Wolf shifted forward, tilting his head, and took a breath to speak.
“But I don’t like what you did this morning, Officer Wolf.” Marino’s voice raised in volume. “You put one of my best policemen in a a bad situation. He trusted you.” He stood up and walked halfway around his desk, sitting one buttock on top.
“I don’t know what you are talking about, sir.”
“You don’t?” Marino folded his hands on his leg and stared motionless for five seconds.
Wolf waited again.
Marino glanced sideways at Lia, then back to Wolf.
“We’ve had some interesting developments in the last couple hours. We almost had all of north Italia going on a wild…turkey chase looking for this white truck of yours. A hunch from an American…consulente.”
“That wasn’t a hunch, I saw-”
“We found the truck,” he spoke loudly, holding up his index finger again. “Without having to call a national search, Officer Wolf. National search orders have to come from me.” He pecked his chest with his finger. “So officer Rossi took every action he could to keep me out of this cowboy show. I am in debt to him for that. And do you know why that eez Officer Wolf?”
“They stopped the truck in question at the Trieste border within the last hour.” He held up a piece of paper between his thumb and index finger. “The truck was searched thoroughly, by human and by dog — much like many of the shipments that go through that border. There was nothing but the parts listed on the manifest prepared by the employee my officers harassed this morning at the Osservatorio di Merate!” His face flashed to a bright crimson, veins bulged in his temples.
“It was the wrong truck then,” Wolf said. “I know what I saw, and I saw a truck loaded with cocaine and stolen electronics.”
Marino began to chuckle, yanked a cigarette from the pack sitting on the desk, lit it, and dismounted in a high handed pirouette.
“Ah, yes! The brilliant piece of detective work you did last night! I hear you broke into the observatory grounds and saw some interesting things!”
“Yeah. I did see some interesting things.”
“Did you? Well, let me tell you a few interesting things. You were trespassing. Trespassing illegally in a foreign country. As my guest in our country,” he gestured wide with his arms, “you cannot come strutting into Italy on your horse and play cowboy, doing as you please. If you would have been caught, you would be in jail right now and there would be nothing I could do to get you out.”
“If I would have been caught I’d be dead like my brother right now. Because I was shot at! How are you turning a blind eye to this? You’ve got a pub fronting as a legitimate business, going around murdering people, smuggling stolen electronics and drugs! If you don’t care about that, then what the hell do you care about?”
Marino snapped his head to Wolf and let the silence hang for a beat.
“Don’t test me Officer Wolf. I am warning you.” Marino looked at the door, and back to Wolf for effect.
Wolf calmed himself with a deep breath. “I know what I did was out of line, and I could have put you in a very compromising position. But I haven’t tried to make you or your department look bad on purpose. I was acting on a hunch. A hunch I should have talked to you guys about first, I admit,” he said. “But I swear I saw what I saw.”
“And I will take your observations under consideration and proceed accordingly in due time, Officer Wolf. Just because you have a flight to catch back home doesn’t mean we can cut corners and ignore laws in this country. There is no evidence to go on here. Nothing! So, you are going to have to make a decision right now, Officer Wolf. You have to trust me, and trust officer Rossi, and trust officer Parente here, and the rest of our very capable Caribinieri to follow up with this case in due time, the proper way.”
Wolf exhaled hard and leaned his elbows on his knees.
Marino’s expression melted to sympathy, and he flopped down in the chair with a grunt. “Look at this from my point of view. I have hard, undeniable evidence that a man used a pipe to beat another man’s skull in, killing him in cold rage. I have fingerprints, usable fingerprints, in
“I have evidence that a man hung himself from his ceiling. I have evidence he died of strangulation. Putting those two pieces of evidence together tells me that I have evidence this man killed himself. There was no one else in the apartment at the time. We have a testimony from the upstairs neighbor that she did not hear anything at all. If there were men inside, she would have heard, would she not? The door to your brother’s apartment was locked from the inside, keys still in the door. All of the evidence points to no one being in the apartment that night.
“And then,” he gestured to Wolf, “we have the conviction of a brother who doesn’t want to believe the evidence that is staring him in the face.”
Wolf didn’t move. “You guys dismissed this case from the beginning. You haven’t given it enough attention. There’s more to it. You didn’t even perform an autopsy, which probably would have told you the bruise on his head was not after death, but before death. You would have found out my brother doesn’t take drugs. There wouldn’t have been any drugs in his system.”
A tinge of doubt crept into his mind with the last statement, but he kept his poker face. “If you would have followed up on the receipt in my brother’s pocket, you would have seen that he was at a pub the night he died. A pub owned by some shady individuals who are current or former gang members. The kind of guys you want to look into further. Guys that I now know are smuggling drugs. Undoubtedly the same cocaine that was found at my brother’s and at Dr. Rosenwald’s apartment.
“There wasn’t even an investigation into the night of his death. Who was he with? What exactly was he doing? Where were the people he was with? These questions didn’t come up for your investigators?”
Marino inhaled deeply and let the question hang.
“Officer Wolf, it looked like a suicide.” He swiped his hands together and held them up, a gesture Wolf was becoming intimately familiar with.
“Not to me.”
Marino took another drag and swiveled his chair to the side, smoke seeping from his nostrils. He stood up. “I will have my men look into it further. Officer Parente will help,” he said. “You have my word. Now I need you to go home and let us do our job.”
Wolf shook his head and looked to the dirty tile floor.
Marino sat on the edge of his desk. “You will let us do our job. Or we will risk having an international incident. I do not want to have to take you into custody, Officer Wolf. But I will not have you going around breaking into property and conducting an investigation by yourself. How would you like it if this happened in your town in Colorado? How would you deal with it?”
Wolf looked at Lia, who gave him a sympathetic sideways glance. He narrowed his eyes and stared back at the floor, coming to a lucid conclusion. “All right. I have your word you will look further into the pub owner and the observatory employee?” He stood up straight and tall.
Marino put his cigarette in his mouth and stood, hands out to his sides.
“You have my word.”
Wolf exhaled, looking to the ceiling, a resigned look on his face. “Okay. I’ll take the next day and get my brother’s things in order, then I’ll be leaving on Sunday morning.” He looked back down to Lia, who sat obediently. “Is it possible to get a ride to the airport on Sunday morning from officer Parente? Rather than take the train again?”
“If it is her day off. You will have to arrange that with her.”
“I’m on duty Sunday, sir,” she said.
“Then Lia will take you to the airport in the morning. You two can arrange it. Now if you will excuse officer Parente and myself, we need to speak about something.”
Wolf shook Marino’s hand and opened the door.
“Officer Wolf,” Marino called.
“Yes?”
“I’m very sorry. Good luck to you and your family.”
