A Very Venetian Murder Page 8

  “Eric Werth? What’s he have to do with anything?” Abbott asked nervously.

  “Just speculating,” Reuben said. “He did come to Venice to see Baxter.”

  “How do you know that?” Abbott demanded.

  “We met him and his lawyer on the plane from Paris and have been running into them ever since. Everywhere except at your party.”

  Abbott now seemed even more nervous. “That couldn’t be helped. Gregg wouldn’t have them there.”

  “Why not?”

  “They were a nuisance. He didn’t want to do business with them.”

  The tables set in front of the caffè had begun to fill up as they talked. There were now two waiters bustling about, getting ready for the lunch trade. Theirs came by and asked if they wished to eat, “Volete mangiare?” They declined, so he asked if they wanted anything else, the implication being they should give up their table if not.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes,” Abbott told him.

  “Where do we go from here, Mr. Abbott?” Reuben asked.

  “I hate to be callous about it, but my first concern is to call every buyer Doris and I can get hold of to tell them Baxter Fashions is going to back Tony Garrison and go right on producing. Thank God New York is six hours behind us. Then, after that, I guess we have to worry about getting Gregg’s body back to New York.”

  “Does he have family?”

  “Only a sister. His parents are dead.”

  “What about your Commissario friend?”

  “I was sort of hoping you’d give us a hand there.”

  “How do you mean?” Reuben said.

  “This guy Valier was very stiff. He wants us back at three o’clock to make formal statements. He didn’t exactly treat us like suspects, but he was pretty cold. You’re an outsider. There’s no logical way you can be linked to the murder. I think you’ll be able to get on with him better than we can.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Reuben said. “A professional policeman being asked to cooperate with an amateur detective, and a foreigner at that …”

  “I took the liberty of telling him you were Baxter’s lawyer.”

  “But that’s not true,” Reuben protested.

  “It is, sort of. You are a lawyer and Gregg asked you to help him yesterday.”

  “It’s stretching things,” Frost said, not entirely happy with what he was hearing. Still, he couldn’t deny that he was curious about Baxter’s murder, and if this was the way to get him involved, despite all his grumbling protests, perhaps no great harm had been done.

  “We told him you might come by to see him and he said that would be fine with him.”

  “So you think I should talk to him?”

  “We’d both appreciate it,” Abbott said.

  “Will he be there now?” Frost asked.

  “He said he’d be in all afternoon. He’s in that smaller building down from the Questura, incidentally.”

  “Where I saw you come out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll go pay a call,” Reuben said, realizing that he was inexorably changing the character of his vacation. But then, the Doges’ monuments would still be there another year; the chance to participate in a murder investigation in exotic Venice might not be. And he could even end up with a tale or two to astound the Filberts when he next saw them.

  “Commissario Jacopo Valier. Do I have the name right?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Valier

  Reuben waited on the Fondamenta di San Lorenzo until Abbott and Medford disappeared. They were on their way back to the Bauer Grunwald; Abbott had again volunteered to help Medford move, this time back to the Cipriani.

  Frost walked quickly to the entrance of a building with the austerely forbidding sign SQUADRA MOBILE. If he were lucky, he would catch the Commissario before he went to lunch. Taking a deep breath, he went inside.

  “Prego?” An immensely tall figure had materialized. Unsmiling and unshaven, he wore a dark navy uniform jacket and blue-gray trousers with a narrow red stripe. Rudimentary English met rudimentary Italian, but Reuben soon was face to face with Commissario Jacopo Valier in his plain but spacious office.

  In contrast to the doorkeeper, Valier was short, though he stood almost militarily erect as he shook hands. He had carefully barbered salt-and-pepper hair and, though his face was unlined and tan, Reuben took him for perhaps sixty. He was wearing a single-breasted light brown suit, of a thick, rough fabric that must have been uncomfortable on the warm September day.

  “You are here about Mr. Baxter,” Valier said, as he and Frost sat facing each other across a spare wooden desk, Valier behind an antique typewriter. Reuben had seen computer terminals in other offices he had passed, but there was not one here.

  “Mr. Baxter’s friend, Mr., ah, I have it here, Mr. Abbott, said you would come to see me. You were the dead man’s lawyer, I believe? His mouthpiece.”

  Frost was taken aback at the colloquialism. “Only in the most technical sense,” Reuben said. “I never represented Mr. Baxter before this trip to Venice.”

  “You mean then you represent his estate? When were you hired? This morning?”

  “No, Mr. Baxter retained me yesterday. I doubt that I shall have anything to do with his estate.”

  “Which will be big, yes?” Valier asked.

  “I have no idea, but it’s safe to say Baxter was very rich. He’s been an extremely successful fashion designer in the States.”

  “In other words, we may have set a record.”

  “How do you mean?” Reuben asked.

  “Mr. Baxter may have been the richest man ever murdered in Venice,” Valier said.

  “Surely that can’t be true?” Reuben said. “The Doges who were assassinated …”

  “No, no. There were four Doges assassinated—that we know about—but they had all fallen on hard times when they were killed. Until now, the wealthiest victim we ever had was il conte Lanza, the very rich owner of the Palazzo Dario. He was killed twenty years ago and I regret to say his murderer has never been found. But your Mr. Baxter sounds even better off than Lanza.”

  “Interesting,” Reuben said.

  “May I ask why Mr. Baxter hired you now, at this time? I assume you are here on vacation, not business?”

  “You’re right about why I’m here. As for why he hired me, it had to do with the poison episode.”

  “Poison episode?” Valier asked, looking perplexed.

  “Mr. Abbott didn’t tell you?”

  “I recall no mention of poison, pal.”

  Reuben found this odd, but did not let on to the Commissario. “The late Gregg Baxter was a diabetic. Diabetico. Two nights ago, Wednesday, he was about to take his insulin shot—just before the big dinner he gave—when he thought the medicine bottle had been tampered with. He also said the liquid inside smelled odd. He was sure it had been poisoned. They called me in Thursday morning and we arranged to have it sent out for testing at a laboratory in Mestre. We’re still waiting for the results.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Avvocato Frost, why did they call you? It doesn’t sound like a job for a lawyer.”

  “I agree with you. I think Baxter, or perhaps his man Abbott, foresaw a situation that might become complicated and wanted to bring in an outsider.” Reuben did not think it timely to mention his experience with other homicides.

  “Seems odd to me. But what’s the name of the laboratory?”

  “I don’t know. Il signor Cavallaro, at the Cipriani, made the arrangements.”

  Valier picked up the phone on his desk and called a number from memory. It turned out to be the Cipriani and Alfredo Cavallaro was soon on the other end. Reuben tried to understand the side of the conversation he could hear, but the Commissario’s Venetian dialect seemed almost impenetrable. Deliberately so, Reuben suspected.

  The call was not short. Valier swiveled away from Reuben and put his feet up on the edge of a shelf behind him as he talked. Reuben could not help but no
tice the man’s well-shod but small feet. And the large poster on the stark white wall for Via Col Vento, starring Clark Gabe and Vivien Leigh.

  The conversation ended soon after Valier had written a name and number on the pad in front of him. Glancing at it, he dialed again, without a word to Frost. This time the call consisted of questions by Valier, which grew more excited as the conversation progressed.

  “Arsenico,” he said when he had replaced the receiver. “What do you say? Arsenic and Old Lace?” He gave Reuben a hint of a smile. “The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it,” he said, mimicking a female voice.

  Frost was baffled at what he guessed to be a line from the movie or the play of Arsenic and Old Lace, but the message seemed clear that Baxter’s insulin had been poisoned. “So it was poison,” he said.

  “That’s what la signorina Preti, the chemist, told me. The fluid in the bottle she was given contained arsenic. Which doesn’t assist the theory of Mr. Abbott.”

  “Which is?”

  “That Mr. Baxter picked somebody up at Haig’s Bar and had a fairies’ quarrel with him. A fatal fairies’ quarrel.”

  “Can I ask you what did happen, as far as you know?” Frost said.

  “Baxter’s body was found early this morning in an alley not far from the bar. In a trash bin in the Calle dei Tredici Martiri. He had been dead several hours.”

  “Several hours? Wasn’t the body right out in the open?” Reuben asked.

  “Not exactly. The trash bin I had reference to was there for a construction job. It is very large and about four feet high. So it is possible people went by without seeing the body. Sadly, I do not believe it. There must have been those who saw the corpse—those coming to work at the Bauer Grunwald, for example—and simply went along their way, not wanting to get entangled. Regrettably, this happens.”

  “The phenomenon occurs in my city, too, Commissario,” Reuben said.

  “The cause of death was a single stab wound in the sterno—I’m sorry, I don’t know the English—that went through to the ventricolo sinistro of the heart. At least that’s the preliminary conclusion of the Polizia Scientifica. There was no sign of a struggle. It looks like Baxter was taken by surprise and didn’t put up a fight. There is one strange thing, however. Perhaps Mr. Abbott told you. The murder weapon was a glass dagger. The handle broke off and the blade was left inside him.”

  “Yes, Mr. Abbott did tell me. It sounds bizarre,” Reuben said.

  “It’s very Venetian,” Valier said. “You know our city well, Avvocato Frost?”

  “Reasonably. My wife and I have been coming here for twenty-odd years now.”

  “The Tourist Bureau would be delighted to hear that. But back to the glass dagger. You most likely know that glassware is one of the few things that through our history was made in Venice. As opposed to goods that were merely traded. From at least the twelfth century to the seventeenth, Venice tried to maintain a monopoly on glassmaking in Europe, which is one reason the industry was moved to Murano in the thirteenth century—to keep it from prying eyes.

  “Any glassmaker who committed the treason of leaving the Republic to go into business elsewhere was condemned to death—a sentence carried out by the enforcers of the Republic with a pugnale di Venezia, a razor-sharp dagger made of glass.”

  “Abbott said one could easily obtain such a weapon.”

  “Yes and no. Not in every souvenir stand that sells glass beads, but in some of the fancier shops. Probably one dealing in antique glass. It’s something my men will cover. Let’s hope someone remembers selling a pugnale—and the person who bought it.”

  “Sounds difficult.”

  “No, more bothersome than difficult. We are a small town, Avvocato Frost. Seventy-five thousand souls today. Only three million of us ever. There’s a store selling glass every two meters, but the kind we’re talking about is much fewer. So, as I say, bothersome but not difficult. I told Mr. Abbott that it would be just as well to keep the detail of the glass dagger quiet for the moment, not least because it would create a sensation in the press. But also, so we might have at least one concealed ace up the sleeve.”

  “The secret’s safe with me,” Reuben said. “But one question. What did you say the name of the street was where Baxter was killed? I may go take a look.”

  “The Calle dei Tredici Martiri—the street of the thirteen martyrs.”

  “Which makes Baxter the fourteenth martyr?”

  “Not quite. The tredici martiri were patriots killed by the Fascists in 1944. Ca’ Giustinian, which is on one side of the Calle, was the headquarters of the Gestapo.”

  “I see,” Reuben said quietly, and then, after a pause, asked how he could be helpful.

  Valier did not reply right away, but stood up from the desk and went to the window and looked out on the dark facade of the abandoned church of San Lorenzo. He stroked his already flawlessly combed hair, then plunged his hands into his pants pockets.

  “Mr. Frost, do you know what a bocca di leone is?” he asked finally, turning back to Reuben.

  “Vaguely. It means the mouth of the lion, doesn’t it? It was the name for a container, like a mailbox, where a citizen of the Republic could deposit an anonymous denunciation.”

  “Very good. You are well informed on our history, I see. Anyway, I predict, before this process is finished, that once your interest in Mr. Baxter’s murder becomes known, you will become a sort of walking bocca di leone.”

  “That sounds farfetched to me,” Reuben said.

  “We shall see, my friend,” Valier said. “You’re from New York, I understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “New Yorkers are tough and clever, is that not true? And if you’re a lawyer there, you must also be intelligent. We can use your brains on this one. Everybody’s going to be on our backs to solve it. And to solve it subito. People sometimes forget a murder that is solved, but they don’t forget one that’s not, especially when the victim is as celebrated as Mr. Baxter was. Or as rich as he was. For God’s sake, let’s not tell anyone about his being the richest corpse in our history. Let’s not make the journalists’ headlines for them.

  “Right now, the tourist trade here has quite enough difficulties. Down the hall there you will see the offices of my colleagues in the terrorism squad, who are trying to prevent even the suggestion of a terrorist threat. So we did not need this murder. Nor do we need every rich and fashionable woman in the world saying ‘Oh yes, murdered in Venice, poor thing,’ every time Gregg Baxter is mentioned or someone recognizes one of his dresses. Or worse, as I’m sure some of them would say, ‘Oh yes, Venice, the city where they killed Gregg Baxter.’” Valier gave a small shudder as he contemplated his own dire imaginings.

  “Everyone’s going to be interested in this one. The Questore—that’s our police chief. My bosses, the Vice Questore and the Commissario Capo. The magistrate in charge—the Procuratore della Repubblica—majestic title, heh? And the fellow looking right over my shoulder, the Sostituto Procuratore. Not to mention the journals, the television, the foreign office. Or your consul general in Milan.”

  “I sympathize,” Reuben said, dazed at the bureaucratic structure Valier had outlined.

  “Dunque, if you want to be helpful, the first thing you can do is tell me what you know about Mr. Abbott, Miss Medford and the others in Mr. Baxter’s group.”

  Reuben informed the Commissario of all that he knew. Valier took meticulous notes in a small, fine hand, asking Frost to slow down at one point. After discussing Abbott and Medford—including what details he knew about her firing—Reuben said that “the only others in Baxter’s immediate party were Tony Garrison, his design assistant, and Tabita, his favorite model.”

  “Tony. Anthony. Antonio. Italian?” Valier asked.

  “Ah … in part, yes. His father was a black American soldier, but his mother was Italian.”

  “And Tabita. What kind of name is that? Negro?”

  “Black, yes.”
/>   “Beautiful, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes again.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, there’s la marchesa Scamozzi. Baxter was working with her to develop fabrics for his line.”

  “Cecilia.”

  “You know her?”

  “Avvocato Frost, as I said, this is a very small town. I’ve known her all my life.”

  “You come from Venice, then?”

  Valier nodded. “I hope Mr. Baxter’s death will not keep Cecilia from doing a good business. She can use the money.”

  “A marchesa needing money?”

  “A title doesn’t guarantee money in Venice. The only money you can be sure of was the amount paid to the Austrians, back in those unspeakable years when they occupied us, to buy the titles the blackguards were selling.

  “I’m pretty sure Cecilia is what you Americans call land-poor. She has a home and studio on the Giudecca. But her husband flew the coop years ago. So she has to worry about the upkeep of the house—and of Luigi Regillo, who is a man of expensive tastes.”

  “How does he fit in? Is he a gigolo?” Reuben asked.

  “Not precisely. Do you know the term cicisbeo?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “In the dying days of the Republic, every wealthy woman in Venice had a cicisbeo, a beautiful young man constantly at her side. He may have been taking her to bed, maybe not. The term cicisbeo doesn’t tell you. Luigi is a modern version—Ceil’s companion, but I don’t think her lover. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t cost her much money.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is there anyone else I should know about, Avvocato Frost?”

  Reuben told Valier about Eric Werth and Cavanaugh.

  “We should talk to them. Where are they staying?” Valier asked.

  “They were at the Gritti, but they left this morning.”

  “For New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we have two men, angry with Mr. Baxter, at a hotel very near where he was killed. I’m sorry they got away. When are the others leaving, do you know? I don’t want to lose them.”

  “They haven’t told me, but I had the impression even before Baxter’s death that they were eager to get back to the States.”