Dying on the Vine

laughed like that—from the archway. The woman looked up and, like some kind of quick-change magic trick, her scowl was replaced by a lovely if crooked-toothed smile that completely altered her personality and would have lit up the room on its own. “Luca!” she cried joyfully. She pointed at Gideon and then shook the finger at Luca. “You put them up to this, you scoundrel!” She was laughing almost as hard as he was, and her bare upper arms jiggled like Jell-O.

“Indeed I did, Amalia,” Luca said.

Indeed he had, Gideon thought. “And make sure to ask for the special menus,” he’d told them earnestly an hour earlier. “It will show them that you know what you’re doing, that you’re not just a bunch of dumb tourists who wandered in by mistake.”

It took a few seconds to explain to the others what had been going on, by which time everybody was laughing and was friends with everybody else. Amalia actually squeezed Gideon’s shoulder affectionately, a friendship offering. “I bring wine now,” she said in English.

“You have to stop doing that, Luca,” Linda said as they sat down. “One of these days, she’s going to dump a pot of pasta e fagioli on your head.”

“Yeah, thanks a whole lot, Luca,” John grumped.

Luca was still chuckling. “I can’t help it. I love to hear her do her symphony speech.” He went into an Italian-accent falsetto. “‘Do you tell the conductor what to play?’” A little more laughter, and then he sobered. “That lady, Amalia Vezzoni, is the finest cook I know, the finest in Tuscany. She’s my, what do you call it, my role model. In fact . . . well . . .”

“Oh, go ahead and tell them,” Linda said. “Why not?”

“Sure, why not? Well, the fact is, Amalia’s getting older now, and her husband, who used to work with her, died last year. So we’ve been talking about buying into this place, working with her—and learning from her—for a while, and then, when she’s ready to call it quits, buying the whole thing from her. Time for me to get out of Villa Antica, anyway. It’s not the same with Franco in the driver’s seat, and anyhow, it’s really food I’m excited about now, not winemaking. What do you think?”

Gideon couldn’t help glancing around the place. “Um—”

His expression gave him away. “Yeah, we know,” Linda said. “It’s a little tacky. Amalia’s kind of let the place go. We plan on putting some money into making some improvements.”

“But not too many,” Luca said. “We don’t want a fancy place, that’s not the point.” He leveled a forefinger at Linda. “And nothing changes at all in the kitchen.”

“Well, maybe some of those old cast-iron pots, the ones with holes in them?” Linda suggested.

“They can be repaired. No, the kitchen is beautiful, it’s like my grandmother’s, just five times as big. The sign out front will have to change, though. It’s going to be La Cucina di Nonna Gina.” With that happy thought, he settled back, smiling.

Amalia returned with a waiter and with two bottles of wine, six glasses, and a couple of baskets of crusty bread. Proudly, she held up one of the bottles for Luca to examine.

“Oho, Brunello di Montalcino,” he read. “From Mastrojanni. Wonderful. Is this what everybody’s getting tonight, or just us?”

“Shh, better not to ask,” Amalia whispered.

The waiter didn’t bother to offer him the cork to sniff or a dollop of wine to sip, but simply filled all six glasses, confident they’d be acceptable.

And they were. Luca raised his glass in salute after tasting.

“They wanted white wine,” Amalia told him, obviously an in-joke, but an indulgent one, like a story one parent tells to another about their child’s escapades that day. Luca smiled in response.

“So what’s wrong with white wine?” a pouting Marti wondered. “We’ve been to some first-rate restaurants in Florence and had no trouble getting a pretty damn good local pinot grigio, or a Soave, or—”

“Well, yes,” Luca answered, “it’s true you can get some ‘pretty damn good’ whites here, but Tuscany’s red wines are matchless. Its whites . . . can be matched. And Amalia, like me, is a perfectionist. As you’ll see shortly.” He dunked a crust of bread in his glass, popped the sopping chunk into his mouth, and rolled his eyes with contentment. “Ahh. So. Well. Gideon. You said you were going back to the funeral home to look at the bones again. . . .”

“Which we did.” He and John had spent two frustrating and ultimately unproductive hours with the remains. They’d filled their wives in, but not Luca and Linda.

“And did you come up with anything?” Linda asked. “Do you know what killed him? Any ideas at all?”

Gideon was surprised that they wanted to talk about it at dinner, but if they were game, he was game. Linda and Luca were technically suspects, but, perhaps unwisely, he had excluded them from his own list of possibles. “Not really, Linda. There are those green-stick fractures I was telling you about, but I’m guessing they probably came from the fall. Or put it this way: I have no reason to think they didn’t; they’re perfectly consistent with a fall from a height.”

What he didn’t tell them—why confuse things even more than they already were?—was that the fact that they were consistent with fall-type injuries didn’t mean they were inconsistent with ballistic-type injuries. When bullets hit long bones, or flat bones, or ribs, they didn’t necessarily make the nice, round, internally beveled holes that they made in the skull, and which were instantly recognizable as entrance wounds. Instead, they often just broke or shattered the bones, so they looked no different than bones that had taken some other kind of blunt-trauma hit . . . such as a fall. And Pietro’s remains had plenty of those.

“Nothing else, huh?” Luca asked. “No clues at all?”

“Afraid not, but look, you have to remember, there are all kinds of ways to kill someone without leaving any marks on the skeleton.”

“That’s true,” Linda agreed. “Poison, suffocation—”

“Well, yes, but even knives and guns. It’s not all that rare for a knife or even a slug to penetrate the heart without touching a rib or the sternum or the scapula or anything bony. So not finding anything doesn’t prove that there wasn’t anything.”

“But Gideon, I was thinking,” Julie said slowly, “if you didn’t find anything, doesn’t that mean it’s possible there wasn’t anything? That nobody killed him? That he just died from, I don’t know, a stroke, a heart attack. Anything. People die.”

“Well, yes, of course it’s possible, but if he died of natural causes, why shoot him a month later?”

“Why shoot him a month later if he died of unnatural causes?”

“And why kill Nola?” John asked her.

“And why throw them off the cliff?” Marti asked.

“Heck, I don’t know. Don’t jump all over me. I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t see that the experts”—an eyebrow-raised glance at John and Gideon—“are doing any better. In fact, for all we know, maybe killing Nola was the whole point of it, and making it look as if Pietro did it was a way of covering it up so—”

“If that’s what it was about,” Gideon said, “then I’d have to say it sure was convenient for the killer that he just happened to have Pietro’s dead body lying around just waiting for him. Talk about lucky heart attacks.” He began to laugh, but then caught a glimpse of Luca’s face. “Luca, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting. It’s your father we’re talking about. I shouldn’t be—”

Luca waved him silent. “Forget it. Time to change the subject anyway. Here comes our dinner. Get ready for the best that Italy has to offer.”

But Gideon found the five-course meal disappointing. There weren’t many Italian dishes that he actively disliked, but this meal had them all, starting with ribollita, the bread-thickened bean- and-cabbage affair that was somewhere between soup and stew, that you could eat equally well with a fork or a spoon. Then came a taglierini and truffle dish about which he had no complaints, but the main course of ossobuco—veal shanks braised in wine with tomatoes, carrots, and onions—was his least favorite Italian dish of all.

The others all seemed to love everything that was put in front of them (Marti passed on the ossobuco, of course, having two lip-smacking bowls of the ribollita instead), and after a while Gideon realized what his problem was, and why he’d never liked these particular foods. Nonna Natalia’s cooking reminded him too much of his own Polish-Austrian great aunt’s productions. The ribollita was blood-brother to her gluey cabbage and barley soup, and