by Unknown
“I know. Did you hear Crystal or Shirley say anything?” We stood at the elevator, apparently on our way up to our room without having consciously decided to go there, and I remembered the stationery I hadn’t finished purchasing. I had left the gift shop attendant with both the stationery and ten Euros. It only cost five something.
“Crystal said she found it in a fountain. That’s all I heard.” Lettie walked with me back to the shop. The clerk had my purchase and my change in a bag behind her counter.
Seconds later, another commotion. Two officers barreled in, past the sentry at the side door, with a scruffy man between them. Each had one of the scruffy man’s arms by the biceps, just under his armpits, so he was propelled along with his feet barely touching the polished marble floor. Close behind them was Achille, our bus driver. His face fairly glowed with what looked like self-satisfaction or maybe even pride. They turned the corner, headed for the reception desk, and spun off a breeze thick with the odor of unwashed hair and perspiration as they passed. The former aroma obviously came from the captive man in the middle, whose hair didn’t look like it had ever been washed, but the sweat could have come from all four of them.
The scruffy man wore a dark red shirt with sleeves rolled up, an embroidered vest, and black pants that probably had been chinos at one time. Around his left wrist, a tattooed serpent—green with blood-red eyes, coiled, its fangs in strike position over his pulse. He stumbled along in his dilapidated cross-trainers, saying nothing as the policemen—or more accurately, the carabinieri—growled and hissed at him in bursts of Italian.
“Dotsy! That’s the same man who sold us the little Disney puppets this morning.” Lettie threw both hands over her mouth.
“It sure is.” I would have known that even if my friend with the photographic memory hadn’t pointed it out. I had noticed that snake around his wrist when he was making change for Beth. I wondered if the snake wasn’t a deliberate distraction. While his left wrist flashed around in front of a customer, his right hand could be exploring a purse, pocket or fanny pack. That’s how pickpockets worked, I had heard. Like a magician, they divert your attention away from the real action. “And I’d say he’s almost certainly the one who took Beth’s money and cards.”
“Oh. You might be right.”
“Of course I’m right.” I hadn’t meant for that to come out sounding quite so arrogant, but I didn’t think it was worth amending.
The desk clerk picked up a phone and, within a few seconds, Captain Quattrocchi strode across the lobby. He glanced all around, as if searching for another door to stuff these new guys behind. Achille saw us and sent us a little wave with the fingers of one hand.
The elevator door opened and closed, but Lettie and I stayed where we were. I couldn’t leave right now. Quattrocchi dashed back to the interview room, leaving the four men at the desk. The scruffy man—the Gypsy/puppet vendor—stood stiffly, eyes darting from left to right as if he was looking for a chance to make a run for it. Then Crystal and Shirley emerged, minus the plastic bag, and Quattrocchi waved the four men in.
I called the elevator back and held the door open for Crystal and Shirley.
Crystal looked uncertainly at her mother. “Do you think it’s okay for us to go to our room? He said he needed to talk to us some more.”
Her words were polite enough, but her tone held that contemptuous insolence only a teenage girl could convey. She might as well have said, “Only an idiot would make me go to my room.”
“Crystal found the knife in a fountain in front of that church by the train stationn she . . . when she left a little while ago.” I imagined that Shirley had started to say “ran away” and changed it to “left.” The church she referred to had to be Santa Maria Novella, which I knew was close to the northwest corner of our hotel. “She said it was just lying there . . .”
“It was just there! All shiny, and like, you couldn’t miss it. Like, I knew immediately it was the knife we had on the bus yesterday, and I thought to myself, ‘I guess I should just leave it there and call the police.’ But then I thought, ‘what are the chances it’ll still be here when I come back with the police?’ Zero, right?” Crystal nodded and looked around as if for confirmation that the knife would have been taken if she had left it there. She had a good point.
“So I found this plastic bag, and I had to step in the fountain with one foot to reach the knife.” She kicked up one wet boot that looked as if it was made of some material that wouldn’t be affected by battery acid, let alone water. Above the boot was a soggy black-and-white striped stocking that sagged below her knee. “You shoulda seen that man, the Captain, when I walked in carrying that knife! His eyes ‘bout popped outta his head!”
“Crystal, fortunately, has learned to speak quite good Italian. We had an exchange student . . .”
The elevator stopped at our floor. Crystal and Shirley had one more floor to go, so we said goodbye and left them.
As the door closed again, I heard Crystal whine, “Mom . . .” She dragged it out to three syllables that sounded like the first three notes of “Over There.”
Chapter Six
Our dinner was cold. As twilight crept over the city, lights came on and the huge Duomo, to the east of the Hotel Fontana, lit up. We could see the top of it beyond the rooftops from our French doors. I opened them up to the evening air.
“So they must think that Gypsy did it,” Lettie said, stacking the stainless steel plate covers on the desk.
“It would appear so.”
“Do you think he did?”
“Now, Lettie, how should I know? I don’t know any more about it than you do.” I dragged a chair to the table and seated myself in front of the chicken cacciatore. Lettie had arranged everything nicely. “But it is odd, you know. I hate to sound like I’m stereotyping, but this guy is a Gypsy, and they’re infamous thieves.” I paused, not really sure what I did think, quite yet. “If you are a thief, you get used to breaking and entering, taking stuff, getting away without getting caught . . . don’t you?”
“Right.”
“So if you break into someone’s hotel room, you’d have a standard little song and dance you go through if that room turns out to be inhabited, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“You know what? He could have used Beth’s own room card to get in! Didn’t he take her room card ang with her money?”
“Yes, but how would he have known what room or what hotel it was for?”
I grabbed my bag off the floor and scrambled through it for my room card. “It’s just a blank card. It doesn’t have the room number on it. But it does say ‘Hotel Fontana.’ Wait. They gave us the cards yesterday in a little paper sleeve that did have the room number on it, didn’t they?”
“Yes, my card is still in the paper sleeve.”
“You really should toss that, or leave it here in the room, Lettie. They do it that way so in case it gets taken, the thief won’t have your room number.”
“But if Beth left hers in the sleeve . . .”
“Which is possible, after all, you did.”
“I’ll take it out right now.” Lettie retrieved her bag from the dresser, slipped her card out of its paper sleeve, and put the sleeve in the top dresser drawer. “There.”
“So it’s likely he did go to Meg and Beth’s room, or at least came here with the intention of doing so, and then what? See, that’s the part that makes no sense.”
“I don’t see.”
“Say he goes into their room using Beth’s card and finds Meg there. He what, kills her? Just happens to find a lovely collector’s item knife—extra-sharp—lying there, so he grabs it and kills the woman?”
“We don’t yet know if she was killed with the knife.”
“Pretty good odds, wouldn’t you say? The knife sure didn’t belong in that fountain. But whatever she was killed with, it’s the same problem: a career thief, a pickpocket, an artful dodger has ways of getting out of embarrassing situations lik
e that. He’s been through it before.”
“Well, I don’t know . . .” Lettie wiped a wine spill off the table with her napkin.
“If murder was how he dealt with getting caught, there’d be a trail of dead bodies, wouldn’t there?”
“Maybe he’s not in the habit of breaking into hotel rooms. This was a fluke, you know. It wouldn’t be every day he’d get a free pass into a tourist’s hotel room.”
I put the tray of dirty dishes outside our door and suggested we take in the night air on the hotel roof. I had heard it had a lovely view, and I had already noticed the elevator had a button for tetto, which I figured, must mean roof.
Just before we closed the door, the phone rang, and Lettie ran back to get it. “They want me back downstairs. I guess I’ll have to take a rain check on that trip to the roof.”
“If I’m not here when you get back, that’s where I’ll be.” I didn’t feel like staying in the room by myself. I’d already checked out the TV; game shows in a language you don’t know are the ultimate bore.
Lettie, oh good, you are here.” Beth stood in the doorway. She looked so tiny; as if her sister’s death had diminished her. She still wore the same flowered blouse and navy slacks I had last seen her in when she had stood at the elevator, sweating, muttering and swinging that pot of flowers by its rim. Lettie held out her arms and Beth moved into them, letting the tears fall on Lettie’s shoulder. I considered leaving the room because Beth, after all, was just a new acquaintance of mine, and I felt like an intruder on a private moment. But to announce that I was leaving would be an interruption, and to walk out without saying anything would be rude. So I stepped out onto the balcony. From the street below, lights were popping on in all shades, from the amber glow of the sidewalk lamps to the blue-white beam of a Vespa’s halogen headlight. But no neon. I wondered if they had a local ordinance that forbade neon lights, and my common sense said, “Of course they do.” In fact, it probably would be so unthinkable in this city that survives on its medieval heritage that they don’t even have to make it a law. Instant death for possession of a neon device.
“I’m so sorry I have to rush off, but they called me down to the lobby right when you walked in,” I heard Lettie say. “Can we talk when they finish with me? I don’t think it’ll take too long.” She dashed out, leaving Beth standing there.
I said, “I’m going up to the roof, Beth. Would you like to go with me? A little night air . . .”
“Oh. Oh, yes, I’d like that. I didn’t know we had a roof that you could go out on.”
Beth followed me onto the elevator, and I pushed the top button. I had decisions to make and make quickly. Should I mention Crystal finding the knife, and should I mention seeing our Gypsy friend in the lobby? In an official investigation of this sort, I knew it was crucial that witnesses not taint each other’s recollections. Things can get hopelessly bogged down if people start “recollecting” what somebody else tells them. That was obviously why they’d insisted on us all going to our own rooms earlier. But it was Beth’s knife, after all, and it had been found. Did Beth even know her knife was missing? And the man who almost certainly swiped her money and her cards—the man we had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down earlier—was downstairs, or at least had been downstairs a little while ago. Wouldn’t I be remiss if I didn’t tell her? I decided to err on the side of caution and not mention it. The knife and Beth’s other belongings would certainly be returned to her, anyway.
The elevator opened onto a wonderful little patio, but I barely noticed it. For the moment, my breath had been taken away. The Duomo, floodlit from all sides, glowed like a huge Fabergé egg nestled in the carnelian tile rooftops of the city. Rooftops that by day were orange-red had deepened to a rich, dark wine. It was a sight I’ll never forget.
Beth gasped. “Oh my.”
We ventured over to the iron rail at the edge of the roof. Its bars slanted inward at about waist level, so it would be hard to fall off accidentally, and I imagined it was sufficient to thwart the gymnastic efforts of toddlers. At the back of the patio, near the elevator door, was a wet bar, closed down and padlocked. Several metal tables and chairs were scattered around; tables that had a hole in the center for the insertion of an umbrella. The umbrellas, apparently, were stashaway.
“I’m still in shock,” Beth said. She curled her fingers around the protecting bars.
“I’m sure you are. It was you who found her, wasn’t it?”
She paused a moment before she answered. “Yes. It was awful. I just can’t describe . . .”
I stayed quiet.
“She was lying there, blood all over the wall, all over the floor . . . everywhere. Her throat was cut. It looked as if someone had tried to take her head off.”
I shuddered and glanced toward Beth. Her eyes glistened in the reflected light of the Duomo. She quickly turned her head, and still I said nothing; I wanted her to go on without any interference from me.
“She was at the entrance to the bathroom.” Beth sucked a deep breath and went on. “Across the threshold. Her legs were on the tiles, and her . . . the upper part of her was on the carpet. She wasn’t wearing anything but her bra and panties . . . and socks . . . black socks. Like she had been in the bathroom, and . . . Well, Meg usually puts on her makeup at the bathroom sink before she gets all the way dressed. So it looked to me like someone had surprised her, like she heard something and came out of the bathroom to see, and . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So sorry it happened, and so sorry it had to be you who found her.”
“I haven’t got my head around it yet.” She stood silent for another long minute, staring out toward the Duomo as if its womb-like bulk might offer her safe harbor. “Meg was my sister, but she was a hard woman to like.”
“I gathered as much, but Lettie told me you and Meg have shared a house for some time. You must have found a way to coexist peacefully.”
“Oh, well. I didn’t have much choice, did I? My husband—ex-husband—Harvey left me quite suddenly and unexpectedly two years ago. Same old story, another woman.”
“Did Lettie tell you my husband left me last year?” I asked. “Left me for another woman, so I know how you felt.”
Beth nodded and glanced toward me. “I knew absolutely nothing until one day he came home, walked in the house, dropped a note on the hall table, and walked out. I ran to the window in time to see his car pull out, loaded to the gills with all his stuff, and a woman in the passenger seat.”
Hugging herself as if a cold wind had swirled out of her past, she went on. “He had cleaned out our bank account, our 401k, and our savings account. He had cancelled the life insurance, taken the Mercedes, and left me with the Toyota—which, by the way, was uninsured because he cancelled that policy, too.”
“Oh dear. At least I was able to get a decent settlement. And I had my own bank account.”
“Right.” Beth looked down toward her feet.
I hoped she didn’t think I was implying that she was stupid not to have had her own account. I simply wanted to say that she’d had it tougher I had. “You probably didn’t even have enough to pay your household bills.”
Beth nodded. “I had no choice but to move in with Meg. I had to sell the house because I needed the equity. I had a job, with this lawyer, same one I work for now, but it was just part time, and I didn’t make much.” She leaned back and, holding onto the rail like a child, swayed left and right. “My boss is just wonderful. He doubled my salary and put me to work as his personal secretary. Before, I was a receptionist. So I’ve been struggling to get myself in shape financially . . .and now this.”
“From the little I’ve heard from Lettie, it seems you got along with Meg better than anybody else did.”
“I did the best I could, but sometimes . . . in fact, just today, when I went up to the room . . .” Beth stopped, as if she had started a sentence she couldn’t finish.
“You were angry, weren’t you? Was it because of those flow
ers you had?”
“The flowers. Oh!” She hesitated. “The narcissus? What happened was, I got a phone call from the front desk this afternoon. The woman, she had a really thick accent . . . hard to understand. But she said there was an urgent message for me in my mail slot at the front desk. So I rushed down, but it wasn’t urgent at all. It just said, in English, ‘There’s a gift for you at’ this certain florist shop—I forget the name. It said, ‘We tried to deliver it and couldn’t, so would you please pick it up ASAP?’”
“That’s odd. I wonder why they couldn’t deliver it?” As I said it, I remembered seeing a delivery boy with a vase of yellow roses in the lobby earlier today. What kind of gift is it, if you have to go pick it up yourself?
“I don’t know why they couldn’t deliver, but I ran into Tessa, and she said the florist was just down the via Nazionale, so I decided to walk. It turned out to be a hell of a long way, so by the time I got back, I was fuming.”
“At Tessa or at the florist?”
“At the whole thing. I wouldn’t have walked over there at all, but I sort of thought they might . . . might have been from . . .”
“From Achille?”
“Yes,” she said, her gaze darting toward me, “because we had been talking, just last night, about how much I love flowers. Or I thought they could be from Greg, my boss. You can send flowers internationally, you know, with a credit card, and Greg is sweet like that. Or they might have even been from this man I’ve gone out with a few times back home. Anyway, there was no name on the card, but I think they were from Meg. You know what the card said? It said ‘Vanity, vanity.’”
“I don’t understand.”
“The other night when we were in Venice, we were coming back from our gondola ride and . . .” Beth took a deep breath.
I thought I’d save her the embarrassment. “I remember. I was behind you when we walked down the ramp. I heard what she said when you said you had to find a bathroom.”
“About the diaper?”
“Yes.”