by Mary Leo
“Hurry,” I told her, my heart pounding in my throat.
“What’s wrong?” Jade asked, while gazing out the back window.
“I thought I saw . . .”
“What?” Lisa asked, panic staining her voice. “Is somebody dead? A robbery? What the hell, girl?”
“Stop!” I searched the crowd for the man, knowing perfectly well that my eyes must have been playing tricks on me, but still . . .
“What are we looking at?” Lisa whispered.
“I don’t see anything strange, except maybe for that woman with the bright pink hair pushing her way through the crowd. Whew, but that’s bright,” Jade mumbled, annoying me with her chatter. “Like, I’ve thought of going pink, but that looks painful.”
“Be quiet for a minute. Wait,” I warned as I tried to spot that man again, but he was gone. Smothered by the tightly-knit group of tourists meandering around our shops. Nothing like a good local murder at Spia’s Olive Press to pick up business. My family had to be happy about that . . . the extra business, not the murder.
After a few minutes, Lisa said, “You want to tell us what you saw, or what you think you saw?”
“You guys aren’t going to believe this, but there was a man out there who looked exactly like my dad. I mean down to wearing what looked like Dickey’s pinky ring.”
“Are you sure? How could you see his ring from here?”
“I couldn’t. Not really, but something sure sparkled like his ring. But it can’t be. Right? I mean, my dad’s in Italy. Giuseppe said so. That’s why he’s on that six p.m. flight. That’s why we’re following him. Enzo Spia can’t be here. It was just some kind of weird mind game, right?”
“It has to be,” Lisa agreed. “He would never come back to this country, to this orchard knowing Nick and his team would arrest him in a heartbeat. It’s impossible.”
I settled back down in my seat, and let out the breath I’d been holding. “You’re right. He would never come back to the States, let alone to this orchard. He’d have to be suicidal.”
“Unless he had a really good reason,” Jade added.
“Like what kind of reason?” I asked, thinking she knew something that we didn’t. Both Lisa and I stared at her.
“What? I’m just sayin’ if he’s here, the reason would have to be, like, life or death, right?”
“Are you keeping something from us?” I asked her.
“Me? No.” She shook her head. “I don’t know anything, ya know? I’m just thinking out loud. And besides, it’s getting late. We need to hustle up if we’re going to make that flight.”
“If your dad is here, why would we be going there . . . to Italy?” Lisa asked. “Shouldn’t we find out for sure first?”
She had a point, but there was only one problem with her reasoning. “If we take the time to look for him in that crowd, we’ll absolutely miss our flight.”
“And we’ll never find Giuseppe if we miss his flight,” Jade warned.
I sighed, hating to make the decision. If I chose wrong, we would lose our one chance to find Enzo Spia. The cost to both Jade and me would be enormous. That guy I saw couldn’t be our dad, it just couldn’t.
“You’re right. He was simply on my mind, that’s all, so everybody’s going to look like him. He’d be mad to show up here, and if there’s one thing I know about my father, he is as shrewd as they came. How else could he have avoided getting arrested all these years? Coming back here would be suicidal. He wouldn’t do it, no matter what.”
“Right. Never going to happen,” Lisa said.
“Never,” Jade echoed.
“Onward,” I announced, twisting in my seat so that I faced forward once again.
“Onward,” both Jade and Lisa chanted, and we drove on.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far on the service road when something even more unbelievable stopped us dead in our tracks.
“What the hell . . .?” I mumbled, staring out of the windshield.
“Not again,” Lisa said. “Not now.”
“Holy shit!” Jade whispered.
TWO
A Bump In The Road
Lisa rolled the car to a stop about ten feet from the body lying in the middle of the private service road. None of us moved. I don’t think we were even breathing as we collectively stared out the windshield, completely mesmerized.
The person lying directly in front of us was obviously a man in an expensive tailored suit . . . an expensive gray tailored suit . . . wearing matching gray dress shoes, and striped pink and gray socks. Except for the colorful socks, it was typical Wise Guy attire and most certainly not a tourist. That said, the silver shade of his thick hair and his neat trendy attire didn’t fit any of the older Wise Guys I knew. Was he another import that hadn’t been introduced yet? I didn’t know, and resented the fact that someone had chosen the Spia orchard for their latest whack.
We couldn’t see his face clearly from the car.
My stomach lurched and sour bile bit the back of my throat.
The Spia family did not need another dead body. I thought we’d gotten past all of this murder stuff once we buried our ex-con cousin.
Silly me.
I should have known better: never trust a mob family to do the right thing, especially when the right thing involves whacking your enemies.
Three burning questions came to mind: Who in my family could have done this? Why? And who did the seemingly lifeless body belong to? Another long lost relative?
God, I hoped not!
Okay, so that was four questions, but who was counting at a time like this?
I realized we should have rushed to the aid of the person lying in the middle of the road, but having only very recently come off of finding a dead body and reliving all the chaos that hit had caused, wanting to jump right into yet another chaotic mess didn’t really light a fire under any of us. I, for one, wanted to run, not walk, in the opposite direction.
A horrible thought, but still . . .
And before I could even begin to figure out why a body might be lying in the middle of our service road and how the well-dressed body got there, I had to assume this find was going to put a severe crimp in our Italy plans. This was not how events were supposed to go, but then murder never quite fits onto anyone’s To Do List . . . unless of course, you’re the murderer . . . if, in fact, this was a murder.
“Like, maybe he tripped, you know? And the fall stunned him for a little bit. He’s going to get up any moment. It’s totally possible,” Jade said from the backseat, her voice sounding a bit shaky. “One of us should go out there and check on him.”
“One of us should,” I agreed.
“That would be the right thing to do,” Lisa declared.
But no one moved. We hardly even breathed.
If the person had been dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, we’d be on him like ants on honey, but a suit on a warm day like this, on a service road on this orchard could only mean one thing: One Wise Guy whacked another Wise Guy.
But perhaps I was getting ahead of myself. Perhaps Jade was right.
“Yep, he merely stumbled and fell,” I said, trying to sound all justified and right. “He’s going to get up, dust himself off, and be on his merry way.”
“And one of these trees will bear gold coins instead of olives,” Lisa mumbled in her own offhanded way. “Anything’s possible, but a whack is more plausible in the Spia family than gold-bearing trees.”
“Still, she might be right,” I countered, hoping against all reason that Jade was right.
Lisa leaned forward in her seat, back straight, hands locked in the new nine and three o’clock position on the steering wheel, according to the National Highway Safety Administration. I knew this because Lisa kept up on these types of things to add to her books and liked to share them with me whenever she had the chance. She was a walking survival trivia junkie. “Okay. Then maybe if we sit here long enough he’ll wake up.”
When we’d first decided on t
his trip, we agreed that nothing was going to stop us on our quest . . . except for maybe the dead guy in the road . . . which we hadn’t planned for.
I hoped with all my big-girl heart that was not going to be the case. This was simply a temporary setback and he’d get up at any moment, brush himself off and be on his gangster way.
“It’s possible,” I said praying my gut was wrong . . . entirely and absolutely wrong about this.
“Get up. Get up. Get up,” Lisa mumbled, ordering the guy to do her bidding. Unfortunately, he wasn’t listening.
Growing up embraced by a mob family I had an instinct for knowing trouble when I saw it, and this looked like big bad trouble with a capital C as in Cosa Nostra. Being continually surrounded by Wise Guys, a girl kinda knows when death and mayhem has occurred, and the horizontal tailored suit lying in front of us most definitely had that whole murdered vibe going on . . . but I still held out hope.
“Come on. Get up. Please get up! Please, oh please,” Jade prayed aloud from the backseat.
As cold and calloused as it sounded, we really didn’t have time for another whack. We had a plane to catch. We had an imported gangster to follow back to Italy. We had a father to find. We had places to be. People to meet. There was no room in our agenda for another dead guy, even if he was a relative . . . hopefully a very distant relative. One I barely knew or better still, one I’d never heard of before.
We sat in silence for what had to be a good two or three minutes, probably longer, listening to each other breathe, feeling the tension growing in our confined, albeit plush leather and polished wood space. If I had to wait for some sign of life from a seemingly dead guy, it was much more comfortable to do it from the front seat of a luxury BMW rather than my old pickup truck with the hard seats and the passenger window that wouldn’t quite close all the way.
“How long do you think we should wait for him to get up?” Lisa asked. “I mean, on the one hand, if he’s still alive we might be able to save his gangster ass. But on the other hand, the more practical side of me reasons that, as it is, we still have to pick up your Aunt Babe and we have less than three and a half hours to get to the airport, check our bags, and run to the gate for our flight. We’re already cutting it close even with TSA Precheck. I think we’re in big trouble no matter what.” She grabbed her phone that she kept in a charger attached to the dash. “I could just call an ambulance, give them the exact location, back up out of here and we’d be on our way to Italy as planned.”
Panic soured my normally straight-as-an-arrow thoughts.
“Not yet,” I told her. “My family really can’t afford another murder.”
“You’re talking like a gangster,” she countered. “What? Are we going to hide the body somewhere? Bury it under a tree? Put rocks on his feet and throw him in the nearest river? Just what are you thinking, exactly?”
“For starters, one of us should get out and see if he’s still breathing,” Jade said as she slid forward pulling on my seat to get closer to both Lisa and me. She was now perched between us, bony knees peeking out of frayed stretched denim, hanging over the center console. Jade dressed for our Italian odyssey in millennial trend: a stretchy, comfy-looking, hooded lime-blue sweatshirt, ripped jeans, and flats. An understated fashion statement if I ever saw one. Her blond hair fell around her face in soft swirls, as silver earrings dusted her shoulders.
Our first mistake was taking the service road on my family’s orchard as a shortcut to Aunt Babe’s in order to avoid the tourists who had come to our orchard for olive oil tasting, and to browse our shops. It was our busiest time of year, right after the harvest. The service road really didn’t get used very much except for deliveries, and anyone who lived on the orchard. Mostly this road was used during picking season, which had since passed. It should have been empty and it was, except for the man in the gray suit. We had taken this private offshoot road precisely because it was the most direct route between my apartment and Aunt Babe’s house, a two-story California bungalow that she shared with Aunt Hetty. They owned and operated Dolci Piccoli Bakery on the main street that we’d just passed.
“I hate to be the bad guy here, but I don’t think he’s breathing,” Lisa whispered, as if someone other than Jade and I might hear her.
“You can’t possibly know that from here,” I argued in a hushed voice, desperately trying to disregard the obvious.
“Like, I think she’s right,” Jade said, also whispering. “He hasn’t moved an inch since we pulled up. And I don’t see his chest going up and down like he’s actually breathing, ya’ know? Somebody needs to check.”
Lisa turned to Jade. “Since you suggested it, perhaps you’d like to be the one to do the checking.”
“Me? No, not me.” She shook her head and slid back in her seat. “I’m not going anywhere near him. Besides what do I know of dead guys? They scare me. I’m not used to all this dead body stuff. I’m new to this family, remember? I didn’t grow up in the mob, and just because I worked on Alcatraz Island doesn’t mean I know anything about the underworld, at least not the current underworld. I’ve been living a relatively sheltered life compared to you two. And, like, I don’t know what I’m even looking for. Mia should go. She has experience in this kind of stuff.”
“Me?” I balked in a hushed voice, thinking I didn’t want to go anywhere near another dead body.
After all, what did all those Mobster’s Anonymous meetings mean if we were still in the murder business . . . which we most definitely were not. “Lisa is the expert on dead bodies,” I said. “She knows exactly where to check for a pulse.”
“Just check his carotid artery,” Lisa coached.
“Like I know where that is,” I countered.
She demonstrated while she recited from one of her books. “To check for an accurate pulse one should place the index and middle fingers over the carotid artery which you will find next to a person’s windpipe just under the jawbone.”
Lisa liked to quote her own words whenever possible. I’d learned a lot from her quotes. Much easier than having to actually read any of her books.
“That means I’d have to touch him,” I reasoned. “Who knows how long he’s been lying there. He could be covered in bugs and worms by now and you know how much I hate bugs.”
The thought caused me to physically shiver.
“This is your family and your land,” Lisa argued, staring at me, looking all self-righteous while dressed in a fuzzy white sweater, skinny black designer pants and black leather boots that she’d told me she bought precisely for this trip. Her thick, silky black Asian-straight hair had been pulled back in a tight ponytail, and a beautiful hand-painted silk scarf draped her shoulders. Lisa always resonated good taste and class. “Bugs or no bugs, it’s your duty to learn the truth, and get him help if he needs it. The longer we wait, the less chance he has of survival . . . if he’s actually still alive.”
She had a point . . . but still . . .
Lisa had a way about her. She could gaze at almost anyone and with one simple look, along with a poignant sentence or two, make that person do whatever she wanted. It was her own form of the evil eye and I admired her for it, but I refused to fall under her spell this time.
“I don’t want to,” I protested, folding my arms across my chest, attempting a good pout.
“Either you go and check or I call an ambulance right now,” Lisa threatened, once again playing with her phone. “The clock is ticking. For his sake . . . and for ours . . . you need to check on him. He could be pulling in his last breaths while we sit here and argue. You could be a hero and save a life today. Wouldn’t all this be worth it if you were? His family will love you for it, not to mention how grateful the victim will be.”
I hated when she bullied me with compliments and logic.
The family business was just getting going again. Our shops and tasting room were more crowded than ever, but I didn’t think another murder would promote more sales. It may very well do the exact opposi
te, especially if an unsuspecting customer stumbled upon the body. That would most definitely not be good. All hell would break lose.
“Fine,” I said, unlocking my door then slipping out and leaving it wide open in case this required a hasty retreat. “But he’s probably an orphan gangster, so no one will care.”
I took a couple steps towards the body, and abruptly turned right back around, deciding they both needed to join me. If we couldn’t do this as a team, then how on earth could we possibly ever find Enzo Spia together? Either we had a united front or we didn’t, and if we didn’t we might as well fly off to Maui and forget about all this mob stuff.
I bent over to get a better look inside the car. “We have to do this together, exactly like we’re all going to Italy together to find my dad.”
“Our dad,” Jade corrected.
“Our dad,” I repeated. “This whole thing has to be a team effort or it won’t work.”
“I was never into team sports,” Jade said, stubbornly crossing her arms across her chest.
“Then I hate to say this little sister, but you can go right back to San Francisco because I can’t do any of this alone. If you want to find our dad, checking out dead bodies is part and parcel of the family business. If for some reason you thought it was all about olives, you’re under a tremendous illusion. It’s about our family of mostly recovering gangsters, and it all begins with us . . . namely you and me, and Lisa when’s she’s up to it . . . working together to keep them that way. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”
“Why does it have to be us?”
“Because no one else is willing to be the good bad guy.”
She sat there scowling for a moment, head down, looking all of eight years old. I understood her apprehensions, but no way could one of us opt out. I turned to Lisa. “And what about you?”
“I’m in. I’m in,” she said swinging her door open. “You made your point.” Then before she slipped out, she stopped to gaze back at Jade. “Think about your decision carefully, because if I know Mia, she’ll be really disappointed if you don’t join us.”
