Cape Cod caper

by Arnold, Margot

  "Fingerprints," Penny said abruptly. She looked at Detective Eldredge who had been hovering nearby looking hopeful. "You got them from the body, didn't you?" He nodded.

  "Then tell the Italian police a set of the dead man's prints will be on the way," she told Toby. 'It's possible he had a record and that will cinch the matter of identity. How soon?" She cocked an eye at Eldredge.

  "Right away, if 1 send them off now, they'll get 'em in Rome late tonight or early tomorrow." There was the gleam of battle in his eye.

  "O.K., Toby, I'll get back to you soon—you're a miracle worker," Penny encouraged, and cradled the phone.

  "Well, what was that all about?" Eldredge demanded. She told him. At the end of it he looked at her with grudging admiration. "Seems I owe you an apology. You were on the right track all along. A legitimate son by a previous marriage, eh? Ee-yah, that'll put an almighty flutter in the Dimola dovecote, particularly if the old man kicks off, I reckon." He said it with relish.

  "Quite," Penny said frostily. "So, if you'll excuse me now, Detective Eldredge, I have a lot of thinking to do."

  "Oh, no need to worry yourself any more." He was cheerful. "We can handle it all now. Just relax and let us handle it from here on in." He might have saved his breath, as Toby could well have told him. The gleam of battle in her own eye. Penny smiled at him vaguely and said, "Well, thank you. Would you mind having someone take me back now?"

  "Why certainly, certainly," he said with evident relief at his easy victory, "and I'll be sure and let you know how things turn out on this Lorenzo Amalfi or Dimola."

  Over the faint and fruitless protestations of her driver, she detoured by the police station in Hyannis and, asking for Detective Thompson, got instead Officer Birnie, which suited her well enough. She quickly filled him in on what she had just told the state police and concluded with, "I haven't thought it through yet, but I believe we're going to find it narrows the field considerably. However, until we know something concrete on Lorenzo's movements I feel it might be wise to put a police guard on Zeb."

  He shook his head at her in reproof. "We're way ahead of you, Dr. Spring—half an hour after we got the news of Wanda Dimola's murder there was a policeman at the door of his room, who won't be removed until after we have the murderer in custody."

  She laughed. "I'm sorry. What an old busybody you must think me! Have any of the family tried to see him?"

  He smiled back at her. "The whole damn lot at one time or another. Mightily concerned about Zeb Grange they are—including Carson."

  "At least that's understandable," Penny said defensively.

  "Oh, yes—highly," he said, and the smile died. "I don't suppose you'd consider going up to Boston for a few days until we see our way a bit clearer?"

  She shook her head. "I was afraid you wouldn't," he gloomed. "Oh, well, just be careful, we're stretched so thin we can't spare a man to keep an eye on you."

  She rejoined her restive state trooper and drove back to the cottage, going directly to her room, where she perched on the edge of the bed, cleared off the bedside table, and got busy with pen and paper to aid her thoughts.

  Two years ago Rinaldo Dimola, on a nostalgic visit to the scene of his first brief love with Christiana Amalfi, had stumbled by chance on the secret the rejected Anna-Maria Amalfi had kept so long and so vengefully—he had a legitimate son, the image of himself, whom he had never seen. His eldest son. To a man with Rinaldo's sense of family honor what a cataclysmic revelation that must have been. No wonder his character had changed after that. But why had he kept it to himself and why had it taken Lorenzo so long to get to his father?

  Did any of the others know? She could not understand how any of them could have known the whole story, since only Rinaldo and the Contessa had known that. But they had all been sniffing around after Rinaldo—even the enigmatic Annette, who, according to her own account, had not been to Colle d'Imola at all. They must have suspected something, and one or more of them had been sufficiently alarmed to keep a close enough eye on Rinaldo to intercept and remove the interloper before he ever came under his father's roof.

  At least, she comforted herself, now there would be a lot of leads to follow up. Rinaldo, after that soul-shattering discovery he had an unknown legitimate son, must have instituted a search for him. Private detective agencies both here and in Italy could be canvassed, even if Toby failed to turn up any further concrete information as to where the missing Lorenzo was all that time. Would anyone have known about that search? Alexander possibly, since he was so intimately concerned with his father's business affairs. What had Maria said about that? that her father had looked at Alexander with pity! Pity because the hierarchy of the Dimola family was going to be drastically changed? Or pity because be knew that Alexander shared part of his awful knowledge?

  But something about this irked her. Lorenzo's killer, Zeb's attacker and Wanda's murderer must on the face of it be one and the same person. And she just could not see Alexander coldbloodedly striking down his wife and then putting on an act such as she had witnessed in Zeb's house. He had been grief-stricken and angry, and, unless he was the world's greatest actor, she would have sworn those emotions were genuine. No, she felt she was getting off the track.

  Back to Rinaldo. He must have had some sort of plan for introducing the missing heir to his second family. It was pure guesswork now, but had Lorenzo jumped the gun on this plan, notified his father he was on his way, and was this the shock that brought on Rinaldo's stroke? He had been found in his study slumped over his desk—so something in the mail that day? It was another thing to be checked.

  His impaired mind had kept on hoping—she well remembered that terrible gleam of hope when Maria had announced, "a stranger to see you." Yet something Maria had told him about the inquest upset him so badly that he must have known at that point that his eldest son was, in fact, the body in the bog—and that someone close to him had brought this about. She thought of the terrible finality of that "No" to Maria, Rinaldo knew—or thought he knew —who that person was and, if Penny were any judge of character, would carry that secret to his grave. She sighed wearily—she was getting nowhere.

  Attack it from another angle. Back to Zeb. Zeb had investigated that disturbed grave and found the body— and had seen lying there the living image of his idol Rinaldo. He had panicked, and in his loyalty and innate secrecy had initiated the weird series of events that had brought her into the case.

  But the murderer had been ahead of him, removing the body and mutilating it so that later identification would be impossible. And, save for the unfortunate perspicacity of young Robert Dyke, would have probably succeeded. The murderer knew he could rely on the silence of the eccentric Zeb as long as his idol's secret was involved, and so long as he had no tangible evidence for his basic honesty to work on. With the finding of the body again the danger had returned: Zeb's turning to her and about to pass on the one vital fact that would uncover the body's identity—the likeness. The killer had started to panic then. It had been stupid to remove that photo, the one smiling photo extant of Rinaldo that had given her her first idea about the case. The panic had continued in that the murderer had not completed Zeb's quietus due to the fortuitous advent of Eagle Smith on his own illicit errands, and had been living ever since on a razor's edge of fear lest Zeb came out of his coma before he died and told . .. But was the fear justified? Zeb was going to tell her but not the police. Would his fanatic loyalty still keep him silent? It would not surprise her; if Rinaldo was not talking, she had the feeling neither would Zeb. This too seemed to be leading to a dead end, and there was still no clear picture of the murderer.

  Another angle. Motive. Suddenly her mind seemed to clear and for the first time a straighter path appeared before her. Her notes became more decisive.

  Annette Dimola: apparently devoted to her husband; involved at one time with Steven; something of a liar; but to whom Lorenzo's advent might have been uncomfortable though little more. Her position would i
n no way be threatened, nor her life with Rinaldo. She was inclined to rule out Annette.

  Maria; again, fonder of her father than anyone dreamed of or understood; an ardent women's libber who felt unfairly done in by her father's superpatriarchal household. The advent of a third brother would be a further blow to her feminist ego, but that scarcely would be a strong enough motive to involve her in the cold-blooded murder of a man she had never seen. Also Penny seriously doubted she would have had the physical strength to carry out all the murderer had had to do; she was small and not particularly muscular. So Maria was ruled out.

  Alexander: the motive here was stronger undoubtedly; from younger son to youngest, but he was still his father's right hand and like him in all ways. Even with the unknown and, according to all accounts so far, the unsatisfactory Lorenzo's advent, she simply could not see Rinaldo taking the business out of Alexander's control; Rinaldo was fanatical in some ways but he certainly wasn't stupid. And she also could not see Alexander murdering his own wife, who, though she had been a problem, he had evidently deeply loved. So Alexander was out.

  Which brought her to the pair who, without a shadow of doubt, had the most powerful motive of all. Steven, the quiet, passive, scholarly Steven, with none of his younger brother's dynamism, but basking nonetheless in his father's approval because he was the elder, the heir, as he thought, and who stood to lose all of that. Steven, besides, with the tough, enduring genes of his mother's New England blood, that clung to what it had and did not give it up. Steven, the pampered and the vain, who evidently liked the fuss his possessive wife made over him and equally enjoyed the devotion—possibly the love?—of his glamorous assistant Ann Langley. Vanity was so often a part of a murderer's makeup, allowing them the God-like feeling that life was theirs to dispose of, stifling conscience, nullifying fear. And also Steven the scholarly researcher who just might have stumbled on the truth in that faraway Italian village and had lain in patient wait.

  And his Valkyrie wife, Inga. She, who was so shrewd in some ways, so opaque in others, yet single-minded and domineering. Greedy, jealous of the good things her rich alliance had brought her. Obsessed by her husband, who would be displaced by the interloper, and she too reduced from wife of the heir to just another Dimola woman. Inga, the health freak, with the physical strength and ability to take care of the threats to her comfortable existence.

  One or both of them. It would explain so much. Rinal-do's refusal to speak—for if it were Steven he would never give up his son, even for the crime of fratricide. Or even if Inga had told him it was Steven, the effect would be the same. The more Penny thought about it the more sense it made. Inga with the upper hand in the sick room; the slow recovery, or lack of it, of Rinaldo, the only progress made after Maria had insisted on bringing in a new doctor, Inga's heavy sedation of her helpless patient in recent weeks. If Rinaldo died now, nothing would keep Steven from his inheritance—only a charge of murder. But how could it ever be brought home to them?

  The police would presumably find Lorenzo's trail to Masuit eventually, but then what? How to prove who had lured Lorenzo to the excavation site on God knows what pretext and there murdered him? Zeb's attack. With Zeb's lips sealed by his loyalty to Rinaldo, what hope there? None, she thought. And with the murder of Wanda? At the time of the crime Steven said he had been in his study, but could easily have got out and slipped away unseen. Inga had claimed to be in the sickroom, but who was to say she had not been? Rinaldo, if he were conscious? Never in a million years.

  "There must be some way to do it," Penny said aloud, "some to make them show their hand." One or both—the more she thought about it the more she favored just one— but how to prove it? A slow smile spread across the ugly little face. "I believe that would work! At least it would be worth a try. But I mustn't be stupid about this, I'll need help to set it up."

  As if in answer to the thought a voice called from the lounge, "Anybody home?" She opened her door to see Carson Grange, his son firmly by the hand,- young Penny straddling his shoulders, standing in the middle of the room. "Ann around?" he enquired cheerfully. "I picked up Penny for her. I thought we might take them to McDonald's for a bite." The children made enthusiastic, affirmative noises.

  Penny looked steadily at him for a moment. Despite all Officer Birnie's misgivings, she could not find it in her heart to doubt Carson or his motives. "Yes, Ann will be in soon," she said, "but I've been doing some heavy thinking. I have a plan, and Til need your help on it. Can you park the children somewhere and come in for a minute? You see this is what I've got in mind..."

  CHAPTER 19

  Toby was feeling goaded. There had been a point in the Pergama case when he had been seized by this terrible feeling of urgency, a sort of inner boiling that would allow him no rest; and now this feeling was back, and he did not like it one little bit.

  The immediate thing was to find out where Lorenzo had been during that strange hiatus, and what he had been up to. What sort of person had he been, in fact? Everyone, including his putative mother, had so far not had a good word to say about him, but Toby still had no concrete idea as to why they had all thought him so awful. He shied away from the thought of another confrontation with the Contessa, and that only seemed to leave him with one alternative, Father Antonio. He sought him out at the shabby little presbytery adjacent to the new church, at a slight remove from the village.

  His new anxiety put sternness into his normally cherubic features and straightened his frame from its exaggerated scholar's stoop, so that he made an intimidating picture to the priest, who opened the door to the presbytery himself. "Matters have become grave and urgent," Toby trumpeted to the startled man. "I have sad news to give you and there is information which it is vital you should give me in return."

  He was ushered into the bleak room that evidently served the double purpose of study and refectory. When they were both seated ^e priest cleared his throat nervously. "In what way can I help you, professore?"

  "It is to do with the missing Lorenzo Amalfi," stated Toby, his anxiety making him brusque. "After seeing the Contessa I am in accord with your view that she is a very sick woman, whose time is rapidly running out. You seem to be her only close contact, so I feel I must leave it up to you either to tell her or to prepare her for the sad news. There seems little doubt that Lorenzo Amalfi is dead—murdered, and that he was killed over six months ago on his father's estate in America. His murderer has killed again and is still being sought, and so it is vital that you tell me everything you know about him and his activities."

  The little priest looked aghast. "You are sure of this?"

  "Almost certain," Toby answered. "The anatomical description of the body fits that of Amalfi exactly and his fingerprints are on the way to the Italian police, which should clinch the matter—from his army record here if nowhere else."

  The priest made a helpless little fluttering gesture with his hands. "Then if the fingerprints are his, the police will know. Alas! Lorenzo was well known to them, he has quite a record. It has been a great grief to his mother, a great grief, poor woman."

  "Then please tell me all about it."

  The little man became agitated. "You must understand. Sir Glendower, I do not know much of his early life. I came to the village just fifteen years ago when he was already grown and the pattern started. I can only tell you what I have heard. In many ways he was unfortunate. The Contessa, well, one must not judge ... but her way of life ... and then how she treated him; spoiling him one minute, rejecting h im the next. It was not easy for him, no!"

  "Oh, get on with it, man!" Toby said testily.

  The priest gulped and went on. "As a child, I believe, he was very isolated—the Contessa did not let him mix with the villagers and he was a little terror to them. He was always so full of bottled-up energy; a kind of dynamism that was trying to get out but could not find a channel. There was still some money then, and when the Contessa, er, had a companion, he was often shipped off to a boarding school. But
there would be trouble at the school or the man would go, and then he would be brought back and it would start all over again between them. The school scrapes were all minor ones, you understand, and things didn't get serious until he was about eighteen. It was then he assaulted a man who was living at the palazzo and took the man's car and drove it off a cliff. He was always mad about cars..." The priest gave a little sigh and shook his head. "The man brought charges and though the Contessa managed to hush things up, well, from then on the police had their eye on him. After that he had to do his army service and that was another blow; because he did not have enough of an education he had to go in as an ordinary soldier and not as an officer. And he being so proud! He fell in with some bad types there, and when he got out he just did not come back very often, except when he was on the nm, or needed a refuge, or to get what money he could out of the Contessa." "Was he actually in prison?"

  "Oh, yes," the priest sighed again, "car theft mostly, but once for extortion, an elderly woman, I believe an American."

  "So he spoke English." "Yes, not fluently, but well enough." "And two years ago, when his father found out about him?"

  The priest gave Toby a haunted look. "He was in prison then—he had been picked up as part of a car theft ring."

  "And got out about eight months ago?"