Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

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 cafés, 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 grâce 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.”

Gideon laughed. He didn’t think much of the idea either. “All right, tell me this: How did you establish that he killed her ? How do you know it wasn’t the other way around? She killed him and then shot herself?”

“How could she? According to you, she was already dead from the fall when she was shot. Pretty damn hard to shoot yourself in the head when you’re dead.”

“Never mind ‘according to me.’ How did you establish it in the first place, during the investigation?”

“Oh God, a lot of things. First, the way she was shot: back of the head, execution style. You saw that in the class. The bullet entered in the lower back part of her skull and then ran slightly upward, hitting the inside of her skull pretty much in the middle of her forehead. Which—as I’m sure I don’t have to tell either of you guys—is the path you get if the victim was kneeling, with her head bowed. Well, how many suicides have you run into where the person shot himself in the back of the head that way? Not many.”

“No,” Gideon said, “but there are some who do.”

“That’s true,” John said. “In fact, you can’t come up with any part of the head that some suicide hasn’t shot himself in: the nose, the eye, the ear, the top of the head, the back of the head, the teeth . . . almost any part of the body, in fact: the crotch, the armpit—”

“Well, you guys are lucky,” Rocco said. “You get to look at a lot more gunshot deaths than we do over here, so I can’t argue with you. But I’ve seen a few suicides and I never saw one that did it back- to-front. I mean, why would they? It’s harder. It can’t happen very often.”

“Well, yeah,” John agreed, “that’s so . . .”

“Yes, it is,” said Gideon, “and your execution-style killing idea was pretty good thinking at the time, but—well, sorry, but it’s not correct. She was already dead when she was shot.”

“Yeah, so you keep saying.” Rocco rolled his eyes. “Jesus, did we get anything right?” His hand flew up. “Don’t answer that.”

“Well, it’s understandable. You didn’t know then what you know now—that she fell off that cliff first, before—”

“No, you know that. I don’t know that, and I’m waiting to hear something that convinces me. I mean, no offence, Gid, I know you’re this great expert and everything, but I need a little more than your word here.”

“Give me a minute, Rocco, I’ll get there. But for the moment just assume I’m right. Now think about it. Here’s this woman. She’s just taken this horrendous fall. She’s about as dead as she can get. Half her bones are broken. Now, for whatever reason, he wants to shoot her. So how—”