Tangled Vines

by Janet Dailey

  “No.”

  “Are you sure -” she began, then stopped, shaking her head. “You must be sure or you wouldn’t have charged him with murder.”

  “Do you want the facts, Kelly?” he asked gently. “An eyewitness puts him on the scene with the murder weapon in his hand. A gasoline can was found not three feet from the body. It was full. There was a gasoline stain on the pants your father was wearing when he was arrested. Three more cans were found in the trunk of his car. And a receipt for four gallons of gasoline was found in the pocket of those same pants. His grudge against Rutledge Estate is fairly common knowledge in the valley.”

  Slowly she put the pieces together. “So you believe he went there to set fire to the winery; the baron caught him in the act; and he hit him.” Which meant it wasn’t a deliberate act. Somehow that made it easier to accept.

  “Those are your words, not mine.” But he didn’t deny them.

  “I understand.” Kelly shifted her grip on her purse. “When can I see him?”

  He looked at her for a long second, then tossed his pen down and rocked back on his chair. “Don’t get yourself dragged into this. You don’t owe him anything. Walk away.”

  A smile of rueful amusement tugged at one corner of her mouth. “Wouldn’t the tabloids have a field day with that? ‘Famous Daughter Deserts Father Accused of Murder.’” Kelly paused, sobering. “But that isn’t the reason I’m staying. If I walked away, then I’d be just like he is. And I’m not.”

  “No, you aren’t,” Ollie agreed and reached for the phone. “How soon do you want to see your father?”

  Never. “As soon as possible.”

  Ollie took Kelly at her word. Fifteen minutes later she was ushered into a small, windowless room somewhere deep in the building. It smelled of sweat, stale smoke, and not enough air. She sat at a scarred, black-and-chrome office desk and waited, but not long.

  In less than a minute a uniformed guard escorted her father into the room, then stationed himself inside near the door. Her father pulled out the wooden chair and sat down facing her, and Kelly had her first really good look at him.

  He was barely sixty, yet he looked ten years older. His hair, once a dark shade of auburn like hers, was sparse and streaked with gray. His green eyes were pale and watery and his complexion had a shallow, sickly look to it, broken blood vessels leaving a network of tracks across his cheeks and nose. He seemed smaller, thinner, as if he’d shrunk in the years since she’d last seen him.

  “Got a cigarette, Lizzie-girl?” He fidgeted in his chair and she knew it was whiskey he wanted more than a cigarette. It had always been whiskey.

  Wordlessly Kelly took a cigarette from her purse, lit it, and passed it to him, butt-end first. She lit one for herself and exhaled the smoke in a thin angry stream.

  “My name is Kelly now,” she said stiffly.

  “Kelly was your momma’s name before she married me. Rebecca Ellen Kelly.” He smiled, but his smile was a little off center. “Made me feel good when I heard you using it. Have you been out to her grave?”

  “Yes.”

  “I took some flowers to her, just yesterday it was.”

  She wanted to scream at him not to talk about, her mother. He didn’t have the right. But she hadn’t come here to fight with him.

  “I have the names of some defense attorneys,” she told him. “I’ll talk to them this afternoon and arrange for one of them to represent you.”

  “No need for that.” His hand shook when he tapped the ash from his cigarette in the black plastic ashtray on the desk. “I can get a public defender. We’ll need your money to keep the Rutledges from stealing my vineyard. Don’t spend it on a lawyer.”

  “This isn’t some little scrape. This time you won’t get away with a fine and a few days in jail.”

  “You think I don’t know that,” he shot back.

  “I’m hiring a lawyer to defend you.” Kelly took a quick puff on her cigarette, then lowered it and flicked her thumbnail back and forth over the filter tip. “The vineyard isn’t going to do you any good in prison, and that’s exactly where you’re going.”

  His rheumy eyes narrowed on her in accusation. “You think I did it, don’t you? You think I killed that baron.”

  The guard looked on, his expression stoic, but he had to be hearing every word. That didn’t stop her father, and Kelly didn’t let it stop her.

  “You tell me,” she challenged coolly, realizing that because of him, she had learned to run early in her life. Flight had always been the best defense against his drunken abuse.

  “I didn’t do it.” He searched her face, then something seemed to break inside him and he lowered his head, dragging a hand through his sparse, graying hair. “You don’t believe me. Nobody believes me.” He snorted a laugh. “You can bet she counted on that. That’s why she told the police I did it. With me in jail, there’s no way I can get my hands on the money to keep her from taking my land. I can’t even get my grapes picked. She’s a smart one, all right.” He shook his head, and the ash tumbled from the end Of his cigarette onto the battered desk top. “Cagey as a fox and cold as an iceberg, she is. She wants my land back. It doesn’t matter to her that I’m innocent.”

  “Then why did you run?”

  “Why?” He lifted his head, giving her a dumbfounded look. “What would you do if you stumbled across a body and somebody starts yelling at you? Are you going to stick around and pass the time of day?”

  “I wouldn’t run. Not if I was innocent.”

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and avoided her eyes. “Yeah, well, with as many run-ins as I’ve had with the cops, I wasn’t about to hang around. I got the hell outta there as fast as I could.” Silently Kelly conceded that he had been programmed to run as much as she had. “God, I’m dry. Do you have any gum? Some Juicy Fruit maybe? A couple of candy bars would be good, too. The food is lousy in here.” He looked longingly at her purse. “You always did have a sweet tooth.”

  “Not anymore.” She laid a hand over her purse, thinking of all the times her pockets and purse had contained Snickers bars, packets of M&Ms, or boxes of Milk Duds. Then his request sparked another memory – he had always craved sweets when he came off a big drunk. “You were drinking last night, weren’t you?” She hadn’t thought to ask Ollie that. Maybe she had subconsciously known the answer.

  He bristled. “I had a couple.”

  “It was more – than a couple, I’ll bet.” God, how she hated him. It was like bile in her throat.

  “Okay, so maybe it was more than a couple.” He stabbed his cigarette out, his hand trembling. He looked old and weak, lacking the strength to raise his hand, let alone deliver a killing blow. “I hadn’t had a drop in two weeks. Not a drop in two weeks, I swear.” But that was an old story to Kelly. “Then yesterday things went sour. I thought I was going to get the money to pay off the note she’s holding. But his deal fell through and...”

  “And you got drunk,” she accused in disgust. “So drunk you probably can’t remember half of what happened last night. You could have killed the baron and not remember it just like you never remembered all the times you beat me.”

  She started to push away from the desk, but his hand shot out, his long, bony fingers clamping onto her arm with surprising strength. Reflex kicked in as Kelly raised her other hand to ward off the anticipated slap to her face. But he glanced quickly at the guard and immediately released her, pulling back.

  “It wasn’t like that he insisted. “Not last night. A few parts are fuzzy, but I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t so drunk I would forget something like that.”

  If his voice hadn’t been pitched so low, Kelly would have sworn he was saying that for the guard’s benefit. “Of course you weren’t,” she mocked recklessly. “That’s why you were stumbling.”

  Angrily he leaned toward her. “No, it was those god
damned gas cans.” A wicked gleam suddenly sparkled in his eyes, and he leaned closer, dropping his voice even lower. “Oh, I had figured out the perfect way to get even with her for stealing my land, Lizzie-girl. Just imagine all of Madam’s precious wines tasting like gasoline.” He grinned, then moved his head from side to side in a rueful shake. “If I could have only gotten into those caves of hers, all I had to do was pour the gas over those oak barrels, drizzle some on the corks, and all of it – all of it – would have been ruined.”

  He had never intended to set fire to the winery, Kelly realized; his plan had been much more insidious than that, to taint every ounce of wine stored in the cellars of Rutledge Estate, to ruin vintages that spanned decades and more.

  “How could you do that?” She almost breathed the words.

  Frowning uneasily at her reaction, he lifted one shoulder in a defensive shrug. “If she takes my vineyard, I’m left with nothing. I wanted her to know what that feels like.”

  The walls seemed to close in; the air became suddenly stifling. She couldn’t breathe. She had to get out. Seizing her purse, Kelly stood up and started toward the door.

  “I’m ready to leave,” she told the guard.

  “Where are you going?” her father called.

  “To get you a lawyer.”

  “You tell him I’m innocent. It was the wine. That’s all I went there for. I swear I didn’t kill him. You have to believe me.”

  But how could she believe him? How?

  Chapter Sixteen

  The late September sun blazed over the pool terrace, heating the afternoon air. With clean, rhythmic strokes, Gil Rutledge traveled the length of the pool, touched the side, and pulled up, his daily regimen of twenty laps completed. He scraped the excess water from his face and flashed a look at his son.

  Clay stood near the pool’s edge, nervously chewing at his thumbnail, something he hadn’t done since he’d hit puberty and discovered sex. Nerves, which was another way of saying “fear,” Gil thought. It was something neither of them could afford to show.

  “There’s a pitcher of martinis on the table. Why don’t you pour a couple glasses,” he told Clay and hauled himself out of the pool.

  While he toweled himself down, he kept a covert eye on Clay and observed, with satisfaction, that his hand was steady. Not a drop of liquor was spilled, and none sloshed in the glass when Clay gave it to him. This nasty business might have shaken his nerve, but it hadn’t broken it, That was good.

  Under the circumstances, a toast would be in extremely poor taste. Gil didn’t tilt his glass in Clay’s direction before he sipped the martini in it. Taking a seat, he leaned back in the poolside chair, feeling a measure of pride in the firmness of his tanned flesh, the tack of flab. He was in better shape than most men half his age, and he knew it.

  “Anything new?” He raised a silvered gray eyebrow at Clay.

  “Not that I’ve heard.” Clay sat on the edge of a chair, his elbows on the armrests, both hands holding his martini glass. “The police haven’t been around to ask you any more questions, have they?”

  “No. Why should they?” Gil countered evenly and took another leisurely sip of his martini.

  Clay ran combing fingers through his blond hair and shrugged. “When they took our statements last night, they said they might come around if they had more questions.”

  “There is nothing we can add to what we’ve already told them,” Gil replied with a dismissing wave of his drink glass, then looked at Clay and said, with firmness, “At the approximate time Emile was killed, you and I were together. Dozens of people saw us. Besides, the police have caught their man.”

  “But on the noon news, they had a clip of Dougherty insisting he was innocent.”

  “And there isn’t a guilty man in San Quentin either.”

  “You’re right.” Clay smiled in silent admiration of his father’s calmness, his cool confidence. Some of it rubbed off, and he breathed a little easier.

  “I thought it would be appropriate to pay a visit to the grieving widow tomorrow and offer our condolences.” Gil idly lifted his face to the sun. “My sources tell me that it appears dear Natalie is Emile’s sole heir. How unfortunate for Katherine that she failed to get anything in writing from Emile. It’s possible Natalie might be persuaded to choose a different partner for her joint venture.”

  “I’d say it’s more than possible.” Privately Clay wondered how long his father had been thinking along those lines. But they had a tacit agreement: no questions. It was better that way.

  “That’s what I thought.” This time Gil lifted his glass in a silent salute and downed a smooth swallow, releasing a gusty sigh.

  But it was an earlier comment by his father that had started Clay thinking. He pushed out of his chair and wandered to the edge of the fieldstone pool deck. “You say she’s the sole heir.” He glanced back at his father for confirmation.

  “Assuming he’s made no changes in his will the last few months. Why? What’s on your mind?”

  “Divorce. Barbara could be convinced it’s best.” He sipped thoughtfully at his drink.

  “You’re talking community property. That would be very expensive, Clay.” He stood up, disapproval in his expression and his posture.

  Clay just smiled. “I’d gladly give half of what I have now to get my hands on Chateau Noir. After all, Natalie is going to need someone to help her run it.”

  Gil stared at him for a startled instant, then threw back his head and released a hearty laugh. “By God, I like the way you think.” He walked over and clapped a hand on Clay’s shoulder. “We make one helluva team, son. One helluva team.”

  Grinning, they touched glasses and downed the rest of the liquor in one drink. Both silently recognized that as long as they stood together, there was nothing to fear.

  The rental car bounced along the rutted track into the weed-choked yard. Kelly braked to a stop next to a Buick parked in front of the house. As impossible as it seemed, the house actually looked worse than she remembered.

  The paint that had been cracked and peeling when she left ten years ago was completely gone, exposing gray and rotting boards. The roof sagged at one corner, probably leaked, too. Dust and grime coated the windowpanes. One was cracked, but she didn’t see any that were broken.

  Broken machinery parts, old tires, and odd pieces of junk poked their tops above the tall weeds around the house. If there was any trace of the flower bed she had once outlined with rocks next to the front stoop, it was hidden by the weeds.

  At first glance, the vineyard didn’t look much better. A wild tangle of jungle-thick vines. When she looked closer, Kelly could see places where the canes had been cut back to create the illusion of rows.

  She switched off the engine and stared at the green-and-white Buick parked in front of the house, its bright chrome glinting in the sunlight. It looked out of place next to the weed-choked yard and the rundown house, all clean and shiny, its painted body waxed to a high sheen.

  But it had always been like that; her father had always been very particular about his car. Just as his clothes had to be clean and crisply starched, his car had to be spotless. Keeping it that way had been her job. That old blue Chevy he’d owned when she was in junior high had been the worst, its royal blue color showing every speck of dirt and dust. Kelly remembered all the hours she’d spent laboring to wipe away all the wet streaks before the hot sun baked them dry....

  Almost done, she climbed onto the bumper and stretched to reach the top of the car’s hood with the chamois. The front of her blue knit top was soaked. It clung to her skin, revealing the rolls of baby fat. A rubber band held her lank hair back in a ponytail, sweat plastering the few escaping strands to her face and neck and sliding her glasses down to the end of her nose.

  The screen door banged shut, the sound freezing her for an instant and lacing all her nerves up tightly
. The morning heat and her flagging energy were forgotten as she hurriedly wiped at the rapidly drying splotches of water on the hood, and cast a surreptitious glance at the door.

  Wincing at the bright glare of sunlight, her father halted at the top of the steps and threw up a hand to shield his eyes from it. His face had that telltale pasty look of too much whiskey the night before. In his hand, he held a glass, half full of a pale brown liquid. She knew it wasn’t iced tea he was drinking; it was more whiskey.

  “Haven’t you got that car done yet?” he demanded irritably.

  “Almost.” She scrambled off the hood, feeling as if the whole yard had suddenly become strewn with eggshells.

  “Look at that.” He came off the stoop, pointing a finger at the hood. “You left streaks all over it. What the hell is the matter with you? I buy you a new pair of glasses and you still can’t see.”

  “Sorry.” She hurried to rub the chamois over the area he’d indicated.

  “You’re always sorry,” he jeered. “I ask you to do one simple thing, ‘Wash my car,’ I said, and you’re too fat and lazy to do even that one thing right.”

  “I’ll get it,” she promised.

  “You’re damned right you’re going to get it because I’m going to stand right here and make sure you do. Do you hear or are you deaf as well as blind?”

  “I hear.” She flinched inwardly from the degrading slash of his words, tears stinging her eyes.

  “You better,” he warned, then erupted, “For chrissake, pay attention to what you’re doing. You’re leaving fingerprints all over the chrome. Clean them off,” he ordered and she jumped to obey. “I’m not about to take this car into town with it looking like this. What will people think?”

  She stopped, resentment flaring. “What will they think? Why weren’t you worried about what they would think last night when you stumbled out of that bar? Or last month at the Fourth of July fireworks show when you started singing ‘God Bless America’ at the top of your lungs, waving that bottle around like some drunken -” She cried out as the back of his hand struck her cheek.