Jeff Carson - Foreign Deceit

He studied her reaction, her eyes. He believed her. A woman trying to hide her drug use was something he was intimately familiar with, something he’d learned to read on a woman’s face just as plainly as an animal track in fresh mud.

“Because there was cocaine found on the table in the living room, and in his nose.”

She looked genuinely surprised. “I never knew him to take drugs. He and I never did. We would drink wine, and he would maybe have a cigarette with me every once and a while…but that’s it.”

“Do you know anything about the night he died? That Friday night? What was he doing? Who was he with?”

“He was supposed to go out with a friend,” she said. “His astronomer friend, who works at an observatory.”

“Okay, where is that observatory?”

“In a town just south of here.”

“Okay, do you have the phone number for…what’s his name?”

“Oh, sorry, his name is Matthew. Matthew Rosenwald. No, I don’t have his number. But I know where he works. It’s called the Merate Observatory , I think, or the Osservatorio di Merate I guess it would be named in Italian?”

“Have you heard from him at all?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Okay, so, what was he supposed to do with Matthew that night, do you know?”

“He said they were just going out for a few drinks. They usually went out about once a week together. Matthew’s from Australia, and they met through a friend of mine. They kind of hit it off because they could speak English together, and they both like to drink beer.” She laughed.

He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “Do you know this bar?”

She looked at the receipt for the Albastru Pub. “Yes. It is actually a Romanian bar.”

“Have you been there?”

“Once with John, and actually with David.”

Wolf’s thought’s were burning through the fog of jet lag, excited to have a good direction to take tomorrow.

He put the slip of paper back in his pocket. “The Caribinieri said you heard something downstairs on the night of his death?”

“I did. I heard a crash and went downstairs and knocked on his door. But it was dark underneath his door, and it was locked. I just started to think I probably heard something else, outside, or from across the hall, or something. I just went back upstairs and went to sleep.” Her eyes were wide, staring, unblinking.

“When was that?”

“It was 1:15 in the morning. I remember looking at the clock when I heard the crash.”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” he whispered.

She nodded her head, staring at her hands.

“So you talked to the Caribinieri the next day?”

“Ummm…no. I talked to them on Sunday. When he didn’t call me, or respond to my texts, or answer his door all day Saturday, I started getting worried.”

“Oh, yeah, okay. Sunday.” He rubbed his temples. His mind was struggling to keep details straight. His body demanded sleep. “Let’s see, so, what did you tell the Caribinieri?”

She looked to the ceiling. “Not that much. One guy was just asking if I saw or heard anything the night of his death. I just told him about what I heard, and how I came down and knocked. I told them how he didn’t answer my calls, or my knocking, and how he stood me up for our date, and that’s why I was concerned. Then…well, that was pretty much it. A couple of officers were just waiting outside my door. They said they had a special counselor coming for me to talk. I didn’t want to wait around to speak to some government worker who doesn’t know me, or didn’t know John. I just walked out.”

“Yeah, I understand. I don’t blame you,” he said. “Did they ask about drugs?”

She looked confused. “No, not at all. I didn’t know about the drugs until just now.”

A warm blanket of exhaustion wrapped around Wolf again. He’d had enough. His body needed rest. There was no use fighting it any more.

“Are you going to be around in the next couple days?”

“I have to work during the daytimes, but I am usually home at night.”

“All right. I may need some help with some things this weekend. We’ll see.” He went back to his brother’s apartment thinking about the Friday deadline for Lia’s help.

Wolf picked up his backpack and went into his brother’s room. He put his bag down and exhaled, staring at the bed. “I’m sure these sheets are dirty as shit,” he said out loud to John. Pulling the comforter back, he confirmed his suspicion.

There was a set of sheets on the shelf in the bathroom closet. They smelled nice and washed, but there were no pillow cases.

Looking in John’s bedroom closet bore no fruit. He stood, shaking his head, marveling at the anal retentive organization. The assortment of clothing was meticulously separated into dark and light segments, coats in a separate segment still. John’s six pairs of shoes were lain out in a straight line along the closet wall floor. A cheap hanging plastic rack housed his belts and ties on the very right side.

Clean tee-shirts over the pillows seemed a good substitute, so he pulled two out of his pack.

Pulling it on, he stopped with a jolt and went back in the closet. He pulled the clothes over hard to get an un-obstructed view of the belt and tie rack.

There were four belts, a missing space, and then four ties. A perfect spot to put the belt John was wearing the night he died. So where did the belt he hung himself with hang?

Wolf had been up for four hours when Lia picked him up at 8 am. He met her outside the gate.

She shot a couple appraising glances as they walked. “You look better this morning.”

He had shaved, showered, shampooed the grease mat that was his thick dark brown hair, and put on some fresh clothes. He felt better. Wolf looked at her and smiled. “Thanks.”

He’d always been confident in his good looks. The saying, or whatever it was, tall, dark, and handsome applied to him. He was six-foot-three, taller than most men he came into contact with, had spiky dark brown hair, a complexion that tanned if the lightbulbs were too bright, dark walnut eyes, thick eyebrows, and a mole on his upper right cheek that women in his life had often referred to as a “beauty mark”…not that he considered himself a heart throb, but he wasn’t an idiot either.

He stole a glance at Lia, who was walking fast, chin up, chest out, slender athletic body, a tight pony tail of shoulder-length straight brown hair swaying underneath her Caribinieri cap.

“You look nice this morning too.” He examined her with raised eyebrows, meaning to sound nonchalant, unable to do so with such a truthful statement. He caught a whiff of her lavender scent and cleared his throat, snapping to his senses. “Hey, so, I talked to John’s girlfriend last night, she was home.”

“And?”

“She had the name of the guy he was with the night before. I’d like to go talk to him, his name is Matthew and he works at the Merate Observatory. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, I do. In fact I’ve been there a few times. For high school…I was in Liceo Scientifico.”

“What does that mean?”

“In Italy, you choose your vocation very early in life, and go to school for it. Or, you choose the…how would you call it…the track…”

“The major? Like in college?”

“Well,” she said. “it’s much earlier. It starts in high school. But, I guess it is kind of like a major for college. Anyway, I was Scientifico. We studied natural sciences and I went there a couple times for astronomy.”

“Great. But we have to go back to the morgue first.”