“Thanks,” she said.
“Your welcome,” he said.
They parked in a shadowy alley and walked a narrow cobble stone street up a slight rise. An archway opened into a bright piazza that was the length of a football field and not quite as wide. Water jumped out of a ground level concrete slab a few feet to the right. Cafes with four or five rows of outdoor seating lined the entire length of the piazza, old ornate looking residential buildings stacked on top. Aromas filled the air, making his mouth gush. There were people everywhere.
A male Cabinieri officer stood in the deep distance — light blue shirt, dark blue pants with bright red stripe down the side of each leg, and white leather belt. Lia began walking swiftly in his direction.
Suddenly a cacophony of noise stirred the piazza. It was a group of four kids on some motorbikes, rapping their engines loudly. Wolf thought they looked like dirt bikes, but they had smooth street tires on them. Upon closer looking, he realized they didn’t look like it, that’s exactly what they were — dirt bikes with street tires.
Three of them killed the engines and leaned their bikes up against a side alley wall, while another circled back and revved hard in front of a group of people, scaring them into a frenzy of stumbling and shrieks. It was a group of young mentally handicapped people.
Lia slowed down and Wolf came up along side her. She was watching the officer in the distance march with determination towards the four kids on bikes, who were now taking off their helmets and laughing. The fourth kid still sat on his bike, leaning against the wall with the engine shut off, pealing off his helmet.
He didn’t see it coming.
The officer walked up and slapped his head, a smack that was clearly audible from the forty yards they were at. He ripped the kid off the bike and pushed him up against the wall, giving the boy a typewriter to the chest and a vigorous speech that, by the looks of his whitened expression, was the scariest thing he’d ever heard in his life. He released the boy and said something to the others, who all began pushing their bikes out of site up the alley. The Caribinieri officer turned and started walking towards Wolf and Lia.
Wolf bounced his eyebrows. “That’s good police work right there.”
“Detective Valerio Rossi.” He shook Wolf’s hand. “We spoke on the phone. I’m so sorry for your loss, officer Wolf.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you for all your help so far.”
“Ready?”
“Yep,” Wolf exhaled.
“His apartment is right here. Just off the piazza. Let’s go.”
Wolf followed Rossi and Lia watching them have a conversation in Italian. Lia seemed to be confiding something to him, and Rossi was shaking his head in disbelief, consoling her with a fatherly, or brotherly, pat on the back.
Wolf turned his thoughts away from their relationship dynamic to the task at hand. His heart skipped a beat at the prospect of going to see where his brother died.
Security fencing surrounded the property, iron spikes filed to thin deadly points topping each tall iron bar. Rossi pushed the intercom button and spoke to a male voice who buzzed them in. It was the property manager who lived on site.
“Buon giorno.” He had a sullen expression, holding his hand out to Wolf.
“Hello, do you speak English?”
“Uhhh, no.”
“Okay,” Wolf glanced at Lia and Rossi. “Thank you for meeting us.”
Lia stepped in and began translating.
“You were the one who found my brother?”
“He and the girl, Cristina, that lives above your brother, found him. He called the Caribinieri.” Lia translated to Wolf.
“Okay. Let’s just head up.”
The janitor took a set of keys out of his pocket and expertly inserted the top key into the door of apartment twenty two. He turned it four or five complete revolutions to the left, then put a smaller key in and turning it five more times before the door popped open a crack.
The janitor stepped back and let the door hang open a few inches. They all looked to Wolf, who stepped forward and pushed.
It smelled of lemon disinfectant, and was very dim. Rossi walked around Wolf and went to the small balcony off the main room, sliding open floor to ceiling shutter doors. Bright sunlight poured in revealing a very spacious room with high ceilings he estimated to be ten feet.
There was a dark wood table and four chairs, a recliner seat, television stand, small flat screen television, two person couch, and a couple folding chairs along the wall. No coffee table or end tables. Black and white photographs hung on the walls. Frameless. They looked to be John’s work, perhaps blown up at a local supermarket, or photo shop, or whatever they had here that did that kind of stuff.
“Apparently your brother went out Friday night with a friend, came home, and the girl living above heard a noise. She said she was concerned after not seeing him all day Saturday, or Saturday night. They were supposed to have a date apparently on Saturday night. She became concerned mid-day Sunday and told the manager.
“The manager came with keys and opened the door, which apparently was difficult, because the keys were in the top lock from the inside. He somehow pushed them out and got it unlocked, then they found the body…uh, sorry, your brother.”
“Did you talk to the person he was out with that night? What was his name?”
“No, we did not. I do not know his name,” Rossi answered with a pained face.
Wolf furrowed his brow. “You don’t know?”
“No officer Wolf. The keys were in the lock, locked from the inside, with only your brother inside,” Rossi held out his hands with an apologetic look.
There was a small hole in the ceiling with a capped wire sticking out. He glanced at the floor and noticed a scratch on the wood veneer right below the hole in the ceiling. Wolf bent down and rubbed it. “This is where the chandelier fell and hit the ground?”
“Yes,” Rossi said. “He was underneath it.”
Wolf had heard the story over the phone.
“Where did you find the cocaine?”
“There was a small bag here on the table, and residue on his nose. We have the bag in evidence.”
Wolf noted the shiny, clean table as he walked to the kitchen — a narrow alley off the main room, with another smaller balcony off of it. Stove burners glistened, the countertops shined. It was perfectly clean, obviously cleaned by the manager, not John.
The manager said something and Lia translated, “He says he cleaned yesterday. He emptied the trash, got rid of some food, and cleaned the debris up in the main room here.”
Wolf walked back to the main room and out to the balcony. They were high above the piazza, looking directly down on it from the third floor, otherwise known as the second floor European, with the ground floor as designated floor zero, he’d noted in the earlier ride in the tiny elevator.
A vast section of Lake Como was in view over the roof tops. Kite surfers and wind sailers still whipped back and forth. The air was fresh and crisp on the balcony.
Wolf went through apartment to his brother’s room in back. He opened the same type of floor to ceiling shutter doors on the balcony, revealing a completely different breathtaking view. The opposite side of the apartment overlooked a mass of the orange clay tile roof tops of similar height to the balcony.
Butting up against the balcony just to the right extended one of the clay tiled roofs. It looked like one could step out onto the rooftops and walk all the way across the city, if one didn’t mind the thirty-plus degree slope of the first roof here. He studied it hard, then craned his head over and looked up to the identical balcony above.
Ducking back in, he noted his brother’s room was sparse in furniture, just like the rest of the apartment. A
