Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (22 page)

“I have no earthly idea.”

I paid the rental fee on the laptop computer while Walter took it to the little seating area in front of the elevator. He attached his camera to the computer with a cord he’d brought with him and, after a minute, said, “Damn.” He ran back to the rental desk and engaged the young clerk in a frantic conversation that I didn’t understand. I gathered the computer we had lacked the software program Walter needed for seeing the pictures. Walter and the clerk booted up several mre computers and looked at what was on their hard drives. The fourth one they checked generated a smile from the clerk and a nod from Walter. Three minutes until bus time.

After what seemed like years, Walter pulled up a picture from yesterday’s trip to the piazza. He scrolled past several shots of Michael sprawled out under the bronze David. “I really need to get out of here,” he said, checking his watch.

“Oh, please,” I begged. “Just a couple more.”

The next shot showed Amy, Tessa, and two other people standing at a balustrade. “Yes, yes!” I shouted. “That’s it. Can we make a copy?”

“I’m saving it on the computer. You figure out how to print a copy. I’ve got to go. I can help you some more tonight.”

“For now, would you save that one? And the next two?” I figured I couldn’t push it more than that.

“Do you want the time and date on the pictures?”

“Oh, yes.” That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.

Walter swept the cursor around the screen and clicked on a few things. Then he grabbed his camera, yanked out his wires, and headed for the side door.

“Printer?” I asked the young clerk, who already looked like he had dealt with as many problems as he could handle for one day. “Color printer? I want to make a copy of some pictures.”

Even with his help, I printed pictures of some people I’d never seen before—pictures apparently left on the computer by someone else. Then I printed the right pictures, but smaller than a postage stamp, then the upper left quadrant of pictures blown up much too big. Finally, twelve Euros and a sinful amount of wasted paper later, I returned the laptop and walked out with three photos, taken consecutively at the piazza yesterday.

I flagged down a cab in front of the hotel. The trip to the piazzale Michelangelo was bound to cost a lot, and I hoped I had enough cash. As the driver wound up the hillside through umbrella pines, I tried to figure out where, exactly, the blue Fiat had been yesterday when we saw it from the overlook. There was more than one road it could have been on.

I spread the three pictures on my lap, in chronological order. The time printed on the first picture was 17:40, or 5:40 p.m. In it were four people: Beth, Achille, Amy and Tessa. Beth sat on the stone border of a flowerbed, and Achille, standing beside her, looked out into the distance. Amy and Tessa stood side by side at the balustrade, their backs to the camera.

In the second picture, stamped 17:41, Lettie and I stood at an iron railing with the top of the Duomo visible in the distance. Jim Kelly’s head, out of focus, was in the bottom right side of the photo—as if he had just slipped into the frame and Walter had got him by accident. The third picture, taken four minutes later, at 17:45, showed Achille and Tessa at the stone balustrade, apparently the same one as in the first shot, but Beth and Amy were not there./font>

I had just enough cash to pay the driver, so before I did anything else, I needed to find an ATM machine or some place I could acquire enough cash to get me back to town. At the back of the piazza there was a lovely building which, on closer inspection, proved to be a restaurant—not open yet. Inside, a man was setting tables, so I figured I could cash a traveler’s check there later, if I ordered something.

Walking to the northern edge of the upper level, I set about figuring out where Walter had stood to take each picture. How different it looked this morning. The sun was high in the southeastern sky and the pavement was already hot. To the north, cool, blue mountains beyond the city contrasted sharply with the hot stuccos and orange tiles below. A few little cumulus clouds bounced along the mountaintops, daring the sun to vaporize them. Walter’s pictures from yesterday evening were filled with long shadows and the rosy cast of the setting sun. It looked like a different place.

I held the pictures out in front of me and one of them was instantly whisked out of my hand by the wind. It tumbled across the flagstones, a few feet ahead of my grasping hands. A teenage boy, smoking with some friends near the statue, rushed out and trapped it for me. “
Grazie
,” I said.

Back to the overlook. I found the spot from which Walter had taken the first shot. He had been aiming down onto the eastern overlook, which was largely shadowed by the staircase and by the tops of nearby trees. Amy and Tessa had their backs to the camera and nothing in their posture gave any hint of what, if anything, they were doing other than enjoying the view. Beth, seated at the edge of a begonia bed, looked down at her feet, while Achille, lightly touching her shoulder, looked off into the distance.

For the second picture, Walter had moved left, to the western side of the piazza, but I couldn’t get the photo to align properly with what I saw before me. After trying several spots, I realized that he had stood, not at the upper balustrade, but on the left wing of the stairs. I found the exact place about halfway down. In the photo, Lettie pointed toward something in the town near the Duomo, and I was holding my breeze-blown hair out of my face. Our long shadows stretched across the brick pavement. Jim Kelly had, obviously, just walked down the stairs.

There was a four-minute gap between the second and third photos. I thought of what that meant. Walter could have walked back up the stairs and down the ones on the other side, or he could have gone around the front, to get to the eastern overlook. There would have been plenty of time. In those four minutes, the population of both overlooks might have changed completely. People didn’t tend to stay in one place very long up here.

Walter had stood at or near the bottom of the right wing of the staircase for the last shot.
How odd
, I thought. Achille and Tessa stood, backs to the camera at almost the exact same spot where Amy and Tessa had stood in the first picture, but neither Beth nor Amy was there now. As soon as I located the spot, I saw that the balustrade and pavement wrapped around to the south, extending way around the side. This was not apparent until you walked right up to the edge. Amy might have been there when the third picture was taken.

I walked around that way as far as Icould and looked out across the farmlands dotted with tall cypress trees and stucco houses. At the bottom of the slope and beyond a thin clump of trees, a narrow road wound around the hill. In a flash, I realized that this was the road the blue Fiat had been on yesterday as we had picked our way down the slope to Amy’s body.

Charging up the steps and across the parking area on the upper level, I stepped down and across the slope and grabbed onto the strongest-looking plants on my upslope side for a little bit of anchorage. I found the spot where the body had lain; there was a bit of blood still on the grass. I hadn’t noticed any blood yesterday, but Amy’s head had been twisted in such a way that if she had bled from the mouth or the left side of her head, I wouldn’t have seen it. I paused a minute and thought about Amy. So young and healthy one minute. So dead the next. I hoped she was in a better place.

From here, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact spot from which Amy had fallen. I needed to go back up and put a marker or something at the place Tessa had been standing when I saw her, choking and gasping for breath. I doubted she had moved away, once Amy had fallen, but that didn’t mean that Tessa was right beside Amy when she fell, did it?

The spot from which I thought I had heard the blue Fiat rev up and peel off was just below here and a little to the right. I walked up and down the road for about a quarter mile in both directions. It was too narrow, along most of this stretch, for two cars to pass without one of them pulling onto the shoulder. There was one place where the outside shoulder was wide enough for a car to park. I stood there and looked up the hill. It gave a perfect view of the southern end of the balustrade. The spot where Amy had landed was almost directly between here and there.

If it was Gianni, and I would have bet good money that it was, what was he here for? Could he have been the reason Amy fell? He might have told Amy earlier, “I’ll meet you at the piazza.” It would have been shortly after work, if he worked at a regular nine-to-five job, but I had no idea what hours he worked—or
if
he worked. Amy had mentioned that he did some modeling occasionally, but that wasn’t a steady job.

Suppose he parked here until he saw Amy at the balustrade. If he had a motive for doing away with her, he could have simply walked up the slope—unseen by anyone but her—and pulled her over. Maybe not. I climbed back up the slope until I reached the part that was too steep to go any farther, and looked up. Unless Gianni was part mountain goat, I didn’t see how he could have done it. At best, he could have clambered up to the base of the wall, possibly grabbed the bottom of the balustrade, reached up and . . .

Forget it.
Amy would have had to be a willing participant in her own killing
!

There was another possibility. Suppose Amy thought he was scrambling up to kiss her, à la Romeo and Juliet. Then she would have leaned over the balustrade eagerly.

I thought about Amy and Gianni. Who was he, anyway? A friend of Cesare? A friend of Tessa? How did he and Amy meet? A blind date? Somehow, I had the impression neither Tessa nor Cesare knew him very well. If that was true, had Gianni finagled an introduction to Amy so he could ask her out? If someone wanted A dead, this could have all been planned before any of us even arrived.

Oh, God. Paul is right, I’m finding snakes under every rock.

I returned one more time to the east overlook and stood on tiptoes to get the feeling of wearing high heels as I imagined myself falling over, pulled over by someone on the other side, or pushed over by someone on this side. I couldn’t quite imagine tumbling over in any of those cases, but I chalked it up to being several inches shorter than Amy. I didn’t go so far as to test Michael’s center-of-gravity theory by leaning over the concrete balustrade myself. I’m not that dumb.

I sat a table in the restaurant I had spotted earlier—a delightful respite from the blaring sun. I ordered a sort of bruschetta and a big glass of water, repeating the last part with hand gestures to make it plain that I needed a
big
glass of water. It seemed to me that Italians should adopt iced tea the same way we Americans have embraced their cappuccino and latte. I asked them to call a taxi for me and, when it came, I told the driver, “To the Borgo Ognissanti, please. To the caserma of the carabinieri.”

———

“I have a car for you to check out. It’s a blue Fiat, and the license number ends with either 10 M or I-O-M. It was parked very suspiciously at the bottom of the hill yesterday when Amy fell, and it sped off right after.”

Marco wrote that down and glanced at me. “How does one park suspiciously?”

“What I mean is, I saw the car drive up a few minutes before, and as soon as we started down to see about Amy, it tore off in a huge hurry.”

“Dotsy, you aren’t trying to make Amy’s accident into another murder, are you?”

“I think it should be considered.”

Marco sat stock still, his gaze glued to the corner of his desk calendar. At last he said, “No. It was an accident, and let me tell you why. I know you will think I want it to be an accident because it makes my job easier and because we have no evidence to the contrary. But that is not so. It would actually make my job easier if it was murder and I could prove it.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

“Beth Hines stands to inherit quite a lot of money. According to her brother Joe—” Marco forced the name through his teeth “—Meg had accumulated a small fortune, not entirely by means we would all approve of, but there it is. She has left it to Amy and Beth equally. Joe tells me that he told Meg to leave him a small piece of real estate, a cabin on a lake I believe he said, and that was all he wanted. Apparently he has enough money already.

“So, you see, Beth now inherits the whole thing. If she killed her older sister to get half a fortune, wouldn’t she also kill her younger sister to get a
whole
fortune?”

Every cell in my body wanted to scream at him. I knew Lettie would, if she was here, but if I expected him to treat me like a partnr, I had to maintain a façade of objectivity. “Go on,” I said.

“It can’t be murder because it was very bad luck it was even a death. The height from which she fell—the distance—she was very unlucky to have been killed. Most times, a fall like that would break some bones, perhaps collapse lungs, perhaps fracture the skull. But most times, a healthy young person like that would survive. Yes, she was very unlucky. To commit a murder you must do something that is fatal, Dotsy. If your victim survives, you are in deep . . . you know.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” I stared at my feet for a while. What he said made sense.

When I looked up, I caught him smiling at me, his cheek resting on his knuckles.

“When this mess is all cleaned up,” he said, “I want to take you some place where we can have a nice dinner, a nice evening together . . . just enjoy. Would you like that?”

“Well, yes.” This was the first time I’d been asked for a date in more than thirty-five years. I probably turned a very unattractive red. “I hope this mess is all cleaned up while I’m still in Italy. Have you heard anything from the lab about the purse?”

“The blood is of the same type as Meg’s, but we will know for certain if it is her blood when the DNA tests are completed.”

“It occurred to me that the killer might have used one of those thin disposable rain coats. It would have protected his clothes, and it could have been stuffed into the purse quickly.”