Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “You’re kidding!” Jesus, was I a patsy or what? She had played me for a chump.

  “I am sorry,” Sackheim apologized. “Carrière has told us.”

  “What about Feldman, then?”

  He regarded me sympathetically, then gave a slight nod. “You know the phone message Feldman left at Wilson’s apartment in San Francisco. He said that he made this call as a favor for someone. We know from her cell phone records that Monique contacted Feldman. He, too, had been hurt by Wilson—everyone in Burgundy, it turns out, knows this story—and she thought that he would be sympathetic, that he would help her. But he did not. Just a phone call. I think maybe she arranged to meet Feldman at Domaine Carrière. We do not know yet. But this, too, we shall learn.”

  “Did she murder Richard?” I asked again after a minute. “Kill her own father?”

  “We don’t know.” He was quiet, then said, “We know so little.”

  “Fine. What do you think?” I asked.

  “Well, she had the opportunity. She rented a car at the airport in San Francisco. Ciofreddi discovered this, and we have confirmed it from the records of her credit card. The odometer, it suggests that she followed Wilson to Napa. There is no other explanation. You do not put three hundred kilometers on the car by driving around San Francisco, eh? But personally—it is just my pressentiment, my ‘hunch’—that the killing itself was the work of Jean. The violence, the sloppiness, the hand. She had her own reasons for wanting Wilson dead, but I suspect you are right, that she may have tried to stop Pitot. After all, she desires a living father, not a dead one. Even if he was, in a manner of speaking, dead to her.”

  My mind folded in on itself.

  “On the other hand,” Sackheim went on, “maybe after Wilson rejected her for the last time, she decided to help Jean. The evidence at Norton, it is still not conclusive.” He paused. “And then you arrive in Burgundy,” he continued, “asking questions—as you say, sticking your nose into everything. I am sure that Jean had already told her about you. The American. I do not wish to imply that Mademoiselle Azzine was not attracted to you, Babe, but, you must admit, she needed to find out what you suspected, what you knew. It was Jean, of course, who tried to stop you in Napa after you started to inquire about Wilson’s death.” I thought about correcting him, telling him that it was just some crazy kid from Angwin, but held back. For all I knew, it had been Pitot. Maybe it was Brenneke, too eager for an easy mark, who had it all wrong. “And then you discovered him at Domaine Carrière,” Sackheim went on. “It had to have been Jean who pushed the barrels. But you were not hurt. And you were not scared away. In fact, you were getting very close.”

  We sat for a few minutes in silence, puffing our cigars and sipping wine.

  “Who is guilty, you ask,” he finally said. “The family.” He looked, suddenly, terribly sad. “The whole family is guilty.”

  We grew quiet again, pondering the mysteries of crime and retribution, of passion and hatred, of blood and wine.

  “It is late. I should take you to your hotel,” Sackheim said.

  He hoisted himself out of his chair and walked slowly to get his overcoat. He was not a young man. He was tired, and I realized this would be his last case.

  As we turned off the highway toward Aloxe-Corton, Sackheim said, “It is dangerous.”

  “Yes, at night especially. No streetlights,” I said.

  “Not the driving, Babe. The search for truth.”

  I didn’t respond at first, then said, “You did what you had to do. It’s your job.”

  “You think that is all? That I am just doing my job?” He was irate.

  “I don’t know. Anyway, I owe you an apology for costing you yours.”

  “It is not your fault. It was only a matter of time. The fact is, I am looking forward to retirement. And I’m happy that you came. I don’t think we would have solved this without your help.” With that one statement, Émile Sackheim had redeemed me. After a moment he added, “I regret that Eugénie’s husband is not with her.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I believe that I would have been able to discern if she is happy.”

  “Does that really matter?”

  Sackheim blew air through his lips. “Ey! Please. I am not a beast. It would give me satisfaction to know. Now it will trouble me. Did she merely escape, or did she fall in love?”

  We passed through the little squares of the town, abandoned at that late hour.

  “Don’t worry about tomorrow,” I said when we pulled up in front of the Chemin de Vigne. “I’ll call a taxi to take me to the station.”

  “Yes, it is better. Good-bye, Babe. It seems we say good-bye too often.” He seemed wistful.

  “À la prochaine, then,” I said, patting his arm, and then, “You take care of yourself. And retire, for chrissakes. Neither of us has the strength to go through this again.”

  I called Janie from the hotel room.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “You figured out who murdered my brother?”

  “Yeah, sort of. It’s pretty crazy. I’ll explain it all to you when I see you.”

  “And when is that?” she asked, her voice tinged with censure.

  “I’m leaving first thing in the morning. I’ll call you from Paris.”

  “You’re actually going to make it back for Thanksgiving?”

  “I told you I would. And tell Danny. I’ll pick him up on my way from the airport.”

  I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I walked onto the balcony off my room and gazed out over the vineyards. In the courtyard, the giant linden stood silhouetted against the dim shape of the Bois de Corton. I heard an owl hoot softly, and then it lifted—I could hear the whoosh of its wings—and it struck, some small creature squealing from its talons. I shook my head at the profound, murderous mysteries of nature and went to bed.

  I slept like a baby.

  31

  I called Janie from the airport. I would never have been able to pull it off had it not been for the nine-hour time difference.

  Given that I’d kept my word, she didn’t seem all that happy when I knocked on her door. The important thing right now was Danny, though—we both understood this—but the look she kept throwing me over his head told me that she expected a full account.

  “As I said, it’s complicated. Give me some time. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  “At least you made it home in one piece,” she said.

  On the drive, Danny expressed skepticism about cooking a turkey at the trailer. “Your oven’s too small,” he said.

  We stopped at the Safeway in Napa—the only store open on the actual holiday—and stocked up on canned cranberry sauce and wild-rice salad. He picked out a sweet-potato pie with whipped cream. The only things we had to cook were the bird and stuffing. He insisted on cutting up the celery and chopping an onion. I had to take over when he started to cry. He sat at the table watching me, tears streaming down his face. He looked unutterably sad, and the whole event tottered on the verge of disaster until my eyes began running.

  “Don’t cry, Dad,” he said.

  “You don’t cry,” I said.

  “No, you don’t cry,” he said, and we erupted in laughter. Then we dressed the bird. Danny sewed up the cavity with the agility of a surgeon.

  He was right about the turkey. Though I had bought the smallest bird we could find—there were only a few left in the case—it barely fit in the oven, and I had to turn the temperature down to keep it from burning. We didn’t sit down until sometime after ten.

  We ate in silence. I apologized for the lack of merriment. The only stories I could think of seemed too gruesome to tell. The next morning he asked if he could go home, so I drove him back into the city.

  “Tell your mother I’ll call her next week,” I said. But I couldn’t wait that long. I wanted to get my conversation with Janie out of the way. I phoned, suggesting we have dinner on Saturday in the city.

  It was an awkward date. T
he story I had to relate was not a pretty one, and the fact that Richard’s death was woven inextricably into a larger and more complex tragedy, involving a family she’d never heard of, was hard to take in. Not to mention that she now possessed a niece whose existence to this moment she knew nothing about.

  “A daughter?” She shook her head in disbelief. “What’s she like?”

  “Beautiful. Very lovely, really. Smart. Tortured.” I bit my lip. I needed to get this part right. “She tried to get Richard to accept her. It would appear that he refused.”

  I then explained the history of Monique’s finding Richard, her repeated attempts to get him to acknowledge her, her trip to California.

  “We don’t know,” I finally said, anticipating what she was thinking. “She was there, in Napa, when he was killed. She was probably involved. An accomplice, at least, technically speaking. But I think she may have tried to stop it.”

  “Is she all right?” Janie’s expression now was unreadable.

  “She’s being held as an accessory,” I said.

  “Jesus” was all she could say. I didn’t blame her for being at a loss for words.

  I allowed for a reasonable interval, giving her a chance to digest everything I’d told her.

  “There’s more,” I said.

  “Come on!” she scoffed, not believing there could be any more.

  “Your father. At the end of the war. He had a one-night fling with a young French girl. She gave birth to a son.”

  I watched it sink in.

  “I have a brother in France?” she whispered.

  “A half brother,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “You don’t. Trust me.”

  I poured us both another glass of Turley Zin, and we picked at our food. Jardinière had always been one of our favorite places, but neither of us had much of an appetite, and after what I’d revealed, it was difficult even to pretend we were savoring the meal.

  “It’s a terribly cruel irony,” I said at last.

  “What is?”

  “The bad joke life plays: the father, the son, each had a child by a French woman. The son, ignorant of his father’s sin, commits the same one.” My hand brushed against hers on the table. “I’ve been trying to figure this out, and I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

  She turned her head and pulled her hand away. I knew it was a lot to assimilate and accept, and she would never be able to discuss any of it with either her father or her brother. She refused to look at me. It didn’t matter. I understood. But at least I had done what I said I would do. I’d found out what had happened to Richard; in fact, I had probably found out too much.

  Our good-bye on the street felt excruciating. It was plain to me, at least, that we didn’t stand a prayer, that we were going nowhere, nowhere but home to our separate and inextricably connected lives.

  One thing was certain: I was in no condition to drive, and Janie noticed.

  “You’re coming with me,” she said, taking the keys to the truck out of my hand. “I’ll bring you back in the morning.”

  I sobered up a bit in the passenger seat, the scent of her sitting next to me in the car focusing my mind. At her house, much to my surprise, she led me upstairs, past Danny’s room. The door was ajar. We both looked in on him, a ritual we’d performed so many times that I choked on the emotion. Then, facing me, she led me to her bedroom.

  She undressed me, sat me on the bed, and then undressed herself. There was no reason to speak, nothing to say, and as we found ourselves holding each other, all the tension, the years’ separation, the bitterness and recrimination, dissolved as if we had never been apart. The sweetness and tenderness of our lovemaking seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  I kissed the tears out of her eyes, off her cheeks, and she fell asleep in my arms, and as I fell into my deepest sleep in months, I thought I might be dreaming.

  Danny was flabbergasted and giddy when he found us in bed together the next morning, and though an awkward silence hovered over the breakfast table, it felt more like a silent prayer that somehow we might find our way back as a family.

  A week or so later, I arose early one morning. It was still dark. The moon, past full, was just setting. Roosters acknowledged an imperceptible dawn. I decided to walk. I’d seen Chateau Hauberg many times on my excursions through the hills beyond Angwin. It presided amongst sloped vineyards on the east side of Howell Mountain, a massive stone building—more European farmhouse than winery—constructed in the late 1800s and built to last for centuries, nestled into the hillside beside a small man-made lake. I’d admired it from a distance, its stolid permanence and old-world charm so different from the mock palazzi built as monuments to the egos that had invaded the valley. Daniel Hauberg had arrived in the late seventies with his wife and daughter after selling off his property in Bordeaux—an unlikely trade, it seemed to me.

  As I walked along the side of the road, the sun gained in the east, casting a pink glow on the underbelly of the cloud bank lacing its way from the Pacific. Fog lay like a thin blanket in the hollows of the hills, and as I descended the road, I could make out the massive stone volume of Chateau Hauberg rising above it. The road dipped and rose to the winery. Across from it I could see its proprietor walking in a vineyard, accompanied by his dog in the early light of dawn. I watched as he bent to examine and caress his vines. He walked slowly down a row, the ivory-colored German shepherd limping behind him. It was a touching scene, the profound paternal attention he brought to the land.

  “Hello!” I called from the road. Daniel Hauberg stood and squinted at me.

  “Bonjour,” he said, surprised to see a visitor at that hour of the morning. He walked toward me. “Ah, Monsieur Stern,” he added when he got close enough to recognize me. “I heard you were in France.”

  “I got home just before the holiday. I wanted to get back in time to share Thanksgiving with my son,” I said. He nodded.

  “If you’re looking for Michael,” he said, sweeping his hand across the vista of vineyard and lifting it as if to suggest that Matson had disappeared only a moment before.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking for anymore,” I confessed.

  Hauberg nodded, scratched his chin, and said, “Come, I’ll make us coffee.” He whistled for his dog. As we approached the house, he pointed to the pond. “I put that in around ’82, to water the vines. Vas-y!” he commanded the shepherd, who gazed up at him through sad, limpid, nearly human eyes. The animal flopped under a massive oak tree that towered before the château and laid his head on his outstretched forepaws.

  “King Lear, he loves that tree,” Hauberg said tenderly.

  We passed under an arbor and into the bottom floor of the stone winery, the barrels wrapped in the cool, damp air. He stood at a hot plate and brewed a pot of espresso. I wandered across the floor of the cave. The ceiling rose twenty feet above me, the stone held in place by beams milled in another century.

  “We bring the grapes in up above, on the top floor. The cuverie is just above us on the second floor. And down here is the cave. The whole operation is gravity fed. I never have to pump the wine. Doucement, doucement,” he smiled, gesturing with his hand to show how gently he handled his fruit. “Come,” he said. “It is not too cold for you outside?”

  “Not at all. Merci,” I said, taking the steaming cup.

  “You see this,” Hauberg said as we crossed the threshold, pointing to a brass unicorn nailed to the giant wooden door of the chais, a ring looped through its flared nostrils. “This is the only thing I brought from my home in France. It was used to tie up horses in the old days.”

  He led us outside to a picnic table under the arbor.

  “So,” he asked, “what did you learn on your trip? I heard that you solved the crime.”

  I conveyed in broad strokes what had happened: the shooting of Lucas Kiers, Jean Pitot’s suicide
following the murder of Eric Feldman, and the violent death of Françoise Pitot at the hands of her husband. He already knew most of it from following the story in the French press on the Internet and shook his head at the litany of disasters.

  “Here’s what you probably haven’t read,” I said and told him about Robert Wilson’s fathering a child at the tail end of World War II. I described the shame and hatred that had come to afflict the Pitot family. I left out Richard Wilson’s replication of his father’s indiscretion, thinking that I would do what I could to preserve what was left of Wilson’s reputation.

  He gazed out to his vineyards and took a sip of the scalding coffee.

  “Je comprends,” he said. “You see, the only way in France is to have one child. Under the Napoleonic Code, if I die—when I die—the property must be divided between my children. It creates bitter fights. I refused to subject my family to this . . .” His voice failed, imagining the feuds that would have ensued following his death. He took another sip of coffee. “Of course, if you have only one child and he is killed in a car accident . . . pfoof. Your life is over. You have lost everything. At least this family has a daughter who survives and is safe.”

  We sipped slowly and contemplated the cruelty of life.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, either way, you lose everything,” he added. “So, now, I start over.” He smiled wistfully.

  “It’s beautiful here,” I said, “a beautiful place.”

  “Oui, c’est beau ici,” he said and disappeared into himself.

  We sat for a few minutes, looking out at the land. The sun was up, and the earth was steaming.

  “Well, thank you for the coffee,” I said, rising.

  “Not at all. It was my pleasure.” I turned to go. “I think you did a fine thing, going to France to solve this,” Hauberg said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Au revoir.”

  “Good-bye,” Daniel Hauberg said and stood, taking our coffee cups.