Dying on the Vine

SIX

ROCCO, John, and Gideon all drove back to Florence in different vehicles; the same ones they’d come in, but when the cars pulled into the Carabinieri parking lot alongside the Great Cloister, Rocco was waiting for him. He was still scowling. “Listen, Gid, I can’t figure out what to make of what you were telling us back there. If the shot didn’t kill her, what did?” This was the second time that Rocco had called him Gid, and Gideon resisted the impulse to ask him to knock it off. For whatever reason—he didn’t know himself—it annoyed him to be addressed by diminutives or nicknames—he liked his own full name—and he didn’t hesitate to say so. He had only one friend, none other than John Lau himself, who was granted the privilege. John had been calling him Doc since the day they’d met, and Gideon had had no choice but to go along with it. Gid was even worse than Doc, but somehow, coming out of Rocco’s mouth, it couldn’t have been more natural. It fitted with his brash, wise-guy manner in a way that the prissier Gideon wouldn’t have. So now there were two who were allowed to get away with it. He was mellowing with age.

“The fall is what killed her,” he said.

“The fall?” The scowl deepened. “The fall?”

“The fall.”

“But . . . I don’t get it. The cop from Gibraltar, Clive, he said the bullet would have killed her then and there, and you agreed with him. I agree with him, for that matter.”

“I do agree with him. A .32, back to front, right smack through the middle of the head? It should have killed her, it would have killed her—well, it would have if she hadn’t already been dead.”

“What do you mean, already dead?” John had come up behind them. “Why shoot her if she was already dead? And how do you know that, anyway?”

Rocco was equally bewildered. “Gid, stop messing with us, will you? What exactly are you telling us here?”

“What I’m telling you, Rocco . . . John . . . is that the fall came first, then the bullet. She was already dead—from the fall—when he shot her.”

Rocco, hands spread, looked to one side, then the other, as if searching for someone to explain it to him, but no luck. “Gid, she fell sixty meters—that’d be, uh . . .”

“Almost two hundred feet.”

“Yeah, two hundred feet. That’s a lot of feet. So what the hell would be the point of shooting her after that?”

“Beats me, Rocco.”

“Take a guess,” John said.

“All right, all I can think of would be that he was taking out some insurance. He wasn’t positive that the fall had done it, so he came down and finished the job. Administered a coup de grace. That’s all I can think of, but I have to say I’m not real confident about it, considering that she fell off the equivalent of a twenty-story building onto a rocky surface and must have looked it. But it fits the facts. Sort of.”

Rocco was suddenly irritated. “Okay, tell me something, Mr. Expert—”

“That’s Doctor Expert to you, buddy.”

Rocco was unmollified. “How the hell do you know which came first? I mean, I swear to God . . . you ‘experts’ . . . that’s just the kind of thing . . .” He jerked his head, muttering to himself.

“Fun, isn’t it?” John said, grinning. “I always love when he does this.”

“Well, good for you. I don’t.”

“Rocco, what are you getting worked up about?” Gideon asked. “Does it really make any difference exactly when he shot her? Obviously, it doesn’t change the outcome.”

“Yeah, it makes a difference. It’s weird, it’s inconsistent, it’s . . . well, it’s a loose end, it doesn’t fit.”

Gideon laughed. “If you ever run into a murder case where everything’s consistent with everything else—no conflicting eyewitness testimony, no loose ends, no ambiguities, no unanswered questions—please let me know, will you? We’ll write it up for the journals.”

“You can say that again,” John agreed.

But Rocco stuck to his guns. “It doesn’t make sense to shoot someone if they already fell off a goddamn mountain. That alone throws the scenario our guys put together out of whack, and it worries me. If it’s true. It should worry me. What kind of a cop would I be if it didn’t?” Meaningful pause. “If it’s true.”

Gideon considered himself well and deservedly rebuked. “Rocco, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been treating this as a class exercise, no more. I kind of forgot it’s a real case with real human beings.”

“Oh, it’s a real case, all right. And there’s one other minor little point. If . . .” He sighed. “John, you keep checking your watch. What, I’m boring you guys? You gotta be somewhere?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, we do,” John said. “We’re supposed to meet our wives for dinner at six, and we don’t know how far the restaurant is from here. We don’t even know where the hell it is, exactly.”

“What restaurant?”

“Umm . . .”

“L’Osteria di Giovanni,” Gideon said. “Do you know it?”

“Yeah, it’s a ten-minute walk from here. A good place. Come on, I’ll walk you over partway. We can talk while we walk.”

“Sure,” Gideon said, “but listen, if you’re free, why don’t you join us for dinner while you’re at it?”

“Hey, I’d love to,” Rocco said, his testiness of a moment ago gone as abruptly as it had come, “but I can’t. I have to pick up my wife back at the train station at six-twenty. Come on, it’s this way, down Via degli Avelli.”

Florence’s Via degli Avelli—the Street of the Tombs—is not the gloomy passageway the name suggests. In fact, it is one of the city’s livelier, trendier thoroughfares, with wall-to-wall restaurants, sidewalk cafés, and upscale hotels lining one side of it. The other side, however, runs for more than a hundred yards along the outer wall of Santa Maria Novella’s narrow, old cemetery. This wall consists of a long row of twenty-foot-high, horizontally striped, Moorish stone arches that protect upscale wall-to-wall shelters of a different sort: the ornate, aboveground stone burial vaults of Florence’s fourteenth- and fifteenth-century elite, all bearing intricately carved reliefs of their family crests and insignias of rank.

Rocco gestured at them as they walked past. “Bet there’d be some bones in those things that’d perk your interest.”

Gideon laughed. “I bet there would. So what’s this other minor little point, Rocco?”

“Only that he fell off the cliff too—after shooting himself up there—so he must’ve been twice as dead as she was when he hit the bottom, right? Which would have made it a little hard for him to administer that coup de grâce down below, wouldn’t you say?”

“He shot himself at the top?” Gideon echoed, frowning. “No, you’re right, that complicates things. How sure are you that it worked that way, that he didn’t kill himself down below, after he shot her?”

“Pretty sure, considering that he left most of his skull up there, with some of the rest of it scattered along the way down, while he was bouncing off the rocks. Our guys took most of a day picking them out of the cliff. His skeleton was every bit as busted up as hers was. He took one hell of a fall too, no question.”

“That’s puzzling,” Gideon said. “It would seem to mean he shoved her off the cliff, then climbed down and shot her just to make sure she was well and truly dead, then climbed all the way up again—two hundred feet—shot himself, and then fell off the cliff too. How would you explain that?”

“How would I explain it? Sheesh, you came up with it, how would you explain it?”

“Yeah, how would you explain it?” John contributed, but then he came up with a question of his own. “What’s that cliff like, Rocco? I mean, is it really, like, a cliff—straight up and down—or more like sort of a hill?”

“Well, I guess it’s not technically a cliff. You can get up it without a rope and pitons, if that’s what you mean, but it sure as hell isn’t what anybody would call a hill. I mean, I made it to the top okay myself, but there were some dicey spots along the way. I had to use my hands a lot, and I was breathing pretty hard by the time I got there.”

“So how likely would it be,” Gideon asked, “that a man of Pietro’s age—”

“Almost sixty,” said Rocco. “And, from what I understand, he wasn’t in the greatest shape in the world. A whole lot of years working in those damp wine cellars had screwed up his lungs.”

“So it wouldn’t be too likely, would it, that he’d climb back up a cliff like that unless he had some really good reason? Since he could have just shot himself right down there with her.”

“That’s the way I see it,” said Rocco.

They walked a few paces, heads down, thinking, and then Gideon said: “Could there be anything special about that particular cliff? Does it have any kind of history or reputation? You know, is it a place people come to commit suicide? Lovers’ Point, Suicide Mountain, something like that?”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Well, maybe it had some special significance, some personal significance—emotional, symbolic—to them. Could that be?”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” Rocco said with a shrug. “I guess that could be.”

Gideon laughed. He didn’t think much of the idea either. “All right, tell me this: How did you establish that he killed her? How do you know it wasn’t the other way around? She killed him and then shot herself?”

“How could she? According to you, she was already dead from the fall when she was shot. Pretty damn hard to shoot yourself in the head when you’re dead.”

“Never mind ‘according to me.’ How did you establish it in the first place, during the investigation?”

“Oh God, a lot of things. First, the way she was shot: back of the head, execution style. You saw that in the class. The bullet entered in the lower back part of her skull and then ran slightly upward, hitting the inside of her skull pretty much in the middle of her forehead. Which—as I’m sure I don’t have to tell either of you guys—is the path you get if the victim was kneeling, with her head bowed. Well, how many suicides have you run into where the person shot himself in the back of the head that way? Not many.”

“No,” Gideon said, “but there are some who do.”

“That’s true,” John said. “In fact, you can’t come up with any part of the head that some suicide hasn’t shot himself in: the nose, the eye, the ear, the top of the head, the back of the head, the teeth . . . almost any part of the body, in fact: the crotch, the armpit—”

“Well, you guys are lucky,” Rocco said. “You get to look at a lot more gunshot deaths than we do over here, so I can’t argue with you. But I’ve seen a few suicides and I never saw one that did it back- to-front. I mean, why would they? It’s harder. It can’t happen very often.”

“Well, yeah,” John agreed, “that’s so . . .”

“Yes, it is,” said Gideon, “and your execution-style killing idea was pretty good thinking at the time, but—well, sorry, but it’s not correct. She was already dead when she was shot.”

“Yeah, so you keep saying.” Rocco rolled his eyes. “Jesus, did we get anything right?” His hand flew up. “Don’t answer that.”

“Well, it’s understandable. You didn’t know then what you know now—that she fell off that cliff first, before—”

“No, you know that. I don’t know that, and I’m waiting to hear something that convinces me. I mean, no offence, Gid, I know you’re this great expert and everything, but I need a little more than your word here.”

“Give me a minute, Rocco, I’ll get there. But for the moment just assume I’m right. Now think about it. Here’s this woman. She’s just taken this horrendous fall. She’s about as dead as she can get. Half her bones are broken. Now, for whatever reason, he wants to shoot her. So how—”

Rocco held up his hand again. “Yeah, I see the problem. How is he supposed to get her into a kneeling position?”

“That’s it. What he did do, I’m guessing, was to shoot her where she lay, right on the ground. Prone. Not execution-style at all. The bullet trajectory would have been exactly the same.”

John hunched his shoulders. “I’d say that’s a pretty good guess.”

“Thanks, but it’s actually more than a guess. Remember this afternoon, when I tossed out a couple of reasons why the bullet might not have made it all the way through her skull? Well, there was another reason I didn’t mention, because I didn’t want to muddy the waters at the time—”

“But now you do,” Rocco grumbled.

“I’m a scientist, Rocco. I have to say what I find.”

“That’s what he always says when he does this,” John said cheerfully. “Every single damn time.”

“Okay, so what’s this other reason?” Rocco asked reluctantly.

“It’s something that happens when the spot where the bullet would ordinarily exit is up against something firm, so that the bone is shored up and kept from exploding outward. So the bullet can’t get out either, and it just bounces off and stays inside.”

Rocco nodded his acceptance.

“So if I’m right and she was lying facedown on the ground, and he just leaned over and plugged her, then the earth, or rock, or whatever that was under her head would have kept the bullet from exiting.”

“Well, she was laying on her stomach, all right. Oh boy, I’m starting to think maybe we’re going to have to reopen this whole can of worms after all.” He shut his eyes. “God help me.”

“What about the husband?” Gideon asked. “How was he shot? Was it compatible with suicide?”

“Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re on safe ground there. Couldn’t have been more compatible. Right out of the books. The classic spot for a handgun suicide.” He raised his left hand and jabbed his forefinger at his temple. “Bang. And please, don’t give me any more crap about shooting yourself in the armpit. You know damn well this is where they do it nine times out of ten.”

“I don’t know about your statistics,” Gideon said, “but generally speaking, yes.”

“And righties shoot themselves in the right side of the head and lefties shoot themselves in the left side of the head—”

“But not always,” John put in.

“Oh, come on, you guys, give me a break. What, it’s only ninety-five percent of the time?”

Gideon had to smile. There had been a recent study of just this question, based on an examination of confirmed suicides. The answer: 95 percent.

“And he was shot straight through the left temple,” Rocco continued. “Wanna guess whether he was a lefty or a righty?”

Gideon laughed. “Well . . . this is just a hunch here, but I’m going to take a chance and guess he was a lefty.”

“Bingo. Okay, your turn, Mr. Expert—pardon me, Dr. Expert. Now you’re gonna go ahead and tell me what’s wrong with our theory—why he couldn’t possibly have committed suicide, right?”

“Hey, Rocco,” John said approvingly, “you’re a quick learner.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Gideon said. “You’re right. Sounds like a suicide to me.”

Rocco staggered and clapped a hand to his heart. “I’m shocked . . . shocked.” They stopped walking to let Rocco draw a Marlboro from a pack with his lips and apply a lighter to it.

“Rocco,” Gideon said, “what were the other things that made you so sure he killed her and not the other way around? You said a minute ago that there were a lot of them.”

“Well, two of them, anyway,” Rocco said in a choked, constricted voice while he pulled in his first lungful of smoke. He held it there a moment with his eyes closed and then let it out in a long hoosh. “The other thing was the way their bodies were lying—hers right up against this big rock and his up against hers, which means she would have had to come down first, so how could she have killed him?”

“Well, what about this?” John asked as they began walking again. “Someone else killed them both and tried to make it look like a murder-suicide. You know, rearranged the bodies and all.”

Rocco took two meditative drags. “Look, John, anything’s possible, but there’s just nothing, nothing at all, that points in that direction.” And then, in a muttered afterthought, “Until today, anyway.”

John shrugged. “Okay.” He didn’t think the idea held water either.

“You didn’t come up with any other suspects?” Gideon asked. “At all?”

Rocco bristled. “What do you mean, ‘at all?’ Like we didn’t do a thorough enough investigation or something?” But on reconsidering his words he cooled down. “Well, we didn’t, that’s true. We didn’t do a whole lot of searching. I mean, sure, we interviewed his family, the people who knew him best, and we looked into things, but it was all so obvious. . . . Hell, it seemed obvious. . . . The facts spoke for themselves, you know? He killed her and then he killed himself. Why would we go hunting for other suspects?”

“Yes, I can see that it would have seemed like a waste of money and manpower.”

“Anyway, no, there weren’t any other viable suspects. Oh, wait, there was one other thing: we found the gun. It came down the cliff with him, and it was his, all right. A wartime Beretta. Had it for forever.”

“Any prints?” John said, then jerked his head. “No, what am I talking about? There wouldn’t be, not after all that time out in the weather.”

“As a matter of fact there were. It wound up caught in the opening of his jacket, sort of wedged into his armpit. And it was a good leather jacket, so it was pretty well protected from the elements. So, yeah, we did manage to lift a couple of partials off it.”

“And?”

“And they’re his. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go to court on it because, as I said, they’re only partials. Besides, his prints aren’t on file anywhere. But we found prints that matched what we had on the gun all over his things at home . . . hundreds of them. I don’t know, maybe thousands. On his shoes, his eating utensils, his toothpaste tube, everything. We took prints of his family and the winery staff, and there’s definitely no match there. Our tech guy says the odds are ninety-nine out of a hundred they’re his.”

“You’re right,” John said. “Good odds, but they wouldn’t cut it in a courtroom.”

“There’s something that seems a little hinky to me here, Rocco,” Gideon said. “Am I the only one who thinks it a little, shall we say, unusual that the gun stayed with him all the way down and never bounced away anywhere where you couldn’t find it? That lady we looked at today sure did some bouncing, so I presume he did too, since he took the same route.”

“Well—” Rocco began.

“And then the gun just happened to end up in the very best possible place to preserve any fingerprints that happened to be on it?”

Rocco shrugged. “Sometimes we get lucky. It happens.”

“It happens,” John agreed.

“Yeah,” said Gideon, but he wasn’t satisfied.

“Rocco, you got a motive?” John asked.

“Uh-huh. He thought she was having an affair. This was what you might call an ultratraditional kind of guy, a real dinosaur, and that was all the motive he would’ve needed: she deserved to die, and he couldn’t stand to live. And fossils like him, they don’t do divorce.”

“And was she?” asked Gideon. “Having an affair?”

“Who knows? We were satisfied he did it, and he was dead. No reason to follow up. What would be the point? Just make more misery and unhappiness for the family. Enough said, case closed.” He threw a wry glance at Gideon. “Only now along comes the great Skeleton Detective with his gaga theories and screws up the works.”

“Whoa,” said John, “that’s the first time I ever heard anybody say that about you, Doc.”

“Well, now, how exactly did I screw up the works? Tell me that. All I did—”

“All you did was tell us first she fell off the cliff and then she was shot.”

“Well, I know that complicates things a little—”

Rocco snorted a laugh. “Nah, not really. This guy shoves his wife off a two-hundred-foot cliff, then he runs down and pops her one, just in case a fall that broke every bone in her body didn’t do the job. Then, instead of killing himself right there and making it easy on himself, he climbs all the way to the top again—this fifty-eight-year-old guy with bad lungs—so he can shoot himself right on the edge, the very same spot, and fall down on top of her. Oh, yeah, nothing wrong with that picture.”

“Rocco, we’re getting ahead of the story here. All I can tell you for sure is that she was alive when she fell off the cliff, which I know because—”

“Oh, yeah, I wondered when you were gonna get around to that,” Rocco grumbled

“—because she was conscious when she fell, and if you’re conscious, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re alive.”

“Conscious?” Rocco practically shouted. “Damn, Gid . . .” When words failed him he just shook his head.

“Yes, conscious. Sure. You see—”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it. What hat did that get pulled out of? Don’t you ever stop? First you know she was alive, now you’re telling me you know she was conscious?”

He had stopped walking so abruptly that a daydreaming man walking behind him had to stop himself from stumbling into him. Catching himself just before contact, he made an exasperated noise and gave Rocco the finger, a gesture as readily understood in Florence as in New York.

“Screw you too, pal,” was Rocco’s nonchalant, over-the-shoulder response, in English, before he returned his attention to Gideon. “What are you gonna tell me next, what she was thinking about?” Still shaking his head, he flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

“Believe me, if I could I would, but all I can tell you is that she was conscious.”

“Aw, man, give me a break. How the hell can you possibly know something like that?”

“I know because—”

Rocco glanced at his watch and did a quick mental calculation. “Nuts, I gotta go if I’m gonna make it back to meet the train. Jesus, Gid, you sure know how to turn a simple case into a, a—” He shook his head and pulled out a business card on which he scribbled something. “This is my cell number, my personal phone. Give me a call later and tell me what you were gonna say, will you? But no mumbo jumbo. If I’m gonna go anywhere with this, I’m gonna need some solid evidence—facts—to convince Captain Conforti. He’s a tough nut to crack.” And then to John: “If you think reopening a closed case is tough in the Feeb, you oughta see the Carabinieri. Don’t forget, red tape was invented right here in Florence. Thank you, Machiavelli.”

“I’ll call if you want, Rocco,” Gideon said, “but there’s no need to interrupt your evening. I’ll be going over it all in class tomorrow morning. In detail.”

“Yeah, except I’m not gonna be there. I gotta be in court, available to testify on another case. So call me later? Tonight, I mean?”

Gideon took the card. “I will.”

“In an hour would be good. So look: You can cut across the piazza right here. That street on the other side is Via della Scala. Left on that for two blocks and turn right on Via del Moro. The Osteria’s just a block down.” Another look at his watch, a momentary chewing of his lip. “Ah, what the hell, I can go a little more with you. I can always run back to the station.”

“Or just flag down the first car you see and jump in,” John suggested and growled: “‘Police business.’ That’s what we do in America. Don’t you watch any movies?”

“Yeah, right. Okay, Gid,” he said as they started across the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, “you know she was conscious because . . . ?”

“Well, go back to the bones we were looking at this afternoon, to all those fractures. Did you notice any kind of pattern in the damage?”

That brought roll of the eyes from John. “Oh, honest to God, you can’t just tell us? We really have to do this Socratic thing?”

“Hey, I’m a professor, John. It’s what I do.”

“Tell me about it,” John said grumpily.

“Pattern in the damage . . .” mused Rocco. “Gimme a minute . . . Most of the injuries were to the lower half of her body, is that what you’re driving at?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said John, “her legs were a mess. Her arms weren’t so bad.”

Gideon nodded. “Correct. More specifically, every single one of the six bones in her legs was broken, whereas not a single one of the six bones in the arms was damaged. And the one foot we have has more splintered bones than I had a chance to count. The pelvis is mashed too. But above the waist, the only injuries are some crushed vertebrae—not fractured, but crushed—and her skull. Well, how would you account for a pattern like that?”

“She landed on her feet?” John suggested as they started moving again. “I guess.”

“And you’re right, she landed on her feet, and the fact is that the bodies of dead people—or unconscious people for that matter—don’t do that. If a nonconscious body falls from a great enough height—and two hundred feet is way, way more than enough—then it tends to align itself in the air, so that it lands horizontally. It’s a function of the state of uniform motion of a falling object.”

“The state of . . . ?” Rocco’s brow furrowed.

“Not important,” Gideon said dismissively. “Now—”

“Meaning he doesn’t know what the hell it means either,” John told Rocco.

“Pretty much, yes,” Gideon agreed. “Physics never was one of my strong points. But the point I’m making here is: people who are conscious during a fall, they—”

“Land on their feet.” This from Rocco.

“Exactly. Well, with some qualifications. If it’s from a low height—ten, twenty feet—they won’t have time to change their alignment, so a lot of times they hit with their hands or forearms, trying to protect their heads. Or suicides might land head down on purpose. Otherwise, yes, they almost always land on their feet. And this one very definitely did. You’re frowning.”

“Yeah, I’m frowning,” Rocco said. “I got a problem with this.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, you seem awful sure of yourself, but when I listen to the words, what I hear is ‘tends to’ and ‘almost always’ and ‘most often.’ That doesn’t exactly convince the hell out of me, and it wouldn’t convince a court either, you know what I mean?”

“I do, and it’s a good point. But in this particular case there’s no almost always. I know she landed on her feet . . . and I know it from her skull.”

John and Rocco puzzled over this—Rocco was talking to himself—as they made their way through the great square that fronted the church’s beautifully maintained façade. The piazza itself, however, had seen better days. For more than three centuries the grand event of the Florentine year, the Palio dei Cocchi, had been held here. Now it was a scruffy lawn area, more sandy dirt than grass, on which they had to pick their way between the young and not-so-young backpackers who sprawled, picnicked, and slept, oblivious to the many pedestrians using it as a shortcut.

Beside one of the two stone obelisks that had once marked the turning points for Palio’s chariot races, John paused, eyes narrowed, and leveled a finger at Gideon. “I know you, Doc. If you’re waiting for us to go, like, ‘Whoa! How the hell can you tell somebody landed on their feet from their skull?’ forget it.”

Gideon laughed. “Actually, that would be very much appreciated. I’m not getting paid for this, you know, so how about at least giving me some enjoyment out of it?”

From Rocco, a threatening growl. “How about just telling us?”

“You guys sure know how to take the fun out of it, but okay. Do you—”

“Damn it,” Rocco interrupted, “I really better get out of here. Tell me about it when you call. This is Via del Moro, you turn here. Jesus, Carlotta’s gonna kill me.” He jabbed a finger at Gideon. “No mumbo jumbo. Just facts.” He started off, moving fast.

“Hey, Rocco!” Gideon called after him.

Rocco slowed without turning. “What?”

“So how many carabinieri does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Now he turned around and grinned. “Four. One to climb up on the chair and three to turn the chair.”