Dying on the Vine (8 page)

Beside one of the two stone obelisks that had once marked the turning points for Palio’s chariot races, John paused, eyes narrowed, and leveled a finger at Gideon. “I know you, Doc. If you’re waiting for us to go, like, ‘Whoa! How the hell can you tell somebody landed on their feet from their
skull
?’ forget it.”

Gideon laughed. “Actually, that would be very much appreciated. I’m not getting paid for this, you know, so how about at least giving me some enjoyment out of it?”

From Rocco, a threatening growl. “How about just telling us?”

“You guys sure know how to take the fun out of it, but okay. Do you—”

“Damn it,” Rocco interrupted, “I really better get out of here. Tell me about it when you call. This is Via del Moro, you turn here. Jesus, Carlotta’s gonna kill me.” He jabbed a finger at Gideon. “No mumbo jumbo. Just facts.” He started off, moving fast.

“Hey, Rocco!” Gideon called after him.

Rocco slowed without turning. “What?”

“So how many
carabinieri
does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Now he turned around and grinned. “Four. One to climb up on the chair and three to turn the chair.”

SEVEN

“SO, okay,” John said relatively patiently as they turned the corner. “How do you
know
from her skull that she landed on her feet?”

“Well, you remember that basilar ring fracture in her skull?”

“Where the bottom got all pushed in?”

“Mm-hm. Well, there aren’t many ways you can cave in the skull base like that, but impacting on your feet after a two-hundred-foot drop is one of them. The force is so great that it not only fractures your lower limbs, it drives the spinal column up into your brain—”

John grimaced. “Yeesh.”

“—taking the bottom of the skull partway with it, because the vertebrae are wider than the opening of the foramen magnum. It’s also likely, by the way, to drive the leg bones, the femurs, up into the pelvis and punch holes through it on either side—which also happened here—and to crush and dislocate . . . well, you get the idea.”

“I do,” John said thoughtfully. “And so you think—tell me if I have this right—in a nutshell, you figure she had to have been shot after she fell and not before, because no way could she be alive, let alone conscious,
after
taking a .32 ACP slug right through the middle of her head.”

“Let’s just say it would be highly unusual.”

“But what could be the point? I still don’t understand that. I mean, okay, say she was alive when she went over the edge, she’d be dead as hell once she hit the bottom, right? All those injuries she had?”

“Oh, definitely. There would have been massive internal damage, organs torn from their moorings, probably a snapped spine. And the basilar ring fracture alone—”

“Okay, then, so why shoot her?”

Gideon shrugged. “John, I honestly don’t have an answer for you, but don’t you think this is all starting to get just a little circular? Anyway”—he pointed over John’s shoulder—“we’re here. Let’s go in.”

• • •

L
’OSTERIA di Giovanni was in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century palazzo, relatively modest by Florentine standards. Through the modern glass doors they could see a dining room that managed to be both trendy (well-lit, with abstract art on the walls, and widely spaced, white-clothed tables) and yet distinctly Tuscan (honey-colored, roughly plastered walls, red terra-cotta floor tiles, ancient stone accents peeking through the plaster here and there). At this early hour (by Italian standards), there were few diners.

At the door they were spotted from the rear of the restaurant by a rotund, jolly fellow in a grubby green T-shirt, who came toward them at a trot. This rumpled, convivial personage turned out to be Giovanni himself, who seemed pleased to find that they were Americans, but spoke little English himself and turned them over to the part-Asian hostess. (“This my daughter, Caterina,” he told them.”She speak French too.”) Caterina led them to a table in an interior room. This space was cozier and more traditional—an old copper-hooded fireplace with a family crest, stone pillars anchoring the ceiling arches, tables closer together so it was almost like communal dining. More crowded too, and the noise level suggested the diners had been at it long enough to down a few glasses of wine.

“Your waiter will be Bruno. I hope you enjoy.”

Within seconds the busy, balding, smiling Bruno was bobbing at their side—“
Buona sera, signori . . .”
—setting down ice-frosted flutes of pale, sparkling wine and a fragrant, red-and-white cloth-covered basket. “
Complimenti della casa,
” he declared. John peeled back the cloth to have a peek. “Chicken McNuggets?” he crowed, as incredulously delighted as a kid finding a live, saddled pony waiting for him in the middle of his backyard.

The ingratiating smile dropped off Bruno’s face. He drew himself up. “Is no’ Chicken McNug’,” he told John, oozing grievance. “Is
coccolini
. Special pasta. Fry.”

“Okay,
amico
,
no problemo
. But they look like,
mismo
like, Chicken McNuggets, chicken
mcnuggo
,
pollo mcnuggeti
, that’s all.
Capisce
?” John’s forays into foreign languages were rare, but when they occurred they were always surprising, usually multilingual, and, at least to Gideon, highly entertaining.

Bruno stood even taller and frowned even harder. “I speak English. Is no’ necessary—”

“
Grazie
, Bruno,” Gideon said. “
Sembrano deliziosi
.”

Bruno huffed something and stomped off.

“Well, they do,” John moped. “What’s the big deal? What’s so terrible about Chicken McNuggets?”

“Can’t think of a thing. What do these taste like?”

John tried one and lit up. “Not bad! Greasy, salty, crunchy . . . wow. We better finish ’em before Marti gets here, though,” he said, reaching for another.

Marti Lau, John’s wife, was a nutritionist at a Seattle hospital, and although she knew better than to try to impose on her husband the same saltless, fatless, sugarless, meatless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele, John, an enthusiastic trencherman, found it more enjoyable to do his cheeseburger-chomping and milkshake-slurping when she wasn’t around. She herself lived by dietary rules almost as stringent (she permitted herself cheese and dairy products—sparingly) as the super-healthy regimen she imposed on her hospital population and looked it: a five-foot-ten beanpole, healthy as a horse, and, other than her dietary strictures, a lively, funny, laid-back woman who was a terrific fit for John.

Gideon tucked in too and helped the morsel down with a swig of the wine, a fizzy, lemony prosecco. “They
are
good. I could make a meal of these things.”

“Probably wouldn’t be the first time somebody did,” John said. He used his fork to pluck another from the rapidly emptying basket and more or less flipped it into his mouth, to be quickly followed by one more. When Bruno bobbed up again with menus, Gideon told him they were waiting for two ladies and would order after they arrived. Bruno’s shoulders lifted and fell with acceptance and resignation, as if Fate itself had decreed that these two difficult
americani
were to be his burden for tonight.

“Hey, Bruno,” John called after him, holding up the basket. “We could stand another order
, un altro ordero
, of these things. My buddy here,
mi amigo
, has pretty much gobbled them up,
tutto
.”

Bruno came back and snatched the basket out of his hand. “Will be cost,” he told them, as if expecting an argument.

“
Va bene
,
amigo
,
no problemo
,” John told him with an expansive wave, but then turned seriously to Gideon. “Doc, you can see that you’ve got Rocco thinking about getting the whole case reopened, can’t you?”

“Well, maybe he should. Something’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you have to understand, it’s not just a question of him going to his boss and saying, ‘We should reopen this case.’ It’s a lot more complicated, a lot dicier, than that.”

“Dicier? Why?”

“Because egos are involved, man. When you close a file, especially on a high-profile homicide—in the
Carabinieri
, or the FBI, or the Podunk PD—a lot of people—prosecutor, judge, the cop that was in charge—have put their reputations on the line by signing off on it, on whatever the conclusions were. Believe me, they are
not
happy when some underling comes along wanting to open it up again. So Rocco knows he’s probably gonna get crucified when he brings up the idea.
If
he brings up the idea. He needs some solid ground to stand on.”

“And you don’t think what I’ve been telling you is solid enough.”

“Well, let me ask it this way. How sure are
you
about what you’ve been saying?”

“About which part?”

“About the weird part; that the fall came first, that she was already dead before she was shot.”

“Well—”

“No fancy explanations, no lectures.”

“No mumbo jumbo,” Gideon said with a smile.

“Right. Just how sure are you? Say on a scale of one to ten.”

“Come on, John, I can’t do that. Look, when I say that if you’re conscious when you fall, you’re going to land on your feet, I’m making a generalization. You realize that, don’t you? I don’t know that it works that way every single time. How could I know? How could anyone? And even when we say that a bullet traveling through the middle of the brain
always
produces instant loss of consciousness, how could we possibly know something like that for a certainty? And when we say—”

John tossed back his prosecco in a single impatient gulp. “Goddamn it, it never fails. It’s exactly what my boss says about you. You come on the scene, you throw a monkey wrench into everything, but then, when we want to act on it, the first thing you do is cover your rear end. ‘Gosh almighty, folks, I’m just making a generalization here, don’t hold me to it.’”

“That’s not fair, John. I can tell you what I find and what I conclude from it. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I’m not going to make stuff up.”

John shrugged. “Okay then, tell me what you do know. What are the statistics? What percentage of conscious people land on their feet, and what percentage don’t? Because you can damn well bet it’s gonna get asked in an Italian court if this ever gets there, so give me some figures. Something Rocco can work with.”

“John, you can’t—”

“You don’t have any percentages, do you? There aren’t any, are there?”

Gideon leaned back with a sigh. “Boy, in your next career, you know what you ought to be? A defense lawyer. You sound like the kind of gorilla-for-hire that comes after me in cross-examinations. ‘Can you tell the jury,
Doctor
Oliver,
exactly
what percentage of proximal tibial epiphyseal unions are complete by age twenty-two and one half among Hispanic females with one non-Hispanic maternal grandparent, as compared to that among Hispanic females with—’”

John cracked a smile. “Okay, okay, but seriously,
are
there any statistics? I’m just asking you: do you think Rocco should go back and stir this kettle up again unless you’re pretty sure it needs it? I mean, even if he reopens it and it goes nowhere—
especially
if it goes nowhere—he’ll still have a bunch of important people ticked off at him.”

“Let me put it this way—”

“Statistics,” John demanded.

With a sigh, Gideon leaned back in his chair. John had a point, but what he wasn’t taking into account was that forensics didn’t have the advantages of the experimental sciences. You couldn’t push a thousand conscious people off a cliff to see how they landed, and then shove a thousand more unconscious ones over the edge to find out how the two groups compared. All you had to work with were the suicides, murders, and accidents that happened on their own, without your help—and of those, only the ones that happened to come your way or happened to get written up, which the great, great majority of them didn’t. And even in those you were familiar with, you could only rarely be
certain
that a supposed suicide really was a suicide, or an accident an accident. Not after the fact.

Bruno returned with another basket of
coccolini
and even two more proseccos (without additional cost, presumably). John happily busied himself with them.

True, Gideon thought, there were experiments in which dummies or pig cadavers had been dropped from cranes, and those were instructive, but dummies, even anthropomorphic ones with weight distributions precisely like people’s, weren’t people. The upshot was that your forensic conclusions were often grounded on a shockingly small database, a compilation of your own experiences and those of a few others, along with an intuition that (you hoped) was based on years of subliminal information-processing But there wasn’t any point in going through all the
if
s,
but
s, and
maybe
s with John, who’d heard it all before anyway. “If what you’re asking me is, could I prove, to the certain satisfaction of a judge and jury, that she was still alive when she fell, still conscious, then my answer has to be no. Nobody could prove it because it’s unprovable one way or the other. Do I
believe
she was? Yes, definitely, and I’ve got some decent scientific backing for my opinion. But would I bet my life on it? No way.”

John shook his head. “Oh, that’s just great.”

Gideon pondered for a moment longer, gaze turned inward, finger to his lips. “
Your
life, maybe.”

That won a laugh from John. “Okay, so what do you think? Is there enough there to suggest that maybe this was a double murder, not a murder-suicide? Or let me put it this way: if it were you, would
you
push the buttons to get the case reopened? Considering that, if it didn’t come to anything, you’d be in the doghouse for the next five years.”

Gideon leaned back. “Well, before I did, what I’d really want would be to have a look at the other skeleton, the husband’s skeleton. See if it’s got anything to say for itself. But—”

“Rocco said it’d been cremated.”

“That’s right, he did. But wait a minute.” He put down the prosecco he’d been sipping. “There’s bound to be a report of some kind from the
medico:
an autopsy or something like it.”

“An autopsy of a bunch of bones? Be pretty short, wouldn’t it?”