Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  “Somebody cracked him over the head,” I said.

  “Hit him? But who? Why?”

  Shelly said, “Logan, for Christ’s sake.” Then, to me, “I’ll call the hospital in St. Helena.”

  I nodded as I covered Alex with my jacket. “But we’d better not touch anything in here. There another phone close by?”

  “In the sales room.”

  The pinch-faced guy was still standing in the doorway, gawking. He said to Shelly, “Who is this man? What’s he doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came down to talk to Alex.” He looked me up and down. “He’s been in a fight—”

  “Never mind that now,” Shelly said, and crowded past him into the corridor. “Mrs. Cappellani had better know what’s happened. And Leo.”

  The guy blinked at her. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Then don’t stand around here, go tell them.”

  He did not like her commanding tone—the resentment was plain in his expression—but he didn’t give her any argument. When she turned toward the sales room, he glanced at me again, briefly, and then hurried after her along the corridor.

  There was nothing else I could do for Alex. You don’t move somebody who has been badly hurt, if you have any sense, and you especially don’t move somebody with a head injury. I straightened up and backed over to the door, stopped there to look around the office. Cluttered mahogany desk set against the far wall, between two filing cabinets; an oversized phone on the desk with two rows of buttons on its base unit; a couple of round-backed chairs and a table with a wine rack on it full of dusty bottles. The wine rack told me where the bottle came from that the attacker had used on me, that he had probably used on Alex as well. But there did not seem to be anything out of place in there. The file drawers and desk drawers were closed, nothing was strewn around anywhere on the floor, and the clutter of papers on the desk had a natural appearance, not as if someone had been rummaging through them.

  So maybe I had interrupted the assailant before he could steal anything. Or maybe he had found what he was after with a minimum of mess. Or maybe he had not come to steal anything in the first place. That scraping sound—why would a thief, why would anyone, have been dragging Alex across the floor?

  Well, Alex himself had the answers, if anyone did. It was not up to me in any case; the matter was a police one.

  I went down the sales room. Lights blazed in there now, illuminating shelves and displays and stacked cases of wine, and Shelly was behind a counter along one wall, speaking into a telephone receiver. That telephone, too, was oversized and had the two rows of buttons on its base; when I came up and looked at the buttons I saw that two of them were marked “Open Line” and the rest were numbered. Which meant that the winery buildings, and no doubt the main house too, were interconnected by a series of private lines, so you could call directly from one extension to another.

  When Shelly finished talking to the hospital I took the handset from her and dialed O and told the operator I had a police emergency. She put me straight through to the sheriff’s office. I identified myself to the officer who answered, gave him a brief account of what had happened; he said they would be out as quickly as possible.

  Somebody had left a package of Kools on the counter, and Shelly helped herself to one and then extended the pack to me as I dropped the handset back into its cradle. I looked at it longingly for a moment, felt the lingering tightness in my chest, and thought: Just like putting a knife in my lungs, just like committing suicide.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”

  She lighted hers, blew a long sighing stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I suppose it was necessary to call in the sheriff,” she said, “but I wish you hadn’t done it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t like cops much.”

  “Oh? Any particular reason?”

  “I was married to one once.”

  She said that as if it were a complete and final explanation. But her voice was matter-of-fact, without any trace of bitterness. I wondered, not altogether relevantly, what she would say if and when she found out I was a cop of sorts myself.

  This was the first chance I had had to take a close look at her, and I saw that she was around thirty, that she had gray-green eyes, that her close-cropped hair was a dark auburn color and very fine, like a child’s. But there was nothing childlike about her features. They were strong, intelligent, maybe a little hard around the mouth—the face of a woman who has not had an easy life but who knows exactly who she is and what she wants. A survivalist. Tough and probably cynical about some things; nothing much in this world would suprise her anymore. For all that, though, she was more than a little attractive. Not beautiful, certainly not pretty, but very damned attractive.

  I realized that she had been studying me too—but there was nothing in her eyes to indicate what impression she had formed, or if she had formed any impression at all. In that same matter-of fact voice she said, “You’ve got blood on your shirt where I bit you.”

  I looked down at the area under my collarbone; the shirt there was torn and stained a dark red. The bite still stung, and as soon as my mind focused on the stinging I grew aware again of the throbbing in my head and the dull ache in my wrist and the bunched muscles in my legs. Christ, a walking-wounded.

  She said, “Does it hurt?”

  “A little. It’ll be all right.”

  “I guess we both played rough up in the vineyards.”

  “Yeah, I guess we did.”

  Neither of us said anything for a time, thinking our own thoughts. I broke the silence finally with a question: “The pinch-faced guy—who is he?”

  “Logan Dockstetter,” she said. “He’s the winery’s sales manager. And a fag, if you hadn’t already guessed.”

  That last comment was uncalled for; Logan Dockstetter’s sexual preferences had nothing to do with anything. But I did not say that to her. Apparently she did not like homosexuals any more than she liked cops, and there is never any point in calling someone on his prejudices.

  I said, “Is Dockstetter staying here too?”

  “No. He came up from San Francisco tonight, along with his boyfriend, Philip Brand. Brand is the Cappellanis’ accountant. The two of them—”

  She broke off because there was an abrupt commotion out in the foyer—the echo of hurrying footsteps, the excited babble of voices. I shoved away from the counter, and Shelly came around from behind it, and together we went across to the doorway and out into the corridor just as five people came crowding up.

  Three of them were men, Logan Dockstetter among them, but it was the older of the women who was in the lead. Rosa Cappellani, I thought. But she was nothing at all as I had pictured her, nothing at all like the popular conception of an Italian matriarch. She had a lean but heavy-breasted body that seemed well preserved in a blue pants suit; silver-streaked hair, and features that were too angular to be called anything other than handsome. Those features were set now in firm lines that gave her an imperious, no-nonsense demeanor, and though she had to be pretty upset she gave no outward indication of it. My immediate impression was that here was a woman who was always in perfect command of her emotions, who possessed a good deal of strength and self-assurance.

  She went past Shelly and me without looking at either of us, as if we were not even there. Which gave us no choice but to turn and follow her, along with the three men and the other woman. When she got to the office door she stopped and stood stiffly, staring inside. I saw her face in profile, and nothing changed in it; she did not even blink.

  I stepped up to her. “I checked his pulse and it seems strong and fairly stable,” I said. “It would be best not to touch him.”

  She pivoted to me, acknowledging my presence for the first time, and gave me a long probing look. Then she said, “I had no intention of touching him,” and she had a voice to match her demeanor. “Has an ambulance been called?”

  Sh
elly said, “Yes. I phoned for one a few minutes ago.”

  “And the police?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.” Mrs. Cappellani took her eyes off me and put them on one of the men—a guy about her own age dressed in work clothes and a poplin jacket, with eyes set deep under a craggy forehead and a nose as sharp as a rock spire. “Paul,” she said, “find a blanket somewhere. A heavy blanket. We won’t touch Alex but he has to be kept warm.”

  He nodded and hurried off.

  “Where’s Leo?” Shelly asked.

  “He went out for a walk,” the other woman said. “I don’t know where he is.” She was in her early thirties, attractive, with thick coils of dark hair and breasts even larger than Mrs. Cappellani’s. There was vulnerability in her face and a kind of detachment in her manner, as if she had withdrawn into herself as a defense mechanism against all the things which could hurt her. The exact opposite of Shelly. I thought that she was probably Leo Cappellani’s wife; Alex had told me Leo was married.

  The third man said, “Do you want me to see if I can and him, Mrs. Cappellani?” He had a deep and very precise voice that surprised you a little because of his physical appearance: round soft face, bright eyes, prim mouth. He was about Dockstetter’s age.

  “Yes,” she said. “Do that, Philip.” Philip Brand, I thought “And take Logan and Angela with you.”

  She looked at me again as Dockstetter and Brand and Angela Cappellani went toward the foyer. “Now suppose you tell me who you are and what happened here.”

  I told her. But I did not say that I was a private detective hired by her son, because of the nature of my investigation and because it was not up to me to discuss my findings with her. And I did not say anything, either, about the scuffle with Shelly up in the vineyards ; I was embarrassed by it, and it had no particular relevance anyway. I said only that in the darkness I had mistaken Shelly for the man I was chasing and that he had gotten away for that reason.

  “You have no idea what this man locked like?”

  “No, ma’am. He was just a dark shape, average height and build. But Alex probably saw him and can identify him.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry for what happened to you, but I’m grateful just the same that you arrived when you did. You may well have saved my son’s life.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, and the craggy-featured guy saved me from having to find words by coming back with a folded Army blanket. Rosa Cappellani took it from him, went into the office and shook it out and draped it carefully around Alex’s inert form. Then she straightened up, but she did not come back out of the office; she just stood there, stoically, staring down at him with her hands clasped in front of her.

  The wine smell had begun to get to me again; I could taste sour bile in the back of my throat. I said to Shelly that I was going out for some air, and went into the foyer and through the double doors. As soon as I stepped outside I could hear, in the distance, the faint ululating wail of an ambulance siren. They made good time out of St. Helena, I thought—and I hoped the county sheriff people were as efficient. The sooner they got here, the sooner I could find a hotel or motel and get some rest.

  I took a couple of deep breaths, and the doors opened behind me and the craggy-featured guy came out. He paused to fire one of those misshapen Italian cigars called a Toscana, that smell like smoldering manure, and then walked over to where I was.

  “Paul Rosten,” he said, “I’m the winemaker here.”

  I nodded, gave him my name.

  “What the hell happened in there?”

  Before I could answer that there was abrupt movement to the north, over by the two smaller cellars, and three figures materialized there and came running toward us. When they pounded up into the glow of the nightlights, I saw that two of them were Dockstetter and Brand and that the third was obviously Leo Cappellani ; Angela had evidently remained at the house. Leo had the same dark angular features, the same wide mouth and curly black hair as his brother. But he was a few years older, a few pounds heavier. He also had quite a bit of his mother’s imperiousness, something which Alex did not have. You could tell that about him right off.

  He gave me a once-over look and said to Rosten, “Alex—how badly is he hurt?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Rosten said grimly. “It looks like he was hit pretty hard on the back of the head. He’s probably got a concussion, if not worse.”

  “Christ. Is he conscious?”

  “No.”

  Leo glanced at me again. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  I did not want to go over it again before the police arrived, but he had a right to know, and the others too. So I gave them a somewhat abbreviated version, while the shriek of the siren got louder and eventually headlights—three sets of them, in tandem—appeared at the top of the far hillside.

  When I was done, Leo shook his head and said, “Doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing in that office worth stealing, no money or anything else of value.”

  “The police will get to the bottom of it, Mr. Cappellani.”

  “I hope so.”

  He turned abruptly and went inside the cellar. Rosten went with him, but Dockstetter and Brand stayed where they were and looked alternately at me, as if I were some sort of curious specimen, and at the headlights coming down the road toward us.

  The siren cut off as the ambulance rolled into the yard, but the flasher light on its roof kept going, streaking the darkness with stroboscopic red patterns. The other two vehicles were Napa County sheriff’s cars, neither of which had flasher lights or sirens. They all came to stops near where we were standing, and a couple of interns jumped out of the ambulance and opened the rear doors and hauled out a wheeled stretcher. Three uniformed deputies came running up; one of them asked where the injured party was. I said inside, and Dockstetter said he would show them where and led the interns and two of the deputies into the cellar.

  I identified myself to the third deputy, a guy about my own age. We went over by the county cars and I explained to him what had taken place; I had told the story enough times now so that it was like delivering a set speech. Then I admitted to being a private investigator, showed him the photostat of my license, and said that I had been doing some confidential work for Alex Cappellani. The deputy wanted to know what work, if it could have any bearing on the attack on Alex. I told him I had no ideas on that. But I gave him a rundown of Alex’s reasons for hiring me and of what I had learned about Jason Booker. When I asked him if he could refrain from saying anything to Rosa Cappellani or any of the others until he was able to talk to Alex, because it was a delicate family situation and maybe not related to the attack, he agreed to handle matters with discretion. He seemed to be a decent sort and I thought that he would keep his word.

  While we’d been talking another set of headlights had appeared, this time up in the vineyards to the south, coming down the same dirt-and-gravel road that I had been running on earlier. Now the car, a dusty station wagon, pulled up on the edge of the yard and a man got out and jogged toward us. He was a slender fortyish guy wearing slacks and a turtleneck sweater, with a handsome ascetic face and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin that you could spot at ten paces even in the spinning flasher light.

  Just before he reached us, looking half agitated and half perplexed, the cellar doors swung open and the interns came out wheeling Alex on the stretcher. Rosa Cappellani, and Leo, and Shelly and Rosten and the two deputies, followed in a bunch. The slender guy went straight over there, gaped at the stretcher, and then moved quickly to Mrs. Cappellani’s side and put a hand on her arm.

  I heard him say, “My God, Rosa, what’s going on? What’s happened to Alex?”

  “Someone attacked him, Jason,” she said in her brusque way. “One of the others will explain.”

  Jason Booker, I thought. I watched him stand there scowling as Rosa stepped away from him. The interns were loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance now, and Mrs. Cappellani stood
in a rigid posture with her arms folded across her breasts until they had closed the doors and started around to the front. Then she turned abruptly to Leo.

  “We’ll follow them to the hospital,” she said.

  Leo said something I didn’t catch, and the two of them hurried off toward the house, Rosa without looking again at Booker.

  Her apparent indifference to him made Booker scowl all the harder. He spun around and went over to Shelly and got into a conversation with her, presumably to find out what was going on.

  I glanced at my watch as the ambulance pulled away, and the time was a few minutes past eleven. I asked the deputy beside me if I was going to be needed much longer; he said he didn’t imagine I would be. But then one of the other deputies joined us, and he had questions, and I ended up having to tell my story still another time while he took notes and copied down my name and address and investigator’s license number. It was eleven-thirty before they finally decided it was all right for me to leave.

  I thanked them and started wearily to my car. Halfway there, a voice called my name behind me. Shelly. I stopped, turned to her as she came up.

  “Leaving us?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”

  “That it has.” She watched me for a moment and then smiled faintly. “Maybe we’ll see each other again, one of these days.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  “Ciao then, big man.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Ciao, Shelly.”

  And I left her and got into my car and went away from there.

  4

  I spent the night in a hotel in St. Helena.

  When I woke up a little after seven on Friday morning, after a good deep sleep, I felt better than I might have expected. I still had a headache, but it was muted and tolerable; the pain in my wrist was gone, and my lungs were clear of phlegm and my chest felt normal. I was even pretty hungry.

  In the bathroom I had a look at myself in the mirror. Nickelsized bruise on my cheekbone—but it hurt only when I touched it. The bite wound under my collarbone also hurt when I touched it. It was some bite too: torn skin, raw flesh, the teeth marks sunk so deep they were visible even now. The iodine I had swabbed on it last night before going to bed, from the first-aid kit I keep in my car, made it look even worse. I put more iodine on it and covered it with a gauze bandage, to guard against infection; the bite from a human, I had heard somewhere, can be even more dangerous than one from an animal.