Death By the Glass #2 (29 page)

“While we’re hashing through all this, how did Eliot manage to leave the note on your car? Wasn’t he at the restaurant the whole time yesterday?” asked Rivka.

“He didn’t, Remy left it. I assumed it was about Nathan, but it wasn’t. Remy was afraid I was going to expose his wine-club fraud. He had no idea Nathan hadn’t died a natural death.”

“It’s a shame he’ll go to jail,” said Monty. “One less Master Sommelier on the continent. We’ll have to make due with forty-one of them now.”

“He and Nathan had so many scams running at Vinifera it was a full-time job keeping track of them,” said Sunny.

“And what about the Bandol you came to see me about. How did that figure in?” asked Monty.

“That was what first got me thinking it wasn’t Remy after all,” said Sunny. “When I went to see Eliot on Friday, he showed me his prize possession, a bottle of Bandol that Nathan had given him when they opened Denby’s back in the day. It was in the safe with the accounting ledgers, so it survived the fire. It predated Remy’s employment. When I felt the punt and realized it was a fake, I knew everything couldn’t be Remy’s doing and Nathan wasn’t what he seemed. It would take a genuinely
mean spirit to start a partnership with a lie. We’ll never know for sure, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Denby’s fire was arson. Nathan had been filling the cellar at Denby’s with cheap wine for five years. He needed to get rid of the evidence so he could start again.”

“You figured if Eliot had found out about Nathan, he had a motive,” said Monty.

“The worst kind, revenge,” said Sunny. “I wasn’t sure he knew until Nick told me Eliot had been working late, trying to find a way to save the business. That didn’t fit with what Eliot had said in our meeting. He’d given me the impression that business was booming. I realized he was lying because he didn’t want anyone to know the business was in trouble. That could lead to all kinds of unpleasant questions, such as
why
it was in trouble, considering the place was busy every night. Eliot had to keep Nathan’s fraud a secret and play down the restaurant’s financial problems in order to keep his motive hidden.

“Then I remembered the stack of old ledgers on his desk and figured they dated back to the Denby’s era. It was true that he’d been working late making computations, but he wasn’t trying to save the business. He was calculating how much Nathan had taken him for over the years. It was an obsession. He kept doing it even after he’d killed him.”

“And all that wine locked up at Vinifera was fake,” said Rivka. “I still don’t see how they did it.”

“Not fake, just wrong,” explained Sunny. “Remy would place an order for a bunch of high-end wines. Nathan would intercept it on his wholesaler end and replace it with an order for less expensive stock. Osborne Wines would deliver that order, and the regular guy at Vinifera would receive it so everything looked legit. Then when the invoice went to Remy, he’d swap it out with
the original invoice, lock up the stock in the alcoves so nobody was the wiser, and they’d split the take.”

“Sounds complicated,” said Rivka. “And risky.”

“I think fraud usually is,” said Sunny. “If people put half as much effort into doing things the right way, they’d probably make just as much money and they wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught.”

“A nice sentiment, but untrue,” said Monty. “Let’s say a wholesaler buys a bottle of wine for ten dollars. Using Osborne’s strategy, the wholesaler sells it for a hundred dollars to the restaurant, but then switches invoices. On paper it now looks like the wholesaler sold a ten-dollar bottle of wine for twenty—the usual hundred percent markup. Since he actually sold it for a hundred, he just made eighty dollars more than he should have, tax free. Well, forty, since he has to give the guy on the inside his cut.”

“You’re probably being more generous than Nathan was,” said Sunny.

“I still don’t get how Eliot knew which bottle of Armagnac to poison,” said Rivka.

“He didn’t, since he never knew there were two. He was just lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it,” said Sunny.

“Hang on, I need to sort this out,” said Rivka. “All of this bottle switching still has me confused.”

“It’s actually very simple,” said Sunny, swirling her wine. “Last Friday night Nick put the fake bottle out, locked the real one in the cabinet, and went home. Eliot sneaks in and doses the one that’s out. On Saturday, Nick comes into work and switches them around like he always does. He puts the real stuff out and locks the fake stuff in the cabinet. Later that night, Remy orders a glass for Nathan. He evidently gives Nick the
sign to use the fake stuff. Nick takes that bottle—the one with Eliot’s little present in it—out of the cabinet and pours it. Nathan drinks it, goes home, and dies. Meanwhile, at the end of his shift, Nick does the usual. He locks the real bottle in the cabinet and puts the fake one—the one with the poison in it—on the shelf before he leaves. Eliot nabs the bottle off the shelf late that night and gets rid of it. The real bottle stays in the cabinet until Monday, when they find out about Nathan’s death and Dahlia uses a key to make off with the real bottle.”

“I may never order a digestif again,” said Monty.

“I keep thinking of what Catelina told me,” said Sunny. “‘It’s not what they say is in there that’s the problem, it’s what’s in there that they don’t say.’”

“Enough with the Portuguese aphorisms,” said Monty, “and for the love of god, let’s open a decent bottle of wine. Life is too short to drink mediocre wine, especially on Sunday when there’s a cellar not fifty yards away stocked with great Zinfandel hoping for a visitor.”

He marched to the railing and dumped the contents of his glass over the side. Sunny winced.

“What?” Monty asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Sunny said.

“What?”

She picked up the bottle and scraped at the label with her fingernail, eventually separating the top label from the one underneath. She peeled it away and handed the bottle to Monty, who took one look and said, “You bitch.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“That was really low.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a joke,” said Sunny, laughing. “It was just an experiment. I wanted to see if you could really tell the difference.”

“Let’s see,” said Rivka, taking the bottle. “Oh Lenstrom, that’s gotta hurt. 1991 Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon. If you hurry you can probably still suck a few drops off the grass.”

Monty made a sour face. Sunny poured another glass and handed it to him. He took it without looking at her.

“What about Andre?” said Monty, trying to recover. “You haven’t said a peep about him.”

“I figure I’ll let the dust settle, then give him a call and see where we are.”

“He’ll be there for you, don’t worry,” said Rivka. “And that reminds me. Dahlia gave me something to give to you.” She took a little parcel wrapped in tissue paper out of her pocket and handed it to Sunny. She unwrapped it and spread out the tissue on her palm. Inside was a leather cord with a forest green pouch attached, just big enough to hold the tiny glass vial inside. “What is it?” she asked.

“An amulet,” said Rivka. “It’s called New Beginnings.”

“New beginnings,” said Sunny, putting it around her neck. “I like the sound of that.”