Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  Books by Bill Pronzini

  “Nameless Detective” Novels:

  The Snatch

  The Vanished

  Undercurrent

  Blow Back

  Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

  Labyrinth

  Hoodwink

  Scattershot

  Dragonfire

  Bindlestiff

  Quicksilver

  Nightshades

  Double (with Marcia Muller)

  Bones

  Deadfall

  Shackles

  Jackpot

  Jackpot

  Breakdown

  Twospot

  Bill Pronzini

  Collin Wilcox

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2011

  TWOSPOT

  Copyright © 1978 by Bill Pronzini & Collin Wilcox

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781612320700

  Table of Contents

  Books by Bill Pronzini

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - The Private Detective

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART TWO - The Police Lieutenant

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART THREE - The Private Detective

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART FOUR - The Police Lieutenant

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Epilogue

  “To Lee Wright, with love.”

  PART ONE

  The Private Detective

  1

  The old-fashioned arched sign over the entrance to the private road read:

  CAPPELLANI WINERY

  I swung my car off the Silverado Trail and took it beneath the sign and past another one that appeared in my headlights: GUIDED TOURS. VISITORS WELCOME ● TASTING ROOM OPEN 10-4 ● The road was narrow but well graded, and it began to climb and dip almost immediately through low rolling foothills. The hillsides were carpeted with curving rows of grape vines, most of which had been stripped clean of fruit because it was the first of November and the harvest season was all but over. Here and there were some of the big truck gondolas the pickers used, and oaks and madrone and eucalyptus dotted the terrain, but there was nothing else to see except the black-shadowed vineyards and a black moonless sky. The winery was tucked farther back in the foothills, a mile and a half from the Silverado Trail and a few miles southeast of the village of St. Helena.

  It was just past nine o’clock and the night was cool, but I rolled my window down a little so I could smell the good vinous, earthy scent of the vineyards. A summer fragrance, though, not an autumn one, because the drought that had plagued California for more than a year continued to linger with no signs of abatement. Even the grape leaves had not taken on their fall colors—yellow, scarlet, purple—as they would have by now if the rains had come as usual.

  Alex Cappellani had told me it had been a poor harvest, one of the poorest in the Napa Valley in years. The big wineries which owned the bulk of the 16,000 acres of vineyards in the valley would survive all right on volume; but unless the drought ended soon, Cappellani and the other small cellars could be in serious trouble. They made most of their profits on vintage-dated varietals —Pinot Noir and Grignolino and Grey Riesling—and without a yield of high-quality grapes with which to manufacture these wines, they had little hope of competing in the marketplace.

  This was the latest in a long series of problems that had beset the Cappellani Winery since Alex’s great-grandfather founded it in 1878. Poor harvests and labor squabbles had almost closed it down in the 1890s and in the early 1900s; Prohibition had closed it down for the duration, and there had been an added difficulty when Alex’s grandfather was arrested in 1923 and fined a substantial sum of money for illegally conspiring to produce alcoholic beverages; Alex’s father, Frank Cappellani, had apparently been more interested in reactionary political causes, and as a result of apathetic management the winery had nearly gone into receivership in the early ’60s. Frank’s death of a heart attack in 1964 put the cellar in full control of his wife, Rosa, who had turned out to be a capable and hard-nosed business woman. With the help of Alex’s elder brogher, Leo, and later Alex himself, Rosa had gotten the winery back into the black: until the drought it had been flourishing.

  But the drought and poor harvest were not the only things Alex was concerned about these days, and had nothing to do with why he’d hired me three days ago in San Francisco. What he had come to me about was a man named Jason Booker, an enologist—a wine and winemaking scientist—whom Rosa Cappellani had signed on six months ago. Booker was forty-six, nine years Rosa’s junior, but they had evidently become intimates; and although Rosa insisted there was nothing serious in their relationship, Alex was convinced that Booker was pressing her to marry him. He was also convinced that Booker was a shady opportunist who cared not at all for Rosa, who wanted only to gain control of the winery through marriage. So he wanted me to run a check into this Booker’s background to see if there was anything there that would corroborate his suspicions.

  You can find out a lot about a man in three days if you have a basic fact sheet on him to begin with—where he went to school, where he has lived and worked, things like that—and Alex had provided me with a copy of Booker’s job application and references from the Cappellani offices in San Francisco. Since Booker had lived in California all his life, the first thing I had done was some routine checking with police and credit agencies. Which got me nothing much; he had an average credit rating and no police record of any kind. Then I had driven up here and spent the past two days talking to people at the four wineries which had employed him during the last twenty years, two in Napa Valley and two in the Valley of the Moon. The consensus was that he was a good enologist but nothing much as a man: arrogant, ambitious, charming when he wanted to be, ruthless when he saw an advantage to be gained.

  One other thing I learned was that, his job application to the contrary, he had not worked anywhere for an eight-month period in 1970. This morning, I had found out why: a viticulturist at the Sonoma winery which employed Booker prior to that eight-month gap told me Booker had left there without giving a reason but that he had let it slip he was planning to get married. There had been nothing on the job application about a marriage—he had listed himself as a bachelor—and so I had gone to Santa Rosa and checked the Sonoma County records. Married, all right, to a woman named Martha Towne in February of 1970. According to the marriage certificate, she was sixteen years older than he and a resident at that time of Petaluma.

  The Petaluma address turned out to be an expensive home in an affluent west-side neighborhood. It also turned out to still belong to Martha Towne—a bitter Martha Towne who was more than willing to talk about Jason Booker, to me and to anyone else who might want to listen.

  It was an old story, old and sad and ugly; and it pretty well corroborated Alex Cappellani’s suspicions. Martha Towne had been recently widowed and had inherited a considerable estate from her late husband when she met Booker at a party. She had also been lonely, and flattered and overwhelmed by his attentions, and she had married him three months later. Only to discover, after five months together, that he was far more interested in her money than he was in her. He had gotten her to open joint checking and savings
accounts and had then appropriated fifteen thousand dollars for personal investments about which she knew nothing. When she found out she told him to pack his bags, and divorced him and managed to get a sympathetic judge not to grant him a community property settlement.

  She had not remarried again, and all you had to do was look at her to tell that she never would. Booker had taken a lot more from her than the fifteen thousand dollars; he had taken her faith and her trust, and she had never recovered them either.

  I asked her if she would sign a formal statement of what she had told me, if it proved necessary; I also told her why I might want it, omitting the names of the Cappellani family. She said she would, gladly, and her eyes shone with a kind of malice when she said it. I did not blame her much, but I got out of there pretty fast just the same.

  It was after six when I called the winery from a pay phone and asked for Alex. But the woman who answered said he wasn’t there; he was expected at eight o’clock. So I ate cannellone and drank a couple of beers in an Italian restaurant on Petaluma’s main drag and then drove the fifty miles to St. Helena and called the winery again from there. Alex was in this time; he asked me to come straight out and to meet him at the office in the main cellar building.

  The road wound across a stretch of bottomland, where the vines were laid out in long straight rows. I still could not see the winery from there, but beyond the crest of another low hill there was the faint glow of lights against the dark sky. The night seemed vast and still and touched with a kind of old-world serenity, and you could imagine that this was a foothill vineyard in France or Italy or Switzerland at the turn of the century. That same flavor of Europe long-ago permeated the Napa Valley; you felt and saw it not only in the vineyards and the old stone wineries, but in the quiet villages and the ancient mills and factories and railroad depots, and in the attitudes of the people who lived there.

  All the driving I had done today was beginning to make me a little logy. I rolled down the window another couple of inches, to let in more of the cool night air, and yawned, and the yawn triggered a series of small dry coughs that brought a tightness into my chest. When the coughing stopped I took several slow deep breaths. The tightness eased then, but a dull ache lingered in the region of my left lung.

  There was a lesion on that lung. It was benign, as I had learned after an agonizing week this past summer, just prior to my fiftieth birthday; but there was still the possibility that it would turn malignant, or that other malignant lesions would form on one or both lungs. That was what a doctor named White had told me—and he had also told me that if I wanted to keep on living, I had to give up smoking cigarettes.

  So I had given them up. Cold turkey. I had consumed an average of two packs a day for thirty-five years, and had tried to quit several times with no success; but when a doctor tells you pointblank that you’re going to die if you don’t quit, you do it and you stick to it. I had not had a single cigarette in five months. Every time I thought about having one, which was less and less frequently now, I reminded myself that it would be like putting a knife in my own chest. And the craving would go away.

  The lesion, and the specter of death, had changed me in a lot of ways over these past five months. In the beginning, while I was waiting for the pathology report on whether the lesion was malignant or benign, I had been obsessed by death—so obsessed by it that I was having difficulty functioning. But then, as a result of a complicated case I had been on in the Mother Lode, I had finally come to terms with my own mortality. I was no longer afraid of the specter of death; I had made peace with myself and with the world around me. I was no longer inclined to view certain things and certain people with cynical eyes. I was no longer inclined to care too much and too deeply about the lives and the suffering of others—what the unemotional and intellectual types like to label dismissively as weltschmerz, as if it were some sort of curious affliction. Not that I have stopped caring; it is just that human pain and human folly do not hurt me so much anymore.

  When I got to the top of the low hill beyond the bottomland, the winery buildings appeared in another shallow valley below. What looked to be the main cellar was off to the south, built before a cut in a limestone ridge; nightlights shone across its stone facade and its huge domed roof, illuminated part of a wide gravel yard and a parking area for visitors. Vineyards stretched away on its far side, and at an angle beyond the cellar’s north side were a couple of smaller stone buildings that probably housed bottling and shipping facilities and some of the winery’s smaller cooperage. A stand of oak trees and two hundred yards of open ground separated those buildings from an old stone house, shaded by more oaks, that had the appearance of a nineteenth-century Italian villa. There were lights visible in some of she house’s facing windows.

  I took the car down there, past where the road made a loop toward the main cellar and a gated lane branched off it and led up to the house, and pulled it into one of the slots in the parking area. There was no sign of activity around there; pick-up trucks and a big diesel rig and a handful of empty gondolas sat dark and silent around the north side of the yard. If this were the height of the crush, or if the harvest yield had been a good one, there might have been some nighttime work going on. As things were, it did not seem that anyone was collecting overtime pay tonight.

  I got out and walked across the yard to the cellar. The cool air was pungent with the heady odor of crushed grapes and fermenting wine, and I had the thought that maybe I ought to change my drinking habits too, learn how to enjoy good wine. Wine, at least, did not give you a belly that was starting to hang over the belt, the way beer had with me.

  The only doors in the front wall of the cellar were a pair of brassbound black-oak jobs, set into an archway, that looked as if they had come off a church or a European castle. Above them was a redwood sign that gave the winery’s name, and beside them was a bulletin board that told you the tasting room was inside and what the hours were. I looked for a bell-push of some kind, but there was nothing like that set into the stone wall. So I reached out and tried the doors, and one of them swung inward beneath my hand.

  Inside, the temperature was several degrees colder and the fermenting-wine smell several degrees sharper. There was a dankness too, created by the stone floors and walls and the high stone ceiling. A pale light burned in the tasting room straight ahead, and another glowed in the foyer where I stood, and there were still others spaced at wide intervals along corridors that extended the width of the building on both sides; but they were only diffused pockets of light that made the shadows around them seem deeper, that gave heavy old wood casks and tables and beams an unreal cast, like half-formed lack ghosts.

  I moved forward a couple of paces. From somewhere in the building I could hear the faint hum of machinery; otherwise there was nothing but silence. The corridor to the south, I saw, led into an area filled with huge redwood aging tanks. The one to the north went past a dark enclosure with windows on two sides and rows of wine bottles glistening dully on shelves inside—a sales room—and then past another enclosure that had a palely lighted window, as though from a desk lamp inside. That was probably the office, I thought, and when I glanced up at the foyer wall an arrow sign there confirmed it. I took a step in that direction.

  And something made a scraping sound down there, the kind of sound a person makes when he drags a heavy object across a stone floor.

  I hesitated, listening, but the noise was not repeated. Sounds in the night, I thought, and shrugged, and started down the corridor. My footsteps echoed on the floor, were magnified by the stone walls until they reverberated like the hollow clopping of wood on wood.

  The light in the office went out.

  That brought me up short again. A faint uneasiness began to work inside me, an intimation of something being wrong. Why would Alex Cappellani shut off the light when he heard someone approaching? Unless he planned to come out and greet me—but the office door remained closed.

  I listened. Silence. All right
then, he was waiting in there, or somebody was. For what? To find out who was out here?

  “Mr. Cappellani?” I called. And identified myself.

  Silence.

  The uneasiness grew stronger, but the need to know what was going on carried me forward, on the balls of my feet now, until I was standing just beyond the dark office window. It was pitch black in there; I could not even make out the shapes of furniture.

  “Mr. Cappellani?”

  Nothing but the echo of my voice.

  With the hackles coming up on my neck, I eased forward to the door and put a hand on the knob and turned it. It opened inward an inch or two. I shoved it wide with the tips of my fingers, tensing, looking inside but not moving my body.

  Breathing—somebody breathing just inside the door.

  The scuffling of a shoe sole.

  Those sounds warned me, but not in time to do anything more than take a half-step backward. The dark shape of a man lunged into the doorway, and I had a fleeting perception of something upraised in his hand, something swinging down toward my head, and got my arm up in panicked reaction—and the object glanced off my wrist, glanced off my right cheekbones, brought a bright flash of pain and confusion and sent me sprawling backward across the cold stone floor.

  2