Bitter Finish

by Linda Barnes

  “You did, Katharine, in Paris, a long time ago.”

  “And who let me go to Paris?”

  “I didn’t think I had any right to keep you away.”

  “And I didn’t think you cared enough to keep me away.” They stared at each other until Kate closed her eyes and took a deep sighing breath. She dabbed at her nose with the soggy Kleenex. Spraggue passed over his handkerchief.

  “You’re the only man I know who still carries a handkerchief.”

  “Keep it as a souvenir. You’re the last woman I dreamed I’d ever lend it to.”

  “Haven’t we had the Paris fight before, Spraggue?”

  “Yeah … Let’s talk about something else.”

  “What?”

  “About us. When you get out of here.”

  “When I get out of here,” she said firmly, after a long sniffling pause, “we’ve got to do something about the house.”

  “Remember that chateau by the Loire? The white one with the towers and turrets and gold leaf?”

  “Yeah.” She blew her nose loudly. “We rented horses from an old German expatriate. The silver one tried to throw me.”

  “You want one of those? A white castle with towers and—”

  “I want the time back,” she said. “I want to be twenty again.”

  “You weren’t half as good at twenty.”

  Her chin came up sharply. “I got what I wanted when I was twenty. You never turned me down.”

  “Temporary insanity,” Spraggue said. “I’ll make up for it when you’re out of here.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “A few more days, Kate. If I can’t straighten things out by then—”

  “Do you know what you’re asking? I feel like some kind of animal. I walk back and forth, back and forth.”

  “Things are starting to move,” he lied. “It won’t be much longer.”

  “Have they found out who that other guy was? How he died?”

  “Sorry,” the guard said loudly, “time’s up.” She turned away, so Spraggue pulled Kate close and hugged her again.

  “His name’s still a mystery,” he said. “He was poisoned.”

  “Jesus.”

  “With sulfur dioxide.”

  Kate’s face lost the tiny trace of color it had left.

  “Does that mean anything to you? Sulfur dioxide? I keep thinking—dammit, it’s like some light bulb should spark when I say the words—and nothing happens. It’s just high school chemistry to me.”

  The guard stared pointedly at her watch and took Kate’s arm.

  “One minute,” Spraggue said. “Kate, does sulfur dioxide mean something to you?”

  She swallowed audibly. “Ask Howard,” she whispered, and then she was gone.

  14

  A shower, a shave, a change of clothes—those were minimal requirements before the eight o’clock tasting. A couple hours sleep wouldn’t hurt.

  Spraggue stomped the brakes as a grape-loaded gondola pulled out of a driveway fifty yards ahead, resigned himself to a 25 mph creep behind the vehicle, and, for the first time in days, really took note of his surroundings.

  The valley bustled with its annual September fever. Mechanical harvesters rumbled across a vineyard to his left; the chatter of a picking crew competed to his right. The musty grape-smell was everywhere, overwhelming. Spraggue rolled down his window, drank it in.

  With crush in full swing, getting that cellar book out of Howard’s hands might be trickier than Kate suspected.

  Ask Howard, she’d said. Ask Howard about sulfur dioxide. Why? Damn it, there was something he should know, something he should recall about sulfur dioxide.

  Industrial accident … Enright would follow that trail straight out of the county if he could. Spraggue wondered how political Enright’s decision was. Had he powwowed with the elusive Sheriff Hughes, decided that one unsolved murder was more than sufficient for the sheriff’s current term of office? That a crazed double-murderer was unthinkable? Industrial accident …

  What the hell was SO2 used for? Spraggue’s mind veered back to long-ago chemistry classes. Making sulfuric acid. Bleaching paper? It might have something to do with re frigeration.…

  But the smell, dammit, that sharp, biting stink. SO2 wasn’t any carbon monoxide insinuating itself into the bloodstream, lulling the victim to final dreamless sleep. Anyone breathing sulfur dioxide would know immediately, flee—unless …

  Unconscious. Locked in. God, what an ugly, horrible, burning death.

  Spraggue felt pain in his chest and realized he was holding his breath. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead into his left eye. He rolled up the window, flipped on the noisy air conditioner.

  Industrial accident. And some foreman discovered the dead man, drove the corpse to the valley, dumped it in a convenient car trunk after stoving in the skull. Why? To prevent determining the cause of death? Garbage. The man’s trachea and lungs would yield more than sufficient evidence. To prevent identification, then. If he could just find out who Mr. X was.…

  He turned into the narrow driveway by the house, drove the twisting half-mile to the winery. He parked the station wagon far up, on the right-most verge of the gravel lot, so the gondolas would have easy access to the weight scales.

  Just finding Howard might be tough work. The yard teemed with workers. The whine of a gondola inching up the steep driveway drowned out all but shouted words. One load of grapes had already been dumped into the stainless-steel hopper. The helical screw conveyor revolved slowly, bringing the blackish-purple bunches up to the crusher-stemmer. The smell was incredibly intense, a fact seemingly appreciated by the swarms of vinegar flies and yellow jackets. The crusher-stemmer whirred, churning tons of pulped fruit, its paddles slapping the grapes and skins through holes in the rotating drum, freeing the juice from the berries, leaving the stems behind.

  Spraggue waved at a vaguely familiar young face and blared an inquiry about Howard. A smile, raised shoulders, and a glance toward the winery were all he got for response.

  A disagreement broke out at the weighing station. One of Kate’s assistants grasped the stem of a purple cluster between thumb and forefinger and waved it in the face of a sweating overweight man. Spraggue grabbed a cluster from a passing load, held it aloft to see if he could divine the nature of the dispute. The juice stained his fingers.

  Spraggue admired the new stainless-steel fermenters in the yard, wondered how Howard had reacted to the change from wood to steel. The grape must, piped directly from the crusher along with seeds and skins, slowly filled the huge vat. No sign of Howard outdoors.

  Holloway Hills Winery consisted of two huge barnlike buildings with a concrete walkway connecting the two. Spraggue hesitated between them briefly, then chose the right-hand door. More likely to find Howard fussing in the lab than messing around in the barrel-aging room or observing the quiet bottling line.

  Spraggue waited until his eyes adjusted from bright sunlight to the dark interior of the winery. The outdoor hubbub subsided to a faint hum. Holloway Hills had double walls: a two-foot airspace between kept out noise as well as heat.

  He could hear far-off footsteps, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the stainless-steel, twelve-foot-high tank that blocked his path. Arranged in rows, the tanks made a quick survey of the room impossible; an ideal locale for a kids’ game of hide and seek. Spraggue found himself reluctant to break the silence with a loud shout of “Howard!” He wanted to look around, observe the changes made since his last visit, breathe in the heady grape smell. And he’d hate to alarm poor Howard needlessly, shake loose a glass beaker from those hapless fingers.

  He moved down the aisles, counting the shining, temperature-controlled vats, coming at last to the narrow wooden staircase that led to the system of walkways overhead. He took the steps noiselessly; he’d found his observation post at last. Easy to locate Howard from eight feet up.

  Kate must have relocated the small lab when the new fermenters arrived. It wasn
’t much, just shelves on two walls and an elbow-high workbench studded with chemists’ tubes, Bunsen burners, glass pipes, and the like. Handy to have it up here, Spraggue supposed, for some tasks. Pumping over the wine during fermentation, adding the yeast strains. Inconvenient for others, not that Howard would ever complain.

  He stood in front of the workbench, idly picked up a pipette.

  “You looking for me?” He hadn’t heard Howard dash up the steps. “Joe said a man was looking for me. Uh, I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t alarm you. I wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “Hi, Howard.”

  “Hi.” Howard looked confused. “I, uh, if you want to talk, could it wait till later? The gondolas are coming in, and I have to check every one. Can’t trust the growers. Mechanical harvesters! Right down the road! Did you see them? Terrible. Terrible. Breaks up the clusters. Not to mention the MOG.”

  “MOG?” Spraggue said.

  “Material other than grape,” Howard explained earnestly. “Leaves, flies, bugs, pruning shears, hats!”

  “Howard,” Spraggue said in his gentlest tones, “Kate asked me to take over for her at Leider’s tasting tonight. I have to be able to make some semblance of intelligent comment on your ’77 Cabernet. Can I borrow your cellar book?”

  Howard’s normally pale face glowed red for a few seconds before he turned away. “I, uh, I—”

  “I promise I’ll get it back to you first thing in the morning. It won’t leave my hands.”

  Howard refused to meet his eye. He squirmed uncomfortably, finally spoke. “It’s uh, it’s just that I don’t have it with me right now.… But I could get it. Would it be okay if I brought it to you over at the house? Those tastings never start till eight.”

  “If you’ll tell me where to look, I’ll find it. You leave it out by the crusher?”

  “No, uh, really, Mr. Spraggue, it’s slipped my mind. All this rush … I can’t remember. But as soon as it turns up, I’ll bring it over. Don’t worry!”

  “Don’t leave it too late. I have to read the thing before I show up at the tasting.”

  “Don’t worry,” Howard repeated, still staring at the floor. “Uh, Mr. Spraggue, I hope you’ve thought about what I’ve said, about leaving.”

  “I have. Frankly, Howard, I’m hoping you’ll reconsider.”

  “No, uh, really, look for a replacement. I can’t stay. I really can’t.”

  “Howard,” Spraggue said, “one more thing. What’s sulfur dioxide used for?”

  “Well,” Howard said with a puzzled frown, “of course, you have to use it at the crush, to avoid oxidation. Especially in the whites. We don’t use much here, thirty to sixty parts per million, that’s all. Some of the wineries use more: a hundred parts per million, a hundred and fifty parts, even. You can smell it.”

  “That’s the only time it’s used?”

  “I absolutely have to go now. I won’t forget about the cellar book. Don’t worry about a thing. It’ll be there before you leave.”

  Howard didn’t wait for thanks or any dismissing nod. He bolted headlong down the stairs.

  After a moment’s pause, Spraggue turned back to his survey of the laboratory workbench. Had Howard been avoiding something with his carefully downcast eyes? Or was the man merely gifted with a glance that defined the term “shifty-eyed”?

  It took him ten minutes to find the box—third shelf down, right out in the open. He’d have located it sooner if he’d known what shape to look for. The yellow sulfur sticks came with a warning label, printed in red: POISON. Spraggue read the instructions: “For use in sterilizing winemaking equipment.”

  He replaced the sticks carefully in the box, put it back on the shelf, and retraced his steps to the car.

  15

  Spraggue wasn’t the only substitute at the tasting.

  “Jesus, the timing!” The gray-bearded man seated next to him spoke in an undertone. “You’d think they’d have canceled the damn tasting. None of the winemakers can get away! It’s crazy! We didn’t even start crushing until September sixteenth. And now, everything’s coming in at once! Cabernet before Chardonnay! Crazy!”

  Spraggue sipped from one of the eight long-stemmed, numbered glasses in front of him and tried to pin down the dusky taste. Number 6, he was sure, was Holloway Hills. Good wine. Almost worth sitting through two hours of yammering about foxiness and legs and tannin for. Why did wine language sound so bad, so stuffed-shirt? More to the point, why did he react to it so badly, so much worse than he reacted to medical jargon or computer gobbledygook? Probably because it was bad enough to be the goddamned wealthy scion of the robber-baron-capitalist-pig Spraggue family, without being a wine-snob to boot. Spraggue glared at the eight round small tables, the one long rectangular one at the head, all spaciously accommodated by Leider’s vast living room. The gathering was almost enough to send him out to a boxing match with a six-pack under his arm. He hated boxing just about as much as he disliked beer.

  By ten o’clock the white tablecloths were stained with drops of Cabernet, pockmarked with crumbs of French bread. Spraggue teetered back on two legs of an uncomfortable chair and tried to appear rapt with attention. He wasn’t sure he was focusing on the right speaker.

  The bread crumbs dotted Leider’s fine oriental rugs, the only items in the house Spraggue could look at without distaste. Everything else was glass, chrome, or steel, with harsh angular lines set off by pinpoint spotlights. Not a single rocking chair, not a cushion. All right angles, cold metal, and neutral tones, except for the violently colored abstract paintings on the beige walls. And even they were cold—icy in their geometric perfection. One arched steel lamp, jutting across the floor, made him think of a hospital examining room.

  At a signal from the head table, the bearded man next to Spraggue got to his feet, shoved his hands in his pockets, and began to recite. “The grapes came from our San Vincente vineyard. Cool location, average rainfall just ten inches a year, so we used overhead sprinklers for supplemental irrigation …”

  As host, Phil Leider could have taken his place at the head table. But he preferred sitting with winemakers to sitting with critics, or so he said. Now he jogged Spraggue’s elbow, snorted loud enough for his neighbors to hear: “Supplemental irrigation! Dammit, Brent would have been all over that guy. Great one for stressing vineyards, Lenny was. Dull as hell here without Lenny.”

  Spraggue murmured agreement, picked up another glass, swirled it. He breathed in deeply, filling nose, mouth, lungs. Château Montelena? Clos du Val? The bearded man settled into a monotonous drone. Spraggue thought about death by sulfur-dioxide poisoning.

  Winemakers used the burning sulfur sticks to fumigate the wooden fermenting tanks, that much he’d learned from the printed blurb inside the box. Or was it the aging tanks? Eight glasses of wine improved neither memory nor concentration.

  He tried again. How would you use the sulfur sticks? Light a couple out in the fresh air, toss them in the tank, slam the tiny, barely man-sized gate? Maybe they’d have to be placed inside, upright, in some kind of holder. Take a deep breath, hold it, squeeze through the gate with the lighted sticks, set them up, get out fast … And if someone behind you slams the gate?

  Could anyone wriggle through those tiny portholes carrying burning sticks? A two-person job, then. Or maybe the whole business was handled from the top of the tank. Sulfur dioxide was heavier than oxygen.…

  Or maybe Mr. X, freshly knocked on the head, already unconscious, had been shoved into the tank.

  “The wine was not fined, stabilized, or filtered.” The assistant winemaker on Spraggue’s left raised his voice now that he was near the end of his dissertation. “We did centrifuge. Portions of the wine were aged in Limousin, Nevers, and American oak, then blended … 13.4 percent alcohol, 0.63 percent acid, 0.126 percent residual sugar: those are the stats. I think it’s got a lot of aging potential, but I don’t mind drinking it as is.”

  The man gave a nervous nod and sat down suddenly. There was a smattering
of applause. The drunkest clapped loudest. Mary Ellen Martinson led the round.

  “Brent would have approved of that, at least,” Leider confided in Spraggue’s direction.

  “Of what?”

  “Not filtering the wine. Lenny was all for leaving the damn juice alone and praying to the harvest gods.”

  “In Hungarian?”

  “Right. According to Lenny, the harvest gods didn’t speak American—” A sudden rumble of conversation and a general pushing back of chairs interrupted him.

  “It’s over?” Spraggue said hopefully.

  “Without churning out the ratings? Without identifying the wines? Not on your life! All this palaver’s just the appetizer. What we really want are the grades, like in college. This is only a stretch-your-legs-and-yap break. The judges hope we’ll get our gossip over with and not hang around after the points are given. They like to hit and run.”

  Spraggue nodded, stood, and stretched.

  But Leider wasn’t through. He spread his hands in a proprietary gesture. “So what do you think?”

  Just in time, Spraggue remembered that the ice palace was Leider’s baby. “Impressive,” he said, very sincerely, wondering what other descriptive, but not unflattering, words he could follow up with. Large?

  “Michael! How are you? How’s Kate? Awful about Lenny …” Spraggue found himself saved from a reply to Leider by a horde of vaguely familiar faces, all eager for the low-down on the valley murders. No escape.

  “Great to see you again.” George Martinson, one of the more long-winded judges, pumped enthusiastically at Spraggue’s right hand.

  “Good wine, Phil,” Mary Ellen Martinson yelled across the room to Leider. “Can’t touch your ’75, though. What did you and Lenny do that year? Sell your souls?”

  “The ’75 was very special, wasn’t it?” Leider beamed and nodded, then walked quickly away.

  “Modest bastard, isn’t he?” Mary Ellen inquired of the population at large in ear-splitting tones.