by Unknown
“Here’s what we need to do: Forget motives. They’re too confusing, and we’re perpetually discovering motives we didn’t know about before, so it stands to reason that there are yet more motives out there that we still don’t know about.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s go through the list again, and this time try to think exactly where each person was at about five thirty. Marco—Captain Quattrocchi—says he has it narrowed down to a few minutes on either side of five thirty. When we made the first list, we put down where we thought everyone was between four thirty and a quarter to six.”
I found my original list behind an ice bucket, grabbed a clean sheet of paper, and wrote:
Dotsy and Lettie—sitting in front of the elevator on the ground floor
Meg—in her room, getting murdered
Beth—entering, or about to enter, that same room, carrying a pot of flowers
Amy—downtown with Tessa
Tessa—downtown with Amy
Victoria and Geoffrey Reese-Burton—in hotel, having recently taken the elevator
Crystal—outside somewhere
Shirley—outside, looking for Crystal
Dick, Michael, Walter, and Elaine—downtown and together (at least they all came to the parking lot from that direction and they were all together)
Paul—downtown (he came to the parking lot just behind the gruesome foursome)
Lucille—with us, trying to call the elevator down, shortly after Beth’s call came in to the front desk, but neither Lettie nor I saw what direction Lucille had come from
Wilma—outside, but had stopped by Meg’s room before going downstairs
Jim—in his and Wilma’s room
Achille—in the parking lot, by the bus
Ivo—somewhere in the area, perhaps just entering or exiting the hotel
Cesare –?
Gianni (Amy’s new love)—?
After much discussion, Lettie and I agreed we could mark eleven people off the list of suspects: Ourselves, of course; Amy and Tessa, since they could vouch for each other’s whereabouts; Crystal and Shirley, since they had their own little melodrama going; Dick, Michael, Walter, and Elaine, since they were apparently all together (but maybe they weren’t; we needed to check on that); and, of course, Ivo, since he was physically incapable of cutting a throat with his right hand.
We agreed that just because Paul Vogel had approached the group in the parking lot along with the gruesome foursome, it didn’t mean he had been with them at 5:30—a good thirty minutes earlier. Lucille Vogel was not eliminated because we hadn’t seen what direction she had come from, but I suggested it was highly unlikely she could have presented herself, smiling and completely free of blood spatters, only a few minutes after the murder.
“In fact, Lettie, that whole blood thing still bothers me. This would be a messy affair.” I saw the grimace creep down from Lettie’s forehead to her mouth and told her firmly, “Yes, messy.”
She gulped. “If the person was standing behind Meg, wouldn’t the blood have squirted out the other way? Toward the front?”
“I suppose so. But it would have virtually poured out. And blood is under pressure, you know, when it goes up your neck.”
Lettie put her fingers against her own carotid artery and nodded weakly. “It would have gotten all over his or her hands.”
“And I have a great feeling at least some of it would have gotten on the killer’s clothes.”
“So the killer had time to clean up.”
“And the means of cleaning up. I doubt he or she would have hung around in that room to wash up. He or she would have run out immediately. That makes the people who were supposedly in their rooms, or who could have dashed into their rooms quickly, seem most likely.”
“Not really,” Lettie sat up. “If it was Cesare and he left the hotel unobserved, he had hours to clean up. Same goes for Gianni.”
I couldn’t decide if we had made progress or not. Things were still a bit of a muddle, but at least we had eliminated a few folks. “Lettie,” I remembered at last to ask, “who’s in room three sixty-six, across the hall from Beth’s new room?”>
“Walter Everard and Elaine King, the married couple you say aren’t married, and Dick Kramer and Michael Melon are in room three sixty-eight, next door.”
So now I had to find Paul Vogel and make him a proposition.
Chapter Fifteen
Paul and Lucille were both in their room down the hall from us. Lucille had a surprising offer; she wanted to sing at the memorial service tomorrow.
“That would be lovely, Lucille. Thanks,” I said. “Do you have any particular song in mind?
“I like to do the ‘Ave Maria,’ but I’ll ask Beth or Amy if that would be all right, or if they’d prefer something else.”
“Excellent. But I don’t know yet if we’ll have an organist to accompany you. I have a phone number.”
“Fine if you do, fine if you don’t,” she said, heading for the door. “I don’t mind doing it a cappella, if the organist doesn’t work out.” With a toss of her little round head, she was gone.
“Who’s your client, Paul?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who’s paying you to spy on Walter and Elaine?”
“You’ve been watching too much TV.”
I had to give him credit. Paul could stay calm under pressure. He turned to the window. Talking to the back of his head, I said, “When you told me the other morning that you were in security, photography, and location—or whatever euphemisms you used—I should have translated that as ‘private detective,’ right?”
Paul remained in the same position and volunteered nothing.
“I saw you come out of Walter and Elaine’s room a few minutes ago,” I continued. “If you weren’t spying on them, why were you so careful to wipe your prints off the doorknob?”
“You didn’t see me come out of Walter’s room,” he said, turning and facing me. “I’ve never been in Walter’s room in my life.”
“Room 366.”
“Room 366 is Dick Kramer and Elaine King’s room.”
“Is that a fact?” I said, as if I dealt with this sort of stuff every day.
“You asked who my client was. It’s Dick Kramer’s wife. She knows he and Elaine have been having an affair for some time, but she wants proof to improve her position in the divorce she intends to file for.”
“What a lovely job you have, Paul.”
Ignoring my jab, he said, “Kramer’s wife has all the moneyy, he family. She set him up in the furniture business, and if she pulls her money out of it now, Kramer is S.O.L. This, Mrs. Kramer figures, is exactly what he deserves, but she needs to make sure he won’t get enough in the divorce settlement to stay afloat.
“Walter and Michael are gay,” Paul continued. “They stay in the room next door, regardless of what the hotel register says. In order to make his little holiday with Elaine appear to be a business trip with an employee, Dick offered to pay for both Walter’s and Michael’s trips. So Dick Kramer, or Dick Kramer’s business, I don’t know exactly what account he’s using for this, is paying for all four trips.”
“You said ‘an employee.’ Which one is his employee?”
“Walter. He’s a graphic designer, and he works for Dick Kramer’s company.”
It was hard, I found, to rework my concepts of the curious quartet. This meant that I needed to go back over my talk with Dick Kramer in front of the slave sculptures at the Accademia yesterday. Should I simply fill in “Walter” in place of “Michael” in that conversation? The anguish I had seen on Dick’s face—was it from struggling with his conscience? Or was it from being torn between two women? Or from being torn between his business and his true love? Perhaps he had been faking the whole thing, to divert my attention from the fact that Elaine King, not Michael Melon, was coming back from the restroom to rejoin him. I remembered, now, seeing Paul there, too. He had pretended to be engros
sed in a masterpiece that was actually an air vent on the wall.
Why did I keep running into so many cheating husbands?
“Walter and Michael share an apartment in Washington,” Paul said. “As far as I know, this is a free vacation for them. I really couldn’t care less about those two.”
“Have you gotten all the proof you need?” I didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you keep this just between us,” Paul countered.
“You have to insist? The last time I checked, I was in the driver’s seat. I believe I’m perfectly free to tell everything or tell nothing. Can you give me a good reason why I should keep my mouth shut? Or did you intend for me to interpret that word ‘insist’ as a threat?” I prayed that I sounded more intimidating than I felt.
“I could interpret that as a threat!”
I just stared at him with my jaw clamped tight.
“Or,” Paul said, “did you intend it as blackmail?”
“I don’t like the word blackmail. I meant to suggest that, if you could do something for me, we could be more like partners than adversaries.” I sounded, even to myself, like a character in a B movie—that last line should have been delivered with my thumbs hooked under my suspenders.
“I’m listening,” he said.
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“You think she was killed by someone who came here specifically for that purpose?”
“It’s a thought,” I said, and allowed myself a deep breath. Since my entire dissertation on what I wanted had been delivered with one lungful of air, I felt a little dizzy.
“I think you may be right.” Paul jammed his fist into his plaid shorts pockets.
“Why were you asking Lettie and me questions about Jim Kelly and Geoffrey Reese-Burton the other morning? Do you suspect them, or are they having affairs with Elaine too?”
Paul gave me a sidelong glance and the corner of his mouth quivered in what might have been a smile. “I think this murder must have been committed by a man. Quite a bit of strength would have been needed, you know. Meg Bauer was hardly what I’d call a delicate little flower.”
“But a determined woman . . .” I began, then decided to let it go.
“I hate my job,” Paul said. “Most of what I do is stuff like you saw this morning. All-night stakeouts in motel parking lots make you feel like a slime bag.”
“I can imagine.”
“So when I run across a real murder, the kind of thing I used to dream about doing, my radar starts beeping.”
He wiggled his fingers in my face, and I thought about what Lettie had said about my antennae beeping. Were Paul and I alike? God forbid.
“So you want me to put my sources to work,” he clarified, unnecessarily. “It’ll probably take ‘em a couple of days, but I’ll see what I can do.”
* * * * *
Marco Quattrocchi was not a happy man; I could see that from the hand gesture he flung at the hotel manager, a thin young man who couldn’t possibly bow or scrape more humbly than he was already doing. It was dinnertime when Lettie got the call that Quattrocchi wanted to see her in the conference room adjoining the lobby, a call we had been expecting all afternoon. I figured he’d need to interview us all again, in light of today’s developments, so I had gone down with Lettie in the quickly-dashed hope that I might suggest he join us for dinner and interview both of us over our meal. Given the look on his face, I didn’t care to cross him by suggesting anything. He looked as if he was ready to chew nails and spit horseshoes.
Fortunately, Victoria and Geoffrey Reese-Burton passed by just then and asked me to dine with them. I slipped over to the desk to tell Lettie where I’d be, but Marco had her by the arm, funneling her into the conference room, and I just pointed my finger in a roughly outheasterly direction, a gesture that meant nothing much, even to me. Victoria suggested a small restaurant she and Geoffrey had discovered earlier, and we left by the main lobby doors.
In the middle of the ever-revolving row of taxis in front of the hotel was a thoroughly banged-up blue Fiat, and Gianni Diletti sprawled casually behind the wheel. No doubt he was waiting for Amy.
Achille approached the car from the front and slammed his hand playfully on the Fiat’s curbside fender. Gianni sat up as Achille made monkey faces through the windshield at him.
Beth was with Achille. She wore a blue sundress with a white shawl, so it looked to me as if they might be just leaving for a night on the town. As Achille and Gianni clasped hands and exchanged a few jibes, apparently humorous, in Italian, Beth smiled.
Victoria and I asked for another table in the little restaurant because the headwaiter first seated us in the middle of a noisy crowd. Since I normally had a hard time understanding Geoffrey, I knew that it would be impossible under these conditions. The headwaiter found us a table covered with red-and-white checked oilcloth behind a room divider topped with fake plants.
“I understand Crystal has returned bearing information that’s got the Gypsy man released,” Victoria said.
“The Gypsy man has a lame right hand, and the murder, according to the police, was done by a right-handed person.” I told them all I knew about the adventures of Shirley and Crystal. “Have you heard for sure that he’s been released?”
“Tessa says they let him go.” Victoria realigned her cutlery, a mildly irritating quirk, especially since, most of the time, she only moved it a millimeter or two. “I’ve been wondering if Shirley would think it too strange if I asked Crystal to go with me to San Gimignano one day,” she said. “To the medieval torture museum.”
I must have gasped audibly, because Victoria quickly added, “Here’s my reasoning. I already told you it’s an area of interest for me because of my bookshop. I like to stock what sells, and I’ve learned that people don’t want to know about the clean air and verdant woodlands of medieval times. They want to read about the gore. Man’s inhumanity to man. Of course, there are things going on today that are as bad or worse than anything they thought of back then, but people are blind to that.”
I nodded and said, “Teenagers, especially, faced with the reality of growing up and dealing with the hard, cruel world—leaving the cozy simplicity of childhood—are drawn to the dark side of man’s nature. That’s part of the fascination they have for the Gothic thing: vampires, the occult, witchcraft.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” Victoria seemed delighted that I understood. “I think perhaps they actually need to deal with the dark side of life.”
“Maybe you should talk to Shirley, first. Right now, she’s just glad to have her little girl back, with hair that’s faded down to a medium pink.”
“Right. She probably doesn’t want to take any chances, but I found out there’s a bus one can take from Florence to SanGimignano. It’s not a long ride.”
Geoffrey said nothing until the meal was almost done. He seemed enclosed in his own world, but when our coffee arrived, he finally spoke up. “So no-ow we haaf a real mystery on our hands.”
“Have you a solution?” I asked.
“A lot of people had motives, I think.” Geoffrey harrumphed a couple of times. It seemed to me he was making a concerted effort to speak clearly, each word emerging from his mouth in its own little package. “And a lot of us could have had the opportunity, too.”
“Geoffrey and I talked about it. It must be someone in our group. Don’t you think it had to be?” Victoria peered at me over her glasses.
“If we include Cesare and Gianni in our group,” I said.
“Gianni?”
“Amy’s new love. I have no reason to suspect him, but Lettie and I were talking about it this afternoon and we decided to put him, and Cesare, on our list of suspects.” I poured a lot of milk into my coffee. “Lettie and I decided we could scratch you and Geoffrey off the list, and Amy and Tessa, people we know were together at the time of the murder and can vouch for each other.”
“Can’t
do that,” Geoffrey said. “What if the two are in it together?”
“Oh, dear. Did you have to say that?”
Before we parted, back at the hotel, I reminded Victoria and Geoffrey about the memorial service tomorrow morning at 10, and Victoria suggested that a shared taxi to the church might make sense since it was a twenty to twenty-five minute walk.
“If we leave here by cab about thirty minutes before, we should be in plenty of time,” I said.
“See you half-nine, then,” Geoffrey said, as he turned toward the elevator.
Half-nine. Funny, the way the English say things. Half-nine. Nine-thirty.
I liked half-nine better. It sounded . . . pithier.
* * * * *
There was a bar tucked in beside the restaurant off the lobby, and I saw Tessa at a table by herself. She looked exhausted and defeated, clutching her drink glass in both hands. “Mind if I join you?” I asked.
“Please, do,” she said. “I’ve been given a brief reprieve. Captain Quattrocchi is interviewing Achille right now, so my translating services aren’t needed—for a few minutes at least.”
“I thought Achille was out with Beth.”
“They’re back,” Tessa said. “I think you may be next, Dotsy. He has to talk to everyone again, you know, and this time he’s going into more depth. Has to.”
“Has Ivo definitely been released?”
“Yes, but Quattrocchi didn’t let him go until about two hours ago. He didn’t want to at all, but he had to. The coroner, the prison doctor, and every medical authority Quattrocchi could find tried to trick Ivo into using his right hand. Quattrocchi grilled the coroner for an hour, and the prison doctor examined Ivo’s hand six ways from Sunday.”
“Apparently there’s no way he could have killed Meg with that knife,” I said.
“Apparently.” Tessa retreated into silence, and I asked the waiter for a cappuccino. He didn’t seem to understand me, even after I repeated it two more times. Tessa lightly touched my hand and muttered, “They never drink cappuccino after dinner. It just isn’t done.
I changed my order to an espresso, remembered I’d already had enough caffeine—an espresso would have launched me into orbit for the rest of the night—and finally settled on a glass of wine.