A Very Venetian Murder Page 9

  “I’ll have to see to that. It would be most unfortunate if they left now. I must inform them.”

  “Are you saying they’re not free to leave?”

  “Until our investigation becomes clarified, it would be prudent for them not to.”

  “In other words, they’re under house arrest?”

  “Mr. Frost, I merely said it would be prudent for the interested parties to remain. Per prudenza. I did not use the term arresti domiciliari. Can we leave it at that?”

  “As you wish,” Frost said. “But I have another question. What about Baxter’s body?”

  “The Polizia Scientifica released it at the scene and it has been taken to the Ospedale Santi Giovanni e Paolo. You know it?”

  “Yes. Next to San Zanipolo.”

  “Correct. Not far from here. What we call a medico legale will do an autopsy and then the body can be released.”

  “Good. Mr. Abbott was concerned.”

  “I already told him not to worry. We aren’t going to keep it. We have no extra room for bodies here in Venice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now. Haig’s Bar should be opening soon. I think I’ll go have a talk with the bartender. Can I drop you at San Marco?”

  “That would be very kind.”

  “Good, I’ll call the boat. Just give me a minute. There are some papers I must sign.” Valier made the call and then took out his half-glasses to scan documents from the box on his desk. Reuben watched him as he did so, and listened to him whistle softly. Frost did not quite believe what he heard and finally could not resist satisfying his curiosity.

  “May I ask you something?” he said.

  “Yes?” Valier said, looking up from his reading.

  “You were just whistling. Am I wrong in thinking the tune was what we call ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’? A song I don’t think I’ve heard since I was in the Navy during the War?”

  Valier laughed softly. “You are right,” he said, then sang the first lines, in English:

  “Don’t sit under the apple tree,

  With anyone else but me,

  Anyone else but me.…

  “The Andrews Sisters. Patty, Laverne and Maxine.”

  “I didn’t know their reputation had spread to Italy,” Reuben said, puzzled at the almost surreal occurrence.

  “I heard them when I was a guest in your country,” Valier said.

  “During the War?”

  “You’ve trapped me, Avvocato Frost. I was, as they used to say, a ‘P.W.’ An eighteen-year-old caporale captured in the Battle of Palermo, in Sicily, in 1943. July twenty-two, I’ll never forget. Your General Patton and the Seventh Army. They put us on a troopship returning home to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Then by train to Monticello, Arkansas.”

  The source of the Commissario’s disconcerting Americanisms now became clear to Frost; they had been learned in Arkansas, of all places.

  “They put us to work in a sawmill and lumberyard,” Valier went on. “My job was to count the boards as they came out of the mill. Not very demanding, but I believe they did not want me to sabotage the American war effort. They did not want us dangerous Italians sacking Atlanta like your General Sherman.” He smiled, turning toward his Gone With the Wind poster.

  “The good part was that I listened to the radio all day long—your Young Men’s Christians had given us several—and fell in love with the Andrews Sisters. And learned a little English, though my English today is truly pessimo.”

  “Not at all,” Reuben said, without adding that there was a certain time-warp to the Commissario’s idioms.

  “Not long after we arrived in Arkansas, Mussolini was thrown out and arrested and Italy surrendered. Suddenly we became not the enemy but what the Allies were pleased to call a ‘co-belligerent.’ Your Army had no idea what to do with us. Italy was occupied by the Germans, so we couldn’t be sent back. Yet it wasn’t quite right to keep us as P.W.s, now that we were on your side. So they took away the uniforms with the big P-Ws on them and gave us new ones that said I-T-A-L-Y—and kept us working in the lumberyard. They did raise our ‘pay’ from eight dollars a month as prisoners to twenty-four dollars as your co-belligerents.

  “Many of us wanted to stay in your country, but fifty thousand Italian P.W.s was not what your immigration had in mind. After we were given more freedom, we desperately tried to meet local girls, thinking if we married them we wouldn’t have to come back. But your Army was too smart for that. They forbidded us to marry—even when the girls became pregnant. Not, I assure you, that I tried that stratagemma.

  “So … after V-E day in 1945, I came back here to Venice and joined the P.S., where I’ve been ever since. I was sixty-five two months ago, so I retire at the end of this year. Unless, of course, I’m fired before that for failing to find Mr. Baxter’s killer.”

  “That’s quite a tale, Commissario—”

  “Please, Avvocato Frost. Jack, if you will, for old time’s sake. That’s what they made of Jacopo in Arkansas. Jack Valley-yare. Come on, I’ll give you a lift, as you Yanks say. Or used to, at least.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  Worry

  When Reuben picked up his room key at the hotel, Gigi, the concierge on duty, told him that Cynthia had already eaten and gone across to San Marco. He decided to have lunch by himself at the outside snack bar, which he hoped would mean that he could avoid the whirlwind of gossip he was sure would be swirling among the guests. Yet even in the comparative isolation of the snack bar, Reuben overheard one woman ask another, “What about the murder?” The second woman became flightily upset, until assured that the deed had taken place “in town.”

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “Some queer dress designer I’ve never heard of named Baxter.” Gregg Baxter’s international reputation had apparently not traveled to the outlying reaches of America where the first woman was from. Judging by the leopard-patterned culottes and high-heeled pink shoes she wore, Reuben saw no reason to doubt her ignorance.

  “They say a boy picked him up and killed him,” the first woman said, evoking a scandalized cluck from her companion.

  Reuben ate his hamburger and wondered where the leopard-skin lady had heard about Baxter picking up a boy. It was one thing for Commissario Valier, who knew of the dead man’s movements the previous evening, to speculate about homosexual murder, quite another for a total stranger, presumably without any of the facts, to do so.

  As Frost mulled over this puzzle, Alfredo Cavallaro came strolling by his table.

  “You’ve heard about Mr. Baxter?” Cavallaro said.

  “Yes.”

  “And the laboratory test?”

  “Yes, yes. I was with Commissario Valier when he called you.”

  “It is very, very sad.”

  “Do you have any thoughts on who might have killed him?” Frost asked. “If you’ve seen or heard anything unusual around here, I’d like to know it.”

  “All I’m aware of is what Mr. Abbott said, that they think an omosessuale killed Mr. Baxter,” Cavallaro said. “But I will most surely inform you if anything comes to my attention.” He bowed and moved off.

  After lunch, Reuben stopped to make a reservation for dinner that evening. He had already decided that it might be interesting to go to Da Fiore, where Gregg Baxter had eaten his last meal.

  Gigi said he would make the reservation and wrote down Reuben’s request in his book. Seeing this gave Frost a sudden idea.

  “Gigi, does your book show the reservations you made yesterday?”

  “It shows the ones we’ve made for the whole year.”

  “Then let me ask you this. Did you make any bookings for Da Fiore last night?”

  The concierge flipped back in the bound volume. “Yes. Il signor Baxter and his party …”

  “… I know about that.…”

  “Then the Madreaus. They’re from Paris and went home today. And, yes, I forgot. La signora Morrison and la signorina Cochran went there
last night.”

  Frost thanked the concierge and went into the adjoining room to write Augusta Morrison a note, inviting her and her companion, Sarah Cochran, to tea at five-thirty. Mrs. Morrison, a vigorous, energetic and rich widow of eighty-nine from Philadelphia, had been coming to the Cipriani for the month of September every year since the hotel had opened in 1958. She was both flamboyant and amiable, and well known to the September crowd. They all assumed she would outlive her protector, Ms. Cochran, who, indeed, had broken her ankle and been temporarily replaced on the trip the year before. Neither woman ever missed a detail of what went on around them; the chances that they might have something to report to Reuben were excellent.

  Meanwhile, Frost went back to San Marco to have a look at the spot where Gregg Baxter had been killed. He got off the Cipriani boat and walked to the church of San Moisè. At one side of its heavy facade was the major pedestrian thoroughfare that brought one from St. Mark’s to such familiar landmarks as the Gritti and the Accademia Bridge. On the other was a short passage between the church and the Hotel Bauer Grunwald.

  Reuben went down this passage, which led into the Calle dei Tredici Martiri. The bar of the hotel, with opaque windows, was on his right, and what he took to be the rectory of the church on his left. Walking along, he came to the service entrance of the hotel, then doubled back and examined more carefully the makeshift trash receptacle where the body had been found. It was now filled with plaster fragments, topped by a Fanta bottle and an empty cigarette pack. There were no bloodstains and no evidence at all that a homicide had taken place a few hours earlier; someone had cleaned up thoroughly.

  Except for the open service entrance to the Bauer Grunwald, the Calle dei Tredici Martiri seemed a convenient spot for murder. The short street ran to a dead end at the Grand Canal, so that it was not heavily used; in the fifteen or so minutes Reuben spent nosing around, he did not encounter another person. There were two doors that appeared to lead to residential apartments, but all their windows were shuttered.

  In an odd twist, the Ca’ Giustinian, the erstwhile headquarters of the Gestapo that faced the water at the end of the Calle, was now a local tourist office, the Assessorato al Turismo; Baxter’s murder must have delighted the promoters of tourism inside, Reuben guessed. He walked up and down the Tredici Martiri and the surrounding streets several times, during which he noticed the plaque commemorating the thirteen martyrs, Trucidati dai Fascisti, slaughtered by the Fascists, on July 28, 1944.

  He could not figure out what the light pattern in the Calle would be like at night, so he returned to the Campo San Moisè. He went up the steps of the bridge over the Rio San Moisè and looked across at the front of the church. If one were coming from the Gritti—or Haig’s Bar—and heading for the Cipriani boat, it was necessary to veer to the left to avoid the facade and then turn right at the second street beyond it, the Calle Valleresso. For someone who did not know the route well it would seem more logical to favor the right side of the church closer to the Grand Canal, and to head down the Calle dei Tredici Martiri, just as Jim Cavanaugh had started to do the night before.

  All this was evident to Reuben as he surveyed the Campo from the elevation of the bridge. Had the killer enticed Gregg Baxter into the deserted Calle, perhaps falsely suggesting that it was the route home? Or had Baxter become lost on his own, an accident of fate that had brought murderer and victim together in the isolated street?

  Satisfied that there was not anything more he could learn, Frost decided to continue his Doges project with a brief visit to the Basilica di San Marco, close at hand.

  At the basilica, he was almost swept aside by a small army of Slavic pilgrims, in an eager frenzy to see the treasures inside. They were speaking what Reuben made out to be Hungarian or Czech, were carrying brown bags that looked as if they might contain lunch and, unlike more affluent tour groups, were not laden down with cameras.

  Reuben recalled a conversation with Dott. Caroldo at the Baxter dinner. “The Hungarians humiliated us back in the Quattrocento, when we were forced to give them all of Dalmatia,” he had said. “Yet the Magyars were never able to invade Venice itself. But look at what’s happening now. After the upheavals in Eastern Europe, the Hungarians and the Czechs are free to travel for the first time in forty years. So are the Poles.

  “Where do they want to go? Venice, of course,” he had continued. “The only problem is the poor souls have almost no money. Some piccolo imprenditore from their town herds them into a bus and they ride all night to get here. They can’t afford the vaporetti, so they walk from the Piazzale Roma to San Marco, where they sprawl out and eat the lunch they’ve brought from home. They do a little giretto around the Piazza and the basilica and then trek back to their bus.

  “As you can imagine, the merchants love it—love having the city filled with tourists who spend maybe three thousand lire apiece. It does not appeal to the rapacity of the Venetian soul, I can tell you.”

  Reuben was now witnessing what Dott. Caroldo had been describing. He stood aside until the throng had passed. Then he entered and, aided by the diagram in his Lorenzetti Guide, tried to locate the baptistry, to seek out the tomb of Doge Giovanni Soranzo (1312–28). It was in restauro, completely closed off.

  Reuben was disappointed. On vacation, the figure of Doge Soranzo appealed to him. Historians had concluded that the most exciting event of his sixteen-year reign was the birth of three cubs to a pair of lions that he had been given by the King of Sicily. (The only possible rival event was the conception of the cubs, which allegedly had taken place at the Doges’ Palace before a large crowd.)

  As he walked under the cupolas of the atrium, Frost remembered how much time he had spent there on the two vacations when he had been studying the basilica’s mosaics. The cupolas and lunettes above told the story of Joseph, and he was pleased that he remembered to look for the depiction of Reuben, the first son of Jacob, searching for Joseph, his younger sibling.

  Fighting to the exit—this time through an onslaught of Germans—with some relief he went back to the Giudecca, where he made a turn around the pool to see who might be there. Tony Garrison and Tabita were sitting on the stretch of grass in front of the Baxter suites. They called to Reuben as he passed and he went to join them.

  “I’m glad we caught you,” Garrison, wearing a Madonna T-shirt and his omnipresent PADRES cap, told Frost. “We were just going to change so we could go over to town. We have to be at the police station at four o’clock. Dan Abbott and Doris are there now.

  “It’s on the Fondamenta San Lorenzo?” Garrison asked. “I know this old città pretty well but I’m a little soft on police stations.”

  “That’s right,” Reuben said.

  “Sempre diritto, as the natives like to say,” Garrison observed. “Straight ahead—which of course it never is.”

  “Just remember it’s not the Questura itself you want but the headquarters of the Squadra Mobile two buildings further down. It’s marked.”

  “Do you know how to get there or not?” Tabita demanded to know.

  “I do, babes, I do,” Garrison told her and then, turning to Frost, said, “Rubes, Dan Abbott said you were the expert in how to handle the police and would help us.”

  “Mr. Abbott seems very free in giving me a role in this mess,” Reuben said, with some annoyance at Abbott’s matter-of-fact assumption, not to mention Garrison’s insistence on calling him “Rubes.” “I would be the wrong person to advise you about dealing with the American police, let alone the Italian ones.”

  “Do they have any idea who killed Gregg?” Tabita asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” Reuben answered. “I talked with Commissario Valier, who’s the detective in charge of the case. He’s completely in the dark, I’d say. How about you? Any theories?”

  “None,” Tabita said. “That’s what’s so scary. There’s a murderer out there and nobody knows who he is, or why he killed. And we don’t know if he was only after Gregg or if he’s after his fr
iends, too. Like us.”

  “Somebody must really have wanted to get the poor bastard,” Garrison said. “First trying to poison him, then tracking him down at midnight.”

  “You two know about the poison attempt then?”

  “Yes,” Tabita replied, shuddering.

  “What do the police want with us?” Garrison asked.

  “I presume you’ll be talking to Commissario Valier and that he’ll want to ask the same thing I did—if you have any helpful ideas. He’ll also want to know where you were last night.”

  “That’s easy. We had dinner with Gregg and Dan at Da Fiore. Tabita and I left early and ended up back here around one in the morning. I was supposed to spend today working with Ceil Scamozzi—she and her friend Luigi also were with us last night—finalizing our selection of fabric designs. I knew it would be a rough day, so I wanted to get to bed at a decent hour. I didn’t know how rough.…” Garrison stopped and swallowed hard.

  “I’m interested in your saying you wanted to get to bed ‘at a decent hour.’ Yet you said you didn’t get back here until one o’clock,” Reuben said.

  Garrison smiled broadly. “Diff’rint strokes for diff’rint folks.”

  “Tony has funny ideas about time, Mr. Frost,” Tabita said. “He’s a night person if there ever was one.”

  “What did you do after you left the restaurant?”

  “Just walked around. Two lovers in the moonlight,” Garrison said sardonically.

  “Once you got back here, did you hear or see Dan Abbott? He’s in an adjoining suite, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right. He’s on one side and Doris Medford’s on the other—or at least she was until she moved out yesterday. The last time I saw Dan, or Doris for that matter, was at the restaurant. I didn’t hear or see them back here.”

  “Actually, Tony, we did hear Dan Abbott’s TV, remember?” Tabita said. “It was very low, so it didn’t bother. It sounded like he was watching a movie.”

  “You’re right, I forgot that,” Garrison said.

  “When did you find out about Baxter’s death?”