The Merlot Murders wcm-1

by Ellen Crosby

  “I believe in life after death,” I said carefully.

  “Now, honey, I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to be too upset.”

  “Okay.”

  She clasped her hands together and leaned toward me. “I can’t be too specifical about details,” she said, lowering her voice, “but I have it on good authority that your mother is absolutely committed, I mean committed, to your hanging on to the house and the vineyard.” She straightened up and put her hands on her hips again. “What do you think?”

  What horse’s mouth told her that? “How do you know this?”

  “Oh, the spirits often use me as their medium. I have excellent psychedelic powers. Your mother told me herself when she paid me a little visit.”

  “My mother? You’re quite sure it was my mother you were talking to?”

  “I am positive. Charlotte and I were very close, Lucille.” I’d forgotten she used to call my mother Charlotte.

  “I remember.”

  “Though I admit,” she added, “that I was surprised when she called on me. It was the first time I’d heard from her. Since before, well, you know when.”

  “When did you two have this discussion?”

  “Why, just this afternoon,” she said. “I had my Ouija Board out because Muriel Sims wanted to talk to Henry. She likes to keep in touch pretty regular, you know, since he went over to the other side. And, plain as day after Henry left, there was Charlotte. I knew it was her because I didn’t understand what she was saying at first. I think it was something French. Too bad I can’t remember it now.”

  “And she told you she didn’t want us to sell the vineyard?”

  “Yes, indeedy.” She frowned, pursing her lips. “You’re sure you’re okay, Lucille? It isn’t too much of a shock? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  She looked relieved. “Well, that’s a big load off my mind. I might of figured. You know, you’ve got Charlotte’s backbone, child. And you look just like her. She was a beauty, was Charlotte. Shame your daddy didn’t…” She stopped and glanced down at her hands.

  “Didn’t what?”

  She started fiddling with the lime green bows, spinning them around like tiny propellers. “Oh my, how I do run on!” She looked at her watch. “Time for my next show.” She sidled toward the back of the room.

  “Wait!”

  She turned around.

  “Do you think there’s a chance you might be hearing from Leland on that Ouija Board?”

  She looked surprised. “Now, Lucille, this isn’t ‘Dial-a-Spirit’ I got going here. I cannot just summon people up willy-nilly. They choose their moments. And frankly, I don’t figure Lee would come to me with whatever’s on his mind, anyway. The man always did keep to himself. Folks don’t change their stripes, just because they’re dead. Tootle-oo, honey.”

  She was back at her soaps before I made it to the door. Whoever was trying to pressure Leland to sell the vineyard had been remarkably discreet if Thelma hadn’t got wind of it. She would have either pumped me for more information or else spilled the beans about what she knew. Even the devil himself would have had a hard time keeping a secret from her. Someone had done a good job of covering his or her tracks.

  When I got home, I put the batteries in the flashlight and went upstairs to the attic. Years ago Leland had a carpenter convert half the space into a bedroom for Eli. When I was small, it seemed a remote, distant kingdom, far from the rest of the house, a lighted outpost carved out of the cobweb-filled tomblike darkness. Eli hadn’t liked the room much either, though he refused to admit he believed the stories about dead ancestors’ bones rotting in its far recesses. When he was older, though, the bones stopped bothering him and he realized he could get away with anything in the privacy of his secluded eyrie. I never figured out how Mom didn’t smell the cigarette smoke on him, but by then I’d begun filching unlabeled wine bottles from the barrel room to drink with Kit over at Goose Creek Bridge, so I didn’t begrudge Eli’s tobacco habit.

  Opening the attic door was like opening the door to a blast furnace. I waited until some of the pent-up heat dissipated before going in. The windows in the gabled front of the house, opaque from years of accumulated dirt and sealed shut with grime, were completely inaccessible on account of an obstacle course of dusty boxes, old suitcases, broken toys, appliances, and other things too wearying to catalog. I tried not to breathe the suffocatingly stale air. Luckily I found the fan almost at once, wedged near the door between a suitcase and a box with “baby clothes” written on the side in my mother’s handwriting.

  It didn’t seem likely that someone as fastidious as she had been would have left either a priceless diamond necklace or her diaries up here. No heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. I shone my flashlight around the room. And mice.

  I left, closing the door firmly behind me. Maybe I could get one of the barn cats to move in for a while.

  The rotting plastic handle on top of the fan disintegrated as I carried it down the stairs. I watched it crash down the last few steps, the metallic sound reverberating like dissonant cymbals in the empty house. Fortunately it still worked when I plugged it in to an outlet in Leland’s bedroom. It sounded like an asthmatic on a bad day. I banged the top of the case, which only changed the noise to a new, more annoying whine.

  The master bedroom, furnished with antique carved mahogany pieces from my mother’s family in France, was as disordered as the rest of the house and smelled of the same vague decaying abandonment that pervaded the downstairs. For months after my mother died, Leland had kept her clothes, her lipstick, her hairbrush, and even some lingerie she’d washed and left to dry in the bathroom untouched. Finally Serafina, who used to clean for us, put away the lingerie and makeup and hung up the clothes. It wasn’t healthy for Mr. Lee, she’d said, living and sleeping among the dead like that.

  I didn’t want a living shrine for Leland, either, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his heaps of clothes or his rumpled, stale-smelling bed linens just now. Maybe I could persuade Serafina to come back and help me sort though his things, like she’d done for my mother. It didn’t seem right to displace Leland’s personal effects just yet. It was too soon.

  Frankly, the thought of trying to restore the house as it had been when my mother was alive seemed overly daunting on top of the more urgent problem of keeping the vineyard solvent. For hundreds of years my ancestors had managed to fuse the past with the present, burnishing memories that gave the house a patina of genteel nostalgia. As I looked around the bedroom, I couldn’t summon any of the regenerative magic of my family. Today as I sweltered in the late August heat, the place felt like a mausoleum.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and rifled through the pile of magazines and papers on Leland’s marble-topped nightstand. It looked like he had taken to transacting some of his business from bed, instead of his office. The top piece of paper was a two-month-old bill from the company that made our labels. No doubt unpaid.

  I pulled the wastebasket next to me and began tossing things. He’d obviously continued investing in what Eli called his “fly-by-night” scams. With money we didn’t have. The first one involved a soon-to-be-created tax haven off the coast of Central America. Some guy who called himself Prince Larry was building a pontoon island called “Heaven.” Reading between the lines, it would be a no-questions-asked place to park cash that couldn’t show up on a tax return or a set of corporate books. That would be in addition to the research center devoted to the study of eternal youth. First, though, the prince needed a little seed money to get going and Leland was one of the lucky ones to appear on his radar.

  Another brochure advertised lunar real estate. Eli hadn’t been kidding. A group of Florida developers claiming to be affiliated with NASA were selling plots of land on the moon. They were currently seeking investors in the “preconstruction phase.”

  I tossed the prince and the lunar condos in the trash al
ong with a few other gems, but kept a folder called “Blue Ridge Consortium.” Inside was a single sheet of paper—a letter called “Preserving Our Heritage, Protecting Our Wilderness.” It was addressed “Dear Heritage Friend.” It, too, was an appeal for money.

  “All donations to the Blue Ridge Consortium will allow us to continue buying land for the purpose of turning it into parkland. This land will never be developed,” the letter stated. “It will be your legacy to your children and your children’s children. We cannot allow the natural beauty of our region to be paved over to make way for shopping malls and condominium developments. Your generous donation will continue to preserve a region of great historic significance.” It was signed by Nate Midas, who was appropriately named. He owned a media conglomerate and had a stable full of prize-winning horses over in Upperville.

  The minimum donation was $10,000. Depending on the size of the contribution, the organizers wanted to express their thanks. An all-expense-paid weekend at the Greenbriar. Box seats at the Kentucky Derby. Four days and three nights in Vail during ski season. A week in Tortola at a private villa. It was a safe bet we weren’t members of the consortium.

  I could see through the paper that there was writing on the back so I turned it over. Doodling.

  Mason’s name, with an elaborately embellished box around it. Two phone numbers at the bottom—outside the box—neither of which I recognized.

  I reached for the bedside phone and dialed the first number. After a few rings an answering machine kicked in.

  “Hi, it’s Sara. I’m not here. Leave a message and have an awesome day. Here’s the beep.” A singsongy girlish voice like a teenager. If she’d written the message, there would be little hearts instead of dots over the i’s. I hung up.

  The second number rang half a dozen times then someone answered.

  “Gas-o-Rama, whacanidoforyou?” He sounded Hispanic.

  “Uh, nothing. Sorry, wrong number.” A gas station.

  Whatever Leland had been up to before he died, he hadn’t left any obvious clues about who wanted to buy the vineyard. I reached in the pocket of my jeans for the little key Fitz had given me. I’d been carrying it around like a talisman, trying it out on anything in the house with a lock on it. The mantel clock in the parlor. The elaborately carved chest with its mother-of-pearl inlay containing the Bessette family silver in the dining room. Even the old bread box.

  It would be just like my mother to leave whatever the key opened here in this room and Leland to never find it. I walked over to her mirrored dressing table, pulling open the drawers. They were empty. The drawer and cabinet of her matching bedside table were also empty. Under the bed was a different story. Besides the now-familiar basketball-sized dust bunnies were more newspapers and magazines. I used my cane like a hook and pulled some of them out so I could see them. Old copies of the Wine Spectator, the Post, the Tribune, along with the Loudoun and Fauquier regional newspapers, plus a robust collection of hard-core porn magazines with busty nudes in naughty or teasing poses on the covers.

  The magazines needed to return to utter darkness where they came from—or some gutter—but when I tried to shove them back under the bed, something blocked the way. I knelt down and pulled out a shallow box that probably once held a case of beer but now was filled with papers.

  More bills, these from months ago. Also a copy of the San Jose Mercury News from last January. The lead article on the front page explained why Leland had kept the paper. Next to the headline SOUR GRAPES: WINEMAKER JAILED was a photo of Quinn Santori and two other men. The subheading read BIOTERRORISM SCARE REVEALED FRAUD.

  The jailed winemaker was not Quinn but a man named Allen Cantor, who had been the senior winemaker at Le Coq Rouge Winery in Calistoga, California. He’d been adulterating wine—with tap water, no less—and selling it under a different label to distributors in Eastern Europe and Russia. He’d gotten away with it for several years, making millions of dollars under the table, until someone analyzed a bottle of Chardonnay at a competition. The Homeland Security people got involved, suspecting possible bioterrorism and instead they uncovered fraud and embezzlement. Assistant winemaker Paolo Santori had not been charged, but the owner, Tavis Hennessey, fired him anyway.

  Cantor’s personal financial records showed a man who was heavily in debt and on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Authorities suspected he’d merely moved money to an offshore bank and were pursuing the matter. A photograph taken in the wine cellar of Le Coq Rouge showed Tavis Hennessey, Allen Cantor, and Paolo Santori in happier times with their arms around one another’s shoulders. The last sentence quoted Hennessey who said he expected to close the winery.

  Though he had a ponytail back then and he wasn’t wearing a Hawaiian shirt, it was clearly Quinn. I called directory assistance and got the phone number for Le Coq Rouge. An automated voice announced, not surprisingly, that the number was no longer in service. There was no forwarding number.

  How long had Leland known about this? Had Quinn given him the article himself, been up front about his past? Had Leland decided to hire him, anyway? Someone with this kind of dicey background wouldn’t bother Leland in the least. Hell, people like that were his business partners. They probably got along like a house on fire.

  It was also possible Leland hadn’t known anything about this. Maybe Quinn caught a lucky break when his new employer skipped the background check in a rush to find a winemaker after Jacques’s sudden departure. Obviously, though, Leland found out somehow about what happened in California.

  Then what? Had Leland threatened to expose him? Dismiss him? In that case, Leland’s death had been convenient, even helpful, for Quinn. Not to mention he’d freely admitted going back to the Merlot block and cleaning up all traces of what had happened, even down to looking for the bullet that had killed Leland. Out in the vineyard this morning he’d tried to bully me, saying he was going to run things his way, listening to my opinion but doing what he pleased. With Leland out of the picture, Quinn probably figured now he had carte blanche, with no one to stop him from doing just that.

  Which meant he, too, had a motive for murder.

  Chapter 14

  The phone rang while I was still holding the newspaper.

  It was Dominique and she sounded elated. “You’ll never guess what Quinn has done.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “He went by the sheriff’s office this morning. They’re taking down that yellow tape. Can you get over here? We’re moving the buffet and the wine-tasting back to the villa. Isn’t that great?”

  “He’s full of surprises, isn’t he?” So Thelma had been right about his whereabouts. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  I drove to the winery after I’d changed into an off-the-shoulder white knit top and a long gauzy gypsy-like skirt. What would I say when I saw him? “So, how’s the wine market in Eastern Europe? Do they drink a lot of lite wine over there? I’d like to hang around if you do any blending.”

  But I would keep my mouth shut and play it cool. Besides, maybe he and Leland had already worked out a deal about his past. All I’d do is get him stirred up if I confronted him without knowing the facts. Then he’d threaten to quit. Again. If he walked out on us just as harvest started, I might as well hand the keys over to Eli.

  Dominique was in the courtyard, conferring with two waitresses. Unlike the house, the winery still looked like somebody cared for it. The halved oak wine barrels my mother had set out as planters along the loggia’s curved perimeter were filled with lacy red geraniums and trailing variegated ivy, which overflowed the containers and spilled onto the ground. Her collection of vintage wine-making equipment placed between the planters was clean and still looked in working order. The one exception was the Civil War cannon, now strictly decorative, which reportedly had been used at the battle at Goose Creek Bridge when Confederates delayed Union forces, allowing Lee’s Army to march north to Gettysburg.

  Dominique turned at the sound of my footsteps and the tap of my
cane on the gravel. “You’re just in time.”

  “The place looks lovely. The flowers are gorgeous.”

  “You can thank Serafina. Leland let her do whatever she wanted after Jacques left. He didn’t really care much.”

  We walked to the far edge of the courtyard where the terrain fell away, giving a clear vista of grape-laden vines aligned like soldiers in precise rows. Beyond them a sweep of interwoven low green hills and a darker ridge of conifers and deciduous trees stretched nearly to the edge of a horizon neatly bisected by the powdery blue flatline of the mountains and the milky light of a late-afternoon sky.

  “Do you think Quinn will take care of things the way Jacques did?”

  She shrugged with Gallic expressiveness. “Bah. Who knows? He doesn’t talk much, that one.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. There’s something about him. He seems sort of crispy all the time.”

  She meant crispé. Tense. Fidgety. She reached in the front pocket of her mini-skirt and fished out a crumpled pack of cigarettes with a book of matches stuffed inside the cellophane wrapping.

  “I heard you finally told Eli you didn’t want to sell the vineyard.” She lit a cigarette and blew out the match, which she dropped on the ground, grinding it under her sandal. “That was some argument you had.”

  “You know about it, too? Was somebody recording us or something?”

  “The Romeos were talking about it this morning when they came by the inn for breakfast. You and Eli didn’t exactly discuss things between closed walls, from what I heard. By now they probably know all the way to Paris.”

  I’m sure she meant Paris, Virginia, the last town in the stretch of what was called the Mosby Heritage area. Paris got its name from Paris, France, as a tribute to George Washington’s good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, because it was his hometown.