by Unknown
“You’re making my head spin, Dotsy.”
“Lettie,” I said, buttering a croissant, “supposing Amy was murdered. Can we assume the murder was committed by the same person who killed Meg?”
“No, I don’t think we can.”
“But then we’d be talking about two murderers occurring in one small group. That sort of defies the laws of probability, doesn’t it?”
“Not if Amy was the one who killed Meg, and somebody found out and sought revenge by killing Amy.”
“Okay, that’s possible. But wouldn’t it make more sense to give whatever proof you had to the authorities?”
“Not if you had no confidence in the Italian authorities. Not if you had a personal reason for not wanting your evidence to become known. Not if you just lost control of your anger. Not if—”
Stop. I forgot to take my ibuprofen. I really do have a headache, and you’re making it worse.” I shook two pills from my little bottle and swallowed them with orange juice. “I lean toward the one killer hypothesis, myself,” I said.
“One killer with one motive, or one killer with two motives?”
“Good question. You do amaze me sometimes, Lettie. It could be either, couldn’t it? Perhaps he or she killed Meg for whatever reason, and Amy discovered the killer’s identity. Amy could have been murdered to keep her from talking. But your idea about Amy killing Meg and someone killing Amy for revenge won’t work. We already know that Amy couldn’t have killed Meg because she and Tessa have given each other alibis, and they have an ATM receipt to back them up.” I paused a minute and thought. “Or both Meg and Amy could have been killed for the same reason. They were sisters, after all.”
“I think that’s Captain Quattrocchi’s idea,” Lettie said, “but I don’t buy it.”
We spoke to Elaine, Walter and Michael on our way out. They said they were still undecided about their day’s plans. Walter said he was eager to go to Siena, and Michael concurred.
“I don’t much feel like another bus trip today, especially if we’re going to Rome tomorrow,” Elaine said.
This would allow Michael and Walter a day to themselves, and I saw Michael glance at Walter.
“I’m going to the Ponte Vecchio to look at some gold necklaces in a little while, Elaine,” Lettie said. “Would you like to go with me?”
Elaine appeared startled by the offer. Her head jerked up, and she offered a weak smile, from the lips only. “How nice. Yes, thanks. I’ll walk down with you. Call my room when you’re ready to go.”
I placed my hand on Walter’s shoulder. “I’d like to see the rest of your pictures from the plaza. Could you help me hook your camera up to a computer? I’ll pay for it. If you could download them, I could do the rest myself.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” he said. “Say, nine thirty?”
Assuming the bus departed for Siena at the same time as yesterday, that would give us plenty of time. Especially since we now knew which computer to use.
I left Lettie in our room and carried the borrowed Bible to the front desk. I needed to speak to the girl with the little black curls, because, by process of elimination, I knew she had to have been the one who told Marco she had not delivered any urgent messages last Friday.
Lettie recalled seeing Ms. Black Curls behind the desk, but neither of us remembered seeing her in the group of hotel employees who’d dashed upstairs after Beth called to tell them about the dead body on the third floor. Neither Lettie nor I could recall Black Curls behind the desk Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. If she’d been there, Lettie would have recorded it in her data bank. I can depend on her for things like that.
A night clerk with blonde hair had loaned me the Bible. I didn’t see her. Good.
“Scuzi? Ritorno . . .” I made some deliberately confusing hand gestures while edging toward the swinging half-door at the end of the counter. Just then, I spied the girl I needed, retreating down the narrow hallway behind the desk, and I dashed through, muttering, “Ah, there she is. Un momento. I need to give this to her.”
After explaining to the girl with black curls that this was the hotel’s Bible and I was returning it, I prolonged the conversation with, “I used this Bible for the memorial service we gave for Miss Bauer. Margaret Bauer. You know?”
“Ah, yes.” She adopted a suitably sympathetic expression. “So sorry.”
“You were here the day she died, weren’t you?”
“I was here earlier, but not when the body was discovered.”
“Were you here when Miss Bauer’s sister was called down to the desk? She told me she received an urgent phone call.”
“That is very strange. I was here, but I made no phone call to her room. There was no urgent message. I would remember.”
“Was there any message at all?”
“There was a note in her box. When she came to the desk, she was all . . .” Black Curls puffed her cheeks out and scowled. “She was upset. I gave her the note that was in the slot for her room and she said, ‘This is urgent? This is not urgent.’ Like it was a big deal. Then Tessa D’Angelo, your guide, came over and talked to her.”
So, there had been no phone call, but there had been a note.
I had fifteen minutes to spare before meeting Walter in the lobby, so I hurried up to Paul’s room. Lucille answered my knock.
Damn, how can I talk to him with her here?
“Are you going to Siena, Lucille?” I asked.
“Come in, Dotsy.” Paul pulled a yellow T-shirt over his wet hair, then whacked a pair of socks against the dresser. “I’ve told Lucille about my assignment, so we can talk in front of her. Doesn’t make much difference now, anyway. It seems our man, Dick Kramer, has decided to . . . well, I don’t know what he’s decided, but I have enough stuff on him to write a book. I’m finished.”
Which assignment had he told Lucille about? The assignment given to him by Dick Kramer’s wife, or the one I gave him, the assignment to find out all he could about Meg Bauer’s past? I had already accepted the fact that if his sources back home discovered a connection between Meg and Paul, or Meg and Lucille Vogel, Paul wouldn’t pass that information along to me. Therefore, I might as well talk freely.
“Something Captain Quattrocchi told me this morning makes me think that this may be our last day in Florence,” I said. “Beth and her brother will have to stay, but the rest of us will go, so time is of the essence. What did your rsources back home find out?”
“Have a seat,” Paul said. “I talked to them yesterday. Hospital records and legal proceedings are hard things to get hold of, you understand, but my man thinks he’ll have something on that today. Up to now, the information has come from public records, tax records, talking to nurses. Meg was straight with the IRS. No criminal record, no hard evidence of pilfering drugs. I say ‘no hard evidence’ because Meg Bauer did have a suspicious amount of money for a nurse from an average middle-class home. My sources tell me that, when the bean counters get finished, they wouldn’t be surprised if her net worth doesn’t come to three million, or more. Real estate, municipal bonds, blue-chip stocks. She didn’t get that by clipping coupons.
“The hospital personnel she’s worked with are unanimous. They all say she was a bitch. They all seem to know of one incident or another where Meg was negligent, managed to get somebody else blamed for something she did, made mistakes with medications, or didn’t follow doctor’s orders. But we need names and dates, and that information would be recorded on the hospital records.”
“Which you think your contact will be able to get today.”
“Entirely off the record, of course. Anything we find out from hospital records will have to be kept confidential because it’s strictly illegal. You could use the information to shed light on this murder, but you couldn’t use it in court. You could allude to it if you’re working with Quattrocchi, but you can’t tell him where you got it. Understand?”
I nodded, but other than the possible size of Meg’s estate, he hadn’t told
me anything I didn’t already know.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Poor little Beth shuffled into the lobby between Marco and Tessa. Joe Bauer and a gaunt man—Beth’s lawyer?—followed. I was five minutes early for my appointment with Walter, so I joined them. I told Beth that Lettie was in our room and would love to see her. I asked Tessa about our plans for the day.
“The bus will leave for Siena at ten o’clock and should be back here by three-thirty or so. Then at five we’ll go to the hill country, to Cesare’s party and festival. I’ll join the group for that trip, but not the one to Siena.”
“And tomorrow?”
Tessa looked at Marco, as if asking permission. “Tomorrow we go to Rome. Pack your bags tonight.”
Marco said, “I have your itinerary, if I need you.”
“Ready to do the pictures?” Walter asked, having walked up behind me.
While I rented the good computer, Walter told Marco what we planned to do.
Marco hustled a key from the receptionist and set us up in the small conference room.
As Walter plugged in his camera and clicked on some icons, Marco pulled up a chair beside me. He was so close I could smell his toothpaste.
“Are these in the same order they were taken?” he asked Walter.
“Yes. They’ll include the date and time.”
Walter scrolled through the shots. There were several that preceded the three I had copied yesterday, but only two pictures taken after those. The first was a shot of all of Florence, with the Duomo and the Church of Santa Croce looming above hundreds of rooftops. For the last photo, Walter had apparently swung his camera down and to the west, across the overlook where Lettie and I had been standing. Both pictures were labeled 17:47, so they had been taken in rapid succession.
The last shot showed the top of Lettie’s red hair and the front end of a blue Fiat.
I said, “Wow! Do you see what I see?”
Walter downloaded all the photos from the piazza, unplugged his camera, and left me alone with Marco. I could feel his breath on my neck.
“We can get this blown up,” he said. “We might be able to read the license number, but first let’s make a print of all of the pictures, just in case.”
Marco took the computer with him when he exited. He still didn’t trust me. I’d have to earn his trust. But the smile he gave me was as soothing as a hot cappuccino on a cold winter day.
* * * * *
Jim Kelly was leaving my room when I arrived. He tipped a non-existent hat, then stepped back to let me pass through.
“I expected to find you in bed, recuperating,” he said. “I dropped by to see if there was anything I could do for you and found, much to my amazement, that you’re already out running around. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine. A little embarrassed at having put you all to so much trouble.”
Beth lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and Lettie sat at the desk, her bare feet crossed on top of the morning newspaper.
“Jim and Lettie were catching me up on everything that’s happened since I was so unavoidably detained,” Beth said with a wry grimace.
“But now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies, I have to hurry if I’m to catch that bus.” Jim backed out of the room.
“Jim had an interesting tidbit of information he just happened to throw out,” Lettie said, as soon as the door closed. “While most of us were running around looking for you, Jim saw Cesare in the lobby. Jim spoke to him, but Cesare ignored him and strolled over to the bar next to the restaurant. Jim says Cesare handed Tessa an envelope and left. Didn’t stay for a drink, or anything, as if he was in a big hurry, or he was ticked off.”
“Well, well, the plot thickens,” I said. “Beth, what are your plans for the day? Lettie and Elaine are shopping for gold, at least I think Elaine plans to join Lettie, and I plan to visit the archaeology museum. Any of that interest you?” I figured Beth would be happy to have something touristy to do for a change.
“I’m washing the cigarette smoke out of my hair,” she replied, “and then I’ll take a short nap. I almost had to take up smoking myself last night, in self-defense. But that jail puts out a good breakfast, Dotsy. I have to give them credit for that.”
“Did they treat you okay?”
“Oh, they were quite nice. I can’t complain. But I’m not out of the woods. I can’t leave town, and they’ll probably call me in again.”
“I’ve been downstairs with Walter, looking at the pictures he took up on the plaza. We hooked his camera up to a laptop.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me he took one of Amy.” Beth sat up quickly, her face slack. “I couldn’t bear to see that.”
“No, no. He didn’t. But apparently he shot a picture immediately before Amy fell. Did you say you heard her scream, but didn’t see her fall?”
“That’s right. I walked up those steps and was looking for a water fountain when I heard the scream.”
“Are you sure it was Amy?”
“Yes.”
When Beth left for her room, I thought about her certainty that the scream she had heard was Amy’s. A voice is distinctive, and one would recognize one’s sister’s voice in a normal conversation. But a scream? If you could tell anything more than whether it was male or female, you’d be lucky.
Lettie slid her feet off the desk and tied her shoes. “What do you and Walter think you’ll find out from those pictures? I mean, if he didn’t actually get a shot of Amy falling, what’s the use?”
“We hoped we’d see where the other people were. His camera puts the time on the pictures.”
“Okay, so who can we eliminate from our list of suspects? If we are, as you suggested, looking for one killer, who can we say for sure did not kill Amy?”
“Absolutely nobody.”
“Except you and me.”
“Except you and me.”
* * * * *
chimera (ki-meer-a) n. (pl.-ras). 1. Greek Mythology, a fire-breathing she-monster usually represented as a composite of a lion, a goat, and a serpent..
2. an illusion or fabrication of the mind.
I found a seat near the Etruscan bronze sculpture called the Chimera and studied it. The word itself was strange because I remembered a biology teacher in college using it to refer to something like a hybrid, inferring that it should not even exist. I had seen the famous sculpture in a dozen books, but because I had known, before I left home, that I would be visiting this museum and viewing the real sculpture, I had looked up the word “chimera.”
The statue was beautifully wrought. A lean and hungry she-lion with paws splayed and mouth agape, she had a goat twisting, writhing, emerging from the middle of her back. Her tail was a snake. Like most of mythology, the legend probably grew with time and retelling. Etruscan civilization had always been hard for me to teach, because I didn’t understand it myself. The civilization flourished in Italy, in Tuscany—in fact the word Tuscan comes from Etruscan—before and during Greece’s golden age. Obviously, the Etruscans were influenced by the Greeks, but in my mind, they were strangers while the ancient Greeks were my friends.
This last semester I had taught Ancient and Medieval Civilizations, and was rather proud that enrollment in the course had doubled since I started teaching it. I wanted to give my students their money’s worth.
But the problem with the Etruscans was their writings. A people became “real” to me, like the Velveteen Rabbit, when they spoke to you through their writings. That’s called being historic as opposed to being prehistoric. The Etruscans didn’t write down nearly enough stuff. They used the Greek alphabet, sort of, but we don’t know enough of their words to read what little they did write.
Now I looked around the hall and thought: Speak to me!
But the ancient Etruscans were an enigma. To me, they were an illusion, a fabrication of the mind.
Hey, I thought. Do I perceive a theme here?
A fabrication of the mind brought to mind Meg’s murder. On the face o
f it, we had a number of possibilities and a number of solutions to our mystery, but none of them satisfied. None of them felt right. On the other hand, if there was a satisfying solution, we would have to twist something to reach it. So if I could figure out which assumption or “fact” was false, I could twist it and everything would fall into place.
I could assume with some certainty that the murderer lied. But there were so many people saying “I was here” or “I was there,” if one person lied, the whole thing made no sense.
When I have a problem like this, I find the best thing is to sleep on it and let my mind wander freely around it, but it was a little past noon and I didn’t need a nap. So I wandered around the Museo Archeologico, enjoyed the Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi imported by Leopold II. I bought a little replica of the Chimera and did not think about murder until the museum closed at two.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The bus was hotter than the hinges of hell. Achille had let it sit in the blazing sun in the middle of the parking lot, ever since the Siena group returned. I was the first one there, but changed my mind about waiting on the bus until everyone else arrived, and took up my vigil in the shade of a stone wall. Victoria and Geoffrey Reese-Burton joined me while Achille cranked up the bus’s air conditioner.
“Hop hafstar . . . bisk some, eh?” Geoffrey burbled, as he mopped his brow.
Victoria translated. “He says, ‘I hope they have some starters, biscuits, or something at this party.’ I told him already, I said, ‘You’d better grab a bite of something, because we won’t get back here before half-nine or so,’ I shouldn’t think.”
There was that funny British expression again. “Half-nine.” She meant nine-thirty.
We watched as the group members convened around the bus, but avoided climbing aboard until the last minute. Lettie popped over to show me a gold box-chain necklace she had just bought for her daughter.
“I couldn’t resist,” she said. “The price was too good, at least I think it was a good price, hard to tell, isn’t it? When you go from dollars to Euros, and this is fourteen karat, and they use millimeters instead of inches, it’s hard to tell. I may have paid too much. Oh, look, there’s Beth! Are you going with us, Beth? Oh, I’m so glad.”