Dying on the Vine

anonymous red wine as well—vino a bicchiere, €3,00—that would probably have delighted old Pietro, but would never have made it on the lunch table of today’s Villa Antica, not with Franco in charge. But for what they were eating, nothing could have suited better.

But Gideon chewed almost absentmindedly. The news about Cesare’s death was still sinking in. “Rocco, does the family know yet? I’m heading back to the villa right after lunch. Would you like me to tell them?”

“No, Tonino will do it. He’s on his way there now.”

A few more slowly masticated mouthfuls, and then Gideon asked, “Did the medico have any preliminary opinion? Accidental overdose? Suicide? Murder?”

“All he could say was there wasn’t anything to indicate violence or that anyone forced the dope into him.”

“Which doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”

“Which was what he said. What’s your take, Gid?”

“Personally? I think he was murdered, one way or another. Whatever it was he had on his computer that made someone nervous, Cesare himself had to have known about it too. So they both had to go. I don’t see that there’s much doubt about it.”

The spoon stopped on its way to Rocco’s mouth. “I’m surprised. I mean, it’s not that I don’t think you’re right—we’re looking at murder here, I can feel it in my bones—but that’s not exactly your style.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, hell, you haven’t even seen the body. Where are all the qualifiers, the tend tos, the in most cases, the—”

“I’m not speaking as a scientist here, Rocco. I’m not giving an expert opinion; I’m just giving an opinion. I’m talking to you, not to the court.”

“Fair enough, and I agree with you, but based on what, really?”

Gideon put the panino down and snatched another handful of napkins from the dispenser to wipe his fingers. “You’ve got a newly reopened murder investigation going into the deaths of two people. One day after the investigation starts—two days after the stepson brings a gazillion-dollar suit based on the murders—said stepson, who also happens to be your number-one suspect in the case—dies of an overdose. His computer and its contents are seen no more. It all has to be related, Rocco, and to suppose that his death was a mere inadvertence seems to be stretching coincidence to its limits. There must have been dozens of times in the past he could have died from an overdose—but he didn’t. Kind of provocative, wouldn’t you say, that it happens right now?”

“Well, maybe, but, you know, that suit throws a new angle into things. Maybe it’s not all related. Even if it’s a murder, it might not tie back to the old murders. Maybe it strictly has to do with the suit. A lot of people, that whole family, stand to lose a ton of money. Especially Franco. I’m not sure we’re not confusing things by balling everything up into one package.”

“I don’t agree. There wouldn’t be any suit if there hadn’t been any murders, would there? No, it’s all tied together.”

“You think Cesare had something to do with the murders?”

“Something? I do, yes.”

“I can’t see why.”

“Because of what we’ve been talking about. Because he’s dead and his computer was stolen.”

“Man, I’m trying to follow you here. Are you saying you think it was Cesare that killed them?”

“No, I’m just saying there’s a connection. Maybe he knew who did kill them. Maybe he knew something that could incriminate the killer. Maybe he did kill them. Maybe it was something else. But one way or another, it’s all tied together. They’re too close together, especially in time.”

“I don’t know. Coincidences do happen, you know. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have a word for them.” He laughed, struck funny after the fact by what he’d said. “Hey, you know what Woody Allen said about time? ‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.’”

Gideon smiled abstractedly, then murmured: “Within any set or set of sets, the probability that the components of a series of improbable events are unrelated is inversely correlated with the frequency of occurrence of such events.”

Rocco just looked at him for a long, penetrating five seconds before he spoke. “No shit,” he said.

Gideon burst out laughing. “I saw it written up that way in a journal once. It’s an academic-speak translation of something an old professor of mine came up with, and I quote: ‘When you got too much monkey business going on, too many unrelated things happening all over the place at the same time, to the same people, in the same context; buddy, you can bet your life there’s something funny going on and they ain’t so unrelated after all.’”

It didn’t sound as good to his ears as it did when it had been said with Abe Goldstein’s Yiddish accent, but he believed it wholeheartedly, and he had often put it to good use in his forensic work. He smiled, remembering his friend and mentor. “The Law of Interconnected Monkey Business, he called it.”

“Yeah, well, okay, maybe there’s something to that, but let’s focus on just one event for a minute. Cesare. If someone did kill him by getting an overdose into him, I can’t see how we’re ever going to prove it, even to ourselves, can you?”

“Not really.”

Rocco finished his stew, wiped his mouth, and sat contemplatively back with his wineglass. “You know, when you think about it, what do we really have in the whole damn case that’s solid? Not a whole hell of a lot. We have exactly one definite murder that we’re convinced of, and that’s Nola’s. But that’s based on your theory about the way people tend to fall off cliffs, not on anything anybody would call hard evidence.” He waited for an argument from Gideon, but got none.

“I agree with you, Rocco. Hard evidence it’s not.”

“And then there’s Cesare. We just said ourselves he’s kind of a gray area—maybe somebody killed him, maybe not. And the same goes for Pietro.”

“Rocco, Pietro was shot and thrown off a cliff.”

“Yeah, after he was dead. Weeks after, from what you said. That’s weird, but it doesn’t mean he was murdered in the first place.”

“Well, why would somebody shoot him and throw him off a cliff later on if he hadn’t been?”

“Why would someone shoot him and throw him off a cliff later on if he had been?”

Gideon laughed; Julie had said the same thing the previous night. “You’ve got a point there, Rocco. I sure don’t have an answer. It’s all pretty equivocal, isn’t it?” He carefully downed the one remaining chunk of his panino and applied some more napkins to his fingers and his chin. As far as he could tell, his shirt had made it through unspotted.

Rocco, gazing mournfully out the arched window, sighed. “Was it really only last Tuesday—ah, how fondly I remember—that I had this nice, clear murder-suicide all tied up in a neat little package with not one loose string in sight. Well done, Gardella; case closed, on to the next one. And then you come on the scene, and suddenly it’s totally screwed up. It’s all fuzzy, nothing is clear-cut, everything is as equivocal as hell.”

“I hear that a lot,” Gideon said pleasantly. “I don’t know why that is.”

Rocco’s answering grumble was unintelligible, but then he yawned and laughed. “Oh, hey, I got some of the death-scene photos from today with me. Wanna have a look at ’em before I take off?” He was unwinding the string from the little buttons of a large-sized envelope, the kind used for internal office communications.

“Why would I not?” Gideon said, reaching out his hand. “The perfect ending to a perfect meal.”

They were a dozen or so full-color shots, about five by eight. Sipping his wine, Gideon went quickly through them, moving each viewed picture to the rear of the pack as he finished with it. The body, the surroundings, looked both pathetic and squalid, as they somehow always did in crime-scene photos, even when no overt violence was involved. Maybe it was something about the cameras they used.

The last one was a slightly out-of-focus close-up of the nightstand, and on that one he paused. “I see the snuff kit,” he said, “but what’s the other stuff? Are those Kleenex?”

“Tissues, yeah. And some pens, a toenail clipper, key ring—”

“A bottle of some kind . . .” He peered at the photo. “Oh, it’s cough medicine. Giorniquilla.”