Death in a Wine Dark Sea

by Lisa King

Jean frowned. “Come on, you’re breaking the promise to find his killer. Don’t you think he’d approve?”

  “Maybe, but I have to live with myself.”

  “OK,” Jean said, regarding him with a little more interest.

  “You’re hating this, aren’t you?” Zeppo said. “You’re only doing it for Diane. Come on, it’ll be great—you get to see how a master operates.”

  “What’s second prize? A month with you on a desert island?”

  Zeppo sat up straight and raised his right hand. “How’s this: I solemnly swear to cease all references to your awesome endowments or to the possibility of intimate relations between us for the duration of the investigation. When and if we bring the killer to justice, I reserve the right to resume harassing you.” He put his hand down. “Happy?”

  “Ecstatic.” Jean thought of what Diane would owe her when this was over. Possibly her first-born child. Jean decided she’d rather have Martin’s Porsche. “So can I get in on this?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s probably a good idea not to do it alone. Let’s drink to it.” Zeppo poured them more wine and they clinked glasses. “You want to start now, partner? This won’t take long. I’ve eliminated a lot of people.”

  “How?”

  “Well, several of them have good alibis, like they were out of the country or recovering from surgery.”

  “What if someone hired it done?” Jean asked.

  “We can think about that if the obvious suspects don’t pan out.”

  “Who else you got?”

  “In a lot of cases there’s no longer an issue. We had one guy on the hook because he was cheating on his wife, but now they’re divorced. There are a few more like that.” Zeppo’s nose was reddening and he was making gestures with his wine glass. He poured the last of the wine into their glasses.

  Jean took a sip. “So how did you fill the blue box in the first place? How did you find all these sinners?”

  “You really want the whole ugly story?”

  “Yeah, I really do.”

  “Well, that calls for another bottle.” He jumped up and went into the kitchen.

  Jean recognized the trajectory of the inexperienced drinker. She’d leave when his speech started to slur—she didn’t want to deal with any sexual advances from him. In vino veritas was a sound principle, but only up to a point. As far as tomorrow was concerned, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d gone to work with a hangover.

  Zeppo came back with another bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a plate of supermarket cheese and crackers. “Not exactly elegant, but I’m hungry,” he said. He poured wine into her glass. “OK, here’s the story. For years, Martin had a private detective working on the blue box, but he retired in 2007 and moved back to the Philippines. I got hired in 2008.”

  “What were you doing before that?”

  “I was a bike messenger.”

  “Really? How’d you get from there to being Martin’s assistant?”

  “Let’s not go off topic. Basically it worked like this: Martin would need something for a project, and we’d look at all the people who could give him what he wanted. I’d do research, pick up gossip from neighbors or servants or former spouses or employees. We usually found something we could use. Word was out that Martin would pay for information, and every now and then someone approached him with something to sell. He’d buy all reliable dirt just in case he’d need it later.”

  “How much did Frank know about this?”

  “They had a very clear division of labor. Frank handled the day-to-day stuff like construction materials, labor, logistics. Martin was the idea man. Frank must have known Martin got things done outside conventional channels, but he never complained. It was sort of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of thing. Martin made him rich, after all.”

  “What did he think your job was?”

  “Research. Everyone thought I did background research for Martin’s long-range plans. Martin was vague about a lot of things, so no one thought it was weird.”

  “What about Kay? Seems he would have been quite a political liability.”

  “She must have realized that his business practices weren’t strictly kosher, but I don’t think she knew what was actually going on. Anyway, I bet she would have dumped him if he hadn’t dumped her first.”

  Jean ate some cheese and crackers. “So who are you looking at seriously?”

  “I’m nearly done with the first group of suspects, all the able-bodied men. You’ve seen the pier where they found Martin. It’d be hard to get an uncooperative or unconscious man out there and over the rail unless you were big and strong. And even though the pier is pretty deserted at night, especially in bad weather, you’d have to move fast so no one would see you.”

  “You could do it at gunpoint and hit him once you got there. There were bruises all over his head.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not easy to hit someone hard enough to knock them out. That’s another argument for muscles. The women in the box are either on the small side or too old to do it.”

  “Unless a small woman had help,” Jean said.

  “That’s possible. We can look into that later. One of the last things Martin worked on was Armand Setrakian. He’s the guy I like best for it.”

  “What did Martin want from a sculptor?”

  “Land. Martin wanted to enlarge a housing development he was planning near Sonoma. In fact, that’s the only project he was still involved in when he died. We needed something on one of the neighbors because none of them would sell, so Martin sent me after Setrakian, who owned a big chunk of land right next to the project. I’d heard of him, of course. I even like his work. I went up there and spent a couple of days talking to the locals, saying I was doing a profile on him for the U.C. Davis campus newspaper. I even interviewed the great artist. He was a pompous asshole, but I figured, so what? Picasso was an asshole, too.

  “A few people made offhand remarks about him chasing women, but he’s not married. Then this bartender got pissed as hell when I mentioned his name. She told me to go see her friend in Sausalito if I wanted to know what he was really like. Setrakian spends a lot of time in Sausalito because he shows in some galleries there. The friend worked at one of those waterfront restaurants. She was young and pretty—not in your league, but cute.

  “I bought her a cup of coffee, and she told me that he was a regular at her restaurant and they got friendly. He asked her if she’d model for him and she said sure, figuring he’s a nice guy, he’s famous, what could happen? So she went to his studio and he came on really strong—she thought he was going to rape her. She got out of there in one piece, but it was close. She didn’t do anything about it because it was her word against his and nothing actually happened, just groping and wrestling.”

  “What a prick!”

  “You said it. Once I knew what I was looking for it was easy. I bribed a clerk at the county sheriff’s office and hit the jackpot. Setrakian’s had four complaints of attempted rape filed against him over the past five years, but in each case the charges were dropped. Since it never made the news, I assume he paid the women off.”

  “I guess if you’re not bruised and bloody and full of semen, it’s hard to get people interested,” Jean said. “Too bad those women didn’t go after him together.”

  “Even so, it would have been tough to convict him. Anyway, he recently got a million-dollar commission for a dozen statues from Elan, the women’s clothing company. But Elan would cancel the commission in a heartbeat if they found out he was molesting potential customers—they sell to teens and young women and they’ve got a squeaky clean image. So Martin had a talk with lover boy and bought the acreage he needed.”

  “Served him right, the piece of shit.”

  “Yeah, I really enjoyed that one. I hate that kind of arrogant bully.”

  “So if he killed Martin, not only would he eliminate someone who could screw up his life, he might even stop the development right next to him,” Jean said. “He sounds
promising.”

  “After we talk to him, we’ll start with the second group: women and men who could have killed him with help.”

  “Tell me something: Did Martin ever lose?”

  “Oh sure. A lot of times the people I investigated were clean, so he had to give up on what he wanted or go through regular channels. A few people decided to ’fess up rather than do what he asked. And one guy got even.”

  “How?”

  “Martin wanted to buy a building from a dude named Simon Emory who owned a few nightclubs, but he wouldn’t sell. The building was in a neighborhood where Martin planned to build a mixed-use development. I found out that Emory employed a lot of illegals. But he told Martin to go fuck himself, that when La Migra came around all they’d find would be documented workers. The development had to be scaled back, which really pissed Martin off.”

  “It’s good to know he didn’t have it all his way,” Jean said.

  “It gets better. At the time, Martin was also building a business park in Modesto. The roofing contractor employed a bunch of illegals, and about a week after Martin talked to Emory, a guy from Immigration showed up at the Modesto site and arrested everybody. Martin paid a big fine. Emory must have done some research of his own and then called the federales.”

  “I’ll bet Martin went ballistic.”

  “You should have seen him—it’s amazing he didn’t have his heart attack then. He wanted me to find more dirt on Emory, but I talked him out of it. I had a lot of other projects going and I told him we couldn’t afford to waste our time on revenge.”

  “Is Emory on your list of suspects?”

  “He’s on the ‘improbable’ list—the clerk I bribed told me he has an alibi. But we still have to check him out. I’m not sure why the cops questioned him.”

  “Frank gave the police a list of people Martin had problems with. Emory must have been on it.” Jean excused herself and went into the bathroom, which was as neat and clean as the rest of the apartment. A small framed print of a smiling, voluptuous Modigliani nude hung on the wall. The contents of the medicine cabinet were disappointingly ordinary. The only prescription drug was a bottle of sleeping pills. So his worst medical problem was insomnia.

  She sat back down in the corduroy chair. “Is that all I get tonight?”

  “There is one other thing. It’s probably not important, but it’s weird. Martin had something of Hugh Rivenbark’s.”

  “Something he gave him? I thought they were buddies.”

  “Oh yeah, for years, but this wasn’t in the blue box and Martin had me send it back right before I left the job. It was a handwritten manuscript of Home to Greenwood, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. I read some interviews with Rivenbark, and he’s got this thing about the creative process—it belongs solely to the writer and shouldn’t be scrutinized by talentless academics. He shreds all earlier versions of his books once they’re published. And he writes every draft longhand because he believes a writer’s physical connection to the written word is essential, or some such horseshit.” Zeppo emptied his glass. “So it didn’t really seem like blackmail material—more of an annoyance.”

  “How did Martin get hold of it?” Jean asked.

  “Rivenbark was married years ago, but his wife died soon after he got his Pulitzer. Her brother lives up in Mendocino, runs a bookstore, and he and Rivenbark are pals.”

  “Oh sure, Edward Bongiorni. I met him at the funeral.”

  “Rivenbark’s got this big modern house called The Eyrie. Once when Martin was visiting he found the manuscript in a drawer and kept it, but I don’t know why. Maybe just out of habit.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a motive. Was there anything strange about it?”

  “Not that I could see. I compared it to the published book, which wasn’t easy—he’s got big, sloppy handwriting all over the page. There were editing suggestions in different writing, and some of them were in the book and some weren’t.” He shrugged. “Like you said, not much of a motive. He was in the city that night—he has an apartment on Telegraph Hill, and he stayed there with the Bongiornis after the wedding.”

  “We can ask them about it,” Jean said. “But unless we find out something new, I guess we should put Hugh on the ‘improbable’ list.” They sat in silence for a few moments. “Tell me this,” she asked. “If you sent everything back, why is someone searching everywhere?”

  “All I can figure is that the old pirate had a game on the side I knew nothing about.”

  “You know what?” Jean said. “I think I may have another suspect.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  She told him about the counterfeit Le Pin from Treadway’s wine shop.

  Zeppo looked skeptical. “So you think this guy Treadway killed Martin over a bottle of wine?”

  “Not just one. If he has a big counterfeiting operation going, we could be talking hundreds of bottles worth thousands of dollars. What if Martin threatened to shut him down?”

  “He’s worth a look. Why don’t you make an appointment for us to see him? Tell him you’re a famous wine writer.”

  “I am a famous wine writer.”

  “If you say so.” Zeppo leaned back in his chair. “I never heard of Treadway before now. Sounds like Martin really did have stuff going on I didn’t know about.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t get murdered a long time ago.” Jean looked at Zeppo as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  “I’ll bet people underestimate you all the time.”

  “Yeah. Martin counted on it.”

  “So why hasn’t the killer come after you? You know everything Martin knew.”

  “Right, but nobody’s aware of that. They either didn’t know I existed or thought I was just a gofer.”

  “But if we go around asking questions, they’ll realize what you know. And what I know.”

  “We just have to be careful. We’ll make it very clear that there are no copies and that we aren’t interested in blackmailing anyone—we just want to know where they were on the night of the wedding. Of course, everyone will come up with some kind of alibi. Our job is to figure out who’s lying.”

  “This is starting to sound dangerous.”

  Zeppo looked at her over his glasses. “You want out?”

  “No way. Now that I know all this fascinating dirt, I have to see how it ends. I’m just worrying out loud.” Jean wanted another cracker, but Zeppo had finished the entire plate of food. She looked at her watch. “Oh shit. It’s late. I have to go home.” She stood up.

  He swayed a little as he stood. “You don’t have to leave just because you got me drunk. I promise not to attack you unless you insist.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. I have to get some sleep.”

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  “So what’s our next move?” Jean asked after he’d ordered the taxi.

  “Any chance you can take some days off?”

  “I’ll try to use my vacation days, but I’ll have to go to work for a day or two to set things up.”

  “OK, when your vacation starts we’ll talk to Treadway. Then later we’ll go up north to see Setrakian.”

  In a few minutes, the cab honked in front of Zeppo’s building.

  “That was very enlightening, Zeppo,” Jean said. “This is the first time I’ve seen you without your clown suit.”

  “Say the word and I’ll take everything off.”

  Jean rolled her eyes. “Good night, Zeppo.” She trotted down the steps to the waiting cab.

  CHAPTER 13

  The next day Jean, wearing a gray pencil skirt and white sweater with a wide black belt, went to work with only a slight hangover. The main office was an open room filled with a dozen cubicles. Four private offices lined the back wall, and a corridor led to the production department and conference room. Jean phoned Diane from her cube. “You were right about Zeppo a
nd the blue box,” she told her friend. “And you’ve got yourself a crack team of investigators.”

  “Thank you so much, Jean. I feel better just knowing that.”

  “But if we don’t make any progress by the end of my vacation, you’ll have to turn the whole thing over to the police. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. Why don’t I pay you for your time? I know you never have enough money.”

  “No thanks,” Jean said. “But I might need some if I have to travel. And you can give me a few bottles of Le Pin.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “Zeppo came up with a suggestion last night.” She told Diane about offering a reward.

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll get right on it. Oh, and you’ll need a car. I thought of letting you use the Porsche, but I don’t want your death on my conscience. So I arranged for you to borrow one of the company cars. How’s that sound?”

  “Just because a person totals a car doesn’t mean she can’t drive.”

  “What does it mean when she rolls a car in broad daylight on an empty highway?”

  “I’m a good driver,” Jean insisted. “The Escort’s engineering wasn’t up to the demands I was making. The Porsche wouldn’t have rolled.”

  “Nonetheless, I think a Corolla is a better idea. You’ll have to go to the office and get it. Ask for Jeffrey, the receptionist. And drive carefully, for God’s sake.”

  “Hey,” Jean said, “you set it up already. How’d you know I’d go for it?”

  “Because I know you. You’re a born snoop and can’t resist a challenge. You couldn’t say no to a thing like this, even if it meant spending time with Zeppo.”

  “I hate being such an open book. Talk to you later.”

  Jean poked her head into her editor’s office. Kyle, in a vintage camp shirt with a royal flush in hearts embroidered on the chest pocket, was on the phone, but motioned for her to sit down. “You know we love your work,” Kyle said into the phone. “But it’s all about digital now. You don’t want to be stuck in the Stone Age when everyone else is riding the wave of the future.”

  He must be talking to their Central Coast photographer, a retired newsman who had no email and would only submit slides. “You’re mixing your metaphors,” Jean told him when he’d hung up.