Tantalize (4 page)

At the sound of laughter, I glared at my uncle in one of his typical Hawaiian shirts and his girlfriend in a plunging black dress. Then Ruby laughed again, louder, and everybody looked her way.

She hadn’t known Vaggio well, and she was a disturbing personality.

Ruby (not her real name, I suspected) Kitahara was a living vampire. Not someone infected with vampirism but a human, a wannabe who’d taken tartare too far. Uncle D loved her. Or at least she was the first woman he’d slept with for more than two consecutive weeks. “Woman” being a stretch. I was seventeen, and she was three, four years older than me. As for my baby-faced uncle, lately he might’ve been far from Mr. Maturity, but he was still pushing thirty.

Uncle D adjusted his shades and strolled over. “You ready to go?”

I shook my head. “I can catch a ride.”

“With Kieren?” He’d started treating Kieren like a potential niece defiler about the time we hit adolescence.

“Yeah.”

Uncle D gave me a hug and told me he loved me for the tenth time that day.

Once he and Ruby had left, Kieren joined me on the bench and introduced Daniela and Vaggio’s other lady friends, Celeste, Emilia, Gladys, and LaShauna.

After the initial shock, they’d taken the news of each others’ existence better than most women would, had decided to go out together for margaritas that evening. They all had something to say to me, too. “He loved you.” “Talked about you all the time.” “Light of his life.” “Pride and joy.” “Granddaughter he never had.”

I mustered up a smile as they joined arms to belt out “Strangers in the Night,” Vaggio’s signature song. His last gift to me, those women, and just when I needed them. It was funny, though, the things you didn’t learn about people until after they died.

Kieren and I stayed after Vaggio’s cousin Nancy had gone, kissing each of us on the cheek and promising that Vaggio’s sausage lasagna would be served after his formal funeral. We camped out on the bench I’d chosen earlier, watching the sun glint against the lake.

I felt guilty about the flashes of suspicion I’d had the night Vaggio died. After all, Kieren was half human, too, and I probably wouldn’t have suspected him at all if it had looked from the crime scene like the murderer was
Homo sapiens.

“Is it any less bad?” Kieren asked.

The grief, he meant. It was. Not better. But less bad.

“Quince, I hate to bring this up now, but there’s a chance the murderer might —”

“Don’t talk about that. Not here.”

“Where then?”

“It’s . . . I get that the police can only do so much.” I straightened. “When I go back to the restaurant, I’m taking Grampa Crimi’s .45 with me.”

I didn’t know how to hold a gun, let alone aim and shoot. But maybe I could use it to scare someone.

“No way in hell,” Kieren said, and that caught my attention. He wasn’t the one of us inclined to cuss. “Somebody could use it against you. And even if you were a trained sharpshooter, I don’t think a gun would help.”

God. “Could we talk about this later?”

“Quince, you’re just —”

“I’m scared, okay?” I broke his gaze.
“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Okay. “I love you, you know,” I said, by way of apology. A day like this, I could tell him, and it was less risky. More about us as friends.

His answer was to wrap his arms around me, bring my head to his shoulder, my side to his chest. Touching. He was touching me again. I could feel his breath, hear in it something that might’ve been a whisper, a “Yes.”

I
set the hammer beside my planner book on the hostess stand and hung Vaggio’s framed photo next to those of my parents and grandparents and the first dollar ever earned at Fat Lorenzo’s. There, I thought. The pictures didn’t fit the décor, but so what. No matter what we called the place or how we changed the interior design, this was still a family establishment. My family’s establishment.

Besides, it was a great shot. Vaggio grinning like a fool on his sixty-fifth birthday. It had been last fall, the week before Thanksgiving. I could remember him saying retirement was for wimps. I straightened the frame.

Sinatra himself had never looked better.

Vaggio’s murder had been almost a week earlier, his memorial service two days ago, and I could barely remember what life had been like before. It reminded me of losing Mama and Daddy. Everything’s good, or at least normal, and then, in an instant, nothing would ever be the same.

“Honey, don’t take this wrong,” Uncle D said, joining me in the foyer to study my handiwork, “but Vaggio — and you know how much I’ll miss him — wasn’t family. Not really. This is a nice gesture, but —”

“He was family to Mama and me,” I said. “And Daddy adored him.”

It was my big gun, invoking Daddy. I didn’t do it often.

“But Vaggio wasn’t blood,” Uncle D surprised me by insisting. “Not that it may matter anyway. After all that’s happened, we may be better off renting out the building to some other restaurant.”

“You can’t be serious!” I exclaimed, packing up the hammer and the rest of the nails in the toolbox. Granted, Uncle D had been under a lot of pressure before Vaggio’s death. It made sense that he felt overwhelmed now. But we’d already lost so much. No way would I give up the restaurant, too.

“Commercial real estate has soared on South Congress,” he argued. “Given the breakeven or worse prospects on Sanguini’s, it might be more profitable to collect the rent.” He moved toward the photo of my parents, touched the glass over Daddy’s face. “Besides, there’s so much to be done between now and the opening. Without Vaggio, I don’t know how I’ll be able to pull it all off.”

“I can help,” I told him. I’d always helped. Answered phones, took reservations, seated guests, bused tables, restocked, mopped, dumped trash, whatever. “
Really
help,” I clarified. “Like with management stuff. What do you need me to do most?”

I already had Frank, my day planner, open and ready to record to-dos.

Uncle D turned from my parents’ photo to study me for a long moment. “You’re sure this is what you want, to be entombed in this old place?”

“It’s home,” I said.

“Home,” Uncle D repeated. He thought for a moment and then snapped his fingers. “Well, for starters, I’m putting you in charge of the new chef.”

That was weird, I thought, especially since we didn’t even have a new chef yet. The whole idea sounded suspiciously like busywork, something to keep me out of the way. “Wouldn’t a chef already know what to do?”

“Hopefully,” Uncle D agreed. “But you’ll help him out, keep me posted on any problems. The chef is key to the whole operation. In the end, our future rests in his hands.”

Fine. I’d hover on Uncle D’s behalf, if only so he could concentrate on everything else. “But what about the relaunch, the whole Sanguini’s experience? I want something about the place to have my personal touch.”

Something to make Mama proud, I thought. She’d been a perfectionist, critical sometimes, but that was because she cared so much. She understood how her parents had sacrificed, coming from Italy, building their business from smarts and sweat. That’s why she spent so much time at Fat Lorenzo’s instead of at the house. She wanted to leave something for me.

“We’ll see what develops,” Uncle D said. “In the meantime, you’ll have to really buckle down. Stop running off with your friends so much.”

Kieren, he meant.

“S
anguini’s: A Very Rare Restaurant,” I mumbled into the phone, annoyed that another call had slipped through before I could figure out how to reprogram the automatic answering message. “Hello?” I glanced at the digital clock radio on top of the office desk. It was already a quarter till 7
P.M.
“Hell —”

“Good evening,” greeted an affected voice that sounded more like Count Chocula than Count Dracula. “I just flew in from Transylvania —”

“And your wings are so tired.”

Hanging up, I relaxed into the chair across from my uncle’s desk. The restaurant would debut at sundown Friday, September 13. That in mind, I winced first at the calendar — Thursday, August 15 — and then at the résumés spitting out of the fax machine.

“Anything promising?” I asked.

Uncle Davidson’s smile was a weary one. While I’d been fielding media, crank, and reservations calls, he’d been sorting the chef applications into piles: die-hard goths, fast-food rejects, one-year-plus unemployed, and some woman who claimed Vaggio’s ghost had appeared to her in a dream. Since we’d had no promising local applicants, Uncle D had posted the chef-wanted ad on a few free job-seeker websites, but he’d provided the restaurant fax number instead of requesting e-submissions.
Big
mistake.

“This one doesn’t look bad,” he said, holding up a piece of paper. “I’ll call his references and set up an interview.”

Ruby sauntered into the office, sporting, per usual, a sheer, long-sleeve black dress — feather neck and feather-trimmed sleeve cuffs — over a low-cut, laced leather bustier, black leather pants, and clunky, knee-high boots, each fastened with five oversize silver buckles. Her Morticia-streaked shiny black hair swung low to a microscopic waistline, and she’d gone heavy on the eyeliner. A deep violet, it clashed with her dilated green eyes.

The first twenty-four hours after Vaggio’s death, Uncle Davidson had put
her
in front of the TV cameras. Ruby had managed to pull off confident, in command, sensitive, and low-key creepy in a heartbeat. Hers had been the face on page one of the
Statesman,
the
Chronicle,
the
Cap City News, USA Today,
the recurring clip on CNN. When coiffed heads from Concerned Mothers for America’s Children victim-blamed us for Vaggio’s murder on round-the-clock cable news, Ruby was their prime example of “the demented freaks swarming our cities.”

A lone murder in a southwestern college town wouldn’t normally have merited national coverage. But toss in the restaurant’s theme and the fact that this was the state capital . . . They were calling it “The Texas Vampire Murder.”

I’d been doing all I could to tune out the coverage since the first time I’d heard the words “medical-legal autopsy.”

“Guess what,” Ruby said with childlike delight.

“What?” Uncle D indulged.

“Some guys have set up a table out front. They’re asking people to sign a petition giving amnesty to killer vampires.”

“They’re what?” I asked.

When the
Chronicle
first reported Sanguini’s would have a vampire theme, we’d gotten a couple of concerned calls from BADL (the Bat Anti-Defamation League). Austin was home to the world’s largest urban bat colony, and BADL had been worried about possible PR fallout. Like we’d ever besmirch the city’s most treasured eco-mascots. The point being, political activism was huge here, but this was ridiculous.

“They’re outside our front door?” Uncle D wanted to know.

She nodded like it was the niftiest thing ever.

Sprinting from the back office, down the hall, I followed my uncle past the restroom doors and kitchen door, through the crimson velvet curtains, across the dining room, and through another matching set of curtains to the foyer to pull back a final set of curtains that hung in front of the painted black door. Overkill, designed to tap into the popular idea that sunlight destroyed vampires. No more than a myth, Kieren had told me once. False comfort. In any case, a small, beveled, oval-shaped window had been cut into the door. Uncle D and I took turns peering through it.

Six, no seven, young melanin-challenged guys dressed in black long sleeves, long pants, and shades were perched on the sidewalk in foldout lawn chairs beneath black umbrellas, drinking what I hoped was cherry Kool-Aid out of clear plastic cups. A card table had been set up in front of them. It was so stupid. So incredibly disrespectful.

It would serve them all right if they had heat stroke.

“If this keeps up,” Uncle D said, “the other merchants will start bitching. They’re already nervous.”

The neighborhood association had asked for more of a police presence, and in the past few days, I’d spotted more bicycle officers and squad cars than usual.