A Saucy Murder: A Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mystery

by A. J. Carton

  “Was there any sign of violence, a struggle? Anything at all that you noticed?” O’Hara asked.

  “Well,” Barry hesitated, “not violence. She’d thrown up a little. And it was on her face. That gorgeous face.”

  Officer Bates gestured towards the corpse which the medical examiner’s team was preparing to load onto a gurney. “There was no sign of vomit on the victim’s face when you laid her on the stage, was there?”

  “Oh,” Barry dismissed the officer’s statement. “Of course, I cleaned it off. I had my napkin still in my hand. So I wiped her face. She wouldn’t have wanted people to see her like that, poor darling. I wiped that beautiful face and wiped up some of the vomit that was on the ground. Thank goodness nothing got on her dress. She’d have hated that.”

  “And what did you do with the napkin sir? Can you show it to us?” Bates asked.

  Barry shrugged. He looked dazed. “Oh that. No. I rinsed it in the irrigation ditch when I was done. Before I picked up her body. As a sign of respect. You know. Then I threw the napkin back in the water.”

  He looked at the officers, imploringly. “You won’t say anything about the vomit, will you? It just sounds so…so vulgar, demeaning. Like that fat Mamma Cass choking on a ham sandwich. Or Lenny Bruce dying on the can. Who needs to know? It’s embarrassing. Who wants to remember someone that way? Especially Natasha. She was an angel. That’s how her fans should remember her. Pure as an angel.” He looked at the policemen. “You won’t mention the vomit. You promise me. You must promise me.”

  When the officers didn’t answer, he continued in an angry voice. “I should have known not to tell you. It was so little anyway. Natasha ate like a bird. It was red. The vomit was red. You know. From that sauce. That garlicky red sauce on the spaghetti. Why did Sergio serve that anyway? Wouldn’t a salad have been better? I guess they thought they had to serve Italian food because of the opera. Now my little songbird is dead!” He broke down completely in uncontrollable sobs.

  The speech sent tidal waves of panic through Emma’s body. Had she heard that right? Was Barry Buchanon blaming Natasha Vasiliev’s death on her salsa di pomodoro? In an instant Emma’s world collapsed.

  She couldn’t dwell on her personal tragedy for long, however. Seconds later, Vera Vasiliev threw herself at the policemen screaming something about a ring. It was only when she calmed down a little that Emma understood what she was saying.

  “Officer, I need to show you something. Before you put my sister’s body away. Come here quickly.” Vera grabbed Officer O’Hara’s hand and dragged him to the gurney that the medical examiner’s staff was wheeling towards a van.

  “Look.” She unceremoniously tore the cover off her sister’s body. “The ring. Where’s the ring?”

  The medical examiner quickly stepped forward. “I’m sorry Miss?”

  “Vasiliev,” Vera answered. “I’m the twin sister. Natasha was wearing an emerald ring tonight that matched her eyes. It was here on this finger.” She grabbed the dead woman’s right hand and showed them the empty fourth finger. “Now the ring is gone.”

  “Look Ma’am,” the medical examiner answered, glancing at his staff for corroboration. “When we first examined the body, there was no ring.”

  The staff members nodded. No one remembered a ring.

  By then, Vera had attracted a small crowd of listeners, including Lexie Buchanon who materialized out of the shadows. She stood near Vera listening intently.

  “I didn’t see any ring on the body,” Officer Bates concurred.

  O’Hara nodded in agreement. “Will you describe it please?” he said.

  “It was big, a big brilliant emerald, almost exactly the color of her – of our eyes. Four carats. The shape of a robin’s egg. And it was set in what looked like a nest of pavé diamonds. It was one of a kind. Custom,” Vera added.

  “You mean like this?” Lexie Buchanon stepped forward, raising her right hand to display a sapphire ring, the huge stone roughly shaped like an egg sitting in a nest of pave diamonds. The sapphire blue appeared to match the blue of Lexie’s eyes.

  Vera stared at the ring. Surprise flickered for just a second in her eyes before she said calmly, “Yes, it looked like that. Only green. Natasha’s had an emerald in it.”

  Emma watched Lexie direct a glance at her husband sharp as a dagger. He turned away.

  “Ms. Vasiliev, are you sure your sister was wearing the ring tonight?” Bates asked.

  “Yes. I am absolutely sure,” Vera replied.

  “Anyone else see the ring on the victim’s finger tonight?”

  A few people raised their hands.

  Then Chiara Bruno stepped forward. “I definitely saw it,” she stated. “I saw the ring on her finger when we were having our tarot cards read. Then I noticed it again when she sang her aria. She wore it on stage.”

  “Tarot cards?” O’Hara repeated. “You had tarot cards read tonight? Who read them? Was one of those gypsies here? We’ve had trouble…”

  He stopped talking, seeming to think better about revealing too much.

  Shortly after Vera’s discovery of the missing ring, the questioning resumed in the Buchanon’ kitchen. As Emma feared, based on Barry Buchanon’s narrative, the police focused their attention on the red sauce.

  After identifying himself as the chief caterer and owner of one of Blissburg’s top restaurants, Sergio took the brunt of the interrogation. Unfortunately, neither of the officers seemed aware of Sergio’s stellar reputation in culinary circles. They focused on the kitchen, eventually finding a large box of rat poison stuffed in a broom closet. “Use this a lot?” Bates asked Sergio.

  “No,” came his terse reply. “My kitchens are always impeccabile.”

  O’Hara shook his head. “What does that mean?”

  “Cleanissimo,” Sergio explained.

  “So nothing made you get out the rat poison tonight, right? You might as well tell us the truth. We’ll check the box for fingerprints.”

  “Never touch the stuff. Never need to,” Sergio explained. “Everything in my kitchen is pure, clean.” He glanced pointedly at Emma, as if to say it was all her fault for dropping that spoon. “I have never had a sanitation violation in my life. You can check with the health department. Besides,” he added. It was nothing more than Emma expected. “She made the pasta sauce, not me.” He pointed to Emma.

  “Did you use any rat poison tonight, Ms.?”

  “Corsi,” Emma answered. She was sweating bullets and she knew everyone saw them. “I didn’t use any poison of any kind. Why would I?” she asked.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Julie standing at the back of the kitchen giving her the hatchet sign. Cut it.

  What? Was she being too defensive?

  “I was trying to sell my cookbook not sabotage it,” Emma explained. “The recipe is in the book. Tomatoes, garlic, parsley, onion, butter and olive oil. No poison.”

  “But an extraordinary young woman is dead,” Barry Buchanon shouted from the back of the room. “Dead after eating your sauce!”

  Chapter 4: Saturday Early Morning - Doubts

  After the policemen dismissed them, Julie and Piers walked Emma back to her car. Emma had hoped for support from her daughter and son-in-law after Barry Buchanon’s shameful outburst. She got silence instead. Were they blaming her sauce for the disaster, too? She wondered but couldn’t bring herself to ask.

  Piers opened her car door for her. “Are you sure you’re OK to drive home? We can drop you off and pick up your car here later. Come to think of it, Emma, why don’t you just spend the night with us? I’m pretty creeped out by what happened.”

  Emma shook her head. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  Julie was more practical. “Mom’s right, Piers. Let’s not exaggerate. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for what happened to poor Natasha. Maybe she had an undetected heart defect. Maybe she fell and hit her head. Maybe she had an allergic reaction.”

  To my sauce, Emma felt
like adding, but didn’t.

  “There is no reason, yet, to jump to creepy conclusions,” Julie said.

  “What about the ring?” Piers asked. “The stolen ring?”

  “The ring is probably lying in vomit in the vineyard where she fell,” Julie replied. “I bet it turns up tomorrow.”

  Emma marveled at Julie’s ability to rationalize things. At least no one mentioned her tomato sauce. But as Julie and Piers walked away, deep in conversation with each other, Emma worried that they were thinking about it. Along with most of Blissburg.

  Nonetheless, after checking the locks on the front and back doors, and locking all the windows, Emma put on her nightgown, went to bed, and quickly fell asleep. She was exhausted after the long day’s work. But four hours later, in the middle of the night, she awoke to the full comprehension of all that was now at stake.

  To begin with, one of the brightest rising stars in the world of opera was dead after eating her salsa di pomodoro. Forget book sales. Face it, Emma told herself, no matter what happened next, her career as a food writer was over.

  And it struck her full force that that was the very least of what had happened that night. More importantly, that poor young woman was dead. Her twin had lost her sister. Perhaps, though no one spoke of it, somewhere in Russia a father and mother mourned the loss of their child. Undoubtedly, others had lost a lover. Fans had lost a diva. The world had lost a voice that uplifted the hearts of millions of people.

  Was it possible, Emma wondered? Was there any way at all that she, Emma Corsi, had caused the woman’s death? Was there something on the counter, something in the tomatoes? She knew she should have used canned, but her grandmother always said to use fresh if they were in season. Something in the olive oil? Something in the pan?

  Unfortunately, in the middle of the night, at the very heart of her own inner darkness, Emma believed that maybe there was. That maybe she was responsible for the tragedy because she, like Icarus, had presumed to fly too high. What was she thinking writing a cookbook anyway? Puss Carleton was right. What was someone like her doing writing a cookbook like that?

  Emma pulled the covers over her head and started to weep. And just when she thought she couldn’t sink lower, another catastrophic thought entered her brain, and another. And finally a third. The worst one of all.

  First of all, what about Julie? Would her business ever recover from such a fiasco? Buchanon Vineyards was her best customer. Forget that. What other winery in Sonoma County, in all of California for that matter, would hire Julie to do PR now?

  Then the second thought hit her. What about Piers? Would his clients leave because his mother-in-law managed to ruin Buchanon Vineyards and send a promising young star to her grave? What would Julie’s family live on if Piers’ practice went belly up? Thank goodness for that trust fund, Emma thought.

  That’s when she realized that even the trust fund wasn’t safe. What if Natasha’s family sued her? Or someone else got sick and sued? Legal bills would eat up all her savings and perhaps even Piers’ trust fund, too. Oh why, she wondered as the clock struck four, why had she ever presumed to write a cookbook?

  Emma must have finally drifted back to sleep. When she woke up, the Blissburg sun was shining. She got up, put on her fleece muumuu, went downstairs and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee. What happened to Natasha was terribly tragic, but by light of day, like Julie, Emma was sure there was a good explanation. One that had nothing whatever to do with her pasta sauce. One that wouldn’t destroy her daughter and bankrupt her son-in-law.

  Then she opened her front door to pick up the Blissburg Herald, and the two-inch headline brought her crashing back to earth.

  “FAMED SOPRANO DIES AFTER DINING WITH THE STARS.”

  The article didn’t even mention Emma’s cookbook, but the allusion to its title in the headline was impossible for anyone to miss.

  At lunchtime, Julie called to make sure her mother was all right. Emma, who’d gone back to bed, decided not to answer her cell phone. That only brought Julie knocking on her door. Julie’s office, after all, was in Emma’s front yard. She brought roast pork sandwiches with onion conserve from their favorite bakery, Claud’s.

  Julie took one look at her mother standing in her muumuu at the front door, and went on a rampage.

  “Mom, you’re not even dressed. You look defeated. Why aren’t you doing something? You know perfectly well that nothing in your wonderful pasta sauce killed Natasha Vasiliev.” She paused a moment for a reply. “Well, don’t you?”

  “Of course it didn’t.” Emma had been through it a thousand times in her head. “Everyone at the party ate the pasta and no one else got sick.” She too paused a moment. “Did they?”

  “Of course not, Mom. We all ate it. We’re fine.”

  “So,” Emma continued, motioning to Julie to follow her into the kitchen, “she must have died of natural causes. An undetected illness or allergy. Like you said last night.”

  “Yeah,” Julie nodded, “except Piers called the coroner this morning. They know each other from the Chatham Club. Based on the preliminary results of the autopsy, it does not appear that Natasha died of a heart attack, or a blow to the head, or some weird allergy. The toxicology report will take about ten days. It probably won’t be ready until next Tuesday. But as of now it looks like she died from some kind of poison.”

  They had sat down to eat on two kitchen stools, facing each other across the butcher-block counter of Emma’s remodeled-to-look-like-an-old-farmhouse-kitchen.

  “You mean…,” Emma hesitated. “Let me get this right. You mean the coroner thinks she was murdered?”

  Julie nodded. “Probably by someone at the party. The problem is, the coroner can’t prove that for a couple of weeks. In the meantime every day that passes will give this town more time to mess with your story. People will joke about it. You’re a sitting duck. ‘Soprano Dies after Dining with the Stars.’ Mom, it’s just too good to pass up. I mean, I might have had fun with it myself. If I weren’t your daughter. And in the meantime, because of you – and I don’t mean that I think it’s your fault, Mom – but because of you my customers are calling to cancel their accounts. Piers has already lost a client. Granted, it’s a Buchanon relative who was at the fundraiser, but the valley is crawling with them.”

  “Piers has already lost a client?” Emma cringed.

  “Yes! The media is having a field day. I hate to say this, but the embarrassment with Dad’s arrest didn’t begin to affect us this much. Some people even thought the arrest was kind of sexy.”

  “Julie,” Emma was too angry to cry. “I can’t believe you would dare to make that comparison. I am the victim here.”

  “Funny, that’s just what Dad said.”

  Emma felt like someone had punched her in the stomach. She hugged herself like she was about to fly apart. Then she said. “OK. What exactly am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Simple,” Julie answered. “Find the killer.”

  “Find the killer? Me? You’re joking,” Emma scoffed.

  “I’m dead serious, Mom. Piers and I are willing to jump in to help you. But you need to track down the murderer before that toxicology report comes out. Because by the time it does, your career, my career and Piers’ will be down the tubes.”

  Emma took a deep breath. It was not the way she had envisioned beginning her so-called retirement. It seemed, however, that she had no choice. She rolled her eyes. “Right. I’ll find the killer. How do we begin?”

  To Emma’s surprise, Julie and Piers had already thought this through.

  “We make a list,” Julie began. “A list of anyone we can think of who could be the murderer. Then we divide up the list and, one by one, we start checking them out.”

  “OK,” Emma replied. “Who are your suspects? Off the top of my head I can think of two: Lexie Buchanon the jealous wife, and Chiara Bruno the understudy. Both of them had something to gain by Natasha’s death. And if poison was the murder weapon, I’ll
bet a woman did it.”

  “Oh, come on Mom.” It was Julie’s turn to scoff. “That’s sooo Italian of you. Anyway, of course we thought of Chiara. She had the most to gain from the death. She’s the understudy. She just got her first big break. Singing opening night in Trovatore. But why Lexie Buchanon?”

  “Because of the ring,” Emma exclaimed. “Didn’t you catch all that stuff about the ring?”

  “No, I missed it. I could see Lexie was mad about something, but what?” Julie asked.

  Emma explained. “When Vera described the supposedly custom emerald ring missing from Natasha’s finger, Lexie raised her hand to show off the identical ring with a sapphire to match the color of her eyes. Who do you suppose gave it to her? Her husband, Barry, duh. So who must have given the same ring to Natasha? Lexie’s husband, Barry! But that little four carat bauble isn’t just a thank you for a great night at the Opera, honey. That is a thank you for singing naked on your back in someone’s - Barry Buchanon’s - bed!”

  “Stop!!!” Julie cringed, covering her ears with her hands. “Stop it Mom. The visuals. I can’t take it. Not out of your mouth. You have to stop talking like that!”

  “Don’t you see?”

  “Mom! Again. Stop! I see. Lexie is definitely on the list. Her husband was probably cheating on her and she was jealous.”

  “So who did you come up with?” Emma asked.

  “Well, based on what you just said, why not Barry Buchanon?” Julie replied.

  “Barry? No way!!!” Emma shook her head. “He was heartbroken. Didn’t you see him? Distraught. Sobbing. I don’t think so.”

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Neither do the police. Did you see how careful they were with him? All the more reason he could have done it. He knows the police will stay off his back.”

  “But why?” Emma asked.

  “Because Natasha must have had other lovers,” Julie answered. “Like Sacha. He was all over her at the dinner table. So Barry was jealous and killed her. Who knows how? Maybe he did one of those Kevorkian injections. Something that looks like a heart attack. He’s rich. He could get hold of anything. And then he cleaned up the evidence. You heard him say he wiped off Natasha’s face and then rinsed his napkin before throwing it away. Afterwards, of course he was distraught. Who wouldn’t be, killing your favorite songbird. Personally, I think Barry did it, but Piers won’t agree.”