Dying on the Vine (7 page)

“Well, she was laying on her stomach, all right. Oh boy, I’m starting to think maybe we’re going to have to reopen this whole can of worms after all.” He shut his eyes. “God help me.”

“What about the husband?” Gideon asked. “How was he shot? Was it compatible with suicide?”

“Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re on safe ground there. Couldn’t have been more compatible. Right out of the books. The classic spot for a handgun suicide.” He raised his left hand and jabbed his forefinger at his temple. “Bang. And please, don’t give me any more crap about shooting yourself in the armpit. You know damn well this is where they do it nine times out of ten.”

“I don’t know about your statistics,” Gideon said, “but generally speaking, yes.”

“And righties shoot themselves in the right side of the head and lefties shoot themselves in the left side of the head—”

“But not always,” John put in.

“Oh, come on, you guys, give me a break. What, it’s only ninety-five percent of the time?”

Gideon had to smile. There had been a recent study of just this question, based on an examination of confirmed suicides. The answer: 95 percent.

“And he was shot straight through the left temple,” Rocco continued. “Wanna guess whether he was a lefty or a righty?”

Gideon laughed. “Well . . . this is just a hunch here, but I’m going to take a chance and guess he was a lefty.”

“Bingo. Okay, your turn, Mr. Expert—pardon me, Dr. Expert. Now you’re gonna go ahead and tell me what’s wrong with our theory—why he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, right?”

“Hey, Rocco,” John said approvingly, “you’re a quick learner.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Gideon said. “You’re right. Sounds like a suicide to me.”

Rocco staggered and clapped a hand to his heart. “I’m shocked . . . shocked.” They stopped walking to let Rocco draw a Marlboro from a pack with his lips and apply a lighter to it.

“Rocco,” Gideon said, “what were the other things that made you so sure he killed her and not the other way around? You said a minute ago that there were a lot of them.”

“Well, two of them, anyway,” Rocco said in a choked, constricted voice while he pulled in his first lungful of smoke. He held it there a moment with his eyes closed and then let it out in a long
hoosh
. “The other thing was the way their bodies were lying—hers right up against this big rock and his up against hers, which means she would have had to come down first, so how could
she
have killed
him
?”

“Well, what about this?” John asked as they began walking again. “Someone else killed them both and tried to make it look like a murder-suicide. You know, rearranged the bodies and all.”

Rocco took two meditative drags. “Look, John, anything’s possible, but there’s just nothing, nothing at all, that points in that direction.” And then, in a muttered afterthought, “Until today, anyway.”

John shrugged. “Okay.” He didn’t think the idea held water either.

“You didn’t come up with any other suspects?” Gideon asked. “At all?”

Rocco bristled. “What do you mean, ‘at all?’ Like we didn’t do a thorough enough investigation or something?” But on reconsidering his words he cooled down. “Well, we didn’t, that’s true. We didn’t do a whole lot of searching. I mean, sure, we interviewed his family, the people who knew him best, and we looked into things, but it was all so obvious. . . . Hell, it
seemed
obvious. . . . The facts spoke for themselves, you know? He killed her and then he killed himself. Why would we go hunting for other suspects?”

“Yes, I can see that it would have seemed like a waste of money and manpower.”

“Anyway, no, there weren’t any other viable suspects. Oh, wait, there was one other thing: we found the gun. It came down the cliff with him, and it was his, all right. A wartime Beretta. Had it for forever.”

“Any prints?” John said, then jerked his head. “No, what am I talking about? There wouldn’t be, not after all that time out in the weather.”

“As a matter of fact there were. It wound up caught in the opening of his jacket, sort of wedged into his armpit. And it was a good leather jacket, so it was pretty well protected from the elements. So, yeah, we did manage to lift a couple of partials off it.”

“And?”

“And they’re his. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go to court on it because, as I said, they’re only partials. Besides, his prints aren’t on file anywhere. But we found prints that matched what we had on the gun all over his things at home . . . hundreds of them. I don’t know, maybe thousands. On his shoes, his eating utensils, his toothpaste tube, everything. We took prints of his family and the winery staff, and there’s definitely no match there. Our tech guy says the odds are ninety-nine out of a hundred they’re his.”

“You’re right,” John said. “Good odds, but they wouldn’t cut it in a courtroom.”

“There’s something that seems a little hinky to me here, Rocco,” Gideon said. “Am I the only one who thinks it a little, shall we say, unusual that the gun stayed with him all the way down and never bounced away anywhere where you couldn’t find it? That lady we looked at today sure did some bouncing, so I presume he did too, since he took the same route.”

“Well—” Rocco began.

“And then the gun just happened to end up in the very best possible place to preserve any fingerprints that happened to be on it?”

Rocco shrugged. “Sometimes we get lucky. It happens.”

“It happens,” John agreed.

“Yeah,” said Gideon, but he wasn’t satisfied.

“Rocco, you got a motive?” John asked.

“Uh-huh. He thought she was having an affair. This was what you might call an ultratraditional kind of guy, a real dinosaur, and that was all the motive he would’ve needed: she deserved to die, and he couldn’t stand to live. And fossils like him, they don’t do divorce.”

“And was she?” asked Gideon. “Having an affair?”

“Who knows? We were satisfied he did it, and he was dead. No reason to follow up. What would be the point? Just make more misery and unhappiness for the family. Enough said, case closed.” He threw a wry glance at Gideon. “Only now along comes the great Skeleton Detective with his gaga theories and screws up the works.”

“Whoa,” said John, “that’s the first time I ever heard anybody say that about you, Doc.”

“Well, now, how exactly did I screw up the works? Tell me that. All I did—”

“All you did was tell us first she fell off the cliff and
then
she was shot.”

“Well, I know that complicates things a little—”

Rocco snorted a laugh. “Nah, not really. This guy shoves his wife off a two-hundred-foot cliff, then he runs down and pops her one, just in case a fall that broke every bone in her body didn’t do the job. Then, instead of killing himself right there and making it easy on himself, he climbs all the way to the top again—this fifty-eight-year-old guy with bad lungs—so he can shoot himself right on the edge, the very same spot, and fall down on top of her. Oh, yeah, nothing wrong with that picture.”

“Rocco, we’re getting ahead of the story here. All I can tell you for sure is that she was alive when she fell off the cliff, which I know because—”

“Oh, yeah, I wondered when you were gonna get around to that,” Rocco grumbled

“—because she was conscious when she fell, and if you’re conscious, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re alive.”

“Conscious?”
Rocco practically shouted. “Damn, Gid . . .” When words failed him he just shook his head.

“Yes, conscious. Sure. You see—”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it. What hat did that get pulled out of? Don’t you ever stop? First you know she was alive, now you’re telling me you know she was
conscious
?”

He had stopped walking so abruptly that a daydreaming man walking behind him had to stop himself from stumbling into him. Catching himself just before contact, he made an exasperated noise and gave Rocco the finger, a gesture as readily understood in Florence as in New York.

“Screw you too, pal,” was Rocco’s nonchalant, over-the-shoulder response, in English, before he returned his attention to Gideon. “What are you gonna tell me next, what she was thinking about?” Still shaking his head, he flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

“Believe me, if I could I would, but all I can tell you is that she was conscious.”

“Aw, man, give me a break. How the hell can you possibly know something like that?”

“I know because—”

Rocco glanced at his watch and did a quick mental calculation. “Nuts, I gotta go if I’m gonna make it back to meet the train. Jesus, Gid, you sure know how to turn a simple case into a, a—” He shook his head and pulled out a business card on which he scribbled something. “This is my cell number, my personal phone. Give me a call later and tell me what you were gonna say, will you? But no mumbo jumbo. If I’m gonna go anywhere with this, I’m gonna need some solid evidence—facts—to convince Captain Conforti. He’s a tough nut to crack.” And then to John: “If you think reopening a closed case is tough in the Feeb, you oughta see the
Carabinieri
. Don’t forget, red tape was invented right here in Florence. Thank you, Machiavelli.”

“I’ll call if you want, Rocco,” Gideon said, “but there’s no need to interrupt your evening. I’ll be going over it all in class tomorrow morning. In detail.”

“Yeah, except I’m not gonna be there. I gotta be in court, available to testify on another case. So call me later? Tonight, I mean?”

Gideon took the card. “I will.”

“In an hour would be good. So look: You can cut across the piazza right here. That street on the other side is Via della Scala. Left on that for two blocks and turn right on Via del Moro. The Osteria’s just a block down.” Another look at his watch, a momentary chewing of his lip. “Ah, what the hell, I can go a little more with you. I can always run back to the station.”

“Or just flag down the first car you see and jump in,” John suggested and growled: “‘Police business.’ That’s what we do in America. Don’t you watch any movies?”

“Yeah, right. Okay, Gid,” he said as they started across the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, “you know she was conscious because . . . ?”

“Well, go back to the bones we were looking at this afternoon, to all those fractures. Did you notice any kind of pattern in the damage?”

That brought roll of the eyes from John. “Oh, honest to God, you can’t just tell us? We really have to do this Socratic thing?”

“Hey, I’m a professor, John. It’s what I do.”

“Tell me about it,” John said grumpily.

“Pattern in the damage . . .” mused Rocco. “Gimme a minute . . . Most of the injuries were to the lower half of her body, is that what you’re driving at?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said John, “her legs were a mess. Her arms weren’t so bad.”

Gideon nodded. “Correct. More specifically, every single one of the six bones in her legs was broken, whereas not a single one of the six bones in the arms was damaged. And the one foot we have has more splintered bones than I had a chance to count. The pelvis is mashed too. But above the waist, the only injuries are some crushed vertebrae—not fractured, but
crushed
—and her skull. Well, how would you account for a pattern like that?”

“She landed on her feet?” John suggested as they started moving again. “I guess.”

“And you’re right, she landed on her feet, and the fact is that the bodies of dead people—or unconscious people for that matter—don’t do that. If a nonconscious body falls from a great enough height—and two hundred feet is way,
way
more than enough—then it tends to align itself in the air, so that it lands horizontally. It’s a function of the state of uniform motion of a falling object.”

“The state of . . . ?” Rocco’s brow furrowed.

“Not important,” Gideon said dismissively. “Now—”

“Meaning he doesn’t know what the hell it means either,” John told Rocco.

“Pretty much, yes,” Gideon agreed. “Physics never was one of my strong points. But the point I’m making here is: people who are
conscious
during a fall, they—”

“Land on their feet.” This from Rocco.

“Exactly. Well, with some qualifications. If it’s from a low height—ten, twenty feet—they won’t have time to change their alignment, so a lot of times they hit with their hands or forearms, trying to protect their heads. Or suicides might land head down on purpose. Otherwise, yes, they almost always land on their feet. And this one very definitely did. You’re frowning.”

“Yeah, I’m frowning,” Rocco said. “I got a problem with this.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, you seem awful sure of yourself, but when I listen to the words, what I hear is ‘tends to’ and ‘almost always’ and ‘most often.’ That doesn’t exactly convince the hell out of me, and it wouldn’t convince a court either, you know what I mean?”

“I do, and it’s a good point. But in this particular case there’s no
almost always
. I
know
she landed on her feet . . . and I know it from her
skull
.”

John and Rocco puzzled over this—Rocco was talking to himself—as they made their way through the great square that fronted the church’s beautifully maintained façade. The piazza itself, however, had seen better days. For more than three centuries the grand event of the Florentine year, the Palio dei Cocchi, had been held here. Now it was a scruffy lawn area, more sandy dirt than grass, on which they had to pick their way between the young and not-so-young backpackers who sprawled, picnicked, and slept, oblivious to the many pedestrians using it as a shortcut.