A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2)

by Harvey, JM

  “Pretty awesome, huh?” Victor said to me. “All electric. You’ve heard of electricity, right?” he asked, looking sideways at me. “It’s replaced Mexican power in most of the free world. That Ben Franklin sure was a smart guy.”

  “If we went electric, what would I need you for?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “A happy disposition and good company? A stoic attitude to harsh words?”

  “I could buy a Labrador for that,” I told him as Jimmy went to the tank being filled and checked the fill gauge. “And he’d probably eat less and smell better,” I added.

  “You don’t exactly smell like a flower right now,” he said. “But I guess a Labrador wouldn’t mind that.”

  “He wouldn’t mention it, anyway,” I said as Jimmy stepped back and turned our way.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “You know how it is.”

  I nodded and so did Victor.

  Jimmy continued, “You were lucky to get your crop in so quickly,” he said to me, then flicked his eyes to Victor. “You managed to snap up the best pickers in the Valley before the rest of us even got moving.”

  Picking grapes is more than just stripping the vines of every cluster. A selection process occurs in the field where only the best of the grapes are cut while the raisined and underripe fruit are left behind. On top of that, the harvesting has to be done at top speed, while not damaging the canes that will provide next year’s crop. That combination of knowledge and skill is hard to come by.

  “We were lucky,” I said, though all three of us knew it was more than that. Victor’s charitable activity in the migrant community, and my insistence on paying a better than fair wage had won Violet a loyal following of returning pickers and vine dressers - the men and women who arrange and prune the vines for the following year’s harvest.

  Jimmy grunted at that, but made no reply. He propped his hands on his thick hips and said. “I ended up getting about sixty acres picked before the storm hit, but the last twenty had to sit it out. I’ve got tons of swollen or busted fruit, the Brix sucks and the rows are still muddy so I got dirt mixed in with it, and I’ll have to re-grade the rows this winter. Only good thing I can say is that at least the heat has kept mold from forming.”

  “You think they’ll be usable?” Victor asked, undiplomatically.

  Jimmy shook his head. “Not for Cliff Face,” he said. “I’m planning on running it under another label if I can get the sugar count up. I’ll fortify it if I have to,” he added with a grimace.

  No high end winemaker willingly fortifies their wine - adding sugar to up the alcohol content - but sometimes it’s the only way to turn low-sugared grapes into wine. The resulting wine is not one I would sell at Violet, either.

  “If I’m lucky I might break even,” he finished, “but I doubt it. Probably be more cost effective to crush it and use it for fertilizer, but I don’t have the heart for that.”

  I nodded in genuine sympathy, wincing at every word the way you wince at the sound of the dentist’s drill while you’re sitting in his waiting room, knowing it might be you under the knife next.

  “Anyway, what can I help you with?” he asked, looking past me through the open bay door where Phillip was lifting one of the loaded bins with the forklift.

  There was no subtle way to do this, and subtlety isn’t my strong suit anyway. “I know you’re auctioning through Star Crossed. I was wondering how that’s working out for you?”

  Jimmy’s lips drew into a tight line. “You sign a deal with Blake?”

  I nodded. “Just fifty cases for the moment. The 2009 Reserve. I wanted to see how it goes…”

  Jimmy nodded. “Smart,” he said. “I signed a deal for seven hundred cases of my 2004, 2005, and 2006 to be spread out over seven auctions.”

  “How’s that working for you?” I asked.

  “Not so hot. The price I get isn’t as good as Blake led me to believe. I could make just as much through regular distribution. And he’s slow to pay. Thirty days is what it says in the contract, but it’s more like sixty before I see the cash. And there are never enough sales. Maybe thirty cases an auction. Hardly worth the trouble. And with Dimitri dead, I’m betting it gets worse. He had a pretty high opinion of our pinot. Not that it seemed to help auction sales much. I’d count those fifty cases as a loss and thank your lucky stars you didn’t commit more. I’d tear my contract up if I could.”

  “Couldn’t you hire an attorney?” I asked.

  Jimmy laughed bitterly. “I am an attorney,” he said. “Criminal law. Back before I decided I wanted to be a farmer.” He shook his head. “Blake is fulfilling his end of the contract. Barely.”

  There was no polite way to ask the next question. “Have you ever thought Blake was intentionally underselling your wine?”

  Jimmy’s look turned suspicious. “Why are you asking that?”

  I couldn’t back away from the question, but I didn’t want to use any names. “Another customer of Star Crossed suggested he was deliberately hurting their sales.”

  Jimmy made a face at that. “You’ve been talking to Angela Zorn,” he said. “She told me the same thing. The woman is irrational. The whole wine business is down, you know that.”

  That jibed with my own thinking, but I had to lay to rest Angela’s accusation against Armand. “She claims Armand Rivincita and Blake are colluding to drive the small growers under so Armand can buy them out cheap. Has Armand ever approached you?”

  “Sure. But Armand is trying to buy up half the valley, I doubt that has anything to do with Star Crossed.” Jimmy looked left and right, then over his shoulder before he leaned in close and dropped his voice so low I could barely hear him above the sound of the machinery. “Angela’s a drunk, Claire. She’s grasping at straws. You know as well as I do it doesn’t take a huge conspiracy to go bankrupt making wine. One bad year is enough for that, and Angela’s had more than one bad year.” He looked out the door again then back at us. “I’m sorry, but I gotta get back out there. Gotta move the gondolas up from the rows.” He headed past us, still talking over his shoulder, “Like I said, ditch Becker as soon as you can.” And then he was yelling something at Phillip.

  “Great news about the auctions,” Victor said sarcastically. “At least it’s just fifty cases.”

  “Fifty cases too many,” I said.

  We retraced our route to my Jeep in silence, and stayed silent as we continued on to Star Crossed Wine Cellars & Auctions.

  Chapter 17

  Star Crossed was tucked into the mountainside a thousand feet down and directly below my perch at Violet, deep in a huge copse of gnarled old apple trees, all that remained of the Becker Family Orchards. The trees had been left untended for years. In their youth, covered in greenery and fruit, I remembered them as beautiful, but now they were gray and stunted, twisted and broken. We drove through them toward the wine cellar, where the bulk of the orchard had been cut down to make room for the massive building.

  The cellar wasn’t much to look at on the surface, just a featureless white metal building that looked large enough to house a Boeing 747. To the left of the building, surrounded by a chain-link fence and shaded under a metal awning, was a cluster of air handlers, humidifiers, and huge air conditioning units that kept the cellar at a perfect fifty-five degrees Celsius and fifty percent humidity. Like I said, not much to look at. Most of the money for the cellar had been invested below ground.

  The basement was one sprawling level over seventy-five thousand square feet in size and broken up into small and large cellaring areas where vineyard owners, restaurant owners, wine dealers, and wine collectors stored their bottles either for private consumption or for Star Crossed’s monthly auction sales. The smaller cellars, like my own, were wood paneled with diamond shaped bins for stacking bottles to keep the cork in contact with the wine. The larger cellars were huge concrete bunkers stacked with wine in wood and cardboard cases, ready for shipment or for the auction block. Each owner was given a key to their private cel
lar, but the main pedestrian door was controlled by an access panel for which only Blake and Dimitri had the code.

  A medium-sized white panel truck was parked in front of one of the two huge roller doors fronting the building. Men were moving in and out the door with dollies loaded with cased wine. As we rolled past, one of the movers, a mountain sized man with a bulging gut and a blond buzz cut, stopped loading long enough to scowl at us. He was dressed in denim cutoffs, a white muscle shirt, and black combat boots. His face was broad and square, and so were his lips and nose, all of it drawn down by heavy jowls, so I didn’t hold the scowl against him. With a face like that, every one of his expressions probably looked like a scowl.

  Victor lifted a hand, but the guy just kept staring. And scowling.

  “Skinhead alert,” Victor said sarcastically, returning the guy’s stare, which seemed like a bad idea. Victor probably weighed one hundred forty pounds soaking wet. He turned to me. “Did you see those cases?”

  “I was driving,” I said. “Unlike you, I look where I’m going.”

  Victor ignored the jibe. “He had three old cases of Latour.”

  “You could read that from here?”

  “Unlike some people, my eyes still work fine,” he said then craned his neck back to the guy with the wine. “The cases looked old, all gray and withered with fading lettering. That happens with age, you know. It’s sad...” he trailed off.

  I gave the steering wheel a quick jerk to the left and his forehead bounced off the side window.

  “Ow! Hey!” he yelped.

  “Sorry,” I replied unconvincingly. “We old people have reflex problems.”

  Victor gave me a sour look, then craned his neck back around for one last look at the wine cases as we made the bend that led to Blake’s home and office.

  “I’d love to try a bottle of that,” he said wistfully.

  “I just wish I had the money a bottle like that would cost,” I replied.

  The Becker home had started out as a tiny 1920s bungalow, but it had sprouted an ungainly second floor addition and a kitchen and porch expansion in the ensuing years that made it look like four homes welded together by a lunatic. Victorian trimmings fought with the prairie-style bone structure of the original house while the porch addition with its sagging screens and age-blackened shingles gave it a disreputable, slovenly air. Still, the overall effect was almost charming. Like a crazy, disheveled maiden aunt locked in the attic in an English murder mystery.

  I pulled into the small parking area in front of the house where a convertible BMW 640 sat side-by-side with a white van just like the one I had seen on Samson’s street yesterday.

  As I parked, I looked the van over, getting suspicious all over again, even though Hunter had half-talked me out of it on Monday. Since then, I had almost convinced myself Blake was the killer. Now if I just knew why…it had to be something to do with money. At least that was my theory. Sadly, evidence of something like that was probably out of my reach – that was Hunter’s job. But I needed to goose Hunter a little, which is why I was there.

  “What are we doing here?” Victor asked as I pulled up the parking brake.

  “I want to find out whether Blake actually saw anything Saturday night, or if he’s just making it up,” I told him, my eyes on the house’s door. “And if the rumors about Star Crossed ripping off its customers are true.”

  “Got it,” Victor said as he reached for the door handle.

  I waved him back into his seat. “I’ll handle this one,” I told him. I didn’t want this to become a confrontation. Yet.

  “Let me know if he needs kneecapping,” Victor said in a bad Mafioso impression. He touched his nose with his forefinger and gave me a nod.

  I rolled my eyes and got out of the Jeep.

  “If he turns on the family, he sleeps with the fishes!” Victor yelled at me as I crossed the lot to the side door. I stepped up onto the stoop, opened the door, and walked into a narrow hallway lined with old photos of the Becker family. It hadn't changed a bit since I was a teenager when I would come here to babysit Blake. The hallway ended in a doorway that led into what had once been the living room but was now the business office.

  And that’s as far as I got.

  “If you’re screwing me, I’ll find out,” I heard Armand Rivincita say. That must be his BMW outside. Blake said something in reply, but his voice was pitched low and I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like Jimmy and Angela weren't the only ones dissatisfied with Star Crossed.

  I was stuck on the threshold. It was too late to turn back, and I wouldn’t have if I could have. Angela had implied a conspiracy between Armand and Blake, an idea that seemed ridiculously farfetched – as Jimmy Tate had pointed out - but I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  Armand stepped into view at the end of the short hallway, saw me and stopped walking so fast Becker piled into him. Both men staggered and Blake knocked one of the family photos off the wall. It hit the floor with a tinkle of broken glass

  “What—” Blake began and then he saw me too.

  I was the first to recover. I smiled and continued down the hall.

  “Hello Armand,” I said. “Hi, Blake.”

  Armand recovered almost as quickly as I did. The smile that had charmed half the women in the valley clicked on and he stuck out his hand. I took it. His handclasp was warm and dry. He was dressed rich-man-casual, in a white short-sleeved silk shirt, linen slacks and expensive looking loafers. The clothes probably cost more than my entire wardrobe, and the Rolex on his wrist was worth more than my entire jewelry collection and my Jeep combined.

  “Hello, Claire,” he said and his smile turned into a frown of concern. “How are you holding up? I heard about Samson. That’s a load of bull—” he stopped then added, “hockey.”

  “I agree. It will all work out. You can’t convict an innocent man.”

  Armand nodded at that and released my hand, but Blake looked doubtful. He started to say something then thought better of it.

  “I’m sure you two have business,” Armand said, looking over his shoulder at Blake. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Blake,” he said and there was a warning edge there. Blake nodded at Armand, but he didn’t look happy.

  “See you Claire,” Armand said and I stepped aside to let him pass. The door banged closed behind him, and I heard a muffled “Hey Victor,” before Blake started speaking.

  “I’ve added twenty-five cases of the Reserve to this month’s auction list,” he said, probably used to worried winemakers dropping by. “And I’ve got a few nibbles already. I could probably sell the whole lot in one auction, but better to build some buzz.”

  I was happy to hear he was moving quickly, but Jimmy’s and Angela’s warnings about slow pay and low bid prices dulled my pleasure. Not to mention I was wondering if I was talking to a cold blooded killer.

  “And we’ll be sticking to the minimum bid price I set?” I asked and he nodded.

  “Eight fifty a case,” he said. “That’ll be on a thirty day invoice, though,” he warned me. “These are regular clients; they don’t pay cash at the auction. Checks have to clear and wine has to be delivered first.” He gave me a reassuring smile, turning on the salesman’s charm.

  “As long as it gets paid,” I said. This was business, and I had learned long ago it doesn’t pay to be friendly when the subject of money is being discussed. I’m sure Victor could come up with some Mafia saying to express this more colorfully, maybe a veiled threat or two. I was thankful he wasn’t there to supply it.

  “It will be,” Blake said, his smile slipping. “What brings you by?” he asked, making no move to enter the office behind him or to offer me coffee or water. That was a contrast to my previous visits when he had ushered me in, sat me down, and offered everything from coffee to whiskey. I guessed the honeymoon was over now that we had signed the contract. Men are just alike in every relationship, be it romantic or financial.

  I got directly to the point, hitting him head on, l
ooking for a reaction. “I understand you claim you saw Dimitri and Samson arguing in the basement Saturday night.”

  Blake cocked his head and looked askance at me. “Claim?” he said. “I saw them arguing. I saw Samson shove Dimitri and Dimitri shove back. And then I got the heck out of there. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have stopped them, but at the time…” he shrugged. “I never thought Samson would kill Dimitri.”

  “He didn’t,” I said snappishly.

  Blake nodded, but he looked unconvinced.

  “Why did you go to the cellar to begin with?”

  “Because that’s where Dimitri was,” he replied with a little snap of his own. “I saw him go downstairs.”

  “Victor says you were in the front yard arguing with Angela,” I pressed, not even trying to be polite. What would be the point? He knew what I was implying.

  Maybe it was just my suspicious mind, but I swear his eyes turned shifty.

  “Angela was drunk. She wanted out of her contract. I went inside for maybe five minutes to get Dimitri, hoping he could patch it up with her, but when I saw him arguing with Samson, I thought better of it and went back outside.”

  That was deflating. It neatly explained what could have happened. If Victor was with Jess and Charlie, drinking and laughing, they could easily have missed Blake entering the house and coming back out again - if his trip was as brief as he said. But I had another, darker thought. If he had slipped away, it could have been to kill Dimitri.

  “If there’s nothing else, Claire…” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me, his tone impatient and a little condescending.

  It was the condescension that really made me mad.

  “Seems like you have a lot of unsatisfied customers,” I said, mentally throwing the gloves off. “I’m wondering if I should be concerned.”