Dying on the Vine

“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 cafes, 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 grace 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.”