A Deadly Paradise (5 page)

The talk died down after a while as other gossip took its place. Giorgio Moroni was arrested for beating his wife about the head with a pasta pot. Angela Ricci left town in a huff after she was caught
in flagrante delicto
with her employer’s husband. The notary accused the mayor of falsifying his monthly expenses, although this latter bit of gossip was no surprise to most of the town.

Jarvinia eventually made friends among the old men. She entertained them with stories of the former prime minister’s lechery at various banquets given at the German embassy, occasionally bought a round of grappa in the mornings when most of the regulars were drinking coffee, and judiciously frequented the local butcher, baker, and candlestick maker rather than shopping at the large supermarkets in Bastia.

With respect to Jarvinia, the town had settled into a compromise of sorts. The town never compromised where Anita was concerned. The whispers, which had died down after her mother’s death, started up again. Anita’s deformity, an open secret, fueled the town’s insatiable appetite for sexual innuendo. Wherever she went, to the kiosk for her morning newspaper, to the café, or the pharmacy, people whispered behind her back.

Anita hadn’t fully understood the tenor of Enzo’s remark, but she’d known instinctively when she slapped his face that it was dirty and that it implied something dirty about her. When her request to paint the house pink was denied, and the council refused to give Anita a reason, other than to say it wasn’t appropriate, she consulted Lorenzo. He’d been her science teacher in high school and was a cousin of her mother’s. He was also the only pensioner in town who didn’t frequent the café. His explanation confounded her even further. “They’re afraid if the house is painted pink, its flamboyance will draw attention to what goes on inside,” he’d said.

“But pink is my favorite color,” was Anita’s response. She didn’t understand why the town associated her with the German and those other women, and she was too proud to defend herself against spiteful calumnies. Now, when Anita closed her eyes at night seeking the relief of sleep, she would see her mother’s ghostly presence standing at the foot of her bed, ramrod-straight as she had been in life, lips blackened by death, mumbling invocations to the Virgin to free her daughter from the evils of temptation. The temptations were always those of the flesh! Anita was beginning to hate Jarvinia.

Life in Paradiso became unbearable for Anita on the day she walked into the café and saw Jarvinia at the card table with three of the pensioners. They were playing briscola and the German was dealing. They were laughing uproariously at something Jarvinia had just said, but they stopped immediately when they saw Anita. Enzo broke the awkward silence that followed by offering to buy her a coffee. Anita experienced a spasm of guilt as though it were she in the wrong. Her family had settled Paradiso in the eleventh century, and
she
was now
la straniera. La lesbica
was one of them.

She was determined to rid herself of the German before the lease was up. She consulted a lawyer in Perugia, an octogenarian, who agreed not to charge her unless he could guarantee results. “Dear me,” the
avvocato
repeated several times as he perused the lease. “This is a well drawn-up document, Signora. Iron-clad, unless your tenant is a public nuisance? Is she?” he asked.

Anita hesitated. She wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by a “public nuisance,” but mainly she was reluctant to talk about what was really bothering her. If she said the word out loud, maybe he would think she was one of them. Her need was so great that she finally told him everything, even about Jarvinia’s refusal to pay for garbage pickup. Other than that brief twitch of his lips, he seemed to be taking her case seriously, and once or twice he shook his head in sympathy.

“Unless this woman is running a brothel or charging clients to have sex, she’s within her rights to entertain whomever she wants. It’s her house during the term of the lease. What’s more, she’s a diplomat, so she has some rights even we don’t have,” he added. Anita left his office sorely disappointed, but at least he hadn’t charged her. He even advised her to get tough with the town’s council. “Paint your house pink,” he said. “There’s nothing they can do to you.” Have some gumption, he seemed to imply.

In the end, it resolved itself. The rental agent with whom Anita listed her apartments told her less than a week after she’d hired a painter and purchased the paint that Jarvinia was looking for another house to rent, one with most of the rooms on the same floor. “She can’t do all those stairs any more,” he said. “She had polio as a child and she’s having a recurrence.”

Anita took one more very long look at the pink house and exhaled a sigh of happiness. The carabinieri who had been guarding the square had disappeared. She decided that the police wouldn’t care if she let herself inside to check on the furnishings. The last time she’d been inside, she’d spied deep scratches on the legs of one of her mother’s chairs. No more tenants with cats, she said to herself as she approached the house, and definitely no more Germans.

9

SOME MIGHT SAY that Paradiso is like any other hill town in Umbria, but anyone who has lived there knows this is not true. Some towns are reached by steeper climbs, some have better views, and some, like Gubbio, have preserved their medieval architecture with no pink houses in sight. Even the flower festival held every year to honor the feast of Corpus Christi is not unique to Paradiso, and if you ask any tourist which town creates the most beautiful and elaborate flower paintings, you can be sure they’ll say Spello. Nonetheless, Paradiso is famous throughout Umbria, and even throughout Italy.

In 1978 a mother and her child were murdered there. The mother was found dead in bed, with the weapon of execution, an ax for chopping firewood, embedded in her skull. The child was found on the floor of her bedroom, where it appeared she had been playing with her doll, her head sliced open from front to back. The local doctor, who also served as the coroner, said that he’d never seen such destruction of human flesh or such an abandonment of humanity. Other people had been murdered in Italy, but the Paradiso murders attracted the country’s attention because of the way the bodies were found. A nine-year-old playmate of the murdered child wandered into the house looking for her friend and found
death and blood all around her,
or at least that’s how one of the newspapers put it. Childhood is sacred to Italians, and the horror of this little girl finding the mutilated body of her friend plunged the nation into grief.

Almost always, family murders are committed by one of its members, so the police naturally looked to the husband first. But he had the perfect alibi. He and his brother-in-law, also a likely suspect, were working in Switzerland. The police combed the woods that surrounded Paradiso at the time looking for vagrants, but none were found, and no one was ever arrested for the murders. Some of the newspapers played off the name of the town in their headlines: one of the more literary ran the headline PARADISE LOST. Another headline screamed out OBSCENE PARADISE
,
but the headline that stuck in the minds of the town’s inhabitants was A DEADLY PARADISE
.
At the first town meeting held two months after the murders, one of the inhabitants suggested that they change the town’s name. It won by two votes, but after three years of submissions and rejections, arguing and name-calling, the matter rested.

Although Cenni had been a child at the time of the murders, he was familiar with the case. It was still listed on the police blotter as
open
and had been passed to him five years earlier when the original case officer retired. It was one of seven files that were still open, and this was the oldest of them. He’d read up on the murders a few years ago, but that was the extent of his involvement until now. He did wonder, when the questore was describing the sheer brutality of the German’s murder, if there might not be an association between the two cases. They were different in choice of weapon, but the same uncontrollable rage was evident in both. The police, with the help of a local psychiatrist, had concluded in 1978 that they were looking for someone who was mentally unhinged. Thirty years was not such a length of time. The murderer could still be alive and residing locally. He’d asked one of the clerks to leave the case file on his desk.

The questore had left a message on his cell phone that he’d assigned Cenni a very reliable officer. She would meet him in Paradiso at four o’clock, at the German’s house. He was glad it was a woman and could only hope she was half as good as Elena. He was afraid no one would ever measure up to Piero and Elena. Elena had provided the team with an extra dimension. She had an instinct about motives, particularly where women were concerned, that he and Piero lacked. It was ironic, he thought, that she would have protested this evaluation as chauvinistic, insulted at any hint that women were in any way different as police officers, even if the observation were offered in praise.

The streets of Paradiso are narrow and steep, narrower than most, Cenni realized when he found himself slowing to a crawl to avoid scraping his side-view mirror against a blue Ape that was parked streetside. He made one last sharp turn and entered a tiny square at the top of the town. Cara-binieri were posted at both ends of the square. He showed his identification to a sergeant, who waved him through, indicating that he should park at the north end of the square, adjacent to the open belvedere that looked down on the valley below. Within the belvedere a church pew faced the view. On its other side were parking spaces, identified by six unevenly spaced white lines. Numbers were painted within each space, from one to five, matching the number of each residence in Piazza Garibaldi. Very efficient, Cenni decided, and very American in its blatant declaration of private property. He wondered if anyone in town actually respected this assertion. Probably not, he concluded.

He parked in the last space, which he assumed belonged to the murder house. No. 5 Piazza Garibaldi was a narrow structure squeezed between two public buildings, a clock tower with the hour hand missing and a falling-down chapel with flaking stuccowork. The house was painted an incongruous throbbing pink. In the blinding sun bouncing off the square, it assaulted the eyes. Only one day had passed since the German’s body had been discovered, and no curious crowds or reporters were congregating outside the house. Cenni was grateful that the finer points of Baudler’s murder had not yet reached the press, but realized it was just as likely that it had already dropped into the category of old news.

The door was unlocked, and Cenni entered directly into the main sitting room, which was narrow and minimally furnished with a faded purple couch, two wicker chairs, and a wicker basket filled with art books. No TV, he noted. The floor was marble and completely out of place in this small peasant house. The sitting room led into a small kitchen with highly polished marble countertops and a large fireplace at the far end. Both rooms were empty, and he wondered what’d happened to the questore’s “reliable” officer.

“So you’ve finally arrived. I was getting bored counting my fingers and toes.”

Cenni whipped around to find Elena standing behind him.

“Where did you come from?” was his unfriendly response to his favorite inspector. But he really did want to know where she’d been hiding.

She pointed to a small doorway located between the two rooms.

“Stairway,” she responded. “And I’m doing very well, thank you. Nice to see you too,” she said, but with a wide grin of affection.

“Sorry Elena, but you startled me. How are you? And what are you doing here? Piero told me that you’re still recovering from your gunshot wound, and the questore insisted that you’re on medical leave. I did request you, you know.”

“Piero treats me like a baby, although I love every minute of it,” she added, still grinning. “Marinella called”—Cenni smiled when Elena mentioned the name of the office gossip—“to tell me you’re back. I phoned the questore and told him I wanted to return early, to work with you on this case. He agreed, although he also said that the rules you impose as to those you’ll work with are ridiculous. And my shoulder is healing nicely. Thank you for asking! Would you like to see me do some pushups?”

Cenni hesitated about how to express his pleasure that Elena was back. She was adamant about women’s rights and an advocate of doing things American style, so he was never sure if he was allowed to kiss her on the cheek or even give her a collegial pat on the back. This time she made it easy on him.

Abandoning all foreign influences, she kissed him on both cheeks and smiled in delight. “Look what I found,” she said, holding up a yellowing sheet of paper. “Very interesting stuff!”

CENNI SPENT THREE hours in the house going over the postmortem, the crime-scene photos, and, finally, the evidence that Elena had found. He had already discussed the crime-scene photos and the postmortem at length with Tahany Falchi while she smoked half a pack of Players. The body, she’d said, had been moved after Baudler was dead, dragged ten feet from where she had fallen and positioned against the first cellar step. The German had been standing near the stacked firewood when she was first struck with a jagged piece of firewood. The police found the piece of wood that had been used, lying apart from the other firewood. A sliver had lodged in the dead woman’s right arm. It was a long, unwieldy log, some three feet in length. It was difficult, according to the forensic report, to get clean fingerprints. A number of partials were found, including those of the victim. Perhaps she had stacked the wood herself, Falchi suggested. The other two sets might include those of the murderer, or were those of the person or persons who had delivered and stacked the wood. The initial blow had broken her elbow and must have hurt like the dickens, according to Falchi.

“The first blow was the hardest and also the one that resulted in her heart attack. The other blows, some ten at least, were struck by someone standing over her, most of them landing on the right side of the body and none of them, oddly enough, directed at her head. There was very little blood, as only a few of the blows broke the skin. We found a small pool of blood near the stack of firewood; but most of it was on the steps, from the excision of her clitoris. There were also light smears of blood on the floor between the firewood and the steps, caused by the killer dragging the body. I should also add that the subsequent blows, after the one that broke her elbow, were superficial, and of surprisingly little force.”