Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (7 page)

“I haven’t got my head around it yet.” She stood silent for another long minute, staring out toward the Duomo as if its womb-like bulk might offer her safe harbor. “Meg was my sister, but she was a hard woman to like.”

“I gathered as much, but Lettie told me you and Meg have shared a house for some time. You must have found a way to coexist peacefully.”

“Oh, well. I didn’t have much choice, did I? My husband—ex-husband—Harvey left me quite suddenly and unexpectedly two years ago. Same old story, another woman.”

“Did Lettie tell you my husband left me last year?” I asked. “Left me for another woman, so I know how you felt.”

Beth nodded and glanced toward me. “I knew absolutely nothing until one day he came home, walked in the house, dropped a note on the hall table, and walked out. I ran to the window in time to see his car pull out, loaded to the gills with all his stuff, and a woman in the passenger seat.”

Hugging herself as if a cold wind had swirled out of her past, she went on. “He had cleaned out our bank account, our 401k, and our savings account. He had cancelled the life insurance, taken the Mercedes, and left me with the Toyota—which, by the way, was uninsured because he cancelled that policy, too.”

“Oh dear. At least I was able to get a decent settlement. And I had my own bank account.”

“Right.” Beth looked down toward her feet.

I hoped she didn’t think I was implying that she was stupid not to have had her own account. I simply wanted to say that she’d had it tougher I had. “You probably didn’t even have enough to pay your household bills.”

Beth nodded. “I had no choice but to move in with Meg. I had to sell the house because I needed the equity. I had a job, with this lawyer, same one I work for now, but it was just part time, and I didn’t make much.” She leaned back and, holding onto the rail like a child, swayed left and right. “My boss is just wonderful. He doubled my salary and put me to work as his personal secretary. Before, I was a receptionist. So I’ve been struggling to get myself in shape financially . . .and now this.”

“From the little I’ve heard from Lettie, it seems you got along with Meg better than anybody else did.”

“I did the best I could, but sometimes . . . in fact, just today, when I went up to the room . . .” Beth stopped, as if she had started a sentence she couldn’t finish.

“You were angry, weren’t you? Was it because of those flowers you had?”

“The flowers. Oh!” She hesitated. “The narcissus? What happened was, I got a phone call from the front desk this afternoon. The woman, she had a really thick accent . . . hard to understand. But she said there was an urgent message for me in my mail slot at the front desk. So I rushed down, but it wasn’t urgent at all. It just said, in English, ‘There’s a gift for you at’ this certain florist shop—I forget the name. It said, ‘We tried to deliver it and couldn’t, so would you please pick it up ASAP?’”

“That’s odd. I wonder why they couldn’t deliver it?” As I said it, I remembered seeing a delivery boy with a vase of yellow roses in the lobby earlier today.
What kind of gift is it, if you have to go pick it up yourself?

“I don’t know why they couldn’t deliver, but I ran into Tessa, and she said the florist was just down the via Nazionale, so I decided to walk. It turned out to be a hell of a long way, so by the time I got back, I was fuming.”

“At Tessa or at the florist?”

“At the whole thing. I wouldn’t have walked over there at all, but I sort of thought they might . . . might have been from . . .”

“From Achille?”

“Yes,” she said, her gaze darting toward me, “because we had been talking, just last night, about how much I love flowers. Or I thought they could be from Greg, my boss. You can send flowers internationally, you know, with a credit card, and Greg is sweet like that. Or they might have even been from this man I’ve gone out with a few times back home. Anyway, there was no name on the card, but I think they were from Meg. You know what the card said? It said ‘Vanity, vanity.’”

“I don’t understand.”

“The other night when we were in Venice, we were coming back from our gondola ride and . . .” Beth took a deep breath.

I thought I’d save her the embarrassment. “I remember. I was behind you when we walked down the ramp. I heard what she said when you said you had to find a bathroom.”

“About the diaper?”

“Yes.”

“I was furious over that because I saw Achille standing right there. He had very nicely asked me to go to a little bar where the locals hang out when we got back to Mestre—to our hotel. Meg deliberately said that because she saw him waiting for me. She timed it so it came out when she was right in front of him.”

“You’re sure it was intentional?”

“Certainly. Meg was like that. She liked to hurt. So when I picked up those flowers today and read that card, well.”

I shivered. “How cruel.”

“If you know anything about the language of flowers—it’s sort of a Victorian thing—white narcissus is the symbol for vanity.”

“Oh, of course. Like Narcissus in the Greek myth.”

“I hate to think about it now, but if Meg hadn’t been lying there dead, I would have given her a piece of my mind. I guess I have to live with that.”

“Live with what? You didn’t say anything.”

Beth turned her face away from me. She retreated to the opposite side of the roof, and I followed her. From here, the train station dominated the view. On this side of the station was the beautiful church of Santa Maria Novella, and in front of the church, a broad piazza and a fountain. Lit now from underneath, it seemed much closer than it had earlier today when I had passed it on my way downtown. Was that the fountain Crystal found the knife in? I almost asked that out loud but caught myself.

“Beth, when you reached your room, was the door locked or unlocked?”

“That’s the first thing that policeman asked me. It was open. That was odd, but, of course, I didn’t think about it then, because I didn’t have time to. As soon as I pushed the door and walked in, I saw Meg. I think I screamed. I know I dropped the flowers.”

“Then you called the desk.”

I looked down at the fountain again. Would it have been possible for someone to throw the knife from the hotel to the fountain? I couldn’t tell. Which part of the hotel would it have come from? From what window? I could feel an experiment coming on.

“There you are.” Lettie sneaked up on us from the right.

“Where did you come from?” I was confused. The square brick box that housed the elevator shaft was just behind us. If Lettie had ridden up in the elevator, she should have come from there.

“Stairway. How did you get here?”

“Elevator,” Beth said. “We didn’t know about the stairs.”

“They’re finished with me for now,” Lettie said. “Captain Quattrocchi says if we need to talk to him after tonight, he’ll be in his casar . . . I forget what he called it. He’ll be in his office downtown somewhere.” She turned, caught her first sight of the uomo at night, and paused for a suitable length of time, in awe. “Beth, where are you staying tonight? Surely, they won’t make you stay in your room.”

I hadn’t even thought of that. Meg and Beth’s room was now a crime scene. Of course, Beth couldn’t stay there, but all her things would still be in the room.

“They’ve moved me to another room. This one’s on the second floor. They said they’d transfer my things. I can’t possibly go back in that room.”

“Of course not. And what about Amy?”

“She was in the room next door to Meg and me. They didn’t have a triple room for us, like they did in Venice. Amy said that was just as well, because she was kind of . . . miffed.” Beth caught herself, as if she didn’t think she should have mentioned that. “Anyway, Tessa said she’d like to spend a night or two in Amy’s room while we’re here, to talk over old times, you know. Tessa has an apartment here in Florence. An apartment with a roommate, I believe. But she said she might get Pellegrino Tours to split the cost of the room with Amy if she could think up some logical reason for them to do so. Then Amy wouldn’t have to pay extra for the single supplement.”

I leaned over the rail and peered down the side of the building. Unless I was all turned around, this was the side Meg and Beth’s room—and Amy’s room—would be on. It wasn’t far from the fountain. Lettie and Beth headed for the stairs, but tugged on the door and discovered it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

“I guess that’s a safety feature,” I said.

“Protect the hotel from invaders from outer space?” Lettie raised an eyebrow.

When we got back to our room, Beth took Lettie aside and asked, softly, but I could still hear, “Do you think I could borrow a little money? For a day or so? I can probably get the travelers’ check refund tomorrow, but I need to buy a couple of personal things in the morning, and Amy’s out on a date.”

“Oh, Beth, sweetie! Of course.” Lettie snatched her wallet open. “Fifty? A hundred? Take a hundred.”

“Oh, no. Fifty is plenty.”

“They’re Euros.”

“That’s good.”

“Amy’s out on a date?” It just hit me.

“I thought that was odd, too,” Beth said. She gave Lettie a little hug and tucked the money in her pocket. “Some guy she just met the other night in Venice. Tessa fixed them up.”

Lettie closed the door after Beth left. “So much for Amy’s period of mourning.”

“Out on a date!” I said. “I can’t believe it.”

Lettie pulled a nightshirt out of her suitcase. “They’ve arrested that man,” she said. “fonGypsy man. His name is Ivo. Achille spotted him in the parking lot and thought he looked suspicious. He told the police, and several of them, including Achille, went looking for him. They found him somewhere, a few blocks from here, I think, and he still had Beth’s room card on him. Had a suspicious lot of money, too.”

“Dollars or Euros?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Lettie dragged those three words out to the same tune Crystal had used for the word “Mom.”

Lettie opened the balcony doors to a freshening breeze and stepped out. Taking this as implicit permission to shower first, I stood under the pelting water until my fingers wrinkled. It had been a hot, exhausting day, and my back felt all knotted up. I soaked a “Magic Towel” in water and watched it expand into a respectable terry face cloth. Fortunately, a friend of mine at home had given me several of these to toss in my luggage, because so few European hotels provide them. I wondered how Europeans washed their faces. Did they use their bare hands?

I let the water knead my shoulders while I considered the Gypsy man, Ivo. He didn’t make sense. Why kill Meg? Why not dash out? Pretend to be a bellhop, or say, “I must have the wrong room”? He was not a particularly young man, although the rough life of a Gypsy might have added years to his face, so he would not be new to theft and burglary. Maybe Meg saw him and went ballistic, and he panicked. I could hear her screeching like a banshee if she came out of the bathroom in her underwear and saw him standing there. He might panic. And if the knife was there, say, on the dresser beside the door . . .

I couldn’t convince myself it could have been like that. They must have the wrong man. Strange coincidences, of course—that he happened to have the room card, that Achille happened to notice him, that the police caught up with him—but coincidences happen every day.

So, if Ivo didn’t kill Meg, who did? The most obvious second choice would be Beth. She called the front desk, it was her knife, and she was already mad at Meg. But that pot of flowers, no matter how insulting, would hardly be a motive for murder. Beth had had years of practice putting up with Meg. Sometimes, though, a person takes it and takes it for years, and then something happens. They snap. Or do they, really? I know children and teenagers do. They “go postal,” as the kids say. But adults have better-developed pressure gauges, don’t they? I tend to be skeptical of those defendants who claim they don’t know what happened—a gun just came into their hand and went off. I don’t believe people black out and weapons take that opportunity to animate themselves.

At any rate, I decided I would not voice any of these thoughts to Lettie. Not yet. I needed to look again at the list I had made before dinner. I had the seeds of a couple of ideas—things I wanted to look into. The historian in me loves to uncover things, and the mother in me hates to be lied to, or maybe it’s the “ex-wife of Chet Lamb” in me that refuses to be lied to again.

I pushed my face into the pillow and tried to relax. The big problem was the fact that this was a fourteen day trip; that’s all we had paid for, and it’s all the time most of us had taken off from work. We had already used up four days. In ten days we would leave Italy with the murderer still in our midst and an innocent Ivo facing a trial that might well be stacked against him.

Alternatively, the carabinieri might come to their senses and realize they had the wrong person. Then what? Once we left the country, the investigation would grind to a halt. It would be nearly impossible to follow thin threads of evidence across the ocean, and it would undoubtedly raise huge problems about jurisdiction, extradition—it made my head hurt to think about it.

So, they might rush to judgment and grab the second most obvious suspect, Beth. Lettie had already told me, in no uncertain terms, that Beth could not possibly have killed her sister—that was unthinkable. But I, having only met Beth three days ago, could not be so sure. If Beth was guilty, she deserved whatever she got because even though she had had ample reason to loathe Meg, she was an adult, and she knew she had other options. She hadn’t had to live under Meg’s thumb. But if she was innocent, would we, ten days hence, leave her at the mercy of the Italian authorities? I’d heard stories about foreign jails. Neither Lettie nor I could possibly let that happen, and yet what could we do about it?

I couldn’t allow an innocent man to go to prison, probably for life, and I couldn’t allow a guilty Beth to go home on the same plane with me. I couldn’t allow an innocent Beth to be thrown to the vagaries of a court system whose language she didn’t even understand, and go home on the plane with the real killer. Lettie loved Beth like a sister, and Lettie was like a sister to me, so I reluctantly accepted the only course left. I wouldn’t leave Italy until I knew who really killed Meg Bauer.