Murder Alfresco #3 (8 page)

“Nice,” said Wade.

When they at last sat down, it was to a feast of leftovers, beginning with a winter gazpacho of Seville oranges, pine nuts, and paprika, and a platter of grilled asparagus with chopped hardboiled eggs in a marjoram vinaigrette, followed by lemon-rosemary chicken, a small portion of braised oxtail with leeks and carrots that had been unexpectedly popular that week, and, as the pièce de résistance, roasted spring lamb shoulder with potatoes au gratin, of which there was an ample supply since it had been unexpectedly unpopular all week. They opened a bottle of Skord Zinfandel to go with it.

Monty held up his glass. “Inky. Ninety-eight?”

“Ninety-four,” corrected Wade. “Nearly the last of it.”

“Holding up nicely.”

Platters heavy with food went around the table.

“There’s nothing like a spring lamb,” said Monty. “So tender, so succulent. A wee babe hardly weaned from his mama’s milk.” He held up a forkful admiringly before devouring it.

Sunny put down her silver. She was divided between feeling ridiculous for her new squeamishness about meat and feeling genuinely squeamish about meat. This was not a sensitivity she
could afford to develop. She took a sip of the potent red wine and loaded her plate with a second helping of mixed greens.

“I’ve been thinking about your murder,” said Monty. “In my opinion, it had to be somebody who worked at the winery.”

“It’s not
my
murder,” said Sunny.

“Otherwise there’s no way they would have risked being seen going there.”

“Anybody would have looked suspicious at two-thirty in the morning hanging a dead girl from a tree,” said Sunny, “whether they worked there or not. It’s not exactly part of the typical job description. But you can’t see much from the road anyway. It wouldn’t take much research to observe that you would have darkness and solitude at that hour. And it was a particularly dark night. There was just a sliver of a moon.”

“You think they planned it that way?” said Rivka.

“I think everything about this crime was planned,” said Sunny. She drank more wine. The astringent alcohol seemed to purify her mouth of the unpleasant topic. She didn’t want to talk about the girl, especially not in the middle of dinner, and yet, it was the topic on everyone’s mind, even her own.

“So what’s the connection to the winery, then?” said Monty.

“It has to be sexual,” said Sunny. “The message being sent was blatantly erotic. I would guess some kind of love triangle, but I can’t think of how that would lead to the girl’s death.”

“I’ve met the winemaker at Vedana several times,” said Monty. “A guy named Ové Obermeier. A clansman of Skord’s, I think.”

“Ové sounds Norwegian to me, not Swedish,” said Wade.

“Whatever. Viking type. Gives off a player vibe. Probably he was having an affair with the girl.”

“Why would that make somebody want to kill her?” asked Rivka.

“Maybe his wife killed her,” said Wade.

“I don’t think he’s married,” said Monty.

“You guys are missing the point. This was not a crime of passion. Nobody got angry, killed a girl on impulse, panicked, and decided to dump her at Vedana. This was a planned, calculated murder done by somebody with a serious screw loose. There may not even be a motive. What I saw was an act of evil.” Sunny picked up a spear of asparagus and ate it. “I just wonder if they can catch him.”

“What do they have to go on?” asked Rivka.

“I don’t know. They paid a lot of attention to the road, trying to get tracks from the truck I saw. Other than that, I don’t know what they found. Steve isn’t talking. The ground under the tree was moist but grassy, so I doubt they found much in the way of footprints, and rope and trees aren’t known for holding fingerprints. The most likely place for physical evidence will be the girl herself, I suppose, and I won’t know what they find there until they print it in the paper.”

“They’ll get him,” said Wade. “A guy like that wants to get caught. Somebody who sets up a scene like he set up is looking for attention.”

“I agree,” said Sunny. “And following that line of thinking, a guy like that will kill again, looking for another chance to make headlines. That’s what has me worried.” She bit the head off another spear of asparagus. “All I needed to do was look at the license plate and they’d have him by now.”

“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” said Wade. “You had no reason to believe you’d need to identify that truck later.”

After dinner, Rivka rifled through the CDs for Lester Young and the Oscar Peterson Trio. “This is a job for the President.”

Sunny took down a bottle of twenty-three-year-old Bas-Armagnac and four snifters from a cabinet in the living room.
They settled into the couch and comfortable chairs and listened to the perfect sounds: short, concise notes on the piano, guitar warm and sweet, bass like an easy heartbeat, the swirl of the wire brush, and Pres on tenor sax.

“The sound of New York City,” said Monty.

“In a hot club on a cold night,” said Wade. “Upper West Side.”

“In a silk dress and fishnet stockings,” said Sunny.

“With a bad man in a good suit,” said Rivka.

The kettle whistled and Rivka got up. She came back with a pot of mint tea sweetened Moroccan style and poured it into the colorful, intricately painted glasses Sunny kept for that purpose. She added a few pine nuts to each and handed them around. On the coffee table, she opened an assortment of white containers from the restaurant. There was a slice of Mama McCoskey’s Rum Cake, two bread puddings with caramel sauce, and a box of assorted tea cookies.

“Dessert is a little on the heavy side,” said Sunny. “I didn’t have time to get any fruit. The customers mowed through all the Meyer lemon sorbet. There was one panna cotta with a Riesling-poached pear left, but I sent it home with Heather.”

“Damn her,” said Monty. “I love the panna cotta and I love the Riesling-poached pear.”

“It was pretty good,” said Sunny. “The pears came out perfect. They were the color of that Armagnac.”

“Stop, I’m in agony,” said Monty.

“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to eat a meal at the restaurant once in a while,” said Rivka. “Then you could order whatever you want.”

“You mean pay? My god.”

Wade quaffed the last of the brandy in his glass like it was so much bargain-bin schnapps and leaned back in the old leather armchair. He put his feet up on the wooden stool that served as
an ottoman. “I don’t like it, McCoskey,” he said. “I don’t like you being here alone. I don’t think you should be alone at night until they nab this guy. In fact, it might be a good idea for you to come stay up at Skord Mountain until all this blows over.”

“That’s the problem,” said Sunny. “They may never nab him. I might know everything I’m ever going to know about that girl and whoever did that to her. I have to get used to that idea. I have to forget about the whole business and move on or I’ll lose my mind. It’s over, at least as far as I’m concerned. Now I just have to get back to normal.”

Rivka Chavez, who stayed the longest, had been gone for hours when Sunny heard the rumble of Andre Morales’s motorcycle pulling up outside the cottage. The first night they’d spent together started with a ride on that motorcycle, an old BMW with a cream-colored tank. The sound of it still gave her butterflies. He stomped up the front stairs in his boots, rapped his knuckles on the door, and came in without waiting for an answer. She put down the cookbook she’d been reading and watched him. He was wearing the biking leathers that smelled like pinesap and campfire smoke. He put his helmet and gloves on the table and held his hand out to her.

“Come with me, please.”

“Why did I have to find her?” said Sunny, tugging the tangles from strands of Andre’s hair. “I’m a magnet for death.”

“You’re not a magnet for death,” he said, turning over to face her. “You are just unusually observant. Anybody else would have noticed a truck went by and thought nothing of it. You noticed its lights were off, wondered what it was doing at the winery at
that hour, and spotted something different about the tree. I’m sure that that acute attention to detail leads you to many more good things than it does bad. It’s a positive trait that happened to get you into a bad place this time around.”

“Like chanterelles.”

“What do you mean?”

“I always spot chanterelles when nobody else sees them.”

“Exactly. Sometimes your eagle eye leads you to a mushroom, sometimes to a dead body. You have to take the good with the bad.” Andre stared at the ceiling. “Why don’t you take some time off? You haven’t had a vacation in a while.”

“I have to close the restaurant if I leave town, and I can’t afford to do that. We’re barely making ends meet as it is,” said Sunny.

“That’s because your business model is not economically viable. You need more revenue streams. You need to find ways to make money that are scalable and that can keep happening whether you show up or not.”

“I’m not selling Wildside T-shirts and coffee mugs.”

“They could be nice T-shirts and handmade coffee mugs. You could open for dinner service and weekend brunch. You could do a stand at the farmers’ market, branded gourmet products, a cookbook. All the stuff people do to make money. You need to grow. Your costs go up when you expand, but so does your income. And your profit margin expands with volume. Then you hire some people so you’re not a slave to the kitchen.”

“You’re singing Rivka’s song. She wants to open for weekends and dinner. She needs to make more money, and I can’t afford to pay her any more unless we scale up.”

Andre propped himself up on his elbow and rested his tiger eyes on her. “Both of you need to make more money. You can’t go on just scraping by forever, and you can’t keep doing everything
yourself. You’ll burn out. With Wildside the way it is, even as a resounding success, it’s still a failure because you’re not really making a living. You’re just getting by.”

“I make a living. I like my lifestyle.”

“Savings?”

“Later.”

“Investments?”

“Not in the monetary sense.”

“You can’t live hand to mouth forever.”

“Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“Is there ever a good time? I hate watching you work this hard.”

“You work harder than I do.”

“But I know it’s temporary. I have an exit strategy. I’m out one way or another inside of five years. And I make more money. You need a plan.”

“Let’s go back to talking about whether or not I’m a magnet for death. That was more relaxing.”

Andre got up at six-thirty
to play soccer. Sunny paced the house. Finally she called Wade Skord, thinking a trip up to the vineyard would clear her head.

“Coffee brewing,” said Wade. “And we’ve got bud break.”

She couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, pulling on jeans and grabbing a sweater on the way out. The drive up Howell Mountain did half the job, and the sight of the vineyard surrounded by forest did the rest. By the time she got out of the truck, the breathless, nerve-jangling feeling she’d woken up to was gone.

Farber, Wade’s cat, materialized to rub against her legs. He led the way up the stairs and onto the porch, where he had arrayed what was left of the night’s prey on the doormat.

“Present for you,” she said, when Wade answered the door.

Wade examined the unpleasant deposit. The head remained, and an assortment of red and blue entrails. “Wood rat, from the looks of it.”

He praised the cat and tossed the remains into the woods off the western edge of the deck, then led the way inside. “You’re up early for a day off.”

She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Do you think the killer is like Farber?”

“The cat? How do you mean?”

“Farber leaves the evidence for you to find so that you will know he is a good hunter.”

“He wants me to know he’s doing his job.”

“Right. He knows, or assumes, that you want the wood rats of the world to be torn to bits, so by letting you know he’s out doing your bidding, he builds favor with you.”

“And feels important. He likes to feel like a big shot.”

“Okay, but what if you were a wood rat yourself, or were simpatico with the wood rats? It would be a very different message.”