A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  “The coke dealer—I mean Oliver’s lawyer, Keith—is Caribbean, too. From Barbados.”

  “Let’s not get them together,” said Rivka, turning her bike around. “That guy sounds like trouble. Speaking of Jason, he’s cooking Ital food at Wade’s tomorrow night. You in?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it. What’s an Ital?”

  “In this case, oxtail and plantains. Or maybe curry chicken.”

  “On it.”

  She watched Rivka bump across the lawn to a side street and disappear down the road. She’d forgotten to tell her about the e-mail from Anna.

  * * *

  The traffic was still in a snarl on Main. Between people in parked cars opening doors and people pulling out of parking spots and frustrated drivers deciding at the last second to shoot down a side street, it was too dangerous to try on a bike. Sunny took the side streets toward home and kept going to the police station just outside of town. The woman behind the bulletproof glass had a swimmer’s physique and greenish-blond hair. She told Sunny to take a seat while she tried to find Sergeant Harvey. Sunny heard her radio his car and Sergeant Harvey respond that he was a couple of blocks away and to ask Sunny to sit tight. The woman looked up. “Got it,” said Sunny. She stared at the door, waiting for Sergeant Harvey to come through it. He came from the offices behind her instead and made her jump.

  “McCoskey! What can I do for you?” He had a manila folder in one hand and was working his pager with the other.

  “Sorry to drop in on you,” said Sunny. “I know you’re busy with the new case. Do you have a few minutes to talk in private?”

  “Come on back into the office. How you doing? You get any sleep yet?”

  “Not much.”

  “Me neither.”

  They walked down a hall and into a tiny office, where he offered her a pinkish-gray metal folding chair. The filing cabinets were a pinkish, fleshy brown, too, like certain kinds of intestines and the underbellies of a couple of inedible mushrooms she could think of. The room’s only window looked back on the murky hallway and the offices opposite. Spending more than a few minutes in a room like this would drive anyone to suicide, thought Sunny, or a life of crime. Most of the furniture was the color of some sort of offal. Even the telephone was a muddy beige. It was like being inside a giant gut. It was tragedy so maudlin it was almost funny. One more chip out of the dirty coffee mug on the faux-walnut desk with its laminate buckling, one more stack of yellowing paperwork on top of the scratched-up filing cabinets, and the room would achieve comedy through farce. She shifted in the miserable chair and it gave a metallic groan. Was St. Helena really so bad off that they couldn’t afford a real chair for Sergeant Harvey’s visitors to sit in? Couldn’t the department pool their funds, rent a van one Saturday, and go requisitioning at the nearest Ikea? Sergeant Harvey grabbed a stack of pink phone messages left on his desk and shuffled through them. Probably he never gave the surroundings a second thought. Or he might even like making his visitors suffer. Certainly no one would be tempted to linger.

  “Chop-chop, McCoskey. I’m up to my ears,” he said without looking up.

  “Right. So, as you might imagine, it’s about Anna Wilson.”

  “She have a drug problem as far as you know? Addict?”

  “Recreational. Nothing serious, at least back when I hung out with her enough to say for sure.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About four years.”

  “What happened? Why’d you lose contact?”

  “We both lived in San Francisco. Then she went to Europe and I came up here. We talked and e-mailed a couple of times since then, but Saturday was the first time I’d seen her.”

  “What made her call you up all of a sudden after so long?”

  “Like I said yesterday, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe just a friendly visit, maybe something more.”

  “Such as?”

  “She seemed to be having some difficulties with her boyfriend and she needed moral support from her friends.”

  “Is that what she said, ‘moral support’?”

  “She didn’t use those exact words.”

  “So she might have been interested in actual support, as in a buffer between her and someone else who had become abusive or who she considered potentially violent. A witness, at least.”

  “It’s possible, but there were plenty of people around, if that’s what she was after. The guy she shares a place with in Barcelona, Troy Stevens, was staying there at the house. And Franco, the winemaker for Taurus Rising, Seth’s winery. He wasn’t particularly a friend of hers, more of Oliver’s, but he was staying with them, too. And her friend Jordan was there when I arrived, though I think she’d just driven up for the day from the city. Even without inviting me up, she knew she wasn’t going to be alone in the house with Oliver anytime soon.” Sunny waited until he looked up from the papers on his desk. “We went over all this yesterday, didn’t we?”

  “It doesn’t hurt to go over it again. I was going to ask you to come down here for that purpose tomorrow or the next day, anyway. I know yesterday was a shocker. No offense, but you looked pretty ragged when we talked up there. I figured I’d give you a couple of days to get your head together.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sergeant Harvey penciled some notes on a piece of paper and went on talking without looking up. “I knew that fancy-pants boyfriend of yours was going to be trouble.”

  “The fancy pants usually are.”

  “Speaking of fancy pants, I think I have something of yours.” He opened a drawer in his desk and tossed a Ziploc bag across the desk. “I believe these belong to you.”

  Her bra and underwear were inside. Sunny stuffed them in the messenger bag she used as a purse. “Thanks. Where’d you find them?”

  “Laundry room. Rolled up in a towel.”

  “How’d you know they were mine?”

  “I’m a cop. Besides, who else would wear that stuff?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Come on, McCoskey. Dingy cotton knickers and a training bra with a hole in it? Technically, they’re evidence, but seeing as they’re not of much consequence to the investigation, I figure I might as well return them.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Not that it’s any of my business, McCoskey, but you need a real man in your life, not a pretty boy just passing through.”

  Sunny rolled her eyes. “Thank you for your concern, but I think you happen to be wrong in this case. I diagnose too much testosterone in the current model, not a shortage of. If I ever go shopping for a man again, I will be looking for a wilty little thing I can keep in line with a stern glance.”

  “Don’t confuse the trimming for the tree is all I’m saying.”

  “Point taken. Choose a simple, manly tree. To get back to the more pertinent issue I came to see you about?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Sunny took the envelope out of her bag and handed it to him. “This morning when I got to work I found these messages in my e-mail. The photograph was attached. Anna forwarded them early Sunday morning. She sent them to the generic contact address on Wildside’s Web site from Oliver Seth’s e-mail account.”

  He frowned, flipping through the pages. “How do you know it was her who sent it?”

  “I thought of that. I guess there’s no way to know for sure, but it sounds like her. And she signed it Wils. That’s what I used to call her. Maybe other people call her that, too, but I’ve never heard them. I think it’s from her.”

  Sergeant Harvey nodded. “She send anything else?”

  “Just that.”

  “Nothing else attached?”

  “Nope. You guys get any word back on the autopsy?”

  “Nothing definite yet.”

  “Anything indefinite?”

  He stood up and went over to where the window to the outside world should have been. Instead, there was a poster reproduction of an oil painting of a bald eagle in flight over a rocky c
hasm and several framed certificates. “It’s too soon to know much for sure. No cause of death as yet. I disclosed the main issue to you already, which is that, in my opinion, she was dead before the fall. Nothing from the coroner on that yet, either. They’re still checking what kind of drugs, if any, were in her system, but that’s going to take some time.”

  “So, in theory, it could still be an overdose.”

  “In theory.”

  “Not your theory.”

  “No.”

  Sunny raised her eyebrows. “Because…”

  He went back to his chair behind the desk. “For now this goes nowhere beyond this room.”

  “You have my word.”

  “We’ll do a press conference once everything is confirmed. Until you read it in the paper, you know nothing.”

  “Right.”

  “You say nothing.”

  “Right.”

  “Because I will know the source immediately.”

  “Got it. No digo nada.”

  He locked eyes with her. “I expect the coroner to come back with suffocation. There were no big marks or injuries or signs of any major blows as far as I could tell. The only trauma looked to have been sustained in the fall from the window. However, the skin around her mouth looked slightly abraded, and there was an area on her upper lip that showed some superficial damage. She also had a bruise on one of her wrists. She was slight in build, not particularly muscular, and according to you and others, under the influence of some combination of drugs and alcohol. It stands to reason that anybody reasonably strong could have overpowered her.”

  “Overpowered her, thus the bruise, and stuffed something in her mouth, thus the abrasions?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. They might have put some kind of tape over her mouth to keep her quiet. Something strong, like duct tape. It was late. She might have been asleep when the attack occurred, which of course would make everything easier.”

  “Or passed out.” Sunny shuddered.

  Sergeant Harvey nodded. His mobile phone rang. “Excuse me.”

  Sunny stared at the eagle poster while he took the call, listened, and said, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Sunny, we’re going to have to finish this another time. I’ll contact you tomorrow. Meanwhile, the information I’ve shared with you is to remain strictly confidential.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “I know. That’s why I do.”

  * * *

  Weeds poked through the fence in front of Sunny’s house and the rosebushes reached spiny arms over the sidewalk. She could smell them even before she reached the gate. It was good to be home. She pushed her bike through and was startled to see Oliver Seth. He stood up from the stoop.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I tried the restaurant but you’d already left. I was hoping we could talk about an issue that’s come up.”

  He looked tense but rested. There were no shadows under his eyes, nothing disheveled about his fresh-looking shirt and trousers, but his mouth was a straight line and he was frowning against the sunset.

  “I’d ask you in, but it’s so nice out,” said Sunny.

  “That’s fine. We can talk here.”

  Sunny put the kickstand down on the bike and sat opposite him on the stoop. The gold sunglasses from the photograph were hanging from his shirt. He put his hands together the way she’d often seen businesspeople do, like they were about to bow in Japanese style. Maybe that’s where the gesture had come from. Seth’s hands were extremely clean. It appeared that he’d just had a manicure. His cuticles were neat, the nails buffed and shiny.

  “The last couple of days must have been pretty rough for you,” said Sunny.

  “This is not a pleasant business,” said Oliver. “Not for me, not for you. Not for anyone. But there are some aspects of what’s happening that we can still control. Keep from getting worse.”

  “Such as?”

  “Sunny, I’m going to put my cards on the table. I know about the e-mails Anna sent you. That’s what I’ve come to talk with you about. I want to explain what was going on between us so that you’ll understand what those e-mails mean, and what they don’t mean. Anna and I had a big blowup the night she died. She had gotten into my e-mail and read through a lot of my personal correspondence and I was very angry about it. I thought, and I still think, she had no right to do that. No one does. The last thing I said to her was that I thought she should go back to Barcelona as soon as possible. Then I stormed off. I didn’t see her again until…”

  He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as though fighting tears. Sunny wondered if the display of emotion was genuine or contrived for her benefit. It seemed too sudden to be real. But grief was like that sometimes. He looked up at her and went on. “Until the next morning, when I had to identify her body for the police.

  “You can’t imagine how terrible that was. I always thought we could work things out. Even after the fight, I assumed we would right ourselves. We always have. I was angry that night, but by morning, I had decided to try to make things work. We’d been partying too much lately. Life was getting out of hand. Anna was never someone to do anything halfway. We had that in common, I guess. I figured we’d take things slower, try to get grounded, maybe get some help, and everything would be okay.”

  “You’re telling me you think Anna had a drug problem?”

  “We had several problems. That was one of them.”

  “And the others? Oliver, I’ve read the e-mails. I know you were seeing someone else. Anna guessed it and she was right.”

  “Like I said, some of the problems were mine. This isn’t about blame. I came here tonight to make sure you understand that the e-mails Anna forwarded to you represent extremely personal conversations between me and a woman who works for me with whom I am very close. For Anna, coming out of context, and in the state of mind she was in when she read them, they were understandably upsetting. But you have to put everything in context. I’ve always been fond of Anna, but we’ve never been seriously involved. We’d meet for a week here or there, whenever it was convenient for both of us. There was no pretense of exclusivity or anything permanent, it was just fun. That arrangement was mutual. The decision to try to be together in a more serious way was also mutual, and very recent. We’d just started talking about trying to have a real relationship a month or so ago. In the last couple of weeks, she started getting more and more obsessed with my supposed infidelity, conveniently overlooking her own, incidentally.

  “We weren’t perfect. Anna had vices, and so do I. But we had complementary vices, you might say. We fit each other. We understood each other, or I thought we did. I loved that I could take her anywhere and we would have a great time. She could walk into the dullest dinner party known to humanity and get everyone to open up. Art snobs, money snobs, technogeeks, you name it, she could disarm them all. Even the wives and the female CEOs liked her.”

  “She was always like that,” said Sunny. “But there was a certain amount of trouble that went with it. If you met her for a drink after work, you might end up on a plane across the country before it was over.”

  “There we were too much alike,” said Seth. “I don’t stay anywhere very long, and she never had more than a toe on the ground. It may have been too much. With both of us up in the air all the time, there was nothing to stand on, nothing solid. Even if I’m not in my houses very much, they’re at least mine. I know they’re there. All she had was an apartment in Barcelona, and even that was really just an address. It’s Troy’s place. There was nowhere for her to go home to that was really hers.”

  “What about her mother? Doesn’t she still live around here?”

  “Up near the coast north of here. Over by Petaluma. They’d hardly spoken in the last few years, apparently. I had to call her to tell her what happened. She didn’t even know Anna was in the country.”

  For the first time, Seth looked genuinely sad. Death was such an obscene invasion of privacy, thou
ght Sunny. A person could lead a perfectly good life and when they died strangers at the morgue would undress them and open up their insides. Friends and family would go through every drawer, every possession, pore over their finances, decide who they were close with and who was peripheral. Anna, at least, had left very few effects to dispose of or affairs to manage. Sunny felt a pang for her mother. On the few occasions when she’d met her, she seemed like any other mother, loving and proud, and she and Anna had been close, at least then.

  “That must have been a terrible conversation,” said Sunny.

  Seth put a hand over his eyes and took a few loud breaths. When he took his hand away, his face showed no emotion. Not sad, not happy. Just the tension she’d noticed when she first saw him.

  “It was terrible because it was so mundane. I told her what happened and she hardly said anything. She was very quiet, very calm. She just thanked me for calling and said she would be in touch. But it was a terrible thing to have to say.”

  The air was cooling off and the twilight deepening. Sunny watched Oliver Seth, unable to read his face. Was he heartbroken? If so, he was remarkably composed.

  “You also had a fight before Saturday, didn’t you?” said Sunny. “Anna told me she had discovered hidden cameras around the house.”

  “Not that again. Another blowup over nothing. I’m not as big a pervert as Anna liked to think. I like mixed company. People from all walks of life. Artists, performers. And I have a lot of people coming through the house when I’m not there. Painters, installers, plumbers, cleaners. When people do things they don’t want anyone to see—like shoot up or put away things they’re planning to steal or make phone calls they don’t want anyone to hear—they do it in the bathroom and in bedrooms where they can lock the door. I don’t like hard drugs and I don’t like thieves. The cameras are a simple security precaution, nothing more. I have better things to do than watch the housekeeper clean toilets and make beds.”

  “Does someone monitor them?”

  “No, it’s just for reference. We can go back and look if some problem or question arises.”