The Sauvignon Secret wcm-6

by Ellen Crosby

  At the elevator he said to me, “I know you came to California to humor Charles’s request about black roses, but I wonder if you would have done it if Quinn weren’t here as well.”

  “You mean I’m using Charles’s errand as an excuse for seeing Quinn?” I said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m also supposed to be buying wine for Mick.”

  “Also engineered by Charles,” he said. “But that’s beside the point.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

  “I thought so,” he said, sounding satisfied as the elevator door slid open and we stepped inside.

  He kissed me good night at the adjoining door to our rooms, and for a while I heard him moving about in his own room as I got ready for bed. Then the light went out on his side of the door and I lay down and closed my eyes.

  Only once in my life have I lived in a city—Washington, D.C., years ago—so I’d forgotten that there is always light and motion and noise, no matter what the hour. After a while, I threw off the duvet and got out of bed, opening the curtains to the enormous picture window and letting in a flood of glittering, spangling light. In Atoka the view out my bedroom window is of moon-washed mountains, the dark lacy outline of the forest, my rose garden, and the stars; the only sounds come from nature—the serenade of the cicadas and tree frogs with an occasional hooting owl or the cry of a fox.

  I pulled up the desk chair and sat next to the window for a long time, thinking about Quinn and my life back home and where things were going with us. After a while I remembered his promise to call after he talked to Allen Cantor. I found my phone in my purse, still turned to silent mode from the restaurant, and saw the missed call just before midnight.

  “Sorry it’s so late. I’m sure you’re asleep by now. I got hold of Allen.” His voice was terse and matter-of-fact. “He says he’ll see us tomorrow. We’ve got to do some driving so I’ll pick you up at seven thirty outside the hotel.”

  It was just after three in the morning. Quinn would be waiting for me in less than four and a half hours. I pulled the curtains shut and climbed back into bed. But my mind kept racing with edgy, just-out-of-reach thoughts.

  I didn’t fall asleep until nearly dawn.

  I woke to what sounded like drums pounding. Pale streaks of daylight filtered through the cracks of the curtains and striped my bed. I threw back the duvet, grabbed my cane, and went over to the connecting door to Pépé’s room. He stood there, immaculate in a double-breasted cream-colored linen suit, his gray hair slicked back with water, ready to take on the world. I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the dresser before I opened the door. My hair was wild-looking and stuck out in weird clumps, and my eyes looked like two bruises, since I’d forgotten to take off my mascara before I went to bed.

  “What time is it?” I felt breathless.

  “Good morning, chérie,” he said. “It’s seven o’clock. The limousine taking me to the Bohemian Grove is waiting downstairs. I wanted to say goodbye before I left. Sorry to wake you up.”

  I’d set my phone alarm for six thirty. When had I shut it off?

  “Seven? Dammit to hell. I’m late.”

  “Order anything you like for breakfast.” Pépé seemed to have decided to ignore my train-wrecked appearance and unvarnished language. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening in Calistoga at Robert’s. He’s giving us his guesthouse, so we’ll have a place of our own.”

  Meaning I wouldn’t terrify Robert Sanábria if he saw me slipping into the bathroom first thing in the morning looking like I did just now.

  “I’m sorry, Pépé, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I’ll be there tomorrow. Quinn’s coming in half an hour and I overslept. I’ll get something to eat on the road.”

  “There is coffee in the pot in my room. Help yourself. You look like you could use a cup. Or perhaps the whole pot,” he said. “Where are you and Quinn going?”

  “I don’t know. He promised to show me around.”

  It happened to be the truth and I was glad I didn’t have to lie to my grandfather. For now I didn’t want him knowing about meeting Allen Cantor to check up on Teddy Fargo, going behind Charles’s back to see what else I could learn about this mission he’d sent me on.

  “Will you and Quinn visit Rose Hill Vineyard today or tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Probably tomorrow.”

  “Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I spoke to Juliette last night. Charles isn’t doing well. She’s upset.”

  He sounded upset, too. I wondered who had called whom.

  “Not well.” I repeated his words. “Mentally? Or physically?”

  “Both, I think.”

  Our eyes met. “Are you talking about him or her?”

  “Why, Charles, of course.”

  “And Juliette?”

  He sighed. “Yes, perhaps her, too.”

  “What’s wrong, Pépé?”

  He looked away. “I don’t know. Something happened to Juliette and she’s changed. I can’t explain it. Lately she’s so high-strung. It takes so little to set her off.”

  Just how often did they talk to each other?

  “How long has that been going on?” I kept my voice noncommittal.

  “A while.” He fiddled with his perfectly knotted tie. “I never knew her to be melancholy, or moody like this before.”

  “You can’t fix her problems. Or her marriage.”

  “I know that.” His voice was sharp. “All I could do was tell her everything would be all right.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

  “Me, neither.”

  After he left, I realized I’d forgotten to wish him good luck on his talk in Monte Rio.

  Quinn called my cell when I was in the shower. I grabbed it off the sink ledge while I was still dripping wet, just before it went to voice mail.

  “I’m gonna be late,” he said. “Traffic on the bridge.”

  “Don’t rush.” I swiped a towel and tried to dry the phone. “Overslept, did you?”

  “Absolutely not. I just don’t want you to rush.”

  I heard him chuckle. “I’ll call you when I’m about ten minutes away. What are you doing? Taking a shower?”

  “How could I be taking a shower and talking to you?”

  “Took you too long to answer. Splish-splash go back to taking your bath,” he said and disconnected.

  He picked me up just before eight in a black Porsche with the top down.

  “Nice wheels,” I said as he leaned over to open the door for me.

  “They’re Harmony’s,” he said. “I’m car-sitting, too.”

  I felt an unwelcome flash of jealousy. “Harmony?”

  He glanced over at me and smiled. “Friend of my mother’s. She’s like an aunt to me. A child of the sixties. Flower power, hippies, Summer of Love, the whole enchilada. I think her real name is Penelope. She’s an artist … hence the houseboat in Sausalito.”

  “And the Porsche?”

  “She likes cool cars that go fast.”

  “I’d love to meet her.”

  “She’s in Italy at the moment. Been gone since June. Went to Stonehenge for the summer solstice and did that Druid jumping-around stuff they do.”

  “Don’t be such a cynic. It’s not jumping around. They dance and celebrate summer and light bonfires,” I said. “What’s in Italy?”

  “Good food, great wine … and Italian men.”

  “Then I’d really love to meet her.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I bet you would.”

  We were zipping down vertigo-inducing streets—Quinn somehow timed it so he hit all the green lights—with the wind riffing my hair and cutting in behind my sunglasses. Since yesterday I’d been trying to put my finger on what felt so different about San Francisco—aside from its obvious unique geography—why it was unlike anyplace on the East Coast or even all the European cities I knew.

  As we drove past Union
Square, with its startling tropical palm trees amid skyscrapers, and continued down Mason Street, Quinn rattled off names of the bubbling ethnic stew of neighborhoods, waving an arm to indicate roughly where they were—the Tender-loin, Japantown, Little Saigon—and I finally realized what it was: that despite the old-world roots and history of the city, it looked east to Asia, not west to Europe. Now I understood why Quinn loved it, why he belonged here. It was the perfect foil for his personality; San Francisco still thrummed with the gold rush brashness that grew it big, and the Russian roulette edginess of being built on earthquake fault lines where everyone knew it was a matter of when, not if. Even yesterday, I’d felt an odd little shifting when I’d been in the hotel, finally realizing that it wasn’t traffic thundering along Nob Hill.

  Quinn caught me staring at him and said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just that I like San Francisco.”

  He grinned and reached over to squeeze my hand. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, honey. There’s a map of California in the glove compartment. Get it out and I’ll give you a geography lesson.”

  I found the map, opened it, and refolded it to show San Francisco and the Bay Area.

  “The marine layer’s pretty intense this morning,” he said. “So we’ll head up the Bay side of the Peninsula and go by Sunnyvale, Cupertino—that’s Silicon Valley to you. Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, is beautiful, but it takes longer and it’s dangerous in the fog.”

  “Where are we going now?” I asked.

  “Santa Cruz.” He reached over and stabbed the map. “Sits at the top of Monterey Bay. Beautiful little town—fabulous beaches for surfing, very laid back, very mellow. You’re gonna love it.”

  “What’s in Santa Cruz?”

  “You mean who is in Santa Cruz.” He corrected me. “Allen Cantor. We’re meeting him on the Boardwalk. His choice.”

  “You tell him why you want to see him?”

  “Nope. Just that I wanted to ask him a few questions.” We exchanged sideways glances. “He didn’t even ask what they were. Allen owes me and he knows it.”

  “I wonder if he knows anything about Teddy Fargo,” I said.

  “If there’s anything to know,” Quinn said, “he does.”

  The traffic was heavier as we picked up 101, the Bayshore Freeway, and left San Francisco behind. Quinn punched a button on the satellite radio. I read the display. Sixties on Six. Probably one of Harmony’s presets. Right now it was adrenaline-pumping rush-hour stuff, slipping from Jefferson Airplane into the Rolling Stones.

  “I found out about Mel Racine.” He had to raise his voice above Mick Jagger and the traffic so I could hear him.

  “What did you find out?” I shouted back.

  “Had a series of car dealerships near Santa Cruz. Then he moved up the coast to Half Moon Bay.” His finger skittered over the map again. “See, right there? The bank he bought to turn into a wine storage vault is up for sale.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I studied the map. “By the time we leave Santa Cruz, won’t the marine layer have burned off enough that we can take the coast road north to San Francisco? Looks like it goes right through Half Moon Bay. Maybe we could stop and check out that bank.”

  He turned to me and grinned, singing in a loud, off-key voice, imitating Mick and telling me he didn’t get no satisfaction.

  “’Cause I try … and I try,” he said, leering at me.

  “I guess that’s a yes.”

  He nodded and kept singing as we wove through traffic. Usually I would have joined in. But this morning as the Porsche dodged in and out of the pea-soup marine layer, I couldn’t stop wondering what was in store for us when we got to Santa Cruz and, later, Half Moon Bay.

  Chapter 13

  Once we passed the high-tech Silicon Valley corridor, Quinn turned south at Los Gatos onto Highway 17 and we began climbing through the Santa Cruz Mountains. He knew the road well enough, but the sharp zigzag turns with their blind curves as we sliced through pine and redwood fog-shrouded hills meant he needed to pay attention to his driving. Our conversation ground to a halt. When we passed a sign warning motorists to turn off the air-conditioning to prevent engine boil over, I finally asked if the road was as treacherous as it seemed.

  He nodded. “Lots of accidents, especially at one underpass where drivers are so busy navigating the steep curves they don’t expect a nearly horizontal switchback turn until it’s too late. It’s called the Valley Surprise.”

  My own surprise was Santa Cruz itself. Quinn started talking about it, reminiscing, actually, after we left 17 where it joined Highway 1, which ran north-south along the coast. I don’t know what it was—the jaunty tilt to his chin or the sentimental softness in his voice—but I could easily imagine him as he used to be, growing up in this place that had been his idea of paradise, a well-muscled, good-looking sun god with windblown blond-flecked curls, a surf-board under one arm and a cute girl in a bikini named Tammy or Kimberly hanging on the other. The Byrds were singing “Turn, Turn, Turn” on the radio and I felt a queer tug of nostalgia for a time and place I never knew, the sun-drenched, free-spirited, live-andlet-live California of all the era-defining, generation-shaping songs that caused Penelope to become Harmony nearly half a century ago and never go back.

  We’d left the mountains and the swirling marine layer behind and now were on flatter terrain, a palm- and cypress-lined street of low-rise sand-colored motels advertising cheap beach weekend rates and cable television. Quinn pulled over and reached for his phone.

  I raised an eyebrow and he said, “Allen told me to call him when we were about ten minutes away from the Boardwalk.”

  Their conversation lasted all of ten seconds. “Why the Boardwalk?” I asked. “Does he work there?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know where he works. The Boardwalk’s where the amusement park is located, too. I guess that’s his way of making a joke.”

  I saw the looped silhouette of a roller coaster framed between a couple of palm trees and set against a hazy, blue-white sky as we drove closer to the water.

  “That’s the Hurricane,” Quinn said. “At the other end of the park by the San Lorenzo River is the Giant Dipper, the oldest wooden roller coaster on the West Coast. It’s a historic landmark now.”

  “How old is it?” I asked. “If it’s a historic landmark.”

  “Old, 1907,” he said. “The Boardwalk had its centenary a few years ago. The roller coaster was built in 1924. The Looff Carousel is even older—1911.”

  “It looks like something from an old postcard or a sepia photograph.”

  He smiled. “They’ve done a good job of keeping the vintage feel about the place. Brings in lots of families looking for something wholesome to do.”

  He pulled into a municipal parking lot across the street from a gaudy Moorish-style building with a toothy shark and bright red octopus painted on either side of the arched entrance and NEPTUNE’S KINGDOM written above it.

  “That’s the arcade,” Quinn said. “We’re meeting Allen at the burger place under the colonnade. I had to promise him breakfast and a beer.”

  I stared at him and he shrugged.

  We crossed the street and walked under a sign welcoming us to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Framed by dusky purple mountains, Monterey Bay gleamed silvery blue, the water calm except for a froth of surf lapping at a long expanse of beach. The amusement park, on two levels, was the retro throwback Quinn had promised, with its famous carousel, along with a Ferris wheel, pirate ship, sherbet-colored sky glider cable cars disappearing into the mist down the beach—and the Giant Dipper.

  “Turn right,” Quinn said. “No rides for us today.”

  The burgundy and pale gold colonnade, with its carnival-like rows of flashing lights running along the ceiling, seemed relatively quiet for a Monday morning in the middle of summer. Only a handful of the small metal tables lining the arcade railing were occupied. Quinn picked one that had a checkerboard painted on it and we sat down on two of th
e low welded-on bar stools to wait. The sunlight made perfect half-moon circles of each arch on the concrete walkway, the Beatles sang “Love Me Do,” and the fronds of the scalped-looking palm trees growing a few feet away in the sand rustled in the cool ocean breeze.

  Quinn had taken the seat facing the Boardwalk entrance, as I’d guessed he would do. Thirty seconds later Allen Cantor came into view. I knew at once because of the tiny tightening in Quinn’s eyes and the way his body tensed—like a fighter waiting for the opening bell so he could get into the ring and demolish his opponent. His gaze flicked back at me, a coded message not to turn around. I wondered, as I suspected he did, whether Cantor had been watching us from somewhere on the upper deck of the amusement park and Quinn somehow missed seeing him. Advantage, Cantor. Quinn stood up and held a hand out. I took it and he pulled me up.

  “Showtime,” he said under his breath.

  He had never physically described Allen Cantor to me, and for some reason I’d pictured a short, wiry man with scrimshawlike tattoos, a bandy-legged swagger, and a nervous tic in one eye so that he never looked right at you. In my mind, he’d always been as sleazy as a snake-oil salesman, a liar, a cheat, a thief—so obvious that I’d often wondered why Quinn hadn’t seen it coming when Allen finally got caught, even though in public I defended his innocence, saying he’d been blindsided, just like I told Mick Dunne the other day. But deep down I’d pegged Cantor as the kind of guy mothers told their daughters to keep away from because he was nothing but trouble, that one.

  He was trouble, all right, but in the beautiful, dangerous way a lot of women had found irresistible. Quinn should have warned me, but I understood at once why he hadn’t. Allen Cantor looked me over the way some men look at women who come into a bar alone. I couldn’t stop staring back into those hypnotic blue eyes.

  Physically he could have been Quinn’s older brother—the same fit, taut build, same salt-and-pepper curls, though Cantor wore his hair longer, the same deep crow’s-feet laugh lines around the eyes. It even looked like they’d broken their noses in the same place. But there was something in Cantor’s don’t-you-want-to-know-more? stare that gave me goose bumps and dared me not to look away.