“A year . . . maybe a little longer. We were at a fundraiser on the mainland. I met Alonzo and introduced them.” I introduced them.
Val squeezed his eyes at the nausea in his stomach.
“Focus, Masini. How did you meet him?”
Val shook the guilt from his limbs. “At the bar, the auction . . . I don’t remember. We started to talk. He told me he was in the wine business, and asked who was my lovely wife. I corrected him and Alonzo made my sister blush. I thought it was cute. He sent flowers, wine . . . They started dating. It didn’t take long for him to ask me for her hand.”
“Archaic.”
“Not for me. I expected it. Alonzo knew I’d been the man of our household for many years. I suppose Gabi and I were both honored by his action of asking me permission to marry her.”
“But not your mother,” Margaret said.
“My mother never liked him. Said he was too smooth, too shady.” When did Val stop listening to the ramblings of his mother?
“So Gabi liked him, you liked him, then what?”
Val shrugged. “We fell into a comfortable pace. I asked that he not rush their wedding for my mother’s sake. He didn’t seem happy about that, but agreed. He drops anchor on the island often. He understands the need for limited access of his crew and has always respected that. In what I believed was an effort to woo my sister, he started delivering crates of wine without charge. My guests enjoyed it, so I added his selections to the menu.”
“But the wine isn’t his. So he’s passing another vineyard’s wine off just to schmooze your sister?”
“We won’t know that until we find out if there are other vendors buying his brand. The island goes through many bottles a week, but I don’t think we take all his stock.”
“Aren’t there international shipping regulations to jump through to buy direct from Italy?”
Val took the seat across from Margaret. “I hate to sound uninvolved, but I have people for that. In the case of Alonzo, he gifted the wine. I’ve never paid a dime for any of his bottles. The wine shuffles hands in Italy, then makes it to his yacht . . . or his supplier that sometimes came to port with crates of the stuff.”
“Do you know the name of the ships coming in? Their captains?”
Val hated that all he could do was narrow his eyes toward Margaret.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You have people for that.”
“All good questions, cara. Ones I will ask when we get home.”
She picked up the pen, scribbled on the paper. “Mislabeled wine travels from Italy, to where? Then it makes it to your island. All to impress a girl? I don’t buy it. There has to be more.”
“Bootleg wine is big business.”
“Not when you’re giving it away for free,” Margaret reminded him. “No, Alonzo needed you, Gabi . . . the island . . . I’m starting to think the wine is insignificant. Or a decoy for something else.”
Val’s head went straight to the image forever burned in his head . . . the one with Gabi willingly holding out her arm for a needle.
“The island limits eyes by the nature of it. How do you keep the authorities happy? Who regulates you?”
“The health department passes off on us yearly. Same with the hotel commission and regulating parties. I don’t have complaints so I don’t have many problems.”
Margaret pushed back in her seat and tapped her fingers against the armrest. “So you could be doing nearly anything on the island and no one would know. You’ve buttoned down Internet activity, sworn your guests to secrecy, cut out photographs that are an everyday part of every twenty-first-century life . . . you could be trafficking slaves, drugs, sex . . . no one would be the wiser.”
Val started to lose feeling in his fingers as he gripped the edge of the armrests. “Jesus.”
“Alonzo is trafficking something . . . something better than a few bottles of wine. If he marries your sister, she won’t call him out. If he blackmails you, you have to go along with him—”
“The hell I do!”
Margaret offered the first smile of the hour. “Or so he thinks. Bottom line, he thinks he’s safe by being family. Then before he can marry your sister, Michael and I show up and notice something funny about the wine.”
“Alonzo flips,” Val suggested. “Sees his plan falling apart.” The map of probability started to surface in Val’s head.
“He has a plan set to take photographs to compromise your efforts on the island.”
Val squeezed his eyes shut, swore in Italian. “One of Alonzo’s men said he was ill the week you were on the island. Said he couldn’t travel on the yacht until he was better.” Val met Margaret’s gaze. “He stayed when Alonzo wasn’t there.”
“The guy that cornered me in the hallway?”
“Maybe.”
Val ran his hand over the growing beard on his face. “Then you leave with Gabi.”
“After Gabi and Alonzo fought.”
News to him. “They were fighting?”
“She was questioning marrying him. Right before we left the island, he kissed and made up. A couple of days later, Alonzo makes a grand gesture to whisk her away for a romantic weekend . . . that is going on a week now. At the same time we chase the wine lead . . . someone he knows sees us, or maybe a search on Michael shows that he’s in Italy . . .”
“Damn, Margaret . . . we’re assuming a lot here.”
“Are we? What part isn’t true?”