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

by Nadia Gordon

  Remy glared at her and crossed his arms. “I seriously doubt that the members of my wine club would open their front door, let alone a single bottle of their wine, to satisfy your whim.”

  She put the cork back in her pocket and nodded slowly. She was beginning to regret the morning buns, which had failed to smooth over the visit and were now making it hard to look tough. She was getting nowhere.

  “Okay,” she said, trying to seem unfazed. She used what she knew was her last bit of ammo. “We both know that that case of Marceline in Vinifera’s cellar is fraudulent to the tune of about eight grand. Are you going to let me in, or am I going to go to the police right now?”

  Remy stared at her for a moment, then reluctantly stood aside. She handed him the plate of morning buns and entered the house. He led the way into the living room.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a couch. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  The room was elegantly decorated but cluttered with artifacts competing for notice. The couch was upholstered in wine-red velvet, the dark wood floor lined with kilim rugs in shades of ruby and purple, and the bookshelves loaded with hundreds of old, unjacketed volumes on the theory and practice of wine-making. Mementos of winemaking covered every surface. There was an old wire wine bottle caddy from a French café, a stack of letterpress menus from nineteenth-century French wine bars, and, on a side table, an assortment of what looked like handblown wine bottles, unevenly shaped and presumably very old.

  The walls were painted thunderhead gray, including the ceiling, which sat close overhead, heavy and low. Across from the couch was a gas fireplace with a porcelain log burning orange, and on the mantel, rows of antique corkscrews and absinthe spoons were set out like rusty surgical instruments. Velvet curtains a shade darker than the walls prevented the morning sun from coming in. She wondered if it would feel less oppressive if the purpose of her visit were more pleasant.

  The heat felt stifling. She took off her jacket and waited. The kettle piped in the kitchen and several minutes later Remy appeared carrying a tray with two cups of tea, cream, and sugar. He had changed into a black T-shirt and jeans. He put the tray down, carefully set one of the cups in front of her, then took up the other cup for himself. He had apparently brewed the tea and poured it in the kitchen, because there was no pot and there were tiny bits of leaves floating in the cup. Where was the teapot? Why not bring it out? Such a small thing, and yet it seemed symbolic, like he was hiding something. She stirred cream and sugar into her tea.

  “This tea was grown on the estate of my mother’s family in Ceylon,” said Remy. “I think you’ll find it unlike any other you’ve tasted.”

  She took a tentative sip and put the cup down. “It’s very good,” she said.

  “That is hardly enough to taste it properly,” he said. “You won’t get another chance for tea like this without taking a very long journey. You can’t buy anything like it in the States.”

  Sunny looked at Remy, sitting across from her with his cup of tea on his lap, playing the part of the pleasant host. “I’d like your opinion on something,” she said.

  Remy waited, watching her.

  “I would like to know,” she said, “how you think a bottle of the wine club’s Marceline ended up broken in the middle of Nathan Osborne’s living room on Saturday night.”

  “How do you know it was the wine club’s Marceline?” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” she asked.

  “It might be, it might not,” he said. “If it is, my guess is that Nathan removed it from the cellar himself. He was in the habit of tasting whatever wine interested him, and that wine in particular was of great interest, being relatively unusual.”

  Remy picked up a silver tastevin from the end table beside him. He turned the little cup in his hands, rubbing its embossed handle with his thumb between revolutions. Sunny waited. Was it a nervous gesture, or the unconscious adoration of a collector for his treasure?

  “You mean he would just take wine home from Vinifera’s cellar?” she asked.

  “Certainly. As owner of both Osborne Wines and Vinifera, he viewed every bottle in our cellar as his to take, which was true in a sense, though not of the wine club stock. But he wouldn’t have paid attention to that. Nathan wasn’t one for technicalities.”

  “That would account for one of the two bottles missing from the case. Where is the other one?”

  “I see you’ve made an inventory,” he said. “I have no idea. I only discovered that the wine was missing in the first place after the police mentioned the broken bottle on Monday. Naturally, as I have paid for it already, I would like to know. You have the cork, maybe you took it.”

  She smiled. “You yourself said that cork might have come from any bottle of Marceline.”

  “So which one did it come from?” he asked.

  “It didn’t come from a Grand Cru, that much I know for sure,” she said. “Let’s get back to the bottle in Nathan’s living room. Nick Ambrosi says it looked like it was broken after he was already dead, and the police agree. You must know that from talking with them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Nathan couldn’t have been the one who dropped it.”

  “That seems a safe assumption.”

  “Who do you think did?”

  “I have no idea,” said Remy. “What makes you think I would know anything about it?”

  She’d thought all this through last night and on the way over, thought about each card she had to play, knowing this would be a game of bluff. It was time to take the plunge and hope he would give her something more to go on.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Sunny, leaning toward Remy. “I think you faked that case of wine. I think you did it for the money. You bought the standard-release Marceline, soaked the labels off, and replaced them with phony Premier Grand Cru Reservée labels. The label on the box was easy. I think you’ve done it before, maybe you’ve done it for years. You put, what, an extra seven, maybe eight thousand dollars in your pocket with every case?”

  Remy smiled at her coolly. “Don’t you want your tea? It’s best when it’s still hot.”

  He turned the tastevin in his hands, staring at her. His eyes were dark gray, like the wall behind him, and like the limp strands of hair pushed behind his ears. She lifted her teacup and sipped, looking over it at him. The revelation that she’d found out about his forgeries did not seem to have had much of an impact. She decided to push harder.

  “It should be relatively easy to prove what’s been going on,” she said matter-of-factly. “You obviously don’t have invoices for the Premier Grand Cru Reservée, since you never bought it, but you’ll have the income from having sold it. And I’m sure there is plenty of evidence on your computer. It might take a recovery expert to get at the deleted files, but the scanned images are probably still on the hard disk somewhere. They say it takes months to write over memory. Even if I can’t prove that you perpetrated the fraud yourself, you will still have been caught dealing in forged wine, which I’m sure isn’t good for a sommelier’s reputation. Eliot certainly won’t be amused, and I can’t imagine that the people at Marceline will enjoy having their name sullied with the publicity this kind of crime generates.”

  His eyelids were half lowered and he gazed at her with a drowsy expression. If she didn’t know better, she would guess he was bored.

  “One thing puzzles me,” said Remy. “I don’t understand why you would choose to make any of this your business. Why do you care? Suppose you’re right and the wine isn’t what it’s supposed to be. What is the harm of a few gullible rich people drinking the wrong grape juice? They don’t really care what it tastes like anyway, trust me. The thrill is in the expense. They want to pay excessive amounts of money. It’s part of the high. It makes them feel powerful and privileged. In fact, you may be onto something. Repackaging wine might not be such a bad idea. That way, the rich customers get what they want, the repackager gets what he wants, and someone else, p
erhaps someone who actually understands what he is drinking and can appreciate it properly, gets to buy the real Reservée, of which, as you know, there is an extremely limited supply. I’m starting to like this idea of yours.”

  She smoothed her bangs to the side with her fingers. Was it getting even hotter? She had the urge to pant, like when she was sick to her stomach. The tea. Did he put something in the tea, or was it just too hot in this room?

  “Let me be very clear about this,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “I’m going to need some kind of cooperation from you, or else I’m going to have to go to the police with what I know right now. Why I care is irrelevant to you. I have my reasons. But I know something and I can’t not know it.”

  “What interests could you possibly have in anything that goes on at Vinifera? It has nothing to do with you,” he said.

  “I think you’re missing my point,” said Sunny, losing her patience. “It’s not important that you know or understand my motives. Someone is dead, someone is committing wine fraud, and unless I get your help, I’m going to the police with my theories, right or wrong.”

  Remy put his head down and rubbed his temples. After a long pause, he looked up at her. “There is no reason to discuss any of this. It’s in the past. It’s over. The guilty party is beyond punishment, and the victims never knew what happened and were only harmed in ways they could afford. Nathan came up with the idea a couple of years ago. I was never involved.”

  “You mean you didn’t participate.” Sunny tried not to seem too relieved that he had finally cracked.

  “No.”

  “But you didn’t stop him.”

  “He signs my paycheck.”

  Sunny nodded. “Nathan owned two businesses, both of them successful. You’re telling me he risked it all for penny-ante wine fraud? And if that’s the truth, why would he involve you in it?”

  “Nathan wasn’t as financially secure as some people would like to believe,” said Remy. “A few thousand on the side every now and then could make a big difference. I have to admire the scheme. You fake a few of the very expensive wines that get sold to an audience that self-selects for people guaranteed to have a great deal of money and no idea what they are buying. Nobody gets hurt and he puts a nice chunk of cash in his pocket.” He paused. “That’s the only good thing about his death. Now he’ll never get caught.”

  Sunny watched his eyes, searching for signs of whether or not he was lying. She didn’t like him or want to believe him, but he seemed to be telling the truth. “He won’t get caught, but you might. What if somebody who knows what to look for gets hold of those bottles? Dealing in phony merchandise is a crime.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know that anything has been done. Frankly, I’m not even sure Nathan ever acted on his idea, I just know he talked about it. I simply chose to look the other way. The forgery you are talking about, if that’s what it is, has not been sold, and won’t be until I check it out. This is much ado about nothing.”

  “I wonder if the police will buy that,” said Sunny.

  Remy walked over to the fireplace to adjust the flame. He turned to her with a smirk. “Go ahead and go to the police if it amuses you. It will only make a sad week more difficult for all of Nathan’s friends, and the headlines certainly won’t make your boyfriend feel any better. I’m sure Andre would love to see Vinifera and wine fraud splashed across every newspaper in the country.”

  She tried not to show any reaction. “Tell me more about why you think Nathan would do this. If anyone found out, it would ruin him and both of his businesses. His life in the Valley would be over, and he’d probably go to jail. What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t take that kind of risk for what amounts to pocket change to a man like him.”

  “You didn’t know Nathan,” said Remy dryly. “He liked to play with people, and he liked taking risks, even foolish, pointless risks. It was how he had fun. The money was just an associative benefit. He especially liked to watch people rave about bad wine. I’ve seen him do it on a number of occasions. He liked to play tricks on them, especially if they pretended to know something about wine. I’ve seen him swap labels, funnel one wine into another bottle, lie about what’s in a glass. I even saw him put food dye in a glass of cheap Chardonnay and serve it as a fine Burgundy. He loved to mess with people.”

  “Is that really who Nathan was?”

  “That’s who he was as long as I knew him, and that’s close to six years.”

  Sunny frowned. There was one piece that didn’t fit. She looked at Remy, who was leaning against the mantel with his hands dug in the pockets of his jeans. She cleared her throat. “If Nathan knew the wine-club wine was phony, if he’d gone to the trouble of doctoring its labels, why would he take a bottle of it home?”

  Remy smiled as though pleased with the comment. “I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that he forgot. We can make nice excuses, but in my opinion Nathan was an alcoholic. He drank more or less constantly. The only time he had a clear head was first thing in the morning. He also lied so much that he would forget the truth. After a while, he would believe the lie himself, or at least he couldn’t tell the difference.”

  Sunny’s head whirled as she listened to him. She wondered again if the tea had been drugged. The impulse to stretch out on the couch tempted her and it was all she could do to resist it. She focused on Remy’s face. Their conversation would be over soon, and she could lie down in the truck. She heard a click like central heat coming on. Already the back of her neck was sticky with perspiration.

  “Are you feeling okay? You look ill,” he said. “Let me get you a drink.”

  He was right. She felt so tired. Remy came back with a glass of water.

  “I need to go,” she said, standing up suddenly. “We can finish talking about this later.”

  “My pleasure,” said Remy with a reserved smile. “You know where to find me.”

  Outside, the cool air and morning sun revived her for a moment but walking down the pathway to the truck soon became an effort, her feet heavier with every step. She got in and drove a mile fighting sleep before she knew it was pointless, that the desire to sleep would overwhelm her. She pulled over in the middle of the suburban block and killed the engine. Sixties-era stucco houses lined both sides of the streets, each with its carport and allotment of exotic perennial shrubs imported from Southern California. The last thing she remembered was delicious relief as she stretched out in the cab and settled her cheek into her backpack like a pillow.

  10

  Sunny’s mobile phone woke her up. All she knew at first was that a very loud sound had made her jolt upright. She sat stunned in the cab of the truck. There it was again, farther away now. She looked at her backpack, hardly recognizing what it was, other than the source of the mysterious sound. Gradually the world came back together a piece at a time and she remembered that she owned a mobile phone and that the sound was her phone ringing, which meant she was supposed to find it and answer it.

  “Where are you?” Rivka was on the other end.

  “What?” said Sunny in a dazed voice.

  “Sunny? Where are you?”

  “I’m in the truck.”

  “Where? Are you okay? You sound out of it.”

  “Just a sec.” She put the phone down and stared dully at the dashboard, then yawned and looked around at the suburb where she’d parked. She picked up the phone again.

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine-fifteen.”

  “Shit. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  Sunny walked into Wildside without Rivka noticing. Rivka had the stockpot going and the ambient flamenco rave music cranked up good and loud, like a nightclub in Barcelona. She was at the big sink sorting through a box of produce and moving to the music. The steamy air and food smells in the kitchen reminded Sunny how good it was to be on familiar ground again. The spicy smell of fresh arugula leaves and the grassy smell of spinach, kale, and
basil woke her up, while the smell of onions caramelizing in butter on the stove, the epitome of warmth, soothed her. The stockpot was sending up wafts of salty garlic chicken, celery root, carrot, and freshly squeezed lemon. She went over and ground a dose of pepper into the pot, then stepped into her office to turn down the music a few decibels. When she came back, Rivka looked over her shoulder at her.

  “Where have you been? I was worried. At first I thought you were with Andre again, but he called twice looking for you.”

  “How could you hear the phone?”

  Sunny found an apron and tied it around her hips. Rivka shook the water out of a basket of arugula and set it aside. She looked at Sunny again.

  “Are you going to spill it or not? What happened to you this morning? You look a little fuzzy around the edges, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  The espresso machine beckoned and Sunny went over to make herself a cappuccino. “It’s a long story. I’m not sure where to start.”

  “Start with why you stood up Andre last night. He said you came by the restaurant but then you left before he could see you, and you didn’t pick up when he called your house. He thinks you’re mad at him because he took too long to come out of the kitchen.”

  “I’m not mad about anything. I just needed some time to think. Remember how everything was back to normal yesterday because Nathan Osborne didn’t die of mushroom poisoning? Well, today we’re back to not normal again. Very not normal as a matter of fact.”

  She explained what Nick Ambrosi had told her about the bottle of Marceline in Nathan Osborne’s house.

  “I couldn’t decide what I was going to say to Andre, so I had to get out of there,” said Sunny.

  “I don’t get it,” said Rivka. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Two bottles of Marceline, wine fraud, Nathan’s death. They have to be related. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t see why that means you can’t talk to Andre.”

  Sunny finished steaming a pot of milk and spooned the creamy foam into her cup. She licked the spoon and looked at Rivka.