Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  So, we’d wait. Not wanting my new grandmom to stroke on me, I hinted that now would be a good time for her to go home, but this was apparently better entertainment than her television offered her, and she hung on. Finally I took her inside, fixed her a cup of hot tea, pacified Bearess with an extra dish of dog food, and washed my hands and face and changed my blouse.

  Tired arrived with Redfish in his arms, and when I stepped outside to meet him, he said right off, “This isn’t an official visit, you understand. I’m just here as a . . . friend. Sheriff told me if I bring Redfish to one more official crime scene, I’m off the force.”

  “Where’s his baby-sitter?”

  “Don’t know. A no-show.”

  “Why don’t you find a good day care?”

  “You know what can happen to kids at a day care, even a good one? Germs. Them kids don’t ever wash their hands, and they spit on each other, and I just know Redfish would stay sick. I’m not taking any chances.”

  Okay, that made perfect sense to me, and a full-time nanny probably wasn’t in the budget for a sheriff’s department investigator.

  “All right. I’ll show you the snake.” As I led Tired over to the rattler in the car, with my neighbors milling around waiting for the next act, my front door burst open and Grandmom came stomping toward me, then stopped.

  “What a beautiful baby,” she said.

  As I looked at sweaty, red-faced, on-the-verge-of-a-howl Redfish, he looked past me to Grandmom and reached out his arms to her.

  Grandmom opened her arms to him.

  Redfish cooed as Grandmom took him in her arms, and she cooed right back. Tired and I stood back a moment, and in mutual bewilderment, we watched his son and my neighbor fall in love with each other.

  After a stunned break, I made the introductions. “Dolly Gormand, my neighbor, please meet Tired Johnson and his son, Redfish.”

  “You, I remember you from that AA meeting,” Dolly snapped at Tired.

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think that was any AA meeting. We were—”

  But Dolly didn’t care, she started taking Redfish toward her house. “I need to get him out of this sun and wash off his poor, hot little face.”

  We watched her go.

  “She all right?” Tired asked.

  “She raised three kids, and her grandchildren come and visit four or fives times a year and nobody ever had to call 911.”

  “I better go check her out,” Tired the worrier said and took off after his son.

  Tired was still inside with Dolly when just about the most beat-up pickup I’d ever seen pulled into my driveway. Oh, like, now what?

  On the sides of the truck, red lettering spelled out “Experienced Hog Hunters,” with white letters below it explaining, “Catch or Kill Domestic or Wild Hogs.”

  A man chomping on an unlit cigar crawled out. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a plaid shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his face, the man walked up to me and stuck out his hand. “Percy Ponder, ma’am.”

  I shook his hand, which I noted was long fingered and scarred. “Lilly Cleary.”

  Glancing back at the truck, I waited for the other man inside to crawl out too. He didn’t.

  “Hear you got a problem with a snake in your car?”

  “Yes. Let me show you.”

  Percy studied on the snake in the Honda some, and hummed, and frowned, and chewed on his cigar.

  As Percy studied on the situation and I sweated, Bearess gave voice to a splendid series of howlings, almost operatic in tone, range, and quality. At the doggy chorus of dismay, the pickup-truck door opened and the other fellow got out and shouted: “Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehoods.”

  I gave the young man my famous Hard Look, and then softened it before turning to Percy.

  “Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just touched by the Spirit. Ate some of those cow poop mushrooms, you know the ones make you hallucinate, then he read him the Book of Revelations. Turned out not to be such a good idea, but we figure he’ll come out of it sooner or later.”

  “How long’s he been like this?”

  “Year or so,” Percy said in an unconcerned tone of voice.

  I made a mental note to remind my brother Delvon not to eat psychedelic mushrooms and read Revelations.

  Tired came out of Dolly’s house next door, minus Redfish, and with a relaxed smile on his face, and I assumed some bargain of child care had been reached, and he shook hands with Percy as the Bible quoter ducked back behind Percy’s pickup.

  “Well, let’s get her done,” Percy said.

  Using a long stick with a circle of wire and really thick gloves and a plastic crate with a tight lid and more nerve than most people, Percy and that young man had that snake hissing inside the plastic crate within a half hour. My neighbors began to disperse. After a shower and a change of clothes, I figured I could be at my office in time to bill at least a few hours.

  But first I asked Percy what I owed him, and, surprised it wasn’t more, paid him and then asked, “Where would somebody get a live snake?”

  “Lotta places, maybe,” Percy said. “Boyce, here”—Percy pointed at the Bible quoter—“used to belong to a church of snake handlers. They could probably tell you where to get one. And there’s some fellows I know out of Wauchula that catch and sell snakes to labs and zoos and things. Plus there’s just a whole mess of people in the Everglades who’d catch you a rattler for not much money at all.”

  Tired patted my arm. “Lilly, that’s my job. You let me take care of this. I’ll find out who got the snake, all right? This one and the dead one before it.”

  That struck me as a perfectly reasonable delegation of duties. I thanked everybody, inquired briefly after Redfish, was assured he was in good hands, and went inside and reprepared for work, then left for the office in my Honda, with all the windows down and the air-conditioning on, trying to blow out the combined scent of snake, fear, and cigar.

  Once at my office, I was not the least surprised to find Bonita worried about my lateness. Before I could explain, I announced that the first order of business was for her to reschedule every single one of my hearings and client conferences for the rest of the week. I didn’t care what chaos that created in my files, or what sanctions other attorneys threatened, because I was in no mood to argue out loud with people and didn’t have the time to properly prepare for live performances.

  As Bonita began the mass cancellation project and my snake-induced adrenaline faded, I began trying both to make up time on my unbilled, unworked cases and to distract myself from worrying. Hearings and depositions I couldn’t handle this week, but paperwork I had to handle or I had to resign or die. My unread mail alone was as scary as the snake in the Honda. Thus motivated, I worked frantically on piles of paper until Jackson stormed-troopered into my office.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Dandy,” I lied.

  Jackson studied me a moment and then decided to let it pass.

  “Here. Got something for you to do, since you don’t seem to be litigating much anymore. Might want to try your hand at probating an estate.”

  What I wanted to try my hand at was being somebody else for a while, like, say, I don’t know, maybe a nun in a convent somewhere in the middle of France.

  But Jackson dropped a copy of a will on my desk. “Kenneth drew this up himself. There’s Fred O’Leary, a board-certified estate planner not two offices down the hall from him, but no, Kenneth has to draft his own will.”

  I picked up the will as if it were encrusted with a virulent new strain of the SARS virus.

  “He had it witnessed a couple weeks before he died. Think he had a premonition?” Jackson asked.

  Or a threat, I thought, but made a hmming noise in case Jackson’s question wasn’t rhetorical.

  “Cristal just found it this morning,” Jackson said. “And get this. The personal representative named in the will is
Ashton. Since he’s taking the cure, I’ll have the probate judge appoint you the PR, as a member of the same firm and all.”

  “Ashton?” I blurted out, thinking, Ashton? Ashton, who couldn’t probate Kenneth’s will since he was detoxing in L.A. in a hot tub with a still-unnamed actress.

  Why on earth would anybody who actually knew Ashton name him as a personal representative? Since Jennifer, his nutty beloved, had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the poor man could hardly zip up his own zipper, let alone handle somebody’s entire estate. And, I mean, Ashton and Kenneth were not close, Ashton was not a probate attorney, and Ashton, under the best of circumstances, i.e., before Jennifer jumped and he became a drug-addled zombie, painted with a broad brush and had litigated largely from a deep reservoir of energy and seat-of-the-pants inspiration. In short, Ashton was not generally noted for being detail-oriented. And even Kenneth would know that being a PR required someone who was extraordinarily detail-oriented, as the personal representative reviews the claims against the estate and pays the legitimate bills; finds, collects, and preserves the assets prior to distribution; does an accounting for the heirs and the probate court; deals with the IRS and its irrational record-keeping requirements and indecipherable estate tax code; and ultimately pays the heirs.

  Shuddering internally at the thought of handling all the endless and precise tasks in settling Kenneth’s estate if I became the PR, I asked, “Cristal found this?”

  “Yeah, you didn’t hear me say that? How’d you think all of us missed that in his office?”

  Good question. I tried to read something from Jackson’s face, but he stroked his beard and studied me back as if waiting for me to crack.

  I didn’t have time for a staring contest with Jackson, who always won anyway, so I just asked him, “What do you think this means?”

  “Beats hell out of me, doll. But you be sure to let me know when you figure it out.”

  Ever the Zen master of delegation, Jackson then left my office with no words of farewell.

  Okay, let’s give it a whirl, I thought, but first I checked to make sure the will had the standard provision for fees and expenses for the PR. Then I pulled out my time sheet, entered “Estate of Kenneth Mallory” as the client, and jotted down “conference with Jackson, ten minutes.” Then I picked up the will.

  Oh, and what a read it was.

  Ping, ping, ping. The sound of things falling into place, yet not falling into place.

  Kenneth had left his Hummer, his wardrobe, his coin collection and his Rolex to his brother, Joseph of the last-known address a lavender farm in Washington state. But the great bulk of his worldly belongings Kenneth left to his only other blood relative—to her he left his Oak Ford home, the damn teak sailboat, a heretofore wholly unknown to me small plantation in Costa Rica, a stock portfolio, and other assets including proceeds from some contract with a French company. This list of personal assets included, I noted with just a tiny pang of guilt, an antique silver set and some rings that had once belonged to the grandmother they had shared. I guessed I would have to return the silver and rings I had taken from Kenneth’s house, maybe just ease them back into a general inventory at some future date.

  But the will said not a word about his butterfly garden.

  Beyond the mystery of what was to become of his butterfly garden, it was that other surviving relative who captured my attention.

  A first cousin.

  Catherine Susan Mallory Stallings.

  This was definitely something both Tired and Philip should know. But before I called them with the glee of knowing something they didn’t know, I wanted to find out more about Mr. Mallory’s estate, with which, on a temporary basis, I was more or less entrusted.

  A few phone calls later—one to Edith, our office manager, regarding the state of Kenneth’s profit sharing, 401(k), and other firm goodies, and one to Kenneth’s strangely chatty CPA, whose name and number Edith gave me—and I knew Kenneth wasn’t as rich as he pretended to be, but he still had a few buckets of money.

  After a cursory exchange of professional niceties with his accountant, I told the CPA I was the personal representative on Kenneth’s estate, assuming, as had Jackson, that switching Ashton to me would be a perfunctory act by the probate judge. After running through the basics first, I had eventually asked the CPA, “What’s with this French contract?”

  “Not sure. I just got a copy of it myself. Kenneth had some tax questions, you know, with a foreign corporation and all. There’s a lump sum and then yearly percentages.”

  “Send me a copy of that, will you?”

  “Soon as I get the court papers on you being the PR.”

  Okay, he wasn’t that casual after all. “So what’s with the Costa Rica property?”

  “You didn’t know him well, did you?” the CPA asked.

  “No.” I had tried not to.

  “Kenneth had this master plan. He was going to retire at fifty, with a minimum of five million, to his plantation in Costa Rica. Got the Costa Rica real estate at a good price, with some slight-of-hand nonsense I can’t really tell you about, CPA-client privilege and all. But you ever want some Costa Rica property, you give me a call.”

  “Costa Rica,” I said, thinking of green volcanoes and big birds. Where Kenneth could have been the king of the butterflies.

  “Good plan,” the CPA said. “There, he’d be a rich man still in his prime, in a country with universal health care and excellent coffee. He was even studying Spanish and the culture.”

  Wow, I thought. Not a bad dream. A tropical version of my own aspiration to retire early to my north Georgia apple orchard.

  “So, how was he doing on the five mil?” I asked, lulling myself between visions of butterflies and a few million in blue chips.

  “Well, you know. He was going great guns until 2000. Took a bad tumble.”

  “Lot of tech stocks?”

  “You got it. Lost about sixty-five percent of his portfolio. Then he did these panic buys—against my advice, I might add—with junk bonds, which made things worse. I mean, he was a long way from poor, but with his current income flow and his market losses, he was going to need another decade to meet his financial goals for retirement. He wasn’t happy when I charted that out for him.”

  Okay, retirement at sixty to a Costa Rica plantation didn’t have quite the same ring for him. That probably explained Kenneth’s desperately grabbing at clients and billable hours and trying to force Jackson and the firm into giving him a huge midyear bonus. I took a deep breath. There might be some similarities I didn’t like between Kenneth and me—a certain tenacity of focus, the plans for an early retirement, the quest for a bucolic place in which to live out peacefully the last few decades. But I didn’t cheat my clients. And I didn’t buy Hummers.

  Kenneth could have learned something from me about conservative investments and frugal lifestyles. Too late for that. But I’d learned something from him. The modern replay of the old question: “What profits a man to gain the world and lose his soul?”

  I felt unbelievably sad at the waste that Kenneth had made of his life.

  “Listen,” the chatty CPA said, breaking my contemplation. “Nice talking to you, but I need to run. Time’s money and all. You need a CPA for yourself, give me a call.”

  ’Bye and ’bye and there I was.

  Cat Sue shimmered in as a mirage of a suspect. I sure liked her better for it than Bonita or Benny. She killed her cousin for his money. And to reclaim that nice set of silver.

  But that left the mystery of her own husband, Earl, dead beneath his own farm equipment while Cat Sue was three hours away in Orlando and its neighboring cities marketing organic wine.

  With so many chunks of the puzzle in front of me, I needed a sounding board, someone to verbally fit the pieces into at least part of a picture. I called Philip, who did not answer his private line. “Call me,” I said to his answering machine. Then I called his secretary, who told me he was in a hearing. “Have him cal
l me soon as he gets in,” I said, and then I dialed every one of Tired’s four numbers and left a trail of messages even Kenneth Mallory could have followed from the great beyond.

  I peered out to Bonita’s cubbyhole, but she was among the missing. Biting back my irritation, I buzzed the front reception desk from Bonita’s phone. Cristal answered.

  “What are you doing at the front desk?” I asked, more snippily than Cristal deserved. It wasn’t her fault Bonita had disappeared.

  “Edith has me working here part-time now. Because cleaning up after Kenneth isn’t a full day’s work, Edith says. I mean, come on, I’m a certified paralegal. Did you know that? You need any work done, just let me know. I’d really like helping you and Bonita. Really.”

  Edith the office manager from the jackal school of efficiency had a highly qualified legal secretary and certified paralegal spending her mornings answering a phone? I wondered if I could convince Jackson to hire Cristal as our new office manager.

  “Thanks, Cristal. I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, I need you to page Bonita. Tell her to get back to her desk.”

  “Oh, she left the building a few minutes ago. Didn’t say where to. Anything I can help with?”

  “No. But thanks.”

  We said our good-byes, and I continued to stare for a moment at the space where Bonita was not. While standing there as if I could make her reappear by simply willing it so, I picked up the photo on her desk—the happy family, Bonita and Felipe, the last year of his life, and their five children. Carmen little more than a babe, Felipe Junior holding his daddy’s hand, and Benny stretching out his neck, trying to look taller and older. And Javy and Armando, the unmatched twins, looking like they wanted to punch each other. I put the photo down, sat in Bonita’s chair, and riffled through her personal filing drawer until I pulled out paperwork from her lawsuit with the bottling company. Flipping madly through paper and more paper, I finally found the company’s in-house counsel’s name and number and began the odyssey of calling a lawyer.