Bury Me in the Sky E-Book

Stefano Ferri

• Herausgeber: Robin Edizioni
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Patrizia Mondelli, young scion of a wealthy family, is found dead in her car. Both the evidences and the autopsy show it’s positively a suicide.  Yet inspector Giorgio Bonomi tries to decipher the message the girl left at her side. It’s a shocking message – shocking and apparently nonsense. Apparently. 

Leseprobe

Stefano Ferri

Bury Me in the Sky

Translated by Stephen Irons and Saint-Just

From Riflessi daily paper, September 6, 1977

CAPE CANAVERAL – Two weeks after its twin Voyager 2, yesterday the Voyager 1 space probe started off with its long flight that will lead it beyond the boundaries of the Solar System.

The mission’s main target is to take pictures of Jupiter and its satellites, as well as of Saturn with its rings and its ten satellites, which for the first time we will be able to admire from close range. In addition, the spacecraft will have to detect the characteristics of interplanetary space and of all the celestial bodies it will happen to meet.

Then, along with Voyager 2 – scheduled to continue its journey till Uranus – Voyager 1 will leave the Solar System and cross the “heliopause”, that is the point at which the magnetic field of the Sun ends and the stellar wind begins.

Perhaps this will be the latest information before its equipment falls forever silent.

FIRST PART

I

When they found her, she had been dead for a short time. She was lying on her left side, her face covered with blond hair and her left arm toward the radio still on. Patrizia Mondelli, 22, student in law and daughter of one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the area, had died for inhaling the exhaust fumes of her own car.

The previous afternoon she had left the house telling her mother she would drive into town to go shopping. In the evening, not seeing her return, her parents had alerted the police. They feared an accident, or even a seizure. Yet excluding the possibility of an escape and giving the imprudence as unjustified (it is difficult that a wise girl in her twenties would give in to the lure of the unknowns), even the chance of a kidnapping seemed unlikely. The road that drove downtown – the most probable destination for a girl in the mood for shopping – was among the busiest and most patrolled of the zone. Completing a shot of any kind, moreover in the crowded hours of companies’ closing, would have given problems even to the invisible man.

Therefore, once taken the complaint of disappearance, from midnight onwards police and Carabinieri had begun to patrol the area with poor vigour, sure that at the origin there was a harmless lie: Patrizia hadn’t even thought to leave the town, and her afternoon’s pastime, away from dealing with purchases or other amusements from consumer society, had at least required the presence of another person – a male person.

Patrizia was driving her own car, a blue subcompact whose number plate was promptly given to all the area patrols. She was wearing a white blouse, a skirt and a pair of canvas shoes. These data, along with the mug shot, marked the entire night of research before dawn – the first day of summer’s one – unveiled the truth.

***

Someone had noticed a car along a metalled road without homes or human beings. A car with the engine on and the interior veiled with smoke – a blue subcompact that the rare passers had so far circumvented without even looking at it. So it was, chilling as in any routine finding, that after only one night both family hopes and policemen’s allegations collapsed.

Patrizia had died at the 4th km of the local provincial road, in the middle of a path forgotten by God that led to some houses and to nothing else. The details evidenced the suicide was prepared with bitter determination. The girl had scoured the area till she’d found out the most hidden road. Quite a difficult point indeed, given the intensity of the traffic, and yet sufficient to explain – with dismal hindsight – the short breaks from home she had recently got used to take. Then, the day of her death (she had collected the receipts in her purse), she had gone into a shop for gardening and had purchased the plastic pipe to connect the exhaust to the inside of the vehicle. It was a deeply calculated purchase: its blue colour was very similar to the car’s one, for camouflaging purposes. Afterwards, she had bought the scotch tape, whose package was found inside the car, and she had used it to close the fixtures of windows, doors and ventilation openings. Finally, with the car turned into a tomb, she had turned the engine on and had passed away on the notes of a music compilation recorded at home. Here’s what a young, educated, very pretty girl, rich enough not to have to work a day in her life, can make when she comes out saying she wants to buy a dress.

The area got isolated for several hours. A cordon of policemen and barrage tapes kept away both onlookers and journalists. No one could get closer – there was too much work. Details emerged from minute to minute. The most disconcerting was the death time, calculated between four and four-thirty that morning. Patrizia had died eleven hours after saying goodbye to her mother in their villa’s doorway – a matter as important as difficult to square. Receipts showed that at a quarter past seven she owned both pipe and scotch, and that at the same time she was probably already aware of the place where to die. Thus equipped, and well aware of her goal, she had instead taken all evening and most of the night to make the extreme step.

Fear? Yes – fear of dying, logical. The terror that catches you when everything is ready for your death, and you know the only left steps are those that separate you from the big nothing – the terror of a girl who feels condemned to perpetual darkness by some kind of force. And then there is, she gets rebel, she stamps her foot on the accelerator and starts off for a desperate and lonely escape through the province – screaming she doesn’t want to die, she wants to go home, she wants to hug mom and dad and ask for their forgiveness. And yet she keeps determined to fall into the abyss.

«Does such behaviour from a suicide make sense?».

Giorgio Bonomi had just turned on Patrizia’s car engine and was watching the fuel gauge when he gave the wind his question. The wind. The closest person, the assistant Tommaso Federici, stood a hundred feet away, along with the agents who placed the girl’s body in the litter. Bonomi was sure no one would hear, and all in all he cared little. He didn’t care at all of that investigation. He didn’t care at all of anything. He was thirty-eight, too old as a police detective eager for career and yet forced to chase a poor dead girl in the coils of her madness. Oh God, madness...

Bonomi was far too radical. From his point of view, white was white and black was black. He had read that the destiny of every man can be found in his character, and the reason of the relentless transfers he was forced to was hidden in this sentence: Insufficient integration into the group, as written in the personal sheets. In more prosaic terms, colleagues detested him. Although he was good – but envy is an ugly beast, you know.

In this case, what was the problem? That morning, when Federici had pulled him out of bed announcing the suicide of Mondelli’s daughter, he had shouted out: «Don’t give me your fucking bullshit, she didn’t kill herself!». The poor assistant – so suitable instead for being in a group – just sighed, but seemed somehow amused too, and now the inspector, in front of that car completely scotched from the inside, could easily understand the meaning of his irony. Federici had already seen the car, and evidently expected his detective to prove the unprovable: namely, that someone could take a dead girl, enter a car with her, wrap the whole cockpit with adhesive tape and... get out of the keyhole.

A few days earlier, precisely speaking about death by suicide, Bonomi had told him not to deeply believe suicides were nothing but crazy. He believed them instead enough conscious to decide to compensate with a roaring death a meaningless life. Indeed, he added, given that individuals usually bounce back the responsibilities for their own failures on the others, suicide is generally a means to indirectly punish one or more people – parents, relatives, friends – and force them to live the rest of their days burdened by the worst guilt trips in the world.

The theory had turned Federici on (Bonomi might have been grumpy, and actually he was, but when he got speaking even stones seemed to listen to him), while not entirely convincing him. He explained that to comply with this theory, suicides should require a maturity degree absolutely unlikely in the teens whose flights from the sixth floor after an E-level school exam are frequently reported by the news. Not to mention that “meaningless life” which at most can explain the end of a sixty-year aged man and certainly not the one of a young girl in the prime of life and hopes. Eventually, they agreed that it was better to go back to discussing football.

That morning, unfortunately, no football discussion was available. The dead girl was there, wide-eyed and white-skinned, claiming everybody’s attention. Successfully, Bonomi thought, increasingly listless. His superiors, instead of letting him search for criminals, relied him on a case for which nobody would ever end up in jail. Which was very sad for someone whose job was criminals’ catching.

Successfully, he thought again, and tried to filter that suicide through the acid test of his convictions. It was clearly a suicide – there was no way to get to think otherwise. On the phone with Federici he had been wrong (and who knows how many times he got wrong in ten years of quarrels with colleagues, but that was another matter). Patrizia had really killed herself. She had behaved with method, discipline, even intelligence. From the executive point of view, her death fully reflected Bonomi’s thought: a precise plan, a weapon that gave no way out, and here you go: all eyes on her – the eyes of the police, of the curious, and soon of any citizens. It wasn’t really an anonymity-oriented girl, you bet.

Instead, what no one could explain was the nine-hour tour along the province or the whole region, who knows. The reserve warning light showed there had actually been a wandering, a quite long one: Patrizia’s father remembered making full of gasoline just before her daughter disappeared. The great distance (hundreds of kilometres) made a journey with a clear destination unrealistic: even if the girl had achieved a whatsoever goal, she wouldn’t have had even a minute for staying there, being proved that at four in the morning she was back to base. Why, then, such a death-aimed doll had got so seized by the desire for prolonged nocturnal landscapes?

«Have you seen what’s what?», asked Fede­rici sneaking out some invisible back door.Bonomi looked annoyed. He didn’t want questions – at least, not other questions. «I’ve just seen you, and you’re nothing», he snorted, standing up and shaking his off-season wool pants.

«You’re smokier than this car», Federici insisted. «And it’s only six in the morning».«No one turns the other cheek if woken up before dawn and given on the breakfast table the body of a twenty-two, doesn’t he?», Bonomi said. «Do you remember the other day’s conversation?».

«Which one? The one on suicides?».

«Yes. Do you think this adds up?».

«Your ideas?».

«No, Donald Duck’s».

Federici shrugged and leaned against the blue car. He stroked his eyes on the horizon smoothing his baldness with one hand. As for what he showed, he seemed even less enthusiastic than him. «I don’t know», he murmured then. «She was doubtless aware. But the reason why she did it is still left».

Bonomi lit a cigarette – the third of the day (at six in the morning). «We must catch up with her parents... But anyway I don’t think it’s important».

He lingered back and forth with his head down. He felt Federici’s gaze on him but played dead. Insufficient integration into the group, or whatever his illness was called. Yes, illness. That poor boy, just graduated, had been working for him and more than him for as many as two hours, but there had been little left that as a reward he would be told where to go. Only nervous illnesses can occur in these behavings. Years before, in similar circumstances, a colleague had stared him contemptuously before biting back. You are frustrated, he had said. Not bad – the classic little word to use whenever you want to goad a person with Anglo-Saxon style. But that was not Federici’s way. He didn’t have the courage to. He was too sensitive. And Bonomi felt that, “solved” that case, it would be high time he stepped aside and let him in the whole scene. Frustrated, yes. He was frustrated – damn, that guy was right. «When you called on me I was pretty sure she hadn’t killed herself», he sighed, looking at the smoke rising from the butt. «I mean... I hoped there was more».

He looked at Federici smiling behind his chubby cheeks. «Someone had to deal with this».

«No», he muttered, shaking his head, «but so it is».

He got rid of the cigarette and, hands in his pockets, he began to wander between the car and the litter of Patrizia. He tried to clear his head. Occasionally he looked up, either to the dead or towards the car – the car, by the way. He lingered long on it. That night escape haunted him. «How do you explain the nine hours?».

«Which nine hours?».

«I mean those between the last purchase and the suicide».

«The tour she made along the province».

«Exactly».

«But why are you so interested in it?».

The detective looked down at his assistant’s baldness. He considered that if the stories on the forehead were true, his face should be even marked by intelligence. And that such a compact skullcap could give birth to a totally different kind of liveliness. «Because I don’t find it logical», he said.

«Since the suicides would be resolute and so on?».

«Yep».

«Oh fuck!», fumed Federici. «Will you leave people alone – at least when they die?».

«Leave people – what?».

«Just leave this poor girl in peace. She was tired and went out the back door, without asking your theorems».

«Good point – now answer my question».

Federici spread his arms, won by his boss’ obstinacy. «I don’t know, Giorgio. I don’t know».

«You got a solution for everything, do you?».

«If I had, I wouldn’t work with you».

Bonomi took the blow. He wasn’t making his day, if ever.

«Never mind», smiled Federici.

The detective wasn’t listening. Hands still in his pockets, he took a few steps toward the corpse. He had already seen it, getting a kind of fist on the stomach. He thought he should examine it once more. If she had been alive, no one would have ever saved her a little question about those nine hours. Dead as she was, there was instead no better than her body to work an answer out.

«She must be taken away!», shouted Federici as to urge him to hurry up.

Find out a solution and I can spare me the show, you idiot!, thought Bonomi while the Coroner’s sheet unveiled Patrizia’s last pallor. The thing that once had been her hair, and which had already assumed the consistency of filamentary spaghetti, licked a face showing a terrified grimace, where cyanotic shades looked as a coat of foundation for a date with the devil. The lips were stretched in an unnatural pose, quite an invocation to which death had taken away both breath and reason to be. Cheeks, neck, and even arms and chest began to shrivel in the rigor mortis. They couldn’t reveal anything more than horror, pain and panic.

«Why did you kill yourself?», he muttered to himself.

The old adage of the dozens of beautiful women looked after by some eunuchs seemed best suited to describe the situation. Millions of unfortunate people forced to make ends meet between harassment and sacrifices would be exchanged at face with that daddy’s girl, pulling on themselves with rejoice her capricious spoiled-style depressions. And instead, from up there (or down there, as it seems that God is not that tender with those who claim to replace Him in certain decisions), Patrizia was perhaps peering the worst corners of Earth in search of a poor soul in whose likeness she could spend another life.

What a strange thing, a suicide. A desire in contrast with all the survival instincts, so absurd that he, Giorgio Bonomi, had failed to share it even a minute in its entire lifetime – albeit those thirty-eight springs, so reluctant to get his hairline grey, had been duly full of disappointments as well as of kicks in the shins.

«So then – what do we do?», Federici yet emerged, clearly anxious to decamp.

«Soon we will be gone», said a back-to-reality Bonomi. Basically, he wished a breath of fresh air too. «If only she had left something written...».

«Well, actually there is a message», Federici smiled.

The news, but above all his assistant’s tone – so devoid of embarrassment despite the incredible delay in the notice – made Bonomi shiver in anger. «What?», he yelled putting his eyeballs in those of Federici. «WHAAAAT?».

«A message, Giorgio», he said in a low and trembling voice, snapping back in fright. «I didn’t tell you because...».

«BECAUSE YOU ARE A JERK, THAT’S WHY!», Bonomi attacked, without any restrain. Then he turned around, looking for virtual accomplices in people’s gazing, all focused on him. «Please, explain me. Explain me how you get on a fucking suicide when it’s still night and pull out the message of the dead, THE MESSAGE OF THE DEAD, I SAY, THE-MOST-IMPORTANT-THING-OF-ALL, WHEN JUST A MINUTE’S LEFT TO DINNER TIME!!».

Federici’s fear was meanwhile gone. Or maybe he was still scared, not matter; he took the actual expression of those who go on the offensive – ladies and gentlemen, the quarrel. «Don’t you dare speak to me that way!», he shouted back. «You’re my boss and you can teach me the craft, but you have to respect me and above all help me. You wonder how I can keep certain secrets. But it’s me, my dear, it’s me who wonders how you can come to a suicide when all the fucking work’s been done, without asking anything to your assistant and even chasing him away badly while he brings this to you!».

So saying – so screaming – he pulled out of his jacket a clear plastic bag containing a white sheet. The message.

The detective remembered the scene quoted by Federici. Soon after his arrival, while going to Patrizia’s car, the assistant was getting closer to him but was sent to hell with a hand sweep, without a word. Federici perfectly knew it was better not to insist, when the approach gave such outcomes.

Bonomi had time to repent of his behaviour, yet he didn’t apologize, busy as he was to go after other thoughts. Now he had the opportunity to remedy. «I am aware I sent you away», he admitted. «But then you’ve had plenty of chances to talk to me. How could you keep this for you as well?».

«I saw you focused on your mind», Federici insisted, calmer though still angry, «and I know – you told me – that it’s never the case of interrupting you. After that, I didn’t do anything but answer your questions. I just kept the message here: it was a matter of minutes and I knew you would ask. So much so, look...», he concluded handing it to him, «...it is useless. I dare you to get the meaning».

The detective snatched it. «It’s me who make judgments, here», he commented observing the small crowd of colleagues still focused on him. «Where was it?».

«It was above the dashboard».

«And why do you say that I won’t understand anything?».

«It’s delirious».

«No one goes crazy when making suicide...», grumbled Bonomi. Although nine hours are too many to die, he mulled immediately after, opening the plastic and grabbing the paper.

It was a protocol sheet divided into little squares, written in black ink with no signs of deburring. It seemed as if the girl had planned to write a lot more than a simple message, perhaps a letter, and that something (the defective pen? the fear of dying? death itself?) had led her to an extreme and damning synthesis. A few more sentences would have saved so much work to the police.

«Nothing else?», he asked, almost instinctively.

«No».

The three words that survived the suicide, written very big, as to make them noticed, just added mystery to the mystery. The rude inspector thought that anyone who could write such a thing should really have a soul able to fly – to fly away.

«What do you say?», asked Federici.

Bonomi didn’t answer. Some dark zone of his brain suggested that breaking the news to the parents was up to him and to no one else.

Bury me in the sky.

Patrizia

II

The house was a movie one – more limousines than actors. Protected by a gate with a guardhouse, surrounded by a park of at least five acres, Mondelli villa was an old noble dwelling given a contemporary look by many architectural interventions. It had an asymmetric pool hidden by a wreath of maple trees, polished-marble outer walls and thick glasses on the windows. It was two floors high, a hundred feet long and seventy feet deep. The surmounting sloping roof could have contained three or four city lofts.

Within twenty-four hours Bonomi visited it twice. The first time was shortly after the discovery of Patrizia’s body, when he announced her parents her death and had to cope with one of the most harrowing reactions his job had ever given him the misfortune to witness. Her mother crashed at his feet, turning pale and stammering three times the name of her daughter before passing out; her father, a gentle man whose face inspired in those hours sorrow even more than solidarity, burst into tears that, mysteries of the mind, he managed to stop just in front of the morgue couch on which Patrizia was waiting to be recognized.

The second time was the day after, when the discreet presence of a priest and half a bottle of tranquilizers made Mr and Mrs Mondelli more suitable (well, less unsuitable) to a police interrogation. The meeting was scheduled for after lunch, so as to give the medical examiners time to conclude the autopsy and to announce its predictable outcomes.

Entering the private drive between two wings of croaking cicadas under a fading sun, Bonomi was able to consider on himself, and even to get ashamed. Despite the tragedy that had befallen the family, and despite the leaden atmosphere that till who-knows-when had wrapped the house, he could still feel envious towards all that richness. While trying to control himself, he couldn’t help imagining Patrizia lying by the pool, cuddled by legions of men eager for dowry. And by contrast he thought of himself, closed in the dust of an office in the suburbs, tenant of a small apartment where he spent his Sundays reading, yawning and balancing accounts that never passed the subsistence level. These stereotypes were just the outcomes of a frustration unable to stand limits even in the face of death, an expected and desired one, maybe welcomed as we welcome a liberator.

Liberator... The beautiful women and the eunuchs, murmured the inspector while wandering among the paintings and the porcelains in the living room. The beautiful women and the eunuchs, he kept thinking as he concentrated on Patrizia and on that terrible selfie from afterlife her body looked like under the lights of the autopsy.

Bonomi was confused. In those parents’ shoes he would have felt cheated rather than desperate. How do you dare?, he would have asked the suicide. How dare you prefer a tomb than this tremendous home? How dare you prefer death than a life you still had to start living? Federici could be right. Again he was right. Fuck the eleven hours: these were the questions to ask that wicked girl. What could ever matter a foolish tour around the province in front of such a ruthless farewell?

Apart from what reported by the lean statement he had brought from the police station, the events weren’t clear even to him. The only certain thing was the suicide of a twenty-two year old patrician – an unparalleled example of nominative determinism. As for the rest, full dark. Dark as for the causes, the vagrancy and that message which seemed to be from a black mass. Dark even as for the attitude Bonomi had admittedly taken – an investigative strictness taking him to anything but the obvious. Patrizia had killed herself. She had committed suicide. Needless chase guilty people if they don’t exist.