by Jeff Carson
Wolf took the photos and looked. There were close-ups of John from every angle. He was covered in small glittering slivers of glass, apparently from the chandelier.
“You can see there, a bar on the chandelier lines up very closely to the bruise on his head.” Vittorio dug for another photo and pointed at the wooden chair that was tipped over, five feet from John’s dead form. “I am not completely sure, but I feel the chair was kicked out from under him with a spasm, which could have began the process-a of the chandelier falling.” He flipped to another photo. “And here is a close-up of his right nostril, with cocaine residue.”
Wolf smiled humorlessly. “You don’t think this is grounds for ordering an autopsy? That seems like a very manufactured explanation of his death. What if the bruise was caused by someone else?”
The pathologist looked at Wolf with a look that said it all. “It is not my decision, but in my opinion, I think it could go either way. But we have other pressures here-a, Officer Wolf. Your brother was not a resident here, and the Comune pays for the autopsy — ”
“The Comune?” Wolf asked.
“Yes, the municipality, I think you say?”
“Okay, I get it. You guys looked at the whole scene with worry about money? Jesus Christ, that’s some bullshit.” Wolf shook his head in disbelief, but also knew full well the same thing could happen if a foreigner showed up dead from apparent suicide in his home town.
He looked in silence at the pictures. John was wearing jeans and a long sleeved button up shirt. The jeans had small stains on each leg. Like oval mud stains.
“Do you have the clothing he was wearing here?” Wolf asked.
“Yes, I do, I will go get his belongings.”
Vittorio gently placed the sheet back over John’s face, again with a well executed touch, and left the room. Wolf stood up and paced in thought.
Vittorio returned with a sealed large plastic bag and put it on a steel table against the wall, motioning to Wolf to go ahead and look. He took the bag and began laying the contents out on the table. Vittorio and Lia had a quiet conversation in Italian, walking to the other side of the room.
He dug for John’s jeans first. Pulling them out, he looked at the knees. There were two large, faint circles, as if he’d been kneeling in wet, muddy grass. Next he pulled out his sneakers. They were black Puma low top canvass shoes. The bottom sole pattern held a bit of mud, and the canvass was streaked light gray with the same.
Two belts were in the bag. One for the hanging, one for the jeans he was wearing he guessed. He took another look at a picture to see that the black belt was the one John was wearing, and the other light brown leather belt was the one around his neck. He took the light brown belt over to John’s body, and motioned for Vittorio to pull back the sheet again. Wolf ignored Vittorio’s show of being insulted. The belt looked to be the exact same width as the marks on the neck. It was definitely the instrument that strangled his brother.
He returned to the table and rifled his brother’s pants pockets. Nothing, but he took his brother’s wallet out and looked through it, pulling out the driver’s license and finding a dated receipt from a pub tucked in the main pocket, which puzzled him for a second, until he realized the different way Europeans wrote dates — day, month, year. It was from Friday night. The last night his brother was alive.
His iPhone was in the bag as well, but the battery was dead.
Wolf stood straight and felt light headed and stumbled into the table, bending over, breathing deeply a few times to stop from passing out.
Lia and Vittorio rushed over and patted his back. “Should we go? You need to rest after such a long day,” Lia had on a look of concern.
“Sure. Can I take these belongings with me?” Wolf asked.
“They must-a be released with your brother’s body as soon as the paperwork is finished.” Vittorio scooped his brother’s cell phone off the table and placed it in the clear bag.
They thanked the pathologist and left.
“They don’t do many autopsies here in Italy?” He looked out the car window.
“If determined it is needed, then they will order the autopsy.”
“Do you think there should have been an autopsy?”
She shifted uncomfortably, then shifted the car, “I don’t know, it looks pretty cut and dry. Italians don’t do well with complications. If the shoe fits, they put it,” she said. They poot eet.
“Wear it.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
They sat in silence for a few moments as she drove.
“Look, I guess I’ll go sleep. I am dying here.” Wolf pressed his hand against his eyes. “Are you still with me tomorrow?”
“Yes, I will help you until the end of the week.”
He looked at his watch. It was 6:54 pm. Wednesday night. No pressure.
Chapter 14
He dug into his backpack, filled his lip with a pinch of snuff, fetched a spittoon from his brother’s kitchen, and plopped down on the couch with a grunt. He pulled off his shoes. His entire body ached from a long, long day.
Then he thought of the laptop. He went into John’s room and found the charger, thankfully already hooked to an electrical adaptor, something that never crossed his mind until that moment.
He was presented a login screen. He sighed. Bernie? — their first dog. Nothing.
That was the extent of his hacking skills, especially in his current state of mind. Leaving the computer to charge, he returned to the main room feeling newly dejected.
He plopped down deep into the couch, settling his gaze on the hole in the ceiling, then to the chandelier above his head. He put down the spittoon and pulled a chair underneath the remaining chandelier. Reaching high up the center of the main chandelier trunk, he pulled down with his right arm. Then harder when nothing happened. Then harder still.
Finally he straightened his arm and sagged down, putting the entirety of his weight on the chandelier. With a crack, it jolted free from the ceiling, sending him in a sudden free fall. The chair sputtered sideways from underneath his feet, and he landed hard on his side, instinctually pointing his shins and forearms up to block him from a plummeting light fixture of yet undetermined weight. When nothing hit him, he rolled hard to his right twice and finally stole a look upward. The light fixture swayed violently side to side, hanging by two wires.
Just then a soft knock was at the door. He took stock of his injuries as he struggled to his feet. He’d have some bruises in the morning, but otherwise he was all right.
Opening the front door revealed yet another strikingly beautiful young woman. She stood outside with wide, timid chocolate eyes, and a puzzled expression. She had brownish blonde hair, chiseled facial features, and a slender athletic body. Her scent was flowery, all femininity, and she was dressed in a skimpy white tee shirt, flannel pants and slippers. She asked something unintelligible, and Wolf gave a blank stare in response.
“Who are you?” she tried in English.
“I’m David Wolf. Who are you?”
“I’m Cristina, I live upstairs.”
“Oh, I came to your apartment today, you weren’t there. I’m John’s brother. I was hoping to talk to you.”
“Are you okay? I just heard a loud noise.” She was excited, looking behind Wolf at the still rocking chandelier.
She didn’t speak English in an Italian accent. She spoke well, but not like Lia. His instincts, or what he’d learned from his love of spy movies, told him Eastern European.
“Yes, I’m fine. Will you come in? I’d really like to speak to you.”
She backed up a few feet with a look of horror on her face.
“Uhh, sorry. Here, I’ll show you my passport.” He hurried to his backpack leaning up against the wall, pulled out his passport, and brought it back to her.
“No, I can see that you’re John’s brother. You look just like him. I just don’t want to come in there. You can come up and talk if you want.” She turned and
padded up the stairs.
“Okay, I’ll be right up.”
Her apartment was in stark contrast with John’s. While he went with the interior design of minimalist, six-month-stay, one stop at Ikea, whatever you can pack in a suitcase look, she was all about decoration and permanence. Every square inch on the wall was meticulously decorated in a way that took a lot of thought and creativity — pictures of her, her and her family, landscapes from exotic forests in countries he’d never seen, flowers on shelves, hanging dried flowers, books on shelves, and all sorts of other interesting things. It reminded him of the Pub in Points, though not to the same gaudy interior-of-a-ski-bar extent.
Ambient jazz was playing softly in the background. Pat Metheny, he noted. A few candles were lit and smelled like flowers. She looked to be in the middle of writing in a journal. She bent down and closed it, but not before he caught a glimpse of writing with letters of an entirely foreign alphabet.
She offered him a seat on a comfortable recliner chair. A patterned blanket draped on the back of it was reminiscent of Navajo designs he’d seen countless times in his grandmother’s house, but with more vibrant colors, and with flowers lining the edges of it.
She saw him looking at it. “It’s a traditional weaving from my home. I am from Romania.”
“Oh, okay.” He struggled to picture where exactly that was.
“It’s directly east of here. You travel to Venice and keep going east, through Slovenia, Hungary, and into Romania,” she said.
“Ah, I see.” A deep silence fell between them. “Were you dating my brother?”
She was staring at her hands in her lap. She began to shake. The beginning throws of a good cry, he recognized from recent experience.
“Y-y-y-yes. We have b-b-een seeing each other for a few months.” Her hair drooped across her eyes and she shook lightly. “Had been seeing…”
She lifted her chin and tucked her hair behind her ear, a bright smile lighting up her face. “We met on our balconies. He was sitting there on the computer, and I accidentally threw a cigarette on him because of the wind.” She burst into laughter. Wolf couldn’t help but laugh with her. “I heard him shuffling and grunting, and he poked his head out to yell at me. Then he forced me to go out with him as payment for ruining one of his shirts. It was a piece of crap T-shirt.” She smiled, then when into a fresh fit of tears.
He looked away and steeled his gaze on nothing in particular. They sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I have a few questions,” he said finally. “Firstly, do you think he killed himself?”
“You don’t think he did?” She looked at him with wet, wide eyes.
“No, I don’t. I just don’t think he was that type of person, and…there’s just something going on.”
“I have been thinking all along there is no way that he would do that. But then I kept thinking maybe I didn’t know him that well anyways, so then I wasn’t sure. I’ve been so confused.” She looked back at her hands.
“Well, I don’t think he did,” he said. “Do you do drugs Cristina? Did you and John do drugs together? Just tell me, I don’t care either way. I just need to know.”
“No,” she said quickly. “We don’t do drugs…didn’t do drugs. Not even marijuana. We talked about how it made us both paranoid, so that’s why we didn’t like it. Why are you asking?”
He studied her reaction, her eyes. He believed her. A woman trying to hide her drug use was something he was intimately familiar with, something he’d learned to read on a woman’s face just as plainly as an animal track in fresh mud.
“Because there was cocaine found on the table in the living room, and in his nose.”
She looked genuinely surprised. “I never knew him to take drugs. He and I never did. We would drink wine, and he would maybe have a cigarette with me every once and a while…but that’s it.”
“Do you know anything about the night he died? That Friday night? What was he doing? Who was he with?”
“He was supposed to go out with a friend,” she said. “His astronomer friend, who works at an observatory.”
“Okay, where is that observatory?”
“In a town just south of here.”
“Okay, do you have the phone number for…what’s his name?”
“Oh, sorry, his name is Matthew. Matthew Rosenwald. No, I don’t have his number. But I know where he works. It’s called the Merate Observatory, I think, or the Osservatorio di Merate I guess it would be named in Italian?”
“Have you heard from him at all?”
“No.” She shook her head.
“Okay, so, what was he supposed to do with Matthew that night, do you know?”
“He said they were just going out for a few drinks. They usually went out about once a week together. Matthew’s from Australia, and they met through a friend of mine. They kind of hit it off because they could speak English together, and they both like to drink beer.” She laughed.
He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “Do you know this bar?”
She looked at the receipt for the Albastru Pub. “Yes. It is actually a Romanian bar.”
“Have you been there?”
“Once with John, and actually with David.”
Wolf’s thought’s were burning through the fog of jet lag, excited to have a good direction to take tomorrow.
He put the slip of paper back in his pocket. “The Caribinieri said you heard something downstairs on the night of his death?”
“I did. I heard a crash and went downstairs and knocked on his door. But it was dark underneath his door, and it was locked. I just started to think I probably heard something else, outside, or from across the hall, or something. I just went back upstairs and went to sleep.” Her eyes were wide, staring, unblinking.
“When was that?”
“It was 1:15 in the morning. I remember looking at the clock when I heard the crash.”
“There’s nothing you could have done,” he whispered.
She nodded her head, staring at her hands.
“So you talked to the Caribinieri the next day?”
“Ummm…no. I talked to them on Sunday. When he didn’t call me, or respond to my texts, or answer his door all day Saturday, I started getting worried.”
“Oh, yeah, okay. Sunday.” He rubbed his temples. His mind was struggling to keep details straight. His body demanded sleep. “Let’s see, so, what did you tell the Caribinieri?”
She looked to the ceiling. “Not that much. One guy was just asking if I saw or heard anything the night of his death. I just told him about what I heard, and how I came down and knocked. I told them how he didn’t answer my calls, or my knocking, and how he stood me up for our date, and that’s why I was concerned. Then…well, that was pretty much it. A couple of officers were just waiting outside my door. They said they had a special counselor coming for me to talk. I didn’t want to wait around to speak to some government worker who doesn’t know me, or didn’t know John. I just walked out.”
“Yeah, I understand. I don’t blame you,” he said. “Did they ask about drugs?”
She looked confused. “No, not at all. I didn’t know about the drugs until just now.”
A warm blanket of exhaustion wrapped around Wolf again. He’d had enough. His body needed rest. There was no use fighting it any more.
“Are you going to be around in the next couple days?”
“I have to work during the daytimes, but I am usually home at night.”
“All right. I may need some help with some things this weekend. We’ll see.” He went back to his brother’s apartment thinking about the Friday deadline for Lia’s help.
Chapter 15
Wolf picked up his backpack and went into his brother’s room. He put his bag down and exhaled, staring at the bed. “I’m sure these sheets are dirty as shit,” he said out loud to John. Pulling the comforter back, he confirmed his suspicion.
There was a set of sheets on the shelf in the bathroom closet. They
smelled nice and washed, but there were no pillow cases.
Looking in John’s bedroom closet bore no fruit. He stood, shaking his head, marveling at the anal retentive organization. The assortment of clothing was meticulously separated into dark and light segments, coats in a separate segment still. John’s six pairs of shoes were lain out in a straight line along the closet wall floor. A cheap hanging plastic rack housed his belts and ties on the very right side.
Clean tee-shirts over the pillows seemed a good substitute, so he pulled two out of his pack.
Pulling it on, he stopped with a jolt and went back in the closet. He pulled the clothes over hard to get an un-obstructed view of the belt and tie rack.
There were four belts, a missing space, and then four ties. A perfect spot to put the belt John was wearing the night he died. So where did the belt he hung himself with hang?
Chapter 16 — Thursday
Wolf had been up for four hours when Lia picked him up at 8 am. He met her outside the gate.
She shot a couple appraising glances as they walked. “You look better this morning.”
He had shaved, showered, shampooed the grease mat that was his thick dark brown hair, and put on some fresh clothes. He felt better. Wolf looked at her and smiled. “Thanks.”
He’d always been confident in his good looks. The saying, or whatever it was, tall, dark, and handsome applied to him. He was six-foot-three, taller than most men he came into contact with, had spiky dark brown hair, a complexion that tanned if the lightbulbs were too bright, dark walnut eyes, thick eyebrows, and a mole on his upper right cheek that women in his life had often referred to as a “beauty mark”…not that he considered himself a heart throb, but he wasn’t an idiot either.
He stole a glance at Lia, who was walking fast, chin up, chest out, slender athletic body, a tight pony tail of shoulder-length straight brown hair swaying underneath her Caribinieri cap.