by Grace Brophy
“Jeff was eighteen and obviously gay. Anyone could see that after talking to him for five minutes—the same as anyone can see it about me—but it was with me that he first acted on it. He was religious, and he couldn’t live with having broken God’s commandment or the knowledge that he would do it again, and again. He left a note in his room. It didn’t even mention me. It was addressed to his parents. ‘Mommy and Daddy, Forgive me and pray for my soul. Your Loving Son, Jeff.’
“The police listed Jeff as a suicide but Jeff’s parents refused to accept the verdict. The father hired a private detective, who learned that we’d been together that night. Another teacher had seen Jeff enter my apartment. The detective turned his findings over to Jeff’s parents, who insisted that the college and the police prosecute me. The college terminated my contract and the police asked me in for questioning. Jeff was seventeen when he first enrolled at the university, and on absolutely no evidence, they decided that we’d been lovers before he turned eighteen. I was accused of corrupting the morals of a minor. I left the United States, and I won’t go back.”
4
PIERO AND ELENA left the commissario’s office with a mile-high list of tasks to complete before the three of them would meet again later that day. And while they were meeting, Cenni had received another two reports, both concerning Williams.
The first, from Newfoundland, Canada, was interesting but not directly related to Minelli’s murder. Williams had been one of a large number of young men in a class action suit filed against the Irish Christian Brothers for the systematic abuse of boys, and he had been compensated by the religious order to the tune of $15,000 Canadian a year, for ten years. The way Williams lived, he was not hard up for money.
The second, from the United States, disclosed that Williams had a motive for murder. The State of Maine had an out-standing warrant for the arrest of Williams, who was charged with endangering the morals of a minor. Williams had denied the allegation and fled the country.
Minelli had written in her diary that she had urged Williams to turn himself in. Had she goaded Williams, pushing him relentlessly to do so? Williams struck Cenni as a passive, fearful man, and he also struck Cenni as a liar, at least in some of his responses regarding Minelli. Cenni felt sure from observing Williams’s giveaway tic that he had known about Rita’s pregnancy, and also that they had discussed it on the last day of her life.
But from what Elena had reported, Williams’s alibi appeared to hold up. The priest at San Stefano’s had confirmed Williams’s attendance at five o’clock mass—“He sat in the front pew, received communion, stayed to the end, left about twenty to six.” The priest had refused to confirm that Williams had gone to confession before mass, considering this privileged information. But Elena was sure that Williams was home free there as well. “The priest’s body language was loud and clear,” Elena insisted. “He wanted to tell me he’d heard Williams’s confession; he just couldn’t say it directly. Afraid of Il Papà!” she added irreverently.
Further, the waitress at Il Duomo confirmed that Williams had come in early Friday evening. “Came in a few minutes after we’d opened, about ten minutes to six. I told him we wouldn’t be ready to serve pizza for at least another twenty minutes. I brought him a bottle of water—no bubbles—and his pizza twenty minutes later. Spinach and ricotta, always the same. After he finished his pizza, he waited a short while for his friend. When she didn’t show, he left at a little before seven.”
There was plenty of time for Williams to have killed Minelli if he hadn’t gone to confession at 4:30. Even so, Cenni was confident that Elena was right, that Williams had gone to confession, which would have cut considerably into the time he needed to get to and from the cemetery. Also in support of Williams’s innocence was his demeanor in offering an alibi. Perfectly natural, not a tic in sight. Cenni had no doubts that given the right circumstances anyone could kill, but it didn’t seem likely that Williams had killed Minelli. Still, he was pleased. He had enough on the Canadian now to keep him in custody for at least another two days. If the questore pressed him, again, to arrest Orlic, he’d counter with Williams. And tomorrow he’d bring Williams to Perugia for questioning. He wanted to know what he was hiding. If Williams balked, he could always hint at extradition.
5
HIS HEAD ACHED. The two aspirin hadn’t helped. Now he had a pain in his stomach and a sore head. Batori had called shortly after two with a feeble excuse for not delivering the postmortem as promised. “Tuesday morning, first thing,” he said, adding the perfunctory, “di sicuro!” Cenni was sorry now that he hadn’t signed the petition to remove him. “Useless old fart,” he murmured aloud.
“Scusi, Commissario.”
He looked up from the report he was reading, shielding his eyes from the light, and tried to smile. The senior forensic on the Minelli case stood in the open doorway, three hours ahead of schedule! What excuse would he give?
Instead, the man brandished a manila envelope. But before handing it over and departing, he asked if they could talk privately.
“Certo, Dottor uh . . . Greci,” Cenni said, hoping he’d gotten it right. “Per favore,” he said, waving to a seat and nodding to him to close the open door.
“Crime scene photographs, analyses of trace evidence, print comparisons,” Greci stammered out in a rush of words.
“Standard stuff. Why the need for privacy?” Cenni asked, puzzled.
“Unexpected prints in unexpected places,” Greci announced mysteriously, using his right pinky to slide a pair of thick wire-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
Cenni frowned, thinking of Sophie Orlic. “Go on.”
“On Saturday before you arrived, we scanned the entire vault for prints, not just the altar and the area around the body, but the walls, floors, everything except the ceiling,” he added, conscientiously. “Oddly enough, this made Russo very nervous. He said we were wasting our time and the lab’s resources. He walked off in a huff when I refused to stop.”
“Were you . . . wasting time, that is?” Cenni asked in an effort to appear interested, concluding from the contempt in Greci’s voice that the technician had worked with Il Lupino before.
Ignoring Cenni’s question, Greci droned on, “We’ve recently started using new techniques for finding and collecting latent prints from difficult surfaces: lasers, iodine fuming, digital photography, among others. On porous surfaces, like rough stone, laser scans work faster and are more reliable for finding hidden prints than the old dust and lift methods, and we can check bigger areas in a shorter time. I found a large number of prints, mainly partials, on the left side of the Casati vault. A few of the prints were on the bottom sarcophagus, but most were on the floor.” He emphasized the last bit of information before stopping to catch his breath.
Cenni smiled encouragingly, letting his thoughts race ahead. Russo was doing it in the cemetery!
“Then I used a technique I learned from our British colleagues to highlight the prints. They turn a dark, highly visible blue, easy to capture in digital photographs. Some of our investigating judges don’t think these techniques are trust-worthy, but they do work.”
Cenni smiled politely. “Interesting.”
“What surprised us all was the violence of Russo’s objections. When we left the area around the altar and moved out toward the periphery, he was in a panic. Batori commented on it as well. It wasn’t Russo’s investigation, but if it were, he would have stopped me.”
Cenni looked at his watch longingly. The man moves in his own time.
Greci continued, “Everything in the vicinity of the victim is part of the crime scene. Russo knows that! Besides, it’s not his case. Russo threw his weight around when he was in Perugia, but he’s not in Perugia now.” Through the thick lenses, his eyes flashed with malice.
Cenni interrupted. “It would appear, Dottore, that you and Russo have worked together in the past.”
This proved to be the invitation he had been waiting for.
<
br /> “We had a run-in a few years back, before he got sent down to Assisi. Russo contaminated evidence at a crime scene involving some syndicate thugs. Deliberately, I thought. I reported the incident to my department chief. I didn’t know then that Georgio Zangarelli was Russo’s brother-in-law. I do now! I’ve just returned to Perugia after three years in Foligno, and I intend to stay.” The visible tightening of Greci’s neck and jaw muscles confirmed this intention.
Cenni slipped in quickly before Greci could continue, “Let me get to the point, Dottore! You’re suggesting that Russo is involved in some way with the crime under investigation. No doubt you’ve included all this in your report.” He nodded to the manila envelope that Greci was still clutching. “I’ll forward your report to Antonio Priuli, the investigating judge in this case. It’s standard procedure, as you know.”
Greci sat up straighter before replying. “As I said earlier, I’m not returning to Foligno! None of this is in my report.”
“Why not?”
“Russo’s prints are not in the national database. The ones I used for comparison are from internal police files.” Greci swallowed hard twice.
Cenni took a moment to respond. “You mean, I suppose, without consent!”
“Certo. And none of the prints I found in the vault, including Russo’s, permit identification using the standard twelve-point comparison rule. They’re all partials. I made enlargements on transparency paper and then placed one partial on top of the other, to come up with a complete print. They’re Russo’s all right—palm prints and fingerprints—but don’t tell that to Priuli once he hears how I generated the complete image. He’s no different from the rest of them—suspicious of modern technology!” he added, with the righteous indignation of the true technocrat.
“So why tell me all this if you can’t provide me with the evidence? I need to assert probable cause. I can’t pull rabbits out of a hat!”
“You’ve a reputation for dealing on the square. More to the point, everyone knows that you, not Carlo Togni, run the Perugia Questura, and that it was you who got Russo sent down to Assisi.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour ago—less even— I got a call from Rome: Stop wasting government money!” His eyes glittered. “Russo’s been working his magic again. But I’m not going back to Foligno!”
Cenni smiled. My mother was born in Foligno. Not that she ever admits to it!
Greci smiled back. Cenni had taken his point.
“As I was saying, Commissario! I did the same with all the partial prints that I found in the area by the sarcophagi, creating complete images using transparencies. The obvious areas to look for prints were the altar, the statue, the vases, the steps, and the immediate area around the body. I found complete matches for the countess and the Croatian on the altar and some matches around the gates, but nothing on the statue or the vases. Someone had wiped them clean. There were no matches anywhere in the vault for the granddaughter or the Albanian helper.”
He paused for effect before dropping his bombshell. “I found partials for Rita Minelli and Artemisia Casati in the same area where I found Russo’s prints, in front of the sarcophagi.”
Cenni nodded. Whatever happened to hotel rooms?
“The Canadian and Umberto Casati, you compared their prints?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“I did, for completeness. No matches. But I think you know why I focused on the women, Commissario. Here, look at this.” He pulled a sketch from his breast pocket and laid it on the desk. It was a drawing of the left side of the vault. There were numerous sets of overlapping fingerprints and palm prints on the floor and a smaller number of prints on the lower sarcophagus.
“The prints in red are Russo’s, the ones in green are the dead woman’s, and the ones in blue belong to Artemisia Casati. You’ll notice all three prints are on the floor—red, green, and blue—with the red prints facing the sarcophagus, the green and blue prints facing the outer wall. The prints on the lower sarcophagus, the red and blue (no green) all face the same direction, upward. . . .”
“Red, green, yellow . . .” Cenni groaned out loud. His headache was turning psychedelic.
“Blue, not yellow,” Greci corrected, smugly.
“Madonna Santa! What difference does it make? Say what you have to say. Russo was fucking the two women in the vault. Sometimes up the ass!”
6
THE SILENCE IN the room was palpable. Greci, who had naturally dark skin, had turned a blackish red after Cenni’s outburst. Greci finally responded, after clearing his throat. “Actually the latter—you know, what you just said—was true of Artemisia Casati only, not the American.” He avoided Cenni’s eyes. “The American was straight missionary.”
Straight missionary. The man’s a throwback!
“Sorry, Dottor Greci. Headache,” Cenni offered in apology and rubbed his temples in proof. “Did you find anything else to support this inference,” he asked politely. “Semen stains, for example?”
“No, regretfully. On Saturday, I took only two samples of a number of dried stains in that area. I assumed they were pigeon droppings, which they were. On Sunday, when I realized the implication of the partial prints by the sarcophagi, I went back to the vault with a knife and some swabs. The vault floor had been cleaned. I thought I detected a whiff of carbolic. The vault was still cordoned off, but there were no officers in sight!” Greci went on for another twenty minutes before he was finally induced to leave, after Cenni inquired if he knew of any good restaurants in Foligno.
Greci was maddeningly long-winded, but he had been thorough, and he had given Cenni a lot to think about, not all of it pointing to Fulvio Russo. The bindings on Minelli’s diaries were clean of prints. The only prints on the inside pages were smudges, and in Greci’s view, all were Minelli’s. On a more discordant note, he insisted that Minelli’s wallet had also been wiped clean of prints, by Sophie Orlic.
When Cenni challenged this, Greci was adamant. “Escolta, Commissario, Minelli’s purse and wallet had Russo’s prints all over them, which Russo can justify since he checked their contents after the body was found on Saturday. But Minelli’s prints are missing on both; someone wiped them after the murder. The only other prints I found were the Croatian’s, which is okay on the purse since she admits to handling it. But we also found a partial thumbprint of hers inside the billfold. She missed it when wiping the wallet. Amateur!” he commented snidely. “It’s a partial and doesn’t conform to the twelve-point rule, but mark my words, it’s hers.”
Cenni was flummoxed. Too many suspects and now, too many clues. Someone in the house had wiped the diary, unless Minelli had done it herself, which made no sense. Earlier in the day, while reading the diary, it had crossed Cenni’s mind that Russo might be the American’s married lover. Now he had proof. And it would seem that Il Lupino was also Artemisia’s lover.
Had the ice queen known that Fulvio was fucking her older cousin? And if she had, how had she reacted? Or, were Fulvio and Artemisia working together, to get Minelli’s money? Artemisia had access to her cousin’s room and could easily have removed pages from the diary. But why? Had they contained accusations against Fulvio as the father of her child, a declaration that she was planning to change her will, or other secrets not yet revealed? Secrets to die for? Cenni acknowledged with reluctance that Sophie also had access to the diary. According to Amelia Casati, Sophie had been in the house all day on Thursday to help with the rough cleaning.
The real conundrum was how to explain Orlic’s print on the inside of the billfold. Theft after she’d found the body? Supposedly, she and her helper had been together from the moment they’d entered the vault, so how had Orlic’s print gotten on the billfold if not on the evening before, when the American was murdered? Not such a conundrum after all, Cenni decided. Orlic could have rifled through Rita’s wallet another time, perhaps on Thursday when she was helping in the house. He’d talk to Lucia; she might know if Minelli had complained about missing money. There had to be an innocent e
xplanation for Sophie’s print on the billfold.
Distracted by thoughts of the blonde Croatian, he opened the manila envelope that Greci had handed him and thumbed through the report absentmindedly. Appended to the back were photographs of the crime scene, including a striking photograph of the altar and the matching stone vases. What was it Greci had said about the vases? No prints! Of course, that was it, what had been nagging at him for two days. No prints and no flowers. The vases were empty!
7
CENNI HIT THE redial button for the fifth time. Again, the same anonymous voice. Please try again later. Why did he continue to pay for Piero’s cellphone when he never turned the damned thing on? He could call Elena, but she was overextended. Sergeant Antolini? Just the person. The supremely bored male voice at the Assisi end said the sergeant was away from her desk, “Probably out for a coffee.”
When Cenni first reviewed the pictures that the forensic team had taken of the vault, he’d experienced the exhilaration of discovery. But when the significance of the empty vases dawned on him, he came crashing down. On Saturday, Sophie Orlic had described her weekly routine to him in very precise Italian. “I remove the dead flowers from the vault, replace the water, and arrange the new flowers.” He’d been so sure that Sophie was not Minelli’s killer, even surer that she was not capable of murder—although he was not as precipitate as Elena, who just that morning had staked her professional reputation of two years and three months against Piero’s five years and his fifteen, that Williams was not the murderer. Women’s intuition! Well, he might have to adjust his own intuition. Someone had removed the flowers before Minelli’s body was discovered. If the action had nothing to do with Minelli’s murder, why were there no prints on the vases? And if Orlic was not involved, why hadn’t she mentioned the missing flowers? Flowers were her business. She had to have noticed!
