Aaron Elkins: Dying on the Vine

“Can’t. We’re flying out in the morning.”

“Oh. Hey, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe give me a call, then?”

“Rocco, you don’t look as pleased with yourself as you ought to be,” Gideon said. “Are you expecting problems with the arrest?”

“Oh no, I’m good there. It’s just . . .” He seemed to decide he had a little time after all, lit up a Marlboro, and took a drag. “It’s just that we’re still not getting anywhere on what happened up in the mountains. Nola and Pietro. I mean, I know Nico did them too, but I sure can’t prove it. Hell, I can’t even understand it.”

“Well, you’ve got him now,” John said. “You’ll have plenty of questions for him.”

“Yeah, sure, John, but you know how it is. When you’re asking them questions, it goes a lot better if you already know the answers, and I don’t have any answers for the way it went down up there. Throwing them off a cliff, shooting Pietro . . . I’ve run it through my mind a hundred ways, and it just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, what’s the rationale?” He shook his head, took another drag, and studied the cigarette the way smokers do, as if it held the answer to this and many other deep and ineffable mysteries.

“Oh well, we can help you there,” Gideon said. “Julie can, anyway. She’s come up with a pretty good rationale for what happened up there. It answers every single question we had.”

“Oh, it’s not that great,” Julie mumbled. “I just . . .”

“Look, she’s blushing again,” Marti said.

Rocco smiled. “That’s good, Julie, and I want to hear it, but right now I really have to get back. There’s a lot of paperwork that needs doing, let alone—”

“Take the time, Rocco,” Gideon said. “You need to listen to this.”

Rocco reared back a little, surprised at Gideon’s assertiveness. “Well, okay, sure. Shoot, Julie.”

“It’ll take a few minutes,” Gideon said. “Let’s go sit down somewhere.”

They went to the deserted tasting room, and twenty minutes and one more Marlboro later, Rocco sat back in his chair, slowly nodding. “Julie, I have to say, that is f—absolutely brilliant.”

“Oh, look,” Marti said, “she’s—”

But Julie silenced her with a growl and a look that would have stopped a charging rhino.

• • •

THEYhad anticipated spending some farewell time alone with Luca and Linda that evening, perhaps going out to dinner with them, but Nico’s arrest had naturally enough subdued the family—what was left of them—and pulled them closer together, and the Laus and Olivers had thought it was best to leave them to themselves. They went to dinner on their own, to the pizzeria John and Gideon had been to, then came back to make their good-byes, went to their apartments to pack, and left early the next morning for Florence Airport. There, Gideon’s attempt to reach Rocco was unsuccessful, but a few hours later, during a layover at Amsterdam’s Airport Schiphol, he got through to him.

Thus far, Nico had admitted to nothing yet, Rocco told him, but thanks to the bumbling, pontificating Quadrelli butting in all over the place, Nico had stumbled repeatedly, contradicting himself time after time, and Rocco was convinced that Julie’s reconstruction of events was correct—that Gideon’s cocaethylene hypothesis also had it right, and that Nico had killed both Nola and Cesare.

“But how did you settle on Nico in the first place, Rocco? I’m glad we were helpful, but nothing that Julie or I came up with had anything to say about who did it.”

“That’s a long story, buddy. Police work at its finest. Deductive reasoning—”

“We have to board in ten minutes. Can you make it short?”

He could and did. Admittedly, there was no direct evidence that Nico had killed anyone, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. First of all, Nico, being Pietro’s favorite, was the one most likely by far to break his father’s rule and drop in on him in the mountains—

“‘Circumstantial’ is putting it mildly,” Gideon observed. In fact, by his definition, it wasn’t even circumstantial, not in the legal sense. Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence, a fact of some kind from which another fact can be logically inferred. Jane testifies under oath that she heard Jack and Mary fighting in an adjoining apartment. She heard Mary scream, “I’m going to kill you!” followed by a shot. When the police arrived, John was found on the floor, shot dead, and Mary was gone. Inferred conclusion: Mary shot John and ran off.

But where was Rocco’s “fact” in the first place? This was nothing more than opinion and conjecture.

“Hear me out,” Rocco said. “It gets better. Okay, second, Nico was the only one of them who still had a relationship with Cesare and would have been the only one to have been welcome in Cesare’s apartment, where he could have switched the cough medicines.”

Gideon didn’t think too much of that either and began to wonder just how solid Rocco’s case was, or whether he even had a case. But Rocco’d been saving the best for last. “It turns out that Nico’s getting rid of the computer and printer and the rest wasn’t good enough. Remember, I told you Tonino was checking out Cesare’s list of passwords? Well, he struck gold. One of them was for an outfit called Ricordare that backs up everything on your computer in the cloud. Including e-mail.”

And in Cesare’s e-mail history was a sequence of exchanges with Nico, among which was one in which Cesare told him that he had made a big mistake accepting the new job, and he desperately wanted to return to Villa Antica. He asked Nico’s advice about going to see Pietro at the cabin, hat in hand, to express his regret for what he’d done and to plead with the old man to take him back. Without Luca and Franco around to poison Pietro’s mind, he thought there might be a better chance.

Nico advised against it: Pietro was still furious with his stepson, and a visit from him would only make matters worse. But Cesare wouldn’t take this for an answer. He was determined to do it, and he begged Nico to go and talk to Pietro first to try to soften him up for the visit. Nico had always been the favorite son, the one most able to talk Pietro into changing his mind about anything. Besides, if anybody could get away with dropping in on Pietro during his retreat, he was the one.

At first Nico declined, but Cesare was persistent, and after a few more e-mails he gave in. He told Cesare he would go up to the Casentinese toward the end of Pietro’s mese sabatico , when his father would be at his most relaxed, and he would do his best to set the stage for him. He said he would do it on September 26.

Late that day, Nico e-mailed Cesare that he had made the trip and reasoned with Pietro, and that he had gotten him to agree to leave Cesare’s stipend in the will, and perhaps in time even to welcome him back to the villa, so there was no need for Cesare to go up on his own after all.

“Which couldn’t possibly have happened,” Gideon said. “Pietro’d been dead by then for almost a month.”

“Exactly. It couldn’t have. But Nico claimed it had. Why? There’s more, listen.”

Cesare was ecstatic. He e-mailed Nico that he would go up to the cabin the very next morning to express his sincere gratitude and to extend his promise to live up to Pietro’s expectations in the future and so on. Nico’s response came back in less than two minutes, and was just this side of hysterical: Don’t go, don’t under any circumstances go (it was in italics in the e-mail) to see him. Yes, Pietro had changed his mind about the will, but it was a delicate situation. His feelings toward Cesare were still bitter in the extreme. For Cesare to show up at the cabin was sure to set off an explosion. No, better—much better—to let time take its course, to wait for Pietro himself to decide when the time was right for his errant stepson to make an appearance. Anything else would be a disaster. And then Nico sent two follow-up e-mails saying pretty much the same thing.