Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

“Whoa,” said John, “that’s the first time I ever heard anybody say that about you, Doc.”

“Well, now, how exactly did I screw up the works? Tell me that. All I did—”

“All you did was tell us first she fell off the cliff and then she was shot.”

“Well, I know that complicates things a little—”

Rocco snorted a laugh. “Nah, not really. This guy shoves his wife off a two-hundred-foot cliff, then he runs down and pops her one, just in case a fall that broke every bone in her body didn’t do the job. Then, instead of killing himself right there and making it easy on himself, he climbs all the way to the top again—this fifty-eight-year-old guy with bad lungs—so he can shoot himself right on the edge, the very same spot, and fall down on top of her. Oh, yeah, nothing wrong with that picture.”

“Rocco, we’re getting ahead of the story here. All I can tell you for sure is that she was alive when she fell off the cliff, which I know because—”

“Oh, yeah, I wondered when you were gonna get around to that,” Rocco grumbled

“—because she was conscious when she fell, and if you’re conscious, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re alive.”

“Conscious?” Rocco practically shouted. “Damn, Gid . . .” When words failed him he just shook his head.

“Yes, conscious. Sure. You see—”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it. What hat did that get pulled out of? Don’t you ever stop? First you know she was alive, now you’re telling me you know she was conscious ?”

He had stopped walking so abruptly that a daydreaming man walking behind him had to stop himself from stumbling into him. Catching himself just before contact, he made an exasperated noise and gave Rocco the finger, a gesture as readily understood in Florence as in New York.

“Screw you too, pal,” was Rocco’s nonchalant, over-the-shoulder response, in English, before he returned his attention to Gideon. “What are you gonna tell me next, what she was thinking about?” Still shaking his head, he flipped his cigarette into the gutter.

“Believe me, if I could I would, but all I can tell you is that she was conscious.”

“Aw, man, give me a break. How the hell can you possibly know something like that?”

“I know because—”

Rocco glanced at his watch and did a quick mental calculation. “Nuts, I gotta go if I’m gonna make it back to meet the train. Jesus, Gid, you sure know how to turn a simple case into a, a—” He shook his head and pulled out a business card on which he scribbled something. “This is my cell number, my personal phone. Give me a call later and tell me what you were gonna say, will you? But no mumbo jumbo. If I’m gonna go anywhere with this, I’m gonna need some solid evidence—facts—to convince Captain Conforti. He’s a tough nut to crack.” And then to John: “If you think reopening a closed case is tough in the Feeb, you oughta see the Carabinieri . Don’t forget, red tape was invented right here in Florence. Thank you, Machiavelli.”

“I’ll call if you want, Rocco,” Gideon said, “but there’s no need to interrupt your evening. I’ll be going over it all in class tomorrow morning. In detail.”

“Yeah, except I’m not gonna be there. I gotta be in court, available to testify on another case. So call me later? Tonight, I mean?”

Gideon took the card. “I will.”

“In an hour would be good. So look: You can cut across the piazza right here. That street on the other side is Via della Scala. Left on that for two blocks and turn right on Via del Moro. The Osteria’s just a block down.” Another look at his watch, a momentary chewing of his lip. “Ah, what the hell, I can go a little more with you. I can always run back to the station.”

“Or just flag down the first car you see and jump in,” John suggested and growled: “‘Police business.’ That’s what we do in America. Don’t you watch any movies?”

“Yeah, right. Okay, Gid,” he said as they started across the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, “you know she was conscious because . . . ?”

“Well, go back to the bones we were looking at this afternoon, to all those fractures. Did you notice any kind of pattern in the damage?”

That brought roll of the eyes from John. “Oh, honest to God, you can’t just tell us? We really have to do this Socratic thing?”

“Hey, I’m a professor, John. It’s what I do.”

“Tell me about it,” John said grumpily.

“Pattern in the damage . . .” mused Rocco. “Gimme a minute . . . Most of the injuries were to the lower half of her body, is that what you’re driving at?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said John, “her legs were a mess. Her arms weren’t so bad.”

Gideon nodded. “Correct. More specifically, every single one of the six bones in her legs was broken, whereas not a single one of the six bones in the arms was damaged. And the one foot we have has more splintered bones than I had a chance to count. The pelvis is mashed too. But above the waist, the only injuries are some crushed vertebrae—not fractured, but crushed —and her skull. Well, how would you account for a pattern like that?”

“She landed on her feet?” John suggested as they started moving again. “I guess.”

“And you’re right, she landed on her feet, and the fact is that the bodies of dead people—or unconscious people for that matter—don’t do that. If a nonconscious body falls from a great enough height—and two hundred feet is way, way more than enough—then it tends to align itself in the air, so that it lands horizontally. It’s a function of the state of uniform motion of a falling object.”

“The state of . . . ?” Rocco’s brow furrowed.

“Not important,” Gideon said dismissively. “Now—”

“Meaning he doesn’t know what the hell it means either,” John told Rocco.

“Pretty much, yes,” Gideon agreed. “Physics never was one of my strong points. But the point I’m making here is: people who are conscious during a fall, they—”

“Land on their feet.” This from Rocco.

“Exactly. Well, with some qualifications. If it’s from a low height—ten, twenty feet—they won’t have time to change their alignment, so a lot of times they hit with their hands or forearms, trying to protect their heads. Or suicides might land head down on purpose. Otherwise, yes, they almost always land on their feet. And this one very definitely did. You’re frowning.”

“Yeah, I’m frowning,” Rocco said. “I got a problem with this.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, you seem awful sure of yourself, but when I listen to the words, what I hear is ‘tends to’ and ‘almost always’ and ‘most often.’ That doesn’t exactly convince the hell out of me, and it wouldn’t convince a court either, you know what I mean?”

“I do, and it’s a good point. But in this particular case there’s no almost always . I know she landed on her feet . . . and I know it from her skull .”

John and Rocco puzzled over this—Rocco was talking to himself—as they made their way through the great square that fronted the church’s beautifully maintained façade. The piazza itself, however, had seen better days. For more than three centuries the grand event of the Florentine year, the Palio dei Cocchi, had been held here. Now it was a scruffy lawn area, more sandy dirt than grass, on which they had to pick their way between the young and not-so-young backpackers who sprawled, picnicked, and slept, oblivious to the many pedestrians using it as a shortcut.

Beside one of the two stone obelisks that had once marked the turning points for Palio’s chariot races, John paused, eyes narrowed, and leveled a finger at Gideon. “I know you, Doc. If you’re waiting for us to go, like, ‘Whoa! How the hell can you tell somebody landed on their feet from their skull ?’ forget it.”