The Art of Death (16 page)

When Dr. Anthony Beltrami left the police station in Fort Wayne, he was shaken. He’d expected the interview with Detective Powers to be interesting but not worrisome.

Frowning, he stood for a minute or two beside the driver’s door of his new red Fiat 500 Cabrio. Though not expensive, the Italian car suited his desire to look young and edgy and sexier than he felt. With the Cabrio, he had magically been transported into the zingy ad running on television, the one where beautiful young women tore off their clothes and bonnets at the sight of Fiats roaring into town to the cries of “The Italians are coming!” The convertible was a present to himself in honor of his fifty-third birthday, which was only a few days away. Just sitting behind the wheel took twenty years off his life.

Conveniently, the car was also emblematic of his virtue. A cousin who once worked at Fiat’s Mirafiori plant in Turin had been out of work for two years because car sales in Europe had been plummeting for a long time. Only a month ago, Renzo humbly asked for a little financial help from his rich American cousin, the pride of the Beltrami family, a doctor who was educated and highly respected and much admired in the country of his birth. Renzo was supporting a wife, a child, two dogs, and an ancient aunt who needed expensive medicine. Life had become insupportably austere. A few hundred dollars a month would be worthy of many candles at church.

Renzo’s groveling moved Dr. Beltrami. For a few days he searched his heart for an answer. Perhaps he should send a few hundred dollars a month to Renzo. On second thought, perhaps not.

Though a hard worker, Renzo had always been the family clown. Once, when he was still a teenager, while rolling down the boulevard to impress the girls with his ancient Alfa Romeo convertible, he’d set his own back seat on fire with a carelessly discarded cigarette. Once he realized the girls’ screams weren’t whoops of delight but cries of alarm at his mobile trash fire, he abruptly pulled over, stood on the front seat, and tried to douse the flames by urinating on them. Unfortunately, among the amused onlookers were two nuns and a gendarme. Then, as a spectator at a village goat race, he’d had an unfortunate encounter with a whiskery and crazy-eyed billy goat who decided that winning the race was less interesting than eating Renzo’s shorts.  The goat, rakishly wearing his tattered prize over one eye, resumed his trot toward the finish line but got distracted by a girl wearing braids. Renzo crossed the finish line before the goat did.

Being a clown didn’t make Renzo unworthy of family help, but it made it easier for Dr. Beltrami to justify what he was inclined to do anyway. His decision, of course, had to be expressed in the loftiest terms. “Charity,” he wrote to Renzo, “demeans both parties and solves nothing. But you have moved me to do something much grander that in the long run will help you. I cannot bail you out, but I can bail out the car company that laid you off.” Thus, the purchase of a Fiat convertible became, not an act of selfishness, but an act of generosity and patriotism as well as a signal of reinvigorated manhood.

He got in, simultaneously fired up a cigar and the engine, pushed a button to put the top down, and stared idly through the windshield, wondering what to do next.

He was tired. He needed a drink. He wanted to talk, but Madeleine hadn’t returned yet from New York, and his other friends would already have made plans for an end-of-the week celebration. For once, he did not contemplate with pleasure an evening alone listening to Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor
.

Thus, he found himself driving aimlessly around the city, turning this way and that, distractedly lingering at red lights until honked into action, having no destination in mind. For a rational man, he found it strangely hard to prioritize his concerns about the questions posed by Detective Powers. Had any of his answers made the matter worse?

He denied that Kimberly Swartz had ever threatened him. “The fact that she was still my patient after twenty-three years was a testament to how much she valued my counsel.” Even while he uttered that smug pronouncement, he wondered if the police had found something to the contrary on the girl’s phone or computer. Had she told anyone other than himself and Madeleine about the sex and the cocaine? He wished he knew.

He emphatically denied that he ever purchased cocaine or had any connection with the drug courier now in jail. As a physician licensed by the State, he meticulously followed all rules about medication.

He denied that he’d ever been in the Highland Park Cemetery. “Why would I?” he asked.

He scoffed at the idea that he might own a 3-D printer. “Technology doesn’t interest me,” he declared, as if all such advances were beneath him and shouldn’t interest anyone else either.

He claimed to know nothing about a Captain Ahab other than that Madeleine had had her wrist grabbed by a man dressed like a ship captain at her one-woman show in Indianapolis. “I never saw him, but I saw the marks on Madeleine’s wrist.”

When asked where he was the morning of Kimberly Swartz’s murder, he retorted, “Do you know where you were on any random day in the past?”

“If I don’t remember, I have ways of figuring it out,” Detective Powers responded evenly. “So where were you?”

“That early in the morning? Probably in bed, asleep.”

“Alone?”

“That’s rather personal, don’t you think?”

Detective Powers said nothing. He’d heard the same answer from Madeleine Harrod.

“I don’t know. Probably alone.” He’d have claimed to be with Madeleine if he only knew what she might have said in answer to the same question.

Come to think of it, why in hell hadn’t she told him about her interview at the police station? He cringed at the knowledge that she’d scream a retort right back at him. “You were in Indianapolis with Babette and warned me not to say anything over the phone.”

Finally, when Detective Powers asked if he’d take a polygraph, he refused in a huff. He, Anthony Beltrami, M.D., ABPN Board-Certified Psychiatrist, was now an American citizen and knew his constitutional rights.

The effort to ascertain the consequences of his police interview was too much. His thoughts roiling, Anthony abruptly pulled to the curb in front of the courthouse and once again texted Madeleine to call him as soon as her plane got in from New York. They needed to talk. They should have talked much earlier. Did she need him to pick her up?

At a noise behind him, he checked his rearview mirror.
Merda!
A police cruiser was swirling its lights at him and a uniformed officer, reflective sunglasses glinting ominously in the late afternoon sun and ticket book in hand, was striding toward him. A traffic ticket was the last thing he needed. In a sane world, he’d get a pat on the back for not texting while driving.

That night, Madeleine never answered her phone or returned a text. He didn’t even know if she’d returned from New York.