Free Death By the Glass #2 by Nadia Gordon

Sunday, Andre Morales used a forgery of the same expensive bottle of wine as an excuse to get her to come home with him (not that he needed much of one). Nick Ambrosi didn’t find Nathan until Monday morning, but whoever visited Nathan on Saturday night would have known all day Sunday that he was dead. She thought about family meal out on the back patio at Vinifera Sunday night, with Andre sitting next to her. He had seemed relaxed enough. He was the one who asked where Nathan was. She remembered Remy Castels reaching over them to refill their glasses. Remy had been cordial, even cheerful that night, at least compared to his demeanor when they’d met him in the wine cellar. Rivka had been sitting beside her, and acrossfrom them was Dahlia, the pagan waitress with the blue hair. Nick had been there. He was the one who’d said Nathan hadn’t called for his car that day and that Nathan was feeling no pain by the time he took him home on Saturday night. There were a dozen faces at the table, and more at the other table. There was the guy who made the crack about Nathan going to live at some other restaurant, and there was the co-owner, Eliot Denby, who’d been pouring himself a glass of wine behind the bar as she and Andre left. It made her head thud to imagine one of them might have stood in Nathan’s living room Saturday night, witness to his death, and told no one.
    The existence of those two very unusual bottles of wine in such close proximity to Nathan’s death was too coincidental. The scene in Nathan Osborne’s living room late Saturday night was growing darker by the minute. There had to be a connection, and it was ominous. The thing to do was call Sergeant Harvey right now and enlighten him about the existence of the second bottle. It could be the break in the case he was looking for.
    But her late-night activities would land center stage in an investigation of what was starting to look a lot like murder, and Andre Morales would be right in the spotlight. New lovers were hard enough to find without turning them over to the local law enforcement agency at the first sign of trouble. He couldn’t be involved. But what if he was? What if Andre knew about the wine being phony? What if he was involved in its production? What if he knew more about Nathan’s death than he was saying? That Andre might be involved in murder was impossible to even contemplate. What made more sense, if any of this made sense at all, was that Nathan had discovered the fraudulent wine and had been killed to keep him quiet. In that case, Andre might be in danger as well, especially if word got out that he’dhad his hands on the bogus Marceline. There were more leaps and assumptions than she was comfortable with, but there were too many coincidences and she had to start somewhere. The important thing now was to find out where the phony wine came from, who knew about it, and if it had anything to do with Nathan’s death. If Andre was involved, she wanted to know exactly how before she said anything about it to the police—and before she got further involved with him. Regardless of what she ultimately discovered, the faster she moved, the better. One thing was certain, there was more to Nathan Osborne’s death than heart disease.
    Sunny went over to the mirror, hoping the ritual of freshening up would calm her down. While she combed her hair unnecessarily, smoothed powder over her nose, and glossed her lips, she wondered how much she really knew about Andre Morales anyway. She knew he was born in September, had a promising career as a chef, and lived in the kind of house where the sheets and towels coordinated nicely with the rugs, duvet, and curtains. She knew he was born in Mexico, had tiger eyes, and wore a leather jacket that smelled like pine pitch and campfire smoke. She knew that one of his kisses could open a view to a wide landscape of desire, and that his biceps, round and full, were good places to let her hands come to rest. All of