Death of an Obnoxious Tourist

by Maria Hudgins

  “You’re sure it was intentional?”

  “Certainly. Meg was like that. She liked to hurt. So when I picked up those flowers today and read that card, well.”

  I shivered. “How cruel.”

  “If you know anything about the language of flowers—it’s sort of a Victorian thing—white narcissus is the symbol for vanity.”

  “Oh, of course. Like Narcissus in the Greek myth.”

  “I hate to think about it now, but if Meg hadn’t been lying there dead, I would have given her a piece of my mind. I guess I have to live with that.”

  “Live with what? You didn’t say anything.”

  Beth turned her face away from me. She retreated to the opposite side of the roof, and I followed her. From here, the train station dominated the view. On this side of the station was the beautiful church of Santa Maria Novella, and in front of the church, a broad piazza and a fountain. Lit now from underneath, it seemed much closer than it had earlier today when I had passed it on my way downtown. Was that the fountain Crystal found the knife in? I almost asked that out loud but caught myself.

  “Beth, when you reached your room, was the door locked or unlocked?”

  “That’s the first thing that policeman asked me. It was open. That was odd, but, of course, I didn’t think about it then, because I didn’t have time to. As soon as I pushed the door and walked in, I saw Meg. I think I screamed. I know I dropped the flowers.”

  “Then you called the desk.”

  I looked down at the fountain again. Would it have been possible for someone to throw the knife from the hotel to the fountain? I couldn’t tell. Which part of the hotel would it have come from? From what window? I could feel an experiment coming on.

  “There you are.” Lettie sneaked up on us from the right.

  “Where did you come from?” I was confused. The square brick box that housed the elevator shaft was just behind us. If Lettie had ridden up in the elevator, she should have come from there.

  “Stairway. How did you get here?”

  “Elevator,” Beth said. “We didn’t know about the stairs.”

  “They’re finished with me for now,” Lettie said. “Captain Quattrocchi says if we need to talk to him after tonight, he’ll be in his casar . . . I forget what he called it. He’ll be in his office downtown somewhere.” She turned, caught her first sight of the uomo at night, and paused for a suitable length of time, in awe. “Beth, where are you staying tonight? Surely, they won’t make you stay in your room.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. Meg and Beth’s room was now a crime scene. Of course, Beth couldn’t stay there, but all her things would still be in the room.

  “They’ve moved me to another room. This one’s on the second floor. They said they’d transfer my things. I can’t possibly go back in that room.”

  “Of course not. And what about Amy?”

  “She was in the room next door to Meg and me. They didn’t have a triple room for us, like they did in Venice. Amy said that was just as well, because she was kind of . . . miffed.” Beth caught herself, as if she didn’t think she should have mentioned that. “Anyway, Tessa said she’d like to spend a night or two in Amy’s room while we’re here, to talk over old times, you know. Tessa has an apartment here in Florence. An apartment with a roommate, I believe. But she said she might get Pellegrino Tours to split the cost of the room with Amy if she could think up some logical reason for them to do so. Then Amy wouldn’t have to pay extra for the single supplement.”

  I leaned over the rail and peered down the side of the building. Unless I was all turned around, this was the side Meg and Beth’s room—and Amy’s room—would be on. It wasn’t far from the fountain. Lettie and Beth headed for the stairs, but tugged on the door and discovered it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  “I guess that’s a safety feature,” I said.

  “Protect the hotel from invaders from outer space?” Lettie raised an eyebrow.

  When we got back to our room, Beth took Lettie aside and asked, softly, but I could still hear, “Do you think I could borrow a little money? For a day or so? I can probably get the travelers’ check refund tomorrow, but I need to buy a couple of personal things in the morning, and Amy’s out on a date.”

  “Oh, Beth, sweetie! Of course.” Lettie snatched her wallet open. “Fifty? A hundred? Take a hundred.”

  “Oh, no. Fifty is plenty.”

  “They’re Euros.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Amy’s out on a date?” It just hit me.

  “I thought that was odd, too,” Beth said. She gave Lettie a little hug and tucked the money in her pocket. “Some guy she just met the other night in Venice. Tessa fixed them up.”

  Lettie closed the door after Beth left. “So much for Amy’s period of mourning.”

  “Out on a date!” I said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Lettie pulled a nightshirt out of her suitcase. “They’ve arrested that man,” she said. “fonGypsy man. His name is Ivo. Achille spotted him in the parking lot and thought he looked suspicious. He told the police, and several of them, including Achille, went looking for him. They found him somewhere, a few blocks from here, I think, and he still had Beth’s room card on him. Had a suspicious lot of money, too.”

  “Dollars or Euros?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Lettie dragged those three words out to the same tune Crystal had used for the word “Mom.”

  Lettie opened the balcony doors to a freshening breeze and stepped out. Taking this as implicit permission to shower first, I stood under the pelting water until my fingers wrinkled. It had been a hot, exhausting day, and my back felt all knotted up. I soaked a “Magic Towel” in water and watched it expand into a respectable terry face cloth. Fortunately, a friend of mine at home had given me several of these to toss in my luggage, because so few European hotels provide them. I wondered how Europeans washed their faces. Did they use their bare hands?

  I let the water knead my shoulders while I considered the Gypsy man, Ivo. He didn’t make sense. Why kill Meg? Why not dash out? Pretend to be a bellhop, or say, “I must have the wrong room”? He was not a particularly young man, although the rough life of a Gypsy might have added years to his face, so he would not be new to theft and burglary. Maybe Meg saw him and went ballistic, and he panicked. I could hear her screeching like a banshee if she came out of the bathroom in her underwear and saw him standing there. He might panic. And if the knife was there, say, on the dresser beside the door . . .

  I couldn’t convince myself it could have been like that. They must have the wrong man. Strange coincidences, of course—that he happened to have the room card, that Achille happened to notice him, that the police caught up with him—but coincidences happen every day.

  So, if Ivo didn’t kill Meg, who did? The most obvious second choice would be Beth. She called the front desk, it was her knife, and she was already mad at Meg. But that pot of flowers, no matter how insulting, would hardly be a motive for murder. Beth had had years of practice putting up with Meg. Sometimes, though, a person takes it and takes it for years, and then something happens. They snap. Or do they, really? I know children and teenagers do. They “go postal,” as the kids say. But adults have better-developed pressure gauges, don’t they? I tend to be skeptical of those defendants who claim they don’t know what happened—a gun just came into their hand and went off. I don’t believe people black out and weapons take that opportunity to animate themselves.

  At any rate, I decided I would not voice any of these thoughts to Lettie. Not yet. I needed to look again at the list I had made before dinner. I had the seeds of a couple of ideas—things I wanted to look into. The historian in me loves to uncover things, and the mother in me hates to be lied to, or maybe it’s the “ex-wife of Chet Lamb” in me that refuses to be lied to again.

  I pushed my face into the pillow and tried to relax. The big problem was the fact that this was a fourte
en day trip; that’s all we had paid for, and it’s all the time most of us had taken off from work. We had already used up four days. In ten days we would leave Italy with the murderer still in our midst and an innocent Ivo facing a trial that might well be stacked against him.

  Alternatively, the carabinieri might come to their senses and realize they had the wrong person. Then what? Once we left the country, the investigation would grind to a halt. It would be nearly impossible to follow thin threads of evidence across the ocean, and it would undoubtedly raise huge problems about jurisdiction, extradition—it made my head hurt to think about it.

  So, they might rush to judgment and grab the second most obvious suspect, Beth. Lettie had already told me, in no uncertain terms, that Beth could not possibly have killed her sister—that was unthinkable. But I, having only met Beth three days ago, could not be so sure. If Beth was guilty, she deserved whatever she got because even though she had had ample reason to loathe Meg, she was an adult, and she knew she had other options. She hadn’t had to live under Meg’s thumb. But if she was innocent, would we, ten days hence, leave her at the mercy of the Italian authorities? I’d heard stories about foreign jails. Neither Lettie nor I could possibly let that happen, and yet what could we do about it?

  I couldn’t allow an innocent man to go to prison, probably for life, and I couldn’t allow a guilty Beth to go home on the same plane with me. I couldn’t allow an innocent Beth to be thrown to the vagaries of a court system whose language she didn’t even understand, and go home on the plane with the real killer. Lettie loved Beth like a sister, and Lettie was like a sister to me, so I reluctantly accepted the only course left. I wouldn’t leave Italy until I knew who really killed Meg Bauer.

  Chapter Eight

  “Did you hear? Crystal’s missing.”

  Wilma Kelly went out of her way to walk past our breakfast table and bring us the news. The Hotel Fontana had a delightful little terraced area under a vine-draped arbor just outside the main dining room. Dappled sunlight on white linen and fresh flowers on every table. The only problem was that it was separated from the busy street by a thin hedge so the street noises, banging trash cans, and motorcycles revving up at the corner stoplight, made conversation a little difficult.

  “Missing? What do you mean?” Lettie buttered her second croissant and licked her fingers.

  “Shirley said Crystal went out last night, supposedly for a few minutes, and didn’t come back. She’s absolutely beside herself. She was at the police station most of the night.”

  “Why did Crystal go out by herself? She did that a couple of times yesterday, too,” I said.

  “Well.” Wilma leaned over our table. “Crystal has been popping out every so often for a cigarette. Shirley is horrified that her daughter is smoking, so they’ve had several bouts over that the last few days. At home, Crystal can probably go out with her friends and smoke without her mother knowing about it. If she smells smoke on her, Crystal can always just say, ‘I was in a smoky room,’ but here, she goes out by herself and comes back fifteen minutes later smelling like smoke . . . well. Shirley may be dumb, but she’s not that dumb.”

  “Maybe it’s more like, at home she can pretend not to know, but here it’s too obvious to keep up the pretense,” I said.

  div height="0"> “I suspect that’s it.” Wilma started to leave, but turned back. “Did you hear about the meeting? Tessa wants us all to meet in the conference room beside the front desk at nine. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about Crystal.”

  I thanked her and checked my watch. We had twenty minutes. No sense going back to the room now, so I’d just have another cappuccino . . . and another croissant.

  “I’m so glad I’m finished raising my teenagers, aren’t you?” Lettie’s two, a boy and a girl, were grown now and out on their own.

  “Very, very glad,” I answered with feeling. “Especially the teenaged girl. Give me boys, any day.” My mind flitted quickly past my own daughter, Anne, who at that moment was sailing in the Caribbean under circumstances I refused to ruin my vacation thinking about. My four boys—I was so proud of them. My daughter—well, I still had my fingers crossed.

  Lettie asked, “Speaking of Anne, how is she?”

  Paul Vogel interrupted before I could answer.

  “Morning, ladies, morning! Mind if I join you?” He yanked a chair from a nearby table and seated himself. His ubiquitous camera with the macho lens swung from his neck as he flashed us a yellow-toothed smile.

  “Croissant?” I held out the basket to him.

  “No, thanks. I guess you ladies have a big day planned?”

  Paul Vogel’s sudden joviality seemed as contrived as a hair compliment from a used car salesman. “Just sightseeing,” I said.

  “Yeah, me, too . . . me, too.” He fiddled with his camera. “Lettie—you don’t mind if I call you Lettie, do you? I understand you were in the cat-bird seat yesterday.”

  Lettie looked confused. It surprised me that Paul knew her name; this was the first time he had spoken to either of us directly.

  Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean, cat-bird seat?”

  “Weren’t you sitting at the elevator when all the . . . you know . . . stuff hit the fan?”

  “Oh, right. Yes. Lucille must have told you. She popped in just when . . . well, as a matter of fact, we all, Dotsy and your wife and I . . . we all had to walk up the stairs because they stopped the elevator.”

  “My wife? I’m not married.”

  He said it so simply, I wondered if I had got the last names wrong. Please don’t tell me you and Lucille are having an affair. They might be brother and sister, of course. I found it mind-boggling enough to imagine either of them in the bonds of matrimony. But a passionate affair? Fly off to Europe to melt in each other’s arms? My imagination simply would not leap that far.

  “Oh, no,” Paul continued. “Lucille is my sister.”

  Now that, I could imagine. I remembered Shiry telling me Lucille had pitched a fit in Venice because they wanted twin beds and had been given a double. It all made sense now.

  “How nice that you travel together,” I said.

  “We don’t usually, but she was keen to go on this trip and didn’t want to go alone.”

  “What do you do back home?” I asked.

  “Security.” Paul coughed and tapped his lens cover a couple of times. “Security service. Electronic sweeps. Photography. Location and recovery.”

  “That explains the state-of-the-art camera,” I said.

  I hate it when people tell you what they do in such nebulous terms you still have no idea what they do even after they’ve told you. That happens to me all the time whenever I talk to someone who has a government job or something to do with computers. Paul’s answer sounded to me just like, “You wouldn’t understand if I told you, and if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “This camera is not state-of-the-art anymore, I’m afraid. Nope. I need to go digital, but I’ve been putting it off because it means taking courses to learn what the hell it’s all about and I just haven’t had the time.”

  “I see,” said Lettie. “Is your sister enjoying Italy as much as she thought she would?”

  “Oh, I think so. Of course, we’ve not exactly had just a happy little tour so far, have we? I mean, this whole thing is extraordinary. At the elevator yesterday, did you see Jim Kelly at any time?”

  “No, but I saw Wilma,” Lettie replied.

  What a strange question. It had nothing to do with what we had been talking about. It made me feel uncomfortable, so I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “You and Lucille didn’t do your sightseeing together yesterday, did you? Lucille came into the lobby by herself.”

  “No. I spent my day at the Ponte Vecchio and the Boboli Gardens . . . taking pictures, you know. Lucille went to the Uffizi Gallery.” Paul sipped my water, apparently not noticing that he had done so without asking me first.

  “So Lucille is the art aficionado in the family?�
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  “She’s an artist, all right, but not the visual kind,” he said, tapping his right ear. “The auditory kind.” He leaned forward, one hand on his knee and looked into my eyes in a confidential, almost uncomfortably intimate, way. “Lucille has had a tough time. She was a singer—a classical singer. Voice like an angel. But you know how it is, show business. Tough life.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “She always thought that by the time she reached this point in her life—mid-forties—she’d be an established artist, maybe even famous. But she kind of slipped downhill instead of rising up. She went from concert halls to smaller venues to night clubs to . . . well.” Paul glanced over his shoulder and checked his watch.

  “You said you ddn’t see Jim Kelly yesterday.” He looked straight at Lettie. “Did you see that Brit? What’s-his-name, Reese-Burton?”

  Lettie’s eyelids fluttered. Since she is not quick to pick up on subtleties like a cough or a throat clearing, I resorted to the old kick under the table. With Lettie, though, you run the risk she’ll yell “Ow! Whadja do that for?” Paul was fishing for information. Why, I couldn’t guess, but I felt strongly that it was time for us to clam up. Captain Quattrocchi we would talk to, but Paul Vogel? This was beginning to feel like high-stakes poker, and I knew enough to keep my cards close to my chest. Who was Paul, anyway, and why was he pumping us for details on what Lettie may have seen or not seen yesterday?

  The kick to the shin worked. Lettie grabbed my arm from across the table, looked at my watch, and said, “Oh dear, we’re late for the meeting.”

  We were the last to take our seats in the small conference room. A quick glance around told me that everyone was there except Crystal. And Meg, of course. Beth and Amy sat beside Tessa, Amy holding Beth’s hand. Tessa explained that we were going to play it by ear for the next few days. We were scheduled to stay four nights in Florence, then go to Pisa on the West Coast, but things being like they were, we might stay on here a bit longer. “This hotel has room for us if we need to stay. In fact, you’ll probably be able to stay in your current rooms, if you want to. We can go to Pisa as scheduled, but we might just make it a day trip and return here for the night.