Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  “He’s done this before?” I asked. “Before Dave, he’s skipped school and gone to Myakka?”

  “Yes, I just told you that.”

  “What do you think this means?”

  “He is my son, but I do not always understand him. I don’t know what this means.”

  We pondered the various feasible meanings, psychological and otherwise, of Benny’s fascination with the jaguarundi, but came to no conclusion.

  “Where is Benny now?” I asked.

  “I believe, that is, I hope, he is at school. He promised me this morning he would not go into Myakka again. Not alone. It is dangerous out there, off the main trails, for a boy like Benny, who lets his imagination get away from him.”

  Jackson banged on my door and came inside at roughly the same time he knocked. He was holding a file folder by his side and I fervently hoped it wasn’t another one of his unwinnable cases he was going to toss my way.

  “Taking tea?” he asked, slapping the file against his thigh.

  “Discussing how to handle a case,” I responded. “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you. You two need to get back to our cases, not being social workers. All kids worth their salt play hooky. Boys who grow up to be men, real men, go off in the woods, or the swamps, by themselves.”

  Uh-oh, that suggested Jackson had done a tad bit of eavesdropping.

  Jackson looked at Bonita. “At his age, Benny needs to be around some men. You want, I’ll take him with me next time I go hunting.”

  “Fishing,” Bonita said. “Fishing would be better.”

  “Deep sea,” Jackson said. “I’ll set something up. Out of Boca Grande. We’ll take Judge Goddard and Fred.”

  I thought how simple the world of a man who thinks a deep-sea fishing trip will cure a fifteen-year-old boy of his problems. Well, what did I know? Jackson had raised four sons, and as far as I knew, they were all reasonably normal, or at least stayed under the radar if they weren’t.

  “Lilly,” he thundered, knocking me out of that thought. “That little rat-faced law clerk with the earring brought this folder to me this morning, full of stuff the clerks had worked on for Kenneth. I found this”—Jackson slapped the file in the air as if swatting gnats—“in the pile. I thought you’d want to look at this since that EStall file on his hard drive caught your eye.”

  “His name is Arnold and he is a very fine young man,” Bonita said.

  “Who?” Jackson said as I ignored Bonita and reached for the file.

  “The law clerk.”

  Ignoring my outstretched hand because he was staring at Bonita, Jackson made a low, growly noise, then turned toward my desk and tossed the file on its clear surface.

  “You have any idea what is going on?” Jackson asked me.

  “None, sir,” I said.

  “When you do, tell me first.”

  Grunt, slam, stomp. Jackson was gone, and I grabbed the file and opened it, while Bonita crowded me, looking at the paper at the same time I did. Printouts and forms and copies of American Jurisprudence on the how-tos of filing patents, along with some literature and case law about modifications on existing patents, but nothing specifically about Earl Stallings. The bulk of the information seemed to focus on how significant changes had to be in an existing patent before a person could obtain a new, or independent, patent.

  All this did have something to do with a patent.

  A patent and Earl. Earl and wine.

  Think, think, think, I ordered myself.

  What I thought of was Earl pontificating on the difficulty of making sulfite-free wine and his confident reassurance to me and the Poodle Heads the day I met him that he had a way to produce wine without mold or sulfites. Maybe he’d devised a new process. The world beats its way to a man who makes a better mousetrap—and inexpensive sulfite-free wine, maybe?

  “You should take that to Officer Johnson,” Bonita said.

  My habit of not cooperating with T.R. was pretty well ingrained. But then I thought—Yeah, a patent. A patent doesn’t lead back to Bonita, or Benny, or Dave. Or me.

  Dodging traffic, and worrying, I about wore out my brain on the drive to the county jail, where Bonita had located Tired after a minimum of only three phone calls. For reasons that got lost in the Bonita-Tired phone call translation, he had to stay there for a while, but could see me if I came on out right then. While I would rather have met him somewhere other than the jail, there I was, en route with a file on patents and hopefully a small trail of potential evidence leading away from those I loved.

  Parking in a visitor spot at the jail, I made my way inside and discovered that the cute girl who liked Tired and babies but had the hair from hell was again at the front desk.

  “Hi, again,” I said, and squinted at her hair. It was a kind of big, layered pink do, Cindi-Lauper-does-back-up-for-Tammy-Wynette-on-drugs.

  “Brock didn’t do that, did he?”

  It took the woman a minute or two to figure this all out. “Oh, hi. You’re the lawyer who gave me that guy’s card. Yeah, I remember. You were here to see Tired.”

  “What a coincidence, I’m here to see him again.”

  “Tired’s coming in?”

  I saw a look of anticipation on her face as she smoothed her hair and looked down at her tight pants and tugged at them, but failed to improve upon anything.

  “Can you take a break, a few minutes?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure, why?”

  Why indeed? Because Tired needed a girl and Redfish needed a momma.

  “You wouldn’t take a nine-month-old to McDonald’s, would you?” I asked.

  “Gawd, no. You mean for food? Naw, I wouldn’t take a nine-year-old to a McDonald’s. Except for the salads. They have good salads. Have you ever tried—”

  “Okay, come on,” I said. “Ladies’ room.” I followed her tight pants all the way to the women’s room, where I had to hold my breath till I acclimated. “Sit.” I pointed at a chair of questionable sanitation.

  “What’s your name?” Pink Head asked me.

  “Lilly.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty. I’m Susie.”

  Marveling at how quickly women can bond in a bathroom, I pulled her hair back into a wide, silver barrette I kept in my purse for my own bad-hair days, and said, “Wash your face.”

  Susie had a heavy hand with the foundation and blush. And she had not picked colors that appeared either in nature or that complimented her own delicate coloring. I mean, come on. Didn’t she have a mirror at her house?

  Damp and fresh faced a moment later, Susie looked at me entirely too trustingly for a young woman who worked in a jail and didn’t know me from Adam’s house cat. But I wasn’t taking her to raise, just for a quick, mini-redo.

  Using my portable makeup kit, fished from the bowels of my purse, I gave her the Lilly light touch, and then, knowing I’d never use any of these things again because I’d used them on her and she worked in the jail, I made them a gift.

  Apparently she’d missed that class in middle school on personal hygiene and never using anyone else’s lipstick or mascara. She beamed and said, “Wow, Clinique. I can’t afford that, but I hear it’s, like, one of the best.”

  “Now, go to Brock and get a decent hair color. And a decent cut.”

  “I tried to. You know what Brock charges? I mean, like that’s half my take-home pay. My sister-in-law did this.”

  “Well, fire her.”

  I pulled out another one of Brock’s cards and wrote a note on the back, “Maybe strawberry blond, blunt, chin-length bob. Bill me.” And I signed my name.

  “Why are you doing this?” Susie asked, peering at and then pocketing the card.

  Good question. What was I, Wonderwoman of makeovers? Or what?

  As I pondered this, Susie spun around and studied herself in the mirror. “Yeah, that’s better,” she said. “How’d you know to do that? With the makeup and all?”

  Back when I had first arrived at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley fresh
from law school with a suitcase full of jeans and the concept that Chap Stick counted as makeup, Brock had been an excellent teacher on the art of makeup and elegance in dress, and fortunately Susie’s own pale complexion and blue eyes were a match for my own. So, what looked good on me wore well on her. I simplified this explanation to: “You’re young, you’re pretty, you don’t need much paint, and nobody looks good in orange blush. And I’d peel off those fake nails. And, maybe, ditch the shoulder pads, go for cotton or linen over polyester every time, never wear plastic jewelry, and take up a sport that involves a lower body workout.”

  “Yeah. So, like, why are you doing this? You got, like, a mother complex?”

  Hey, she wasn’t that young that I could be her mother.

  “Not hardly on the mother complex. But Tired’s a nice man, and he and Redfish need a nice woman. But I think his tastes run toward”—what, women who don’t look like cartoon versions of country-western singers from the seventies?—“toward more low-maintenance women.”

  “Like good mother material?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yeah, okay, got it. You and Tired good friends, or just work stuff?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “I need to get back out there.” She reached up and took off the barrette, and that pink-shag bouffant hair fluffed down around her. Ugh.

  Okay, in a pinch, I can do a version of a French twist that will work unless you’re going jogging. “Sit,” I said. “Won’t take a sec.”

  It took me a few minutes, mostly to fish out enough bobby pins from the bottom of my purse, but I got that French twist done, despite the manic layering in her hair. I made a gift of the barrette, which held the largest chunk of hair in place.

  If you didn’t notice the cheap poly shirt or the pink tone in her hair, she looked almost elegant. Very nice cheekbones and chin, I noted. Then said, “Don’t forget Brock. I’ll call him tonight, let him know to expect you.”

  “Yeah, I mean, thanks. Thank you. This is pretty weird, though, you know. I mean, really, pretty weird.”

  Pretty weird was good, that was a step up from the karmic convergence of malevolence that had tagged me of late.

  When we got back to the front desk, Tired was waiting. He didn’t look at Susie until I said, “Well, Tired, Susie here has been most helpful to me.”

  He looked at her, looked sideways at her again, and then said, “Hey, Susie. Helping how?”

  Suddenly afraid he would think Susie had been slipping me secrets, like telling me about the gun Stan took out of my car and all that, I stammered, “Oh, girl stuff, bathroom, soda machine, you know.”

  Tired nodded at Susie and took my arm to herd me toward that same dirty office where he and I and Philip had met the night Dave got himself arrested because he couldn’t outrun a deputy named Sprint.

  “Bonita said you had something for me, ma’am,” he said.

  Paranoia suddenly filled me. Philip would surely counsel against my turning over potential evidence to Tired without first running it by him. Also, it seemed every time I opened my mouth around Tired, I made something worse.

  But for reasons I couldn’t explain, I wanted to tell him. Something about Officer Tired Rufus Johnson inspired a level of trust in me I don’t usually accord members of law enforcement. Or the general public. Maybe the great fatigue in those puppy-dog eyes. Maybe the way he’d blown the gnats off Redfish’s face with a steady, gentle breath, or the way he’d about ma’amed me to death. After all, this was the man who had cut the head off a rattlesnake for me.

  So I blabbed. “It’s possible that Kenneth was working on a patent application for Earl.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We found this today. It’s a file with research on filing for a patent. Plus a good deal of info about modifications on an existing patent.”

  Tired took the file, looked at the label, and opened it. “I went through his office already,” he said, the hint of an accusation in his voice.

  “Yes, I know. Cristal guarded the office until you got the warrant.”

  “Cristal,” Tired said and blushed.

  Whoa, boy, I thought, you’re way over your head there. Cristal didn’t even date lawyers, so I doubted she would date law-enforcement types. Especially plump ones with a baby. In fact, now that I thought about it, Cristal, despite being cover-girl beautiful, didn’t seem to date anyone. I started to say something to Tired to gently dissuade him from the thoughts I imagined produced his blush, but he shifted back to work mode too quickly.

  “So this wasn’t in his office? Or I missed it?”

  “The law clerks had it in a file in the library.”

  Tired sighed. “You people have so much paper.”

  “We’re lawyers.” Then I basically told Tired what little I had learned from the paper EStall file, even as he studied it. And then I shared my suspicion that Earl had perhaps consulted Kenneth about the ins and outs on filing a patent application for a sulfite-free wine process.

  While I watched Tired ponder the significance of this new information, I asked him, “Okay, fair trade. Was Earl murdered or careless?” Tired hadn’t been too sure one way or the other that day at the vineyard when Gandhi and I had found Earl’s body.

  “My money is on murdered,” he said. “The autopsy showed trauma to the back of his head consistent with somebody bashing him with a heavy object. Not enough to kill him, but to knock him out. Then the grape harvester did the rest.”

  I physically shuddered at the image of that big machine with its metal tentacles rendering Earl asunder. “So somebody knocked him out and rigged the scene to look like an accident?”

  “I think so. But there was a big rock right under his head when we found him, so if he fell on that, it could have been the source of the trauma,” Tired said. “So, maybe he did fall off the harvester while working on it, hit his head on that rock, got knocked out and mauled.”

  But Tired sounded skeptical.

  A rock? I thought. Earl’s vineyard was clean. I had admired that about the place. “Tired, I had a good look around at that vineyard and I don’t remember any rocks.”

  “No, ma’am. Me neither.”

  “So, somebody planted the rock?”

  “A well-staged murder scene. There was some thought in it.”

  “Do you think Cat Sue might’ve had something to do with it? She seems a tad unstable,” I added. “Plus that property ought to be worth a fortune if she were to get it and sell it.”

  “That’s the obvious. But we looked into it. That property, the vineyard, all of it is heavily mortgaged. Earl didn’t have any kind of mortgage insurance to pay it off at his death either. Without Earl, the bank’ll probably end up with it. Or a forced sale that’ll bring her pennies on the dollar.”

  “Okay, so greed wasn’t a motive.”

  “Nope, none obvious. Plus, Cat Sue’s got a tight alibi. She was meeting with different potential wine buyers in and around Orlando all day, all those snooty little shopping towns around there with their high-rent liquor stores. She was trying to get some more outlets for the wine. We’ve checked it out and several of the wine merchants remember her.”

  “She would stand out,” I said, thinking of the red scarf around her long hair and her floor-length billowy hippie dresses.

  “Bottom line, she was three hours away about the time Earl got killed.”

  “Thank you for sharing,” I said.

  “Thank you for the file.”

  “Are we square now?”

  “If you’ll let me get your fingerprints?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. Okay?”

  Tired walked me to my car, and thanked me again for telling him about the patent angle. As we stood in the parking lot, in the bright light of the afternoon, I wondered if my extreme ruckus over Tired ripping up my okra was the reason he was now with the sheriff’s department instead of the city police.

  “Tired, did you get into trouble with the police department over my compl
aint? You know, over the okra. Is that why you switched to the sheriff’s office?”

  “No, ma’am, not your fault. Not anybody’s fault. I just didn’t fit in there with all those guys from up north with master’s degrees in criminal justice. I got me a B.A. out of Troy State, you know, south Alabama, and got tired of them looking down their noses at me. People at the sheriff’s office are just as smart, smarter maybe, but not so stuck up.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. For reasons not wholly clear, I felt a sudden warmth toward the man. He’d had a hard lot in life and he was carrying his load with some dignity. And with good manners.

  I offered him what I could.

  “You should ask Susie out. Take her to play tennis some weekend. To Ringling Art Museum, to eat at a nice place with fish and vegetables.”

  “Susie?”

  “Yes. Susie.”

  “Look, the body count’s pretty deep right now, and the high sheriff keeps sticking his finger in my eye,” Tired said. “Little hard to think about dating.”

  “All the more reason,” I said, and smiled my own version of a world-weary smile, and got into my car and drove off.

  Chapter 30

  That night, I awoke from my sleep when a deep, male voice spoke to me and said, “Follow the bullets.”

  Had the voice given me a message like “Teach the children,” “Love your weird neighbor,” or told me where the Holy Grail was, I might have thought the voice of God had spoken to me.

  As it was, I wondered why my subconscious sounded like James Earl Jones.

  And I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this before. It was pretty obvious, now that my subconscious had handed it to me. I mean, yeah, okay, Philip was working on the trail of the murder weapon, but regardless of where the gun had been between Dave’s backpack in my house and the trunk of my car, we all knew where the gun was now: in the custody of Stan the constitutionally unenlightened and Tired Rufus the beleaguered.