Twospot

by Bill Pronzini

  Rosten’s eyes narrowed. “You calling me a liar?”

  For a moment there was the kind of belligerence in Dockstetter’s face that a man gets when he’s spoiling for a fight. Maybe Rosten was a specific target, or maybe it was something and somebody else bothering Dockstetter and the winemaker was a handy outlet. But then the belligerence faded, and his mouth turned petulant; he held up his stained coat sleeve.

  “You’ve ruined this jacket,” he said. “Red wine won’t come out of material like this.”

  “That’s too bad,” Rosten said.

  “I ought to make you buy me a new one.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Rosten turned away to the bartender. Dockstetter glared at his back for a couple of seconds and then spun the other way, toward where Shelly and I were. He gave Shelly a passing glance, me a slightly longer one, but said nothing to either of us. He disappeared behind us into the crowd.

  I said to Shelly, “What’s his problem?”

  “Who knows? He had a fight with his boyfriend at the office Friday afternoon, God knows about what, and Brand hasn’t shown up here; maybe that’s it.” She shrugged. “You know how these fags are.”

  No, I thought, I don’t. But I said only, “Has there been trouble between Rosten and Dockstetter in the past?”

  “Not that I know of. But Brand and Rosten have had words.”

  “What about?”

  “Winery matters. Brand thinks Rosten is incompetent.”

  “Is he?”

  “Not according to Leo and Mrs. Cappellani.”

  “Does Alex get along with Dockstetter and Brand?”

  “He tolerates them and vice versa. You’re not thinking that it could be one of them who’s trying to kill him?”

  “I’m not being paid to think anything,” I said, but that was a half-truth. I was thinking about the possibility, all right—not that it got me anywhere. It could be Dockstetter or Brand or both of them, but it could also be Rosten, or Leo, or Shelly herself, or anyone else Alex was acquainted with. Without positive evidence of some kind, it was nothing but a damned lottery.

  We got glasses of white wine—Grey Riesling, Shelly said it was —and took them to one of the picnic benches. We talked for a time about nothing much, and I looked around periodically to keep tabs on Alex. He was still belting wine. When I saw him go back to the casks for yet another refill I excused myself from Shelly and went over to him.

  “You’d better take it easy with that stuff,” I said.

  There was a bleariness in his eyes that made the whites seem curdled. “Why?” he said. “What difference does it make?”

  “I thought you decided getting drunk wouldn’t solve anything.”

  “Neither will staying sober.”

  “I told you earlier that I don’t like bodyguard work much,” I said. “I don’t like it at all if it means looking out for a drunk.”

  “All right,” he said, and waved a hand loosely, and the expression on his face became self-pitying. “All right, have it your way.” He banged his empty glass down on the table, left it there, and moved off a little unsteadily.

  I rejoined Shelly, and she asked me if I knew how to polka, and I said it had been a long time and I wasn’t much good at it anyway; dancing was the last thing I felt like doing at the moment. We sat talking some more instead, listening to the accordion music. From time to time she touched my hand or my arm, and finally she moved close to me and I could feel the warmth of her hip and thigh against mine. I wondered if she was feeling the same sexual stirrings I was.

  At three o’clock the elder Simontacci called lunch. We sat with the Cappellanis and Rosten and ate antipasto and barbecued chicken and garbanzo bean salad and homemade French bread. I had not had anything all day, so I wolfed my portion; Shelly ate with the same gusto. But nobody else seemed to be hungry, and there was little conversation. Leo appeared more interested in the passage of attractive women than in any of us—I wondered briefly where his wife was—and Rosa gave most of her attention to Alex. She did not look at Rosten and Rosten did not look at her; I thought that if Brand had been right in his comment at The Boar’s Head and they had or had had some sort of sexual relationship, it was completely private and secretive. Alex picked listlessly at his food and semed to be getting more and more restless. And halfway through the meal he got up abruptly, without saying anything, and went off toward the Simontacci house.

  He was gone for fifteen minutes. When he came back I knew right away that he had gone after more alcohol in spite of my warning; the color was high in his face and he was walking in that slow, measured pace drunks affect when they don’t want you to know they’ve been drinking: it doesn’t fool anyone but themselves. Well, damn it. I gave him a sharp look as he sat down, but he avoided my eyes.

  Beside him Leo said distastefully, “My God, you smell like a fermentation vat. How much have you had to drink?”

  “None of your business,” Alex muttered.

  “It’s my business if you make a spectacle of yourself.”

  “Sure, that’s right. Somebody’s trying to make me dead and all you think about is your public image.”

  Rosa said, “Alex, be quiet,” in her imperious voice.

  He ignored her. “How’d you feel if you were a target instead of me?” he said to Leo. “Huh? How’d you feel?”

  “I wouldn’t get drunk in public,” Leo said.

  “You’d be nice and calm and rational, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh sure,” Alex said. “Big man, big business executive—a goddamn iceberg, that’s what you are. No feelings at all. You don’t give a shit about anything except profit-and-loss statements and Monday-noon projects; you don’t care about anybody except yourself.”

  We were all staring at him now, Leo with his face drawn tight and cold. Rosa said in a flat, mother-to-recalcitrant-children tone, “That’s enough, both of you. You’re only making matters worse.”

  “Screw it,” Alex said. He shoved away from the bench again, stood up; he seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes focused.

  “Where are you going?”

  He did not answer her, but then he didn’t have to: he went off in an unsteady gait toward the wine casks.

  The rest of us exchanged glances. I said to Mrs. Cappellani, “Unless you’ve got an important reason to stay on here, I think we ought to get him home.”

  She nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Do you want me to tell him?”

  “No. I will.”

  “You can also tell him that if he keeps on drinking, I won’t go on working for him. I mean that, Mrs. Cappellani; I’m no good with drunks.”

  That broke things up. She gave me a long unreadable look but no argument; another nod, short and stiff, and we all stood from the bench. Shelly took my arm, and when Mrs. Cappellani and Leo and Rosten were out of earshot she said, “One big happy family. You’re going to have your hands full if you stay on.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Two accordion players started up with a traditional tune, and the people at the benches began clapping their hands in time to the music. There was laughter, spontaneous singing.

  Some fest, I thought wryly. Some celebration.

  16

  It was after four when we got back to the Cappellani Winery. I rode in the back seat with Alex; Leo did the driving and Mrs. Cappellani sat like a block of granite beside him. None of us had much to say. Alex was sullen and fidgety, and you could see the beginnings of withdrawal sickness in his eyes and in the blotchy pigmentation of his skin.

  When Leo parked the Lincoln in front of the house, Alex got out immediately without saying anything to any of us and went inside in quick jerky strides: a man on his way either to his bed or to his toilet to do some vomiting. The rest of us got out and stood looking after him. As soon as he was gone, Rosa turned to me.

  “He won’t drink any more today,” she said. “He’ll probably just sleep.”

  I nodded.

&nb
sp; Leo said, “He never could hold his liquor very well.”

  She fixed him with a stony gaze. “Must you always make disparaging comments about Alex?” She said. “He’s not as strong as you, Leo, we all know that—and he knows it as well as any of us.”

  Leo seemed about to argue with her, changed his mind, and said instead, “Yes, I guess he does. Maybe you’re right, Rosa. Maybe I have been a little rough on him.”

  You said it, brother, I thought.

  The two of them went into the house. I stayed out there in the warm sunshine, for no particular reason except that I did not want to shut myself up in any of those musty rooms. It was quiet in the vineyards and around the winery buildings; all of the grape pickers and the cellar workers had evidently gone home for the day. Shelly and Rosten—and Dockstetter too, I supposed—were still at the fest. Shelly had said, just before we left, that she would see me later tonight; I may have read promise in that where none was intended, but I found myself thinking now, again, about going to bed with her.

  I killed five minutes doing nothing, decided that was hardly what I was getting paid for, and finally went inside. Neither Leo nor Mrs. Cappellani was around; the house had a hushed aura to go with its mustiness, like something out of a Gothic novel. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  Upstairs, I went through my room and into the adjoining bathroom and stood listening at the closed door to Alex’s room. Silence, except for a faint breathy sound that might have been snoring. I opened the door and looked in, and Alex was sprawled out face down on his bed, clothes on, shoes on, breathing heavy sour odors through his nose. I went in there and took his shoes off and opened his shirt and covered him with a blanket. He did not move through any of that; he was going to be out for a while.

  Back in my room, I pulled off my jacket and my own shoes and lay down on the bed. I thought about reading, but I had not brought any pulps with me and the only books I had seen downstairs were those on military history and winemaking. So I closed my eyes, just to rest—but the day had already been a long one: I was pretty tired. I fell asleep within minutes.

  Nothing happened to disturb me, and it was dark when I woke up. My watch read seven forty-five. I got up and put my jacket on —the air in there had turned a little chilly and a little dank; I did not like the feel of it in my lungs—and went to look in on Alex again. He was still sleeping, lying on his back now, the bedclothes rumpled around him.

  That damned musty dankness drove me out of my room and downstairs. People can learn to like living in different places, different environments, but the Cappellanis could have this place and welcome to it.

  When I stepped down into the foyer I saw somebody sitting in the big family room across from the stairs. Shelly. I detoured over there and went inside, and she smiled when she saw me and got to her feet. There was nobody else in the room.

  “Sitting here all alone?” I said.

  “Not until a couple of minutes ago. I was having a drink with Leo, but he’s gone into a business conference with Mrs. Cappellani. He’s leaving for San Francisco tonight.”

  “When did you get back from the fest?”

  “A little after five. It was pretty dull after you left. How’s Alex?”

  “Still sleeping it off.”

  “Looks like you’ve been sleeping yourself. Your hair’s mussed.”

  Which told me I had forgotten to run a comb through it before leaving the bathroom. Old age or chronic slob, take your pick. I got the comb out and worked with it briefly and put it away again. “Better?”

  “I liked it more the other way. Want a drink?”

  “I don’t think so. I was going out for some air. How about joining me?”

  “I’d love to—as they say in the old movies.”

  We went outside and wandered down the lane and then down the road past the cellar. There were drifting clouds in the sky now, obscuring what there was of a moon, and the air had an autumn crispness that cleared my lungs immediately. We were the only two people out and around that I could see. The winery buildings and the rolling vineyards were dark shadows against the dark sky; the nightlights on the main cellar had a remote look.

  Shelly took my arm and held it so that I could feel the swell of her breast, intentionally or otherwise. I began to think again about getting laid. She was thinking about it too, because when we got down beneath the black oak near the pond she stopped abruptly and turned to face me, and a couple of seconds after that we went into a clinch. As they say in the old movies.

  The intensity of her kiss surprised me: there was a kind of violence in it. Violence, too, in the way she wrapped both hands not around my neck but in the material of my shirt, as if she wanted to tear it off me, and in the hard thrusts of her body against mine. It went on that way for twenty or thirty seconds before I stopped it; one of her clutching hands had dug into the wound where she’d bitten me on Thursday night.

  “Hey,” I said, “take it easy. I’m an old man.”

  “Sure you are.” Up close this way, her face had a kind of fixed intensity of its own. Even in the darkness I could see that her eyes were bright and excited. “Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Where? Your cottage?”

  “No. Come on.”

  She let go of my shirt, reached down for one of my hands, and pulled me along the shore of the pond. But there was nothing where she was heading except the curving rows of grape vines. I said something to her about that, but she didn’t give me an answer; she just kept moving forward, hurrying, holding tightly to my hand. I had known eager women in the past, and I had been eager myself a few times—I was eager enough right now—yet there seemed to be something just a little odd about the way she was acting.

  She led me straight up into the vineyard, between two rows of tall old vines where the ground was hard and clodded. Then she stopped and pivoted to me, kissed me again—quick, hard—and tugged on my jacket and my arm so violently that we both went down to our knees. She leaned in against me, breathing rapidly now, and began banging the side of my neck with a bunched fist. Not gently; with enough force to hurt.

  Confusion and the pain from her blows made me grab both her wrists, hold her away from me. “Christ, Shelly,” I said, “what’re you doing?”

  “Come on,” she said, and there was a kind of animal wildness in her face. “Come on, come on.”

  “Here?”

  “Right here, right now. Just like the other night.”

  “What?”

  “Rough, rough. Make me fight you, hurt me a little.”

  I got it then, and it was like having cold water splashed on the back of my neck. I said, “Jesus.”

  “What are you waiting for? Come on!”

  Just like the other night, I thought. Out here in the vineyards. That was the big attraction for her, that was what all those looks had meant on Thursday and at The Boar’s Head on Friday and this afternoon at the fest. Make me fight you, hurt me a little. All the eagerness and all the desire went out of me; I released her wrists and pushed up onto my feet.

  I said, “No. No way.”

  She sat on her knees on the hard ground and stared up at me; the wildness faded out of her expression, the intensity faded, and what was left was bewilderment. Thickly she said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not into rough stuff. If that’s the impression you got of me the other night you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  Silence at first while she came to terms with what I was telling her. Then things happened in her face, giving it a bunched, masklike appearance for an instant, and she called me something obscene that I was not and never would be. I thought I was going to have to deal with savage outrage—only she surprised me on that score too. As soon as the one word was out of her mouth, her features smoothed and her lips quirked upward at one corner in a wry smile. She got slowly to her feet.

  “You like your sex all cozy and cuddly in bed, is that it?” she said. “Strictly missionary position, right?”

 
; “Not exactly. But you’ve got the idea.”

  “Then that’s your tough luck, big man. I stopped liking it cozy and cuddly the first time my ex-husband raped me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For me? Bullshit. Different strokes for different folks.”

  “If you like it that way, why did you fight me the other night when you thought I was a rapist?”

  “You were a stranger then,” she said, as if that explained it.

  The other night. Out here in the vineyards.

  The thought made me frown because it kept replaying at the back of my mind. Out here in the vineyards; just like the other night. Then something else jarred in my memory, and all at once I was hearing Frank Hastings’s voice on the telephone this afternoon, saying to me at the tag end of our conversation, “Just take it easy out in those vineyards this time. No more nighttime wrestling matches.”

  But how had Hastings known about what happened between Shelly and me on Thursday night? I hadn’t told him; I had not told anyone.

  I said abruptly, “Shelly, did you tell anybody about the other night? About us, about what happened with us?”

  The sudden shift of the questions made her blink. And then she misread my reason for asking them. Her smile curled up at the other corner of her mouth: contempt mixed with the wryness. “Worried about your reputation?”

  “No. Listen, did you tell anybody?”

  “No, I didn’t tell anybody.”

  So how did Hastings know?

  Unless—

  Sure. The only other person who could have known, who could have seen me wrestling with Shelly, was the man I had been chasing—the man who had attacked Alex. And if that man had accidentally let a comment slip to Hastings at some time during his investigation, and Hastings could remember who it was. . .

  I looked at Shelly for a moment. I did not condemn her for her sexual preferences; I had no right to judge her morality. But she was judging me, all right—hating me a little with her eyes as she had that other time in the vineyards. We had come full circle: we had no more relationship now than we’d had before I mistook her for Alex’s assailant.