by Nadia Gordon
nadia gordon
death by the glass
a sunny mccoskey napa valley mystery
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped with the creation of this book, especially Judy Balmain, who read and commented on drafts as they were written. Further thanks to Dorian Asch, Rebecca Carter, Dave Chapman, Derek Chen, Patrick Comiskey, Dale Crowley, Kelly Duane, the folks at Longmeadow Ranch, Lauren Lyle, Erin McMahon, Lore and Maya Olds, Norm Ross, and Jonathan Waters, who variously shared their input, expertise, good company, and opinions on topics from vintage port to police procedure. While their assistance has been valuable, any errors or oversights in the text are entirely my own. I am particularly grateful to my editor, Jay Schaefer, for his patience, insight, and ongoing support. —NG
Copyright © 2003 by Chronicle Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Though Napa Valley and the adjacent regions are full of characters, none of them are in this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, places, persons, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Gordon, Nadia.
Death by the glass : a Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley mystery / Nadia Gordon.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8118-4180-4 (hc) — ISBN 0-8118-3678-9 (pb)
1. Napa Valley (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Wine and wine making—Fiction. 3. Restaurants —Fiction. 4. Women cooks—Fiction. 5. Cookery—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O594D43 2003
813′.6—dc21
2003009591
Manufactured in the United States of America
Book and cover design by Benjamin Shaykin
Cover photo by Untitled/Nonstock
Composition by Kristen Wurz
Typeset in Miller and Bodoni 6
Distributed in Canada
by Raincoast Books
9050 Shaughnessy Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V6P 6E5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chronicle Books LLC
85 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94105
www.chroniclebooks.com
For Josephine
“He had a weak point—this Fortunato—
although in other regards he was a man to
be respected and even feared. He prided
himself on his connoisseurship in wine.”
—The Cask of Amontillado,
Edgar Allan Poe
The last of the wait staff did rock, paper, scissors to see who would take Nathan Osborne home. Nick Ambrosi, the bartender, lost. Now he stood outside the restaurant and waited, watching his breath. It was past midnight and cold, the clear night sprayed with white pinprick stars. He could hear Osborne inside talking loudly, ranting about some culinary detail that had offended him, and the soft murmur of Dahlia Zimmerman’s voice as she coaxed him to put his arms through the sleeves of his coat so she could button him up.
“If she’s so concerned, why doesn’t she take him home,” muttered Nick to himself. Half an hour round-trip at least, he figured, and that wouldn’t put him in bed until after two. He let out a sigh of disgust. After a minute, the door swung out and disgorged Nathan Osborne into the night.
Nick had already pulled the car around. The Mercedes was idling, its diesel engine purring like a sewing machine. Nick held the passenger door for his boss and closed it after him, then went around to the driver’s side. He pulled out of Vinifera’s parking lot and headed toward the hills that overlooked Yountville. A sliver of moon lit the way.
“Morales is going to fucking ruin me,” said Osborne, puffing as he settled his briefcase and groped for the seat belt. “He’s trying to destroy my restaurant.” He waited for a response but didn’t get one. “Who eats Moroccan food, anyway? Who wants to eat Moroccan food?”
“Moroccans?” said Nick.
“Nobody comes to Napa Valley to eat Moroccan food,” said Osborne dismissively. “We’re supposed to be in Provence. Or Tuscany. Nobody in Napa wants to eat preserved lemon rinds and couscous.”
“You’re sure about that?” said Nick, tapping his ring on the steering wheel. “Seems to me Andre knows what he’s doing.”
“Is that what they’re teaching you at that phony college of yours?” said Osborne. “How to run a restaurant?”
“Hire the best and then let them do their job. Isn’t that what they say?” said Nick. “You did the first part right.”
“Mafia,” said Osborne. “You’re all organized against me. That whole staff is like a mafia, with its secrets and its little cliques. I see you with your looks behind my back. I ought to fire every last one of you. I’ve been in the food and wine business for twenty years. Twenty-five. And I have to fight every one of you on every decision.”
Nick looked at him and turned up the volume on the stereo.
“What is that?” said Osborne.
“Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
Osborne ejected the CD and tossed it in the backseat. “Have you seen next week’s menu?” he said.
“I saw it.”
“And?”
“I think it’s genius, like always.” Nick shook his head, smiling. “You keep badgering him like he doesn’t know how to run his kitchen, and one of these days Andre Morales is going to get fed up and walk, and you’re gonna have no one to blame but yourself. That is not going to be a pretty day.”
“It’s a mafia,” muttered Osborne, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “I have been run out of my own restaurant.”
Osborne’s breathing deepened, and after a pause he started to snore.
Nick felt the sedan take charge of the curves leading into the hills. It wasn’t all bad driving Osborne home. At the turnoff to the house, Nick lowered the window and punched the key code into the pad by the gate. It buzzed and swung open, and Osborne snorted awake. They drove up the driveway in silence. At the house, Osborne climbed out and waited while Nick opened the front door and switched on the lights, setting Osborne’s briefcase down inside. Osborne moved slowly. His legs were bothering him again.
“Damn gout,” he said, puffing.
“What about the car?” said Nick.
“Put it in the usual spot. I’ll call tomorrow when I need it.”
After Nick left, Osborne rested his briefcase on the counter and removed the bottle of wine, running a finger over the label. His movements slow and steady with reverence, he circled the lip of the foil with a knife, then inserted the corkscrew, being careful to set it precisely enough off center to accommodate the twist. He pulled the cork and took down the decanter, then changed his mind and put it back. It was too late to bother with formalities, and besides, a little sediment wouldn’t hurt him. He poured himself a glass and went into the living room, taking the bottle with him. The same Chet Baker album had been on the turntable for a week and he was getting sick of it, but he started it anyway, too tired to make a new selection.
He sat on the couch and drank, then poured himself another glass. He would have expected more sediment from a Burgundy that old, but you could never tell about these things. Every wine was different. Could be the sediment was all stuck together along one side or at the bottom, depending how long it had been standing up. He held up the bottle to see, but the room was too dark. He set it back down and put his feet up on the coffee table and his hands on his belly, trying to relax. Andre Morales took life too se
riously. He couldn’t wait to be famous, as if that would change anything. He already had everything a guy could want. Osborne thought of what it would be like to be young and handsome and unaware that one day life might be lived in a state of more or less constant pain.
He tried not to think about anything and just listen to the music. The sound of it both lulled and excited him. How could anybody be sick of Chet Baker? Especially when he was playing “Tenderly” the way he did that first time he recorded it in Paris. It would have been around 1955. Baker was what, twenty-five at the time? Younger? Just a kid in Paris with his trumpet.
He poured another glass of wine. When he himself had been twenty-five, he was island-hopping and hanging out in Greece and Key West, and on a little strip of sand and palm trees his girlfriend found just a short boat ride off Samoa. That was some kind of place. Osborne’s head grew pleasantly foggy as he drifted into the past.
After a while, a funny feeling came over him and he came back to the present. He couldn’t quite place the feeling. He put down his glass and looked around the room as though he expected something to happen. The lamps seemed to flicker and his eyes widened with fear. He gasped once, gurgled, and slid down off the couch. Just that quickly, Nathan Osborne was dead.
PART ONE
Faux Finish
1
Sunny McCoskey had a nose for wild mushrooms. That morning she’d spent four hours collecting a bagful of fresh chanterelles from her favorite spot. Now they sat on the passenger side of her pickup, filling the cab with a smell like damp leaves.
She rolled down the window to let in the cold air. The afternoon sky was a low, velvety gray. It was winter in Napa Valley and the hills were carpeted in new grass, the grapevines bare, yellow sprays of mustard between the rows. She hit fourth gear and the truck sailed down Highway 29, rocking gently on its old shocks.
At Yountville, she turned off and in a couple of minutes pulled into the parking lot of Vinifera. Banging her door shut, she went around to the passenger side to collect her knives, uniform, and bag of mushrooms. The parking lot was mostly empty. Near the front, parked under a tree, was a Mercedes sedan the color of vanilla ice cream. A black 911, too new to have license plates, sat nearby showing a tease of cherry-red disk brakes through the silver wheel covers. At this time of day, they had to belong to the owners, maybe the chef. Sunny peeked in the window of the 911. Could this be Andre Morales’s car? She shook her head. She’d made her choices, keeping her own café small and manageable. No eighty-hour work week, no six-figure profits, no racy little Porsche. She glanced back at her 1978 Ford Ranger, with its root-beer side panels and its body nicked up like an ancient whale’s. The truck had its virtues: it could hold a cord of firewood, for one thing, or six wine barrels. To each her own.
Inside the grand stone entrance to Vinifera, she slipped past a heavy curtain into the dining room, where a few staffers were getting organized for the night. The scope of the place was impressive, especially compared to Wildside, the ten-table restaurant Sunny owned, and where she was the chef. At Vinifera, a veritable soccer field of tables and booths stretched toward the kitchen doors. A mahogany bar ran the length of the room off to the right. Behind it, an enormous mirror reached for the ceiling, and glass shelves glowed with scores of bottles and their clear or amber liquids. Across the room, a staircase went up to a balcony with more seating. To the left, a catwalk led past several closed doors. Straight above, dangling from the ceiling by cables that looked far too slender for the job, was an aluminum dragonfly as big as a hang glider. Art.
One of the staffers, a sous-chef from the way he was dressed, came up to Sunny and asked her to please wait at the bar. He disappeared back into the kitchen. Behind the bar was a guy with sandy blond hair and big shoulders who was talking intently on the telephone. Sunny sat down. Cradling the handset on his shoulder, the bartender set up a glass of mineral water with a squeeze of lime and slid it toward her, meeting her eyes for an instant. She watched his hands while he went on listening, occasionally correcting the person on the other end of the line. She sipped the water and looked around for someone else, then went on watching the bartender. He was probably a few years younger than she was, maybe in his late twenties. He held himself well, like an athlete, and had a smooth, deliberate way of moving. She was just about to decide which martial art he practiced when Andre Morales walked up carrying a large mortar and pestle. He set it down on the bar and wiped his hands on his apron, then greeted her with both a vigorous handshake and a kiss on each cheek. He smelled of freshly ground pepper, spicy and floral and mineral. She fought the urge to grab him and inhale deeply.
“We’ve met before,” he said, “but I’m sure you don’t remember. It was only for a second and you were pretty busy.”
“Of course I remember,” she said. “It was at the Star Route Farm dinner, about this time last year.”
They exchanged the usual pleasantries and small talk for a few minutes, giving Sunny the chance to study him. It would have been difficult to forget Andre Morales. He made quite an impression, and he was making it again. He was a large part of the reason she had agreed to participate in tonight’s event, a benefit dinner called Night of Five Stars, when five well-known chefs came together to cook five different courses. There were certainly more noble reasons, such as supporting the Open Space Coalition cause and being part of the community, but the truth, and she would barely admit it even to herself, was that she’d agreed to do it because she wanted to see him again. He was a well-executed interpretation of the tall, dark, and handsome motif. With golden brown eyes lined with black lashes and hair shoved back from his forehead in graceful waves, he reminded her of a Chilean architect she’d had a crush on once, but Andre had stronger, more relaxed features.
“I can give you the grand tour, if you’re interested,” he said.
“Definitely.” She looked at her watch. “How many are we serving tonight?”
“A hundred and forty.”
“All in one sitting. We sold out.”
He nodded. “That’s seventy thousand bucks for the OSC.”
That’s also one hundred forty plates of hand-cranked fettuccine with wild mushroom sauce, Wildside’s signature dish, thought Sunny. That was about a hundred and twenty more than she was used to making. With a pang of regret, she reflected on her decision not to bring pre-made pasta, a decision that could have gone the other way and made her life, or at least the next few hours, so much easier. Almost no one could tell the difference between really fresh pasta and really, really fresh pasta, anyway.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ve got you set up with more than enough of everything you ordered, and there’s plenty of help if you need it. We have the entire staff on deck.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. She imagined a line of plates a hundred and forty feet long.
He started the tour in the kitchen, a setup that made the kitchen at Wildside look like a hot plate and a mini-fridge. Not only was the place enormous, it was immaculate and filled with state-of-the-art equipment. The granite counters glistened. The twelve-burner range was spotless. She tried not to gawk. Andre introduced her to the covey of staff members already busily at work, then she followed him into the walk-in, a chilly wonderland of ingredients almost the size of the entire kitchen at Wildside. She eyed a shelf of white plastic containers labeled “Nathan’s Salad Dressing,” “Der Wunder Sauce,” and “Nathan’s Fancy Marinade.”
“We have some special needs customers,” said Andre, following her glance.
“Vegan?” she said.
“If only it were that simple. Most of that stuff is for regulars who get attached to a certain dish or dressing and keep asking for it after we take it off the menu. It drives me crazy.”
“I’ve had the same problem at Wildside,” said Sunny. “There are a couple of dishes that I never want to see again, but every time I try to take them off the menu, people get all upset. Tonight’s pasta, as a matter of fact, is th
e primary offender. Every fall I try to replace it with a slight variation, something just a little bit new so I don’t die of boredom, and all my regular customers make a fuss until I put it back exactly the way they’re used to it.”
“Same deal here, except the biggest offender is an owner,” said Andre. “He has a whole menu of his own, and one of his girlfriends is even worse.”
“One of?”
“I can’t keep track. Anyway, she doesn’t eat dairy, seafood, pork, or duck, and when she eats chicken it has to be accompanied by her special sauce or else Nathan comes into my kitchen and looks for it himself.”
“Skinless breast of?”
“What else?”
Andre led the way back out through the kitchen and dining room, then down a flight of stairs.
“Now for the complement to any great meal,” he said, pulling on the handle of a heavy wooden door. It swung open with a sucking sound and they stepped into the cool, underground air. “This is the secret of Vinifera. A true cellar. We don’t air-condition or control humidity. It stays between 58 and 62 degrees on its own. We have a walk-in for whites that keeps them at precisely 52 degrees, but other than that it’s completely au naturel.”
The room was as big as a gymnasium and filled with wine. There was wine in boxes, on racks, and even in barrels along one wall. About half of the open space was taken up with stacked cases of wine in cardboard boxes; the other half held standing racks of bottles. Lights in wire cages stuck out from the rough walls at intervals, providing puddles of dim yellow light. Otherwise the room was dark, a tableau of cement gray, woody browns, and deep bottle green. On three sides, alcoves blocked with metal grating receded from the light. Andre walked between the racks. Every few steps he extracted a bottle and turned the label for Sunny to see.
“This is the wine that’s on the list right now, or most of it,” he said, gesturing to the general area where they were standing. “We have about twenty thousand bottles in circulation, and about the same number laying down until they’re ready to drink.”
