Dying For Siena (24 page)

When he stuck his head into the interrogation room, he saw Cini behind the young woman, his arms crossed over her waist. Dante narrowed his eyes. “Cini?”

Cini jumped and moved three meters away from Sara. He stood stiffly at attention.

“Sir. I was just…just showing Sara—
Signorina
Tommasi—how we in the police force…how we subdue criminals. Sir.” He was beet red.

“Well, you might want to show
Signorina
Tommasi how we in the police force walk out the door.” Dante wondered if the police force had a special hold for that. “Accompany her up to the
Certosa
and have her wait in the archive room. The receptionist will show you which room it is. Wait outside, and when we’re finished, you can accompany
Signorina
Tommasi to Florence. To the—” He switched his gaze. “To the hospital?”

She nodded.

“To the hospital at Careggi. Is that clear, Cini? Cini? You might want to look at me when I’m giving you orders.”

Cini’s head swiveled and he turned an even deeper shade of red.

“Yes, sir,” he mumbled. “Very clear.”

Dante walked out to the little antechamber which held the gun lockers and entered his combination in the lock. He reached into the little tray and, for the first time in days, put on his shoulder holster. He hated the damn thing because it meant he had to wear a jacket in this heat.

Dante sprinted down the stairs. Nick was waiting for him at Ugo’s corner bar.

Dante parted the long plastic strings that served as a transparent door in the summer and peeped in. Ugo was regaling Nick with a blow-by-blow account of the Eagle’s victory two years ago. Dante had heard it at least three hundred times.

“Nick,” he said, “let’s go. Sorry, Ugo.”

Ugo had his hand in the air, which meant that he was now imitating the jockey on the third lap of the track. In three years, the words and the gestures had remained unwavering, like a liturgy.

Nick dug into his pocket and paid for his cappuccino
,
then met Dante at the door. “So—what’s up?”

Dante started up the
Via di Città
. “What’s up is that the bottle of whiskey brought to the murdered man’s cell by a maid only Faith Murphy saw was poisoned.”

“Hey,” Nick stopped in his tracks. “That doesn’t mean Faith poisoned it.”

Dante nudged him forward again, not an easy thing to do with someone of Nick’s heft. “Maybe. Maybe not. To tell the truth, I don’t see her doing that either. But there’s something really screwed up here and I hate it when it’s like that.” He veered left into the
Via delle Terme
, going as quickly as Nick’s knee would allow. Nick followed obediently.

“Where are we going?”

Dante hesitated, knowing Nick wasn’t going to like what was coming.

“To where it began,” he said. “To the
Certosa
.”

The
Certosa
has never looked lovelier,
Nick thought, as they pulled into the graveled driveway. It had only been turned into a conference center in the past ten years. He remembered as a kid spending his summers in Italy, coming to the ruins of the ancient monastery with his cousins. Mike knew the caretaker and, for a bottle or two of
Nonno’s
excellent Gallo Nero
,
the caretaker would unlock the creaky gate and allow the kids in for an hour or two.

Dante had dated the chief restorer of the
Certosa
a few years ago, a pretty girl who had been much too sweet for Dante. Nick remembered her saying that the restoration team was proud nothing structural had been changed—not even the lock on the gate.

The restored
Certosa
was soberly elegant now, but it had had a wild and glorious ramshackle beauty all those summers ago. The cousins had run wild in the cloisters, avoiding the rats’ nests and piles of bricks lain untouched since the Middle Ages.

Nick winced now at the thought of running his hands along powdery painted walls, enjoying the feeling of crumbling stucco. He realized now that he’d probably destroyed whole strips of priceless frescoes, just as they’d dumped the shards of what had been centuries-old terra-cotta vases in corners so they could play soccer undisturbed along the corridors.

It had been wild and wonderful then just as it was cool and beautiful now. All of Siena was dotted with warm and wonderful memories for him. He couldn’t ever remember being unhappy here.

Is this where I belong?
Nick wondered as he followed Dante’s swift progress through the arcades of the main courtyard. Was his family’s adventure in America about to run its course?

Nick’s own father and mother were talking more and more about moving to Siena when his father retired next year. If they did, Lou would follow. Without making an issue of it, she would probably find a way to get a job in Siena or Florence for a year or two, which would stretch into forever. She was so good at her job they would fight over her services in the Gobi Desert. And Lou being Lou, she’d be knee-deep in suitors before the year was out.

Nick would be left alone over in Deerfield.

He had plenty of friends, but most of them were hockey players or sports writers or managers. He knew the score. Overnight, he had gone from being a big man in the game to being a has-been. Everyone would try hard to keep in touch, but the pull of the game would tug them away.

Nick shook his head. He hardly recognized his own brain. He never ever thought about the future until it was right on top of him.

He followed Dante through a narrow archway into a smaller cloister. A burst of laughter came from an open doorway in the eastern corner. They turned left.

It wasn’t like him to have such somber thoughts. It was as if the Nick-shaped slot he’d inhabited all his life had suddenly disappeared.

He stopped in the doorway as another burst of laughter echoed in the hot, dusty air, and stared at the tableau.

It looked like Faith had found a little slot all her own.

She was surrounded by men, and damned if they didn’t look a lot like admirers. He recognized Professor Gori—Dante had dated
his
daughter, too—and that slimy creep, Tim something. Her other colleague—what was his name? Something dumb like Griffen. There were two weedy-looking guys and a Japanese man, nodding and bowing and grinning.

Nerdy geeks, all of them, except for Gori and that Griffen guy. They looked like elegant geeks.

They were crowded around an overhead projector. Faith held a pen and was going down bullet points, the pen and her slender hand projected hugely overhead on the white screen.

“And here we have tipping,” Faith said and, crazily, there was an audible murmur of approval. Like a flock of very odd birds, all the men bent their heads and tapped into their handheld computers.

Faith’s big, light-brown eyes were alight with intelligence and humor, and Nick was suddenly floored with how wildly attractive she looked just then, hair a red-brown nimbus around her face, cheekbones and forehead slightly sunburned, wide mouth curved in a smile.

In the throes of lust when first dating Dee Dee, Nick had once commented on how gorgeous she was. Lou had shocked him by saying Faith was prettier. Nick had laughed at the time, but it was true, he had discovered.

He’d rarely seen Dee Dee without makeup, not even in bed. The few times he’d managed to catch a glimpse of her unadorned face, she seemed like a different person. Eyes small and too close together. And her nose—well, it was definitely a bit…piggish. Dee Dee made up for it with good makeup, tight clothes and pretty hair out of a bottle.

Dee Dee, in ten years’ time, would be puffy and over the hill. Faith, he could clearly see, would probably look even better. She’d probably fill out some. Like
Nonna
, she had the kind of facial structure that aged well.

Right now, she was sexy and vibrantly alive as she held the undivided attention of all the men in the room, whose collective IQ was probably as high as the amount of money he had in the bank.

Faith made a comment, something crazy about… He leaned forward to hear better. Was she talking about
hysterias
? Whatever it was, was sparking another round of laughter. Nick shook his head. No wonder the geeks had stayed away from the jocks in college. They didn’t even speak the same language.

A bell rang and Faith turned, murmuring something in that dry tone of hers. The room erupted into laughter again and Faith looked up. She froze when she saw Nick at the back of the room.

Her body language had been smooth, even elegant, but now her movements became jerky. Her mouth tightened and she declared the session adjourned.

Nick realized all over again how much he’d hurt her.

He waited patiently as ten or twelve of the geeks huddled around Faith like groupies around a rock star. He was surprised they didn’t ask for autographs, though one of them
did
ask her to write something on the blackboard. She did, some impenetrable symbols, and the man nodded, humming a little.

Nick couldn’t read anything of what she’d written—it was in math and God knew he had enough trouble with English.

He’d been slightly dyslexic as a child. Luckily, his parents were loving, attentive and smart. He got help early, but he distinctly remembered that feeling of helplessness in school—everyone understanding but him. Even now, when he got too tired or anxious, the words danced about on the page.

Faith certainly didn’t have that problem.

Actually, Faith didn’t have any problems at all that he could see. Kane’s death had liberated her. She was going to be successful and she was on the verge of understanding what a desirable woman she was. Kane’s death had done that. For a moment, Nick almost wished Faith really had offed him. It would have been poetic justice.

He hung back as Dante walked forward into the little flock of mathematicians.

“Faith,” Dante said, his voice somber, “I need to talk to you again.”

One of the geeks stepped forward, the one Nick particularly hated. The one who thought he had a claim on Faith. Tim—Tim Something. Tim Something glared at Dante. “What’s this about?”

Dante barely glanced at him. “I need to talk to Miss Murphy,” he repeated.

“Well, we’re in the middle of work here and we need to talk to Faith, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Oui.”

“Si.”

“
Hai.
”

The men’s voices formed a chorus.

“What is this, Dante?” Leonardo Gori asked with a frown. “We’re busy here. Whatever it is, won’t it keep?”

“It’s a little matter of murder, Leonardo, and no, I’m sorry, but it won’t keep.” He beckoned with his hand. “Now, Faith, come with me, please.”

Nick was used to seeing Dante as his cousin, his best friend, a guy he’d practically grown up with. Good-natured and kind beneath his casual exterior. But this was a new Dante—Dante the Cop.

Leonardo Gori shut up.

Without a word, Faith put down the pen and moved forward. She walked past him silently and followed Dante out of the room. If Nick had told her to follow
him
, she would have turned in the opposite direction.

If this was the effect you got,
Nick thought
, then maybe I should become a cop.

Chapter Eleven

Anything that begins well, ends badly.

Anything that begins badly, ends worse.

Faith watched the two Rossi cousins’ broad backs as she followed them into the central cloister. She stifled a sigh. She’d been having such a good time with her colleagues, but Murphys didn’t have good times for very long. It was some kind of law. Unwritten, but unyielding. She should have known that.

They passed through two big wooden doors, the cop Rossi shouldering them open, the jock waiting for her to pass then following hard at her heels, then another set of glass doors which opened onto a corridor. They must be somewhere near the kitchen because she could smell cooking.

Roast beef for dinner,
she thought.

They went through the third and last door on the left. Coming in from the dim hallway, Faith had to shield her eyes.

They were in a corner room of the monastery and light flooded in through four large windows. Like the other rooms, it had high ceilings, but there the resemblance ended. It was sparsely furnished with cheap utilitarian furniture, and was a replica of the room Dante had first interrogated her in. Clearly, the
Certosa
kept a few rooms sparely decorated just to interrogate her in.

No pink putti on the ceiling. No antique furniture. Just a metal, Formica-topped table and six matching Formica chairs, pure vintage Seventies, and a gray-green metal bookcase holding document classifiers, each folder with the date written in pen on a label. The dates ran from 1973 through 1991 when, presumably, some form of computerization had taken place.

Perched on the edge of one of those lethally uncomfortable-looking chairs was an attractive, dark-haired woman.

Her glance moved briefly and without interest over Faith, then immediately to the two Rossi men. She beamed at both, and Faith bristled before she remembered that Nick wasn’t hers. Had never been, never would be hers.

Faith stopped a few paces into the room and looked at Dante. This was his show.

“Please sit down, Faith.” As he had the first time he’d questioned her, he didn’t take a chair to sit behind the table, to show authority, but sat down in the nearest chair.

Nick leaned his shoulders against the wall, hands deep in the pockets of his loose tan cotton trousers.

Dante gestured to the woman. “This is Sara Tommasi, Faith. She’s one of the wait staff working at the
Certosa
while the conference is on.”

Faith nodded to the woman and received a chilly smile in return.

“Now, I want you to tell us once again about the night you saw Miss Tommasi, the night Professor Kane was murdered. I want you to tell us every detail. Don’t leave anything out.”

Faith frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. When did I see Miss Tomas— What was the name again?”