Dying on the Vine (25 page)

Martignetti couldn’t help punching the air, a little gesture of triumph. Good old Philario, still the same guy, still not the brightest crayon in the box.

“Absolutely.” He meant it too.

“Very well. His name is Severo Quadrelli. Would you like me to spell that for you?”

• • •

“SOMETHING interesting?” Rocco asked when the call had ended.

“I’ll say.” He told Rocco what he’d just heard.

Rocco was as surprised as Martignetti. “What do you know: Quadrelli. Well, at least now we know why he didn’t want to turn the accounts over to us.”

“Yes, and this makes him a lot more interesting, doesn’t it? We’ve got a hell of a motive now. What do you think the chances are that it was him?”

“The chances of him killing them? Not too good. Yeah, he tried to put us off about the accounts, but in the end he let us have them, didn’t he? What did it take, five minutes? If he thought there was something there that could help us finger him as a murderer, he’d have used every lawyer’s trick he knew to keep us from
ever
getting them. No, I think he just didn’t want it to come out that he was diddling the wife of his old friend and employer.” He shivered. “Whoo. Now there’s an image I’d like to get out of my mind.”

“Hold it,” Martignetti said when the switchboard buzzed him. “Let me see if this is anything.” He listened a minute, then said “I’ll take it,” and replaced the receiver. “It’s the guy who used to be Pietro’s doctor—another possible lead from the account statement. There was a bill from him for a follow-up visit with the old man last August, a month before he went up to the mountains. I figured there might be something there.”

“Right, go ahead and take it.” Rocco stood up to leave.

Martignetti put his hand back on the phone but waited before picking it up. “Rocco, on this Severo thing . . . if it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and dig into it a little, see if there’s anything there, but you’re probably right; chances are this is a whole separate thing, no connection.”

“No, I never said there wasn’t any connection.”

“You didn’t?”

“No, I didn’t.” He smiled. “Tonino, did you ever hear of the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

TWENTY-THREE

GIDEON
spent the rest of the day working on the four-hundred-page dissertation but failing to make it all the way through. By the next morning, he was only three-quarters through, and it had been a teeth-grinding slog the entire way. Full professor of physical anthropology he might be, but physical anthropology had a great many subdisciplines these days, in some of which he was as much at sea as the rawest grad student. And one of those subdisciplines was the subject of Angela Stark’s dissertation:
Assessing the Extent of Genetic Admixture Between Modern Populations of Tatars, Kazakhs, and Karakalpaks in Northern Uzbekistan by Means of the Analysis of mtDNA, Y-chromosome STRs, and Autosomal STR Markers
.

“Angela,” he’d told her when she’d asked him to be on her advisory committee a year earlier, “I’d love to, but I really don’t think this one is for me. If I can’t understand what the title means, how am I going to understand the rest of it?”

“Professor Oliver,” she’d said, “I already have Dr. Sherman and Dr. Spatz on my committee, and they know the technical side forward and backward. What I’m really asking from you is to keep me honest on the overall rationale, the big picture. The scientific method. Do my conclusions follow from the data? That kind of thing. I mean, the two of them are great, just great, don’t get me wrong; but . . . well, they’re kind of, you know, not exactly ‘with it,’ if you know what I mean. Not that I’m criticizing . . .”

He’d known it was his duty to defend his colleagues, but she was right. “Oh, the guy’s got a full six-pack, all right,” he’d overheard a student say about one of them—he didn’t remember which, but it fitted them both—“he’s just missing that plastic thingy that ties them together.” So he’d limited himself to a mild “Well, I wouldn’t say that.” And then a few minutes later he’d given in and taken her on. It was nice to have a student so concerned with proper scientific method. But now, sitting on the terrace with the thing on his laptop, he rued the day, as he’d known he would.

It wasn’t that he thought the application of DNA research to anthropology wasn’t a tremendous breakthrough—he knew it was—or even simply that he was a bit shaky on the technology, or that he had to take frequent breaks from reading the dissertation because his eyes glazed over every few paragraphs. More than that, the stuff made him feel like a fossil himself. Although he was on the young side for a full prof, he was an old-school, low-tech scientist. His field, as he saw it, comprised human variability, population movements and relationships, growth and aging, evolution, locomotion . . . it was, in other words, what the word
anthropology
literally meant: the science of
people
. But over the last decade or two, as in so much of science, there had been a reductionist revolution. The new bright lights of the field didn’t seem to him to be people-studiers so much as chemists, physicists, geneticists, statisticians, mathematicians, and computer modelers, all more grounded and interested in these dry (to him) subjects than in human beings as such.

Or maybe the whole idea of DNA depressed him because he knew that it portended the end of the usefulness of the forensic anthropology that had become so central a part of his life. What he’d been doing with Rocco was out of the ordinary. What forensic anthropologists did, by and large, was to assist the police in the identification of skeletal remains. But who needed someone to tell them that a particular set of bones had belonged to a white female of twenty-five to thirty- five, right-handed, five feet three to five feet six in height, who had suffered a broken ulna in childhood, and who had gone through at least one period of malnutrition during adolescence, when all they had to do to find out who she was was to take a DNA sample and enter it into the vast data banks of DNA that would someday—someday soon—be as ubiquitous as fingerprint records?

It came as a relief when this gloomy line of thought was cut off a little before noon by the noisy return of Luca’s group, back from their culinary travels. It had been the last event of the class, so there were hugs and good-byes and e-mail address exchanges all around. Gideon gratefully shut down the laptop and went out and found Julie and the Laus, who were talking longingly about taking a break from serious food and wine and finding someplace—a bar, maybe—where they could have a non-Italian lunch. Not that there was anything wrong with ambitious Italian food, of course, but enough was enough. They needed a little time off.

“Good luck finding someplace non-Italian around here,” John said, then brightened. “But there’s this great pizzeria—”

“Ah, but there is a place,” Gideon said, breaking in. “I was taking a walk this morning”—on one of his frequent breaks from
Assessing the Extent of Genetic Admixture
—“and I went right by what claims to be an English-style pub and looked like one to me. Says they serve lunch, English beer—”

“Ploughman’s lunch!” Marti cried, grabbing his arm and shaking it. “Take me there! At once, do you hear? At once, I say!”

“I could sure stand a shepherd’s pie,” Julie said dreamily. “And an English ale.”

“They have hamburgers in pubs, don’t they?” John asked.

• • •

AND
so they headed off to the Gate House Pub on Piazza Serristori, a small square that fronted the Teatro Garibaldi, the town’s nineteenth-century opera house. From the outside, it did indeed look vaguely like an English pub, and once through the door it smelled like one too: a cozy, comforting mix of old pipe and cigarette smoke, floor polish, and decades of spilled ale that permeated the splintery wooden floors and probably the chairs and tables as well. There was another aroma they couldn’t place and didn’t associate with pubs, but it was appetizing enough, and in they went.

Behind the bar were a broad-backed woman in a black, spaghetti-strap dress and a burly man with a black T-shirt and a dense but neatly trimmed black beard, both of them busy serving up beer. The burly guy looked up from pulling on one of a dozen pump handles, quickly marked them as Americans, and waved them in with a grin. “Hello, Yanks, what I can do for you?”

John happily took in the rows of quaint, colorful, indubitably English pump handles. “You can send over four pints of that Old Speckled Hen,
por favor
.”

“Half pint for me,” Marti amended.

“And some menus, please,” said Gideon.

The place was only half full—everyone else was Italian, as far as they could tell—so they had no trouble finding a table. They chose one in a niche, under a wall hung with old ad posters for Pears’ soaps and Triumph motorcycles, and scattered black-and-white photos of matronly Victorian ladies, including Victoria herself. They had barely sat down when the beers came, in traditional, dimpled glass mugs.

They all raised a silent toast and sipped, except for John, who glugged down a long contented swallow, then studied his glass. “Interesting. A toffee-and-forest-mold foundation supporting leathery after tones with a blackberry edge—”

“He’s been at Villa Antica too long,” Marti said. “We’ve got to get him home.”

“I saw that once in England in a beer ad, and I memorized it,” John confessed. “Been waiting forever for the chance to try it out.”

“So what do you really think of it?” Julie asked.

“S’okay.”

The day’s menus were delivered by a second guy in a black T-shirt, not quite so burly, and with a slightly smaller black beard. Brothers, Gideon thought. One look at the menus explained the smell they couldn’t place: it was a mixture of jalapeños, salsa, guacamole, and fried tortillas. No Scotch eggs, no shepherd’s pie, no ploughman’s lunch, neither in the air nor on the menu. They had come on a Monday, and Mondays were
il Pranzo Messicano
days. For English food, come back tomorrow.

Their disappointment lasted about two seconds before they started poring over the menus, which were in English and Italian.

“Anybody want to split a fantasy salad?” Marti asked. “Feta cheese, olives, radicchio, tomatoes, cucumbers . . . sounds good, doesn’t it?”

All she got back from the others were brief, contemptuous glances before they returned to their studies.

Gideon was deciding between a couple of dishes when his phone bipped. It was Rocco, starting out in high gear. “Hey, listen, I just got the damn—”

“Hold on a second, Rocco, I can hardly hear you. Let me take the phone outside.” He stood up. “It’s Rocco. Be back in a minute. Order me the beef burrito, will you?”

There was a raucous, impromptu, four-man-team soccer game going on in the piazza, but he found a relatively safe place at the edge of the square and stood in the scant shade of a lone tree, next to a marble-slab bench.

“Okay, Rocco, I’m back. You just got the damn what?”

“The lab report on Cesare, and also the—”

“Whoa, whoa, you got that two days ago. You already told me about it.”

“No, not that report; the report on the cocaethamethawhatever. And they—”

“The cocaethylene report? How could you have that already? The request just went in yesterday.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that. Look, what you gotta remember is that we don’t have all those murders you got in the States, you know? Our lab isn’t all booked up for weeks and weeks. They do a lot of sitting around. They appreciate it when we give them something.”

“Still, it’s unbelievable. In one day? I didn’t even think it was possible. I thought it only happened on TV.”

Rocco let go a noisy sigh. “Are you gonna shut up and let me say what I want to say? I don’t have all day here.”

“Speak. I’m all ears.” The soccer ball had come rolling his way, and he gently kicked it back to the players.

“Thank you. Okay. Here’s what it says. . . . Umm . . . I don’t know, milligrams, kilograms . . . but the upshot is, now they’re saying the primary cause of death isn’t cocaine toxicity anymore, it’s coca . . . coca . . . what you said.”

“Cocaethylene toxicity. Son of a gun.”

“Yeah. But the manner of death is still undetermined, no change. So I get them on the phone—this was, like, ten minutes ago—I get them on the phone, and I say, What am I supposed to do with this? What’s it mean? Why did you send it to me instead of the public prosecutor? And they say, Hey, all we do is analyze the blood sample. You’re the ones who figure out what it means. You ordered it, don’t
you
know? Except that I didn’t order it—”

“Uh, yeah, Rocco, that was me. I tried calling you yesterday—”

“I know, Tonino explained it to me.”

“It wasn’t his fault, Rocco, I—”

“I know, I know, he’s not in any trouble; he does it all the time, don’t worry. But he doesn’t know why you wanted it either. So how about telling me now? Why did you ask for this particular test? What
does
it mean?”

Gideon sat down on the bench, his thoughts tumbling.

“Gid?”

“I think it means,” he said slowly, “that you do have another murder on your hands, all right. And now we’ve got some solid evidence to back it up.”

Cocaethylene, he explained, was a toxic metabolite that was formed in the liver when cocaine and alcohol were taken together and which subjected both the liver and the heart to enormous stress; many times more stress than was produced by alcohol or cocaine alone. Some studies indicated that the risk of death as a result of cocaethylene formation was twenty-five times greater than the risk of death from cocaine alone.

“So Cesare was drinking, along with snorting the coke, is that what you’re saying?”

“As far as I know, that’s the only way that cocaethylene gets made.”

“So where did the alcohol come from, Gid? There wasn’t any booze on the nightstand. There wasn’t any in the whole apartment. No wine, no cordials, no bottles in the garbage, nothing.”

“That’s because he didn’t drink, Rocco. Ever. He knew better. Linda told me he once had a friend who died from mixing the two. Which is why we can assume that if he had any alcohol in him—and the cocaethylene proves that he did—he didn’t drink it knowingly.”

“You’re losing me again, buddy. If he was doing coke and alcohol at the same time, how could he not know it? And where did the alcohol come from? You’re saying whoever did it took it away with him?”

“No, I’m saying it was right there on the nightstand.”

“The nightstand?” Gideon could practically hear Rocco’s forehead wrinkling. “What, the cough medicine? No, that was Giorniquilla. I know that stuff. No alcohol.”

“Rocco, I also asked Martignetti to request an analysis of the contents of that bottle. That didn’t come back yet?”

“I don’t think so. Just a minute.” A clatter indicated the phone had been put down, and Gideon heard just bits and pieces of what ensued. “Hey, Tonino . . . did we . . . ? Well, why the hell didn’t you . . . ? Let me see. . . .” And then he was back, speaking directly into the mouthpiece again. “Gid, there
was
alcohol in it—twenty-five percent. You want to tell me what the hell is going on here, please? And how you knew about it?”

“I didn’t know, Rocco; I guessed.” But it was a masterful guess—a masterful series of guesses, really—and he was feeling highly satisfied with himself.

The idea had come to him the previous morning at breakfast, when the literal meaning of Giorniquilla had belatedly dawned on him.
Giorni
, of course, meant “days,” and
quilla
was probably from
tranquilla,
so Giorniquilla was a medicine that would quiet your cough and give you “tranquil days.” Well—and here was where the guesswork started—if there was a cough medicine for quiet days, might there not be a variant of that medicine for quiet nights? And if there was, might that variant contain alcohol, as some American nighttime cold medicines did? And, if luck was on his side, might that medicine taste much like the daytime version, or at least enough so that someone wigged out on cocaine might not notice the difference? Might it even look like the daytime version?