Murder in Chianti

by Camilla Trinchieri

  She had died fourteen months ago, and her face, her voice were beginning to fade. He missed them both.

  OneWag sniffed the air loudly and dropped into a crouch with a low growl. Nico heard footsteps and tucked OneWag under his arm. “Shh. No acting out on holy ground.”

  “‘Bella, dolce donna.’ A beautiful inscription.”

  Nico turned around to see who had spoken.

  The woman noticed the startled look on his face. “Please forgive me.” She offered her smile. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your thoughts. I simply want to thank you for giving me a much-needed ride on Monday. Remember?” She held out her hand. “Maria Dorsetti.”

  He shook the offered hand. “Nico Doyle.” He didn’t mumble this time. “Yes, I do remember. You gave me directions to the carabinieri station in Greve.” She had a pleasant face and large, rich brown eyes that kept a steady gaze on him. Today, she was wearing a perfectly ironed pale blue short-sleeved linen suit that showed off her good figure. Nico shifted OneWag to his other arm. Making conversation with this attractive woman in front of Rita’s grave embarrassed him.

  “The meeting went well, I hope.”

  Was she just making conversation, Nico wondered, or was she the meddling kind? “The maresciallo is a very nice man,” he offered as an answer as he nervously stroked OneWag.

  “Of course he is. We depend on him and his men to keep us safe. I’m sorry we are meeting again in such a sad place.” Actually, though, she considered it a happy event. There was a gentleness, a childlike lost quality to this man that had attracted her right away. American men had a reputation for being kind, she’d read somewhere. She’d been foolish enough to hope she would spot him over the weekend among the hundreds of people at the Chianti Expo, perhaps share an espresso with him later to counter all that wine tasting. Or even a meal. Her other widowed friends had told her often enough that she was foolish to hope their lives would change, but as Ungaretti concluded in a sad poem she studied in school, she had never been so coupled to life.

  “I buried my husband here four years ago.” Maria waved to the wall of tombs at the upper end of the cemetery. Four rows of loculi that looked like filing cabinets. “My inscription isn’t as loving as yours. Just his name and the years he lived.”

  OneWag squirmed against Nico’s grip.

  “I see your dog has gotten impatient. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” She stepped closer. He inhaled her scent and recognized it as sandalwood mixed with something else. Tilde had given him a box of sandalwood soap at Christmas. He found the smell comforting.

  “Goodbye, Signor Doyle. Maybe we will meet at one of the wine stands this weekend. I’m going on Friday when it opens at eleven. I like to watch the people flowing eagerly into the piazza.” The crowd’s chatter and laughter getting louder with one wine tasting following another lifted her spirits. “Podere San Cresci offers very good wine.”

  “Thank you for the tip,” Nico said. He understood that she was giving him the opportunity for a date. Maybe after four years, she had put grief aside.

  Maria hesitated for a moment. When Nico added nothing, she lowered her head and walked away.

  OneWag yelped. Nico had been holding him too tight. “Stop it!” He loosened his grip and bent down on one knee. With his free hand, he fidgeted with the aster plant. Months after it had become clear that he and Rita would never have children, he’d brought home a hairy ragamuffin of a mutt from the ASPCA, a dog he’d instantly taken to. Rita had burst into tears and asked him to take it back. She couldn’t accept a substitute for the child they could not have. And she wouldn’t adopt a child, for reasons he was never able to understand.

  He held up OneWag close to the gravestone. “Look what found me, Rita. He needs a home.”

  FIVE

  Daniele’s motorbike zoomed into the parking lot at the station just as Perillo got out of the Alfa Romeo. He acknowledged his superior with a curt nod. Perillo supposed his words about Rosalba turning him into hamburger meat still stung.

  “Ehi, Dani, I’m going for a coffee.” He knew he’d been a little rough. “Come on, my treat.” When he’d been stationed in Naples, he’d never had to pay. Cafés and restaurants were only too glad to see him scare the pickpockets away. Tuscans weren’t as generous. They also didn’t have as many pickpockets.

  Daniele shook his head. A coffee or a fruit juice wasn’t going to do it. “I’d better see if any messages have come in. We’ve been gone a while.”

  Perillo pointed a finger at him. “Good thinking. I’ll be fast.”

  When Perillo walked into the bar next to the station, he was greeted by the grumpy bartender with a torn rotator cuff thanks to thirty years of making espressos. “What’s the count so far?”

  “Eight, maybe.”

  “How about a glass of milk?”

  Perillo snorted. “You want to kill me?”

  “Caffeine will kill, not milk. Caffeine and cigarettes.”

  “If everyone stopped drinking coffee, you’d be out of a job. I need the jolt. I’ve got a big one on my hands.”

  The bartender put the espresso cup on the counter and took the euro Perillo gave him. “This isn’t like the last one, eh?”

  “Nothing like it.” He’d solved the other murder in two days. An Albanian had stabbed another Albanian to death over a woman. Back in the late nineties, the Albanians had poured into Italy, fleeing the war in their homeland. Most had come with good intentions. A few less so. An Italian thief Perillo had sent to jail several times had come into the office to announce he was changing careers because the Albanians had taken over his territory. There was nothing politically incorrect about admitting it was a fact. People stole when they couldn’t find work. There was work here in the vineyards, in construction. They were hard workers. The Africans were still coming too, but too many drowned en route. Now the government wasn’t allowing them in. How could anyone turn desperate people away?

  Perillo drank his espresso in one gulp, raised his hand in salute to the bartender and walked out, jabbing a cigarette in his mouth. He was about to light it when his phone rang.

  “Are you coming back?” Daniele asked.

  “After I smoke a cigarette.” The carabinieri stations were now smoke-free by order of some high-ranking health nut. “Why?”

  “There’s news.”

  “I’ll be there.” He shoved the cigarette back in the pack and hurried back to his office.

  Daniele sat by the phone at his desk, next to his computer, his face beaming with excitement.

  Good news, then, Perillo sensed, and felt his stomach do a tarantella step. “Yes?”

  “The Avis car rental company from Florence just called and said one of their cars was supposed to have been returned yesterday. The employee remembered that the man who rented it said he was going to Radda in Chianti.”

  “Did you get the name?”

  “Yes, and the make and license plate number.” Daniele took his time looking over his own note. “A metal-gray Fiat Panda, license plate SI 182144.”

  Daniele was certainly getting back at him. “Name, please.”

  “Robert Garrett.”

  Mother of God and all the saints! An American. Not their dead man. Perillo threw down his car keys on the desk and sat down. He turned to face Daniele, whose desk was in the back of the room, where his keyboard tapping was less noisy, allowing for Perillo to think, which he felt compelled to do at times. “What do they want from us? To look for their car when we’ve got a murder on our hands and the substitute prosecutor calling any minute to ask why we haven’t solved the case yet? Tell Avis they’re going to have to send their own people looking.”

  “Substitute Prosecutor Della Langhe called while we were in Radda. Do you want to hear the message?”

  “Not on an empty stomach. Give me the short version.”

  “He expects you to
call him first thing tomorrow morning. Tonight he has a gala at Palazzo Vecchio and can’t be disturbed.”

  Perillo looked up at the ceiling and silently asked if a kind God would send him some good luck for once. “How long has it been since we found the man? Twenty-eight hours?”

  Daniele looked at his watch.

  “Stop that, I don’t need to know. It’s been no time at all, and already Count Roberto Della Langhe or whatever his title is wants results. All we’ve got is how much the bracelet cost and that a Tuscan with a weathered face bought it.”

  “A Tuscan who wasn’t wearing an expensive watch. Maybe he bought the bracelet for somebody else?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Fourteen hundred euros is a lot of money. Maybe the dead man hired this man to buy the bracelet for him because he didn’t want anyone to know about it. It could also explain what he was doing in the woods so early in the morning.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Maybe he was meeting someone and didn’t want to be seen.”

  That made sense. “Wait a minute. Are you saying this Robert Garrett who was going to Radda in Chianti and didn’t return his car might be our dead man?”

  “The technicians confirmed that the victim’s clothes were American brands. According to Avis, Garrett’s passport said he’d come from California.”

  AP, the only legible letters on the blood-soaked T-shirt. “Napa Valley is in California,” Perillo exclaimed with a quick burst of excitement.

  “Exactly! The ‘AP’ on his T-shirt. And gold shoes. Maybe he was from Hollywood. I’ve read that movie people love glitter.”

  Whether the man was from Hollywood or not, his brigadiere, who’d been on the job only six months, was possibly onto something. Why hadn’t he considered that the Tuscan might be a go-between? “I’ll send Dino and Vince to look for the car. Call the other carabinieri stations from Florence to Siena and ask them to help.”

  “I think we should try the roads surrounding Gravigna first.”

  “You think so?” Perillo asked sarcastically.

  Daniele felt his cheeks go hot. “Yes, Maresciallo. He died there.”

  “Indeed he did,” Perillo said. He knew he was being a resentful idiot. “Good thinking, Brigadiere Donato. When you’re finished, come upstairs and we can have lunch together.”

  Daniele shot out of his chair so quickly his chair almost overturned. An invitation to share a meal with his superior upstairs was a first. An honor. Every day, the smells of Signora Perillo’s cooking wafted downstairs to tease his nostrils and make him salivate. “Thank you, Maresciallo.”

  Perillo walked to the door, opened it and waited for Daniele to follow him. “My wife’s made veal involtini stuffed with mushrooms and spinach.”

  Daniele still stood by his chair, his face pale.

  “What’s the problem? You’re not hungry?”

  “I am, but I’m a vegetarian, Maresciallo.”

  Perillo lifted his arms in a sign of resignation. Of course, Daniele the moralist! “So my wife will heat up what’s left of last night’s eggplant parmigiana. No dead animal in that. Now get going. The day won’t last forever.”

  At eight that evening, Nico sat on a bench in the main piazza of Gravigna while OneWag circled the area in search of new scents and what tourist tidbits the pigeons and sparrows hadn’t gotten to yet. The sun had fallen below the hills, but the day’s light seemed reluctant to cede its place to darkness. The old men had gone home. At one end of the piazza, the trattoria was filled with locals and tourists. Lavender-haired Carletta with nails to match was serving the few intrepid tourists who preferred the outside tables despite the cool air. The florist and newspaper shop had closed. Behind the closed glass doors of Bar All’Angolo, Jimmy was mopping the floor while Sandro buffed the long steel counter. The glass balls of old cast-iron streetlamps burst into life just as Perillo stopped in front of the café.

  After his visit to Rita, Nico had gone to Panzano to do some shopping at the small Coop, the nearest supermarket, then gone home and eaten lunch. OneWag got half a can of dog food he barely touched, preferring Nico’s salame. After lunch, Nico had settled on the balcony with the Italian translation of Jo Nesbø’s latest thriller. The dog preferred the sofa.

  Maresciallo Perillo’s request for help kept interrupting Nico’s reading. It left a mark he recognized. The one left by a man in need. A need far lighter than the one the murder suspect in his last case had left on his conscience. Responding to that woman’s need had cost him his job. But he had no regrets. He would do it again. And tonight, he would listen to the Maresciallo, even if Gogol thought the man was bad. Maybe because of it. Finding out made life interesting. Besides, Nico was willing to bet Perillo didn’t hold a candle to some of the men he’d met in his line of work. And if he could help solve the case, why not? He had nothing to lose except boredom.

  “We’re in luck. I nabbed the last table in the garden,” Perillo announced as soon as OneWag settled in the backseat of the Panda and Nico buckled his seat belt. He shifted into first gear. He swung the car onto Route 222, which would take them toward the village of Lucarelli and Da Angela’s restaurant.

  Nico inhaled deeply and was relieved the car did not smell of cigarette smoke.

  Perillo heard the intake of breath. “Ah, no, my wife would divorce me if I smoked in our car.”

  Nico smiled. “Mine was the same. No smoking in the house, either.”

  “We have a balcony.”

  “We didn’t. It was just easier to give it up. Now I’ve gone back to having one or two a day.”

  “I admire your restraint. I love it too much.”

  They both knew they were exchanging easy talk, a warm-up.

  They climbed up a winding road. Perillo drove fast, cutting the curves. It wasn’t dark enough to see oncoming headlights yet, and Nico chose to keep his eyes on the wall of trees whisking by, then the suddenly revealed scenery below.

  “We’ve made some progress. First, the jeweler.” Perillo went into detail about his visit.

  “Do you believe her?”

  “That she sold the bracelet to this man? Yes.” He turned to look at Nico just as the Panda approached another sharp curve. Nico held his breath. “Why would she make that up?”

  “Your brigadiere is very handsome.”

  “Well, I suppose he is,” Perillo conceded, “but with her looks, she wouldn’t have to make up lies, I assure you.”

  It was clear to Nico that Daniele wasn’t the only man smitten by this Rosalba, which didn’t make for clear thinking. “Maybe I’m too cynical.”

  “I didn’t think cynicism was an American trait. It’s an Italian specialty.”

  “It comes with police work. If she’s detail-oriented, a sketch artist will help.”

  “I thought of that, although we may not need one.” Perillo told him about the missing car rented to an American. He was about to go into Daniele’s theory of a go-between when, just before the umpteenth curve, a car barreled past them with only a few inches to spare.

  Nico’s heart missed a few beats, or so it felt. He’d always been a careful driver. “Stodgy,” according to Rita. “Slowpoke Doyle” in the squad room. “Let’s continue this conversation when we’re not in motion.”

  Perillo laughed. “As you wish. Just remind me never to give you a ride in our Alfa. That one can do two hundred fifty-seven kilometers per hour. I think that’s about a hundred sixty of your miles.”

  “I’ll be sure to remind you.”

  Rosalba looked up from setting the table when she heard the front door. “Ciao, Mamma, I’m in the dining room.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Irene called out as she walked down the hall. The apartment was large and crammed with the heavy, dark furniture Rosalba’s great-grandfather had chosen when he’d bought the building that housed his j
ewelry shop. The other three apartments had been sold to keep the business going during the lean years. The furniture stayed. Rosalba’s mother had tried to sell it, but no one wanted antiques anymore. Italy was going modern.

  “Pina made stuffed zucchini. They’re warming in the oven. How did it go?” Rosalba prayed the trip to Florence had been successful. She needed her mother in a good mood.

  “Florence was a nightmare. I had to elbow my way through Piazza Signorina just to sit down and have a lemonade at Rivoire.”

  “Will he design for us?”

  “It depends on how much I’m willing to pay him.” Irene clicked across the marble pavement in her heels, impeccably dressed in a red silk Valentino dress she’d bought at the Barberino Designer Outlet three years ago. “He showed me some lovely designs he can make in gold, silver and even steel. I don’t see the purpose of having steel jewelry. You might as well put a series of paper clips around your neck and call that jewelry.” She pecked at her daughter’s cheeks. “But de gustibus non disputandum est.” She stepped back and surveyed the T-shirt and pants Rosalba had changed into after closing up the store. “Not attractive.”

  Rosalba puffed out a sigh. She wasn’t in the mood for this. “I was tired. It hasn’t been a good day.”

  Irene’s hand reached down to realign a knife and spoon. Now they lay in perfect parallel. “You didn’t sell anything.”