by Nadia Gordon
Sunny hesitated. Behind her hostess, an effusive green lawn faced a pool as blue and inviting as the sea. An enormous avocado tree stood twenty or thirty feet tall, towering over one end of the backyard. It was covered with large, glossy leaves.
“Well, to start with,” Sunny said, “do you know what Jack might have been doing on Mount Veeder last Wednesday night, late?”
Larissa made a sour face. “I have no idea. I did not keep Jack’s daily calendar.”
“Does he have friends who live up there?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Lots of people live on Mount Veeder.”
Sunny shifted in the cold chair. It was getting dark; soon it would be too cold to sit outside comfortably. The patio was an interesting choice of venue for a meeting at this time of day, no doubt designed to ensure a speedy consultation. She said, “Did you know he flew to Los Angeles at the last minute that morning for business?”
“No, but that wouldn’t have been unusual. Jack traveled a good deal, often at the last minute, and he didn’t exactly make a habit of keeping me informed. We saw each other maybe once or twice a week. I have—I had—no way of monitoring his whereabouts at all times when we were apart, nor did I have any particular interest in doing so.” There was more than a hint of bitterness in her words.
“When Jack died, he was wearing a tuxedo. The two of you had been together that night, hadn’t you?”
“Yes, he was here at the house. I always put on a formal cocktail party to celebrate crush. There were sixty or seventy people here when Jack left. I’ll never do it again now. Now it will always be the night when Jack was shot.”
“Why did he leave?”
“His cell phone rang and then he said he had to leave for an urgent meeting.” She looked at Sunny with exasperation. “He did not say who he was going to meet or where or anything else about it. The police have been over this a dozen times.”
“Did you expect him to come back?”
She smiled bitterly. “I learned a long time ago not to expect anything from Jack Beroni. It was better that way.” She stubbed out the cigarette in a glass ashtray on the table and extracted the pack from the pocket of a jacket draped over the chair beside her. She tapped out another and put the pack on the table, angling it at Sunny. Sunny shook her head. Larissa struck a match and went on, holding the tiny flame at the ready. “Jack had a particular loathing of expectations. Wasn’t his style.”
Sunny waited while she drew on the cigarette. “Is that why you never got married?”
She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Oh, but we did, just not legally. I was reminiscing about that just before you telephoned. We were married on a sailboat in the Marquesas years ago. By a displaced Jamaican priest we’d picked up in Tahiti. Defrocked, of course.” Larissa held a thin, pale hand up for Sunny to see. A diamond ring of the sort found in piñatas and candy machines sat on her ring finger. When Sunny looked up, she almost thought Larissa would cry. The next instant, the steely mask came back over her face. “That was years ago. We were terribly, terribly in love, like kids. Or at least one of us was. I was very young.” She smoked, studying Sunny. “How much have they told you? Not much, I’d wager. The phone call Jack received here at the party, for example, did you know it was made from the phone booth outside the Dusty Vine?”
Sunny tried not to look surprised. “When exactly was that?”
“About ten o’clock.”
The Dusty Vine was a little honkytonk bar a few miles from Wade’s place where the locals drank beer and played pool. “I assume nobody saw who it was?”
“Not as far as I know, but I’m sure they’ll find someone. If they can get hold of someone who will say it was your friend, they’ve got him.” Larissa pulled on the cigarette and exhaled, smiling. A middle-aged maid in a black-and-white uniform walked by the sliding glass door to the patio, lingering at the opening. Her black hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. Larissa turned to Sunny. “Would you like something to drink?”
Sunny declined. Larissa shook her head and the woman went away.
Sunny said, “Had Jack ever met anyone at the gazebo before? It seems odd.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Why wouldn’t he meet the person at his home?”
Larissa shrugged with a resigned smile.
Sunny said, “I’m sure the police have asked already, but did Jack have any enemies? Anybody who was angry at him? Failed business deal? Argument? Maybe there was a recent event that might have upset someone?”
“I’m sure plenty of people wanted to kill Jack at one point or another. He was powerful, and he had enemies. All powerful people have enemies. Jack made it worse by cultivating them.”
“Anyone in particular?” asked Sunny.
“No, no one in particular,” said Larissa. “I thought for a while it might have been that old idiot Nesto Campaglia, but he doesn’t have the nerve.”
“Nesto? Why?”
“Boss’s son versus boss’s right-hand man. The usual rivalry.”
“There has to be something. Was Jack into anything new? New business, hobby, sport? Recent trip somewhere unusual?”
Larissa shook her head.
“Anything unusual at all about the days or weeks before his murder? Anything at all perplexing about his behavior?”
“Nothing. As far as I could tell, Jack was as he has always been. Elusive, opaque, secretive.”
Sunny studied her. She seemed to be seething with bitterness and sorrow. People sometimes reacted that way when a loved one dies. She’d seen it in her family when her uncle passed away. The people close to him were overcome with grief, with the exception of his wife, who was raging with anger at him for leaving. Sunny took a deep breath. “You and Jack were together for several years. How would you describe your relationship?”
Larissa stared at her calmly and smoked. Her green eyes were like turquoise stones. Jack would have stared into those eyes on so many occasions, thought Sunny. This face with the white skin and the gemlike eyes was the one he knew best and loved least, if Sunny guessed right.
Sunny said, “I mean, did you see other people?”
Larissa gave her the bitter smile again. “Jack was a serial polygamist. He was always seeing other women. He couldn’t help it. He fancied himself a connoisseur, I suppose.”
“Do you know who he was seeing recently?”
Larissa stood up and paced the patio—imported slate, from the look of it—and plucked at the dead leaves on a nearby lilac bush with short, fierce little motions. Her red hair picked up the last of the evening sunlight beautifully. At last she said, “I don’t really know. I had my suspicions. I thought that he might be trying to rekindle an old high-school romance. It’s crazy, but that’s what I thought. He was talking a lot about his high-school days, very idealistically. Whenever Jack fell in love, he would idealize the woman’s life. If he was sleeping with a ballerina, suddenly the most glorious art form in existence would be dance, and he’d talk about it all the time. If she was a florist, it would be all about ikebana. He’d buy a dozen books on flower arranging and stay up all night reading about the natural history of the tulip. He couldn’t help himself. I think this time it was a sort of early midlife crisis, an attempt to return to the warmth and security of his adolescence. He wanted to reclaim his innocence.”
“His high-school girlfriend is still here?”
“I think so.” Larissa turned and stared at Sunny. Judging by her disapproving look, Sunny surmised she was expected to leave now. She stood and they walked back through the house to the front door. Sunny thanked her for her time. On a whim she threw out one last question: “Who is Michael Rieder?”
“Mike? He’s Jack’s attorney.”
10
The last of a whipped orange-and-gold sunset dissipated as Sunny drove toward Gabe Campaglia’s place. He was about the same age as Jack, which meant they would have gone to high school together. There was no point in going to a private school i
n St. Helena, when the local high school looked like an Ivy League spa and had a better reputation for academic excellence than most colleges. Gabe would probably know who Jack’s sweetheart had been.
It took close to an hour to get up the valley to Gabe’s house, and by the time she arrived at his place, she was feeling the heaviness of the long day. It was almost a relief to see that the cottage was dark and Gabe’s truck was nowhere in sight. She turned around and headed home.
There were plenty of cars on the highway—the usual wine country assortment of farm trucks and midrange family cars belonging to the locals, the European sedans of visitors, and the occasional racy sports car of the successful vintner. She wasn’t sure when she first noticed a particular set of headlights behind her. It was more that she became gradually aware of them, perhaps because they stayed constant while all the others sped past, fell behind, or turned off. For miles, one set of headlights was always one or two vehicles back. When she hit town, she turned down Adams Street, then took a left on Adelaide. As she made the turn, she saw the flicker of another car’s headlights turning onto Adams behind her. She slowed, then stopped and waited for the car to pass by on Adams, feeling slightly paranoid. She was surprised when it didn’t go by. They could only have parked or turned down one of the other two streets between Adelaide and the highway, neither of which supported many houses. Either it’s nothing, she thought, or I’m being followed. She made a slow U-turn and parked in front of her place. She couldn’t see anything other than elm trees and a few lights on inside each of the houses. She thought of walking up to Adams and checking to see if anybody was sitting in any of the cars parked along the street. Then she thought how she was letting her mind work on her, feeding her unsubstantiated fears. Tomorrow would start very early; now she needed to get some sleep.
Inside, she locked the door just in case and closed all the curtains. She mixed some granola and plain yogurt for a rare stand-up dinner and headed for the bedroom. The window stood open and she walked over to close it, then changed her mind. The night air this time of year was too nice to shut out just because she felt spooked. She changed into sweats and a T-shirt, took a quick peek under the bed out of old habit, and crawled between the sheets, falling immediately asleep.
Two hours later she opened her eyes suddenly. Her muscles were tensed and she had the definite feeling that a sound had woken her. She lay still, her heart pounding, listening. She heard only the creak of the house settling, the occasional scuff of dry leaves moving under some ripple of breeze, a tiny creature scurrying in the backyard. She told herself she was letting her mind obsess over Jack’s murder. She was letting fear shake her. She rolled over and wiggled until she was comfortable, determined to go back to sleep. Her left hand hurt. It was throbbing and felt hot. She turned onto her other side, conscious of where she put her hand and the throbbing. Her arm ached as well. She listened again, straining to pick up a footfall or the scrape of a door opening. On the third rotation in bed, her mind began to turn over a growing collection of questions. Who had dropped Michael Rieder’s business card? Could Larissa have hired someone to kill Jack? Why did Jack Beroni stay with Larissa? Who will inherit Beroni Vineyards when Al and Louisa die?
It was no use, she couldn’t sleep. She opened her eyes. Quarter to twelve. She stretched out flat on her back, then got out of bed and changed into jeans and an old sweater. If she couldn’t sleep, at least she would do something productive. Sunny attempted to convince herself that sleeping at night was an essentially arbitrary tradition and that it was merely the rut of habit and closed-minded thinking that kept late-night baking from being the norm. It really was the nicest time of day to bake; perfectly quiet, plenty of elbowroom in the kitchen. To prove her point, she decided to go down to the restaurant and work on replacements for Rivka’s missing cookies, maybe even simmer up a batch of candied orange peels. It was better than tossing and turning in bed and trying not to think about things. Baking, with all the gooey and powdery textures and the warm smells, had always been the best way to unwind when something was bothering her. When she got home she would be so tired, she would sleep like a baby, at least for a few hours until it was time to go back to work. Best not to think of everything that had happened. The thing to do was focus on the cookies.
The jangle of the front-door bells as she left the house broke the silence of the sleepy block and started a chain reaction of dogs barking. Sunny crept out through the front yard to the truck and shut the door softly. There was no avoiding the roar of the engine, which to her sounded loud enough to wake every creature for miles. She flipped on the headlights and froze a pair of raccoons skittering across the pavement. They stared into the high beams with guilty faces, then hotfooted it into the shrubs between two houses. Sunny drove out to the highway. Not long after she’d turned south toward Wildside, a pair of headlights appeared in the distance behind her, the only other car on the road. Its sudden appearance was odd, because that stretch of highway was perfectly straight for a couple of miles in either direction and there had been no cars in sight when she pulled out. It must have come from a side road, like she had, without her noticing.
At the narrow, bumpy road leading to Wildside, Sunny turned off, crossed the railroad tracks, and drove slowly toward the parking lot, keeping tabs as much as possible on the highway. She stopped and killed the lights, watching the highway in her rearview mirror. No cars passed. She pulled into the lot and cut the engine, rolled down the window, and listened, watching through the trees for the glow of lights on the highway. A car passed in the opposite direction. After a while, she got out and walked up to where she could see the road directly. There were no headlights. The crimson taillights of the car that had just passed receded toward Mount St. Helena, but the other car had vanished. She walked back and let herself into the restaurant. She switched on the lights.
Even with its stainless-steel racks and the industrial rubber mats on the floor, the kitchen looked inviting. How could the car have vanished? Vanished, she thought, chastising herself, is an overly dramatic description. The car had simply turned off the highway, or pulled to the side and turned off its lights, or turned around and gone in the other direction. There was nothing sinister about any of that. How often had cars followed and then disappeared before without her notice? She was nervous and her imagination was running ahead, unimpeded by good sense. It was even possible, assuming the worst, that the car had never been there in the first place and she was losing her mind. The hallucinations of a crazed insomniac baker. Of course, there was one other possibility: Someone was following her.
She took three balls of chilled hazelnut dough out of the walk-in and left them on the counter, then reached for the wire citrus bowl from a shelf and selected eight oranges as bright as Wade’s correctional institution jumpsuit. At the sink, she scrubbed the wax off their skins. Someone had followed her home. At least she’d had that feeling, even if she hadn’t actually seen the car itself, only lights. If someone really was following her just now, that meant they had been waiting and watching her house. Somebody was losing sleep making sure they knew where she was day and night. It could be Steve Harvey or some other cop keeping tabs on her. She quartered the oranges and peeled away the fruit, then put the rinds on to simmer in a skillet of water and started making a replacement batch of cookie dough. The smell of oranges filled the room.
Rubber gloves protected her injured hand from the acid of the oranges but did nothing to make mixing stiff dough less painful. Each time she turned the heavy dough, the spoon cut into her palm where she’d fallen. There was a power mixer a few feet away, beckoning. She always struggled with the belief—difficult to verify absolutely—that the electric mixer robbed dough of a certain nameless quality. She stopped to strain the orange rinds, cover them with cold water again, and put them on to simmer a second time. She turned the cookie dough a few more times, the wooden spoon forced painfully against her palm, and then brusquely dumped the mixture into the electric mixer’s trough
and hit the switch. The contraption roared to life, producing smooth and even dough in less than a minute. Too smooth and too even, thought Sunny. It was boring dough, lacking the complexity of idiosyncrasy. On top of it, or perhaps more to the point, the sound had raised the hair on her neck. That sound just gave anyone creeping about outside the opportunity to move around without being heard, even open a door or a window. That sound had just made her all the more vulnerable. The cooling unit on the walk-in clicked on, blanketing the room in low noise that would surely drown out any stalker’s footsteps. Baking was not proving to be restful.
Sunny found an open bottle of Bandol red up front and poured herself a generous glass, thinking, Get a grip, McCoskey, it is ridiculous to let yourself get all spooked. You are a grown woman armed with a cook’s razor-sharp cutlery and an arsenal of modern industrial kitchen appliances. And so is anyone else in this building, countered her subconscious. She went back to the kitchen and shaped the new cookie dough into three neat balls, wrapped them in cellophane, and stored them in the walk-in, being careful not to startle herself by catching sight of her reflection as she passed by the windows.
She grabbed the chilled dough off the counter and dusted a board and rolling pin with flour. She was letting her imagination take over. No one was following her; no one was watching her. She rolled the dough flat, ignoring the pain in her hand, and began to cut autumn-leaf shapes with a butter knife. Sunny was very good at cutting autumn-leaf shapes, and normally this would be her favorite part of any day at work. She looked at the clock and went to take the orange peels off the stove to cool, then continued rolling and cutting. Assuming that there was only one guilty party responsible for Jack’s murder, then the events of Thursday night were relatively easy to guess. At around ten o’clock, the killer stops at the Dusty Vine and uses the pay phone out in the parking lot to make a call to Jack Beroni’s mobile. Jack answers and hears something compelling enough to take him away from his girlfriend’s party in the middle of the evening to a secret meeting in a dark and secluded place. A few minutes later, he leaves the party and drives home, probably directly. He walks down to the gazebo and waits, growing impatient, even annoyed. He lights a cigarette. Meanwhile, the killer has stashed her—or his—car on the old logging road neatly hidden from view. She tucks a pair of gloves in her pocket and walks to Wade’s place. When she arrives at the winery door, she pulls out her gloves and puts them on, not noticing that she has dislodged a business card she was recently given. Knowing at least vaguely where to look, she finds Wade’s gun, takes it along with the case, and makes her way overland to the lake at the base of Beroni Vineyards. She waits. With the moon shining, the night is almost too bright for her purposes. She spots Jack walking down the hill, his white shirt picking up the moonlight like neon. She can even see the light hit his polished shoes. She waits, watching. When she is ready, she lifts the rifle to her shoulder and settles her eye to the scope, sliding the crosshairs over the scene until they come to rest on his heart. She knows better than to second-guess a shot. She exhales, steadies her aim, and pulls the trigger.
