A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  “Let’s do it. I don’t want people eating cold bird. We can make a toast when she gets here,” said Monty.

  “Is that who I think it is?” said Wade, pointing a shrimp tail at the parking lot, where Franco Bertinotti and Keith Lachlan were getting out of Oliver Seth’s convertible BMW. “That guy must be, what, seven feet tall? Where did he find a suit that big?”

  “Not quite, but tall enough,” said Sunny. “It’s good to see him walking again. It’s funny to think what might have happened if he hadn’t shown up that night. I might not be here.”

  “She wouldn’t have done it,” said Monty. “There’s no way she would have gone through with it.”

  “Of course she would have,” said Rivka. “After you’ve smothered someone in their sleep, pulling the trigger on a gun is nothing. Besides, she had no choice. What’s she going to do, just walk out and go home? Once you break into somebody’s house and pull a gun on them, you’re sort of committed.”

  “Steve was right behind him,” said Sunny. “But he might have been too late.”

  Franco and Keith walked toward the group. Sunny was the first to greet them. “How is the leg?” she asked, standing back. “Looks okay from here.”

  “It’s healing up pretty well,” said Keith. “I can’t complain. I’ll never model with that leg again, but I still have the pretty face.”

  Sunny turned to Franco and let him pull her to him for a kiss on each cheek. “I’m glad you decided to stay. I was hoping you would,” she said.

  “Had to,” said Franco, winking at the others. “I have to finish hammering out the deal with the new boss.”

  Monty and Wade looked at Sunny.

  “We are considering…I am considering,” she said, “the possibility of potentially, if all the details are exactly right, taking on a financial partner so we could expand the business, if that’s what we decide to do, and we may not. There are still a lot of details to work out.”

  “You’ve got talent and guts,” said Franco, “not to mention a great team.” He nodded to Rivka. “With a little backing, Wildside could expand into a nice little franchise.”

  “It’s already a nice little franchise,” said Sunny.

  “But we’re ready to grow,” said Rikva, leaning into her.

  “We’re ready to consider it,” said Sunny. “I’ve always handled the business on my own, on my own terms. It’s not an easy thing to give that freedom up.”

  “Sometimes you have to trust your fate,” said Keith. “Everything is negotiable.”

  Rivka beamed. “Look out, Andre Morales, here we come.”

  “It’s about time,” said Wade. “You know,” he said, pausing to finish chewing a shrimp, “I find it ironic that the person who wasn’t looking for a backer found one and the person who was looking for one lost one.”

  “You mean Andre?” said Keith. “Oliver may still do something with him. It might just be on a slower time line.”

  “You mean he’ll have to fit it in in between federal corruption investigations?” said Sunny. “He’s going to be busy with his lawyers for a while. Oh, sorry. I guess you’re caught up in that whole mess, too.”

  “Not me. I had no part in any of it,” said Keith, raising his hands. “I just execute the contracts, I don’t vet the strategy. That’s his boat to sink. I’m just the lawyer.”

  “Come on,” said Sunny. “You’re not named on any of the indictments?”

  “Oh, I’m named, all right. Everyone is named. Even this guy.” Keith jerked his thumb at Franco. “But Seth and Taurian will bear the brunt of it. It’ll be fine. This is a problem money can fix.”

  “Are you sure?” said Sunny. “Won’t he go to jail?”

  Keith looked incredulous. “Oliver Seth? No way. He might pay a hell of a fine and a fortune in legal fees, but he can afford it. He’s made way too many people too much money to go down for something as minor as doctoring the books.”

  “But wasn’t it more than that?” said Sunny. “Cynthia was sure it would ruin him.”

  Keith turned his hands up as if to say there was nothing he could do. “Inconvenient, certainly. Expensive, definitely. Embarrassing? A little. Ultimately not that big a crisis. He’ll live to deal again. Or at least retire somewhere hospitable.”

  Sunny frowned and was about to say something, then decided it was a good time to call everyone to the table.

  * * *

  In the deep blue of late twilight, the last of the rusty orange bouillabaisse was ladled out and the last of the dinner wines poured. Ripples of laugher rose up, and happy shouts punctuated the coming of night. Wraps appeared on bare shoulders and Monty emerged from the kitchen with his arms full of fresh bottles. Decades earlier he’d started buying ports from the best years to shore up against future celebrations. He smiled knowing those days were here at last.

  “I’ve been meaning to thank you,” said Keith, taking the seat next to Sunny.

  “For letting you come to my rescue?”

  “I guess you didn’t know the police had an arrest warrant out for me that night. If it weren’t for you, I might have gone to jail for Anna’s murder.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The guy who put the bullet in my leg told me.”

  “Back up, folks,” said Rivka. “Sunny keeps telling me she doesn’t remember exactly what happened that night. It’s all some kind of blur to her. But you were there. What exactly happened, anyway?”

  “And while you’re at it,” said Sunny, “why don’t you explain how you ended up at my house in the first place. I’ve been wondering about that.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” said Keith. “I was at Oliver’s house when you called. I saw Cynthia listening in, and when she took off right afterward, I figured I’d follow her and see what she was up to. I knew things were getting thick. Jordan had already called me after you talked to her, so I had my suspicions about what was going on.

  “I followed her over to your place and watched her jimmy the bathroom window. Trouble is, I didn’t have a plan. I figured she had some kind of weapon. Nine-one-one would have been too slow. Then I remembered something this guy told me about.” He grabbed Franco as he walked past. “The trusty old Sicilian paper-bag trick.”

  “You are insane. I still can’t believe you actually used the paper-bag trick,” sputtered Franco, choking on a mouthful of bread and wine.

  “What is the Sicilian paper-bag trick?” said Rivka.

  “It’s absolutely nothing,” exclaimed Franco, taking a seat. “That is the insanity of it! I told him a little story of something funny that happened when I was a boy in the countryside in Sicily. How one of my cousins hid outside an uncle’s house who was a notorious hothead and pretended to be an angry neighbor on attack. He had a paper bag that he blew up with air and then popped to make a sound like a gunshot. It worked just the same way as for Lachlan, here.” He laughed breathlessly. “Ha! Only my cousin got buckshot in his behind, not a bullet in the leg.”

  “It was that or nothing,” said Keith, his face lit by candlelight, the long fingers of his big, graceful hands interlaced on the table. Overhead, little Moroccan tin lanterns filled with tea lights flickered from the olive branches.

  “So you’re outside Sunny’s house,” said Rivka, “and you see Cynthia climb in the bathroom window and you decide there isn’t time to call for help.”

  “No, I called. I just figured it would be too late by the time they came. I knew I had to do something in the meantime. There was an old McDonald’s bag in the car. I decided that was the best I could do. So I take it and go up to the front door and I listen. I can hear them talking inside, which is better than not hearing anything, but I figure I’d better get on with whatever I’m going to do or it’s going to be too late. So I blow up the bag and yell something like, ‘Freeze! Police!’ Then I pop the bag and hit the door with everything I’ve got. At first I thought a splinter from the door must have got me. One of the shots—I don’t know if it was the cop’s or Cy
nthia’s—shattered the front window. There was glass everywhere, then the cops stormed the place. The next thing I know, Cynthia was running toward me and then bam!, she goes down. Then Morales gets the sucker punch and he’s down. You know the rest. Cynthia goes to jail. I get seventy-eight stitches in my thigh.”

  “Andre and I spent the next three hours explaining everything at the police station,” said Sunny.

  “But I still don’t get how you knew to follow Cynthia in the first place,” said Rivka.

  “The same reason Sunny knew it was her who killed Anna. Because I knew it wasn’t me. I had a general idea I was about to get set up, but I didn’t realize how close I was until I saw Oliver’s face after he hung up the phone. I knew then he thought I did it. I started thinking about that night. Oliver and I had spoken, late, about what Anna had found, and how she was threatening to go to the press with it. He was upset and concerned. To tell the truth, part of me always thought maybe he did it. I didn’t want to think that, of course, but who else could it have been? No one else knew what was going on. No one else would care enough about Anna to go to the trouble of killing her. Then when I saw his face, I knew he felt the same way. He’d been thinking maybe it was me who killed her. Then it hit me. The only other person Oliver really trusted was Cynthia. All of a sudden I knew what had happened.”

  “That’s exactly how it was with me,” said Sunny. “At first I thought it had to be you. That Oliver confided in you and you decided to take care of the problem yourself, to save your own skin as well as his. When I found out all that business about the pie, I realized it could have been Cynthia, too. You guys were like a family. You, Oliver, Anna, and Cynthia. It had to be one of you. I wanted to see Oliver to find out if he had told Cynthia about what happened with Anna.”

  “But even if he told her, it wouldn’t prove she did it,” said Rivka.

  “That’s right,” said Sunny. “That’s why I told Sergeant Harvey to go up to Oliver’s and get the pie.”

  “Which she had already disposed of,” said Keith.

  “What pie?” said Monty.

  “Cynthia was making a pie that night. She wore rubber gloves when she killed Anna, and covered Anna’s mouth with duct tape. Afterward she needed to stash them somewhere, so she put them in the pie and put it in the freezer. It was gone by the time I figured it out.”

  “So if she hadn’t panicked and come after you that night, she might have gotten away with it,” said Rivka. “Keith might even have been accused of Anna’s murder.”

  “And it would have been ugly. As it turns out, I was driving down the hill about the time Cynthia killed Anna. I wouldn’t have had an alibi. In fact, I would have been in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, and what’s worse, I’d already lied about it.”

  “That is extremely ironic,” said Wade, waggling a forefinger. “The real killer gets caught because she’s trying too hard not to get caught. And the guy who everyone thinks is a killer turns out to be the hero who saves the day.”

  “It might be ironic, but it didn’t have to happen at all. If you’d gone to Wade’s house like you said you were going to,” Rivka said to Sunny, “none of it would have happened. The police were getting close. They probably would have tracked the murder back to Cynthia eventually.”

  “While I waited in jail,” said Keith.

  “Sometimes you have to be bad to be good,” said Sunny.

  “Don’t be cocky. You thought it was Keith or Cynthia,” said Rivka, “but it could have been anyone, really. The guy who found her, our friend Franco here, even Andre.”

  “No,” said Sunny, “it had to be someone who knew about what Anna had discovered. Somebody who would lose as much as Oliver or more if Anna made what she’d found public. I didn’t think Anna told anyone that night other than me. She said I was her insurance policy in her e-mail. That left Oliver. I found out he’d called Keith, and that Keith had lied about where he was when Anna died. But he’d already lied about leaving the party before he found out about the fight. That was too much of a coincidence. Molly was thoroughly occupied the whole night. The only other person Oliver might have told was Cynthia. And if he went down, she definitely went with him. He was her landlord and her employer, and she was in love with him besides. It all fit perfectly. After the fight with Anna, Oliver turned to the only shoulder he could cry on. He went to see Cynthia at her house, confided to her what had happened, and went back to his house. Then he sat in his car in the garage the rest of the night and fiddled with his phone. By morning, Anna was dead.

  “All of that made sense. My mistake was assuming Cynthia thought she got away with it.” Sunny looked around the table. “Now that it’s over, we think we know exactly what happened, but I’m not sure we do, or ever will.”

  “What do you mean?” said Rivka.

  “The biggest question of all,” said Sunny, turning to Keith. “When Oliver told Cynthia, and even you, about Anna’s threats, was he just confiding his troubles, or was he giving implicit instructions to prevent a disaster at all costs? Did part of him want her, or you, to kill Anna? Was that his intention in disclosing what had happened?”

  Keith nodded solemnly. “I’ve wondered that, too. There is no way to know for sure. He probably doesn’t know himself.”

  “He couldn’t have been blind to his power over Cynthia,” said Sunny. “He knew she worshipped him.”

  “Oliver is, shall we say, conflicted about women,” said Keith.

  “I don’t think it’s about women so much as power,” said Sunny. “He simply wants what he wants and he doesn’t care what happens to other people in the process. He’s like a spoiled kid with endless means.”

  “That’s not spoiled,” said Rivka. “That’s much more serious than spoiled. It’s evil. It takes a dark heart not to care how your actions affect others.”

  “You mustn’t go too far,” said Franco. “Oliver Seth is anything but evil. He’s one of the kindest, most generous, hardworking people I know. It is true that he can be, on occasion—particularly when it comes to the enjoyment of women—excessive. Oliver likes to have a good time and he has no regard for what other people think of him. There are worse things. I would go further and say that he also understands, from experience, that people can be bought. This is something only a very few people experience. Everyone likes to say, and believe, that there is no price, but he has done it often enough to know that the price is simply much higher than most people imagine. This is a corrupting experience. And yet I think he genuinely loved Cynthia in a certain way. In his way. He respected her talent as a cook, that is certain, and he was very close with her as a friend, but essentially he saw her as an employee, not his wife, which is perhaps, I would dare to say, a far narrower distinction in his case than one would like to admit. If they slept together occasionally, that was simply something that happened. A perk, even, I’m sure is the way he imagined it. And of course it goes without saying that Cynthia was extremely well-paid.”

  “How can you go on making excuses for him? He knowingly played all those women off each other,” said Rivka. “This girl Astrid. Anna. His live-in mommy surrogate and occasional lover. And Anna died because of it, not to mention the fact that Cynthia will spend the rest of her life in jail. He should be made to take at least partial responsibility for driving her over the edge. It’s not fair he gets to just walk away and say, ‘Oh well, at least I had a good time.’”

  Sunny glanced approvingly at Rivka and watched Franco carefully.

  “That is hardly what he is saying,” said Franco. “On the contrary, I think it is an extremely difficult time for him. He’s lost Cynthia as well as Anna, not to mention ‘this girl’ Astrid, who I have instructed to find other employ and entertainment immediately.”

  Sunny raised her eyebrows. “How can you instruct her to do that?”

  “I can’t. She is a grown-up woman of twenty-two years old. But as her father, I can make a suggestion and hope she listens to me. Astrid is a remarka
ble young woman. She’s talented, beautiful, well educated, and capable. She is also impetuous and reckless. But this time it was me who was reckless, by introducing her to our friend Mr. Seth. To think it could have been her on the ground that morning!”

  “But he had her arranging meetings in Russia,” said Rivka, “and setting up new companies. She’s just a kid.”

  Franco made a gesture of innocence with his hands. “As I said, she has had a very good education. She studied business in Germany. Astrid’s mother is Russian and her current husband is a rather high-ranking member of the Russian Parliament, so Astrid is fluent in the language and rather well connected in the business community. In any case, it hardly matters now. She is young, so there is plenty of time yet to find another job and a lover she can tell her father about.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so nonchalant about your daughter and your boss getting together,” said Rivka. “Especially given the circumstances.”

  Franco chuckled. “I suppose I don’t think of Oliver Seth as my boss, first of all. And second, we are not so concerned about such things in my part of the world. What Astrid does with the intimacy of her heart is her business. Besides, we cannot know the answers to these kinds of questions. The secret pacts formed between lovers are beyond the scrutiny of outsiders, aren’t they?”

  Monty smiled to himself.

  “But did he love Anna or your daughter?” insisted Rivka.

  “Boff. Who knows? Both, neither—it doesn’t matter. It’s time to move on. It’s time to celebrate this man’s upcoming wedding, not mash our teeth through this old business that’s in the past. But I’ll make one point before I let it drop.” He looked at Sunny. “All the times when I saw him most happy were when he and Anna were getting along well. I thought for a moment they would be happy together.”

  Wade Skord waggled a finger. “In trying to help the man she loved, Cynthia inadvertently took away the only woman who ever made him happy.”

  Sunny gave him a heavy look. “Skord, you have got to stop.”