The Chardonnay Charade (15 page)

“So it’s true you didn’t like her?”

“I didn’t say that. And frankly, it’s none of your business what my personal opinion of her was.”

He was right, of course, but I kept going. “I saw the two of you leave the fund-raiser together. You’re one of the last people to see her alive, except for whoever had sex with her. And her killer. Unless they were the same person. Then you’re probably the next-to-last.”

He leaned toward me and poked his right index finger at my chest, jabbing the air as he spoke. “How dare you? I have no idea who she was with that night. And as for your smutty insinuation, I volunteered to give the sheriff a DNA mouth-swab sample. No one had to coerce me. After I left Georgia—
alive
—I was on the phone most of the night making fund-raising calls to the West Coast and talking strategy with my campaign manager in L.A.”

He lowered his finger and, instinctively, it seemed, began twisting his wedding ring around and around. But his hands trembled. So he had a verifiable alibi.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Senator. But the sheriff thinks Ross Greenwood killed her and he’s innocent, too.”

The temperature between us hovered near absolute zero. “Then let the sheriff do his job and mind your own business. I need to get back to my guests. I think we’re done here.”

After the limousines had gone and Quinn and I were cleaning up, he said to me, “What the hell happened with you and Lang out there on the terrace? What’d you do to him to get him so royally pissed off?”

“I tried to talk to him about his daughter and my sister, who spend their evenings together getting drunk,” I said. “He said Abby’s over twenty-one and that was the end of the conversation.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean?” I was stalling and he knew it.

“Don’t make me drag it out of you. Right after he came back in I heard him ask Bonita for a glass of water. He took a pill and I saw his hands shaking so bad he spilled the water. Must have been something you said to him.”

“I asked him about Georgia,” I said. “So did the sheriff. He said he did one of those DNA swabs proving he didn’t have sex with her. I guess talking about it rattled his cage.”

Quinn put a cork in a bottle of Cab and set it under the bar. “So he’s off the hook, is he?” He looked at me soberly. “You never should have said anything to him. He’s right. You were out of line.”

“Maybe so, but you know something? I think he’s hiding something.” I wiped the tile counter with a sponge, then wrung it out like it needed strangling. “Lot of that going around lately.” I slapped the sponge down on the edge of the sink.

“Something else bugging you?” he asked. “You’ve been in a rotten mood all day. Ever since you came back from Leesburg.”

“I feel great,” I snapped. “See you tomorrow.”

Afterward at home neither the novel on my bedside table nor an old movie on television held my interest, so I finally gave up around midnight and went downstairs to the kitchen. An open bottle of California Chardonnay—what else?—in the refrigerator looked pretty good. I poured a glass and drank it sitting in the glider, pushing myself back and forth with my good foot.

I didn’t see the faint light coming from beyond the rosebushes until my eyes adjusted to the moonlit darkness. Quinn must have gone to the summerhouse with his telescope. He probably couldn’t sleep any more than I could. Maybe the tension between the two of us kept him awake, too.

I picked up my cane and walked across the dew-damp grass. In the stillness, his voice startled me. I was about to call out when I heard the other voice. Female. For a moment I stood there like I’d grown roots, waiting.

Then I heard her giggle. “You are so awesome.”

Less than a day and he already made a move for Bonita. Their voices rose and fell, sweet chuckles and gentle teasing. Too quiet to understand what they were saying, but expressive enough to know what they were doing.

He’d asked me to look at the stars with him—but that was before he met her. If I had secretly hoped Quinn’s invitation to go stargazing was anything more than a casual offer, then it was my own stupid fault. I walked back to the veranda and threw the rest of the Chardonnay onto the lawn. Halfway up the spiral staircases on my way back to bed, the phone rang.

“Sorry to be calling so late, but I knew you’d want to know.” Kit sounded agitated. “Bobby just told me the D.C. police found Randy.”

“D.C.?” I said. “What’s he doing in Washington?”

“He probably didn’t start out in D.C.,” she said. “They found his car upstream parked near White’s Ferry. The cops fished his body out of the Potomac. He must have floated downstream. You were right. He’s dead. Shot himself through the head at point-blank range.”

The news about Randy overshadowed everything that was—or wasn’t—going on between Quinn and me. I told him first thing the next morning when we got to the villa.

“Christ, that’s awful.” He was standing in the doorway to my office. “I can’t imagine him wading out into the water…and bang. How do they know it was suicide? Randy doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d do something like that, if you ask me.”

“Kit told me the police fished his gun out of the water at White’s Ferry. He left a note. In his car. All it said was, ‘I’m sorry.’ It makes me sick thinking about it.”

“They have any idea how long he’d been in the Potomac?”

“Long enough to float,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have found him. His body would have sunk at first. Then…the gases…so he’d float. Plus there are so many rocks and falls between White’s Ferry and T. R. Island that his body could have caught on something and got stuck upstream for a while.”

“That’s where he washed up? Teddy Roosevelt Island?”

I nodded. “I’m meeting Kit for a drink tonight at the English pub in Upperville before Georgia’s wake. I’ll get the rest of the story then.”

“Damn shame,” he said. “Keep me posted.”

Yesterday we’d decided he’d spend the day in the barrel room with Bonita and Jesús to finish filtering the Chardonnay and get the bottles washed and sterilized. I’d be in the fields with the rest of the crew, planting rootstock. Today I wasn’t sorry we weren’t going to be in each other’s company. He didn’t know about my near-miss viewing of him and Bonita in flagrante delicto. If I heard him asking her to open and close the ball valve in the tank, I know I’d start thinking about other things and my face would probably show it.

Manolo picked me up in front of the entrance to the villa, Spanish music blaring loudly through the open windows of Hector’s Super-man-blue pickup truck. He turned the music down as I threw my garden gloves and cane on the passenger-side floor and climbed in.

“How many guys have we got?” I pulled on Eli’s old New York Mets baseball cap and tucked my hair into it.

“Ten,” Manolo said. “César’s with a couple of them, digging fence-post holes for the Norton block. The rest are planting.”

“Let’s try to get all the Viognier done today,” I said. “If there’s time, we can start the Seyval. Or maybe a few of the men can help César put up trellis wires.”

He nodded. “We should finish the Viognier, easy. Then we can see how far along César is.”

Manolo had been with us almost since the vineyard opened, though he was a good thirty years younger than Hector. My mother and Hector hired Manolo almost as soon as he arrived from Mexico. He’d told Hector he was eighteen, to which Hector reportedly replied, “Sure you are, and I’m Benito Juárez.” We finally found out he was only fifteen. At first he worked for us during the season and washed dishes for local restaurants the rest of the year. Gradually, as we became more established, we were able to keep him on year-round. For the last few years he’d been the unofficial
jefe
when Hector wasn’t there and the men respected him. I knew he had a string of girlfriends but no one serious enough to marry. He also liked to hang out in the Hispanic bars around Herndon and Sterling, but what he did on his own time was his business and he never once showed up for work drunk or hungover. Though he wasn’t as steady and methodical as Hector, he had good instincts and a sense of humor. I liked him. He would be a good manager.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure,” he said easily.

“Do you know Emilio Mendez?”

He didn’t take his eyes off the road, though he could have driven it with them closed. “I heard the cops are looking for him.”

“That wasn’t the question,” I said quietly. “You know him, then, don’t you?”

“No.”

“But you could find out where he is?”

“He’s laying low, Lucie. His girlfriend’s older boy got in with a gang. They don’t want trouble.”

“The police need Emilio and Marta to say that Dr. Greenwood delivered their babies the night his wife was murdered,” I said. “They won’t do anything to the boy.”

“You don’t know that. You’re not the cops.” The easiness had vanished.

“What if I can get Bobby Noland to come here to the vineyard—alone—and talk to them right here? Then they can leave.”

“They’ll never believe that.” He was adamant.

“Could you get them to talk to me, at least?”

“I don’t know. I told you, they’re scared.”

“An innocent man could get convicted of his wife’s murder,” I said. “He took care of them when they needed him. Please, Manolo. I’m begging.”

He parked the truck next to our two green and yellow Gators. Finally he said, “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

He wasn’t going to budge. “Thank you,” I said.

We both got out of the truck, Manolo giving orders to the crew in staccato Spanish as he pulled on a pair of muddy gloves. “Lucie, you gonna prune the roots, right?” His expression was bland. No more discussing Emilio and Marta.

I nodded and picked up a pair of pruning shears that were lying in the back of one of the Gators, then pulled on my own gloves. Message received.

Until the vines were ready to be planted, we kept them soaking in five-gallon utility buckets filled with water. Between one and two feet long, the vines had thin, straggly roots like a woman’s tangled hair. I unthreaded one from the bulky mass in the bucket and lifted it out of the muddy water, trimming the roots until they were even. Next I handed the vine off to whoever was ready to plant. Slowly the pile of trimmings at my feet grew.

Ever since we’d been in business, we got our rootstock from a nursery near Williamsburg. It was top quality—and we paid for it—because in Virginia we still had a problem with phylloxera. A devastating aphid that fed on the roots and foliage of vines, it changed the world of viticulture forever when, in the mid-1800s, European botanists unknowingly took infected American vine cuttings home with them. The result was a horticultural catastrophe, as millions of acres of European vineyards that lacked the natural resistance of American vines withered and died. Only American rootstock, grafted onto European vines, had saved the industry from obliteration.

As a result, the cuttings we got now were also two different vines grafted together and held in place by a wax nodule—the roots, or rootstock, which was phylloxera-resistant, and the scion, or top of the vine, which in this case was Viognier, the actual vine variety.

Planting vines is the same slow, backbreaking manual labor it’s been since Noah supposedly planted the first vineyard on the slopes of Mount Ararat. For a while, the only sound was the metallic chipping of shovels above the gentle whistling of the wind. The men set the plants in holes about a foot deep, keeping two to three feet between each vine. Other vineyards planted their vines farther apart, but we followed the European way, thanks to Jacques, which meant one strong trunk per vine that grew straight up before spreading out along the top wire. Had we left the canes on the lower wires, they’d be stripped by foxes, groundhogs, raccoons, or geese. Even now we had to put grow tubes—pale blue plastic tubing—over the bases of the young vines to protect them from being eaten.

I stayed out in the fields until early afternoon, then took one of the Gators back to the villa. My bad foot ached from standing so long, but I’d die before I’d admit it to the men. Instead I told Manolo I needed to catch up on paperwork.

He nodded. “We’re okay here. I’ll stop by later and let you know how much we get planted.”

I made myself a pot of coffee in the kitchen, then went back to my office and propped my foot up on my wastebasket. Halfway through calculations for the monthly TTB report—the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau—Quinn appeared in the doorway holding an unlit cigar.

“Hey,” he said, “how come you didn’t let me know you were back? I thought you were going to come by the barrel room when you were done in the fields.”

I set down my pen. “Because it’s the end of the month and this report is due.”

He squinted at me. “What’s your problem? I say anything and you bite my head off. Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

“Nothing I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “How about you? Is there something you want to tell me?”

At first his expression was blank, then the light dawned in his eyes. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I get it. Mick Dunne. You’re upset about that.”

I exploded. “How come you didn’t say anything? Why did I have to hear about it from someone else? I thought you were working for me. Here. At this vineyard.”

He held up a hand. “Whoa, sweetheart. Stop right there. You don’t own me. I am not your property.”

“Of course I don’t own you. That’s a cheap shot and you know it. But you still could have told me that you’re moonlighting…or whatever it is you’re doing…for Mick. The other day you were barely civil to him. Now you’re his new best friend.”

“He pays well,” he said. “And, no offense, but I’m not exactly breaking the bank on the salary I get from you.”

His words hit like a bucket of cold water. But he made perfect sense. Money.

“I see. So he was the high bidder. You should have told me it was an auction.”

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I’m just giving the guy advice. He’s paying me for it. You ought to be flattered he thinks you’ve got yourself someone good who knows what he’s doing. He could have asked anyone. Especially with the money he’s throwing around.”

“Did he offer you a job as his winemaker?”

“No.” He looked at me levelly. “I work here.”

“That’s good to know, because I wasn’t sure. I’d better get back to this report. I’m meeting Kit at six and Georgia’s wake is at seven-thirty.” I started punching numbers on the calculator again. He didn’t move or speak.

Finally he said, “You coming here tomorrow before the funeral?”

“I don’t know.” I kept making calculations, eyes fixed on the LED display. “I’ll call you in the morning and let you know.”

“Sure,” he said. “Call me. I got those EPA reports to finish getting ready. Sorry for disturbing you.”

After he was gone I put my head down on my desk and thought about him working for Mick and what had happened last night when I went out to the summerhouse and heard him with Bonita.

I never did get that report done.

Kit was nursing a beer at a table on the terrace when I got to the pub. In the milky light, her face looked washed out and marionette lines framed her mouth. It took a moment before I realized her pallor was due to the fact that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. I wondered if she’d been crying.

“Want a beer?” she said. “Keep me company.”

“Sure.” I sat down. “Talk to me.”

“A Boy Scout troop found Randy. They were working on some merit badge studying woodland sanctuaries.”

“Oh, God. Those poor kids.”

“He was in awful shape, Luce. At least that’s what Bobby said.”

“He must have died instantly from that gunshot wound.”

Kit nodded. “Looks like it, but they’re still doing the autopsy.”

“Did they find anything that tied him to Georgia’s murder besides the note?”

“A yellow hazmat jumpsuit in the trunk of his car,” she said. “And I’m not supposed to know this, but they found a used condom in your barn. A couple of ’em. They’re waiting for the results to see if there’s a match with what they found on Georgia.”

The waitress set down my beer and another for Kit. We clinked glasses.

“Do you believe he killed himself?” Kit swallowed more beer.

“As opposed to what? Someone staged it to make it look like he did?” I asked.

Kit nodded. “There’s one person who wanted them both dead.” She picked up her beer coaster and began rolling it back and forth like a wheel. “Ross.”

“Who couldn’t have done it,” I said flatly. “He wasn’t there. So let’s move on. Georgia left the party with Hugo Lang, but he was on the phone all night making calls after he said good night to Georgia. And he gave a cheek swab for DNA. So he wasn’t the one who had sex with her, though I think he’s nervous about something.”

“Hell, yeah. It’s called the vice presidential nomination,” Kit said. “He needs this kind of tabloid fodder tarnishing his pristine image like a hole in the head. I’m sure he can’t wait for the funeral and everything to blow over.”

I thought about what she’d said and Hugo’s shaking hands. That kind of high-stakes politics—even without all the tawdriness of Georgia’s death and now Randy’s body being recovered—could account for the strung-out nerves. “I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. So eliminate Hugo. You want something to eat? I’m starved.” Kit signaled for the waitress and asked for an order of french fries. Then she said, “So who did it, if you’re so sure it wasn’t Ross?”

“I still think we ought to consider the possibility someone was after Randy, rather than Georgia.”

“You mean besides the Cancún girlfriend?” she asked, and I nodded. “Who’ve you got in mind?”

“Jen Seely seemed too defensive when I asked her about Randy. I think she knows something. Or she’s hiding something. Maybe about Randy.”