Dead in the Dregs (29 page)

I sighed. “We know they were killed because they were writers, wine critics. That’s why you asked me whether Feldman was left-handed. His writing hand.”

“Good.”

“Pitot took a trophy from each victim.”

“
Oui.
”

“But you’ll need to find the wine. ‘
Le cépage critique.
’”

“Very amusing,” Sackheim said, without cracking a smile.

“When you find it—if you find it—you’ll need to subject it to chemical analysis to check for traces of Wilson’s and Feldman’s blood,” I continued.

“
C’est extraordinaire
,” he murmured, shaking his head.

“But then there’s Kiers . . .”

“
D’accord.
Who shot Lucas Kiers?”

“There’s something fishy about Carrière. You know, at the Hospices, he threatened me.” Sackheim glanced at me sharply. “I know—why didn’t I tell you? But he only implied it, that I had to stop snooping around or something would happen to me. I don’t know. I think you guys need to look more closely at the family tree.”

“What is this, a ‘family tree’?”

“You know, the genealogy that Ponsard drew.”

“
Ah, la généalogie, oui
,” Sackheim nodded. “I could not agree more. No, the investigation must continue. Nothing is as simple as it seems.”

He paused, then spoke slowly, thoughtfully: “We French are less sanguine in our pursuit of the truth. We love to talk, to argue the fine points, to labor over
toutes les nuances.
We do not presume innocence.
Au contraire
, we presume guilt. And it is this system that charges the
juge d’enquête
to conduct his inquiry, to pursue all the crucial bits of evidence in his search for the truth. Something is wrong here. He will take his time. He will make an exhaustive inquiry into the facts of the case until he feels that he has achieved an accurate understanding of what has taken place.”

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you. I’ve got to get home. I promised my son we’d be together on Thanksgiving. If I screw this up . . . I have to be there, that’s all.”

“Of course, I understand,” he said.

For the moment, there was nothing else to say.

Sackheim called me a taxi, and I picked up my car at the
gendarmerie.
I stopped at a café in Auxey-Duresses on the way to the
gîte
and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of red wine. Then I had a second glass. After lunch I walked out behind the restaurant to a stream that ran through woods. I watched the water for a while, hoping it would wash everything away. It didn’t. Back at the car, I called Air France and booked my flight home. I couldn’t take any more.

Monique was in
the house waiting for me when I got back. I was surprised to see her and even more startled to learn that she was worried about me.

“How’d you get in?” I asked.

“The door was unlocked. Anyway, I spoke to Philippe Frossard. He said it was okay.” She looked directly at me. “I didn’t know where you were, and no one was here.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her anything about where I’d been or what I’d seen, but I didn’t see any way around it.

“How well do you know Jean?” I began.

“Jean?”

“You know, the guy you were arguing with at Gauffroy,” I said, too sarcastically, given what I was about to tell her.

She sat down on the sofa. “He wants to be with me. I told him to leave me alone.”

“That’s it? That’s all?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You ever meet his parents?” I asked, sitting next to her.

“Once,” she said. “He hates them.”

“Why?”

“Have you seen them? His father?” I nodded. “He’s a bastard, a drunk. A dreadful person.”

“What about his mother?”

“She scares me.” She peered into the dead embers of the fireplace.

“The only one who scares me is Carrière,” I said. “What’s the deal with him?”

“What do you mean, ‘the deal’?”

“Jean works there. But why would Carrière send him to Napa?” She eyed me warily. “You knew he was there, working at Norton, when Richard was killed, right?”

“He didn’t talk about it,” she said, her voice suddenly distant.

“I know what you mean. And I think there’s a reason.”

She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve, pulling it until there was a visible rent in the fabric.

“I tried asking him, but he wouldn’t talk to me,” I added.

“Ask him what?”

“About Richard. Why he really was in California and why he left.”

She bent over and cut the thread with her teeth, then rolled it between her fingers into a ball and set it on the coffee table.

“But his
stage
was over,” she said.

“Just like yours here,” I said.

“
D’ac.
” She said nothing, only stared at me. “So, what have you learned? You have figured it all out, right?” she finally said.

“Absolutely nothing. Every person I’ve wanted to talk to is dead. With the exception of Goldoni, that is.”

Her eyes searched mine for an explanation.

“Jean is dead,” I said. “Drowned. We found him in the well at the Pitots’ house.” She put her hand to her lips as the color drained from her face.

“Who are you?” she asked. “All these terrible things happen around you.” Her eyes were accusing, her voice tense and shrill.

It was time to tell her what I knew, what Ponsard had learned about the Pitots, about my search for Feldman and the incident at Domaine Carrière, about Lucas Kiers. When I got to the part about finding Feldman’s body, I left out the grisly details. She sat with her legs tucked underneath her, her expression uncomprehending.

“But why you?” she said. “What is happening?”

I described my relationship to Janie, my history with Richard.

“So, you are his . . . how do you say,
beau-frère
?”

“His brother-in-law. Ex-brother-in-law.”

Her expression was pained. She touched my hand.

“So, you are here because you love your wife still and you thought maybe, if you solve this crime, she will come back to you.”

“Something like that,” I said, though I knew it was far from that simple.

“You think you figured out who killed him?” she asked.

“It seems pretty obvious.”

“Jean?” she said.

“Jean.”

“And why did you think you could do it, solve the crime?” she said softly.

“Richard and I were very similar. I think people misunderstood him.”

“But you’re better than him.”

“Not better,” I said. “Different, maybe, but not better.”

“Well, I think so. And maybe more sensitive.”

“Listen, all I know is that we experienced wine in a similar way. But then he succumbed to the myth of his own power.”

“And you?” she asked gravely.

“I keep running away from myself.”

“I will think about that. Because when you do, you seem to run into dead bodies.”

“I know it seems that way, but none of this has anything to do with me,” I said.

“Are you so sure?”

“Believe me, I’m sure.”

We sat there, at a loss for words.

“
Écoute
, do you want something to eat?” Monique finally asked.

“What I’d like is a stiff drink. Something that wasn’t bottled around here.”

“I know just the place—Pickwick’s.” She pronounced it
Peekweek’s
. She grinned at me.

Her mood was celebratory, giddy. It made no sense. Four men were dead, and not of natural causes.

 

Pickwick’s was as
unlikely a place as you could hope to find in the French wine country: an ersatz Irish pub on a darkened street corner. We walked in, and the bar stink hit our nostrils. Aretha, Springsteen, the Beach Boys on the jukebox. Photographs, posters, and plaques cluttered every wall, every shelf. Firelight and TV shadows flickered against the timbered ceiling, while the horse racing and golf paraphernalia appeared ludicrously out of place. A rail lined with empty boxes for
eaux de vie
and single malts ran the perimeter of the tables. I felt oddly at home seeing Coors and Guinness on tap, Murphy’s, Baileys, and Graham’s tilted bottoms-up at the dispensers. Drinks on the menu sported names like Pappagallo, Cuba Libre, Exotique, and Acapulco. Where did they think they were, Mazatlán? Two drunks lurched at the dartboard, hitting the floor, the wall, everywhere but the bull’s-eye.

We grabbed a booth and I ordered a Johnnie Black and a Coors back. Monique asked for a beer, then walked up to the jukebox and selected Otis Redding to serenade us out of our misery. I might as well have been sitting at Pancho’s. I kept looking at her, pretending we had a future. In the booth behind us I overheard two guys talking in French.

“
C’est vrai
?”

“Is what true?”

“What they’re saying, that they put him through a crusher-destemmer.”

“Well, the rumor is that he was bottled.” His friend laughed. “It’s terrible, but . . . it’s funny, no? The joke is that the skin-to-juice ratio wasn’t very good. And that given his natural
acidité
, he probably isn’t worth drinking. A good writer but a shitty wine.” He cracked up uncontrollably.

Even we had to laugh. But how the hell did they know about Feldman? It seemed impossible.

“It’s true,” I said, leaning over the back of the booth, breaking into English. “How did you hear about it?”

“A friend of mine is a
flic
,” one of them replied, looking startled for only an instant. “He was out at Nuits this morning. Everybody’s talking about it.” His English was fluent.

“Who do you think did it?” I asked. Why not ask? I had nothing to lose.

“Well, one thing’s for sure: Pitot was too stupid and Jean-Luc is too arrogant to have screwed up his own wine.”

“Yeah, right. So, who?”

“Who knows? Unlike Wilson, Feldman made more reputations than he wrecked. He could be hard, but he was fair. Very careful. Meticulous. He did his own work. Every year, the same domaines.
Boomp, boomp, boomp.
His memory was excellent.”

“I guess he was making up for the national deficit,” his friend chimed in. “With exceptions, of course,” he said, nodding in apology. “
Pardon.
”

I scrunched down in the booth. “Unbelievable,” I whispered. “This place is as bad as Napa.”

“Worse,” Monique said.

“Well, then, how about another
pression
?” She nodded.

“How are you feeling?” I said when I returned with our second round. I didn’t know why I asked it, except that she appeared too relaxed.

“About what?” Monique said. She seemed strangely unsurprised by the question.

“I don’t know. About life. You seem relieved, almost happy.”

“I feel cleansed.” It was an odd thing to say under the circumstances.

I asked her what she was going to do.

“I have to get out of here. Home first. Then I’ll see.”

“I’m leaving Wednesday morning,” I said. “Colonel Sackheim will have to solve this insanity without me. One night in Paris, and then . . .” I imitated a plane with the flat of my hand.

She looked down at her hands.

“Come with me. To Paris. One night,” I said. I hadn’t planned on asking her. I wasn’t even sure why I said it, except that Gio would be gone by the time I got home, and the prospect of explaining to Janie everything that had happened suddenly loomed as an impossible task that I wanted to put off as long as possible.

She smiled and looked down again and then up at me, her eyes
pleading and sad. Abruptly, she stood up. I paid our tab at the bar and followed her out.

We strolled down the street to a little park, and I pissed against a stunted tree. My urine smoked in the cold, and the stink scented the air. I zipped my fly and stepped back, barely dodging a pile of dog shit.

We walked slowly, and she held on to my arm, but two rounds without any food in my stomach left me unsteady, and I realized I was leaning on her. The scudding clouds opened and closed across the moon’s face, and the stones of a belfry glowed and darkened in and out of the light. We took a circuitous path. In the center of a square, a statue of a monk stood in repose, a Mona Lisa smirk frozen on its mouth, his hand furled in an odd way.

“You know,” I said, “in Greece that gesture—the funny way he has his hand—means, ‘Come here.’ But in Italy it means, ‘Eat shit.’”

“How in God’s name will we ever make ourselves understood?” she asked in faux protest.

I hugged her to keep her warm, to warm myself, and groped her ass. She slapped my hand and I stumbled a step, and as we zigzagged down the street, I brushed against a man.

“
Pardon
,” I mumbled. He grunted but said nothing, and I looked back at him. He was burly and held himself tightly. From the back, his silhouette reminded me of Carrière, and I shivered uncontrollably.

“Take me home,” I said.

I lay down on the sofa in the living room in front of the fireplace. It was filled with ashes and half-consumed logs and smoldered, hissing and crackling quietly. I was drunk, I knew, but beyond the physical condition of inebriation, I was drunk on death.

Monique leaned down and kissed me—long and deep—and I felt myself falling into her, falling forever, and fell asleep.

I slept late. When I awoke, I could hear the shower running downstairs. She had left the door to the bathroom open and had failed to pull the shower curtain. It was an invitation, and I gazed unabashedly at her body as she soaped her limbs and washed her hair. Breathless, I tore myself away from the vision of her and went
upstairs to brew a pot of coffee. When she emerged she had her hair swathed in a towel. I looked at her, shaking my head in disbelief, and she laughed at me like a little girl.