A wine cellar is visible beneath plate glass in the hardwood floor and when I walk across it I have the fleeting sensation of vertigo, a fear of falling, that flutters in my stomach. I step to one side of it and don’t look down at the hundreds of bottles in circular wooden racks and decorative wooden casks and a table for tasting.
Copper cookware as bright as rose gold hangs from a wrought-iron rack above a butcher block with a maple top where plastic bags of groceries are spilled open, hastily set down by the chef when he returned from shopping late today. Milk and fine cheeses and cuts of meat have been left out and I can see evidence of his panic after he discovered police cars in the driveway.
He would have driven right past my big white truck with MA Office of Chief Medical Examiner and our crest painted in blue on the sides and there are few sights less welcome than my staff and machinery showing up. It’s heart-stopping. It causes instant visceral terror and I tend to forget the god-awful effect I have especially when I’m unexpected, which is almost always. I resist the impulse to tuck perishables into the refrigerator. It seems such a waste. I photograph them instead.
I pause by the commercial French cooktop to look at fine carving sets with green beechwood handles. Paring, boning, tomato, bread, and chef’s knives, wide and narrow and up to twelve inches long, and also sharpening steels, are all in the proper slots of two cutlery blocks. I take more pictures, documenting every place I look and whatever I touch, as Benton continues to check messages landing from Lucy in a rapid succession of alert tones that he’s set to sound like an irritating bicycle bell so he doesn’t miss a single one.
39
“All the phones here are on software like a PBX.” Benton talks more freely now, showing me what Lucy just sent.
“A good way for Lombardi to keep tabs on what everyone was doing,” he elaborates but not happily or with the gratification that I feel as the facts are made plain, “and apparently he got a call at four fifty-seven this morning from a number that has blocked caller ID. None of Double S’s sixteen phone lines including the ones here in the house accept blocked calls.”
Inside drawers I find wooden boxes of steak knives and a variety of cooking tools, potholders, and dishcloths. There are takeout menus for local pizza and Chinese but I doubt anybody delivered up here.
“So this particular caller had to enter star eighty-two like every other poor schmuck on the planet or his call wouldn’t have gone through,” Benton says. “Lucy’s asking if I recognize the number and I do. It’s Granby’s mobile and it’s not the only time he’s called here. She says this same number has shown up a lot. The question is when.”
He types his answer to her, and he’s no longer careful about what he tells me out loud. We have evidence of Granby’s criminal involvement. Double S’s computer is proving to be a treasure trove and it’s no longer our word against anybody else’s. It’s not a suspicion or circumstantial evidence, and it’s impossible we can be accused of misrepresenting the ugly truth. The data are irrefutable and safely backed up at my office. And Benton’s boss has no idea what’s about to happen to him.
“Marino arrived at my house around five this morning,” I point out. “By then news of the body at MIT and who it might be was already on the Internet. So it appears Granby’s call to Lombardi was probably about that.”
Another irritating bicycle ring and Benton reads, and then he says, “A lot of calls back and forth between the two of them, clusters of calls back in March, April, during the time when Granby was relocating here, and dozens of them last month, some on the very days that Sally Carson’s and Julianne Goulet’s bodies were found. Christ.” Benton leans the small of his back against a counter. “This is fucking awful.”
“We knew it would be.”
“What else would Granby have been calling about if it wasn’t Gail Shipton?”
“I think you know the answer.”
“A simple one,” Benton verifies what he already believed. “She wasn’t supposed to be murdered. Nobody asked this psycho to do it and Lombardi was ballistic and he’d been there before with whoever this person is only now there’s even worse trouble because Gail is directly connected to Double S. It’s like asking a drunk to run your bar.”
“You don’t ask a drunk to run your bar unless you don’t know he’s a drunk or have something personal with him.” I slide out a knife with a nine-inch carbon-steel blade that’s curved to carve around bone.
“Get your rogue killer here, get your PR person here, serve cupcakes and straighten it out,” Benton says.
“Good luck when the rogue killer is on stimulants and craving sugar, swinging out of balance and about to explode.” I hold the knife in my gloved hand, feeling its balance and the smooth, hard shape of its elegant wooden handle.
It wouldn’t be good for killing someone. I return it to its cutlery block and it makes a quiet steely hiss as it slides into its slot.
“Of course the chef would have to confirm if something’s missing.” I don’t need to look at any other knives in Dominic Lombardi’s kitchen. “Any one of these could inflict lethal damage.”
“But it’s not what was used,” Benton says and I shake my head.
The weapon is nothing like any of these. It’s an oddity, whatever it is, and as I continue taking photographs I explain that the blade we’re looking for is short and narrow, single-edged, with a beveled angle, and possibly the tip is rounded and badly bent.
“I’m basing this on the shallow incisions with peeled skin and abraded edges that parallel the deeper ones,” I add. “And the pattern on a towel he used to wipe off the knife also gives us a clue about its shape and that it might have burrs that snagged threads when he wiped it off. Knives generally don’t get burrs unless you sharpen them.”
Another bicycle bell, a long text from Lucy, and she informs Benton that Lombardi’s second wife spends much of her time in the Virgin Islands where he has a number of companies registered. Shell companies, Lucy suspects, including art galleries, high-end spas, stores, hotels, construction, real estate development.
“Businesses convenient for money laundering and probably drugs,” Benton suggests. “Maybe labs where the designer drugs are coming from, here or abroad.”
He opens a door near a half bath, with a toilet and sink, and a windowsill overflowing with gourmet magazines. Bon Appétit, Gourmande!, Yam. The leisurely reading of a French chef who suddenly has no job anymore. And people like him would be a dime a dozen if he went back to Paris, where his wife is with someone else and his children have no use for him. Tout est perdu. Je suis foutu, he said to Benton when he and Marino were making their clandestine tour.
We climb carpeted steps, four of them, and then a landing with prism crystal sconces spilling from faux-stucco walls. I imagine Lombardi climbing and pausing to rest or catch his breath with thick, stubby-fingered hands on the polished brass railings, the diamond ring on his right pinky and the bracelet of his solid gold watch clicking against metal as he moved his heavy body along. Getting around his compound and up to the master floor couldn’t have been easy, as big as he was.
Benton opens another door that isn’t locked because he left it that way and on the other side is a vast space overwhelmed by antique Italian furniture in rare woods, and the elaborate crown molding and decorative relief on the walls and ceiling are gold. A multicolored, two-tiered Murano fruit chandelier hangs from a faux Michelangelo mural of God creating Adam, and there’s a circular conversation settee upholstered in gold satin near the foot of a bed fit for a king. The headboard is more than five feet high and a brilliant red with gilt acanthus.