Enemy of the People

by Peter Eichstaedt

  The lights flickered on the Napa County Sheriff’s Department band as more calls came. Another sheriff’s unit was responding. The next transmissions were a ten-fifty-three and a ten-fifty-four. Person down, possible body.

  Dante yanked the narrow notebook from his back pocket and jotted down the time, date, and ten-code numbers. It was nearly 11 a.m. and the crime beat reporter was out. Dante smiled as a shot of adrenaline pulsed through him. The story could be his and his alone. A shooting at the Morrison Creek Winery could salvage his sputtering career. It might even lead to … what? He didn’t have time to think about it, or the personal problems he had with the winery owner. He hustled back to his desk, pulled on his corduroy sport coat and slipped the notebook into the outside pocket. Looking again at the management memo, he wadded it and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  Dante wove among the desks in the crowded newsroom to the glass-walled office of his managing editor, Seth Jones. A veteran reporter and editor in his late sixties, he’d grown a little soft around the middle, but carried the extra pounds well. Jones wore hippie-styled wire-rimmed glasses, had bushy white hair, and loved murder stories even more than corruption scandals. “Did you hear that?” Dante asked, standing in the open door.

  Jones looked up from his desk. “Yeah. What is it?”

  “Shots fired at Morrison Creek Winery. Possible body. I’m going.”

  “The hell you are!” Jones barked, holding up a hand. “You’re the wine editor. Let Hansen cover it.”

  Dante clenched his jaw, exhaled, and shook his head. “She’s not here.” Cathy Hansen was the newspaper’s young cops, crime, and district court reporter. She’d been hired out of journalism grad school at UC Berkeley, his alma mater. She was the kind of person they wanted these days, tech savvy and a social media maven willing to work long hours for entry-level pay and who didn’t talk back to her bosses. Nice girl, a good writer, but she was overly confident and naïve. She reminded him of himself at that age.

  “I wrote about Morrison Creek a few weeks ago,” Dante said. “Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. What’d you call the wine? Horse piss or something?”

  Dante swallowed and felt his face flush. “Not in those words. The guy who owns the place, Bernie Morrison, deserved it. He’s selling box wine in bottles.”

  “He threatened to kill you if he ever saw you again.”

  “C’mon, Seth. Threats come with the territory.”

  “There’s been a possible homicide at the winery of a man who said he hates you and the ground you walk on. Now you want to run over there and poke around? It probably has nothing to do with the wine.”

  “But maybe it does.”

  Jones leaned back in his chair behind the large oak desk, pulled off his glasses, and massaged the bridge of his nose. Dante knew Jones felt lucky to have his job. The San Francisco Chronicle had summarily dumped him years earlier after disbanding the investigative team Jones ran when the newspaper was sold and deflated to a husk of what it once was. Dante had worked for him then and had followed him to the Santa Rosa Sun.

  “When are you going to accept the fact this newspaper can’t afford a full-time investigative reporter?” Jones asked. “I went to bat for you, Dante. It’s how you got the wine editor’s job.”

  Dante looked out across the empty newsroom, waiting for the lecture to end. His job was to keep tabs on Northern California’s billion-dollar wine industry. Spread a thick layer of happy talk over the endless acres of vines and proliferating wineries. Exposés were a thing of the past, a fact he refused to accept.

  “Did you read the reorganization memo?” Jones asked, his voice low and conspiratorial.

  “Of course,” Dante said.

  Jones glanced out into the newsroom and motioned for him to close the door.

  After quietly closing the door, Dante settled into one of the straight-backed chairs facing Jones’s desk. The burn flared again in his stomach. Closed door chats were never good.

  “I want to give you a head’s up,” Jones said, mashing his lips together, struggling to find the words. “They’re eliminating your job.”

  Dante swallowed hard. Not long after joining the Sun, he’d launched a wine column called “The Grapes of Rath,” replacing a blandly named column, “Wine Country Week,” telling Jones the column needed personality if anyone was going to read it.

  “My wine column has been well-received,” Dante said. “Wineries are calling us for a change, asking for their ads to be placed on the same page.”

  “I know,” Jones said, holding his hands up defensively.

  “I’ve put my heart into the wine beat,” Dante said, his voice rising. “Earlier this year I helped organize the annual Symposium for Professional Wine Writers here in the Napa Valley. I read every wine book and magazine I can get my hands on. They’re on my desk now, under all those winery press releases I get every freakin’ day. I read all the wine blogs. The newspaper is even paying for me to get a wine certificate at the UC Davis! Now they want to cut the position?”

  “Calm down.”

  “It’s not like I needed to do any of this crap, you know,” he continued. “I grew up right here in wine country. I helped my grandpa make what they used to call Dago red. Barrels of it, year after year. Long before anyone took California wine seriously.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been a good boy, you know,” Dante said, not letting up. “When all those free cases of wine began showing up at my doorstep, I didn’t keep them, did I? No. I donated them to charity auctions.”

  Jones shook his head and leaned back in his chair as Dante fell silent. “Done yet?”

  He exhaled. “So, what the hell are they going to do with the job?”

  “Slice ‘n’ dice. The wine business news will be handled by Thompson in the business section. The food and wine reviews will go to Donatello in the lifestyle section. Wine reviews will be freelanced by several of the self-styled wine critics who populate this region.”

  Dante’s heart sank. He looked at the floor, then at Jones. “So now what?”

  “Do I look like an employment agency?” Jones said.

  “What about putting me on general assignment?” Dante said. “I’ve covered every kind of story there is, from obits to exposés.”

  Jones was unmoved.

  “We won the Pulitzer, remember?” Dante said, trying to eke out a sympathetic smile.

  “That’s history,” Jones said. “You know how the news business is these days. The only thing publishers want to know is what you’ve done for them today. Even if someone else quits in the next few weeks, you’re not getting the job. According to the consultants, the staff is bloated.” Jones exhaled noisily. “For what it’s worth, you’re not alone. After this reorganization, they’re giving me a bonus and pushing me out the door.”

  The knot in Dante’s stomach tightened, the heartburn smoldered. He felt his world slipping away—again. “So, how long do I have?”

  “The consultant’s report is due in a couple of week. It goes into effect a month or so later. So you have about six weeks.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re one of the best investigative reporters around. Start looking. What’s going on with your buddies at that nonprofit journalism outfit at UC Berkeley?”

  Dante shook his head. “No openings. They’ve got problems, too. Nonprofits depend on grants. The grants come from rich people who don’t like reporters writing about how they and their friends make all their damned money.”

  “The rich just get richer,” Jones said with a groan.

  Dante sat up and crossed his arms as a wry smile crossed his lips. “It’s all the more reason for me to go out to the Morrison Creek Winery.”

  “It is?”

  “There’s more to this story than a dead body or two.”


  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “I told you, Hansen is covering the story,” Jones said.

  “When you find her, tell her she can do the main crime story,” Dante said. “I’ll write a color sidebar with some history of the winery. It’ll also give me something dramatic for my next column.”

  Jones sighed. “Okay. She and a photographer will meet you there. Help them out, will you?”

  “Glad to be of service.” Dante turned from the office and burst out of the newsroom and into the warmth of the late morning sun on the loading dock. He hurried down the steps, his mind reeling. In the parking lot, he pulled open the door of his aging dark green Mustang, a retro fastback coupe. Heat roiled from inside. The V-6 engine roared to life, settling into a soft rumble, enhanced by a hole in the muffler. He loved the sound. Much better than the putter of the mufflers punks installed on their rice rockets.

  Dante swerved out of the parking lot, his tires squealing. He slammed through four of his five gears and merged into traffic, quickly hitting 70 mph as he headed south out of Santa Rosa on Highway 101, and found fifth gear. He avoided the two-lane State Route 12, knowing it would be clogged with SUVs, vans, and limousines loaded with wine drinkers in the hunt for their next winery amid the rolling hills of Sonoma County.

  Yeah, the winery owner Bernie Morrison had threatened him all right. He’d expected nothing less from Morrison and knew he deserved it. Still, he had dismissed Morrison’s death threats. If anything, Morrison should have been the one worried about him, after how Morrison had carried on with his late wife. Dante’s stomach knotted and his heartburn returned. He was going 85 mph now, swallowed hard as he checked his rear view mirror for cops, and backed off the accelerator.

  After Morrison’s threats, he’d done what the newspaper management wanted. He talked to the police. The cops told him to take the threats seriously. He didn’t. They also told him to consider buying a weapon. He didn’t do that either.

  If it were Morrison on the ground at the winery, Dante knew he’d have a hell of a story. Everything about Morrison was phony, even the name of his winery—“Morrison Creek.” There was no such creek. Morrison made it up to sound rustic. Dante decided if he had only six more weeks as a Sun reporter, it was going to be six weeks no one would forget. He checked his rear view mirror for cops again and stepped on the accelerator.

  Chapter 2

  Dante wheeled onto the exit to State Route 116, and thirty minutes later turned off the Carneros Highway before reaching Napa and saw the sign he was looking for. He slowed and took the narrow paved road to the Morrison Creek Winery, a renovated barn nestled in a grove of trees just off the road. His pulse quickened at the sight of the emergency vehicles, police, and sheriff’s units crowding the winery parking lot, lights flashing in the sunlight. He pulled over to the side of the road, stopped, and climbed out while checking for his notebook and pen. He drew a deep breath and told himself to calm down.

  Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the parking lot entrance, but no cops guarded it. A few uniformed investigators clustered around a small table near the adjoining vineyard. Dante squinted at what looked like plastic baggies on the table. Evidence. His eyes fell on two bodies covered with sheets on the sparse grass near the vineyard. A couple of officers walked between the leafy vines, eyes to the ground.

  A female voice called out his name. He wheeled to the sight of a woman in heels showing remarkable balance as she hurried toward him. She was Carmen Carelli, an attorney whose clientele included some of the best winemakers in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys and beyond. They’d had lunch not long ago, but nothing had come of it. Dante had wanted her to talk about a client, one of California’s biggest winemakers. She’d been agreeable and polite, but had revealed little he didn’t already know.

  As she strode toward him, her dark hair fell over the shoulders of a gray pinstriped suit jacket. The plunging neckline of her ivory silk blouse revealed a glimpse of cleavage. She looked at him with dark, piercing eyes and knitted her brows, as if annoyed he was there.

  “Chasing ambulances these days?” he asked.

  “Hardly. One of the bodies over there was my client.”

  Dante caught his breath. “Who? Morrison?”

  She shook her head. “No, the other one.”

  Dante glanced again to the vineyard and back. “So, one of the dead is Morrison?”

  Carmen pressed her lips together. “It’s what I’ve been told.”

  “By whom?”

  “I have my sources, just like you do.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Ask the cops, Dante.”

  “You’re not being helpful.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Crime isn’t your thing, is it?”

  “Some of the wine around here is criminal. Like Morrison’s.”

  Carmen smiled. “That’s funny.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do. I read your column. You did a real number on him. Morrison was extremely upset. So was my client.”

  Dante didn’t feel like going into it, not here anyway, and pulled the notebook from his pocket. He wanted to get a comment from Carmen before she disappeared into the crime scene.

  “Who was your client?” he asked.

  “Is this for the newspaper?”

  “No, Carmen. It’s for a comedy skit.”

  “That’s why what you write makes me laugh.”

  “I’m glad you’re amused.” He held his pen, poised on his notebook. “So, if your client was upset about what I wrote, he must have been involved with the winery.”

  Carmen squinted at him in the sunlight, saying nothing.

  “So, who was he?”

  “You asked me already.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  Carmen exhaled, looked to the parking lot, and back at Dante. “You didn’t get this from me,” she said. “His name was Chao Ling.”

  “C-h-a-o…L-i-n-g,” he said, jotting the name as he spelled it out. “What was Mr. Ling doing here?”

  Carmen crossed her arms. “You are full of questions.”

  “Was Ling an investor in the winery? Or was he a customer?”

  She tilted her head to the side. “Maybe he was both.”

  “Everyone dreams of owning a winery, don’t they?”

  “Not everyone.”

  “What else can you tell me about Ling?”

  “Nothing. Attorney-client privilege.”

  “Carmen, the man’s dead.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “It’s the rules. I follow them. He has assets. They need to be protected.”

  Dante waited for more, but she said nothing. He scratched his temple with his pen and looked off to the distant table where investigators were huddled. “If Ling had a financial interest in the winery, why would Morrison want to kill him?”

  “We’d all like to know, wouldn’t we?”

  “It might be useful for you to talk to me about this, sooner rather than later.”

  “Useful to you, maybe.”

  “Rath!”

  He turned as Cathy Hansen jogged toward him, with Nate Segura, the chief photographer, trailing, his camera bag bouncing on his hip. Two television station SUVs topped with broadcast dishes wheeled into the parking lot, spilling reporters and cameramen.

  “What are you doing here?” Hansen asked. “This is my story.”

  Dante smiled calmly. “Glad you could make it.”

  Hansen wore her blond hair in bangs with the sides trimmed at her jawline. She wore a burgundy T-shirt tucked into her designer jeans under her tweedy sport coat. She scowled. “I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Dante said.

  “So what the hell happened?�
� Segura asked.

  Dante pointed toward the investigators and the bodies on the ground. “Two people dead.”

  “Can we get in there?”

  He shook his head. “You’d better use a long lens, Nate.”

  With the arrival of Hansen and Segura, along with the television vehicles, a couple of deputies hurried to the crime scene tape, waving their hands for them to stay back.

  “You’re Ms. Carelli?” one of the deputies asked Carmen.

  She glanced at her watch, the gold links of the wristband glittering against her light olive skin, and looked at Dante. “I gotta go. Call me sometime.”

  “Count on it,” he said.

  A deputy handed her a clipboard. “Here. Sign in.”

  She scribbled her signature, and the deputies lifted the tape for her.

  “Why do you get to go in?” Dante asked.

  She turned. “They called me. They want to talk to me about Ling.”

  Dante watched the sway of her hips as she strode into the winery, thinking about how he’d like to get to know her a lot better. He wondered why he hadn’t done so already.

  “Not fair,” Hansen said with a whine.

  Dante squinted at her. “She knows one of the dead. She’s his attorney. And, she’s part of the Carelli family, one of the oldest names in the California wine business.”

  “I know who the Carelli family is,” Hansen said. “Who can I talk to here?”

  “Hold on,” Dante said, pulling out his phone and stepping away to talk. He came back and looked at Hansen. “I called a friend who’s on the force. He’s up there now. He’s agreed to talk to us, but it has to be off the record.”

  “Okay,” Hansen said. They watched Segura screw a monopod into the bottom of his camera, attach a 400 mm lens, and focus. He snapped a few frames and moved along the tape to get better angles.

  A Napa County special investigator came down from the crime scene and paused on the other side of the tape. “Jake,” Dante said, reaching out to shake his hand.