The Fatal Touch

by Conor Fitzgerald

  “Is he here?” asked Caterina.

  “No, but he’s on his way. Then things will get organized.”

  “Who called in the body?”

  “I did,” said Rospo. “Pair of Huns saw him lying in the street, went straight back to the hotel to tell the manager. That’s how they must report crimes in Germany. See a dead body, find the nearest hotel manager. Fucking Germans . . .” he spat.

  “Has the victim been identified?”

  “Sure.”

  “By who?”

  “Me again,” said Rospo. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen this guy, English tramp. Been living here for years. He paints, gets drunk. Sometimes gets into fights, though he must be about seventy. You’d almost admire that. People round here have complained about him for years, pissing into doorways, singing songs in the street.”

  “Tramp?”

  “Artist, if you prefer. Anyhow, soon as I saw who it was, I told the German to fuck off back to his hotel, then Di Ricci and me tried to lift him up and get him to walk home. We dragged him for a few meters, but then I immediately realized he was inert and pretty cold, so we put him down again, called dispatch, and requested a crew.”

  “You dragged a dead body several meters from its original position?” asked Caterina.

  Rospo shrugged. “We’d picked him up off the ground twenty times before. Who was to know he was dead this time? Anyhow, we put him back. This sort of shit happens all the time.”

  “So those two technicians there are looking at where the body was, originally?” She pointed at two men standing a few meters apart from the others, staring at a piece of empty ground.

  “More or less there, maybe a bit to the left, a bit behind that spot,” said Rospo.

  “You don’t feel like going over and telling them to take a step or two back to where you actually found the body?”

  “I can’t be so precise. Besides, they’ve probably already looked there. Nothing to see.”

  Caterina walked over and stood outside the circle of technicians, none of whom acknowledged her. The victim was lying flat on his back on the ground, like he wanted to look at the stars. He had a short white beard, neater than seemed right for a tramp. His hair was white and curly, all of it bunched in curls at the back of his head. The moonlight through the magnolia leaves cast a strange pattern on the upturned face. Caterina moved slightly, but the pattern remained the same, and she realized the man’s left cheek was wrinkled and scarred. It looked like an old burn. She bet he had grown the beard to hide it. She felt the muscles in her neck tense and a shudder pass through her and turned around to see Rospo.

  “I found him more or less here.” He knelt down on the ground, as if looking for something, stood up, brushed dirt off his knee, and nodded. “Yes, no, wait. It was maybe a bit further over. Fuck it. Let’s just say it was here.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “While the ambulance was on its way, I felt for a pulse and found none. The EMTs reached the scene twenty minutes later and pronounced suspicious death, and a forensic team was called in. The suspected cause of death is blunt head trauma.”

  Caterina looked over to see if the uniformed policemen had sealed off the entrances to the piazza like she said. They had not. Then, to her immense relief, she saw Commissioner Blume and Inspector Panebianco walking over toward her. Blume was carrying a bag, which he dropped on the ground next to her. He unzipped it, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, and snapped them on. Panebianco did the same, and then they waited for her. Feeling self-conscious, Caterina plucked out two gloves from the box and pulled them on, taking twice as long as Blume.

  Blume nodded at Rospo, then turned his head downwards at his bag, and pointed at a roll of crime scene tape with his toe. Rospo picked it up, and Blume shook his head in sharp dismissal, saying, “What the hell? You need to be told everything?”

  Rospo was gone. Blume asked Caterina to start writing down anything and everything she saw. But first, he wanted her to get the names of the policemen called to the scene and everyone present.

  Then he asked her if anything had been added to the scene since she arrived or if anyone had touched the body. But as she began her complicated response he stopped her.

  “It’s OK. I know about Rospo’s body-lifting efforts already. I just wanted to see if you did.”

  “You were testing me?” A thought occurred to her. “You’re not really just arriving now, are you?”

  “No. I got here a while ago.”

  “You didn’t seal the area off,” said Caterina, annoyed at being played like this.

  “I did. You didn’t check. The exclusionary cordon you wanted was fine, but I chose to close off Vicolo del Moro. No access there means no access to any entrance to the piazza. One roadblock instead of two. Less manpower. We’ll narrow the area later, when people start waking up and going to work.”

  “I see,” said Caterina.

  Blume pointed to a pile of cobblestones and sand piled up against the wall of a bar, and said, “Use the tape and ring it around those stones afterwards. They might want looking at.”

  “OK,” said Caterina.

  Blume clapped his hands together. “So, are you having fun, Inspector?”

  “I am glad to be here, if that’s what you mean,” said Caterina.

  “If I had meant that, I would have asked if you were glad to be here,” said Blume. “Don’t you think this is fun?”

  Caterina thought of her son waking up to her absence, the dead tramp with the white beard a few meters away, the scorn she had seen in the policemen’s eyes when she tried to give them orders. “No. I wouldn’t say fun, exactly, more . . .” She stopped, realizing that Blume did not really want to stand there listening to her trying to give shape to her thoughts.

  Blume confirmed her suspicion by getting down to business. “So Rospo and his partner moved the body. Well, that’s a good start. I suppose we’ll begin with the assumption this is yet another mugging. Certainly, it’s another foreigner . . .” He stooped and she realized it was up to her to continue.

  “The victim—” began Caterina.

  “He may not even be a victim,” interrupted Blume. “Unless you broaden the category to include victims of misfortune or stupidity, in which case we are all victims.”

  “He was just a tramp, banged his head; then died from exposure,” said Caterina. “I saw some scenes pretty similar to this with illegal immigrants.”

  “Just a tramp, eh?”

  “I didn’t mean that a tramp is less important,” said Caterina.

  “It was not a moral reprimand, Inspector. It’s just you never know where a corpse is going to lead you. Murder cases can be short or long. Go have a look at those cobblestones, I’ll call you over in a minute. Oh, and do a sketch, would you? Of, you know . . .” he swept his hand around. “This place. It’s a nice little piazza. Sort of like an arena, isn’t it? Or a Greek theater. Or something.”

  Caterina took some crime scene tape and went over to the pile of cobblestones, and stared at them blankly, looking for their significance. Inspector Panebianco, who had not said hello, was standing beside Blume and taking copious notes.

  She looked at the notebook in her hand, and, without removing her latex gloves, rapidly sketched the piazza, including the two trees, the restaurant, a bar, a potted sacred fig, the cars parked in herringbone formation in the middle of the piazza; she counted the cars, counted the bolted-down tables and potted plants outside the restaurant, and counted the windows of the buildings overlooking the scene. The cornice along the roof of the tall pink building was a strange white, and she realized the sun was about to clear the rooftops behind. She would have to phone Elia soon, make sure he was OK. As she counted the windows, a pair of brown shutters swung open and a head bobbed out, then back in again. When it reappeared, it was in the company of two more. The three heads gave a friendly nod to the shutter to the left as it opened and another head appeared.

  She looked at the cairn of
cobblestones, neatly piled there as if for a well-organized riot later that afternoon. She picked one from the top, turned it over, and glared at its gray underside. Was she supposed to be looking for blood, matted hair, bone fragments? Maybe the killer used a cobblestone to batter the victim, but what sort of killer would then put the weapon back in the pile, ready for discovery? Throw it into the river, sure; dump it in a garbage container, maybe, or even just roll it under a parked car.

  If the Commissioner was testing her endurance or obedience, she was not going to fail. She checked thirty of the elongated cubes forming the top of the pile, putting aside two with strange chipping on their sides. The idea that a killer had restacked a neat pile after bludgeoning his victim to death in the middle of a piazza surrounded by sixty windows and doors was ridiculous.

  The photographer was taking shots of a spot on the ground. He seemed to be moving slowly, but Caterina realized that in the minute or so she watched him, he had taken at least half a dozen separate pictures, all of them close-ups. They were setting up a sort of tent structure around the body, which was largely obscured from overhead by the magnolia tree and from street view by the parked cars, but more and more brown shutters were opening and more heads were looking out. The sun struck the upper stories of the pink building in front, and the halogen lights of the technicians suddenly seemed sickly and yellowish. More uniformed officers had arrived, and the entrances to the piazza were properly sealed off now. The technicians were packing up, and Panebianco was nowhere to be seen.

  The Commissioner called her name, inviting her over. She braced herself. She was not afraid of seeing a dead body, but it would be the first she would look at as a murder investigator.

  Chapter 3

  “His skull is caved in from behind,” said Blume as she reached him. He bent down and lightly stroked the curly white hair at the back of the prostrate figure. “You can feel the concave indent here.” He cupped his hand slightly, making his fingers disappear. “Want to feel?”

  “No thanks,” said Caterina.

  “Not for fun,” said Blume. “Put your hand there. Touch the damage. You need to know.”

  She bent down, pushing her satchel behind her back, put her hand at the back of the dead man’s white head, wrinkling her nose against the powerful smell of alcohol, urine, and something else.

  “Deeper,” ordered Blume. “That’s the foramen magnum, where you have your fingers now, which is the natural hollow for the spinal column. Move your fingers up to the occiput . . . There!” he said as Caterina shuddered, closed her eyes, and almost lost her balance. “You’ve found it. It’s almost as if the foramen magnum just continued higher up into the skull than it should, but if you put your index finger in it now you can feel the circular edges. It’s like a divot from a bad golf shot.”

  Caterina completed the examination, then stood up, and ripped off her latex glove. Smiling, Blume took the glove and held out a new one for her, which he seemed to have ready in his hand.

  “You need to keep them on while we’re here,” he said.

  “Of course, I don’t know why I did that. It was stupid.”

  “You’re doing great. Find any suspicious stones?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Two, maybe. But unlikely.”

  “Don’t forget to give them to the technicians before they go,” said Blume. “But for now, I want you just to stand here. Do you pray?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Really?” said Blume. “I don’t. Nothing out there to pray to. But I find it helps if you just stand as if you were praying. It gives a bit of respect back to the victim and helps empty your mind of noisy thoughts. It’s not the same thing as concentrating. Concentration is what we do next.”

  He stood there, hands behind his back, head bowed, and she did the same, conscious of the risk that this could be a humiliating initiation rite and Rospo might right now be snapping photographs of her solemn, prayerful pose for the office bulletin board.

  But she had to believe the Commissioner would not treat her like that. So she stood beside him, and did not turn or raise her head. The corpse staring up at them from the ground showed no visible signs of injury on this side, no blood, no bruises. His arms were at his sides and his legs were placed neatly, but that could have been the solicitude of the two policemen who had let him down gently. Green paper bags, like the ones her mother brought onions home in, had been put over his hands. He was wearing dark pants, with a brown belt, a blue narrow-rib corduroy shirt, and a dark jacket. His shoes were heavy, brown, scuffed, and messy, like Blume’s.

  Blume’s lips seemed to be moving. Maybe he was praying? Hoping it would not earn her a reprimand, she bent down again, and lifted the dead man’s arm ever so slightly, then glanced back up at Blume.

  “They’ve done all that stuff,” he said, but his tone was approving. “Rigor has set in. We got a body temperature reading that puts the time of death back at more or less when the German tourists say they found him. The magistrate, Bianchi, has already been and gone. He’s interviewing the German tourists and then he’s signing it over to his colleague, De Santis.”

  “De Santis who’s investigating the muggings?” said Caterina. “So Bianchi is treating this as a mugging gone wrong and transferring the case just like that?”

  “I am not privy to the workings of his fine legal mind,” said Blume. “But rarely have I seen a man less keen to take on a new case.”

  She stood up and felt the soothing warmth of a beam of sunlight on the nape of her neck, as the sun cleared the building behind. The victim suddenly looked very white.

  “His name was Henry Treacy,” said Blume, his voice still hushed. “He was Irish, born in 1949, in a place called Killken—, no Killarney, no that’s not it either. Kill-something.” He held out an ID card for her to see. “This was in his wallet.”

  “Wallet?”

  “Yes. You forgot to ask Rospo about that and he, of course, didn’t volunteer the information. It could still be an attempted mugging. Struggle, violence, death, and then the mugger runs off without his loot. But the presence of a wallet does open the way to new possibilities. As does the fact that this guy may well be foreign, but he’s no tourist. He’s been living here for years. Rospo knew him by sight. Did you notice the burn marks on the left side of his face?”

  “Yes,” said Caterina. “They look old. I guess he grew the beard to hide the scars.”

  “Just what I think,” said Blume. “He already has a beard in the photo on his ID card which dates from eight years ago. You can just make out the scar there. See?” He showed her the disintegrating ID card.

  She read: “Eye color: blue; height: 182 cms.” So far it was a description that suited Blume better than the sad shadow lying at her feet. Surely he wasn’t that tall? She took the card out of Blume’s hand and read the rest of the details: “Nationality: Italian; civil status: single; profession: artist; distinguishing marks: left-handed.”

  “That’s strange,” she said.

  “What him being Italian but born abroad?” said Blume. “No, that’s perfectly normal. Lots of people are born abroad.”

  “No, the bit about left-handedness. Usually that’s for things like a mole, a missing finger, or in his case, scar on left side of face. Visible stuff.”

  “So he must have felt being left-handed was important to others instead of just to himself,” said Blume. “If you ask me, that is just the sort of self-centered bullshit you would expect from an artist. Artists need to be knocked down the social scale again, maybe to about the level of barbers. Same goes for dentists and surgeons and musicians. All hands, no brains. Overpaid for being a bit dexterous. Like soccer players, if you think about it.”

  “Not a tramp, though,” said Caterina, daring to interrupt. She was pleased. She did not want her first body to be a nobody.

  Blume said, “He had three euros in coins in his wallet. Not a single banknote.”

  He paused, and Caterina realized she was meant to contribute. Sh
e said, “So he must have spent it.”

  “You think so? Why not assume someone stole it? If we are hypothesizing that someone hit him over the back of the head, then it is logical to assume a theft—if assuming on the basis of a hypothesis is a logical way to proceed, which it isn’t by the way.”

  Caterina stayed silent for a moment pretending to understand, then spoke cautiously, watching Blume’s face for signs of irritation. “They’d have taken the wallet itself, not just the money inside. And if it was in his pocket, they would have had to remove his wallet, take the money, then put it back, leaving fingerprints. It doesn’t work.”

  “Good. I agree,” said Blume. “But of course, the wallet was bagged and taken off by the technical team who will look for fingerprints anyhow. Now, that dimple mark on the back of his skull, what weapon could have caused that?”

  Caterina didn’t know where to begin.

  “I don’t know either, but it’s more consistent with falling and hitting your head on a protruding cobble while drunk than being hit over the head with a heavy weapon like a bat. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see from the autopsy. Two receipts were found in his pocket. They give us the name of two bars, one he visited last night, one from a few nights ago. I have two men on that already. Both bars are closed at this time. So we’re tracking down the owners, find out who was serving last night. The main thing is to identify who Treacy was with, if anyone. We need to find out who was the last person to see him alive.”

  Caterina heard the sound of a two-stroke motor ricocheting up the walls of the houses. She waited and a few moments later, a black-and-blue three-wheeled Piaggio Ape van carrying nets of carrots and a thin man appeared, got into animated conversation with a policeman at the closed-off entrance on Via della Pelliccia, then retreated, motor snarling.

  “That guy just breached my security cordon,” said Blume.

  “Maybe he lived in one of the three houses between Via del Moro and here,” said Caterina.

  “Which is why your idea to close off only this piazza was better than my idea to block off the connecting streets,” said Blume. “When you see I’m being stupid, let me know, will you? We need to close off the piazza now.”