by Harvey, JM
“We just hauled Blake’s body out of the cellar,” Hunter cut me off.
“Then it really is over,” I said.
“No,” Hunter replied, “It isn’t. I need to see Armand, but he’s not at his home or the hospital.”
“What’s going on?”
Hunter was silent for a protracted moment before he said, “Armand told me Blake shot himself.”
“He told me the same thing,” I said, getting another gruesome mental image.
“It’s a lie,” Hunter said. “Blake was shot three times in the back of the head. It wasn’t a suicide.”
“Oh,” I said, my knees suddenly wobbly.
“I’m at the hospital now. I just spoke to Samson. He’s groggy, barely coherent, but I asked him if Blake shot him. He said no, and then he muttered something about the devil. He’s really out of it, but I think Armand shot both of them, Samson and Blake.”
I dropped into a kitchen chair and hung my head. “My God,” I whispered.
“It gets worse,” Hunt said. “We’ve been doing some background work on Bartlett. Did you know he worked for Armand in Venezuela?”
“For Armand?” I said, but I wasn’t really asking a question anymore; my mind was reeling as I mentally connected the dots, fitting this new information into the puzzle. I had been a fool. All along I had struggled with the notion of Blake Becker as the criminal mastermind, but I had little trouble in fitting Armand into that role. Armand would be capable of orchestrating a sophisticated wine forgery scheme - a scheme far beyond the capabilities of the blundering Blake. But would Armand be capable of killing Dimitri, Jorge, and Angela to avoid exposure?
Yes, I decided. The Armand I had seen today would be more than capable. I considered the charade he had put on that morning - waving the gun around like a crazy man, feigning surprise at the wine forgery I had uncovered. Armand had probably decided at that moment to kill Blake and set the fire to cover up the fraud.
But Armand needed more than Blake’s death and the destruction of the wine cellar; he needed Dimitri’s murder investigation closed. So he called Samson and claimed Blake had kidnapped Alexandra, luring Samson to Star Crossed. With Samson dead, there would be no messy trial or continuing investigation…
But what about the port spiked with methanol? Had Blake suspected he was next and tried a preemptive strike? I thought it possible, even likely. And sadly, I could imagine Blake trying to poison his enemies. It was the weapon of choice of the weak.
Hunter was talking, but I missed the first part of what he was saying.
“…the doors and stay inside. Go to your bedroom, get your gun out and lock that door too. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Okay,” I said woodenly.
“I’m coming to you, Claire,” he told me. “Don’t leave the house. Turn off the lights and stay low. There’s no telling what this guy will do. He’s already killed four people.”
“Okay,” I whispered and he was gone.
I kept my phone in my hand as I went to the kitchen window again and looked out into the fog. The darkness was even more sinister than before. More frightening.
I doused the kitchen light, left the coffee behind, and hurried down the hallway.
Alexandra was sitting on the sofa. She jumped up with a start when I barreled in and flipped off the lights.
“Hunter just called me. It looks like Armand is behind the fire at Star Crossed…” I hesitated, but I had to let her know, “and Dimitri’s death.”
Perhaps it was all too much to take in, but she didn’t even flinch at the news. She just stared at me.
“I need you to go upstairs to my bedroom, the first door on the right. There’s a gun in the bedside table, get it out and stay there. I’m going to lock up down here and then I’ll join you. Hunter will be here in twenty minutes.”
Alexandra still said nothing, she merely nodded. She looked shaky and scared, but no shakier or more frightened than I felt. And not just of Armand. As much as I now feared him, I felt I could understand him - he was making a lot of money with a very low risk of punishment – but his henchman Bartlett was another story. He was a coldblooded animal capable of anything.
I watched Alexandra climb the stairs before I hurried down the hallway and made a quick circuit of the lower floor, checking all the windows and locks. That left only the cellar. I felt sure the cellar’s outside door was locked, but I needed to be sure.
I flicked on the light and took the steps down two at a time. The overhead light was bright, but the clutter of equipment and stacked cases of wine cast sinister shadows. I crossed the floor quickly and checked the back door - it was locked – and was heading back to the stairs when my eyes fell on the pegboard of tools. Many of the tools were still missing - impounded by the Sheriff’s Office - but there was a short pry bar hanging there. I normally use it to pry open wooden crates, but I took it down and stuffed it in my rear pocket under the tail of my shirt and instantly felt a little safer. It was less than a foot long, but it had a wickedly curved nail-puller that would take a nasty bite out of anything I swung it at. Or anyone.
I went back up the stairs, locked the cellar door behind me, and went toward the front of the house. I had done all I could, but I was anxious to get to the bedroom and lock that door as well…and to trade in the pry bar for my father’s gun.
A blast of cold damp air hit me in the face as I entered the central hallway. It was coming from the open front door, where Alexandra Pappos was standing with my father’s pistol hanging by her side.
“Alexandra!” I yelled, trotting toward her as fast as I could on my still weak ankle. “I asked you to stay upstairs. Why did you open the door?” I went past her and grabbed the doorknob.
“I heard something,” Alexandra said and pointed outside.
“What did you see?” I asked, peering out into the night. “Where?” I took a step halfway out the door. The fog was damp on my skin, the air cold and biting.
“Who? Who is out there?” I was still staring out into the night. The fog was even deeper now. It wreathed my legs and twirled up across my face. I could see nothing. I turned back to her. “Let’s get inside and—“
The raw, body-odor smell hit me a split second before I heard footsteps on the walkway behind me. Almost on top of me! I tried to spin around, but my bad ankle gave out halfway through the maneuver and I fell to my knees on the stoop. I didn’t stay down long before a massive hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked me back up, wrenching my neck and almost tearing my scalp off my skull.
Bartlett gave me a small, mean smile as he kept lifting me, forcing me to rise up on my tiptoes as a scream built in my throat. A scream that was rendered mute with terror when he raised his free hand and pointed a revolver between my eyes.
“Payback time,” he said.
Chapter 34
“Don’t hurt her,” Armand Rivincita said from somewhere behind Bartlett, out of sight in the fog. Hidden as he was, his voice came to me disembodied, flat and impersonal, almost lifeless. “Take her into the living room.”
Bartlett lowered the pistol, released his grip on my hair, spun me around and pushed me into the house, around the corner and into the front room. My bad ankle failed me again and I stumbled after three steps, to fall sprawling on the floor.
Armand followed us into the living and stared silently down at me. He too had a pistol in his hand, hanging loose at his side, but it wasn’t the big silver automatic he‘d had at his home earlier that day. I recognized it as my father’s pistol – the one that had been in Alexandra’s hand just a moment ago.
Armand looked at Bartlett. “Help her to her feet,” he said.
“Don’t touch me,” I barked as Bartlett bent down. I shoved myself up and stepped to the left where I could lean my back against the arm of the sofa, just out of his reach and facing all three of them. “Lay a hand on me and I’ll crack your skull again,” I added, pointedly eyeing the bandage on his forehead.
He touched
the bandage, his muddy eyes boring into my own. “I’ll kill you for that,” he promised.
“You’ve tried twice and failed,” I snapped back at him, my instinctive combativeness winning out over my fear. I slid my right hand behind my back until my knuckles brushed the pry bar through the loose material of my shirt. I didn’t pull it out, however. I’d have to wait for a chance to make it count.
Bartlett took a plodding step forward, his gun sweeping up.
My hand slid under my shirt and touched the cool steel.
“Not in here!” Armand said harshly, as if he was calling a dog to heel. And Bartlett did heel. He stopped dead in his tracks. But he didn’t look happy about it. His tiny eyes stayed glued to my face as he reluctantly backed away. He stopped in the hall doorway, his huge frame blocking it almost completely.
Armand shot a glance at Alexandra, waved at the sofa and said “Sit down.”
Alexandra complied, moving with the jerky motions of a marionette. It was obvious she was as frightened as I was, but that didn’t abrogate the anger I felt with her. It might have been unkind, but what kind of fool opens the door to a pair of murderers? And we were going to pay the ultimate price for her mistake.
Armand continued to stare at Alexandra as she crossed the room and sat on the far edge of the sofa, her eyes downcast. “Don’t worry. This will be over soon, mitera,” he said with an edge of sarcasm.
The word, mitera, rocked me so badly I almost slid down the side of the sofa. I recognized it from many years of hearing Samson mutter it as part of a variety of curse words.
“Mother?” I said, looking between Armand and Alexandra. Neither of them spoke, but they didn’t need to explain it to me because that single word was like the final linchpin of a complicated puzzle. Suddenly it all came into sharp focus.
I recalled the mesmerized expression on Alexandra’s face as she had stared at Armand at my crush party. Then the witch’s ladders – a gypsy curse - that Dimitri and Samson had both received. And Samson’s semi-delirious statement that, ‘The devil is not dead’ after we had dragged him out of the fiery cellar at Star Crossed. And, finally, the ICU nurse telling me that Samson had muttered ‘The devil sorts us’ over and over, like a dying man’s lament. But Samson hadn’t said ‘The devil sorts us,’ I now realized.
“Sotis,” I whispered, and Armand looked sharply over at me. He smiled then, but there was no friendliness in it; it was a cold and lifeless rictus. “You’re Alexandra’s son,” I said, searching his face, trying to see a resemblance that wasn’t there. He was tall and blond, though with a swarthy complexion. And then I remembered Alexandra had said her husband, Sotis Senior, had been light-haired and eyed. Northern Italian.
“Correct,” he said with a hint of surprise. “You are clever, Claire,” he added, then turned his cold gaze back on Alexandra. “Me, mom, and grandpa together again. One big happy family.”
Alexandra flinched as if she had been slapped. “Sotis—”
“Shut up,” Armand said flatly, without rancor or heat.
“Please, do not hurt her. Make it quick,” Alexandra continued. “You promised me that much.”
Those words hit me in the solar plexus like a punch. I stared down at Alexandra. “Not you too?” I said, the word wheezing out of my airless lungs. “You’re with them?”
She didn’t raise her head. Didn’t look at me. “He is my son,” she said. “I thought he was dead until …” she went silent, but I finished her sentence.
“Until you saw him at my party.”
She nodded. “He looks just like his father,” she whispered. “I knew it was him.”
“Did you know he killed Dimitri? That night?” I demanded, and she shook her head, but I knew it was a lie. “And that he was going to kill Samson today?” My voice grew louder by the word, and more contemptuous. Another betrayal. Another liar. “My God, you’re the one who got Samson to go to Star Crossed today, aren’t you? You set him up! Your own father!”
Alexandra’s shoulders slumped lower and lower with every accusation, but that only made me angrier. I turned on Armand.
“You lured Dimitri here to the Valley to kill him,” I said. “You got Blake to offer him enough money to come halfway across the world just so you could kill him.”
Armand eyed me for a moment, his gaze detached, impersonal, like I was a bug tacked to a dissection board. “That’s partly true. I showed Blake how he could save his business—”
“By stealing his customers’ wine and replacing it with fakes,” I cut in.
He shook his head. “Not fakes,” he said, “Just less acclaimed vintages. I’ve been doing it for years and never got caught. When I saw Blake’s customer list, I almost started to drool. It was perfect, and the risk was far lower than selling the counterfeits on the open market. But Blake took some convincing. He was a fool. Millions of dollars in wine at his disposal and he was going bankrupt.”
“But Dimitri found out,” I said.
Armand nodded. “Dimitri came to me at your party and told me he had found some fake Domaine de la Romanée-Conti magnum labels in Blake’s cellar. He actually wanted to warn me Blake was stealing my wine. He wanted to go directly to Hunter. I insisted we confront Blake first. And once we had Dimitri in the cellar …” he trailed off with a shrug. “I had no choice.”
“You killed him in cold blood,” I said, shocked at the audacity of this decision to murder Dimitri at a party where forty guests were just outside the cellar doors. I had imagined it was in the heat of the moment, not a calculated act. One more piece of proof I was dealing with a psychopath.
Armand gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I was planning on killing him anyway. But that wasn’t the only reason I lured him here, Claire.” He looked over at Alexandra again and his lips curled with contempt. “I wanted him here because I knew she would follow him.”
It took me a moment to make the connection. “You were going to kill her? Your own mother?”
“I was going to kill them both,” he said, still looking at Alexandra. “But not now. She has been a great help to me. She could have betrayed me at any time,” he paused again then added, “She had done it many times before.”
Alexandra’s head came up. “I did not betray you! I tried to do what was best for you. I tried—”
“Shut up,” he said again in that curiously flat voice. “You sent me to prison.”
“It was a school for children like you—”
“For animals,” Armand said. “The things that were done to me there…” he shook his head as if to erase the mental images.
“And what about Samson?” I asked, drawing his attention back to me. “He’s your grandfather!”
“He is nothing to me,” Armand said. “But he has something that is rightfully mine. And I want it.”
That’s when my anger got the better of me. Not just at Armand, but at myself. I was not going to cower here and wait to die. Armand wasn’t the first psychopath I had dealt with.
Of course, the first psychopath had almost killed me…
“His money,” I said, injecting as much contempt as I could into those two words. “You want his money.”
“My money,” he said. “My inheritance. Money that he has squandered on those peasants in Naousa.”
“He was atoning for the murders you committed!” I shot back. “For the people you killed!”
Armand shook his head. “I was a child myself. It was an accident,” he said, though I don’t think he believed it. I remembered the way he had looked at the fire at Star Crossed. That feverish, unfocused look in his eyes. “And they’re dead, Claire. They have no use for money,” he continued matter-of-factly, like a banker tallying up an account.
Alexandra’s head ducked back down and her shoulders began to shake. I knew she was crying again but I had no sympathy for her now. She was as guilty as Armand.
“What you’re doing now is no accident,” I said, trying to drag out the conversation, hoping Hunter was racing up the m
ountain road at that moment. But the fog was so dense I knew he would make slow time. I was on my own. “You’ve killed four people. You planned to kill your entire family!”
“The Pappos family had millions in property but we lived like paupers,” Armand said, getting truly angry for the first time. His voice trembled and his eyes blazed as he vented a rage that had obviously been nursed for thirty years until it became insanity. “Every day I had to work in the vines. Like a slave! We had nothing when we could have had it all! In the village they called me gyftoi and spat on the ground behind me to ward off the evil eye. But I knew I was better than them. Stronger. After the fire I left that place. Twelve years old and I was all alone. You cannot imagine the things I did to survive - the things that were done to me - but I did survive. And more. I got rich. But it didn’t change how I felt about them. Over the years I only grew angrier. They had to pay.”
“Rivincita,” I interrupted, finally getting the bitter joke his name implied. Rivincita is Italian for revenge. I think I had been dimly aware of that, but it had never clicked.
Armand smiled at that. “A name I took many years ago. A reminder of what had been done to me. And of what I was going to do to them.”
“Sheriff Drake is on his way here, now,” Alexandra interjected. She swiped at her eyes with a tissue and stood. “You must hurry, Sotis.”
“Don’t call me that!” Armand bellowed at her, fixing her with a fierce glare. “Never call me that!” She wilted back to the sofa.
Armand turned back to me and his voice regained its cold composure like flicking a switch. “What have you told Hunter?” he asked.
“Everything,” I said quickly, trying to sound triumphant as my hands trembled and my heart banged against my ribs at triple speed. I knew I was counting down the minutes to my death, but I wasn’t going to go quietly. My hand slid under my shirt to touch the cold steel of the pry bar. Once again I was taking a stick into a gunfight, but it was better than nothing.
“I doubt that,” he said. “And, anyway, I’ll have to take the chance. I’ve gone too far to stop.”