Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (13 page)

“No, only the parade people, the marchers, will be in costume. You can wear whatever you want.”

Back at the hotel, Lettie stopped by Beth’s room, and I knocked on Shirley and Crystal’s door but got no response. Lettie managed to get a call through to Ollie from a public phone in the lobby by using a phone card.

“I was a fool for even mentioning Meg and Crystal and Shirley to Ollie. Now he’ll do nothing but worry ‘til I get home,” Lettie fretted, kicking her shoes into a corner.

“Did Ollie know Meg?”

“No. He’s met Beth once or twice, but not Meg.”

“If I were you, I’d call him every night for the next few, just to relieve his mind.”

“Good idea,” Lettie said. “So what do you think about Victoria’s story—about Meg and Shirley and those poor patients? Is it possible that Shirley came on this trip just to get Meg?”

“And then Crystal disappears because . . .?”

“Huh?”

I slathered a big dollop of cream across my face. “Do you have a theory that explains why a mother would bring a kid on a trip on which she plans to commit a murder? And why the kid then promptly disappears?”

“Well, no.”

“I’d say we can scratch Shirley off our list of suspects . . . if we ever did suspect her.”

“Scratch her
off
?”

“Sure. If she had had any idea of killing Meg, why would she have handed Victoria her motive, on a silver platter?”

———

It’s odd how we go on vacation to get out of the rut we’re in and immediately start forming new ruts. Lettie and I walked straight to the patio for breakfast, took the same table we’d had yesterday, and ordered the same things with one exception: I added a large fruit cup to my order, because I had noticed one on my way in and thought it looked delicious. We each sat in the same chair as yesterday.

“I’ll go to Tessa’s room after I eat and see if she’s called that vicar yet. I guess today would be a good time to catch him at the church, right after morning services.”

“Do you need me to go with you?” Lettie asked.

I shook my head.

“I sort of told Beth I’d do something with her this morning,” Lettie continued. “I think she wanted to go to services at the Duomo, but I’m so worried you’ll have another one of your spells like you had yesterday. Don’t you want me to go with you?”

“No. In fact, I think I’ll see if Amy can go with me. I want to get to know her a little better.” I buttered a croissant. “I’ve been thinking about motives. Paul Vogel is obviously interested in Jim Kelly and Geoffrey Reese-Burton—at least he was yesterday. Why do you suppose that is? Does either of them have a motive?”

“Not that I know of, and you say we can forget about Shirley because she blabbed her motive to Victoria.”

“Well, don’t you agree that she would hardly have mentioned it, if she had any thought of committing murder?”

“I suppose so. Beth had a motive. The way Meg belittled and embarrassed her all the time could be construed as a motive, don’t you think? Especially over time. Living with her. The resentment would build up and build up . . .” Lettie bit her lip. “But Beth couldn’t kill a fly. I’m serious. I’ve seen her pick up crickets in a napkin and carry them outside.”

“Sorry, Lettie, but there’s no connection. Crickets are innocent creatures. You can’t hate a cricket. Meg was a human who knew what she was doing, knew when she was hurting her sister, and did it deliberately. That’s evil. Crickets don’t know about good and evil.”

“Okay, what about Amy?”

“Motive? None that I know of. Of course, we all did hear her say, ‘I hate you, Meg,’ when we were boarding the vaporetto in Venice. But that was more in sympathy for poor Beth than for herself. How about Lucille Vogel?”

“Lucille? I don’t think they even know . . . knew each other,” Lettie said. “I don’t recall ever seeing them together, so what possible motive could she have?”

“Money. If she really is a drug addict, she needs money to support her habit, doesn’t she?”

“And she looked like she had money yesterday, didn’t she? Lucille might have plenty of her own, though. We have no reason to think she needs to steal.”

A city bus roared by on the other side of the hedge that separated us from the street, interrupting conversation and leaving a trail of foul air in its wake. “I told you the main reason I thought that Ivo, the Gypsy man, couldn’t have killed Meg—other than the fact that an experienced thief would have better ways of dealing with the situation—was because he wouldn’t have known about the knife. Unless it was lying out in plain view, he wouldn’t have known about it. Yesterday, Marco said Beth told him she’d put the knife in a dresser drawer.”

“Ivo might have been going through the drawer when Meg walked in on him.”

“That’s possible.” I thought about it. Yes, that was possible. “But Lucille
did
know about the knife. Think about it, Lettie. A drug addict, desperate for a fix, notices Meg has a lot of cash in her wallet, knows Meg’s sister has just bought a knife that could be hocked or fenced for a decent chunk of change, and knows what room they’re staying in.”

Lettie nodded, finished her coffee, and headed upstairs to find Beth.

I was on my way to Tessa and Amy’s room when, passing through the lobby, I came to a screeching halt. The sign on a little booth advertised the rental of cell phones, pagers, fax machines, printers, and various electronic gizmos. I hadn’t brought a cell phone with me because I had assumed it wouldn’t work in Italy, and I had never used a pager in my life, but here was a possible solution to Lettie’s anxiety about me and my diabetes.

It wasn’t that easy. The boy who waited on me spoke no English, and his attempts to show me how the pagers worked made no sense at all. I could see, however, that they had little screens and could display either numbers or letters, so I rented two of them for a week and trusted that Tessa could help me. If it turned out that they weren’t what I needed, I could bring them back.

Tessa sat with me on the bed and showed me how the two-way pagers worked. Amy was barely awake, her eyes still puffy from sleep, and her voice gravelly. Tessa, her head turbaned in a shampoo-scented towel, punched a message into one device and sent it to me, two feet away.

“Boboli Gardens,” I read. “So that would tell me where you are, but not what you want me to do about it.”

“Right. If I want to talk to you, I get a phone number from somewhere, maybe a phone booth or the bartender’s phone, and just send you the number . . . like so.” Tessa looked at the phone on the nightstand between the two beds. She punched in that number and sent it to me.

“Let me try one.” I punched in ROOM 238 and sent it. It was easy. “Have you called that vicar yet? The one you told me about last night?”

Tessa checked her watch and dragged a phone book from under the nightstand. “It’s not too early to call on a Sunday, I’m sure, but I bet he’s already doing a service. I probably should have called earlier.”

While Tessa waited for an answer, I explained everything to Amy. She seemed too fog-brained to process more than the basics, but I had the idea Tessa had mentioned the possibility of a memorial service to her already. She didn’t look surprised.

“If the vicar can see me, would you go with me?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything about stuff like that,” Amy said.

“But you know what Meg liked and didn’t like, I don’t even know if she belonged to a church, or had any particular beliefs we should be sensitive to, or—”

“Meg belonged to the church of Meg!” Amy diverted her gaze to the window. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Our parents took us to the Episcopal Church when we were little. I don’t believe Meg attended any church regularly since she grew up . . . not that I know of. So if this is an Anglican Church or Church of England, that will be fine.”

Amy pulled a bra and panties from a red suitcase. I debated whether I should repeat my request for her to go with me as she padded, barefoot, to a closet and dragged out a yellow shirt.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’ll go with you. But I have a date tonight, so I don’t want to be gone too long.”

———

Amy needed a few minutes to dress, so I headed down to my own room. Something made me look out the northwest-facing window in the stairwell. A bedraggled woman pulled herself, hobbling, to the Fountain of the Bloody Knife. Her dirty, flowered skirt was half covered by an equally grimy blue-flowered shirt, and her blonde hair hung in wet strings. She was barefoot. She fell onto the low ledge that surrounded the pool and leaned over, dipping her hands into the water. As she lowered her head to splash it, I saw the bottoms of her feet. They were bleeding and as raw as fresh hamburger. After splashing several handfuls of water into her face, she turned toward the hotel, but I already knew it was Shirley Hostetter.

I dashed down the stairs and out the side door. I glimpsed a few people milling around near her who were apparently afraid to approach her. Shirley appeared dazed, and caution told me not to rush up to her since I might startle her. I simply sat beside her on the edge of the fountain and said, “Shirley?”

She looked at me and smiled, tears beginning to roll.

“I’ll get you to your room, Shirley. Sit here a minute while I run in and get some help.”

“No. I don’t need help. Just let me l on you. I can walk.”

“Your feet, Shirley. Your poor feet. Will you at least wait a minute while I run in and get a pair of slippers for you?” I had the feeling she didn’t want to deal with anyone else and would have preferred for me not to have seen her, either, but it was too late for that.

“I’ve been looking for Crystal,” she whispered, “but I couldn’t find her.”

I was relieved to find the side door into the stairwell could be opened from the outside. I guessed they locked it in the evenings, so after dark it could be used only as an exit, because I had tried it last night after we got off the bus and had found it locked. I dashed down the hall to my room. My own slippers had backs and would not have fit Shirley, I figured, since she’s several inches taller than I am. Lettie had brought slip-ins, so I thanked her in her absence for her kind donation and took them out to the fountain.

Shirley refused to go down the hall to the elevator, insisting that we take the stairs—up two floors, four flights of stairs. She put most of her weight on me and the banister, but uttered not a whimper the whole way up. I imagined she wouldn’t allow herself that luxury, lest I remind her I had recommended the elevator.

“Do you have your room card?” I asked.

“No, I lost it.”

As I was planning how I would need to drop Shirley in the hall, prop her up against the wall and run down to the lobby for help with opening the door, she added, “We put Crystal’s card on the ledge above the door because we knew she’d lock herself out, otherwise.”

Above each door on the hall was a narrow transom window and a deep ledge. I couldn’t reach that high, but by backing up and jumping a few times, I saw the card. I used a sheet of newspaper, rolled lengthwise to coax it off the ledge, then attempted to return the front page of
La Nazione
to an acceptable state of neatness for the occupant of room 357.

I helped Shirley onto a bed and worked on her feet with a wet towel while I convinced her to let me call room service for some breakfast. She lay heavily, like one completely defeated, and tried half-heartedly to cry. Faint traces of mascara and tears still streaked her face, which had faded to the color of bread dough. As we waited for room service to come, Shirley began to talk.

“I went to a Gypsy camp. I found out where the largest one was. There are three big ones outside of town, and I exchanged clothes with this woman I found at the train station. I knew I’d stand out like a sore thumb with my own clothes, and my hair.

“The conditions they live in are horrible . . . you can’t imagine. This camp, there must have been five hundred people there, is just lean-tos. People living in plywood . . . corrugated tin . . . cardboard.”

Shirley seemed about to doze off, so I prodded her with, “How did you manage to communicate?”

“I didn’t. I walked all around the place several times until I had seen everything I could see without walking into someone’s . . . home. Then it got dark, and the music started. The men played guitars and . . . things. All the women danced around this huge bonfire, and I knew I’d be too conspicuous if I just stood there, but I couldn’t possibly let myself go enough to dance unless I got a little drunk first. There was plenty of wine around, in big goatskins . . . gallon jugs. So I drank until I loosened up. I thought I was doing pretty good, too.” Shirley raised one hand and soundlessly snapped her fingers. I saw the faintest hint of a grin on one side of her mouth.

“But I danced right out of my headscarf, and that was it. Game over. I ran out and kept running for about a mile or so, I think, until I looked back and there was no one behind me anymore.”

“They actually chased you?”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure they thought I was a spy, a police informant. I tried to get away by walking fast, but there were about ten of them gaining on me, so I broke into a full run.”

“It was your blonde hair that did it?” I asked.

“Some of them are blonde, too. I think it was the haircut. Sixty-dollar cuts and moisture-conditioned hair are not the norm in a place like that. Anyway, I walked along the road. I was thinking, all night long, that a bus would come along or a car would stop and pick me up. I knew, at least I thought I knew . . . at first . . . then I wasn’t so sure, that I was heading in the right direction, back to Florence. But I didn’t know how far it was, because I had taken a bus out there yesterday and hadn’t paid attention to the distance. I walked all night. Not one bus. A few cars, but they just looked at me as they sped past. I guess I looked like a derelict. I suppose they were afraid to pick me up. Miles and miles and miles. I had flip-flops to begin with, but one of them broke, and I tried shifting the good one from one foot to the other. That made the bare foot hurt worse, so I finally chucked that flip-flop, too.”

“You poor baby.” I checked her feet again. A doctor needed to take a look at them, but for now I thought it best to leave them open to the air.