Dying on the Vine (27 page)

“Gentlemen,” said Franco with air of austere resignation, “how may we help you?”

The newcomers didn’t reply. There was something about them—a reserve, a formality—that sent a ripple of uneasiness around the table.

After a moment’s stony silence, the
tenente
pointed. “Him.”

The
brigadiere
stepped smartly forward, reaching for his handcuffs.

TWENTY-FIVE

“AREN’T those
Carabinieri
cars?” Marti asked as they got out of their own rental car in the Villa Antica’s main parking lot. She was looking at a midnight-blue Fiat hatchback and an Alfa Romeo compact parked in the far corner, each decorated with a slashing red stripe from front to back.

“Ya think?” John said. “Could be. Hey, maybe that’s what that big ‘
Carabinieri’
on the sides means.”

Marti bared her teeth at him. “How amusing. I couldn’t see that from where I was sitting.”

“Did you know they were coming here?” Julie asked Gideon. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Not a clue,” Gideon said.

The question was answered before they reached the entrance. The door swung open, and five men emerged, walking quickly. Three of them were stone-faced
carabinieri
: Rocco, Martignetti, and a brigadier. Directly in front of them and being more or less frog-marched by the brigadier was a shambling man with his head down, his feet stubbornly dragging, and his wrists cuffed behind him. The fourth man, trailing behind and babbling at Rocco, who wasn’t paying attention, was Severo Quadrelli.

The group strode by them without word or glance. And, even if there had been a glance, they wouldn’t have noticed. They were staring at the man in handcuffs, and once he’d gone by, they looked at each other.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” Marti said.

“Yeah, it is,” John agreed. “I figured if it was any of them, it had to be Franco. Or maybe Quadrelli.”

“I’m just glad it wasn’t Luca,” Julie said.

Gideon was as surprised as any of them, although the pieces were already beginning to fall into place. “What do you know about that?” he said softly.

Nico
.

• • •

NICO
was stowed in the caged-in back seat of the hatchback with Martignetti beside him. The brigadier took the driver’s seat, and Quadrelli stuffed himself, with some effort, into the front passenger seat. Rocco, who was apparently going to drive the compact back to Florence on his own, had a few words with Martignetti through the window, saw them off, and walked back to where the Laus and Olivers had stood watching.

“Surprised?” he said.

“A little,” John said. “What exactly is he being arrested for?”

“Cesare’s murder.”

“But not Pietro’s and Nola’s?” asked Gideon.

“Hey, I’m not, you know, Superman. I can’t do everything at once.”

“Rocco, take it easy,” Gideon said, laughing. “That wasn’t a criticism. Jeez, you’re sensitive. You guys are doing great. An arrest in
one
day. Congratulations. Do you have time to tell us how you—?”

“No, I better get back to the city with them. Maybe tomorrow sometime we could go get a cup of coffee somewhere.”

“Can’t. We’re flying out in the morning.”

“Oh. Hey, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe give me a call, then?”

“Rocco, you don’t look as pleased with yourself as you ought to be,” Gideon said. “Are you expecting problems with the arrest?”

“Oh no, I’m good there. It’s just . . .” He seemed to decide he had a little time after all, lit up a Marlboro, and took a drag. “It’s just that we’re still not getting anywhere on what happened up in the mountains. Nola and Pietro. I mean, I
know
Nico did them too, but I sure can’t prove it. Hell, I can’t even understand it.”

“Well, you’ve got him now,” John said. “You’ll have plenty of questions for him.”

“Yeah, sure, John, but you know how it is. When you’re asking them questions, it goes a lot better if you already know the answers, and I don’t have any answers for the way it went down up there. Throwing them off a cliff, shooting Pietro . . . I’ve run it through my mind a hundred ways, and it just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, what’s the rationale?” He shook his head, took another drag, and studied the cigarette the way smokers do, as if it held the answer to this and many other deep and ineffable mysteries.

“Oh well, we can help you there,” Gideon said. “Julie can, anyway. She’s come up with a pretty good rationale for what happened up there. It answers every single question we had.”

“Oh, it’s not that great,” Julie mumbled. “I just . . .”

“Look, she’s blushing again,” Marti said.

Rocco smiled. “That’s good, Julie, and I want to hear it, but right now I really have to get back. There’s a lot of paperwork that needs doing, let alone—”

“Take the time, Rocco,” Gideon said. “You need to listen to this.”

Rocco reared back a little, surprised at Gideon’s assertiveness. “Well, okay, sure. Shoot, Julie.”

“It’ll take a few minutes,” Gideon said. “Let’s go sit down somewhere.”

They went to the deserted tasting room, and twenty minutes and one more Marlboro later, Rocco sat back in his chair, slowly nodding. “Julie, I have to say, that is f—absolutely brilliant.”

“Oh, look,” Marti said, “she’s—”

But Julie silenced her with a growl and a look that would have stopped a charging rhino.

• • •

THEY
had anticipated spending some farewell time alone with Luca and Linda that evening, perhaps going out to dinner with them, but Nico’s arrest had naturally enough subdued the family—what was left of them—and pulled them closer together, and the Laus and Olivers had thought it was best to leave them to themselves. They went to dinner on their own, to the pizzeria John and Gideon had been to, then came back to make their good-byes, went to their apartments to pack, and left early the next morning for Florence Airport. There, Gideon’s attempt to reach Rocco was unsuccessful, but a few hours later, during a layover at Amsterdam’s Airport Schiphol, he got through to him.

Thus far, Nico had admitted to nothing yet, Rocco told him, but thanks to the bumbling, pontificating Quadrelli butting in all over the place, Nico had stumbled repeatedly, contradicting himself time after time, and Rocco was convinced that Julie’s reconstruction of events was correct—that Gideon’s cocaethylene hypothesis also had it right, and that Nico had killed both Nola and Cesare.

“But how did you settle on Nico in the first place, Rocco? I’m glad we were helpful, but nothing that Julie or I came up with had anything to say about
who
did it.”

“That’s a long story, buddy. Police work at its finest. Deductive reasoning—”

“We have to board in ten minutes. Can you make it short?”

He could and did. Admittedly, there was no direct evidence that Nico had killed anyone, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. First of all, Nico, being Pietro’s favorite, was the one most likely by far to break his father’s rule and drop in on him in the mountains—

“‘Circumstantial’ is putting it mildly,” Gideon observed. In fact, by his definition, it wasn’t even circumstantial, not in the legal sense. Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence, a fact of some kind from which another fact can be logically inferred. Jane testifies under oath that she heard Jack and Mary fighting in an adjoining apartment. She heard Mary scream, “I’m going to kill you!” followed by a shot. When the police arrived, John was found on the floor, shot dead, and Mary was gone. Inferred conclusion: Mary shot John and ran off.

But where was Rocco’s “fact” in the first place? This was nothing more than opinion and conjecture.

“Hear me out,” Rocco said. “It gets better. Okay, second, Nico was the only one of them who still had a relationship with Cesare and would have been the
only
one to have been welcome in Cesare’s apartment, where he could have switched the cough medicines.”

Gideon didn’t think too much of that either and began to wonder just how solid Rocco’s case was, or whether he even had a case. But Rocco’d been saving the best for last. “It turns out that Nico’s getting rid of the computer and printer and the rest wasn’t good enough. Remember, I told you Tonino was checking out Cesare’s list of passwords? Well, he struck gold. One of them was for an outfit called Ricordare that backs up everything on your computer in the cloud. Including e-mail.”

And in Cesare’s e-mail history was a sequence of exchanges with Nico, among which was one in which Cesare told him that he had made a big mistake accepting the new job, and he desperately wanted to return to Villa Antica. He asked Nico’s advice about going to see Pietro at the cabin, hat in hand, to express his regret for what he’d done and to plead with the old man to take him back. Without Luca and Franco around to poison Pietro’s mind, he thought there might be a better chance.

Nico advised against it: Pietro was still furious with his stepson, and a visit from him would only make matters worse. But Cesare wouldn’t take this for an answer. He was determined to do it, and he begged Nico to go and talk to Pietro first to try to soften him up for the visit. Nico had always been the favorite son, the one most able to talk Pietro into changing his mind about anything. Besides, if anybody could get away with dropping in on Pietro during his retreat, he was the one.

At first Nico declined, but Cesare was persistent, and after a few more e-mails he gave in. He told Cesare he would go up to the Casentinese toward the end of Pietro’s
mese sabatico
, when his father would be at his most relaxed, and he would do his best to set the stage for him. He said he would do it on September 26.

Late that day, Nico e-mailed Cesare that he had made the trip and reasoned with Pietro, and that he had gotten him to agree to leave Cesare’s stipend in the will, and perhaps in time even to welcome him back to the villa, so there was no need for Cesare to go up on his own after all.

“Which couldn’t possibly have happened,” Gideon said. “Pietro’d been dead by then for almost a month.”

“Exactly. It couldn’t have. But Nico claimed it had. Why? There’s more, listen.”

Cesare was ecstatic. He e-mailed Nico that he would go up to the cabin the very next morning to express his sincere gratitude and to extend his promise to live up to Pietro’s expectations in the future and so on. Nico’s response came back in less than two minutes, and was just this side of hysterical: Don’t go,
don’t under any circumstances go
(it was in italics in the e-mail) to see him. Yes, Pietro had changed his mind about the will, but it was a delicate situation. His feelings toward Cesare were still bitter in the extreme. For Cesare to show up at the cabin was sure to set off an explosion. No, better—much better—to let time take its course, to wait for Pietro himself to decide when the time was right for his errant stepson to make an appearance. Anything else would be a disaster. And then Nico sent two follow-up e-mails saying pretty much the same thing.

“And so, your conclusion,” Gideon said, summing up for him when Rocco seemed to have finished, “is that, having gone to the cabin at Cesare’s request, and having found Pietro’s body, he’d already made up his mind to kill Nola and make it look as if she were the one who died first. So he had to lie like crazy—
Pietro was there, sure, but don’t go near him, you’ll ruin everything!
—to keep Cesare away.”

“Right. And then, as for killing Cesare, you know, I wondered at first why he took so long to get around to that. But then I realized there was no reason for him to do it, not until, well—”

“Yeah, I know. Not until we blabbed to everybody that Pietro had died long before Nola did—which suddenly made Cesare a threat to him, on account of those exchanges. Until then, there was nothing in them that contradicted the Pietro-killed-Nola fairy tale.”

“Yup. We broke the news to them—including our boy Nico—on Friday afternoon. Saturday morning, Cesare was dead. So . . . that’s the story. What do you think?”

“Rocco, I think you’ve nailed it.”

“Me too, buddy,” Rocco said happily. “And the public prosecutor says it’s a go. Thanks a million for your help. And thank Julie!”

• • •

“THAT wasn’t Betty,” Julie said, coming back outside after answering the phone.

It had been two weeks since they’d returned home to Port Angeles. It was late September now, so the gloomy rainy season couldn’t be far behind, and they’d been taking advantage of what might be the last of the sunny, golden evenings of fall and sitting out on their deck before dinner, watching the big Black Ball auto ferry from Victoria do its usual smooth, impressive job of pulling—backward and sideways—up to the ferry dock, when they’d heard the phone ring inside the house.

“I’ll get it,” Julie had said, getting up. “I’m pretty sure it’s my sister.”

Gideon had been more than content to continue to remain outside in the mild breeze, sipping his martini on the rocks and munching on an occasional shrimp or little wedge of Gorgonzola from the plate of appetizers they’d brought out with them. The call had taken a surprisingly long time—twenty minutes—and as he’d just learned, it hadn’t been from Julie’s sister Betty.

Julie dropped into the deck chair she’d been sitting in before and dipped a shrimp into the cocktail sauce. “That,” she said, chewing, “was Linda.”

“And what did she have to say? I can tell from the look on your face that it was something interesting. Something about the trial?”

“No, nothing about that. Gideon, that night at the
Vino e Cucina
reception—do you remember a woman we were talking to? Tall, kind of imposing . . .”