by Jeff Carson
He plugged it in, switched on the computer and rubbed his eyes when he was presented with a login screen.
He typed in B-e-r-n-i-e. The name of their first dog. Nothing.
That was the extent of his hacking skills, especially in his current state of mind. He left the computer to recharge and returned to the main room, feeling thoroughly dejected.
He burrowed deep into the couch, settling his gaze on the hole in the ceiling, then to the second chandelier that was still hanging in the room. He put down the spittoon and pulled a chair underneath it. Reaching high up the center of the brass chandelier trunk, he grabbed it and 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 it. 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 upward to block himself from a plummeting light fixture of yet undetermined weight. When nothing hit him, he rolled on the ground to get out from under it. Only then did he finally steal a look upward.
The light fixture swayed violently from side to side, hanging by two wires. A fleck of white plaster landed on the floor.
Just then he heard a soft knock on the door. He took stock of his injuries as he struggled to his feet. He’d have some bruises in the morning, but otherwise there was no damage.
He opened the front door, which revealed the second strikingly beautiful young woman of the day. She stood outside with wide, timid, chocolate eyes and a puzzled expression. She had brownish blond hair, chiseled facial features, and a slender athletic body. Her scent was flowery, all femininity, and she was dressed in a skimpy white T-shirt, flannel pants and slippers. She asked something unintelligible, and Wolf gave a confused 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. It sounded Eastern European.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Wolf said. “Listen, will you come in? I’d really like to speak to you.”
She backed up a few feet with a look of horror.
“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 a 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 family, and landscapes from exotic forests in countries he’d never seen; flowers on shelves; hanging dried flowers; rows of bookshelves; and a myriad of other collectibles. The volume of knickknacks reminded him of the pub in Rocky Points, though nothing could match the pub’s gaudy interior-of-a-ski-bar décor.
Ambient jazz was playing softly in the background, and he recognized it as Pat Metheny. A few candles were lit, filling the apartment with a flowery aroma.
She offered him a seat on a comfortable chair, and bent down to close what looked to be a journal she’d been writing in.
He sat, eyeing the patterned blanket draped on the back of the chair. It was reminiscent of Navajo designs he’d seen countless times in his grandmother’s house, but with more vibrant colors and flowers lining the edges.
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, apparently reading his mind.
“Ah, I see.” A deep silence fell between them. “Were you dating my brother?”
She stared at her hands folded in her lap and began to shake. The beginning throes of a good cry, he recognized from recent experience.
“Y-yes. We have been seeing each other for a few months.” Her hair drooped across her eyes. “Had been seeing …” she corrected herself. She lifted her chin and her face brightened with a smile. “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 and laughed, then broke into another fit of crying.
He looked away and steeled his gaze on nothing in particular. They sat in heavy silence for a few seconds as the music changed tracks.
“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 anyway, 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 pot. 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 a 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.”
“What’s his name?”
“Matthew. Matthew Rosenwald.”
“Okay,” Wolf said leaning forward, feeling a jolt of energy. “Where is that observatory? What’s it called?”
“It’s in a town just south of here. In Merate. It’s just called the Merate Observatory, I think, or the Osservatorio di Merate, I guess it would be named in Italian.”
“Do you have Matthew’s phone number?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“Have you heard from him at all?”
“No.”
“Okay. How about what he was doing with Matthew that night, do you know that? Did he tell you about it?”
“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.” She sucked in a breath. “And, actually, Matthew was there too.”
Wolf’s thoughts were burning through the fog of jet lag, and he felt excited to have a good direction to take the next day.
He put the receipt back in his pocket. “The carabinieri said you heard something downstairs that Friday night.”
“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.” She seemed to be staring back in time, shaking her head at the horrific thought.
“When was that?” Wolf asked gently.
“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 again.
“So you talked to the carabinieri 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. “What did you tell the carabinieri?”
She looked to the ceiling. “Not that much. One guy was just asking if I saw or heard anything that night. I just told him 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 to. 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 anymore.
“Are you going to be around in the next couple of 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 over the next two days, and maybe this weekend.” He thought once again about the Friday deadline Marino had given for Lia’s assistance.
“Let me know. I’ll be glad to help.”
“Thanks.”
He let himself out and walked back down the marble stairs to his brother’s silent apartment, trying not to think about the ghost of his brother as he went.
Chapter 17
Wolf picked up his backpack and went into his brother’s room, ready to finally succumb to the exhaustion. Putting down the bag, he pulled the comforter back, surprised to see there were no sheets on the bed. He found a set on a shelf in the bathroom closet, but there were no pillowcases.
Looking in John’s bedroom closet bore no fruit. Wolf stood, shaking his head and marveling at the anal-retentive organization. The assortment of clothing was meticulously separated into dark and light segments, coats in a separate section still. John had set out six pairs of shoes in a straight line along the closet wall floor, ordered from darkest to lightest. A cheap, hanging plastic rack housed belts and ties along the right side, and a robe hung from a hook on the other side. But no pillowcases, so he decided he would live without one.
As he spread out the clean bottom sheet over the mattress, Wolf stopped with a jolt. He went back to the closet and pulled the clothes over to get an unobstructed view of the belt and tie rack.
There were four belts, an empty space, and then four ties. A perfect spot to put the belt John had been wearing the night he’d died. So where was the space for the belt he’d hanged himself with?
Chapter 18
Wolf had been up for four hours when Lia picked him up at 8 a.m. Despite his exhaustion the night before, his jet-lagged body had rebelled against sleep in the early-morning.
They met outside the apartment-building gate and headed into the piazza, where Lia said she had parked.
She shot a couple of appraising glances at Wolf 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 old adage, or whatever it was, of 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 light bulbs 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. She was walking fast with her chin up, chest out, and slender athletic body bouncing lightly on her feet. She wore the same tight ponytail, swaying underneath the back of her carabinieri cap. She looked the same as she ever had to Wolf.
“You look nice this morning too,” he said, meaning to sound nonchalant. It was impossible to do so with such an understatement. He caught a whiff of her lavender scent and cleared his throat, snapping to his senses. “I talked to John’s girlfriend last night; she was home.”
“And?”
“She had the name of the guy he was with the night before. I’d like to go talk to him. His name is Matthew Rosenwald and he works at the Merate Observatory. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been there a few times. For high school ... I was in Liceo Scientifico.”
“What does that mean?”
“In Italy, you choose your vocation early in life, and go to school for it. Or you choose the ... how would you call it ... the track.”
“The major? Like in college?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s much earlier. It starts in high school. But I guess it is kind of like a major for college. Anyway, I was Scientifico. We studied natural sciences and I went there a couple of times for astronomy.”
“Great,” he said. “But we also have to go back to the morgue. And I want to do that first.”
She gave him a puzzled look as they climbed in the Alfa Romeo cruiser. “Why?”
“I have to see the belt he hanged himself with again.”
He explained what he’d seen in the closet the night before.
“Okay,” Lia said. “Definitely sounds interesting. Do you want to get a coffee before we go over?”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about coffee since I woke up four hours ago.”
They pulled up to a bustling “Bar,” as it was called on the sign, and Wolf followed Lia inside. A herd of people were standing up against a long elbow-height counter, packed three-people deep, barking fast orders to the two men behind the counter. Lia expertly wove her way to the front of the crowd and made eye contact with one of the baristas.
“What do you want?” Lia yelled back at Wolf.
“Just a ... I’ll have what you’re having.”
She whipped her head toward the barista. “Due caffè e due brioche marmallatta.”
A few seconds later, a thimble of coffee and a jam-filled croissant were pushed in front of him. He took a large bite of the croissant and a small sip of the coffee.
“Bouna?” She nodded at Wolf.
“Uh, si.”
He felt the glares of people waiting b
ehind him for the countertop real estate he and Lia were occupying. He shoved the rest of the croissant in his mouth and downed the coffee with two hearty sips. She followed his actions, slapped down her cup, went to the unoccupied cash register, laid down some coins and threaded her way out the door. He followed her, wondering what the hell had just happened.
“Good Lord. Felt like my first time all over again,” he mumbled to himself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
They continued walking for another few seconds.
She turned with squinted eyes. “Are you saying that was like your first time having sex?”
“What? Uh … yeah. That’s what I meant.”
She looked down and resumed walking. “So, your first time was that crowded? I don’t understand.”
“No, more like standing, uncomfortable, and over before I knew what had happened.” He looked into the distance at nothing in particular. “Never mind. I … regret what I just said now.”
She burst into a high-pitched natural laugh that magnified his caffeine buzz.
Lia drove at speed through the tight streets and swirling traffic circles, keeping both hands on the wheel when she wasn’t expertly shifting.
“So, how the heck do you speak such perfect English?” Wolf asked, trying once again to sound nonchalant as she swerved into the oncoming traffic lane and blew past a long truck.
She laughed. “My mother is from New York. She spoke only English to me and my brothers when we were kids. It just comes second nature to me. And I went for two years of college in North Carolina ... Wake Forest.”
“Aha. Okay, that explains it … And you and Valerio?” He braced himself as she dove full speed into another traffic circle. “You seem like close friends.”
“Yes. Valerio is kind of like a brother to me. Our families have always been close. I have three older brothers, and he has a brother, and they were all friends growing up.”
“Wow. Three brothers? Older brothers? That must have been rough.”