A Deadly Paradise (27 page)

“You can’t accuse Vannicelli of a crime just because he didn’t tell the police that his cat was hurt climbing a neighbor’s fence,” Elena asserted. “We have too many laws in Italy, but, thank God, that’s not one of them!”

“How about misleading the police in their investigation of a homicide or removing evidence from a crime scene? Those are just for starters,” Cenni responded calmly. “Don’t forget, I asked Vannicelli if his cat had climbed back through the cellar window the day after the murder. He responded that Tommaso was too occupied entertaining the German’s cat. But the cat couldn’t even walk, according to the vet; he was hardly up to entertaining the ladies. And what cat lover, unless he’s got something to hide, wouldn’t mention that his cat was at home with a serious injury?”

“So, draw some conclusions,” Elena said. “How does the case of
The Cat Strikes Again!
relate to Baudler’s murder?”

“I can think of a few possibilities, but someone who doesn’t like cats could never appreciate them,” Cenni responded, finally provoked.

14

LORENZO VANNICELLI’S HOUSE stank of cat urine, and Cenni looked around to see what kind of litter he used. The box was in the corner of the kitchen, filled with shredded newspaper. Signora Cecchetti had been correct on that point: the Vannicelli family hated to part with its money.

Vannicelli looked very sheepish when Cenni asked to see Tommaso. He responded that Tommaso was out, roaming the neighborhood, a difficult lie to sustain when Tommaso, no longer threatened by a strange voice, came crawling out from under the couch. He looks pathetic, Cenni thought, as he watched the cat hobble over to his owner and rub against his leg, begging to be picked up.

“Please do,” Cenni said, indicating to Vannicelli that he should pick up the cat.

Elena, who had come with him on the call, made a comment under her breath that sounded like,
Please don’t.

When they finally sat down to talk, with Tommaso sitting on his owner’s lap, Vannicelli was apologetic. He admitted that when he found Baudler, he’d also found Tommaso with a terrible injury.

He looked from Cenni to Elena and sighed deeply before proceeding. “This town is totally against Anita. They’ve made her life miserable, almost from the day she was born. As though she could help what’d happened to her at birth. Everyone knows that Anita hated Jarvinia Baudler and also that she hates cats. I was afraid if you knew of the injuries to Tommaso and made inquiries, you might conclude that Anita was implicated.”

Cenni interrupted. “You’re suggesting, then, that Anita Tangassi killed Jarvinia Baudler.”

Lorenzo looked away from Cenni and down at the cat. “That’s not what I said. It’s the others in this town I was worried about. You know what that witch across the street said about her, and she’s not the only one. Just because Anita always cooked Orazio’s supper, they accused her of feeding her uncle poisoned mushrooms.”

Cenni said, “You yourself told me that Anita was in Rome in the hospital when her uncle died.”

“
Certo.
It’s true. But Orazio’s body was found only two days after Anita left for Rome. People in town said she could have easily cooked the poisoned stew before she left. I never believed it for a second,” he said, stroking the cat.

“You also told me that Anita was with you in your garden when you saw her mother fall from the balcony.”

Lorenzo chewed on his upper lip and lifted Tommaso to his shoulder before responding. “I was in the garden, dottore, but Anita was not with me. But she wasn’t on the balcony either, or I would have seen her, I’m sure.”

“So why did you tell me she was with you?” Cenni asked.

“My dislike of the gossips in this town. They’ve never had anything good to say about Anita, jealous because she has money and they don’t. Some of them even suggested that she’d killed little Bianca Lanese. Can you imagine? Accusing a nine-year-old girl of putting an ax into the head of her best friend.”

LATER THAT EVENING, after his interview with Vannicelli and a brief encounter with Anita Tangassi, and then another with Enzo, Piero’s uncle, Cenni was in his office preparing the necessary papers to finish up the Baudler case. He had a number of tasks to complete, details the public prosecutor would insist on before he’d agree to ask for a preliminary hearing. Elena was typing up her notes and also checking the hospitals in Rome to find out where Anita Tangassi had had her treatments. “And make sure you get arrival and checkout dates,” Cenni had instructed her. He’d also sent the rookie, Sergeant Giachini, over to the medical examiner’s office with a set of fingerprints to be matched against those found at the crime scene. Tomorrow, if all went as planned, Jarvinia Baudler’s murderer would be in prison.

And then there were the other loose ends. Dieter Reimann had called three times in the last two days, wanting closure. “The ambassador is anxious, and the service for Baudler is Thursday. We’d much prefer to hold the service after the killer is in custody, more satisfying to everyone. Have an end to it and move on,” was how Dieter had phrased it. He had also offered up Juliet Mudarikwa as a possible candidate.

If the Germans wanted closure so much, he’d give them closure and make everyone happy, at least everyone on the Italian side of things.

Nothing would make Ettore Hyppolito happier than to secure Leonardo’s drawings and notes for the Vatican Library’s permanent collection. Perhaps a gift from the German Institute to the Library? The ambassador could make the announcement on Thursday at Baudler’s service: a gift from the German government to the Italian people, in Baudler’s name, for all her years of service to culture. The Germans might protest a bit when Cenni made this suggestion, but he was sure that if it were put delicately, they’d appreciate the tradeoff. If the British were to learn that the Germans had used counterfeit pounds after the war, they’d want restitution, and at current rates.

What would Elena think of such a maneuver, he wondered? Doesn’t matter, he decided. One woman’s blackmail is another man’s diplomacy. It was a simple matter of returning to Italy what had belonged to her all along. The Greeks need someone like me to get them back the Elgin marbles, he decided, as he dialed Reimann’s number.

15

ANITA’S HEAD HURT dreadfully, and Lorenzo had given her some pills to help, some kind of herbal remedy. Two or three before bed with a glass of wine, he’d suggested. A glass of wine always helps before retiring. She definitely needed to take them tonight. Since the murder of her tenant, Anita had taken just the one, two nights ago. It had worked beautifully, stopping the ache in her head and sending her into a deep sleep for ten hours, an entire night without a single visit from her mother. She had no idea what the pills were, or where Lorenzo had gotten them, but she was determined to get some more. But not from her doctor. The last time she had asked for pills, he’d said she was an addict. What does it matter, she thought, so long as I sleep? Tomorrow, she’d call around in Perugia and find a pharmacy that would help her, or maybe she’d call Dottor Ubaldi in Rome. He was always so concerned about her health.

For as long as Anita could remember, she’d had problems sleeping, although her memories didn’t go back beyond the age of six, when she began primary school. Her first day at school was etched in her memory. She wore her favorite dress of pink tulle. Her mother had said “No,” that “it was a party dress and not appropriate,” but she had cried until she got her way. The other children stared and stared, and at first she thought it was because they liked her dress, but even after she had covered it with a blue smock, and she looked like everyone else in the first grade, the children continued to stare. Signora Taccini gave her a seat at the front of the classroom, and when she’d asked Anita to recite the alphabet Anita could only get to the letter
G.
The other children, who had attended infant’s school and already knew the alphabet, laughed. Even her teacher laughed, and Anita re-fused to go back Her mother let her stay home for a while, but then the police called at the house. When she returned to school, Lorenzo came with her and he spoke to Signora Taccini. None of the children laughed at her after that, and Anita made very sure that they would never laugh again. From that day on, she led her class, particularly in mathematics, in which she excelled.

Until Bianca came to Paradiso, Anita never had any friends. Bianca was two years younger, but Anita had seen her standing alone in the schoolyard, and she went over and spoke to her. They became friends right away. Bianca had a father, but he was always away from home, and Anita had no father. They loved playing dolls together, but Anita had just the one doll, an old Raggedy Ann, which some-one had given to her when she was a baby. Monsignor Lacrimosa said dolls were idolatrous, and her mother agreed and refused to buy any others. Anita was desperate for a real doll; she wanted one with hair that grew right out of the doll’s head, and it was because of the doll that she’d found Bianca’s body. Anita had the idea that they should try to set the doll’s hair with bobby pins, and when Bianca didn’t show up at school, Anita went looking for her.

The only time that Anita spoke to anyone about that day was to the police immediately afterward. For years, she refused to talk to anyone, including her mother, and she never told the police that she’d picked up the doll and washed the blood from its hair before returning it to Bianca. Bianca would have liked that. She talked to her mother only once about that day, just months before her mother’s death. And, finally, this year she’d told Dottor Ubaldi. She had been sitting across from him in his consultation room, and, out of the blue, she began talking about that day, even to telling him how she’d washed the blood from the doll’s hair. When she’d finished, he got up from his chair and came around the desk. He knelt down beside her and wrapped her in his arms, pulling her tight to his chest. It lasted just briefly, but some times at night if she thought about that moment, she’d hug herself and pretend it was his arms and his strength.

What she told her mother was a different story, and in a different tone. They’d been arguing, as they usually did before one of Anita’s trips to Rome, and her mother had accused her of being secretive and closed. Anita screamed back that she knew plenty of secrets, and she did too. She told how Bianca counted the men who came to her mother at night like other people counted sheep. “One of them was your precious priest and the other was your crazy brother, and just about every other man in this town, including the carabinieri.
Paradiso hypocrita,
” she’d said in her best school Latin, taunting her mother. Her mother had gasped, “But not Monsignor Lacrimosa,” and Anita had taunted her further. “More times than Bianca could count. She was only seven, you know, and had to stop at a hundred.” She had laughed at the pain on her mother’s face.

That’s why Anita’s mother visited her every night in her sleep, because she had lied to her. Monsignor Lac-rimosa had gone to the Lanese house just the once, to threaten Bianca’s mother with excommunication if she didn’t stop receiving men. Not that Bianca knew that word. What Bianca actually told Anita was that the priest had called her mother “an occasion of sin.” Bianca knew what that meant, as she’d just made her First Holy Communion. It was Orazio who came every night and broke furniture and threw things. But Anita’s mother wouldn’t have cared if it had been Orazio; she hated her brother.

Anita was still considering how many of the pills she should take, when her telephone rang. It was after ten o’clock, and no one in Paradiso ever called after nine. She picked up the telephone gingerly and broke into a smile when she heard his voice. Dottor Ubaldi. He’d just returned from a conference abroad and had seen an article in one of the Rome papers about the German’s death. He’d called to ask if she were all right.

On her last visit to Rome, he had warned her about taking too many sleeping pills, and she decided that tonight she’d try his remedy instead, an aspirin and a warm glass of milk. It was a night meant for dreaming.

16

CENNI SPENT TEN minutes waiting in line to pay his admission fee so he could gain access to the streets of Paradiso. It was the Sunday after the feast of Corpus Christi, and Paradiso was celebrating the festival of flowers. Lines were long, the sun was hot, tempers were flaring, and the woman directly behind him had asked twice if he would mind holding her child while she looked for wipes in her carryall. A commissario in the
Polizia di Stato
shouldn’t have to wait, or pay, but Cenni had decided not to identify himself to the man at the front gate. He had no desire to announce himself or his intentions to anyone but Baudler’s murderer; even on a day like this, news of a senior detective’s arrival in Paradiso, all the way from the Perugia Questura, would spread like wildfire.

It was not the sort of day on which to arrest anyone, and Cenni had considered waiting until evening for the tourists to go home, but he was afraid that Baudler’s murderer had a pathological conviction of invincibility. He’d seen the signs yesterday, and he had to be careful. A neighbor might drop a careless word or indicate by a sideways glance that the killer was no longer safe. Signora Cec-chetti was not the only person in Paradiso who saw and remembered things, and Cenni feared that the killer might strike again.

Yesterday, Cenni had promised Lorenzo Vannicelli that the police would give him advance notice if they planned to arrest Anita so he could be on hand to assist her. He had also promised Vannicelli that an arrest, when made, would be quiet and dignified: the police would not come at Anita with sirens whirring or officers brandishing guns. He never made promises he couldn’t keep.

Vannicelli had expressed extreme guilt when he realized it was due to his unwitting slip of the tongue that the police now viewed Anita as the prime suspect, and he was quick to point out that Anita was a special case, deserving special consideration. “She’s suffered enough without having the neighbors looking on as she’s led away in handcuffs. Her mother was my cousin, but she was a fool like most women. It was that priest who stirred her up. Every time Anita did something that Marta thought in the least improper, she’d run to him for advice. Marta spent more time in confession and at the rectory than she ever did at home with Anita. If she could have, she’d have left her money to the Church, but thanks to Garibaldi we have laws to prevent that kind of thing. I’m glad Anita poisoned that frock-wearing hypocrite. It would have been more fitting, though, if she’d laced his communion wine with cyanide.” At the end of his diatribe against the priest and his idolater, he added, “You need to be very gentle with Anita. She’s tried to kill herself once, and I worry that she might try again.”