Foreign Deceit (9 page)

She looked to the ceiling. “Not that much. One guy was just asking if I saw or heard anything the night of his death. I just told him about what I heard, and how I came down and knocked. I told them how he didn’t answer my calls, or my knocking, and how he stood me up for our date, and that’s why I was concerned.
 
Then…well, that was pretty much it. A couple of officers were just waiting outside my door. They said they had a special counselor coming for me to talk. I didn’t want to wait around to speak to some government worker who doesn’t know me, or didn’t know John. I just walked out.”
 

“Yeah, I understand. I don’t blame you,” he said. “Did they ask about drugs?”

She looked confused. “No, not at all. I didn’t know about the drugs until just now.”
 

A warm blanket of exhaustion wrapped around Wolf again. He’d had enough. His body needed rest. There was no use fighting it any more.

“Are you going to be around in the next couple days?”
 

“I have to work during the daytimes, but I am usually home at night.”

“All right. I may need some help with some things this weekend. We’ll see.” He went back to his brother’s apartment thinking about the Friday deadline for Lia’s help.
 

Chapter 15

Wolf picked up his backpack and went into his brother’s room. He put his bag down and exhaled, staring at the bed. “I’m sure these sheets are dirty as shit,” he said out loud to John. Pulling the comforter back, he confirmed his suspicion.
 

There was a set of sheets on the shelf in the bathroom closet. They smelled nice and washed, but there were no pillow cases.
 

Looking in John’s bedroom closet bore no fruit. He stood, shaking his head, marveling at the anal retentive organization. The assortment of clothing was meticulously separated into dark and light segments, coats in a separate segment still. John’s six pairs of shoes were lain out in a straight line along the closet wall floor. A cheap hanging plastic rack housed his belts and ties on the very right side.

Clean tee-shirts over the pillows seemed a good substitute, so he pulled two out of his pack.
 

Pulling it on, he stopped with a jolt and went back in the closet.
 
He pulled the clothes over hard to get an un-obstructed view of the belt and tie rack.
 

There were four belts, a missing space, and then four ties. A perfect spot to put the belt John was wearing the night he died. So where did the belt he hung himself with hang?

Chapter 16 - Thursday

Wolf had been up for four hours when Lia picked him up at 8 am. He met her outside the gate.
 

She shot a couple appraising glances as they walked. “You look better this morning.”
 

He had shaved, showered, shampooed the grease mat that was his thick dark brown hair, and put on some fresh clothes. He
felt
better. Wolf looked at her and smiled. “Thanks.”
 

He’d always been confident in his good looks. The saying, or whatever it was,
tall, dark, and handsome
applied to him. He was six-foot-three, taller than most men he came into contact with, had spiky dark brown hair, a complexion that tanned if the lightbulbs were too bright, dark walnut eyes, thick eyebrows, and a mole on his upper right cheek that women in his life had often referred to as a “beauty mark”…not that he considered himself a heart throb, but he wasn’t an idiot either.
 

He stole a glance at Lia, who was walking fast, chin up, chest out, slender athletic body, a tight pony tail of shoulder-length straight brown hair swaying underneath her Caribinieri cap.
 

“You look nice this morning too.” He examined her with raised eyebrows, meaning to sound nonchalant, unable to do so with such a truthful statement. He caught a whiff of her lavender scent and cleared his throat, snapping to his senses. “Hey, so, I talked to John’s girlfriend last night, she was home.”

“And?”

“She had the name of the guy he was with the night before. I’d like to go talk to him, his name is Matthew and he works at the Merate Observatory. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, I do. In fact I’ve been there a few times. For high school…I was in Liceo Scientifico.”

“What does that mean?”

“In Italy, you choose your vocation very early in life, and go to school for it. Or, you choose the…how would you call it…the track…”

“The major? Like in college?”

“Well,” she said. “it’s much earlier. It starts in high school. But, I guess it is kind of like a major for college. Anyway, I was Scientifico. We studied natural sciences and I went there a couple times for astronomy.”

“Great. But we have to go back to the morgue first.”

She gave him a puzzled look as they climbed in the Alfa Romeo cruiser. “Why?”

“I have to see the belt he hung himself with again.”

He explained what he saw in the closet the night before.
 

“Okay,” Lia said. “Definitely sounds interesting. Do you want to get a coffee before we go over?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking about coffee since I woke up, six hours ago.”
   

They pulled up to a bustling “Bar” as it was called on the sign. A herd of people were standing up against a ten foot long elbow-height counter, packed three people deep, barking fast orders to the baristas. Lia expertly wove her way to the front of the crowd immediately and got eye contact from one of the men behind the bar.
 

“What do you want?” she yelled back at Wolf.
 

“Just a…I’ll get what you are having.”

She whipped her head to the barista. “Due caffe’ e due brioche marmallatta.”
 

A few seconds later a familiar thimble of coffee was presented to him with a jam-filled croissant. He took a large bite of the croissant and a small sip of the coffee.
 

“Bouna?” She nodded her head to Wolf.

“Uh, si.”
 

He felt the glares of people waiting, impatiently, for the counter top real estate they occupied at the moment. He shoved the rest of the croissant in his mouth and downed the coffee with two hearty sips. She followed his actions, slapped down her cup, went to the unoccupied cash register, laid down some coins and threaded her way out the door. He followed her out, wondering what the hell just happened.
 

“Good lord. Felt like my first time all over again,” he mumbled to himself.
 

“What?”

“Nothing, never mind.”

They continued walking for another few seconds.
 

She turned with squinted eyes. “Are you saying that was like your first time having sex?”
 

“What? Uh, yeah,” he said. “That’s what I was saying.”
 

She looked down and resumed her walking. “So, your first time was that crowded? I don’t understand.”

“No, more like standing, uncomfortable, and over before I knew what happened.” He looked into the distance at nothing in particular. “Never mind. I very much regret saying that now.”

She burst into a high pitched natural laugh that magnified his caffeine buzz.
 

Wolf turned to Lia as she drove. “So, how the heck do you speak such perfect English?”

She laughed. “My mother is from New York. She spoke only English to me and my brothers growing up my whole life. It just comes second nature to me. And I also went for two years in college in North Carolina, at Wake Forest.”

“Aha. Okay, that explains it.”

“And you and Valerio?” He braced himself as she dove full speed into another traffic circle. “You seem like close friends on the force.”

“Yes. Valerio is kind of like a brother to me. He grew up with our family. I have three older brothers, and he has a brother, and they were all friends growing up.”

“Wow. Three brothers? Older brothers?” She nodded. “That must have been rough for you growing up.”

“You could say that,” she said with a smirk. Then her expression turned serious. “I had to fight for independence from my brothers growing up. Two of them were very protective of me. I hated it. I didn’t need the protection. It was hard.”
 

She paused, glancing to the right, then cranked the wheel left, throwing Wolf into a spastic look to his left, then realized she was using another convex mirror.
 

She looked at him and laughed softly. “I fought and gained the respect I deserved from my brothers.”

A heavy silence engulfed them for a minute.
 

“So, you feel this job…the colonnello…you aren’t getting the respect you deserve, or the chances you deserve?”
 

She glared out the windshield. “Yes. Something like that. Valerio was a friend of the family. He grew up with us. He knows I can handle myself. He knows I’m better than what they think. But it’s also a matter of paying your dues. But the dues are much more expensive for a woman in Italy.”

Wolf nodded his head. They drove alongside the lake shore once again. Diamond waves glistened in the sun.
 

“What do your brothers do? They cops too?”

“Ehhhhhh,” she exhaled, “let’s see, one is a lawyer in Roma, one is a Caribiniere in Bergamo, and one is Guardia di Finanza.”

“What’s
Guardia di Fananza
? Finance guards?”
 

“Yes. They are part of the military, kind of like the Caribinieri. They patrol the territorial waters of Italy. Working against smuggling, illegal immigration, that type of thing. Among a lot of other duties.”

“Okay.”

“Yes, Luca is my brother in the Guardia. I am most close to him.” Her face melted into a fond smile, then looked to him with a tinge of regret, as if she realized she was just flaunting a toy he didn’t.
 

She was, but she didn’t mean anything by it. They drove on in silence.

Chapter 17

They were buzzed into the morgue, this time by a female voice. He met the morning pathologist on duty, Bianca. Lia explained the situation, and Bianca left for a few minutes, returning with the bag from the night before.
 

Wolf brought the bag into the room where his brother lay, and set it down on the steel table. Lia followed close behind, intrigued. He removed both belts and lay them side by side on the table. The brown belt that was found around John’s neck was noticeably longer. The holes still lined up, but the wear marks were at least five inches apart.
 

“This brown belt isn’t John’s. It’s from someone with a waist band that is at least five inches bigger.”

“Yeah, but couldn’t the belt have stretched from him hanging on it?”

Wolf looked close at the belt. “It’s not stretched at all,” he said. “There’s a thread pattern on the edges, those would be broken with significant stretching. There’s not one broken thread.”
 

“Okay, so what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that my brother was found on the ground in his apartment. Not hanging from the ceiling. The chandelier couldn’t hold his weight, there was irrefutable evidence of that. So you tell me which is more likely…

“One —
 
He borrowed someone else’s belt, or stole it for the purpose of hanging himself, did some cocaine, then hung himself with the belt. He hangs there until he is almost dead, kicks the chair out with a convulsion, which sets off a slow drop of the chandelier…but a perfectly timed drop…because the hanging has to
kill
him. Otherwise he would have just gotten up later with a bad bruise on his head. So, the chandelier stays hanging,
just
until he dies, then it falls within time to still bruise him after death. Because, like the pathologist said last night, bruising can occur for only a short period of time after death.

“Or, scenario two — Someone strangles him with the belt, probably in a fit of rage. In an effort to cover it up, he strings him, or rather,
they
string him, to the chandelier.”

“They?” Lia asked.
 

“There’s no way one man could hold his dead weight up and string the belt on the chandelier at the same time. It had to have been two people. So, they are trying to cover up the murder with a hanging. They string him up, and all goes wrong when the chandelier won’t hold him. He drops, the chandelier drops. It makes a very loud noise, and they freak out. They lock the door and turn out the lights. Cristina said she went downstairs and saw the lights were off underneath the door. John wouldn’t have hanged himself in the dark. That wouldn’t have made sense. The door was locked from the inside. Keys still in the top lock. So they had to be still in the apartment. They probably freaked out after the loud crash…probably didn’t want to go out the front door in case the neighbors came knocking to see what happened. So they turned off the lights and sat quiet. Then they heard the knock at the door. They had to leave some other way, like out John’s balcony along the rooftop next door. They couldn’t have left out the front door, the door was locked, and his keys were found in the apartment.”

Lia was staring at him with raised eyebrows.
 

He caught her expression and stopped talking.
 

“I think that there was another man’s belt found around his neck.” She used a slow controlled voice. “I believe
that.
”

“How do you
explain
that fact? How does he have a heavier man’s belt around his neck?” Wolf asked. “It’s not his belt.”

She looked at him. “I don’t know.”
 

Wolf stared wide eyed at the floor, envisioning the night with perfect clarity. Doubt stabbed his line of thought, and it began to waver, and swirl apart. “We need to go talk to an astronomer.” He walked out of the room.
 

They drove in silence for the twenty minute journey south. Wolf stared unblinking out the window. In his mind he was there the night of John’s death. What really happened? Is it conceivable John killed himself? Had he given up on life?
He waits to become a mega successful blogger and author, only to end it all after snorting a bit of cocaine?