by Jeff Carson
“He is saying you can stay here if you like. The rent is paid for the month, and he can give you the keys,” Lia said.
“Thanks, that would be perfect,” Wolf took the keys from the manager’s outstretched hand. “What is your name?”
“Guiseppe.”
“David. Thank you. Gratzie.”
The manager showed Wolf the different keys for the outside gate and door locks, then left. They all looked at their watches. It was 5:38 p.m. local time.
“Is it too late to go see my brother?” Wolf asked, ignoring his urge to collapse on the mattress in his brother’s room.
“I have to leave for other commitments,” Rossi looked at his watch.
Lia nodded, “The morgue is open twenty four hours. We can go right now.”
Chapter 15
Wolf sat in silence on the way over to the morgue. Glancing at his watch, he did a quick calculation. He’d been up since midnight Colorado time when the plane landed at 8 a.m. local time, with a few hours sleep before that on the plane. So what did that mean? It just meant he was tired as hell.
“I’m sorry I was so angry earlier,” Lia said, looking at Wolf. Her tanned olive skin coupled with her luminous eyes in the evening sunlight was startling to him, and he wasn’t easy to startle. He unconsciously rubbed his face, noting the long stubble—way past a five o’clock shadow.
“No problem. I would have been pissed too,” he said.
She shot him a suspicious look.
“I couldn’t tell if your boss was just a terrible English speaker, or a terrible bigot. I take it he’s a terrible bigot. ‘We have important work to do and cannot spare officers, so I will give you Lia for two days,’ I believe he said. Yeah, that would piss me off too.”
Lia gave him an unreadable look and resumed driving.
“I know that what your boss thinks is important to you, and you think that he thinks he’s put you on an unimportant case. Maybe that pisses you off; I’d be pretty angry, too. But, the thing is, my brother didn’t kill himself. I’m one hundred percent sure of that. So that leaves only one explanation. He was murdered.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Wolf could see Lia glancing at him from his peripheral. She was keeping silent, and seemed unsure of what to say.
“I was really sweating being paired up with Tito there for a minute,” he said breaking the silence. “So, thanks again.”
“Yeah, like I said, Tito’s a dumbass.” She laughed and smiled. “You would’ve been pretty screwed with him.”
She was beautiful.
…
The morgue was another building that looked straight out of the Mussolini era – square, gray concrete, and non-descript. It was in sharp contrast with the rest of the city, which was full of statues, elegant curved lines, and natural stone. Lia pushed a button on a state of the art looking electronic keypad next to the heavy steel door.
“Si?” said a tinny male voice.
“Noi siamo.”
Buzz. Click.
“Ciao,” a voice said from a doorway down the hall. A bald man peeked his head out of a doorway, looking over pushed down glasses, and waved at them to come.
They walked down the hall to where he was. The room was cold, and smelled of formaldehyde, just like any other morgue room Wolf had been in. Two rows of four refrigeration units lined the far wall. The lower right-most one was pulled out displaying a sheeted lump of a figure. His brother.
His heart skipped and his breath caught as he looked down, then he turned to shake the hand of the pathologist.
“Ciao. I am Vittorio.” The pathologist blinked rapidly behind thick glasses while stretching his neck muscles as if his collar was itchy. He had a shiny baldhead and was slightly shorter than Lia.
Vittorio and Lia had a brief exchange in Italian. Vittorio spoke quietly and rapidly with intelligent eyes. Vittorio then left the room quickly, and Wolf turned to the pulled out refrigeration unit.
Suddenly, he was anxious to get everything over with, but he knew he should probably wait for the pathologist to return before looking at his brother. Besides, Wolf realized, he wasn’t in that much of a hurry to look at his brother’s face, a face he hadn’t seen in real life for over five months, other than in tiny pictures on a blog.
Lia stood beside Wolf, put a hand on his shoulder, and gave a gentle squeeze.
“Sorry.” Vittorio moved swiftly into the room. “I have the records all here now,” his accent was vaguely British. “Are you ready, Officer Wolf?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” He wasn’t.
The sheet was pulled back in a well-executed, not too slow-not too fast technique, revealing his brother beneath.
John’s skin was a bluish white, and he wore a peaceful sleeping expression on his face. His hair had been closely cropped, and a large straight-line bruise was on the right side of his head, angling from the top of the forehead to ear. There was a deep black bruise lining the circumference of his neck, indicating where the belt had been wrapped around his throat.
“Why was no autopsy ordered?” Wolf asked, keeping his eyes fixed on his brother’s lifeless face.
“We determined the external evidence on the body to be consistent with suicide,” Vittorio said quietly. “And we normally do not perform an autopsy for a suicide, unless ordered by the coroner in collaboration with officers on the scene.”
“How do you explain the bruise on his head?” Wolf asked.
“We determined the bruise was ante mortem … how you say?”
“Sure, ante mortem.”
“Bruising from the chandelier falling on his head.” Vittorio said.
“Okay.” Wolf shook his head. “So how did he die? Are you saying he died from the hanging, then the chandelier fell on his head, causing a bruise?” Wolf looked skeptical. “Once the heart has stopped beating, isn’t it impossible to bruise?”
“It is actually entirely possible to bruise shortly after death. If he died while hanging, then shortly thereafter the chandelier gave way and fell on him; it could have bruised his head. There was also pooling of blood on the left side of his body, as you can see by the bruising all down the left side, consistent with the position he was found underneath the chandelier.”
“What was the evidence of drug use?”
Vittorio produced some photos from the file he had. “Since we didn’t do an autopsy, we did not do a complete toxicology report. But I did an exterior exam, and found residue on his nose that was confirmed to be cocaine. I have some photos of your brother’s body at the scene.”
Wolf took the photos and looked. There were closeups of John from every angle. He was covered in small glittering slivers of glass, apparently from the chandelier.
“You can see there, a bar on the chandelier lines up with the bruise on his head.” Vittorio dug for another photo and pointed at the wooden chair that was tipped over, five feet from John’s dead form. “I am not completely sure, but I feel the chair was kicked out from under him with a spasm, which could have began the process-a of the chandelier falling.” He flipped to another photo. “And here is a closeup of his right nostril, with cocaine residue.”
Wolf smiled humorlessly. “You don’t think this is grounds for ordering an autopsy? At best, we have a manufactured manner of death, as if you made up the story first and then pieced together evidence to support it. What if the bruise was caused by someone else?”
The pathologist looked at Wolf with a look that said it all. “It is not my decision, but in my opinion, I think it could have gone either way, the decision for an autopsy, that is. But we have other pressures here, Officer Wolf. Your brother was not a resident here, and the Comune pays for the autopsy—”
“The Comune?” Wolf asked.
“Yes, the municipality, I think you say?”
“Okay, I get it. You guys looked at the whole scene with worry about money?” Wolf shook his head in disbelief, but also knew the same thing could happen in Rocky Points if a foreigner died from an a
pparent suicide. Still …
Vittorio offered a solemn expression in response.
Wolf took a deep breath and silently studied the pictures. John was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved button-up shirt. The jeans had small stains on each leg. Like oval mud stains.
“Do you have the clothing he was wearing?” Wolf asked.
“Yes, I do, I will go get his belongings.”
Vittorio gently placed the sheet back over John’s face, again with a well-executed touch, and left the room. Wolf stood up and paced in thought.
Lia stood in silence.
Vittorio returned with a sealed large plastic bag and put it on a steel table against the wall, motioning to Wolf to go ahead and look. He took the bag and began laying the contents out on the table. Vittorio and Lia had a quiet conversation in Italian, walking to the other side of the room.
Wolf dug in the bag for John’s jeans first. Pulling them out, he looked at the knees. There were two large, faint circles, as if he’d been kneeling in wet, muddy grass. Next he pulled out a pair of black Puma low top canvass shoes. The bottom sole pattern held a bit of mud, and the canvass was streaked light gray with the same.
Two belts were in the bag—one would have been used for the hanging and John would have been wearing the other one, Wolf guessed. He took another look at a picture to see that the black belt was the one John was wearing, and the light brown leather belt was the one around his neck. Wolf took the light brown belt over to John’s body, and motioned for Vittorio to pull back the sheet again. Wolf ignored Vittorio’s show of being insulted. The belt was the same width as the marks on John’s neck. Wolf felt a faint shudder as he realized he was holding a murder weapon.
He returned to the table and rifled through his brother’s pants pockets. Nothing, but he took his brother’s wallet out and looked through it, pulling out the driver’s license and finding a dated receipt from a pub tucked in the main pocket, which puzzled him for a second, until he realized the different way Europeans wrote dates—day, month, year. It was from Friday night. The last night his brother was alive.
His iPhone was in the bag as well, but the battery was dead.
Wolf stood straight and felt light headed. With a crash, he stumbled into the table and bent over, breathing deeply a few times to stop from passing out.
Lia and Vittorio rushed over and patted his back. “Should we go? You need to rest after such a long day,” Lia had on a look of concern.
“Sure. Can I take these belongings with me?” Wolf asked.
“They must be released with your brother’s body as soon as the paperwork is finished.” Vittorio scooped his brother’s cell phone off the table and placed it in the clear bag.
After a few more minutes, Wolf and Lia thanked the pathologist and they left.
“They don’t do many autopsies here in Italy?” Wolf stared out the car window at the tall mountains surrounding the city, now black against the glowing orange sky.
“If determined it is needed, then they will order the autopsy.”
“Do you think there should have been an autopsy?”
She shifted uncomfortably, then shifted the car, “I don’t know, it looks pretty cut and dry. Italians don’t do well with complications. If the shoe fits, they put it,” she said. They poot eet.
“Wear it.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
They sat in silence for a few moments as she drove.
“Look, I guess I’ll go sleep. I am dying here.” Wolf pressed his hand against his eyes. “Are you still with me tomorrow?”
“Yes, I will help you until the end of the week.”
He looked at his watch. It was 6:54 p.m., Wednesday night. That gave him two days. No pressure.
Chapter 16
Wolf dug into his backpack, filled his lip with a pinch of snuff, fetched a spittoon from his brother’s kitchen, and plopped down on the couch with a grunt. He pulled off his shoes. His entire body ached from a long, long day.
Then he thought of the laptop, and how he should probably contact his mom. He went into John’s room and found the charger, thankfully already hooked to an electrical adaptor for Italian plugs, something that never crossed his mind until that moment.
He was presented a login screen. He sighed. Bernie? Their first dog. Nothing.
That was the extent of his hacking skills, especially in his current state of mind. He left the computer to recharge and returned to the main room feeling newly dejected.
He burrowed deep into the couch, settling his gaze on the hole in the ceiling, then to the second chandelier that was still hanging in the room. He put down the spittoon and pulled a chair underneath it. Reaching high up the center of the brass chandelier trunk, he grabbed it and pulled down with his right arm. Then harder when nothing happened. Then harder still.
Finally he straightened his arm and sagged down, putting the entirety of his weight on it. With a crack, it jolted free from the ceiling, sending him in a sudden free fall. The chair sputtered sideways from underneath his feet, and he landed hard on his side, instinctually pointing his shins and forearms up to block him from a plummeting light fixture of yet undetermined weight. When nothing hit him, he rolled on the ground to get out from under it. Only then he finally stole a look upward.
The light fixture swayed violently side to side, hanging by two wires. A fleck of white plaster fluttered to the ground.
Just then he heard a soft knock on the door. He took stock of his injuries as he struggled to his feet. He’d have some bruises in the morning, but otherwise there was no damage.
He opened the front door, which revealed the second strikingly beautiful young woman of the day. She stood outside with wide, timid chocolate eyes, and a puzzled expression. She had brownish blonde hair, chiseled facial features, and a slender athletic body. Her scent was flowery, all femininity, and she was dressed in a skimpy white tee shirt, flannel pants and slippers. She asked something unintelligible, and Wolf gave a blank stare in response.
“Who are you?” she tried in English.
“I’m David Wolf. Who are you?”
“I’m Cristina, I live upstairs.”
“Oh, I came to your apartment today … you weren’t there. I’m John’s brother. I was hoping to talk to you.”
“Are you okay? I just heard a loud noise.” She was excited, looking behind Wolf at the still rocking chandelier.
She didn’t speak English in an Italian accent. She spoke well, but not like Lia. His instincts told him eastern European.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Wolf said. “Listen, will you come in? I’d really like to speak to you.”
She backed up a few feet with a look of horror.
“Uhh, sorry. Here, I’ll show you my passport.” He hurried to his backpack leaning up against the wall, pulled out his passport, and brought it back to her.
“No, I can see that you’re John’s brother. You look just like him. I just don’t want to come in there. You can come up and talk if you want.” She turned and padded up the stairs.
“Okay, I’ll be right up.”
…
Her apartment was in stark contrast with John’s. While he went with the interior design of minimalist, six-month-stay, one stop at Ikea, whatever you can pack in a suitcase look, she was all about decoration and permanence. Every square inch on the wall was meticulously decorated in a way that took a lot of thought and creativity—pictures of her, her and her family and landscapes from exotic forests in countries he’d never seen; flowers on shelves; hanging dried flowers; rows of bookshelves, and a myriad of other collectibles. It reminded him of the pub in Rocky Points, though nothing could match the pub’s gaudy interior-of-a-ski-bar décor.
Ambient jazz was playing softly in the background, and he recognized it as Pat Metheny. A few candles were lit, filling the apartment with a flowery aroma.
She offered him a seat on a comfortable recliner chair, and bent down to close what looked to be a journal she was wri
ting in.
He sat, noticing the patterned blanket draped on the back of it was reminiscent of Navajo designs he’d seen countless times in his grandmother’s house, but with more vibrant colors and flowers lining the edges.
She saw him looking at it. “It’s a traditional weaving from my home. I am from Romania.”
“Oh, okay.” He struggled to picture where exactly that was.
“It’s directly east of here. You travel to Venice and keep going east, through Slovenia, Hungary, and into Romania,” she said, apparently reading his mind.
“Ah, I see.” A deep silence fell between them. “Were you dating my brother?”
She stared at her hands folded in her lap and began to shake. The beginning throes of a good cry, he recognized from recent experience.
“Y-y-y-yes. We have b-b-een seeing each other for a few months.” Her hair drooped across her eyes. “Had been seeing …” she corrected herself. She lifted her chin and her face brightened with a smile. “We met on our balconies. He was sitting there on the computer, and I accidentally threw a cigarette on him because of the wind.” She burst into laughter.
Wolf couldn’t help but laugh with her.
“I heard him shuffling and grunting, and he poked his head out to yell at me. Then he forced me to go out with him as payment for ruining one of his shirts. It was a piece of crap t-shirt.” She smiled and laughed, then broke into another fit of crying.
He looked away and steeled his gaze on nothing in particular. They sat in heavy silence for a few seconds as the music changed tracks.
“I have a few questions,” he said finally. “Firstly, do you think he killed himself?”
“You don’t think he did?” She looked at him with wet, wide eyes.
“No, I don’t. I just don’t think he was that type of person, and … there’s just something going on.”
“I have been thinking all along there is no way that he would do that. But then I kept thinking maybe I didn’t know him that well anyway, so then I wasn’t sure. I’ve been so confused.” She looked back at her hands.
