Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (23 page)

Marco winked at me. “I am ahead of you. I have men looking through all the trash containers, dumps—anywhere trash is found—within a one mile radius of the hotel.”

“Why one mile? Why not more?”

“Because we have to start somewhere. If this search turns up nothing, we will keep expanding.”

“Are you going to check out that car?”

“The blue Fiat? Yes. We will get a list of plates that match your description and see if any of them are registered to anyone we know. Do you recall Gianni’s surname?”

“No, but I imagine Tessa can tell us.”

“That’s all right. I have it in my notes somewhere.” Marco thumbed through a notepad. “Diletti—there it is. Gianni Diletti. What else do you know about him? He did not know Amy Bauer before this trip, did he?”

I told Marco everything I could remember about what Amy had said about Gianni on Sunday. Then I gave Marco my impression of Gianni, based on our evening at the restaurant in the country. Marco listened, his forefingers pressed against his seductive lips, and I wondered what he looked like without the beard.

The three photos began to burn a hole in my purse. Marco was so certain Amy’s death was an accident, he saw no need to investigate. But I was here because I thought it wasn’t an accident, and if I really believed that, then I was withholding evidence in a felony crime, wasn’t I?

The phone rang, and before Marco finished that conversation, a uniformed officer popped in with a note for him. He glanced at it and responded. That gave me time to consider what would happen if he discovered Amy had indeed been murdered. He would find out that I had been sleuthing, and he’d find out about the pictures. He’d have to question all of us again, and if I didn’t tell him about the pictures, Walter would.

“Could we go out for a walk? I need to get out of here for a little while,” he said.

I waited until we had wound through traffic and down to the street that ran along the Arno. Marco lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.

“I have some pictures Walter Everard made yesterday, just before Amy . . . fell.” I pulled them out of my bag. “Do you want them?”

“What did you do? How did you get these?” He snatched the pictures from me.

“Walter used a digital camera, so I asked him to print them for me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I began, deliberately
not
looking at his face, “I wanted to figure out what happened. I went up there this morning.” I pointed across the river to the southeast. The piazzale Michelangelo capped the big hill just beyond the Ponte Vecchio. If the bronze David were closer to the front of the overlook, I think I could have seen it from where we stood.

“You what?”

I explained. He ground out his cigarette on the sidewalk. “Did you go to the hospital yesterday?” I asked. “Did you see Amy or talk to the doctors?”

“Yes. Yes.” He walked a while in silence. “They have probably already done the autopsy because one has to be done in a case like this. I saw the body at the hospital, and I saw your friend Lettie. She was with Beth Hines.”

We had come to an intersection, and Marco paused to take my arm. I wondered if he knew I could cross a street by myself.

“Did they give you the contents of her pockets,” I asked, “or would they have given them to Beth?”

“To me, but there weren’t any.”

“Yes, there was. A slip of paper in Amy’s pocket.”

“Her pockets were empty.”

“Marco, I saw the paper sticking out of her pocket when she was lying on the slope, and I stayed with her body until the ambulance arrived.”

“Her personal effects consisted of a Swatch watch, very colorful, a Greek key bracelet, and a pair of small gold hoop earrings. That was all.”

“No money?”

“Lettie thought she had left her purse on the bus.”

Feeling like the worst kind of snoop, I told him what the note in Amy’s pocket said. Perhaps trangeness of the note would make him consider the possibility that Amy’s death was not an accident.

Back at his office, Marco slipped the three pictures in a manila folder marked BAUER, asked me to spell “syntometrine,” and peeked out into the hall. He closed the door again and took my hand. Pulling me gently to him, he lifted my chin and kissed me lightly.

“This is a terrible thing, Dotsy. I know it is difficult for you and for Lettie.” He stroked my cheek with one finger. “But it will all be over soon.”

Over soon? How could he say that?

I took a taxi to the hotel and sent Lettie the message “Room 220” with my pager. That was to inform her that I was back in our room, but almost as soon as I opened the door, the telephone rang.

“Have you had lunch yet?” Lettie asked. “I need to get out and do something.”

“What about Beth?”

“She and Joe are going out for a bite. She’s getting dressed now.”

After I freshened up, I walked to Beth’s room. As Lettie let me in, I glimpsed Beth, at the bathroom sink, sweeping blush onto her cheeks with a large brush. Having prepared myself for a pale and wan Beth with swollen eyes, I was shocked by how good she looked. Lettie grabbed her Florence guidebook and pushed me out the door. “Let’s go,” she said. “I need to get out of here.”

Moseying vaguely in the direction of the city center, we decided to eat, then head for the Uffizi gallery. We found a trattoria with a free table near the Piazza della Repubblica, roughly halfway to the Uffizi. “How is Beth doing?” I asked, as soon as we had ordered.

Lettie jiggled her hands and bounced in her chair as if she didn’t know where to begin. “She’s devastated, of course. We talked, she cried, and I cried until the wee hours. But Dotsy, Achille called her about every fifteen minutes all night and this morning! I don’t know how she stands it. I finally talked to him myself about an hour ago, and I told him, ‘Quit calling. Beth needs to rest.’”

“Didn’t he take the group to Pisa today?”

“Yes, but he has a cell phone with him. Every time they make a stop, he calls. He’s in love with her.”

“And Beth? Is she in love with him?”

“She doesn’t know. She can’t think about anything right now, except Amy and Meg. And then there’s Joe. He isn’t helping much. The phone rings and Joe stands there tapping his foot and going, ‘Who is this joker, anyway?’ Joe almost had a fist fight with Captain Quattrocchi this morning, and he’s threatening to sue the tour company and the carabinieri and . . . oh, I don’t know. He’s trying to help, but he’s like a big old bulldozer. He’s making things worse.”

“Did Beth see Amy fall?”

“No. She said she and Achille were on the same overlook with Amy and Tessa, you know, the one on the other side from where we were, and she left to find a place to get a drink. She was looking for a bar or a water fountain or whatever. She heard the scream like we did, but she didn’t see anything.”

“I went back up there this morning,” I said. I told her all about Walter’s pictures and the computers and about walking up and down the road where the blue Fiat had been. “So I visited the caserma and asked Marco to find out who owns a blue Fiat with a license that ends in 10 M or I-O-M.”

“You talked to Captain Quattrocchi today?” Lettie, wide eyed, leaned forward too far and got a swipe of marinara sauce on her blouse, at the point of her left breast. She dipped her napkin in her water glass and worked on the smudge.

I knew it was time to tell her about Marco and me, before it got to the point where I was deliberately leaving it out. “Marco kissed me last night . . . and again today.”

“Oh, how wonderful!” Lettie clapped her hands noiselessly because there was a wet napkin in one hand. “A summer romance. A Latin lover. What is it they say? La dolce vita.”

“Contain yourself, Lettie. I’m not sure how I feel about it. There’s so much tension, so much happening.” I searched Lettie’s face for a hint of anything other than simple schoolgirl delight and found nothing. “With Marco and Joe going at it tooth and toenail, and a murder investigation and all, I think it’s crazy to complicate things further.”

“How did it feel when he kissed you?”

I laughed. “You’ve seen those pictures of a guy crawling across desert sands, haven’t you? All skin and bones and dying of thirst, and suddenly there’s this great big glass of ice water? It felt like that.” I looked at my plate of spaghetti—twisted and tangled, but not more than the current state of my mind. I had lost my appetite. “Did Beth sleep at all last night?”

“We talked until about two a.m. I was totally worn out, but every time I thought Beth was about to wind down, she’d start crying again.” Lettie put the back of her hand beside her mouth in that curious little stage-whisper way she does. “So I slipped her a mickey.”

“You what?”

“I put some sleeping pills in her ginger ale.”

“That was dangerous. What if she was allergic to the pills or something?”

“No chance. I got ‘em out of her own toiletries kit. She told me, back home, that she was bringing some pills so she could sleep on the plane.”

“Did that do the trick?”

“You bet. As soon as she dozed off, I went to the lobby and called Ollie and cried on his shoulder. It wasn’t even bedtime at home, yet.”

———

In Florence, there’s a real danger of art overload. This is a state of depravity in which the poor visitor has sunk so lowthat he schleps by Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus,
giving it only a quick glancewhile adjusting his sunglasses. The Uffizi Gallery is so huge and so crammed with masterpieces, the only way one can avoid going completely numb is to take in a small part at one time. I steered Lettie to a bench in an open-air courtyard as soon as I noticed her eyes had glazed over. Kicking off my shoes, I stretched my legs out in front of me.

“Did you talk to Tessa last night?” I asked.

“We called her room several times but there was no answer. Why?”

“This is bound to be tough on her. She might lose her job, especially if Joe sues the company.”

“She’s also lost a bridesmaid and a friend,” Lettie added.

“When you rode to the hospital yesterday in the ambulance, they let you and Beth ride in the back, didn’t they? With Amy?”

“Yes.” Lettie grimaced as if the memory was still painful.

“Now, think carefully. Did you see a piece of paper sticking out of Amy’s pants pocket? Did a piece of paper fall on the floor or on the gurney?”

“A piece of paper? No, I don’t think so.”

“Think carefully, please, because I found a piece of paper in her pocket when I was on the hillside with her, when we were all waiting for the ambulance. I read the note and stuck it back in her pocket. It would have been in her left pocket.” I told Lettie what the note said, and she looked at me, stunned. “And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen that same piece of paper, either. Amy dropped it in the airport in Milan. She just about cracked my skull diving for it.”

“I don’t remember that. In the Milan airport?”

“You were being—” I lowered my voice “—strip-searched at the time.”

“Oh,” she said. “But what can it mean?”

“I don’t know, but think again. Were you sitting beside Amy, beside the gurney on the way to the hospital?”

“There was a sort of bench along one side. I sat there and Beth did, too, for part of the way. Then she knelt on the floor and put her arms around Amy’s head. It was so horrible.” Lettie frowned and turned her face away.

“But you didn’t see a piece of paper?”

“No.” Lettie stared across the courtyard until I stood up.

“Ready for a few more masterpieces?” I studied a floor plan of the second floor and set out in search of Michelangelo’s
Holy Family.
Lettie followed me.

“Beth says something was bothering Amy,” she said. “Last night she told me that Amy hasn’t been herself since she got here.”

“I don’ don’t kw she was normally, but I had a long talk with her on Sunday, and she seemed cheerful enough then. Surprisingly cheerful, in fact, for someone whose sister had just been murdered.”

“I don’t think Amy was the sort to pretend to be sad. And I don’t think she was that upset over Meg.” Lettie stopped in front of a wonderful Titian. “And then there was Gianni. Amy really flipped out over Gianni.”

“Does Beth know who it involved? This thing that was bothering Amy?”

“No, but she says it started right after they arrived. They got here a day or two earlier than we did, you know. Beth said there was a phone call—she thinks Amy was the one who made the call—and there was a violent argument between Meg and Amy that Beth overheard. It was while they were at the hotel in Venice. Beth couldn’t make out what they were yelling about, and neither Amy nor Meg would talk about it later.”

“Odd. I wonder what that was all about?”

My mind raced. If the piece of paper had fallen out of Amy’s pocket, Lettie would have remembered; she never missed things like that. If the piece of paper had been in Amy’s pocket, the hospital would have given it to Marco. Except, nobody had thought Amy’s fall anything other than an accident, so a hospital employee could have found the note . . . and trashed it.

———

Lettie and I took a small detour on our way back to the hotel, to visit the Duomo. On a narrow cobblestone side street, a cool guy on a Vespa grazed my leg as he bumped by, weaving against the traffic, which was all pedestrians because the street was clearly closed to motor vehicles. The Italian love of traffic rules is wonderful to behold. Rules are made to be broken. If there were no traffic laws to break, driving would be no fun.

While catching my breath from that close call, I noticed that we were on the corner where Ivo had displayed his dancing puppets last Friday. Ivo, I surmised, had set up shop elsewhere, because there was a scarf concession there now.

Around the corner, we dodged two uniformed carabinieri on white horses. Lettie looked at me and grinned. “They’re all so handsome. Oh, not as handsome as your Marco, of course, but—“

“Shut up, Lettie.”

The inside of the Duomo is cavernous. With seats removed to accommodate tourist traffic on weekdays, it has the hollow sound of a train station. Our voices and footsteps echoed dully, then were lost in the air. I lit a candle for Amy, but my conscience bothered me. I should light one for Meg, too. And one for Beth, since she was more sorely in need of help right now than either of her sisters. So I expanded the candle’s responsibility to cover the whole Bauer family.