The Killing Room (24 page)

‘I want you to go to Massini and tell her what you’ve done,’ she said. ‘From you threatening Rosina her kids will be taken away, right on up.’

Vera’s face was frozen. ‘And why would I want to do that?’ she forced out.

‘I’ll tell her why you did it,’ said Giuli. ‘That was your mistake, you see. I’ve got nothing to lose.’

From the cold depths of the shop came a little cough, and a woman stepped out, clutching a book. Apologetically she looked from Vera to Giuli and back again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and with those words Giuli realised she knew this woman, she just didn’t know how.

*

In the washroom downstairs at Frollini, Luisa peered into the mirror.

You’re not going to die, she said silently to herself. Why had she said that to Sandro? About marrying again. No trace of the cancer, last time they looked, and she had her breast back. It didn’t really feel like hers, but you couldn’t have everything. She rubbed her cheeks to bring some colour back into them. That’s better.

I love you
, he’d said behind her, as she leaned down to step into the car, but when she’d looked up he was turning away. She thought,
Should I have replied?
Saying I love you was not normal for them. It was not required: it was not welcome.

She came out of the little washroom, and jumped. Enrico Frollini stood at the top of the stairs. Again.

‘Is everything all right? I saw that girl working upstairs, what’s her name? The whatsit. Intern.’ He sounded impatient, and worried.

Typical, thought Luisa; absolutely typical. If they needed him, Frollini was always uncontactable, but just when you wanted to get something done under the radar, there he was.

She had already spoken to Giuseppina about leaving early. They’d arranged for the intern to come in; Luisa had stifled her anxiety. Free help, was what she was. But not bad: the well-educated, sensible daughter of a supplier fallen on hard times, needing to get her a place. It was how the world worked. And with Luisa out of the way, Giusy was promoted to head saleswoman. Was that how it was? You wanted out, she told
herself. Did you think you were indispensable?

‘Enrico,’ she said, climbing the stairs.

Frollini brightened, sidestepping to let her past. ‘So how did it go?’ he said. As she hesitated, his eyes wandered back to the intern. ‘She’s Andrea’s girl? I suppose she’ll do.’

‘How did it go?’ For a moment she didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘At the mall,’ he said impatiently. ‘Bottai’s little venture.’

‘Oh,’ said Luisa, picking up her jacket again casually. ‘It was fine. It had to be cut short, because . . . well, it doesn’t matter. We got back a little early. But I negotiated their discounts. I’m sure they’ll pay up.’

‘It was a matter of goodwill, not money,’ Frollini said, crestfallen. ‘Connections. I wanted to know what you thought of the mall. I thought you might enjoy it.’

Luisa looked at him, expressionless.

‘Do you want to know the truth, Enrico?’ she said. ‘I thought the mall was horrible.’

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

‘I think the last thing you should be doing is getting into a place like that,’ she said, gently. ‘A place where you’d never dream of working or shopping yourself.’

‘They’ve spent a lot of money on it,’ Frollini said, mustering an affronted expression.

‘Maybe so,’ said Luisa, pulling on one sleeve of her jacket. ‘And I’m sure you could make money with an outlet there, too. But it’s not your style, Enrico. And personal shopping . . . I don’t know if it’s me.’ She smiled sadly. ‘I’m used to my little kingdom. You know that.’

‘Where are you going?’ he said, automatically helping her into the other sleeve.

‘I’ve got to do something for Sandro. It’s to do with the investigation he’s on.’

Too late she realised that Frollini knew where Sandro was working, of course he did, and that the whole point of it was it was a steady job, no more investigations. No more trying to still be a police officer, on the side of right against wrong. Turning over stones. She hurried on.

‘I’ve sorted it all. I finish at six anyway, the intern’s covering.’ Snatching up her bag, Luisa could hear the truculence in her voice. Twenty years ago, ten, five even, she’d never have dared talk to Frollini like this.

Frollini looked around in mute appeal for support, to Giusy on the shop floor, to Beppe who’d appeared on the stairs. They looked faintly abashed, saying nothing.

‘Well, I suppose . . .’ he said, and stopped. ‘I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’ He straightened his shoulders, reasserting his dignity. ‘And where exactly is it you’re going? On this errand.’

‘I’ve got to go and talk to someone’s landlady,’ she said with weary patience. ‘Out near Firenze Sud. I haven’t even called a cab yet.’

‘Firenze Sud?’ he said with distaste. Frollini lived in a handsome villa below Bellosguardo, everything expensive, everything tasteful; the motorway intersection clustered round with motels and condominiums, the Viale Europa with its supermarkets and dry-cleaners, was somewhere he preferred not to contemplate. ‘What kind of a husband is he?’

Luisa said nothing, her expression hardening.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said, and briskly, to save face, he took her elbow and steered her ahead of him. ‘Carry on,’ he said to Giusy over his shoulder, in an attempt to assert himself.

‘I’d rather work on the Viale Europa than in that mall,’ said Luisa, as she climbed into the cream leather interior of her boss’s huge Alfa Romeo. Enrico Frollini pretended not to hear.

It took more than half an hour: the traffic was building to rush hour and they got stuck in a series of gridlocked arterial interchanges. They were only just beyond the station, wedged between a truck and an airport coach, when Frollini, who’d been working up to it with a succession of sighs and gestures to other drivers, and meaningful looks stolen at Luisa, finally spoke.

‘Seriously, though, Luisa,’ he said. ‘We’ve known each other long enough. What’s he playing at? This is no job for a woman of your . . . of your—’ And he broke off under her gaze, apparently unable to say what kind of woman she was.

‘I’m helping my husband out, Enrico,’ she said, turning to look straight ahead. A
motorino
wove between them and the airport coach, clipping the wing mirror, and Frollini made a pained sound. Up ahead the traffic began to move and he engaged the gears.

From memory she guided them to the dingy villa Therese Van Vleet had pointed out that afternoon. Frollini pulled up in a small parking area, and turned off the ignition.

‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ he asked reluctantly. ‘A landlady, you said?’

‘It’s fine, Enrico,’ she said, turning to look at him. They might have been lovers on an assignation, sitting in a hotel car park
before or after their encounter: some element of that dynamic lay dormant between them. Only it would never happen; Luisa knew it, even if Frollini, ever the contented optimist, didn’t. ‘You can leave now,’ she said gently. ‘Go back to your wife, have your
aperitivo
, have your dinner. I can get a cab back.’

‘No,’ he said grumpily. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

A
HEAD OF HIM,
B
RETT
Van Vleet took the stairs nimbly for a man carrying a bit of extra weight. His shoulders, Sandro noted, were the shoulders of a swimmer or a high-school football star, as wide as a door. These were factors that once he had had to calculate on the spot, as a police officer – things like relative bodyweight, musculature, fitness, as well as concealed weapons and exit points. If there was any possibility you were about to get into what they called a situation.

Exit points had been on Sandro’s mind since he first took this job, he realised, puffing in the American’s wake. Escape routes.

When they’d come in from the terrace, they had paused at the foot of the stairs, beside the lift doors – Sandro couldn’t have said if it had been him or Van Vleet who’d stopped. On the far side, another set of stairs curved down to the basement complex, to the cellars, the steam room. The lift was somewhere above them: had Van Vleet hesitated to decide whether or not to wait for it? Sandro had stepped across the lift doors to glance down, into the soft dark. A gilded sign on the wall with an arrow:
Centro
Benessere/Spa Complex
, it said. And the rest, thought Sandro. The stairs down weren’t an escape route, they were its opposite. A place where the condemned would have been led, hundreds of years earlier, with no way back up. There was a faint odour beneath the lily scent, a tang of damp.

Van Vleet had not paused to look down to the cellars, though. When Sandro turned back he was already out of sight, heading up.

The door to the first-floor apartment stood open. She was in the bedroom.

The room was crazy, was Sandro’s first thought, like Versailles: the windows so heavily swagged with curtains, the view – the lovely view, down across the gardens to the river and the façade of Santa Croce – was reduced to no more than a sliver of green river and rooftops, the bed crowned with some heavy fabric and piled with brocade cushions. And at the centre of it Therese Van Vleet sat, looking like a child on the vast bed, in stockinged feet, shoes tumbled on the floor. She held something in her hands, and her face was swollen with crying.

Behind him Sandro registered Van Vleet’s careful tread, stepping to close the door. He was aware of holding himself very still. A precarious moment, one card set against the next, and a draught, a door opening at the wrong moment and it could all fall. The puzzle, the pattern, and the pulse of excitement that comes with rising certainty: he began.

First things first. Sandro took a step to look at what she held in her hands. A dog’s narrow, expensive suede collar, dotted with stones. The original colour would have been a pale sand, only it was heavily stained with dark reddish brown. Probably blood.

‘I see,’ he said, and cleared his throat. She looked up at him, the eyes no less startlingly large and blue for the puffiness around them. ‘But there’s still no sign . . . no sign . . .’ She shook her head, but he finished the sentence anyway. ‘The dog. No sign of the dog.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Van Vleet, and then Sandro heard it, the fakery, the bluff. The lie.

‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you see she’s distraught? I should goddamn well sue the ass off this place. You guys. I was warned about Italy. Crooked as they come, and incompetent with it. I didn’t want to believe it. The dog, Giancarlo, Therese’s purse. My car, goddamn it, they had no right.’

Sandro caught a look in Therese Van Vleet’s eye, of panic. Out of her depth.

As one card was laid against the next, Sandro held his breath.

‘What happened to the car?’ he said quietly, and he saw the same panic reflected in Brett Van Vleet’s red face.

‘They took it, from the garage,’ said Therese, and her fingers tightened around the collar, her chin in the air. ‘A mix-up. Over the shipping costs.’

He nodded, holding her gaze, looking at Brett Van Vleet. He knew, and they knew he knew. ‘Where did you find the collar?’ he asked.

‘It was on the door handle,’ she said, and her eyes welled again. ‘Someone had hung it over the handle, in the corridor.’

He saw that her wallet lay on the bed beside her, open, rifled through. Emptied.

‘It’s unpleasant,’ said Sandro quietly, ‘isn’t it?’ Therese looked at him, not understanding. ‘These tricks someone is playing.
The dog. Your wallet.’ Her eyes widened, and he frowned. He shouldn’t feel sorry for her, but he did.

‘Someone put a pornographic magazine in my briefcase,’ he said. ‘An American one. Did you know my wife had had a mastectomy?’

She was very pale; she looked beseechingly at her husband, whose flush had deepened against the sandy hair. ‘What do you mean?’ said the American, his voice thick.

‘I could show it to you, if you like,’ Sandro said. ‘The magazine.’ And on the bed Therese recoiled. He could see a trace of silk slip at her hem, but when she put a hand down to tug at it he saw her nails were chipped and one was bitten down.

‘Mr Van Vleet.’ He looked away from the ragged nail, and kept his voice reasonable as he addressed the man. Van Vleet looked as if he was about to explode. ‘Your car was taken because you couldn’t pay the shipper and your payments on this place,’ and Sandro looked around, disbelieving, at the hired luxury, ‘are overdue. Your wife hid her wallet so she’d have an excuse not to buy anything at the mall, not to mention getting herself the sympathy vote.’

With each card laid gently down, he saw them flinch. Sandro took a breath, focusing on Therese, who stared as if hypnotised. ‘I don’t know when you thought of playing all these tricks, to make it look like you were being persecuted – maybe the dog falling down the well gave you the idea. Did you take Athene’s bracelet, was it you Giancarlo was protecting? Were you the woman who found the key outside the steam room, when Marjorie Cameron got locked in? Was it going to be your excuse for not paying your rent?’

Therese had her hand to her mouth. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said faintly. ‘I – I . . . you don’t think I’d—’

‘I don’t think you’d kill your little dog, Mrs Van Vleet. But maybe your husband told you he was in a safe place?’

Brett Van Vleet clenched his fists, the knuckles cracking, but his wife only went on staring at Sandro. Who looked at the husband.

‘Giancarlo was paying your hookers for you, you were so short of cash. You’ve just gone through your wife’s purse and taken what she had. What did Giancarlo want in exchange?’

Brett Van Vleet was pale too, now, his complexion unpleasant, but the house Sandro was building held. Another card.

‘A journalist came around, too, didn’t he?’ Sandro spoke softly. ‘I bet that scared you. Poking around. John Carlsson. Do you know what happened in Bari, Mr Van Vleet? And do you know where Mr Carlsson is now?’

A different look came over Van Vleet’s face, giving Sandro pause, but he had to finish this. He pushed.

‘Lino said you got back late the night Vito died, after he’d gone off duty. A well-built man was seen leaving Giancarlo’s place late. Did he want money? Did it all get to be too much? First Carlsson, you got rid of Carlsson, then you got scared, so you went to see Giancarlo. Your buddy. Did you ask him for help, and instead he told you it was payback time? So you had to kill him too.’