Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (16 page)

“It’s time to reevaluate our list, Lettie. This morning I’ve learned about some more possible motives people might have had for killing Meg.” I quickly filled Lettie in on the return of Shirley and of Crystal to the safety of the Fontana Hotel, my visit with Amy to the English church, and our chance encounter with the Hostetters. “Amy, Beth, and Joe were all more or less screwed out of their inheritance by Meg’s conniving. That’s one thing. Now that Meg’s dead, Amy and Beth will finally get what should have been theirs to begin with—that is, if Amy told me the truth. Also, Amy has noticed, as I already had, that Tessa’s boyfriend tosses around more money than you’d expect from a small-time farmer.”

“So maybe he’s involved in some shady business. What would that have to do with Meg?”

“Good question. Maybe drugs? She’s a nurse. Aren’t there sometimes connections between hospital staff and black market drugs?”

“I don’t know.” Lettie stretched out on her bed and laced her hands across her chest.

“And Meg apparently had the better part of a thousand dollars in cash at the time of the murder.”

“Really. Who has it now?”

“Ivo? Didn’t they say he had a lot of money on him at the time of his arrest? They probably took it away from him when they arrested him.”

“If not, then whoever killed her probably took the money,” Lettie said.

“Here’s what we need to do: Forget motives. They’re too confusing, and we’re perpetually discovering motives we didn’t know about before, so it stands to reason that there are yet more motives out there that we still don’t know about.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go through the list again, and this time try to think exactly where each person was at about five thirty. Marco—Captain Quattrocchi—says he has it narrowed down to a few minutes on either side of five thirty. When we made the first list, we put down where we thought everyone was between four thirty and a quarter to six.”

I found my original list behind an ice bucket, grabbed a clean sheet of paper, and wrote:

After much discussion, Lettie and I agreed we could mark eleven people off the list of suspects: Ourselves, of course; Amy and Tessa, since they could vouch for each other’s whereabouts; Crystal and Shirley, since they had their own little melodrama going; Dick, Michael, Walter, and Elaine, since they were apparently all together (but maybe they weren’t; we needed to check on that); and, of course, Ivo, since he was physically incapable of cutting a throat with his right hand.

We agreed that just because Paul Vogel had approached the group in the parking lot along with the gruesome foursome, it didn’t mean he had been with them at 5:30—a good thirty minutes earlier. Lucille Vogel was not eliminated because we hadn’t seen what direction she had come from, but I suggested it was highly unlikely she could have presented herself, smiling and completely free of blood spatters, only a few minutes after the murder.

“In fact, Lettie, that whole blood thing still bothers me. This would be a messy affair.” I saw the grimace creep down from Lettie’s forehead to her mouth and told her firmly, “Yes, messy.”

She gulped. “If the person was standing behind Meg, wouldn’t the blood have squirted out the other way? Toward the front?”

“I suppose so. But it would have virtually poured out. And blood is under pressure, you know, when it goes up your neck.”

Lettie put her fingers against her own carotid artery and nodded weakly. “It would have gotten all over his or her hands.”

“And I have a great feeling at least some of it would have gotten on the killer’s clothes.”

“So the killer had time to clean up.”

“And the means of cleaning up. I doubt he or she would have hung around in that room to wash up. He or she would have run out immediately. That makes the people who were supposedly in their rooms, or who could have dashed into their rooms quickly, seem most likely.”

“Not really,” Lettie sat up. “If it was Cesare and he left the hotel unobserved, he had hours to clean up. Same goes for Gianni.”

I couldn’t decide if we had made progress or not. Things were still a bit of a muddle, but at least we had eliminated a few folks. “Lettie,” I remembered at last to ask, “who’s in room three sixty-six, across the hall from Beth’s new room?”>

“Walter Everard and Elaine King, the married couple you say aren’t married, and Dick Kramer and Michael Melon are in room three sixty-eight, next door.”

So now I had to find Paul Vogel and make him a proposition.

Paul and Lucille were both in their room down the hall from us. Lucille had a surprising offer; she wanted to sing at the memorial service tomorrow.

“That would be lovely, Lucille. Thanks,” I said. “Do you have any particular song in mind?

“I like to do the ‘Ave Maria,’ but I’ll ask Beth or Amy if that would be all right, or if they’d prefer something else.”

“Excellent. But I don’t know yet if we’ll have an organist to accompany you. I have a phone number.”

“Fine if you do, fine if you don’t,” she said, heading for the door. “I don’t mind doing it a cappella
,
if the organist doesn’t work out.” With a toss of her little round head, she was gone.

“Who’s your client, Paul?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who’s paying you to spy on Walter and Elaine?”

“You’ve been watching too much TV.”

I had to give him credit. Paul could stay calm under pressure. He turned to the window. Talking to the back of his head, I said, “When you told me the other morning that you were in security, photography, and location—or whatever euphemisms you used—I should have translated that as ‘private detective,’ right?”

Paul remained in the same position and volunteered nothing.

“I saw you come out of Walter and Elaine’s room a few minutes ago,” I continued. “If you weren’t spying on them, why were you so careful to wipe your prints off the doorknob?”

“You didn’t see me come out of Walter’s room,” he said, turning and facing me. “I’ve never been in Walter’s room in my life.”

“Room 366.”

“Room 366 is Dick Kramer and Elaine King’s room.”

“Is that a fact?” I said, as if I dealt with this sort of stuff every day.

“You asked who my client was. It’s Dick Kramer’s wife. She knows he and Elaine have been having an affair for some time, but she wants proof to improve her position in the divorce she intends to file for.”

“What a lovely job you have, Paul.”

Ignoring my jab, he said, “Kramer’s wife has all the moneyy, he family. She set him up in the furniture business, and if she pulls her money out of it now, Kramer is S.O.L. This, Mrs. Kramer figures, is exactly what he deserves, but she needs to make sure he won’t get enough in the divorce settlement to stay afloat.

“Walter and Michael are gay,” Paul continued. “They stay in the room next door, regardless of what the hotel register says. In order to make his little holiday with Elaine appear to be a business trip with an employee, Dick offered to pay for both Walter’s and Michael’s trips. So Dick Kramer, or Dick Kramer’s business, I don’t know exactly what account he’s using for this, is paying for all four trips.”

“You said ‘an employee.’ Which one is his employee?”

“Walter. He’s a graphic designer, and he works for Dick Kramer’s company.”

It was hard, I found, to rework my concepts of the curious quartet. This meant that I needed to go back over my talk with Dick Kramer in front of the slave sculptures at the Accademia yesterday. Should I simply fill in “Walter” in place of “Michael” in that conversation? The anguish I had seen on Dick’s face—was it from struggling with his conscience? Or was it from being torn between two women? Or from being torn between his business and his true love? Perhaps he had been faking the whole thing, to divert my attention from the fact that Elaine King, not Michael Melon, was coming back from the restroom to rejoin him. I remembered, now, seeing Paul there, too. He had pretended to be engrossed in a masterpiece that was actually an air vent on the wall.

Why did I keep running into so many cheating husbands?

“Walter and Michael share an apartment in Washington,” Paul said. “As far as I know, this is a free vacation for them. I really couldn’t care less about those two.”

“Have you gotten all the proof you need?” I didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you keep this just between us,” Paul countered.

“
You
have to insist? The last time I checked, I was in the driver’s seat. I believe I’m perfectly free to tell everything or tell nothing. Can you give me a good reason why I should keep my mouth shut? Or did you intend for me to interpret that word ‘insist’ as a threat?” I prayed that I sounded more intimidating than I felt.

“I could interpret
that
as a threat!”

I just stared at him with my jaw clamped tight.

“Or,” Paul said, “did you intend it as blackmail?”

“I don’t like the word blackmail. I meant to suggest that, if you could do something for me, we could be more like partners than adversaries.” I sounded, even to myself, like a character in a B movie—that last line should have been delivered with my thumbs hooked under my suspenders.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“You have contacts it part of your business I want to find out everything about Meg Bauer’s work history, threatened lawsuits settled by her hospital, reprimands, what in folder at and especially the name or names anyone has been accused harming killing their next kin no make that everyone family know if is straight with irs she removing more than a paycheck from you drugs kind thing.”

“You think she was killed by someone who came here specifically for that purpose?”

“It’s a thought,” I said, and allowed myself a deep breath. Since my entire dissertation on what I wanted had been delivered with one lungful of air, I felt a little dizzy.

“I think you may be right.” Paul jammed his fist into his plaid shorts pockets.

“Why were you asking Lettie and me questions about Jim Kelly and Geoffrey Reese-Burton the other morning? Do you suspect them, or are they having affairs with Elaine too?”

Paul gave me a sidelong glance and the corner of his mouth quivered in what might have been a smile. “I think this murder must have been committed by a man. Quite a bit of strength would have been needed, you know. Meg Bauer was hardly what I’d call a delicate little flower.”

“But a determined woman . . .” I began, then decided to let it go.

“I hate my job,” Paul said. “Most of what I do is stuff like you saw this morning. All-night stakeouts in motel parking lots make you feel like a slime bag.”

“I can imagine.”

“So when I run across a real murder, the kind of thing I used to dream about doing, my radar starts beeping.”

He wiggled his fingers in my face, and I thought about what Lettie had said about my antennae beeping. Were Paul and I alike? God forbid.

“So you want me to put my sources to work,” he clarified, unnecessarily. “It’ll probably take ‘em a couple of days, but I’ll see what I can do.”

———

Marco Quattrocchi was not a happy man; I could see that from the hand gesture he flung at the hotel manager, a thin young man who couldn’t possibly bow or scrape more humbly than he was already doing. It was dinnertime when Lettie got the call that Quattrocchi wanted to see her in the conference room adjoining the lobby, a call we had been expecting all afternoon. I figured he’d need to interview us all again, in light of today’s developments, so I had gone down with Lettie in the quickly-dashed hope that I might suggest he join us for dinner and interview both of us over our meal. Given the look on his face, I didn’t care to cross him by suggesting anything. He looked as if he was ready to chew nails and spit horseshoes.

Fortunately, Victoria and Geoffrey Reese-Burton passed by just then and asked me to dine with them. I slipped over to the desk to tell Lettie where I’d be, but Marco had her by the arm, funneling her into the conference room, and I just pointed my finger in a roughly outheasterly direction, a gesture that meant nothing much, even to me. Victoria suggested a small restaurant she and Geoffrey had discovered earlier, and we left by the main lobby doors.

In the middle of the ever-revolving row of taxis in front of the hotel was a thoroughly banged-up blue Fiat, and Gianni Diletti sprawled casually behind the wheel. No doubt he was waiting for Amy.

Achille approached the car from the front and slammed his hand playfully on the Fiat’s curbside fender. Gianni sat up as Achille made monkey faces through the windshield at him.

Beth was with Achille. She wore a blue sundress with a white shawl, so it looked to me as if they might be just leaving for a night on the town. As Achille and Gianni clasped hands and exchanged a few jibes, apparently humorous, in Italian, Beth smiled.

Victoria and I asked for another table in the little restaurant because the headwaiter first seated us in the middle of a noisy crowd. Since I normally had a hard time understanding Geoffrey, I knew that it would be impossible under these conditions. The headwaiter found us a table covered with red-and-white checked oilcloth behind a room divider topped with fake plants.