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    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery
    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery
    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery
    Ebook185 pages2 hours

    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery

    By Gene Masters

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    About this ebook

    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery - A dream ten-day honeymoon in Venice!  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, for Metro Detective Rich Vitelli and his new wife, Pam, just about everything!

    First, the wife of Pam's friend, Calvin Iams, is abducted from their Venetian hotel.   Then Iams gets word that unless he cooperates in the theft of millions of dollars' worth of contemporary art, his wife, Donna, will be killed.   And so, a grand scheme begins to play out: a plan masterminded by Vitelli's old nemesis, Anubis Cline.   And it's Cline's local minions, operating according to plan, who almost get Vitelli killed!

    The action takes place in La Serenissima, Venice, one of the world's most beautiful cities, one prone to flooding from time to time.  When the elements combine just so, they produce Agua Alta, or "high water," an event that only complicates Vitelli's efforts to thwart what might well be the art theft of the century!

    Sit back, pop open a cool one, and enjoy Gene Masters' fourth book in the Rich Vitelli Mystery series: Vitelli in Venice.  This is the fourth book in the Rich Vitelli Mystery Series.  The other three, in order, are The Dry Cleaner, True Believers, and Bobby Doyle is Missing.  All are available in print and ebook editions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGene Masters
    Release dateMay 14, 2023
    ISBN9798223090311
    Vitelli in Venice: A Rich Vitelli Mystery

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      Book preview

      Vitelli in Venice - Gene Masters

      Chapter 1

      Somewhere back up the Grand Canal, and past the Rialto Bridge, Donna Iams sat in a worn, padded, wing chair in a locked interior room.  The unadorned walls were of peeling paint: cream-colored, ancient, and glossy, at least what was left of it.  The ceiling was of white plaster, with spots of soot deposited here and there by long-gone candles.  Now, the room was lit by what was once an elegant crystal chandelier with missing pieces; those that remained were yellowed.

      She was still dressed in the same clothes she had worn at breakfast: blue silk blouse and pants suit.  But at breakfast she had been smiling.  Now she was in tears.

      Someone speaking in strangely accented English had called up to her room at the Ca’ Affascinante hotel early that morning.  Come quick! he had said.  "There has been an accident.  Your husband has been hurt.  He is in hospital and is asking for you.  You must come."

      She dropped everything and made her way downstairs and directly to the lobby, where two men were waiting.  They looked ordinary enough: dressed, perhaps, like the resident working Venetians, in rumpled work shirts and brownish woolen trousers.  One was tall and hefty, with a beefy nose, a pleasant, round face, and chocolate-brown eyes; the other much shorter—and lean.  The shorter of the two—pockmarked face, gray eyes, and thin hawk nose—did the talking, his English with a strange—not Italian—accent.  Your husband needs you, he said.  Come with us.  We have a boat waiting. They led her out into the late morning sunlight.

      They said nothing as the boat pulled away and into the Grand Canal from the Accademia dock, and headed west and north, toward the Rialto Bridge.  They had passed under the bridge before Donna thought to ask, Where exactly are we going?

      I said the hospital, the short man replied.  "Signore Iams, he is there."

      They were well past the Rialto when the big man pulled the boat well up into one of the side canals, turned left into yet another, and stopped at a long, concrete dock, or fondamento.  "We are here, Signora," the little man said.

      But instead of to a hospital, they had taken her here, manhandling her when she had resisted, having finally realized that she had been duped.  Tell me there was no accident, at least, and that my husband is all right, she pleaded.

      "You can relax, Signora, he is fine, and you will both stay fine, just so long as both you and your husband, cooperate," was the answer.

      Cooperate? she asked.  Cooperate how?  With what?

      But neither man answered.  Instead, they left the room, and locked the door.

      Back to TOC

      Chapter 2

      In the afternoon of the day before Donna Iams was abducted, Pam Vitelli was sitting in a vaporetto as the boat made its way up the Grand Canal.  The day was gorgeous: sunny and mild, without a cloud in the blue Autumn sky.

      Pam sat alongside her almost-new husband, Rich; they were holding hands and guarding their luggage, admiring the beautiful homes and palazzos that lined the waterway, their structures rising from the very waters of the canal, like some emerging Venus rising from the sea.  Most of the buildings were marked with a black mold, and some had patches of missing stucco, exposing the powdery red brick beneath; yet there was something aristocratic and grandly elegant about each of them: grand old ladies sitting on old money.  Each had its own landing, or a dock extending out into the canal.  Securing pilings rose from the water; most were gaily colored (barber-shop stripes seemed popular), some were at odd angles.

      The Vitellis had flown into Rome overnight, having left Kennedy Airport in New York at 6:40 PM; then they flew east for eight hours and twenty minutes.  Sitting up in coach, Pam had slept only fitfully during the flight.  They were flying into the sun, so it was already 9:00 AM in Rome when they landed.  By the time they cleared customs and made their way to the train terminal in Rome, it was almost noon.  They were at Mestre terminal four hours later at just 4:00 PM (or 16:00, according to the clock in the terminal).

      It was to be their ten-day, dream honeymoon in Venice.  Pam Vitelli had been looking forward to it ever since she married Metro Police Lieutenant Richard Vitelli the previous March.

      Oh, there had been a quick, three-day visit to New York City right after the wedding, but Pam hardly considered that a proper honeymoon.  Between the hassle at Newark Airport (both going and coming), and the getting into, and then the getting back out of, the city, the two days and two nights at the Park Central Hotel hardly seemed worthwhile.  By the time they had gotten to the hotel that Friday, and got to bed, Pam remembered that they were almost too tired to do much of anything.  Now, she chuckled to herself, remembering how they more than made up for it the next morning.

      Aside from the obligatory (for Pam, anyway) visits to the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the trip to New York was pretty much a bust.  She thought that, right after the wedding, they might just as well have booked a room at the four-star Tecumseh Hotel back home in the city.  They would have been far more relaxed and would have required a lot less sleep, anyway!

      The exit from the train terminal had been right on the Grand Canal, and it was just a short walk to the vaporetto dock.  The vaporetto was a kind of waterborne city bus: a long, wide boat, with lots of enclosed seating and plenty of standing room.

      Pam was struck right off by the utter uniqueness of the place: the only highways were those of water, with no traffic patterns, just boats randomly passing one another.  Nor was there an automobile or motor scooter in sight—there was not even a bicycle!

      They had hauled their luggage to the dock.  Unlike Rich, Pam was an experienced traveler, and had known enough to pack light.  A suitcase on rollers and a backpack for each, made lugging the short distance to the vaporetto stop relatively easy.  Of course, about half of what was packed in Rich’s baggage was Pam’s stuff.  Pam waited with the luggage while Rich figured out which vaporetto they needed to catch, and bought tickets.

      Number two, he announced, will take us all the way down the canal to our stop, the Accademia.  They boarded the number two vaporetto, and headed up the Grand Canal.  Neither had been to Venice before, and they delightedly absorbed all the exotic sights and scenes as their vaporetto made its winding way along the canal, stopping at various stations to load and unload passengers.  As they passed them, they recognized many of the specific landmarks from the guide book they had both studied back home; but what they had seen in photographs and videos didn’t do justice to the peculiar beauty of their surroundings.

      As their vaporetto wound its way toward their destination at the other end of the city, they were given glimpses of the Venice its pedestrians knew by sighting down the various smaller canals that served just like side streets off a main highway.  Each of these had its crossing footbridge.  Unlike the buildings along the canal that seemed to rise unsupported out of the water, those that they glimpsed back inside the city were buildings built on what appeared to be more solid ground: homes, shops, and churches facing out onto paved squares and narrow streets.

      Pam consulted her Walking Venice map, noting that there were three bridges that spanned the Grand Canal.  The first had been the one opposite the train terminal.  The upcoming bridge had to be the middle one of the three: the Rialto Bridge.  Tourists, people just like themselves from all over the world, lined the railings and gawked down at them as their vaporetto made its way under the Rialto, and onward toward the third, and final, Accademia Bridge.

      But before reaching the Accademia Bridge, the vaporetto wended its way to stop number twelve (the Accademia), just short of the bridge, where the Vitellis debarked.  They searched a bit before they found their hotel, Ca’ Affascinante.  In the end, it was right there on the Calle Dorsoduro, number 724, where the Walking Venice map said it would be.

      Besides being very close to the vaporetto stop, the Ca’ Affascinante was also just steps away from not only the Accademia Museum, but also from the Linda Oppenheim Museum.  In the Oppenheim was the show Pam had worked so hard to set up: Modern Works from American Museums, that exhibition now in its final week.

      The hotel was expensive—even off-season it would normally cost three-hundred-eighty euros a night—but, her boss, Calvin Iams, had gotten them the special rate enjoyed by visiting museum staff.  Even so, Pam was sure, their eight-day stay there was most likely costing her new husband a bundle.  She has seen the pained look on his face when he saw the hotel’s rates, but he assured her that they could afford it.

      Back to TOC

      Chapter 3

      The former Pamela Karns, widow of the late James Wagner, now Pamela Vitelli, was currently employed back home as the Assistant Director of the city’s Metro Foundation Museum of Art.  She had been hired for the job right out of Cornell University, where she had majored in Art History, and minored in Museum Administration.  A scholarly paper she had written as an undergraduate had been published in the Journal of Contemporary Art.  It caught the eye of the Metro Foundation Museum’s Director, Calvin Iams, himself a well-known scholar of contemporary art.  Iams was in the process of setting up the collection for the Metro Foundation Museum, and was looking for an assistant, an administrator who could handle the museum’s day-to-day affairs.  Pam was a bright young lady with a brilliant mind, one who could be hired at a bargain-basement price.  Iams interviewed her while she was still a senior at Cornell, and was suitably impressed.  He offered her the job upon her graduation, and Pam quickly accepted.  She was thrilled to have landed any job in her field right out of school.  Most of her fellow graduates with similar educational backgrounds were not nearly as fortunate.  Some of them, she knew, were still working as baristas, or flipping hamburgers, back in their home towns.

      Pam attacked her new job with the same intensity as she had attacked her studies.  She had an eye for shrewd purchases of individual artworks, and had a knack for convincing private collectors that the museum would be a fine place to donate, or at least exhibit, their most prized pieces.

      Two years after moving to the city, Pam met James Wagner, a young project engineer who worked for Dealey Enterprises.  They dated for a year, and then married.  Less than a year after their marriage, James consulted a doctor about a sudden onslaught of overwhelming fatigue, and bloodwork showed that he had been stricken with a virulent form of leukemia.  A year of debilitating chemotherapy followed, but ultimately failed, and Pam became a widow just twenty months after her marriage.

      She was devastated at first, but was never one to mope around and feel sorry for herself.  Instead, she coped with her grief by turning to her faith, and by throwing herself headlong into her work.

      Now, just over five years a widow, Pam had become the bride of Richard Vitelli, who was newly forty-five, and almost thirteen years her senior.

      Her parents thought the marriage ill-conceived, and told

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