Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  “What happened after you and Dave left, looking for Waylon?”

  “We went to his house, Waylon’s, I mean, and they got into some kinda talk, and they seemed upset, and told me to wait in the kitchen, and there was a phone in the kitchen.”

  Benny stopped talking and studied his big feet as if the answers to the mysteries of life were engraved there in gold.

  “Benny, did you call the police on the body? From Waylon’s kitchen phone?”

  “Dave said not to. Dave said it wasn’t a good idea to call the police.”

  Sure, I thought, that would be Farmer Dave’s point of view. But Benny was Bonita’s son, raised right on the fear of God and a blind trust in the American justice system. Not a fifty-year-old man with pigtails and a list of felony warrants dating back to Woodstock.

  “But I called the police and told them about the body. I mean, aren’t you supposed to call 911 when you find a body?”

  Yes, in a big, general sense, but maybe not when you’re in the kitchen of a house where a man you like is obviously up to something if not illegal, at least strange. “Best to call from a pay phone, and don’t give a name,” I said, hoping Bonita wasn’t listening at the door.

  “A whole bunch of cops came, and an ambulance—I guess I got confused on the phone call, or something, about where the dead body was—and the cops were from the sheriff’s, I think, and Dave heard them coming and told me to shut up about the money and then him and Waylon flushed a bunch of stuff down the toilet, and Dave ran off into the woods, but this one deputy caught him, and then a bunch of deputies arrested him and Waylon ’cause of the wine.”

  How did they know it was stolen? I wondered, but asked, “Where was the money?”

  “Still in my truck. They had sirens and all when they came down the road, so we had a few minutes before they got to us and Dave made me promise to take the suitcase full of money back to a woman he knew and he gave me directions to her house and told me to tell her to give half the money to you to get them out of jail.”

  Benny hesitated.

  “Is that all?” I mean, that was enough, but something in the way he stopped talking and took up the religious study of his feet again suggested he might be hiding something. “You need to tell me everything that happened, I mean, if I’m going to help you.”

  Pause. Sniffle noise. Eyes up, eyes down.

  “Benny?”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s what happened. All of it.”

  “No, it isn’t. I can tell when you’re lying. You aren’t any good at it at all.”

  “Dave told me to take half the money and keep it for myself. That woman divided it up and put it in grocery sacks.”

  Whew. Quite the night for an altar-boy type. One afternoon and evening with Farmer Dave and Waylon had potentially wiped out fifteen years of Bonita’s scrupulous churchgoing child rearing.

  “Listen, Benny, don’t beat yourself up over this, and don’t tell your mother. Okay, let me go see Dave at the jail, and then you and me, we’ll talk more, and sort this out.”

  “What do I do with the sack of money?”

  “Hide it,” I said, “and don’t tell anybody, not even your mom, about this.” So okay, as a godmother, I sucked. That’s why I have a large dog and no children. And technically, I am not Benny’s official godmother, that honor goes to his aunt, Gracie of the order of the ex-nun, but I’m the one he’s been running to since we first met ten years ago, and I think of myself as his stepgodmother. Find a Hallmark card for that.

  “Especially, don’t tell your mom,” I reiterated.

  Benny nodded.

  “Benny, I have got to go. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t feel good about leaving him, but then I hadn’t felt good about anything since Farmer Dave had rung my doorbell.

  I didn’t know that, comparatively speaking, the night was still young.

  Chapter 5

  Jails are creepy, okay.

  Seriously creepy on a Saturday night.

  And this one smelled bad. The place was manic with too many people—screaming women, crying men, stoic law-enforcement types of diverse size and make. A small, dark man was throwing up in a trash can in the corner.

  Too late I realized I should have sprayed myself down with Lysol, not White Linen perfume. I tried not to inhale or touch anything. Pulling my arms in as close to my body as I could, I inched through the crowd and toward what I assumed was the front desk.

  A serious meat-eater type with dirty glasses didn’t even look up at me when I cleared my throat.

  “I’m looking for Philip Cohen, a lawyer, and I’m a lawyer too, and we are supposed to visit our client, a man named David Baggwell, that’s with two gs, and I—”

  “Room on the left. Down that way.” Beef Eater then looked over me to the man behind me breathing car-exhaust fumes onto my dainty white blouse, which I figured I would have to boil in Clorox before I could wear it again.

  I walked down the hallway and, using the tail of my shirt as a protective sheath so I wouldn’t have to actually touch it, I opened the door. Two men, seated at what was little more than a card table, were drinking out of white plastic cups and a bottle of wine was on the table. I recognized the label—they were drinking some of Farmer Dave’s wine.

  “Lillian,” a well-dressed man wearing glasses said, and stood up and offered his hand. “I’m Philip Cohen.”

  Though I would rather not have touched anything that had been touching things in the jail, I took his hand. We traded firm handshakes, and I looked through his glasses into large, black eyes, and read nothing there. His black hair needed either a good cut or a dab of gel, but was glossy and thick. In a taller man, his face and hair would have made him handsome. But he was a good two, maybe three inches shorter than me, which made him about average since I’m six feet and was wearing one-inch heels. Compact body, probably trim under an immaculately cut gray jacket. Unless I missed my guess, his white shirt was starched and hand pressed.

  “May I present T. R. Johnson, Tired Johnson, that is,” Cohen said, “an investigator with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. Investigator Johnson, may I present Lillian Cleary, attorney.”

  The other man stood up and walked around the card table and offered me his hand.

  While his hand dangled there, I studied him with the feeling that I knew him. Investigator Tired Johnson studied me right back and then I saw his eyes pop open with a surprised recognition, and he sucked in his cheeks.

  That did the trick. Twenty pounds lighter, this man and I had met in a screaming fit in my own backyard.

  “How in the hell could you not know the difference between okra and marijuana?” I blurted out.

  “Ma’am, I did, I knew that was just okra, but that lady next door was raising such a complete ruckus, and she wouldn’t take my word for it, so I thought the best thing to do was just take the plants in and have them officially ID’d for her.”

  “You couldn’t have taken a couple of cuttings? You had to rip them up, roots and all?”

  “Like I told you, she was having a fit. You wouldn’t believe her.”

  Yes, actually, I would believe my neighbor Covenant Nazi and her capacity to pitch a conniption. But that didn’t excuse this man’s mistake. I mean, come on, he was a hefty boy, and he carried a gun. What? He couldn’t stand up to a skinny old woman?

  “What, may I inquire, are you two talking about?” Philip asked.

  “Okra,” Tired and I answered in concert.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story,” Tired answered. “Look,” he said, turning to me, “I’m sorry.”

  “Would you like some wine, Lillian? I’m sure I can procure another cup,” Philip offered.

  Oh, yeah, right, like I’m drinking stolen wine out of a jailhouse plastic cup that’s been touched by who knows who. “No, thank you.”

  “Officer T. R. Johnson is the arresting investigator on your . . . your friend Dave’s case, and he just happened to be here, so I a
sked him to wait until after I saw Dave, and his friend Waylon.”

  “So you’ve seen them. Are they all right? Is Dave okay?”

  “They are both fine.”

  “Can I see Dave?”

  “That would be unnecessary now, and perhaps difficult. Tired and I have been discussing the matter.”

  “I want to see Dave.”

  “Ma’am, he’s all right,” Officer Tired said. “He didn’t get hurt or anything during the arrest. He did run like hell, but just his luck one of our deputies—we call him Sprint—was on duty and he wrestled him down.”

  “I want to see Dave.”

  Philip leaned in toward me, put his hand on my arm, and said in a crooner’s voice, “I assure you that Dave is fine. I’ve seen him. To go through the procedures for a second lawyer to visit him would sorely tax the Saturday-night jailer, and I am sure you can comprehend why I attempt to stay on positive terms with him.”

  Philip’s hand lay on my arm like a caress, sending off a warmth that made me overlook the possible jail germs migrating up my arm.

  I nodded, muted by his touch and his Dean Martin voice.

  As Philip removed his hand from my arm, and blood circulated in my brain again, Tired, or T.R., said, “We’ve been, you know, talking over the situation.”

  Talking, and drinking Dave’s wine, I noted. “What’s the T.R. stand for?”

  “Tired Rufus.”

  “That’s got to be a—” I wanted to say joke, but these country boys can be sensitive about their names, their mommas, and their dogs, so I finished with “—nickname. Tired, I mean.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s on my birth certificate. Tired Rufus Johnson.”

  Well, there was probably a story there, but I didn’t intend to know Tired long enough to learn it, and so I just nodded. I never did shake his hand.

  “Well, I’ve got to go. I’m still on duty,” he said, continuing to stand rooted to the space in front of me. But then he reached back to his plastic cup and swallowed the last of the wine. “You take care now,” he said toward both of us, nodded his head, and ducked out the door.

  “He is a decent man, a proficient officer. You should not be rude to him.”

  “Why are you drinking Dave’s wine? And where is it, the truck of wine, I mean, and when can you get Dave out of jail?”

  Philip smiled at me, a long, slow, sensual type of smile. A smile that changed things. His lips were full, and wide.

  “Perhaps you would be more comfortable discussing this somewhere else?”

  Yeah, after about two or three hot showers to wash off the jailhouse scud. I nodded, numbed by his smile and his voice.

  “If we go to my office, I’d have to disarm the security system. What about your office? Or, my house?”

  I nodded, frozen to the dirty floor.

  Philip stopped smiling. “You understand, it will be twenty-four hours before Dave’s first appearance. He will be informed of the charges against him and his rights in a more formal setting, though I assure you he is aware of both after our discussion. At that first appearance, the terms of Dave’s pretrial release will be discussed, and the reasonable conditions for such release determined by the judge. As Dave is not a resident, I suspect the assistant state attorney will ask for some kind of bond even though the crime is nonviolent, though a second-degree felony. What works against Dave, besides the lack of community ties, is his past history.”

  Philip paused and I tried to erase the uh-oh look that no doubt flitted across my features at the mention of Dave’s past history.

  “As you apparently know, there is a problem with an outstanding warrant from Georgia on Dave for bulldozing a motocross track into ruin. It came up on the NCIC.”

  Just the one warrant? I thought, relieved and momentarily attributing the other alleged warrants to Dave’s exaggeration.

  “If, as I suspect, Dave is detained after his first appearance until the officials can work out whether they will extradite him, the state attorney’s office has thirty days to file its information, that is, its formal charges, but I doubt we will proceed that far.”

  Philip paused, took off his glasses with one hand, and with his other hand, put his fingertips to his eyelids as if to rub them, but didn’t. Then, dropping his hands from his face, he studied me as I studied him. He kept his glasses off, and let me have a full, deep look into his eyes, wide open, guileless, honest, and soulful. A good, theatrical gesture, widely used by attorneys. Even knowing that Philip was deliberately playing me like a juror, or a pickup in a bar, I was soaked right up into all that liquid darkness of his eyes.

  “We’ll go to my house and discuss this further.” Philip put his hand on my arm and guided me toward the door and down the hallway and out into the fresh air of the spring night. The lingering warmth of Philip’s touch on my arm made me tingle. I wasn’t at all sure I cared where the damn truck of wine was.

  Chapter 6

  All I remembered about criminal law 101 from law school was that our professor kept talking about scienter the first day. I confused this with sphincter, and given the professor’s fascination with it, pegged him right off for a pervert until I actually read my assignment, out of a book that had cost me a fourth of my life’s savings, and learned that scienter was a fancy Latin word for criminal intent. Or guilty knowledge.

  So, along with that right-to-silence thing, I did know that one had to possess scienter to be convicted of a crime.

  That’s what I was thinking about, oh, and about Philip’s black eyes and his very long fingers, as I dutifully drove behind his car toward his house on the bay. I had my window down and in the night air caught the saltwater and fish smell of the Gulf of Mexico. Philip drove an Infinity, a black one, but not new, so as I followed in my cobalt blue Honda with its 194,000 miles on it, I gave him brownie points for not driving an SUV or something right off the showroom floor.

  When I parked behind Philip in a long, circular driveway, he was quick to open my door and offer his hand as I crawled out of my Honda. I looked up at the sky as if I could actually see stars with all the light pollution, and then looked square into the black eyes of Philip Cohen, pursed my lips for the perfect, witty comment, and said, “So?”

  “So?” he said back, smiling with those sensual lips. He let go of my hand, which I noted he had held longer than strictly necessary to guide me from my car, and ran his freed hand through his hair as if I had, perhaps, failed to notice that he had a full head of it. It was as black as mine, though he was letting his gray show through and I wasn’t.

  “So. Can you get him out on bail?”

  “Probably.” He stopped smiling and popped open the trunk of his car, then lifted out a case of wine. I could see there was another case still in the trunk.

  “So. Is that Dave’s wine?”

  “Dave’s? Waylon’s? A vintner named Earl Stallings? It depends upon whom you ask.”

  I followed Philip into his kitchen, where he put the case of wine down, and then put his middle finger on the inside of my arm, right below where the sleeve of my dainty, white blouse ended. “Shall we share a bottle?”

  “So,” I repeated, feeling my chin bob up and down.

  I talk for a living. I talk for a hobby. I talk to think. I talk to live. And this man smiles at me, and then puts one finger on one tiny spot of my exposed skin and so is the best I can do.

  I hoped the woman on the phone wasn’t his wife.

  “Perhaps you’d like to freshen up?” Philip then directed me to the guest bath.

  The bathroom looked brand new and wholly unused. But still I had to wash the bar of soap under hot water until my hands turned red and a third of the bar of soap was down the drain, then I had to wash my hands after handling the previously unwashed soap, then I had to wash the soap and my hands again, all the way up to my elbows, and then I scalded them off, and then started over so I could wash my face, washing off not only the jail’s floating air germs but my light coating of makeup.

  The
n I snooped. Nothing of interest in the bathroom cabinet, no good prescription drugs or even any worthy OTC stuff. The closet held towels. The shower and tub were clean and the soap in the dish was still in its wrapper, and I wished I had noticed that before I used the unwrapped soap by the sink, which might have been used by who knows who for who knows what.

  There being nothing else to snoop into, I drifted back to the kitchen, taking in as much as I could of the lay of the land.

  In the kitchen, as Philip poured the wine, I looked about me some more. Okay, his car wasn’t too Big Lawyer Ostentatious, but the house gave me pause. It was exactly the kind of big, pink, fake-Spanish stucco monster house on the bay that rankled me, exemplifying what the carpetbaggers and scallywags had done to Sarasota. Built on dredged-up sand, big enough to sleep my entire high school graduation class, and totally too well decorated, Philip’s home was like a house version of a Cadillac SUV. Totally overpriced, wholly unnecessary, and pretentious enough to spit up supper over.

  Still, there was his smile. I sipped the wine. It was good. But my tongue couldn’t say so.

  “Remind me to give you a case of this wine before you leave,” Philip said. “Shall we sit in the den?”

  “So,” I said, and nodded, and followed him into a room with walls a shade of purplish maroon that only a professional decorator or a person on good hallucinogens could have chosen, and I told myself that if I didn’t speak a sensible sentence without the word so in the next five minutes, I was going to cut my hair into spikes and dye it maroon for penance.

  I sat where he pointed, on a simple beige couch. Real leather. Sitting, I sniffed the air for the woman who had answered the phone. Philip said something I didn’t catch, intent as I was at detecting other female presences.

  “Business first,” he said, and smiled that smile again, and my toes curled in my kicky little shoes.

  I nodded.

  “First, I will need a check for my services, just to start us off. Dave assured me you would pay me from funds he has entrusted to you.”