Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  Her face flushed, Bonita peered over her shoulder. Apparently satisfied that no crazed killers were immediately behind us, she said, “Cristal presented me with a bottle of Earl’s wine for a Christmas present last year. Since I do not drink, I gave it to Gracie, but then I remembered that and thought about it—Earl’s wine is not sold anyplace yet except at his winery.”

  “So you figured Cristal and Cat Sue and Earl knew each other?”

  “Yes. But I was not sure how any of that mattered until you ran out of the office that day with those old bullets.”

  “Like we talked about, it had to be somebody who could have gotten the bullets from Dave’s backpack but who also had access to my office. But how’d you—”

  “The laptop.”

  “Kenneth’s laptop?”

  “Yes. You see, while Cristal was working the front desk this morning, I happened to find occasion to search her office.”

  “She wouldn’t leave the laptop in her office?”

  “No, she put it back in Kenneth’s office.”

  Oh, what better place to hide something other than where it belonged. Kenneth’s laptop in Kenneth’s office. Especially after Jackson and Officer Tired Johnson and I had already searched it. Talk about your “Purloined Letter” concept.

  “So, okay, when you found the laptop, you figured Cristal was part of the puzzle,” I said. “And then when I called you from the barn, you put it together.”

  “Not immediately. I was standing at my desk calling Officer Johnson when I saw through the window that Cristal was running to her car. So I hung up and followed her. She got away from me in the traffic, but I believed I knew where she was going. It made sense to me that she had listened in on our conversation and had gone to do you harm.”

  If I hadn’t been so hot and breathless, I would have hugged Bonita.

  Looking about her, Bonita pointed to a greenish log with lidded eyes on the bank of a branch of tea-colored water. “That’s an alligator, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you aren’t a small wading bird or a toy poodle, so it won’t hurt you unless—”

  “We should leave this place,” Bonita said. “Now.”

  Yes, we should, I thought. As we started walking, swarms of flying, biting bugs fogged us as we moved deeper into the cypress swamp.

  Though we were walking fast enough that chatter was hard, I had to ask, “Who was Benny protecting? I mean, that night at your house, when he said he wasn’t a tattletale?”

  “It is complex.”

  “Hey, I’m a lawyer. We love complexities.”

  “He probably meant he was protecting me. But he also might have meant Dave. Maybe even Cat Sue, because he’d promised.”

  “How so?” I asked, and swatted a devil’s walking stick out of my way with the back of my hand, but still drew blood from the thorns.

  “I think we should not go deeper into this swamp,” Bonita said, and picked her feet through some muck and rubbed a spiderweb off her face.

  “What? You want to go back?” But as I turned around to look at what going back meant, I realized I didn’t know. I mean, okay, a swamp looks pretty much the same in any direction, especially when you’re running. The ooze and underbrush had closed behind us, leaving no appreciable trail marking our passage.

  “So,” I said, “the bad news is, we’re lost. But the good news is, Cat Sue and Cristal probably can’t find us.”

  Bonita sighed, rubbed her cross, and started walking toward a modest high spot in the expanding dankness. “The night the deputies arrested Dave and Waylon, Dave told Benny to take his backpack to Cat Sue. Apparently there were sirens as the law went out to Waylon’s, so Dave had time to arrange things. Not much time. But enough. Dave also gave Benny a suitcase full of money.”

  So despite my telling Benny not to tell his mother about the money, he obviously had.

  “Dave told Benny he could keep half the money for all his . . . trouble. But Benny said Dave was clear that he wanted Cat Sue to have the backpack,” Bonita said. “Benny had promised Dave not to tell anyone.”

  “How’d he know where to go?”

  “Benny’s finding the yurt was easy. They were already near it and he needed only to drive east on State Road 72 until he saw the winery sign.”

  So Benny had taken Cat not only the money, but Dave’s gun and his 158-grain roundnose bullets. “And?”

  “Cat Sue was at the yurt, and Benny told her about the dead man and what Dave had said. He said she was very agitated. But she let him in and let him take what appeared to be about half of the money.”

  Bonita stopped, tilted her head as if she were hearing the sounds of pursuit, and stood still.

  I looked around and listened. Still no sounds of the crazed girlfriends.

  “What happened then?” I asked, and flicked a tick off my arm.

  “As Benny was trying to leave, Kenneth was driving up the road in his Hummer. Kenneth blocked the road and wouldn’t back it up. So Benny got out of his truck and asked to pass. They recognized each other and Kenneth demanded that Benny explain himself, so Benny told him he was just out driving around on a Saturday night and had tried to buy some wine for a party. Then Kenneth threatened Benny that if he told anybody, he, Kenneth, was there at the winery, he would hurt me.”

  Poor Benny, I thought, though I gave him plus points for the quick, inventive lie.

  And then I realized that Kenneth, bent as he was on a killing spree so he could retire to Costa Rica financed by Earl’s harvester designs, could well have killed Benny. I wondered if Bonita had thought of this. Maybe killing children was too much even for Kenneth.

  “Benny and I, in trying to understand, did not believe that Kenneth at that time yet knew the welder was dead in the swamp, but we do not know.”

  Something suddenly crashed behind us and Bonita and I both yelped and jogged a few steps and then turned. A large, wild hog stood behind us. A boar with gray tusks protruding from its long snout, looking for all the world like something out of a Tarzan movie. Or hell. Two more hogs crashed out of the scrubs and milled around the first one.

  Oh, frigging great. Where was Percy Ponder the wild-hog hunter when we needed him? As Bonita and I began a hasty backing up while watching the feral hogs, they crashed on through the wet underbrush and went their way.

  “Let us, please, concentrate on getting out of here,” Bonita said.

  “Maybe we should follow the boar,” I said. “You know, the wild hogs and deer make trails and if we find one, the walking will be easier, plus the trail might cross a real road somewhere.”

  “I am not following those pigs,” she said.

  While I contemplated pointing out that I was closer to a rural survivalist expert than she was, Bonita turned back to the direction she had already chosen and marched forward. So, okay, she was the one with all the saints, I thought, and followed, still trying to get my mind around what had happened the night Benny took Dave’s gun to Cat Sue at the yurt. I mean, if we were going to die in the outreaches of Myakka State Park, at least I wanted to understand the events that conspired to drop me in this wet jungle full of things that could hurt me.

  “So, that thing with the lawsuit,” I said, connecting a few more dots, “that was Kenneth threatening you to guarantee that Benny didn’t tell Tired about seeing him that night at Cat Sue’s?”

  “Yes.”

  I could only guess why Kenneth had gone back out to Cat Sue’s that night; he must have been looking for word about Mad. Possibly he was planning to kill Mad if Dave had dragged him back alive. Maybe Cat Sue told Kenneth I had Mad’s cash, or maybe he followed Cat Sue when she brought the money to me and had waited for me so he could knock me over the head and steal it back. Talk about not knowing when to leave bad enough alone!

  We might never really know precisely what had gone down, but if Bonita and I got out of this quagmire of gators and pigs alive, and Dave didn’t go to jail, then I’d settle for a murky big picture.

  And speakin
g of murky, there was still that question of why Kenneth’s threat had scared Bonita. “So, okay, what was that nonsense about some of your children not being Felipe’s?”

  Bonita walked in silence for a long time. I had about given up on an answer when she said, “My sister, Gracie, was a nun in El Salvador. She smuggled children out.”

  I let the implications of that splatter against me like a face full of raw eggs.

  “Wow,” I said, stunned back to my adolescent vocabulary. That’s why Armando looked more like an Indian and not at all like Javy, his so-called twin. And Benny? Benny, who at least looked like Javy. That is, in a general, wiry, dark-haired-boy sort of way. “What about Benny?”

  “Benny, Javy, and Armando are all El Salvadorans. Armando was rescued half starved from a destroyed native village. Javy and Benny were children of what the government considered a dangerous radical. If they had stayed there, they would probably have died with their father.”

  “But how?”

  “Gracie was part of a mission, a group of rescue people, and they all knew skilled men who could create birth certificates. Gracie’s people smuggled the three of them into Mexico while Felipe and I lived there, but we could not adopt the children because they were illegal babies. So we hired the men to make us the forged papers and planned to move so the neighbors would not talk and create trouble. What Gracie’s men prepared was good enough to get us all in this country when the orange-juice factory wanted Felipe as one of its engineers. Of course no one challenged any of us at that point because the American company wanted us to come.”

  “Carmen and Felipe,” I said, remembering the vastly pregnant Bonita lumbering around.

  “Yes, after we were here in this country, they were born, after Gracie had been expelled from El Salvador, and we were all living here, thinking we were safe.”

  “Benny knows this?”

  “Now he does.”

  He was just a kid. But I thought Benny had taken all this pretty well. Then I remembered Benny dodging me, Benny skipping school, Benny locking himself in his bedroom, Benny shutting his mom out, and Benny hiding behind his Walkman’s noise. Tough little kid that he was, he’d done some hard adjusting after finding out his life was based upon a nun’s act of mercy and some forged papers.

  But the burden on Benny was not as hard as the one on his mother. Obviously Bonita had been afraid that if Kenneth messed around with his lawsuit, the immigration people would deport her children back to El Salvador.

  Frankly, I didn’t know if they could have been deported or not. I would hope not. But I’d read some scary stories in the papers over the years about our government deporting worthy people, even children, over minor technicalities and with what appeared to be capricious whim. So I could see where Bonita would be afraid to risk it. I wondered if this was why Bonita had never become a naturalized American citizen. Maybe she didn’t want immigration taking a second look at the papers on her children.

  “Do Armando and Javy know?”

  “No. I will tell them when they are sixteen.”

  Bonita stopped walking for a moment, so I did too, which had the immediate effect of causing a black mist of gnats to glom on to us. All of this information was almost too much to absorb.

  “We must never speak of this again, you and I,” Bonita said. “Or to anyone.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. But how did Kenneth know?”

  “I am not sure he really did. My belief is that he thought that I had the first children out of wedlock, or had been unfaithful, so that Felipe was not their father. Otherwise, I believe he would have threatened me with immigration, not with a lawsuit. One time I caught him studying that photo of us on my desk. Another time, he asked me why Benicio wasn’t named after Felipe. Our Hispanic tradition calls for naming the firstborn son after the father, not the third son.”

  Well, okay, after all, that day I had studied the same photograph, I’d wondered myself why Armando looked so different from the rest of them.

  “We must not speak again—”

  “Yeah, I know. But you aren’t done yet. That night Kenneth was killed. My car. What happened?”

  Bonita sighed and pushed a three-leaf vine out of the way, while I shuddered at the thought of the poison-ivy itch to come. Then she said, “Our office computer security is very . . . loose. The afternoon you loaned me your car, I broke into the bookkeeping files on the hard drive. We have all heard rumors of Kenneth’s billing excesses.”

  “Yes. The thirty-hour days.”

  “I found documented evidence of his fraudulent billing. That night, Benny drove your car to Kenneth’s house with me so that we might convince him to leave us alone. Like a trade, I would not show the bills to his clients and Benny would not ever tell anyone about seeing him that night. But Kenneth had to promise to leave us alone.”

  Good for Bonita, I thought. If those thirty-hour-a-day bills had come to light, Kenneth would have lost his clients, been investigated by the ethics division of The Florida Bar, and possibly been prosecuted by the state attorney’s office.

  “Only,” Bonita said, “Kenneth was . . . the door was unlocked. He was already dead. I had pressed the doorbell, but when no one answered, Benny pushed open the door and saw him first. He took hold of me and we ran off.”

  Mierda, but Benny had been through a lot. My own childhood suddenly looked ideal. At least there had been no murdered bodies in it.

  “So it was you in my car the neighbor saw? You and Benny?”

  “It was wrong. We should not have run. But we were afraid. Afraid no one would believe us, or that even if they did, an investigation might come back to those forged papers.”

  “And Henry, later that night, at your house? You called Henry in for the alibi,” I said, asking and answering my own question.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? I’d’ve alibied you.”

  “Yes. I thought of that. But you might have lost your law license if it ever came out. And Henry, Henry was so eager to . . . prove himself. It made him feel very masculine to help us.”

  Wow. Even under the pressure of finding a dead man and the fear of immigration, Bonita had been considerate. But at what cost? I wondered. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “We will find our way out of this pantano and not speak of any of this again.”

  We both had a lot to think about. But first we had to get to safety. We were lost in the wet, buggy, scary world of a wild Florida cypress swamp. I realized this was a new variation of the dragon and the whirlpool. Lost in snake heaven, with deepening swamp in front and with a gun-toting hippie killer and her forger-schemer girlfriend possibly behind us.

  As we stood there, lost in the thicket and contemplating our limited options, Bonita said, “Lilly.” Her voice was soft and very sad. “It is our cat.”

  Following the line of Bonita’s hand as she pointed, I stared into the marbled shadows in the underbrush. Like letting my eyes adjust to darkness, it took me a moment to make out the transplanted South American cat. First I saw a dappled, coppery shape in the shade of the deep scrub, then I registered its movement, then I focused on the jaguarundi.

  When I finally saw it, I could not look away from the wildcat. Sleek, low to the ground, definitely feline, and with a very long tail and big panther eyes, the animal stood there in front of us, not more than twenty feet away.

  “He’ll help us,” Bonita said.

  Yeah, right, like we were in a Disney movie.

  As the gnats thickened, I waited for the cat to run off. But it didn’t.

  “Gandhi told Benny that Felipe’s spirit lives in a jaguarundi, here in Myakka.”

  “That’s why Benny did that paper and kept trying to find the jaguarundi, isn’t it? Skipping school and all?”

  “He’s waiting for us to follow him,” Bonita said, her eyes wistful as she stared at the cat and ignored my question.

  So, okay, it wasn’t any weirder than anything else that day. With
out speaking further, we walked toward the wildcat, which turned and prowled through the scrub, slow and easy, while we followed it.

  We walked as quietly as we could, lagging behind the jaguarundi and occasionally losing sight of it. But every time we lost the cat, Bonita seemed to know what track to take until we saw it again. Once the jaguarundi growled at us when we got too close, and we had to back off. But finally, with the faint trace of a cat barely in our vision, we came to a gutted, muddy road. Ghostlike, the jaguarundi disappeared back into the swamp: a long, low wildcat, then a shadow, then poof!, nothing.

  Exhausted and hot and itchy from the descending mosquitoes feasting on us, Bonita and I followed the dirt road to a bigger road and finally to a park-ranger station in the state park.

  After the initial babble of officiousness, the ranger was Johnny Helpful and shoved a phone toward me and I called Tired at the sheriff’s office. Tired was out, some woman said. “Okay, let me speak to Stan.” I didn’t like Stan, but at least he already knew who I was.

  “Stan’s out too,” she said.

  “Who’s in that I could speak with about the person who shot Kenneth Mallory, the lawyer.”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  Muzak assaulted me along with my rising itch and irritation, and I was about to hang up when a man came on the line and introduced himself as chief deputy so and so. I explained who I was, but suddenly mindful of the fact that I might actually have created an attorney-client privilege with Cat Sue, I edited my summary of events at the Stallings barn and winery.

  After telling Mr. Chief Deputy that activities which invited official scrutiny had occurred at the vineyard today, I asked that he relay this information to Tired.

  “Don’t go back to that Stallings place,” he said. “I’ll send a deputy to pick you up. Stay put, you hear?”

  Yeah, I heard. But there is just something about a male voice issuing a direct order that has, like, this totally negative impact on me. Plus, Bonita and I needed to find Benny and tell him this madness would soon be over. After Bonita and I washed our hands and faces and slurped some ice-cold bottled water, I sweet-talked the ranger into taking us back to the barn.