A mile after reaching the highway and turning toward Santa Ynez, Kaye slowed for flashing emergency lights a quarter-mile ahead. Two police vehicles had a car pulled over and the car’s trunk was open.
Officer Reid had the driver out of the car while Hawkins directed Titus in a search.
Kaye shook his head, twisted the throttle and continued on.
***
Kaye’s plan was to take CA 246 west, cut through Santa Ynez and Solvang, pick up the 101 in Buellton, then head home.
But he’d eaten early, and as he rolled into Santa Ynez he started looking for a place to get some lunch.
A mile on he spotted a sign for ‘Auggie’s Wine’N’Diner’ and decided to try it. The diner occupied the end space in a strip mall, and the parking lot was jammed with motorcycles. He found a place to park and headed for the door. Parked on the sidewalk outside was a newer, blue Harley CVO Street Glide, and he stopped for a moment to admire it.
When he stepped into Auggie’s he was transported back to the 1950s. The floor was checkerboard black and white linoleum. The twenty or so booths were upholstered in red leather. The dozen or so tables and their chairs all had stainless steel legs, with the cushions upholstered to match the booths. Every booth and table in the place had a mottled Formica top, banded with ribbed stainless steel. Some were red, some green, some blue. The sound of Bobby Darin singing ‘Dream Lover’ filled the space.
Along the back wall Kaye saw what he thought was an old soda fountain behind a bar that matched the tables and chairs. But a closer look revealed beer taps and shelves lined with wine bottles.
And the place was packed.
“May I help you,” the bright-eyed young lady stationed just inside the door asked expectantly.
“Looking for some lunch,” Kaye replied as he scanned the space.
“I don’t have a table right now,” she said, “but I think there’s one empty stool down at the far end of the bar.”
“Can I eat at the bar?”
“Sure,” she said. “Here’s a menu.”
Kaye wound his way through the crowded space. Almost everyone in the diner was wearing biker garb and a lot of them turned to check out the Big Boar jacket as he walked by.
There was one empty stool. Kaye grabbed it and pulled it around the end of the bar so he had a view of the entire restaurant, nodding politely to the leather-clad couple sitting on the next two stools.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked. She was tall and deeply tanned, her dark hair swept haphazardly up onto her head and pinned with what looked like a knitting needle, exposing her clip- and piercing-laden ear. A black tank top showed off some impressive ink from her left shoulder down to the elbow.
“Iced tea,” Kaye said, loudly to be heard over the crowd. “Do I order food from you?”
She smiled and made an exaggerated effort to look back over both shoulders before looking back at Kaye.
“See anybody else?”
Kaye smiled back and said, “I do not.”
“Is that iced tea regular, or Long Island?”
“Regular, please, and a club sandwich.”
“Fries, chips, or pasta salad?”
“Nothing else,” Kaye said. “I’m watching my girlish figure.”
She laughed and said, “Mister, you’re about the least girly-looking man I’ve ever seen. But you got it.”
She spun around, and a moment later returned with Kaye’s drink.
“Auggie, we’ll take our check,” the man two stools down said after she’d put the iced tea down.
Kaye heard and realized the woman was the owner.
“Coming right up,” Auggie said.
She delivered the check, thanked the couple for coming in and told them it was always nice to see them, then turned to Kaye.
“Your sandwich will be right out.”
“No hurry.”
Over the next ten minutes the place almost emptied out, and Kaye figured the bikes outside were a club ride, with Auggie’s their destination.
“Here you go,” Auggie said, laying a plate almost covered with a giant sandwich in front of Kaye.
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Enjoy,” she said, then pointed at Kaye’s tea glass. “Refill?”
“Sure.”
She returned with a pitcher and topped off Kaye’s glass.
“So,” she said, studying Kaye, “you looking for a slot for your club?”
“Excuse me?”
“I saw your colors. Never heard of the Big Boar MC, and you’re by yourself.” She paused and looked at the expression on Kaye’s face. “Sorry, I think I just made a bad assumption.”
“No need to apologize,” Kaye said. “But I don’t have a clue what you mean.”
Auggie laughed heartily. “A time slot,” she explained. “Like a reservation, you know, for your club to come in.”
“You have a schedule?”
“Damn right,” she said, leaning on the bar. “Had to. I opened about two years ago. Word got around the place was biker friendly and pretty soon we were totally mobbed on weekends. Way more people than I could handle, fights in the parking lot, shit like that.
“You know – well, maybe you don’t, I don’t know – most of these guys are suits during the week,” she went on. “On weekends they gear up and pretend they’re Marlon fucking Brando. The cops told me they were gonna shut me down, so I had to do something. I got all the club honchos together and we worked out a schedule. It rotates, so everybody gets a time slot, everybody gets a seat, everybody eats and drinks with their friends. Voila, no conflicts, no more fights, everybody’s happy, and everybody makes new friends.”
“And you stay busy?”
“We’re pretty much slammed from about noon Friday until closing time Sunday, and steady the rest of the time,” she said, nodding and drawing Kaye’s attention to the front door.
Kaye looked, and saw four more bikers coming through the front door and two dozen more in the process of parking out front.
“Excuse me,” Auggie said, standing up straight and turning toward the door. “Hey, Kurt, Tiffany,” she shouted. “Welcome back. The usual?”
“Yep,” the man yelled back. “That Ohana pinot if you’ve still got it.”
“Coming right up,” Auggie said. She grabbed a bottle from under the bar, put it on a platter with two red wine glasses and set the lot on the service bar. Then she came back to Kaye.
“You sell wine to bikers?” he asked.
“Hell, yeah,” she said, grinning. “By the barrel. Technically, I guess you’d say I sell wine to the suits I was telling you about. But I only sell the really good boutique stuff, you know? You can’t buy anything on our list at any liquor store in Los Angeles. A few really good restaurants, but not many. I also have a club, if you’d like to sign up.”
“I’m impressed,” Kaye said, and he meant it. “Mind if I hang around?”
“Not at all. I’m Auggie McMaster.” She extended her hand across the bar.
Kaye took it and said, “Johnny Strabler.”
“Nice try, Marlon,” she said, giving Kaye the eye and holding onto his hand. “That’s my favorite movie of all time.”
“Ben Kaye.”
“That I buy,” Auggie said, letting go. “Stick around, Ben Kaye with the giant handshake. I’ll be busy for a bit getting everybody what they want to drink, then it’ll be less crazy…well, maybe a little…for a while, anyway.”
Kaye watched Auggie’s Wine’N’Diner fill almost to capacity over the next ten minutes. Only the two stools around the corner of the bar from him remained vacant. Almost all the new patrons wore the same club patches supporting Jesus on their jackets or vests.
It was frantic, but Kaye could tell it was a practiced routine and everybody was having a great time. The servers and patrons all seemed to be acquainted and he overheard conversations about families, progress at school, kids and other topics of familiarity and common friendship.
He finished his sandwich and nursed his tea, seeing that Auggie was much too busy to interrupt.
After about twenty minutes Auggie approached, pitcher in hand.
“Want a refill? Or maybe you’d like to try a glass of something? On the house.”
Kaye thought for a moment before saying, “Do you have any of the Valle delle Viti wine?”
Auggie’s eyes went cold and her jaw clenched as her expression hardened.
“I don’t sell their wine.”
Kaye caught the anger in her voice.
“I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong?”
“No, you’re okay,” she said, her expression softening. “It’s not your problem, it’s mine.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
“Nope,” she said curtly, then turned to walk away. She took three steps, then spun and came back.
“They stole my vines,” she said. “I hate those bastards.”
“You’re a wine maker?”
“I am,” she said, leaning over and lowering her voice. “I had forty acres of my own grapes. It was leased and had mature pinot and chardonnay vines on it. I was slowly replacing some of them with my own choices of clones and was starting to make some pretty good stuff when those assholes stole them.”
“I still don’t understand,” Kaye said. “How does someone steal grape vines?”
“In a court room.”
“Oh,” Kaye said. “What happened?”
“I was about six years into a twenty year lease on my acreage, with an option for forty more acres,” Auggie replied. “Valle delle Viti wanted to buy my lessor’s property and all his vines, but he wouldn’t sell. So you know what those fuckers did? They used eminent domain to steal that land, and those vines, for forty cents on the dollar.”
“Wait a minute,” Kaye said. “Eminent domain?”
“Yep. The courts can now take your property and give it to somebody else for a price they set just because the other guy claims he’ll do better with it than you’re doing. It’s a giant economic development scam.”
“I had no idea,” Kaye said. “But you had a lease, right?”
“I did,” Auggie said. “I fought them for almost a year. But I couldn’t afford to keep fighting their army of lawyers, so I lost. They got my land, my vines, and six years of hard work.”
“But they had to pay you, right?”
“Nope. Their lawyers argued that they had already paid for the land when they paid my lessor. The court agreed and told me my only recourse was to sue the lessor for abrogation of the lease terms.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t have the money to pay another lawyer,” Auggie said. “Plus, I just didn’t have the heart.”
Kaye looked at her, but didn’t have to ask.
“I leased from a guy named Bud Richards. After Valle delle Viti took his life’s work, Bud gave up. Took his own life. I couldn’t bring myself to go after his kids. I just couldn’t do it.” She looked around and saw three servers waiting at the service bar. “Gotta get back to work. Nice meeting you, Ben Kaye. Bring that girlish figure back around any time.”
“One quick question?” Kaye asked.
“Uh, sure.”
“Who’s behind Valle delle Viti?”
“I have no idea. Only people I ever saw were their fucking lawyers.”
She tapped her hand on the edge of the bar twice, smiled, and turned back to business.
Kaye nursed his iced tea and watched while Auggie took orders from several customers for wine club shipments. She dealt with her employees like a benevolent Drill Sergeant, if such a thing exists, and she treated her customers like royalty. She hadn’t brought him a check and he didn’t want to interrupt her, so he pulled three twenties off the cash in his pocket and laid them on the bar, used a napkin to wipe the condensation off the tea glass and put it down on top of the bills.
Outside, the next group of bikers looking to be wined and dined was already starting to trickle in.
He sat on the Road King and considered what Auggie had told him. He remembered his conversation with Alicia Valdez and her comments about Valle delle Viti’s lawyers.
The lions in the room.
***
For Kaye, riding a motorcycle was almost a form of meditation. Those who practice Buddhist meditation, particularly westerners who come to the discipline later in life, know that there are good sessions and bad sessions.
The ride home from Santa Ynez was not a good session.
His mind wandered, trying to figure out how, or even if, Valle delle Viti was somehow connected to Avi Geller’s murder.
People don’t kill people over wine. Or do they? If Geller had put fifty million into the project, surely he – or his wife, Kaye reminded himself – would soon start to see a handsome return on the money. Which logically meant the other investors would, too, and he still clung to the belief that happy investors don’t kill each other.
That Valle delle Viti might be owned by a swarm of unethical sharks was not his problem to investigate. Sure, he felt bad for Auggie, but unethical and illegal were not, unfortunately, interchangeable terms. At least not in a court of law. And with the kind of money he’d seen that morning at stake, what came out of a court of law was all that mattered.
He still wanted to know who owned Valle delle Viti, but he made the decision not to spend a lot of time digging into the operation unless and until he had a stronger connection between it and Geller’s death.
To do that, he needed to know more about Avi Geller’s life, and he needed to know more about Ziva Geller.
It’s not always the jilted husband, wife, or lover, he told himself.
Well, yeah, it almost always was.
Getting stopped by the Chumash Oaks Police still rankled him. He’d been stopped before, not always for what he considered good probable cause, and he’d collected a few tickets over the years because he preferred to keep his profession to himself. If he thought he deserved a cite; if he’d write it if the positions were reversed; he kept his mouth shut and let the chips fall where they may.
But Reid had pissed him off. It wasn’t the speed trap. Those had been around forever, with some small towns practically financing their operations with fine revenue harvested from unsuspecting travelers passing through. At least in Chumash Oaks there was little chance the cops preyed on the poor, trapping them in the endless cycle of unpaid fines that led to more fines and penalties they couldn’t pay and eventually to jail, where they couldn’t afford bail or a lawyer.
But that stop hadn’t been traffic enforcement, good or bad. It had been a shakedown.
He’d have to look into Reid and the Chumash Oaks PD.
***
The aroma of weed and yomogi filled the space behind the parking garage pillar.
But the left heel was stilled, not playing the rhythm of the rider’s nerves.
This one would be easier than the Ferrari. Up close and personal, with that singular, defining moment when you could smell the fear erupting from the target’s pores and see that millisecond of awareness in the eyes that they were about to die. Maybe some cleanup afterwards, assuming there was time.
Yesterday hadn’t worked out. Too much workday traffic, the target emerging from the elevator in the company of several others, a couple of whom walked with the target all the way to his car.
Which made the rider wonder: Was he suspicious?
This evening was the last opportunity for this window. If the target was not alone today, the rider was prepared to take whatever steps were necessary. It was regrettable, but unavoidable. The Lord had ordered it.
Location was crucial. A preparatory survey of the garage had revealed a pattern of blind spots in the security camera coverage, allowing the rider to hang the full-face helmet on the handle bars and replace it with a baseball cap pulled low. A small, green duffel bag rested atop the bike’s tank.
The rider checked the time.
Almost.
Partners in
the firm seldom worked on weekends, and if they did, they didn’t work late into the evening. That was left to the recent graduates, scrambling to get a foot onto the corporate ladder’s rungs and willing to tromp on the toes and fingers of those already there.
Less than five minutes later the elevator bell sounded, the door opened, and the target emerged. Alone.
The joint was quickly crushed out against the pillar and went into the duffel bag.
Confidence was one thing. Carelessness was quite another.
The target walked toward his car, head down, his briefcase awkwardly clamped under his left arm while he tried to walk and send a text at the same time.
The rider, pulse and breathing escalating with anticipation, grabbed the duffel bag and walked a course calculated to intercept the target at a specific spot with no camera coverage. The weapons were double-checked and ready.
When the target was less than ten feet from the rider, he looked up, startled. His briefcase almost escaped his grasp, but a quick contortion saved the day. He continued to hold his phone in both hands.
Recognition dawned in his eyes and he stopped.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, smiling. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello, Clifford,” the rider said, taking a few steps closer. “I stopped by to see you.”
“Do we need to go back to my office?”
“No, no,” the rider said. “Here will do.”
“Uh, okay. What can I do for you?”
“You can die,” the rider said, dropping the duffel bag and sliding forward with the speed of a striking mamushi while drawing the scalpel-sharp tanto from inside the leather jacket.
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