Murder in Chianti

by Camilla Trinchieri

Perillo shook his head. “Ehi, what’s up? Is somebody making off with your beautiful wife?”

  Excited words rumbled out of Perillo’s cell. That the caller was a man was all Nico could make out.

  “Who told you?” Perillo asked. He didn’t think Laura or Cesare would be eager to spread the word about their murdered guest.

  “Ah, Bruno.” Perillo pressed a cigarette between his lips. He’d have to be satisfied with the pretense of smoking while he listened to the anxious sputterings. “The very same Bruno who stole our poor murdered man’s car to take his girlfriend for a dawn joyride to the town of many towers and Vernaccia wine. The only good thing I can say about him is that he has good taste in locations.”

  While Perillo sucked on his cigarette and listened, Nico took the flutes to the sink. There was no point to eavesdropping on someone else’s phone conversation if you didn’t know who was on the other end of the line. OneWag gave one last sweeping lick of his bowl and scampered to the sofa to sleep. Daniele, more concerned about the glasses he might have to replace, joined Nico at the sink and took over washing them. The American’s big hands didn’t look like they were used to handling delicate things.

  “Yes, I agree with you, Aldo,” Perillo said, the jocular tone gone. “Your nephew is a jerk. And yes, I’m sure it’s all his mother’s fault, and no, I’m not going to tell you who our victim is.”

  “The news will be out in the morning,” Nico said. “Tell him to come over now. We offer whiskey and the man’s identity.”

  Perillo relayed the invitation to Aldo and clicked off. “He’ll probably fly over. You think he might be involved?”

  “Too soon to know, but I bet he can tell us something about Roberto Gerardi. It’s a small town. He’s bound to have known him.”

  TEN

  While waiting for Aldo, Nico put out a bowl of fruit salad. He added a mug filled with sugar next to it on the table. As heavy footsteps made the stairs creak, OneWag jumped off the sofa, parked himself in front of the door and barked his head off.

  Nico barked back. “OneWag!”

  The dog turned to look up at Nico, understood he meant business and with a huff went down on all fours, ready to jump at the intruder if the situation called for it.

  Aldo burst into the room with his face flushed from the effort of the stairs. He was wearing his usual entertain-the-tourists uniform: jeans and the bright leaf-green and purple Ferriello T-shirt. He waved a bottle like a man who’d found a lost treasure. Aldo had told Nico he was in love with every single bottle of wine he produced, a love he was always eager to sell.

  “I thought vin santo, the wine of hospitality and friendship, was just the thing to keep us safe from murder. It’s new this year. Wait until you taste it. Made with half merlot grapes, half cabernet.”

  “Stop selling it and uncork it.”

  Aldo dropped his full weight onto the chair Nico had vacated and handed the bottle and corkscrew to Daniele. “Sorry, they ate all my cantuccini.” He shifted position to face Perillo. “So tell me. Who is it?”

  “First, let’s have a taste of this holy wine. We could all use some of that, right, Dani?”

  Daniele turned his back to Perillo as he uncorked the bottle.

  Aldo clasped his knees and tried to lean forward, but his belly got in the way. “Come on, tell me.”

  Perillo enjoyed keeping Aldo in suspense, his revenge for the measly discounts the vintner had given him last year when he’d treated his wife to a Super Chianti for her birthday. “Tell us how you make it. Does a priest bless it?”

  “Stop it, Salvatore.” Aldo, who loved to expound on his own wines and his olives, was in no mood for games now. “Christ, tell me who it is.”

  Was it simple curiosity, Nico asked himself, or was he afraid?

  Daniele sat down in his chair and poured the wine into the three flutes he had just washed. He would abstain. Mixing red wine, prosecco and sweet wine would hammer nails into his head.

  “No, I’m sure Nico and Daniele want to know about the production of this special wine,” Salvatore replied. “I hear it’s expensive and takes a long time to make. We’ll enjoy it more if we know the process. You tell me, then I’ll tell you. It’s only fair.”

  Nico stayed by the sink, flute in hand, and wondered if keeping Aldo on tenterhooks had another purpose besides annoying him.

  Perillo lifted his flute. The wine’s amber color turned gold in the light. “Just pretend we’re foreigners.”

  Aldo resigned himself with a loud exhale. “One: you need perfect grapes. No rot. Two: they’re dried until they shrivel like raisins.” He spoke quickly. “Three: they get pressed. Four: into oak barrels they go. Five: I wait from three to seven years, depending on how intense I’d like the wine. It is very costly and time-consuming.” Aldo pressed against the back of his chair, which creaked in protest. “Your turn.”

  Perillo complied. “Roberto Gerardi.”

  The flush on Aldo’s face disappeared, and his expression went dead for a moment. He stared at Perillo. “Are you sure?”

  Perillo nodded while Daniele quietly spooned fruit salad into his dish.

  After what seemed like a full minute, Aldo let out a laugh from the bottom of his stomach.

  From the sofa, a disrupted OneWag sleepily lifted his head.

  The blood rushed back to Aldo’s face. “That’s a good one. So Roberto Gerardi got his comeuppance. Never thought I’d see that! He left years ago. No one around here has heard news of him since. Why the hell did he come back?”

  “That’s what we need to find out.” Perillo forked a pineapple piece and put it in his mouth. “You knew him. What can you tell us?”

  Daniele followed Perillo’s cue and started eating, careful not to make a sound. He didn’t want to miss anything. OneWag settled back to continue his slumber.

  Aldo wiped his large hand over his face. When it came down, all trace of laughter was gone. “I guess you’d find out anyway, so I might as well tell you. I don’t want you to think I’m the one who killed him, though, because I’m not.”

  Nico leaned against the narrow kitchen counter. He liked watching, getting a first impression from a distance. It was something he’d picked up from Rita when she took him to see his first abstract art show at MoMA, back when he was still a patrol cop. The paintings were just a jumble of colored splotches and lines to him. She told him to step back to see the whole and allow the painting to speak to him. He did step back, and just sometimes, he saw something that he maybe understood. Oddly, Rita’s advice about viewing art stuck with him once he made detective. When he needed to interrogate a suspect, he would let his partner do it first as he stepped back to watch. Watch the body, the twitches, the shifting, the breathing. Hear the words last.

  Perillo took a sip of vin santo. “Why would we think you killed him?” He raised the flute. “This is good, by the way.” Far too sweet for his taste, but Aldo only ever wanted praise.

  “Gerardi worked for me for a couple of years.”

  “When was that?” Perillo asked casually, wanting Aldo to think they were just having a conversation between friends.

  “I hired him to work at the winery twenty-four years ago. The first year Ferriello Wines made a profit. A small one, but still, not a year I’m likely to forget.” Aldo’s stomach started shaking with breathy laughter. “You know what’s funny? I’m not making this up. Last time I saw Roberto, I told him I never wanted to see his face again. And now he’s gotten his face blown off. Cinzia will get the shivers when I tell her.”

  “What did Gerardi do for you?” Perillo was willing to wait to see what was so funny.

  “It was Cinzia’s idea to hire him. He was working at a hotel in Panzano. Roberto was good-looking, well spoken. He knew a little English and French, enough to show tourists how we make wine, walk them around the vineyard. He could charm them into buying more than t
hey’d planned on. He was a real asset.” Aldo paused, his eyes on some distant point beyond the room.

  Perillo waited, plucking another piece of fruit from the bowl, playing the disinterested listener.

  Daniele had cleaned his plate and sat still, his stomach muscles clenched in anticipation.

  Nico leaned against the kitchen counter and sipped the sweet wine. The murdered man had been important to Aldo. So something had soured.

  “But he stopped being an asset?”

  Nico regretted the question as soon as he asked it. This was Perillo’s case. He was just a bystander.

  Aldo lifted his head slowly. Anger burned in his eyes now. “Roberto was someone I trusted completely. I was still learning the wine and olive oil business. I needed help, and he gave it to me.”

  Perillo could repeat Nico’s question, but he preferred approaching this from another angle. As the Tuscans said, with patience, you won everything. “Do you know anything about his life outside of work? Any relatives?”

  “A lot of time has passed. His parents were dead. I think he had a married sister somewhere, but they weren’t close. I don’t know her name.”

  “Did you two socialize outside of work? Ever meet any of his friends?”

  “If he had friends, I didn’t know them. The two of us went out for pizza occasionally when Cinzia was off somewhere. Sometimes we drank too much.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Just gripes about too much work, too much rain, not enough sun, lazy workers, women troubles. His, not mine. Look, I wish you’d stop interrogating me. I told you, I didn’t kill him.” Aldo was quickly clenching and unclenching his hands now.

  Perillo straightened his back, aware of the impatience flickering across his face. “I’m not interrogating you, at least not while we are in Nico’s home and sharing the wine you’ve brought. I’m asking questions because we’re dealing with a very ugly murder, and I’m hoping you know something about Gerardi that could help us. You are the one who’s said we might think you killed him.”

  Nico opened the kitchen cabinet to get the bottle of whiskey. There was one glass left, and it looked like Aldo needed it.

  Aldo stretched his fingers. “One night, Roberto got very drunk and confessed he was very much in love with someone. Wanted to marry her. There was some kind of trouble with her though, something about her family being against it. He did have a reputation for womanizing, which might be the reason he was having trouble with the family. He wouldn’t tell me who she was.”

  Nico filled a glass, walked slowly to the table and placed it in front of Aldo.

  Perillo looked at the half-filled glass of whiskey with great envy. “Anything else you can think of that might help us get a sense of the kind of man he was?”

  Aldo downed the whiskey in one go. “Well, the bastard stole from me.”

  From me were the key words there, Nico noted. Aldo could have said from the winery or simply called him a thief, but it was the personal affront that mattered, not the action itself.

  “I even loaned him some money, idiot that I am.”

  “What did he steal?” Perillo asked, wondering if there had ever been rough patches in Aldo’s relationship with Cinzia. She’d been the one to bring Gerardi in. Men couldn’t stop looking at Cinzia. Even he’d had his own inappropriate thoughts there.

  Aldo leaned back in his chair and fixed his eyes on the now-empty whiskey bottle. “It was Arben who figured it out. He was the most ambitious of my Albanian employees, and at first I thought he was just smearing dirt on Roberto because he was after his job. Well, he got it. It took a few years, and now he can run the place without me. Arben’s a very good man.” Aldo looked up. “I’m the godfather of his first child,” he said proudly. “Our families get together a lot. You know, I hired quite a lot of Albanians and Kosovians after they fled their countries and came here. Sure, they were hungry, but I discovered they were good workers, and cheap.”

  Perillo let Aldo ramble. He always talked too much.

  “I’m ashamed to say, though, I haven’t always trusted them. They get into fights with each other, don’t they, Salvatore?”

  “So do Tuscans.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, but I was just trying to explain why I didn’t listen to Arben. Roberto was Tuscan, and I trusted him. Arben was a foreigner, and therefore I didn’t believe him. Arben understood that and was too proud to insist. That’s how stupid I was. When I found out Arben had told me the truth, I punched Roberto in the face. He punched me right back. Arben and the others had to separate us. That’s when I fired him and told him I never wanted to see his face again.”

  “What did he steal?” Perillo asked again.

  Aldo looked surprised. “My wine, of course. What else could he steal? That’s all I’ve got.”

  What about a wife? asked Nico silently.

  “He stole straight from the barrels. Siphoned off the wine just before we bottled it. A bottle or two at a time, not so much that we’d notice.”

  Nico asked, sitting with the others at the table, “How did Arben find out?”

  “One night, we had a big group of Americans here. Arben was upstairs helping with the dinner because Cinzia wasn’t feeling well. She’s in charge of feeding the guests. We always serve a dinner or lunch with the tour, and once it was over, it was part of Roberto’s job to escort the group across the courtyard to the dining room in the other building and eat with them. The guests came, but Roberto showed up late. I was too busy talking about the wines they were drinking to notice anything. After everyone had left, Roberto included, Arben went down to the basement and checked the barrels. He noticed wine on the floor under several of the spigots. He’d made sure the floor was spotless before the guests came. Arben went back upstairs to the bottling and labeling room and noticed a few empty bottles were missing. He’d noticed missing empties before and told me about it, but a missing empty or two went with the territory, I told him. That night, after everyone left, he told me he thought Roberto was siphoning off wine. I accused him of being jealous. It’s a miracle Arben didn’t walk off the job that very night. I know I hurt his pride, and maybe he decided to stay to prove me wrong. After that night, whenever we had an evening tour, Arben would offer to help Cinzia. She couldn’t have been happier. What we didn’t know is that he’d set up a camera in the barrel rooms that he turned on just before the guests went down there. Early the next morning, he’d go back to turn it off. He gathered three months’ worth of stealing before he showed me the videos. I had, thank God, the good grace not to ask him why he waited so long.”

  “Thank you, Aldo. For the moment, I don’t believe you shot Gerardi’s face off, but tomorrow, who knows?”

  Aldo flung his arms in the air. “Good God. You’re joking, right?”

  Perillo clinked his empty flute against Aldo’s empty whiskey glass. “Don’t I always?”

  Aldo let out a grunt that might have been a laugh. “You do, and I put up with it.” He stood up. “Thank you for the hospitality. By now, Cinzia must be jumping out of her skin to know who it is.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Cinzia too,” Perillo said. “She might know more about his love life.”

  Aldo scowled. “What are you implying?”

  “Sometimes men confide in women.”

  “He didn’t get anywhere near her.”

  “I’m not saying he did, but she’s the one who pointed him out to you. She might know something you don’t.”

  Aldo seemed mollified. “All right, I’ll tell her.”

  Perillo stood up and the four of them shook hands.

  After the door closed and Aldo’s footsteps disappeared, Perillo asked Nico, “What do you think?”

  “After twenty-two years, he might still carry a grudge against Gerardi, but not one major enough to kill him.”

  “Unless he didn’t tell
us the whole story,” Daniele added. This job was making him cynical.

  Perillo picked up his leather jacket. “We’ll find out. But for now, I think it’s time to bid our host good night. Pack up the flutes, Dani, and we’ll go. Good night, Rocco.”

  OneWag lifted his head, wagged once and went back to sleep. Nico was surprised the dog reacted to the name. “You’ll turn him into a schizophrenic.”

  “Italian dog, Italian name. Anything else is against nature.” At the door, Perillo remembered and turned around. “Your friend Gogol made a first-time appearance at the local hotel yesterday, laughing loudly and clapping. Laura, the manager, had a difficult time convincing him to leave. Maybe you can find out why?”

  “I can try.”

  Once the maresciallo and his bridgadiere were gone, Nico washed the pots, dishes and tableware, dumped the empty wine bottles in the recycling basket and sponged the table and the sink clean. He dried his hands and walked over to the sofa. “Bedtime, OneWag.”

  The dog uncurled himself and waited.

  “No dice.” Nico walked to his bedroom. “You’ve got four legs. Use them.”

  OneWag turned over and began scratching his ear, which didn’t itch. Next, he busied himself with gnawing his front paws, which were perfectly clean. After what the dog considered a suitable amount of time, he jumped off the sofa and, tail held high, slowly made his way to the bedroom.

  The next morning, Thursday, the sky was a thick gray cap leaking heavy rain. With OneWag still nestled between the sheets, Nico took his espresso out on the balcony. A flutter of wings brushed his face as the swallows left their sleeping quarters to swoop through the curtain of rain, not caring if they got soaked. The vegetable garden would be grateful—Nico had forgotten to water it last night—but he knew Aldo and the other local vintners wouldn’t be happy to see the rain dilute the sweetness and strength of their grapes. Enough water had fallen during the summer to satisfy the humidity required by the vines. With the grape harvesting only five or six weeks away, heat was needed to produce a good year.