A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) (15 page)

“He and Alexandra just went out the back door with Channel Seven hard on their heels.” His eyes jumped past me and he pointed at the street. “And there they go!”

I turned and saw a silver Mercedes making the corner fast, heading east. Right on its bumper was a white van with
Action News 7
emblazoned on the side. If I had a gun I would have shot out the tires of both vehicles. Instead, I whirled back to Victor.

“Where's the truck?”

“Out back. I—”

I didn’t wait to listen; I was already cutting across the green expanse of lawn, running at top speed. “Come on!” I yelled over my shoulder, “They're getting away!”

By
the time Victor
and I got to the truck and made it to the street, Samson and Alexandra were long gone. I called him three times as we drove up the highway toward Violet. We stopped by Samson’s house in Edwards Street, but the silver Mercedes was not in the driveway, and neither was the Channel Seven news van. Victor parked and checked the front door anyway, but Samson and Alexandra were not in residence. He climbed back into the truck.

“Not here,” he said. “Probably hiding out form the cops and the news crews.”

“Probably out murdering someone,” I said sulkily.

“Him or Alexandra?” he said, trying for humor. “The octogenarian Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Thanks.
She’s probably not any older than I am,” I said, giving him a glare he didn’t deserve. “Hardly octogenarian.”

Victor blew out a heavy sigh and said nothing more. He twiddled his thumbs on the steering wheel as we sat there silently. The morning sun beat down on us, turning the unairconditioned truck into a sauna. It was going to be another unseasonably warm day.

I tried Samson’s number again. Voice mail. I slammed my phone into my purse.

“Where to?” Victor asked, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

I shrugged. I had no idea. Another silent few minutes passed with me staring at Samson’s front door. Where would Samson go? Back to the motel? To the widow’s home? To some other hideout? What was the crazy old man thinking? He was making himself the primary suspect in a murder! I was almost thankful he had been in jail the previous day; at least he couldn’t be accused of Jorge’s murder as well.

And what about Alexandra bailing Samson out of jail? She had called him a murderer Saturday night. Had screamed it, in fact. Had she decided she was wrong? And why would Samson give her power of attorney when he knew Victor and I were on the way? Too many questions and no answers.

“Sure is hot,” Victor said, interrupting my thoughts. “Good for the fermentation of the new wine.”

“Not good for the corpses piling up,” I replied.

That got another sigh. “My little ray of sunshine,” he said dryly then started the truck.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m taking you home,” he said, his eyes on the rearview as he backed down the driveway. “I can only handle so much of your brilliant repartee.”

“Samson might come back here,” I pointed out.

“One more reason to beat a retreat,” Victor replied as he backed into the street and turned right.

I kept my mouth shut after that. I knew when my company wasn’t wanted.

Samson was not at
Violet. That left the StarVista Motel and Alexandra’s home, wherever that was, but I lacked the energy to continue my search. Victor dropped me off at the back door and headed upstairs to change clothes while I headed for the kitchen.

God, I wanted a cigarette so badly I could scream. Instead I flopped down at the kitchen table and stewed.

That was it, I decided. I was done. If I never saw Samson or Hunter again it would be too soon. I know that sounds harsh, but after days with too little sleep and two dead bodies, I was over it.

Jessica called while I was brooding. She had just spoken to her father, who had informed her of Samson's arrest and release, and our impending divorce. She was furious I hadn't kept her posted on Samson, and seemed saddened by the news that Roger and I were finally formalizing the end of a marriage that had been over for decades. I wasn't in the mood to discuss Samson or Roger, so we ended up sniping at each other for ten minutes before we finally hung up, minus our usual exchange of 'I love you.'

Depressing.

I had to find something to do or I’d be racing down to the store for a pack of cigarettes. I went upstairs, changed into jeans and a Violet Vineyard t-shirt stained and splattered from last week’s bottling.

Speaking of bottling, once the weather cooled down I’d have to start thinking about getting the 2012 vintage bottled. That thought made me cringe, and not just because of the work, but because it was possible Samson would not be here to help. I trust my own palate - I’ve been making wine for more than twenty years - but I had never produced a vintage without him. Just thinking about that possibility made me want to sit down and cry. Instead I grabbed the rusted pruning shears and headed out into the rows.

The work was no distraction. It was mindless labor that left my brain plenty of time to work, switching between the possibility of Samson’s guilt and conspiracy theories that would explain away the evidence against him.

And every single one of my conspiracies hinged on Jorge’s too-timely death.

It just couldn’t be a coincidence that the one person who knew who the killer was had turned up dead just days after the initial murder. But that was the same argument I had made to Hunter with little impact. Of course, Hunter could be correct - Jorge’s death could have been a drunken accident - but I doubted it. The wire wrapped around Jorge’s wrist defied the accident hypothesis. I had stretched enough wire to fence in all of California, but I had never looped it around my wrist and cinched it tight.

In the end, the most compelling evidence I had for Samson’s innocence was my relationship with the old man. He was no killer. His bad attitude and his stubbornness were his only crimes. Prison time might be in order, but not life without parole.

By the time I had finished three rows, it was almost 5:00PM and I was drenched in sweat and my fingers were cramping. I trudged up the row, crossed the lawn to the patio and flopped into one of the metal chairs. Victor had been on the tractor all afternoon, tilling under the clover between the vines. He finished the last row not long after I had quit for the day. He raised the blades of the tiller and came roaring my way, driving my old tractor right up to the edge of the patio before he killed the engine.

“That belongs in the barn,” I reminded him as he hopped down.

“There is
no beer
in the barn,” he replied as he went past me, leaving a spatter of sweat droplets on the flagstone. His shorts and t-shirt were dripping wet, his dark hair plastered to his head. He reemerged a moment later with two beers.

“I don’t want one,” I said.

“Neither of these is for you,” he said scoffingly. “You have legs.” He dropped into a chair.

“Only drunks drink alone,” I reminded him.

“If the shoe fits I will drink a beer from it,” he said and threw his feet up on the table.

“Victor…” I said, eyeing his ratty, grass-stained tennis shoes with a wrinkled nose.

“Breaking the law! Breaking the law!” he sang in a broken falsetto, doing a bad Judas Priest imitation while scratching wildly at an air-guitar.

“I’ll be breaking your legs in a minute,” I warned him, and he dropped his feet to the ground. He pushed one of the beers across the table to me, cracked open the other one, and took a swallow.

I opened my beer and followed suit. It was hot enough for it to taste really good. And Victor’s nonchalance and humor were easing my tightened nerves. I knew he was putting on an act, but didn’t a psychologist once say ‘Act happy and happiness will follow’?

“Do you think he could have done it?” I asked, dreading the reply. Victor was always the pragmatist. It was one of the things I counted on. One of the things Violet Vineyard’s modest success counted on.

Victor shook his head decisively. “He might curse someone to seven shades of hell, but he wouldn’t kill them. And if he did, he wouldn’t do it in one of our wine tanks.” Not exactly accolades, but it echoed my own thoughts and offered a lot of comfort. “He’s rude and crude, belligerent and fussy, but he’s a good guy,” Victor added.

“If he hadn’t been hiding out in the cellar during the party,” I said pointlessly.

“Smooching and boozing in the cellar,” Victor corrected wryly. “I don’t know how much of the 2012 there will be to bottle. He samples a gallon a day.”

We both laughed at that.

My laughter died first. “I’ve been angry at Hunter for suspecting Samson,” I said. “But the evidence…” I said.

“What evidence?” Victor asked, worry in his voice. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to Samson at the courthouse.”

I laid it all out for him, though he already knew some of it. I relayed everything Hunter had told me the night before. Every word I had passed with Jorge and Angela and Roger. I left nothing out, working backward from Samson being bailed out of jail that morning with two hundred fifty thousand dollars of his own money, to the night of Dimitri’s murder, reliving it all in reverse, trying to sort it out in my head as I spoke. Victor was most interested in the ancient shooting in Naousa, but I knew very little about that. I finally finished at the beginning.

“Samson claims the first time he saw Dimitri that night was when he found him floating face down in the tank, but Blake Becker said he saw the two in a shoving match not long before Alexandra screamed.”

“Blake?” he said, rocking forward and putting his now-empty beer down on the table. “I saw Blake out front arguing with Angela Zorn before Mrs. Pappos screamed,” he said. “I was in the side yard, talking to Charlie and Jessica. Angela and Blake were out front really going at it. We could all hear them. Blake couldn’t have seen anything in the cellar.”

That got me on the edge of my seat. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I’d had seven or eight glasses of wine by that point,” he said with a small smile. “But I drank every glass with someone else, so I’m not a drunk.”

His attempt at humor was lost on me. I was staring at the flagstones, thinking. If Blake was lying it might be to deflect suspicion from himself… he wouldn't be the first man to kill his business partner.

And if Blake wasn’t lying? If Samson had killed Dimitri?

I couldn’t even consider that. Losing Samson would be more than I could bear.

I stood abruptly, grabbed my purse and started across the patio. Victor stood and followed.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To pick a fight,” I replied.

Chapter 16

Our first stop wasn’t
Star Crossed Cellars. Angela Zorn had claimed she and several other small growers were being ripped off by Blake. I had no idea if she was telling the truth, but I was going to find out.

Cliff Face Winery was just off the Wine Trail, up a narrow asphalt track called Stone Canyon Road. Its tasting center was exactly what you would expect it to be; rustic and picturesque with a lot of stone work, rough wood and copious greenery clinging to the walls and crowding a broad veranda that fronted a bank of glass doors.

“What do you want with Jimmy?” Victor asked as I turned into the crushed stone parking lot out front.

“Ammunition,” I said, unenlighteningly. I climbed out of the Jeep and headed for the broad wooden stairs and up to the veranda.

A handful of tourists were grouped together at one of the half-dozen picnic tables filling the veranda while a young man in jeans and a plaid shirt hovered over them with an open bottle of wine, extolling the 2011 pinot noir. I recognized the young man as Jimmy Tate Junior as I crossed the planks toward the group. Victor trailed behind me, both of us looking out of place in our sweaty clothes, him in his battered t-shirt and shorts, and me in a grungy sweatshirt and jeans.

Jimmy Junior spotted us and raised an eyebrow as I stopped three tables away. He nodded at us then continued with the guests, one of whom, a heavyset man with a florid face, was talking with the narrowed-eyed superiority of a wine snob.

“It tastes remarkably different here than at the restaurant,” he said. “This is fantastic, but when I had it last weekend, I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I sent it back. At two hundred a bottle I expect to be wowed.”

“And it was the 2011?” Jimmy asked and the guy nodded. Jimmy pursed his lips into a frown. “Many things can affect the taste of a wine after it’s bottled,” he said unhappily. “It has to be handled and stored properly, and it sounds like it wasn’t. What was the name of the restaurant?”

“Pier 69. They’re a Michelin Star restaurant. You’d think they would handle wine correctly,” the tourist said doubtfully. “But…” he shrugged and held up his glass for more.

Jimmy’s frown deepened as he poured another dollop into the glass. “I don’t think we sell to Pier 69,” he said. “But I’ll look in to it. They might have bought it at auction. I’m glad you sent it back. Life is too short for bad wine.”

“And money is too hard to come by,” the tourist said, which didn’t seem to make Jimmy any happier, but he nodded anyway. He put the bottle down and turned our way.

“Hey Victor, Mrs. de Montagne. What’s going on?” he asked without leaving the table.

“I was looking for your father,” I replied.

“He’s at the winery,” Jimmy said, jerking his head at the glass doors. “We’re finishing the crush.”

“Much damage to the crop?” Victor asked, and I almost kicked him in the shin. Discussing a poor harvest in front of customers was bad form.

Jimmy shook his head and glanced furtively at the guests. “Nope, everything went well,” he said, but his expression told another story.

Victor recognized his misstep and tried to patch it up. “I’m sure it will be spectacular. You guys produce some of the best wine in the Valley.”

“The best,”
Jimmy said.

Victor bit his tongue and nodded agreement, though I knew that statement would have started an argument at any other locale, out of sight of the tourists.

Before Victor could open his mouth to push his foot further into it, I grabbed his elbow and we said our goodbyes and headed through the sliding glass doors into a gift shop loaded down with every wine accoutrement and bauble you could imagine. Towels, books and glassware - trivets, corkscrews and refrigerator magnets. Along the far wall was a wine rack with a few hundred bottles awaiting purchase. There were no customers in sight and no one behind the counter. We crossed the tiles and went out a back door marked Employees Only.

A crushed-stone path cut through the acres of vines and led up to a winery built of the same roughhewn materials as the tasting room and gift shop.

The rows of pinot noir vines we passed were still heavy with unpicked fruit a crew of two dozen men and women were harvesting by hand, lugging crates of fruit to the ends of the rows where they dumped them into one-ton plastic bins that would then be transported to the crush pad. I couldn’t help but notice the state of the crop as we passed. The fruit was swollen so badly a lot of the grapes had burst open and their weight was sagging the trellis wires. I was reminded again of how lucky we had been to harvest before the deluge. And evidence of the rain was not just in the fruit – it was everywhere. The vines looked beaten down and ragged and runoff gullies had been carved through plantings of clover that looked yellow and sickly. One thing was certain; this would not be a stellar year for Cliff Face pinot.

Victor and I waved at a few people we recognized working in the vines. Good pickers and vine dressers are hard to find, but it looked like Jimmy Senior had the best the Valley had to offer that day. Not that it was going to do him much good.

The path ended in a concrete pad extending the length of the winery.

Jimmy Senior was using most of that space at that moment. He has double the acreage I do, and he also buys grapes from other growers who either do not produce wine or do so only in limited amounts.

As we stepped under the shade of the awning over the concrete pad, Jimmy was behind the wheel of a forklift, raising one of the huge bins of grapes up and tipping it forward, dumping a mound of freshly picked grapes into a stainless steel hopper. Jimmy was short and broad with a mess of wild gray hair that stuck out from under his cap in snarls and twists. Perched atop the forklift, in his red shirt, green cap, and khaki pants, he looked like a garden gnome.

Jimmy worked the forklift’s levers and bounced the gondola up and down to get the last of the grapes out, then backed away as a young man in jeans and a t-shirt dotted with bits of leaves and stems stepped up to the hopper and began raking the grapes onto a conveyor. The conveyor carried the grapes to a shaker table where two more men sorted through the grapes, removing loose stems, leaves, and culling unripened or raisined grapes before the fruit was dropped into another hopper that fed the crusher and destemmer. Stems were flying from the waste end of the destemmer while a large pump roared, pushing the must on to the fermentation tanks inside.

Victor and I didn’t get in the way or interrupt; we merely stepped to the side to watch a process we had completed ourselves the week before. Just watching made me weary, but I was interested in what Jimmy was doing. He makes pinot noir, a more delicate, less tannic red than the cabernet I make, so his destemming process was far more rigid, with almost one hundred percent stem removal.

Jimmy backed the forklift away from the hopper, lowered the empty gondola, and stepped down. “Phillip!” he yelled and one of the guys at the shaker table looked up. Jimmy pointed at the forklift and then at the two full gondolas and Phillip nodded, wiped his hands on his jeans and stepped down from the elevated platform. He went to the forklift as Jimmy came our way.

Jimmy didn’t pause and he didn’t try to talk over the clatter and hum of the machinery. He stepped past us, waved for us to follow, and headed into the winery.

Jimmy kicked at the large hose that snaked across the winery floor to the first stainless steel tank in a row of six. I could hear wine slopping into the tank. He stopped when we were well inside the winery, though the noise of the whirling steel barrel of the destemmer was still loud.

Even with all that was happening in my life at the moment, I still found it in me to be envious of Jimmy’s operation. The winery building was three times larger than my own. The bottling line was set up on one side, covered by tarps but ready to go at a moment’s notice, while mine had to be shoved out of the way and hauled out and reassembled every time it was used. And the tanks - while no larger than my own - were a much more expensive version with pneumatic lids that doubled as presses that could be used to punch down the wine, a process done by hand at Violet. They could also be used to press every last drop out of the must, a process that was a hotly debated topic in Napa and everywhere else wine is grown. Too much pressing and the wine becomes overly tannic, too little and your wine loses structure and the yield is greatly reduced. I knew Jimmy did only a light pressing, a practice I followed myself. A reduction in production was acceptable to me for the elevation in quality.

“Pretty awesome, huh?” Victor said to me. “All electric. You’ve heard of electricity, right?” he asked, looking sideways at me. “It’s replaced Mexican power in most of the free world. That Ben Franklin sure was a smart guy.”

“If we went electric, what would I need you for?” I asked.

He shrugged. “A happy disposition and good company? A stoic attitude to harsh words?”

“I could buy a Labrador for that,” I told him as Jimmy went to the tank being filled and checked the fill gauge. “And he’d probably eat less and smell better,” I added.

“You don’t exactly smell like a flower right now,” he said. “But I guess a Labrador wouldn’t mind that.”

“He wouldn’t mention it, anyway,” I said as Jimmy stepped back and turned our way.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “You know how it is.”

I nodded and so did Victor.

Jimmy continued, “You were lucky to get your crop in so quickly,” he said to me, then flicked his eyes to Victor. “You managed to snap up the best pickers in the Valley before the rest of us even got moving.”

Picking grapes is more than just stripping the vines of every cluster. A selection process occurs in the field where only the best of the grapes are cut while the raisined and underripe fruit are left behind. On top of that, the harvesting has to be done at top speed, while not damaging the canes that will provide next year’s crop. That combination of knowledge and skill is hard to come by.

“We were lucky,” I said, though all three of us knew it was more than that. Victor’s charitable activity in the migrant community, and my insistence on paying a better than fair wage had won Violet a loyal following of returning pickers and vine dressers - the men and women who arrange and prune the vines for the following year’s harvest.

Jimmy grunted at that, but made no reply. He propped his hands on his thick hips and said. “I ended up getting about sixty acres picked before the storm hit, but the last twenty had to sit it out. I’ve got tons of swollen or busted fruit, the Brix sucks and the rows are still muddy so I got dirt mixed in with it,
and
I’ll have to re-grade the rows this winter. Only good thing I can say is that at least the heat has kept mold from forming.”

“You think they’ll be usable?” Victor asked, undiplomatically.

Jimmy shook his head. “Not for Cliff Face,” he said. “I’m planning on running it under another label if I can get the sugar count up. I’ll fortify it if I have to,” he added with a grimace.

No high end winemaker willingly fortifies their wine - adding sugar to up the alcohol content - but sometimes it’s the only way to turn low-sugared grapes into wine. The resulting wine is not one I would sell at Violet, either.

“If I’m lucky I might break even,” he finished, “but I doubt it. Probably be more cost effective to crush it and use it for fertilizer, but I don’t have the heart for that.”

I nodded in genuine sympathy, wincing at every word the way you wince at the sound of the dentist’s drill while you’re sitting in his waiting room, knowing it might be you under the knife next.

“Anyway, what can I help you with?” he asked, looking past me through the open bay door where Phillip was lifting one of the loaded bins with the forklift.

There was no subtle way to do this, and subtlety isn’t my strong suit anyway. “I know you’re auctioning through Star Crossed. I was wondering how that’s working out for you?”

Jimmy’s lips drew into a tight line. “You sign a deal with Blake?”

I nodded. “Just fifty cases for the moment. The 2009 Reserve. I wanted to see how it goes…”

Jimmy nodded. “Smart,” he said. “I signed a deal for seven hundred cases of my 2004, 2005, and 2006 to be spread out over seven auctions.”

“How’s that working for you?” I asked.

“Not so hot. The price I get isn’t as good as Blake led me to believe. I could make just as much through regular distribution. And he’s slow to pay. Thirty days is what it says in the contract, but it’s more like sixty before I see the cash. And there are never enough sales. Maybe thirty cases an auction. Hardly worth the trouble. And with Dimitri dead, I’m betting it gets worse. He had a pretty high opinion of our pinot. Not that it seemed to help auction sales much. I’d count those fifty cases as a loss and thank your lucky stars you didn’t commit more. I’d tear my contract up if I could.”

“Couldn’t you hire an attorney?” I asked.

Jimmy laughed bitterly. “I
am
an attorney,” he said. “Criminal law. Back before I decided I wanted to be a farmer.” He shook his head. “Blake is fulfilling his end of the contract. Barely.”

There was no polite way to ask the next question. “Have you ever thought Blake was
intentionally
underselling your wine?”