A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 3: Murder Alfresco

by Nadia Gordon

  Monty held up his glass. “Inky. Ninety-eight?”

  “Ninety-four,” corrected Wade. “Nearly the last of it.”

  “Holding up nicely.”

  Platters heavy with food went around the table.

  “There’s nothing like a spring lamb,” said Monty. “So tender, so succulent. A wee babe hardly weaned from his mama’s milk.” He held up a forkful admiringly before devouring it.

  Sunny put down her silver. She was divided between feeling ridiculous for her new squeamishness about meat and feeling genuinely squeamish about meat. This was not a sensitivity she could afford to develop. She took a sip of the potent red wine and loaded her plate with a second helping of mixed greens.

  “I’ve been thinking about your murder,” said Monty. “In my opinion, it had to be somebody who worked at the winery.”

  “It’s not my murder,” said Sunny.

  “Otherwise there’s no way they would have risked being seen going there.”

  “Anybody would have looked suspicious at two-thirty in the morning hanging a dead girl from a tree,” said Sunny, “whether they worked there or not. It’s not exactly part of the typical job description. But you can’t see much from the road anyway. It wouldn’t take much research to observe that you would have darkness and solitude at that hour. And it was a particularly dark night. There was just a sliver of a moon.”

  “You think they planned it that way?” said Rivka.

  “I think everything about this crime was planned,” said Sunny. She drank more wine. The astringent alcohol seemed to purify her mouth of the unpleasant topic. She didn’t want to talk about the girl, especially not in the middle of dinner, and yet, it was the topic on everyone’s mind, even her own.

  “So what’s the connection to the winery, then?” said Monty.

  “It has to be sexual,” said Sunny. “The message being sent was blatantly erotic. I would guess some kind of love triangle, but I can’t think of how that would lead to the girl’s death.”

  “I’ve met the winemaker at Vedana several times,” said Monty. “A guy named Ové Obermeier. A clansman of Skord’s, I think.”

  “Ové sounds Norwegian to me, not Swedish,” said Wade.

  “Whatever. Viking type. Gives off a player vibe. Probably he was having an affair with the girl.”

  “Why would that make somebody want to kill her?” asked Rivka.

  “Maybe his wife killed her,” said Wade.

  “I don’t think he’s married,” said Monty.

  “You guys are missing the point. This was not a crime of passion. Nobody got angry, killed a girl on impulse, panicked, and decided to dump her at Vedana. This was a planned, calculated murder done by somebody with a serious screw loose. There may not even be a motive. What I saw was an act of evil.” Sunny picked up a spear of asparagus and ate it. “I just wonder if they can catch him.”

  “What do they have to go on?” asked Rivka.

  “I don’t know. They paid a lot of attention to the road, trying to get tracks from the truck I saw. Other than that, I don’t know what they found. Steve isn’t talking. The ground under the tree was moist but grassy, so I doubt they found much in the way of footprints, and rope and trees aren’t known for holding fingerprints. The most likely place for physical evidence will be the girl herself, I suppose, and I won’t know what they find there until they print it in the paper.”

  “They’ll get him,” said Wade. “A guy like that wants to get caught. Somebody who sets up a scene like he set up is looking for attention.”

  “I agree,” said Sunny. “And following that line of thinking, a guy like that will kill again, looking for another chance to make headlines. That’s what has me worried.” She bit the head off another spear of asparagus. “All I needed to do was look at the license plate and they’d have him by now.”

  “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” said Wade. “You had no reason to believe you’d need to identify that truck later.”

  After dinner, Rivka rifled through the CDs for Lester Young and the Oscar Peterson Trio. “This is a job for the President.”

  Sunny took down a bottle of twenty-three-year-old Bas-Armagnac and four snifters from a cabinet in the living room. They settled into the couch and comfortable chairs and listened to the perfect sounds: short, concise notes on the piano, guitar warm and sweet, bass like an easy heartbeat, the swirl of the wire brush, and Pres on tenor sax.

  “The sound of New York City,” said Monty.

  “In a hot club on a cold night,” said Wade. “Upper West Side.”

  “In a silk dress and fishnet stockings,” said Sunny.

  “With a bad man in a good suit,” said Rivka.

  The kettle whistled and Rivka got up. She came back with a pot of mint tea sweetened Moroccan style and poured it into the colorful, intricately painted glasses Sunny kept for that purpose. She added a few pine nuts to each and handed them around. On the coffee table, she opened an assortment of white containers from the restaurant. There was a slice of Mama McCoskey’s Rum Cake, two bread puddings with caramel sauce, and a box of assorted tea cookies.

  “Dessert is a little on the heavy side,” said Sunny. “I didn’t have time to get any fruit. The customers mowed through all the Meyer lemon sorbet. There was one panna cotta with a Riesling-poached pear left, but I sent it home with Heather.”

  “Damn her,” said Monty. “I love the panna cotta and I love the Riesling-poached pear.”

  “It was pretty good,” said Sunny. “The pears came out perfect. They were the color of that Armagnac.”

  “Stop, I’m in agony,” said Monty.

  “You know, it wouldn’t kill you to eat a meal at the restaurant once in a while,” said Rivka. “Then you could order whatever you want.”

  “You mean pay? My god.”

  Wade quaffed the last of the brandy in his glass like it was so much bargain-bin schnapps and leaned back in the old leather armchair. He put his feet up on the wooden stool that served as an ottoman. “I don’t like it, McCoskey,” he said. “I don’t like you being here alone. I don’t think you should be alone at night until they nab this guy. In fact, it might be a good idea for you to come stay up at Skord Mountain until all this blows over.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Sunny. “They may never nab him. I might know everything I’m ever going to know about that girl and whoever did that to her. I have to get used to that idea. I have to forget about the whole business and move on or I’ll lose my mind. It’s over, at least as far as I’m concerned. Now I just have to get back to normal.”

  Rivka Chavez, who stayed the longest, had been gone for hours when Sunny heard the rumble of Andre Morales’s motorcycle pulling up outside the cottage. The first night they’d spent together started with a ride on that motorcycle, an old BMW with a cream-colored tank. The sound of it still gave her butterflies. He stomped up the front stairs in his boots, rapped his knuckles on the door, and came in without waiting for an answer. She put down the cookbook she’d been reading and watched him. He was wearing the biking leathers that smelled like pinesap and campfire smoke. He put his helmet and gloves on the table and held his hand out to her.

  “Come with me, please.”

  “Why did I have to find her?” said Sunny, tugging the tangles from strands of Andre’s hair. “I’m a magnet for death.”

  “You’re not a magnet for death,” he said, turning over to face her. “You are just unusually observant. Anybody else would have noticed a truck went by and thought nothing of it. You noticed its lights were off, wondered what it was doing at the winery at that hour, and spotted something different about the tree. I’m sure that that acute attention to detail leads you to many more good things than it does bad. It’s a positive trait that happened to get you into a bad place this time around.”

  “Like chanterelles.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I always spot chanterelles when nobody else sees them.”

  “Exactly. Sometimes
your eagle eye leads you to a mushroom, sometimes to a dead body. You have to take the good with the bad.” Andre stared at the ceiling. “Why don’t you take some time off? You haven’t had a vacation in a while.”

  “I have to close the restaurant if I leave town, and I can’t afford to do that. We’re barely making ends meet as it is,” said Sunny.

  “That’s because your business model is not economically viable. You need more revenue streams. You need to find ways to make money that are scalable and that can keep happening whether you show up or not.”

  “I’m not selling Wildside T-shirts and coffee mugs.”

  “They could be nice T-shirts and handmade coffee mugs. You could open for dinner service and weekend brunch. You could do a stand at the farmers’ market, branded gourmet products, a cookbook. All the stuff people do to make money. You need to grow. Your costs go up when you expand, but so does your income. And your profit margin expands with volume. Then you hire some people so you’re not a slave to the kitchen.”

  “You’re singing Rivka’s song. She wants to open for weekends and dinner. She needs to make more money, and I can’t afford to pay her any more unless we scale up.”

  Andre propped himself up on his elbow and rested his tiger eyes on her. “Both of you need to make more money. You can’t go on just scraping by forever, and you can’t keep doing everything yourself. You’ll burn out. With Wildside the way it is, even as a resounding success, it’s still a failure because you’re not really making a living. You’re just getting by.”

  “I make a living. I like my lifestyle.”

  “Savings?”

  “Later.”

  “Investments?”

  “Not in the monetary sense.”

  “You can’t live hand to mouth forever.”

  “Do we have to talk about this right now?”

  “Is there ever a good time? I hate watching you work this hard.”

  “You work harder than I do.”

  “But I know it’s temporary. I have an exit strategy. I’m out one way or another inside of five years. And I make more money. You need a plan.”

  “Let’s go back to talking about whether or not I’m a magnet for death. That was more relaxing.”

  8

  Andre got up at six-thirty to play soccer. Sunny paced the house. Finally she called Wade Skord, thinking a trip up to the vineyard would clear her head.

  “Coffee brewing,” said Wade. “And we’ve got bud break.”

  She couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, pulling on jeans and grabbing a sweater on the way out. The drive up Howell Mountain did half the job, and the sight of the vineyard surrounded by forest did the rest. By the time she got out of the truck, the breathless, nerve-jangling feeling she’d woken up to was gone.

  Farber, Wade’s cat, materialized to rub against her legs. He led the way up the stairs and onto the porch, where he had arrayed what was left of the night’s prey on the doormat.

  “Present for you,” she said, when Wade answered the door.

  Wade examined the unpleasant deposit. The head remained, and an assortment of red and blue entrails. “Wood rat, from the looks of it.”

  He praised the cat and tossed the remains into the woods off the western edge of the deck, then led the way inside. “You’re up early for a day off.”

  She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Do you think the killer is like Farber?”

  “The cat? How do you mean?”

  “Farber leaves the evidence for you to find so that you will know he is a good hunter.”

  “He wants me to know he’s doing his job.”

  “Right. He knows, or assumes, that you want the wood rats of the world to be torn to bits, so by letting you know he’s out doing your bidding, he builds favor with you.”

  “And feels important. He likes to feel like a big shot.”

  “Okay, but what if you were a wood rat yourself, or were simpatico with the wood rats? It would be a very different message.”

  “Definitely,” said Wade. “No cream, by the way. I haven’t been to the market lately. No sugar either, but I have syrup.”

  “For my coffee?”

  “It’s just like honey, but maple flavor.” Wade twisted the top of the maple syrup, scowling at its stubbornness.

  “Here.” Sunny twisted the top off easily and poured some syrup in her coffee.

  “The McCoskey brute strength.”

  “Anything red open?”

  Wade took a bottle of Zin from the counter and she added a splash to her coffee. “It would become a message of intimidation.”

  They pulled chairs up to the old wooden table. A new three-legged ceramic pot, a souvenir from his recent trip to Mexico, stood in the middle of it.

  “Right,” said Wade. “If Farber left a human head and entrails on my doormat, I would be worried about my next trip out to the woodshed.”

  “Exactly. And why would he want you to feel that way? What is to be gained by making someone afraid of you?”

  “They do what you want,” said Wade. “You can control them.”

  “My thinking exactly. I think somebody at the winery knows that message was for them,” said Sunny. “Somebody over there is very, very nervous right now. We’ll find out who it is eventually, because they’ll crack under the pressure. That is going to be the cops’ biggest lead.” She tasted the coffee. “Odd, but not bad.”

  “Except that the message didn’t get delivered as it was intended,” said Wade. “You intercepted it. All that got through was that a girl was killed. What if that’s not enough? What if they don’t know it was for them? Nobody saw her but you.”

  “Right again. The police haven’t identified her yet. That’s when the fur is going to fly, when the name is released. If I heard a man was killed and left in a tree at Wildside, I’d be upset. But if I learned it was a guy named Monty Lenstrom, for example, I’d freak out.”

  Wade went to the kitchen and came back with a slab of cheddar cheese and a couple of apples. He cut both into wedges and added dishes of walnuts and raisins to the spread.

  “You eat like a hunter-gatherer,” said Sunny.

  “If cheese grew wild, I’d never go to the grocery store again.” He walked into his office and returned with a newspaper. He put the front page down in front of Sunny. “I wasn’t going to show you this. I thought you might want a break from all this business. But since you brought it up.”

  The entire top half of the front page of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat was dedicated to the girl with the long black hair. Sunny read the article three times, wringing each sentence for every nuance of meaning. She had been identified as Heidi Romero. Her family had reported her missing on Thursday night after she never showed up for work that day. She was twenty-six, grew up in Rohnert Park, and lived in Sausalito, a little fishing village turned tourist destination right across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. She worked at the REI in Corte Madera. Her coworkers said she loved being outside, mountain biking, and surfing. Her mother said they knew something was wrong when they found her car in the parking lot and her purse inside her house. Sergeant Harvey was identified as the investigating officer and quoted as saying his team was pursuing a number of leads and awaiting the coroner’s report.

  Next to the article was a photograph of Heidi Romero at the beach. She had just come out of the water and was standing with her arm around her surfboard and an ecstatic smile on her face. Sunny studied her. Was there any chance this sporty, wholesome-looking girl was into serious bondage? Can you tell who has that kind of kink just by looking? People have their secrets.

  “How do you get from this picture to what I saw Wednesday night?” asked Sunny. “Those two worlds aren’t supposed to meet. Not ever.”

  “If I knew,” said Wade, “I’d be knocking down somebody’s door right now.”

  They spent the morning hiking the hillside vineyard, examining bud break and pulling weeds. Wade cursed like a pirate whenever he spotted a growth of thi
stle, pulling it up with passionate hatred. His vitriol continued between offenses. “Thorny bastards,” he muttered. “How dare they open up shop in my vineyard. I’d sooner burn the place down than let the thistle have it.”

  At lunchtime, they visited the garden for greens, baby carrots, and green onion. Sunny made an omelet and salad and rubbed toasted slices of peasant bread with garlic. After lunch, they opened a bottle of Wade’s experimental Sangiovese and sat down to stick labels on the Zinfandel harvested four years earlier that was finally ready to be released. When the sun went down, Wade followed her home and they watched his DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, a film they could both recite.

  Andre came in late and left early. Sunny stayed in bed. She wanted the forgetfulness of sleep.

  9

  It was a garden party like any other. Sunny held a paper plate loaded with food and chatted with people she seemed to know. The afternoon sun warmed the patio pleasantly. Through the trees, she could see a green slope. Beyond it was the pale blue of the open sea. Just inside the trees stood Heidi Romero. She was wearing a skirt and blouse and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She beckoned to Sunny with a smile, inviting her to come over so she could tell her something. Sunny stared, her heart racing.

  “You can’t be here,” she said. “You’re… You’re…” The word would not come out. She tried to say it, but her throat would permit no air, no sound to pass.

  Heidi smiled, encouraging her to walk over so they could talk.

  Sunny shook her head. “You can’t be here. You’ve been… You’ve been…” It was as though the words lodged in her throat. She woke gasping for air.

  “This was one of those super-realistic, vivid dreams, exactly like it was really happening,” said Sunny, huddled over a cup of tea. It was still early on Sunday morning, but she had decided to call Rivka anyway. If Rivka was seeing someone, it would be different. She wouldn’t call and wake up two people. But since Rivka had ended her romance with Alex Campaglia, she’d been in a dry spell. “What do you think it means?”