Dying For Siena (23 page)

Dante stopped the history of Stella Catering in full stride. “So could it have been your female colleague who was seen at the
Certosa
? Maybe she replaced you instead of Paolo.”

Sara smiled, the mysterious smile of
La Gioconda
, the Mona Lisa who’d been born not far from Siena. “Not likely,
Commissario
. Anna gave birth a week ago. To the most darling little boy. Why, he’s already smiling, can you believe it? Strapping little boy, too. He weighed—”

Dante leaned forward. “Let me see if I can get this straight. We have an eyewitness who is willing to swear under oath that a female employee at the
Certosa
—” Dante pulled out his notebook and flipped a few pages, “—dressed in a black-and-white uniform and wearing white gloves—”

Sara Tommasi snorted, a most unladylike sound.

Dante looked up from his notes. “Yes?” he asked politely.

“The
Certosa
is nice, but it isn’t the Excelsior Hotel. None of us wear uniforms unless it’s an official dinner. And I certainly don’t wear white gloves.”

Dante looked up at the ceiling and then out the window. It was the hottest part of the afternoon, when even the pigeons took refuge in the shade under the eaves. The big windows were open, the rooftops gray-red in the hard afternoon sunlight. The view always helped him think. “If it wasn’t you at the
Certosa
,
Signorina
Tommasi,” he said, knowing what the answer would be, “then who was it?”

She shrugged, smooth shoulders rising and falling. “Who knows?”

Dante looked over at Nick, whose face was as grim as he knew his was. Someone was lying. Either Faith Murphy or Sara Tommasi. If Sara’s relatives or this Paolo could vouch for her, then Faith Murphy had just moved up in the Murder Suspect Sweepstakes.

Dante took down the name of the waiter who had replaced her, the name of the two owners of Stella Catering and the number of Sara Tommasi’s parents.

“
Commissario
?” Cini stood in the doorway, eyes widening as he saw Sara Tommasi. He stared, slightly slack-jawed.

“Over here, Cini,” Dante said dryly.

Cini’s head snapped around to him. “Eh? Oh! Yes, sir. You have a phone call in your office from Florence, sir.” He stood to attention, but his eyes wandered Sara’s way.

Dante pushed himself up from his desk, grabbing the numbers Sara Tommasi had given him.

Cini’s eyes were riveted again on the young woman as if they were magnets and she was made of iron filings. Gorgeous, brunette iron filings.

“Cini, while I take the call, why don’t you stay in here and…keep an eye on things?”

“Yes,
sir
!” Cini moved enthusiastically into the room.

Nick was watching the scene with a half-smile on his face.

Dante knew Cini needed a little boost to his love life. He hadn’t dated since he’d been jilted a couple of months ago by the daughter of Dante’s high school math teacher. Maybe he should clear the decks for Cini.

“Nick—why don’t you wait for me downstairs at the corner bar? I won’t be long.”

“Absolutely.” Nick got to his feet and hobbled to the door.

“See you in about ten minutes,” Dante said, in the tiny little vestibule just off the landing.

Nick nodded, moved past the big locker where the officers kept their weapons and started down the ancient, uneven staircase.

Dante watched him for a second, then, hating himself for sounding like his mother, and Aunt Lidia, and Aunt Beatrice and
Nonna
, called out, “Be careful going down. The steps are steep.”

Nick didn’t turn around. He just lifted his hand to show he’d heard and continued his slow way down the stairs, one at a time.

Dante opened his office door and breathed in deeply. Someone had had the good sense to open his windows. He could smell what was going on in the neighborhood. Freshly ground coffee, suntan lotion, tomato sauce cooking, jasmine in full bloom, dust, heat…the heady smells of Siena in the summer.

A flash of yellow caught his eye. The Eagle banner, a two-headed eagle on a gold background, fluttered in the breeze.

The banners lined the
Via di Città
up to the “border” with the Forest
contrada
, crackling when the wind rose in the evenings and forming a gold corridor four meters up. Two blocks east, the corridor turned green and orange with the colors of the Forest, and two blocks west, the Panther’s red and blue banners proclaimed the switch of an allegiance from one step to the next.

It reminded Dante of those houses in
Alto Adige
where the living room was in Italy and the bedroom was in Austria.

He heard the sound of a foot connecting solidly with a football and the cries of young boys going up in a cheer.

Another generation of kids was playing football the next block over in the
Quattro Canti
, the Four Corners. No doubt they were as delighted to play under the noses of the cops as he had been when he’d been a boy.

By the time the bored officer standing guard duty at the
Questura
had ambled his way down the
Via del Castoro
over to the Four Corners, the ball would have disappeared, as would most of the boys, into the labyrinth of streets around the cathedral.

It was a game that had been playing itself out for generations and would continue to do so as long as there were children, and cops, in Siena.

A violin sounded up, then a viola.
Palazzo Chigi
was only a few rooftops away. The Chigiana Music Festival was about to start and the musicians were practicing. Though he knew he had barbaric tastes in music, Dante had very, very fond memories of a certain Californian viola player.

He leaned out the window for a moment, wishing with all his heart that he were at the San Marco
Compagnia Militare
, the red-brick building that was the heart and soul of his
contrada
, with the photographs of his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather up on the wall.

“Siena doesn’t have crime,” he remembered his boss saying to a visiting politician from Rome. “It has the
Palio
instead.”

But, with a sigh, he realized that, notwithstanding his best efforts, a crime had been committed and he had to see to solving it.

He picked up the phone. “Oh, there you are
Commissario
,” the operator said in relief. “Please hold, you have a call from the Florence
Questura
.”

A moment later, a deep voice came on the line. “Dante, how are you, you son of a bitch? How are the ladies? You keeping them busy?”

Dante smiled. He always enjoyed the company of Marco Ricci. They’d trained together at the Academy in Rome and had done their best at night to lay all the pretty girls and drink all the white Castelli Romani wine in Rome.

“I do my best. But there are so many of them, Marco, and only one of me.”

Marco’s heartfelt sigh was only a little theatrical. “Lucky you. I remember…” His voice suddenly turned brisk. “Never mind, I’m married now. Listen, I called because I have the toxicology results of that bottle of whiskey you sent over for us to analyze, and there’s a little surprise.”

Dante sat down and picked up a pen. “This case has been nothing but surprises so far, but what can you expect when foreigners are involved.”

“That’s the truth. So listen, I’ll fax you the results and send you the original by courier, but right now take note of the fact that the bottle of whiskey had enough Gamma hydroxybutyrate to drop a horse.”

Dante’s pen hovered. “Uh, would you want to repeat that?”

“Gamma hydroxybutyrate. Otherwise known as Liquid E, Organic Quaalude and other cute street names. Sold as Temazipan and Rohypnol. It’s not too common over here yet, thank God.

“In America it’s what’s known as a—” Dante could hear him shuffling papers, “—a date rape drug.” Marco’s voice spoke the English words hesitantly, and he pronounced the words “date rape” as if they had four syllables. “That means—”

“I know what it means, Marco.” Dante was trying to square a date rape drug with the distinctly unattractive man he’d seen stretched out on his cell floor.

“That’s right, I forgot. You’re practically an American.”

“Yeah. So it’s a date rape drug? How potent?”

Marco’s voice turned grim. “As potent as they come. I checked it out. It’s a hypnotic and an anesthetic. There have been a hundred-and-twenty deaths in America so far. Mostly young girls whose drinks had been spiked. I haven’t heard of any middle-aged men. It’s been a controlled substance since March, 2000.

“A few drops of Gamma hydroxybutyrate added to a drink can make a young girl lose consciousness within a quarter of an hour. A dose of— How much did your guy weigh?”

“Seventy kilos.”

Dante could hear scribbling. “A dose of four milligrams would induce respiratory distress, seizures, coma and possibly death. The bottle contained enough GHB to administer five milligrams per glass. Someone seriously disliked your victim.”

“A knife in the heart is a pretty good sign of that, I think.”

As he was talking, Dante was flipping through the documentation he’d built up during the investigation. The file was thick and dense, another reason why he hated murder.

He finally found the copy of the autopsy report, and he had to still his stomach as he remembered the autopsy. His finger ran down the blood tests.

“Listen, we’ve got a pretty good medical examiner at
Le Scotte
. And he didn’t find anything in the blood but alcohol. Actually, more alcohol than blood. How’s that?”

“Well, GHB is called a ‘stealth drug’. Apparently it’s very hard to detect. When was the autopsy performed?”

Dante did a quick calculation in his head. “About thirty-six hours postmortem.”

“That’s it then. It would have been metabolized if—”

“If?”

“Well, that’s the weird thing, Dante. If he’d imbibed any GHB. Which I doubt he did. The bottle you sent us was full.”

“Could the victim have drunk a little bit? Just enough to—you know, push him over?”

“Nope. The bottle was a seventy-centiliter bottle and there were seventy centiliters of liquid inside. Someone had eased up the excise tax tab, poured some of the whiskey out, topped it up with GHB, probably with a syringe, then stuck the tab back down.”

“Did you—”

“Yes, we sent it to Rome.”

They both knew the Rome state police laboratory was the only place in Italy that could carry out DNA testing. There had been talk of setting up another laboratory in Milan, but so far—like many things in Italy—it had remained just that—talk.

“But this is clearly a guy who reads his thrillers. There were no fingerprints on the bottle—none. Zip. So I think he might’ve had the smarts not to lick the tab. He probably used a wet sponge.

“At any rate, I know the head of the lab in Rome and he owes me a favor. He’ll send me the results as soon as they come in. He won’t sit on it like they usually do.”

“This is strange,” Dante said slowly.

“You better believe it. Someone goes to great lengths to poison a bottle and the victim doesn’t even have the good taste to drink it.”

“It would’ve been overkill. The guy had a three-hundred-and-fifty blood alcohol.”

Dante could almost hear Marco wince. “Christ.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a weird case, isn’t it?”

Dante sighed. “Yeah.”

Murders weren’t usually weird, not in Italy. They were pretty straightforward, or at least that had been his experience in the four years he’d spent at the Naples
Questura
.

There had been a murder every three days there, on average, and none of them had been strange. Brutal maybe, but not strange. Most of them were mob killings, the who and the why and the how as clear as a bullet to the back of the neck, and the rest were passion killings. In that case, it was the murderer who usually called in the police, and they would arrive to find the distraught wife or appalled husband still holding the pistol, crying over the loss of the loved one.

As if the police were priests, the killer would start babbling a confession as soon as they walked in the door, looking hopefully at them as if they had the power of absolution.

This wasn’t anything like that.

“Foreigners,” he said again.

“Tell me about it. Last March we started getting hysterical phone calls from little old ladies living in
San Lorenzo
. You know—the marketplace?”

It was the central fruit and vegetable market in Florence and home to the elderly poor and recent immigrants. “Sure.”

“Well, they were shouting about bloodbaths and screaming children, so we got over there real quick. You know what we saw?”

Bloodbaths.
Dante’s stomach gave a little warning twinge. “Do I want to hear this?”

“Come on, Dante. Turns out it was
Eid Al Adha
, this Muslim religious holiday which has to be celebrated by sacrificing goats. Abundantly. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny sixth-floor apartment turned into a slaughterhouse. There was so much blood we had to wear rubber boots.”

Dante’s stomach slid greasily up his throat. He swallowed and it moved back down. Grudgingly. “That’s really, ah, interesting, Marco, but I have to go now. Listen, get that DNA report to me as soon as you have it, okay ?”

“Absolutely. What horse did your
contrada
draw?” Marco had always loved the
Palio
.

“Lina.”

“Good horse. And who’s your jockey?”

“Nerbo.”

“He’s the best,” Marco said approvingly. “Nasty, with a lot of dirty tricks up his sleeve. Well, this might be the Snail’s year,” Marco said genially.

Dante hung up on Marco’s chuckle. He tapped his pen against the desktop once, then twice, sharply.

The bottle of whiskey Sara Tommasi swore she hadn’t delivered to Roland Kane’s door had been poisoned. But not drunk. He let the possibilities settle in his mind, then lifted the receiver of the phone and dialed the first number on the sheet of paper in front of him.

Fifteen minutes and three phone calls later, he put the phone back down. Paolo Tucci, the owners of Stella Catering and Sara Tommasi’s parents all swore Sara had left the
Certosa
at 5:30 p.m. If it was a conspiracy, it was a seamless one.