by Jeff Carson
“No, we did not. I do not know his name,” Rossi answered with a pained face.
“You didn’t look into that?” Wolf asked.
“No, Mr. Wolf. The keys were in the lock, locked from the inside, with only your brother inside.” Rossi held out his hands with an apologetic look.
There was a small hole in the ceiling with a capped wire sticking out. He glanced at the floor and noticed a scratch on the wood veneer right below the hole in the ceiling. Wolf bent down and rubbed it. “This is where the chandelier fell and hit the floor?”
“Yes,” Rossi said. “He was underneath it.”
Wolf had heard the story over the phone. They walked in, found him underneath the chandelier, a leather belt around his neck still fastened to the chandelier. Drugs found at the scene.
“Where did you find the cocaine?”
“There was a small bag here on the table,” Rossi said, “and residue on his nose. We have the bag in evidence at the questura, the station, I believe you Americans would call it.”
The manager said something and Lia translated. “He says he cleaned yesterday. He emptied the trash, got rid of some food, and cleaned up the debris in the main room here.”
Wolf noted the shiny, clean table in the main room as he left to walk to the kitchen, which was a narrow galley with small appliances, a few small cupboards, and a little counter space. At the far end of the kitchen was a small balcony. Stove burners glistened and the countertops shined. It was perfectly clean. Classic John, Wolf thought. The manager probably hadn’t had to clean too hard. His little brother had always been anal-retentive when it came to keeping his space neat.
Wolf pictured his little brother’s room growing up—how the bed was always made, everything hung in just such a way on the wall, and his clothes always tucked and hung in their places in the closet. Wolf allowed himself a small smile at his brother’s memory.
He walked back to the main room and out to the balcony. They were high above the piazza, looking directly down on it from three floors up. A vast section of Lake Como was in view over the rooftops. Kite surfers and wind sailors still whipped back and forth over the white-crested water. The air was fresh and crisp. Not a bad place to live.
Wolf walked inside and through the apartment to the bedroom in the back. It was dark like the main room had been when they came in. Wolf pulled the shutter doors open to another balcony, and sunlight blazed in, revealing a completely different breathtaking view. The opposite side of the apartment overlooked the rooftops of Lecco, jutting at all angles like frozen waves in a sea of orange-clay tiles.
One of the clay-tiled roofs butting up against the balcony extended into the distance. It looked like one could step out onto the rooftops and walk all the way across the city, if one didn’t mind the thirty-plus degree slope of the first roof here. He studied it for a moment, then craned his head over and looked up to an identical balcony above.
Ducking back in, he noted that the bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the apartment. A queen-sized mattress lay directly on the floor with no bedside tables. One reading lamp stood next to it, surrounded by a smattering of paperback books—mostly old-looking literary stuff Wolf wasn’t into. A flimsy-looking wood table was tucked in the corner with an open Mac computer perched atop it, a wireless router hooked into the wall.
Wolf went to the computer, swiped his finger, and then pushed a few buttons. It was dead.
The small closet was filled halfway with hanging clothes, separated into different color schemes.
Wolf raised his voice. “The girl upstairs, what was her name? Cristina?”
“Yes.” Rossi walked to the bedroom doorway.
“I’d like to go talk to her.”
“Let’s go.”
They left John’s apartment and went upstairs, found the door for Cristina and knocked. There was no answer.
“How about the apartment below his apartment? What did they say? Didn’t they hear anything? The chandelier hitting the floor?”
“Nobody lives there.” Rossi shrugged.
“Okay, this girl isn’t home. Do you guys know where she is? Where she works?”
“I do not know,” Rossi said.
Lia shook her head.
“Did you question her on Sunday?” Wolf asked.
“I talked to her,” said Rossi. “I asked if she heard anything. It was apparent that she was having a tough time, and she needed support. She was very upset. We called in a person, but she had disappeared before the ... person could arrive.”
“A counselor?”
“Yes, a counselor. But she left before the counselor arrived.”
“Okay.” Wolf sighed heavily. “Did you ask her about the drugs?”
They walked down the stairs to the outside of John’s door.
“No. It really was not an interrogation. We were dealing with the delicate task of removing your brother’s body. Knowing what the evidence inside was presenting us, it was more a matter of comforting the girl.”
“And this neighbor?” He pointed to the only other door that was on his brother’s level. Number twenty-one.
The manager said a few sentences, and Rossi took the reins with translation. “They were gone, and have been for over a month. A lot of people go on vacation for August here, and they have been gone all of August, and all of September so far. They weren’t here.”
“Okay.” Wolf suddenly felt a little lightheaded. He needed food, and he needed sleep. Two things he would have time for later.
The manager said something to Rossi and Lia while pointing at Wolf. He held up the keys and shrugged his shoulders.
Rossi waved his hands as if declining something, then looked questioningly at Lia, who then looked skeptically at Wolf.
“What’s going on?” Wolf asked.
“He is saying you can stay here if you like. The rent is paid for the month, and he can give you the keys,” Lia said.
“Thanks, that would be perfect.” Wolf took the keys from the manager’s outstretched hand. “What is your name?”
“Guiseppe.”
“David. Thank you. Grazie.”
The manager showed Wolf the different keys for the outside gate and door locks, then left. They all looked at their watches. It was 5:38 p.m. local time.
“Is it too late to go see my brother?” Wolf asked, ignoring his urge to collapse on the mattress in his brother’s room.
“I have to leave for other commitments,” Rossi said, looking at his watch.
Lia nodded. “The morgue is open twenty-four hours. We can go right now.”
Chapter 15
Wolf sat in silence on the way over to the morgue. Glancing at his watch, he did a quick calculation. He’d been up since midnight Colorado time when the plane landed at 8 a.m. in Italy, with just a few hours sleep before that on the plane. So what did that mean? It meant he was tired as hell.
“I’m sorry I was so angry earlier,” Lia said, looking at Wolf. Her tanned olive skin coupled with her luminous eyes in the evening sunlight was startling to him, and he wasn’t easy to startle. He unconsciously rubbed his face, noting the long stubble—way past a five o’clock shadow.
“No problem. I would have been pissed too,” he said.
She shot him a suspicious look.
“I couldn’t tell if your boss was just a terrible English speaker, or a terrible bigot. I take it he’s a terrible bigot. ‘We have important work to do and can’t spare anyone of importance, so I’ll give you Lia for two days,’ is, I believe, the gist of what he said. Yeah, that would piss me off too.”
She gave him an unreadable look and resumed driving.
“I know that what your boss thinks is important to you, and you think that he thinks he’s put you on an unimportant case. Maybe that pisses you off; I’d be pretty angry, too. But, the thing is, my brother didn’t kill himself. I’m one hundred percent sure of that. So that leaves only one explanation. He was murdered.”
They drove in si
lence for a few minutes. In his peripheral vision, he could see Lia glancing at him.
“I was really sweating being paired up with Tito there for a minute,” he said, breaking the silence. “So thanks again.”
“Yeah, like I said, Tito’s a dumbass.” She laughed and smiled. “You would’ve been pretty screwed with him.”
It was the first time he’d seen her smile. She was beautiful.
…
The morgue was another building that looked straight out of the Mussolini era—square, gray concrete, and non-descript. It was in sharp contrast with the rest of the city, which was full of statues, elegant curved lines, and natural stone. Lia pushed a button on a state-of-the-art electronic keypad next to the heavy steel door.
“Si?” said a tinny male voice.
“Noi siamo.”
Buzz. Click.
“Ciao,” a voice said from a doorway down the hall. A bald man, looking over pushed-down glasses, peeked his head out of a doorway and waved at them to come.
They walked down the hall to where he was. The room was cold and smelled of formaldehyde, just like any other morgue room Wolf had been in. Two rows of four refrigeration units lined the far wall. The lower right-most one was pulled out, displaying a sheeted lump of a figure. His brother.
His heart skipped and his breath caught as he looked down; then he turned to shake the hand of the pathologist.
“Ciao. I am Vittorio.” The pathologist blinked rapidly behind thick glasses while stretching his neck muscles as if his collar was itchy.
Vittorio and Lia had a brief exchange in Italian, Vittorio speaking quietly and rapidly with intelligent eyes that never looked in Wolf’s direction. Then the man left the room quickly, and Wolf turned to the pulled-out refrigeration unit.
Suddenly, he was anxious to get everything over with, but he knew he should probably wait for the pathologist to return before looking at his brother. Besides, Wolf realized, he wasn’t in that much of a hurry to look at his brother’s face, a face he hadn’t seen in real life for over five months, other than in tiny pictures on a blog.
Lia stood beside Wolf, put a hand on his shoulder, and gave a gentle squeeze.
“Sorry.” Vittorio moved swiftly into the room. “I have the records all here now.” His accent was vaguely British. “Are you ready, Mr. Wolf?”
He wasn’t. “Yeah, go ahead.”
The sheet was pulled back in a well-executed, not-too-slow/not-too-fast technique, revealing his brother beneath.
John’s skin was a bluish white, and he wore a peaceful sleeping expression on his face. His hair had been closely cropped, and a large straight-line bruise was on the right side of his head, angling from the top of the forehead to his ear. There was a deep black bruise lining the circumference of his neck, indicating where the belt had been wrapped around his throat.
“Why was no autopsy ordered?” Wolf asked, keeping his eyes fixed on his brother’s lifeless face.
“We determined the external evidence on the body to be consistent with suicide,” Vittorio said quietly. “And we normally do not perform an autopsy for a suicide, unless ordered by the coroner in collaboration with officers on the scene.”
“How do you explain the bruise on his head?” Wolf asked.
“We determined the bruise was ante mortem ... how you say?”
“Sure, ante mortem.”
“Bruising from the chandelier falling on his head,” Vittorio said.
“Okay.” Wolf shook his head. “So how did he die? Are you saying he died from the hanging, then the chandelier fell on his head, causing a bruise?” Wolf looked skeptical. “Once the heart has stopped beating, isn’t it impossible to bruise?”
“It is actually entirely possible to bruise shortly after death. If he died while hanging, then shortly thereafter the chandelier gave way and fell on him, it could have bruised his head. There was also pooling of blood on the left side of his body, as you can see by the bruising, consistent with the position he was found in underneath the chandelier.”
“What was the evidence of drug use?”
Vittorio produced some photos from the file. “Since we didn’t do an autopsy, we did not do a complete toxicology report. But I did an exterior exam, and found residue on his nose that was confirmed to be cocaine. I have some photos of your brother’s body at the scene.”
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 with 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 begun the process 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? At best, we have a manufactured manner of death, as if you made up the story first and then pieced together evidence to support it. 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 have gone either way, the decision for an autopsy, that is. But we have other pressures here, Mr. 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?” Wolf shook his head in disbelief, but also knew the same thing could happen in Rocky Points if a foreigner died from an apparent suicide.
Vittorio offered a solemn expression in response.
Wolf took a deep breath and silently studied 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?” 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.
Lia stood in silence.
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.
Wolf dug in the bag 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 a pair of black Puma low-top canvas shoes. The bottom sole pattern held a bit of mud, and the canvas was streaked light gray with the same.
Two belts were in the bag—one would have been used for the hanging and John would have been wearing the other one, Wolf guessed. He took another look at a picture and saw that the black belt was the one John had been wearing, and the light-brown leather belt had been around his neck. Wolf 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 was the same width as the marks on John’s neck. Wolf felt a faint shudder as he realized he was holding a murder weapon.
He returned to the table and rifled through 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; it 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 lightheaded. With a c
rash, he stumbled into the table and bent over, breathing deeply a few times to stop himself passing out.
Lia and Vittorio rushed over and patted his back.
“Should we go? You need to rest after such a long day,” Lia said.
“Sure. Can I take these belongings with me?” Wolf asked.
“They must 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.
After a few more minutes, Wolf and Lia thanked the pathologist and they left.
“They don’t do many autopsies here in Italy?” Wolf stared out the car window at the tall mountains surrounding the city, now black against the glowing orange sky.
“If determined it is needed, then they will order the autopsy.”
“Do you think there should have been an autopsy?”
She fidgeted 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. And it’s cut and dried.”
“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 p.m., Wednesday night. That gave him two days. No pressure.
Chapter 16
Wolf dug into his backpack, filled the inside of his lip with a pinch of snuff, fetched a plastic cup 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, and then ached some more from the cliff-top fight with Connell. When had that been?
Shit. His mom. She would be worried sick, and he still didn’t have a SIM card for his phone. He thought of the laptop in John’s room and walked to get it. Thankfully it was already hooked to an electrical adaptor for Italian plugs, something that hadn’t crossed his mind until that moment.