When Blood Lies

by Richards, Linda L. ;

  His book. I’d forgotten all about it.

  “I must have missed that part,” I said quietly.

  “Anyway,” Clark said, sounding only slightly huffy, “it says that the Concordia Monastery has a treasured place in the history of British Columbian wines. Canadian wines, come to think of it. See, at a time when—to be frank—many wineries were making rotgut—”

  “Rotgut?” I interrupted.

  “As in ‘rot your guts.’ Very bad wine,” he explained. “But Concordia was producing wines that could compete with what were then the very best wines in the world. Despite being made with fox grapes.”

  “Fox grapes?” It was like he was speaking a different language.

  “The Vitis labrusca family of vines. Used widely in winemaking to this day. Fox grapes are, in fact, native to North America. Concord is one of the more well-known varieties. In Concordia Monastery’s time, it was the most common variety in North America.”

  “And what time would this be?” I’d interrupted him, but it seemed important for context.

  “Why, the teens, of course. Of the twentieth century—1917 or thereabouts.”

  “Of course,” I murmured, and he went on.

  “Concord grapes are hardy and do well in many climates. However, they generally have a sort of foxiness about them that doesn’t, in the end, lend itself to fine wine. But at Concordia, they brought that humble vine to new heights. They created a wine that was venerated throughout the viticulture of the time.”

  I raised my eyebrows at his use of lofty words but didn’t remark on it. Everyone liked the wine, is what he was saying. I got it. Maybe they even liked it a lot.

  “And it was all made by the monks?”

  “No, not at all. See, that was one of the remarkable things. There was no actual monastery at Concordia Monastery.”

  “Pardon? That doesn’t make sense. Why put the word Monastery right on the bottle if there wasn’t one?”

  He laughed, and I could tell he was pleased to share his knowledge. “At the time, only religious orders could get the licensing required to make wine. As I said, this was at the time of Prohibition.”

  “I thought that was only in the United States.”

  “Mostly. In British Columbia, Prohibition was enacted in 1917. It only lasted just into the 1920s. But that was the period in which Concordia got going. By the time the ban was repealed, Concordia Monastery was the moniker, and they kept it. But Concordia had no actual religious affiliation. Even the name was kind of an inside joke. Concordia as in Concord grape, nothing to do with the Roman goddess of harmony or the university or any other Concordia at all.”

  “Is the winery still around in some form?”

  “Well, after all that, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no. Though that’s what I find so intriguing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, the wine, you see. It was so superior, it was remarkable.” He laughed. “Remarkable! So remarkable, in fact, it was remarked upon around the globe.”

  I got the point. Remarkable. He’d said it three times. The wine was really good.

  “Concordia Monastery’s 1929 vintage was particularly superior and won them accolades in France, where it was exhibited. Early in 1930, though, the winery shut down under mysterious circumstances. But that ’29 Concordia, which was what they called it, became legendary. In fact, it became something of a holy grail.”

  “How so?”

  “As a rule, British Columbian wines are not collectible. Even today. There are some obvious exceptions, of course. But for the most part, no. But the Concordias of that era truly are. Everything about them contributed to this. The unique way they were bottled. The fineness of the wine itself. The mystery that came via the demise of the winery. All of it.”

  “So it’s collectible. What do you think that might mean?

  “Pardon?”

  “Put a value on it.”

  “Hard to say, really. But at auction a few years ago, a case of the ’28 went for half a million dollars.”

  “What?” I didn’t know a lot about wine, but that seemed like a lot to me.

  “That’s right. The ’29 might very well be priceless.”

  He told me more, but I didn’t hear a lot of it. Priceless. I wanted to get off the phone. I wanted to get home.

  I couldn’t get to my car fast enough. Once I was driving, it seemed that traffic had never been so slow. I parked hurriedly and raced up the stairs, slowing only when I couldn’t get my key into the lock.

  And when I finally did and the door opened, there, of course, it was.

  The bottles I had were all labeled 1929.

  SIX

  It appeared Kyle and I had almost opened and drunk a priceless bottle of wine. The very thought made me swoon.

  The kind of money Biederman had talked about was not chump change. It was the sort that can change lives. More to the point, the kind of money that people will go to great lengths to both acquire and protect. Joseph MacLeish had been bidding against me for the desk. Did he know about the wine? It seemed likely. It was time to do more digging.

  When I’d seen their photographs side by side, I’d noticed the physical similarity between Morrison Brine and Joseph MacLeish. I needed to see if there was an actual connection. I decided to head to the newspaper’s morgue and see if I could find evidence of one.

  Of course, the paper’s morgue is mostly electronic now. But I knew there was still a room where copies of the earliest editions were kept. There were also microfiche of the editions between the earliest and those of the late 1980s, when everything started to be collected digitally. In my three years on the job, I’d never needed to find the morgue before, so I had to ask where it was. When I was directed to the basement, I wasn’t surprised.

  Microfiche was used in the era before digitization to store information that would take up too much room in physical form. Looking at it is like looking at strips of negatives. There was a time when it was someone’s job to photograph every page of every edition and put it into microfiche form. That would have been a tedious job.

  I knew about microfiche from high school and my journalism studies. But I’d never had to deal with it in a real-life situation until now. The newspaper microfiche was archived by day and date so that if something needed to be looked up at some future point, it would be relatively easy to find. And I say relatively because nowadays, we are used to random access. We can enter a date or a name or phrase, and a computer will find what we’re looking for, easy peasy. Microfiche isn’t like that. No actual data has been stored—just photographs of data. You have to find the film for the date you want and then load that piece of film into a reader that looks like an old-timey computer. And then you just poke around and read until you find something. The whole process does not lend itself to a fast search.

  And so I loaded and poked and prodded away, surprised when I checked the time after a while and found that several hours had passed. It was quiet down in that room. There might once have been some sort of keeper or librarian down here in the archives. There wasn’t now. I’d inserted my ID card into a computer to gain entry, and that was it. Finding the history I needed was up to me.

  I found myself following certain types of searches. The mention of a new building being designed by Morrison Brine would lead me forward a year or so to the dedication of the building. Or to some event celebrating it at which a photo might have been taken. It was painstaking work. Wedding notices. Birth announcements. Announcements of marriages and engagements. Until, finally, I found what I’d been looking for. A gorgeous Vancouver day. A society event that the guy doing my job in
those days would have been documenting. A good photograph from the mid-1980s. Morrison Brine, his much younger wife and their three sons. All of them fair and blue-eyed like their mother. None who could have grown to be the man who had bid against me for the desk.

  I sat back, mission accomplished. But I had a hollow feeling. It was confirmed—I was back to square one. That feeling subsided as I was packing up the last of the microfiche. Something caught my eye. It was a news item from 1955, the first time Morrison Brine’s name had ever been mentioned by the Vancouver Post. It was a small item. So small I’d gone right past it my first time through:

  YOUNG ARCHITECT WINS BIG ASSIGNMENT

  Morrison Brine, a recent hire at the esteemed Vancouver firm of Matheson, Chase has been fingered to design investor Enzo Rossi’s new Southwest Marine Drive estate. The aforementioned estate has been much mentioned in this newspaper over the last few years. At ten thousand square feet, it will be, upon completion, the largest private residence west of Toronto.

  There was more. Describing the Italianate fixtures that were being brought in. And gold newel-posts and bathroom taps. The private ice arena and indoor pool that were being designed. The house still existed. It was now owned by the city and rented out for functions. I’d been to a few society events there as a reporter. As a private residence, the place was so grand it was stupid, but it was a great venue for weddings and the like.

  None of that was remarkable to me in this moment. What was remarkable was that Morrison Brine, then a junior designer and at the whopping age of (I did the math) twenty-eight, should be awarded such a plum of a job. It made no sense. I was not an expert on the hierarchy of architectural offices, but it only added up that they were like everything else—juniors get the crappiest gigs. You earn the good assignments. And there he was, a nobody of twenty-eight, designing some fancy house.

  Before I had time to think about it very much, my phone rang. It was Rosa Itani, getting back to me as promised.

  “So actually,” she started without preamble, “there’s not much I can tell you. Not much beyond what you already know.”

  “I was afraid of that,” I admitted. “But since I don’t know much of anything, whatever you add will give me more.”

  “Okay then. You have the name?”

  “You sent that in email.”

  “Right. Joseph MacLeish. The team you saw making the arrest had been staking him out for some time.”

  “Staking him out. Like, following him everywhere?”

  “And watching what he was doing. That’s right. Our organized-crime squad has had him under observation for some time.”

  “Organized crime.”

  “Yes. Mafia, specifically.”

  “Mafia? That makes me think Godfather-type stuff. Do you mean something different?”

  “Sadly, no. I do not. We have Godfather-style Mafia in Vancouver.”

  I digested that, feeling it should not have surprised me. If I wanted to be a crime reporter, I was going to have to know stuff like this.

  “So what is MacLeish doing with the Mafia? What is his involvement?”

  “A good question. And a fair one.”

  “But you can’t answer it, can you?” I’d heard something in her voice.

  “That’s right, Nicole. Sorry. It’s part of an ongoing investigation.”

  “Investigation of…?” I prompted.

  “Nice try.”

  “Anything more you can tell me?”

  I heard papers shuffling. “MacLeish is six foot three. And he weighs 190.”

  “O-kaay. Can I ask something else?”

  “You can try.”

  “The arrest. Did it have anything to do with architecture? Or wine?”

  That got a soft chuckle from Rosa. “Those are about as different from each other as I can imagine, and…no. Both counts. I can honestly say, based on what I know, that it had nothing to do with either of those things.”

  I sighed. “It was worth a shot.”

  “You sound pathetic.” Rosa laughed. “So what the hell? I’ll throw you a bone. MacLeish had been promoting a stock.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he was pumping it around town—you know, talking it up, trying to get people to buy it so the price would go up.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Within limits, yes.”

  “And he exceeded those limits?”

  “That I can’t tell you. But I’ll say this—we still have him. I guess you knew that. He’s in remand, awaiting a court appearance.”

  “Wait. You said he’s in remand. What’s he charged with?”

  “False stock promotion, but between you and me, it’s not going to stick. They wanted to hold him. It’s not him they’re after so much. It’s the bad boys he’s been running around with.”

  “And the suspicion was that the stock had a Mafia tie-in?” She hesitated, so I answered for her. “You can’t tell me that either, can you?”

  Another chuckle. “Can’t pull one over on you, Nicole.”

  “But you said it’s not going to stick, so maybe no Mafia connection.”

  “Maybe,” she said cagily. “But closer than wine. Or architects.”

  “Great,” I said. Another dead end. We said goodbye and hung up, but then I had a different thought and called her right back.

  “Sorry, Rosa. Me again. You said Mafia. But that’s just a word we use, isn’t it? An expression.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Mafia is sort of a catchphrase for organized crime, isn’t it? We’ve all heard it—Russian Mafia or Gay Mafia or whatever. That’s what you mean, right? When you say Mafia. Organized crime.”

  “Well, I get what you’re saying. That can be the case. But it isn’t here. That’s why I didn’t qualify it. I didn’t say the something Mafia because I meant it in the classic sense. The Cosa Nostra.”

  “Italian.” It was little more than a whisper from me as pieces started to fall into place.

  “Sicilian,” Rosa corrected. “And yes, there has traditionally been a strong component of that in Vancouver.”

  “As far back as the 1950s, would you say?”

  “Oh, sure.” There was no hesitation in her answer. “And much, much before that. Say, is there any reason you’re focusing on that aspect? Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Oh, no. It’s just…interesting, is all. There’s no reason.”

  That wasn’t true, of course. There was a reason. I just wasn’t ready to tell her yet. There was too big a chance that I was wrong. But now I had some pieces, though none of them seemed to make much sense together. It felt like having parts of half a dozen different jigsaw puzzles. Put those pieces together, and you had a confusing mess. That’s what I had now.

  A respected Vancouver architect, now dead, with a possible Mafia tie-in. His desk, with old and remarkable wine hidden inside. A much younger man who actually bore a resemblance to the architect and who was perhaps involved in some sort of shady stock deal.

  One thing was in my favor. Rosa had said MacLeish was in remand, so I knew where he was. Since I had no other real leads, it had occurred to me to try to talk with him. I thought an interaction might offer up some information that would help me make sense of the confusing puzzle pieces.

  As a layperson, I would not have been able to gain access to MacLeish, who was in lockup at the downtown Vancouver police station. But my press status enabled me to set up an interview. I scheduled it for the following day at 11 AM. The duty officer was reluctant.
But my credentials were in order, even if the whole “Nicole at Night” thing established that I was pretty lightweight. It was enough to get me in the door. The rest would be up to me.

  That night I had two more-important-than-usual events to attend, and Kyle had told me he’d like to tag along. Even though he’s not a journalist, he doesn’t have anything against free food and drinks, and I’d told him I’d be glad of the company. The paper didn’t mind if I brought someone along to events, as long as I got my pictures and filed my stories.

  Since Kyle’s Volvo is nicer than my domestic hatchback, he offered to pick me up. I was still getting ready when he got there, and I buzzed him up and left him to his own devices in my not-so-palatial digs.

  “MacLeish.” It was his tone more than the name that alerted me. I poked my head out of the bathroom and saw him at my laptop. A violation, but not a major one between brother and sister.

  “Yes,” I said, coming up behind him. He was looking at my notes. I’d included a copy of one of the microfiche photos of Morrison Brine and his sons. And I’d gotten my hands on the booking photo that had been taken of MacLeish the day before. “That’s who was trying to buy my desk,” I said. “The one who got arrested at the auction house.”

  “Come on, Nic. You didn’t recognize him?”

  I looked from Kyle to the photo and back again.

  “Recognize him?” I repeated, clueless. But something was beginning to dawn on me.

  “It’s Joey MacLeish, Nic. When we were growing up, I’m sure he spent more time at our house than he did at his own.”

  The mug shot didn’t do much to enhance the face I’d seen briefly at the auction house, but now that Kyle mentioned it, I did see… something. When I searched my memory, matching the name with a face from my childhood, I came up with a scraggly beanpole of a kid. He had often lounged around the house with my brother. But they were older than me, and bolder, so I hadn’t paid too much attention. Sometimes even on purpose. But, yes, when I thought about it, and when I studied the eyes closely, I could see it.