The Mystery of the Three Orchids

by Augusto De Angelis

  “Where is the dead man?”

  “Upstairs on the third floor. You might easily notice nothing.”

  “Because you can already tell me who the killer is?”

  Prospero started. “Me?” He gasped. “How could I?”

  “Because… Look, if he was killed in this building, I won’t be able to allow anyone to leave before I’ve carried out the necessary investigations.”

  Clara looked at both of them, her eyes wide. A dead man… Behind her, Rosetta grabbed at her skirt. “Oremus”’s head had gone all red.

  De Vincenzi felt sorry for the poor man. “Don’t worry! And if possible, I will avoid disturbing the people gathered in the showrooms. My men can stay here at the entrance. No one will notice them.”

  A faintly ironic smile fluttered over his face: how could anyone believe that no one would notice their presence? He hung his hat on a hook.

  “Sit down, all of you, and don’t move from this room. No one must leave.” He turned to the secretary. “That’s an order, Signor O’Lary. Do what you need to do so that no one attempts to go against it and my officers don’t need to enforce it. Now let’s go.”

  Prospero led the way. They passed Clara. De Vincenzi observed everything around him. He saw the Boltons standing in the corridor and Anna’s green eyes struck him, as did her crêpe veil. For his part, Bolton stared at De Vincenzi, no longer smiling. When the men had disappeared into the lift, the American glanced at his sister and nodded imperceptibly towards the showrooms. The two of them slowly went in.

  “Even seaside fashion betrays some interesting nineteenth-century influences, seen through the multifaceted crystal of our century. Notice, for example, the original design we present here…”

  Through the crystal lenses—neither multifaceted nor graduated—of his gold-rimmed spectacles, Mr Bolton could in fact see a bathing costume with an extremely short skirt and a clinging bolero that barely fastened under the breast of the beautiful model.

  “What have you done, Anna?” he whispered without moving his lips.

  “I saw her.”

  “Did she recognize you?”

  “I think so.”

  “It smells like something’s burning in here…”

  Anna Bolton sat down in an armchair and her brother took a seat beside her.

  6

  De Vincenzi saw the body, Cristiana and the orchid. By now he was used to seeing bodies and women—how many inquests had he racked up, each with at least one body and always lots of women?—but less used to seeing orchids, though he loved them quite a bit more.

  So he stopped to look at the flower for longer and with greater pleasure. An unnatural flower made of flesh, born from rotting slime, grown in a tropical atmosphere. He sensed the woman looking at him, her gaze heavy, suspicious and enquiring. He was particularly well acquainted with the look women have when they find themselves in a frightening situation and are forced to defend themselves. He knew that a sudden, unexpected question can take a man by surprise, but a woman, never. Lying and distraction come easily to women; their deviousness is automatic.

  He lifted his eyes from the orchid and looked at the body, moving so quickly that he bumped into Prospero O’Lary, who had come up beside him without his noticing. Prospero teetered and stumbled before steadying himself and finding his balance.

  “Pardon me,” he muttered, red in the face. He pushed his glasses up his nose.

  De Vincenzi stood over the bed. He could see for himself that the young man had been strangled, but he needed to know much more. However, he could do nothing but wait for the doctor, who had been called and would get there whenever he got there—at his own convenience.

  How long had the victim been dead? Had he really been strangled? It wasn’t that he doubted it, yet the young man bore no other visible traces of beating or injury: he was healthy and strong enough to have put up a defence. Was it possible that he’d been killed without a struggle? His face was both handsome and common, with an air of cynical, insolent effrontery even after death.

  “Who is—or rather, who was he?” he asked without turning round, still studying the dead man’s clothing. It was costly and pretentious, silk, with a gaudy handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket.

  “Valerio Tardini,” said O’Lary.

  “Oh, no! just Valerio. You only need to call him Valerio.” Cristiana’s voice resonated musically, full of melodic undulation, though it was thrumming with suppressed anxiety.

  De Vincenzi left the bed and went over to stand beside Cristiana, who was still sitting.

  “Am I to understand, Signora, that this man meant something to you?”

  Cristiana couldn’t raise her eyebrows in surprise—they already formed two black arches in the middle of her forehead. But her eyes widened.

  “Meant something? Oh, no! Valerio was nothing to me. He didn’t mean anything to anyone. He was my personal secretary, having been my waiter and then my errand boy. He belonged to me, belonged to the O’Brian Fashion House.”

  “I see,” De Vincenzi said suavely. “He belonged to you, like an object, or a cute pet.”

  Cristiana scrutinized him. “You’re a police inspector, aren’t you?”

  De Vincenzi bowed his head.

  “How did you know that he belonged to me in just that way?”

  “I think that’s what you wanted me to understand. But why was he killed, and here on your bed? Isn’t this your room?”

  “My room, Inspector, and that’s my bed. Why he was killed, I have no idea, unless someone did it just so I’d find him on my bed!”

  Should he interpret her reply as a confession or a complaint? Too soon! He mustn’t jump to conclusions. If ever there were a case that couldn’t be rushed, it was this one. De Vincenzi sensed snares and danger as a diviner senses water, and he’d felt them from the moment he’d walked into the building. To complicate things further, there was a general air of suspicion, enough to give one the shivers. He remembered having had the same impression many years before, when he’d been embroiled in the mystery at The Hotel of the Three Roses during an awful, nightmarish and interminable evening of bodies.

  He made a show of giving no weight to her words.

  “Will you tell me how events took place?” And he turned away, as if he hadn’t put the question to Cristiana. It was then that he noticed another woman in the room. Marta was in fact leaning against the wall near the wardrobe, eagerly watching, listening and hoping to understand the thinking behind his words and actions. This was someone new to him. On the way to the lift, Prospero O’Lary had spoken only of Cristiana O’Brian and the dead man.

  “Events? But there were no events, Inspector, or at least there was only one. I came up to my room, saw the body and…” she smiled, both pitying and excusing herself, “and I think I fainted. It’s never happened to me before, Inspector. I beg you to believe me when I say it’s never happened before.”

  “I believe it, Signora. How long were you away from your room?”

  “Well—for a long time. Since this morning. My life takes place downstairs, on the first floor, in my office and the showrooms. I come up here during the day only to change my clothes, and at night, to sleep.”

  “What time was it when you came up today?”

  “Oh, I know very well. You policemen always want to know the exact time everything happened. As though anyone who does anything keeps track of time with a stopwatch! However, it must have been four, Inspector. I say four because the fashion show began at three-thirty with the models, and I was there.”

  “So you came up to change your dress?”

  She didn’t hesitate. She lied immediately.

  “Exactly. I was tired of seeing myself in that red dress. There are a lot of mirrors downstairs.”

  “Do you live alone on this floor?”

  “There’s Madame Firmino.”

  “Madame?”

  “Firmino. She’s my artistic director, a French woman from Antibes.”

&n
bsp; “Was she with you in the showrooms?”

  “No, that was exactly where you wouldn’t have found her.”

  Marta finally pulled herself together.

  “Madame Firmino came up to her room at three. She never attends our fashion shows. She says it’s a nauseating spectacle for the person who’s created the designs. A little after four, we bumped into her downstairs. She was in her bathing costume, barely covered by her dressing gown.”

  She waited for De Vincenzi to interrupt, but he contented himself with a nod, as if the matter appeared entirely natural to him. So Marta explained.

  “Madame Firmino takes a sunlamp cure—UV-ray therapy.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Do you think so? Well, she heard a thud in her room, rushed in here and found Signora Cristiana O’Brian in a faint on the floor and—and—” She stopped and pointed to the body.

  “I see.”

  “At least, that’s what she told us,” Prospero O’Lary added.

  “But it’s absolutely true that she was taking a sun cure.”

  “You gathered that from her costume?”

  “I deduced it from the fact that her face was covered in oil,” “Oremus” affirmed in disgust.

  “You can’t argue with that.”

  Yes, that might have been so. At least, that was how it looked, an impression the killer wanted to create. But, thinking about it carefully, that impression did nothing but distance him from the killer.

  “And Valerio?”

  “What about him?” Cristiana asked.

  “Where should he have been at that time?”

  “Wherever he wanted! Valerio didn’t have a schedule, or even somewhere specific to be. The room he slept in is on the second floor beyond the atelier. He could come and go as he pleased. I needed him only rarely, and in any case I certainly wouldn’t have needed him today, the day of the show.”

  “And not one of you saw him today?”

  “He came to see me at eleven and asked for something to do. I didn’t have anything for him so he went off. I didn’t see him again from that point on.”

  De Vincenzi addressed Marta. “And you are?”

  “The director.”

  “Did you see Valerio today?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “Where I always see him—in the models’ room. He spent his time with those girls since they usually have nothing to do.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Two. Because I’d forbidden him to go into that room and the models had a lot to do today, Valerio escaped as soon as he saw me.”

  “So he was still alive at two. Did Valerio often come up to this floor?”

  There was a quiet pause. For the first time, De Vincenzi felt that his question had met with some resistance. Up to then he had been shadow-boxing.

  “I told you he was free to go wherever he wanted.” Cristiana’s tone was cold and sharp.

  “But what reason could he have had for coming here? To your room, for example?”

  Prospero O’Lary squirmed, but Cristiana stopped him.

  “No one ever knew what was going on in that boy’s head, not even me. He had a devious mind. And anyway, Inspector, who says he was killed in this room?”

  “Of course.” De Vincenzi looked at the orchid. “Are you an orchid lover, Signora O’Brian?”

  Cristiana trembled visibly.

  “I detest them. That flower, too, was brought to my room without my knowledge. Just like the body!”

  7

  The door to Cristiana’s room was still open and a very tall man appeared at the threshold. He was extremely thin and lugubrious. He had a leather case under his arm and wore a wide black hat with a sloping brim. His black bow tie sat under his overcoat, which was buttoned up to the collar. He glanced around the room, looking first at the body and then at the people standing around it. He took off his hat and stayed where he was.

  It wasn’t hard to guess that he was the doctor.

  “Come in, Doctor.”

  The young man’s horsey face lit up as if the immediate recognition had thrown him a lifebelt.

  “I came as soon as I heard.” And he stepped into the room.

  His shyness disappeared once he was in the presence of the body. They all watched him as he threw his wide hat on the floor, put his leather case on a chair and bent over the dead man. They followed closely as he took one of the hands by the wrist, lifted the arm and let it fall back down.

  He turned to De Vincenzi. “Can I move him?”

  “As you wish, Doctor. But tell me first whether his position seems normal to you for a man who was killed in this room. Let me explain myself. Do you think he fell from the killer’s grasp like that and then died on the bed, or was he brought in and dropped there after he died?”

  “Hmm,” said the doctor, and he took a second look at the body.

  Valerio’s torso lay on top of the bedspread, at a slight diagonal, his head bent towards one shoulder and his legs dropped over the side of the bed; his feet nearly touched the floor. The grey damask bedspread was smooth and showed no trace of a struggle. Moreover, Valerio’s arms were thrown apart and his hands were open.

  “Did you study him, Inspector?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And what have you concluded?”

  “Given that one can’t strangle someone else without a struggle, I feel that the body is too well composed to have been killed where it was found. The bedspread has no creases on it other than the ones made by the body.”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “You’re mistaken, Inspector.”

  De Vincenzi was shocked. “So you’d say that there had been a mortal struggle here on this bed?”

  “Certainly not! That isn’t your error. Naturally, you haven’t had to digest the works of Gross, Niceforo, Filomusi-Guelfi and Nysten, so you’re unaware of experiments that have established how a superficial trauma to the upper laryngeal nerve can result in sudden death. There are many cases of sudden or rapid death caused by a blow to the throat, even when it’s not very forceful or leaves no sign.”

  “But the signs are here!”

  “Indeed”—the doctor pointed to the victim’s throat—” there are several obvious abrasions and bruises indicating that this poor man was grabbed by the throat and squeezed till he suffocated. But the semicircular abrasions made by the outer edges of the fingernails are missing. No, believe me, Inspector, in this case the clutch was calculated and pressure was applied immediately to the lethal spot. This young man died in a few short seconds and you’ll see the autopsy will bear me out, since they won’t find any rupture in the muscular fibre, much less a rupture of the intima or the hyoid bone.”

  “So you allow that he might have been killed on this bed?”

  “No. I rule out the bed. But there’s another reason. If death really occurred instantaneously, the pressure had to be equally rapid. Does this strike you as the normal position of a man surprised by an attack? Clearly not. The body is lying here as we see it because it was thrown there after death. Rather than thrown, placed. But I don’t know where he was killed. It could have been in this room or some kilometres from here, supposing that whoever murdered him was sufficiently robust to have carried a weight like that for some time.”

  Yes, the young doctor’s conclusions were perfectly sound and logical. Valerio could have been killed on Cristiana O’Brian’s bed or somewhere else. However, De Vincenzi had a strange feeling that he hadn’t been killed in that room. A feeling, however, for now completely lacking any logical explanation. The killer might have taken Valerio by surprise in the room or come up behind him, and then thrown him on the bed—in which case there would be no need to look for signs of a struggle.

  “How long has he been dead, in your opinion?”

  The doctor smiled fleetingly, with the immediate effect that his face seemed even more funereal.

  “We don’t have any symptoms of rigor mort
is here, and since that appears from three to six hours after death depending on the subject and ambient temperature, I would say that this young man expired around three hours ago, definitely not more than six. One takes the internal temperature and then calculates by the degree to which the body has cooled. As a general rule, the temperature of a cadaver drops progressively one degree Celsius every hour, from 26 degrees, which is the temperature at which death occurs. But this sort of estimate is fairly unreliable and quite often wrong. No, Inspector, content yourself with knowing that this man was definitely alive six hours ago and could even have been alive for three hours after that.”

  De Vincenzi took his watch out: it was ten past five. Marta had seen Valerio at two, so presumably the young man had been strangled between two and four, when Cristiana found the body—as long as it really was the owner of the O’Brian Fashion House who’d found the body.

  The doctor picked up his hat and leather case.

  “Are you sending him to the morgue right away?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “In that case, you have no further need of my work.”

  He bowed slightly towards the dead man, again, more definitively, towards the inspector, and glanced at the bystanders. Then, crossing the room in a couple of long strides, he vanished into the corridor, his pedantic and monotonous voice echoing through the anxious silence of the four people huddled around the body.

  The first to break that silence was Prospero O’Lary, in a voice so hoarse it sounded like the creaking and groaning of ice as it cracks.

  “I would ask you please, Inspector, not to act on your suggestion.”

  Still gazing at the orchid, De Vincenzi roused himself.

  “Which one?”

  “That of having the body removed immediately. The stretcher would have to pass through the showrooms—which are full of ladies… clients—first empty, and then with its grim burden. Not to mention the panic it would cause the dressmakers and the rest of the staff.”

  “You’re forgetting, Prospero: there’s a service stairway,” Signora O’Brian said coldly.