A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  The next time she woke up it was four o’clock in the morning. The room was freezing. She hadn’t latched the French doors and an icy draft was coming through the space where they stood ajar. As she got up to close them, she heard a thump, and another, as though something heavy had been dropped on the floor above. Someone—it sounded like a woman—was sobbing. It had to be Anna, though the lurching, animal sobs sounded nothing like her. She listened, wondering again if she should go up, see if she was okay, try to comfort her. But what if she didn’t want comforting? What if she just wanted to be left alone? What if she wasn’t alone?

  Sunny stood at the door, trying to decide what to do. She put herself in Anna’s place. Would she want a friend there? No. She would want to be left alone to cry it out. She stood a long time, wondering if that was the right decision. Anna was still sobbing when Sunny once again resolved that it was not her affair to put her nose into, closed the French doors, made sure they were latched this time, and climbed back into bed. She jolted awake one more time before daybreak but heard nothing and didn’t look at her watch.

  * * *

  Daylight. Sunny’s face pressed hard into the pillow. Far away, or so it seemed, she could hear serious-sounding male voices and purposeful strides. She groped the nightstand for her watch. Nine-fifteen. She turned over and lay listening to whatever was going on. Someone heavy jogged down the stairs, keys jingling. A knock at the door. Merde! thought Sunny.

  “Hello? Anyone in there?” said a husky male voice.

  “Just a minute.”

  She got up and pulled the sheet around her. Her stomach lurched. She had a crease down her cheek and her head was pounding and her mouth felt like a day-old scone with a nicotine addiction. This promised to be a genuine hangover, not that she didn’t richly deserve it. Drink and smoke all day and into the night and this is how you feel the next day, no mystery there. The big question was who had the courage to knock on any door in this house at this early hour on Sunday morning. Could it be a rude call to breakfast? She hobbled over to the door hopefully, thinking of freshly squeezed orange juice, and opened it. On the other side, dressed in his neatly pressed uniform and looking distinctly displeased, stood Sergeant Steve Harvey of the St. Helena Police Department. If he was surprised to find Sunny, as he certainly must have been, he maintained his composure seamlessly.

  “Sunny.”

  “Steve?” It was difficult to speak. Her voice came out deep and scratchy.

  “Sorry to wake you. We need everyone upstairs in the kitchen as quickly as possible.”

  She nodded. “Will do.”

  5

  Sunny closed the door. She listened to Sergeant Harvey walk down to the next door and knock. Why on earth was he here, rousting people out of bed on a Sunday morning? It had to be because of Anna and Oliver’s fight. Somebody must have called in a domestic disturbance. Not Anna. She wasn’t the type to think calling the cops was a cute way to get the upper hand, and despite his threat, Sunny couldn’t picture Oliver resorting to state-sponsored backup. He would handle things himself or call a lawyer, not the cops. Could it be a drug bust? Maybe something valuable was missing and Oliver had called the police. The house was full of art, intoxicants, and strangers. It was a tempting combination. A theft! That was it, thought Sunny. After his fight with Anna, Oliver stayed up late watching his security cameras and he spotted a breach. Thus the early-morning raid. She shuffled into the bathroom, sheet dragging behind her. As long as somebody produced an omelet, bacon, a side of waffles, and a pitcher of fresh OJ, she didn’t care if the FBI stormed the house.

  The McCoskey look was seriously impaired. Punk-rock hair. Eyes glazed and puffy. Shoulders and, she suspected—confirmed—bottom and backs of calves sunburned the color of strawberry sorbet. And where on earth were her clothes? She thought for a long, foggy moment and finally remembered the passionate embrace of Molly Seth and Jared Bollinger. Sunny cursed them and their blossoming love. What to do? The room might look like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, but it lacked certain key amenities, for example, the all-important terry-cloth robe. She checked the closet and behind the bathroom door. Nothing. There was little choice. She hitched up the sheet and headed upstairs, passing two more police officers on the way. Both sternly avoided eye contact.

  The set of doors opening onto the north-wing hot tub were easy to find. She retraced her steps to locate the door where she’d left her clothes. It was closed, naturally. Molly and Jared were no doubt entwined inside, mingling their bodily fluids over Sunny’s best dry clean–only shirt. She racked her brain to come up with a better plan than knocking on the closed door of a known love nest. There was no choice. Bracing herself for the invasion of privacy, she knocked softly, waited, and knocked again. Someone moved around inside. A high voice murmured tenderly. Sunny knocked once more and said, “Sorry, you guys, I need to get my clothes.”

  There was more movement behind the door, and more soft, high words, followed by husky low ones. Sunny waited. She was just on the point of giving up and resigning herself to a police interrogation while wearing a sheet when the door opened and Sunny’s boyfriend, Andre Morales, stood in front of her, handsomely rumpled, naked to the waist, towel around hips. He gaped in surprise. “Sunny! What on earth are you doing here?”

  She tried to speak but couldn’t. Her voice would not come. She coughed and cleared her throat and finally croaked out, “When did you get here?”

  “Late last night, after work. What about you?”

  “Earlier.”

  “I see that.” He glanced at the sheet. “Have fun?”

  “Not as much as you, apparently.”

  Marissa, Keith Lachlan’s Polynesian princess, the same last seen sampling Jordan Crowley’s earlobe in the hot tub, came up behind him in her camisole and panties. She held Sunny’s clothes in one hand.

  “Yours?”

  Sunny took them. Marissa wrapped her arms around Andre’s waist, pressing her head to his chest. Andre scrubbed at his hair. He put one arm around Marissa’s shoulders absentmindedly, which he let drop when he looked at Sunny.

  “Listen, I know this is, uh, awkward. Why don’t you come in for a while and relax. Whatever the hell is going on out there can wait a little longer.”

  “Excuse me?” said Sunny.

  He licked his lips. “Look, Sunny, I’m not saying this is an ideal situation, but it’s happened, and now we have a choice. You have a choice. You can storm off and we can do the whole drama crisis thing. Or you can come in and we can talk things over, and you’ll see it’s not as big a deal as it seems.”

  Sunny looked at him, then Marissa, who gave her a smile and the look a cat wears when it’s settled into the best chair in the living room.

  “Don’t storm off,” he said, reaching for Sunny’s wrist. “Come in. You’ll see. There’s no need to get all upset.”

  Sunny glared at his hand and he removed it. She walked back through the house to the room where she’d slept. There she took her time getting dressed. The image of the two of them—Andre wearing a fixed stare like a man focused on a distant goal, Marissa looking sweetly content, both of them rumpled and rosy cheeked—burned itself into her memory with such force and clarity that long afterward she could study them like an image in a book. She could see the position of Marissa’s slender hand on Andre’s ribs, and the dip of flesh above his collarbone where Sunny had formerly liked to place her lips when they were the ones who woke up in bed together.

  * * *

  “You don’t look so good,” said Sergeant Harvey, handing Sunny a mug of black coffee.

  “I’ve had better mornings.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  His tone silenced any further exchange. She went over to the counter, where a collection of half-empty bottles from last night had accumulated. A bottle of Stag’s Leap Artemis Cab was open and hardly touched. That would be Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, thought Sunny, not to be confused with Stags’ Leap Winery or the Stags Leap District. H
ow many hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars did the lawyers get to sort out that tangle of suits and countersuits? And, in the end, it all came down to the placement of an apostrophe. The place where one stag leaps versus the place where multiple stags leap versus the declarative statement that multiple stags are inclined to leap around these few acres where very good Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are grown. If Oliver Seth was right, the great battles from here on out would be fought over such ephemeral issues, over ideas themselves. Intellectual property. The ownership of an idea and the subsequent wealth it generated in a global marketplace. What else was wine, anyway, other than an idea? Could they really tell which plot of land had produced the fruit to make a particular wine? People paid more because they liked the idea that the grapes for their wine came from a certain piece of land that they considered prestigious. They drank it for the idea of relaxation, indulgence, pleasure, luxury, superiority, heritage. She poured a splash of the red wine into her coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, hugging the mug with both hands.

  Spotlight consciousness, thought Sunny. The hangover was limiting her ability to see the big picture. She could see the elephant’s trunk but not the elephant, and certainly not the field the elephant was standing in. The entire morning seemed unreal, like she was watching someone else’s life. Had she really seen her boyfriend in the arms of another woman? Were the police really here, setting up camp as though they planned to stay? Was she really thinking about wine and intellectual property in the global marketplace when she should be wondering what the hell was going on? And where was everyone else, most notably Anna and Oliver? Were they hiding in a bedroom while the police swarmed the house?

  Sergeant Harvey sat down across from her, his already impressive physical presence augmented by his uniform and the creaking belt and holster strapped around his waist. His crew cut was groomed to honor-guard perfection as usual.

  “Sunny, you’re the last person I expected to see this morning,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, Steve,” she said, and took a sip of coffee.

  His expression turned serious and he shook his head. “I’m not making conversation. I need an answer.”

  She put the cup down. “A friend I hadn’t seen for years called me yesterday and said she was in town staying at her boyfriend’s weekend house and I should come over for lunch.” She gestured to the surroundings. “I came over, lunch turned into dinner and cocktails, and I ended up spending the night. They have plenty of room.”

  “Your friend’s name?”

  “Anna Wilson.”

  He nodded. “Sunny, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you about your friend. This morning at seven twenty-five, nine-one-one got a call from a guy named Mike Sayudo. Mr. Sayudo is employed by Oliver Seth in the capacity of landscape gardener and outdoor maintenance man. He said he came out early this morning to make sure the drip system was functioning. Apparently it’s been a problem and he’s been keeping an eye on it.”

  “The drip system.”

  “That’s right.” Sergeant Harvey glanced out the window. “I guess I don’t know exactly how to tell you this except to come right out with it.” He looked back at Sunny. “This morning Mr. Sayudo found your friend. Oliver Seth identified her body a few minutes ago.”

  “Her body?”

  “She died sometime early this morning.”

  “She overdosed,” said Sunny softly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Nothing specific. Just, you know…”

  “She was doing drugs.”

  “I don’t know for sure. It seemed like it. Or maybe just drinking too much. I don’t know.”

  Sunny stared into her coffee. It was hard to feel anything. The whole morning, the whole day yesterday, felt like a strange dream. “If she didn’t overdose, how did she die?”

  “It looked like she fell out of one of the second-story windows onto the patio. The hill slopes away, so it was a pretty good drop. Fifteen feet or so.”

  Over time, Sunny had come to know Sergeant Steve Harvey pretty well. He prided himself on accuracy and chose his words with care. “What do you mean, ‘looked like’?” she said.

  He hesitated, glancing around the room. One of his lieutenants was lingering in the hallway off the kitchen. They could see him through the floor-to-ceiling glass. No one else was around.

  “Sunny, we’ve known each other quite a while. We have a certain rapport, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Definitely.”

  They’d worked together, in a manner of speaking, on three murder investigations in the valley. Thanks to some unusual associations, a little too keen a nose, and a tendency to roam around at night, Sunny had landed in the middle of three of the valley’s most notorious crimes in years. Naturally, Sergeant Harvey would rather see her cooking lunch than out digging around in his jurisdiction. Still, no matter how irritated he might be at her involvement, he was always respectful, if a bit stern and intimidating. He had a weight lifter’s body and used it to full effect, wearing his shirts tight and standing arrow-straight. Now he spoke in a low voice, poking her forearm with a burly finger after each phrase.

  “I don’t know how you managed to turn up in the middle of this”—poke—”but if I were to tell you something about a case”—poke—”based on that rapport we have”—poke—”and I tell you it is absolutely vital that you not share this information with anyone”—poke—”in a situation like that”—poke—”I assume I could trust you implicitly to keep such information confidential until such time as I choose to reveal it to others at my sole discretion.”

  Sunny moved her arm. “I would take a situation like that very seriously.”

  Sergeant Harvey stared at her. “I’m sure you can imagine why I would take such a risk.”

  She could not. She had, specifically, not the slightest idea. He continued to stare at her until the fog began to clear. “Because things are going to get messy?” she asked finally.

  He nodded. “That’s right. I don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with here, but I’ve seen plenty of people with head injuries. Car accidents. Drunks falling down. Fights. You name it. This one doesn’t look right to me.” He shook his head. “Something’s just not right. We won’t know for sure until the coroner’s report, but I’d bet my badge on one thing.” Sunny waited. Sergeant Harvey gritted his teeth. “The funny thing about what happened to your friend Anna Wilson, Sunny, is that it’s hard to fall out a window when you’re already dead.”

  6

  The situation demanded an emotional response. Tears, ideally, and lots of them. Uncontrollable sobs. Collapse. Something to indicate she was human and felt human grief and compassion. Sunny McCoskey had never been the type, as much as she would have liked to be. She knew it was strange. It felt strange even to her. One of her oldest friends was dead and her eyes were dry as cork. Nothing. Not even a tingle. She’d always been this way. Emotionally powerful situations rendered her calm, cool-headed, and oddly devoid of emotion in direct proportion to the severity of the impact. The more serious the incident, the calmer the state of mind. After the crisis passed, and usually at an oddly irrelevant moment, she would finally feel the punch of grief, doubling up with sobs over a particularly moving beer commercial or the sight of a dog locked in a car.

  It was an effort to keep still. Her pulse was racing. She wanted to sprint up the dry trail behind the house, to run and claw and pull herself through the scraping bushes all the way to the top. She wanted her lungs to pump air until they burned and her legs and arms to work and sweat until they quivered with exertion. The worst was having to sit in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee and wait. The police had asked them not to talk to one another, not to go anywhere, not to contact anyone, not to use their cell phones. An officer was left to watch over them while one by one they went into the improvised police headquarters set up in one of the guest rooms to tell their stories.

  It was a
relief not to have to talk. Franco tried to discuss the situation, but the officer guarding them asked him to refrain from unnecessary discourse. He resorted to sighs and the occasional disgruntled expletive as he settled and resettled himself in the chair. Once he glanced over at Sunny with a look of such penetrating sorrow that she almost got her wish. Her throat tightened and it took a great effort to arrest the welling up of tears.

  They sat around the kitchen in a grim parody of the previous day’s festivities. Troy Stevens, looking even paler and more disheveled than yesterday, slumped in the corner of a built-in seat in his black T-shirt and jeans, staring out the window. In the other corner, Jordan cried quietly but profusely. Every few minutes she took a wet ball of tissue from the pocket of a terry-cloth tracksuit and blew her nose. Sunny, Franco, and Jared sat at one end of the kitchen table. Molly stood outside the sliding glass door in her black skirt and heels, smoking, and Jared watched her. Cynthia sat at the other end of the table staring at her hands. Andre and Marissa occupied two of three barstools at the island, leaving one empty between them. Andre kicked back and forth on the stool, checking his watch. Sunny had heard Marissa tell Franco that Keith had returned to San Francisco late last night. Oliver had been in the guest room with the police giving his statement for more than an hour. Sunny’s stomach growled. On cue, a cop arrived with a pink box full of doughnuts and a jug of reconstituted orange juice. The stuff confessions are made of.

  * * *

  “She was murdered, obviously,” said Franco, squeezing sunscreen into his palm and rubbing it over his face and neck.

  They were out by the pool, waiting. It was almost two o’clock. Sunny, like the others, had described her experiences of the day and night before to the police in detail, though one could argue that she’d left out the juicy bits. She had skipped Keith Lachlan’s offer of a pick-me-up. She left out the late-night hot-tub session and interrupting Molly and Jared in flagrante delicto, as well as her surprise upon discovering that Andre Morales had joined the party after she went to bed. The manic energy she’d felt earlier had worn off and now she was in a daze. She stared at the water of the barely rippling pool as if she was watching television. Her hangover had probably, she now reflected, clouded her judgment. The events she had skipped over would come out eventually. Even if she didn’t mention getting into the hot tub, someone else would. The police were going to come back to her and she would have to explain. At least by then her stomach wouldn’t be lurching and sloshing like hide tide at the boardwalk. At the time of the interview, none of it had seemed terribly relevant. She thought describing the seedier aspects of the night would only embarrass her and shock Sergeant Harvey, who had seemed to grow sterner and angrier with every question. It was hard to say how much such stories offended him. Where did drugs, sex, and rampant affluence fall in his moral universe? Well outside, she assumed. Sergeant Harvey liked rules, and not just because he was a cop. He was order and regulation and discipline from his neatly trimmed nails to his gleaming black boots.