Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)
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• • •
THEY had anticipated spending some farewell time alone with Luca and Linda that evening, perhaps going out to dinner with them, but Nico’s arrest had naturally enough subdued the family—what was left of them—and pulled them closer together, and the Laus and Olivers had thought it was best to leave them to themselves. They went to dinner on their own, to the pizzeria John and Gideon had been to, then came back to make their good-byes, went to their apartments to pack, and left early the next morning for Florence Airport. There, Gideon’s attempt to reach Rocco was unsuccessful, but a few hours later, during a layover at Amsterdam’s Airport Schiphol, he got through to him.
Thus far, Nico had admitted to nothing yet, Rocco told him, but thanks to the bumbling, pontificating Quadrelli butting in all over the place, Nico had stumbled repeatedly, contradicting himself time after time, and Rocco was convinced that Julie’s reconstruction of events was correct—that Gideon’s cocaethylene hypothesis also had it right, and that Nico had killed both Nola and Cesare.
“But how did you settle on Nico in the first place, Rocco? I’m glad we were helpful, but nothing that Julie or I came up with had anything to say about who did it.”
“That’s a long story, buddy. Police work at its finest. Deductive reasoning—”
“We have to board in ten minutes. Can you make it short?”
He could and did. Admittedly, there was no direct evidence that Nico had killed anyone, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. First of all, Nico, being Pietro’s favorite, was the one most likely by far to break his father’s rule and drop in on him in the mountains—
“‘Circumstantial’ is putting it mildly,” Gideon observed. In fact, by his definition, it wasn’t even circumstantial, not in the legal sense. Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence, a fact of some kind from which another fact can be logically inferred. Jane testifies under oath that she heard Jack and Mary fighting in an adjoining apartment. She heard Mary scream, “I’m going to kill you!” followed by a shot. When the police arrived, John was found on the floor, shot dead, and Mary was gone. Inferred conclusion: Mary shot John and ran off.
But where was Rocco’s “fact” in the first place? This was nothing more than opinion and conjecture.
“Hear me out,” Rocco said. “It gets better. Okay, second, Nico was the only one of them who still had a relationship with Cesare and would have been the only one to have been welcome in Cesare’s apartment, where he could have switched the cough medicines.”
Gideon didn’t think too much of that either and began to wonder just how solid Rocco’s case was, or whether he even had a case. But Rocco’d been saving the best for last. “It turns out that Nico’s getting rid of the computer and printer and the rest wasn’t good enough. Remember, I told you Tonino was checking out Cesare’s list of passwords? Well, he struck gold. One of them was for an outfit called Ricordare that backs up everything on your computer in the cloud. Including e-mail.”
And in Cesare’s e-mail history was a sequence of exchanges with Nico, among which was one in which Cesare told him that he had made a big mistake accepting the new job, and he desperately wanted to return to Villa Antica. He asked Nico’s advice about going to see Pietro at the cabin, hat in hand, to express his regret for what he’d done and to plead with the old man to take him back. Without Luca and Franco around to poison Pietro’s mind, he thought there might be a better chance.
Nico advised against it: Pietro was still furious with his stepson, and a visit from him would only make matters worse. But Cesare wouldn’t take this for an answer. He was determined to do it, and he begged Nico to go and talk to Pietro first to try to soften him up for the visit. Nico had always been the favorite son, the one most able to talk Pietro into changing his mind about anything. Besides, if anybody could get away with dropping in on Pietro during his retreat, he was the one.
At first Nico declined, but Cesare was persistent, and after a few more e-mails he gave in. He told Cesare he would go up to the Casentinese toward the end of Pietro’s mese sabatico, when his father would be at his most relaxed, and he would do his best to set the stage for him. He said he would do it on September 26.
Late that day, Nico e-mailed Cesare that he had made the trip and reasoned with Pietro, and that he had gotten him to agree to leave Cesare’s stipend in the will, and perhaps in time even to welcome him back to the villa, so there was no need for Cesare to go up on his own after all.
“Which couldn’t possibly have happened,” Gideon said. “Pietro’d been dead by then for almost a month.”
“Exactly. It couldn’t have. But Nico claimed it had. Why? There’s more, listen.”
Cesare was ecstatic. He e-mailed Nico that he would go up to the cabin the very next morning to express his sincere gratitude and to extend his promise to live up to Pietro’s expectations in the future and so on. Nico’s response came back in less than two minutes, and was just this side of hysterical: Don’t go, don’t under any circumstances go (it was in italics in the e-mail) to see him. Yes, Pietro had changed his mind about the will, but it was a delicate situation. His feelings toward Cesare were still bitter in the extreme. For Cesare to show up at the cabin was sure to set off an explosion. No, better—much better—to let time take its course, to wait for Pietro himself to decide when the time was right for his errant stepson to make an appearance. Anything else would be a disaster. And then Nico sent two follow-up e-mails saying pretty much the same thing.
“And so, your conclusion,” Gideon said, summing up for him when Rocco seemed to have finished, “is that, having gone to the cabin at Cesare’s request, and having found Pietro’s body, he’d already made up his mind to kill Nola and make it look as if she were the one who died first. So he had to lie like crazy—Pietro was there, sure, but don’t go near him, you’ll ruin everything!—to keep Cesare away.”
“Right. And then, as for killing Cesare, you know, I wondered at first why he took so long to get around to that. But then I realized there was no reason for him to do it, not until, well—”
“Yeah, I know. Not until we blabbed to everybody that Pietro had died long before Nola did—which suddenly made Cesare a threat to him, on account of those exchanges. Until then, there was nothing in them that contradicted the Pietro-killed-Nola fairy tale.”
“Yup. We broke the news to them—including our boy Nico—on Friday afternoon. Saturday morning, Cesare was dead. So . . . that’s the story. What do you think?”
“Rocco, I think you’ve nailed it.”
“Me too, buddy,” Rocco said happily. “And the public prosecutor says it’s a go. Thanks a million for your help. And thank Julie!”
• • •
“THAT wasn’t Betty,” Julie said, coming back outside after answering the phone.
It had been two weeks since they’d returned home to Port Angeles. It was late September now, so the gloomy rainy season couldn’t be far behind, and they’d been taking advantage of what might be the last of the sunny, golden evenings of fall and sitting out on their deck before dinner, watching the big Black Ball auto ferry from Victoria do its usual smooth, impressive job of pulling—backward and sideways—up to the ferry dock, when they’d heard the phone ring inside the house.
“I’ll get it,” Julie had said, getting up. “I’m pretty sure it’s my sister.”
Gideon had been more than content to continue to remain outside in the mild breeze, sipping his martini on the rocks and munching on an occasional shrimp or little wedge of Gorgonzola from the plate of appetizers they’d brought out with them. The call had taken a surprisingly long time—twenty minutes—and as he’d just learned, it hadn’t been from Julie’s sister Betty.
Julie dropped into the deck chair she’d been sitting in before and dipped a shrimp into the cocktail sauce. “That,” she said, chewing, “was Linda.”
“And what did she have to say? I can tell from the look on your face that it was something interesting. Something about the
trial?”
“No, nothing about that. Gideon, that night at the Vino e Cucina reception—do you remember a woman we were talking to? Tall, kind of imposing . . .”
He raised his voice to an imperious mezzo-soprano “‘So what is it that a Skeleton Doctor does exactly, anyway?’ Was she somebody important? She seemed to think so.”
“She is important. She’s a TV producer, and she works with the Food Network. She was there to look Luca over as the host for a possible cooking show.”
“Was she? He’d be great at that.”
“That’s what she thought. Luca’s got himself a show. Guess what it’s called?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sure you do. Take a guess.”
He thought for a moment. “La Cucina di Nonna Gina?”
“That’s it. La Cucina di Nonna Gina with Chef Luca Cubbiddu.”
“Well, good for him. He’ll love it. And they’ll love him. Here’s to Luca and Grandma Gina.” He raised his glass and they clinked.
“They’ve been filming right there at Villa Antica since yesterday. First show airs here October 19. He’s starting with a tricky dish to make right; I messed up when he tried to teach us in the class. But I’ll record the program this time. He says it’s one dish you can freeze—if you do it at the right stage—so I can make enough for a few meals. It’ll be a wonderful one-dish dinner on cold winter nights.”
“Sounds good. What is it?”
“Ossobuco. I’ll make a ton of it.”
Gideon downed the rest of his martini, choking just a little, and rose with his glass. “You know, I believe I’ll have another.”
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Other titles by Aaron Elkins
Gideon Oliver Novels
DYING ON THE VINE*
SKULL DUGGERY*
UNEASY RELATIONS*
LITTLE TINY TEETH*
UNNATURAL SELECTION*
WHERE THERE’S A WILL*
GOOD BLOOD*
SKELETON DANCE
TWENTY BLUE DEVILS
DEAD MEN’S HEARTS
MAKE NO BONES
ICY CLUTCHES
CURSES!
OLD BONES*
MURDER IN THE QUEEN’S ARMES*
THE DARK PLACE*
FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR*
Chris Norgren Novels
OLD SCORES
A GLANCING LIGHT
DECEPTIVE CLARITY
Lee Ofsted Novels (with Charlotte Elkins)
ON THE FRINGE
WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDIES GONE?
NASTY BREAKS
ROTTEN LIES
A WICKED SLICE
Thrillers
TURNCOAT
LOOT
THE WORST THING
*Available from Berkley Prime Crime