He grabbed the railing with both hands, so tightly his knuckles stood up in bold relief. “I cannot keep your group here much longer. I’ve questioned all of you, and unless I can arrest someone, I have to let you go on your way. You have all paid for a tour of Italy, right?”
“Right.”
“I have to know who killed Meg Bauer. It was a brutal killing.” Marco spat the words out.
I felt exactly the same way. Never mind what Meg was or wasn’t; it was a brutal killing. From Marco’s point of view, it was his job to find out who did it. From my own, it was the only way my innocent friends could get out from under the cloud of suspicion that lay over all of us.
Marco took a deep breath. “I know Mrs. Hines is a close friend of your friend, Lettie, but look at what I have here. Beth Hines, who had good reasons to hate her sister Meg, stands to benefit financially by her death. Beth is seen entering an elevator. She is angry because her sister finanpulled another one of her cruel tricks, and a few minutes later, that same sister is found dead, killed with the knife Beth bought the day before and left in a drawer by the door. Now, I can make up stories that will put someone else, like Lettie, or you, or Paul Vogel, or even Achille, at the handle end of that knife, but compared to the simple, obvious case against Beth Hines, all the other stories I can make up are . . .” And here his English failed him.
“Like straining at gnats?”
“What?”
“Never mind. I do see what you mean.” I held back my hair with my hands. “Have you considered Jim Kelly, Marco? I can’t think of a sufficient motive, but out of all our group, Jim is the only one with no alibi. He was in his room, he says. His wife was out.”
“Jim Kelly has a better alibi than anyone. In fact, he has a perfect alibi. From four forty-one p.m. until five thirty-five, he was on the phone with the United States Secretary of Agriculture. They were discussing the safety of Canadian beef, and there are tapes and backup tapes of the entire conversation in Washington, D.C.”
“Okay. What about Paul Vogel?”
Marco put his hand against my cheek and turned my face toward him. The kiss was warm and sweet and traveled to the very heart of the lonesome part of me. I didn’t want to think about what this meant, or if it meant anything. I simply wanted it to last.
“Paul Vogel couldn’t cut a cooked chicken,” Marco whispered, pushing the hair out of my left eye. “Meg Bauer would have had him pinned to the floor in two seconds.”
Like a cyclone, Joe Bauer blew into the lobby, rained chaos down upon the front desk, and thundered into the elevator, taking most of the air with him. Lettie had slipped out of Beth’s room, leaving her asleep, to get a bite of breakfast with me. We were waiting to be seated when the hubbub arose.
“Oh, dear, he’s going straight up to Beth’s room,” Lettie said. “I’d better head him off at the pass. She needs to sleep.”
I grabbed her collar as she tried to run out. “Let him go. You couldn’t stop him anyway.”
Tessa, clean and nicely dressed, popped in. Her sunglasses, normally on top of her head, were across her eyes today, but other than that, she looked the same as usual. “Meeting in the conference room at nine thirty,” she said and popped out again.
———
Except for the Bauers, we were all there by 9:30, and the meeting only lasted a few minutes.
“I know that some of you want to get on with our tour and some of you don’t,” Tessa said. “I have to stay here today, as I’m sure you’ll understand, but that doesn’t mean the rest of you can’t go to Pisa as originally planned. Achille will meet you in the parking lot at ten thirty, or as Geoffrey would say, ‘half-ten.’ The drive takes about an hour and a halfYou can have lunch there, and you should be back here by six o’clock. If you’re not in the parking lot by ten thirty, Achille will assume you don’t want to go and leave without you.”
“I’m staying here,” I told Lettie on the way out. “What about you?”
“Me, too. I want to be handy in case Beth needs me. Do you mind if I don’t go with you wherever you go today?”
“Of course not,” I said.
Marco Quattrocchi and Joe Bauer stepped off the elevator, steam pouring out of all four of their ears. They sidled off to the little seating area, the same one where Lettie and I had sat last Friday while Meg was being murdered.
“I have to talk to her today. Whether we do it here or at my office, I do not care,” Marco said, gesturing firmness with his hands. His voice was cold and measured.
“After what she’s been through? You’ve got to be kidding!” Joe, a big, barrel-chested man squeaked on that last word. He looked as if he was about to lose control, if he hadn’t already.
“I have a murder to solve.”
“It’s out of the question.”
“Your sister has been murdered. You should both be trying to help me!”
“Beth is in a state of shock. You saw her. She’s a zombie! You will have to wait.”
The way Joe said it, I thought Marco would be smart to back off. Lettie and I sneaked over to the plate glass window in front of the gift shop and pretended to study the shawls on display. We could still hear the two men.
“I can have her picked up and taken to my office in a squad car for questioning.”
“You do, and I’ll sue.”
“You are an alien, remember?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What I mean is,” Marco hissed through clamped teeth, “by the time you figure out how to sue the carabinieri—in Italy—you will have to apply for a visa, or maybe even citizenship. I have to find out who killed your sister, and I have to do it while these people are still in Italy.”
“You’ve had
three days
to talk to Beth. Meg was killed on Friday!”
“And I did talk to her, several times. But I need to talk to her some more.”
It was time for Lettie and me to go upstairs. Soon Marco and Joe were bound to notice us hanging around, and we couldn’t pretend to be interested in shawls forever. I hadn’t told Lettie about the kiss, and I don’t exactly know why I hadn’t. I suspect it was because I enjoyed keeping it to myself. Or maybe it was because I wanted to be free to distance myself from Marco if Lettie and the Bauers declared war on the carabinieri.
As soon as the elevator doors sed, Lettie said, “I’m going up to Beth’s room now. In case the captain and brother Joe move their battle upstairs, I want to be there to protect Beth. She can’t take any more conflict; she’d go right round the bend. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m going to visit Paul Vogel.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later. We’ll have a lot to talk about tonight.”
I rode up to the second floor with Lettie and held the door open for Victoria Reese-Burton and Crystal Hostetter who were rushing down the hall together. Victoria raised one finger—the universal hold-the-door signal—as Crystal, a few steps behind her, lifted a couple of complimentary shampoo bottles off the maid’s cart.
“We’re going to Pisa today, Crystal and I. Shirley wants to take it easy and stay here,” Victoria said.
“I don’t blame her. Her feet are still healing, I’m sure. How
are
her feet, Crystal?”
If Crystal had any guilt over her mother’s lacerated feet, she didn’t show it. “They’re okay, I think. She says she’s going to return the crutches to the doctor’s office today.”
“What about San Gimignano? I thought you wanted to go to the . . .” I let my voice trail off. I realized, when I was halfway through that sentence, that Victoria might have decided not to mention the medieval torture museum. She might have decided it was not appropriate.
“Oh, the torture museum,” Victoria said, and the gleam in Crystal’s eyes told me that she had already mentioned it. “Tessa says we’ll probably have another day trip to Siena tomorrow. San Gimignano is between here and Siena, so we might have the bus drop us off on the way.”
“Don’t forget, Pisa is the home of Pinocchio. I understand you can get some wonderful puppets there.” I deliberately said that so I could watch Crystal’s eyes roll, and she didn’t disappoint me.
Paul and Lucille’s room was on the first floor, only a few doors down from mine. Paul answered my knock and looked a little uncomfortable as I invited myself in. Lucille was in the bathroom with the door open, so neither of us could actually say, “Where can we talk in private?”
But Lucille was dressed, her ample waist already girded by a denim travel pack, which I took to mean that she was on her way out.
“Your songs at the memorial service yesterday were wonderful, Lucille. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she muttered, hitching up her waist pack.
“I don’t think there was a dry eye in the chapel when you sat down. I know my own weren’t.”
“‘Amazing Grace’ always gets ‘em,” Lucille tossed over her shoulder as she walked out and slammed the door.
Paul jammed his hands into his shorts pockets, then sheepishly studied his feet. “My sister is not as rd as she pretends to be.”
“Have you heard anything from your contacts back home?”
“Not yet. Maybe today. I’m still not sure what you’re looking for,” he said.
“I’m looking for a connection between Meg Bauer and somebody on this trip. Something other than the obvious sister or fellow nurse or whatever. I know Meg had problems and conflicts as a nurse. She caused Shirley Hostetter to quit her job. She had views that ran counter to those of Wilma Kelly, a political activist. Meg had a reputation for sloppiness. Tessa has a younger brother who suffered some sort of problem at birth that resulted in a severe handicap, and Amy had an early marriage that ended quickly. I have it on good authority that Tessa’s fiancé, Cesare, is likely in the Mafia, and one can’t really ignore their well-known dealings in drugs, or the fact that nurses have been known to pilfer drugs.”
“You’re seeing motives everywhere you look, aren’t you?” Paul couldn’t hide his grin.
I think I must have blushed. “Well, they do seem to be popping up all over the place.”
“Have you found a motive for
me
, yet? I feel left out.”
I didn’t dare approach the subject of his sister, Lucille, and the possible nurse/drug addict connection. We didn’t need to go into that. But I felt like countering his sarcasm with a little impertinence of my own. “I don’t really have a motive for you yet, Paul, but it has occurred to me that if your sources back home uncover one, you certainly won’t pass it along to me.”
“I don’t believe you! You are the most . . . the most . . .” He spluttered and spun on his heel.
“Oh, but I don’t suspect everybody. I’ve eliminated Jim Kelly. Captain Quattrocchi told me that Jim was certifiably on the phone to the U.S. Agriculture Department throughout the time of Meg’s murder. They have tapes and everything.”
That got Paul’s attention. He didn’t admit it, but his face told me it was news to him.
“I’ve been thinking about what I said, that the murderer had to be a man,” he muttered. “That was probably a bit sexist. Actually, if a woman—”
“Wait! If you’re about to say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, may I suggest that that would be even more sexist?”
“I doubt Meg was killed because someone got scorned. I can’t imagine a woman being jealous of her.”
“Paul, do you think Amy fell by accident yesterday?”
“No.”
“Me, either.”
“A lot of people have a fear of heights, you know. Acrophobia. Very common. People walk up to the edge of a cliff or an overlook or something, like that place yesterday, and they don’t want to get too close to the edge because they’re afraid they’ll fall. Some people are afraid they’ll suddenly be overcome by an irresistible urge to jump. But nobody ever does actually fall. Can you name me one example where somebody accidentally fell off a cliff or the edge of an overlook? I’m not talking about mountain-climbers, guys hanging onto the side of a cliff with ropes, of course they fall sometimes. I’m talking about somebody just enjoying the view, and whoops!” Paul’s left hand described a trajectory that smacked it into his right.
“That’s sort of what I thought. Michael Melon thinks Amy lost her balance because her shoes were too high-heeled.”
“I probably don’t know as much about high heels as he does, but I do know that women learn how to navigate on those things, somehow. Haven’t you learned how to compensate?” He stuck his hands out to the side as if he were walking a tightrope. “I saw Amy take off, running across that plaza. Obviously, she had a lot of practice in high heels.”
“Quite right,” I said. “Paul, you took pictures up there yesterday. Could you get them developed? Like today?”
“No way. I have to use the developers I work with back home.” He pulled a desk drawer open. A dozen labeled film cans already littered the bottom. He looked at them wistfully, as if they all held shocking secrets just screaming to be brought to light. “I really need to go digital.”
“Who does have a digital camera?”
“Walter.” Paul looked at me. We were both thinking the same thing. “If we could hook it up to a computer . . . They have computers for rent downstairs, don’t they?”
I raced up the stairs alone. Paul refused to go with me to the rooms he had explored surreptitiously, because, I expect, he feared saying something that would expose him for the spy he was. If the curious quartet was going to Pisa, they would be leaving soon or they might have already left.
Should I knock on room 366 or 368? It gave me a headache to think about it.
Walter was supposedly staying in 366, but, according to Paul, he was actually in 368. But I wasn’t supposed to know that. Therefore, if I was here to see Walter, I should try 366 and, whoever answered, it would be all right. Elaine opened the door and told me Walter was visiting Michael, next door. A towel draped her shoulders. She brushed her thick hair and slipped a scrunchy around her unruly mass of curls. “But they may have already gone down to the bus,” she added.
Walter surprised me. He showed more enthusiasm for putting his pictures into a computer than for making it to Pisa. He suggested we go downstairs immediately to see about getting a computer. As we dashed to the elevator, he checked his watch. “Ten minutes before the bus leaves,” he said. “Think we can do this in ten minutes?”