Good Blood (22 page)

Caravale had been frowning, fingering his side, near the bottom of his rib cage, like a man whose ulcer was worrying him. “I don’t mean to question your expertise, but… well, a few years ago I fractured a rib in an automobile accident. Down here.”

“Yes?”

“The doctor said… Well, I’m fairly certain he said… that it was my seventh rib.”

“That looks about right,” Gideon agreed. “The seventh or eighth.”

“But the heart, isn’t it up here?” He put his other hand, with the cigar, on his sternum. At Gideon’s nod, he went on. “Well, then, how could a knife thrust here, at the seventh rib, go into the heart? That is, unless it was practically straight up-which our knife there isn’t. It would go into, into…”

“The left lobe of the liver, correct. Several inches below the heart.”

“So…?” Caravale shook his head, lost.

Gideon laughed. “What you’re forgetting is that the ribs don’t go straight around, they angle upward from front to back. Yes, that’s the seventh rib down there in front, but by the time it curves around and connects to the vertebral column in back, it’s way up here.” He reached around and with one finger tapped Caravale on the upper back, between the left scapula and the spine. “And that’s where the knife went in.”

“Ahh,” said Caravale with his brown-toothed grin. “I see. Straight into the heart.”

“Well, it would have had to get through a few muscle layers first, and the left lung, but yes. Straight into the heart.”

“Stabbed in the back.”

Gideon nodded. “Yup.”

They stood looking down at the bones. “So he put his arm up to ward off the blow-that’s how he got it broken-succeeded for a moment. ..,” Caravale took a final drag on his cigar stub and ground it out in a metal ashtray. “… but must have fallen and gotten himself knifed in the back.”

“That’s pretty much it, but from the angle of the thrust, it doesn’t look to me as if he was on the ground when the blade went in. I think he probably just twisted around, maybe trying to get away, and got stabbed before he could make it. He was an old man, and he was lame.”

Gideon finished his Brio and tossed the bottle into a wastepaper basket under the table. It still surprised him how easy it was to talk about these hideous events as if they hadn’t really happened to a living human being, as if they hadn’t involved agony and terror and unspeakable, bloody horror.

“All right, so what do we know now that we didn’t know before?” he asked, musing, getting his mind back on the clean, comfortable present.

“Several things,” said Caravale. “We know the cause of death. We know for certain that he was murdered. Until now it was strictly circumstantial-he was buried, therefore, he must have been murdered. But now we know. ”

“Yes, sure. But why did somebody try to steal the bones? Why was I attacked? What was that all about? Okay, so we know he was murdered with a kitchen knife or something like it. So what? Why kill me to keep that from coming out?”

Caravale pensively scratched his cheek. “It could be to make sure we didn’t identify the murder weapon and somehow connect it to the killer.”

“So throw away the knife. They’ve had ten years to do it. Wouldn’t that be a whole lot simpler?”

“And safer.” Nodding, Caravale plucked a dark fleck of tobacco from his lip. “There must be something else.”

“Maybe, but I sure can’t imagine what. I’ll go over every single bone, though. Give me an hour.”

With Caravale gone, Gideon worked bone by bone by bone, sliding each one into the light, turning it over in his fingers to see and to feel every angle and facet, scanning it with the magnifying glass, putting it aside into the “discard” pile, and moving smoothly on to the next one. He could work far more quickly than usual because there was no reason to measure them, apply height or race formulas, or do anything else to help in the identification process. All he had to do, basically, was look for anything unusual; in particular, trauma and pathologies.

There was nothing that amounted to anything. Some dental caries, a lot of expectable age-related arthritis, and various long-standing deformities of the lumbar vertebrae and of the knee, ankle, and foot joints, all of which were clearly related to the old man’s hip problem, but that was all. Nothing new, nothing that explained anything.

Still, it ended up taking quite a bit more than an hour, and when he found Caravale in his office to tell him the results, Caravale simply looked up with a grumpy expression and said: “Jesus, it’s about time. I’ve been sitting here listening to my stomach rumble for the last twenty minutes. Let’s go and have some lunch.”

Caravale preferred not to eat in Stresa, where so many people knew him. Instead, they drove a few miles up the lakeshore road, past graceful villas and Art Nouveau hotels, to the quieter town of Baveno, where they pulled into the parking lot of a rustic, homey restaurant called II Gabbiano, the seagull. The owner knew Caravale and his preferences, and without being asked he showed them to a wooden table more or less hidden in a niche beside an arched entryway separating the two small rooms that made up the place. The place smelled of oregano and baking bread. It was like sitting in somebody’s country kitchen.

As Gideon had surmised, Caravale took his eating seriously. After a brief but thorough scan of the menu, he rattled off an order for artichoke pie appetizer, risotto Milanese, veal pizzaiola, parsleyed potatoes, and sauteed fennel, with cheese, grapes, and coffee to follow. Mineral water to drink. This was a stupendous initial order (for a native) in a country in which doggie bags do not exist because one’s stomach is supposed to plan ahead, and people generally choose one course at a time, not an entire meal that they might not be able to finish. The restaurant owner was not surprised, however. Without writing it down, he grunted, then turned to Gideon and said, translating as he went: “The trota, trout, is very fine, fresh this morning in the lago, the lake. Very good fritto, fried.”

Gideon went along with that, ordering a bowl of minestrone and some bread and mineral water to accompany it. Coffee afterward, but no dessert.

“That’s all you want?” Caravale seemed disappointed. “Your meal is courtesy of the Carabinieri di Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta. That doesn’t happen every day. You should make the most of it.”

“I didn’t realize that, but really, that’s all I want. And thank you.”

“A small expression of our gratitude.” He rubbed his hands together and looked over his shoulder. “So, let’s go and see what awaits on the antipasto table.”

With a platter of olives, sauteed peppers, salami, stuffed zucchini, and marinated shrimp and mussels between them, Gideon picked at a slice or two of salami, then raised something that had been at the back of his mind for a while.

“Tullio, I had a nasty thought. What you said before, about who could have attacked me, who could even have known that you’d found the bones…”

“Ahh,” said Caravale with an evil, knowing grin. So he’d had the same nasty thought.

“Assuming you or your men haven’t been broadcasting it around,” Gideon went on, “the only people who’d know would be-”

“The de Grazias, that’s right. We’re back to them. And that doctor, Luzzatto. Or maybe other people they might have told. But that’s easy to check. For the time being, it looks as if we’re talking about the nine fine people that were in that room with us yesterday.”

“Eight people. I think you can pretty safely exclude Phil Boyajian.”

Caravale said nothing, but only tipped his head to one side and waggled his hand, palm down. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Fair enough, Gideon thought. From the police point of view, at this stage of the game no one was to be excluded, certainly not on the testimony of an old friend.

Gideon did a little more pondering. “If it is one of those people-”

“One or more of those people.”

“-then that pretty much has to mean that the same person-”

“Or people.”

“-was behind Domenico’s murder ten years ago, or at least involved in it in some way. Right? Why else try to hide anything about the bones?”

Caravale’s answer was a head-tilted, open-handed shoulder shrug that as much as said that the conclusion was self-evident; the facts spoke for themselves.

“His own family,” Gideon said.

“Or Luzzatto. One of the nine people in that room,” he said again.

Gideon shook his head. “The guy that choked me-he wasn’t in that room, I can tell you that much. Believe me, I would have remembered those arms.”

“A hired hand.”

They paused while the owner-waiter set down Gideon’s soup and Caravale’s wedge of artichoke pie.

“Hired hands kidnapping Achille last week, a hired hand trying to stop me from examining the bones of his murdered grandfather today,” Gideon said. “Isn’t that a lot of hired hands? You can’t have that many criminals for hire wandering around Stresa. Doesn’t it make you wonder at least a little if the two things might be related?”

“Wandering around Stresa, no. But not so many kilometers away, wandering around Milan, yes. Look, Gideon, the kidnapping, the murder, they happened ten years apart.”

“To the same family.”

“Yes, the same family. So? What are you suggesting, that one of the de Grazias not only murdered Domenico, but kidnapped Achille too? We had a liquor store robbed the day before yesterday in Stresa. Do you think that might have been the de Grazia gang as well?”

“No, of course that’s not what I’m suggesting-well, I don’t know, maybe I am. All I’m saying is that the two things might possibly be connected one way or another. I had an old professor who used to talk about what he called the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. I don’t know how that would translate into Italian, but what he was saying was that when too many seemingly unrelated incidents occur to the same set of people in the same-”

“I understand what he was saying, but what do you say we just deal with the facts that we have instead of coming up with complicated theories? We have a decade-old murder of an old man. We have a week-old kidnapping of a boy. Two separate cases, ten years apart. Believe me, we have enough resources to deal with them both on their own merits. And as things stand, I don’t see a good reason for assuming they’re part of anything bigger.”

Gideon held up his hands in defeat. Caravale had just delivered a pretty good precis of Gideon’s standard classroom presentation on Occam’s razor, the Law of Parsimony: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. The simplest theory that fits the facts is the best one upon which to proceed.”

And Gideon believed in that. Absolutely.

On the other hand, there was Alfred North Whitehead’s take on the subject: “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” That was the nice thing about theories. If you looked hard enough, you could always find one to fit what you were thinking.

“Gideon?” Caravale said on the drive back to Stresa. “Do you remember yesterday, at the ‘consiglio’ ”-he put a sour-mouthed set of quotation marks around the word-“that Luzzatto said something about Domenico de Grazia’s having something to ponder on the day he died?”

“Yes.”

“Can you remember exactly what he said?”

“Everybody was speaking Italian, Tullio. I didn’t pick up every word. But didn’t he say he knew-knew for a fact-that Domenico had some kind of decision to on his mind?”

“But not what? No specifics?”

“If he did, I didn’t hear it.”

“Nor did I. Then that will be an interesting question to ask him, don’t you think?”

“What important decision Domenico had on his mind just before somebody killed him? Yeah, I’d say it would be.”

“I would too,” said Caravale.

As Caravale slid the car into a parking space at the Hotel Primavera, the question of Gideon’s safety was raised and quickly disposed of. The colonel needed to go out to the island that afternoon to interview the family and get statements. While there, he would make sure that everyone was informed that Gideon’s examination of the remains was done and his report to Caravale had already been made. He’d do the same with the local press, which was naturally showing interest. That would, or should, remove any new danger to him. Unless, of course, Gideon wished protection, in which case it would be provided.

“Thanks, no.” Gideon had been through the well-meaning intrusiveness and inconvenience of police protection before. He got out of the car, closed the door, and leaned in the open window. “I’ll be fine, Tullio. I appreciate the offer, but I’d be happier not seeing a cop every time I turn around.”

Caravale looked up at him and mournfully nodded. “So would I.”

It took a while for Gideon’s parasympathetic nervous system’s post-stress reaction to fully kick in, but when it did, it was a lulu. Saying “ciao” to Caravale, he’d felt all right, but by the time he’d climbed the three flights to his room, his leg muscles were twitching and the strength was running out of him like water. Fumbling weakly at the door with his key, he could practically feel the adrenaline overdose draining out of his system. He made straight for the bed and flopped on his face. Before he could take his shoes off, he was asleep.

When the telephone rang two hours later, he was still on his face, his feet over the edge of the bed. He lifted his head and cocked one eye open to see the time and to gauge how he felt. Better than he’d expected: no shakiness, no palpitations. Homeostasis pretty much restored. But the short, deep sleep had made him dopey. It took four chirps of the phone before he was sitting up and groping for it. Caravale was on the line.

“Listen, are you up to coming over to my office? If not, I can come there.”

“No, I’m fine. I could use the fresh air. What’s up?”

“I have a picture I want to show you.”

THERE were six color photos, not one, arranged along the edge of the desk for his inspection. Four of them were dual, full-face-profile mug shots, the other two candid photographs. The men in them all looked superficially similar.