Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  This could be just the thing I needed.

  I actually whistled when I sauntered in the back door at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley. Whistled until I saw Kenneth glowering over Bonita, who was seated behind her desk in her cubbyhole outside my office.

  The infernal Muzak, which is piped into every office and hallway and corridor as a fundamental part of our office manager’s experiment to see how many of us she can drive stark, raving mad, must have drowned out my whistling. But then Kenneth looked up, saw me, and glared back at Bonita and said something in Spanish I couldn’t catch over the sound of piped-in pseudo-music.

  Kenneth turned from Bonita and started down the hallway without further acknowledging me.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  For a moment, Bonita slumped at her desk, her normally perfect posture lost to the moment, and then she put her head down on her desk.

  “Bonita? What’s wrong?”

  “That Kenneth,” she said, and lifted her head, straightened her shoulders, and pointed at a clipped collection of paper on the top of her neat desk.

  As Bonita put the iron back into her spine, I reached over and picked up the paper. A quick glance told me it was a refined version of the complaint for relief from judgment that Angela had shoved at me just days before.

  “He told me . . . he told me that he could convince the company to file it, or not. Depending upon—” Bonita stopped.

  “Depending upon what?”

  Bonita continued to sit, and not speak, her face a filling-in-the-blank slate.

  Okay, I thought, she doesn’t want to make me feel bad that Kenneth’s going after her to get back at me for stealing the money that he stole from me. “He’s just bluffing, Bonita, he’s just . . . trying to get back at me.”

  A flit of puzzlement crossed her face as I studied her, and then the blank slate was back.

  But the puzzlement stopped me. Then logic interceded. Kenneth had started this nonsense before he knew I had taken the money from his credenza.

  But not before he knew I had the money in the first place.

  This had started right after Farmer Dave went on his adventure to the county jail.

  So, maybe this wasn’t just about me.

  “Kenneth hasn’t filed this yet?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you what evidence he has for his claim, this totally spurious nonsense about your children?”

  A hint of an expression I couldn’t recognize crossed Bonita’s face, but was gone too fast for me to read it, and she fingered the gold cross on the chain around her neck and finally said, “No.”

  “Bonita, it will be all right. I’ll figure something out, right now, to stop him.”

  But before I could even begin to fathom what I might do, Bonita, in a wholly uncharacteristic display, released a stream of invectives, both in English and Spanish, the likes of which I had never imagined the normally calm and religious Bonita to even know, let alone say.

  I was impressed by her vocabulary. And troubled by her predicament.

  Bonita was my secretary, and my friend, and I needed to help her.

  Meanwhile, I figured Bonita should just go home. After all, it was Friday afternoon, and sending her home early seemed the kind thing to do.

  “Bonita, look, I’ll think of something.” For starters, I’d have to seriously consider giving Kenneth the money back, even if that meant I lost any leverage I might have. “Why don’t you just go home?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Anything pressing going on here?”

  “No.”

  “Then go home, spend some quality time with Benny.”

  At the mention of Benny, something like worry crossed Bonita’s face and she nodded. “Okay. But first I have to do some bookkeeping stuff. By the time I finish that, Benicio will be home from school.”

  Idly I wondered what pressing bookkeeping she needed to do, then figured she needed to catch up on my billings, and I nodded, and retreated into my office.

  An hour later, I poked my head out. “You okay?” I asked Bonita.

  “I have finished my bookkeeping task, and I am going to leave now. You’ll call me later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Bonita gathered up her purse, eyed the cardboard carton full of Girl Scout cookies, sighed, said, “If Henry comes by, don’t let him eat them all,” and left. I heard the back door shut after her.

  Wondering what my next-best move might be, I stood there for a moment.

  Then Bonita came slouching back in. Despite her earlier recomposure, she did not look good.

  “You all right?” I asked despite the plain evidence to the contrary.

  “Someone is double-parked, and I’m blocked in. I don’t recognize the car.”

  Our parking lot had not been expanded since the firm doubled in size and added a second floor to the building, and clients frequently just left their cars wherever rather than hunt out something on a side street.

  Bonita could wait or I could just let her take my cobalt blue, repainted, re-windowed, practically ancient Honda, and recent haven for dead rattlers. That would be the easiest, I thought, giving Bonita my car, assuming nobody had blocked it in, and I could just take Bonita’s car home later.

  “Here,” I said, grabbing for my keys. “Take my Honda. Give me your keys, and I’ll drive your car home tonight. We can trade tomorrow.”

  “Won’t you be stuck here?”

  I was always stuck here, I thought, there was no life outside this building, this law firm. But I shook my head. “By the time I leave, whoever double-parked will be gone.”

  After Bonita took my key and left, I marched into Kenneth’s office only to find him gone. Instead of the efficient, if blond and beautiful Cristal, I found a woman I dimly recognized as someone from the word-processing pool upstairs, and she assured me, though I didn’t ask or care, that she was competent to be a legal secretary.

  “Where’s Kenneth?”

  “He had a hearing in Tampa at four. Said he wouldn’t come back to the office.”

  “Where’s Cristal?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Thus, frustrated again, I thanked her and left, and actually billed some time on some files before I snuck out early for me. At home, I made a quick call to Bonita, who, once updated that there was no update, assured me she was fine.

  “Fine,” I said, and asked to speak to Benny. After a wait, Benny came on the phone and did that I’m-fifteen-so-I-don’t-talk-to-grown-ups thing, and I promised myself to go over and see him tomorrow and make him talk to me. Then I showered and dressed for my date with Philip, going a little conservative for a Friday night with a linen dress in pastel green and flat, forest green sandals.

  Philip was punctual and brought roses and wine, and I was glad I went conservative. This man was from the nineteenth century.

  And nineteenth-century men apparently didn’t take suggestions from their women. No matter how I tried to convince Philip to take me to the Café at the Granary, the health food store in town, or the health food, vegetarian restaurant on Siesta Key, Philip insisted upon taking me to a new, fancy place on Palm Avenue, one of those places where the cool and the rich and the old who live in the condos on the bay front near Palm Avenue like to gather and show off their expensive clothes. One of those places whose slogan ought to be “High Prices, Small Servings.”

  And so it was that I found myself in the odd position of having nothing on the menu that I could order, other than the Zephyr Hills bottled water, though I noted that at $3.50 per bottle for what sold for about a buck at the grocery store, I wasn’t sure I’d even order that.

  I tried to convince myself that the salad would be fine. But I didn’t know their source for raw vegetables, or how well they were washed, and I had to assume that nothing was organic.

  Glancing at the other tables, I was able to tell that the bread was strictly white.

  The place specialized in aged beef, and no way I was eating
a dead cow, especially a dead cow that had been dead for quite a while.

  When pressed, the waiter admitted the vegetable of the day was both frozen and cooked in chicken broth.

  When pressed further, the waiter brought the manager, who assured me of the cleanliness standards of his fine establishment, but no, for insurance reasons, he could not let me examine the kitchen.

  BS on the insurance, I thought, this man had a dirty kitchen, and I gathered my inner resources to tell Philip to pay for the wine and take me to the Café at the Granary, or home.

  Philip leaned back in his chair, sipped his wine, and said, “I didn’t realize you suffer from cibophobia. That explains why you are so thin.”

  I’m thin because I do wind sprints, keep my face out of high-fructose corn syrup, drink lots of coffee, and work out like a fiend at the YMCA, and I’m not cibophobic, whatever that is.

  “I didn’t realize you were such a chauvinist you couldn’t take suggestions from a mere woman on a good place to eat.”

  “Perhaps it’s not cibophobia, which, incidentally, means ‘fear of food.’ Maybe you have orthorexia nervosa. Do you know what that is? It’s a new term. Fear of eating anything except organic foods is one of the symptoms. Health food eating carried to extremes.”

  “Look, short man with thick glasses, I paid good money for a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder from somebody with an M.D. and I don’t need any new diagnoses from a prissy-talking attorney who can’t even get a man out of jail for misdelivering a little wine.”

  Philip leaned back in his chair and burst out laughing.

  As dates went, this one was actually going pretty well, so far.

  “Just take me to the Café at the Granary, or home, please.”

  Philip paid the bill for the wine, slipped the waiter a big tip, and draped his arm around me as he herded me out the door.

  We had a perfectly fine dinner at the Café at the Granary, a place I’ve eaten at many times and where I’ve had many a guided tour of the kitchen, and where they know how to make a vegan cheesecake that doesn’t taste at all like soggy cardboard. Using the cheesecake as demonstrative evidence, I plunged my fork in and said, “See, no fear at all.”

  Then Philip took me home, and coasted in the door with me. I poured us a glass of Earl’s organic wine and wondered idly how many cases of wine had disappeared from Dave’s rental truck before the sheriff’s department returned it to Earl’s vineyard. We had finished the first round when Philip took off his glasses, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me.

  Umm, those lips did more than just look good.

  “I was hoping we might make love now,” he said, lifting himself away from me.

  While I didn’t verbally respond, I did pull him back to me.

  About the time I was really getting into the kissing, the phone rang. Bearess came leaping into the room and started barking at the phone.

  “Ignore it,” I said.

  We did, kissing some more until the answering machine came on.

  “Er, ah, Lilly? This is Tired. You better call me.” He left a number. He didn’t sound happy.

  “Dave’s still out of jail, right?”

  “Yes,” Philip answered.

  We went back to kissing.

  The phone rang again, and Bearess howled at it, and jumped on the couch with Philip and me.

  I shooed Bearess off, but then my answering machine squawked out: “Lilly, Jackson here. Call me. Right now.” Blam.

  Philip and I looked at each other, I shrugged and reached for him, and the phone rang again. Tired left another message to call him immediately.

  All right. I got it. Something was up.

  I called Jackson first.

  Before I even said hello, Jackson thundered out, “Somebody shot the man. Shot him dead.”

  “Oh, my god, not Dave,” I screamed.

  “Dave? Who’s Dave?”

  “Who got shot?”

  “Kenneth Mallory. Somebody shot him at his house, a couple of hours ago. I just heard. It made the ten P.M. news.”

  “Mierda,” I said, and hung up. So much for making out with Philip. I punched in the number Tired had left.

  “Tired,” I said, no need for any extended hello under the circumstances. “What happened?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. You need to come down to the sheriff’s office. I need to, to, ask you a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just come on down to the sheriff’s office. I’ll have somebody meet you out front. No, better yet, I’ll send somebody to pick you up.”

  “Why me?” I shouted, but he hung up.

  Naturally, Philip went with me, riding politely in the backseat of an official car while I worried in the front. I mean, okay, what was I, the karmic center for murder? We were up to three bodies in the last week, and still had Saturday to go. Plus, I thought, Tired sounded as if he thought I was a suspect.

  Which, as it turned out, he did.

  Chapter 20

  After all the time I had spent wishing ill winds to blow upon Kenneth Mallory’s head, I actually felt guilty.

  But what I also felt was uncharitable relief.

  That is, until I got the gist of Tired’s questions and realized he had penciled me in as the most immediate suspect in Kenneth’s death.

  “Hey, bud,” I said, jumping up out of my plastic chair in a tacky, dank, and cramped little interview room at the sheriff’s department, “I’ve got an alibi.”

  “Lilly,” Philip repeated in his official, i.e., not Dean Martin, voice, “for the last time, be quiet.”

  Oh, yeah, Philip had been counseling me from the get-go to keep my mouth shut, and just see what we could find out from Tired.

  What we had learned after a circuitous and irritating route, in which everyone in the room, including some darkly dressed man introduced as Stan Varna-dore, apparently Tired’s supervisor, had raised their voices two or three times, was that Kenneth Mallory had been shot six times.

  Between sniping, Philip had also managed to trick Tired into admitting that one neighbor had heard shots and called 911, while still another had seen a car speeding away from Kenneth’s house.

  Therein lay the rub.

  The car the neighbor had seen was a bright blue Honda, and not a new model. One with unusually dark, tinted windows.

  After hearing the car description, I knew what was coming. After all, Tired had had a pretty good look at my not-new-model Honda, repainted in what was technically deemed cobalt blue, which incidentally did not look all that blue on the paint-sample card when I had it repainted after Jennifer the crazed StairMaster wizard had shot it all up, but to the layman it was probably just bright blue. And for security reasons, I’d had the shot-out windows replaced with darkly tinted windows, and would have gone for bullet-proof glass until I got the quote. I mean, really, do they make that stuff out of diamonds, or what?

  It laid out pretty easy: Tired thought I had driven to Kenneth’s in my unfortunately distinctive Honda and plugged the man with six bullets.

  “Well, it wasn’t me and it wasn’t my car because—”

  “Lilly, shut up.” Philip put a hand on my shoulder, and shoved me down in my plastic chair.

  “I have an alibi,” I said, and shot right back up, hovering in Tired’s face. “I’ve been out with Philip since eight P.M. We ate dinner in a room full of people, and I—”

  Uh-oh, what if Kenneth had been killed at seven-thirty?

  “Will you just be quiet and sit down,” Philip said.

  I sat down.

  Then we went forty rounds, with Stan interrupting and apparently playing his version of bad cop, though Tired was wavering in his imitation of good cop, and finally, I just flat out had had enough and stood up. “If I’m not under arrest, I am going home. I trust that the deputy who brought me will take me home.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Philip said.

  “I want to talk to Lilly alone,” Tired sa
id.

  “No, that is not advisable.” Philip physically edged himself between me and Tired.

  “No, that’s fine. I’ll talk to Tired. It’s all right.”

  “Lilly, am I your attorney or not? I am advising you, no, telling you, ordering you, not to speak with Tired without counsel present.”

  “Nobody tells me what to do.” Oh, except for Jackson.

  Proving my independence, I pranced out the door, and Tired followed me out into the hallway.

  “What time did Kenneth get killed?” I asked first.

  “I’ll go square with you if you do with me.”

  “All right. I think that’s a good idea.” Rather, I thought it was a good idea if Tired thought I was cooperating.

  “We got the 911 call, shots fired at 8:35 P.M.”

  I grinned in spite of myself. That would have been just about the time I was harassing the manager of the swank Palm Avenue eatery and he, the waiter, and the folks at the nearest tables would be sure to remember me.

  “Alibi, absolutely,” I said. “Just somebody else’s Honda. Must be a thousand of them in this town.”

  “Where were you?”

  I gave him the name of the place, a brief highlight of my exchange with the manager, and, of course, the fact that Philip would vouch for me. Tired’s face visibly relaxed, and I was touched to see his obvious relief.

  “I didn’t think you’d shoot a person,” he said, and reached out and patted my shoulder for about half a second.

  “Let’s go back in,” I said, that is, before Philip imploded.

  Okay, I was off the hot seat, but I didn’t have a clue where Bonita had been. And I really doubted that there were thousands of cobalt blue Hondas in Sarasota County, not ones as old as mine, and not ones that old with dark, tinted windows.

  Chapter 21

  Philip’s hand on my arm didn’t feel sensual, but rather custodial, as he pushed me out the door and toward a cab.

  He groused at me all the way back to my house, but he also paid the cabdriver.