Sharpshooter

by Nadia Gordon

  “Thank God,” said Monty, squinting through his little gold glasses. “I wanted to lunge at that tray of food, but it didn’t seem polite. It was torture just staring and pecking at it.”

  Every now and then a car went past. When they’d finished the sandwich, Sunny poured coffee and got out the chocolate chip cookies. One of the new Volkswagen Beetles went by, flashing license plates that read WINEBUG.

  “That’s very cute,” said Sunny. “Almost too cute.”

  “Or menacing. It depends how you read it. You can get the wine bug, that’s good. But if you have wine bugs, that’s bad. Phylloxera. The glassy-winged sharpshooter.”

  “I think they mean they are driving the wine bug.”

  “Right. Gotcha.”

  “I don’t know what makes people get vanity plates, anyway. The only one I ever saw that I really liked was ‘Aztec Lover,’ with a heart for the ‘love’ part. I didn’t see the driver, but I assume it was a guy who looked like the drawings on those calendars they hand out at Mexican restaurants at Christmas. You know, standing on top of the mountain holding the Indian maiden.” Sunny stood up to illustrate what she meant.

  “It could have been an anthropologist.”

  “No, the car was all muscle. Like a Trans Am or something.”

  “I saw ‘Wine Guy’ the other night. In fact, I was nearly run down by Wine Guy on my way home. I was about to turn into my driveway when Mr. Guy comes flying around the corner going about a thousand miles an hour. I saw the plates because I looked to see if he was going to wipe out on the turn. He made it, but not without taking some rubber off the tires. He hit the brakes so hard they squealed.”

  “Was it a silver Jaguar?”

  “Yeah, I think so. How’d you know?”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “Um, Tuesday? No, Wednesday night. I was coming back from dinner at Delfina with the wine buyer from Bistro Five.”

  “In the city?”

  “Yeah. I can hardly ever get him to come up here. I always have to drive all the way to San Francisco.”

  “So it was late.”

  “About twelve-thirty, maybe quarter to one.”

  “You’re sure it was Wednesday night?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think I saw him that clearly. He was wearing a suit and tie, I remember that.”

  “But you didn’t recognize him?”

  “Sunny, stop. You’re making me nervous. What’s this all about?”

  “Monty, don’t you know that the silver Jag with ‘Wine Guy’ plates is Jack Beroni’s car? I thought everybody knew that.”

  “Well, not me. As far as I could tell, he was just a maniac driving way too fast on a steep, winding road late at night in front of my house. That was enough for me.”

  “What could he have been doing up there so late at night, and why would he be in such a hurry?” Sunny wondered aloud.

  “I have no idea. Maybe he was visiting somebody.”

  “Like who?”

  “How should I know? The man knew everybody.”

  “Don’t you find it interesting that he was on top of Mount Veeder late at night, driving in some sort of erratic, hyperadrenalized state on the night before he was murdered?”

  “I would, except that he didn’t know it was the night before he was going to be murdered. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on his calendar. ‘Go to gazebo, be killed.’ To him it was just another night. And it’s not exactly unusual to drive a fancy car fast on a curvy road. That’s what Jaguars are for.”

  “That’s true. Still, it seems odd to me. Especially since he’d canceled his lunch with Ripley that morning so he could fly to Los Angeles for business. That makes for a long day. Wouldn’t he be tired?”

  “Maybe, but he could afford to sleep in the next day. He didn’t exactly have a day job.”

  They finished their coffee in silence and Sunny drove Monty home. She had the urge to drive further up Mount Veeder to check out who Jack might have been visiting, then decided it could wait. Right now she needed time to think.

  9

  At Highway 29 she hesitated, then turned south. With luck she’d make it down valley before the Sunday afternoon traffic heading back to San Francisco transformed the road into a parking lot with a view.

  Twenty minutes later she pulled into one of a dozen identical shopping complexes in Napa and parked under a scrawny shopping mall tree in front of the gym. Joining the gym had been Rivka’s idea. She’d argued that the pounding beat of rave music and the smoothie bar with the curvy Italian chairs would more than make up for the drive down to Napa. Not so, as it turned out, but what did was the Olympic-sized pool. Inside the gym, the air was warm and wet. Sunny changed into her swimsuit, headed for the deck, and dove in, skimming across the top of the water in a shallow dive. The cool rippling of the water passing over her body obliterated all thoughts of Jack Beroni and Wade Skord. Soon she was listening to the white noise of each stroke plunging into the water and was alone, suspended in a colorless, almost odorless world of nothingness. She counted each stroke, enjoying the numbers as they came, one after the other, orderly and predictable shapes like well-behaved students in uniform. At thirty-two, she flipped and felt for the wall to push off, enjoying the pulse of satisfaction when it was there. Half an hour later, she pulled herself out of the water, as if emerging from a sound sleep.

  Back out at the truck, the seat felt wonderfully warm from the sun. She sat staring at the brown wood and plastic signage of the shopping mall for a moment, letting the heat soak in. As in all pod malls, the shops radiated out from the parking lot instead of the reverse. It suddenly seemed interesting that the resources of the place were lavished on the cars, which had acres of space, while the shops themselves were shunted to the side: puny, dark, and mostly deserted. Here in the semirural zone, parking reigned supreme. Whatever it is you want to do, whether pick up a few groceries or gun down an acquaintance, chances were extremely good that you would need to drive most of the way there and then you would need to park your car. Skord Mountain, as much as Beroni Vineyards, was isolated. To get there from almost anywhere would be a significant journey on foot. Sunny turned the key and started the truck.

  About a quarter of a mile shy of the Beroni Vineyards archway, Sunny noticed twin ruts that led off the road through trees that entwined overhead, camouflaging the spot so that one might easily drive by without ever noticing the primitive road, as she had for years, until just now. She drove on until there was a wide spot on the shoulder. She left the truck shoved as far to the side as she dared without getting stuck, then walked back. The ruts were definitely some kind of road. A deep layer of fallen leaves and pine needles had smoothed over the tracks, which looked like they had been used fairly recently. In places, there were tire scars or depressions in the thick bed of leaves. The old road led around a corner and opened onto a small, perfectly sheltered meadow with an obvious place to pull off and leave a car on the right and an equally obvious grassy spot for Gabe Campaglia to eat his lunch facing the creek to the left. Decades earlier, it had probably been the landing where the logging crew had stacked up decks of logs before they were hauled away to the mill. On the right, near a sagging old embankment, were signs that a car had been parked there recently. There were twin depressions in the moist, grassy ground, and at one end, where the grass was thinner, a couple of inches of tire tread had showed in the bare soil. Someone had scored over them with a stick.

  Sunny walked up the road. The forest ticked in the hot sun. Once the rains started, this might be a good place to hunt chanterelles. It would be worth checking after the first storm.

  The road became harder to follow as she walked along. No one had driven this far up in many years and the tree trunks were closing in, making it difficult to find the way. Sunny took her bearings to avoid getting lost, and to determine where the road should be. She noted the creek at the bottom of the ravine
to the left, the steep hillside to her right, the main road behind her to the west, rising around the hillside. She thought the trail would eventually come out on top of the hillside, behind the elegant driveway that led to the Beroni estate. She was just lamenting that she hadn’t brought a bottle of water or a compass when her cell phone rang, startling her in the quiet. The tiny screen read, Incoming call: Wildside. She answered it and Rivka said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”

  “What? Do I want to believe it?”

  “The thief has struck again.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the candied orange rinds are gone.”

  “Oh,” said Sunny, trying not to sound relieved. “That’s terrible.”

  “I spent hours making them. They were perfect. I just came in here to finish dipping them in chocolate and they’re gone.”

  “Maybe somebody moved them,” said Sunny.

  “No, I found the container in the walk-in, right where I left it. It was empty. The cookies are gone, too. There were enough for Monday and Tuesday, and now they’re gone.”

  “Strange. I don’t think anybody could eat a whole batch of candied orange peels without being sick. Is anything else missing?”

  “I don’t think so. Last week it was the shortbread.”

  “I remember. Don’t worry about making more today, we can get by without them for a day or so if we have to. Just lock up and I’ll talk with everybody tomorrow and see if I can get to the bottom of it.”

  “Okay. I’m going home. If Heather took them for one of her stupid parties, I’ll kill her.”

  Sunny tucked the mobile back in her pocket. She’d been yanked out of the solitude of her surroundings while she was on the phone; now the quiet rushed back in. She hiked more quickly, eager to find the end of the old logging road. Tomorrow they started a new menu at the restaurant and that always slowed things down. She’d tried leaving the menu the same for a month, but it got tired with the same regulars coming in all the time, so she went back to changing it every two weeks. It was also easier to stay on top of what local ingredients were really fresh that way. The new menu combined with her cut and bruised hands and interrogating the staff promised to make for a challenging Monday morning. Who would steal two pounds of candied orange peels? She stepped carefully, taking care not to fall again. Her hands hurt with a dull ache whenever she thought about them, and the last thing she wanted to do was fall again.

  The old road went up over a gentle rise, revealing the winding paths and late-summer flowers of Louisa Beroni’s rose garden across a shallow valley. The garden was designed for strolling, and there were stone benches set up here and there and a lawn in the middle. Beyond the rose garden, portions of several structures were visible through the trees, including the round tower and cupola that topped the Beroni mansion. Sunny stood catching her breath. One of the other structures must be Jack Beroni’s cottage. She imagined the blond woman parking her car in the clearing and walking up this old road. Jack would meet her on the way and they would walk together, maybe even sit in the rose garden before going on to his place. From what Nesto had said, it was love as much as afternoon delight.

  She turned and walked quickly back to the truck. There was one other person who might be able to tell her who this mysterious blond woman was, and maybe offer a few other insights as well. She decided to drive out to Wade’s to use the phone book and the bathroom, get a drink, and maybe make a list of questions to ask Larissa Richards, assuming she would agree to meet. While she was there she could check on the berries, feed Farber, and satisfy her curiosity once and for all. Something had been nagging at her since yesterday afternoon. She’d looked for that gun, and looked carefully. Still, she couldn’t shake the desire to search the winery one more time.

  At Wade’s, she found the phone book in the office and flipped through the white pages. There she was, “Richards, L.” Sunny picked up the phone and dialed, then suddenly hung up. It certainly wouldn’t be a good thing for her to see the call ID’d as Wade Skord. She reached for her mobile but remembered there was no cell reception at Wade’s. She jotted down the number and went to work feeding Jasper and examining the vineyard. When she was done she headed for the winery.

  It was turning dusk and she left the big sliding barn door open, letting the last of the daylight in, and switched on the single winery light. A bare bulb hanging from a rafter emitted a weary yellow glow. Wade rarely worked after dark, so he hadn’t bothered installing much in the way of artificial lights. Behind her, Farber slithered in and began casing the winery shadows. Sunny stared at the barrels and tanks, the gloom of the rafters above, and the passages leading to the storage room and cave, and felt the bleakness. She could always tell when she was tired, because whatever she was doing suddenly became hopelessly overwhelming. She couldn’t force herself to go over the entire winery again now. She’d check behind the racks down in the cave and have another good look around the fermentation tanks, then call it done.

  The cool, musty smell of the wine cave heartened her, though she didn’t find anything out of the ordinary behind the racks. As far as she could see, which was admittedly not very far in the soft light, there was nothing but dust and a few stray labels. Back in the main room, she stared at the fermentation tanks. Regretting her little yellow sweater, she reached behind the oak tank as far as she could, hugging the rough wood tank and groping along the wall with one outstretched hand. She reached the two-by-four stud that Wade always leaned the rifle against easily. She’d been thinking that the gun could have slipped beyond that and fallen out of reach. She groped further, squeezing in between the tank and the wall. Her fingertips grazed the next two-by-four without any sign of the gun. She followed the stud down as far as she could, inching toward the cement floor, then backed out, sat on the dirty floor in her good blue skirt, and leaned in sideways, feeling along the wall and then patting the floor as far as she could reach. She exhaled and squeezed another inch further into the gap, running her hand back and forth over the floor, hoping against all logic to touch the fabric of the gun case. There was nothing.

  Outside, the sun was beginning to drop behind the mountains to the west and the crickets had started whirring. Sunny called to Farber and tugged the door closed after him, trying to touch the handle as little as possible, in case the police ever decided to dust it for fingerprints. She brushed off her skirt and looked down. So much for her favorite sweater. It was snagged in several places and smudged all over with thick dust. Her skirt had fared better, but not by much. Farber hurled himself against her shins while she stood, then wound in between her legs, making it impossible to walk. She bent over to sweep him up and noticed something white in the weeds. It looked like a business card. She put Farber down and picked it up. Printed in shiny, raised black letters were the words Michael Rieder, Esq., Corporation Law.

  Sunny sat down in the grass and stared at it. The card looked crisp and white. It hadn’t rained in months, but there was dew on the grass every morning. A card would get warped and stained if it lay there for very long. Sunny’s heart beat quickly. How could a business card have arrived here, just outside the winery door at Skord Mountain? It might have fallen out of Wade’s pocket, of course, but Wade had used the same lawyer for years, and Sunny couldn’t think of any reason he would need one who specialized in corporate law. Wade didn’t like corporate anything, let alone attorneys. It could have been dropped by a visitor, except that it was a notably quiet time of year at the winery with harvest on the way. Wade hadn’t had any visitors as far as she knew in at least a week. There was the smallest of chances that she was wrong about that, and an equally slim chance that Rivka had dropped it when she stopped by. She looked up at the winery door with its metal handle and the tall grass and weeds growing to the right, where she’d found the card. The flesh on her arms raised with goosebumps. Suddenly it made perfect sense. She still didn’t know who had dropped it, but she could see how it had happened as though in a movi
e. The card had landed exactly where she would have expected to find it. She walked up to the truck, slipped the card into her wallet, and drove out to the main road.

  When she had four bars of cell reception again, she pulled off and dialed Larissa Richards’s phone number, still not sure what she would say. Larissa picked up. With that first hello, her voice conveyed the disdain that can be an unfortunate byproduct of good breeding. Sunny stammered, her nerve faltering. What business did she have bothering a woman whose boyfriend had just been killed? This is not about being polite, she reminded herself, this is about helping Wade. Sunny explained her business, how Wade Skord had been arrested and she was looking into a way to prove his innocence.

  “The police think he did it,” said Larissa. “I don’t see why I should subvert their efforts.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything subversive, just answer a couple of quick questions. It will only take a few minutes, and you can tell the police everything we talk about. In fact, you’ve probably told them everything I want to know already.”

  Larissa reluctantly agreed, which was more than Sunny had hoped for. She followed the directions she’d jotted in her day planner while they were on the phone, wishing there was time to stop at home to change. There wasn’t; the dirty, snagged sweater and the skirt with the dusty print on the butt would have to do, even for high society. She couldn’t risk keeping Larissa waiting and have her decide to run off for some reason.

  The house was a Spanish-style mansion complete with white adobe archways and climbing bougainvillea. Larissa answered the door herself. In her wool crepe trousers and thin purple sweater, she looked tall and almost too thin. She was probably around thirty-five and had the ingredients of beauty with her high cheekbones, pouty lips, and strong eyebrows, without, at least for the moment, actually being pretty. She was smoking a cigarette and looked like she’d been crying; her pale skin was lightly reddened and her lipstick had been rubbed off, probably from blowing her nose. She led the way outside to the patio. “Sit,” she said, and gestured to a chair at a glass table. Sunny obeyed. The metal chair was icy cold. Larissa sat down opposite her. “Now, what is it you wanted to ask me?” she said in a crisp English accent.