The PR woman was actually pointing at him from the audience, her long finger erect in the bright lights of the camera, then running across her upper lip, as if to say “Zip it.”
In the front row, McGuire, the crime reporter for the Chronicle, had started to snigger.
Kelly picked up the envelope the infobabe had given him, ripped it open, and read the contents with growing disbelief.
3
Teresa Lupo wished the American policewoman hadn’t asked about Maggie Flavier’s poisoning. Teresa hated imprecision more than anything.
So she simply said, “The poor woman met her wicked stepmother. Or stepfather. Who knows? Unless your people find the man who gave her that poisoned apple.”
“Mobile caterers …” Catherine Bianchi sighed. “They’re minimum-wage businesses. What do you expect?”
“Not much. The thing is …” She felt as if she were trying to analyse a scene from a movie, one that had been ripped out of context. Without knowledge of what preceded the event, she couldn’t begin to pull some logic out of what might follow. “… it’s a very strange way to try to murder someone. If that’s what it was. Particularly given the way they killed Allan Prime. A crossbow bolt through the skull. A poisoned apple given to someone with a food allergy. It doesn’t even sound like the same person to me. What they did to Maggie was horrifying. But …”
The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. “If I were a betting person, I’d lay money against her being badly affected by a cruel stunt like that, much less killed. She spends most of her time near lots of people. She knows she has that allergy and she’s prepared to deal with it. Yes, she was at risk in the woods, alone with Nic. But who could have predicted she’d be there? The chances of her dying should have been quite slim.”
Falcone finally took his attention away from the Lukatmi building. “You mean they weren’t trying to kill her?”
“I don’t know what I mean. I just think it was a very odd way to go about it if that’s what they wanted. Perhaps they just planned to hurt her. They certainly managed that.”
She tried to put the problem succinctly. “What bothers me most of all is the style. Allan Prime had no chance of survival whatsoever. He died from violence of the most extreme sort, the kind of brute force we see ten, twenty times a year because that’s the way the human race tends to go about eliminating one another. It’s quick. It’s easy. You don’t have to do much in the way of preparation. But poisoning … it’s rare. And tricky. I’ve only dealt with one case of willful poisoning in my entire career and that worked only because the victim was dying from heart disease already. Why now? Why here of all places?” One more thing bothered her. “Do they grow almonds in California?”
“Of course,” Catherine answered. “Millions of them. Merced County. About an hour south. I go at the end of February, when the blossom’s out. You can do a tour. It’s beautiful.”
“Farmed almonds? For sale?”
“Sure. But you don’t need to go out and buy almonds to get almond essence. It’s on sale in any grocery store.”
“Not this kind,” Teresa answered, wishing she had her lab and Silvio Di Capua. “Whatever was injected into that apple was homemade. There were traces of fibre. You don’t get that in essence. Also, there was a small but noticeable amount of prussic acid.”
That silenced them.
“Cyanide,” she explained.
“Cyanide smells of almonds,” Peroni pointed out.
“Or almonds smell of cyanide, whichever way you want to look at it. The native wild almond contains a substance that transforms into hydrogen cyanide when the flesh is crushed or bruised. Domesticated varieties have had that mostly bred out of them, though they retain the smell. That’s not what Maggie Flavier got. She was poisoned with the crushed fruit of a wild bitter almond. You can still buy bitter-almond essence in Rome. We use it, very carefully, in cooking. But it’s banned in the U.S., except in medicine, which is why I guess he had to make it himself.”
“So she had cyanide poisoning, too?” Catherine asked, bewildered. “And you still think they weren’t trying to kill her?”
“Not with cyanide. It was a minute amount. You can get exactly the same effect using standard almond essence from a grocery store. It was the allergic reaction that put Maggie in hospital. There wasn’t enough cyanide there to do much of anything. I don’t get it.”
Falcone yawned. Details that went nowhere always bored him.
The clock on the dashboard ticked over to one-fifteen. They were due inside Lukatmi.
“That supermarket over there,” he said, reaching into his wallet and pulling out a fifty-dollar bill. “We need some shopping.”
Teresa took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. “Are you going to do this to me every time there’s someone interesting to talk to?”
“We scarcely have reason to be in that place,” Peroni said apologetically. “You certainly don’t.”
“So I’m supposed to shop? While you question the Lukatmi guys?”
“A suggestion only,” Falcone cut in. “I would never presume to give you orders. It would be impertinent. And also …” He mulled over the words. “… somewhat counterproductive. You fare best left on your own. Think about old films and bitter almonds, please. Just do it out of my earshot.”
Muttering something obscene in which the phrase “stinking cops” was one of the milder rebukes, she got out of the car, slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.
It was a bright, cold summer day. The chill of the strong sea breeze soon began to make her teeth ache. She thought of walking out to Fort Point, a mile or so towards the bridge, and trying to find the exact location for the haunting scene in which Jimmy Stewart rescued Kim Novak from the ocean. Much, it seemed to her, as Nic had apparently saved the stricken Maggie Flavier. Life imitating art. Quattrocchi believed that was happening. So did she, but in a different way. While Leo Falcone …
Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she was right. But she was certain they were wrong, at least in part.
She walked back towards the Marina, thinking. Naturally, she’d keyed their number into her phone, under the single name HankenFrank.
“Pronto!” said a voice on the other end.
“What the hell are you doing talking Italian, Frank?”
“What the hell are you doing being ignorant of caller ID?” the voice on the other end demanded. “And how did you know it was me, not zygote two?”
“Because you sound different, even if you don’t know it. Can I buy you two coffee?”
“Only if you have some interesting questions with which to entertain us.”
“That,” Teresa said, pocketing Falcone’s fifty-dollar bill, “I can guarantee.”
4
Bryan Whitcombe was droning on about poetry again, things a homicide cop could never, Gerald Kelly felt, be expected to understand or take seriously. About how the fourth circle was to do with the avaricious and the prodigal. About how they should expect, given the rigid adherence to the subject matter of the structure of Inferno, that any next intended victim should somehow have fallen guilty to these sins.
“That narrows it down in the movie business,” Kelly muttered. He didn’t mind that a couple of people in the front row got to hear, the furious-looking public affairs woman among them.
Someone put up their hand and asked the kind of obvious question hacks always wanted to bring up: “And after that?”
Whitcombe launched into the list. The fifth circle, the irascible. The sixth, the heresiarch, which he defined as the leader of some dissenting movement. Then the seventh, the violent. The fraudulent and the malicious, the eighth. Finally the last, the traitors.