Bitter Finish - Linda Barnes

by Linda Barnes

  Spraggue waved at a vaguely familiar young face and blared an inquiry about Howard. A smile, raised shoulders, and a glance toward the winery were all he got for response.

  A disagreement broke out at the weighing station. One of Kate's assistants grasped the stem of a purple cluster between thumb and forefinger and waved it in the face of a sweating overweight man. Spraggue grabbed a cluster from a passing load, held it aloft to see if he could divine the nature of the dispute. The juice stained his fingers.

  Spraggue admired the new stainless-steel fermenters in the yard, wondered how Howard had reacted to the change from wood to steel. The grape must, piped directly from the crusher along with seeds and skins, slowly filled the huge vat. No sign of Howard outdoors.

  Holloway Hills Winery consisted of two huge barnlike buildings with a concrete walkway connecting the two. Spraggue hesitated between them briefly, then chose the right-hand door. More likely to find Howard fussing in the lab than messing around in the barrel-aging room or observing the quiet bottling line.

  Spraggue waited until his eyes adjusted from bright sunlight to the dark interior of the winery.

  The outdoor hubbub subsided to a faint hum. Holloway Hills had double walls: a two-foot airspace between kept out noise as well as heat.

  He could hear far-off footsteps, but he couldn't see anything beyond the stainless-steel, twelve-foot-high tank that blocked his path. Arranged in rows, the tanks made a quick survey of the room impossible; an ideal locale for a kids' game of hide and seek.

  Spraggue found himself reluctant to break the silence with a loud shout of "Howard!" He wanted to look around, observe the changes made since his last visit, breathe in the heady grape smell. And he'd hate to alarm poor Howard needlessly, shake loose a glass beaker from those hapless fingers.

  He moved down the aisles, counting the shining, temperature-controlled vats, coming at last to the narrow wooden staircase that led to the system of walkways overhead. He took the steps noiselessly; he'd found his observation post at last. Easy to locate Howard from eight feet up.

  Kate must have relocated the small lab when the new fermenters arrived. It wasn't much, just shelves on two walls and an elbow-high workbench studded with chemists' tubes, Bunsen burners, glass pipes, and the like. Handy to have it up here, Spraggue supposed, for some tasks. Pumping over the wine during fermentation, adding the yeast strains. Inconvenient for others, not that Howard would ever complain.

  He stood in front of the workbench, idly picked up a pipette.

  "You looking for me?" He hadn't heard Howard dash up the steps. "Joe said a man was looking for me. Uh, I'm sorry. I hope I didn't alarm you. I wasn't sure it was you."

  "Hi, Howard."

  "Hi." Howard looked confused. "I, uh, if you want to talk, could it wait till later? The gondolas are coming in, and I have to check every one. Can't trust the growers. Mechanical harvesters! Right down the road! Did you see them? Terrible. Terrible. Breaks up the clusters. Not to mention the MOG."

  "MOG?" Spraggue said.

  "Material other than grape," Howard explained earnestly. "Leaves, flies, bugs, pruning shears, hats!"

  "Howard," Spraggue said in his gentlest tones, "Kate asked me to take over for her at Leider's tasting tonight. I have to be able to make some semblance of intelligent comment on your '77 Cabernet. Can I borrow your cellar book?"

  Howard's normally pale face glowed red for a few seconds before he turned away. "I, uh, I——"

  "I promise I'll get it back to you first thing in the morning. It won't leave my hands."

  Howard refused to meet his eye. He squinted uncomfortably, finally spoke. "It's uh, it's just that I don't have it with me right now .... But I could get it. Would it be okay if I brought it to you over at the house? Those tastings never start till eight."

  "If you'll tell me where to look, I'll find it. You leave it out by the crusher?"

  "No, uh, really, Mr. Spraggue, it's slipped my mind. All this rush . . . I can't remember. But as soon as it turns up, I'll bring it over. Don't worry!"

  "Don't leave it too late. I have to read the thing before I show up at the tasting."

  "Don't worry," Howard repeated, still staring at the floor. "Uh, Mr. Spraggue, I hope you've thought about what I've said, about leaving."

  "I have. Frankly, Howard, I'm hoping you'll reconsider."

  "No, uh, really, look for a replacement. I can't I stay. I really can't."

  "Howard," Spraggue said, "one more thing. What's sulfur dioxide used for?"

  "Well," Howard said with a puzzled frown, "of course, you have to use it at the crush, to avoid oxidation. Especially in the whites. We don't use much here, thirty to sixty parts per million, that's all. Some of the wineries use more: a hundred parts per million, a hundred and fifty parts, even. You can smell it."

  "That's the only time it's used?"

  "I absolutely have to go now. I won't forget about the cellar book. Don't worry about a thing. It'll be there before you leave."

  Howard didn't wait for thanks or any dismissing nod. He bolted headlong down the stairs.

  After a moment's pause, Spraggue turned back to his survey of the laboratory workbench. Had Howard been avoiding something with his carefully downcast eyes? Or was the man merely gifted with a glance that defined the term "shifty-eyed"?

  It took him ten minutes to find the box—third shelf down, right out in the open. He'd have located it sooner if he'd known what shape to look for. The yellow sulfur sticks came with a warning label, printed in red: Poison. Spraggue read the instructions: "For use in sterilizing winemaking equipment."

  He replaced the sticks carefully in the box, put it back on the shelf, and retraced his steps to the car.

  15

  Spraggue wasn't the only substitute at the tasting.

  "Jesus, the timing!" The gray—bearded man seated next to him spoke in an undertone. "You'd think they'd have canceled the damn tasting. None of the winemakers can get away! It's crazy! We didn't even start crushing until September sixteenth. And now, everything's coming in at once! Cabernet before Chardonnay! Crazy!"

  Spraggue sipped from one of the eight long-stemmed, numbered glasses in front of him and tried to pin down the dusky taste. Number 6, he was sure, was Holloway Hills. Good wine. Almost worth sitting through two hours of yammering about foxiness and legs and tannin for. Why did wine language sound so bad, so stuffed-shirt? More to the point, why did he react to it so badly, so much worse than he reacted to medical jargon or computer gobbledygook? Probably because it was bad enough to be the goddamned wealthy scion of the robber-baron-capitalist-pig Spraggue family, without being a wine—snob to boot. Spraggue glared at the eight round small tables, the one long rectangular one at the head, all spaciously accommodated by Leider's vast living room. The gathering was almost enough to send him out to a boxing match with a six-pack under his arm. He hated boxing just about as much as he disliked beer.

  By ten o'clock the white tablecloths were stained with drops of Cabernet, pockmarked with crumbs of French bread. Spraggue teetered back on two legs of an uncomfortable chair and tried to appear rapt with attention. He wasn't sure he was focusing on the right speaker.

  The bread crumbs dotted Leider's fine oriental rugs, the only items in the house Spraggue could look at without distaste. Everything else was glass, chrome, or steel, with harsh angular lines set off by pinpoint spotlights. Not a single rocking chair, not a cushion. All right angles, cold metal, and neutral tones, except for the violently colored abstract paintings on the beige walls. And even they were cold—icy in their geometric perfection. One arched steel lamp, jutting across the floor, made him think of a hospital examining room.

  At a signal from the head table, the bearded man next to Spraggue got to his feet, shoved his hands in his pockets, and began to recite. "The grapes came from our San Wncente vineyard. Cool location, average rainfall just ten inches a year, so we used overhead sprinklers for supplemental irrigation . . ."

  As host, Phil
Leider could have taken his place at the head table. But he preferred sitting with winemakers to sitting with critics, or so he said. Now he jogged Spraggue's elbow, snorted loud enough for his neighbors to hear: "Supplemental irrigation! Dammit, Brent would have been all over that guy. Great one for stressing vineyards, Lenny was. Dull as hell here without Lenny."

  Spraggue murmured agreement, picked up another glass, swirled it. He breathed in deeply, filling nose, mouth, lungs. Chateau Montelena? Clos du Val? The bearded man settled into a monotonous drone. Spraggue thought about death by sulfur-dioxide poisoning.

  Winemakers used the burning sulfur sticks to fumigate the wooden fermenting tanks, that much he'd learned from the printed blurb inside the box. Or was it the aging tanks? Eight glasses of wine improved neither memory nor concentration. He tried again. How would you use the sulfur sticks? Light a couple out in the fresh air, toss them in the tank, slam the tiny, barely man-sized gate? Maybe they'd have to be placed inside, upright, in some kind of holder. Take a deep breath, hold it, squeeze through the gate with the lighted sticks, set them up, get out fast . . . And if someone behind you slams the gate?

  Could anyone wriggle through those tiny portholes carrying burning sticks? A two-person job, then. Or maybe the whole business was handled from the top of the tank. Sulfur dioxide was heavier than oxygen ....

  Or maybe Mr. X, freshly knocked on the head, already unconscious, had been shoved into the tank.

  "The wine was not fined, stabilized, or filtered."

  The assistant winemaker on Spraggue's left raised his voice now that he was near the end of his dissertation. "We did centrifuge. Portions of the wine were aged in Limousin, Nevers, and American oak, then blended . . . 13.4 percent alcohol, 0.63 per-cent acid, 0.126 percent residual sugar: those are the stats. I think it's got a lot of aging potential, but I don't mind drinking it as is."

  The man gave a nervous nod and sat down suddenly. There was a smattering of applause. The drunkest clapped loudest. Mary Ellen Martinson led the round.

  "Brent would have approved of that, at least," Leider confided in Spraggue's direction.

  "Of what?"

  "Not filtering the wine. Lenny was all for leaving the damn juice alone and praying to the harvest gods."

  "In Hungarian?"

  "Right. According to Lenny, the harvest gods didn't speak American—" A sudden rumble of conversation and a general pushing back of chairs interrupted him.

  "It's over?" Spraggue said hopefully.

  "Without churning out the ratings? Without identifying the wines? Not on your life! All this palaver's just the appetizer. What we really want are the grades, like in college. This is only a stretch-your legs-and-yap break. The judges hope we'll get our gossip over with and not hang around after the points are given. They like to hit and run."

  Spraggue nodded, stood, and stretched.

  But Leider wasn't through. He spread his hands in a proprietary gesture. "So what do you think?"

  Just in time, Spraggue remembered that the ice palace was Leider's baby. "Impressive," he said, very sincerely, wondering what other descriptive, but not unflattering, words he could follow up with. Large?

  "Michael! How are you? How's Kate? Awful about Lenny . . ." Spraggue found himself saved from a reply to Leider by a horde of vaguely familiar faces, all eager for the low-down on the valley murders. No escape.

  "Great to see you again," George Martinson, one of the more long-winded judges, pumped enthusiastically at Spraggue's right hand.

  "Good wine, Phil," Mary Ellen Martinson yelled across the room to Leider. "Can't touch your '75, though. What did you and Lenny do that year? Sell your souls?"

  "The '75 was very special, wasn't it?" Leider beamed and nodded, then walked quickly away.

  "Modest bastard, isn't he?" Mary Ellen inquired of the population at large in ear-splitting tones.

  "Elegantly stated, my dear." Martinson placed a restraining arm around her unsteady shoulders. "As usual."

  "Hi, there, friend of Lenny's." Even without turning Spraggue knew that the soft, sarcastic voice belonged to Grady Fairfield. What the hell was she doing at the tasting? Looking at her, in a pale green dress with that flame of hair, Spraggue found it easy to believe she'd been invited many times over.

  "Grady," he called softly. "Wait up."

  His way was blocked by a small man who snatched at his arm and held on, a man with a

  plump, slightly bovine face. What was the name that went with that face? Steve? No. Stefan, a pretentious Stefan.

  "About Kate," said Stefan urgently. "Have they released her? Anything you'd like me to do, Michael?"

  Grady disappeared through an archway.

  "It's under control," Spraggue said quietly. "But I appreciate the offer, Stefan." He shook hands and tried to pass.

  Stefan gripped his arm, half-pulled him into a corner. "You ever see a crush like this one? Such a cold August, and now . . ."

  Finally, Spraggue placed him. A grower, a vineyard owner. "You doing all right?" he asked.

  "Me? Sure. My grapes are the finest. And I watch them like a mother. Nice sugar. High acid—" Stefan took note of Leider, moving along in pursuit of some hostly duty. "Your crush going well, Phil?"

  "Fine."

  "Anyone working with you this year?"

  "On my own."

  "Luck, then."

  Leider walked away. Easy for him. Stefan didn't have his arm in a death grip.

  Stefan edged closer. "Now, I want to know everything."

  "There's not much I can say—"

  "Not about the damned killings! I'm sorry Kate got messed up in the whole business. About United Circle, though—"

  "Huh?"

  "Don't play coy with me, Spraggue. I know they're interested. That guy's been crawling all over your place. And you should let your friends in on a thing like that. Those big outfits, some of them don't like to grow their own grapes. Tedious business, planting grapes. A good grower, given the faintest hint, might be able to move in quite nicely, if you know what I mean."

  "Hurting for customers?" Spraggue raised an eyebrow.

  "Not really. Leider's doing more of his own growing, of course, and he was a buyer of mine for years—"

  "Forget it, Stefan."

  "No deal with United Circle?"

  "Never intended. Just an idle rumor."

  "Sure are lots of those going around."

  "Always." Spraggue carefully removed Stefan's hand from its grip on his jacket sleeve. The grower seemed not to notice, so Spraggue nodded and made good his escape. He strolled through the archway into the Bloomingdales window dining room, searching for a green sundress and red hair, smiling and greeting people he scarcely remembered. They all asked about Kate, about Lenny's murder.

  He shook them off, climbed six suspended steps to another plateau of Leider's confusing multilevel domicile, scanned the floor beneath. No flaming hair. He followed a distant laugh down a narrow parqueted hallway, climbed another six steps to the screening room.

  He flicked a switch to the right of the doorway and whistled under his breath as soft indirect lighting illuminated acres of cool gray carpet. In the center of the room a rectangular seating pit was delineated by a maroon velvet wall some three feet high, broken at the corners by gray-carpeted steps leading down to the pit's interior. A mirrored wall reflected the image. Heavy maroon curtains masked the projection booth, the movie screen.

  A giggle interrupted his thoughts.

  "It's the only comfortable spot in the whole damn house." Grady's voice came from the velvet depths of the pit. "I think I may be just a little drunk." Her voice rippled across the room again and Spraggue noticed one bare foot peeping over the back of the sunken maroon sofa closest to the door. A beige, high-heeled sandal blended into the rug.

  Spraggue strolled a few paces across the room, positioned himself over the foot, looked down at a spectacularly bare leg.

  Grady lay back among the pillows with the studied grace of an arti
st's model, dress hiked, one knee bent high, the other leg extended over the sofa back. She smiled lazily up at him, but didn't move, didn't attempt to pull the skirt over her thighs. Spraggue thought that if the lights were any stronger or her thighs spread any wider, he would know whether or not Grady dyed her hair.

  Slowly she brought her knees together, stretched one long dancer's leg full-length on the couch. Her face was slightly flushed.

  Spraggue felt like a high school kid caught peeking in the girls' locker room. She noticed his discomfiture and laughed.

  "What's the opposite of a voyeur?" she asked.

  "A blind man."

  "No. I mean the object of a voyeur. Someone who likes being looked at. A narcissist?"

  "Exhibitionist."

  "I like to be looked at," she said. One of her knees inched upward. Not as exciting a pose as the first, but one that gave an interesting view of thigh progressing to buttock, further convincing him that underwear and Grady were strangers.

  "Expecting an audience?" he asked.

  "Actually I thought you might try to find me."

  "So you vanished."

  "I opted for a more private rendezvous." She patted a fat gray cushion next to her, swung effortlessly into a sitting position, one leg crooked underneath her. "I wanted to ask if you'd found anything worthwhile in that pile of Lenny's clothes, Mr. Snoop. Any clues?"

  Spraggue removed his shoes, padded down the plush steps into the pit, and almost smacked his shins on a clear glass coffee table. He sat next to Grady. She leaned against his arm.

  "No," he said.

  "Nothing?"

  "Even less than I expected to fund. Did you forget to put anything in the box?"

  She pulled away, rearranged herself, chose a reclining pose, legs splayed on the coffee table.

  "So you own Holloway Hills," she said.

  Spraggue had to turn almost ninety degrees to look at her face. "That woman who came to see you about Lenny . . ." he began.