“Okay. What about Paul Vogel?”
Marco put his hand against my cheek and turned my face toward him. The kiss was warm and sweet and traveled to the very heart of the lonesome part of me. I didn’t want to think about what this meant, or if it meant anything. I simply wanted it to last.
“Paul Vogel couldn’t cut a cooked chicken,” Marco whispered, pushing the hair out of my left eye. “Meg Bauer would have had him pinned to the floor in two seconds.”
Chapter Twenty
Like a cyclone, Joe Bauer blew into the lobby, rained chaos down upon the front desk, and thundered into the elevator, taking most of the air with him. Lettie had slipped out of Beth’s room, leaving her asleep, to get a bite of breakfast with me. We were waiting to be seated when the hubbub arose.
“Oh, dear, he’s going straight up to Beth’s room,” Lettie said. “I’d better head him off at the pass. She needs to sleep.”
I grabbed her collar as she tried to run out. “Let him go. You couldn’t stop him anyway.”
Tessa, clean and nicely dressed, popped in. Her sunglasses, normally on top of her head, were across her eyes today, but other than that, she looked the same as usual. “Meeting in the conference room at nine thirty,” she said and popped out again.
———
Except for the Bauers, we were all there by 9:30, and the meeting only lasted a few minutes.
“I know that some of you want to get on with our tour and some of you don’t,” Tessa said. “I have to stay here today, as I’m sure you’ll understand, but that doesn’t mean the rest of you can’t go to Pisa as originally planned. Achille will meet you in the parking lot at ten thirty, or as Geoffrey would say, ‘half-ten.’ The drive takes about an hour and a halfYou can have lunch there, and you should be back here by six o’clock. If you’re not in the parking lot by ten thirty, Achille will assume you don’t want to go and leave without you.”
“I’m staying here,” I told Lettie on the way out. “What about you?”
“Me, too. I want to be handy in case Beth needs me. Do you mind if I don’t go with you wherever you go today?”
“Of course not,” I said.
Marco Quattrocchi and Joe Bauer stepped off the elevator, steam pouring out of all four of their ears. They sidled off to the little seating area, the same one where Lettie and I had sat last Friday while Meg was being murdered.
“I have to talk to her today. Whether we do it here or at my office, I do not care,” Marco said, gesturing firmness with his hands. His voice was cold and measured.
“After what she’s been through? You’ve got to be kidding!” Joe, a big, barrel-chested man squeaked on that last word. He looked as if he was about to lose control, if he hadn’t already.
“I have a murder to solve.”
“It’s out of the question.”
“Your sister has been murdered. You should both be trying to help me!”
“Beth is in a state of shock. You saw her. She’s a zombie! You will have to wait.”
The way Joe said it, I thought Marco would be smart to back off. Lettie and I sneaked over to the plate glass window in front of the gift shop and pretended to study the shawls on display. We could still hear the two men.
“I can have her picked up and taken to my office in a squad car for questioning.”
“You do, and I’ll sue.”
“You are an alien, remember?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is,” Marco hissed through clamped teeth, “by the time you figure out how to sue the carabinieri—in Italy—you will have to apply for a visa, or maybe even citizenship. I have to find out who killed your sister, and I have to do it while these people are still in Italy.”
“You’ve had three days to talk to Beth. Meg was killed on Friday!”
“And I did talk to her, several times. But I need to talk to her some more.”
It was time for Lettie and me to go upstairs. Soon Marco and Joe were bound to notice us hanging around, and we couldn’t pretend to be interested in shawls forever. I hadn’t told Lettie about the kiss, and I don’t exactly know why I hadn’t. I suspect it was because I enjoyed keeping it to myself. Or maybe it was because I wanted to be free to distance myself from Marco if Lettie and the Bauers declared war on the carabinieri.
As soon as the elevator doors sed, Lettie said, “I’m going up to Beth’s room now. In case the captain and brother Joe move their battle upstairs, I want to be there to protect Beth. She can’t take any more conflict; she’d go right round the bend. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m going to visit Paul Vogel.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later. We’ll have a lot to talk about tonight.”
I rode up to the second floor with Lettie and held the door open for Victoria Reese-Burton and Crystal Hostetter who were rushing down the hall together. Victoria raised one finger—the universal hold-the-door signal—as Crystal, a few steps behind her, lifted a couple of complimentary shampoo bottles off the maid’s cart.
“We’re going to Pisa today, Crystal and I. Shirley wants to take it easy and stay here,” Victoria said.
“I don’t blame her. Her feet are still healing, I’m sure. How are her feet, Crystal?”
If Crystal had any guilt over her mother’s lacerated feet, she didn’t show it. “They’re okay, I think. She says she’s going to return the crutches to the doctor’s office today.”
“What about San Gimignano? I thought you wanted to go to the . . .” I let my voice trail off. I realized, when I was halfway through that sentence, that Victoria might have decided not to mention the medieval torture museum. She might have decided it was not appropriate.
“Oh, the torture museum,” Victoria said, and the gleam in Crystal’s eyes told me that she had already mentioned it. “Tessa says we’ll probably have another day trip to Siena tomorrow. San Gimignano is between here and Siena, so we might have the bus drop us off on the way.”
“Don’t forget, Pisa is the home of Pinocchio. I understand you can get some wonderful puppets there.” I deliberately said that so I could watch Crystal’s eyes roll, and she didn’t disappoint me.
Paul and Lucille’s room was on the first floor, only a few doors down from mine. Paul answered my knock and looked a little uncomfortable as I invited myself in. Lucille was in the bathroom with the door open, so neither of us could actually say, “Where can we talk in private?”
But Lucille was dressed, her ample waist already girded by a denim travel pack, which I took to mean that she was on her way out.
“Your songs at the memorial service yesterday were wonderful, Lucille. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she muttered, hitching up her waist pack.
“I don’t think there was a dry eye in the chapel when you sat down. I know my own weren’t.”
“‘Amazing Grace’ always gets ‘em,” Lucille tossed over her shoulder as she walked out and slammed the door.
Paul jammed his hands into his shorts pockets, then sheepishly studied his feet. “My sister is not as rd as she pretends to be.”
“Have you heard anything from your contacts back home?”
“Not yet. Maybe today. I’m still not sure what you’re looking for,” he said.
“I’m looking for a connection between Meg Bauer and somebody on this trip. Something other than the obvious sister or fellow nurse or whatever. I know Meg had problems and conflicts as a nurse. She caused Shirley Hostetter to quit her job. She had views that ran counter to those of Wilma Kelly, a political activist. Meg had a reputation for sloppiness. Tessa has a younger brother who suffered some sort of problem at birth that resulted in a severe handicap, and Amy had an early marriage that ended quickly. I have it on good authority that Tessa’s fiancé, Cesare, is likely in the Mafia, and one can’t really ignore their well-known dealings in drugs, or the fact that nurses have been known to pilfer drugs.”
“You’re seeing mo
tives everywhere you look, aren’t you?” Paul couldn’t hide his grin.
I think I must have blushed. “Well, they do seem to be popping up all over the place.”
“Have you found a motive for me, yet? I feel left out.”
I didn’t dare approach the subject of his sister, Lucille, and the possible nurse/drug addict connection. We didn’t need to go into that. But I felt like countering his sarcasm with a little impertinence of my own. “I don’t really have a motive for you yet, Paul, but it has occurred to me that if your sources back home uncover one, you certainly won’t pass it along to me.”
“I don’t believe you! You are the most . . . the most . . .” He spluttered and spun on his heel.
“Oh, but I don’t suspect everybody. I’ve eliminated Jim Kelly. Captain Quattrocchi told me that Jim was certifiably on the phone to the U.S. Agriculture Department throughout the time of Meg’s murder. They have tapes and everything.”
That got Paul’s attention. He didn’t admit it, but his face told me it was news to him.
“I’ve been thinking about what I said, that the murderer had to be a man,” he muttered. “That was probably a bit sexist. Actually, if a woman—”
“Wait! If you’re about to say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, may I suggest that that would be even more sexist?”
“I doubt Meg was killed because someone got scorned. I can’t imagine a woman being jealous of her.”
“Paul, do you think Amy fell by accident yesterday?”
“No.”
“Me, either.”
“A lot of people have a fear of heights, you know. Acrophobia. Very common. People walk up to the edge of a cliff or an overlook or something, like that place yesterday, and they don’t want to get too close to the edge because they’re afraid they’ll fall. Some people are afraid they’ll suddenly be overcome by an irresistible urge to jump. But nobody ever does actually fall. Can you name me one example where somebody accidentally fell off a cliff or the edge of an overlook? I’m not talking about mountain-climbers, guys hanging onto the side of a cliff with ropes, of course they fall sometimes. I’m talking about somebody just enjoying the view, and whoops!” Paul’s left hand described a trajectory that smacked it into his right.
“That’s sort of what I thought. Michael Melon thinks Amy lost her balance because her shoes were too high-heeled.”
“I probably don’t know as much about high heels as he does, but I do know that women learn how to navigate on those things, somehow. Haven’t you learned how to compensate?” He stuck his hands out to the side as if he were walking a tightrope. “I saw Amy take off, running across that plaza. Obviously, she had a lot of practice in high heels.”
“Quite right,” I said. “Paul, you took pictures up there yesterday. Could you get them developed? Like today?”
“No way. I have to use the developers I work with back home.” He pulled a desk drawer open. A dozen labeled film cans already littered the bottom. He looked at them wistfully, as if they all held shocking secrets just screaming to be brought to light. “I really need to go digital.”
“Who does have a digital camera?”
“Walter.” Paul looked at me. We were both thinking the same thing. “If we could hook it up to a computer . . . They have computers for rent downstairs, don’t they?”
I raced up the stairs alone. Paul refused to go with me to the rooms he had explored surreptitiously, because, I expect, he feared saying something that would expose him for the spy he was. If the curious quartet was going to Pisa, they would be leaving soon or they might have already left.
Should I knock on room 366 or 368? It gave me a headache to think about it.
Walter was supposedly staying in 366, but, according to Paul, he was actually in 368. But I wasn’t supposed to know that. Therefore, if I was here to see Walter, I should try 366 and, whoever answered, it would be all right. Elaine opened the door and told me Walter was visiting Michael, next door. A towel draped her shoulders. She brushed her thick hair and slipped a scrunchy around her unruly mass of curls. “But they may have already gone down to the bus,” she added.
Walter surprised me. He showed more enthusiasm for putting his pictures into a computer than for making it to Pisa. He suggested we go downstairs immediately to see about getting a computer. As we dashed to the elevator, he checked his watch. “Ten minutes before the bus leaves,” he said. “Think we can do this in ten minutes?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
I paid the rental fee on the laptop computer while Walter took it to the little seating area in front of the elevator. He attached his camera to the computer with a cord he’d brought with him and, after a minute, said, “Damn.” He ran back to the rental desk and engaged the young clerk in a frantic conversation that I didn’t understand. I gathered the computer we had lacked the software program Walter needed for seeing the pictures. Walter and the clerk booted up several mre computers and looked at what was on their hard drives. The fourth one they checked generated a smile from the clerk and a nod from Walter. Three minutes until bus time.
After what seemed like years, Walter pulled up a picture from yesterday’s trip to the piazza. He scrolled past several shots of Michael sprawled out under the bronze David. “I really need to get out of here,” he said, checking his watch.
“Oh, please,” I begged. “Just a couple more.”
The next shot showed Amy, Tessa, and two other people standing at a balustrade. “Yes, yes!” I shouted. “That’s it. Can we make a copy?”
“I’m saving it on the computer. You figure out how to print a copy. I’ve got to go. I can help you some more tonight.”
“For now, would you save that one? And the next two?” I figured I couldn’t push it more than that.
“Do you want the time and date on the pictures?”
“Oh, yes.” That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.
Walter swept the cursor around the screen and clicked on a few things. Then he grabbed his camera, yanked out his wires, and headed for the side door.
“Printer?” I asked the young clerk, who already looked like he had dealt with as many problems as he could handle for one day. “Color printer? I want to make a copy of some pictures.”
Even with his help, I printed pictures of some people I’d never seen before—pictures apparently left on the computer by someone else. Then I printed the right pictures, but smaller than a postage stamp, then the upper left quadrant of pictures blown up much too big. Finally, twelve Euros and a sinful amount of wasted paper later, I returned the laptop and walked out with three photos, taken consecutively at the piazza yesterday.
Chapter Twenty-One
I flagged down a cab in front of the hotel. The trip to the piazzale Michelangelo was bound to cost a lot, and I hoped I had enough cash. As the driver wound up the hillside through umbrella pines, I tried to figure out where, exactly, the blue Fiat had been yesterday when we saw it from the overlook. There was more than one road it could have been on.
I spread the three pictures on my lap, in chronological order. The time printed on the first picture was 17:40, or 5:40 p.m. In it were four people: Beth, Achille, Amy and Tessa. Beth sat on the stone border of a flowerbed, and Achille, standing beside her, looked out into the distance. Amy and Tessa stood side by side at the balustrade, their backs to the camera.
In the second picture, stamped 17:41, Lettie and I stood at an iron railing with the top of the Duomo visible in the distance. Jim Kelly’s head, out of focus, was in the bottom right side of the photo—as if he had just slipped into the frame and Walter had got him by accident. The third picture, taken four minutes later, at 17:45, showed Achille and Tessa at the stone balustrade, apparently the same one as in the first shot, but Beth and Amy were not there./font>
I had just enough cash to pay the driver, so before I did anything else, I needed to find an ATM machine or some place I could acquire enough cash to get me back to town. At the back of the piazza there w
as a lovely building which, on closer inspection, proved to be a restaurant—not open yet. Inside, a man was setting tables, so I figured I could cash a traveler’s check there later, if I ordered something.
Walking to the northern edge of the upper level, I set about figuring out where Walter had stood to take each picture. How different it looked this morning. The sun was high in the southeastern sky and the pavement was already hot. To the north, cool, blue mountains beyond the city contrasted sharply with the hot stuccos and orange tiles below. A few little cumulus clouds bounced along the mountaintops, daring the sun to vaporize them. Walter’s pictures from yesterday evening were filled with long shadows and the rosy cast of the setting sun. It looked like a different place.
I held the pictures out in front of me and one of them was instantly whisked out of my hand by the wind. It tumbled across the flagstones, a few feet ahead of my grasping hands. A teenage boy, smoking with some friends near the statue, rushed out and trapped it for me. “Grazie,” I said.
Back to the overlook. I found the spot from which Walter had taken the first shot. He had been aiming down onto the eastern overlook, which was largely shadowed by the staircase and by the tops of nearby trees. Amy and Tessa had their backs to the camera and nothing in their posture gave any hint of what, if anything, they were doing other than enjoying the view. Beth, seated at the edge of a begonia bed, looked down at her feet, while Achille, lightly touching her shoulder, looked off into the distance.
For the second picture, Walter had moved left, to the western side of the piazza, but I couldn’t get the photo to align properly with what I saw before me. After trying several spots, I realized that he had stood, not at the upper balustrade, but on the left wing of the stairs. I found the exact place about halfway down. In the photo, Lettie pointed toward something in the town near the Duomo, and I was holding my breeze-blown hair out of my face. Our long shadows stretched across the brick pavement. Jim Kelly had, obviously, just walked down the stairs.
Death of an Obnoxious Tourist Page 17
