Page 58 of Vengeance in Venice
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Bianca Premarin’s wordsflabbergasted Solomon. He could only stare at her.
“I went to his house. At night.”
“Which night?” he managed at last.
“Lots of nights.”
His heart had begun to beat with slightly horrified excitement. “Including the night he died?”
She nodded.
Careful to sound neither shocked nor urgent, Solomon asked casually, “What did you do there?”
“I watched for him. Sometimes I saw him.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Not yet,” she said dreamily, as though she had forgotten that he was dead.
Tears started in her eyes. The pretense of the coquette, the sophisticated woman of love affairs, crumbled so quickly and so hopelessly that Solomon felt both appalled and desperately sorry for her.
He moved hastily on. “Did you see him the night he died?”
She shook her head. “I did not even see him at the window.”
“Did you see my wife or me?” he asked curiously.
She stared at him. “No.”
“What time was this, signora? When you were watching? Was it after midnight? It is important to me.”
She smiled. “Then yes. I must have been there around three in the morning.”
“Three? How did you get there?”
She lifted her eyebrows. “I walked. It is easy enough. The house—this house—is quiet then. The children are asleep, and the servants are abed. I have all the keys.”
Solomon felt a pang of disappointment. “You walked. Then you watched the Palazzo Savelli at the front of the house.”
“No one ever saw me,” she said anxiously. “I wore a veil and the hood of my cloak, and in the dark I could blend in with the tree at the side of the canal. I hoped he alone would see me there and come to me. But he never did.”
“Did you hear anything that might have come from the back of the house? Voices? The splashing of oars, perhaps? A fight?”
“No,” she said with a vagueness that told him she wouldn’t have noticed a major battle taking place out of her immediate line of vision.
“So, you went home again without seeing anyone?”
Her gaze refocused on him with a spark of triumph. “Oh, I saw someone. As I was going home, someone passed me in a boat, turning out of the canal that runs along the back of the Palazzo Savelli.”
“Did you see his face?” Solomon asked without much hope.
“Oh yes, it was Ludovico Giusti, and he could only have been coming from his lover. Elena.”
Chapter Thirteen
Under normal circumstances,Solomon would have gone straight to Giusti, but he had already been away from Constance too long in her current condition. On top of which, the stupid feeling that she could not be safe without his presence never quite left him, which was ridiculous considering she had been poisoned right under his nose.
