Death al Fresco Read online

  Death al Fresco

  A SALLY SOLARI MYSTERY

  Leslie Karst

  To Robin, whose patience and support allowed me to make my deadline.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Jane Lasswell Hoff, Nancy Lundblad, and Robin McDuff, who took time to read and comment on the early manuscript of this book, and Shirley Tessler, for her assistance in editing the recipes. Moreover, I am grateful to those who let me pick their brains with regard to their various areas of expertise: Ian Cole of Ocean2Table and Dylan Buckingham (fishing in the Monterey Bay); Dan Jones (ocean currents); Jane Lasswell Hoff (forensics); Nancy Lundblad (medical issues); and Luci Zahray, aka “the Poison Lady” (toxicology). But please note that any factual mistakes that may exist herein are entirely mine.

  In addition, I must acknowledge the helpfulness of the oral history titled Malio J. Stagnaro: The Santa Cruz Genovese (interviewed by Elizabeth Spedding Calciano, 1975), a part of the Regional History Project of UCSC. For anyone interested in the history and culture of the original Italian fishing families in Santa Cruz, this is an invaluable resource.

  Enormous thanks are due, as well, to Jane Gregorius and Barbara Gunther, art teachers extraordinaire who helped me learn how to truly see.

  Finally, as always, I am indebted to my terrific agent, Erin Niumata of Folio Literary Management, and to all the marvelous people at Crooked Lane Books, including Matt Martz, Sarah Poppe, Jenny Chen, Anne Brewer, and my amazing editor, Nike Power.

  Chapter 1

  Eric was late. Not at all surprising, but it irritated me nonetheless. Normally I would have simply shaken off his tardiness and leaned back on my bench to enjoy the colorful scene playing out around me on the wharf: young fishermen with white plastic buckets of bait at their side, elderly Italian men arguing over their game of bocce, Russian tourists in Giants baseball caps leaning over the railing to snap photos of the noisy sea lions lazing below.

  But Eric was my go-to sounding board when I had to get something off my chest, and right now I was itching to tell him the news I’d just gotten from my dad. Even more important, I was hungry, and the aroma wafting up from the two takeout boxes beside me on the bench was making my mouth water something fierce.

  Checking the time once more—it was already a quarter past twelve—I dropped my phone back into my bag with a shake of my head and returned to watching the pudgy teenager one bench down who’d been trying for the past five minutes to untangle a hopelessly knotted fishing line. He continued to pick at the line with his blunt fingers, mumbling to himself all the while, and then slammed the rod down on the wooden bench. With an oath, the young man pulled a jackknife from the pocket of his canvas shorts, cut the line, and dropped the tangled mess at his feet.

  That made two of us who were annoyed.

  Perhaps a little prodding was in order. I retrieved my phone, typed a “where ARE u?!” message, and then, as soon as I’d sent the text, spied Eric’s black Lexus cruising by. The car disappeared as he passed the Solari’s building, and then another several minutes elapsed with no sign of the guy. I was about to walk over and see what the hell had happened to him when my cell buzzed.

  “Here and ready to eat!” I read on the screen and looked up to see Eric’s slight form sauntering around the corner. Ignoring my sour expression, he avoided a stray bocce ball that had bounced out of the court and crossed to my bench.

  “Hey, Sally.” Eric shoved the boxes aside and took a seat. “How’s it going?”

  “I’d be better if you’d been on time. Now we’ll have to inhale our lunch if we don’t want to be late for class.”

  Eric patted me on the knee—the sort of patronizing gesture he knew I hated almost as much as having to rush through a meal—and handed me the top box and one of the paper napkins I’d tucked underneath. “Guess we’d better get to it, then,” he said, opening the other container and extracting the enormous crab sandwich within.

  Part of me wanted to shove the gooey sandwich in his face, but I resisted the urge. He was, after all, just being Eric. And it was good to have periodic reminders of why we’d broken up several years back—sometimes the charming side of Eric could make me temporarily forget this other bratty side. Much better to have him as a best buddy, whose faults I could simply ignore when I chose. Like right now.

  I unfolded the white cardboard box and spread its sides over my lap. “So, to answer your question,” I said, “it’s not going all that great. My dad dropped a huge bombshell on me this morning. Just when I think I’ve finally extricated myself from Solari’s, he announces he’s taken on that big ol’ sister-cities dinner next month.”

  “The one for that Italian mayor who’s visiting? I read about it yesterday in the paper.”

  “Uh-huh.” I lifted my sandwich from the box. “It’s a very big deal. She’s the mayor of Sestri Levante, the town in Liguria where the original Sixty Families came from.”

  “The Sixty Families?”

  “You know, the Italian fishermen who settled in Santa Cruz back in the day? Like my great-granddad Ciro. And it sounds like all sixty families, plus every single one of their friends and relations, are coming to the dinner. Dad says they’re expecting well over a hundred people.”

  I took an angry bite of my sandwich, causing several chunks of crab to squirt out the sides. From previous experience, I knew to lean forward so they’d fall onto the box rather than down the front of my pale blue, button-down shirt.

  “Wow.” Eric had wisely tucked a napkin into his T-shirt and was using a second to wipe mayonnaise from his mouth. “Where’re they all going to sit? No way can Solari’s fit that many.”

  “He has this plan to set up a big tent out here for the event. But that’s not the point.” I popped one of the fallen crab morsels into my mouth before going on. “The point is, he’s guilted me into coming back to Solari’s to help out with all the planning and with the dinner itself.”

  “Sucker,” Eric said with a grin, removing his horn-rimmed glasses to clean a speck of mayonnaise off the lens.

  “Yep. But it’s not like I had much of a choice. Dad started doing this whole guilt thing about how it’s our ‘heritage,’ what an honor it is for Solari’s to be chosen to host it, how great it’s going to be for business.” I stared glumly at the young fisherman, who had now restrung his line and was casting some live bait—an anchovy, by the looks of it—out to sea.

  “Well, he’s right, you know,” Eric said. “The publicity should be enormous. It said in the paper that tons of city officials are going to be there, as well as a bunch of business owners and other big mucky-mucks. Hey, I wonder if the DA’s office will be invited. It’d be nice to get my ticket comped—”

  “You’re still missing the point,” I interrupted. “Don’t you see? This is Dad’s way of sucking me back into Solari’s yet again. He just can’t seem to let me go. And Javier’s going to be livid. Now that he’s actually gotten some confidence in my abilities as a line cook, he’s depending on me at Gauguin. Especially after that great review we got the other day in the paper, which is sure to bump up business the next two weeks. What’s he going to say when he finds out I’m going to be AWOL for a huge chunk of that time?”

  Gauguin was the restaurant I’d inherited from my aunt after her grisly murder the previous spring. It had taken months to convince its head chef to start teaching me to work the hot line—something my dad had never allowed me do at Solari’s—and only recently had I finally gained Javier’s trust as both owner and cook. Trust that could quickly be lost if he saw me as favoring my dad’s restaurant over Gauguin.

  “I’m sure you’ll be able to work it out. Javier’s a reasonable guy.” Eric stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and smashed the cardboard
box flat. “C’mon,” he said, standing up. “You can eat the rest of yours on the way. We wouldn’t want to be late for class.”

  Like you’ve ever worried about that, I thought as I followed him to his car.

  * * *

  After swinging by my house to pick up Buster, we headed back down to the water, me spending the entire return trip elbowing the dog’s hairy muzzle out of the way so I could finish my sandwich in peace. Buster had been my aunt’s dog, and I was still getting used to the change in lifestyle that came with adopting a rambunctious pooch. But it was impossible to ignore his pleading brown eyes, so I saved the last bite and passed it to him in the back seat.

  “You do realize you’ll never get him to stop begging if you always cave like that,” Eric said.

  “I know, but it means so much to him. Even if it’s just a piece of dry bread, I swear he acts like it’s filet mignon.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eric found a spot in the parking lot across from Its Beach—a lucky thing on a warm Saturday in late September—and the three of us climbed out of the car. But as soon as Eric popped the trunk, we realized we had a problem. How the heck were we going to transport all our gear down to the beach? Not only did we have easels, paint boxes, pads of paper, and jars of water, but we also had an eager dog straining at the leash to get down to his playmates and romp in the surf.

  This afternoon was the second meeting of the painting class we’d enrolled in. Or rather, that I had signed up for and then convinced Eric to take along with me. About a month earlier I’d bought a book about Paul Gauguin, having decided to educate myself about the painter after whom my new restaurant had been named. The more I read the story of the free spirit who’d left France for a life in Tahiti and the more I gazed at the eye-popping canvases he’d created while there, the more I’d become inspired to try my hand at some painting myself.

  When I mentioned this to my pal Allison, she’d told me about a friend who needed a few more students to fill out an art course he was teaching. It was a plein air class—outdoor painting—consisting of five Saturday afternoon sessions at various spots along the coast. Perfect! I thought. But it would be a lot more fun if I could get someone to take it with me.

  Eric was the first one I asked, since I knew he’d dabbled in watercolors in college. And besides, I figured he owed me after having convinced me to join his chorus the previous summer and where that had gotten me. When you sign up to sing the Mozart Requiem, even though it is a mass for the dead, you don’t expect the experience to include investigating the murder of one of the tenors.

  I was still surprised, however, by how readily Eric had agreed to take the class with me. Was he reading more into my invitation than I’d intended? It did seem as if he’d been wanting to spend more time with me of late. But I’d shrugged this notion off. We’d been broken up for several years, and he had to realize how much better we worked as best pals than as a romantic couple.

  In any case, here we were with a stack of art supplies, an overexcited dog, and only five minutes till the start of class.

  “Why don’t you take Buster and your easel,” Eric said, “and I can carry one load with you over to the stairs. Then you can wait for me there while I go back for the rest of the stuff.”

  “Very chivalrous,” I said as the dog ran circles around me and barked his impatience. “And given the circumstances,” I added, grabbing hold of the car to steady myself as I freed Buster’s leash from about my legs, “I’ll take you up on it, this one time.”

  Once down on the beach, we headed to the far end, below the lighthouse, where a dozen other art students were already congregated. Its Beach is dog friendly, so as soon as I’d dumped my gear onto the sand, I unhooked Buster’s leash. He immediately took off after a Jack Russell terrier with a tennis ball in its tiny mouth, and the two of them commenced a game of chase. Good. He’d get some vigorous exercise and then hopefully settle down and sleep after we got home.

  It was warm on the sand, so I shrugged out of my outer shirt down to a yellow tank top. For the past several days we’d been experiencing what folks around here call the Diablo winds, blowing in offshore from the coastal range. Most people hate these hot, dry winds, and for good reason, since September is also fire season in Northern California. But I’ve always found them a welcome change from the dreaded marine layer that can shroud Santa Cruz in fog for most of the summer.

  The teacher, Omar, clapped his hands for attention and we all gathered in a circle. “Okay,” he said, “last week we concentrated on site selection and composition as well as the blocking in of the darker masses and shadows. Today we finally get to the fun stuff—applying the colors!” With a shake of his bleached-blond dreadlocks, Omar pumped his fist like a running back who’d just scored a touchdown.

  “As I talked about last time,” he went on, “it doesn’t matter a whole lot what colors you use for your underpainting since it’s mostly going to be covered up later on. But I like to use the blue palette for the cool shadows and yellow ochre for the warm areas, especially for landscapes.” Omar held up the painting he’d started the previous Saturday as a demo, pointing first to the muddy purple areas blocked out in rough brushstrokes for the cypress trees and sandstone cliffs, then to the golden highlights where the light hit the rock.

  Once he’d given a short lecture about mixing and applying our colors, Omar directed us to set up our easels, and we all did our best to find the exact same spot we’d been in the previous week. As we began mixing colors and dabbing them on our paintings, the instructor circulated among us, providing advice and commentary where needed.

  After checking on Buster’s location—he and a plump brown-and-white corgi were now investigating a pile of kelp that had washed up onto the beach—I clipped my work-in-progress to my easel and opened my box of paints.

  Our class was working with gouache, a water-based paint similar to watercolors but more opaque, which makes it way more forgiving to work with, because you can paint over your mistakes. I had chosen the view looking west, toward the natural bridge at the far end of the beach, for my composition. As I was squeezing some green paint onto my palette—an aluminum pie tin with a plastic snap-on top—Omar came up behind me to watch.

  “Think before you apply that color,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Huh?” I capped the tube and turned to face him. “It’s for the green vegetation,” I said, pointing to the ice plant draped over the sandstone cliffs.

  “Yes, but remember,” he said, “gouache remains active even after it dries, so the undercoat will have a tendency to blend with any color you lay on top of it, especially if you use a wet brush. You’ve blocked in your cliffs with a dark blue, so what do you mix with blue to get green?”

  “Uh … yellow,” I answered.

  “Right. So rather than applying green from the tube here, perhaps you should experiment with some yellows and reds to achieve the deep green you’re looking for.”

  “Good idea. Thanks.” I leaned down to extract the yellow ochre from my box, and as I stood back up, I saw that Buster and his friend were now knee-deep in the kelp, digging furiously at the center of the pile.

  Oh, no. Any second now, he was going to roll over and go for a full-on scent bath in the stinky mess. “Buster, no! Leave it!” I hollered, knowing damn well that even if he could hear me from halfway across the beach, the dog would feign deafness.

  Setting my brush and palette carefully on top of my paint box, I darted over the sand toward the two dogs, continuing to shout. “No! Leave it!”

  Even once I got to the edge of the kelp, where I knew he could hear me, Buster wouldn’t budge. He and the corgi continued to paw at the seaweed, now shoving their muzzles deep into the dense, brown mass.

  Cursing the stubborn dog, I stepped gingerly onto the pile. Rubbery bladders popped under my feet and I was immediately swarmed by thousands of tiny flies. “Buster, you are so going into a time-out,” I said as I grabbed hold of the dog’s collar. “What the hell is s
o interesting down there, anyway? Not that I even want to know.”

  I yanked his nose out of the kelp and was about to turn away when a glint of silver caught my eye. Was that jewelry? Holding my breath, I bent down to get a better look at the piece of metal reflecting the light of the afternoon sun.

  It was a wristwatch. A pretty expensive one, too, by the looks of it. I reached down to take hold of the watch, but it was entangled in the mat of kelp. Pulling harder, I finally succeeded and the watch came free from the seaweed.

  And with it, the arm to which it was still attached.

  Chapter 2

  Releasing the watch with a yelp, I jumped back, dragging Buster with me. What if I’m standing on … the rest?

  My cry startled the owner of the corgi, who had arrived at the kelp pile to collar his own dog. “What?” he said, jumping back, his wide eyes a mirror of mine.

  “There’s a … a…” I pointed at the ghoulish sight poking out from the tangle of seaweed. The forearm was pale and had the rubbery look of a giant doll that had washed up onto the beach. Until you noticed how its wrinkled skin was starting to peel away from the hand to reveal yellow fat deposits below.

  “Ohmygod.” The man’s hand went to his mouth and his eyes got even wider. He stared at the appendage for a moment and then knelt down. I thought he was going to be sick, but instead he began to frantically pull the kelp from around the arm, tossing it aside in great heaps.

  “Wait,” I said, as the form of a man’s body began to appear. “I think it might be best if we didn’t touch anything until the—” But then I stopped.

  He had uncovered a head with silky white hair and a stubbled gray beard. The left temple bore a large abrasion, the blue-black tinge of its ragged skin a marked contrast to the pale color around it. Only part of the man’s face was visible, the rest buried in the wet sand, but I recognized him. It was Gino, an old Italian fisherman from my nonna’s generation. One of Solari’s regulars.