“You sell wine,” Deal cut in.
“Oh yes,” the man said. “Indeed I do.”
“Good wines, I understand.”
“I have a truly outstanding Pinot Noir from Oregon,” Gonzalo Fausto said, moving toward a bin behind the counter. “Domain Drouhin—”
“I really came here to ask for your help, Mr. Fausto,” Deal cut in.
The old man turned, a look of uncertainty on his face. He had another look at the scratches tracing Deal’s arms, then glanced toward the front of the shop again, as if to make sure it was Balart and his limo parked outside.
“What kind of help are you looking for?” he asked.
“I saw a wine label a couple of days ago,” Deal said. “An old one. I thought maybe if I described it to you, you could give me some information.”
The old man thought about it a moment. “It is possible,” he said. “Depending on what you can tell me.”
Deal nodded. He’d been trying to reconjure the image of the label he’d seen from the moment they’d left the Pier House. “It was French,” he said. “And very old. Nineteen twenty-nine, I think.”
The old man pursed his lips and nodded. “One of the finest vintages of all time,” he said. “Would this have been a red wine or a white?”
Deal shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What about the name of the winery?”
Deal gave him a bleak look. “Château something or other,” he said. “It didn’t register at the time.” He glanced toward the bins where wines were stored. “I was hoping you might have some bottles I could look at, maybe it’d jog my memory.”
The old man gave him a tolerant smile. “This is only a humble shop,” he said. “For what you are looking for, you would have to go to Miami, perhaps New York or London.”
Deal stared at him. “London?”
The old man shrugged. “A bottle from that vintage is rarely seen outside the auction houses and the most prestigious shops. And if the wine you are talking about was one of the four first growths—”
“Bear with me, Mr. Fausto,” Deal said, holding up a hand. “Until recently, I was unscrewing the tops on the wine I bought.”
The old man gave him a tolerant smile. “It is simply a way of designating the best Bordeaux wines,” he said. “The system was devised in 1855. For more than a century, there were only four wineries which produced wines classified as ‘first growths,’ or the best of the best: Châteaux Margau, Lafite-Rothschild, Haut-Brion, and Latour. After 1959, the distinctions became more varied.” He paused. “But certain wineries can always be counted upon.”
Deal’s mind ticked over the names, but it was hopeless. He’d taken Spanish in school, and even that had been a stretch. As far as the French went, oui was a major accomplishment for him. “I don’t know,” Deal said. “It could have been one of those, I guess. Let’s say it was, in fact. What would a bottle like that be worth?”
The old man shrugged. “That would depend upon many things: the provenance of the wine, for one thing—”
“Mr. Fausto,” Deal interjected.
“Of course.” The old man gave him an apologetic glance. “The ability to trace the wine’s ownership,” he said. “To establish the conditions under which it was stored, which of course affects its viability—”
“A bottle of wine from 1929 would still be good?” Russell asked.
“A bottle of wine from 1829 could still be good, assuming the cork had held up so that air could not enter, and that the bottle had been kept in a sufficiently cool place.”
“Let’s say everything was hunky-dory, Mr. Fausto. How much are we talking about?”
The old man thought for a moment. “It’s not my ordinary realm, of course, but I’ve seen bottles of that vintage offered for as much as fifteen thousand dollars.”
“You got to be kidding,” Russell said.
“Of course, the bottle from which your label came would be virtually worthless,” the old man said.
Deal stared at the old man for a moment. “Because you couldn’t prove what was in the bottle?”
“That would be part of it. Of course, the cork could be removed and checked. Ordinarily the name of the winery and the vintage would be stamped there.”
“Wouldn’t that ruin everything once it was open?”
“Not necessarily,” Fausto said. “Collectors quite often return rare bottles to the wineries to be recorked. But a bottle without its label attached”—he shook his head again—“that would almost be like owning a very rare stamp that had been torn in half. The value would be very difficult to ascertain.”
Deal took it in, then glanced at Russell, who rolled his eyes. “All this for a worthless bottle of wine?” the big man said with a sigh.
“Excuse me?” Gonzalo Fausto asked, looking confused.
“Nothing, Mr. Fausto,” Deal said, his mind already racing along. “You mentioned collectors. Is there anyone here in Key West who fits that category, persons who might own or be interested in wines like this?”
Fausto glanced out the window toward the waiting limo. “Well, there is Mr. Stone, of course. I have ordered some excellent wines for him. And there’s the occasional visitor…” The old man’s gaze drifted toward the ceiling, his thoughts seeming to wander.
Deal nodded, his thoughts racing along as Fausto searched his memory bank. Given his growing suspicions, he could hardly go ask Stone for a look at his wine cellar. Maybe he could run an ad in the Key West Citizen, “Yo, all you wine aficionados out there…”
Deal shook the notion away and turned back to the shop owner. “I don’t suppose you have a book or something I could look in?”
Fausto shook his head. “There would be a number in the library, I’m sure. You could try on Monday.”
Deal was nodding glumly, wondering what the possibilities of breaking into a public library might be, when suddenly a thought occurred to him. “Mr. Fausto, you’ve been very helpful. Do you have a telephone I could use?”
“Of course,” the old man said, turning to point toward an old-fashioned model with a dial on its face hanging on the wall behind the cash register. He moved to unlatch the gate that led behind the counter, and Deal followed on his heels, wondering just how long it had been since he had actually dialed a phone.
Chapter Twenty-five
“You can find that address okay?” Deal called to Balart through the open driver’s partition.
“Is in Key West, I can find,” the man said without turning. He pulled the limo from the curb into a gap in the growing evening traffic, then swung off Duval at the next intersection.
Deal had managed to track down Malloy on his cellular, the attorney about to tear into a rack of lamb at Louie’s Backyard, where he was dining with an actual paying client. When he heard the brief version of what had happened at the Pier House, he agreed to meet Deal at his home in fifteen minutes.
It took less than half that for the limo to make its way to Malloy’s, a low-slung single-story place, built in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, down Olivia Street, not far from the graveyard they had passed earlier. You might not have known the house was there, Deal thought as he and Russell stepped out of the limo, what with all the lush foliage that shielded the entrance from the street.
“We won’t be long,” Deal told the driver, who waved away his concern.
“I tell the boss you had one more thing to see about,” Balart said, holding up his phone. “He say no problem. On Key West time, down here,” he added with a smile.
Deal nodded, considering the concept, then turned to unlatch the wooden gate. He led the way along a path that twisted through the vegetation and past a shallow garden pool where several huge koi flashed away at their approach.
“Those are goldfish?” Russell asked.
“Big orange carp,” Deal said, glancing back where the limo idled. “Expensive ones. What do you make of our man Balart?”
Russell followed his gaze. “H
e’s a fellow con.”
Deal shook his head. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning I trust him.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He did time in one of Castro’s jails, didn’t he?”
Deal stared. “So what?”
Russell stared at him. “Then he was in for nothing,” he said. “Same as me.”
Deal let it go. He ducked under the low-hanging porch eave and was about to press the bell when the door swung open smoothly and a woman with the broad face of an Indio ushered them in.
“Señor Malloy say please come in,” she said in a soft voice, averting her eyes quickly from the shallow cross-hatching of cuts on Deal’s forearms. “Is coming soon.”
Deal gave her a smile that must have looked like something his daughter had hacked out of a lopsided pumpkin, then motioned Russell inside. They followed the woman down a slate-tiled hallway and into a living room where a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto a garden that was even more artfully landscaped than the one they’d walked through.
There was a pool done up to look like a natural pond, fed by a stream that tumbled over a series of boulders placed to resemble a jungled cliffside at one end. Deal saw a fluttering of wings among lush foliage out there, followed by the screech of a parrot.
“We must’ve come to the wrong place,” Russell observed. “This looks like the fucking zoo.”
“It’s just Key West,” Deal said.
“The lawyers must do pretty good down here,” Russell said.
Deal had to agree. There were three buttery-looking leather love seats arranged to take advantage of the view outside, their centerpiece a coffee table that looked like a cross section of a giant redwood, lacquered and waxed until it glowed in the soft, indirect lighting.
Set into one wall was a sizable salt-water aquarium that provided an idealized rendition of marine life very nearly as exotic as the jungle landscape outside. A school of blue disk-shaped fish as vivid as neon dollars shimmered back and forth in the tank above a pink-spotted moray eel that lounged on the sandy bottom like Popeye’s disembodied arm. Deal couldn’t see the thing’s head, and he didn’t want to. The last time he’d seen a tank with an eel in it, the owner had ended up floating amidst his former razor-mouthed pets, a sight he’d never been able to banish from his memory.
At the other end of the room was a series of louvered doors that Deal suspected hid a TV the size of a theater screen from his youth, one side flanked by a floor-to-ceiling wine rack, maybe half of its slots occupied.
“Maybe Malloy knows something about this wine…” Russell began, breaking off when Deal formed his hand into a pistol’s shape and mimed the hammer snapping down.
“One of the reasons we’re here,” Deal told him.
Russell nodded, and Deal turned to survey the room once more. Rusty had come up the hard way, his old man a second-generation Irish immigrant, the owner of a glass installation business that Barton Deal had used whenever he could. The Malloy home had been a modest three-bedroom ranch on a quarter-acre lot in South Miami. Rusty had moved to a different level, or so it would seem.
“Johnny-boy,” Deal heard behind him, “what the hell have you done this time?”
Deal turned to see Malloy coming through the hallway passage, his show of exasperation fading when he saw the crosshatchings on Deal’s arms. “Holy shit,” he said. “You look like a Zuni warrior.”
“I believe the Zunis cut themselves up on purpose,” Deal said.
“Man oh man,” he said, casting a questioning look at Russell. “Where were you when this happened?”
Deal saw Russell stiffen at Malloy’s suggestion. “Leave it alone, Rusty. He was on the balcony of the room, keeping an eye out. Whoever it was fired two shots at Russell when he charged in. He could have been killed.”
“Hey,” Malloy said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I was just asking.”
Malloy flashed Russell a conciliatory smile, then turned to Deal. “You want to explain what you were doing in that hotel room?”
Deal shrugged. “I forgot something.”
Malloy shook his head. “I’m not only your attorney, John, I’m your friend. If you expect me to help you, then you’ve got to be up front when you explain things.”
Deal nodded, looking around their plush surroundings. When they’d been kids, a big outing to the movies, with popcorn, Cokes, and Jujubes, might have set them back a couple of bucks apiece, but Rusty had always been one to do more than his share. If he had an extra dollar, then they’d both enjoy a milk shake on the way home. Once again, he was extending his generosity. All he wanted in return was the straight story. It didn’t seem too much to ask, even if Deal had little idea of what the real story actually was.
“How much do you know about wine, Rusty?”
Malloy’s glance traveled to the half-filled wine rack, then back to Deal. “Like I told you, I had to bone up or stop taking clients to dinner.” He shrugged. “What’s wine got to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure,” Deal said. “But I found a wine label in Dequarius Noyes’ hand the night he died in my room.”
Malloy shook his head as if it meant nothing. “Go on.”
“I thought it was a note he was holding at first,” Deal said. “It was folded in half. I figured if the guy wanted me to read it that badly, I was going to take a look. Anyway, when I took it out of his hand and opened it, I saw it was a wine label, an old one.”
“How old?” Malloy asked, his interest growing.
“Nineteen twenty-nine, I think,” Deal said, going on to relate what he had learned from his conversation with Gonzalo Fausto.
By the time Deal had finished, Malloy’s gaze was intense. “So you don’t recall where it came from?”
Deal shook his head. “It was French, that’s all I can tell you. I didn’t have a lot a time before the cops got there. I thought you might be able to help.”
Malloy paused, thoughtful for a moment. “Why didn’t you show this label to Dickerson?” he asked finally.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Deal said.
“Not much of a question in my mind,” Russell cut in. “The cops in this town are bought and paid for.”
“Nonetheless, you’ve withheld evidence,” Malloy said to Deal. “You could always call Dickerson, say you forgot, but now…” He broke off with a shrug.
“And there were some other things,” Deal continued, glancing at Russell. “When we were at Ainsley Spencer’s house earlier in the evening, I found a note in Dequarius’ room with my number at the Pier House on it. He’d made some doodles while he was waiting to reach me, I guess. Most of it was just chicken scratchings, but in one place he’d written ‘Vino, vidi, vici,’ and underlined it several times.
“‘Wine, I saw, I conquered’?” Malloy translated, looking at Deal in confusion.
“It being Dequarius, I thought he might have just misspelled it,” Deal said. “But now, whole new theories begin to occur to me.”
“That Dequarius Noyes was trying to sell you some supposedly valuable wine?” Malloy shook his head. “As they say in court, John, this is only speculation…and pretty tenuous at that.”
“A couple of other things,” Deal continued. “When I was going through Dequarius’ closet, I saw a clear outline in the dust on the floor, where someone had moved a crate or a box that had been there a long time.” He gestured at the wine racks. “About the size of a case of wine, I’d say.”
“John…,” Malloy said, his protest evident, but Deal continued, resolute now.
“And later, when I went back to the old guy’s house and had the run-in with Conrad, I noticed that a bottle of wine that had been in the kitchen cupboard earlier that night was missing, too.”
Malloy gave him a look. “Maybe the old lady took it.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Deal admitted. “But why would someone go to the trouble of tossing my
room, for a wine label and some scribblings by Dequarius Noyes?”
“That’s what cops do,” Malloy said. “Dickerson probably went through that room with a fine-tooth comb after you left.
“That still doesn’t explain why someone would be waiting for me to come back,” Deal cut in. “Not unless they wanted to find something that they thought Dequarius had and might have brought to me.”
“A case of wine?” Rusty Malloy said, the disbelief evident in his voice.
“I don’t know what, exactly,” Deal said. “Dequarius told me he’d found something, something he obviously thought was important. Then, in short order, Russell and I find a Monroe County sergeant beating the living daylights out of the kid. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn’t come along. A few hours later, someone bursts into Dequarius’ home and fatally wounds him. The next thing I know, somebody’s ready to kill me for information Dequarius Noyes may have passed along.”
Malloy released a breath and moved toward a bar that jutted out from the wall opposite the bank of windows. He pulled a crystal rocks glass down from a rack and filled it with ice from a dispenser recessed beneath the counter. “You look like you could use a drink,” he said, pouring the glass full of scotch.
“A beer, if you’ve got one,” Deal said.
Malloy bent and fished something out of an undercounter refrigerator, then rose and deftly popped the cap of a squat brown bottle with a red-and-white label painted on its face. “Red Stripe,” Malloy said with a smile. “Jamaica’s finest.” He slid it across the bar counter in Deal’s direction.
Deal caught the bottle and raised it in a salute. Leave it to Rusty to have Red Stripe on hand.
“How about you?” Malloy asked, his gaze traveling to Russell.
“Why not wine?” Russell asked, his expression neutral.
Malloy didn’t miss a beat. “Red, white, zinfandel…”
“Mad Dog 20-20, if you’ve got it,” Russell said. “Otherwise, whatever’s wet.”
Malloy managed a smile, then turned and retrieved a bottle from the shelf behind him. The cork had already been pulled, Deal saw, as Malloy removed a stopper from the bottle and poured a glass half full of red.
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