The Bordeaux Betrayal wcm-3

by Ellen Crosby

  For a moment I remembered the high school boy who used to be a regular in detention hall and how I’d tutored him to earn honor society service hours because he was flunking algebra. He was smart enough, but back then he thought algebra was, as he used to tell me, as useful as tits on a bull.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Eli never would.”

  “Better not,” he said. “The statute of limitations isn’t up yet.”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  His heh-heh laugh was all I got. “I can drop your letter off this afternoon since I need to come by.”

  “Buying some wine?”

  “Talking to your winemaker.”

  “Is he in trouble?” I asked.

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “This and that.”

  “Come on, Bobby, it’s me. What’s up?”

  “I need to ask him about an acquaintance of his.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Nicole Martin.”

  I heard him let out a breath. “I understand she’s Quinn’s ex-wife. Also that she’s here in town.”

  “That’s right. Is she in trouble?” Maybe Bobby’d figured out how to connect her to Valerie and the Washington wine.

  “Sounds like you know her, too.”

  “I’ve seen her a couple of times. She dropped by here yesterday.”

  “What for?”

  “To look at a bottle of wine Jack Greenfield donated for our auction. Actually, donated, then asked for it back.”

  “I heard about that. That wine is supposed to be worth a bundle,” he said. “You talk to the Martin woman yourself?”

  Knowing Bobby, he already knew the answer to that question and all the others he’d just asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what? Don’t play games with me, Lucie.”

  “Okay, okay. Nicole was friends with Valerie Beauvais, so I asked Nicole if Valerie talked to her about the provenance of Jack’s wine,” I said.

  “Provenance?”

  “History of its ownership.”

  “Why would Valerie talk to Nicole about that?”

  “Because they met up in France when Valerie was doing research for her book,” I said.

  “Is that so? What’d Nicole say?”

  “That as far as she was concerned the wine was genuine.” I left out her comments about the muddiness of documenting the trail of ownership of a two-century-old wine. “And that she and Valerie didn’t discuss the subject of provenance.”

  “Huh.”

  Something about his noncommital tone made me realize he knew they’d spoken and he was trying to fit what I’d told him into what he could already confirm. The deputy from the CRU who picked up my Volvo said they’d just wrapped up their investigation on Valerie’s car. They must have found something—her cell phone, maybe?

  “You got the records from her cell phone, didn’t you? So you know they talked to each other recently?”

  “No comment.” But he sounded irritated, which meant I’d guessed right.

  I wanted Quinn to hear from me that Bobby would be dropping by and it wouldn’t be a social visit. I knew I’d find him in the barrel room running the Brix tests on the Cabernet since we needed to determine whether or not primary fermentation had finished and the sugar had fully converted to alcohol. Once that happened, we’d press the wine and add bacteria to start the malolactic, or secondary, fermentation.

  As I expected, he was in the lab recording test results. Now that the weather had cooled off he’d retired the Hawaiian shirts until next spring. Today he wore faded jeans and a Henley shirt with frayed cuffs. The Hawaiian shirts were loose and baggy. I couldn’t help noticing that the Henley, which looked like it had shrunk with wear, revealed how muscular and fit he was.

  He threw down his pencil when he saw me. “What’s up?”

  We hadn’t talked since he gave Nicole the vineyard tour yesterday. “You finish Brix?”

  He squinted at me. “It’s around thirteen. I want to take the free run juice before we press. So we have at least two or three more days before it goes to zero and we start ML fermentation.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “You could have called, if that’s all you wanted to know,” he said. “Something’s up. You’ve got that bug-eyed look you always get when you’re trying to pull a fast one. I can tell every time. What’s going on?”

  Sometimes I wondered why I bothered trying to spare his feelings since he usually ran over mine with an eighteen-wheeler. “Bobby Noland’s coming by to see you.”

  “He say why?” He focused on something over my head. Who was he to talk about conning someone? He may not have known why, but he sure knew who.

  “He wants to ask you some questions about Nicole.”

  He kept his voice bland. “Is she in trouble?”

  “Bobby knows she knew Valerie Beauvais.”

  “How do you know that?”

  My mother always said if you tell the truth then you don’t have to remember what lie you made up. “She had a copy of Valerie’s book. It was inscribed to her. I saw it on the seat of Shane’s car when you two were taking your tour of the vineyard.”

  “You really have it in for her, don’t you? Why can’t you stay out of this?” He banged his fist on the metal lab table. A beaker that had been sitting next to his calculator bounced and hit the concrete floor. It shattered and glass flew everywhere.

  “Stay out of what? Why did you have to break that beaker? She lied to you yesterday and and I’m pretty sure she lied to me, about what she and Valerie talked about before Valerie died. Bobby already knows, Quinn. So don’t you go lying to protect her, okay?”

  Quinn looked at the floor and then he looked at me. “I think it would be a good idea if you left. There’s a lot of broken glass here and you might cut yourself.”

  The two feet between us could have been the Grand Canyon. Trying to keep him from getting dragged in to whatever Nicole was involved in was like throwing dust into the wind. Either it was going to get thrown back in his face or it would blow away and he’d be left with nothing. Whichever way it went with Nicole, he was going to lose.

  “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m not the one who’s going to get hurt.” My voice shook I was so angry. I gestured to the floor. “You better be careful, when you clean up the mess you made. I’ll see you later.”

  An hour later I watched through my office window as an unmarked Crown Vic pulled into the parking lot. Bobby got out and headed directly for the barrel room. He left about forty-five minutes later.

  I wondered what he had asked and what Quinn had told him. But I did not go back to the barrel room to ask.

  That night Quinn went to the summerhouse. I saw the red flashlight as I finished putting away my dinner dishes. Pépé was out with friends for the evening once again.

  I got my jacket and a flashlight. As I crossed the lawn, I shone the light to make sure he’d know I was coming. Once I passed the rosebushes I switched it off to preserve his night vision.

  He was setting up his telescope next to the Adirondack chairs, with the red light propped on an arm of a chair so he could see what he was doing.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said without looking at me. “You want to know what Bobby said.”

  I was tired of this war between us. “I came for you,” I said. “We’re barely speaking. I can’t take it anymore.”

  This time he did turn his head. “Have a seat.”

  I sat and laid my cane on the ground next to my chair. The chilly night air had swept away the clouds that had hung over the Blue Ridge at sunset. The moon looked like a scuffed silver coin in a star-filled sky.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  He threw himself in the other chair and pulled out a cigar from his jacket pocket. “I’ve been thinking about Pluto.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Pluto. One minute it’s the ninth planet in the solar system, the next it’s bumped
off the list and relegated to being a dwarf.”

  “That’s what’s on your mind?” I didn’t smell alcohol on him. Why was he talking about that? “Pluto?”

  “Despite the demotion it’s still the same ice ball it always was. Still takes 248 years to revolve around the sun because of its wonky orbit. Nothing’s changed except what people call it.”

  “That’s too bad.” I watched him light his cigar. The flare of the match illuminated his face. He, too, looked the same as he always did, even though he sounded like he’d temporarily lost a marble or two.

  “In its planet days, it was the planet that ruled Scorpio.”

  “Really?” I read my horoscope for fun and believed it when it suited me.

  “Nic’s a Scorpio. She’s really into all that voodoo junk.”

  I waited.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that Pluto’s moon—Charon—is bigger than it is and they orbit in a kind of dumbbell formation like they’re permanently locked in a power struggle to see which one can dominate?”

  “I did not know that.”

  “Kind of a metaphor for our marriage,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He expelled a cloud of smoke. “Don’t be. It’s over. You know what else? It’s the goddamn planet of power and destruction and corruption. That is my beautiful ex-wife to a T. Almost makes you believe all that horseshit.”

  “This is about what happened with Bobby today, isn’t it?”

  “You know it is.” He was angry. “And you can stop pretending you’re not glad you were right about her.”

  “I am not glad about anything and I am not going to be your whipping post again!” I was mad, too. “Until four or five days ago I never even knew you’d been married. How the hell would I know, anyway? You don’t talk about your past—your life in California—anything. You came to Virginia like you dropped in from—” I waved my arm above my head. “Some place up there. No history, no nothing.” I picked up my cane and stood up. “I’m going inside. I’m sick of you jumping down my throat no matter what I say. I understand why you don’t want to talk about Le Coq Rouge but—”

  “Don’t go.” He wrapped his hand around my wrist like a vise. “Sit down and I’ll tell you. You don’t understand anything.”

  I sat but his voice scared me.

  “She was screwing Alan.” He sounded hoarse with anger, shame, and remembrance. “On top of everything else he did to me. She was in that whole scheme with him but I covered up for her so she could walk away free and clear without doing jail time. I left town with a goddamn cloud over my head because of the scandal and the trial. You have no idea what it was like—the way people looked at me.”

  Alan Cantor was the winemaker at Le Coq Rouge. So Quinn’s old boss and his wife had had an affair, on top of the wine fraud and embezzlement, which finally forced the vineyard to close. I waited for Quinn to continue.

  “When I left, I never wanted to see her again. Then she showed up here.” He expelled a long breath of smoke. “Shit, I just about died.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s been rough for you since she’s been here.”

  His mock-laugh almost sounded like a sob. “Rough. Yeah. That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Does Bobby think she has something to do with Valerie’s murder?”

  He rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t surprise me if he did.”

  “What did he ask you?”

  Quinn looked at me. “I knew you wanted to know.”

  At least in the darkness he couldn’t see my face burning. “Please tell me.”

  “He asked about our relationship. When I was with her, whether I had any contact with her before she came to Atoka.”

  I’d never thought of that. “And did you?”

  “Jesus, Lucie. No.”

  The wind had picked up. I shivered and pulled my legs up into the chair, wrapping my arms around them. “It’s cold out here. Come on. Why don’t we go inside and have a drink?”

  “You go,” he said. “I’m not cold. I’d like to stay right here.”

  “Then I’ll stay, too. I don’t mind.”

  “No, thanks. I’d rather be by myself. No offense.”

  I stood up and reached for my cane again. The chasm between us was beginning to narrow, but it was still there.

  “See you in the morning,” I said.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said. “I’ll be in to check the Brix and make sure the cap’s punched down but otherwise I plan to get lost this weekend.”

  “Oh. Well, sure. See you Monday, then.”

  “Yep.”

  I left him and walked back to the house. Nicole was ruled by the planet of death and destruction and corruption, he’d said.

  And here we were, right in the middle of her maelstrom.

  Chapter 16

  I woke up early Saturday and went downstairs in my bathrobe to make coffee. On the way to the kitchen I looked through the parlor window to see if Quinn’s car was still in the driveway, though I doubted he’d spent the night in the summerhouse with the temperature dipping into the forties. The car was gone but a bright red trail of something led up the gravel driveway toward the house.

  I opened the front door. If I hadn’t looked down, I would have stepped on the bloodied, gutted animal on the doorstep. I cried out and moved back. A dead fox.

  Or meant to be. A stuffed animal. I’d seen him in a couple of shops in town—Freddie the Fox, bright-eyed, tail pointed straight as an arrow, feet positioned as though he were on the run, and a goofy, sly smile on his face.

  Someone had ripped Freddie open and poured red paint on him, leaving his “entrails” for me to find. I listened at the bottom of the staircase in case my shriek had wakened Pépé but there was no sound from the second floor. Thank God, because I didn’t want him to see someone’s twisted idea of a prank.

  I went back upstairs and got dressed. Freddie’s final resting place was a black plastic trash bag, which I left in the old carriage house we used as a garage. It seemed like a good idea to hang on to Freddie, at least for a while. A few minutes with the garden hose, the nozzle turned to a hard spray, washed away the paint until the pale pink rivulets disappeared into the border gardens and bushes.

  That was the end of the fox, except for the image still in my mind. Somehow such a juvenile act didn’t seem like something Claudia and Stuart Orlando would pull to get their point across about foxhunting. But if not them, who else was angry that I planned to let the Goose Creek Hunt ride through my farm in three days? This afternoon Pépé and I planned to watch a couple of Mick’s maiden horses run in the GCH’s fall Point-to-Point. Whoever left Freddie on my doorstep probably expected me to be upset enough to react—maybe even call off the meet at Highland Farm.

  I put away the hose and decided to keep my mouth shut.

  From an oak-shaded ridge overlooking 112 acres of green velvet hills that tossed and rolled, spectators gathered to watch thoroughbreds gallop across the vast, sweeping panorama of Glenwood Park. On the far stretches of the four-mile course, the horses and riders would look like toys as they cleared fences of brush or timber. I liked coming here for the spring and fall races. For all the breathtaking beauty of Glenwood, the atmosphere was less formal and less pressured for the horses, owners, and jockeys than the big-purse races like the International Gold Cup held nearby at The Plains.

  The relaxed mood spilled over to the tailgate picnics where people with kids and dogs in tow sauntered from group to group to mingle, chat, drink, and eat. It was possible to feast royally at these events—smoked salmon, caviar, pâté, champagne served in Waterford flutes, fine wine in Riedel stemware, and handmade chocolates and exquisite cakes for dessert. The drinks were kept on ice and served off the tailgate of a Range Rover or Mercedes station wagon. The food—sometimes catered, sometimes homemade—was arranged on tables with pretty tablecloths and matching napkins. Fox- or horse-themed decorations and elaborately arranged flow
ers in antique silver urns or crystal vases were centerpieces. I liked the grace and easy flow of these parties and the chance to see so many friends and neighbors on a cool sun-spattered afternoon.

  Amanda always had a betting pool at her tailgate, asking guests to make dollar wagers on each race. The maiden races were pure fun because the horses were unknown and untested in racing, which meant bets were often placed because someone liked an interesting name or the color of the jockey’s silks. The winner always donated the money to one of Amanda’s charities.

  Her position as secretary of the Goose Creek Hunt gave her the clout to secure a railside space next to the finish line for her picnic. Although post-time wasn’t until one o’clock, I knew from experience that her party started at eleven when the gates opened. It was twelve-thirty when I parked the Mini on the grass field behind the paddock where dozens of cars and trucks had already lined up in ragged rows. Pépé and I walked toward the enclosed area reserved for patrons, past a line of empty horse trailers. Today all the horses that were racing were foxhunters since the Point-to-Point was the GCH’s annual fund-raiser. Mick, I suspected, would be in the owners’ tent near the stables and the jockeys’ area though he’d promised to join us once the races began.

  As we got closer to the paddock I saw Shane Cunningham on a chestnut thoroughbred, talking to Sunny Greenfield. He wore his foxhunting Pinque, the red jacket that supposedly got its name from the British tailor who first made them, and a black hunt cap. Though he wouldn’t be racing, he’d be out in the field once the races started, working as an outrider to bring back any horse that got away from its jockey. He waved an arm over his head when he saw me and Sunny turned around. When we got to the paddock I introduced them to my grandfather.

  Sunny was cool but polite. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’d better get going,” she said. “I have an appointment with a client in Charlottesville.”

  “You’re missing your own Point-to-Point?” I asked.