Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “Vous comprenez maintenant?” Sylvie Carrière whispered.

  Sackheim leaned over to place his hand on Eugénie’s shoulder and said, “I am sorry, Mesdames. I deeply regret the pain I have caused you both. I am grateful, however, that you chose to share with me this very difficult history.”

  Rising, he signaled me to stand as well.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning back as we neared the door. “There’s just one more thing.” Sackheim looked at me in surprise. “Have you seen your family since getting back?” I asked Eugénie. “Your mother and father?” I added, needing to clarify what had become terribly murky.

  “Yes, last night,” she said, her face still buried, her voice muffled.

  “Did you bring any presents for your family?”

  She lifted her head. “Yes, how did you know this?”

  “A package that your brother asked you to carry?”

  “How did you know?” Her eyes locked on mine.

  Instead of answering her question, I asked another one: “Didn’t it seem strange that Jean would ask you to bring something back when he’d already left in September?”

  “He left it at my house on his last visit. He told me he had forgotten it. Is it a crime to bring your mother a gift, a gift your brother is no longer alive to deliver?” Her tone now was sharp.

  “No, Madame, it is not a crime,” Sackheim replied for me, casting a look my way that said we were done. “Merci, Mesdames.” He nudged my shoulder, and we walked down the hallway and left the house.

  28

  We sat for some time in the car in the shadow of the brick wall.

  “What are you thinking?” Sackheim said.

  “Well, for one thing, this condition Eugénie described in her grandmother and uncle: It comes from excessive exposure to copper sulfate. Winegrowers dust the leaves with it to prevent powdery mildew, a fungus. You can take it in through your eyes and skin, and they breathe it when they mix it up, like her grandmother did.”

  “I still do not quite understand. All vignerons do not suffer from this, or am I mistaken?”

  “No, of course not. And copper sulfate doesn’t kill you. I mean, it can, in sufficient doses, but they probably used too much of the stuff. I don’t think they knew as much about it back then as we do today. But that’s not the point.”

  “And the point is?” Sackheim asked.

  “This family, they possess a genetic disorder that absorbs and stores the copper in the body.” I paused as Sackheim took in the awful nature of the malady. “I don’t know about her grandmother’s blindness. I never heard of that. But it makes you tired, and in really extreme cases, it can lead to seizures, Parkinson’s, a whole host of neurological and psychiatric problems. In their case, I’d say it’s made them crazy.”

  “Very interesting. And hideous, non?”

  “In English it’s called Wilson’s disease.”

  He just stared at me. “Wilson’s disease? Vraiment?”

  “Can you believe that?” I said and shook my head.

  “This irony, it is too cruel.”

  “And so sad,” I said.

  “Sad, yes. In fact, it’s tragic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us at all. None of this explains why Jean killed Richard Wilson. Or Feldman.”

  We sat silently a moment. It was all too much.

  “Explain to me, s’il vous plaît, your question about the package,” he then asked.

  “Richard Wilson’s hand,” I said. “Jean didn’t forget it. He left it at his sister’s on purpose. He needed to put some distance between himself and the crime.”

  Sackheim looked at me with attenuated exhaustion. “And where is this hand?” he said.

  “Chez Pitot,” I said. “But we have one stop to make first. I’d like to drop by Domaine Gauffroy in Gevrey, if that’s all right.”

  The abbey was sheathed in silence. I knocked—there was an iron ring on the timbered double doors—and we waited in the courtyard where Jean had accosted Monique. Gauffroy’s wife opened the door. She and Sackheim both looked to me for an explanation.

  “Pardonez-moi, Madame. The day of the tasting a young man, the son of Madame Pitot, who brought the terrine late in the day, left a bottle of wine on your table. Do you remember?”

  “Oui,” she said tentatively.

  “Do you have it? Is it here?”

  She thought a moment, then shook her head. “I am sorry.” She started to close the enormous door.

  “Perhaps your husband knows?” I suggested.

  “Un moment, s’il vous plaît, Messieurs.”

  She excused herself and reappeared a few minutes later with her husband. I repeated the question.

  He had to think for only a second before saying, “Suivez moi.”

  We descended to the tiny cellar where Kiers and Rosen had had their argument. He pulled open the wrought-iron gate at the very back of the cellar, leaned down to a niche, and pulled out a bottle of wine—the only one not displaying a skin of dust.

  “I don’t know why I saved it,” he told us. But it didn’t surprise me. He might not have admitted it, but he’d been curious and probably intended to taste it. I’d never met a Frenchman who simply poured a bottle of wine down the drain. They weren’t that profligate.

  A half dozen glasses sat on an upturned barrel surrounding a corkscrew that had been fashioned from a gnarled grapevine, the screw embedded in its shellacked knuckle.

  “May I?” I said.

  Gauffroy nodded. I put the bottle between my knees and pulled. Sackheim was studying me. I poured a couple ounces. I held it to the light, twirling it until it sloshed up the side of the glass, then concentrated on the wine, smelling it, twirling it, then smelling it again. Over and over. I held it up one last time and finally took a sip. I let it swirl around my tongue and paint the sides of my mouth. Then I aerated it and let it sit on my palate a long time before spitting it onto the ground.

  Sackheim watched me, his impatience mounting.

  “The color is too evolved for a wine this young. See this?” I said, indicating a bricky tint that rimmed the wine. The slightest tinge. “Here you call this pelure d’oignon.” Lucien Gauffroy nodded. “But you should never see this in a new wine. And the nose isn’t fresh. Not just tight, but off,” I added.

  “And the taste?” Sackheim said anxiously. “How does it taste to you?”

  Gauffroy, curious to understand my commentary, poured himself some wine.

  “It’s not as ripe or as generous as it should be,” I said. “Even wrapped up—which you’d expect—it should possess a lushness, a concentrated fatness and depth, an undercurrent of fresh fruit held in check by the tannins, that it just doesn’t have.”

  Gauffroy sipped and nodded but remained silent. He followed my English, but I wasn’t sure how much he had understood.

  “And you explain this how?” Sackheim said.

  “Do you understand the term fining, Colonel?” I said. I racked my brain for the French translation.

  “Collage,” Gauffroy said, just as the word came to me.

  “Exactly: collage,” I said.

  “Gluing?” Sackheim said, confused. “This is what an artist does, gluing things to paper,” he said to the vigneron.

  “Yes, but it’s also a stage in the winemaking process,” I said, acknowledging Gauffroy.

  “Expliquez, s’il vous plaît,” Sackheim said.

  “Fining—collage—is the process of clarifying wine,” I explained.

  “Et puis . . . ?”

  “You add an agent to the wine.”

  “La colle,” Gauffroy interjected.

  “Egg whites, milk, bentonite,” I went on, “that coagulates and absorbs the colloids in the wine, pulls out the particulates so the wine won’t be cloudy.”

  “It helps to stabilize the wine, too,” Gauffroy added.

  “D’accord,” Sackheim said, following along.

  “But historically, in the olden days, the French used to use dried blood pow
der, ox blood, to fine their wines. N’est-ce pas?” I said to Gauffroy.

  “Oui, c’est vrai,” he said.

  Sackheim looked at us, an expression of bafflement slowly giving way to one of triumph.

  “You see,” he said proudly, turning to Gauffroy, “our American friend is truly a scholar of wine. But how did you . . .”

  “Last night I drank a bottle of Carrière’s Chambolle I bought in town. It was incredible. Gorgeous, opulent fruit. This,” I said, holding the glass to the lamp hanging from the stone ceiling, “is the same wine. And not the same wine.”

  Lucien Gauffroy seemed utterly confused.

  “It is the addition of the blood that makes it so?” Sackheim said.

  “If I say the word saignée, what does it mean to you?”

  “‘Bled’? Do I understand correctly?”

  “Yeah, literally, sure. But it’s another winemaking term. You say, ‘to perform a saignée’ or, ‘a saignée of Pinot Noir.’”

  Back on familiar territory, Gauffroy nodded authoritatively.

  “Typically, saignée refers to a rosé,” I continued. “But in Burgundy, they sometimes bleed the skins to get rid of extra juice, to concentrate the wine.”

  “D’accord,” Gauffroy said.

  Then they looked at me and fell quiet.

  “Jean, maybe Carrière as well, bled the skin of Eric Feldman,” I said. The vigneron set his glass on the barrel, staring at it, realizing what he had just tasted. “And then used it as a fining agent. Instead of purifying and stabilizing the wine, the blood spoiled it.”

  “C’est ça,” Sackheim said. “C’est brilliant, et c’est diabolique, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Non, mais c’est horrible, c’est affreux,” Gauffroy muttered, a look of total revulsion contorting his face.

  “Yes, you’re right. It is. Horrifying and evil, both,” I said. “And very hard to detect.”

  “Come, take the wine,” Sackheim said.

  “Chez Pitot,” Sackheim commanded. “Allons-y.”

  At his instruction, I threaded my way back through Gevrey-Chambertin and headed toward Nuits. We were silent on the drive south. On the east side of town, Sackheim ordered me to pull over at the public swimming pool. He called Ponsard and told him to bring two cars and some men, and to meet us chez Pitot.

  We parked on the street in front of Jean’s house behind Monique’s Fiat and a dark blue Mercedes that appeared distinctly out of place in the run-down quartier.

  “Carrière,” Sackheim said. “And . . .”

  “Mademoiselle Azzine,” I whispered.

  The house was even shabbier than I remembered it. Sackheim seemed uncharacteristically nervous. He pushed open the gate—the crime-scene tape that ribboned the house was already torn—and we passed the shed and the well, both of which had also been cordoned off with tape, and approached the house. We stepped up to the front door. The TV was on. A game show. Sackheim motioned for me to keep quiet. He led the way around the side of the house. We passed through the carport, and as we reached the far corner of the house, we could hear voices from a shed. It stood just outside the fence of the property. I’d noticed it two days before when we found Jean in the well and Eric Feldman buried in his shallow grave but hadn’t given it a second thought. Smoke seeped through chinks in its walls and roof.

  Sackheim crouched down and I followed suit. The first voice I heard was Françoise Pitot’s.

  “Idiot! Con! He dumps the body in a foudre and cuts off his hand. What am I supposed to do with a hand?”

  “That should teach you!” It was the voice of Henri Pitot. “Fuck this asshole and that’s what you get! Un arriéré!”

  “You should know!” she screamed.

  “Leave this to me,” Henri said.

  “This is ridiculous!” Now we heard Jean-Luc Carrière. “They will find this. You are crazy.”

  “My God, I can’t believe this!” a woman said in English, and I realized it was Monique. “What are you doing? It’s disgusting!” she exclaimed, again in English, as if by the mere fact of language she might separate herself from whatever it was she was seeing.

  We heard a car, two cars, in the street.

  “Stay here,” Sackheim whispered, pointing to his ear, and backed up to intercept his lieutenant.

  Though I hadn’t noticed it, the wind must have shifted. An odor reached me, foul and noxious.

  Sackheim, in a running crouch, hurried to my side. I followed his eyes to the near edge of the field and saw Ponsard take up a position behind the hay bales I’d seen the day Feldman had been found. The arrow was still there, its feathers glinting in the sunlight.

  “Don’t move!” he said and rose, gesturing for Ponsard to follow, and hurried to the entrance of the shed. I couldn’t resist running after him.

  The scene we met was bizarre. Henri Pitot stood bent over an antique still. It looked like an hourglass fashioned from hammered copper, the upper chamber smaller than the lower, the whole thing no taller than a couple of feet. The contraption sat on a cast-iron wood stove. As I reached the entrance, Henri Pitot fed the fire and slammed the door shut. A pipe emerged from the top of the still and twisted its way to a rusted copper bucket that sat on a wooden stool.

  I inched my way forward and gagged. An overpowering stench filled the tiny room.

  “Arrêtez!” Sackheim shouted. “You, all of you, I am putting under arrest!”

  Jean-Luc Carrière stood there, his arms akimbo, paralyzed. Françoise Pitot glowered at us. Her husband wore a hunted, terrified expression. Monique simply stared at me.

  “You see!” Carrière screamed. “Just as I said!”

  “I have nothing to do with this,” Monique pleaded. “They’re crazy, all of them.”

  “Liar!” Françoise said. “She helped Jean. You don’t really think he could have killed Wilson by himself, do you? He was nothing, a weakling. Your father rejected you,” she said, turning back to Monique. “You wanted revenge, too.”

  “It’s not true!” Monique cried.

  “Quiet! All of you!” Sackheim shouted. “Come with us,” he ordered.

  At that moment, Henri Pitot somehow shoved his way past Sackheim and fled in the direction of the house. Ponsard took Carrière by the arm to make sure he, too, didn’t escape. Monique came up to me and took my hands in hers.

  “You have to save me,” she said, her eyes desperate. “I don’t belong here. It’s a mistake. You have to believe me.”

  “Bastards!” Françoise Pitot said. “You’re all bastards!”

  “Be that as it may, Madame, it is over,” Sackheim said. “Lieutenant,” he added, indicating that Ponsard should take Carrière and lead the way. We ducked under the low door and walked in single file toward the house, Ponsard in front, followed by Jean-Luc Carrière, Monique, Françoise and me. Sackheim took up the rear.

  As we entered the back gate of the property, I could hear Françoise Pitot muttering under her breath, “This is all your fault. I told Jean to get rid of you.” I glanced back, and Sackheim took her by the shoulder.

  We entered through the kitchen and gathered in the foyer and living room. The old woman sitting before the television screen stirred at the commotion.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il se passe?” she said. “Is that you, Françoise?” She turned, and I looked into the milky whites of her eyes, spectral against her jaundiced skin.

  No one knew what to say, and nobody moved. Finally Sackheim ordered Ponsard to take Carrière to one of the police cars and to have another officer join us.

  Ponsard was back within two or three minutes, accompanied by another flic. Sackheim told them to keep an eye on everybody and disappeared to search the cellar for Henri Pitot. He returned empty-handed and turned to the old woman, who hadn’t budged from the sofa.

  “Pardon, Madame,” he said. “I apologize for the disturbance. And permit me to express my sympathies. It is horrible, what the sulfatage does to your family. I had not realized . . .”

  Fran�
�oise snorted. “What do you know?”

  “Your daughter, Eugénie, she explained this terrible condition.”

  “This is what you think? That she is blind from the sulfatage?” she asked contemptuously.

  “C’est vrai, n’est-ce pas?” Sackheim said.

  “True? You want the truth, Monsieur? Monsieur le gendarme? Le grand détective? Do you think you can stand the truth?”

  “Is it not so?” Sackheim appeared confused.

  “That she is poisoned? Oui, bien sûr. But not as you think. It is not the poison of sulfur that kills her, though truly her insides have been eaten away. Tell him, tell him what you think,” she said to her mother-in-law.

  “Forgive me, Madame, but I do not understand,” Sackheim said.

  Françoise moved to the sofa and sat down heavily next to the old woman. I stood by the half wall that separated the foyer from the living room and could see the line of the elder Madame Pitot’s coarse stockings rolled above her knees. She slouched, her chin resting on her chest, her breath coming heavily.

  “Two years ago, she thought she was dying,” Françoise Pitot said. “She finally confessed. She had never told anyone.”

  I could barely hear her. Sackheim lifted his head as if he had picked up a scent. The old woman appeared disoriented, baffled by the commotion and cacophony of voices.

  “Are you going to tell them, or should I?” Françoise asked. The old woman turned to face her, but without her eyes, it was impossible to tell what she was feeling.

  “Henri’s mother was a young girl during the war,” Françoise started, nodding at the diminished figure.

  “I was pretty then,” Madame Pitot suddenly said. Her voice was thin, frail. “There is a photograph somewhere,” she said and waved her hand distractedly, then lapsed into silence.

  “When the Americans came that September,” Françoise continued, “she told her father she wanted to go to Dijon to welcome them. He said no, but she went anyway. You always did whatever you wanted.”

  “Many people went. It was like a holiday, everybody in the streets waving American flags,” the old woman said, reliving the scene in her mind.