The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  I smiled. “Oh, he’s real all right. He and Pépé have known each other for decades. It’s thanks to Charles that Pépé is giving that talk at the Bohemian Grove.”

  “What does this have to do with Brooke?”

  “Well, nothing. No, actually, it does have to do with her. It’s all sort of related.”

  “That’s good, because I think I’m lost already.”

  “Sorry, but there’s more.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Charles is interested in Brooke’s vineyard,” I said. “It’s not called Rose Hill for nothing. He says there are some exotic specimens of roses grown there, gardens in addition to the vineyard. He pitched the idea of Mick buying a couple thousand gallons of Brooke’s Cab. Told Mick about the roses and all that, and made it sound like the wine was the next best thing to a first-growth Bordeaux. Mick went for it.”

  “Yeah, well, Mick doesn’t give a damn about terroir, as long as the wine’s good. And he’s sort of a rose nut, isn’t he?”

  “ ‘A rose nut.’ ” I rolled my eyes. “You say ‘tomato,’ I say ‘rosarian.’ ”

  “Whatever.”

  “Charles wants to know if the previous owner cultivated black roses. Not real black roses, because they don’t exist, but there are some roses that are such a deep, dark red that they’re referred to as black roses.”

  “Why does he want to know this?”

  “He thinks the guy who owned Rose Hill before Brooke is someone he knew a long time ago.” I finished the last of my coffee and set the mug on the table. “There’s something else. Paul Noble hanged himself the other day.”

  “God, how awful.” Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m having a hard time keeping up with the players in this story. Is he involved in this, too?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s sad about Noble, but he was a bastard to vintners.” He paused and said, “God rest his soul. How’d you hear about that?”

  “Firsthand,” I said. “I drove over to his house in Waterford to talk to him and found him in his studio. He’d been drinking. A bottle of our Sauvignon Blanc.”

  “Jesus, Lucie. What the hell’s going on?” Quinn set his empty Irish coffee mug on the table and lined it up with mine. “This story gets weirder and weirder.”

  He stared at me as though he were considering something.

  “Look, we can either have breakfast here or we can clear out and I’ll take you to Scoma’s,” he said finally. “You’re speaking so softly I can hardly hear what you’re saying with everyone talking around us.”

  “That whiskey went right to my head. I could use a little air.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  On our way out the door, he leaned over and said in my ear, “What are you involved in, Lucie? I still don’t understand where you’re going with this, but I can tell you right now that I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

  I glanced over my shoulder as Quinn held the door for me. Three thousand miles away from home on the other side of the country and I felt Charles Thiessman’s presence as though he were right here with us.

  Suddenly I didn’t have a good feeling about what I was dragging Quinn into, either.

  Chapter 11

  We passed a park as we walked toward Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero. The steady breeze carried the pungent, briny scent of the Bay and an unexpected fragrant smell of baking.

  “It smells like bread,” I said to Quinn.

  “Sourdough. Boudin’s is nearby. It’s a pretty famous bakery out here.”

  The fog had burned off, leaving a tender blue sky that faded to white behind the dusky hills across the Bay. The water—lemon-lime with froths of white—looked tropical.

  “You’re thinking about Southern California,” Quinn said, when I asked him if it was warm enough for swimming. “Northern California beaches are cold with great crashing waves and lots of cliffs and rocks.”

  He pulled out his phone and called Scoma’s, asking if we could have a table for two in forty-five minutes.

  “Are we walking to the restaurant?” I asked.

  “Nope. There’s a Scoma’s here on the Wharf, but we’re going to the one in Sausalito. Taking the ferry. It leaves in ten minutes.”

  The Embarcadero was a crowded, bustling tourist strip that seemed part kitschy outdoor carnival, part upscale yacht club. Quinn pointed out Alcatraz as we passed a busker with a sad Quixote face playing Dylan on an acoustic guitar. Sailboats tacked across the water, gulls screeched overhead, and the weather—sharp sunshine, crisp shadows, and that fresh riffing breeze off the water—was flatout perfect. I could almost feel the physical tug this place had on Quinn—its freewheeling openness, the rugged scenic beauty, the live-and-let-live tolerance and lifestyle everyone sang about in those ballads about San Francisco.

  He took my hand as we headed down a pier to a building with a BLUE & GOLD FLEET sign on it.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  We passed a silver-faced mime performing next to a souvenir stand with T-shirts that read I ESCAPED FROM ALCATRAZ and cans of San Francisco fog. “Nothing, really. Pretty day.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Most of’em are out here.”

  We stayed outside on the deck for the half-hour ferry trip to Sausalito. Quinn loaned me his jacket since the breeze was chilly on the water. I pulled it tight around my shoulders and breathed in his scent, remembering how it smelled on my own skin after we’d made love.

  I’d seen the Golden Gate Bridge before, but never from the water and never the full majestic sweep of it—the towering orange-red spans backlit by the sun against an azure sky with tiny dark cars buzzing across like migrating ants. Beyond the bridge, the Pacific Ocean was a straight dark line on a limitless horizon.

  “Get a good look at it,” Quinn said. “You might not see it on the trip back. It disappears like a magic trick. Sometimes the fog rolls in late in the day; it’s not just in the morning. The view doesn’t get much better than this.”

  The ferry let us off on Sausalito’s main street, Bridgeway, which curved along the waterfront. Scoma’s was a charming wood-framed building located on a pier that jutted out over the water, not far from the ferry landing. A hostess led us through the restaurant to a light-filled room with a breathtaking view of the Bay. Quinn pointed out the landmarks: Belvedere, Angel Island, Treasure Island, and the Bay Bridge. To the right was San Francisco, watery-looking through a gauzy marine haze, like a distant kingdom.

  Quinn told me I had to try the Dungeness crab, so I did; he ordered crab cakes. He chose a bottle of California Chardonnay, and we started by sharing a plate of oysters. Our waitress filled our water glasses and set down a basket of warm sourdough bread.

  “You want to finish your story from the Buena Vista?” Quinn opened the breadbasket and held it out. “Tell me about Paul Noble and how his suicide ties in with Charles Thiessman and black roses.”

  I filled in the blanks while we ate. Somehow in this bright, cheery room, my tale seemed less disturbing, less menacing. It also seemed less plausible. As I talked, Quinn’s lengthy silence and occasional are-you-kidding-me? arched eyebrow made me wonder if he didn’t believe I’d lost a few marbles since April.

  “So Charles believes the guy who owned the vineyard before Brooke has gone off the grid and is now finishing off whoever is left of this Mandrake Society after forty years?” he said when I was done. “Just supposing that’s true, why now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think Charles knows?” He asked the question in a calm enough manner, but I could tell he still wasn’t buying any of this.

  He picked up the bottle of wine and filled our glasses. I set down my fork. The meal had been fabulous.

  “I’m sure he knows more than he told us,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  I folded my hands together and leaned across the table. “Look, I don’t believe Thelma really communicates with my parents on her Ouija board, and I don’
t hear voices when no one’s around. But if you’d been in that lodge with him that night, he made a pretty compelling case.”

  “After how much booze?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Were you guys drunk?”

  “Not really. I mean, yes, we were drinking.” I pushed my wine-glass to the side. “We shared a bottle of Margaux.”

  “After cocktails and wine with dinner, no doubt,” he said. “So was he drunk?”

  “He kept pace with us, then he switched to brandy. He wasn’t slurring his words until the end. But he wasn’t that bad.”

  “Maybe that’s all it was, then. He got sloshed and started babbling about something he’s lived with like a noose around his neck for four decades.”

  “You could have chosen another metaphor,” I said.

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. Paul.”

  The waitress stopped by with dessert menus. “I couldn’t eat another thing,” I said. “Just coffee, please.”

  “Look,” he said after the waitress left. “If Charles is right, then something must have happened recently to this Theo guy, or Teddy Fargo, to open an old wound and get him thinking about revenge out of the blue.”

  “Presuming Teddy Fargo is Theo Graf,” I said.

  “Presuming.”

  “I think it’s odd that both Paul and the other guy, Mel Racine, died with those Mandrake Society wineglasses next to them,” I said. “That’s got to be more than just a bizarre coincidence.”

  “I don’t know why that name rings a bell,” Quinn said. “Mel Racine. When I get back to the boat tonight, I’ll look him up on the Internet.”

  “He moved out to the Bay Area,” I said. “And he owned car dealerships. Those guys pester you with advertisements and deals worse than politicians at election time. If he’s local, I’m surprised you wouldn’t have heard of him.”

  “That’s because you probably don’t realize how much geography you’re talking about in a big state like California,” he said. “The Bay Area goes as far south as Santa Cruz and as far north as Napa.”

  I spun my coffee spoon around on the linen tablecloth like a needle on a compass. Quinn figured something must have happened to prompt Theo, or Fargo, to make good on a forty-year-old threat. What if he was almost right?

  “Maybe it wasn’t something that set Theo off,” I said. “Maybe it was someone.”

  The waitress set down two coffees and the check.

  “So who is the someone?” Quinn slid the leather billfold to his side of the table.

  I poured cream in my coffee and automatically started to put some in his before I caught myself.

  He smiled. “Go ahead. You know how I take it.”

  “A little cream and strong enough to strip paint.” I finished pouring and opened a couple of sugar packets for mine. “To get back to your question, I haven’t got the foggiest idea who it could be. All the players are dead, except Charles—and, I guess, Theo. And he’s the only one who knows the answer. Too bad Theo’s gone. Wonder if he’s still in California.”

  “Whoa, there, sweetheart. Hold your horses. If this guy’s running around bumping off his ex-colleagues, you really think it’s a good idea to look him up and ask him what’s going on?” Quinn said. “He might not like it too much.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to do it.” I gave him a cross-eyed stare. “But I wonder what he knows. And who or what made him go off after all those years.”

  Quinn set his coffee mug on the table. “There might be a way to find out what you want to know about Fargo without talking to him.”

  “Sure. Ask Brooke Hennessey. She bought the place from him,” I said. “Though if I make her nervous once she realizes why I want to know, she might decide not to let me take a look around.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Brooke.”

  I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. Finally I said, “Quinn?”

  He worried his lower lip and stared out the window. “I know someone who would know anything that’s out there about this Fargo guy. Good, bad, indifferent. Especially the bad stuff.”

  I wondered if whoever this was belonged to the old history Quinn never wanted to talk about.

  “This guy sounds scarier than tracking down Fargo.” I tried to make a joke. “Care to tell me who it is?”

  “I need to make a call first,” he said. “And if he’s okay with it, I’ll take you for a drive tomorrow. Show you more sights.”

  “Okay.” He was talking in a deadpan voice that unsettled me. “Sure. But do you mind telling me what this is all about? I feel like I’m a couple of chapters behind, all of a sudden.”

  He lifted his head, a rueful expression in his eyes. “I should have guessed you’d be the one to make me face all my old ghosts, Lucie. Asking me to see Brooke again after all these years … that was such a kick in the teeth when you said her name the other day on the phone.”

  What was he talking about? “All what old ghosts? Who are we going to see tomorrow?”

  He drummed his fingers on the edge of the table and resumed staring outside. When he spoke, I had to lean close to catch what he said.

  “Allen Cantor.”

  The winemaker who had destroyed Brooke’s father’s business and brought Quinn down with him.

  “I thought he was in jail,” I said.

  He worked the muscle in his jaw that always meant he was upset.

  “He was.” His voice was grim. “He got out.”

  Chapter 12

  By the time we left Scoma’s, the lunchtime crowd had thinned to a few remaining tables of diners, mostly couples lingering over coffee as we had done. It looked like the staff was beginning to set up for dinner.

  Outside on the pier, the breeze had picked up and the sun had sunk lower in the sky. The light held an end-of-day tinge and our shadows were long and soft.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Quinn glanced at his watch. “Going on quarter to five.”

  “I should get back to the hotel, to Pépé.”

  “My car’s in the lot down the road,” he said. “I could drive you. Or you could catch the five o’clock ferry, if you want. It’d probably be faster, with all the weekend traffic heading into San Francisco.”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking the ferry,” I said. “Save you a trip into town through traffic, and then driving back here again.”

  “Yeah, you’ll enjoy that, especially at this hour. There’s some fog, but you might get a view of the Golden Gate again.”

  “Then that settles it,” I said. “Walk me to the pier?”

  “Sure.”

  He took my hand and we threaded our way single-file through the slow-moving crowds that clogged the sidewalk and lingered in front of the art galleries and pretty shops that lined Bridgeway. When we got to the ferry landing, Quinn handed me a ticket.

  “I bought two round-trip tickets this morning. Kind of figured you’d want to take the boat back to San Francisco.”

  My mouth dropped open. “How’d you know … you had this all planned out, didn’t you?”

  “Who, me?” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You don’t want to miss your boat. It’s leaving soon.”

  “There are so many ways I could respond to that.”

  He grinned and brushed his finger across my lips. “I’ll call you about tomorrow after I talk to Allen.”

  “You sure about doing this, Quinn?”

  “Yup.” But his voice had tightened. “Off you go. Enjoy the view. Keep my jacket, you’ll need it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stayed on deck and watched him as the ferry pulled away from the pier. The wind gusted and nipped at his clothes, but he just stood there with his hands in his pockets and waited until the boat had left the harbor. I watched until he was so small I could barely tell when he turned and started up Bridgeway to his car.

  The Golden Gate glowed vivid orange against the soft dark folds of the Marin Headlands and the sky looked like it was on fire. I found a sheltered spot on t
he deck where I watched the bridge drift in and out of view through wisps of mist—a tower or a section of the suspension cables or part of the deck—until finally the thickening fog swallowed all of it up for good. The breeze, now sharp as needles, was cold so I went into the cabin and watched the looming San Francisco skyline grow larger.

  If Allen Cantor agreed to talk to us tomorrow, I might learn more about Teddy Fargo and who he really was or was not. The more I thought about it, the more I felt sure the answers I needed were here in California.

  They just weren’t to the questions Charles had asked.

  When I got back to the hotel, Pépé was in his room, ready to take me to the Top of the Mark, with its 360-degree glass-walled view of the city, for a martini, or two, as he’d promised. A waiter led us to a window table overlooking the Bay with a view of the TransAmerica building. On the other side of the room, Pépé told me, you could see the Golden Gate and the Pacific.

  The city lights made hard-edged boundaries between the land and water, burnishing the coastline so it gleamed like polished copper before fading into blackness farther up the Bay. Pépé handed me the one-hundred-martini menu and told me stories about how the Top of the Mark had been a popular hangout for soldiers and sailors shipping off to the Pacific Theater during World War II, pointing out the widows’ corner overlooking the Golden Gate on the other side of the room, where wives and girlfriends had watched as ships sailed under the bridge until their loved ones disappeared from sight. We finally chose our drinks and decided to order hors d’oeuvres. Then we sat there, mostly without talking, drinking our martinis and listening to the pianist play songs that Pépé remembered from the war years.

  When he swung into “In the Mood,” Pépé asked how my day went with Quinn.

  “Fine,” I said. “We had lunch in Sausalito.”

  “And you also went to the Buena Vista?”

  “Yes. For Irish coffee. In fact, I’ve had so much alcohol today, my liver is probably starting to pickle.” I yawned.

  “Your head is dropping into your glass, ma belle,” he said. “We should go.”