by J. D. Griffo
“Ciò che sale deve scendere,” Alberta said.
“Shut up, Alfie,” he groaned.
“I have no idea what my grandmother said, but I’m pretty sure it proves our point,” Jinx declared. “If you couldn’t climb up the tree stone-cold sober, how could Jonas ever have done it drunk?”
“He did prove our point, lovey,” Alberta confirmed. “Ciò che sale deve scendere. What goes up, must come down.”
“Also too, come down hard,” Joyce added. “Are you okay, Vinny? Should we call someone?”
“I’m fine,” he groaned again, still not moving.
“No you’re not, you’re just being a stunod,” Alberta corrected. “You’re lucky you didn’t get yourself killed like poor Jonas.”
Wincing, Vinny rolled onto his side, maneuvered himself onto his knees, and then hoisted himself up into a standing position before replying. “He probably pulled the ladder up after him, but forgot to put it back out when he left.”
“I guess that’s possible,” Alberta acquiesced. “But the only way to know for sure is to get inside the tree house and inspect it ourselves.”
Whatever Vinny was going to say in response was interrupted by his ringing cell phone. He looked at his phone and was visibly relieved when he saw the caller’s identity. “Kichiro! Where in heaven’s name have you been? Wait, I don’t have the time, just get yourself to the tree house in Tranquility Park.” Vinny was about to end the call, but then shouted one final command, “And bring a ladder!”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Kichiro entered the park carrying a large, metal ladder under his arm. Behind him holding her pocketbook in the crook of her arm was Helen.
“What do we have here, Vinny?” Helen queried. “Another murder?”
“No,” Vinny replied.
“We think so,” Joyce said.
“Yes,” Alberta and Jinx declared.
“I’m glad to hear we’re all in agreement,” Helen quipped.
Nodding to the women, Kichiro stopped in his tracks when he saw Jonas’s unmoving body. “Oh my God! No!” He was so shaken by the sight that he dropped the back of the ladder and Vinny had to grab the front of it to prevent it from falling to the ground and possibly disrupting the potential crime scene or landing on one of the women’s feet.
“I’m sorry, Kich,” Vinny apologized. “I should’ve warned you.”
“I . . . I can’t believe this,” Kichiro stuttered.
“Neither can I,” Vinny said, his voice adopting a fatherly tone. “But we have a job to do.”
Kichiro only hesitated a moment, but in that moment it was clear that Jonas may have had a rough life, but he had friends. Despite the circumstances, however, Kichiro still had a boss.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone when I called?” Vinny whispered.
“Sorry, I-I . . . overslept,” Kichiro replied, almost bashful.
“That’s a first,” Vinny said, sounding as if he didn’t entirely believe Kichiro’s excuse.
“Yeah, well, it was a rough night,” Kichiro confessed.
“It looks it,” Jinx interrupted, her voice much louder than the two men. “What happened to your finger?”
Startled, Kichiro didn’t immediately know what Jinx was referring to until he lifted up his right arm, the one holding the ladder, and noticed the Band-Aid wrapped around his finger. “Oh this . . . It’s nothing,” Kichiro answered dismissively. “Just cut myself.”
“In that case it must’ve been a really rough night,” Jinx said.
As Kichiro followed Vinny’s instructions and placed the ladder underneath the tree house door, unfolding it, and locking it in place, Jinx couldn’t take her eyes off him. The last time they were standing near a dead body he was animated, even belligerent, and now he was quiet and sullen. Kichiro wasn’t acting anything like the pompous, hotheaded cop Jinx, from previous experience, knew him to be. It could be that her journalistic instincts were being honed or that her own inquisitive nature was working overtime, but she believed there was more to Kichiro’s story and that he had deliberately left out important facts. She would dwell on that later. Right now Vinny was commanding everyone’s attention.
After snapping on a pair of protective gloves, Vinny climbed the ladder with much more speed and dexterity than he had exhibited trying to climb the tree. At the same time a few more policemen arrived, who immediately blocked off the area with yellow police tape to prevent a crowd from interfering with their work. Already, some onlookers walking their dogs in the park and other early-morning joggers had gathered around hoping to get a closer look at the action. Alberta and Jinx looked around and couldn’t help feeling a teensy bit superior to the rest of the people since they had VIP access to the event. An event that was about to take an interesting turn.
With Kichiro still at the base of the ladder holding it firmly into position, Vinny positioned himself near the top with each foot one rung above the other. After a pause to make sure that he could maintain his balance without holding onto the ladder with his hands and that the ladder itself wasn’t going to shift from not standing on level ground, he leaned his left hand against the tree house wall and with his right turned the door knob to pull the door open. He was momentarily in a precarious position because he had to lean backward in order to open the door fully, and the women let out a collective gasp thinking that history was going to repeat itself and Vinny was going to fall once more onto the ground, knowing that from this higher height he would bruise more than his ego.
When the door was fully open and he could see inside, Vinny shouted, “Mucca sacra!” one of his favorite Italianisms since childhood that roughly translated to “Holy cow!”
“What is it, Vinny?” Alberta asked.
“This tree house is more like a love nest,” he announced.
Now that he saw the tree house was very likely a hotbed of clues, Vinny remained on the ladder and didn’t enter the interior so he wouldn’t contaminate it. He offered a commentary of the tree house’s contents while taking pictures with his cell phone and described it as containing pillows, a few quilts, an empty Tupperware container, a bottle of wine that looked like pinot grigio, and two glasses.
“I knew I saw someone else in there!” Alberta shouted proudly.
Vinny twisted around so abruptly to face Alberta that Kichiro had to add more pressure to the side rails of the ladder to steady it so his boss wouldn’t fall off.
“You saw someone else! Why didn’t you say something?”
“It was when we first entered the park, near the archway, so we were a little distance away,” Alberta clarified. “I thought it was just a bird.”
“You saw two people?” Vinny asked.
Alberta saw that not only were Jinx, Helen, Joyce, and Kichiro staring at her waiting for her to respond, but so too were the other policemen and onlookers. She felt like she was on trial, and while she hadn’t placed her hand on a bible and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, she knew it wasn’t the right time to embroider the facts with possibilities.
“Not exactly,” Alberta confessed. “I only saw one shadow and I’m not sure if it was a bird’s or a person’s. . .”
“Or maybe even a squirrel’s,” Helen added, not altogether helpfully.
“I would’ve been able to tell if it was a squirrel, Helen,” Alberta scoffed.
“You aren’t sure if you saw a man or a blue jay,” Helen corrected. “For all we know you saw a squirrel playing house. Rumor has it they love climbing all over trees.”
Stepping down from the ladder onto the grass, Vinny shook his head. “You’re not helping, ladies.”
“No you aren’t, Helen,” Alberta said, disregarding the fact that Vinny spoke in the plural. “I’m not exactly sure what I saw, but with two glasses and a bottle of wine, Jonas must have had a guest.”
“You don’t know that, Alfie, and you gotta stop guessing. Sure, we have to follow a hunch every now and again, but police wo
rk is mainly following the facts.”
“Then can you explain how Jonas climbed up the tree if there wasn’t a ladder?” she asked.
“No I can’t, not just yet,” he admitted. “But Jonas did live in Tranquility his entire life and he worked in the park so he knew the area better than anyone. If there was away to get up there, he’d know it.”
“If I may speak as a woman who dedicated her entire adult life to an organization that deals almost exclusively in hunches and faith,” Helen said, referring to the Catholic Church. “Facts aren’t always as factual as they may seem, and they often need to be taken with a grain of salt. Or some sacrificial wine.”
Wiping a few beads of sweat from his brow, Vinny sighed. “I have no idea what you’re saying, Helen.”
“Two glasses and a bottle of wine sound more like a romantic getaway than a drunkard’s hideaway,” she asserted. “So Berta’s right and you know it. If Jonas was up there, chances are very good that he wasn’t up there alone.”
“There’s only one problem though,” Joyce interjected.
“What would that be?” Helen asked, not thrilled to hear that there was a flaw in her theory.
“Jonas’s drink of choice was vodka.”
All heads turned to Joyce following her pronouncement. After years of having to prove herself in the corporate world and always having her business judgment questioned because of her gender and the color of her skin and not the validity of her rationale, Joyce was used to being put in the position of having to offer a further explanation to support a claim. This situation was no different.
“Jonas saw me buying a few bottles of flavored vodka once at Luigi’s Liquor over in Sparta,” Joyce started.
“They have very good prices over there,” Helen said.
“How do you know that, Aunt Helen?”
“Father Sal swears by it,” she answered. “And if you can’t trust a priest about wine, who can you trust?”
Vinny took a deep breath and looked over at Kichiro presumably in search of professional camaraderie, but Kichiro was staring at Jonas’s body and lost in thought. Knowing he wasn’t going to get the support he needed from his deputy, he turned his sights on trying to corral the chorus of amateur detectives.
“Can you all please shut up so Joyce can continue?” Vinny asked wearily.
“Thank you, Vincent,” Joyce said demurely. “Jonas told me that he was something of a vodka connoisseur and that his favorite was butterscotch.”
“He had good taste,” Helen added. “For a drunk, that is.”
Just as one of the medical technicians was about to pull the sheet up to cover Jonas’s face, Alberta stopped her. “Hold on a second, please. What’s wrong with Jonas’s face?”
“Other than the fact that he’s dead?” Helen asked.
“Helen!” Alberta chastised. “I’m talking about his nose and his lips. I noticed it before, but it seems to be getting worse.”
They all peered closer at Jonas’s face and noticed that Alberta was right; there were some physical traits that could simply be the man’s ordinary features, postmortem abnormalities, or they could be clues. His nose seemed redder than before and his lips were severely chapped. They all knew that a red, veiny nose was a symptom of alcoholism and not an uncommon physical trait, but the chapped lips were a bit of an anomaly.
“If he was drinking only alcohol and not enough water, he could’ve gotten dehydrated,” Kichiro offered.
It was a simple comment, but again Jinx noticed something strange in the detective’s voice. The timber was lower than his usual high-pitched tone, and there was a sadness to it. She quickly corrected herself when she realized that just because she didn’t particularly like Kichiro, he did have feelings and his relationship with Jonas might have been more than just professional. The two men could’ve been friends.
Despite the evident despondency of Vinny and Kichiro because of the death of their friend and Jinx’s own sorrow knowing that a human being had lost his life, what she mainly felt was excited at the possibility of solving another murder.
“I think we really might’ve found our next case, Gram.”
“I think so too, lovey,” Alberta whispered in Jinx’s ear. “But let’s not count our chickens before they’re hatched.”
“You think there’s a chance Vinny could be right?”
“A very small chance,” Alberta admitted. “But nobody likes a sore winner so let’s not say, ‘I told you so,’ until, of course, we have proof.”
As they rolled the stretcher away, Alberta silently added, “Don’t worry Jonas, you may not know us, but we’ll get to the bottom of how you died. You can count on that.”
CHAPTER 5
I morti non rimangono in silenzio.
“To Jonas!”
After Alberta’s salute, all four women raised a jelly glass full of butterscotch vodka in the air to celebrate the life of Tranquility’s latest fallen resident. They were sitting around Alberta’s kitchen table, the canasta cards spread out on the harvest-themed tablecloth, but no one was in the mood to play, not even Helen, who almost always wound up winning each hand. They were more interested in discussing and speculating what the results would be of the preliminary investigation into Jonas’s death.
“I agree with Gram, this was no accident.”
Joyce wasn’t so sure. “I know it’s unusual that there wasn’t a ladder around, but that in itself doesn’t mean there was foul play. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Jonas could be his own worst enemy.”
“Like cousin Patty?” Alberta questioned.
“Exactly,” Joyce confirmed.
Since it had been over a decade since Jinx had lived close to the bulk of her relatives, her knowledge of family details and closet-dwelling skeletons was limited, and even the facts that she did remember had become cloudy with age. As the de facto matriarch of the Ferrara clan, Alberta was always looked upon to fill in any gaps in order to educate the younger generation and even to repair the memories of the older, more forgetful, relatives. As much as Alberta wanted to keep moving forward toward the next chapter of her life, she understood the importance of knowing what had come before and was always happy to share her wisdom.
“Food was to cousin Patty, what alcohol was to Jonas,” Alberta explained. “It was a crutch, maybe an addiction, though I’m no psychiatrist so what do I know about that?”
“It doesn’t take a shrink to know that Patty was obsessed with food, still is,” Helen said. “At one time or another we all tried to get her to go on a diet or at least eat healthier, though nothing as insane as the way you eat, Jinx.”
“I take that as a compliment, Aunt Helen.”
“That’s because you’ve destroyed your taste buds with all that vegan, gluten-free nonsense you insist on eating,” Helen remarked. “I even got Patty an appointment with one of those gastric bypass doctors.”
Joyce was so surprised to hear this revelation that she almost spit out a mouthful of butterscotch vodka. “You did that?”
“Of course I did that!” Helen snapped. “I don’t know why you all think that I’m heartless.”
Suppressing a smile, Alberta couldn’t help herself from stating the obvious. “Maybe because all you do is yell and criticize.”
“It’s called ‘tough love,’ Berta!” Helen yelled as she leaned forward to gather all the stray cards. “If Jesus could bear it from his father, you people can handle it from me.”
Although it was apparent that no one was in the mood to play a game of canasta, out of habit Helen started shuffling and then dealing the cards around the table. Absentmindedly, Jinx stroked Lola’s fur while the cat napped contentedly in her lap. Until Jinx spoke, the only sounds in the kitchen were Lola’s purring, the snapping of the cards, and the water from the faucet as Alberta washed a few dishes that had been left in the sink. “How well did you know Jonas, Aunt Joyce? Other than the flavor of his favorite vodka.”
“Not very well, honey,” she replied. “Jonas
was a loner and kept to himself, but he could address every resident by their first name.”
“So he was kind of on the outside looking in,” Jinx observed. “Even though he had a front row seat to the show.”
“That about sums him up,” Joyce confirmed. “He was born and raised in this town, and like I said, I didn’t know him very well, but I don’t think he traveled farther than New York his entire life.”
“That doesn’t sound possible,” Jinx remarked.
“The most important thing I learned in the convent, Jinxie, is not to judge other people by your own experiences or desires,” Helen advised. “What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander.”
“Or the neighbor’s dog.”
No one responded to Alberta’s comment because no one understood it. But in the silence that followed her remark they were able to at least figure out where her non sequitur came from. In the distance they could hear a dog barking. The sound wasn’t the gruff, commanding bark of a guard dog or the excited, almost breathy, cry of a dog roughhousing with its owner, it was the annoying yelp of a dog that wanted nothing more than to be noticed. It was also a sound from Alberta’s childhood.
“Oh my God, Helen, that sounds just like Bocce.”
While arranging the cards she held in her hand in numerical order, Helen tilted her head toward the kitchen window so she could hear the sound better. After a few more yips from the clearly agitated dog filtered into the kitchen, the sound also transported Helen to the past.
“It’s not only the same pitch, it’s the same rhythm,” Helen confirmed. “One bark, then a pause, then two more barks. Always the same, like he was trying to tell us something that we would never understand.”
“Caro signore, I haven’t thought about that dog in years,” Alberta reflected.
“Maybe he’s come back from the dead to haunt us.”
Although they should have been used to it, Helen’s blunt comment caught the ladies by surprise. Even Lola propped up in Jinx’s lap, raised an eyebrow, and gave Helen a questioning look.
“Um, Aunt Helen, why do you think your childhood pet would return from the grave to haunt you?” Jinx asked.