A Case of Sour Grapes: A Cass Elliot Companion Novel (Cass Elliot Crime Series Book 3)

by Gae-Lynn Woods

  “No, ma’am. If Bret’s phone is in there, the tank could be a crime scene.” Cass looked at Mitch. “What do we do?”

  He shrugged. “Call the fire department.”

  AN OBSCURE BUNNY BAND

  “WHAT’S UP WITH YOU, Maxine?” Harvey asked in that gravelly voice. His gym was now open for business and gaining traction from the late Sunday morning crowd. Energizing music with a steady beat thrummed through the speakers, and a barrage of running shoes pounded the treadmills in a steady cadence. Although my personal session with him was over, Harvey still hovered.

  I was rowing my little heart out when he spoke, and looked up with a start. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not your usual snarky self. You’re preoccupied, which is out of character. You need to talk more than you need to work out. What’s up?”

  I followed him to the juice bar and accepted a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, then opened up. Maintaining client confidentiality as best I could, I told him.

  “You’re hung up over an obscure Bunny band that might or might not’ve recorded a second album back in the eighties?” he said, summarizing my plight.

  “Essentially, yes.”

  Harvey smiled at a trio of girls who were headed for a Pilates class. “Why do you care if the tapes are missing?”

  “It bothers me that these guys have turned up all of sudden. Why now? What’s changed?”

  “You think they’re messing with this other guy, the one who played the banjo?”

  “I do.”

  “Then go find out, Miss Private Eye. And don’t come back until you have the answer. This mystery is interfering with my libido.”

  THE UNLUCKY HARVEST HAT

  THE BARREL ROOM WAS a hive of activity as a fire crew helped two burly men into breathing apparatus that looked like scuba gear. After signaling that air was flowing, they hurried across the room. Blue’s mop was still in its bucket, and it leaned against the tank. Kado had already dusted the ladder’s handrail for prints, and the two men climbed up the steps to the catwalk running above the tanks.

  Blue put her hands on her hips. “Be careful,” she called. “Those grapes make some of our most expensive wine.” After a moment, she added, “And don’t you dare take off those masks.”

  One man held his thumb up in acknowledgment, then helped his partner raise the cap higher. They eased a net on a long pole into the tank and lowered it until the pole was nearly submerged. Together, they swept through the fermenting grapes. After a few moments, they stopped and looked at each other, then down at the crowd watching from below. One reached in the tank and withdrew an object. He let it drip and then held up a sodden mass.

  Blue gasped.

  “What is that?” Mitch asked.

  “Bret’s hat,” she whispered. “His lucky harvest hat.”

  __________

  “I’LL KILL HIM IF he’s not in there,” Blue fumed, watching a hose pulse as fermenting grapes pumped through it. “Do you know much this will cost us? Arturo’s moving the wine to a new tank. He’s an amazing vintner, but even he can’t save it. That means no Vermentino unless we buy the grapes in, and there’s not a chance this late in the season. Every grape is sold. We’ll have to wait another year.”

  She paced behind the yellow crime scene tape separating the barrel room from the rest of the winery and the firefighters edged out of her way. Mitch and Cass watched her stalk back and forth, a caged cat with nowhere to go. At last she turned and disappeared into the dining room, returning shortly with a trio of waitstaff bearing trays of wood-fired pizzas. Blue cleared paperwork from a desk in a corner, and they placed the food and cutlery on it. She motioned the firefighters over. “Eat. The girls will bring tea and water.”

  Kado climbed down from the catwalk and took his face mask off. Mitch and Cass stepped away from Blue to join him.

  “Any prints on the cap?” Mitch asked.

  “Not a one.”

  Cass watched the wine maker adjusting a pump and the hoses. “Do you think he’s in there?”

  Mitch shrugged. “I’d hate to see Blue get hold of him if he’s not.” He motioned to the mop and bucket. “She was mopping around that tank earlier, Kado.”

  The forensics man squatted. “I’ll take a sample and we’ll see what it is. Fermenting grapes, I’d imagine.”

  “From that tank?”

  “Maybe. You think she’s washing away evidence?”

  “She wiped down the tank and mopped the floor. Seems like it to me.”

  “Hold up,” Cass said. “All we’ve got right now is a hat that might belong to Bret Ivey, and his phone ringing in that tank. Which makes me wonder, how could a phone survive in that much liquid?”

  “Cases are great nowadays,” Mitch said. “I got Darla a waterproof one after she dropped her last phone in the tub.”

  “She was taking a bath and talking on the phone?” Kado asked. “Women do that?”

  “Heck no. My wife is a sophisticated multi-tasker. She was giving Zeus a bath and talking on the phone. That’s when she dropped it.”

  “If the phone survived,” Cass said, “we can see who he was talking to and texting.”

  “It looks open and shut to me, Cass,” Mitch said. “Blue found out he was cheating, killed the competition, and then killed him.”

  “I don’t think it’s that straight-forward,” Cass answered. “If she was running around killing these girls, why would she hire Maxine to find Bret?”

  “So she could kill him, too.”

  “That wouldn’t be very smart, would it? She would’ve been better off to keep her mouth closed and let the bodies turn up where they turned up. We’d struggle to figure out who killed the girls.”

  “Except that we have evidence. Kado, do you have enough gear here to test the softball bat for blood and fingerprints?”

  “It’s too convenient, Mitch,” Cass persisted.

  “Cass, most people are dumb when it comes to killing. They get in a fit and smack somebody in the head and think nobody will know they did it, or they’re too dumb to clean up after themselves.”

  They watched as Kado tested the bat’s barrel for blood. “Positive,” he said, and dusted its length for fingerprints. “It’s clean.”

  He turned to the eye drop bottles next, and lifted several sets of fingerprints. He laid the cards out side by side and then stacked them into piles. He scanned three images into his laptop and compared them to saved files. “Blue’s prints are on all of them, and one bottle has another set I can’t match out here.”

  Cass looked back at the tank. “If he’s in there, do we arrest her?”

  Mitch nodded. “I think we have to.”

  Arturo turned off the pump but left the hoses in place and turned on the fans again before joining Blue at the crime scene tape. Kado, Mitch, and Cass walked over.

  “I can’t believe Bret would do something like this,” Arturo said. He was a strong man with a serious demeanor. “Work around a tank while the wine is fermenting. He knows the dangers.”

  “I haven’t understood anything Bret is doing for a while now, have you?” Blue asked.

  The wine maker grimaced. “No. It’s all totally out of character.”

  “Maybe the carbon dioxide got to him and he dropped his phone and hat,” Blue said. “But I don’t understand why he didn’t tell someone, or try to fish them out himself.” She looked at Kado. “Who should help you?”

  Kado shook his head. “I can manage.”

  “Not alone. Even though it’s been drained, I want someone outside to pull you back if you’re overwhelmed.” She motioned to her wine maker. “Arturo knows the most about working around these tanks. Are you happy that he helps you?”

  “How about Arturo and one of the firefighters?” Mitch said. “That would give you Arturo’s knowledge and somebody independent on the outside.”

  Kado nodded.

  “You’ll need wellies and a shovel,” Arturo said.

  “A shovel? W
hat for?”

  “The wine is gone,” Arturo said. “But the dead yeast remains.”

  THE BODY IN THE TANK

  CASS ONLY REALIZED SHE was holding her breath when her body forced her to breathe again. Her relationship with Kado was still young, but her heart had already cracked open to let him in. Blue stopped pacing and watched as Kado disappeared into the dark hole, then started walking again. Cass fought the urge to join her. Mitch and the firefighters stared at the dark hatch as if they could will Kado to come back out.

  Cass turned her back to the tank and touched her left shoulder, the place where a bullet had passed through her flesh only weeks ago. The gesture was reflexive rather than driven by pain, and she’d almost broken herself of the habit. But when she was stressed, her body seemed to need to touch that weak spot, almost as a reminder that she’d pulled through bad situations before.

  Through the roar of the fans, she heard a commotion and turned to see Arturo struggle to grasp a form covered in a white-ish paste. Head and shoulders emerged first from the hatch. Before Cass could stop her, Blue slipped under the crime scene tape.

  “Oh my God. Is that Bret?” A fireman caught her around the waist and shoulders, and Blue strained against him. “Is it him?”

  Arturo grunted with the body’s weight and Mitch and another fireman grabbed the shoulders. The rest of the body slithered through the opening like a slippery infant sliding from the womb, and Kado crawled from the hatch behind it. His face was streaked with sweat and he held up a dripping rectangle. “The phone,” he croaked.

  Blue squirmed harder and broke free, then fell to her knees next to the motionless body. She wiped gently at the pasty face, clearing sludge from eyes, nose, and mouth. “Bret?” she whispered. “Bret?”

  Arturo touched her shoulder. “Blue.”

  She shook him off and scraped the yeast from his ears. “Bret? Can you hear me?” When he didn’t respond, she put her head to his chest and murmured his name.

  Cass exchanged a look with the fireman and mouthed, “Check.”

  He lifted a bushy brow but pulled a stethoscope from a bag and knelt beside Blue. “I need to check for a pulse, ma’am.” When she tightened her grip, he added, “I won’t hurt him, I promise.”

  Blue straightened and stroked Bret’s forehead. One side of her face was matted with yeast and tears traced a path through the white sludge on her cheek. The fireman struggled with the slippery top few buttons of the shirt and slipped the stethoscope inside. He listened for several moments, watching the chest and moving the stethoscope around, and then looked up at Cass and gave a slight shake of his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Blue, and eased away from the grieving woman who only moments ago had promised to kill her husband.

  A RICH WIFE

  I TOOK HARVEY’S ADVICE and cycled home and showered in record time. I carefully unsleeved Poison Ivy and the Dismembered Bunnies’ first album and put it on my turntable, then plugged my headphones in. No point irritating the neighbors with music like this, was there?

  I plopped down on the red leather sofa with my laptop, a glass of sparkling spring water, the shotgun within reach, and folk punk on low volume. My cursor found its way to the Google search bar, and I wondered what to type. Compulsion might be my middle name, but like Harvey said, who cares about a thirty-year-old musical mystery?

  I did. I was no longer employed by Blue Ivey and didn’t understand why I couldn’t let go of the puzzle surrounding Bret’s band. I needed to know where the missing tapes were, and what happened to Sonny Arellano.

  Undaunted by my doubts, I typed in the band’s name and clicked links. Stan’s story matched the online version of the band’s history, with the exception of a minor detail. An update on the Arellano crime family noted recent sightings of a man believed to be Sonny Arellano who was acting in a leadership capacity in the drug cartel. My high school Spanish was rusty, but I worked my way through a news briefing on a Mexican website where the government said it believed this rumor was untrue, that the family was led by one of the four sisters. One mystery solved. Maybe.

  I sat back and sipped my water, choosing to believe the reports were true. It seemed more than coincidental that Sonny was spotted in Mexico in the months leading up to the break-in at Bret’s houses. If Sonny Arellano was alive and heading a drug cartel, why would he be interested in finding tapes from an old recording session, if the things even existed?

  I printed the articles and decided to look deeper into my main man, Bret Ivey. If he’d misspelled his name on one marriage certificate, who was to say he hadn’t done so on others? While incredibly useful, Cindy’s dive into the databases on Saturday morning had been perfunctory. It was time for some serious searching.

  Since I didn’t have the keys to the kingdom, i.e., the usernames and passwords for the industrial strength databases, I started with public marriage and divorce records in the California wine country where Stony Pike Winery, now owned by Bret Ivey’s ex-wife Imelda Sanchez, was located. I found a marriage certificate from 2001. A divorce certificate from 2006. No other records for Bretton Baxter Ivey. Recent articles from local newspapers and magazines were flattering about Stony Pike and the woman who owned it. They referenced her tough upbringing as one of eight children born to immigrant parents. She had a knack for numbers and made a bold move into day-trading that morphed her initial baby-sitting money investment of one thousand dollars into a seven-figure fortune in the 1990s. She ‘retired’ and moved into wine-making as a joint venture with her new husband in 2001.

  Aha. A rich wife.

  To make sure I had the full picture, I searched Bretton Baxter Ivey, and then swapped the first and middle names. I did it again with Ivy. I tried last names only. Big fat goose egg on all fronts.

  A map of California showed the counties neighboring the one where Bret and Imelda married and divorced, so I expanded my search geographically in widening circles. I hit pay dirt on the third county to the south: Bretton Baxter Ivy climbed on the marriage treadmill with a Mary Sterling way back in 1983. They divorced in 1987. I searched local newspapers but online archives were sketchy before the mid-90s.

  Probably not a rich wife.

  I expanded again.

  Bret moved farther south and in 1991 married a Susan Spikes. They divorced in 1997. The local society magazine was helpful. Susan was the only child of the man who owned the local bank. She and Bret Ivy met while he worked for her father. According to the tidbits of gossip in the local paper, Susan dumped Bret for the rich son of another banker. The merger of the two banks swiftly followed. Local gossip hinted Bret was quite the eligible bachelor given the windfall he received in the divorce.

  Another rich wife.

  I opened a note pad. Bret and his marital activities were confusing.

  I worked my way to the California counties bordering Mexico, and decided my abilities didn’t extend to prying open the official records of another country. Yet. So I went north again, back to the counties radiating up and out from Imelda and her winery. And hit the lottery once again.

  Baxter Bretton Ivye married a Karen Smythson in 1999. They divorced in 2004. For the record, Karen was the daughter of a local artist of some note. Karen ran his gallery in a little seaside town up near the border with Oregon.

  Yet another rich wife.

  My note pad was a mess, so I organized his marriages into timelines and all was revealed. Well, as much as I could gather so far. Bret started his polygamous habits in 2001, when he married Imelda Sanchez Ivey in California. At that time, he was already married to Karen SmythsonIvye. He married Nicole Ivy in 2002 for a total of three wives at one time. He didn’t unburden himself until 2003 when he divorced Karen, and then again in 2006 when he and Imelda divorced.

  Three names, Ivy, Ivey, and Ivye, and I finally understood why they changed.

  I drained my glass of now room-temperature water, stood, and stretched. I considered calling it quits. After all, this was my time. The dirt I was d
igging on Bret Ivey wouldn’t matter one whit to Blue. But that wasn’t the point.

  I was angry. Angry at the way he’d lied to and presumably manipulated these women, much as he had Blue. Men like that weren’t worth the price of the leather on their soles. They needed to be hunted down and dealt with.

  I didn’t stop to consider what I’d do with the information. I settled back on the couch, changed my search references to Texas, and went at it again.

  THOSE THINGS’LL GIVE YOU CANCER

  BIG BILLY GRUNTED AND rolled onto his side, squinting at the light flowing through the filthy windows. A buzzing sounded and he swatted the air around his head before realizing it was the cell phone. He raised up on one arm and swayed, letting the nausea pass, then snatched the phone from the floor. He poked Sugar. “Wake up and answer this.”

  Sugar peered through gummy eyes. “Wha?”

  “Answer it.”

  “My head, man.” He squinted at the screen. “It’s a message.”

  “Listen to it.”

  “You listen to it.”

  Billy lay back and put his arm over his eyes. “Nope. Those things’ll give you cancer.”

  “They’ve done studies -”

  “They lie so you’ll buy more phones.”

  “You don’t care if I get cancer?” Sugar asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t say that. Of course you care.”

  “No, I don’t. Listen to it.”

  Sugar did, and slowly sat up, his mouth hanging open.

  “What is it?”

  He carefully closed the phone. “There’s two messages. One bawling us out for getting drunk last night. The other one says BB’s dead.”

  Billy sat up, one hand to his head. “He’s what?”

  “BB’s dead.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “He doesn’t know.” Sugar pulled at his nose. “You know what this means?”

  “What?”