Dying on the Vine

TWENTY-FOUR

“WHY . . . and who?” Marti asked when Gideon had finished telling them about the call and they were done expressing their astonishment at identifying Quadrelli as the lothario in question.

He’d returned to the table after hanging up and had found them finished with their meals and drinking coffee. His own food wasn’t out yet. Julie had correctly assumed that his “Back in a minute” was more hopeful than realistic and asked them to hold his burrito until he returned.

She cut in now. “Can we forget about the who and stick with the why for a minute? I think . . .” She paused to order her thoughts. “I just wonder if it all might not go back to the will, the joint will.”

“For which Severo was the executor,” Marti said pointedly, still digesting the news about Quadrelli.

“No, forget about Severo too. I’m not thinking about Severo; I’m thinking about Pietro and Nola. Look, the will said whoever dies first, everything goes to the other one, isn’t that right? Pietro says: If I die first, everything goes to my wife. Nola says: If I die first, everything goes to my husband.”

There were nods around the table.

“But,” Julie continued, “Pietro also says: If she dies before I do, then I leave everything to Franco.”

“Right,” said John. “And she says: If he dies before I do, then I also leave everything to Franco.”

“Meaning, one way or another, in the end Franco winds up with it?” Gideon said, turning it into a question. He was trying to figure out where she was heading.

Yes, in the end!” Julie said excitedly. “But first it would necessarily have to go to one of the two—Pietro or Nola.”

All three of them were looking blankly at her.

“Don’t you see? Pietro dies first—Nola gets it. Nola dies first—Pietro gets it.”

“But they both died, so Franco gets it.” Marti said. “What difference does it make which one died first?”

Gideon’s order had arrived. The burrito turned out not to be beef, but tuna and bean, but he hardly noticed. He was beginning to get a glimmer of what Julie was driving at, and he liked it. She, however, was getting increasingly frustrated with her effort to explain.

“Julie,” he said to help her out, “why don’t you just try telling us exactly what it was that you think happened?”

“Okay. Good. Let’s assume that Pietro did die of that heart attack. But of course, nobody knows about it. Well, one of the brothers—make it Franco—shows up at the cabin to see him about something—”

“I thought Pietro didn’t want anybody coming up while he was there,” Marti said.

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean nobody ever did. Maybe it was a question about the winery, or something Pietro needed to know, or maybe it was just to check up on him—that bad heart, you know? Or to see if he needed anything? All it would have taken was a couple of hours’ drive. Anyway, he finds Pietro dead, and—”

“When would this be?” John asked. “Early, just after he died, or near the end of the month?”

“I don’t know that it would make any difference, John. It works either way. Anyway, he does some fast thinking, and what he thinks is: I’ve had it. Pietro’s dead; Nola’s still alive. She gets everything.”

Marti shook her head in confusion. “But doesn’t she eventually have to leave it to him, to Franco?”

“Eventually, but not now. Now she has full control of it all. Who knows how much will be left by the time she dies, or how long it’ll be before she gets around to dying? Who knows whether or not she’ll try and get that will changed so she can leave it all to Cesare?”

Now she got nods. It was starting to make sense.

“So he decides that Nola has to die too. And it has to look as if she died first—predeceased him—that’s the key part. He knows when she’s going to show up to pick up Pietro, so he goes back up there early that day, and he . . . well, he kills her.”

Marti was looking befuddled. “Okay, but I’m still not quite getting the weird thing with Pietro. Why throw him off the cliff too? Why shoot him? Why make it seem—”

“Because the whole idea, if I’m right, was to make it look like Pietro killed her and then committed suicide himself. See?” She paused expectantly, encouragingly, waiting for some sign that she’d gotten through to them.

“Yes,” Marti said, “but I still don’t quite—”

“There was one absolutely sure way to make it look as if he definitely outlived her, Marti, and that was to make everybody think he killed her. So he . . . I don’t know . . . he hides Pietro’s body somewhere, and then when Nola shows up, he gets her out on that path somehow and pushes her off the cliff and then goes and gets Pietro’s body, takes it up to the cliff, puts a bullet in his head, so it looks like he shot himself, and throws him off the cliff too. And then—I’m kind of making this part up as I go along—then he goes down below and arranges the bodies so it’s clear that Pietro came down after she did—”

“And probably sticks the gun in his jacket,” said Gideon.

“Probably.”

“But why did he shoot Nola then?” Marti asked after a moment. “She was already dead, wasn’t she? If he was going to shoot her, wouldn’t it have made more sense to shoot her up above?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I guess he just wanted to be positive she was dead.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Gideon said, “but now I’m thinking—and this seems more likely, given what you’ve been saying—that he needed for her to be shot with Pietro’s gun so that there was no question about what supposedly happened, but he didn’t have the nerve to do it up above, so he pushed her off and did it down below.”

That puzzled Marti even more. “What, it takes less nerve to push somebody off a cliff than to shoot them?”

“Sure,” John said. “Think about it. If you’re going to shoot somebody, especially with someone else’s gun—a seventy-year-old gun—you have to worry about what’ll happen if it jams, or if the charge is too weak, or if your hand shakes and you only wound them, or if they turn around just before you pull the trigger and you panic. But to push them off a cliff? A quick shove when they’re not looking—on the back, the shoulder—it doesn’t matter where—and over they go. It’s done. You can shoot them later.”

“I see,” Marti said. “Yes, that makes sense. But wasn’t he afraid that when the bodies were found, it’d be obvious that Pietro’d died a long time before her? I mean, changes in the corpse—well, you know more than I do about that, Gideon.”

“Yes, it would have been obvious for the first few months,” he agreed, “but not if the bodies were someplace where they wouldn’t be found for a year—which is probably why he pushed them off the cliff and into a difficult-to-find area in the first place, rather than just shooting them and leaving them where they were, up on the path. By that time, in that climate, the soft tissue would be gone. They’d both be nothing but beat-up, chewed-on skeletons—as they were. And I doubt very much that he’d think those bones would give away anything about who died first. Or when.”

“The bones and the jacket,” John pointed out. “The fact that Pietro’s body had been gnawed on under the jacket. That was also something he wouldn’t have thought of.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Julie said. “But what about the jacket? What was the point of putting it on him at all? That, I can’t figure out.”

“My guess,” Gideon said, “is that it’s something he didn’t think about when he first found Pietro. It would have been summertime, Pietro wouldn’t have been wearing a leather jacket. But when it came to doing the final deed, the weather would have gotten colder, and he realized it would have raised questions for Pietro to be out on a forest trail in his shirtsleeves—Nola was wearing a leather jacket, remember—so he slipped it on him then. After the animals had been at him.”

They looked at each other, trying to figure out if they’d covered all the bases. It was John who said, “I like it, I like it, except . . . how did he know the bodies would ever be found? Because if they weren’t . . . oh, wait, of course! He was the guy who called about them, who supposedly didn’t want to get involved, who just happened to have the exact coordinates on his GPS.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Gideon said.

Julie returned to her coffee. “So—you think I might be right? That that’s what happened?”

“I think you are right,” Gideon said. He’d finished his burrito now, and he too waved for a cup of coffee. “I have to say, nothing like that ever crossed my mind, but now that you’ve laid it out, it sure answers a lot of questions.”

“Sure didn’t cross mine,” John said. “Good job, kid!”

“Hey, she’s blushing!” Marti said delightedly.

“That’s the hot sauce,” Julie declared.

“Julie,” Gideon said, “you used Franco as your example. Do you think it was him?”

She thought about that. “He seems like the most likely one, because he had the most to lose, but I don’t know. They all had a lot to lose. Not just those stipends, but their jobs at the winery, and their free living arrangements. So . . . I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Same as you do. Could be any of them.”

“Franco,” said John.

“Franco,” said Marti.

“Do you think you ought to pass the idea to Rocco?” Julie asked Gideon. “Something for him to think about?”

“No, I think you ought to pass the idea to Rocco. You came up with it, you should get full credit.” He got out his phone. “He must be still in his office. Give him a call. The number’s in there.”

“Well, I think I just might do that,” Julie said, taking the phone and flipping it open. She was very visibly pleased.

“You’ll want to be outside to do it,” Gideon told her. He swallowed half the coffee and set the cup down. “Everybody’s finished, right? Let’s all go outside.”

“Muchas gracias, amigos,” the bigger of the two burly guys called to them as they left.

“And gracias a tu, signores,” John called smilingly back.

• • •

ROCCO was unavailable, so Julie left a message.

“Well,” Marti said, “we might as well get back to the villa, pack, say our good-byes—”

“Nope,” said Gideon firmly. “We’ve been in Tuscany for more than a week, this is our final day out in the country, and I have never once visited an archaeological site. This is unacceptable. I’m going to spend at least one afternoon at an archaeological site. You are welcome to join me. Or not.”

“Are you kidding us?” Marti said, laughing. “We just came from Florence. The whole place is one big archaeological site. The Duomo, the Uffizi—”

“The Duomo was built in the fourteenth century, the Uffizi in the sixteenth. I’m talking about someplace old.”

“How old is old?” John asked.

“For Gideon?” Julie said. “Ten thousand years would be about right.”

“No, I was thinking of a place called Sovana. It’s not that far south of here. There’s an Etruscan necropolis there. Rock-carved tombs going back over two thousand years. We could see it and be back here by six or seven, and in Florence at what passes for dinnertime in Italy.”

John burst out laughing. “Tombs! Skeletons! Whoa, that’ll be something different, won’t it? Real change of pace.”

But both Marti and Julie indicated interest, and Marti poked John with an elbow. “Come on, sport. It’ll be fun.”

“Yeah, maybe, but . . .”

Gideon put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Dinner will be on me, how’s that?”

“Well, now we’re getting someplace,” John said.

• • •

BY five o’clock that afternoon, all of the Vino e Cucina attendees had cleared out of the villa, with the exception of Julie and Marti, and they were off somewhere with their husbands. So, for the first time in days, the Cubbiddus felt that they could sit on their own terrace and discuss private matters without being overheard. They were at the largest of the tables: Franco, Nico, Luca, Linda, and Quadrelli. All of them except Nico had a glass of 2008 Villa Antica Sangiovese Riserva in front of them. Nico was drinking Cinzano from a highball glass.

The subjects under discussion were the death of Cesare and its implications for the suit. Was it ended now? Or did signora Batelli have something else up her sleeve? They had more than that on their minds, though. It escaped none of them that, if suspicions of homicide arose, they would all be high on the suspect list, with Franco, who had the most at stake, at the very top. Franco himself understood it best of all. But no one talked about it. It was the suit they concentrated on.

“I myself spoke with signora Batelli again a few hours ago,” Quadrelli was saying solemnly, “and I am happy to report that I anticipate no continued threat from that quarter. I believe I can safely say that I set the lady straight on— Ah, gentlemen.”

Three uniformed carabinieri had come out onto the terrace from the main building: Tenente Gardella, Maresciallo Martignetti, and a lower-ranking brigadiere they hadn’t seen before.

“Gentlemen,” said Franco with air of austere resignation, “how may we help you?”

The newcomers didn’t reply. There was something about them—a reserve, a formality—that sent a ripple of uneasiness around the table.

After a moment’s stony silence, the tenente pointed. “Him.”

The brigadiere stepped smartly forward, reaching for his handcuffs.