A Deadly Paradise (19 page)

“I suppose if they broke them, they should pay,” Cenni responded, always looking at it from the other point of view.

“Gianluca says he was the one who searched through that box, and the dishes were already broken. The broken dishes were wrapped differently from the others, with the broken pieces stacked within the wrapping, so they must have been broken before they were packed. My God, but that woman is cheap! Imagine trying to get a free set of dishes from the carabinieri—good luck to that! Do you want me to go to Paradiso with the photographs just to be sure the firewood, was actually moved?” she asked skeptically.

“It was moved,” Cenni responded, “but look again, just to be sure nothing was missed in the search. I’m off to see Giuseppe Landi, my counterpart, who investigated the 1978 murders in Paradiso.” He noticed Elena’s raised right eyebrow, and added, “Just a hunch.”

GIUSEPPE LANDI HAD risen to the position of commis-sario at a time when being in the “old boy” network was still the only way to get ahead in government circles. Those who rose in the ranks had three things in common: the habit of dotting their
i’
s, the ability to flatter their superiors, and, most important of all,
una raccomandazione.
You didn’t aspire to a high rank unless you had a
padrino
in an even higher rank. It hadn’t changed a whole lot in thirty years, but it had changed some. Cenni never dotted anything, and he certainly never flattered Carlo, but he had to admit that his mother, a Baglioni before her marriage, knew everyone who was anyone in Umbria, and he had no guarantee that she hadn’t used her influence to get him his promotions, although he doubted it, as she cringed any time someone referred to him as a policeman.

Landi, who had agreed to a meeting to review the Par-adiso murders, was exactly as Cenni remembered him: portly, garrulous, and a gentleman. Cenni suspected, after sitting with him in his garden for less than ten minutes, that Landi was bored to death with tomatoes and zucchini and his wife’s complaints about their children never visiting. He was ripe to talk about anything and anyone.

“Absolutely not!” was Landi’s response when Cenni asked if Anita might have committed the murders. “I’m sorry they got rid of all the evidence from the case, or you’d see for yourself that a nine-year-old girl could never lift an ax that size, let alone deliver the ferocious blows that killed that poor woman and her child. You’re thinking of those lightweight tools they sell nowadays. The ax used in the Paradiso murders was made for a lumberjack.”

Alex nodded his head in agreement, but he was still not totally convinced. “You were on the scene, Giuseppe, so, of course, you’d have a far better sense of what was possible. I was just wondering about some of the child’s cryptic answers and the infighting that went on between the mother, the parish priest, and the neighbor. What was that all about?”

“That trio—I had my fill of them, let me tell you.” He leaned closer to Cenni. “Some very strange things went on within that circle.” He looked up to the heavens as though seeking guidance from a higher power. “Things have changed a lot; did you see that special a few nights ago about the Vatican giving a pass to priests who are sexual predators? Nothing of that nature was aired on public TV thirty years ago. The church is losing its power.”

“Are you suggesting that the priest—Monsignor Lacrimosa—had something to do with the murders? Was he preying on the two little girls? Is that why Anita looked over at him during your interview, when you asked if she’d seen any strange men lurking around their play area?”

“I’m not thinking little girls,” Landi said. “Did you read the pathology report?”

“No, because it’s missing, along with the ax and the crime-scene photographs. The only file left is the interview you conducted with the girl, and one very short police report. I looked through both, and couldn’t find the addresses of the father or the brother.”

“Don’t bother! Believe me, we were very careful to check their whereabouts. They were both in Switzerland at the time of the murders. It would have made things so much easier if either of them had been the killer.”

“Why?”

“If you’d read the pathology report, you’d know why. I’m surprised they didn’t destroy all the files, but I suppose since the case is still officially open, they couldn’t dump everything. The woman was pregnant, four months according to the doctor who did the autopsy, and the husband had been gone for more than a year. So we knew for sure that she’d been having an affair, we just didn’t know with whom.”

“But wasn’t there a reasonable chance that the man who’d gotten her pregnant was also her killer?” Cenni asked.

“Reasonable! Of course it was reasonable. Her only close neighbor, an old man who lived down the road, said he’d seen a man going in and coming out of the house on numerous occasions, and always after dark, so he couldn’t give us a description. But on the day before the murder, he saw the priest coming out of her house, and in mid-afternoon— he swore it was the priest. He also claimed to have seen Orazio Vannicelli, Anita Tangassi’s uncle, hanging out at the back of the house earlier in the week. But I was instructed to
let it go
when I wanted to bring them both in for questioning. Whatever you do, they said, don’t talk to the priest.
He’s a saver of souls.
I don’t know about the woman who was killed, but in my view there was definitely something going on between the priest and Marta Tan-gassi, the child’s mother. I don’t say it was sexual, but it was strange. You’ve heard of Svengali, I suppose. Well, the priest was Marta Tangassi’s Svengali. Whatever he told her to do, she did. The woman was priest-ridden. You see it all the time in small towns.”

He stopped abruptly in the middle of his story and got up to chase a ginger cat that was sniffing around his tomato plants. “Every year, that cat destroys at least one of my tomato plants. He’d eat all the leaves if I let him. Now where was I?”

“Svengali!”

“Yes, well this particular Svengali had the right connections in Rome, or someone did.
Tell the press you’re looking
for a vagrant and shut the investigation down,
was the message we received from Rome. What did you expect me to do?” he asked defensively. “Go against direct orders?”

Cenni hadn’t said a word in criticism, but he knew guilt when he heard it. He said, “I know the influence the Church used to have, but I would have thought it drew the line at impeding a murder investigation, particularly one involving the brutal murder of a child.”

“As that TV program made clear the other evening, the Church doesn’t draw lines when its prerogatives are in jeopardy. It’s just another political party as far as I’m concerned. And remember, Alex, the Lanese case made its way onto the world stage a month after Aldo Moro was kidnapped. Imagine the scandal if it turned out that the local priest murdered his pregnant mistress by putting an ax through her head, and then did the same to an innocent child. Bianca Lanese was buried in her First Communion Dress. Prime Ministers snatched in broad daylight; innocent children axed to death by priests. All hell would have broken loose, and Italy’s reputation as a nation that loves children would have been shattered.”

“So, you think it was the priest?”

“Not at all, although I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t a vagrant. I wasn’t given the opportunity to investigate properly, so how can I know anything? But it certainly looked suspicious when our investigation was shut down. You were still a child then, but you probably remember the trauma we suffered as a nation. Aldo Moro had just been kidnapped, and Italy was in a state of siege. I suppose in someone’s mind, it was a reasonable tradeoff:
We let a killer go free,
but we don’t stir up any more national scandals.
Was it the priest, the uncle, the butcher, the baker? We’ll never know.”

“Perhaps one of them will make a deathbed confession. The uncle is dead, but there’s still the monsignore,” Cenni said.

“A little late in the day for the monsignore. He died in 2000, from eating some bad mushrooms. I thought you knew!”

3

ALEX LOVED ALMOST every month in the year, although January, February, and March were a bit like one’s slower children. You loved them equally with the others but wished they were a bit smarter. But if he really had to choose a favorite month, it would have been June. In Umbria, June is the month of perfection. The spring rains are forgotten, the flowers are in bloom, and the fields are green with the shoots of new crops. The crime rate in June is lower than in any other month, and everyone you meet has something good to say about the weather. It’s the ideal time for a trip to Urbino.

He had promised himself that he would talk to Renato about Chiara when the Baudler case was wrapped up, but he decided after leaving Giuseppe Landi that he had to see his brother today. Renato was a bishop, so surely he had the connections to find out what had happened in 1978—whether the Church was involved in shutting down the Lanese investigation, and, if so, why? He arrived in Urbino at four in the afternoon, parked his car outside Renato’s residence, stuck a police card in the windshield, and rang the front doorbell. The official residence of the Bishop of Urbino is a vast palace with more rooms than can be comfortably viewed in a single visit, and in the new millennium it still lacked central heating. Even his mother, who bragged mercilessly to her friends about her son the bishop and his palazzo, managed to stay away in the winter months. Renato was currently negotiating with his superiors to turn the palace into a museum. As he confessed to Alex, he was not above feigning a painfully arthritic hip to secure a centrally heated residence. After minutes spent listening to the bell echo through the cavernous rooms, Alex was finally greeted by Renato’s dour housekeeper, who directed him to the Cathedral, “where His Excellency is hearing confessions.”

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been a while since my last confession,” Alex recited when Renato opened the confessional screen.

“And since when is twenty-five years
a while?
” Renato asked.

“I need to talk.”

“It’s not Hanna, is it?” Renato asked, worried.

“Hanna’s fine. It’s about me.”

“That’s a relief. When you say ‘talk,’ do you mean in here?” Renato asked, without any actual expectation that his brother was in the throes of a religious rebirth.

“No, outside, if you can leave, although I don’t see why not. No one else is waiting in line.
His Excellency
isn’t very popular,” Alex said laughing. He liked to tease his brother, who almost never took offense.

“My parishioners think a bishop will give them longer lectures and extra Our Father’s. I use the time to write my Sunday sermon. I’ll change and we can walk and talk, perhaps stop for a coffee in the Piazza della Repubblica.”

RENATO LISTENED TO what Alex had to say concerning the Lanese case without interrupting; but when his brother had finished, he launched forth on what Alex knew to be one of his very rare lectures:

“I know the Church has its faults, far better than you, Alex, but Landi has no idea why the investigation was stopped, and to assume it had something to do with the priest and, even if it did, that the Vatican was involved, is ridiculous. I’ve had access to a good deal of information about what was happening at the time of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, and I can assure you that the Church was far too busy trying to save Moro’s life to influence a murder investigation in Paradiso. My gut tells me that the government put a stop to the investigation; it was probably afraid to stir up more ugly feelings and reactions at a time when Italy was in crisis. Easier all around to blame it on a vagrant,
an immigrant vagrant,
than to take a chance that it was the parish priest. Listen, Alex, I’ll do some snooping for you, but I’m sure I’m right. And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what’s really bugging you? You didn’t drive two hours to Urbino to discuss a case that goes back to 1978.”

Alex told his brother of his visit to Murano and about Chiara. He’d been prepared for some skepticism on Renato’s part, but his brother agreed immediately that it must have been Chiara. He also agreed that she appeared to be running away.

“Covering her hair with a scarf and holding hands with a child as she got off the vaporetto in Murano—definitely Chiara. She was always the brains in the outfit,” Renato said smiling. “Obviously, you know Chiara better than I do, Alex. But I doubt that she ran away because of her scarred face. She was the least vain woman I’ve ever known; I wonder if she even knew she was beautiful. The Chiara I knew twenty years ago was a rare and remarkable woman, and I assume she still is. For Christ’s sake, Alex, I never thought you were a wimp. Do you really plan to let her go without making a single effort to find her?”

“She knew it was me, and she ran away. How can I justify going after a woman who’s running away from me? Maybe she’s married again.”

“Sounds a little like wounded vanity to me.
If she doesn’t
want me, I don’t want her.
Possibly she’s remarried, but I doubt it. When the glass dealer asked her out, she gave a sick relative as an excuse. From what I remember of Chiara, she would have said directly that she had a husband. And even if she’s married, don’t you want to see her again? You’ve been in love with her for twenty-two years; you need to find her, Alex, if only to say good-bye.”

“Then you agree that I should quit the police?”

“I do not. Your original reason for joining the police still holds true. You have access to information that a private citizen would never have. You can ask questions, make inquiries, demand answers in true police style. My own guess is that she’s still living in Puglia. She may have a child. Twenty years have passed. She may even have grandchildren. Maybe she thinks you’d reject her if you knew she had a child. You can be pretty stubborn at times, Alex. Don’t forget your reaction when she wanted to get an advanced degree and hold off marrying for two years. You threw a fit!”

“That’s what I love about family,” Alex responded, with annoyance. “They remember everything you don’t want them to remember.”