by Unknown
* * * * *
“They’ve arrested Beth,” said Wilma Kelly.
She stood at the door. Lettie and I were trying for the fourth time to leave for dinner, and if Wilma had been thirty seconds later, she wouldn’t have caught us.
Lettie and I had gone back to the room for Lettie’s room card. Then we returned for my pager. Then, standing at the elevator, I mentioned to Lettie that she was wearing bedroom slippers, and before we could leave the room for the third time, the phone rang. Shirley Hostetter had lost Crystal again.
“I was in the lobby when Beth and Achille came in,” Wilma said. “Apparently, they’d been out somewhere together. Anyway, you remember that Captain what’s-his-name? The one who’s handling the investigation of Meg’s murder? Well, he stepped out from wherever he’d been, I hadn’t noticed him until then, and he had a couple of uniformed men with him, and he said, ‘Elizabeth Bauer Hines, I am arresting you.’ I forget whether he said ‘for the murder of,’ or ‘on suspicion of murder.’”
“I said, “For the murder of whom?”>
“Margaret Bauer, of course.”
Lettie blanched and fell into a chair.
Wilma closed the door behind herself. “Well, my mouth fell open, and Jim’s did too, and Beth, she looked like she was going to pass out. She stared at Achille and her lips were trembling, and he, Achille, looked so helpless. Looked like he wanted to attack the Captain. Protect Beth. Slay the dragon.” Wilma took up an en garde position and brandished an air sword. “But he’d just get himself arrested, too, if he did anything.”
“So they took her away?” Lettie asked. “Did they put handcuffs on her? Please tell me they didn’t.”
“No. No handcuffs. They led her out the front doors and left Achille standing there, looking helpless.” Wilma glanced at me, then at Lettie, as if we knew more than she did. “They’ve got it wrong, haven’t they? Beth couldn’t have killed her own sister, could she?”
“Of course she didn’t,” Lettie and I said together.
“Does Tessa know about this?” I asked. “Does Joe Bauer know?”
Wilma shrugged.
I called Tessa’s room, Beth’s room and Joe’s suite.
No answer.
Wilma ran off to spread the news to the other members of the group, while Lettie and I dashed out and snagged the first taxi we saw.
“To the caserma,” I said.
* * * * *
I don’t know why I expected to find an inflamed mob at the caserma, but as our cab careened through the narrow streets, I imagined myself elbowing my way through a raucous throng of newsmen in loud ties with press cards stuck under their hatbands. Notepads, pencils, and microphones flying around. “Can you give us a quote, Mrs. Lamb? Did she do it? Did she kill her sister, Mrs. Lamb? Did she kill both of her sisters?” I forgot that Beth was not famous, and neither was I. To the Florence press, this was not the big story of the summer.
In fact, the reception area was as quiet as a lead-lined tomb. Once we had swallowed hard and marched brazenly past the Uzi-packing sentry at the door, Lettie and I found no one awaiting us but a small, uniformed man engrossed in his computer screen and Achille, sitting alone by the far wall, wringing his poor cap into a trapezoidal shadow of its former self. He jumped up when he saw us.
“Buon giorno,” I said to the uniformed man at the desk. “We are friends of Beth Bauer. I mean, Elizabeth Hines.” It sounded as if I didn’t know who I was a friend of. It didn’t matter anyway; he just looked at me blankly. “Can we see her?” I asked.
“No,” the man said.
“We brought her something she has to have,” Lettie said.
She would be in big trouble if he asked her what that was. I wondered if I could pass off a bottle of Advil as medicine she would die without. Fortunately, the man showed no interest in what that something was. In fact, he showed no interest in us at all.
Achille walked meekly to the desk. “So queste donne. Posso spiegare?” And to us he said, “Beth is back there.” He pointed down the hall to the left of the reception desk. “They are asking her questions. Tessa is with her, but they will not let anyone else go back.”
The front door banged open and Joe Bauer thundered in.
What sort of man walks past a soldier with an Uzi—in a foreign country, yet—and acts like he owns the place?
“Where’s my sister?” he demanded. “You’ve got my sister and I want to see her. Now!”
The man behind the desk threw his chair backward and stood up to his full height, which was still an inch shy of Joe Bauer’s chin.
“Uh, oh.” Lettie muttered.
Sometimes I amaze myself. I guess it comes from staring down a few Rottweilers and evading a few suspicious men at bus stops when my kids were little, but I’m good at handling potentially dangerous situations like this one. I held out my hand to Joe and oozed, in my best old Virginia accent, “You must be Beth’s dear brother, Joe. I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Dotsy Lamb.”
He, of course, had to shake my hand, and that gave me an opportunity to lead him away from the desk and whisper, as if we were old and trusted confidantes, “They’re not going to let us back there right now, but if you don’t mind my making a little suggestion—”
“Mrs. Lamb?” Marco materialized halfway down the hall and waved me into his office.
I handed Joe Bauer over to Lettie.
Marco exhaled noisily as he closed the door behind us. He walked to the window, avoiding eye contact, and with his back to me, squared his shoulders.
“Does Beth have a lawyer with her?” I asked.
“I’ve told her she should have one. She needs a bilingual lawyer. Here is a good one.” He turned and scribbled on a memo pad, still avoiding eye contact. “Do not worry. I do not get a . . . a kick-back from him.”
Marco returned to the window. I stayed silent. His back muscles were so tense it made a gap between his spine and his belt.
“I thought honesty was important to you,” he finally said, “but now I find you asked Paul Vogel to send his . . . his goonies . . .”
“Goons,” I muttered.
“His goons snooping in the States, to ‘dig up’ information on Meg Bauer.”
I felt faint, but managed to stay on my feet.
“Dotsy, I have my own people doing that! Legally, too, I might add.” He turned toward me, his face contorted with anger. “How will the persons who are questioned know the difference between my legal investigators and Paul Vogel’s goons?”
“I’m sorry, Marco. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You should have thought of that. It could ruin my whole case.” He put his forearms against the window and lowered his head to the glass. “You visited the florist, did you not? I sent some of my men to Fiorestocana and they tell me two women looked at the order for Beth’s flowers. That was you and Lettie, was it not?”
“Yes.” I wished I could melt into the floor.
“Here’s something you may not know. The phone call Beth says she got from the hotel front desk was never made. She lied about that. Seems you are both good liars.”
“Marco, I never lied to you. I—”
“Get out of my office.”
Somehow, I managed to grab the memo sheet he’d written the lawyer’s name on and stumble out of the office.
Lettie had wisely maneuvered Joe out to the street. I could see them through the glass-paneled front door. Walking outside and handing Joe the memo sheet, I realized there was no way he would use Marco’s name when he called the lawyer. He couldn’t even say the name without spitting.
“Joe,” I said, “I don’t think you’re taking full advantage of what could be a very useful ally.”
“Ally?”
“Yes. Achille.”
Joe snorted. “That little bus driver?”
“That ‘little bus driver’ speaks Italian and English. And he has your sister’s best interests at heart. Beth needs a lawyer, and it only makes sense if Achille hel
ps you make the call. He has a cell phone.”
Tessa popped out the door, pushing her hair back from her face. “Break time,” she said. She took Lettie’s hands in her own. “I’m so sorry, Lettie. I would have told you about the arrest, but I didn’t know about it myself.” Dropping Lettie’s hands, Tessa said, “Anybody want a soda?”
“I’m going back to the hotel,” I said quickly, before I broke into sobs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I walked back to the hotel alone, but I don’t remember the first part of the trip. I don’t remember anything until I passed the corner where Marco and I had stopped for ice cream the night before last. The shop was filled with lovers. The sidewalk was filled with lovers, too. I was the only person out that night who wasn’t with a lover.
And the worst of it was that Marco was r>
I couldn’t think of any out-and-out lie I’d told him, but that was beside the point, wasn’t it? Omitting the whole truth is as bad as lying. I had warned my kids about the sins of omission, told them to be forthright and open. If you want people to trust you, you must be trustworthy, I had said. I was a fraud.
The night I found out my husband was having an affair, I had screamed, “Our marriage isn’t wrecked because I found out. It was wrecked the minute you started lying to me.”
He had looked at me with a straight face and said, “I never lied to you. I never told you I wasn’t having an affair. You never asked.”
And I had told him it was the same thing, and it was.
As I dragged myself to the main entrance of the Hotel Fontana, Lettie’s cab pulled up alongside the curb. “There you are,” she said, stating the obvious. “Want to get some dinner? We haven’t eaten yet, you know.”
“I’ve lost my appetite,” I said. “I’m going up to the roof.”
“Want some company?”
“Sure.”
On the elevator ride up, I told Lettie what had happened. As I stepped out, I focused on the floodlit Duomo. It seemed to float on waving streaks of light. In truth, it was lamplight drawn out into long slanting beams by the film of not quite tears between my eyes and the city.
Lettie said, “I’m sorry, Dotsy. I know it hurts.”
“My own fault.”
“I was in on it, too.”
“Don’t try to share the blame, Lettie. This is all my fault. Why did I have to be so sneaky?”
“You had to be sneaky because if you’d told him what you wanted to do, he’d have told you not to.”
Lettie edged over to the south side of the roof. Since that would have put me in the same spot where Marco and I had stood last night when he kissed me, I didn’t follow her.
“When I left the caserma,” Lettie said, “Achille and Joe were calling that lawyer, the one on the piece of paper you gave Joe.”
Gradually, Lettie moved back toward me. As she did, she said, “Tessa told me about what the girl at the reception desk said to Captain Quattrocchi. What do you think, Dotsy? Beth wouldn’t have made it up, would she?”
“Whatever happened with the message, the flowers were real enough. She did get them from that florist, and they really were from Meg. They were charged to Meg’s credit card.” I caught myself. They were charged to her card, but did that mean they were from her. If the order had been called in, anyone who had access to Meg’s card number and expiration date could have charged them to Meg’s card. Beth would have certainly had that access/dit I didn’t feel like mentioning this to Lettie.
“What about Gianni? Tessa said she didn’t know him.”
“Surprised me,” I said. “It’s not strange that a man would see a girl walking through a lobby and say to himself, ‘I have to meet that girl.’ It happens sometimes. I suppose he saw Amy, saw her talking to Tessa and Cesare, and struck up a conversation with Cesare as a way to get an introduction.”
“Yes, and Amy was very beautiful, so I guess it wasn’t that strange.”
“But as long as we’re looking under rocks to see what crawls out, we may as well imagine that he could have had other motives.”
“You mean that, from the beginning, he had ulterior motives for getting together with her?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” I pulled out a plastic chair from one of the tables and sat, but that was a mistake. Enough dew had collected on the chair to wet the back of my slacks. “Oh, hell.” I retrieved a handkerchief from my bag and wiped down the chair, but it was too late for my slacks. “Let’s go back to the room,” I said.
As Lettie slipped her room card into the slot, I thought I heard a guitar. “Wasn’t Shirley looking for Crystal a while ago?” I asked.
“Two hours ago, at least.”
“You go inside, Lettie. I’ll check on Shirley and Crystal.”
Their room was roughly above ours but one floor up, and the guitar music was indeed coming from their room. Crystal opened the door, guitar in one hand, and said that Shirley was in the shower, but everything was cool. She seemed a bit peeved about her mother calling us.
“Lovely music, Crystal,” I said. “And I loved what you played at the memorial service. Where did you get the guitar?”
“Rented it. I have to take it back tomorrow morning.”
My purse felt too light. As I walked back down the hall, I peeked inside. My wallet was missing. My first thought was that I had been victimized by a pickpocket. We’d all been sensitized to that ever-present threat. My second thought was that if my wallet had been snitched before I visited the roof, I would have noticed the weight difference before now. I decided not to panic until I looked on the roof.
Taking the elevator back up, I found the wallet lying beside the chair I had briefly sat in. It had probably fallen out of my purse when I retrieved the handkerchief. I picked it up and sat for a minute, letting the breeze play with my hair.
What did my list of suspects look like now? I had revised it the other night, based on new information, but now things had changed again. It seemed to me that I had quit thinking about Shirley, Wilma, or Victoria as possibilities, and yet nothing about their status had changed. They were still possibilities. Jim Kelly was out, however. Marco said there was a tape of his phone call to the U.S. Agriculture Department, and that he had been on the phone during Meg’s murder. I never had considered Geoffrey Reese-Burton as a possibility—or Victoria either, for that matter—andI still didn’t. What about Crystal? I shuddered to think of one so young . . . no! She was responsible for Ivo’s release. If she had done the deed herself, she’d hardly have gone running in with the evidence that cleared Ivo.
Gianni and Cesare were now on my list, and I had no more idea than a goat where either of them had been when Meg was killed. They could have been anywhere, including the third floor of the hotel. Cesare could have been acting on Mafia orders, or something like that, and Gianni—who knows? Was there an ulterior motive behind his introduction to Amy?
Marco popped into my head, and I pushed him out. Was this it for my love life? Was this the way it would be for the rest of my life? What were the chances I’d be kissed by a man again, ever? On the other hand, I hadn’t come to Italy looking for romance. If I’d never met Marco, I wouldn’t have thought there was anything missing from my vacation. I certainly didn’t need a man in my life.
What hurt was that he had been right and I had been wrong. Not only wrong from his viewpoint, but from my own. What had compelled me to play super-sleuth? Was it my own hatred of lies? The importance, to me, of finding out the truth?
My mind flashed back to Marco’s face when he ordered me out of his office. It was frightening how furious he’d looked. The veins had stood out on his temples. But that was the Italian temperament, wasn’t it? Hot one minute, cold the next? Even when we ate ice cream together, he’d changed from sullen to cheerful in an instant.
I stood up, shook myself back to the present, and stumbled sideways. My heart pounded in my ears. To steady myself, I grabbed the iron railing with my hands. I felt dizzy, an unpleasant sort of d
izziness, like seasickness.
In the parking lot below and to the right of the fountain, a girl ran across to meet a man in dark clothing, with his collar turned up and his cap pulled down low on his face. Obviously, he was waiting for her. Seated on a low wall at the edge of the lot, he stood up as she approached. The girl was Tessa. The flowered dress and clunky shoes were the same clothes I’d seen her wearing at the caserma earlier. In the dim half-light of the lamp posts, colors were mostly shades of blue, and spots danced before my eyes, but Tessa’s mop of curls, the flowered dress, the clunky shoes, the way she ran—it was definitely Tessa.
She couldn’t have exchanged more than two sentences with the man. She handed him an envelope, turned, and ran back the way she had come. The man opened the envelope and appeared to check its contents. He watched her retreating figure for a minute, then ambled—almost a swagger, it seemed—to his car. I was about to throw up, but through waves of nausea, I strained to get a good look at the car. It looked like a Fiat, but I couldn’t determine the color. Everything in the parking lot looked blue.
I strained to see the license plate, but the front end of the car, the end facing me, was in shadow. It could be Gianni. There was nothing about him that couldn’t be Gianni, but with the cap, I couldn’t see his face at all. On the way to the Uffizi gallery today, Lettie and I had remarked on how many Fiats there were; far more than in America. And blue was a common color.
What would Tessa have given to Gianni? What could have been in that envelope? A payoff? A memento? Something to remember Amy by? I couldn’t think. In a dim sort of way, I realized I needed to get downstairs—to get some sugar. The elevator doors seemed a mile away, but I reached it, somehow, and punched the button. There was only the one button, unnecessarily marked with an arrow pointing down. I waited. Nothing.
I pushed the button again and waited. Sweat beaded up on my forehead. It was hard to estimate how long I had been standing there, or to decide how long I should wait. There was always the staircase. I didn’t think I could make it down the stairs, but at least I could start. Once inside the building, I could yell for help. Would anyone hear me? The stairwell was separated from each floor by a set of double doors, but perhaps someone would be on the stairway—if only I could yell loud enough. My voice, I felt, would be too weak. I weaved my way to the stairwell door, my purse slapping annoyingly against my side as I lurched forward. I grabbed the door and pulled. Nothing. Locked.