Fatal Touch cab-2

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “It doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Well, it is. Who did you phone on the bridge?”

  Caterina hesitated. She was sure Blume had not seen her make the call to Elia. She had kept her eye on his back all the time. She had hit speed dial, spoke for, what, twenty seconds at most, and Blume had not turned around once.

  “How do you know I phoned someone?”

  “You deliberately fell back by pretending to be interested in a journal of civil service examinations at the newsstand, and so I figured you wanted privacy to make a call. When you caught up, I saw you were a little distracted. And I’ve noticed you hook your hair over the back of your right ear when you’re using a phone. Your hair was still pushed back when you sat down here.”

  Caterina brought her hand up to her ear.

  “No. It’s fallen back in place now,” said Blume. “Here’s the thing: I like to know who my investigators are talking to while we’re at work.”

  “My son.”

  “Oh, right. I didn’t know you had a son. Or maybe I did, but I’d forgotten. I didn’t know you were married either. Or are you?”

  “I was. My son’s just turned nine. I don’t like people knowing. It’s hard enough being a woman and getting taken seriously, but being a single mother, well, you can imagine.”

  “Well, no. I can hardly imagine being a single mother, can I? You should have reminded me the other day when you came in asking for fieldwork.”

  “Would knowing that have influenced your decision?”

  “I don’t know,” said Blume. “I’d like to think not. But let’s do a test. Tell me what we have so far. Give me a hypothesis. Go on.”

  Caterina cleared her throat and said, “Well, not much…”

  “Good start,” said Blume. “Never forget the law of parsimony, Inspector. Whichever theory needs fewest assumptions is the best.”

  “The tourist mugger, hearing him singing in English, decided to rob him. A struggle ensued, the mugger hit him over the head. Or pushed him down.”

  “That’s short enough,” said Blume. “Most reports of the mugger speak of one man acting alone, which is a bit odd since they usually work in twos or threes. That’s not a core issue now, but keep it in mind all the same. More importantly, the reports all mention him having an unusual thin knife, like a stiletto or something. So if he is going to kill, why not use that?”

  “He hasn’t used it yet,” said Caterina.

  “There’s always a first time,” said Blume.

  “Except, this wasn’t it, obviously,” said Caterina, surprising herself as she heard annoyance creeping into her voice. “Seeing as he wasn’t stabbed.”

  “So let’s rule out that hypothesis and think of one even likelier and simpler,” said Blume. “Like this: The man had been drinking. He was in his early seventies…”

  “Wait…” She double-checked her arithmetic. “He was in his early sixties. Not his seventies.”

  “Yeah?” Blume looked skeptical, then spent some time counting on his fingers. “You’re right. Jesus, that’s terrible.”

  “What’s terrible?”

  “It’s not so long till I’m that age.”

  “You’ve still got a fair bit to go,” said Caterina, smiling at him.

  “I don’t drink. I suppose that’s a plus,” said Blume. “I gave it up eighteen months ago, don’t even miss it. Alcohol intoxication lessens muscular protective reflexes, and makes the brain more vulnerable to concussive trauma. This is Treacy I’m talking about now, by the way. So, the old fellow falls down, bangs the back of his head, manages to get up, and struggle on for a few meters, perhaps on his knees. He crawls a bit, but his brain is hemorrhaging, so he lays the side of his face on the street, pisses his pants, and dies a drunkard’s death. End of story.”

  “Oh,” said Caterina. “This isn’t going to be my first murder investigation, is it?”

  “I doubt it. The magistrate has lost interest already. Expect a lot of disappointment in this work,” said Blume.

  Chapter 5

  As they recrossed the pedestrian bridge to the piazza, Blume’s phone rang.

  “Excellent. Well done, Linda.” He turned to Caterina, “She’s the young blond…”

  “Yes, I know her,” said Caterina.

  “Linda’s just done her first piece of investigative work and got us an address for Treacy.”

  “You mean she looked it up in a telephone book?”

  “She did, bless her. Now as for the address, it’s just a three-minute walk from here. Treacy had almost made it home.”

  They reached Blume’s car, which sat in the middle of Via della Pelliccia, a blue light flashing justification for the disruption. Now he went over to it, removed a bag from the trunk, took off his jacket, which looked too small when it was on him but huge as he held it in his hand, then his V-neck, which, she noticed, was pocked with moth holes. He folded them with more difficulty than care, then opened the back door of the car, and tossed them in.

  “You missed the seat,” said Caterina as he slammed the car door shut.

  He strapped the bag over his shoulder. “Never mind.”

  They walked back to the piazza, open again to its residents. The small police tent in the middle lent the piazza an air of slight gaiety, as if someone had set up a food stall, though the festive effect was spoiled by the presence of a blue van of the Mortuary Police.

  “Those bastards take their own sweet time,” said Blume. “The body went in the back forty minutes ago.”

  Blume went over and seemed to get into a vicious argument with one of the men inside the van, but when he came back he was laughing.

  “It won’t start. The battery’s flat. He says it happens all the time. Nice to see the police aren’t the only ones with vehicles that don’t work.”

  “Is that so funny?” she asked.

  “No. Just something the driver said about the guy lying in the back enjoying the air-conditioning, while he had to sit there… never mind, there’s Grattapaglia.”

  Grattapaglia came out of the pink building to the left accompanied by two policemen. They watched him send them to the next building, then he came over.

  “Nothing, no witnesses, most people at work. Six officers are going around all the local bars to see if there were any incidents, arguments.”

  “You and Inspector Mattiola here can do a bit of door-to-door, then come back here to me in about a quarter of an hour or whenever you see the van leave.”

  Blume went over to Inspector Rosario Panebianco who had been maintaining the scene, watching the forensic teams, and re-examining the area.

  “Anything else here?”

  Panebianco tutted dismissively. “Nothing, Commissioner. Surely this is just an accident scene? That’s what I feel at least.”

  “Yes,” said Blume, “but there’s the question of the mugger. Maybe this was a mugging that went wrong.”

  “He had his wallet.”

  “He might have put up a fight and the mugger fled without taking it. The victim is foreign, like the mugger’s preferred targets. For the Questura and the press, we need to be careful how we treat foreigners.”

  “Dear me, has anyone ever mentioned that to Grattapaglia?”

  “Don’t even talk about that,” said Blume. “Just to be clear: you found nothing new here?”

  “Nothing. No real evidence of a crime.”

  Blume watched as the last of the forensics team packed away their stuff. A thin man in cotton blue coveralls came walking around the corner. Tucked under his long arm as if it weighed nothing was a gray Magneti Marelli battery. He gave a cheery wave to the driver of the mortuary van, as if they were old friends. Two patrolmen busied themselves taking down the tent, the electrician went to work under the hood of the van, passersby cast curious glances. Ten minutes later, the mortuary wagon drove off, the electrician sitting squeezed in between the driver and his companion, the three of them chatting and smoking. With its departure, the only sign that anythi
ng had happened at all was the unusual number of policemen coming in and out of the buildings around Blume and the broken strands of police tape fluttering at the corners of the piazza.

  A few more minutes passed and Inspector Mattiola and Sovrintendente Grattapaglia came out of the building to his right.

  “How many people did you two manage to talk to?” asked Blume.

  “Two,” said Grattapaglia.

  “Five,” said Caterina.

  “So which is it,” said Blume. “Five or two?”

  “Seven,” said Grattapaglia.

  “Ah,” said Blume. “You split up.”

  “It was quicker that way,” said Caterina.

  “Sure.” Blume lifted his bag onto his shoulder. “Treacy lived a few minutes from here. We’re going to check his house, see what we can find.”

  Grattapaglia stepped forward, “I’ll take that bag for you.”

  “No, it’s not heavy — also, you’re staying here. Continue coordinating the house-to-house interviews, watch this area, note who comes by.”

  Grattapaglia stepped back without a word.

  Blume nodded to Caterina. “Inspector, shall we go?”

  Chapter 6

  Blume spoke as he walked down the lane, “We still have to treat a death from unknown causes as if it was a murder. Because it could be a murder. And to do this properly, we have to convince ourselves that it is a murder, which means ignoring all my experience which says it isn’t. Are you following?”

  “I wish you had not humiliated Grattapaglia like that in front of me,” said Caterina. “You were the one who said I had to start getting on better with people.”

  “Too bad. You blew your chance. I detailed you and him to go door-to-door together, and you didn’t.”

  “So you’re punishing me too, by angering him all the more?”

  “Sort of. You need to learn to handle this sort of petty stuff. I don’t know what it was like in Immigration Affairs, but it seems to me you must have been surrounded by selfless superior beings such as the rest of the force can only dream of.”

  Caterina increased her pace to keep up as Blume hurried down Via Benedetta. She caught up with him as they reached Piazza della Malva. “Most of my old colleagues were petty bastards, too. Was he married?”

  “Treacy? Not according to his ID card, but he could have been living with someone. We’ll see now. You know, I’ve been turning that name over in my mind. It’s familiar to me. He was an artist, according to his ID card.”

  “A painter?” asked Caterina.

  “I guess so. It’s bad enough putting down ‘artist’ as your profession, but it’s almost justifiable if you’re a painter.”

  “Or a musician.”

  “Yeah, a musician might do that, but it would not be justifiable. As long as he was not a writer or a photographer, I’ll forgive him his pretention.”

  Blume waited till a small knot of American students outside the John Cabot University had passed, then turned on to Via Corsini. Caterina wandered over to the first house on the short terrace to check the number. “Which house?” she asked.

  “Number 15. Down the far end, probably,” said Blume.

  Only one side of the street had buildings on it. The other was flanked by railings that fenced in the overgrown courtyard of Villa Corsini. The last house was number 14.

  In front of them was the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, to their left was the Podogora barracks of the Carabinieri.

  “Where the hell is number 15?” asked Blume.

  “We could ask the Carabinieri for directions,” said Caterina.

  “That would look good, wouldn’t it?” said Blume. “Phone lovely Linda and get a confirmation of the house number.”

  He stood at the front gate of the Botanical Gardens and found himself looking directly at a dark-suited park keeper with a full beard, who sat in his white booth gazing down the strangely rustic street with a proprietorial air, like some Sicilian gabellotto. Blume folded his arms, nodded, and was ignored. He decided to let it go and drifted over to the side of the street out of the man’s line of vision, and found himself before a green wooden door that seemed to be a side entrance into the gardens. A square marble slab was attached to the wall beside the door, the number 15 chiseled into it, off-white against white. Below it was an intercom with a clear plastic button and a single name: Henry Treacy.

  By the time Caterina arrived to say they had confirmed the address, Blume had pressed the intercom button three times.

  “Nobody there,” he said after a while. He put his bag on the ground and stood back, looking up to the top of the wall as if he had half a mind to scale it. “This looks like a side door into the Botanical Gardens,” he said. “Did Treacy live in a flower bed or something? We need to go around to the other side.”

  The guard in the white box watched carefully as they came through the main entrance. Blume took a few steps to the right, but he could already see there was nothing there but wall.

  “Hey!”

  Blume stopped and put down his bag which was beginning to weigh. He waited for Caterina to flash a police ID card and send the guard reluctantly back to his post.

  Together they stepped over a red-and-white plastic chain that looped around a square of manicured lawn bordered by outsized yellow daisies.

  Caterina looked at the wall, then back at Blume, and shrugged. He went over to the wall, folded back a deep curtain of ivy, slapped the dusky ocher wall behind, then clapped the dust off his hands. “This is the perimeter wall,” he said. “The green door on the other side was more or less at this point here, which means there must be two walls and a narrow passageway between them. And they must lead to that garden lodge there.” He pointed to a small two-story house with a red tile roof to their left. “We could get in from this side, or go back and enter through that green door. I have some picklocks in the tactical bag.”

  A few minutes later, Blume was working at the tumbler lock on the door. “Almost have it,” he said after five minutes. “I’m a bit out of practice.”

  Eventually, he pulled out a crowbar from the same bag, stuck it into the wood frame next to the strike plate, and hurled his body against the door. The wood of the door jamb was so damp and spongy that the only noise it made as it gave way was a squeak and a sigh.

  Directly in front of them was the wall they had been looking at from inside the Botanical Gardens. Blume pushed the door half closed against its splintered frame, and turned right into a passageway that was not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Both sides were covered in ivy and wet moss. The passage was about ten yards long and led up to another door, this one a little sturdier. No longer keen to hone his lock-picking skills, Blume slammed the crowbar under the lock mechanism, jerked it around roughly till he felt it reach deeper in, then started wrenching it back and forth. After several attempts he motioned Caterina over.

  “On the count of three,” he said, steadying his hands on the bar in preparation. When he reached three, they pushed against the door, but their timing was slightly off. They did it again, and the door burst open so easily that they almost fell over each other.

  The sudden brightness in the room into which they now entered was disorientating. They stood there blinking for a few moments, Caterina trying to understand how the inside of a house could have so much light. As her eyes adjusted, she realized they were standing below a sloping glass roof. Ficus, bamboo, dracena plants, and small trees she could not identify grew from wide-bodied blue glazed urns sitting on a terracotta floor. “We’ve just broken into one of the botanical hothouses.”

  “No,” said Blume. “This is part of the house. A sort of add-on greenhouse used as a workroom. Hot in here.”

  He bent down, rummaged in his bag, and came up with a box of latex gloves, and wiggled his fingers like an important surgeon as he put them on.

  The glass room contained wickerwork chairs with yellow cushions, a ceramic-topped table with a demitasse coffee cup on it.
Blume noticed some bookshelves and, in the far left corner, a high, long work desk, like he remembered from science lessons in school, except this was made from mahogany. A leather-bound folio-size volume lay beneath three quarto volumes, also leather bound. Beside them sat an ebony box, open to reveal five rows of silver-topped jars, filled with colored powders. Three crystal jars held dozens of paintbrushes.

  Blume peered at the top book, but the lettering on the cover was too faded for him to make out the title. He opened it; the text was in Latin.

  In the corner of the greenhouse, next to the bead curtain, stood a squat cast-iron wood-fired stove, on top of which sat a tall copper stockpot and beside it a double boiler.

  A clacking noise made him turn around as Caterina pushed aside a bamboo bead curtain covering what must have once been the back door to the building. She stepped inside.

  “There’s a kitchen here,” said Caterina’s voice. “And another stove.”

  Blume followed Caterina in. The light was less intense and the whitewashed walls, the gray marble washstand, and the heavy brass taps made the room feel cool. A pastry-board lay half across a large rectangular ivory marble table, on which three boxes of eggs and an earthenware jug of what appeared to be milk sat. An ice-cube tray filled with black liquid shimmered slightly in response to the impact of Blume’s footsteps as he moved around the table, taking it in. A zinc box contained herbs, flakes of charcoal, dried leaves, and a collection of gnarled woody fruits of some sort. In here was another stove, only this was modern, boxy, made from burnished gunmetal steel.

  He opened the refrigerator. “A lot of eggs. Milk, cheese,” he announced.

  The milk smelled old. “Beer. Garlic, feta cheese, some withered greens. A single man’s refrigerator.” The cold green bottles of beer clinked invitingly as he closed the refrigerator. Tuborg and Peroni. He used to drink both. He felt thirsty. There was no real need for him not to drink. It wasn’t as if he had had a problem. Apart from the weight thing, but not drinking hadn’t helped much there. He’d think about it later.

  The next room, the living room, was lit by two dirty-paned windows. Blume immediately noticed three easels. One was folded and propped in the corner. One was gripping a pristine white board holding red-tinted paper with the first gray lines of what looked like a foot.