A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) (11 page)

“I can’t talk about that,” he said. “But it's serious.”

I barked a harsh peal of laughter. “Wow! Thanks, Hunt! That makes me feel a lot better!” He started to say something, but I plowed right over him. “A man was murdered two days ago in my wine cellar and now Samson is missing! And you're acting like this is some kind of cop show on TV.” I dropped my voice into a fake baritone. “Back away little lady, let the big man do his job.”

Then it was Hunter's turn to get angry. “Damn it, Claire, this is official business. If you hear from Samson I need you to call me. Immediately. And don’t go acting like Nancy Drew again. That didn't work out too well for you last time with the Harlans.”

That last line was one step too far. Not only did it make me angry, it hurt my feelings as well. And it was far from the truth.

“If
you
had done
your job
last time I wouldn't have had to do it for you,” I said stiffly then continued before he could reply. “I'm not some criminal you can just bark orders at,
sheriff.”

Hunt blew out another exasperated breath. “Claire, just stay there and wait for my guys. They’ll take your statement and then I want you to
go home.”
he said pointedly.

“Why should I stay here?” I asked. “As you pointed out, I didn’t actually
see anything,
did I?”

“Claire—” he began, but it didn’t sound like he was going to apologize so I hung up on him and stowed my phone in my purse. It rang almost immediately. I checked the caller ID. Hunter.
Right.
I hit DECLINE and dropped the phone back into my purse.

I locked Samson's front and back doors and returned to my Jeep. I sat behind the wheel for a long moment staring at the house. What did Hunter want Samson for? That didn't take me long to work out. Jorge had been released and that must have moved Samson up to suspect number one. I couldn't fault that logic, but Hunter had known Samson for years! Samson was a crotchety, often mean-spirited old buzzard, but he was no killer. And Hunt should know that.

Hunter and I had been estranged for over a year, and this was a perfect example of why. His failure to detect a murder cover up when he was a sergeant on the Napa County Sheriff’s Department had led to a series of murders and the false arrest of a person I loved more than life itself. And now he was doing it again! But I sure wasn't going to help him.

And if I never saw Hunter again, that would be just fine with me.

Chapter 12

I drove home, resisting
the urge to use my cell phone as I made the trip back to Violet, driving fast, but not fast enough to draw police attention. I pulled up behind my home to find Hunter’s khaki colored Ford pickup parked on the far side of the gravel. I could see him sitting in the shade on my patio, a cigarette in his fist, the smoke curling up through the wisteria vines.

I set my jaw, stepped down from the Jeep, and headed up the path as he stubbed out the cigarette on the heel of his shoe.

“Give me one of those,” I said as I walked under the trellis, side-stepping a long tendril of green vine dangling from the arbor.

He shook his head. “No.”

I didn’t argue, even though the lingering haze from Hunter’s Winston was making me salivate. Cancer, I reminded myself. Heart attack and stroke. Ruined clothes and smelly hair.

I dumped my purse on the metal table and dropped into the chair directly opposite Hunter’s.

Hunter started round two of our argument.

“If you know where he is, you need to tell me,” he said.

I crossed my arms over my chest and said nothing.

“Claire,” he said, his tone taking on a warning edge.

“I don’t know!” I barked at him. “He isn’t answering his phone. That’s why I went to his house. I haven’t seen him since the party.”

Hunter looked at me speculatively for a moment. And then his shoulders slumped and he looked away from me, out across the valley, a gold-green picture postcard under a canopy of pure blue.

“Did you know Samson had threatened to kill Dimitri if he didn’t sell out and leave the Valley?” he asked, his gaze still on the view. “Multiple times. In writing.”

I shot up straight in my seat.
“What?”

Hunt still didn’t look at me as he nodded. “We found the letters at Star Crossed. In Dimitri’s desk. They’re in Greek, but I had a grad student over at UC Davis translate them for us.” Hunter turned his head and looked at me, his gaze piercing. “There are three letters, each one worse than the last.”

I laughed, but it had an edge of hysteria. “My God, Hunter, you know Samson. He’s volatile, a little crazy, but he’s not violent.”

“I’d like to believe that,” Hunter said, but his tone belied the words.

“A couple of crank letters don't mean—” I said but Hunt was shaking his head before I could finish.

“There’s more than that,” he said.

My heart fell. “What?” I asked with dread, but he replied with another question.

“Did you know Samson and Dimitri come from the same village in Greece? Naousa?”

I knew that Samson was from Naousa, of course. The town and the region are famous for a red wine that the Greeks call Xinomavro, literally translated as ‘sour black.’ It was in the arid vineyards outside of that town Samson had learned his craft, working his way up from the dirt, literally. But Samson had never mentioned he knew Dimitri from Greece.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Naousa isn’t a village, it’s a small city. Thousands of people. They might never have met.” I felt like I was grasping at straws, but straws were all I had at that moment.

“They knew each other,” Hunter said. “I spoke to the chief of police there. His English isn’t that good, but better than my Greek. They still have an open warrant on Samson for shooting Dimitri thirty-two years ago.”

“What?” I lunged up out of my chair, my thighs banging painfully on the metal lip of the table. “He shot Dimitri?”

Hunter nodded and I dropped back down in my seat.

“Why?”

Hunter shrugged. “The chief didn’t know. And he didn’t act like he was all that anxious to find out. Or to find Samson. Not much interest in pursuing a thirty year old assault case. But it sure made the Napa County prosecutor salivate. He’s requested the files from the Greek Consulate.”

I sat there in stunned silence.

“I called Samson yesterday after he missed his appointment with me,” Hunter continued. “I asked him to come in and discuss that and a couple of other things. He hung up on me and took off. He hasn’t been home, Marjory hasn’t seen him and now, you tell me you haven’t either.” He let that hang in the air for a moment then added, “It looks bad.”

That was the understatement of the year. My stomach was knotted and I felt cold. The sun was halfway through its descending arc and the cool air of the mountains above had begun to seep downslope. When night fell, the fog would come in from the coast and the temperature would dip to sweater weather.

I shook my head more to clear it than in response to Hunter. “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “I wish I did.” At that point, I just wanted Hunter to go so I could make some calls. My anxiety over Samson’s MIA status was reaching critical mass. I knew Samson was no killer, but there
was
a killer on the loose. And for all I knew Samson might be the next target. But I wasn’t going to try to track him down with Hunter listening in.

Hunter must have read my mind. The look he gave me was filled with distrust. “I just want to talk to him. Straighten some things out,” he said as he stood, tall and lean, dressed in Levi’s and a khaki shirt with a tin badge pinned to the left breast. He could have been a marshal in the California of 1880, except the gun strapped to his hip wasn’t a Colt .45. “If you hear from him, call me immediately.” he said.

I nodded, all out of words.

Hunt crossed the patio, but stopped at the edge and looked back at me, half of him illuminated in the light of the setting sun, his dark hair haloed in gold. “I’m sorry this is happening now,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t just talking about Samson’s problems. I wanted to say something, to leave an opening for him, but I didn’t know what to say. I nodded mutely and I saw the flicker of hurt and uncertainty in his eyes. He turned and went down the path, his boots crunching gravel. He didn’t look back at me, just cranked his truck and drove away.

I was saddened things were souring between Hunter and I, but I had bigger issues to deal with. I dug out my phone and started punching up numbers. Samson’s friends first.

All three of them.

I
called Marjory first.
She was unusually subdued on the phone. I didn’t go into detail, just asked her if she had seen Samson that day.

“Not since the party,” she said and left it at that. The silence stretched between us, a silence that Marjory would normally have filled with a babble of conversation that would shift from erudite to catty to bawdy, sometimes in the span of a single sentence.

“Are you two okay?” I asked.

“No,” she said miserably. “We’re not.”

“Oh, Marjory.”

“I’ve called him five times and he hasn’t answered.”

“He’s not answering my calls either,” I told her. “And Hunter is looking for him, too,” I added, but that wasn’t news to Marjory.

“Hunter has been here three times,” she said and then went on in a gush of words, all of them choked with emotion. “I told him we were at the back of the cellar. We were—” she stopped abruptly, but I could imagine what they had been doing. “We heard a splash from the front of the cellar. Samson put his jacket on and went to see what it was. I waited for him, but when he didn’t come back I went out front, too. Samson was up on the catwalk trying to drag Dimitri out of the tank. He yelled at me to help and I did. We didn’t know he had been murdered! I thought he might have fallen in. And then I saw his throat. Oh, Claire, it was awful.”

“It’s going to be okay,” I told her. “You and Samson didn’t do anything wrong.” I paused then added a too-abrupt, “I have to go, Marjory.” I cringed as I said it, feeling awful for abandoning my best friend in the middle of a crying jag, but I had two more calls to make. And what she had just told me had made me even more anxious for Samson’s safety.

“You’ll tell him to call me?” she asked, the plea in her normally boisterous voice making me wince. Love cuts the knees out from under all of us I thought, as I promised that I would. I finally hung up and pulled up Victor’s number.

Victor hadn’t seen or heard from Samson since the party two days before. We didn’t talk long before he told me he was on his way to Violet. I spoke to Jessica next, but all that accomplished was to make her as worried as I was. She was with Charlie at his home, preparing fifty chicken breasts for a buffet he was catering that evening, but by the time we were finished on the phone, she was making apologies to Charlie and heading for the door. I had no idea what we were going to do, but there were three of us now to do it.

My third call was my seventh to Samson’s cell phone.

He answered on the first ring. “de Montagne,” he said. “I need clothes. You will bring me them in the morning.”

“Where are you?”
I demanded. I had been so worried about Samson I had circled the wagons and called in the cavalry, but all that worry was devoured in a flash-fire of anger.

“A motel. Room 117. The VistaStar Lodge, though there is no lodge and no vista.” I knew the VistaStar. It was a cluster of rundown cabins on the edge of American Canyon, tucked into a loop of tall pine trees.

Samson was still talking. “And the prices! They have charged me for cable. I don’t even watch TV! I—”

“Hunter says you’re hiding from him,” I said, cutting him off. “And that you threatened to kill Dimitri? In writing! What are you thinking? Is this the onset of dementia or are you determined to end up in jail?” I piled the questions on fast and hard, but Samson seemed unperturbed.

“I did nothing,” he sniffed. “Why should I be jailed? You are the crazy one with the dementia. That Jorge, he is the one. They have him, so why do they need me? I am busy. I have no time for Hunter. I am—”

“Jorge was released,” I said. “He didn’t kill Dimitri.”

“And neither did I!” he bellowed in my ear. “You see how these policemen are! They arrest everyone! Guilty unless they say you are not!”

“You need to call Hunter,” I bellowed right back. “Quit being a fool! You’re a witness to a murder! You can’t hide from the police!”

“I saw nothing. Marjory and I were sampling in the back of the cellar. The 2012 is almost ready for bottling. It has a finish that will make you sigh. We have made no better. I think we will bottle next week. I am—”

“I’m not interested in the 2012! There’s a killer on the loose. Call Hunter or I will!”

“Betrayer!” Samson yelled.

“Idiot!” I yelled back.

Samson sighed melodramatically then went silent for a long moment. “I will call Hunter tomorrow,” he finally said grudgingly.
“After
you bring me clothes.”

I started to argue, and then gave a weary sigh of my own. I was done talking to Samson over the phone where it was impossible to throttle him. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“No! Tomorrow morning. I need pants and shirts and the clothes for under them. And socks. Be sure you are not followed! By anyone!”

“No one would—”

“You do not know!” he yelled and I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “Thieves and murderers, de Montagne! Thieves and murderers! They are everywhere!”

I’d had enough of Samson’s craziness so all I said was, “Right,” then I hung up. I wasn’t going to be his laundry service. And I wasn’t going to wait until morning.

I called Jessica and told her to turn around. She was relieved Samson was safe, and almost as relieved, I thought, that she could return to Charlie’s. I had a moment where I wondered if she was moving too fast with this new beau, but I kept that to myself. I didn’t need another argument at that moment; I had to save my energy to beat the tar out of Samson.

I called Victor. His phone rang just as his battered red Ford pickup turned the corner at the back of the house and came to a stop beside my Jeep. He didn’t get a chance to step down - I ditched my phone in my purse and was on my feet before he even turned the engine off. I waved at him to stay put, circled his truck and climbed into the passenger seat.

He had the Padres pregame on the radio, the volume so low I could barely make out the words.

“He’s in American Canyon,” I said as I pulled up Google Maps and started typing. “Hiding from the cops.”

Victor took that in stride. “At least he’s okay,” he said.

“Not for long,” I replied through gritted teeth.