The Lovely Pines

by Don Travis

  “When would this have been?”

  “Shortly before I retired, I think. Maybe ’05 or ’06.”

  “He have siblings?”

  “An older brother and sister showed up a couple of times to bail him out.”

  “Okay, get on them, will you?”

  I HOOKED up with Paul at the house after work. With a rare second free night in a row, we decided to go to the C&W Palace. Monday nights weren’t the best time for the club, but you take what you can get, right? There would be enough stray cowgirls to help Paul indulge his passion for line dancing.

  I donned a Stetson and cowboy boots, but Paul went the extra mile in stonewashed jeans, a pale blue slipover body shirt, and a mustard-colored leather vest with short fringes. When he plopped his black hat on his dark curls, he looked ready to take on the world… and handsome enough to do it.

  The C&W on Central east of Expo New Mexico—more commonly called the State Fairgrounds—was a huge nightclub dedicated to attracting genuine cowboys and cowgirls, as well as cowboy and cowgirl wannabees like us. We no sooner found a small table near the dance floor than Paul was off and running looking for a partner. The C&W was a hetero place, so we never danced with each other here. There were a couple of gay spots for that.

  My eye automatically went across the cavernous place to the spot where the Santos Morenos, a violent local gang, once held court on the east side of the room. Three years ago I had a hand in taking them down in the case I called the Zozobra Incident. So far as I could tell, nobody missed them.

  My attention snapped back to the present when a couple swept by the table keeping time to a lively country-and-western tune I didn’t recognize. That wasn’t unusual, I didn’t recognize many of them… except for Patsy Cline’s tunes. Strange how that woman’s warbling soulful tones grabbed a devoted classical music lover, but they had. I would stop in the middle of a busy freeway to listen to that powerful voice.

  I wasn’t certain why the couple snared my attention until they danced back in this direction again. The Pines’ vineyard supervisor, James Bledsong and a woman… his wife, I presumed. Margaret. Or Maggie, as he’d called her. I caught his eye, and he nodded.

  “Okay,” Paul said, setting a couple of drinks on the table before claiming a chair. “Got a couple of dances lined up, but the band’s about to go on a break. So I’m all yours for the next half hour.” He blinded me with a smile.

  I nodded over his shoulder. “Maybe not.”

  He turned as the Bledsongs walked up to us. James stuck out his hand as we exchanged introductions.

  “Join you for a couple of minutes?” he asked.

  “Sure. Need anything?”

  “What’re you having?”

  “Long Island iced tea.”

  He shook his head. “Too strong for me. What’s yours, Paul?”

  “Plain old bourbon and water.”

  “That’s more my taste. Honey?” he asked Maggie.

  “Same, please.”

  I signaled a waitress and delivered the order before turning back to the Bledsongs. “You guys come here often?”

  “Once a month. Whether we need to get out of the house or not,” Maggie answered.

  James laughed. “Don’t exaggerate, honey. Well, I guess it’s not much of one. We’re on a limited budget.”

  “We’re saving to invest in a winery of our own one day,” she said.

  Bledsong looked stricken. “Uh… that’s a long way down the road.”

  I grinned at him. “Don’t worry. Your boss didn’t hire me to spy on you, just to find out about the break-in.” I got serious. “That’s not to say I won’t tell him anything that’s relevant, but I don’t carry gossip.”

  Maggie gave a nervous laugh. “Thank goodness. I forgot about you being a PI and all that.”

  “Confidential investigator,” Paul corrected. “He’s too high-hat to be a PI.”

  She seemed to think that was funny. Their drinks arrived, allowing time for her tension to dissipate.

  “As I understand it, Gonda brought you with him from Napa Valley,” I said.

  Bledsong nodded. “Yep. He stole me from Alfano Wineries. Not that I was a loss to them or anything.”

  “Don’t say that,” his wife protested.

  “It’s true. I wasn’t anywhere near their top viticulturist, but I know my business. Ariel saw that and offered me a deal.”

  “You like it out here?”

  He gave me the expected reply. “Except for the ocean. There isn’t one. And that pond out at Lovely Pines doesn’t raise much surf.”

  We talked for a few minutes about life in California versus life in New Mexico until the band returned with a rattle of drums and a strum of an electric guitar. The lead singer announced a line dance.

  “May I borrow your wife?” Paul asked, rising and holding out a hand.

  “Be my guest, but return her without dings, dents, or scratches, please.”

  “Ma’am?” Paul said in his best southwestern drawl.

  “I’m not sure how good I am at this, but I’ll give it a try.”

  We watched the tall attractive young man lead the much shorter attractive woman out onto the dance floor and take up positions opposite each other.

  “This should be interesting. She hasn’t line danced in a long time,” Bledsong said. Then he shifted his gaze to me. “You and him… together?”

  I met his eyes and nodded. “For almost three years now.”

  “You cover it well.”

  I’d engaged in this exact conversation with a dozen people over the years, so I gave him my stock answer. “Not covering anything. Just me being me and Paul being Paul. Fair enough?”

  He took a sip of his drink and put it back on the table. “Sure. Have you met Zuniga yet?”

  “Just to shake his hand. Why that question at this time? Is he gay?”

  Bledsong shrugged. “Nobody’s sure. But I’ve lived around the Bay Area most of my life, and sometimes I can tell.”

  “Would it bother you if he is?”

  “Naw. Like I say, I’ve lived around Frisco too long.”

  “Zuniga’s not married?”

  He shook his head. “And doesn’t go out much. He and Claudio Garcia, one of my guys, rent a house at the edge of Plácido.”

  “You think Garcia’s gay too?”

  “Naw. Claudio’s obsessed with his wife. He’s lonely, you know. He saves every spare dime to go visit them in Juarez as much as he can. He has no social life.”

  “If he’s legal, why doesn’t he bring his family up here?”

  “Ariel’s offered to help him do that. But she takes care of her elderly parents and won’t leave.”

  I grimaced. A case of economics at work, pure and simple. Claudio could make a better living for them up here than back home. These days Ciudad Juarez was about the most dangerous city on the planet, especially for young males. I knew from the payroll records Garcia was twenty-four.

  I leaned back in my seat and took a tiny sip of the Long Island. One of those was my limit for the night. “That provides a nice segue into the next question. Is it possible Garcia’s so desperate for money for his family he would break into the winery?”

  “For what?” Bledsong asked. “There wasn’t anything missing. Except for one bottle of wine. And it was the chocolate-flavored wine. Claudio doesn’t like that. He’s a purist when it comes to the grape.”

  “One bottle that we know of. That place has so many bottles, who’s sure of what’s missing?”

  “Don’t let that fool you. Ariel riddles the place every three days, you know… giving each bottle a twist to break loose the sediment. So he knows what’s there, and probably Zuniga, Jones, and Hakamora do too. Besides, Ariel took a fresh inventory as soon as he discovered that bottle missing.”

  I watched Paul and Maggie dance while I thought. She seemed to be keeping up just fine. “Gonda brought all of the top management with him, right? And that includes you.”

  “Right. T
he cook—Ms. Bright—Parson Jones, Garcia, and Tso were all hired by old man C de Baca. Ariel brought in the rest.”

  “Including the waitress?” I asked.

  “That’s a turnover position. You know, kids graduate from college or their schedules change, and we have to replace them.”

  “Katie… that’s right, isn’t it…? Katie?”

  “Yeah. Katie Henderson. She works full time during the summer and during the holiday break. Otherwise she works only on weekends and holidays while she goes to school at UNM here in Albuquerque. She’s a psych major.”

  “She’s not married?”

  He shook his head. “Got a boyfriend named Miles. Miles Lotharson, I think. She brought him along once when Ariel gave a little party for the staff. So far as I can tell, he’s a loser. Decent enough looking, but she’s way above him. That’s the way I figure it, anyway.”

  The band ended the number with a bang and a twang, and the twin line of dancers broke up. Paul escorted Maggie back to the table. The Bledsongs took their leave shortly thereafter.

  Paul emptied what little was still in his glass. “Learn anything?”

  “Bits and pieces.”

  “Any good bits and great pieces?”

  “Enough to make our trip up here to the Heights a business expense, not a personal one.”

  Paul fixed me with his brown-eyed stare. “Let’s go home and indulge in some personal business.”

  Line dancing always charged his batteries.

  Chapter 4

  THE NEXT morning I drove straight up I-25 and exited at the north Bernalillo ramp east to the Lovely Pines. The drive, even obeying the speed limit, was no more than forty minutes. Gonda walked around from behind the chateau to greet me as I parked and got out of the Impala.

  “Good morning, BJ. You have come to tell me my mystery is solved, I hope.”

  “No such luck. We’ve started the background searches, and so far it’s just the usual. You know, traffic tickets. Minor stuff. Of course, the checks aren’t completed yet. We’re also expanding the search and looking into the C de Baca family’s background.”

  His eyebrows climbed. “Why so?”

  “Ariel, I could feed you some baloney, but to be honest, I’m casting around for demons. You’ve owned the winery for fewer than six months, so it’s possible whatever is going on traces back to the prior owners. Can you tell me anything about the family?”

  “Very little. The old man enjoyed a solid reputation as a vintner. He did not have much of a variety, but the wine he sold was good. Those bottles I presented you were his product.”

  “What do you know about his death?”

  “Just that it was sudden and unexpected. At least, it seemed so to me.”

  “Did you see any evidence of illness during the time you were negotiating with him?”

  “He was a spare man, but that’s just the way he was built. He wasn’t emaciated or frail.”

  “How small was he?”

  Gonda dry washed the lower part of his face with his left hand in a gesture that was becoming familiar. “Let’s see, I would judge him to have been about five seven. He weighed in at maybe a hundred and thirty or thirty-five pounds. He carried no fat, and the evidence of long years of hard labor still showed in his muscles. He looked entirely healthy to me. They said a heart attack took him.”

  “How did his family react?”

  “Quite distressed over it, I would say. German—they spell it like ‘German,’ you know, but say it like Herman. Something about the Gs. At any rate, he was the eldest child and took his father’s death hard. He worked with Ernesto for his entire life. Consuela, the daughter, is a little harder to read. She is a tough one, that lady.”

  “Tough how?”

  He squinted as he considered the question. “Grasping, I would say. She was the one who wanted to sell, but German held the power by right of his position in the company. During my months of talking with Ernesto, German never indicated one way or the other how he felt about selling out. But I had the distinct impression he preferred to keep it in the family.”

  “So why did he agree to sell after his father died?”

  “Consuela’s influence, in my judgment. She convinced him of it.”

  “Why were the negotiations taking so long with Mr. C de Baca?”

  “The asking price. The old gentleman wanted two and three-quarter million dollars for the business. That included a total of 125 acres, made up of the winery property, the vineyard, and the lake. The buildings were quite substantial, and his equipment and inventory were good, to say nothing of the grapes, but there were too many intangibles—how do you say it?—too much blue sky in the price. With only fifty planted acres, the capacity was too small without buying other terroirs from neighboring vineyards. The investment in planting the additional fifty acres would be considerable. Therefore the return on investment would be insufficient.”

  “Wasn’t he willing to come down on the price?”

  “Modestly. But after an appropriate amount of time following his death, his heirs met my price of two million two.”

  “Is the daughter married?”

  “Yes, and I have met her husband, Braxton Simpson, several times. He is a retired banker and seems a pleasant fellow.”

  “If Mrs. Simpson is so grasping, why did she agree to more than a half-million-dollar reduction?”

  He shrugged. “Presumably because she wanted her share of the money more than she wanted a going business.”

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  “I am afraid not.”

  “I believe there is a younger son. Was he involved?”

  “You are speaking of Diego. He is serving in the Army, or at least one of the services. I was given to understand he did a stint in Afghanistan—or maybe it was Iraq—but may have come back stateside. He wasn’t involved in our negotiations, and my lawyers assured me that since German was president of the company, the younger son’s consent was not required. You see, the entire property was owned by a corporation, C de Baca Enterprises, Inc. Technically, I merely purchased assets from an existing corporation.”

  “That explains why it wasn’t tied up in probate following his death.”

  “The shares of the corporation are subject to that procedure, but not the assets. Management was free to sell them.”

  “May I ask how you financed the purchase?”

  “Certainly. Margot and I put in upwards of a million dollars of our own money into the venture. My father, Philippe, and my younger brother, Jean, each invested five hundred thousand. Something like six hundred thousand was financed by a private Swiss banking establishment, which was sufficient to complete the purchase as well as provide funds to plant out the vineyard and give us adequate working capital.”

  He took a breath, did his invisible beard brush, and continued without my having to ask for more. “C de Baca was producing around 35,000 gallons of wine annually. When the new vines mature, we will improve on that considerably. Our business plan calls for $300,000 in gross income during our first year. That is income from all sources—the winery, the Bistro, the gift shop, educational classes we conduct for various wine clubs, and the like. Next year we expect to double that. When we are at our peak, we should be able to gross around a million two.”

  “And that will be profitable?”

  “Oh, yes. Our breakeven should be around nine hundred thousand.”

  “Thank you for sharing that information. You will notice I have not recorded it, nor will it appear in any of our reports, but I will share this conversation with my associates because it helps to understand your operation.” I changed subjects. “Have you thought about getting some security? Cameras or dogs, for instance?”

  “I would have to fence the place for dogs. The wall is not high enough to prevent animals of that size from entering or exiting at will. And there are the wild creatures to consider. Deer in the woods and such. The vineyard is adequately fenced for protection against them, but I wo
uld not like a similar wire fence around the chateau. And I fear the presence of such large beasts would defeat the purpose of alarms or cameras.”

  “I strongly suggest you consider the cameras, at least. And dogs can be trained to patrol within a given perimeter.”

  “Perhaps I will consider it.”

  “I’d like to visit the cellar again, if you don’t mind.”

  “Certainly.”

  I wanted another look at the racks upon racks of bottled wines. According to Bledsong, Gonda kept them under a tight inventory. I wanted to see for myself. Gonda obligingly led me through that part of the cavern, explaining the various types of wines aging in the bottles as we passed. Suddenly he stopped short.

  “Das Schwein!” he exclaimed. “Here is another one.”

  “Another what?” I moved up beside him.

  He indicated an empty slot in the rack. “He has taken another bottle. One of our most expensive table wines.”

  “Could it have happened at the same time the other bottle went missing and you failed notice it?”

  “Nein. We turned the bottles in this section yesterday. We have them on a very strict schedule.”

  We completed the circuit without finding anything else missing. But the discovery unsettled Gonda. It was clear evidence someone still had unauthorized access to the winery, lock or no lock on the door.

  “Would you consider interrupting your schedule to assemble everyone in the reception area in the chateau for a few minutes?”

  “If it will help us to determine what is going on, then the interruption will be trouble worthy.”

  “It may reveal nothing,” I cautioned. “Still, I would like to do it.”

  THE GATHERING turned up no helpful information, but it gave me an opportunity to observe the body language of Gonda and his crew. Either the entire bunch was genuinely puzzled, or else someone among them was an accomplished actor. I read concern, even worry, but no overt nervousness. Parson Jones seemed the most affected.

  I caught up with him right outside the back door of the chateau after the meeting broke up.

  “You’re taking this more seriously than anyone else except the Gondas. Why?”