sick to travel?”

  He still looked sick. He was slightly gray and new lines crisscrossed his pale skin.

  “Yeah, I had the flu. I still have the flu, for that matter. But the doctor said I could fly.” He shook his head. “But—but I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”

  Faith was about ready to apologize for taking his place, but then she remembered that she wasn’t taking his place. She was taking her place, a Faith-sized space all her own at the conference. Leonardo had said so.

  “It’s a long story, but basically, Kane told me to come. Here.” She picked up his battered carry-on. “Is this your luggage? I’ll carry it up for you.” He looked like he would have trouble carrying himself up the stairs. “The accommodations are one flight up—oh, of course, you’ve been here before. You’d know that.” She sneaked another look at him. He looked really awful. “Maybe you might want to rest up for a while, Tim. Not much is happening today. Tim?”

  He looked in deep shock. Jet lag took some people like that. Plus he had the flu. She took his arm gently. “Come on, let me just take you up—”

  Tim shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just—it’s just—” He blew out a long breath. “Listen, I think I should check in with Roland first, and then you’re right. I think I’ll go lie down for a while.”

  “Well, Tim, there might be a little problem with that.” She steadied her grip on his arm. “Seeing as how Roland’s dead.”

  She felt the jolt.

  “Dead?” Tim breathed. His eyes rounded so much she could see the whites all around. “Of what? Heart attack?”

  “Sort of.” Was there a polite way to say it? “He was…killed. Someone knifed him. In the heart.”

  Tim’s jaw snapped shut and he looked up into the sky as he processed the information. Tim had a good head on his shoulders. Not a good-looking head, but a good-thinking one. Faith could almost see his hard disk working.

  “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed in disgust. “Who the hell beat me to it?”

  Chapter Seven

  Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

  Back in his office two hours later, Dante reflected again upon how much he really, really hated murder. It ate up time and resources as surely as it ate up the lives of its victims.

  He looked down at the list on his desk of the people who had spent last night in the Certosa di Ponteremoli. The Americans—Faith Murphy, Griffin Ball and Madeleine Kobbel. The University of Siena staff, consisting of Egidio Pecci and the gardener—a none-too-bright geezer.

  Egidio had been asleep in his cot inside the small room just off the porter’s lodge. He had no alibi and no one could vouch for him. On the other hand, why would he kill Roland Kane? Now, if Kane had belonged to the Giraffe contrada, the arch-rival of Egidio’s Caterpillar contrada, Egidio might well have killed him. But a foreigner, an American, would have been right off Egidio’s mental map.

  It was possible—not probable, but possible—that a thief had scaled the walls and been caught in the act by Roland Kane and had killed him.

  Dante had set Loiacono the task of taking imprints of all the shoe prints around the Certosa and matching them with the guests and the staff. Loiacono had approached the task with an unhealthy enthusiasm and Dante could be certain that he’d soon know everyone who had ever been near the Certosa in the past year.

  It was a possibility it was a stranger, but Dante didn’t believe it. In his experience, murder was an up close and personal crime, much more than robbery. No, he’d lay odds that someone Roland Kane knew, and knew well, had slipped a knife in his heart.

  Which left Madeleine Kobbel, Griffin Ball and Faith Murphy, the woman who’d found the body. And who was also Nick and Lucrezia’s friend. He’d already interviewed Faith Murphy, who’d proven herself to be intelligent and reasonable.

  Protocol had it that she was still suspect number one, at least until he could interview the two other professors and, however far-fetched it might seem, the rest of the Certosa staff, but he was willing to bet anything—anything short of his contrada’s victory, that is—that she was innocent.

  He’d know more when Southbury Police Department emailed him some information on the three.

  But for now, he had to take everyone’s statements.

  “Cini!” he called.

  Piero Cini stuck his dark head into Dante’s office. He brushed at some crumbs on the short-sleeved shirt straining around his stomach. The pastries at Nannini’s on the Via di Sopra were his downfall. “Yeah, boss?”

  “Send in the woman professor.” Dante checked the sheet again for the name. “Madeleine Kobbel.”

  “Right away, boss.” Cini ambled away and Dante wondered with a sigh what this particular right away might mean. Cini had a very elastic sense of time. Nannini’s was very, very close by, they made superb truffle-and-butter sandwiches, and it was nearing either late lunch or early afternoon snack time.

  But Dante was wrong to be so cynical. Ten minutes after Dante had watched Cini’s broad back retreat slowly down the stairs, his subordinate was back with a tall, middle-aged lady in tow.

  Dante stood and walked around his desk. “Ah, Professor Kobbel,” he said genially and shook her hand. “I’m Commissario Dante Rossi and I’m in charge of investigating the murder of your colleague, Professor Roland Kane.” He put a gentle hand to her back and urged her forward. Not rushing her, but not treating her like an invalid either.

  Dante was good with women. He liked women, all of them—grandmothers, little girls and everything in between. As a police officer, as a man, he always treated them, even the hard-bitten prostitutes pulled in on the occasional raid, as courteously as he could.

  “Please be seated. This shouldn’t take long. Here, take this chair.” He settled her down in the high-backed Gothic revival chair he kept for just this purpose and sat down again behind his desk.

  He saw her eyes drift up to the wall behind him, full of framed citations. It was extraordinarily impressive and he’d put them up for precisely that purpose.

  The citations meant absolutely nothing. Some were for a job well done, but most were for merely existing. There were citations engraved in gold for taking a computer refresher course, for a handwriting analysis course, for having been a judge at a firearms contest, for having participated in the police annual parade…you name it, he had it. Though Dante had drawn the line at his dog’s training course certificate.

  The Italian state paid its minions a pitiful pittance and made up for it with fancy engraved citations and even fancier dress uniforms. The carabinieri had better uniforms than the police force, though—designed by Armani, no less.

  Dante observed Madeleine Kobbel in silence for a moment until her eyes came back to him.

  “I realize this must be most painful to you, Professor Kobbel, to lose an esteemed colleague in such a violent fashion. I do apologize most sincerely, but you must understand that I must ask you some questions. It is my job.”

  Dante’s English was excellent. The Rossi clan bounced back and forth across the Atlantic often. He’d spent most summers with Nick and Lucrezia, either here in Tuscany or in Massachusetts. He’d even spent his high school senior year abroad in Southbury.

  Colloquial English had helped his sex life no end. The world
was full of pretty young Americans and English women, Australians and New Zealanders, and even the odd Canadian. Many pretty young things came here, fell in love with Siena and couldn’t believe their luck at finding a policeman knowledgeable about Siena’s history who could explain things in their own language.

  He got laid a lot thanks to English.

  But now he kept his English slow and formal and stepped up the accent. It gave him time to think. If he wanted more information, he could pretend he hadn’t understood and required further explanation.

  The woman nodded her distinguished gray head. “I’ll try to contain my grief, Commissario,” she said dryly.

  Dante searched her eyes and found no trace of grief, sadness or much of anything else. She met his gaze evenly and coolly.

  As Faith Murphy had done.

  Maybe mathematicians were like that. Maybe working with cold numbers all day turned them into cool numbers themselves.

  Being so attuned to women, Dante felt he could read Madeleine Kobbel’s history in her face.

  She was decent-looking, with high cheekbones and unlined skin, but did absolutely nothing to enhance her looks. Her hair, which must have been dark brown once, had been allowed to go steel gray, which aged her. She had on no makeup. Her dress was dark red, long-sleeved and too warm for the day outside.

  “So, Professor Kobbel…” He leaned back in his chair, relaxed, a man idly passing the time chatting with an intelligent woman. “How well did you know Professor Kane?”

  “Well enough,” she replied evenly. “We were colleagues. The mathematics faculty at Southbury is small. There are only fifteen of us, plus some adjunct professor s like Faith. So we all know each other fairly well.”

  “How long have you worked in Southbury, Professor?”

  “Five years in all. Four years on staff,” she said. “Originally I worked as Roland Kane’s personal assistant for a year. He paid my salary out of his own pocket. That year he produced his Theorems of Mathematics, which has become a standard textbook. I liked Southbury itself and I liked the environment at the university. There was a job opening, I applied and I was accepted.”

  “So, the two of you wrote a book together?”

  She was still a moment. “Only Roland’s name appears on the book jacket,” she said finally, her voice neutral.

  “But would it be fair to say that you had…how shall I phrase it?” Dante pursed his lips. He thought about stroking his chin, but decided against it. Overkill. “That you had a—a certain…input into the book?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her voice was dry and she inclined her gray head. “It would be fair to say that.”

  Dante wondered whether stealing someone’s academic work warranted murder.

  He would have thought not, but years on the force had taught him otherwise. He’d once arrested a man in Naples who had burned down another man’s house for winning at briscola, the local card game. Dante had learned long ago that the human heart was fathomless. And this was a female heart, the most mysterious object in nature.

  Time to cut to the chase.

  “And what was Professor Kane like? Can you tell me something about the man? His character? His likes and dislikes?”

  A faint smile creased her face. “As you will no doubt find out, Commissario Rossi, if you haven’t already, Professor Kane was a most unpleasant man. He liked power—both academic and personal—money and alcohol. He was more or less averse to everything else in life. He was intensely disliked by everyone who ever met him. He was an indifferent administrator, an uninspired teacher and a disloyal colleague.”

  Whoa, Dante thought. Why don’t you tell me what you really think?

  “He was also,” Madeleine Kobbel added with a sigh, “a brilliant mathematician. He had, perhaps, too great a love for applied mathematics, for anything he thought would earn him money or prestige or power, but nonetheless he had an extraordinary intuitive grasp of problems. I wouldn’t hesitate to define him as a genius.”

  So most likely it wasn’t being a superior mathematician which had gotten Roland Kane killed. It was being an inferior human being.

  “Did you, personally, dislike him?”

  The corner of her mouth tilted upwards. “If you mean was he my favorite human being, then no. There was no way he could be, given the type of man he was. If the subtext to that question is ‘did you kill him’, then the answer is no once more.”

  “Hmm,” Dante said neutrally. “Can you tell me about last night, Professor Kobbel? Who was there at the dinner table?”

  “Well, except for the absence of Tim Gresham and the presence of Faith Murphy, the very same people we’ve been having dinner with on our first night in the Certosa for seven years. There was Roland, of course. And Griffin Ball, myself, Professor Gori—he’s the head of the mathematics department at the University of Siena—”

  Dante nodded noncommittally. He’d gone to school with Leonardo Gori’s daughter, Raffaella. They had even had an unmemorable night of sex together years ago. The last time he’d seen her she’d gained thirty pounds and had three kids. She’d looked happy, though. Dante shunted that thought aside the moment it popped into his head.

  “Oh, and we usually have Evan Myers from the University of Middlesex in England, but he’d emailed to say he’d be arriving only on the day of the conference itself. Roland was particularly upset at that—Evan does a lot of the administrative work leading up to the conference and that meant Roland was going to have to actually do something himself.”

  “So, if I’ve got this straight, Professor Kobbel, at dinner last night at the Certosa, there was you, Professor Kane, Griffin Ball, Faith Murphy and Professor Gori.”

  Madeleine Kobbel nodded.

  “And what was the atmosphere like at the dinner table?”

  She frowned. “Atmosphere?”

  “Yes. What did you talk about?”

  “The upcoming conference mostly. Professor Gori asked about our flight and we also discussed what remained to be done before the opening session. There is a great deal of hard work that goes into organizing a conference such as ours. And this year we have people coming from as far away as Japan. The Quantitative Methods Seminar is very well known in our field.”

  “Were there any disagreements amongst the diners?”

  “If you’re intimating that one of us stood up, screamed ‘I hate your guts!’ at Roland and then left the table, only to slip a knife in his heart later, well…no. There was nothing like that. Roland was his usual unpleasant self, but we’re all used to that. And he’d had so much to drink on the flight over and during dinner that he wasn’t too cogent anyway. I hardly noticed when he excused himself from the table and left.”

  “How soon after did you leave, Professor Kobbel?”

  Hello. Unexpectedly, she blushed. It was fascinating to watch a young girl’s blush steal over the features of a more than mature woman.

  “I—ah, actually, now that I come to think about it, I must have left soon after him. It was after 10:00 pm and I’d had a hard day. I was jet-lagged and we’d already made plans with Professor Gori to meet the next day. So when Roland left, I thought that could be my cue to leave, too.”

  “You left soon after him—or with him, Professor?”

  “After. I could hear his footsteps ahead of me. Are you familiar with the layout of the Certosa, Commissario?”

  Dante nodded his head. He’d once come very close to losing his virginity at the Certosa before it had been restored. He still had fond memories of the abbot’s cell.

  “Well, as you know, there’s an arcade around the central courtyard. The rooms assigned to us are on the other side of the cloister from the refectory. I followed Roland around the cloister and up the stairs, but then our ways parted. My room was along the northern corridor and his was along the eastern side.”

  “So, the two of you didn’t talk on your way up to the cells?”

  “Why on earth should we? We’d spent almost twelve hours traveling together and w
e’d just had dinner together. And I repeat, he’d had so much to drink he wouldn’t have made much sense anyway.”

  Dante watched her for a moment. She hadn’t answered the question, but she didn’t have that cagey look of a witness who’d lied and got away with it.

  “So you retired…when, Professor Kobbel?”

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling, reflecting. “Well, I guess it must have been about a quarter past ten. I was in bed by 10:40. I remember looking at my alarm clock before turning out the light.”

  “Did you happen to hear anything unusual during the night?”

  “No, nothing. As I say, I was jet-lagged and I’d…ah…taken a melatonin pill to sleep better. I woke up around a quarter to eight and went downstairs for breakfast an hour later. It was around ten when I heard the news that…that something had happened to Roland.”

  A long, thin something. Plunged straight into Roland Kane’s heart. Dante changed tack.

  “So, I guess we can sum up by saying that you saw nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing. Am I correct?”

  A corner of her mouth lifted. “Put that way, Commissario, I sound guilty as hell. But actually, that’s the way it is. You’ll find the same holds true for the others as well. We were all tired from a long journey, we all had dinner together and we all went to sleep afterwards.”

  “Except one of you got up later and killed Professor Roland Kane.”

  Madeleine Kobbel started. “Well, ah—” she stammered. She shook her head sharply. “Surely it doesn’t have to be one of us who—who killed Roland? Surely it could have been—I don’t know…one of the staff perhaps? An outsider who sneaked in? Why one of us?”

  He sighed. “Because, Professor, ninety percent of homicides are committed by someone the victim knows. This year a new company won the contract to cater the conferences at the Certosa. The staff started in April of this year and they had never met Professor Kane—or any of you for that matter—before.