Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

But that box of 158-grain roundnose bullets might still be in the custody of Kenneth’s killer.

  James Earl Jones seemed to suggest this.

  The gun and the bullets would have traveled together, at least for a while. I knew this because I knew, thanks to Philip and his spies in the sheriff’s office, that six 158-grain roundnose bullets had plowed into Kenneth.

  I thought about that box of 158-grain roundnose bullets in Dave’s backpack at my house. Okay, so what happened to them after that?

  Obviously Dave hadn’t carried the backpack with him to the jail or there would have been quite the discussion there about the gun and the bullets. As a convicted felon, Dave wasn’t supposed to be toting around guns and bullets with him. So that meant that the backpack was probably left at Waylon’s duplex.

  Or, and I didn’t like the next thought, they had been left in Benny’s truck and Benny had taken them.

  If Benny had taken the backpack, and found the gun, and borrowed my car from Bonita, and . . . Or, if Bonita had found them . . . Bonita, who was quite firm in not voluntarily giving Tired her fingerprints . . . Bonita, who had a reason . . .

  No, I couldn’t complete these thoughts.

  But I would have to ask Benny and Bonita about that box of bullets.

  I looked at the clock by my bed. Four in the morning, the witching hour, the hour we wake and wonder, and the lucky take a wiz and go back to sleep, while the rest of us wrestle with our demons.

  Or we get out of bed and do something.

  Crawling over Bearess, on the floor, I got up, drank a glass of double-filtered water, and pondered my options, or perhaps my targets—Dave, Benny, or Philip.

  Well, Philip had said to call him anytime.

  After several rings, a sleepy-sounding Philip answered, not with hello, but with, “This better damn well be an emergency.”

  “More or less.” Everything at four in the morning had the shadowy feel of an emergency.

  “Lilly? Damn, don’t you sleep?”

  “Not so much since I stopped the Xanax and Percocet.”

  He muttered something I couldn’t make out.

  “I need to know. What about the gun and the box of bullets?”

  “What about them?”

  “Track them for me, can you do that? I mean, you told me that you were going to work on the trail of the gun. But what about the box of bullets? They were in Dave’s backpack, and he took the backpack the night he and Benny went to Waylon’s and he got arrested. Where’d it go from there?”

  “What box of bullets?”

  Uh-oh, I hadn’t mentioned that, had I? “The box of 158-grain roundnose bullets, they were in Dave’s backpack, with the gun.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “Oh.” Well, excuse me, I had had a lot on my mind and was still suffering from some confused notion of protecting Dave by not broadcasting that information. Not wasting any time in chastising myself, I told Philip all I could remember about the bullets. To his credit, Philip grasped the point much quicker than I had.

  “So whoever had the .38 and the box of bullets loaded the weapon with six and then had a nearly full box left,” Philip said. “This person then planted the weapon in your trunk. But what would this person do with the box of bullets?”

  “Yes. Exactly. If we find that box of bullets, we might find Kenneth’s killer.”

  “The most sensible thing for the shooter to do with the box of bullets would have been to dispose of them. They might well be at the bottom of Philippe Creek.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. Track the gun for me. What did Dave say about the gun? Where’d it go after he took it from my house?”

  “I asked him that. Precisely that. Several times. I’ve been trying to track that weapon since I first learned about it.”

  Philip sounded fully awake now. Good, nothing an insomniac likes better than other people who can’t sleep.

  “And?” I asked the easiest question I could.

  “Dave offered an incomplete explanation.”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t know, or he is not fully elucidating what he does know.”

  “Would you cut the crap and tell me what he said?” I mean, come on, who uses words like elucidating at four in the morning?

  “Lilly, if I ask you nicely, would you please refrain from using that word? It is not at all ladylike.”

  What word? Crap? Bypassing any linguistic debates, I asked, “What the hell did Dave say about the gun?”

  “That he didn’t know what happened to it. The backpack was apparently left at Waylon’s duplex. It was gone when Dave was released from the jail and went back for it. He assumed, apparently, that Waylon had taken it with him to Lakeland. I have spoken to Waylon over the phone and he denied ever seeing the .38 and is emphatic that he did not take it. So Dave said he didn’t know where the gun was. That is, until it showed up in your trunk. He has no explanation for that.”

  “Why are you saying apparently the backpack was left at Waylon’s?”

  “Because the first time I asked him, Dave said he thought he had left the backpack in Benicio’s truck. But then he backed off that.”

  Frigging great. That left us with myriad equally worrisome options: Benny had taken the gun; Waylon had taken the gun; someone who had access to Waylon’s duplex or Benny’s truck had taken the gun; or we flat out didn’t know.

  “I’ll go ask Dave myself,” I said, assuming Dave was at the yurt.

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Shouldn’t be that much traffic this time of the night.”

  “Lilly, it’s the morning. Four in the morning. Go back to sleep.”

  Easy for him to say.

  While I was right about the lack of traffic and Dave being at the yurt, he was less than gleeful to see me at four-thirty A.M.

  “Sum’n wrong?” he asked, bleary-eyed, slack-jawed, and wild-haired.

  Behind him in the doorway, Cat Sue looked at me, radiant in her long hair and her gauzy nightgown, her face somehow both alert and bewildered.

  “May I please speak with Dave? Alone?” I looked directly at Cat Sue, watching her.

  “Come on in.” Cat Sue spoke the polite words in a slightly singsongy, but pleasant way, which Dave heard. But behind his body, she glowered at me.

  As I went in, Cat Sue floated back to the futon and I grabbed Dave’s arms and pulled him into the kitchen space and whispered, “I’ve got to know, and don’t be bullshitting me, but where did your gun go after you left my house on Saturday?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Dave, this is me. Tell me.”

  He rubbed his eyes, and shoved his hair, wavy from his braids, behind his ears, and he squinted as if he was outside in the bright sunlight, and then he said, “I don’t know.”

  “Damn it, Dave. Tell me.”

  “Man, I tell you what, best I can recollect, I took the backpack with me in Benny’s truck. I didn’t have it at the jail, so either I left it in his truck, or I carried it in to Waylon’s and left it there. Same as I told Philip.”

  “That’s the truth?”

  “Lilly Belle, sweetheart, would I lie to you?”

  In a heartbeat if the need was there. “Dave. This is me, Lilly. You know I’d never betray you, even if you killed Kenneth. Besides, I’m your attorney, I can’t tell anyone anything you tell me. Same as with Philip. Attorney-client privilege, and all.”

  “Now why would I kill Kenneth? I’d never laid eyes on the man. And, you know what, I sure could use that money back.”

  I stared at Dave until I was sure there wasn’t going to be anything else I could learn from him, and then I said good-bye, and I drove to Bonita’s house, where I woke her up, but when I asked to see Benny, she told me he was asleep.

  “Let me wake him up. I need to ask him something. It’s important.”

  Bonita stood back and let me in.

  Together we walked down the hallway, then knocked on Benny’s door. And knocked. And knocked, and
finally Bonita opened the door and we walked in.

  When Bonita flipped on his light, Benny’s eyes opened and shut a few times and then he looked at me and Bonita and said, “Mierda.” And he snatched up his sheet to cover his skinny legs and plaid boxer shorts.

  I waited for Bonita to correct him for cursing, but she didn’t.

  “Benny, what happened to Dave’s backpack? The night he was arrested? He left my house with the backpack, and you in tow. When he got arrested, where was the backpack?”

  Benny glowered at me and then said, “I don’t know. Now get out of my bedroom.”

  “Benny,” Bonita said, just the slightest hint of chastisement in her tone.

  “Please get out of my bedroom.”

  “I will. Sorry to have disturbed you. But first, make sure. Think about it. When did you see the backpack last?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Did Dave carry it with him into Waylon’s duplex? Or leave it in your truck?”

  Benny frowned and looked at Bonita, which made me look at her, and then Benny and I looked at each other.

  “I don’t know. Things happened fast. I don’t remember.”

  Having awakened him, I figured I’d caught Benny without defenses or pretenses. In other words, I believed him. Thinking I was going to have to track down Waylon in Lakeland and ask him, I sighed, apologized, and then left.

  It never occurred to me that the little boy I’d watched growing up, difficult as his last years had been, would lie to me.

  Chapter 31

  Wholly without any idea of what else to do, I went home and flopped down on my bed. Against incredible odds, I dozed and then woke, hot and late for work. After stumbling through my morning routine, I headed out to my humble Honda.

  Bleary to my soul despite the copious amounts of morning coffee, I staggered into my ancient Honda, waiting like a noble beast of burden in my carport. My purse fell off my shoulder and thunked down beside me in the bucket seat and I grabbed it to throw it in the other seat, and when I did, I saw a rattlesnake on the floor of the passenger side of the car.

  Well, damn if I’m falling for that twice, I thought, and leaned over to pick up what I blithely assumed, given my prior experience, was a dead rattler.

  The snake flicked its forked tongue, hissed, and raised its head.

  Uh-oh.

  I froze, I held my breath, and my hand was stuck there in the air as I watched the snake.

  Remembering my grandmom’s admonitions to never back a snake into a corner, or scare it, or piss it off, I contemplated my options as sweat began to pool on my upper lip.

  It was unlikely that gallant young Tired would lope across my driveway with that peculiar cowboy gait of his and throw his knife and rescue me.

  No, this time it was up to me.

  Despite the fact that I had voluntarily chosen to be a trial attorney, I am not normally predisposed to encouraging physical danger. I don’t rock climb, I don’t ski, and I applaud bungee jumping only as a means of reducing the population and generating litigation. But, being a trial attorney, I don’t fall apart under pressure.

  So I thought: I have to do something. I can’t remain frozen in space indefinitely, no matter how appealing that seemed to be at the moment, and I was quickly reaching the limits of my ability to hold my breath. The snake had not coiled, but as Grandmom had taught me early on, a rattler does not need to coil to strike.

  The trick then was to be still until the snake calmed down and no longer perceived movement, which a snake will translate into a threat when the movement doesn’t come from the soon-to-be frog dinner in front of it.

  After the snake calmed down, the trick would be to hurl myself out of the car before it was riled up again and bit me.

  And if I failed, I had my cell phone in my jacket pocket and could hit 911 in plenty of time not to die. I was young, relatively speaking, and healthy, and one snakebite when I was six blocks from the hospital would not kill me.

  But it would be a new experience in the extremely unpleasant. And despite having chosen to be a trial attorney for a career, I do not normally invite physically unpleasant events.

  So naturally I was hesitant to hurl myself toward the door lest the snake proved the faster of the two of us.

  Next door, to my horror, I saw my new grandmom come ambling out of her house, wave at me, start across her unnaturally green grass, and pause to frown at my own not-chemically-treated grass, as I’m one to let nature take its course where lawns are concerned. Then she trotted straight toward the passenger side of my car, her right hand slightly extended as if she was planning to open my passenger-side door and chat with me.

  Well, okay, I wasn’t going to let her pop my car door open and get bit. She might not survive it, and if she did, she was sure to sue the hell out of me. Highly motivated, I catapulted myself against my door at roughly the same time I opened it and I fell out on the driveway, screaming, “Get away,” and slammed the car door. Nothing bit me.

  I wondered if moves-faster-than-a-rattlesnake was something I could use in my Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley firm brochure bio.

  “Get back,” I shouted at Grandmom.

  “Well, my goodness, you don’t have to be that rude. I just wanted to invite you over tonight for dinner.”

  “Watch out,” I said, wheezing slightly and pulling myself up. I peered into the car. The snake was coiled. “Don’t open the door. There’s a rattler inside.”

  “Oh, my dear, I’m sure you are mistaken. You stay up too late at night, no wonder you see things.”

  “All right, then, don’t open the door, but look inside. Just don’t open the door.”

  Grandmom looked inside and gasped. “Now haven’t I been telling you to enclose that carport? Get a garage and wild things won’t crawl into your car, and you’ll improve the value of your house and this whole street will look that much better.”

  Well, okay, she had spunk and she didn’t scare easily and I had to appreciate those qualities. As I pulled out my cell phone and punched 911 for the third time this month, I wondered if there was some limit to the number of times I could call that emergency number before the county sent me a bill.

  As the dispatcher sputtered to life on the other end of my line, I wondered. I had figured Kenneth for the dead fish and the dead snake. That was pretty obvious. But now that he was traveling to his next incarnation, who would want to scare me? Or hurt me?

  Chapter 32

  Sarasota is a rich city, built on a bay front that follows the curve of the land against blue water. Beyond the bay, barrier islands outlined the region with their tufts of green resort communities and sand lapped by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sarasota has some of the finest restaurants in the entire country. It has a private service industry bar none. It has grand, high-rise condominiums full of old people who once lived up North and now reside in million-dollar rooms with panoramas of the many waterways they are too old and too urban to explore beyond the view from their balconies. It has shopping to rival any large megalopolis. It has the Ringling Art Museum, with real Rembrandts, and live theater and opera and its own ballet troupe, all of which paint the city with a veneer of sophistication. The city has pink water fountains with dolphins at downtown intersections and tile-and-brick mosaics on the streets of its restored funky old 1920s artsy neighborhoods. It has a whole subculture of people who make their fine livings servicing the retired people who move here to die.

  But would you believe in all that shimmering, big-city facade, in all that teeming service industry, in all its government and its bureaucracies, Sarasota did not have a single service designed to remove live rattlesnakes from one’s car.

  Go figure.

  The Sarasota police detective who came to my door wrote down everything I said, asked not a penny’s worth of questions, wished me luck with the snake, and left.

  I called the Fish and Game people, who asked a few questions, and then said that because the rattler wasn’t on an endangere
d species list, I was on my own.

  I called every one of the bird rescue groups, only to have a multitude of basically nice people explain to me in patient detail that, fundamentally, a snake was not a bird and I was on my own.

  I called Jackson, who said he could come over and “shoot the damn thing,” and I considered this, but didn’t want to kill it now that it was no immediate threat to me—I mean, it was just a snake doing its snake thing, not the Antichrist or anything. Also, I didn’t want snake guts all over the inside of my Honda, so I concluded that I was on my own.

  With my grandmom neighbor, I discussed my theory that if I opened the door and waited, the snake would leave of its own accord and in its own time. Grandmom, perhaps understandably, didn’t want that big rattler living in her neighborhood, and she offered a variety of wholly useless tips—like call 911—and continued to blame me for my wild lifestyle and for not enclosing my carport, and I concluded that I was on my own.

  As I was standing in my own driveway, studying the yellow pages under any conceivable topic, the snake crawled up the inside of the car and flicked its forked tongue in the window.

  Okay, yeah, the snake was probably as eager to leave as I was for it to go.

  With sweat trickling down my neck, Bearess howling from behind my front door, my new grandmom ranting at me, and a small contingency of my stay-at-home neighbors gathering to offer utterly inane suggestions—call 911 being the lead tip despite the number of times I told everyone I had called 911, I thought of Tired. After all, he’d rescued me before. When I didn’t catch him at his office, I called him at home. In a too-much-adrenaline-rush sort of garble, I got the basic problem across.

  “Yes, ma’am. Getting that snake out could be tricky. I know an old fella from back home, operates out of east county now, out by the winery and Myakka River State Park, who I bet can help. Give me a sec to call him, then I’ll come on over.”

  East county, that tiny corner of Sarasota County that is still wild, old Florida, with the cracker boys and the long-horned cows and the scrub and the snakes and the wild hogs and bugs and cypress swamps and back water from the Peace and the Myakka Rivers and the myriad little creeks. The real Florida. Okay, somebody from out there was far more likely to know how to get rid of a snake in a car than somebody with a master’s degree in criminal justice from an urban university.