by Nadia Gordon
“He came by yesterday to talk about the false morels I found on Sunday night. I think initially they were worried that Osborne might have come in contact with some of them.”
“They grilled a bunch of us here about that too. The police have been knocking on our door every five minutes to question somebody about something for the last two days. They were here again this afternoon.”
“I guess it’s good they’re being thorough,” she said. “Still, I don’t understand why there’s an issue if the autopsy says he died of a heart attack.”
Nick selected an olive out of the little dish and ate it. “They’re trying to figure out who was in Osborne’s house Saturday night.”
Sunny sampled an olive. “What makes them think someone else was there?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“They didn’t give me any details.”
Nick ate another olive and stared at her while he chewed, thinking.
“Nathan was in the living room when I found him,” he said. “It looked like he’d come in, poured himself a glass of wine, and sat down on the couch. He was sort of crumpled on the floor right in front of it, like he’d slid down there when he died. The glass of wine he’d been drinking was on the coffee table in front of him. That all makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that a few feet away, a full bottle of wine was smashed on the floor. Osborne’s living room has a tile floor. Somebody dropped a bottle of wine and it broke. There was wine all over the place when I got there.”
Sunny raised her eyebrows. “Maybe it was Osborne who dropped it,” she said. “Maybe he started to have a heart attack, dropped the bottle of wine, and sat down on the couch.”
“No way,” said Nick, frowning. “I’m no expert, but my guess is that it was dropped after he was dead. You could tell by the way there were splashes on the pant leg that was closer to where the bottle broke. I’m guessing the police think the same thing, or they wouldn’t be looking into it. Plus, the bottle that was broken hadn’t been opened. The cork was still in it. It wasn’t the bottle he poured his glass of wine from.”
He rubbed his neck and tipped his head back, cracking several vertebrae loudly enough for Sunny to hear. She waited, sensing there was more. There was.
“The really odd thing is, they haven’t found an open bottle of wine anywhere in the house,” he said. “And you wanna hear the kicker?”
“There’s a kicker?”
“A good one.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“They ran a report from the security system and somebody disarmed it about two hours after they figure Osborne was already dead. That’s why they’ve been questioning everyone around here. It had to be somebody who knew the alarm code.”
“How many people is that?”
“Most of the longtime staffers around here. Anybody who ever took him home knew it. It’s the same code that opens the gate on the driveway.”
Sunny ate another olive. No wonder Steve Harvey was checking out all the possibilities. This was starting to sound like a very complicated heart attack.
“There’s no security tape?” she asked.
“You mean video?”
“Yeah.”
“No, there’s nothing like that. It’s not Fort Knox up there. He’s just got a regular alarm system with a motion detector and an automatic gate.”
She met Nick’s eyes. “What do you think happened?” Sunny asked.
“Me?”
“You were there. You saw it all with your own eyes. You must have a theory.”
He held up a finger for her to wait and went down the bar to pour a couple of glasses of wine for other customers. When he came back he said, “I haven’t come up with anything that explains all of it. I can imagine him giving his alarm code to a woman, so she could come over late at night and let herself in. He was like that. Did you know him?”
“No, we never met.”
“It was amazing the women he brought in here. I don’t know how he did it. Osborne loved women. All kinds of women.”
“So she lets herself in,” said Sunny.
“She lets herself in,” said Nick. “It’s late. She expects to find him in bed, but he’s not there. So she goes through the kitchen into the living room and flips on the light. When she sees him slumped over on the floor she screams and drops the wine she was carrying.”
“Then she panics and leaves,” said Sunny. “She doesn’t call the police?”
“She’s afraid to,” said Nick. “Maybe she doesn’t want anyone to know she was there. There could be lots of reasons for that. If I was sleeping with Osborne, I wouldn’t want anyone to know it.”
“I’ll bet!” laughed Sunny.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. Anyway, the startled lover theory doesn’t quite fit. Her prints would be on the wine bottle, the light switch, both alarm key pads,” said Sunny. “The cops must have found something by now.”
“If they have, they haven’t said so.”
“And there might be footprints in the wine,” she said. “Did you see anything like that?”
“I don’t think so, but I didn’t really look. There were plenty of my footprints by the time the cops got there, that’s for sure. It didn’t occur to me to be careful at first. It was a very weird scene to find him like that. I walked around a bunch looking for the phone to call the police.”
Nick swigged his water. “There’s another hole in my theory. It doesn’t explain where the wine in his glass came from. They looked everywhere for an open bottle in the house.”
“Everywhere is big. Maybe they missed it,” said Sunny. “Maybe he’d already put it in the recycling. Or maybe our lady friend took the open bottle with her.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Sunny, chewing another olive thoughtfully. “There are two bottles of wine to account for. We can presume there was an open bottle, because there was wine in his glass and that didn’t come from nowhere. And we know there was an unopened bottle, because it’s still on the scene. We also know, maybe, that there was someone else present. Since the someone else and the open bottle are both missing, it seems logical that they would have left together. What we don’t know is why.”
He gave her a grin. “You think like that all the time?”
“Too many Perry Mason reruns when I was a kid,” said Sunny. She held up an olive. “This is about the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. It’s like the best pickled thing and the best salty thing and the best deep-fried thing all in one.”
“They’re dangerous,” said Nick. He looked up the bar, where one of the servers was waiting to put in an order. “Don’t go anywhere.”
A few minutes later he came back. “You come up with anything?” he asked.
“Not yet.” She sipped her wine. “I think we have another problem. I don’t think a lover would bring a bottle of wine to a guy whose business is wine, especially when she must know that he would have had plenty to drink by the time she got there. Besides, she’s already playing rent-a-babe delivery service. She wouldn’t bring a bottle of wine on top of it.”
“Especially not that wine.”
“Why, what was it?”
“Auction house material. It was a 1967 Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque. The good stuff too. Premier Grand Cru Reservée made by Michel Verlan. It’s a pretty chunk of change for a bottle like that, if you can even get your hands on one. They never make much of it, and to find a bottle that old is really unusual. It’s definitely not your typical booty-call red. Personally, I usually bring a six-pack of Corona and call it done.”
Sunny nodded. “Can I get a glass of water?”
Nick filled a glass and put it down in front of her, then held up a finger and went to tend to customers down at the other end of the bar.
Sunny sipped the water. It was the same wine, the wine she and Andre drank, the really expensive, old, rare French wine. The phrase booty-call red kept running through her mind
like a mantra of disaster. She was slightly nauseous. There was a possibility, small but growing, that she would regret the dish of deep-fried olives with anchovy. She needed a moment to think and get her head together. She decided to take refuge in the ladies’.
It seemed to take forever to cross the dining room, and the stairway leading downstairs looked impossibly far away. With each step she became more conscious of the placement of one foot in front of the other, making it more and more difficult to walk. The buzz of conversation in the dining room receded and she heard instead the rasp and click of her heels on the floor. They struck the polished concrete loudly with each step and after a while that was all she could hear.
7
The bathroom at Vinifera had a foyer decorated like a bachelor pad. Sunny sat down on a white leather bench and put her head between her knees, staring at the zebra print rug under her feet and hoping no one would come in. Breathing heavy little breaths, she sorted through the facts, putting them in order, trying to figure out what they could mean.
It seemed to go like this: On Saturday night, Nathan Osborne came home from Vinifera late, died in his living room, and had a mysterious visitor who left behind a very expensive bottle of wine. On Sunday, Andre Morales used a forgery of the same expensive bottle of wine as an excuse to get her to come home with him (not that he needed much of one). Nick Ambrosi didn’t find Nathan until Monday morning, but whoever visited Nathan on Saturday night would have known all day Sunday that he was dead. She thought about family meal out on the back patio at Vinifera Sunday night, with Andre sitting next to her. He had seemed relaxed enough. He was the one who asked where Nathan was. She remembered Remy Castels reaching over them to refill their glasses. Remy had been cordial, even cheerful that night, at least compared to his demeanor when they’d met him in the wine cellar. Rivka had been sitting beside her, and across from them was Dahlia, the pagan waitress with the blue hair. Nick had been there. He was the one who’d said Nathan hadn’t called for his car that day and that Nathan was feeling no pain by the time he took him home on Saturday night. There were a dozen faces at the table, and more at the other table. There was the guy who made the crack about Nathan going to live at some other restaurant, and there was the co-owner, Eliot Denby, who’d been pouring himself a glass of wine behind the bar as she and Andre left. It made her head thud to imagine one of them might have stood in Nathan’s living room Saturday night, witness to his death, and told no one.
The existence of those two very unusual bottles of wine in such close proximity to Nathan’s death was too coincidental. The scene in Nathan Osborne’s living room late Saturday night was growing darker by the minute. There had to be a connection, and it was ominous. The thing to do was call Sergeant Harvey right now and enlighten him about the existence of the second bottle. It could be the break in the case he was looking for.
But her late-night activities would land center stage in an investigation of what was starting to look a lot like murder, and Andre Morales would be right in the spotlight. New lovers were hard enough to find without turning them over to the local law enforcement agency at the first sign of trouble. He couldn’t be involved. But what if he was? What if Andre knew about the wine being phony? What if he was involved in its production? What if he knew more about Nathan’s death than he was saying? That Andre might be involved in murder was impossible to even contemplate. What made more sense, if any of this made sense at all, was that Nathan had discovered the fraudulent wine and had been killed to keep him quiet. In that case, Andre might be in danger as well, especially if word got out that he’d had his hands on the bogus Marceline. There were more leaps and assumptions than she was comfortable with, but there were too many coincidences and she had to start somewhere. The important thing now was to find out where the phony wine came from, who knew about it, and if it had anything to do with Nathan’s death. If Andre was involved, she wanted to know exactly how before she said anything about it to the police—and before she got further involved with him. Regardless of what she ultimately discovered, the faster she moved, the better. One thing was certain, there was more to Nathan Osborne’s death than heart disease.
Sunny went over to the mirror, hoping the ritual of freshening up would calm her down. While she combed her hair unnecessarily, smoothed powder over her nose, and glossed her lips, she wondered how much she really knew about Andre Morales anyway. She knew he was born in September, had a promising career as a chef, and lived in the kind of house where the sheets and towels coordinated nicely with the rugs, duvet, and curtains. She knew he was born in Mexico, had tiger eyes, and wore a leather jacket that smelled like pine pitch and campfire smoke. She knew that one of his kisses could open a view to a wide landscape of desire, and that his biceps, round and full, were good places to let her hands come to rest. All of that was sweet and lovely, the stuff of pleasant daydreams, but it didn’t tell her where he got that Premier Grand Cru Reservée or if he had anything to do with dropping the second bottle in Nathan Osborne’s living room.
He would probably be waiting for her when she got back upstairs. She foraged for a mint, as though fresh breath would help her think of what she would say to him, and walked out rehearsing excuses. A server coming out of the wine cellar nearly ran into her as he pushed out the door and jogged upstairs without a second look. She looked at the cellar door. Almost before the idea occurred to her, she slipped inside.
She didn’t bother checking the racks in the middle of the room. What she was looking for was bound to be locked away in one of the alcoves. Nathan and Andre had at least two things in common, namely Vinifera and Château de Marceline. It stood to reason that both bottles probably came from Vinifera’s cellar, which would be the closest, most convenient source. It was worth having a look, at least. Sunny walked around a mountain of boxed cases to the other side of the cellar, where she peered through the grating on the locked alcoves at the bottles laying down inside. All she could see were the logos stamped into the foil at the end of the bottles on the first rack. There was almost no chance she would see anything useful in the gloomy light without a key to the grating, but she looked into each alcove anyway, hoping to find something. She was at the far end of the cellar, near the last of the alcoves, when the door opened and she saw Remy Castels come in with another man walking behind him.
She froze in the shadows, hoping they wouldn’t look in her direction and quickly trying to think of a reason for her to be there. If they noticed her, she could always say she was curious about their wine collection in a professional capacity and wanted to make some notes. That might not suggest the best manners, but it was at least plausible. She watched them walk over to the main racks and turn down one of the rows. They wouldn’t see her unless they walked to the end of it and looked to the right. She crept over to a far stack of boxes, walking on the toes of her shoes like Catwoman, and sunk down behind them. She listened to them moving around the cave. The man said something she couldn’t hear. Remy’s reply was too muffled to make out. They rounded a corner and she could hear them more clearly. Remy said, “I’d have to check, but I don’t think we’ve bought any in months. He made those bottles last.”
“At that price, I’m sure as hell glad he did,” said the other man. His deep voice resonated in the stone chamber.
“He drank very little of that kind of thing lately,” said Remy.
The man chuckled. “You’d never know it.”
They turned down another row and Remy said, “What did you need, the ninety-four?” and the other’s voice said, “Ninety-six.”
“Take the ninety-four. Tell them it’s worth the extra fifteen dollars. If they resist, give it to them at the same price as the ninety-six.”
“Will do.”
She heard heavy footsteps and then the door, presumably the other man leaving. Remy’s shoes made a soft, coarse sound as he moved down the rows of wine. His steps grew louder as he walked toward her, along the corridor that went past the alcoves. She edged further awa
y, crouching low and hugging the card-board boxes of wine. He stopped and she heard the jangle of keys and a lock opening on one of the grate doors. A few minutes later it shut with a loud metallic clang and he walked back across the cellar to the main door and out. She exhaled with relief and walked around the far end of the cases toward the door.
All that adrenaline was a waste of time. If she was going to find a bottle of Marceline in this place, she was going to need those keys. She was trying to think of ways that that might happen when, off to her left, a stack of boxes caught her eye. Several cases had been set aside on a pallet and secured with the wide plastic wrap used to hold shipments of cartons together. One of the boxes was labeled “Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque.” Forget the keys.
She went over to have a closer look. The box on top had been opened. Looking around first to make sure she was alone, she lifted one of the cardboard flaps and pulled up a bottle. The foil was red. The label said “1967 Premier Grand Cru Reservée,” with “Michel Verlan” spelled out in red capital letters near the bottom, an etching of a château faint in the background. She lifted the other flap. Two bottles were missing from the case. She let the flaps drop and stepped back. A piece of paper with “Do Not Touch—Reserved for Wine Club” written on it in black marker was taped to the boxes and sealed over with cellophane.
Her heart was beating hard as she went upstairs and walked back to the bar. She waited for Nick to work his way over to her. When he got there, she asked him to tell Andre she wasn’t feeling well and had gone home. He said for her to wait just a second and he would go get Andre so she could tell him herself, but she said, no, she needed to leave right now, and would call him later.
He gave her a concerned look. “All right, whatever you say. Are you okay?”
“I don’t think it’s serious. I just don’t want to get sick again,” she said. People left you alone when your stomach was threatening, she found.
