Blood Wine (13 page)

“Did you really kill someone? With a gun, you shot him?”

“With a gun, I shot him, yes.”

“Enough!” Miranda snapped. “You've got an army out there, they want to shoot someone, too. We have a situation here. They're not going to wait forever. The city needs them, and they'll want to clean this mess up and move on. So. It's time, Elke. Let him go.”

To Miranda's surprise, the blond woman emerged from the shadows and, standing fully illuminated within sight of the marksmen poised outside, she handed the gun to Miranda and proceeded to untie her hostage. Then she reached out for the gun again. Miranda backed away, gently. Elke could force a shooting and Miranda did not want that. Elke moved back onto a sofa and sat down, as if she were prepared to resume an interrupted conversation.

Ivan Muritori stood up tentatively. He started to edge toward to door, brushing his hands over the front of his crotch, holding them poised furtively. Miranda noticed that he had wet himself.

“Hey, champ,” she said. “Why don't you change clothes before you go out to meet your public!”

Heartened, he walked into the bedroom.

Miranda picked up the cellphone. “Clancy?”

“Yeah. You coming out?”

“Give us a minute.”

“You got it. You all right?”

“Yeah —”

A gunshot shattered the room. Miranda, gun in hand, dove toward Elke, covering her with her body as the sofa tipped over on its back. She assumed the shot had come from outside. No glass was broken. Another shot exploded from the bedroom doorway. She rolled away from Elke across the floor, firing in motion. A single shot. She squeezed out another, then her gun jammed. She lunged behind a chair. Nothing moved. She could hear Clancy's voice. The cellphone lay out in the open.

Two more shots shook the room. There was silence, then Ivan Muritori emerged from the bedroom, clutching the second gun he had retrieved from his arsenal. He stood still for a moment. He seemed to assume they were both dead. Miranda held her breath. She could hear her blood pounding. He walked into the hallway. He opened the massive front door, still brandishing his pistol.

The entire scene fell absolutely quiet, as if someone had switched off the soundtrack in a movie. A single shot rang out, and for a split second there was silence. Then a riot of explosions filled the air as rifles and handguns rhymed off innumerable shots into the body of Ivan Muritori.

As suddenly as the lethal clattering started, it stopped. Again there was silence.

Then it was broken inside the apartment by a voice on the cellphone.

Miranda picked up the phone, simultaneously checking to see if Elke was alive.

“Toronto! You okay?”

“Yes,” said Miranda. “We're both okay. Don't come in.”

“She still holding a gun on you?”

“Don't come in. Everything's under control. Give us a few minutes. Have your army stand down. Danger's over.”

“Roger that. Well done.”

Miranda had helped Elke to her feet while she was talking. They looked at each other like comrades at arms. Miranda's leg was throbbing from her bullet wound that until now she had forgotten about, although it had ached on the plane coming down. Together they sank back against the closest wall, sliding onto the floor.

“Your accountant had two guns!”

“He's a mobster.”

“And only two bullets in one of them, or it jammed. A very strange ex-boyfriend.”

“That's why I broke it off.”

“You nearly broke a lot more than that. You're lucky to be alive.”

“That's a subjective judgement.”

“Well, yes it is, Elke. Being alive is subjective, that's the way it goes. Now tell me about the man in Toronto. I want to know before the NYPD get to you.”

“Is he dead?”

“Who? Ivan? Yes, I would imagine he is. Were you holding him to avoid talking to the police about the shooting?”

“No. Once I remembered, I wanted to talk. To you, not them. I'm your problem, your jurisdiction. I figured you'd call my answering machine. I tried to leave a message. I knew they'd be watching my place.”

“Exactly. So what happened. We've got a few minutes.”

“He betrayed me. I wanted to hurt him. Thank you for coming.”

“Pick it up from Bonnydoon, we haven't got long.”

The Mob

I
t
came back to me on the bus. I was trying to sleep. You know what it's like on a bus, you're droning along, wheels humming, and you're half awake and you lose track of where you are. It came back in images, but not as you'd imagine, not in random order on a scale of intensity. It came back in chronological sequence, like I was watching an old-fashioned movie.

You remember I was in the wine shed, the bottling shed at the end. I was blindfolded, taped in a chair. I told you I heard someone, the others called him Mr. Savage. He chopped off the screaming man's hand. Or someone did it on his order. They mostly weren't speaking English.

I had flown to Rochester to check out a wine source. We had cases of vintage Châteauneuf-du-Pape from an estate I couldn't track down. I couldn't get a price on it. We always publish an estimate of what something will bring at auction. This was a mystery wine, and the paper trail traced our lot through a retailer in Rochester.

So, there I am at Bonnydoon when I hear a gunshot. I could picture what happened. I was blindfolded, but I could hear the body fall into the vat.

“Get rid of her,” said a voice I assume was Mr. Savage's. In English. Then he said something in another language, and then he said, “Not here.” Then he said in Italian, “I don't want her found. She disappears.”

He was speaking in three languages.

I was blindfolded, but the blindfold slipped off. It didn't seem to bother them. As far as they were concerned, I was already dead.

He dumped my purse, motioning to another man, who picked up a severed hand. There was a gold ring. It seemed like the flesh was still pulsing. It seemed like it was alive. He wrapped it in tissues and dropped it into my bag. He scooped up my stuff, removed identification cards and papers, then dropped the rest into the bag.

“The hand,” he said, then he said something in another language. Then in Italian, he repeated, “She disappears.”

He leaned over me. I could see every pore in his face. He was breathing through his nose but I could smell his breath; it was sweet and minty. He ran his hands over me, not sexually, not so you'd know it. Even the crudest groper wants a response, but it was more like he was assessing a slab of meat at the slaughterhouse or trying to embed anatomical details in his memory, knowing I was going to die.

He stopped, or he was stopped. I'm not sure.

Mr. Savage told someone in Italian where to find you. Miranda Quin, he said. He gave your address on Isabella Street and spoke as if he were repeating known information. I got the impression the man he was talking to was supposed to find you and kill you. You were the main event. Your death. Mine was a nuisance, yours a necessity. Your name, your address, they were seared into my brain.

I was placed in a car. It was night. I could see lights in the big house up behind the vineyards, the house where the old lady lived.

My hands were taped at the wrists. I had gloves taped over my hands. They didn't want fingerprints. My ankles were taped. The driver taped them after I walked to the car. He ran his hands up my legs. God, men are pathetic. He had a chance, he took it. I didn't have tape over my mouth. I had not said a word since they picked me up in the Rochester parking lot. Nothing. Mute. I whispered in his ear as he was leaning over me, “Fuck you.” It startled him. He flipped my skirt to prove his power then smoothed it down to prove gentility.

Gentility! The guy was going to kill me.

We drove. The scenery, the highway signs — everything I saw — was intensified by the terror. I recorded every detail in my mind, I jammed my head with facts.

After we got on the main highway, I started talking to him. In Italian. He answered in Italian but switched to English. His Italian was worse than mine. We talked in English. We might have been on an arranged date. Like I was from out of town, visiting his relatives.

We drove along the Queen Elizabeth Way, the QEW as he called it. I told him I had to pee. Badly.

It was his car. A big brutal sedan. He swore he would kill me.

I said, that's what you're going to do anyway. I'm going to pee and I'm going to throw up in your car.

He told me to wait, we'd be stopping soon. At a building site. I could pee there.

I insisted, sooner. He pulled over then realized he'd have to free me legs and my arms too, or else hold up my skirt. By now we were friends in his mind, he had too much respect.

We were almost in Toronto. He pulled off at a sign for Lake Shore Boulevard. We circled around and he parked at the base of a bridge. A sign said it was the Humber River. I remember everything.

I really did have to pee. I was losing it. By the time he got my legs free, I thought I'd wet my pants. I was squirming, so he panicked and cut my wrist tapes. I started to drop my drawers, and he turned his head away, I grabbed his gun tucked in his belt right there in front of me. He turned his head back — he looked so surprised.

I pulled the trigger. And again and again, it just kept firing. It was empty before he hit the ground.

He was looking up at me like he was disappointed, only he was dead.

I got in the car. The keys were still in the ignition. I dropped his gun, I guess, into my purse, then I backed up carefully so I wouldn't run over him. I stopped when the headlights picked him up. I got out of the car. He looked unnatural, lying there. I pushed him over into the river. I tried to finish peeing, but I couldn't. I had to go but I couldn't.

When I got to a subway, I dumped the car. Left it parked on a side street. Asked directions to your place, to Isabella. I had to rescue you. I had to connect. That's about it. You know the rest.

Do I
? thought Miranda. She took a deep breath. The story was consistent with the facts. The woman wasn't accounting sufficiently for the amnesia, but then, Miranda supposed, the thing about amnesia is you forget what it's like when it's over.

“If Ivan betrayed you, why hold him hostage, why not just walk out? You had the gun, you could have left.”

“The police were here before I knew what to do. It was instinctive. I wanted to hurt him. I don't just mean he betrayed me, calling the cops. Miranda, he set me up.”

“Set you up?”

“Rochester. Ivan set me up to be killed.”

“Elke, why on earth — you were there to find out about a shipment of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, somebody's wine cellar you wanted to auction.”

“But did I say where it came from?”

“Yes. Someone's estate. Originally from upstate New York.”

“It was an estate Ivan told me he was working on.”

“Not surprising. He was in the insurance business. He's lying riddled with bullets outside the front door. Doesn't that …” she searched for the right word, “… engage … engage your interest?”

“Here's what I think,” said Elke, ignoring Miranda's question. “I think he tried to use me. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt — he's dead — let's say he didn't know it was counterfeit. He just wanted to dump a bunch of wine. Fifty cases, a good year on the Rhône, say $200 a bottle, that's $120,000. So, let's say he really does moonlight for the mob —”

“The mob!”

“Gangsters, bad guys, Tony Soprano —”

“He's into garbage, that's where the big money is.”

“Let's say I'm right.”

“Okay.”

“Somebody in the mob pays him off in wine, he doesn't know how to sell it, he turns to me. Then what happens? I find there's no such wine and no dead guy, no estate being cleared. So, I trace the wine back to Millennium in Rochester. Dead end. I go there to find out their supplier. You with me?”

“Yes.”

“Meanwhile, the gangsters freak out. He wasn't supposed to get caught. He was supposed to pay off a jobber, unload the wine through a few select stores with mob connections. That's how these things are done. But he was greedy, he tried to sell it through me. ATF don't care, in stores it's only a few bottles at a time.”

“ATF?”

“The Feds. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. Whatever, it's a government agency. But me, I was going to blow the whistle. Not intentionally. I'm just good at what I do.”

“So good, they figured if you knew, you needed to be eliminated.”

“Exactly, Miranda. These guys don't fool around. They probably wanted to get rid of Ivan as well. When they saw you and Morgan and me back there at Bonnydoon, they figured the word was out. Everything was already wired for just such an occasion. They blew everything up.”

“No question the house was a bomb, set for maximum destruction.”

“Yes, in case things went wrong. There must have been evidence in the house, records and things.”

Miranda smiled at the younger woman. “Come on. Take my arm. We'll walk out together.”

“Thanks for being here,” said Elke. “You came a long way.”

“Not so far,” said Miranda. “Toronto's about the same distance away as Cleveland or Raleigh, North Carolina.”

“Thanks anyway.”

They stood in the shadows inside the open door. Miranda could feel Elke's breast pressing against her arm as she leaned into her for support.

“Coming out!” Miranda shouted. The street was in shadow now, and there was a flurry of restrained activity. Then everything stopped. The two women stepped into the open. The stoop was brilliant with splattered blood. They stood still.

Clancy walked up the steps, followed by two cops swathed in bulletproof armour. He reached out and took Elke's arm.

“No,” said Miranda. “It wasn't her.” She could not stop herself. She pulled Elke away from his grasp.

“It was him,” she said. “He was holding
her
hostage.”

“Say what!”

“It was him, holding her! Ivan Muritori. He forced her to say it was her, the other way around, but he was going to kill her. And say it was self-defense. When I went in, he had the gun on her. He was sitting in the open so you could see him. He kept her out of sight.”

“Jesus!” said Clancy.

Miranda was astonished by what she was saying. Elke was stunned into silent compliance.

“He had us both, he was going to kill us together.”

“Where'd the other gun come from?” said Clancy, running all the known facts through his mind, still dubious but not antagonistic.

“It was his,” said Elke. “They were both his. It was in the living room. In a desk drawer. I told Miranda, I told Detective Quin.”

“She distracted him, I went for the gun,” said Miranda. “You heard the shootout. We were lucky. He took off.”

“Yeah,” said Clancy, “you were lucky. What took so long, after he came out?”

“I was hysterical,” said Elke. “Detective Quin talked me down.”

“I know her,” said Miranda. “We've shared some pretty bad things. We need her for questioning. There's no way she did the killing in Toronto, but we need her to process the details.”

What Miranda knew was that Elke's execution of the man under the Humber bridge was a reasonable act of self-defense, but if she admitted Elke's involvement, the NYPD would have no option but to arrest her, and Miranda did not want that.

“Yeah, well, we need her here, too,”

Miranda felt her heart sink, but he continued.

“She might help us figure who killed this guy.” He nodded toward the ambulance with the back door still open, where Ivan Muritori's corpse lay under a plastic shroud.

“Who killed him? It wasn't us? Didn't you? Didn't he go down in the proverbial hail of bullets?”

“He did,” said Clancy, “after a sniper picked him off from somewhere across the street. It was a perfect hit. Our guys were focused on the guy coming through the door. He's waving a semi-automatic. Pop goes a shot. He drops. Before the guy hits the ground, our guys let loose. Reflex. Once the shooting starts, take no chances. But we didn't fire the first shot, and neither did he. It was a hit.”

“The mob!” said Elke.

“The mob,” said Clancy. “It was professional, definitely the mob.”