by Fiona Grace
“Oh, it’s a service I do for all my favorite ladies,” she said with a smile. “So that they look and smell nice for their men friends.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Audrey said as Sabina let go of Bella. Bella scampered off the counter as quick as can be, flying across the tub and sending water splashing on Sabina’s face.
Sabina sighed as Bella attempted to bite the scarf off her neck. “Oh. Some of the girls are such tomcats.” She giggled. “But Bella is so pretty, she just needs a little confidence!”
And Sabina was clearly a little off her rocker. She might have considered murder to be a fine solution to her problems. But did she have an alibi?
Audrey handed Sabina a towel. “How have things been going around here?”
Sabina wiped her face and shrugged. “I’ve been handling this place for twenty years. It’s like clockwork now,” she said. “I hope Vito hasn’t been giving you any trouble?”
“Oh, no. Just the opposite. He’s very sweet.”
Sabina gazed at her doubtfully. “Well, that’s good. I never could get through to that boy. He’s a bit of a mystery to me. The younger age, you know? Attached to their phones and their crazy music and sulking all the time. Sometimes I think I could just kill him!”
Audrey smiled through gritted teeth. “Ha. But he’s okay. I think he’s a great kid. He has a big heart.”
“Good. That is nice to hear. I try to raise a good boy, but there is much he never tells me. And you never can tell.” She nodded. “Sometimes I think he’s on the right track. And sometimes I think he’s headed the way of the heartless Dr. Mauro. I know you’re not to speak ill of the dead, but some people make that so hard.”
Audrey was glad Sabina brought that up, because she’d been trying to figure out how to do it herself. “So you heard about Dr. Mauro?”
She laughed. “Yes. Serves him right that someone finally did away with him.”
“Yes. Did you hear how he died? Someone killed him with pentobarbital,” she said casually, leaning against the examination table. “Isn’t that interesting?”
Sabina let out a short “Ha!” and went to clean up the counter. “I’d say it serves him right for suggesting what he did at that last council meeting. It was absolutely barbaric, that he would even bring up such a thing.”
“You mean, euthanizing all the stray pets?”
“Right! That’s what he wanted to do!” the old woman said, throwing up her hands and raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Unbelievable, and unbelievably cruel and vile. He wanted to come into my place with a vial of that murder juice for each one of my strays. I told him he could stick that vial where the sun doesn’t shine!”
“So you were at that meeting?”
“Oh yes, I was. Of course I was,” she said, her voice hard with determination. “Anything I could do to get that man to back off my animals. I was the first one there, and I spoke out against him and everything. And then I confronted him on the front steps of the place. We almost got into a fist fight, him and me. I would’ve flattened him to the ground, the idiota. I think his death was the best thing that’s ever happened to Lipari!”
“Wow,” Audrey said. And here, when Audrey first asked about him at Pietro’s, she hadn’t seemed nearly as rabid in her hate for Dr. Mauro. But now, Sabina was almost frothing at the mouth. “You really didn’t like him, did you?”
“No. I did not. But I wasn’t the only one. And I was not as bad as some people. In fact, there is a whole group of people who hate the man. For one, there is Vittoria Vittelo, and her whole group.”
“Vittoria . . . who?”
“Vittelo. Oh, she’s a very sweet lady, but a bulldog, you know?” Sabina slapped her knee. “You get her riled up and she goes after you, no stopping! She’s the president of the local animal welfare league. It’s not much now, but she’s trying to grow it. And she was there, outside, holding up signs against the doctor. She spit in his face!”
“She did?”
“Oh, yes. It was in our local paper. It was quite the story. She got arrested for it!” Sabina’s fists clenched and unclenched. “I say, good for her!”
“When was this? She’s not still in jail, is she?”
“Oh, no. She was out in a day. Bailed out by her people. She lives down by the sea, though I don’t think she has an actual address. Her home is the whole island. You’ll always find her out there, trying to get the tourists to stop feeding bread to the birds and things like that. She’s the one holding a sign and screaming about the injustices of the world. She has a million crusades going on at once, all involving the animals she loves and the planet.” Sabina smiled with admiration. “Quite a woman.”
“Interesting,” Audrey said, making a mental note of the woman’s name. “Sabina . . . yesterday afternoon, when I was catching animals, what did you and Vito do?”
She smiled. “Yesterday . . . afternoon? Oh, I was with Vito the whole time. We were cleaning up the yard. Quite a lot of work to get all of that poop thrown away!”
“Oh. Yes,” Audrey said, relieved. Vito would be able to confirm that. And so, unless they were both lying, it meant that she could strike two possible suspects off her list.
Only 1,994 more to go. Starting with this Vittoria Vittelo.
Because any woman crazy enough to spit in someone’s face over something they were passionate about was probably brazen enough to commit murder over it, too.
*
There was still a lot of work to be done at the clinic, so as helpful as Vito had been to her, Audrey slipped quietly out just before closing time. The kid already had a few strikes against him. She didn’t want him to follow her around and risk getting in trouble again.
The walk to town was downhill, so it wasn’t a difficult one, and from going back and forth the past few days, Audrey already knew her way around the winding streets. At the end of the block, she turned toward the harbor and the rocky beach, to see a small collection of people gathered there. A woman was shouting something in Italian into a bullhorn, about tartarughe, as she passionately stalked the beach, attempting to rouse up the crowd like a general would an army of soldiers.
Unfortunately, no one seemed very interested. There was a family of tourists on beach towels there with two small children who kept snapping pictures as if she was a famous attraction, and a few sulky teenagers were smoking cigarettes and mimicking her.
I wonder what that is all about, she thought, quickly putting the word tartarughe into her Google translate. Turtles.
Ah. Save the turtles.
Audrey kicked off her shoes and sunk her toes into the sand. It was cool, now that the sun was setting. The beach was nice, the waves calm, dappled with orange rays of the dying sun, and Audrey thought for a moment how she’d have loved to sit out here and just relax, maybe read a book. If I ever have the time while I’m here, which face it—isn’t going to happen.
She snorted at the thought, then a little voice said, If you accepted Gallo’s offer to be Lipari’s veterinarian, you would have the time. You could come here after work, every day, and unwind.
She sighed and looked down at Nick, next to her. Even he seemed to enjoy frolicking in this new world. He was digging in the stony, volcanic sand, letting his tail sweep across it, making footprints in it. He wouldn’t mind, that’s for sure.
As she got closer, she saw the sign the woman was holding. It had a picture of a turtle on it. The woman had long, flowing gray hair, streaked with white, and was wearing an amorphous, flowing tunic and skirt that reached her toes. She screamed and shook her fist, pausing for effect, and Audrey had to believe that she was a great speaker, even though Audrey had no idea what she was saying. A few admirers applauded and gazed at her with awe, but as Audrey approached, some people peeled off and headed away, laughing, muttering, pazza.
That was one word Audrey knew. It meant crazy lady.
Finally, she finished her speech, and the random applause quickly dissolved. The woman put down her sign and
sighed. Audrey stepped forward. “Vittoria Vittelo?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Si?”
“Buonasera,” Audrey said unsurely, wishing she had Vito to help her. “Um . . . sapevate Dottore Mauro?”
She frowned. “Cretino. Perché lo chiedi?”
Audrey stared. “Um . . .” She laughed. “Sorry. I don’t know what that means. You don’t speak English, do you?”
“I do,” she said, her voice a low, no-nonsense rasp. She grabbed her signs and her sandals, and began to trudge toward the street. “I was asking why you ask about such a low, bad man. Terrible scum, he is.”
“Oh, thank goodness you speak English,” Audrey said. “I suppose you already heard what happened to him?”
“Of course I heard. Nothing escapes my ears, especially in a town as small as this,” she said. “I’ve been living here in Lipari all my life. That’s fifty years. I was born here. I know everything and everyone. I even know you.”
Audrey blinked. “You do?”
She nodded and swept her long hair back behind her shoulders. There were long scraggles of black seaweed in there. Maybe she did sleep on the beach? “Yes. You arrive here on the ferry a couple days ago. I watch. I see. I see Matteo Gallo come and meet you at the pier, and that says to me, you are someone important, no?” She stroked her chin. In the dying sunlight, Audrey could see a few black whiskers there, sprouting from an unfortunate, dark wart at the very tip of it.
As they approached the street, a striped yellow cat came up to Vittoria. She reached down, petted it, and then pulled a handful of what looked like dry cat food from the pocket of her flowing skirt, feeding it to the kitty. “There you go, Luna,” she said. “Good girl.”
Then she straightened, and almost looked surprised that Audrey was still standing there. Audrey got the feeling that most people tried to steer clear of her, or didn’t stay in her company for long. Audrey understood. Even in the fresh air, the woman smelled heavily of incense and body odor—sweet, and yet a bit putrid.
The kitty ran off, and Vittoria continued. “I see you around with that Sabina’s boy, that handful, Vito. That tell me you know Sabina. And I hear through the grapevine there was a big fight between a new, young veterinarian and the old cretino . . .” She grinned widely, revealing yellow, crooked teeth. “Something tells me that you are that new veterinarian?”
Audrey nodded, astonished. Wow, either word really did get around fast, or this woman was extremely nosy. Or both. “That’s right. That’s pretty impressive.”
“Ah.” Vittoria waved the notion away and headed to a bench across the sidewalk from the beach. She set down her sign and began to wipe the sand from her feet. “You live here long enough, you hear all, notice all.”
That was promising. “So you didn’t like Dr. Mauro?”
She snorted. “That is like asking if I like the devil.”
“Oh,” Audrey said, trying to choose her words carefully. The last thing she wanted was a woman who’d spit in her enemy’s face on her bad side. “Do you have any idea who could’ve killed him?”
“No. But I wish I knew who did it. I’d like to pin a medal on his chest. The man was no good. Very bad man,” she said, plopping down on the bench and shaking her head as she gazed out at the shoreline. “Why you fight with him?”
“I didn’t want to. I’m here to help control the stray pet population. All I wanted to do was give him some advice, speak to him, vet to vet, but he accused me of moving in on his business. That’s not what I was trying to do. I have my own clinic in Mussomeli.”
Vittoria nodded. “I believe you. He’s a big idiota. He don’t let no one tell him his business.”
Audrey sat next to her. “I heard that you saw him at a council meeting and . . . had words, too?”
She laughed, with a glint of pride in her eyes. “I spit in his stupid face.”
“Yes. That’s what I heard. Why did you do that?”
Her laughter grew. “Oh, I had many, many reasons. The latest was that he was a murderer. He called it euthanasia, and I call it murder. Wiping out the stray pet population by poisoning their food supply was not humane. Not to mention that it would have murdered countless other wild animals. It was cruel. Too cruel. He was not a doctor. He was supposed to save lives, not destroy them.”
Audrey nodded. “That is what I heard.”
“You’re no better. You put those kitties in jails. They no want to be in prison. They did nothing wrong.”
“Well, they’re suffering because there’s not enough to eat. There’s too many of them. I hoped to control the cat population by neutering the male animals. But he didn’t seem to want to listen to outside ideas.”
“That’s right.” She huffed. “I can tell you one thing. I am not sad he’s dead. Typical sexist man. Big ego. Thought he knew everything. He would not let any woman tell him his business. I heard his office was a horror show. All the people who go in say it’s not a good place. Dirty. Falling apart. Old equipment. He was too set in his ways to change anything.”
“So you’ve never been inside his clinic?” Audrey asked. “Do you have any pets?”
She smiled. “All the animals in Lipari are mine. The ones in the sea, the ones on land, the ones in the air. I care for them all. To me, a house, four walls, is a jail. The world is my home, and the home of all creatures. And one of the ways I take care of the animals in this island is by not taking them to see that butcher.” She leaned in, as if imparting a secret. “I can see you are not like him. You care for the Earth’s creatures, even if you want to put them in prisons.”
“Not forever. Just until they’re neutered. That way they won’t reproduce.”
She smiled. “You’re a good one. I like you.”
“Signorina Vittelo,” Audrey said, relieved to have gotten on her good side. It emboldened her enough to ask the next question. “You seem to be the eyes and ears of this island. Did you see anything suspicious last night, around dinner time, when Mauro was murdered?”
She went to a nearby trashcan, and to Audrey’s horror, began to pick through it. She found a red child’s sand bucket with a broken handle and placed it in her big shoulder bag. “No. I wish I’d been around. But only because I would’ve cheered the killer on!” She laughed harder, but this time, it dissolved into a phlegmy, wet cough. “No. I was at the harbor the whole evening, organizing a protest against the idiota tourists.”
“Tourists?”
“Yes. They come here in droves, to fish our waters, and they’re destroying the habitat of the creatures in the sea. The turtles! The poor turtles.”
Oh. So that means not only did she not see anything, she can’t be the killer. There were probably dozens of people who saw her on the harbor, if she organized the event.
“Well, thank you,” Audrey said, turning toward the street. “I appreciate your—”
She froze.
Oh no. Here comes trouble.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Heading Audrey’s way, with one of the other police officers on her tail, was Officer Lorenzo.
She stiffened as she watched the two officers rapidly approaching her. From the look in Lorenzo’s eyes, she wasn’t happy.
Quickly, Audrey said, loudly enough that anyone nearby could hear, “So, Signorina Vittelo, where do you normally see the most strays on this beach?”
Vittoria gave her a confused look as the two officers stepped onto the sidewalk. Officer Lorenzo motioned to Audrey. “Can I speak to you, Miss Smart?”
She crossed her arms tightly in front of herself. “Uh. Sure. Of course. What can I do for you?”
The officer motioned her forward. “Privately?” Then she looked at Vittoria. “Don’t go anywhere, Vittoria. We need to have a word with you, too.”
Vittoria rolled her eyes. “As usual.”
There was definite familiarity in their banter, as if they were old friends, or probably more accurately, old rivals. Audrey followed the older female officer down the sidewalk, until they
were a safe distance away. The woman sighed. “What are you doing here?”
Audrey shrugged. “I was appointed by the council to solve the stray problem. I was just trying to get local opinion as to where the biggest stray population is usually found. I heard Ms. Vittelo is the person to ask.”
Lorenzo gave her a doubtful look. “Right.”
“It’s true.” At least, partly. “But you’re wasting your time if you’re interviewing Vittoria about the murder. She was at a protest last night at the harbor. At least, that’s what she told me.”
“We know that already. Remember what I told you, Miss Smart,” she said, seeming to emphasize the word “Miss,” just to get under Audrey’s skin. “We don’t need anyone meddling in this case. We have enough work to sort through on our own, without you adding any more to it.”
“I’m not trying to add trouble. I was only trying to—”
“Whatever you were doing, whether you try to our not, is causing trouble. It’s best if you stay in your lane, stick to your job, and leave the investigation to us.”
Officer Lorenzo had to have been a mother, because after that stern tongue-lashing, Audrey felt a lot like the child found with her hand in the cookie jar. She nodded and started to back away.
“But, since you’re here, I will fill you in on an interesting development,” she said with a sly smile.
Audrey bristled. If the officer did want Audrey out of the investigation, giving her news of “interesting developments” was probably not the way to do it. Unless . . . unless there was something else up the officer’s sleeve.
A chill went up Audrey’s spine as a terrible thought came to her. Maybe they had discovered someone had broken into Mauro’s office. Maybe the vet had a hidden camera somewhere in his office, or a witness had seen her climbing in the window.
