A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  “Or feeling adventuresome,” said Monty.

  Wade shook his head. “Nobody in his right mind would keep that kind of evidence on his person where it might be found, especially in a place it would be pretty damn hard to explain. He’d burn it. Or bury it. Or stick it somewhere in the house where it would take a while to find. The cops can’t look everywhere.”

  “They had a pig. Maybe you could rub it with peanut butter and feed it to the pig,” said Sunny.

  “A pig won’t eat duct tape no matter what you rub on it,” said Wade. “If they had a goat, I’d say maybe. A goat’ll eat the siding right off your house. Pigs are finicky. I had a pig that wouldn’t eat a cookie if it had a bite out of it. He liked ‘em round.”

  “So if there is any evidence, it could be anywhere,” said Sunny. She walked over to the sliding glass doors and looked out at darkness, across the dry grass, light as milk in the moonlight, at the sagging barn where Wade made some of the best Zinfandel the Howell Mountain appellation had to offer. Farber, Wade’s cat, was stalking toward the overgrown patch of rhubarb and asparagus that grew on the other side of the winery. Off to hunt mice and wood rats.

  * * *

  They gathered at the plank table. Jason set a steaming bowl of rice and a Dutch oven full of curry chicken on the table. Sunny brought out an heirloom tomato, basil, and fava bean salad. Monty added baguettes from the bakery in Yountville and several bottles of wine. There was a Mayacamas Chardonnay to start, then a couple of local Pinots to compare. Everyone was hungry. Wade put João Gilberto on the dust-encrusted boom box he carried out to work every day, and they ate listening to the music and saying little until plates began to go around for seconds. The days since Anna’s death had been stressful. It felt good to eat, drink, and relax.

  Wade held the bowl of rice and Sunny passed her plate. He dished up seconds, ladling the rich yellow curry chicken with onions and potatoes over it. She inhaled deeply. “Spicy. Is that Habanero?”

  “Scotch bonnet. Same thing, more or less,” said Jason.

  “Where did you learn to cook?”

  “At home growing up. We cooked every day. I never ate in a restaurant until I worked in one.”

  “I think this might be what’s been missing from my life,” said Sunny, looking at Rivka. “Spice. We need more spice. Is there anything spicy on the menu at Wildside?”

  “Loads of flavor, not much spicy.”

  “That’s right. No spice. Nothing hot. We need more hot. Or at least a little bit of hot.”

  Truth be known, she was a sip or two over the top. It felt great to unwind, even if she had to use the sledgehammer approach of alcohol to do it.

  “Anything but more salmon and I’m happy,” said Rivka.

  “So this guy Smith,” said Monty, pausing to take a drink of wine as though he’d just noticed the glass in his hand, “is mega-rich.”

  “Seth. More money than anybody I’ve ever known. Billions, apparently,” said Sunny. “He had real art in his house. Like art you see in museums. It was like staying at the Bellagio.”

  “When did you ever stay at the Bellagio?” said Rivka.

  “You know what I mean. Art. Decadence.”

  “Millions and billions sound alike, but a billion dollars is a serious pile of cash,” said Jason. “I heard this thing one time. You think about all the time that’s passed since Jesus Christ was born. Sixty minutes in an hour, so—what’s that?—six hundred twice plus a hundred and twenty twice, that’s a thousand four hundred and forty-four minutes in a day. That makes about ten thousand in a week and about forty thousand in a month, so let’s say roughly four hundred eighty thousand in a year. You with me? Multiply that by a couple thousand years and you get pretty close to a billion minutes since the time of Christ.” He pointed to each of the faces around the table with his fork in turn. “If somebody gave you one dollar for every minute that has passed since Jesus was over there in Bethlehem sawing wood and hammering nails, you’d have about a billion dollars.”

  “All that money and his big dream is to do what you do every day,” said Sunny, looking at Wade. “His big passion is making wine.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” said Wade. “These days, if you want to live like a peasant and make wine and have chickens and a pig and dig up your own vegetables, you have to be part of the wealthy elite. Farming is the new status symbol. I remember when store-bought food was how you snubbed your neighbors. Only the schlumpy households had to get their hands dirty. Now it’s the reverse.”

  “Like in Europe,” said Monty. “The gentleman farmer.”

  “I guess we’re all grown up,” said Wade. “Land is going to keep getting more expensive. Pretty soon the weeds won’t be able to afford a place to live.”

  * * *

  Monty held the bottle over Sunny’s glass. “¿Mas vino?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  Monty poured.

  “That guy Franco you think is so great, I think he threatened me when I saw him,” said Sunny. She told him what Franco said about the Sicilian Mafia and the little fish restaurant in Scylla.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t just being colorful?” said Monty. “And I don’t think he’s so great, but if he was really in charge of what he claimed to be in charge of, he’s a hell of a winemaker.”

  “Of course he was threatening you,” said Rivka.

  “Why would he threaten me?” said Sunny.

  “Sounds like he’s trying to protect his meal ticket. He’s probably worried you’re going to help send Oliver Seth to jail. What does he look like?” asked Rivka.

  “Bertinotti? Decent looking, for a guy older than Wade. Short white hair, lounge-singer tan, reasonably fit. Well-groomed, by American standards.”

  Wade ran his hand over two days of stubble. “Some of us have better things to do than sit around by the pool. I’d say you’re reading too much into it. Sounds to me like he’s laying the groundwork for a business proposition.”

  “You don’t want to mess with Sicilians,” said Jason. “I knew some of those guys back east. They’re as tough as Jamaicans.”

  “Maybe he’s the one who killed Anna,” said Rivka. “He’s covering his tracks. He wanted to see you to test the waters, see what you might know.”

  “Maybe he did it, or maybe it was Oliver, or the gardener, or one of the ex-boyfriends hanging around. It could have been anyone,” said Sunny. “I still don’t see any reason why Franco or anyone else would want Anna dead. When we know why she was killed, we’ll know who did it.”

  “My money’s on the lawyer,” said Monty.

  “Keith Lachlan? Why?” said Sunny.

  “He’s the only person who left the party, he’s close enough to Oliver to be involved in whatever personal business may have been going down, and you yourself said he was huge. Overpowering a little drunk girl would be all in a day’s work.”

  “Keith is the guy from Barbados, right? Run away,” said Jason. “Dem Bajans always cookin’ up some trouble. They’re ruthless like the Brits but cunning like Jamaicans.” Sunny noticed he used his accent only to emphasize certain phrases. Otherwise he sounded like any other California kid.

  “He a black guy?” asked Jason.

  “More or less.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “Handsome in an un-cola sort of way.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You know, the 7-Up guy in the white suit and the wicker chair? Never mind, you’re too young. Tall, shaved head, nice skin, nice smile. Drinks too much, or something of that order. Didn’t look too healthy. His eyes were dull and kind of jaundiced.”

  “Yellow eyes notwithstanding, I don’t think this is your guy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Racial profiling. A rich, good-looking Bajan wouldn’t kill his best friend’s girl and run away. For one thing, islanders are superstitious. A Jamaican bad mon will take him cutlass to a mon troat, but he’s not going to sneak up on his best friend’s girl like a coward. That’
s inviting some kind of retribution. You don’t want to get a curse put on you by the local shaman. In Barbados and Haiti and all over the West Indies it’s the same. And honor is a big deal, especially among the rude boys. He wouldn’t betray the friendship. But maybe they weren’t friends anymore. Maybe they had become enemies all of a sudden. So we leave that to the side. He still wouldn’t kill her. Which leads to problem number two. We run hot down in the Caribbean. If this guy goes into this girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night, he’s going for one reason and one reason only, beg pardon to the ladies.”

  “That’s just talk,” said Monty, blushing and sounding flustered. “Maybe he’s the one islander who doesn’t mind being a coward. Maybe he’s the only Caribbean guy out there who’s not much with the ladies.”

  “I know one thing for sure,” said Jason. “If he really is straight out of the islands, he could be as ruthless as they come. To survive down there well enough to make it out to California, you’ve got to be a killer. I just worry that when they go looking for this particular killer, they’re going to find the nearest black man, like always.”

  * * *

  Rivka stared mush-eyed at Jason. Monty Lenstrom took his spectacles off and cleaned them on a square of fabric he took from his wallet. Sunny sat deep in the couch, fighting sleep.

  “Another example,” said Wade, continuing a ramble about his new theory. “That Beach Boys song that goes, ‘She’ll have fun-fun-fun till her daddy takes her T-Bird away-ayyy’.” He sang in a scratchy falsetto. “Dad gets wind his daughter has been racing around in her new car instead of studying, so he takes it away. Little does he know, he has just delivered his precious little girl into the arms of the pursuing male. Ironically, by trying to shield her from one danger, he makes her vulnerable to an even worse threat.”

  “That’s not irony, that’s a parable of modern paternalistic society,” said Rivka, sitting up. “It’s the signal that it’s time for the girl-chattel to be shifted from the property of the father to the property of the suitor. The father, who initially gives his daughter the spoils of his wealth, must disenfranchise her in order to prevent her from disrupting the male power structure by gaining independence.”

  Wade looked stunned. “Okay, maybe that one’s too complicated. Let’s look at another example. You only hurt the ones you love. Irony. Another one. The surest way to lose something is to find a special place for it so you won’t lose it. Irony. I’m serious! What if the universe achieves stasis—balance—not through compassion, as I was once foolish enough to believe, but through irony? The irony theory solves the greatest riddle of existence: If God is all powerful, why does he allow pain and suffering? Because, ironically, God is not all powerful. Irony is how a benevolent but not-all-powerful god makes sure the smarty pants don’t overrun the place. Irony is the ultimate check on power. It underpins everything.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said Monty. “Like, I’ve always wondered why crackers and chips go soft when you leave them out, but bread gets hard. Why shouldn’t bread get soft?”

  “Ah, that’s a different principle at work,” said Wade, his eyebrows rising to the challenge. “Whatever your strengths are, you degrade toward their opposite. Crispy gets soft, soft gets crispy.”

  “But obsessed nutcases just get nuttier and nuttier,” said Rivka. She looked at Wade and Monty. “Hello! Crackers get stale because they absorb moisture from the air. Bread dries out because it releases moisture into the air. It’s about relative water content, not metaphysics.”

  “Ironically, the girl who looks like the high-school dropout is actually the brains of the group,” said Wade.

  “You might be right about crackers,” said Sunny, “but bread is more complicated. It doesn’t dry out. If it did, warming it in the oven wouldn’t make it soft again, it would make it harder. It’s soft because heat makes the starch soften up. As it cools down, the starch recrystalizes and it gets harder.”

  Monty looked over his glasses at her. “How do you know these things?”

  “Cooking is chemistry,” said Sunny.

  “Ironically, putting dry, hard bread in a dry, hot place makes it more moist,” said Wade, staring at his friends with a ridiculous look of triumph. “Another one. When do you find your true love? When you’re not looking. Ironically, the desire for love is the most effective repellent against it.”

  “That is regrettably and painfully true,” said Monty.

  “So irony explains everything,” said Sunny.

  “Not everything,” said Wade. “Only things that are, say, out of balance. Irony is the great corrector.”

  “Would you say murder is evidence of something out of balance?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then by that logic, we should be able to apply your theory to Anna’s death and figure out what happened.”

  Wade’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, we should.” He thought for a moment. “The trouble is, you have to know who the joke is on. I’ll give you an example. I have a friend from way back who always wanted to be a great artist. Was one, really. Worked so hard before one big show, he gave himself spinal meningitis and nearly died. Nothing much happened in his career. He did a bunch of great work, a few critics recognized it, a few pieces went to good collections, but nothing really took off. Finally, after years of struggling to get by, he gives up. Decides it’s not worth it, he’s not going to paint anymore. To hell with it. He moves back to Montana, where his family has some property, reverts to his old carpentry hobby, and starts building furniture in the barn to make ends meet. Whereupon he is immediately hailed as a modern master of furniture design and his chairs end up in the MoMA and the Smithsonian. The list of people waiting to pay forty grand for a chair is as long as my arm. Now, that, my friends, is irony. Not the work of a cruel god, but the best gesture of a compassionate creator in over his head. ‘You can’t always get what you want, but you can get what you need.’ ‘Careful what you wish for.’ ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ Irony is at the heart of all our wisdom sayings.”

  “Since when have the Rolling Stones been indoctrinated into the canon of cultural wisdom?” said Rivka.

  “Nineteen sixty-eight,” said Wade.

  Jason yawned and Rivka stood up. “Ironically, since I’m very tired and have to get up early, I’m going home,” she said.

  “That’s not ironic,” said Wade.

  “You’re right,” said Rivka, and gave him a sock in the arm.

  She and Jason said their good-byes and headed out the sliding door. Monty followed close behind.

  “So you’re saying there are two kinds of irony,” said Sunny when they’d gone. “Punitive and benevolent.”

  “That’s my current thinking,” said Wade. “You get what you deserve, for better or worse. If something bad happens that can’t be helped, it at least comes with a silver lining. On the other hand, every blessing is a little mixed.”

  “I can’t think of any way Anna deserved to die. This is all very cute rhetorically, but reality has plenty of unmitigated tragedy in it.”

  “Ironically, a benevolent universe can only retain its goodness by allowing genuine evil to exist,” said Wade. “Ironically, just when the girl no one could catch was finally ready to settle down, it was too late.”

  Too late, thought Sunny. She put down the glass of port she’d been sipping and decided to put her shoes on and go home to bed. Ironically, it was at precisely that moment that she fell into a deep, sound sleep on Wade Skord’s couch and didn’t wake up until long after the sun warmed her cheeks the next morning.

  14

  The shriek of the coffee grinder woke her.

  “Sorry, I thought you were awake,” said Wade.

  “With my eyes closed?” said Sunny.

  “Okay, I lied. I couldn’t wait any longer for coffee.”

  She sat up, feeling exactly like someone who has slept in her clothes on a friend’s couch without washing her face or brushing her teeth. “Ugh. What happened?”<
br />
  “You drank half of New Zealand and passed out. I wasn’t going to let you drive and I figured you’d punch me if I took you to bed, so that seemed like the best place to leave you.”

  The percolator started perking and the smell of an extremely potent brew wafted her way. Synapses sputtered.

  “Tell that thing to hurry up. I might snap in half like a dry twig if I don’t get some coffee in the next thirty seconds or so. What time is it?”

  “You should always drink a few glasses of water after you down a bottle of wine. A good mountaineer always pees clear.”

  “I’ll remember that next time I pass out. The time?”

  Wade consulted the clock on the wall directly in front of them. “Six fifty-seven.”

  Sunny hauled herself up and took a seat at the kitchen table. Farber the cat rubbed against her ankles. Wade made toast with butter and honey and joined her. There was a bowl of blueberries and a plate of strawberries.

  “Just like a B and B.” Sunny picked up a strawberry and smelled it. “From the garden?”

  “Dirt to table in under ten minutes.”

  “Impressive.”

  “We aim to please.”

  Wade got up and came back with coffee. They sipped, watching the new day outside the glass doors. Sunny spoke first.

  “If irony is the core nature of the universe, then the person who loved Anna most, who most wanted her to stay alive, must have killed her. That’s Oliver Seth.”

  “Only if the joke is on him,” said Wade, waggling a weathered finger at her. “You have to figure out who is the butt of the joke, cosmically speaking. Who was behaving like the biggest jackass?”

  “You mean other than me?”

  “As far as I can tell, you behaved with the usual McCoskey restraint.”

  “That’s what I mean. If I’d been more impulsive, I would have gone up there to their room when my intuition told me to and Anna would still be alive.”

  “If, if, if. You must stop torturing yourself about it, Sun. There’s no way to know what might have happened. Think of Lawrence of Arabia. Maybe it was written. You just never know what might have happened. If I’d married my high-school sweetheart, I’d have ten kids and a dog by now. Do you want to look back and create a bunch of feelings of regret, or shall we try to figure this out?”