The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore

by Dan Andriacco

  And I started to think...

  My cameo, like the statues of Napoleon, wasn’t that special by itself, except to me. There would be no reason for somebody to risk ripping it off my neck in public to get it - unless there was something in it! I knew there wasn’t, of course, but maybe the thief at Trevi Fountain didn’t know that. Suppose this all had something to do with Amber and with Roberto’s murder, if that’s what it was. I couldn’t fit it all together, I was moving too fast for that, but somehow I intuited that it did fit together. I needed to talk to Amber. She still had her cameo. Maybe there was something in it that she didn’t know about. After all, it had been given to her by Roberto, who was now out of the picture.

  There was a pounding on the door - the bathroom door.

  “Hey, Lyn, the door is stuck. I can’t get out. Can you help me?”

  It was a sliding door. I looked down and saw that a screw had come out of one of the bottom glides. The loosened glide had twisted, wedging the door in place.

  “Um. I’ll try. Just wait a minute. I have to do something. Practice putting down the toilet seat lid for a while.” Jeff always forgot that, which was quite annoying in the middle of the night.

  I left the room, trotted downstairs, and knocked on Amber’s door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Lynda.”

  When she opened the door, I could see that she’d been lying down on the bed for a late-afternoon nap. She was wearing another retro tie-dyed T-shirt, The Doors this time, and no necklace. Her blond hair was mussed.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said quickly, “but I wonder if I could look in your locket.”

  “But there’s nothing in it.”

  “Well, maybe not, but let’s see.”

  She picked the necklace off of a dresser and handed it out to me as if she disdained it. “You can have it. I never want to see it again. Men are such pigs.”

  I opened the locket. There was a memory card for a camera inside. “What’s that doing in there?” Amber asked.

  “I think Roberto must have hidden it there. Do you have a camera?”

  “Sure.”

  We put the memory card in the camera. Several of the pictures were vibrant street scenes, a few showed Amber and a handsome young man who I presumed to be her lost boyfriend, and two were the reason the card was hidden. They showed a man I recognized in close conversation with another man who must have been someone important.

  “I know why your room was searched and why my necklace was stolen,” I told Amber. “I’ll explain very soon.” I also knew for sure now what had happened to Roberto, and it was going to be hard to break that to her gently.

  I put on Amber’s necklace, with her permission, and went back to our room.

  Jeff was still stuck. I pushed on the door and rotated the glide back into position so the door would slide open.

  You’d think Jeff would be grateful to be liberated. “Where the hell have you been?” he fumed.

  “If I answered that now, it would be the beginning of a long explanation that we don’t have time for. Put on some clothes and meet me downstairs. I’m calling Petrocelli.”

  I smothered his objections with a deep kiss - amazing how that always works with him - and ran out of the room, leaving him there in his undershorts.

  On the ground floor I looked out the window. The gypsy was still there. I called the phone number on the business card Petrocelli had given me.

  “Ispettore, I think I have something that you’re going to want to see.”

  “Where are you, signora?”

  He promised that he would only be a few minutes, and he was as good as his word. In fact, he arrived just after Jeff. I had no time to prepare my poor husband for what was about to happen.

  We met Petrocelli outside.

  “Your cameo!” he exclaimed. “You recovered it. You are better than the police. How did this happen?”

  “Come with me,” I said.

  Without giving him a chance to answer, I marched across the street and right up to the gypsy.

  I handed him the cameo necklace. “I think you’ll want to see what’s inside there. And I also think you’ll want to arrest Inspector Petrocelli.”

  Petrocelli’s hand moved quickly toward the Beretta concealed by his tailored suit coat. For a second I thought I was going to have to give him a practical demonstration of Tae Kwon Do. But the gypsy was quicker. His gun was out in a flash and aimed at the inspector. “I believe we are in your debt, Signora,” he told me.

  “So, Petrocelli was a crooked cop and the gypsy was an honest cop,” Jeff said over dinner at Dino & Tony. We were drinking wine and waiting for the first wave of antipasti.

  I nodded. “You know I’m better at faces than at names. I would have recognized him right away as the agente that investigated the burglary in Amber’s room if it hadn’t been for the dark-skin makeup.

  “He was all part of an investigation of police corruption. I read about that in La Repubblica on our first night in Rome, but I didn’t pay attention to it, just like I didn’t pay any attention to the story about poor Roberto’s murder.”

  “So they killed him because of this photo he took of Petrocelli meeting with a well-known Mafia boss?”

  “Right. A lot of this is speculation, but apparently Roberto was taking some atmospheric shots for a magazine piece at some out-of-the-way pizzeria a few weeks ago. He recognized the Mafia guy, Barzini, when he took the picture. Later on, he saw a picture of Petrocelli in the paper and he realized the importance of a picture of a police inspector breaking bread with a Mafia don. He tried to blackmail Petrocelli.”

  Jeff winced. “I could have told him that wasn’t a good idea.”

  “No, it was a terrible idea. Petrocelli’s minions followed him to our B&B, then to his apartment. Under torture, he finally admitted that he’d given the memory card with the incriminating photo to his new American girlfriend, hidden for safekeeping in a cameo locket. That’s what Petrocelli’s thugs were looking for when they tore apart her apartment. When they didn’t find it, they decided she must be wearing it. They’d never seen Amber, so when they saw a tallish blonde come out of our B&B wearing a cameo necklace, they just assumed I was her.”

  “But didn’t they think it was a little strange that Roberto’s girlfriend was with another man?”

  “Well, Petrocelli certainly was thrown for a loop when he found out I was married and you were with me at Sogni d’Oro. But maybe his minions didn’t know anything about Roberto; that would be the smart way to play it.”

  “And Petrocelli just happened to be the investigating officer when your necklace was ripped off your neck?” Nobody does sarcasm like Jeff Cody.

  “He arranged it that way, silly. That would have been a clue if I were looking for clues - to have an inspector investigate a minor street crime didn’t really make sense.”

  “Why was the younger cop - d’Annunzio, wasn’t it? -watching the house?”

  “If I understand this correctly, the higher-ups already suspected Petrocelli. He was under surveillance when he met with Roberto. When Roberto was killed not long after, they were sure that Petrocelli was behind it but had no proof. They told the media that the murder involved drugs, as duly reported by La Repubblica, to lull him into a false sense of security. When Amber’s room was ransacked, they assumed - ”

  “Wait a minute,” Jeff interrupted. “How did the police know she was Roberto’s girlfriend?”

  Dino and a waiter set down two trays of antipasti with a flourish. After they left, I said, “They’d followed Roberto for a while because they had no idea who he was and they thought he might be somebody important. So they’d seen him go into Sogni d’Oro with her. Anyway, when Amber’s room was searched the Polizia di Stato figured the robbers were Petrocelli’s thugs who had been lo
oking for something that they didn’t find. So they assigned d’Annunzio to watch the place in disguise in case they came back.”

  “And you saw through the disguise,” Jeff said.

  “I was pretty sure it was a disguise, but it took me long enough to figure out who was beneath the makeup.”

  “But you did it! And you figured out that cameo thing, too.” He chuckled. “Who needs Sebastian McCabe with a super-sleuth like you around?”

  I thought of my hidden copy of Racconti di Sherlock Holmes that had provided me with the inspiration. My little deception.

  “Um, actually, I had some help. I’ve been meaning to tell you about that. More wine, tesoro mio?”

  A Few Words Of Thanks

  My wife, Ann, and I visited London with friends just a few months after the McCabes and the Codys. It was much as Jeff described, although we could never find the King Charles Hotel. Jeff and I owe a special note of thanks to (in chronological order):

  Roger Johnson, who introduced us to Speedy’s over a delightful lunch and who read this book in manuscript form, doing far more than I asked;

  Steve Emecz, my publisher, who took our whole crew to dinner at the Sherlock Holmes Pub;

  Robin Rowles, who gave us his Red-Headed League Tour of London;

  Paul Austin, who showed us the Reform Club, and Tim Symonds, who made that possible; habitués of the Reform Club will note that it has similarities to the Brigadiers Club in this book, but also differences.

  In addition, I wish to thank as usual the others who read, proofread, and commented on this work before publication: Ann Andriacco, Kieran McMullen, Jeff Suess, and Steve Winter.

  This book was improved immeasurably by their efforts. The mistakes that have escaped their eagle eyes were probably added later by Jeff Cody or by yours truly.

  About The Author

  Dan Andriacco has been reading mysteries since he discovered Sherlock Holmes at the age of nine, and writing them almost as long. The first three books in his popular Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody series are No Police Like Holmes, Holmes Sweet Holmes, and The 1895 Murder. He is also the co-author, with Kieran McMullen, of The Amateur Executioner.

  A member of The Tankerville Club, a scion society of The Baker Street Irregulars, since 1981, he is also the author of Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings. Follow his blog at www.danandriacco.com, his tweets at @DanAndriacco, and his Facebook Fan Page at www.facebook.com/DanAndriaccoMysteries.

  Dr. Dan and his wife, Ann, have three grown children and five grandchildren. They live in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, about forty miles downriver from Erin.

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