Brutal Little Murder (Ana Delgado Book 2) Page 2

  I had forgotten, somehow, that Tiffany was the kind of person who could make sweatpants look sophisticated; normally, when I would meet her, she would be dressed in something that would have cost more than my apartment at the time. And that had been a pretty nice apartment. To her credit, inheritance notwithstanding, she had earned every penny of her wealth herself. For this evening, she looked classy as ever. An elegant black one piece, her dark hair styled to one side over her shoulder.

  “Long time, stranger,” she said in her trans-Atlantic drawl as she stood to greet me. She gave me a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek before she turned to the bartender and gestured for a couple of drinks. I noticed her almost empty glass beside her chair and wondered if she had been waiting long.

  “It’s good to see you.” I smiled as I took a seat on a stool opposite her.

  “You, too.” She grinned back.

  “Who was that?” I asked, gesturing after the guy in the suit.

  “Oh, just a friend of the family. I’ve been on the phone with him all afternoon,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s the police commissioner. Definitely an old flirt, but he’s harmless, really. Likes to come in here to beef his ego occasionally. He spends a lot of money, so who am I to complain?”

  I smirked. “Fair enough. How have you been? You look good.”

  “I’ve been great! And thank you,” she replied, beaming back at me before giving me a once-over with her eyes. “You’re looking pretty good yourself, no bandages or visible bruises, which I like to see. Did you have a good trip over?”

  I smiled in spite of myself and nodded. “No bruises. And the trip was uneventful, which I prefer.”

  “Definitely a bonus.”

  I gestured to the room as I looked around again. “This looks pretty incredible. I’m looking forward to seeing all of it in the daylight.”

  “It’s beautiful, you’re going to love it.” She smiled as she took a final sip of her drink and looked around the room herself with a smile. Another drink was placed down next to her by the bartender, along with my own, and the empty glasses were removed. “It’s like a magical wilderness out there,” she went on, gesturing out the window at the dark forest that surrounded us. “I finally feel as though I’ve got the hotel where it needs to be.”

  “Yeah?” I asked in a deadpan tone as I looked around. “I dunno, seems like you could’ve put a bit more effort in. I’m very underwhelmed.”

  She laughed at me through a glare.

  “Not enough gold for my personal taste,” I continued, pushing my luck as I swirled my glass and watched the liquid slosh around the rim. She nearly knocked me off the barstool with a shove and I grinned at her. “I’m happy for you.”

  She had the class to look a little shy, and smiled. “Thank you. I’ve got family staying at the moment, so I was nervous about what they would think. But they seem to approve... I think my grandfather would have liked it. But anyway, what about you? What have you been doing?”

  “Ah, you know, this and that.” I replied. “Who’s the family?”

  She rolled her eyes and persisted; she was almost as stubborn as me. “Always so damn evasive. Why do I have to work so hard for every morsel of personal information with you? The family visiting is some of my cousins. Speaking of family, how is your grandpa doing? Has he still got the ranch?”

  “Still got the ranch.” I nodded in the affirmative. “Saw him just before I came out here. He’s still going strong. He’s a charmer, but a loner, and he gets mad if I ‘hassle’ him too much, meaning too many visits in a year. So I try to give him time to miss me in between.”

  “Sounds about right,” she replied with a smirk and a wink. “A few years did it for me.” Rude.

  “So who are these cousins that are visiting? Do I know them?” I asked, reminding her that I could be stubborn too. Stubborn and polite, a quality she could think about picking up.

  “I don’t think so. Cecilia, Josef, and his wife Dahlia. They’re quite a bit older than me and they live in Austria, so I doubt you’d have ever had the chance to meet them. I hadn’t seen them for quite a while until I moved out here to work on the hotel. The family have always had a connection to Remondanes, though, and Josef’s business is based here in town. Most of the time, he runs it from home, but he comes out about once a month. We’re close, especially me and Josef.”

  “That’s pretty sweet, are they staying long?”

  She shook her head. “They’ve been here a week already and they leave this weekend.” I was about to reply when she cut in, changing the subject abruptly. “What are you doing for work these days?”

  I shrugged. “Odd jobs. Mostly your basic P.I. stuff for locals wherever I’m at. I try to help folks out when I can. Plus, I don’t spend a lot. I like the freedom of my car, waking up and just going. I find little bases for a while, rig myself up. Got a little hammock.”

  She gave me an eyebrow, which didn’t change my mind about a thing.

  I ignored her and continued. “Besides, Gramps was smart with the inheritance from my parents. Invested it in the right places, didn’t let me have it all at once when I turned eighteen. Keeps my head above water. And his.”

  I wasn’t a person that really enjoyed giving detail. The less people knew about me, the better, in my opinion. Information is the most valuable resource on the planet. So why in the hell would I give mine away for free? That wasn’t to say that I didn’t trust Tiffany, I did. I just found that when folks knew too much about you, they or someone else could use it against you. And I ain’t about giving people that kind of leverage.

  “Well that’s good. So, you’re still living out of the truck?” she asked with a wry, vaguely disapproving smile.

  “You know me,” I replied, draining the last of my drink and winking at her. “If a situation calls for it, I’ll set up a little spot for a while. Someplace to cook, eat, sleep. It works nicely.” I looked at the glass. “What is this, anyway?”

  “A special house cocktail we’ve just created. All local ingredients, most of them from the valley we’re currently situated in. You like it?” she asked, not waiting for my answer as she signaled to the bartender for two more.

  “We? A special house cocktail we’ve just created? Tiffany, did you do anything to create this cocktail beyond paying people to go research, forage for and mix it?” I asked with an eyebrow.

  She gave me a glare that told me the answer, and also not to push the subject in front of her staff.

  I smirked, but fortunately, my stomach chose that moment to rumble for my attention. It worked. “Yeah, I like. You got a menu?”

  She scoffed dramatically. “Have we got a menu?” She leaned across the edge of the bar with a flourish and grabbed a couple of menus from underneath, thrusting one into my face.

  I snatched it out of her hand and began scanning the items with decided interest. Most of them seemed to be unnecessarily complicated, either in ingredients or in name. I was pretty sure that ‘croque monsieur’ was just a fancy name for a grilled cheese sandwich with some ham, but I figured I’d be smart to wait more than five minutes before beginning my critique. I was growing.

  Tiffany opened her menu and started an energetic and enthusiastic monologue. “We’re up in the northwest of Italy, right on the border between Switzerland and France, so we’ve got a nice selection of food that’s influenced by the continent, as well as the surrounding areas. But all the ingredients are locally sourced—”

  “Yeah, I don’t need the local, organic, vegan schpiel. Does it taste good? That’s all I need to know.”

  “It tastes good,” she assured me as she turned back to her menu. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, an almost imperceptible shake of her head. It told me she had been looking at her memories of my behaviour with rose-tinted glasses. It told me that was no longer the case.

  The bartender arrived with more drinks and placed them on the bar in front of us. I looked up when he didn’t move away. His eyes darted between us and our menus
, intensely expectant. I pointed to a couple of items and Tiffany confirmed each choice, communicating them to the guy in American-French. This seemed unnecessary, as he clearly spoke English, being in a hotel on the continent and all. With a firm nod of his head, he took our menus and darted off to the kitchen.

  “What, are you whipping them?” I asked, and she snorted some of her drink in response.

  “Have you got anything planned for tomorrow?” she replied, ignoring my question.

  “I’ve been here, like, two hours.”

  “Well, I don’t know! I was wondering if you’d like to go for a walk around the area, or I could show you around the hotel properly. A behind-the-scenes tour,” she said, gesturing as though she were showing me the sign in lights, suspended in mid-air.

  “That sounds very useful, thank you.” I smiled at her and she gave me a goofy grin in response.

  A few minutes later, our food arrived and we spent the next hour or so devouring it, catching up and drinking some more ‘locally sourced cocktails’. By the time I was heading up to my room, it was gone midnight. I was exhausted and a little drunk. I fell into my big, beautiful bed and grabbed the remote, switching the TV on and lowering the volume on what looked like italian Jeopardy, to a gentle background hum. Unable to sit up, I stayed lying on my back and attempted to wrestle my boots off my feet. Finally, I succeeded and threw them in the general direction of the floor. It was my final disrobing success of the evening before I gave up and allowed myself to be enveloped by the mattress, and by sleep.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, I rolled out of bed at around nine—though I wasn’t totally confident of what time-zone that related to. I showered and pulled on some respectable clothes, got into the elevator and headed down to the lobby, all the while dutifully ignoring the insistent buzzing of my phone. The rhythmic vibrations had been accentuating the odd disorientation of my jet lag, which was an interesting way to go about the morning.

  Fortunately, I was greeted by Tiffany and her ever-sunny disposition as the elevator doors opened into the lobby. “Jesus, where have you been?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Tiffany,” I replied, walking out and joining her in the hoi polloi. “Where might I find some coffee?”

  “Good morning, Ana,” she huffed impatiently. “I’ve been calling you for, like, an hour.” With a roll of her eyes, she turned and began walking towards the doors.

  “I know, I’ve been ignoring you for an hour. Coffee?” I called after her as I began to trail reluctantly behind, hoping I would witness a sudden turn towards the bar area from her at any second.

  “There’s coffee in your room,” she called back mercilessly without turning around.

  “I’m aware of that, too. I didn’t think you’d appreciate calling me for an hour and a half. Coffee,” I repeated insistently.

  “We will stop for coffee while we’re out! We’ve gotta get moving!” She was almost at the entrance now. My protests had fallen on deaf ears. She didn’t care about my fragile, under-caffeinated, jetlagged state. She was already gone. As I broke into a jog to catch her up, I spotted the commissioner again. He was making his way across the lobby also, and into the bar, but what caught my eye were the odd glaces at Tiffany as she swept through the main doors. I followed her as I watched him and, not paying attention to where I was going, was almost knocked out by the door swinging violently behind her as she strode out into the cold morning air.

  I let the odd moment slip from my mind as I pushed through the door. I reminded myself that I was on vacation and not everything was a murder plot. I managed to catch up with Tiffany as she arrived at one of the cars parked in the lot at the side of the hotel. Our feet crunched through the crisp white snow underfoot that had begun to melt in the gentle morning sun. I realized this was the first time I’d actually been here during daylight hours and I stopped in my tracks to take it in. The snow clouds that had dominated the sky the evening before had cleared, and the sun shone down on the courtyard and the dense forests that surrounded it. The road that the taxi had come in on last night wound and disappeared into the conifers that rose to fifty, sixty feet high and encircled the space. I turned around to take in the hotel itself. Constructed from a mixture of stone and wood (I assumed also locally sourced) god knows how long ago, it stood grand and impressive in the snowy woodland. It was five stories high and rose out of the trees, looking down on the town of Remondanes below it. Behind it, the dramatic, jagged mountains of the Alps loomed over us.

  “Makes you feel pretty small, doesn’t it?” asked a voice from behind me.

  I jumped and spun around, hand to my chest. “God, I thought you’d gone to the car.”

  “I did, but you never arrived. Let’s go.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me to the car.

  “I was just trying to appreciate the scenery. Thought that was the point…” I grumbled, before noticing what car I was being forced into. “Tiffany?”

  Her head popped up from the driver’s side and she looked at me across the roof. “Yes, Ana?”

  “This is an Alfa Romeo.”

  “What’s your point, Ana?”

  “Well, it’s an Italian car.”

  “And?” she asked, growing ever more impatient.

  “I don’t know, I just thought you cared about actually arriving, but if you’re not concerned…” I replied as I ducked into the car, “that’s fine, too.”

  After being beaten in the arm several times, it was a five minute drive into the heart of Remondanes. The town itself was nestled in an alpine depression, mountains rising to dominate the view on every side. The hotel overlooked the whole valley, being situated just above the majority of shops, restaurants and homes, hidden amongst the vast, surrounding woodland that rose up the mountain. Tiffany gave me the tourist schpiel as we drove, ‘bordering France and Switzerland, the Aosta valley is a rich and colorful…’ yadda yadda yadda.

  I managed to convince her to let us stop for some breakfast before the tour began and she finally relented, suggesting a small, family run cafe that belonged to a couple she was friendly with. The cafe sat right next to the river Lys, which ran through the center of town, flanked by the main road.

  Tiffany sat us in the large bay window at the front that overlooked the river. Pa came over to take our order and returned with coffee and the daily newspaper. We chatted with him for a few minutes, how are you finding the town, how long are you staying, before Ma came over with our food and they left us to eat.

  I began to devour the rolls in front of me after covering them in butter and jam. After a minute or two of satiating my hunger, the newspaper in the middle of the table caught my eye. I had been mostly relying on Tiffany’s translations to get past the language barrier, Spanish only helping me with about thirty percent of the conversations I’d had since I arrived. Most people in Remondanes spoke an unusual French-Provençal dialect that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. But reading was different, and I realized I could translate the headline on the front page.

  L'attività Della Mafia Si Dirige Verso Nord. Mafia activity makes its way north.

  Well. There we were. In black and white. The mafia had disappeared for a minute, taken a little power nap and regrouped. Now, they were coming back in full force. Historically, Calabria and Sicily had been the main operating theaters for the mafia, and though there had been sporadic activity in places like Milan and Turin since the fifties, they had struggled to make their presence last in any sustained kind of way.

  “You seen this?” I asked Tiffany, lifting up the paper to show her the headline.

  Her face dropped into a serious look and she nodded solemnly. “A little boy was killed recently in the south, it’s always been much more intense down there. But yes, it’s spreading now. These headlines are cropping up all over Europe. It’s not even just Italy any more.”

  “Back home, too.”

  “Yes, but there are more families here, so there is more violence, more competition. Besides, i
t used to be in the code, no drugs, no beating on women, you know? But in the north, drugs are the only way they’ve consistently been able to make money. So, the ‘morals’ are becoming more lax. When that happens to the mafia, you’ve got a good reason to feel a little nervous.”

  I pushed down the concern building into a little knot in my stomach. This was a vacation. None of that this week. Just relaxation.

  Caffeine levels restored, we left the cafe. I let Tiffany guide me around the streets, educating me on ancient bell towers and churches. As we strolled around the town, she pointed out areas of interest: the road that led out of town and past her cousin’s business, the eighteenth century bridge that linked the two wilderness-covered slopes flanking the town, the local bakery and her favourite spots to relax. It was an insanely atmospheric place, idyllic, the exact kind of provincial town that you’d see in those nostalgic arthouse movies from the fifties. That feeling was only accentuated by the bright sunshine and the piercing winter winds.

  We arrived back at the hotel as the sun was setting behind the mountains, and met back up again for some dinner after we had freshened up. At around eight thirty, Tiffany and I finished off our digestifs and I stretched and yawned, ready to sleep off the food and the jet lag.

  We stood from the table and started to leave the bar when an odd noise, kind of like a scuffle, reached my ears from the lobby. I slowed, straining to make out what it was, and then heard a shout. A jolt of adrenaline shot through my body and I instinctively threw my arm out in front of Tiffany. She walked hard into it and let out a noise of protest at me that was cut off by an odd pop that rang out and echoed off the high ceilings. Fear etched its lines across her face and I pushed her back and sprang forward as another pop rang out. I yelled out a, “Stay here,” over my shoulder as I ran down through the small entrance way of the bar, past the potted ferns and confused diners, and into the large lobby. I skidded to a halt in the center of the room. My eyes darted across every face and each nook and cranny for a gun, a shooter, but I saw nothing. I noticed a crowd forming in the center of the room and I knew, with a sense of dread in my stomach, exactly what I would see on the other side. Each person seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, or they had just frozen in shock. I pushed through their murmuring bodies until I reached the middle of the crowd. My eyes fell on another body, this one lifeless and sprawled across the floor. Blood was beginning to pool underneath him.