[Mark Twain Mysteries 05] - The Mysterious Strangler

by Peter J. Heck

  “Strangled,” I said in a half whisper, and Maggio nodded. The murderer had come to our own neighborhood, obviously with the purpose of silencing Battista.

  “Well, let’s get a light, and go see what we can do.” said Mr. Clemens, and he pointed toward the door.

  “Si,” said Maggio, and they strode together toward the front door of the villa. Almost as if I were sleepwalking. I followed them out into the chilly evening air.

  25

  Luigi Battista's body lay in a pool of shadows just off the footpath, within a hundred yards of the front door of Villa Viviani. Standing over the body holding a lantern, I saw no sign of blood nor wounds, but it was clear that Battista's death had not been peaceful. The bulging eyes and protruding tongue were ample proof of that. Maggio knelt beside the body, and began to go through the dead man's pockets.

  “Should you disturb the body before it’s been looked at by the police?” I asked, remembering the care with which Scotland Yard's detectives had examined the room where a man had been murdered, a few months ago during our stay in England.

  Maggio paused in his search and looked up. “I am the police.” he reminded me. “This man has been dead only a short while. I want to find any clues quickly. Maybe then we catch the one who killed him before he kills again.”

  “Kills again?” said Mr. Clemens. “I reckon he already has killed again—the same person who strangled that Fleetwood girl did this, didn’t he?”

  “Is a good bet,” said Maggio, looking up solemnly. Returning his attention to the corpse, he emptied the pockets methodically. He found a handful of coins, a small folding knife, a box of matches, a crooked Italian cheroot—and in the right coat pocket, a rectangle of cardboard. I knew even before he held it up to me what it would be. In the lantern's beam I could see Mr. Clemens’s printed name. It was the card I had left with the woman at his shop. I took it and handed it to my employer.

  “If we didn’t already know it, there’s the proof he was coming to see me,” said my employer. He looked at me, then at Maggio. and asked. “Anybody who doesn't think he was killed to keep him from talking to us?”

  “In any case, it was no robbery,” said Maggio. holding up the coins he had taken from the pocket. The lantern light picked up the gleam of gold.

  “Not necessarily. The killer could have heard you coming and skipped off before he had a chance to go through the pockets.” said Mr. Clemens.

  “That is possible.” admitted Maggio, “but it is not the way most bandits work. Easier to get money by showing a pistol or a knife than to kill a man with your bare hands.”

  “Granted.” said Mr. Clemens. He stood turning the card over and over in his hands, as if to see whether there was anything written on it besides his name and address. Then he stopped and looked at Maggio. His frown was visible even in the dim light from the lantern. “How did you happen to find the body, so soon after he was killed? Did you see or hear anything'7”

  Maggio stood and looked down at Mr. Clemens. “I know what you mean,” he said—rather calmly. I thought, considering that Mr. Clemens had just implied that Maggio might have done more than merely discover the body. “Here is what happened. As you know, I go home to change clothes and eat with my wife. I come back on the tramvia, just a little while ago, and many passengers get off here. It already starts to be dark, so I can’t see other people in the crowd. But one woman, she falls down getting off the car, and I stop to help her. Her husband is right there, but her ankle is twisted, and I help him get her to their house, a little ways off—so it takes me ten, maybe fifteen minutes before I start up the road to your place.”

  “Very convenient.*' said Mr. Clemens. “I suppose this man and his wife will remember you?”

  “He will, yes,” said Agente Maggio. still calm. “They live not far from the trumvia stop. He is a barber, very well known in this neighborhood. Enrico Russo is his name.”

  “OK. I suppose we can check up on the story if we need to.” said Mr. Clemens. “What happened next?”

  Maggio shrugged. “I come up the hill toward your place, and as I come around that corner”—he pointed back down the hill—”I hear a noise to the side. I can just see some man run away, and somebody lying here. I shout to tell the man to stop, but he keeps running. I stop to look if I can help this one. but I can see he is dead—and I recognize who it is. By then, the other man is gone—I search for a minute, but don't find him. Then I come up to the villa, and the rest you know.”

  “Yes. I guess I do.” said Mr. Clemens. He shook his head. “I just wish Battista had lived long enough for me to ask him a few questions about that damned painting. He might have given us the key to the whole damned case. But now we’ll never know.”

  Agente Maggio cocked an eyebrow. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he said. “I am sure that Luigi Battista would also wish he had lived long enough for you to ask him a few questions—and perhaps even longer.”

  Satisfied that he could learn no more from his examination of Battista's body, Agente Maggio asked me to help him carry it up to Villa Viviani. Mr. Clemens carried the lantern, and without too much effort. Maggio and I lifted the little artist’s lifeless body by the shoulders and legs and took it up to the courtyard.

  At first we were going to take the body in the house, but Mr. Clemens demurred. “Livy and the girls don’t need to see this lying on the sofa,” he said. Maggio and I agreed, so instead we took it into the gardener s toolshed. and placed it on the floor. Then, after bolting the door to the shed. Mr. Clemens and I went inside the house while Agente Maggio went back down the hill to send word to his headquarters.

  Mrs. Clemens met us at the entrance. “What is wrong. Youth?” she asked, an anxious look on her face.

  “Luigi Battista has been murdered.” he said. “He was on his way to see me—my card was in his pocket. It looks as if he was killed to keep him from talking to us.” He stated the facts bluntly; this was no time for joking.

  ‘That is terrible.” said Mrs. Clemens. Then, cocking her head to one side, she said. “I’ll keep the girls in the parlor, so you can discuss this without their interruptions.”

  “Let's go to my office.” said Mr. Clemens, looking at me. Then he turned to his wife and said. “It'll be a little while before Maggio gets back, and you can send him there when he does.”

  Upstairs, Mr. Clemens poured us both a bumper of whisky to steady our nerves, then looked at me and said. “All right, who knew Battista might be coming here?”

  I took a drink—it burned my throat, but it might help me get a grip on myself after moving the body. “A lot of people,” I said, after a moment’s thought. “That woman at his shop—the card in his pocket was the one I’d given her. Maggio. Garbarini. The people at Stephens’s table in Diabelli's—Wilson, Mrs. Atwater, Freeman, Muller, Miss Woods… anybody they talked to after I left…” The list was depressingly long. I began to wish I hadn't told quite so many people at the cafe about my employer wanting to see Battista.

  “I don't think we need to worry about Miss Woods or Penelope Atwater,” said Mr. Clemens, standing behind his desk. “And probably not the woman at Battista’s shop, either When a woman kills someone, it’s almost never by choking them to death.”

  “Can we eliminate Maggio. Too?” I asked.

  Mr. Clemens paced a few steps before answering. “His story about the woman falling will probably hold up, but he might still have helped her home, then caught up with Battista and killed him. It seems odd that he was on the same tram as the victim and didn't know it. Hmm—if somebody else killed Battista, odds are he was on the same tram, too.”

  “Not necessarily,” I pointed out. “Someone might have come out here as soon as they learned we wanted to talk to Battista, and waited for him.”

  “True,” said Mr. Clemens. He took another sip of his whisky, then sighed. “Let's step back a bit. Whoever it was, they had to have some reason for killing him. If we can figure that out, maybe we can figure out the rest.”<
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  “He was killed to keep him from telling us something.” I said. “That seems obvious. If we can discover what that was, it should tell us the murderer’s identity.”

  “Well, we were going to ask about the stolen painting— and that other copy of it,” said Mr. Clemens, sitting on the edge of his desk. “That painting must be behind the killing—behind both killings, if we can just figure out the connection.”

  “That seems logical,” I said. I stared into space for a moment, trying to think, then continued: “The timing of Virginia's death suggests that she witnessed the theft of the painting from Stephens’s.”

  “That makes sense.” said Mr. Clemens. “But how did the thief get her to go with him out to that graveyard? Did she accompany him under duress or voluntarily?”

  That seemed obvious to me. “Voluntarily, of course—he had no weapon, so he couldn’t have frightened her into silence.”

  Mr. Clemens slammed his fist into his other palm. “Then the killer was somebody she knew and trusted,” he said. Then he frowned. “That doesn’t narrow the field much— most of the men at Stephens's party fit that description, wouldn't you say?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I said dejectedly. “That’s the problem here—we have too many suspects, none of whom seem to have any more motive than the others.”

  “Well, let’s try this angle,” said Mr. Clemens. He stood up and began to pace, picking his way between the piles of books on the office floor. “Let’s assume that both killings were meant to cover up some kind of monkey business with the painting. Who do you think stands to gain the most from that?”

  “That’s hard to say” I said. “Mr. Stephens loses the most from the painting’s being stolen, and I guess the thief gains the most.”

  “Hmmm…” Mr. Clemens rubbed his chin. “If I take money out of my pants pocket and put it in my jacket pocket, am I ahead or behind?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “I don’t follow you.”

  My employer returned to his desk and picked up his glass. It was empty, and he gave it an annoyed stare before continuing. “It don’t matter,” he said. “I’ve got an idea how things might have happened. But I need to verify a couple of hunches before I can connect all the loose ends. That means talking to a couple of people who might have a stake in making the truth known. I want you to go get one of them, and Maggio. when he gets back, may be able to find the other one for me.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Who are these mysterious witnesses?”

  Mr. Clemens picked up the whisky decanter and refilled his glass. “One’s the woman in Battista’s shop—she may be the last person who talked to him before he was killed.” He sipped his drink, then went on. “I want you to go get her. You may have some trouble convincing her to come with you, but if you show her my card again, maybe it’ll work. One thing—unless she already knows, don’t tell her Battista’s dead.”

  “I’d best go now. in that case,” I said, standing up. “Even now, I may have missed her. Odds are she won’t be at the shop this late.”

  “Go to Battista’s home,” said Mr. Clemens. “They’ll know where to send for her.”

  As it turned out, there was no need to send for the woman—Angela. I remembered her name was. It was she who answered the door at Battista's home. “Signora Angela?” I asked.

  “Si,” she said, not opening the door far enough to let me inside, had I wanted to enter. “You come looking for Luigi again? I give him your message already. He tells me he is going to see Signore Mark Twain.” I could almost see her thinking. Did he lie to me and go somewhere else? I decided right then that she knew nothing of what had happened to Battista.

  “He came there, yes,” I said, more or less accurately. I took out one of Mr. Clemens’s cards and showed it to her. “But now we need to talk to you, too. Can you come to Signore Twain’s house with me?”

  “What you need to see me for?’ she asked, peering suspiciously at me—and at the carriage I had come in. “Why don’t Luigi come for me? Is he in trouble?”

  “Oh. no.” I said—somewhat less accurately than before, but perhaps still not an outright lie. “He’s at Mr. Twain’s house, and he can't leave just now. I work for Mr. Twain, and he asked me to come bring you.”

  Angela stared hard at me. then nodded. “You don’t try to trick me. or you don’t like what happens to you,” she said, in a tone that left no doubt that she meant every syllable—or that she was capable of backing up the unspecified threat. “I come with you. You wait here—I get ready, then we go.” She shut the door and left me standing outside. I stood there long enough to begin worrying whether she might have left the house by the back entrance—but after an interval she appeared, wearing a huge shawl over her elaborately dressed hair. I helped her into the carriage, then took the seat opposite her, and the driver gee’d up his horses.

  We rode in silence out to Settignano. and I was just as happy; if I had any further conversation with her, I was likely to reveal something of the circumstances she would find at the end of our journey, or to make it clear that I was hiding something important from her. It was apparent that Angela's attachment to Battista was more than just as an employee. I did not want to be the one from whom she heard the news of his death.

  I ushered Angela through the front door of Villa Viviani, only to find Capitano Rosalia sitting in the parlor. He was not in a good mood—especially when he saw the lady I was escorting. But he bowed to us, and spoke briefly to her in Italian. Then he turned to my employer and said. “Signore Clemens, I have asked this lady to wait while we talk. Can we go to your office?’

  “Sure,” said Mr. Clemens. “Wentworth, have the butler bring the lady some refreshments while she waits.”

  “A stiff drink of brandy would be appropriate.” said the captain, and he turned and stalked off in the direction of the office. Mr. Clemens looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and I nodded and rang for the butler. After telling him to bring Angela her choice of refreshment, I hurried upstairs to join the captain and my employer.

  There, I found the captain in the midst of delivering a full-scale scolding. “Signore Clemens,” he said, shaking his outstretched finger no more than two inches in front of my employer’s nose, “I am the policeman here, not you. It is not for you to call and question witnesses in an important crime. It is not for you to send my officers all over the city on your personal business.”

  Mr. Clemens was not about to be intimidated. He puffed up his chest and said, “I know the difference between my personal business and my public obligations. Captain. Unlike a lot of people, I take the latter pretty seriously. I asked Agente Maggio to bring back a witness who may help us solve these two murders once and for all. It’s a good thing you’re here—you’ll have a chance to hear him firsthand, instead of waiting for a report from Maggio.”

  Rosalia leaned forward, putting his face closer to my employer’s. “We should be interrogating this witness in the police station, not in a private home.”

  “With a bunch of overfed bruisers on hand to make sure he cooperates?’ Mr. Clemens scoffed. He opened a drawer of his desk and brought out one of his pipes. He looked into the bowl, as if checking whether it needed cleaning, then looked up at Rosalia and said, “The man hasn’t done anything to deserve that. I was worried that sending a cop to fetch him would scare him—but I had to send Wentworth to fetch that woman, so Maggio was all I had left.”

  “That woman.” Capitano Rosalia stood up straight and put his hand over his eyes. “One of us is going to have to tell that woman that Battista is dead. She is not going to take that news at all well. It would have been much better to tell her such bad news in her own home.” He looked behind him. as if to make sure she had not crept upstairs to listen, then turned to me and asked, in a soft voice, “Did you happen to notice whether or not she is carrying a knife?”

  “Why, no.” I said. “It never occurred to me…”

  “You Americans!” said the captain. “I suppose it never
occurred to you that she might become violent at the news her man has been murdered. Are your women so tame?” Mr. Clemens answered before I could open my mouth. I suspect he saved me from expressing myself more bluntly than is wise when speaking to a police officer. “Look here, Rosalia, we could insult each other all day long, and it’d get us no place either of us want to be. I asked this woman to come here because she might be the last person who talked to Battista before he was killed. So it’s a good thing you’re here—you’ll be able to talk to her while the details are still sharp in her mind. And I'll have a chance to talk to her, too—I reckon I’m doing as much to solve this case as you are. Did you know Battista was peddling a copy of that stolen Raphael?”

  “What?” Captain Rosalia's mouth fell open. Then his eyes narrowed, and he said. “Why didn't you tell me so when you learned of it? It is a crime to conceal evidence from the police, you know.”

  “Is that so?” Mr. Clemens raised his eyebrows. “I’ve just told you about it. so where’s the crime? Besides, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Do you want to catch whoever killed Battista—who, I suspect, is the same person who killed that Miss Fleetwood?”

  “Of course I do.” said Rosalia, leaning over the desk. “Do you know who it is? I demand that you tell me at once.”

  ‘I can’t tell you something I don’t know,” said Mr. Clemens, staring the looming carabinieri captain directly in the eye. “But I can help you find out, if you’ll listen to my suggestions instead of demanding things nobody’s got to give you. Can we do business in a civil manner, or not?”

  Rosalia straightened up and looked down at my employer. “And what is your price for doing business with me? The lion’s share of credit for solving a crime? Making the police look like fools and amateurs?”

  “Hell no,” said Mr. Clemens, so sharply that the captain fell back a pace. “I don’t give a rat’s ass for the credit. I just want to see that everybody responsible for the death of that girl—and of Battista, too—gets his full punishment. If you’d gone right to work and caught the killer the day after the murder. I’d have applauded and gone back to work. But you were more interested in using it as an excuse to go after the anarchists, until you realized that horse wouldn’t pull the plow. If you hadn't wasted time on that pack of nonsense, Battista might still be alive.”