A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) (33 page)

A blast of cold damp air hit me in the face as I entered the central hallway. It was coming from the open front door, where Alexandra Pappos was standing with my father’s pistol hanging by her side.

“Alexandra!” I yelled, trotting toward her as fast as I could on my still weak ankle. “I asked you to stay upstairs. Why did you open the door?” I went past her and grabbed the doorknob.

“I heard something,” Alexandra said and pointed outside.

“What did you see?” I asked, peering out into the night. “Where?” I took a step halfway out the door. The fog was damp on my skin, the air cold and biting.

“Who? Who is out there?” I was still staring out into the night. The fog was even deeper now. It wreathed my legs and twirled up across my face. I could see nothing. I turned back to her. “Let’s get inside and—“

The raw, body-odor smell hit me a split second before I heard footsteps on the walkway behind me. Almost on top of me! I tried to spin around, but my bad ankle gave out halfway through the maneuver and I fell to my knees on the stoop. I didn’t stay down long before a massive hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked me back up, wrenching my neck and almost tearing my scalp off my skull.

Bartlett gave me a small, mean smile as he kept lifting me, forcing me to rise up on my tiptoes as a scream built in my throat. A scream that was rendered mute with terror when he raised his free hand and pointed a revolver between my eyes.

“Payback time,” he said.

Chapter 34

“Don’t hurt her,” Armand
Rivincita said from somewhere behind Bartlett, out of sight in the fog. Hidden as he was, his voice came to me disembodied, flat and impersonal, almost lifeless. “Take her into the living room.”

Bartlett lowered the pistol, released his grip on my hair, spun me around and pushed me into the house, around the corner and into the front room. My bad ankle failed me again and I stumbled after three steps, to fall sprawling on the floor.

Armand followed us into the living and stared silently down at me. He too had a pistol in his hand, hanging loose at his side, but it wasn’t the big silver automatic he‘d had at his home earlier that day. I recognized it as my father’s pistol – the one that had been in Alexandra’s hand just a moment ago.

Armand looked at Bartlett. “Help her to her feet,” he said.

“Don’t touch me,” I barked as Bartlett bent down. I shoved myself up and stepped to the left where I could lean my back against the arm of the sofa, just out of his reach and facing all three of them. “Lay a hand on me and I’ll crack your skull again,” I added, pointedly eyeing the bandage on his forehead.

He touched the bandage, his muddy eyes boring into my own. “I’ll kill you for that,” he promised.

“You’ve tried twice and failed,” I snapped back at him, my instinctive combativeness winning out over my fear. I slid my right hand behind my back until my knuckles brushed the pry bar through the loose material of my shirt. I didn’t pull it out, however. I’d have to wait for a chance to make it count.

Bartlett took a plodding step forward, his gun sweeping up.

My hand slid under my shirt and touched the cool steel.

“Not in here!” Armand said harshly, as if he was calling a dog to heel. And Bartlett did heel. He stopped dead in his tracks. But he didn’t look happy about it. His tiny eyes stayed glued to my face as he reluctantly
backed away. He stopped in the hall doorway, his huge frame blocking it almost completely.

Armand shot a glance at Alexandra, waved at the sofa and said “Sit down.”

Alexandra complied, moving with the jerky motions of a marionette. It was obvious she was as frightened as I was, but that didn’t abrogate the anger I felt with her. It might have been unkind, but what kind of fool opens the door to a pair of murderers? And we were going to pay the ultimate price for her mistake.

Armand continued to stare at Alexandra as she crossed the room and sat on the far edge of the sofa, her eyes downcast. “Don’t worry. This will be over soon, mitera,” he said with an edge of sarcasm.

The word, mitera, rocked me so badly I almost slid down the side of the sofa. I recognized it from many years of hearing Samson mutter it as part of a variety of curse words.

“Mother?” I said, looking between Armand and Alexandra. Neither of them spoke, but they didn’t need to explain it to me because that single word was like the final linchpin of a complicated puzzle. Suddenly it all came into sharp focus.

I recalled the mesmerized
expression on Alexandra’s face as she had stared at Armand at my crush party. Then the witch’s ladders – a gypsy curse - that Dimitri and Samson had both received. And Samson’s semi-delirious statement that, ‘The devil is not dead’ after we had dragged him out of the fiery cellar at Star Crossed. And, finally, the ICU nurse telling me that Samson had muttered ‘The devil sorts us’ over and over, like a dying man’s lament. But Samson hadn’t said ‘The devil sorts us,’ I now realized.

“Sotis,” I whispered, and Armand looked sharply over at me. He smiled then, but there was no friendliness in it; it was a cold and lifeless rictus. “You’re Alexandra’s son,” I said, searching his face, trying to see a resemblance that wasn’t there. He was tall and blond, though with a swarthy complexion. And then I remembered Alexandra had said her husband, Sotis Senior, had been light-haired and eyed. Northern Italian.

“Correct,” he said with a hint of surprise. “You are clever, Claire,” he added, then turned his cold gaze back on Alexandra. “Me, mom, and grandpa together again. One big happy family.”

Alexandra flinched as if she had been slapped. “Sotis—”

“Shut up,” Armand said flatly, without rancor or heat.

“Please, do not hurt her. Make it quick,” Alexandra continued. “You promised me that much.”

Those words hit me in the solar plexus like a punch. I stared down at Alexandra. “Not you too?” I said, the word wheezing out of my airless lungs. “You’re with them?”

She didn’t raise her head. Didn’t look at me. “He is my son,” she said. “I thought he was dead until …” she went silent, but I finished her sentence.

“Until you saw him at my party.”

She nodded. “He looks just like his father,” she whispered. “I knew it was him.”

“Did you know he killed Dimitri? That night?” I demanded, and she shook her head, but I knew it was a lie. “And that he was going to kill Samson today?” My voice grew louder by the word, and more contemptuous. Another betrayal. Another liar. “My God,
you’re
the one who got Samson to go to Star Crossed today, aren’t you? You set him up! Your own father!”

Alexandra’s shoulders slumped lower and lower with every accusation, but that only made me angrier. I turned on Armand.

“You lured Dimitri here to the Valley to kill him,” I said. “You got Blake to offer him enough money to come
halfway across the world
just so you could kill him.”

Armand eyed me for a moment, his gaze detached, impersonal, like I was a bug tacked to a dissection board. “That’s partly true. I showed Blake how he could save his business—”

“By stealing his customers’ wine and replacing it with fakes,” I cut in.

He shook his head. “Not fakes,” he said, “Just less acclaimed vintages. I’ve been doing it for years and never got caught. When I saw Blake’s customer list, I almost started to drool. It was perfect, and the risk was far lower than selling the counterfeits on the open market. But Blake took some convincing. He was a fool. Millions of dollars in wine at his disposal and he was going bankrupt.”

“But Dimitri found out,” I said.

Armand nodded. “Dimitri came to me at your party and told me he had found some fake
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti
magnum labels in Blake’s cellar. He actually wanted to warn
me
Blake was stealing my wine. He wanted to go directly to Hunter. I insisted we confront Blake first. And once we had Dimitri in the cellar …” he trailed off with a shrug. “I had no choice.”

“You killed him in cold blood,” I said, shocked at the audacity of this decision to murder Dimitri at a party where forty guests were just outside the cellar doors. I had imagined it was in the heat of the moment, not a calculated act. One more piece of proof I was dealing with a psychopath.

Armand gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I was planning on killing him anyway. But that wasn’t the only reason I lured him here, Claire.” He looked over at Alexandra again and his lips curled with contempt. “I wanted him here because I knew she would follow him.”

It took me a moment to make the connection. “You were going to kill her? Your own mother?”

“I was going to kill them both,” he said, still looking at Alexandra. “But not now. She has been a great help to me. She could have betrayed me at any time,” he paused again then added, “She had done it many times before.”

Alexandra’s head came up. “I did not betray you! I tried to do what was best for you. I tried—”

“Shut up,” he said again in that curiously flat voice. “You sent me to prison.”

“It was a school for children like you—”

“For animals,” Armand said. “The things that were done to me there…” he shook his head as if to erase the mental images.

“And what about Samson?” I asked, drawing his attention back to me. “He’s your grandfather!”

“He is nothing to me,” Armand said. “But he has something that is rightfully mine. And I want it.”

That’s when my anger got the better of me. Not just at Armand, but at myself. I was not going to cower here and wait to die. Armand wasn’t the first psychopath I had dealt with.

Of course, the first psychopath had almost killed me…

“His money,” I said, injecting as much contempt as I could into those two words. “You want his money.”

“My money,”
he said.
“My
inheritance. Money that he has squandered on those peasants in
Naousa.
”

“He was atoning for the murders you committed!” I shot back. “For the people you killed!”

Armand shook his head. “I was a child myself. It was an accident,” he said, though I don’t think he believed it. I remembered the way he had looked at the fire at Star Crossed. That feverish, unfocused look in his eyes. “And they’re dead, Claire. They have no use for money,” he continued matter-of-factly, like a banker tallying up an account.

Alexandra’s head ducked back down and her shoulders began to shake. I knew she was crying again but I had no sympathy for her now. She was as guilty as Armand.

“What you’re doing now is no accident,” I said, trying to drag out the conversation, hoping Hunter was racing up the mountain road at that moment. But the fog was so dense I knew he would make slow time. I was on my own. “You’ve killed four people. You planned to kill your
entire family!”

“The Pappos family had millions in property but we lived like paupers,” Armand said, getting truly angry for the first time. His voice trembled and his eyes blazed as he vented a rage that had obviously been nursed for thirty years until it became insanity. “Every day I had to work in the vines. Like a slave! We had nothing when we could have had it
all!
In the village they called me gyftoi and spat on the ground behind me to ward off the evil eye. But I knew I was better than them. Stronger. After the fire I left that place. Twelve years old and I was all alone. You cannot imagine the things I did to survive - the things that were done to me - but I
did
survive. And
more.
I got rich. But it didn’t change how I felt about them. Over the years I only grew angrier. They had to pay.”

“Rivincita,” I interrupted, finally getting the bitter joke his name implied. Rivincita is Italian for revenge. I think I had been dimly aware of that, but it had never clicked.

Armand smiled at that. “A name I took many years ago. A reminder of what had been done to me.
And
of what I was going to do to them.”

“Sheriff Drake is on his way here, now,” Alexandra interjected. She swiped at her eyes with a tissue and stood. “You must hurry, Sotis.”

“Don’t call me that!” Armand bellowed at her, fixing her with a fierce glare. “Never call me that!” She wilted back to the sofa.

Armand turned back to me and his voice regained its cold composure like flicking a switch. “What have you told Hunter?” he asked.

“Everything,” I said quickly, trying to sound triumphant as my hands trembled and my heart banged against my ribs at triple speed. I knew I was counting down the minutes to my death, but I wasn’t going to go quietly. My hand slid under my shirt to touch the cold steel of the pry bar. Once again I was taking a stick into a gunfight, but it was better than nothing.

“I doubt that,” he said. “And, anyway, I’ll have to take the chance. I’ve gone too far to stop.”

“You’ll never get to Samson. You’ll never see a penny of that money,” I promised him.

Armand laughed in my face. “It’s funny you should say that. Those are the
exact
words that Samson said after I shot him. He told me he had left everything to you, Claire. It’s the only reason I didn’t kill him there in Blake’s cellar.”

The confusion I felt must have been written on my face, because Armand went on to explain, “Dead people can’t inherit.” He paused significantly, but I was still missing the point.

“If you die before Samson, even if it is only a matter of hours, the estate goes to his next of kin.” He glanced at his mother again. “My mitera will inherit and I will take control of the estate.”

“If you think you’re going to make it back to Greece alive, you’re as crazy as your son,” I said to her. “This has nothing to do with the money; that’s just an excuse he’s cooked up so he doesn’t have to face the fact that he’s a psychopath. He’s going to kill you whether he gets the money or not.”

Alexandra didn’t look up, and she didn’t speak. I think she already knew her fate. I think she had accepted it as an act of contrition.

Armand didn’t bother to refute that. He looked at Bartlett and gave the brute a curt nod. “We’ve wasted enough time,” he said. “Don’t mark her up.”

Bartlett smile gleefully as he crossed the room and grabbed me by the elbow. I tried to wrench it free, but that was hopeless. He dragged me across the carpet, out into the entryway, then pushed me flat against the hall wall. He stepped back, and raised the pistol, aiming it at my forehead.

Armand had followed us. He stepped to the left, down the hallway toward the kitchen but still within my reach.

“Home invasion,” Armand said as he raised my father’s pistol. He cocked the hammer and aimed it at my breastbone.