Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (6 page)

Shirley and Crystal both babbled, interrupting each other, until the desk clerk picked up the phone. “He’ll be right out,” the clerk said. Quattrocchi strode out and strode straight to the desk. He motioned to a uniformed officer who, until that moment, had been part of the wallpaper. The four of them hurried into the interview room, and a few seconds later, Lettie popped out.

“Well, something more important than me came up. Did you see that knife?” Lettie glanced back over her shoulder, but the door had already closed behind her. “You should have seen Tessa’s face when they came in! That’s the knife Beth bought yesterday, Dotsy.”

“I know. Did you hear Crystal or Shirley say anything?” We stood at the elevator, apparently on our way up to our room without having consciously decided to go there, and I remembered the stationery I hadn’t finished purchasing. I had left the gift shop attendant with both the stationery and ten Euros. It only cost five something.

“Crystal said she found it in a fountain. That’s all I heard.” Lettie walked with me back to the shop. The clerk had my purchase and my change in a bag behind her counter.

Seconds later, another commotion. Two officers barreled in, past the sentry at the side door, with a scruffy man between them. Each had one of the scruffy man’s arms by the biceps, just under his armpits, so he was propelled along with his feet barely touching the polished marble floor. Close behind them was Achille, our bus driver. His face fairly glowed with what looked like self-satisfaction or maybe even pride. They turned the corner, headed for the reception desk, and spun off a breeze thick with the odor of unwashed hair and perspiration as they passed. The former aroma obviously came from the captive man in the middle, whose hair didn’t look like it had ever been washed, but the sweat could have come from all four of them.

The scruffy man wore a dark red shirt with sleeves rolled up, an embroidered vest, and black pants that probably had been chinos at one time. Around his left wrist, a tattooed serpent—green with blood-red eyes, coiled, its fangs in strike position over his pulse. He stumbled along in his dilapidated cross-trainers, saying nothing as the policemen—or more accurately, the carabinieri—growled and hissed at him in bursts of Italian.

“Dotsy! That’s the same man who sold us the little Disney puppets this morning.” Lettie threw both hands over her mouth.

“It sure is.” I would have known that even if my friend with the photographic memory hadn’t pointed it out. I had noticed that snake around his wrist when he was making change for Beth. I wondered if the snake wasn’t a deliberate distraction. While his left wrist flashed around in front of a customer, his right hand could be exploring a purse, pocket or fanny pack. That’s how pickpockets worked, I had heard. Like a magician, they divert your attention away from the real action. “And I’d say he’s almost certainly the one who took Beth’s money and cards.”

“Oh. You might be right.”

“Of course I’m right.” I hadn’t meant for that to come out sounding quite so arrogant, but I didn’t think it was worth amending.

The desk clerk picked up a phone and, within a few seconds, Captain Quattrocchi strode across the lobby. He glanced all around, as if searching for another door to stuff these new guys behind. Achille saw us and sent us a little wave with the fingers of one hand.

The elevator door opened and closed, but Lettie and I stayed where we were. I couldn’t leave right now. Quattrocchi dashed back to the interview room, leaving the four men at the desk. The scruffy man—the Gypsy/puppet vendor—stood stiffly, eyes darting from left to right as if he was looking for a chance to make a run for it. Then Crystal and Shirley emerged, minus the plastic bag, and Quattrocchi waved the four men in.

I called the elevator back and held the door open for Crystal and Shirley.

Crystal looked uncertainly at her mother. “Do you think it’s okay for us to go to our room? He said he needed to talk to us some more.”

Her words were polite enough, but her tone held that contemptuous insolence only a teenage girl could convey. She might as well have said, “Only an idiot would make me go to my room.”

“Crystal found the knife in a fountain in front of that church by the train stationn she . . . when she left a little while ago.” I imagined that Shirley had started to say “ran away” and changed it to “left.” The church she referred to had to be Santa Maria Novella, which I knew was close to the northwest corner of our hotel. “She said it was just lying there . . .”

“It was just there! All shiny, and like, you couldn’t miss it. Like, I knew immediately it was the knife we had on the bus yesterday, and I thought to myself, ‘I guess I should just leave it there and call the police.’ But then I thought, ‘what are the chances it’ll still be here when I come back with the police?’ Zero, right?” Crystal nodded and looked around as if for confirmation that the knife would have been taken if she had left it there. She had a good point.

“So I found this plastic bag, and I had to step in the fountain with one foot to reach the knife.” She kicked up one wet boot that looked as if it was made of some material that wouldn’t be affected by battery acid, let alone water. Above the boot was a soggy black-and-white striped stocking that sagged below her knee. “You shoulda seen that man, the Captain, when I walked in carrying that knife! His eyes ‘bout popped outta his head!”

“Crystal, fortunately, has learned to speak quite good Italian. We had an exchange student . . .”

The elevator stopped at our floor. Crystal and Shirley had one more floor to go, so we said goodbye and left them.

As the door closed again, I heard Crystal whine, “Mom . . .” She dragged it out to three syllables that sounded like the first three notes of “Over There.”

Our dinner was cold. As twilight crept over the city, lights came on and the huge Duomo, to the east of the Hotel Fontana, lit up. We could see the top of it beyond the rooftops from our French doors. I opened them up to the evening air.

“So they must think that Gypsy did it,” Lettie said, stacking the stainless steel plate covers on the desk.

“It would appear so.”

“Do you think he did?”

“Now, Lettie, how should I know? I don’t know any more about it than you do.” I dragged a chair to the table and seated myself in front of the chicken cacciatore. Lettie had arranged everything nicely. “But it is odd, you know. I hate to sound like I’m stereotyping, but this guy is a Gypsy, and they’re infamous thieves.” I paused, not really sure what I did think, quite yet. “If you are a thief, you get used to breaking and entering, taking stuff, getting away without getting caught . . . don’t you?”

“Right.”

“So if you break into someone’s hotel room, you’d have a standard little song and dance you go through if that room turns out to be inhabited, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“You know what? He could have used Beth’s own room card to get in! Didn’t he take her room card ang with her money?”

“Yes, but how would he have known what room or what hotel it was for?”

I grabbed my bag off the floor and scrambled through it for my room card. “It’s just a blank card. It doesn’t have the room number on it. But it does say ‘Hotel Fontana.’ Wait. They gave us the cards yesterday in a little paper sleeve that did have the room number on it, didn’t they?”

“Yes, my card is still in the paper sleeve.”

“You really should toss that, or leave it here in the room, Lettie. They do it that way so in case it gets taken, the thief won’t have your room number.”

“But if Beth left hers in the sleeve . . .”

“Which is possible, after all, you did.”

“I’ll take it out right now.” Lettie retrieved her bag from the dresser, slipped her card out of its paper sleeve, and put the sleeve in the top dresser drawer. “There.”

“So it’s likely he did go to Meg and Beth’s room, or at least came here with the intention of doing so, and then what? See, that’s the part that makes no sense.”

“I don’t see.”

“Say he goes into their room using Beth’s card and finds Meg there. He what, kills her? Just happens to find a lovely collector’s item knife—extra-sharp—lying there, so he grabs it and kills the woman?”

“We don’t yet know if she was killed with the knife.”

“Pretty good odds, wouldn’t you say? The knife sure didn’t belong in that fountain. But whatever she was killed with, it’s the same problem: a career thief, a pickpocket, an artful dodger has ways of getting out of embarrassing situations like that. He’s been through it before.”

“Well, I don’t know . . .” Lettie wiped a wine spill off the table with her napkin.

“If murder was how he dealt with getting caught, there’d be a trail of dead bodies, wouldn’t there?”

“Maybe he’s not in the habit of breaking into hotel rooms. This was a fluke, you know. It wouldn’t be every day he’d get a free pass into a tourist’s hotel room.”

I put the tray of dirty dishes outside our door and suggested we take in the night air on the hotel roof. I had heard it had a lovely view, and I had already noticed the elevator had a button for
tetto
, which I figured, must mean roof.

Just before we closed the door, the phone rang, and Lettie ran back to get it. “They want me back downstairs. I guess I’ll have to take a rain check on that trip to the roof.”

“If I’m not here when you get back, that’s where I’ll be.” I didn’t feel like staying in the room by myself. I’d already checked out the TV; game shows in a language you don’t know are the ultimate bore.

Lettie, oh good, you are here.” Beth stood in the doorway. She looked so tiny; as if her sister’s death had diminished her. She still wore the same flowered blouse and navy slacks I had last seen her in when she had stood at the elevator, sweating, muttering and swinging that pot of flowers by its rim. Lettie held out her arms and Beth moved into them, letting the tears fall on Lettie’s shoulder. I considered leaving the room because Beth, after all, was just a new acquaintance of mine, and I felt like an intruder on a private moment. But to announce that I was leaving would be an interruption, and to walk out without saying anything would be rude. So I stepped out onto the balcony. From the street below, lights were popping on in all shades, from the amber glow of the sidewalk lamps to the blue-white beam of a Vespa’s halogen headlight. But no neon. I wondered if they had a local ordinance that forbade neon lights, and my common sense said, “Of course they do.” In fact, it probably would be so unthinkable in this city that survives on its medieval heritage that they don’t even have to make it a law. Instant death for possession of a neon device.

“I’m so sorry I have to rush off, but they called me down to the lobby right when you walked in,” I heard Lettie say. “Can we talk when they finish with me? I don’t think it’ll take too long.” She dashed out, leaving Beth standing there.

I said, “I’m going up to the roof, Beth. Would you like to go with me? A little night air . . .”

“Oh. Oh, yes, I’d like that. I didn’t know we had a roof that you could go out on.”

Beth followed me onto the elevator, and I pushed the top button. I had decisions to make and make quickly. Should I mention Crystal finding the knife, and should I mention seeing our Gypsy friend in the lobby? In an official investigation of this sort, I knew it was crucial that witnesses not taint each other’s recollections. Things can get hopelessly bogged down if people start “recollecting” what somebody else tells them. That was obviously why they’d insisted on us all going to our own rooms earlier. But it was Beth’s knife, after all, and it had been found. Did Beth even know her knife was missing? And the man who almost certainly swiped her money and her cards—the man we had tried unsuccessfully to hunt down earlier—was downstairs, or at least had been downstairs a little while ago. Wouldn’t I be remiss if I
didn’t
tell her? I decided to err on the side of caution and not mention it. The knife and Beth’s other belongings would certainly be returned to her, anyway.

The elevator opened onto a wonderful little patio, but I barely noticed it. For the moment, my breath had been taken away. The Duomo, floodlit from all sides, glowed like a huge Fabergé egg nestled in the carnelian tile rooftops of the city. Rooftops that by day were orange-red had deepened to a rich, dark wine. It was a sight I’ll never forget.

Beth gasped. “Oh my.”

We ventured over to the iron rail at the edge of the roof. Its bars slanted inward at about waist level, so it would be hard to fall off accidentally, and I imagined it was sufficient to thwart the gymnastic efforts of toddlers. At the back of the patio, near the elevator door, was a wet bar, closed down and padlocked. Several metal tables and chairs were scattered around; tables that had a hole in the center for the insertion of an umbrella. The umbrellas, apparently, were stashaway.

“I’m still in shock,” Beth said. She curled her fingers around the protecting bars.

“I’m sure you are. It was you who found her, wasn’t it?”

She paused a moment before she answered. “Yes. It was awful. I just can’t describe . . .”

I stayed quiet.

“She was lying there, blood all over the wall, all over the floor . . . everywhere. Her throat was cut. It looked as if someone had tried to take her head off.”

I shuddered and glanced toward Beth. Her eyes glistened in the reflected light of the Duomo. She quickly turned her head, and still I said nothing; I wanted her to go on without any interference from me.

“She was at the entrance to the bathroom.” Beth sucked a deep breath and went on. “Across the threshold. Her legs were on the tiles, and her . . . the upper part of her was on the carpet. She wasn’t wearing anything but her bra and panties . . . and socks . . . black socks. Like she had been in the bathroom, and . . . Well, Meg usually puts on her makeup at the bathroom sink before she gets all the way dressed. So it looked to me like someone had surprised her, like she heard something and came out of the bathroom to see, and . . .”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So sorry it happened, and so sorry it had to be you who found her.”