Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  When the rain had passed, I returned to the hotel and slept for a couple hours, undisturbed by dreams. I was empty. There was nothing left.

  Twilight came on early, the sky darkened by a storm front moving in from the north. The patronne served me an apéritif unbidden as I lingered in front of the fireplace in the dining room. I smelled the kir but couldn’t get the odor of the marc out of my nose.

  At seven I heard a horn honk twice. Sackheim’s Citroën sat idling on the street. We drove to the western edge of Beaune.

  “I must extend to you Burgundian hospitality,” he said, pulling into a driveway beside a modest house that was beautifully situated at the base of the Montagne de Beaune. “No restaurants tonight,” he said and winked.

  As we got out of the car, he pointed to vineyards that might as well have been his backyard—Les Grèves, Les Toussaints, Les Mariages—indicating their boundaries. Before us stretched a cemetery, and in the middle distance, a half mile from where we stood, I could see the radio tower that rose from the gendarmerie on rue des Blanches Fleurs.

  He had set the table formally: white linen, china, sterling silver that had seen daily use, its surfaces tarnished with age.

  “A simple meal,” he said, his blue eyes refracting the shiny crystal stemware. “I did not have much time.”

  “I can’t believe you had any time at all. What happened? Did they really pull you off the case?”

  “They have taken it out of my hands. Even Lyon’s hands. Paris has taken charge. It is now a triple-murder investigation: Feldman, Kiers, Françoise. Not to mention Jean’s suicide. And two of the victims are Americans. It is too, how do you say, ‘high profile.’ We are unaccustomed to this.”

  “I hope my being here . . .” I started, but he didn’t let me finish.

  “Well, they are not pleased that I permitted you to accompany me to the scene of Kiers’s murder, that you were present chez Pitot, that I involved you at all. But these, these are technicalities. I told you, they have been trying to get me to retire. For the moment, I’m on temporary leave. But they have sent me out to pasture.” He paused. “It is fine. I am ready,” he added, and walked to the kitchen.

  I felt awful. To avoid thinking about it, I examined the photographs on the mantel. I could hear Sackheim at work. He came out bearing two plates.

  “Meursault, Les Charmes. Comtes Lafon, 1989,” he announced as he took his seat and lifted a bottle from a silver coaster. He poured the wine and raised his glass.

  “À votre santé,” he said, and we clinked. “Et à votre santé mentale,” he added. “Forgive my buying a boudin de mer at the charcuterie, but I’m sure you understand.” He took a bite. “Coquilles Saint-Jacques, brochet, et écrevisses. How do you say?”

  “Scallops, pike, and crayfish.” He had finished the dish with a simple beurre blanc.

  “Pas mal,” he shrugged.

  “What happened this afternoon?” I asked.

  “We were overwhelmed. The team from Lyon took control chez Pitot. Another from Dijon started at Domaine Carrière. And then Paris arrived. My men? It is quite beyond their capabilities. They stand around and look at each other in shock. C’est incroyable.”

  “What about Feldman? I’m still trying to figure out what happened, exactly.”

  “I am convinced that Feldman discovered the real father and son. He overheard them at Domaine Carrière arguing the day he arrived for his appointment. But Jean, Jean is crazy, non? It is like a disease.”

  “And you think this explains Kiers?” I said.

  “Not exactly. I believe that Carrière shot Kiers.”

  “Why?”

  “You know this yourself, do you not?” he said. I put my fork down. He regarded me with studied restraint. “You said that Carrière threatened you at the dégustation publique,” Sackheim went on. “And you said that Kiers was there. And you have said that Kiers’s specialty was, how did you say, ‘human interest stories,’ stories about families.” He paused. I sat back in my chair. I could see it coming, but that didn’t make it any easier. “Carrière knew all about you, about your investigations in Napa, about the purpose of your trip to Bourgogne. He realized that he had threatened you in public, and he was afraid—apparently Kiers said something about your staying at the same hotel—that you would tell Kiers everything. And then, of course, Kiers, being a journalist, would write this story.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “I got him killed.”

  “Please, do not blame yourself. This family, they are mad, all of them. And they hate all wine writers, it would seem. Besides, what did we learn about Madame Pitot today?”

  I didn’t respond. I was shaken and just sat there, guilt stricken.

  “That she hates men, all men. I think that she goaded Carrière, insulted him, told him that he was not a man. He had to prove himself. He, too, had to be an accomplice. But, of course, he could not permit this story to be published.”

  Sackheim rose from the table, cleared our plates, and served a salad of butter lettuce. He ate his in silence. I picked at mine.

  “You saw the photographs?” he asked as he cleared the salad plates, not bothering to chastise me for not finishing mine. “My wife and daughter. My wife, Mireille, died in 1985. Breast cancer.”

  “And your daughter?” I said, shaking myself out of it.

  “She works for Microsoft. In Paris.” He shrugged, walked to the kitchen, and set to work on the next course. I could hear him opening and closing the oven door, and then the light sizzle of a sauté pan on the stove.

  “There are two great French contributors to the investigative arts from the last century,” he called from the kitchen. “Who are they?”

  I got up from the table and walked around the dining room, racking my brain to think of the French equivalent of Sherlock Holmes.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur.”

  “She invented X-rays, and he invented fermentation,” I said, standing at the door to the kitchen, wanting to reassure him that I wasn’t a complete moron.

  “The X-ray, oui. To unlock the mysteries of energy and see into the heart of matter. Not to be fooled by surfaces. Measure the constant of energy and follow it into the realm of the invisible,” he said as he pulled a roast from the oven. “Sanglier,” he said. “How do you say?”

  “Wild boar.”

  “But Pasteur,” he continued, “no, my naïve and ignorant American friend, Pasteur did not discover fermentation. Man has been fermenting things for thousands of years: honey, grain, grapes.”

  “I knew that,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb and shaking my head. “I meant, he discovered how to control fermentation.”

  “How to stop fermentation, to isolate the microbe from the ferment itself. Pasteur said, ‘La génération spontanée est une chimère’: ‘spontaneous generation is,’ how does one say in English, ‘an illusion.’” He tossed the sauté pan like a pro. “Trompettes des morts,” he said. “I adore them. And appropriate for the occasion. ‘Only products originating under the influence of life are asymmetrical because the cosmic forces that preside over their formation are themselves asymmetrical.’ That’s a quote. One of the most perceptive things ever said of the criminal personality.”

  He carved the pork into two portions and spooned a little pile of mushrooms on the side of each plate.

  “Pasteur said that since every active substance originates from life, then fermentation itself must be the work of life, not the work of death. Yeast, microbes, germs come from life! Not from death! But . . .” and he paused, it seemed, for dramatic effect: “The conditions under which fermentation takes place, this corruption and putrescence of a living thing, is anaerobic, without air, stifling, suffocating!”

  His eyes gleamed. He gazed at me imperiously, astounded by the brilliance of it, as he carried our plates to the table. He moved slowly, like an elderly waiter in a one-star restaurant, then brought an open bottle of wine I hadn’t noticed from the sid
eboard. It was an old-vine Musigny from Comte de Vogüé.

  “A ’59?” I remarked, examining the label as he held it before me.

  “The year of your birth, non?” he said, delighted with himself. “An auspicious year en Bourgogne.”

  “No, sorry, I’m younger than that. But thank you for the thought,” I said.

  I twirled the wine and smelled it. I was on the point of describing it, but he put his index finger to his lips.

  “Do not speak. It requires no words. Drink it. Enjoy it. Trust me, it is . . .” and then, putting the tips of his fingers to his lips, he kissed them into a petite explosion signifying nothing, signifying perfection. We tasted the wine. “Just remember it,” he said. “Ça suffit.”

  The meal was impossibly delicious. I hadn’t realized how ravenously hungry I was, and as I ate, I felt completely restored.

  We ate in silence. When we had finished I said, “So, who is guilty? Other than me, I mean,” and winced.

  He placed his knife and fork on his plate and pushed it back.

  “À la fin, we arrive at an understanding of la famille Pitot. And truly, it is an unhappy story. Remember what I said of Pasteur. His insight was that the process by which wine is degraded is biological. The hatred of Françoise, it is like a bacterium, a germ, and it feeds on her, devours her, and through her, the entire family. Does it derive from her father? Her mother? Is this defect biological, genetic? Perhaps, but I am not a scientist, mon ami, I am a detective, a cop. What we know is that first she poisons her mother-in-law with her spitefulness, a woman who already lives secretly in disgrace; then she poisons her sister with her cupidité, how do you say, her greed. Then she infects her husband, who, too, is ashamed, though she does not yet know the secret of Henri’s birth. All she knows is that he’s a failure, so she uses her lover, her own sister’s husband, to inflict the ultimate injury on her husband, and then doubles back, as you say in your Westerns, and corrupts Carrière with her hatred, itself an infection passed from father to child. Even so, she is not finished. No, she has a son, and she will not be finished until she turns him to acid, too.” He paused. “Would you like a little fromage? Some dessert? I have a petite tarte aux pommes from the patisserie.”

  “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but, to mangle the words of Brillat-Savarin when he stood on the verge of death and was peering into the void, life is short. Let’s dispense with the cheese course—and in this case, dessert, too—and have a cigar with the last of the wine.”

  “Formidable,” Sackheim said and fetched his humidor.

  We took our time over the ritual.

  “So, who is guilty?” I repeated.

  “Who is guilty? Who committed the crime?” Sackheim asked. “It begins with Etienne Pitot, who is ashamed of the bastard he must call his son, and Pascal Ginestet, who is, in his own eyes, a failure. But how can you say they are guilty when one had taken his own life and the other . . . Well, I think he took his own life, too. One by the rope and one by the bottle. And of course, there is Robert Wilson and his son.”

  He took a long drag on the cigar and blew two perfect smoke rings, the second passing through the first and blowing it apart.

  “Magnifique!” I remarked at the feat. “But what about Françoise? I don’t get it.”

  “She is the most important. The mother.” He nodded gravely.

  “I get that,” I said defensively.

  “No, I mean, she is the mother of the crime. Remember what Monique said today—maybe the one true thing she has said: ‘It was all her idea.’ It is Françoise who gives birth to the plan. She uses her son, her husband, her lover, everyone around her as if they are weapons.” Sackheim took a deep sip of wine. “Françoise wanted her revenge. By the time she met Monique, she knew the truth of her husband’s paternity. These things came together in her mind—and yet, she has killed no one. In fact, she is a victim herself.”

  “What do you mean, by the time she met Monique?” I said.

  “Ah, forgive me.” He got up from the table and reached into a briefcase that sat by the front door. “Monique asked me to give this to you.”

  He handed me a letter. It had already been opened. On the envelope, in a feminine hand, was written BABE.

  “Please, go ahead,” Sackheim said. “I have already read it.”

  My hands were shaking as I opened the letter.

  30

  Dear Babe,

  I am sitting alone in my cell. It is quiet and dark. I have never been so lonely in my life.

  I know the case is coming to an end. I’m not sure how it will finish. No one tells me anything, not even you. I just sit here, lost in my thoughts, wondering what will happen to me.

  There are so many things I want to say to you. I’m sorry I ran away last night. Now I wish you were here so we could talk.

  The thing I need to tell you is that you were right. Richard was my father. My mother told me this last year. I don’t know why she told me this now, after so many years. She met Richard when she was very young. Richard was young, too. Too young, maybe, to understand what he was doing. I thought a long time about what I should do, and I finally wrote him a letter telling him who I was. Last spring when he came to Bordeaux, I found him. It wasn’t hard. Everybody knows where he goes.

  He wasn’t nice about it at all. I think he thought I was trying to get money from him, which isn’t true. Do you know what it’s like, suddenly finding out that you’re not who you thought you were? That you’ve never known your real father? That your mother lied to you her whole life until the moment when she felt so much guilt that she had to tell her secret?

  I went to his hotel in Bordeaux early in the morning. He didn’t believe me. He asked me what proof I had, other than the word of my mother. I never felt so humiliated in my life.

  I told him the only thing I wanted was the chance to love my father and to have him love me. I hugged him. At that moment Jacques came into the room, saying that they were late and that he had been waiting for Richard downstairs. Then he saw me with my arms around my father. I know that Jacques thought we had slept together and that I was saying good-bye to the great and powerful wine writer.

  After that, no matter what I did, Richard never responded to me. I tried calling his hotel, I sent notes to him at his office, but he never called or wrote back. Nothing. He must have said something to Jacques, but I’m not sure what he told him. Not the truth. Just something about a young woman who was bothering him.

  Jacques knew where I was in Barsac. He would call late at night and send me postcards. Everyone in the office at the château read them. It was awful. They accused me of harassing the great Richard Wilson, of trying to seduce him and his assistant, and fired me. That’s when I went to California to find my father.

  I didn’t see Jacques again until that night at the restaurant in Beaune. He wouldn’t leave me alone. After the dinner he said that he was sure I had something to do with Richard’s murder and unless I slept with him, he would go to the police. I didn’t know what to do. If my own father wouldn’t believe me, why would anyone else? And then, at the tasting at Gauffroy, he said it was my last chance, that unless I screwed him, he would destroy me. Well, it doesn’t matter now. I am destroyed anyway.

  What am I supposed to do?

  I don’t think Jacques ever said anything to the police. What could he say? All he wanted to do was screw me. But I think that Sackheim believes I had something to do with it. That I killed my own father.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do. You have to save me.

  Monique

  “It is true,” Sackheim began, “I did believe that she was involved in Wilson’s death, but I could not see why. This letter, it explains so much. And it confirms everything you told me this afternoon.” He paused. “What do you know of Mademoiselle Azzine?”

  It was a strange question. I wasn’t sure what he was driving at.

  “She’s gorgeous, smart, ambitious,” I said. “I think she could have been a
star.”

  Sackheim sipped his wine and then puffed the cigar till it flared.

  “Monique is not telling the whole truth. I am not saying that she is a liar, but she is playing with the truth.” He set the cigar in the ashtray. “Today I had the opportunity to talk with her. And Jean-Luc Carrière. I had nothing else to do, and they are the only ones left.”

  “There’s Henri,” I said.

  “Yes, well, you can imagine. Anyway, a year ago, before the events of these past few weeks and months, Mademoiselle Azzine made another stage in Burgundy.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I tried to brace myself for what was coming.

  “But she did. She worked at the domaine of Jean-Luc Carrière. At Carrière she met Jean Pitot, and he, like so many others, was taken by her. He was a lonely boy, vulnerable. She got to know him quite well. He even invited her home for dinner several times, and there she met Françoise. It was only a matter of time until the bitterness of this family was communicated to her. But Monique Azzine had her own, how do you say, agenda, which only now we understand. Her father had rejected her. She was humiliated and angry.”

  I regarded the length of ash that extended from the tip of my cigar.

  “When she left Bordeaux in the summer,” Sackheim went on, “she did not come directly to Burgundy, as you know. Lieutenant Ciofreddi has established that she was, in fact, in San Francisco on the day Wilson was last seen. But by then, it was too late. The plan, it was already made. Perhaps if Wilson had accepted her, she might have stopped it. He could have saved himself.”

  I was dumbfounded. “You think she had a hand in killing him?”

  “You suspect this yourself, but we do not know, do we?”

  “Maybe she tried to stop Pitot,” I said. Sackheim regarded me across the table. “It’s possible, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I am not certain,” he said. “But we will learn the truth of this. Of that I am quite sure.”

  I wasn’t sure of anything. I was reeling.

  “Enfin, one thing we are beginning to understand is the strange relationship this young woman had with la famille Pitot. You know, the day you visited Domaine Carrière, the day the barrels fell, Monique had been there.”