Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “They lost the farm,” I said.

  “Exactement,” Sackheim said. “Now Henri has nothing. A few poor pieces of land and a son who hates him.”

  “And maybe hates Americans even more. But why would he blame the Americans?” I asked, feeling a little defensive.

  “We are French,” Sackheim said. “We blame the Americans for everything. Nothing is our fault.”

  The three of us stared at the blackboard.

  “What a tortuous path,” I said.

  “Mais oui, and it leads to Jean Pitot,” Sackheim concluded. “One can only imagine the resentments he heard at his father’s kitchen table.”

  “C’est tragique,” I said.

  “Oui, c’est ça,” Ponsard agreed.

  “Ah, well, let us end this tale,” Sackheim said, rising. “It is time for the dénouement. You will drive with us,” he said to me.

  As we passed through the outer office, Sackheim instructed two of the officers who’d been at the Bois de Corton the day before to follow us.

  We drove north. The day was lovely: cold and crystalline, the colors in the vineyards brilliant, the air fresh and cleansing. The crows were out again, cackling and fighting for the leftovers from the harvest, and a few workers straggled over their wheelbarrows, completing their pruning and burning. Traffic was light, a few trucks racing up and down the highway. The officers followed Sackheim’s car in their matching Renault Laguna, their lights spinning in silence.

  “You are very quiet, Babe,” Sackheim now said to me.

  “I still think Jean could be Richard Wilson’s son,” I said. Ponsard turned in his seat, and Sackheim glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I think Goldoni knows this. And maybe Monique, too. On the other hand, maybe he’s just a screwed-up kid trying to make a life for himself.”

  “Ça suffit,” Sackheim said, sorry he had prompted me to say anything that might distract him, and I kept my mouth shut.

  “When we arrive,” he finally said, “follow us but stand back. You never know.”

  At Nuits we turned off to the east and followed the road to the edge of the village. We parked outside the fence chez Pitot, and Sackheim gathered his team.

  “Let us be swift, professional, correct,” he said. “Allons-y!”

  An eerie hush hovered over the property. Even the crows seemed to have abandoned their endless haggling. Sackheim pushed open the gate; it creaked on its rusted hinges. He and his men walked single file across the dirt and dead grass that covered the yard. I followed at a discreet distance. The wooden lid had been pulled from the top of the well, and as Sackheim stooped, picked it up, and reached to put it back in place, he looked down. He was suddenly frozen. We all stopped.

  “Mon Dieu,” he whispered hoarsely, shaking his head. Then, very calmly he said, “Ponsard, call for help.” He searched out my face. “We are too late. Quel dommage.”

  I walked up and peered over the lip of the well. Twenty feet below, the figure of Jean Pitot lay facedown, bobbing on the surface of the murky water, his limbs twisted and broken by the fall.

  I looked at the house. Françoise Pitot stood at the window, staring at us from behind the faded lace curtain. She screamed then, her cry rending the silence. A flock of crows took off from a vineyard, cawing madly.

  “Why did Jean kill himself?” Sackheim mused. “Did he kill himself?”

  He looked toward the house. Françoise Pitot dropped the curtain and disappeared.

  For the second day in a row, they brought the K-9 unit from Dijon. The handler worked his dog systematically over every inch of the courtyard, and when he failed to turn anything up, Sackheim instructed him to go down to the cellar. There the animal’s nose went crazy, his senses confounded by the overlapping scents—the rot and mold and fermentive stink sending him off on fits of barking that we could just hear from the yard—but when the officer ascended, he approached the colonel and said, “Rien.”

  It was only when the man walked the dog outside the property to the edge of the field behind the house to let the poor creature relieve himself that the German shepherd produced a definitive yelp, three barks in quick succession, and the cops raced around back. Sackheim put a team to excavate a low mound of earth, its surface darker than the soil that lined the plowed field of stubble, not twenty feet from where I had hidden the night I had gone to snoop around. Even in the cold they sweated, their shovels appearing over the piles of dirt as they dug deeper.

  Sackheim joined me by the well.

  “Did you not notice that Françoise Pitot screamed when she saw us standing here?” he said. “She already knew. But how?”

  Sackheim lit a tiny cigarillo and offered me his lighter. We smoked in silence.

  An hour into it, one of the men called out and Sackheim went to look. I watched from a distance as one of the cops turned around and vomited into a furrow. A forensics team that had arrived disappeared into the hole. After half an hour they carefully pulled a decomposing body up and laid it onto a stretcher.

  Before they pulled the plastic sheet over him, I got a good look. My own stomach gave a severe turn. Pieces of skin and flesh had been cut and peeled off the torso, bits of muscle and bone left exposed, worms crawling and twisting over and into the tissue. His skin had been notched dozens of times as if with the tip of a knife, the cuts tiny slashes of black clotted with blood and bits of earth. His left hand had been severed at the wrist. I had to look away. Two hay bales were stacked at the far edge of the field. The shaft of an arrow stuck out of the upper bale, its stiff red feathers like a blood-soaked, trifoliate coxcomb, and I wondered whether Jean Pitot had, in fact, tried to kill me that night near the trailer. Maybe there had been more than one deranged young man in the neighborhood.

  No one asked me this time to make a positive identification, but had they done so, I’d have told them it was Eric Feldman.

  I walked back to the entrance to the house. Standing at the gate, I looked out at the train tracks and lit another cigarette. Sackheim materialized at my elbow.

  “Do you know, was Monsieur Feldman left-handed?”

  I tried to picture the morning we had tasted together, recollecting the crabbed handwriting, and closed my eyes to reconstruct the scene.

  “Yes, I think he was. No, definitely. I remember now.” I paused. “It’s very strange,” I said.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” Sackheim said.

  “It sounds bizarre, I know, but I’m fairly certain Pitot did this to make wine. He tried to peel Feldman, like a grape, though from what I could see, he didn’t do a very pretty job of it.”

  Sackheim squinted. “And then?” he said.

  “Pressed the skin and flesh. But why didn’t the dog find anything in the house?” I continued. “Nothing in the shed, at that old wine press? Where did he make the wine?” I paused again, but Sackheim didn’t respond. “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out, though he probably washed down the equipment,” I said.

  He turned away and ordered Ponsard to call for a truck to have the ancient press taken in as evidence.

  I lingered at the car, then walked the edge of the field as the police completed their horrific job. Sackheim spent some time questioning Madame Pitot. Her husband, informed of their son’s death, promptly descended to the cellar, cursing at the top of his lungs, no doubt intent on drowning his sorrows. He’d be soused by the time Sackheim got to him.

  The work took a couple hours. Other cops arrived, and I saw Sackheim speaking to one in particular at length. After twenty minutes or so, he came up behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “So, what do you know now that you did not know before?” Sackheim said.

  “I can’t think. It’s impossible to take it all in. I feel like a walk-on in some Grand Guignol.”

  “I agree, my friend, but you must force yourself, s’il vous plaît.”

  I sighed. “We know they were killed because they were writers, wine critics. That’s why you asked me whether Feldman was left-hande
d. His writing hand.”

  “Good.”

  “Pitot took a trophy from each victim.”

  “Oui.”

  “But you’ll need to find the wine. ‘Le cépage critique.’”

  “Very amusing,” Sackheim said, without cracking a smile.

  “When you find it—if you find it—you’ll need to subject it to chemical analysis to check for traces of Wilson’s and Feldman’s blood,” I continued.

  “C’est extraordinaire,” he murmured, shaking his head.

  “But then there’s Kiers . . .”

  “D’accord. Who shot Lucas Kiers?”

  “There’s something fishy about Carrière. You know, at the Hospices, he threatened me.” Sackheim glanced at me sharply. “I know—why didn’t I tell you? But he only implied it, that I had to stop snooping around or something would happen to me. I don’t know. I think you guys need to look more closely at the family tree.”

  “What is this, a ‘family tree’?”

  “You know, the genealogy that Ponsard drew.”

  “Ah, la généalogie, oui,” Sackheim nodded. “I could not agree more. No, the investigation must continue. Nothing is as simple as it seems.”

  He paused, then spoke slowly, thoughtfully: “We French are less sanguine in our pursuit of the truth. We love to talk, to argue the fine points, to labor over toutes les nuances. We do not presume innocence. Au contraire, we presume guilt. And it is this system that charges the juge d’enquête to conduct his inquiry, to pursue all the crucial bits of evidence in his search for the truth. Something is wrong here. He will take his time. He will make an exhaustive inquiry into the facts of the case until he feels that he has achieved an accurate understanding of what has taken place.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you. I’ve got to get home. I promised my son we’d be together on Thanksgiving. If I screw this up . . . I have to be there, that’s all.”

  “Of course, I understand,” he said.

  For the moment, there was nothing else to say.

  Sackheim called me a taxi, and I picked up my car at the gendarmerie. I stopped at a café in Auxey-Duresses on the way to the gîte and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of red wine. Then I had a second glass. After lunch I walked out behind the restaurant to a stream that ran through woods. I watched the water for a while, hoping it would wash everything away. It didn’t. Back at the car, I called Air France and booked my flight home. I couldn’t take any more.

  26

  Monique was in the house waiting for me when I got back. I was surprised to see her and even more startled to learn that she was worried about me.

  “How’d you get in?” I asked.

  “The door was unlocked. Anyway, I spoke to Philippe Frossard. He said it was okay.” She looked directly at me. “I didn’t know where you were, and no one was here.”

  I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her anything about where I’d been or what I’d seen, but I didn’t see any way around it.

  “How well do you know Jean?” I began.

  “Jean?”

  “You know, the guy you were arguing with at Gauffroy,” I said, too sarcastically, given what I was about to tell her.

  She sat down on the sofa. “He wants to be with me. I told him to leave me alone.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You ever meet his parents?” I asked, sitting next to her.

  “Once,” she said. “He hates them.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you seen them? His father?” I nodded. “He’s a bastard, a drunk. A dreadful person.”

  “What about his mother?”

  “She scares me.” She peered into the dead embers of the fireplace.

  “The only one who scares me is Carrière,” I said. “What’s the deal with him?”

  “What do you mean, ‘the deal’?”

  “Jean works there. But why would Carrière send him to Napa?” She eyed me warily. “You knew he was there, working at Norton, when Richard was killed, right?”

  “He didn’t talk about it,” she said, her voice suddenly distant.

  “I know what you mean. And I think there’s a reason.”

  She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve, pulling it until there was a visible rent in the fabric.

  “I tried asking him, but he wouldn’t talk to me,” I added.

  “Ask him what?”

  “About Richard. Why he really was in California and why he left.”

  She bent over and cut the thread with her teeth, then rolled it between her fingers into a ball and set it on the coffee table.

  “But his stage was over,” she said.

  “Just like yours here,” I said.

  “D’ac.” She said nothing, only stared at me. “So, what have you learned? You have figured it all out, right?” she finally said.

  “Absolutely nothing. Every person I’ve wanted to talk to is dead. With the exception of Goldoni, that is.”

  Her eyes searched mine for an explanation.

  “Jean is dead,” I said. “Drowned. We found him in the well at the Pitots’ house.” She put her hand to her lips as the color drained from her face.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “All these terrible things happen around you.” Her eyes were accusing, her voice tense and shrill.

  It was time to tell her what I knew, what Ponsard had learned about the Pitots, about my search for Feldman and the incident at Domaine Carrière, about Lucas Kiers. When I got to the part about finding Feldman’s body, I left out the grisly details. She sat with her legs tucked underneath her, her expression uncomprehending.

  “But why you?” she said. “What is happening?”

  I described my relationship to Janie, my history with Richard.

  “So, you are his . . . how do you say, beau-frère?”

  “His brother-in-law. Ex-brother-in-law.”

  Her expression was pained. She touched my hand.

  “So, you are here because you love your wife still and you thought maybe, if you solve this crime, she will come back to you.”

  “Something like that,” I said, though I knew it was far from that simple.

  “You think you figured out who killed him?” she asked.

  “It seems pretty obvious.”

  “Jean?” she said.

  “Jean.”

  “And why did you think you could do it, solve the crime?” she said softly.

  “Richard and I were very similar. I think people misunderstood him.”

  “But you’re better than him.”

  “Not better,” I said. “Different, maybe, but not better.”

  “Well, I think so. And maybe more sensitive.”

  “Listen, all I know is that we experienced wine in a similar way. But then he succumbed to the myth of his own power.”

  “And you?” she asked gravely.

  “I keep running away from myself.”

  “I will think about that. Because when you do, you seem to run into dead bodies.”

  “I know it seems that way, but none of this has anything to do with me,” I said.

  “Are you so sure?”

  “Believe me, I’m sure.”

  We sat there, at a loss for words.

  “Écoute, do you want something to eat?” Monique finally asked.

  “What I’d like is a stiff drink. Something that wasn’t bottled around here.”

  “I know just the place—Pickwick’s.” She pronounced it Peekweek’s. She grinned at me.

  Her mood was celebratory, giddy. It made no sense. Four men were dead, and not of natural causes.

  Pickwick’s was as unlikely a place as you could hope to find in the French wine country: an ersatz Irish pub on a darkened street corner. We walked in, and the bar stink hit our nostrils. Aretha, Springsteen, the Beach Boys on the jukebox. Photographs, posters, and plaques cluttered every wall, every shelf. Firelight and TV shadows flickered against the
timbered ceiling, while the horse racing and golf paraphernalia appeared ludicrously out of place. A rail lined with empty boxes for eaux de vie and single malts ran the perimeter of the tables. I felt oddly at home seeing Coors and Guinness on tap, Murphy’s, Baileys, and Graham’s tilted bottoms-up at the dispensers. Drinks on the menu sported names like Pappagallo, Cuba Libre, Exotique, and Acapulco. Where did they think they were, Mazatlán? Two drunks lurched at the dartboard, hitting the floor, the wall, everywhere but the bull’s-eye.

  We grabbed a booth and I ordered a Johnnie Black and a Coors back. Monique asked for a beer, then walked up to the jukebox and selected Otis Redding to serenade us out of our misery. I might as well have been sitting at Pancho’s. I kept looking at her, pretending we had a future. In the booth behind us I overheard two guys talking in French.

  “C’est vrai?”

  “Is what true?”

  “What they’re saying, that they put him through a crusher-destemmer.”

  “Well, the rumor is that he was bottled.” His friend laughed. “It’s terrible, but . . . it’s funny, no? The joke is that the skin-to-juice ratio wasn’t very good. And that given his natural acidité, he probably isn’t worth drinking. A good writer but a shitty wine.” He cracked up uncontrollably.

  Even we had to laugh. But how the hell did they know about Feldman? It seemed impossible.

  “It’s true,” I said, leaning over the back of the booth, breaking into English. “How did you hear about it?”

  “A friend of mine is a flic,” one of them replied, looking startled for only an instant. “He was out at Nuits this morning. Everybody’s talking about it.” His English was fluent.

  “Who do you think did it?” I asked. Why not ask? I had nothing to lose.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure: Pitot was too stupid and Jean-Luc is too arrogant to have screwed up his own wine.”

  “Yeah, right. So, who?”

  “Who knows? Unlike Wilson, Feldman made more reputations than he wrecked. He could be hard, but he was fair. Very careful. Meticulous. He did his own work. Every year, the same domaines. Boomp, boomp, boomp. His memory was excellent.”