A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 2: Death by the Glass

by Nadia Gordon

  “This is not a terribly modest girl,” said Sunny.

  “Anyway,” said Rivka, “the point is that she used to date Nathan.”

  “Whoa. For how long?” said Sunny.

  “I don’t know. It sounded like they were pretty serious. They just broke up recently.”

  “She must be about thirty years younger than him,” said Sunny.

  “About that. She’s my age. Apparently he’s dated loads of younger women. A few of us went to Bouchon after you left and they were talking about how Osborne is such the ladies’ man.”

  “I can’t believe that. I had the impression nobody liked him,” said Sunny.

  “Really? I figured it was just the obligatory boss bashing. He must be sort of okay if Dahlia was into him,” said Rivka.

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” said Sunny.

  “Don’t worry, you’re immune. You’re not a boss in the derogatory sense,” said Rivka.

  “I hate to say it about someone who’s died, but he sounded kind of like a jerk to me,” said Sunny. “I don’t think Andre liked him much.”

  “I actually thought the one nobody seemed to like was Dahlia. Everyone was ripping on her all night,” said Rivka.

  “If she was dating the owner that was bound to alienate her from everyone else. It’s like being the teacher’s pet,” said Monty.

  “I thought she was interesting,” said Rivka. “She’s an artist and she lives in a tent cabin way out in the middle of nowhere. I’m going over to her place tomorrow after work to see some of her paintings.”

  “A tent cabin,” said Sunny. “That’s fantastic. I love it.”

  “What does any of this have to do with McCoskey getting her ashes hauled last night?”

  “You are so crude, Lenstrom,” said Rivka, smiling.

  “I’m sorry. What does any of this have to do with McCoskey falling in love in a deeply meaningful, though remarkably swift fashion late at night. I need a name.”

  “Andre Morales,” said Sunny. A sense memory of the night before flashed back for an instant, sending a pleasant jolt through her body.

  “The chef?”

  “Yes,” Sunny said.

  “Perfect!” Monty said, rubbing his hands together. “That’s going to fit beautifully into my plans. We’ll have holidays at your place. Rivka can watch the kids. The food will be impeccable.”

  “Don’t get all excited, it was just one date,” said Sunny. “I don’t think we need to call the florist yet.”

  “I’m not sure you can actually call last night a date,” said Rivka. “I’d call that a hook up.”

  “Chavez takes the hard line,” said Monty in his baseball announcer voice. “Calls it like she sees it. Now it’s up to McCoskey to defend her position.”

  “He picked me up after work and we went for a drink. That’s a date,” said Sunny.

  “He picked up on you at work and took you home with him. That’s a hook up,” said Rivka.

  “It’s Chavez with a deep line drive, she’s easily rounding first, second, she’s headed for third and looking confident! McCoskey is going to have to come up with something more substantial than that if she’s going to stay in this game,” said Monty.

  “Aren’t you the one who was urging me on?” Sunny said. “I think you may have actually said seize the moment.”

  “I’m not saying it was a bad idea,” said Rivka, giggling. “I’m just saying it wasn’t a date.”

  “Point taken,” said Sunny.

  “Can we skip the semantics?” said Monty. “I want to know how he enticed you to stay out after midnight. You’re the biggest stay-at-home I’ve ever known.”

  “Hot body,” Rivka fake-coughed.

  “Wrong,” said Sunny. “It was much more than that. He said he had a very special bottle of wine that he had been saving and he wanted to open it.”

  “That makes sense to me,” said Monty. “You have to open that stuff while it’s still fresh or you might as well throw it out. It was probably due to expire the next day.”

  Rivka snickered.

  “That is absolutely the oldest line in the book,” said Monty, “but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it working.”

  “You guys are being mean. It may have been a line, but at least it was true. He had an old bottle of Burgundy I’ve never even seen before, let alone tasted.”

  “What was it?”

  “1967 Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque Premier Grand Cru Reservée by Michel Verlan.”

  “Tah-tah-tah,” said Monty. “I guess somebody has some cash to burn. Give that guy my card, will you?”

  “The sad thing is, it was sort of a waste. By the time we got there and opened it I was so tired I couldn’t taste anything. It didn’t seem like anything special. I’d already had about four different wines and a glass of port. He could have opened anything and I wouldn’t have known the difference. And we only drank about half of it.”

  “Not a big deal,” said Monty. “That’s around, what, two hundred dollars a glass, give or take a few ounces? Next time, get a doggy bag for me. I tasted a seventy-one a few years ago. That old stuff doesn’t come around very often.”

  “I wanted to soak the label off the bottle for my journal, but I couldn’t think of a way to smuggle it out without looking like a complete dork,” Sunny said.

  “You could have told him you’re really into recycling,” said Monty.

  “At least I got the cork.” She groped in her jacket pocket and produced it, handing it over to Monty. He examined it and opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and served himself a second helping of salad instead. Sunny looked at him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Monty.

  “There’s something. You have a funny look.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “What? Tell me,” said Sunny.

  “You’re insane. I’m just getting more salad,” said Monty.

  “No you’re not, you’re hiding something. Tell me what it is.”

  “No way.”

  “She’s right. You have to ante up when you make a face like that,” said Rivka.

  “For the last time, it’s nothing.”

  “Okay,” said Sunny. “You leave me no choice. I am going to throw all of this delicious food on your nice, clean floor in exactly ten seconds if you don’t tell me what that look was about. Ten.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Nine.”

  “Stop counting.”

  “Eight. Come on, tell me. It makes me crazy when you do this.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather live the fantasy?” said Monty. “Instead of getting it all smudged up with reality?”

  “Seven. Of course not. What are you talking about? You know how I am about full disclosure. I always want the whole truth, no matter what,” said Sunny. “Six.”

  “Okay, stop counting. I just hate to tarnish what sounds like a lovely evening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Monty picked up the cork, turned it a few times, and set it down again. “What you drank was a very good bottle of Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque, but not the Premier Grand Cru Reservée. That particular producer bottles several different wines each vintage, only one of which is estate grown and has the winemaker’s signature and all the other goodies. It’s like Hess Collection versus Hess Select, or DKNY versus Donna Karan black label. They sell the bridge line and they also sell really high-end stuff. This cork comes from a bottle of their less expensive wine, who knows what year.”

  “How do you know?” asked Sunny.

  “All of these producers do things a bit differently. Some put their name on the cork, some put the year. Some producers put everything on there, the name of the winery, the vintage, distinctions like Grand Cru or vintner’s reserve or whatever, their phone number, the web site. I’ve even seen bin numbers on some corks. There are no rules about this stuff. All the Frog’s Leap corks say is ribbet. Marceline does every
thing differently for the Grand Cru. The bottle has green foil instead of red, the label is different, of course, and the cork says Premier Grand Cru Reservée right on it along with the year. And they use slightly longer, higher-grade cork because the really expensive wines are built to last. This cork comes from a bottle of their very good but not nearly so expensive regular release. You can tell because they didn’t print the year, and because it doesn’t say Premier Grand Cru Reservée, and it’s the wrong style of cork. I’ve probably opened a hundred bottles of this stuff and the cork has always been the same. Like this.”

  “I don’t understand how that could be right,” said Sunny. “I made a point of looking at the label. It was definitely the Grand Cru, with the winemaker’s name on it and everything.”

  “Do you remember what color the foil was?”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t pay much attention to the foil. Are you absolutely certain, Monty?”

  “Completely. This is the wrong cork for that bottle of wine.”

  “One of us has to be wrong. I saw the label.”

  “Maybe you saw a forgery,” said Monty.

  “A forgery?”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “Are you going to tell him?” Rivka asked Sunny.

  “I don’t know. No, probably not. He was so excited about opening it.”

  “Believe me, he’ll be plenty excited when he finds out he paid eight hundred dollars for a sixty-dollar bottle of wine,” said Monty. “He needs to go back to the place where he got it and get them to explain where that bottle came from.”

  “Have you seriously heard of that?” said Sunny skeptically. “I mean, somebody getting hold of wine that isn’t authentic?”

  “Absolutely, especially at the very high end. I don’t think it happens often, but it happens. That’s why the industry has traditions like special foil and labels and printed corks and stamped wax. Most people couldn’t tell the difference between a 2001 California Pinot and a 1972 Burgundy if all they had to go on was the wine itself, and yet the price difference between those two bottles would be at least two hundred dollars, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands more. Authenticity becomes a matter of packaging, and in wine, the packaging amounts to a hunk of green glass, a square of paper, some cork, and a scrap of foil. Can you think of a commodity worth that kind of money that’s as easy to falsify? Every once in a while somebody gets caught doing it. The French are particularly bad on that score. It’s always some little old man from Marseilles who looks like he belongs on a bicycle with a baguette in the basket and a beret on his head who’s been selling bottles of seventy-year-old St.-Aubin that he happened to have whipped up in his basement about a week ago.”

  Sunny tapped the cork on the table anxiously.

  “Who cares if the wine had red foil or green foil?” said Rivka, looking from Sunny to Monty and back again. “What’s important is that you had a great time opening it together. I don’t see how it changes anything.”

  6

  At one o’clock the next afternoon, the wait for a table at Wildside was forty-five minutes. The windows steamed up with a cozy heat from a room filled with the bustle and clatter of service. Sunny and Rivka worked quickly. It was days like this when they were at their best. There wasn’t time for distraction—no talk or music—it was a clean, straight-ahead hustle, their hands passing over the food with choreographed efficiency. Around two o’clock the sound of flames kicking up on the grill mixed with the heavy patter of raindrops on the roof and patio.

  At three, Sunny sent out the last plate of chicken cooked under a brick with celery root dressing, roasted beets, and garlic mashed potatoes. She stopped long enough to down a glass of water and wipe the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket. At four, she watched the maître d’ carry out a last round of cappuccino, espresso, and doppio macchiato. What was that pleasant sensation washing over her, soothing her tired muscles? Satisfaction. Life felt almost normal again after the flurry of the unusual, the unexpected, the tragic.

  The coroner’s report had come back that morning and Sergeant Harvey and Officer Dervich had stopped by the restaurant to deliver the news personally.

  “The autopsy lists the cause of death as cardiac arrest,” Steve had said, looking almost as relieved as Sunny. “No evidence of trauma or suspicious substances, nothing to suggest foul play.”

  “What was it that made you think there might be in the first place?” asked Sunny.

  “There was some evidence at the scene that seemed to suggest that Osborne may not have been alone the night he died. We’ll keep looking into it, but it doesn’t seem to have had any bearing on the ultimate outcome.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  Steve smiled at his partner and said, “Sunny likes to spend her spare time doing police work,” but he didn’t answer her question.

  Probably the story about how she’d practically gotten herself killed not too long ago chasing a murderer was still making the rounds at the police station. Her hand went to the back of her thigh involuntarily, touching the place where a shard of glass had sunk in several inches, a lucky break considering she had narrowly missed taking a bullet.

  “So you’re satisfied with the autopsy?” she said.

  “For now,” said Steve.

  “Is something going to change?”

  “You never know.”

  Steve Harvey was a man of few words, and fewer today than usual. The way he seemed to enjoy withholding information tried Sunny’s patience. She suspected he was showing off for his new partner.

  By the time Andre Morales called late in the afternoon, everyone but the dishwashers had gone home and Sunny was busy battling paperwork in the office. The workman’s compensation people had sent a stack of forms as thick as a dictionary and about as user-friendly as any of the other government documents littering her desk. She stared at the jumble of blanks, boxes, charts, and fine print. The only thing clear about most of the forms was that not completing them correctly could result in the immediate or eventual demise of her business. The phone was a welcome interruption, made more so when she heard Andre’s voice on the other end of the line. Her heart kicked up a notch or two, and she felt her face get hot and her hands go cold.

  “I’ve been meaning to call,” he said. “I haven’t had a second. It’s been chaos over here. Did you get the news? The police said they were going to stop by and let you know.”

  “You mean about the autopsy? They came by this morning. What a relief.”

  “You’re telling me. Now maybe we can get back to work around here. I thought things were bad while Osborne was alive. He’s twice as much trouble dead.”

  “Can you say that?”

  “You mean is it a sin against the deceased?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Knowing Nathan, he’s getting a kick out of watching me sweat. His final insult.”

  “He wasn’t really that bad, was he?”

  “He wasn’t bad, he just loved to be a pain in the ass. He loved to push my buttons and he was very good at it. He wasn’t what you’d call the warm fuzzy type. Not that I like the fact that he died, but I’m certainly not going to miss having him in my face every other night.”

  “I guess I can understand that.”

  The line was quiet for a moment.

  “So, do I get to see you tonight?” he said. “I’m working, but you could come by the restaurant around ten and we could hang out for a while, maybe have a late snack.”

  Satisfaction comes in many forms. What she had been planning to do at ten o’clock that night was snuggle up in bed with the tower of books and magazines stacked on the nightstand, and that’s exactly what she would have done, except that there was no denying the deeper impulse to return to Andre Morales. Sunday night had certainly brought them together in a way that was arguably too close, too fast. Now the idea of him drew her irresistibly toward him. Wasn’t there something abo
ut that in physics? How bodies of a certain substance manufacture their own gravity and can’t help pulling in anything that comes too close? She had picnicked in his gravitational field and now a subtle, pervasive force was pulling her toward him whether she was ready or not.

  She took a bracing shower and put on her best jeans, the ones that could pass for dress clothes, chose a silk blouse and pointy alligator heels, threw her wallet and a lipstick in her good handbag, and drove down to Vinifera. With the Nathan Osborne mushroom crisis behind them, she could give her undivided attention to getting to know Andre better.

  At Vinifera, the hostess came back from the kitchen with the message that Andre would be out in a few minutes and suggested she have a glass of wine. It looked like a slow night. Only about half the tables were full and there was plenty of room at the bar. Then again, it was well past the dinner hour. Nick Ambrosi, the bartender, lifted his chin at her when she looked over. She sat down in front of him.

  “You’re back,” he said. He stood with his palms on the bar, like he was about to do a push-up.

  “I’m meeting Andre,” she said.

  “So I heard.”

  “Did you?”

  “No secrets around here,” he said. “He’s been sending someone out every five minutes to ask if you’re here yet. What would you like to drink?”

  “A glass of something red sounds good. Whatever you have close by.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “I just opened a bottle of Au Bon Climat Isabelle Pinot that’s drinking really nice.”

  “That sounds great.”

  He poured the wine and set the glass down in front of her, then walked to the other end of the bar, returning with a dish of little deep-fried nuggets.

  “Green olives stuffed with anchovies,” he said.

  “Yum.”

  He leaned into the corner of the bar.

  “I was sorry to hear about Nathan,” she said. “Steve Harvey said you were the one who found him.”

  He nodded and took a swig from a bottle of Calistoga water.

  “That must have been terrible,” said Sunny.

  “Not a pretty sight,” said Nick. “I’ll be glad when things get back to normal around here and I can forget about it. Is Sergeant Harvey a friend of yours?”