Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

What he didn’t tell them—why confuse things even more than they already were?—was that the fact that they were consistent with fall-type injuries didn’t mean they were inconsistent with ballistic-type injuries. When bullets hit long bones, or flat bones, or ribs, they didn’t necessarily make the nice, round, internally beveled holes that they made in the skull, and which were instantly recognizable as entrance wounds. Instead, they often just broke or shattered the bones, so they looked no different than bones that had taken some other kind of blunt-trauma hit . . . such as a fall. And Pietro’s remains had plenty of those.

“Nothing else, huh?” Luca asked. “No clues at all?”

“Afraid not, but look, you have to remember, there are all kinds of ways to kill someone without leaving any marks on the skeleton.”

“That’s true,” Linda agreed. “Poison, suffocation—”

“Well, yes, but even knives and guns. It’s not all that rare for a knife or even a slug to penetrate the heart without touching a rib or the sternum or the scapula or anything bony. So not finding anything doesn’t prove that there wasn’t anything.”

“But Gideon, I was thinking,” Julie said slowly, “if you didn’t find anything, doesn’t that mean it’s possible there wasn’t anything? That nobody killed him? That he just died from, I don’t know, a stroke, a heart attack. Anything. People die.”

“Well, yes, of course it’s possible, but if he died of natural causes, why shoot him a month later?”

“Why shoot him a month later if he died of unnatural causes?”

“And why kill Nola?” John asked her.

“And why throw them off the cliff?” Marti asked.

“Heck, I don’t know. Don’t jump all over me. I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t see that the experts”—an eyebrow-raised glance at John and Gideon—“are doing any better. In fact, for all we know, maybe killing Nola was the whole point of it, and making it look as if Pietro did it was a way of covering it up so—”

“If that’s what it was about,” Gideon said, “then I’d have to say it sure was convenient for the killer that he just happened to have Pietro’s dead body lying around just waiting for him. Talk about lucky heart attacks.” He began to laugh, but then caught a glimpse of Luca’s face. “Luca, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting. It’s your father we’re talking about. I shouldn’t be—”

Luca waved him silent. “Forget it. Time to change the subject anyway. Here comes our dinner. Get ready for the best that Italy has to offer.”

But Gideon found the five-course meal disappointing. There weren’t many Italian dishes that he actively disliked, but this meal had them all, starting with ribollita , the bread-thickened bean-and-cabbage affair that was somewhere between soup and stew, that you could eat equally well with a fork or a spoon. Then came a taglierini and truffle dish about which he had no complaints, but the main course of ossobuco —veal shanks braised in wine with tomatoes, carrots, and onions—was his least favorite Italian dish of all.

The others all seemed to love everything that was put in front of them (Marti passed on the ossobuco , of course, having two lip-smacking bowls of the ribollita instead), and after a while Gideon realized what his problem was, and why he’d never liked these particular foods. Nonna Natalia’s cooking reminded him too much of his own Polish-Austrian great aunt’s productions. The ribollita was blood-brother to her gluey cabbage and barley soup, and the ossobuco was close kin to her dreaded schmorbraten —rump roast simmered on the range top—and simmered, and then simmered some more, until the gray meat literally slid off the bone and fell apart into shreds. It was from Tante Frieda’s pot roast that he’d learned firsthand that muscle was constituted of long, separable, stringy fibers.

Even the dessert was straight out of Tante’s kitchen: bread pudding. But here he had to admit that Nonna Natalia’s budino di pane, had Tante Frieda’s ofenschlupfer beat by a mile. Frieda made up for overcooking everything she cooked on the range by under-baking everything she did in the oven. Her “famous” bread pudding was a crustless, sodden, overly sweet lump of dough, edible because it had cinnamon and raisins in it, but nothing to look forward to. Nonna Natalia’s budino was another thing altogether, brown and crunchy on top, delicate as a fine soufflé inside, only slightly sweetened, and filled with perfectly cooked apples, figs, and pears; as warming to the soul as it was to the body as it glided down his throat. Eating it was enough to make him forgive Nonna Natalia for her ossobuco , and he happily spooned up a second helping from the family-style bowl it had come in, as did most of the others.

Only as they finished their desserts, pushed back from the table a little, and turned to their espressos, biscotti, and glasses of Vin Santo, did the talk return from food and wine to the events of the day.

Luca loosened his belt a notch or two, shoved his chair back from the table, and patted his belly. “Well. I suppose, except for Linda, none of you guys have heard the latest development from the Cesare branch of the family.”

“We know about the wrongful death suit, if that’s what you mean,” Marti said.

“No, that was hours ago, ancient history. This is a weird new twist.”

“This sounds bad,” Gideon said.

“It’s not good. You remember when Severo went out to call his attorney? He couldn’t wait to tell her she might as well forget about suing us, because, what do you know, babbo couldn’t have killed Nola, being dead himself at the time?”

Gideon nodded. “Sure.”

“Well, it worked. She listened to what he had to say, she took an hour to think it over, and she did it. She dropped the suit.”

“And this is not good, why?” John asked.

“Because, instead of suing Franco for four million or whatever it was, now she’s challenging the entire will. She wants it declared invalid.”

“On what grounds?” Marti asked.

Luca waited while Amalia returned with the bottle to refill the glasses of those who wanted more Vin Santo. Only Gideon declined: too sweet for his taste. He considered asking if there was any brandy, but decided it was safer to let it pass.

“So, what you think?” a smiling Amalia asked in English when she’d finished pouring and setting the bottle down on the table for their continuing use. “Pretty good dinner, no?”

Everyone, Gideon included, agreed that it had been superb, even better than they’d expected. Only when she departed, broadly smiling, did Luca come back to Marti’s question.

“On what grounds? On the grounds that, since Pietro died before Nola— weeks before her, according to the brilliant, world-famous Skeleton Detective . . .”

Gideon sighed. “Gee, why do I have this feeling that I’m about to get blamed for something?”

“. . . that, since Nola outlived Pietro, everything should technically have gone to her when he died.”

“Wait a second,” Gideon said. “I thought his will left pretty much everything to Franco—the winery and all—with you and Nico and Cesare getting monthly stipends for a few years. Is that not right? Or did he leave something to Nola too?”

Luca poured some more wine for Linda and for himself, and passed the bottle to John. “No, that’s not right, not quite. The two of them had—I forget what it’s called in English—they had the same will—”

“A joint will?” Marti suggested.

“That’s it, yeah. Consisting of one paragraph. Three sentences. Exactly a hundred and fifteen words; I counted them once.”