by Grace Brophy
She kept the keys in order on a large rectangular key ring. The Casati key was nearest the catch as it was the first vault that she visited every Saturday. “And I always check my keys before leaving the apartment,” she added matter-of-factly, responding to Cenni’s earlier question. It wasn’t until she was walking toward the vault, just after she had entered the side gate, that she realized that the key she needed first was gone.
“The key ring is old, it has a faulty catch,” she added by way of explanation.
“Why don’t you buy a new one?” the commissario asked with a half-smile.
“Key rings cost money,” she replied.
“And just that key was missing? No others had dropped off?”
“Yes. No others,” she replied, ignoring the implication of his question.
After another three questions, she acknowledged that she had walked back along the path to look for the key. When she didn’t find it, she started to look in the bushes along the side of the path.
“How long did that take?”
“Ten minutes.”
While Orlic was still looking, Alba came down the path. Alba had a copy of all the vault keys, and Orlic suggested that they use her key to open the Casati vault. At that point, with some urging from Cenni, Orlic described her normal routine. For the first time she responded with some enthusiasm, pride in her work overcoming her obvious dislike of the police.
She worked in two cemeteries, Assisi and Santa Maria degli Angeli. For the Assisi cemetery, she purchased all the flowers from a wholesaler in Rivotorto on Friday mornings and did all the arrangements in her apartment on Friday evenings. On Saturday mornings, she left for the Assisi cemetery before 7:00, carrying half the flowers in two large baskets. She usually met Alba at the side gate. She removed the dead flowers from seven of the vaults, replaced the water, and then arranged the new flowers in their containers. Alba did the same for five of the vaults. When they finished the first set of flowers, they would walk back together to her apartment to pick up the remaining flowers, a five-minute walk. Sometimes they would have a coffee in her apartment. She generally finished her arrangements by 11:00 and then checked on Alba’s.
“Why, don’t you trust her?” Cenni asked, amused.
“You don’t just plunk flowers into a container. You have to know how to arrange them. Some flowers in a mixed arrangement need to be positioned so they’re more prominent than others. Most of my customers want the more expensive flowers to be more visible, roses before carnations. And the foliage needs to be arranged correctly. It’s not that easy and Alba is still learning!” She responded at length and with spirit, irritated by his question.
“So you and Alba went to the Casati vault together. Why didn’t you just take her key and let Alba get on with her work?” Cenni asked, watching her face carefully. She took more than the usual time to reply.
“The key ring is large and the catch is difficult to open. Besides Alba had to pass by the vault anyway,” she replied in the indifferent tone that she’d used for most of her answers, but a barely perceptible twitch at the side of her mouth told Cenni that she was pleased with her response. It’s her first unrehearsed answer, he thought.
The gate to the Casati vault was shut. It was only when she inserted the key and tried to turn it that she realized the gate wasn’t locked. She’d even remarked on this to Alba. They had both seen the body even before they entered the vault. But it wasn’t until they were inside that she knew it was the American. She also agreed with Sergeant Antolini’s earlier statement that Alba probably hadn’t known Minelli.
“Did you or Alba touch anything in the vault while you were there? The body?”
“No.”
“Why not? Weren’t you concerned that she might need help?”
“I knew she was dead as soon as we entered the vault.” For the first time that day, she volunteered some information without being asked. “I trained as a physician’s assistant. I was married to a doctor. I know a dead body when I see one,” she stated, haughtily. The carrot or the stick, Cenni thought. One of them usually works.
“The statue. Where was it when you entered the vault?”
“It was lying a few feet from the dead woman,” she replied.
“Did you touch it?”
“No.”
“Where was it normally located?”
She shrugged before answering. “It was the first time I’d seen it.”
“What about the murdered woman’s handbag? I understand from Sergeant Antolini that you brought it back to the station. Surely you know from all the police dramas you’ve seen on TV that you’re not supposed to touch anything at the crime scene.”
“I don’t watch television,” she replied.
At that moment Piero looked up from his note-taking, pleased that the interview was finally going their way. The suspect was getting less cautious. A half-smile flitted across his face, but not quickly enough. Orlic met Cenni’s eyes for a brief moment before she looked away. Cenni knew immediately that she wouldn’t be making any more flippant remarks that day nor any mistakes.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” she said, responding a second time to the previous question, this time without being asked.
“I don’t understand? Why should you think that?”
“The bag was open. I thought someone had tried to rob her. I was worried he might return before the police arrived?”
“Why he?”
“It was obvious from her clothing that she’d been . . .” She stopped in mid-sentence and breathed deeply. “Raped,” she finished abruptly and looked down at the basket of flowers at her feet.
“You didn’t consider that the murderer might have made it look like rape, that it might not have been a man?” he asked, scrutinizing her face.
“No,” she replied, looking directly into his eyes. If she’d been injected with botox, he thought, her face couldn’t have been less expressive.
Cenni had questioned many murder suspects in his years of police work, and Sophie Orlic was certainly a suspect in the murder of Rita Minelli, with motive, means, and opportunity. None, except those with their lawyers present, had kept their composure half so well. He reflected that Sophie Orlic was either a complete innocent, just dull-witted and distrustful of the police, or a highly intelligent adversary. From the flashes of intelligence she had displayed in the last hour, he was inclined toward the latter opinion. He thought of the poster that he had hung on his bedroom wall when he was fourteen, the Annunciation by da Vinci. Too bad for Sophie Orlic that he was no longer susceptible to Renaissance Madonnas.
9
IF, AS RECENTLY rumored, the party of the prime minister was planning to sell Italy’s public monuments and buildings to lower the national debt, then via San Francisco would be a good place to start, Cenni reflected, as he and Piero approached the Casati home on foot. Bordered on the west by the Basilica of St. Francis and on the east by the Piazza del Comune, it was a street lined with civic and religious buildings of both historical and architectural significance. Located across from the Oratorio dei Pellegrini, built during the Renaissance to house and comfort pilgrims, a few doors down from the medieval Casa Comacini, headquarters to the masons who had come to Assisi to build its many shrines, the Casati home was the last fully private residence on via San Francisco. The others had all been sold to religious foundations, turned over to the government to pay taxes, or subdivided into apartments or into stores selling religious kitsch.
“The family had either great wealth or even greater determination, to hold on to this place through greed, famine, pestilence, and taxes,” Cenni remarked idly to Piero as they waited for someone to answer the door. It was, he also noted to himself, a rare example of a medieval townhouse that had not been tortured in later centuries to conform to more elaborate architectural fads. He was curious to see the inside.
The young woman who answered the door, a servant judging from her demeanor, was dressed in street clothes rather th
an a uniform. A good sign, Cenni thought, that the family might not be as pompous as the questore had suggested. Cenni showed her his credentials and smiled. That appeared to fluster her for the moment, but she gathered her forces admirably and asked them to follow her.
The entrance hall to which they had been admitted cut through the center of the house, from front to back. A series of vaulted arches suggested to Cenni that the hall had been carved out of multiple smaller rooms. The walls, painted a Tuscan yellow, were hung with family portraits—some of them quite good, he thought from his quick appraisal as he walked down the hall. At the end, she opened a door into what appeared to be the family sitting room.
“The count will be with you in a moment. He asked that you make yourself at home,” the servant said, smiling faintly. She left by a different door.
Piero accepted the invitation to make himself at home by sitting on the largest, most comfortable-looking chair in the room. Cenni wondered if Better sit than stand was the Tonni family motto. He walked about the room slowly, using this opportunity to get to know its inhabitants before he met them in person.
It was a room he liked. It was at the back of the house and he could see a large stone terrace through the French doors that stretched across the south end of the room. The ceiling was high and vaulted, yet the room seemed intimate and informal. Various-sized oriental rugs, mainly tribal, covered the highly polished chestnut wood floors, and one prayer-sized Persian lay in front of the fireplace. Painted a warm white, the walls were covered with family photographs and a few amateurish-looking watercolors. The only important work of art in the room was an Impressionist painting hanging over the fire-place mantle, a Sisley he found upon examining the signature.
Built-in shelves on each side of the fireplace held a stereo, an old-fashioned record player, a small portable television, a VCR, and lots of books, about half of them with English titles. He smiled, noting the number of murder mysteries shoved in among the Dickens, Thackeray, and Austen novels. There were two full shelves of works on and by feminists— Italian, French, and English authors mixed together—and a number of books on the occult; surprisingly, three of them written by Aleister Crowley, the Englishman who had been expelled from Sicily in the 1920s for scandalous acts of black magic and for trafficking in heroin and cocaine. Some Sicilians had even accused Crowley of human sacrifice. Umberto Casati’s father had been a close friend of Mussolini, and as Cenni recalled from his studies of drug use in Italy, it was Mussolini’s followers who had driven Crowley from the island. He wondered if there was a connection?
The record, tape, and CD collections were diverse, suggesting an eclectic taste for rock, blues, jazz, and opera. The furniture was chintz-covered, overstuffed, and worn, and a small fire burned behind the grate. It was a room in which people could put their feet on the coffee table, he thought with envy, remembering the rigid enforcement of his mother’s rules: Shoes off in the house, feet off the furniture. He was examining the photo of a good-looking young man prominently displayed on a large refectory table when he heard the door opening and looked about.
The man who entered the room was in his late sixties or early seventies, tall, thin and slightly stooped, well over six feet tall, about his own height, Cenni thought. He had gray hair, cut close, and was wearing thin wire glasses. He was dressed informally but with elegance, in an English tweed jacket, opennecked dark gray knit shirt, and black wool slacks, Italian cut: all expensive. He must have been quite good looking when he was young, Cenni thought. He’s still handsome and certainly distinguished, a man who knows his own importance. The count extended his hand in greeting.
“Dottore, I was told you’d be paying us a visit. Please have a seat,” he said, motioning to a sofa adjacent to the chair that Piero had already taken. Without waiting for Cenni to comply, the count seated himself directly across from Piero, in a straight-backed wing chair. He eased himself slowly into the chair, holding on to the arms for support. “Arthritis of the back,” he said unapologetically, in response to the surprised look on Piero’s face.
“A terrible tragedy!” the count began, not waiting for Cenni to introduce himself, Piero, or the subject of their visit. “For something like this to happen on Good Friday and in Assisi, makes it that much more heinous. You can be fully assured that I will do whatever is necessary to assist the police. Assisi doesn’t need this type of publicity! A reward, perhaps,” he mused.
“And your niece, it’s certainly tragic for her as well as for Assisi. She was still a young woman, forty-five I understand,” Cenni interjected, then stopped, annoyed at himself for reacting so openly to the count’s detachment.
“Well, of course, uh . . . Inspector. That goes without saying,” the count responded dryly, demoting him for insubordination, Cenni assumed. “As I said, I’ll do all I can to help. Please tell me what that might be.”
“I’d like to know as much as possible about your niece, what she was like, who her friends were, why she was here in Italy. But before that, I understand that Dottor Russo called you this morning and that he also sent over one of his own men, Inspector Staccioli, to secure the house. I’d like to speak to Inspector Staccioli before I begin interviewing your family and your household staff, and I would also like to visit your niece’s living quarters. I asked one of my own staff, Inspector Ottaviani, to meet me here with the forensic police. Assuming they’re somewhere in the house, I’d like to speak to them as well.”
“Surely it’s not necessary to interview my family,” the count rejoined sharply, focusing on only one of Cenni’s requests. “My wife, daughter, and granddaughter are all distraught over this brutal murder. My wife is in bed under a doctor’s care. We haven’t yet told her that my niece was raped. I prefer that you not disturb my family with unnecessary and frivolous questions. Whatever you need to know about my niece, I can tell you. I discussed this very point with Dottor Russo this morning, and he understood my position perfectly.”
Piero had followed their exchange as a disinterested observer might watch a tennis rally, waiting patiently for one of the players to hit the ball over the line. He finally had his patience rewarded. Now he’s done it! he thought.
“I do understand your position, Signor Casati, perhaps even better than Dottor Russo,” Cenni responded, his tone dangerously deferential. “I must point out to you, however, that this is a police investigation into, as you yourself stated very precisely, a brutal murder. No one who knew the victim or saw her on the day of her death is exempt from questioning. That includes all the members of your household: your wife, daughter, and granddaughter. If you prefer we can question your wife in her room with her doctor present.” He checked his wrist-watch. “I would like to meet with the household in thirty minutes— in this room, or in another if you prefer. And now, with your permission, I would like to speak to officers Staccioli and Ottaviani.”
10
PIERO HAD BEEN disappointed when the count had acceded so easily to Cenni’s demand to interview the family with a simple certo. He had been hoping for some entertainment to cheer him up after Sergeant Antolini’s brush-off. It would have been an interesting battle. Cenni was well known for his skill in handling the rich and famous, the principal reason the questore assigned him to so many high profile police investigations. But Piero had been working with Cenni now for more than four years and knew that every now and then he got his back up. As Elena would say when that happened, using an expression she had heard in one of those women’s flicks she was always watching, Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night. Very bumpy, Piero thought, as they followed the count below stairs to the kitchen.
The kitchen was the kind of room Piero liked. He loved to eat and the Casati kitchen was just the place in which to do it. It was located immediately below the family room but was at least twice its size. When the house was originally built, it had probably served as both kitchen and storerooms for root vegetables, barrels of wine, flour, salt, and other provisions the family would hav
e needed to get through the cold Umbrian winters. The ceilings were at least fifteen feet high, and supported by massive oak beams blackened with the smoke of centuries. A large alcove on the east wall, carved out of stone, was now used to cure meats and age cheeses. It was also lined with wine and port barrels, although he doubted that a count would drink wine from a barrel. Probably for the servants, he thought. He counted four large oak presses, similar to the one that his nonna had in her kitchen when he was growing up. She’d kept biscotti in a jar on the top shelf. He remembered climbing up to the top by pulling out the bottom drawers and using them as steps. He still had a scar on his elbow from one of his falls. He had no regrets, though. That day she had let him finish the whole jar.
There was a huge fireplace on the west wall, large enough for a grown man to enter without stooping. It reminded him of a fireplace he’d once seen in Toledo the year that he and his mother had visited Spain. It had stone benches inside, covered on top with tiles. The guide had told them that the family would sit inside the fireplace in the winter to stay warm. At some point the Casati family had installed a modern gas stove, stainless steel sink, and large refrigerator in the back of the kitchen, but the original stone sink and wood-burning stove were still the centerpieces of the cooking area. In the center of the room stood a large refectory table, at least twelve feet long. One side held baskets of fresh vegetables, two large loaves of bread—just out of the oven he surmised from the warm smell of yeast that filled the air—and what looked to be the beginnings of a torta di pasqua. At the other side were four police officers, all comfortably ensconced drinking coffee and eating biscotti. Fasten your seatbelts, Piero said to himself when he spied Elena among them.
The commissario was close to the boiling point. From what he had observed since entering the house, it appeared that nothing had been done to secure it or Rita Minelli’s living quarters. If Staccioli was not able to produce the only existing key to Rita Minelli’s room, it meant that any member of the family or their servants had had plenty of time to search her room and remove anything that might embarrass or incriminate them, he reflected. He acknowledged to himself that the murderer, if actually living in the Casati house, would have had ample opportunity the previous night to search Minelli’s room before the body was discovered. But the real irritant was that one of his own officers was relaxing with Russo’s lazy bastard!
