Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  Ignoring my last plea, Cat Sue said, “Earl had this real important wine conference in San Francisco. Everybody who was anybody in the American wine scene was there. We had to start marketing our wine nationally or we didn’t have a chance to stay afloat until Earl started making money off his patent.”

  As interesting as all this was, my legs were cramping under Cat Sue’s weight. “Could you just get off me? My legs are going to sleep.”

  “Oh, I hate that. That tingling feeling is so awful.” But Cat Sue didn’t get up. Rather, she said, “But, see, everybody was so mean to Earl in San Francisco. They made total fun of his wine and said Florida couldn’t ever produce a wine that would sell outside of Dixie. ‘Cracker wine’ was what one fella called it and laughed about muscadines as wine grapes. Earl got his feelings hurt so bad he just left, caught an early flight home.”

  I tried to sort of kick my legs around to get the blood flowing, but for a thin woman, Cat Sue weighed a lot when all of her was across my thighs.

  “You wanta hear this or not?” she asked as I wiggled ineffectively under her.

  “By all means. It’s fascinating.”

  “See, when Earl got home that Saturday, first thing he did was go check on things. And right off, he found that the wine in storage had been stolen, so he runs off to track down the sheriff about his stolen wine and leaves me here by myself.”

  “At least sit on my ankles,” I said. “You’re really hurting me.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Cat Sue slid down a few more inches.

  “Thank you, that’s better. Now, please continue,” I said.

  “While Earl’s off chasing his stolen wine, Kenneth comes up all in a dither. He told me his yardman had just stolen a whole bunch of money from his house and Kenneth had chased him to just up the road from here. But the guy wrecked his car on a curve and ran into the swamp, with the money. See, Kenneth wanted me to send a couple of my Mexicans into the swamp and bring back the man and what Kenneth said was his money. He was way too scared of getting dirty or a tick bite to go after him himself.”

  “But you sent Dave instead?”

  “See, Dave needed the money. Kenneth said he’d pay the Mexicans a ten percent finders’ fee.”

  Yeah, Dave would go into a swamp for three thousand, I thought, especially since subsequent events suggested he intended to keep all of the money. But Dave’s risk-versus-benefit analytical defects aside, I had to get out of here before Cristal came. Hopefully it was just a matter of sweet-talking Cat Sue into getting off me. But first I had to know if Dave was part of anything worse than planning to steal the whole sum total of the money. “Did Dave know what was going on at that point?”

  “No, Dave didn’t know anything bad. I didn’t even know the man was Mad. It was, like I said, just me figuring Dave needed the finders’ fee ’cause him and me had just broken up. You know, between Earl and Cri . . . er, carrying the gift shop, I just didn’t have time for a boyfriend and all, and he was leaving town.”

  “You didn’t know that he’d stolen Earl’s wine?”

  “Not right then, no. I was just trying to get Dave some traveling money. That’s all. I always did like Dave. If I’d known he’d taken care of that by stealing Earl’s wine, I wouldn’t’ve bothered asking him to go after Mad.”

  Okay, a bit dizzy, I thought. What with Mad running and Farmer Dave stealing and Earl coming home early, I could see how everything had gone to hell in a hurry.

  “So, neither you nor Dave did anything wrong. All you did was ask a friend to recover some money Kenneth said his yardman had stolen from him.”

  Cat nodded vigorously and I had the feeling I was making up her defense for her. “That’s right,” she said.

  Taking all this in, I realized that the Saturday Dave came to my house, he was looking for a sack of cash in a swamp, not a jaguarundi. But why would he take Benny with him to pretend to track a wildcat?

  Then I remembered that first he had wanted me to go with him, no doubt for safety. Growing up like we had, roaming the red hills of south Georgia, we knew to take a buddy when traipsing off trail in the woods and swamps of the great south. What happened to Mad had proved this lesson. So when I couldn’t go with Dave, he had taken Benny to watch his back and yell for help if something happened.

  Mierda. Dave was in town long enough to fall in love and commit a few felonies but didn’t come calling until he needed me to wade out in a swamp to fight wild hogs and snakes over a sack of money. That made me mad enough I had to swallow hard a few times.

  Then I forced myself to refocus. “Kenneth killed Earl, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Cat Sue said. “Son of a bitch even bragged about it to me. Said he didn’t have any choice because Mad turning up dead was eventually going to get Earl figuring things out.”

  “You mean Earl didn’t know what was going on?”

  “No, why would he? He was trying to get his stolen wine back and still figuring on another year or two before he’d’ve perfected his grape-picker plans good enough to get a patent.”

  So, okay, there’s Earl, just churning away and working on the perfect mechanical grape harvester while Mad and Kenneth totally decompress. No doubt Mad’s panic mode triggered the same in Kenneth, especially given the aborted blackmail attempt. With Mad so conveniently out of the way, it was easy to imagine Kenneth driving up Tuesday morning to visit Earl, knocking him over the head, and staging the accident scene. After all, Earl wouldn’t have a clue that Kenneth was any threat.

  “So, how’d you find out about Kenneth selling Earl’s plans?”

  “Cristal figured it out. She’s real smart, you know? A certified paralegal and all. After Earl was killed, she got to thinking things through after I told her no way Earl gets himself killed accidentally on that thing. Cristal remembered this contract with a French company that Kenneth had been real secretive about. So she hunted out that contract and brought it to me and we put two and two together.”

  And came up with a plan to kill Kenneth right back, I thought.

  It had to be Cat Sue—with a wigged Cristal flaunting Cat’s credit card a three-hour drive from the murder scene, perfecting an alibi. I’ll be damned, Gandhi was right.

  On the remote chance I could convince Cat Sue I was a total idiot and believed either that she did not kill Kenneth the evil lawyer, or that I believed she had done so in self-defense, or that I was bound by attorney-client privilege, I kept my own counsel about the Cristal and Cat Sue conspiracy to commit murder.

  “So,” I said, trying to pull my face and voice into that of the complacent believer, “while you were in Winter Park, somebody killed Kenneth.”

  “Yes. You did.” Cat Sue beamed at me. “That’s why you had the gun in your car trunk and the bullets in your office.”

  Okay, to tell or not to tell about the gun being inadmissible and the bullets being wrapped in the Sunday funnies next door at Grandmom’s house on Tulip. Hmm, hmm, hmm—wisely I opted not to tell and went for another dodge. “Whoever killed him, it would be self-defense. I mean, Tired told me Kenneth had a gun and got off a shot.”

  “Self-defense,” Cat Sue said, apparently mulling this over.

  Yeah, right, I thought, self-defense with six shots and a preconceived alibi. That would be a very enthusiastic self-defense. I wiggled my legs forcefully under the increasing burden of Cat Sue’s body on top of me.

  “You know I got nothing against you or anything.” As she said that, Cat Sue scooted up until she was sitting on my stomach again. “But framing you doesn’t look like it’s going to work out, what with Bonita taking your car and all. So I’m gonna have to do something else with you.”

  “But you don’t need to. I’m your attorney. You just hired me. I can’t report any of this or The Florida Bar’s ethics commission will have my license.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Cat Sue appeared to be studying on this. Before I could think of what else to say, I heard the sound of a vehi
cle pulling up outside the barn. Oh, please, please, please, cosmic forces, God of Delvon, blue gods, wood spirits and guardian angels for attorneys everywhere who won’t butt out when told to do so, please let that be the posse. Even just Tired. Even just Dave.

  Of course, it was Cristal.

  I mean, why not? I’d practically told her where I was and what I was doing.

  “Cristal called me earlier, said you were inside the barn snooping,” Cat Sue said as I struggled to look at Cristal prancing into the barn. “She told me that I should hold you here.”

  Obviously Cristal had listened to my call to Bonita. Naturally she was also armed.

  As I contemplated my limited future, Cristal walked over to Cat Sue and stroked her face. “You all right, baby?”

  “Yes,” Cat Sue said. And finally she rolled off me and stood up.

  “I told you that live rattler wouldn’t scare her off. You don’t know this woman,” Cristal said to Cat Sue, as if I weren’t even there. “She’s doggedly persistent.”

  Hmm, “doggedly persistent.” I rather liked that, but stopped myself short of thanking Cristal as I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “So the dead snake and the fish, that was Kenneth?” Oh, yeah, like that mattered now.

  “That was Kenneth. That’s where Cat got the idea for the live snake,” Cristal said.

  Not to be sidetracked, Cat Sue said to Cristal, “She says there’s this attorney-client privilege and she can’t rat on us, but I don’t trust her. Maybe we can, I don’t know, shoot her, put her in a wine barrel, haul it out—”

  “Wait a minute,” Cristal said. “Let me think.”

  “Look, killing Kenneth was self-defense,” I said, putting that dogged persistence into a persuasive mode. “Philip Cohen is an excellent criminal-defense attorney and I know he and I can get either one of you off. But if you kill me, that’s first degree. Florida still has the death penalty, you know? Even for shooting your own lawyer.”

  “Self-defense?” Cat Sue said. “Yeah. Kenneth pulled his gun on me. I knew he had to kill me to cover up his killing Earl and stealing his designs.”

  “Then it’s perfect self-defense. Philip and I can get you out of this, absolutely.” Tentatively I stood up, testing my legs and the attitudes of the two women holding guns on me. “We’ll call Philip out here, he’ll coach you on what to say, and then we’ll explain it to Tired. It will be all right.”

  “Self-defense.” Cat Sue said it dreamily.

  And for a moment I even believed it myself.

  Until Cristal laughed. “Premeditated self-defense. Sure, Philip could make that work.”

  “What?” Cat Sue asked Cristal.

  “The fake alibi. You don’t set up an alibi and then kill somebody in self-defense,” Cristal the certified paralegal explained to Cat Sue.

  “Damn Kenneth, getting us all into this,” Cat Sue said. “Kenneth always looking down his nose at Earl and me, lording it over me he’s the great white lawyer. Greediest man I knew. Kenneth took all of our grandmother’s things when she died. I didn’t get anything and you wouldn’t believe the silver she had.”

  Yeah, actually, I would believe the silver.

  “But the worst of it,” Cat Sue said, “was Kenneth killing Earl with that grape picker. Kenneth said what’s wrong with me, didn’t I get the irony of killing him with his own damn grape harvester? Kenneth probably planned to kill Earl and me all along, but was stalling for the best time. Mad’s getting killed kinda changed things.”

  “Those modifications on the harvester, were they really worth plotting a double first-degree murder?” I asked, recoiling at the depth of Kenneth’s greed. Out of the corner of my eye, I gazed at Cristal, who alternately watched me and Cat Sue.

  “Yes. A grape harvester that wouldn’t bruise the grapes, why that’d be like the cotton gin. It would reduce labor costs significantly. With a sixteen-inch bucket conveyor, a good harvester like the one Earl was perfecting could handle twenty tons per acre. Big market for such a machine in California and Michigan, as well as France, Chile, and Israel.” Cat Sue suddenly had an earnest-businesswoman tone for someone so recently camped on my stomach.

  But I didn’t care so much about profit margins as I cared now about keeping Cat Sue and Cristal talking, because as long as they were explaining things to me they weren’t stuffing me in a wine barrel. “What exactly happened at Kenneth’s?” I asked in my best cross-examination mode.

  “Kenneth answered the door with his gun out and admitted he killed Earl so he wouldn’t get in trouble for stealing Earl’s plans and chasing Mad to his death. Then, like, after that, the man had balls enough to offer to pay me off, give me half. Like I would trust him, kin or not. Like I’d let Kenneth get away with killing Earl. See, Earl was a good man and he didn’t deserve to die and I was tired of Kenneth doing shit and getting away with it, and I knew it was just a matter of time before he’d kill me too, so I pulled out Dave’s gun and I shot him.”

  “But Tired said Kenneth fired a round too,” I said.

  “Yeah, but that man couldn’t shoot straight. Even close up. The kick on the gun threw him off. Lucky for me that gave me time to shoot him.”

  “So, he fired first. It was self-defense.”

  “Yeah,” Cat Sue said and nodded again.

  “I already told you, nobody will believe it because we set up the alibi first,” Cristal said, sounding just a tad put out.

  Okay, so the self-defense bluff was pretty much over. “Why didn’t you just turn Kenneth in to the sheriff instead of killing him?” I asked, seeing no further need to wordsmith as only physical action and karmic intervention were going to save me now, but even at death’s door I was terribly curious.

  “Money,” Cristal said. “I destroyed all copies of a will Kenneth drew up himself. Do you know, he left everything to the National Butterfly Association?”

  Kenneth had left his fortune to bugs with wings?

  Then it hit me: Cristal the certified paralegal, Cristal the forger. I was probating her will, not Kenneth’s.

  “I did a good job on that will,” she said, not shy in her own praise. “I prepared and signed it, leaving nearly everything to Cat Sue. Forged a couple of witnesses’ signatures. With a token in the will for Kenneth’s brother. I mean, the brother wasn’t close at all, so I didn’t think he’d contest anything. Also I heard from Ashton he was coming back soon, so I figured he’d be the perfect PR. I mean, he certainly wouldn’t get a handwriting expert to examine it. Then Cat and I would have all of Kenneth’s estate, plus the Fleur-de-Lis contract to pay off the debts on Earl’s place.”

  Okay, money would do it. I wondered idly if Kenneth’s greed had been contagious and Cristal had caught it like the first winter flu through an office. Or, is greed just the human condition?

  Cat Sue turned to Cristal, saying, “Attorney-client or not, I say she’s gonna rat us out for sure. I can’t go to jail. Cristal, sweetie, you just know I wouldn’t do good in a prison. Not with my heart murmur.”

  “Damn. We need to think,” Cristal said. But then she added, “Come on, Lilly, let’s go to the winery.”

  “You take good care of her,” Cat said as Cristal pointed her gun at me.

  I walked out in front of her. Okay, what would Willie do?

  Stomp, stomp, stomp. Whoa, what was my hurry? I stopped walking and turned around to face Cristal, planning a last-ditch appeal. But as I stared at Cristal’s tense face, Bonita materialized from behind a giant hibiscus by the barn.

  As sweat poured down my face, Bonita, the good Catholic mother, picked up a brick from the hibiscus-garden border and threw it at Cristal, hitting her solidly in the back of her shoulder and spinning her around. Cristal stumbled to the ground, stunned, but her hand still held her gun.

  Grabbing for the gun was too big a gamble, especially with an armed Cat Sue just inside the barn. I dashed at Bonita, grabbed her arm and screamed, “Run,” as if that wasn’t the obvious option.

  Chapter 35
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  We ran.

  And we ran, and we ran, taking the ground in front of us in giant leaps. Down the path between the rows of grapes, we galloped. More intent on protective cover than pavement, I steered us toward the wooded fringe of the vineyard rather than down the dirt road to the highway. With the armed and deadly girlfriends presumably coming after us, I didn’t want the clear target of our backs out in an open space. No, I wanted dense trees and foliage.

  So we ran, and ran, deeper into the woods, following no path, but spinning our way through the underbrush into the live oaks and cypress woods, thick with moss-hung trees and grounded with a spongy, wet floor, green with lichen and ferns, and we ran deep enough that we began to pass from the trees into the scrubs and thickets of a Florida hammock. We were nearing the edge of Myakka River State Park, where the Myakka River would soon make a swamp of the hammock. We were gasping for air. I put out my hand and stopped Bonita, there in one of the last great expanses of true Florida wilderness.

  We needed to breathe. We needed to see where we were. We needed to listen for sounds of a gang of girl killers following us. I looked around. Standing as still as I could while catching my breath, I listened, but didn’t hear any thrashing in the bushes or other sounds of anyone chasing us.

  Before us lay the palmetto scrubs where rattlers and boars and the myriad forms of wildlife that were capable of harming a person lived their lives, but also where the scrub jays, white-tailed deer, and gopher tortoises went placidly about their gentle lives. Perhaps a panther or a jaguarundi might still prowl, wholly unaware of the monster housing developments working their way toward their meager habitat, guaranteeing their eventual extinction.

  Florida wilderness is nothing if it isn’t the ultimate example of the yin and yang.

  But I was too scared to be philosophical. I wanted to keep running until I was safe in the protective custody of a sheriff’s deputy. First, though, I gasped out what I had been wondering as we ran. “How did you know?”