A Very Venetian Murder

by Haughton Murphy

  The hostess insisted that her guests have a drink. Reuben inspected the bottles Regillo had arranged; the pickings were slim. There was no gin, only a half-empty litre of vodka and one of sweet vermouth. He noted that the bottle of Schweppes tonic was also half empty, meaning that it was flat, he was sure. The white wine looked newly opened, so he opted for that. It was lukewarm and almost sour.

  The next arrival was Marie Tyson, a novelist and short-story writer Reuben had often seen in New York, where she was a PEN activist (“Poets, Editors and Novelists,” she had once assured Reuben, not “Pricks, Eunuchs and Nitwits” as a grumbling author had once called the organization in his presence) and a fixture at its benefits and any other literary event of significance in the city. She was a chronicler of female angst whose novels were stuffed with walloping sexual exploits. One of them, written after a long visit, had been set in Venice and highlighted the sexual adventures of an American visitor (reliably thought to be Tyson herself). “Did you know that Marie Tyson writes on her back?” a bookish wag had once asked Reuben. Reading her output, it seemed entirely plausible to him.

  “Reuben Frost!” she said, as she reached him while circling the room. “I didn’t know you were in Venice!”

  “I could say the same. You going to be here long?”

  “No, sadly. I’m just noodling around Europe until the Frankfurt Book Fair. It’s such a drag, but my publisher says I have to flog my new novel. Have you ever been?”

  “No, it’s not really my line,” Reuben said.

  Doris Medford came in while Marie Tyson and Reuben were talking. Even from a distance he could tell that she looked better than she had at Antica Besseta, when she had been drinking too much, and certainly at the Questura. Frost decided to talk with her before she got lost in another conversation, so he extricated himself from Marie Tyson and walked across to where she was standing.

  “I’m sorry we missed you yesterday,” Reuben said. “We had a fine excursion to Torcello.”

  Medford looked puzzled. “Dan told me about your trip. But I didn’t know I’d been invited.”

  Now it was Reuben’s turn to be confused. He was sure his written invitation to Dan Abbott had explicitly included Medford, but obviously there had been some misunderstanding. He decided that it might be embarrassing to pursue the matter, so he changed the subject. “I understand you want to go to Milan,” he said.

  “Not want to go. I don’t much like it. But I have to make sure a whole group of fabrics gets into production. I suppose I could call the manufacturers up and tell them the police won’t let me leave Venice, so would they please come and see me here? But that’s too shame-making.”

  Reuben did not know quite how to respond, so he let her remark pass. “Now that you’ve had a chance to rest, do you have any thoughts on who might have killed your boss?”

  “Former boss, don’t forget. This time Gregg didn’t get around to hiring me back.”

  “That was the pattern, wasn’t it?”

  “God, yes. Once or twice a year, I’d be told to pack up and leave. Then a day, a week later—six hours once—he’d call me back. It was crazy, and not great for the old self-esteem.”

  Reuben saw no point in getting into a discussion of Medford’s psyche and was trying desperately to figure out how to change the conversational direction when Cynthia arrived. She was with Ephraim Miller, a hardy old party they had known for years and the scion of a nineteenth-century New England shoemaking fortune. By the time the Miller millions had been passed down to Ephraim’s generation, they had diminished considerably, but he had enough to live modestly in Rome and for the month of September each year in Venice at the Bucintoro, an unpretentious pink pensione near the Arsenale. A jolly sort, he made annual excursions to Glyndebourne, Bayreuth, Salzburg and other music and dance festivals around Europe. Today he was wearing a double-breasted white linen suit, so old that it was more yellow than white.

  “Reuben, I just picked your wife up on the Fondamenta outside,” he said, shaking hands.

  “You make it sound as if she were soliciting,” Reuben said.

  “Oh, no, no, no. Our meeting was purely accidental. And platonic,” he said, then added, “Why there’s Valarie Keene,” as he spotted a tall, awkward-looking American woman hesitating at the door. Keene, who was now on the far side of thirty-five, had come to Venice a decade earlier with two objectives—to find a husband and to become a famous artist. She had failed at both, though she continued to paint in a studio in the Dorsoduro.

  She was not unattractive, even though she wore her hair in a single lumpy pigtail, but her height had scared off a succession of men, mostly shorter, macho Italians unprepared to cope with a taller companion. She specialized in realistic studies of local scenes. They were professional enough, but she had never been able to capture the magical light of La Serenissima, a failing she shared with many an artist more accomplished than she; her Venetian city-scapes were bathed in the bright, harsh light that might have prevailed in her native Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Valarie Keene was followed almost immediately by a trio Reuben did not know but who were shortly introduced by Ceil Scamozzi as Dalton Glover, an American film director, and Betty Staples, the blond star of his movies and his life. The third member of the party, who it turned out had arrived with the movie pair only by coincidence, was Enzo Marcatti, a reporter for the local daily, Il Gazzettino. The bespectacled, graying Marcatti was ubiquitous on the local social circuit. As Erica Sherrill had once put it, he was always ready to go to a party at the drop of his wife. She was a long-suffering and invisible lady who lived with their four children in Treviso, on the mainland. He circled the room, kissing each lady’s hand, and then requested a vodka to renew his strength.

  “I say, Enzo, have you been covering the Gregg Baxter murder?” Ephraim Miller asked him.

  “I’ve been involved, yes,” the newspaperman replied.

  “Well, tell us what’s happening,” Miller boomed at him.

  As if they had been anticipating a discussion of the murder—as indeed they had—the other guests grew quiet and waited for Marcatti’s reply.

  “I know very little. Commissario Valier is handling the indagine, the investigation. He’s a clever man. He is being very silent and what is known is what we have had in the paper—the facts of the crime only, no speculation about criminality.”

  “But surely they must have some idea of who killed the poor fellow,” Ephraim pressed.

  Marcatti raised his hands palms upward and shrugged. “If they do, they have not told me. There has been only a small hint, a very small hint, that they think he may have fallen into bad company at Haig’s Bar before he was killed.”

  No one at the party seemed to know of Reuben’s interest in the Baxter case. This suited him fine, as it enabled him to listen unnoticed.

  Miller, mentioning that he had read somewhere that Dan Abbott had been Gregg Baxter’s business partner, now turned to him. “Mr. Abbott, what do you think?” Then, realizing that his craving for gossip had gotten the better of his manners, he added, “His murder was an outrage. I’m sure you have the condolences of everyone here. You certainly have mine.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Abbott replied. “Several of us were close to Gregg and we appreciate your sympathy. All I can say is that I agree with Mr. Marcatti, that the probability is that Gregg Baxter met up with a bad character when he was at that bar Thursday night.”

  A few minutes later, satisfied that the murder talk was winding down, Reuben turned to Dalton Glover and asked him what he was doing in Venice.

  “The film festival brought me here. What keeps me here is Betty,” he replied, nodding at Betty Staples. “We decided—she decided—to stay on a few days.”

  “Dalton’s movie Oysters was in the competition,” Staples explained. Reuben had not seen it, but remembered reading about it when it opened in New York the previous spring. Ms. Staples played a fishing-boat captain, a modern Tugboat Annie, who fought the polluters of h
er offshore oyster beds.

  “For all the good it did us,” Glover said. “We didn’t come close to winning the leone d’oro. The festival juries in recent years have never liked American movies. But this time they outdid themselves, as you probably saw. A Dutch movie winning the golden lion, for God’s sake! I didn’t even know there were Dutch movies!”

  “Good-bye to God,” Betty added. “About a nun who gets married. It was terrible. Dalton suffers because he makes movies about serious subjects like ecology and native American history.”

  Reuben made appropriate noises of commiseration and then excused himself to talk to la marchesa Scamozzi. “Cynthia and I are going to Da Ivo for dinner,” he told her. “Would you and Luigi like to join us?”

  “What a lovely idea!” she said. “Ask him. I’m sure it’s all right.”

  Frost moved to where Regillo was talking to Marie Tyson and Dan Abbott.

  “Ah, Commissario Frost,” Abbott said by way of greeting.

  “Commissario?” Regillo said, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Frost, besides being an eminent lawyer, is a well-known detective in New York,” Abbott explained. “Specializing in murder cases. Which certainly makes him at least an honorary Commissario and a valuable fellow to have around right now.”

  Reuben smiled tightly, not happy to have his cover blown.

  “Participating in the Baxter case?” Tyson asked.

  “From a great distance,” Frost said coolly. After some further small talk, he managed to get Regillo aside and repeated the invitation for dinner.

  “Let me ask Ceil,” he said.

  “I already have,” Reuben was about to say, but Regillo had quickly darted off to confer with her. The two of them had an intense conference, after which Regillo came back.

  “Thank you for your invitation, Mr. Frost, Commissario Frost,” Regillo said, “but Ceil is feeling very tired. She still has not recovered from the shock of Gregg’s death, as you can understand. She feels that it would be better if we went out another evening.”

  Reuben gave Cynthia the high sign that it was time to leave. She was talking with la marchesa and he went to join them.

  “It’s all in here,” Ceil Scamozzi was saying. She handed Cynthia a thick, leatherbound book.

  “What’s all in there?” Reuben asked.

  “Everything the Venetians knew about coloring fabrics,” Ceil said. “This monk, Angelo Natal Talier, gathered the existing learning—you can tell from the title, Dell’Arte di Tingere in filo, in seta, in cotone, in lane ed in pelle—The Art of Dyeing Thread, Silk, Cotton, Wool and Hides. This is the original edition, published in 1791, which I’ve had rebound. It’s from this that I’ve found out what I know about dyes.”

  “Ceil has invited me to visit her workshop,” Cynthia said.

  “Yes, I mean it. Just call me when it is convenient and I will show you everything. You might even enjoy it.”

  “I’m sorry you won’t have dinner with us,” Reuben said.

  “It’s better, I think,” she replied. “Luigi is right. We should stay here and be quiet.”

  The Frosts thanked la marchesa and then made their farewell rounds, kissing and shaking hands.

  “I’m afraid Ceil’s seen better times,” Reuben said a few minutes later as they stood at the railing of the circolare, watching the Giudecca shoreline pass by. “No whiskey and that rot-gut wine.”

  “It was dreadful, wasn’t it?” Cynthia said. “But none of the social Italians take drinking seriously. It’s almost a badge of honor to be frugal.”

  “Perhaps so,” he said. “Her living quarters certainly get shabbier year by year.”

  “It’s a pity. Let’s hope her business bails her out.”

  Reuben mentioned the puzzling and contradictory reactions to his dinner invitation. “If she’s as hard up as she appears, I’d have thought she would have jumped at the chance for a free dinner.”

  “I have an explanation,” Cynthia said. “Maybe not the right one, but an explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “It sounds to me as if Luigi Regillo did not want to be looked over too closely by the honorary Commissario.”

  “Hmn,” Reuben grumped. “An interesting thought.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  One Up, One Down

  “Claudio, what have you done to give us such magnificent weather?” Reuben asked in the Cipriani dining room Tuesday morning, as he and Cynthia had breakfast. They had now been in Venice for a week and a day and the weather had been clear, without even a threat of rain.

  “You brought us good fortune, Signor Frost,” the maître d’ replied diplomatically.

  “Mid-September really is the time to come here, Cynthia,” Reuben asserted. “The weather’s good and the summer hordes are gone. That hokey regatta is over, and so is the Film Festival. But as Erica Sherrill said the other night, you’re in time for white truffles and mushrooms. And she forgot the wild strawberries. Tartufi, funghi and fragolini di bosco—what more could one ask?”

  “I have to admit that Signor Ivo’s tagliatelle con tartufi last night was delicious. White truffles on pasta are enough to make the whole trip a success,” Cynthia said. “And since you’re so taken with Venice in September, where are you going today?”

  “San Vitale and Santo Stefano. Assuming Jack Valier doesn’t have other ideas for me. What about you?”

  “The Palazzo Grassi,” she said, referring to Venice’s newest museum.

  “Even if the current show isn’t supposed to be much,” Reuben said.

  “If it’s too bad, I’ll just slip into their sweet lunchroom. Harry’s Bar food without Harry’s prices, if you remember.”

  “Yes. The cheapest Bellini in town. At least that I’ve found. Will you have lunch there? Or shall we meet up?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Let’s go our separate ways and I’ll see you later.”

  Unable to reach Valier at the Questura, Reuben picked up his green bag and headed off to the Accademia, where he crossed the bridge and walked to the deconsecrated eleventh-century church of San Vitale. Here he looked over the carved commemorative portraits of Doge Carlo Contarini (1655–56) and his wife set in the Palladian-style facade. Frost recalled from his reading that Contarini had died after less than fourteen months in office, and his successor lasted barely a single month. The result was the election of the Commissario’s ancestor, Bertucci Valier, who was a mere fifty-nine. Frost thought it resembled the “youth movement” at the Gotham, his New York club, with about the same notion of what constituted “youth.”

  Returning to the Campo Morosini, Reuben passed the tilting campanile of Santo Stefano and then went inside to examine the memorial set in the floor honoring Doge Francesco Morosini (1688–94), the last Doge who personally led an army in battle. He won against the Turks at Salamis, Hydra and Spetsai, before dying ingloriously of gallstones in 1694.

  As Reuben stood by the slab cast by the Doge’s cannon makers, he also read (in his Norwich, certainly not on the monument itself) of Morosini’s ill-fated attack on Athens in 1687 when a Venetian cannon was fired at the Parthenon, causing an explosion that blew up its roof and fourteen of its columns. Not the most splendid achievement to be remembered for, Frost decided. If there were any parallel between this Doge and Chase & Ward’s Executive Partner, Reuben could not think of it. None of the firm’s disasters, of which there had been a few in its history, compared even figuratively with wrecking the Parthenon.

  On his own for lunch, Reuben strolled to the Vino Vino, a modest enoteca near the Fenice with a variety of wines. He settled for a glass of rich, and expensive, Brunello di Montalcino, and a plate of baccalà Montecato, codfish with polenta.

  Later, napping back at the hotel, he was awakened by a ringing telephone and the operator telling him he had a call from New York. It was Jim Cavanaugh. An angry Jim Cavanaugh. “Boy, am I glad you’re still there,” he told Frost. He went on to describe an i
tem in Sharon Meagher’s gossip column in the morning New York Press and read it aloud to Reuben:

  “The jet set is buzzing about an angry feud that boiled over in Venice last week between Eric Werth, the perfume king, and slain designer Gregg Baxter. It seems Werth had gone to Venice to entice Baxter into putting his very hot name on a line of fragrances. The temperamental Baxter not only refused to see him but revoked his invitation to the fabulous dinner extravaganza the designer threw the night before he was killed. Nobody will talk, but we have learned that Werth returned to New York in a fury hours after Baxter was found stabbed to death near the Grand Canal.”

  “That’s damn close to libel,” Cavanaugh said.

  “It’s pretty raw,” Reuben agreed.

  “I called you because I figured you probably would know what’s going on. If there’s any thought of dragging my client into this, I want to hire a lawyer to look out for his interests over there.”

  Frost admitted that he had gotten enmeshed in the investigation, though he told Cavanaugh “there isn’t much I can report now.”

  “Can I ask you to keep me posted, to let me know if the police are breathing down Eric’s neck?”

  “Or yours, I should think,” Reuben said.

  “Yes, I suppose mine,” Cavanaugh agreed, after a pause.

  “No, I don’t see any problem with giving you a call if I hear anything.”

  “I sure would be grateful,” Cavanaugh said. “What a tragedy, even if he was a shit. You know, we must have seen Gregg Baxter right before he was killed.”