I know about his father’s love of fine art and how much money he made from it but it’s the first time I’ve heard about the space above the fireplace and the Pissarro that Benton missed.
“It took five minutes to find out about these. I e-mailed photographs to my office before Granby sent me home.” Benton holds up his phone, which has become our most trusted link to truth and justice. “The small bronze on the bedside table is a Rodin. You can see his signature at the base of the left foot, stolen from a private collection in Paris in 1942 and off the radar ever since.”
There are scraps of paper and what look like receipts under it. Lombardi was using it as a paperweight, and the loathing I shouldn’t feel because no crime scene should be personal only gets more acute when I look inside his dressing room crammed with racks of hand-tailored suits and shirts and rows of handmade shoes and what must be hundreds of Italian silk ties. In the master bath is a countertop made of tiger’s-eye with a gold-plated sink and a shaving set made of mammoth ivory.
The back wall beyond the shower and the tub is filled with an opulent trompe l’oeil mural of Lombardi in a suit and tie posed with a magnificent Arabian horse inside an English barn, and, behind it, a stone arch that opens to what looks more like a Tuscan landscape than the Concord countryside. His plump hand rests possessively on the horse’s sleek neck as a farrier in a leather apron and chaps bends over the hind leg he holds in his leather-gloved hands, trimming the hoof. Lombardi’s jowly face with its small cold eyes seems to stare at me as I lean closer to get a better look.
The workbench is mounted with a vise and arranged with many picks, rasps, nippers, and sharpening files and a leather strop, but it’s what the farrier grips securely in his right hand that transports me to a place I never thought I’d be while inside the private spaces of Lombardi’s house. Suddenly I find myself inside the gambrel barn without going there, staring at a knife with a long wooden handle and a short, chisel-shaped blade, one side beveled, the other flat, with a hooked tip that curls in on itself to trim away a horse’s loose and dried-out sole.
“When you were in the barn with Marino was this what it looked like?” I point to the workbench inside a large stall with hay on the floor and dark wooden exposed beams overhead.
“Not quite as nice and tidy and no stone arch opening onto vineyards,” Benton says wryly. “There are a lot of tools. The horse’s name is Magnum.”
40
“A hoof knife.” I touch the painted one the farrier holds in the mural on the wall.
“The sharp curled tip would explain the wider, shallow abraded cut that peeled the flesh in places and runs parallel to the deep incision made by the straight edge of the blade,” I describe to Benton. “The killer may have gone into the barn because he knew what was easy to grab and how it would function as a weapon. It’s impossible to imagine he’s not familiar with the grounds and that nobody saw him.”
I run my finger along the brown wooden handle gripped by the farrier and along the narrow short silvery blade to where it curls in on itself at the tip. I feel the thick layers of paint on cool tumbled marble and I imagine Lombardi in his shower or bath looking at the very tool that one day would almost sever his head from his neck.
“It’s not what you would think of unless you know about it.” I envision getting my hands on a hoof knife and trying it on ballistic gelatin to see precisely what it does. “If you saw one on a workbench, you might not realize how effective it is, sharp enough to trim a hoof but not so sharp as to cut too deeply into the sole, not straight-razor sharp, which is difficult to control if you’re frenzied or bloody. It’s quite an art how farriers sharpen their tools — not too sharp, not too dull — so you can do the job without injuring the horse or yourself.”
“An eccentric choice that on the surface seems illogical.” Benton walks behind the long, deep stone tub to study the mural. “But I didn’t see any regular knives in there and maybe that’s why he grabbed what he did and it could be related to the drugs he’s on. If he’s watched horses being taken care of and shod and seen farriers get tired and sweaty and the horses not stay still the same way people don’t stay still if you’re cutting their throats, he might have been present when someone cut himself or he might have watched the knives being sharpened.”
He looks at the hoof knife clamped in a vise on the workbench in the painting.
“And in his increasingly disordered thinking it means something to him.” Benton works his way around the edges of the killer’s mind. “He envisions himself a horse, just another one of Lombardi’s possessions he controlled and kept in a stall and treated with disrespect and indifference, and maybe this morning was reprimanded, verbally whipped. There could be symbolism like with the vapor rub, like the tools under rocks. Power. I win, you lose. It’s all about that but also at this stage a by-product of his delusions.”
“What I can say with some degree of confidence,” I reply, “is whoever did this didn’t wander into the barn randomly and happen to see an unusual tool with a long wooden grip and stubby blade that’s hooked on the end and figure it would work just fine for killing people.”
“He knows horses, this barn and this place,” Benton states. “And he’s become so preoccupied with his delusions they’re completely disrupting his life.”
“Why wouldn’t the staff want to say who it is? For fear he’d find them and hurt them if he’s not caught first?”
“Maybe the opposite. They might not fear him because he doesn’t fear them. Especially if he was in the barn with them earlier and was friendly and has been here before.”
“Now they’re accessories to murder after the fact, participants by concealment.”
“If it can be proven, yes.”
“It’s probably not a new way of life for them,” I decide as I photograph Lombardi and the farrier with his knife. And then the bicycle bell rings again, another message from Lucy landing in Benton’s phone.
“He has three children with the second wife,” he informs me. “A son who is a financial planner in Tel Aviv and two daughters who are in school in Paris and London.”
“Sounds like a lovely family,” I reply as I decide the photograph of the young man and the elephant needs to go to Lucy because I have a feeling about him, not a good one.
Then Benton and I leave the house as we found it and the night seems more raw and cold. The heavy pines we walk through seem more sodden than they were before and their wet branches grab at us as the wind shoves and shakes them. In the parking lot we find more unmarked cars and light fills the shades in every window on both floors of the office building where the dead are gone, by now autopsied and safely in my coolers.
It seems later than it is and the powerful rumble of Benton’s turbo Porsche seems louder than I remember as we follow the driveway, passing the huge red barn, stopping at the barricades where a black FBI van with dark-tinted windows is parked. A surveillance vehicle, and I know where there’s one there will be others, monitoring Concord and the roads leading in and out of it and intersections along any route the target might take. I’d find it reassuring if they were looking for the right target but they’re not.
Benton shifts the Porsche into neutral and pulls up the brake. He opens his window and waits, knowing exactly how the FBI thinks and the importance of doing nothing suddenly or nervously that might be misinterpreted. Maybe the agents inside the van are aware of his car and that it’s been parked on the property for a while but Benton is of no concern to them as they’ve held their post at the entrance of the driveway, out of sight inside their van with all of its equipment. I imagine them tracking every car, truck, or motorcycle that passes on the street, communicating with other agents in vehicles and on foot, waiting to use diversions or decoys to mobilize into what Benton calls a floating box that invisibly surrounds whoever they’re after.