Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  It came as a relief when this gloomy line of thought was cut off a little before noon by the noisy return of Luca’s group, back from their culinary travels. It had been the last event of the class, so there were hugs and good-byes and e-mail address exchanges all around. Gideon gratefully shut down the laptop and went out and found Julie and the Laus, who were talking longingly about taking a break from serious food and wine and finding someplace—a bar, maybe—where they could have a non-Italian lunch. Not that there was anything wrong with ambitious Italian food, of course, but enough was enough. They needed a little time off.

  “Good luck finding someplace non-Italian around here,” John said, then brightened. “But there’s this great pizzeria—”

  “Ah, but there is a place,” Gideon said, breaking in. “I was taking a walk this morning”—on one of his frequent breaks from Assessing the Extent of Genetic Admixture—“and I went right by what claims to be an English-style pub and looked like one to me. Says they serve lunch, English beer—”

  “Ploughman’s lunch!” Marti cried, grabbing his arm and shaking it. “Take me there! At once, do you hear? At once, I say!”

  “I could sure stand a shepherd’s pie,” Julie said dreamily. “And an English ale.”

  “They have hamburgers in pubs, don’t they?” John asked.

  • • •

  AND so they headed off to the Gate House Pub on Piazza Serristori, a small square that fronted the Teatro Garibaldi, the town’s nineteenth-century opera house. From the outside, it did indeed look vaguely like an English pub, and once through the door it smelled like one too: a cozy, comforting mix of old pipe and cigarette smoke, floor polish, and decades of spilled ale that permeated the splintery wooden floors and probably the chairs and tables as well. There was another aroma they couldn’t place and didn’t associate with pubs, but it was appetizing enough, and in they went.

  Behind the bar were a broad-backed woman in a black, spaghetti-strap dress and a burly man with a black T-shirt and a dense but neatly trimmed black beard, both of them busy serving up beer. The burly guy looked up from pulling on one of a dozen pump handles, quickly marked them as Americans, and waved them in with a grin. “Hello, Yanks, what I can do for you?”

  John happily took in the rows of quaint, colorful, indubitably English pump handles. “You can send over four pints of that Old Speckled Hen, por favor.”

  “Half pint for me,” Marti amended.

  “And some menus, please,” said Gideon.

  The place was only half full—everyone else was Italian, as far as they could tell—so they had no trouble finding a table. They chose one in a niche, under a wall hung with old ad posters for Pears’ soaps and Triumph motorcycles, and scattered black-and-white photos of matronly Victorian ladies, including Victoria herself. They had barely sat down when the beers came, in traditional, dimpled glass mugs.

  They all raised a silent toast and sipped, except for John, who glugged down a long contented swallow, then studied his glass. “Interesting. A toffee-and-forest-mold foundation supporting leathery after tones with a blackberry edge—”

  “He’s been at Villa Antica too long,” Marti said. “We’ve got to get him home.”

  “I saw that once in England in a beer ad, and I memorized it,” John confessed. “Been waiting forever for the chance to try it out.”

  “So what do you really think of it?” Julie asked.

  “S’okay.”

  The day’s menus were delivered by a second guy in a black T-shirt, not quite so burly, and with a slightly smaller black beard. Brothers, Gideon thought. One look at the menus explained the smell they couldn’t place: it was a mixture of jalapeños, salsa, guacamole, and fried tortillas. No Scotch eggs, no shepherd’s pie, no ploughman’s lunch, neither in the air nor on the menu. They had come on a Monday, and Mondays were il Pranzo Messicano days. For English food, come back tomorrow.

  Their disappointment lasted about two seconds before they started poring over the menus, which were in English and Italian.

  “Anybody want to split a fantasy salad?” Marti asked. “Feta cheese, olives, radicchio, tomatoes, cucumbers . . . sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  All she got back from the others were brief, contemptuous glances before they returned to their studies.

  Gideon was deciding between a couple of dishes when his phone bipped. It was Rocco, starting out in high gear. “Hey, listen, I just got the damn—”

  “Hold on a second, Rocco, I can hardly hear you. Let me take the phone outside.” He stood up. “It’s Rocco. Be back in a minute. Order me the beef burrito, will you?”

  There was a raucous, impromptu, four-man-team soccer game going on in the piazza, but he found a relatively safe place at the edge of the square and stood in the scant shade of a lone tree, next to a marble-slab bench.

  “Okay, Rocco, I’m back. You just got the damn what?”

  “The lab report on Cesare, and also the—”

  “Whoa, whoa, you got that two days ago. You already told me about it.”

  “No, not that report; the report on the cocaethamethawhatever. And they—”

  “The cocaethylene report? How could you have that already? The request just went in yesterday.”

  “Yeah, you keep saying that. Look, what you gotta remember is that we don’t have all those murders you got in the States, you know? Our lab isn’t all booked up for weeks and weeks. They do a lot of sitting around. They appreciate it when we give them something.”

  “Still, it’s unbelievable. In one day? I didn’t even think it was possible. I thought it only happened on TV.”

  Rocco let go a noisy sigh. “Are you gonna shut up and let me say what I want to say? I don’t have all day here.”

  “Speak. I’m all ears.” The soccer ball had come rolling his way, and he gently kicked it back to the players.

  “Thank you. Okay. Here’s what it says. . . . Umm . . . I don’t know, milligrams, kilograms . . . but the upshot is, now they’re saying the primary cause of death isn’t cocaine toxicity anymore, it’s coca . . . coca . . . what you said.”

  “Cocaethylene toxicity. Son of a gun.”

  “Yeah. But the manner of death is still undetermined, no change. So I get them on the phone—this was, like, ten minutes ago—I get them on the phone, and I say, What am I supposed to do with this? What’s it mean? Why did you send it to me instead of the public prosecutor? And they say, Hey, all we do is analyze the blood sample. You’re the ones who figure out what it means. You ordered it, don’t you know? Except that I didn’t order it—”

  “Uh, yeah, Rocco, that was me. I tried calling you yesterday—”

  “I know, Tonino explained it to me.”

  “It wasn’t his fault, Rocco, I—”

  “I know, I know, he’s not in any trouble; he does it all the time, don’t worry. But he doesn’t know why you wanted it either. So how about telling me now? Why did you ask for this particular test? What does it mean?”

  Gideon sat down on the bench, his thoughts tumbling.

  “Gid?”

  “I think it means,” he said slowly, “that you do have another murder on your hands, all right. And now we’ve got some solid evidence to back it up.”

  Cocaethylene, he explained, was a toxic metabolite that was formed in the liver when cocaine and alcohol were taken together and which subjected both the liver and the heart to enormous stress; many times more stress than was produced by alcohol or cocaine alone. Some studies indicated that the risk of death as a result of cocaethylene formation was twenty-five times greater than the risk of death from cocaine alone.

  “So Cesare was drinking, along with snorting the coke, is that what you’re saying?”

  “As far as I know, that’s the only way that cocaethylene gets made.”

  “So where did the alcohol come from, Gid? There wasn’t any booze on the nightstand. There wasn’t any in the whole apartment. No wine, no cordials, no bottles in the garbage, nothing.”

 
; “That’s because he didn’t drink, Rocco. Ever. He knew better. Linda told me he once had a friend who died from mixing the two. Which is why we can assume that if he had any alcohol in him—and the cocaethylene proves that he did—he didn’t drink it knowingly.”

  “You’re losing me again, buddy. If he was doing coke and alcohol at the same time, how could he not know it? And where did the alcohol come from? You’re saying whoever did it took it away with him?”

  “No, I’m saying it was right there on the nightstand.”

  “The nightstand?” Gideon could practically hear Rocco’s forehead wrinkling. “What, the cough medicine? No, that was Giorniquilla. I know that stuff. No alcohol.”

  “Rocco, I also asked Martignetti to request an analysis of the contents of that bottle. That didn’t come back yet?”

  “I don’t think so. Just a minute.” A clatter indicated the phone had been put down, and Gideon heard just bits and pieces of what ensued. “Hey, Tonino . . . did we . . . ? Well, why the hell didn’t you . . . ? Let me see. . . .” And then he was back, speaking directly into the mouthpiece again. “Gid, there was alcohol in it—twenty-five percent. You want to tell me what the hell is going on here, please? And how you knew about it?”

  “I didn’t know, Rocco; I guessed.” But it was a masterful guess—a masterful series of guesses, really—and he was feeling highly satisfied with himself.

  The idea had come to him the previous morning at breakfast, when the literal meaning of Giorniquilla had belatedly dawned on him. Giorni, of course, meant “days,” and quilla was probably from tranquilla, so Giorniquilla was a medicine that would quiet your cough and give you “tranquil days.” Well—and here was where the guesswork started—if there was a cough medicine for quiet days, might there not be a variant of that medicine for quiet nights? And if there was, might that variant contain alcohol, as some American nighttime cold medicines did? And, if luck was on his side, might that medicine taste much like the daytime version, or at least enough so that someone wigged out on cocaine might not notice the difference? Might it even look like the daytime version?

  And it had all panned out; for once in his life, every guess had been right. Dormiquilla—“tranquil sleep”—was made by the same company; had very much the same tongue-curling, acrid taste (with a bit more “bite”); was the same color (the labels were sharply different); and had the same ingredients, in the same proportions, except for the addition of etanolo—ethanol; pure alcohol—which accounted for twenty-five percent in volume.

  So how hard would it have been for someone with murder in mind to purchase a bottle of each, empty the Giorniquilla bottle, and pour into it instead the alcohol-laden Dormiquilla version? Answer: not very. And once in Cesare’s apartment, switching it with Cesare’s current bottle could have been accomplished in an instant. Once that was done, death wouldn’t have been long in coming. Gideon himself had seen Cesare take long guzzles of the stuff twice inside ten minutes. Certainly, he’d downed a good six ounces in that time alone.

  Assume he was going at it at anywhere near the same rate at home. Twenty-five percent of six was 1.5. And 1.5 ounces of pure, one-hundred percent alcohol was the equivalent of two one-ounce shots of eighty-proof whiskey; surely enough, when consumed in a short time in combination with the reckless ingestion of cocaine, to trigger a fatal cocaethylene explosion. Gideon was way out of his field here, so, to be certain, he had called his friend Dave Black, a clinical prof at Vanderbilt who was his go-to person in matters toxicological, and had been told that that much alcohol would create more than enough cocaethylene to do the trick, especially in someone whose constitution was already compromised by his drug habit. That had been good enough for Gideon.

  “I don’t get it,” Rocco said. “Why get all tricky and futz around like that? Why not just shove the guy out of a window? He lived on the third floor—what you call the fourth floor. He’d have gone splat when he hit the piazza.”

  “I assume it was because whoever it was figured it might raise suspicions, what with the suit and everything else.”

  “And he didn’t think a doctored bottle of cough medicine would raise suspicions?”

  “Well, it didn’t, did it?

  “Well, no, not at the time, but—”

  “And the reason it didn’t is because everything—the circumstances, his history—pointed to a simple cocaine overdose. I mean, it was practically expected, sooner or later. And since cocaine toxicity and cocaethylene toxicity kill you in exactly the same way—the heart has to strain so much to pump blood that it decompensates; it just gives up and stops working; heart failure, in other words—well, on account of all of that, there was absolutely no reason to suspect anything other than a plain cocaine overdose. No reason to test the cough medicine any more than a carton of milk he might have had in his refrigerator.”

  Hearing something like a mutter from Rocco, he added: “Nobody did anything wrong here, Rocco. Not the doc, not the lab, not you. Anybody would have drawn the same conclusion: death by cocaine poisoning.”

  Rocco was unmollified. “Anybody but you, of course,” he grumbled. “Nothing gets by the great Skeleton Detective, does it?”

  “What can I say? What’s true is true.”

  Rocco laughed, and his voice eased up. “You’re really something, you know?”

  “If that’s a compliment, I accept it. What about your end of things? Anything interesting happening?”

  “Nah. Well, yeah, a few things. For one, we turned up a two-page list of passwords that he had at the back of his freezer.”

  “Passwords? For Web sites?”

  “You got it.”

  “So he did have a computer.”

  “Exactly. And whoever took it didn’t know about it—more likely didn’t think about it. He’s got some kind of code for what they’re for, but the passwords are clear enough, and Tonino’s busy deciphering right now and putting in every single one. We got his e-mail address from Franco, so it’s easy enough.”

  “And? Anything?”

  “So far, no. Bank accounts, airlines, discount travel, that kind of thing. But he just got started, so we’ll see. I have hopes. Oh, and he’s been going over those account statements we got from Severo too—”

  “You keep the guy kind of busy, don’t you?”

  “Sure. Idle hands, you know? Besides, I’d have to do it if he didn’t. Anyway, one of the bills was from a private eye Pietro hired. Guess who Nola was screwing around with.”

  “It’s somebody I know?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Rocco couldn’t see him, but Gideon shook his head anyway. “I can’t think of anybody.” He laughed. “Severo Quadrelli?”

  “Now how the hell did you—?”

  “It was Quadrelli? I was just kidding.”

  “No, it was him, Don Juan Quadrelli. Pietro hired the PI to keep an eye on her while he did his hermit thing in the mountains. The guy took less than forty-eight hours to get the goods on them. Called Pietro on his cell phone on September second, one day after he got up there.”

  “Huh. Are you going to inform the family?”

  “Not unless there’s a reason to. I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same. We told the PI we’d keep his name out of it.”

  “Sure. What purpose would it serve anyway?”

  “That’s the way I see it. Oh, and we also heard from Pietro’s doc; there was a bill from him in the accounts. Now, this is interesting. Pietro had a heart condition.”

  The ball had rolled Gideon’s way again, and he kicked it back, but he was processing what he’d just heard, and it wasn’t a very accurate kick this time. The players had to chase it farther than they would have had he not interfered, and he took some verbal abuse for it. “Now that is interesting,” he said. “A bad heart?”

  “Yup. ‘Patologia cardiaca coronarica,’ it says.”

  “Coronary heart disease. Hardening of the arteries.”

  “Right. Pietro himself kept it quiet, no big deal, bu
t it was serious, and it’s been serious for a while. That was why he started taking his sabbatical in early September a few years ago instead of at the end of the month. The doc wanted him away while all the craziness was going on. But, you know, Gid, this brings up a question. . . .”

  “It sure does. Was it a heart attack that killed him? Did the call from the PI bring it on? September second; that would be about right for the time of death.”

  “Yup, I’m thinking it went down like this: Here’s this old, sick guy with a bad heart. He gets a call from his PI telling him his wife is definitely cheating on him. He grabs his chest and falls down in a heap, and that’s it. Never moves again.”

  “Could be.”

  “So, pardon me repeating myself for the thousandth time, but . . . why shoot his corpse in the head and throw the body off a cliff a month later?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “WHY . . . and who?” Marti asked when Gideon had finished telling them about the call and they were done expressing their astonishment at identifying Quadrelli as the lothario in question.

  He’d returned to the table after hanging up and had found them finished with their meals and drinking coffee. His own food wasn’t out yet. Julie had correctly assumed that his “Back in a minute” was more hopeful than realistic and asked them to hold his burrito until he returned.