A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  “Like now.”

  “Yes, like now.”

  “And did you?”

  “Watch the footage from Saturday? Not yet.”

  “Why not?” exclaimed Sunny.

  “There are certain…complications.”

  “What complications?”

  “Just complications. I’ll tell you about it someday when the police have sorted everything out and we’re all back to normal.”

  “What about the police?” insisted Sunny. “They must have the footage from Saturday.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why not? Oliver, you have to give it to them. Those cameras could tell us what happened.”

  “They might help fill in some of the blanks, but they won’t show everything. There’s no camera on that window.”

  “But they could show something important that occurred before she died, or in another part of the house.”

  “Possibly, but I doubt it. How much preamble is there to getting high and falling out a window? Listen, Sunny, I didn’t come here to talk about security cameras. I know you’ve had a long day after a very painful weekend and I don’t want to keep you. I came here tonight to ask you not to share those e-mails that Anna sent you with anyone else. Anna and I were trying to figure out our relationship. She did some not-nice things and so did I. Exposing the details of my private life won’t bring her back, but it could cause a scandal I’m sure everyone would love to read about. I don’t see what good that would do.”

  “You have my word,” said Sunny. “No one sees them except the police.”

  Oliver frowned. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. If you give them to the police, they’ll be public knowledge before long.”

  Sunny stared. “Oliver, I have to give them to the police.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. If they ask for them specifically, sure. But you don’t have to go to them on your own. I can have one of my lawyers call you if you like and explain it.”

  “Explain how withholding evidence from a murder investigation could be a good idea? They throw you in jail for that kind of thing.”

  “Who said anything about murder? Anna had too much to drink and fell out our bedroom window. It’s a stupid way to die, but it’s not murder.”

  “The police are calling it a suspicious death. It said so in the paper.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” said Oliver angrily. “They have to call it that until the autopsy comes back. It was an accident. A stupid, preventable, tragic accident that ended Anna’s life and changed mine forever. End of story. You and I both know there is absolutely no reason the police need to see those e-mails. She had no right to send them to you in the first place. My personal affairs certainly had nothing to do with her death.”

  “You honestly believe she fell out the window.”

  “What else could have happened? She was very out of it, very emotional that night. I never should have left her like that. She opened the window to smoke one of her stupid cigarettes and fell out.”

  “Is that true? Did they find a cigarette?”

  “I assume so. She sat there to smoke all the time. I assume that was what she was doing when she fell. She would sit there in the dark and smoke when she couldn’t sleep.”

  Sunny studied his face. He’d shaved recently, but it didn’t look as if he grew much of a beard, anyway. “That night, after your fight, or maybe before, did you kiss her?”

  Oliver gave her a blank look.

  “Did you kiss Anna the night she died? I mean a very passionate kiss, the way people do sometimes after a big fight.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I just wonder about the last few hours of her life. What state of mind she might have been in.”

  He looked down. “I’m afraid they were probably pretty lonely. They were for me. I didn’t kiss her. I wish I had. If I had, none of this might ever have happened. I let her push me away and I left.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Outside. I walked around. I ended up sitting in my car the rest of the night working.”

  “Working?”

  He smiled cynically. “It’s always business hours somewhere.”

  Sunny nodded. “I should tell you I already gave those e-mails to the police. I had to.”

  Oliver stood up. “Well, then I guess it’s your problem now.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re on their radar now. The police will have to check it all out. They’ll wonder why she sent all that stuff to you just before she died, why she decided to reconnect with you on this particular weekend, out of all the weekends in the past four years. Whether she ever sent you anything else.” He stopped and shook his head, smiling coldly. “Don’t forget where you were that night. You’re the one who said it was a suspicious death.”

  He gave her an odd smirk and left. Sunny got out her keys, but the front door was already open.

  10

  The house was stuffy and hot. Sunny walked through the living room and kitchen opening windows, stashed the leftovers she’d brought home in the refrigerator, and changed into shorts and flip-flops. In the back garden, a jungle of summer vegetables fought for room in two raised planters, giving off the tangy, fuzzy green smell of tomato plants. She turned the water on and inspected the garden while it ran. She harvested a dozen perfect tomatoes, but the basil had gone to seed. The last of the salad greens were struggling in the heat, thin and wilted and ready to call it off for the season. The neighbor’s cat zipped across the yard, spooked at her presence. She sprinkled ground pepper all over the garden once a week to keep him from using the loose dirt as a toilet, but he still did now and then. There are some things you can’t do much about, thought Sunny.

  She pulled weeds and checked for pests until the watering was finished and it was dark. Three bright green tomato worms as long and fat as her thumb came off the tomato plants. She squashed them into a lime-green smudge in the dirt with a swipe of her flip-flop and headed inside. The talk with Seth had shaken her, but the garden had done its work. She was ready to have a closer look at whatever it was that had him concerned enough to show up at her house. She didn’t believe for a moment that he thought Anna’s death was an accident. Seth knew as well as Sergeant Harvey and everyone else that she had been killed. If he was out doing damage control, the stakes had to be high.

  She made herself a plate of cold poached salmon and dill and poured a glass of wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. It was the same wine she’d been drinking for more than a week, though not the same bottle. With each glass she noticed some new detail she’d missed or underappreciated. It was a locally grown Syrah blended Côtes du Rhône–style with a bit of Grenache and Muvedre. Smooth, mild, drinkable. The message light on the phone was blinking. She’d been too tired to listen to her messages last night after dinner at Wade’s house. The first was from Wade himself, left early in the morning on Sunday. He sounded excited.

  “Sun, we need to talk,” he said. “I’ve been thinking and I think I’m onto something extremely important. You know how from the time I was a kid, I’ve been trying to work out how peace, love, and harmony, et cetera et cetera, could be the core nature of the universe when the planet is so goddamned messed up? I mean, no matter how many flowers and strawberries and songbirds are in the world, you can’t call a creator benevolent who also happens to have cranked out a bunch of guys with claws and fangs who can only survive by ripping apart other creatures, not to mention this virus that goes around eating the faces off Tasmanian devils for a living. I mean, whoever came up with that is just sick, right? Well, I stumbled onto an idea the other day walking up on top of that ridge over above the Beroni place and I think I’ve finally got it figured out. You ready? I hate to tell you something this important on the phone, let alone your machine, but it’s so exciting that I can’t—”

  The line cut off and the next message cued up.

  “Typical,” said Wade, sounding disgus
ted. “Anyway, here it is. Peace and love and goodness are not the core nature of the universe. It’s nice to think they are, but they’re just not. It’s wishful thinking. Peace might be the goal, but, and here’s the breakthrough part, the core nature of the universe is actually irony. Irony, Sun. Trust me, this is pure genius stuff. Give me a holler when you get home and I’ll walk you through it.”

  That one’s a keeper, thought Sunny. His third call was more on-topic.

  “I guess you’ve seen the paper by now. They’ve got it on the front page online, too. Now, if that’s not a clear-cut case of irony stepping up to the plate and knocking a home run right into the bay, I don’t know what is. The only woman I know who is—” He stopped to laugh, which turned into a coughing fit. “The only woman…Ha!” More laughter, more coughing. “The only woman I know who is more repressed than my ex-wife gets busted at a sex party. Now, that is ironic. Anyway, don’t let all this get to you, McCoskey. This, too, shall blow over. Well, except for what happened to your friend. Uh, well, anyway, gimme a call.”

  Sunny dialed Skord Mountain. Wade picked up on the first ring. “McCoskey.”

  “What’s with the hacking cough on your message? Are you dying up there or what?”

  “You mean this morning? I was eating peanuts. Sucked one down the wrong way.”

  “And I am not repressed. What do you know about my sex life, anyway? As far as you know, I could be a nymphomaniac.”

  “If you were, it would fit my theory perfectly. The prudish types are always the naughty ones deep down. They don’t call them sexy librarians for nothing.”

  “I’m not prudish.”

  “Reticent.”

  “No.”

  “Excessively cautious.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Seriously now, what are you going to do about this mess?”

  “What can I do? Anna is dead. Nothing’s going to change that. Like you said, everything else will blow over in time. Hopefully the police will figure out what happened quickly. Then I go on with my life.”

  “You coming to dinner tomorrow? Riv and the hunter gatherer are coming over to cook.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  They said good-bye and Sunny set up her laptop on a little wooden table tucked into the corner next to the fireplace. While it was booting up, she finished the last of the poached salmon, put the plate in the sink, and poured another glass of wine. Then she pulled up a chair and reread Anna’s e-mail and the exchange between Oliver and the woman named Astrid. They were to meet with investors in Moscow. Astrid had had a dream a boat was sinking. Oliver told her not to worry. He told her to control her fate. There didn’t seem to be anything terribly important in any of it. Yes, they seemed intimate. But she couldn’t see why Oliver should be so protective of that information. By his own admission, he and Anna were not together exclusively, or hadn’t been for long. None of it made sense. Anna called it an insurance policy but she died, anyway. Oliver wanted it hushed up, but nothing in it was terribly damaging. And what did he mean by, “She’s bullish on the new vintage”?

  Sunny stared at the glass of wine on her desk, the distillation of a year in the life of a few patches of rocky soil and the vines that grew on them. The memoirs of a short, happy life on a sunny slope. It was the consumable record of the rainy spring days and the hot summer ones, the chilly nights and the breeze through the big eucalyptus the next field over, the roots forcing their way down, the nibble of jackrabbits, the buzz of insects, the tread of workers’ boots, the tractor with its metallic diesel smell, all of it compressed down to a sequence of flavors in the mouth, a melody, each aspect a note, each note finding its place relative to the others to record the life of a grape. It was entirely ephemeral and yet utterly tangible.

  Franco Bertinotti said he would “commune with the grapes and see what they have to tell us.” In the end there were two kinds of winemakers, thought Sunny, the Falstaffs and the intellectuals. The Falstaffs like to drink wine, so they make wine. The intellectuals are interested in the idea of wine and what it represents. Despite his trim physique and fastidious nature, Oliver Seth was a Falstaff and Franco Bertinotti was an intellectual. She considered it slightly odd that Oliver had chosen to establish a winery before getting married or having children. Usually it was the other way around. People generally had their careers and families and then tried their hand at winemaking with the proceeds in retirement. Oliver’s success so early in life had made it possible for him to sidestep the distinction between work and play, and to simply do as he liked. It was easy to forget, given his situation, that he could hardly be more than thirty years old. He had called his estate his citadel. It must be the self-sufficiency he liked. He had his hilltop vineyard, his garden, his olive trees, his chickens, and even his pig, like any good Roman citadel.

  The Seth citadel was probably still under siege, thought Sunny, occupied by the St. Helena police. They would have his computer by now. After the body, that was the first thing they took back to the lab these days. If so, they had the e-mails already and he knew it, unless he had deleted them early Sunday morning before the police arrived. He took a risk coming here, thought Sunny. Guilty or innocent, he was a hunted man now. The police would have someone watching him day and night. They were probably monitoring his cell phone and credit cards, following his car, making sure he didn’t fly off anywhere. She wondered if he was suspect number one in Sergeant Harvey’s eyes.

  A sound outside made her glance up instinctively. Something inside her knew what it was before she could even think about it. A cool, sweet breeze came through the open window. Footsteps, a gentle knock at the door.

  She went over and stood in front of it. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me.”

  She opened the door. Andre Morales had his motorcycle helmet under his arm and his gloves in his hand. “Can I come in?”

  Just like that, six months together was reduced to one question he hadn’t had to ask since their first date. The nights he came over, late after work or early for dinner, he would walk in without knocking and stand in her kitchen and take off his helmet and gloves, then his jacket, and finally the leather riding pants he wore over his jeans. It was her favorite bit of performance art. Then there was the sound of his voice, and the warm, honey smell of him. His hair was soft and heavy and always smelled of the chamomile shampoo he used. She stood aside to let him in.

  “Sun, it was not what you think. You know that. I wanted to call you earlier, but I didn’t want to talk about it while you were at work.”

  “I wasn’t at work last night. Neither were you.”

  “I know. I should have called. I just…I didn’t know what to say. So much had happened. I needed some time to think.”

  He took her hand and tried to lead her to the couch.

  “Don’t. Let’s just get on with it. Why were you there? I mean, you said you didn’t know Anna.”

  “I know Oliver,” said Andre. “He comes into the restaurant when he’s in town. He called and said he had some interesting people over and I should come by after work. You know how I am after we close. I can’t just go to bed.”

  “It looked like you did.”

  “Come on, that’s not fair. You were there, too.”

  “But I went to bed alone.”

  “I didn’t go to bed with her.”

  “Is there another bed in that room?”

  “Okay, maybe we slept in the same bed but we didn’t sleep together. We just slept. You know what I mean.”

  “And you think that’s the point.”

  He rubbed at his forehead and groaned as if the conversation gave him physical pain. “Okay, you’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.”

  If he had come to feel and understand, thought Sunny, that there was genuinely something wrong with sleeping with the Guamanian princess even if he didn’t bother to actually sleep with her, it would be something. A small something, but still something. A streak of light seeping out from under
a closed door.

  “The thing is, Sunny, I’m not used to having a girlfriend. I guess I’ve never really had what you would call a real girlfriend. I admit I made a mistake, but I don’t want to make any more. I don’t want this to end. I want to rewrite everything, the way I do things, with you in it, with you first.”

  11

  “And you fell for that line?” Rivka Chavez was standing at her workstation making strategic cuts in a raw chicken so it would lay flat to be cooked under a brick. “¡Híjole! That guy ought to sell real estate.”

  “You weren’t there. It was very romantic,” said Sunny, tying her apron strings and smiling to herself.

  “I’m sure it was. Snow jobs make everything look pretty. And how exactly did he talk his way out of what happened?”

  “He said it wasn’t what it seemed. You know, they were just there, like I was.”

  “And did that explanation sound good to you before or after he showed you what’s under the biking leathers?”

  Sunny held up her hand. “No interrogation, please. We had a beautiful night and I want to enjoy it. It was like waking up from a bad dream. I was so sure it was over, then suddenly there was this reprieve. I can’t tell you how good that felt, especially after everything that’s happened.”

  “I’m just trying to shed a little light on how this whole reconciliation went down,” said Rivka. “Did he call you and you said, ‘Come on over, let’s talk’?”

  “No, he didn’t call.”

  “So he doesn’t call for, what, two days. Then he shows up and says, ‘Baby, it’s all good,’ and that’s it, everything’s hunky-dory again.”

  “It was only one day.”

  “Two days after the incident,” said Rivka, eyebrows raised and holding up two fingers incredulously.

  “He said he needed some time to think. He seemed sincere.” Sunny rubbed her hands over her face. “I need an aspirin or a Coke or, like, a transfusion. I’m seeing spots.”

  “Up all night?”

  “Most of it.” Sunny retreated to the walk-in so she wouldn’t have to look at Rivka. She came out with a tub full of greens and went to work.