by Linda Barnes
The machine recorded silence, broken by Spraggue’s steady breathing. It wiped out all the carefully studied lines and cues from Still Waters. And what did that matter, Spraggue thought, when he wouldn’t be around to recite them? If he could tape Leider’s confession, hide the tape, at least—At least what? Where would he hide it? Who would think to look? If his body was found afloat in a vat of Pinot Noir, would the acid have eaten away the cassette? What he needed was an escape plan, not a recording.
“Why don’t you tell me the gory details, Phil?” he said. For now, keep Phil talking, keep him from doing something irrevocable. “All about Mark Jason. Then maybe I’ll come out.”
Leider laughed. Hell, Leider ought to feel comfortable enough to laugh; he was holding all the cards. “A fairy tale?” he said. “Before you go to sleep?”
“A horror story,” Spraggue said, hoping the recorder was picking up both sides. “About a berserk winemaker.”
“I don’t know that one. How about the ‘Three Little Pigs’?”
“I’ll prompt,” Spraggue offered. “I know almost every line.”
“Bragging?”
“Maybe. Check it out. Aren’t you curious?”
“Not particularly.”
“When did you first decide to sell the winery?” Spraggue asked.
“Come out where I can see you.”
“Come in after me.”
“Go ahead and tell your horror story,” Leider said.
Spraggue inched over to a new barrel, peered through the crack. Leider wanted to keep him talking, too, so he could pin down the sound. Great. With each of them trying to get the other to talk, he might have a long-playing album on his hands.
“Once upon a time,” Spraggue found himself saying in a nursery-calm voice. The “Three Little Pigs” reference must have stuck in his mind. “—There was a big fat piggy who got fed up with the wine industry.”
“No crime in that.”
“He mismanaged his winery,” Spraggue said, “blew all the cash that should have gone into upkeep and repairs on fancy cars and a monstrosity of a house.”
“You don’t like my taste,” Leider said. “Pity.”
Spraggue stared up at the wall of barrels in front of him. The wood-frame barrel rack resembled a jungle gym. Spraggue considered the similarity. His eyes narrowed. He tucked the tape recorder back into his jacket pocket, shifted his weight to his left foot, untied one shoe.
“Keep talking,” Leider demanded.
“Well, this ingenious swine doped out a plan to skyrocket the net worth of his winery before offering it to a corporate hog. United Circle, right?” The floor was cool under Spraggue’s stockinged feet. He shoved one shoe under his arm, abandoned the other.
Leider chuckled as the flashbeam pried closer. “How on earth did he manage that, the clever pig?”
Spraggue placed one foot on the wooden barrel rack, tested the strength of the supports. “Why, he decided some of his swill would look better in classier bottles. Bottles labeled 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon, Private Reserve.” The rack was solid. Spraggue half-zipped his jacket, stuffed the shoe inside, and started to climb.
“What a smart piggy,” Leider said. “That wine was bottled gold.”
“How much a bottle?”
“Retailers are getting over thirty-five dollars. It went on the market for seven.”
Spraggue switched back to his nursery-tale voice. “Now the piggy planned to be long gone with the cash before anyone bitched about the inventory.”
“Are you kidding, Spraggue? That was the beauty of it. No one would have had the nerve to complain. After I copped the ’79 Académie tasting, you wouldn’t believe the requests I got for that stuff. Not from the regular places, from goddamned corner liquor stores in Oshkosh. From shops that just wanted prestige labels on their shelves. From the airlines, for Christ’s sake!”
“I tried a bottle on TWA,” Spraggue said.
“Damn them! They had specific instructions to age it another year.”
“I assumed they’d stored it wrong.”
“See?” Leider was clearly delighted. “If anyone with half a palate did taste a spurious bottle, he’d blame it on storage.”
Spraggue clung to the rack and inhaled deeply. If he started gasping for breath, if the strain of the climb showed in his voice, Leider might catch on.
“Go on with your story,” Leider said expansively. “I’m beginning to enjoy it.”
Spraggue murmured a silent prayer and swung himself over the topmost barrel. From ten feet up, he could just see Leider, revolving like a plump top near the landing, uncertain where the voice in the dark originated. The gun glinted in the flashbeam. Harry Bascomb would have known what make it was.
“Go on,” Leider ordered. “Talk.”
“But the piggy needed to blend his swill.” Spraggue was pleased with the sound of his voice. No gasping, no quavers. “He didn’t want it to taste all that different from Lenny’s prize-winning ’75, at least not at first. So he hired an innocent student from U.C.–Davis. That was around Christmastime, wasn’t it, Phil?”
“Mark Jason was all in favor of playing a joke on the wine snobs.”
“But I’ll bet he didn’t know you were planning to sell out to United Circle. If Lenny hadn’t spilled the—”
“Damn Lenny,” Leider muttered, much too softly for the recorder to pick up.
“If it hadn’t been for Lenny,” Spraggue continued, “your whole scam might have worked.”
“It’ll still work!” Leider screamed the words, and Spraggue, staring down from the mountaintop, could see the sickly color in his fat face, the beads of sweat on his brow. Maybe murder wasn’t so easy for him after all. Or perhaps the dull flush that spread across his cheeks was primed by fear, terror at the details Spraggue already knew. Maybe Phil imagined that Spraggue had told others.…
“How did Lenny find out? Did he realize you were getting rid of him when you sent him over to Holloway Hills?”
“Never,” Leider said. “I maneuvered it nicely, made him think the move was his own idea, that I was heartbroken at the prospect of going on without him. He ate it up.”
“Then how?”
“Lenny stole a case of wine, one crummy case. I’d given him his share when he left. But that wasn’t enough for Lenny. He’d made it; he thought all the wine was his.”
Spraggue, with the glimmering of a plan in his mind, struggled forward down the mountain of barrels an inch at a time. He was no longer in danger of exposure from the flashlight beam; the front edge of the barrel tower would have deflected the light had Leider thought to raise it so high. The chief peril now was a sudden fall. Spraggue tested each barrel before straddling it. Most were full, heavy, solid, and quiet. He said, “And Lenny must have donated a bottle from that special case of his to George Martinson. Rotten luck.”
“Worse for Martinson than for me,” Leider said. “The Leider Cabernet had an unassailable reputation by that time. And then that L.A. paper reviewed one of the original bottles. George Martinson was a laughing stock.”
“Lenny threatened him,” Spraggue said.
“Good.”
“But then Lenny himself must have tried a bottle from the mislabeled case, right? And he went straight off to confront the guilty hog.” As Spraggue spoke, his nursery-tale voice serene, he wiped the sweat off his forehead and sank back against a barrel. One slip and he was gone. If the fall didn’t kill him outright, Leider would hardly miss an unconscious target. Spraggue wondered idly if the fat man was strong enought to lift him, if he had another tank prepared, a few leftover sulfur sticks.
“Dammit, Spraggue,” Leider shouted. “I thought Lenny would see it the way I did. As a joke on a conglomerate, on all those wine snobs who can only tell what they’re drinking by the label and the price.”
“How did Lenny see it?” Spraggue led Leider on while surveying the barrel mountain, searching for the key location.
“He didn’t want me to sell.
Or if I did sell, he wanted to buy. A song down, forever to pay.”
“Not quite your intention.”
“It was blackmail!”
“So …” Spraggue found a barrel formation that would do, started carefully toward it. “You paid him off for a while. You probably even let Lenny use certain locations in your new house for his obscene amateur photography.”
“How did you—”
“He stowed the negatives in the cellar at Holloway Hills.”
“You see what kind of vermin the man was? You could line up the people who wanted Lenny dead, just the women who wanted him dead, and get a line from here to—”
“From here to the county jail, Phil.”
“Enough, Spraggue. The steps are the only way out and—”
“But I’m getting to the best part,” Spraggue protested.
“I didn’t want to kill Lenny.” Spraggue couldn’t see Leider’s face, but he bet the man was drenched in perspiration by now.
“He forced my hand,” Leider said. “Money wasn’t good enough for him anymore. He decided his reputation was in jeopardy. His reputation! You’d have thought his name was on the bottle, not mine! He was going to turn me in so his goddamned reputation wouldn’t get sullied. Send me to prison, screw the deal with United Circle.”
The triad of barrels Spraggue had spotted looked perfect, slightly unstable with a wide enough depression behind a key barrel for Spraggue to fold himself into the slot. Even if he couldn’t manage to kick the right barrel loose, he’d be out of sight, safe from all but the luckiest of shots. Spraggue wasted a minute staring down the hole, wondering if he’d be able to squirm his way out. Maybe not; maybe he’d starve to death, and next spring, when the United Circle vintner made his rounds to top off the barrels, he’d find a corpse clutching a tape recording.
“So you had to kill Lenny.” Spraggue used the words to prod Leider to further defense. He didn’t want any long periods of silence now.
“Not then,” Leider corrected. “I laughed in his face. He didn’t have a smidgen of proof. A case of wine was mislabeled. Tough. Someone made a mistake.”
“When did Lenny locate Mark Jason?”
Leider’s toes tapped the wooden floor. His voice bit off the brittle words. “He knew I’d have needed help. I couldn’t blend the wine myself, couldn’t run the damn bottling line alone. Once he found Jason, he had to die. They both had to die.”
The top barrel of Spraggue’s chosen triad was blessedly empty. One of the other two seemed only partially full. Spraggue crawled down into the crevice. If he executed the maneuver just right, he might start an avalanche of barrels.
“Is that the end of your story?” Leider asked, his voice back in control. “Isn’t the big bad pig supposed to get punished? Or was he too clever for you?”
Spraggue wriggled over on his back, drew his knees up to his chest, and pressed his feet flat against the key barrel.
“Spraggue, say something!”
With last-minute inspiration, Spraggue fumbled the shoe out of his jacket pocket. If he could create a loud noise, far away, Leider might help him out by taking a few steps away from the precious landing. He took a deep breath and flung the shoe hard over his head. It smacked satisfyingly against the far wall.
The flashbeam jerked. Leider took three quick steps forward. The silence, the tension, the sudden noise betrayed him. He fired his gun wildly, in the direction of the fallen shoe. Spraggue closed his eyes and put every muscle he commanded into the task of straightening his bent knees.
The room exploded with barrels and bullets. Spraggue jumped for the landing.
“You missed.” Barely halfway down the flight of stairs, Spraggue heard the hissing whisper and whipped his head around. Leider, on the landing, raised his pistol steadily. It had a bore as big as a cannon’s mouth.
Without conscious thought, Spraggue fell.
26
The stuntman’s words roared in his head: relax, cradle your head, hit with your thighs. Leider’s gun barked. The fall took forever, like a slow-motion replay of one of the Boston location shots.
Roll when you land! His ankle ached and his breath came in sharp, painful jabs but he kept moving, veering in and out between the tanks. He tried the steps to the catwalk; his ankle refused the climb. He passed the centrifuge, spotted the switch, and flicked it on. Machinery droned. Everything he passed, he switched on, hiding his dragging, panicked footsteps in a forest of noise. The bladder press wheezed. The bottling line rattled through its empty motions. Every door he tried was locked. The windows were too high for escape.
Moonlight filtered through the dusty panes. Spraggue was shocked by the darkness. He had no sense of the time spent on the second floor; it could have been three minutes or three hours. Surely, by now, someone would be searching for him. Someone might find those broken bottles at Lenny’s place, figure out where he’d gone and why.…
Behind a huge wooden tank, Spraggue collapsed on the floor and rubbed his swelling foot.
The roaring machinery benefited the hunter as well as the hunted. Leider couldn’t hear Spraggue’s rasping breath. Spraggue strained for Leider’s approaching footfalls.
The bottling line jerked to a halt. The bladder press gasped and gave up. Leider turned off the centrifuge. His footsteps rang on the catwalk steps. “You didn’t finish your story,” he said. The flashlight made him a moving target. But he had the only gun.
Dammit. Leider had a strategic position overlooking the room. Leider had the keys. Leider had the gun. How many bullets did the fat man have left?
Spraggue ran a hand through his hair, clamped his lips together. Shit. Old Harry Bascomb would know. Given a single split-second glance at Leider’s hunk of blue-gray metal, he’d ID it as a .38 caliber Webley or whatever automatic. He’d holler, “That’s your final shot, Leider. Your number’s up!” Or some such garbage.
Spraggue was almost certain, he’d heard four distinct shots at the top of the stairs. And three on the way down. Seven.… That seemed about right for an automatic. But he couldn’t be sure.
In answer to his unspoken question, he heard a sound that could only be a magazine clicking home in Leider’s pistol. Seven more shots. How could he draw them without playing clay pigeon? Did Leider carry yet another clip?
The catwalk creaked overhead, and Spraggue scuttled crablike around to the other side of the tank.
“Why the hell … couldn’t you just … leave me alone?” Leider shouted. His breath came in great gulps, tearing the sentence into three separate bits. His agitation and grief were palpable. He was starting to fray, his self-possession coming apart at the seams. Spraggue hoped his emotions would affect his marksmanship.
“Why did you try to pin it on Kate?” Spraggue asked. Leider whirled and fired. Three shots lodged themselves harmlessly in the tank. Spraggue waited for a fourth, but none came. Leider must have pulled himself together, realized the folly of firing with no clear target. Three shots gone.
“I had to,” Leider said. Spraggue held up the tape recorder and shook it. It whirred merrily along. During the fall, his ribs had sustained more damage than the machine.
“Everyone said that Kate would sell out,” Leider continued. “Some executive from United Circle was sniffing around Holloway Hills. Dammit, I’d spent most of a year negotiating with them. If they’d bought Holloway Hills, that would have killed my deal. Holloway Hills has a better location, better facilities.”
“Kate would never have sold,” Spraggue said.
“I’m supposed to take that on faith? I had to dump the bodies; I thought I’d put Kate out of action at the same time. She couldn’t sign any United Circle contract from a jail cell.”
“What a very clever piggy you are,” Spraggue said. “Only—”
“Only you had to stick your nose in. And keep it in, even after I got Kate off the hook. Why the hell couldn’t you …”
Spraggue felt a deep sick wrenching in his gut. That was why a teenager had
been found in the trunk of an abandoned car so far from Holloway Hills.…
“You murdered that boy just to get me off your back,” he said haltingly, hoping for Leider’s denial.
“You were starting to be a greater risk than the chance of Kate selling out to United Circle.” Leider laughed softly, a laugh tainted by a hint of hysteria. “Don’t you remember what I told you coming down in the car that first day? Hitchhikers gamble every time they get in a car with a stranger.” The vintner’s laugh intensified.
“You’re crazy,” Spraggue said. He spat into a corner and forced himself to think—not about some child killed without compunction—but about how to take this Leider, this sweating, giggling maniac. How to wrap his hand around that fat throat …
“On the contrary,” Leider hollered triumphantly. “I considered the matter carefully. Judiciously. A third ‘Car-Trunk’ slaying would make even the most moronic cop release Kate. The murder was a refinement, another step in an unavoidable chain of regrettable actions. My sole error was in figuring that you would drop the whole mess and return to work you’re more suited for.”
Spraggue liked the way Leider’s voice had tightened when he’d called him crazy. He picked at the sore. “You loony bastard,” he said. “You psycho case—”
“I’m a pragmatist,” Leider shouted. “I did exactly what I had to do, no more, no less. Every act was well planned. A reason behind every act.”
“Why did you use sulfur dioxide on Mark Jason? You could have drowned him, too, couldn’t you? But the cruelty appealed to you, turned you on.” Spraggue put all the disgust he hadn’t been able to spit out into his voice.
“Shut up! Come out where I can see you. If you do, I’ll give you an easy death, a clean death. Later, I might change my mind, shoot you in the kneecap first—”
“Was setting fire to Jason’s apartment carefully planned?” Spraggue said quickly. Bringing out the worst in Leider wouldn’t help if he gave the vintner a chance to think, to plan instead of react. “You could have killed twenty, thirty innocent people.”