Payback

“I wouldn’t know. Sorry, Mr. Savarini. Like I said, I’m new. I only started last week and I’d never waited on him before, that’s for sure.”

“Did he pay by credit card? If so, could you tell me his name? That would help me to confirm it really was my friend.”

Merrie wasn’t stupid. Her smile vanished. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give out personal information about one of our customers. As it happens, though, the guest you’re inquiring about paid in cash. In fact, he left without even waiting for his check. He just dropped a bundle of twenty-dollar bills on the table, but it was more than enough to cover his bill. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’re really busy and I need to get back to work.” She walked away before Luke could ask any more questions.

“Well, that got me precisely nowhere,” he said to his sister, sliding back into his seat. “The server admitted the guy didn’t wait for a check. He simply left a stack of twenty-dollar bills on the table to pay for his meal. As the owner of three restaurants, I can tell you that almost never happens.”

“Let it go, Luke.” His sister handed him the dessert menu. “The reality is that Ron Raven is dead and you saw somebody who looked like him.”

“The man recognized me,” Luke said. The more he replayed the incident in his mind, the more convinced he became that he’d seen Ron Raven, not some look-alike. “He knew I’d recognized him and he bailed without even waiting for his check. Then he damn near ran me down in the parking lot in order to avoid talking to me. If it was somebody who just looked like Ron, why was he so anxious to avoid me?”

“Because you made him nervous the way you were obviously pursuing him?”

“No.” Luke gave a decisive shake of his head. “He ran because he recognized me. Then he dropped a pile of cash on the table to cover his bill because he hoped to get out of the door before I caught up with him. And it worked.”

Luke knew he was being obstinate, but the sound of Ron’s laughter and the tilt of his head had seemed familiar even before he’d glimpsed the man’s features full face. A stranger might happen to look like Ron. What were the odds that the same stranger would also sound like him and have similar mannerisms?

Anna was silent for a moment, finally giving real weight to the possibility that her brother had seen what he claimed. “If that man was Ron Raven and he recognized you, that means he hasn’t lost his memory….”

“I agree.”

“But if Ron isn’t suffering from memory loss, he’s deliberately hiding. That can’t be good, especially for his families.”

Luke shrugged. “His wives and children already know Ron was a liar and a cheat. How is it worse for them to know he’s a live scumbag as opposed to a dead one?”

“Maybe it’s not,” Anna conceded. “But I sure as hell would think long and hard before I went to either of his previous wives and informed them that I’d just seen their supposedly dead husband eating dinner in my cousin’s restaurant. Their most likely reaction is to have you arrested for harassment.”

“Don’t they have a right to know?” Luke was unsure how he would answer his own question.

“Know what, precisely?” Anna demanded. “That you think you may have seen a man who looks like Ron Raven, but he left the restaurant before the two of you exchanged a single word? Wow! There’s news to set the blogosphere humming.”

“I wouldn’t be telling his families I saw a man who looked like Ron Raven,” Luke answered quietly. “I’d be telling them I’m pretty much one hundred percent sure that I saw Ron Raven, alive and in the flesh.”

Anna drew in a sharp breath, taken aback by his conviction. “You were simply a business acquaintance of Ron’s, not an intimate friend. You probably didn’t meet him more than a couple of times.”

“Try at least a dozen. Usually one-on-one, and sometimes for meetings that lasted as long as three or four hours. Ron Raven was a hands-on type of investor.”

“Even so, it was six years ago and you’ve been leading a hectic life ever since then. Memories blur. Impressions get distorted. Plus, you have no idea what sort of people his wives and children are. Do you have the right to mess with the lives of people you’ve never even met?”

Luke was silent for a long time. This was what came of stubbornly clinging to the notion of privacy in a family where if one person sneezed on Tuesday, by Friday every sibling and ten percent of the other relatives would have called to find out how the guy’s cold was progressing.

“I have met Ron’s family,” he said finally. “Or at least his Chicago wife and daughter. I know them quite well, in fact.”

Anna stared at him. She was thirteen months older, which meant that she’d known him for the entire thirty-four years of his existence. Apparently something in his voice had alerted her to the fact that his meetings with Avery and Kate Raven involved more than socializing with the family of the man who’d provided him with investment capital.

“Define what you mean by knowing them quite well,” she said, in an ominous, older-sister tone of voice.

Luke cursed silently. If he hadn’t been thrown for a loop by the glimpse of Ron Raven, he would never, ever, have laid himself open to this sort of sisterly scrutiny.

He tried to speak with brisk indifference. “Kate…Ron’s daughter…is a pastry chef. She was a member of the U.S. team that competed in the Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie last year. The design concept for their chocolate torte was Kate’s and their team took the bronze medal. The French team won, of course—they always do—but the U.S. has never even placed in that competition before. These days, Kate is working as head pastry chef for La Lanterne, the finest bakery in Chicago.”

He was rather pleased with his casual summation of Kate’s life. All professional accomplishment and nothing personal. Anna, unfortunately, was not deceived. “How long have you been dating her?” she asked. “And how the hell could you have kept quiet about her all those times we discussed Ron’s disappearance?”

“I’m not dating her.” Under his sister’s unrelenting gaze, he expanded his answer. “Not anymore. We broke up a while ago.”

“Before her father was murdered?”

“Yes. A few weeks before, in fact.” To be precise, not long after their argument as to whether Luke respected her professional ambitions enough to take time off from the opening of his newest restaurant to fly to Lyon and watch her compete in the most important contest of her professional life. The preparation and endless hours of practice for the Coupe du Monde were so arduous they had both known Kate would be unlikely ever to enter the contest again. Seven months after their breakup, he was finally able to admit that his decision not to fly to France had probably contributed to the chain of events leading to their final, hideous confrontation.

Anna looked hurt. “Quite apart from all the times we discussed Ron Raven’s murder, why didn’t you ever tell me you were dating somebody special?”

Because he’d worked his ass off to keep the affair quiet. Because while he and Kate were dating, he’d been desperate to develop the relationship minus the analysis of his parents, his five siblings and all the assorted in-laws and cousins who might decide to stick their noses into this latest interesting piece of Savarini family gossip. Ironically, the spectacular emotional storm that ended his relationship with Kate had taught him the hard lesson that there were far more ways to screw up a relationship than subjecting it to benevolent interference from a close-knit family.

“There was no point in talking to you about Kate. It wasn’t serious and we didn’t date all that long.” Eight months wasn’t very long, he soothed his conscience, so he wasn’t exactly lying. Luke hurried on, dodging more sisterly questions. “The thing is, I do know Kate and her mother well enough to be fairly sure that if Ron Raven is alive, they would want to hear about it.”

A gruff, rumbling voice greeted them from across the room, saving him from further cross-examination. Thank you, Jesus.

“Anna, mia piccola, come stai, carina?”

“Bruno! Che sorpresa piacevole! Sto bene, grazie. E tu?”

“Eh, cosi, cosi. No, no, don’t get up, Anna.” Cousin Bruno squeezed her shoulder. “What a treat to find you here! I’m glad I decided to stop by the restaurant after my daughter dragged me to the movies. We saw this horrible, boring movie about blowing up cars. If there was anything more to the plot, I must have missed those two lines of dialogue.”

Anna laughed and stood up to hug him, ignoring his command. “Bruno, stop complaining. You know you love movies with lots of car chases.”

“Yes, providing there’s a plot squeezed in between the chases.” He patted her shoulder. “You should have told me you planned to eat here tonight. I would have skipped the movie and been here to welcome you both.”

“I wasn’t sure what our plans would be. Luke’s only in town for twenty-four hours. By the way, do you remember my brother, Luke?”

“We never met.” Bruno shook hands. “But I ate at your restaurant last year when I was in Chicago. Luciano’s on Chestnut. I inquired after you, Luke, but the sous-chef told me you were at one of your other places that night. You can be very proud of what you’ve achieved with Luciano’s. The meal my brother and I ate was spectacular.”

“Thank you. It’s a relief to know you were there on a night when we didn’t screw up.”

“Somehow, I get the impression that you and your team don’t screw up very often.” Bruno pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, I can’t compete with Luciano’s—we don’t even try to cater to that level of sophistication—but I’m proud of the desserts we make here. What can I get the two of you? Our tiramisu is made from an old family recipe handed down by my grandmother, and it’s the best ever, if I do say so myself. The panna cotta with caramel sauce is mighty fine, as well. We use buttermilk in addition to the cream and it’s not as bland as the traditional recipe.”

“I love your amaretto ice cream,” Anna said. “It’s my personal favorite.”

“Then amaretto ice cream it shall be for you, cara.” Bruno gave her hand a fatherly squeeze. “Luke, how about you?”

“The panna cotta would be great,” he said. “I’ve never made it with buttermilk and it sounds interesting.”

Their desserts arrived along with tiny cups of aromatic espresso and Luke chatted politely with his cousin, who seemed both a kindly man and an experienced chef. Maybe the ravioli has just been an unfortunate exception to generally good food, Luke mused. The panna cotta was certainly first-rate, and the buttermilk made for an intriguing variation on an old standby.

Bruno excused himself to have a word with his staff, and Anna worked hard to keep Luke from reverting to their previous conversation about Ron Raven. Since Luke was working equally hard to prevent her picking up their conversation about Kate, the atmosphere around the table was unusually strained. They were both relieved when Bruno returned after a few minutes and sat down across from Luke.

“Merrie, one of our servers, asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Luke a thin, crumpled credit card receipt. “She said you were inquiring about a couple that was seated at one of her tables. Apparently, they left this behind.”

Luke picked up the flimsy slip of paper. “I appreciate Merrie thinking of me. But she told me that couple paid their bill in cash.”

“They did. This isn’t one of our charge slips,” Bruno said. “If it was, I couldn’t pass it on. But Merrie found it tucked in among the stash of twenties they left behind to pay their bill. She was about to toss it away when she saw me ordering your desserts and realized you really are my cousin. Since this charge slip is nothing to do with us or the meal they ate here, and there’s no way to return it to the couple, I figure there’s no harm in handing it over to you. Merrie says you were interested in this man.”

There was a definite question in his cousin’s voice and Luke repeated his story about seeing an old friend he’d lost touch with. “I’m not sure if I’m enthusiastic enough to track him down through a credit card bill, but I appreciate Merrie’s gesture. Tell her thanks from me, will you?” He deliberately downplayed his interest, since he could only imagine how Bruno would react if Luke repeated his claim to have seen a supposed murder victim eating dinner on the other side of the dining room.

Bruno seemed satisfied with Luke’s explanation, and left to go back to the kitchen after another profuse round of good wishes and goodbyes.

Luke smoothed out the charge slip, scrutinizing the scanty information as he and Anna made their way back to her car. The charge of forty-three dollars and change had been made earlier in the day at an establishment called Sunrise. There was no indication of what sort of establishment Sunrise might be.

“What’s the name on the charge slip?” Anna asked, clicking her key to spring the locks on her car.

Luke held the slip up to the light. “Stewart M. Jones.”

“You see!” Anna looked relieved. “I told you the man you saw wasn’t Ron Raven. Now you can relax and stop obsessing about seeing dead people. I feel as if I spent the past hour living in an outtake from The Sixth Sense.”

The fact that the name on the charge slip read Stewart Jones proved nothing at all about the identity of the man Luke had seen in Bruno’s, as his sister must realize. If Ron had faked his own death, he wouldn’t be opening charge accounts under the identity he’d just been at great pains to get rid of.

Anna must be afraid that he was seeing visions of Ron because he was hung up on his failed relationship with Kate, Luke decided. As it happened, his sister was way off the mark. He wasn’t fixated on Kate—far from it. Their affair had ended in nothing less than misery and he sure as hell wasn’t wasting any time regretting its end. Kate might be beautiful and sexy and have the same career interests as he did, but their personalities were polar opposites. Not to mention the fact that her concept of faithfulness bore no relationship to his.

He realized now that their character differences had mattered almost as much as the betrayals. As their affair started to unravel, their differences worked to the surface, causing unbearable friction. His frustrations had boiled over into the sort of noisy Italian explosiveness he’d spent most of his adult life learning to control. Kate had reacted to each of his displays of temperament with a deeper and deeper retreat into icily silent WASP disapproval.

Even the memory of those last few weeks was enough to make Luke feel slightly sick, quite apart from the horrors of the final denouement. Allowing his sister’s comments about the real identity of Stewart M. Jones to slide past unchallenged, Luke tucked the charge slip into his billfold and took his seat next to Anna in the car. He returned the conversation to family, food and the imminent birth of their youngest sister’s first baby and made sure he kept it there.

For all his silence, Luke’s conviction that he’d seen Ron Raven remained strong. But six months had already passed since Ron disappeared, and Luke decided he could afford to wait until he got back to Chicago before notifying the authorities that, far from moldering in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, Ron Raven was alive and well, and seemingly enjoying life in one of the more prosperous suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Three

Chicago, October 10, 2007

The Miami police department didn’t even bother to be polite when Luke called to inform them that he’d seen the supposedly dead Ron Raven eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, a week earlier. Dismissed by a bored clerk—his call never made it as far up the hierarchy as a real cop—he tried again with the Chicago police.

Smarter this time around, he directed his call to a detective sergeant whom he’d met eighteen months earlier when Luciano’s was being remodeled. The cop had been assigned to find out who was stealing construction materials from the restaurant site and Luke figured the two of them had a good rapport.

Their rapport apparently didn’t extend far enough for the cop to believe Luke’s claim to have seen Ron Raven. His tale was received with greater politeness, but with the same bored disbelief demonstrated by the police department in Miami. The bottom line was that cops in both places had fielded hundreds of reports alleging that Ron Raven was alive, and the fact that Luke described himself as an old friend and business acquaintance of the deceased carried no particular weight.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve received so many reports because Ron Raven is alive and people really are seeing him?” Luke finally asked, no longer bothering to hide his frustration.

“No,” the cop responded baldly.

“That’s it?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Just no?”

“What do you want me to say?” The detective sighed. “We receive reports like this every time there’s a murder that attracts a lot of TV coverage. And when there’s no body to be buried, you can guarantee that half the weirdos in the state are going to claim they’ve seen the deceased.”

It was sobering to realize that from the detective’s point of view he was simply one more wing nut craving notoriety. “But you’ve dealt with me before!” Luke protested. “You know I’ve met Ron Raven because it was right in your report about the thefts from the construction site. You needed a record of who was providing financing for the restaurant and I told you then—almost three years ago!—that I had a revolving line of credit with Ron Raven.”

“That’s true.” The cop’s voice added a layer of impatience to existing boredom.

“And it isn’t as if I’m calling you when Ron Raven’s disappearance is being hotly reported by the media. They moved on to fresh meat weeks ago. Months ago, in fact.”

“I’m sure you believe what you’re telling me, Mr. Savarini—”

“But you don’t believe me, and you have no interest in conducting any sort of follow-up investigation.”

“No, I don’t.” In view of their past acquaintance, the cop relented enough to expand on his reply. “Look, here are the facts. I pulled up the case notes while you were talking and I’m reading them right off my computer. In the three months the investigation was on active status, we took reports from a hundred and twelve people claiming to have seen Ron Raven. Do the math. That’s around ten supposed sightings a week. Miami police have taken hundreds more. On top of that, six callers told us they’d committed the murder, and another three identified themselves as the woman who’d been in the hotel room with Mr. Raven. We followed up on all six confessions and interviewed all three women who claimed to have been in the Miami hotel room. Our detectives concluded the closest any of those people had come to seeing Ron Raven was via the TV screens in their living rooms. That was your tax dollars at work, Mr. Savarini, from May until the end of July. A complete waste of time and police resources. Be grateful the case has been put into inactive status. Except for the warrant outstanding against Julio Castellano, of course. Now, if you thought you’d seen him, I’d be more interested.”

“The fact that crazy people like to confess to murders they didn’t commit proves nothing about whether I saw Ron Raven in Virginia last week.”

The cop no longer sounded bored, only impatient. “We have forensic evidence that proves Julio Castellano, a twice-convicted murderer, was in Ron Raven’s hotel room,” he snapped. “We have bullets and blood-spatter patterns in the hotel room, in the exact places forensic experts would expect if the victims were shot while they were running from the bed. We also have security video of two bodies being wheeled onto a yacht. Based on discrepancies between the ship’s log and data collected from the yacht itself, experts have calculated that the boat traveled a total of thirty-five nautical miles that night without knowledge or permission of the owners. Trust me, Mr. Savarini, we know exactly what happened to Ron Raven the night he disappeared. He was murdered. He’s dead and his body—what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

It was depressing to hear Anna’s arguments repeated more or less point by point. Luke realized that announcing he had the number of the car in which “Ron Raven” had driven away from the restaurant was going to get him nowhere. The chance of the Chicago police department agreeing to run the numbers was somewhere south of zero. He cut short what was clearly a useless exercise by thanking the cop for his explanations and hanging up.

It was approaching 11:00 a.m., almost time for him to leave for work, and way past time for him to stop obsessing about a sighting that apparently nobody cared about except him. He was sweaty after his morning run, and he retreated to the bathroom to take a shower in preparation for the long hours ahead. He’d be lucky if he was back in his Lincoln Park condo before two or three in the morning, and that was assuming the night produced no major crises at any of his restaurants.

Luke let the water pound in a scorching stream over his head and body. The cops were convinced they had the case of Ron Raven’s disappearance wrapped up, despite the minor detail that they hadn’t actually managed to arrest the alleged murderer. Who was Luke to persist in the claim that he’d seen Ron eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, when the rest of the world was happy to accept that the guy had long since become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Atlantic fishes?

Even if he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he had no good reason to hurl himself against the brick wall of police indifference. The eight months he’d spent dating Ron’s daughter didn’t justify sticking his nose into Raven family business months after his affair with Kate had ended. God knew, he had enough problems within his own family to keep him occupied for the next lifetime or two. He sure as hell didn’t need to take on anyone else’s family problems.

But, dammit, he’d seen Ron Raven! The annoying conviction remained, despite his efforts to wash it down the shower drain. Luke reminded himself of all the reasons why this was a totally lousy time for him to set off on some idiotic quest to convince the world that Ron was alive. The sous-chef at his newest restaurant in suburban Winnetka had sliced open his thumb yesterday, which meant that Luke would be putting in ten long hours of intensive labor tonight, instead of merely checking in for a couple of hours before transferring to his flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago. The Food Network had called yesterday and asked him to tape a show for their upcoming series on America’s most exciting new chefs. Somehow, his already crammed schedule for next week had to be expanded to include eight hours of interviews, with a camera crew trailing him while he cooked and the network expert analyzed everything from his fall seasonal recipes to his underlying technique.

Luke turned off the shower and shook water from his body. Clearly, he didn’t have time right now for pursuing ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Nevertheless, he found himself grabbing a towel and padding wet-footed back into the spare bedroom that served as his home office. Tucking the towel around his waist, he grabbed his Palm Pilot and retrieved a phone number for George Klein, a private detective he’d hired over the summer to identify a dishonest Luciano’s employee.

George greeted him warmly, a soothing change after the indifferent cops. “Luke, it’s good to hear from you again. How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I need your help. Nothing to do with the restaurants, thank God. Either the security systems you put in place are working or I’ve managed to hire some really loyal and honest employees. I hope it’s the latter.”

“I do, too. There’s nothing I like better than to install protective systems that never get activated. So, how can I help you?”

“I’m hoping you can run a license number for me. It’s a Virginia plate, and I need to know who the car is registered to. Do you have any contacts in Virginia?”

“A couple. Hopefully, they’ll come through for me. Give me the plate number and I’ll give it my best shot.”