Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 (37 page)

Everyone liked Kevin Harlan, even the person who beat him to death with a rusty shovel.

Until the morning Kevin’s battered body was found in my vineyard, I had known him only as a good neighbor, but before his killer was finally stopped the secrets of his unhappy life and brutal murder would almost destroy everything and everyone I loved.

My name is Claire de Montagne but don’t let that put you off. My name may be pretentiously French, but my ancestry is actually loud-mouth Italian mixed with a splash of drunken Irish and I am as earthy as the grapes I grow. I am fifty years old, the mother of one grown daughter and the owner of and slave to twenty acres of cabernet grapes perched on a rocky ridge that overlooks Napa Valley and the town of St. Helena.

My vineyard was originally planted by a banker who bankrupted himself trying to ‘return to the soil.’  He had named the vineyard Stony Farm, a name I changed to Violet Vineyards, not because grapes are purple, but because I love all things purple. One look into my kaleidoscope-purple kitchen would give that away. Purple tea-towels, purple curtains, lavender trivets, violet pot holders and framed prints and paintings of grapes overwhelm the walls, shelves and counters. Only the huge bay window that looks out on the rows of manicured vines and the valley beyond is unadorned. I love purple, but I love the view of the vines and the hills even more.

I am married…in a way. My husband, Roger, and I have an arrangement: he keeps his distance and I don’t kill him. I’ve seen him only a half-dozen times since our daughter, Jessica, graduated from high school, and every time he was shorter, fatter and balder. And the woman on his arm was younger. I can’t honestly say why I don’t divorce him, except that I am by nature a loner. An absentee husband whom I despise suits me better than one sitting across the breakfast table slurping coffee. His reasons are much the same. As long as Roger has a wife, none of his mistresses will expect an engagement ring, his family fortune remains intact, and he remains free to chase the next young thing in spandex.

Roger comes from money and I come from a lack of it. Perhaps that’s why our marriage lasted, in the truest sense, only five years. I was frugal and he was flamboyant. I wanted a home and a hearth, and he wanted to party until he dropped. My purchase of Violet Vineyards was the knockout punch to our already reeling relationship. More specifically, it was my refusal to use his money or have his name on the deed. For a down payment I used the small estate my parents left me in their passing. For that reason my parent’s wedding photo hangs over the fieldstone fireplace in my small tasting room and no picture of Roger has ever blemished my walls…

My daughter and my wines are the joys of my life, and the biggest source of tension. In all fairness, Jessica is bright, beautiful and healthy, and for that I am thankful. She teaches at the Bishop Lynch daycare center in Napa where she is the favorite of the children and the staff. But her emotional relationships and the chaos they wreak on our lives have been a battleground for Jessica and me since she was fifteen and sneaking out to see the captain of the junior high swim team. I was relieved when she moved out to attend college but, unfortunately, she didn’t stay out. Every time I turn around she’s back on my doorstep with a suitcase in her hand. It was during her latest two month ‘visit’ that Kevin Harlan was found dead in my vineyard.

I was up at 5:30 that Monday morning, planning my day. I intended to supervise the cutting back of lateral canes before checking the rootstock planted earlier that spring. Then I was going to sample the 2008 Vintner’s Reserve Cabernet that we’d be issuing the following week. After that I had a dozen smaller chores to take care of and several calls to make to restaurants and distributors.

I was sipping a cup of coffee and smoking my first cigarette of the day when Victor Gonzalez, my vineyard foreman, charged in the back door and skidded to a stop.

I was a mess. The previous evening, Stanley Kostyol, my daughter’s ex-boyfriend, had stopped by at 2:00 A.M. after an overdose of beer at one of the local taverns. Jessica pleaded with him to leave while I hovered in the background gripping an empty wine bottle by the neck, waiting for an excuse to crack Stanley in the forehead. Stanley was maudlin and angry in turns, pacing across the driveway in the glare of his truck’s headlights, doing a cut-rate Brando impersonation. When I had had enough, I called the sheriff. That got his attention. He squealed off in his pickup, screaming ‘I love you!’ at the top of his lungs. I guess that loving feeling wore off, because he was back an hour later to throw a brick through my living room window. By then Jessica was in hysterics and I was ready to grab a shotgun and hunt the little bastard down.

This wasn’t the first incident in their long and torturous relationship, but I was determined that it would be the last. I filed a complaint and an arrest warrant was issued. Stanley had been a troublemaker since high school. I even suspected that he was the person who had broken into Jessica’s car in St. Helena two weeks before Kevin’s murder and stolen her gym bag. Jess preferred to believe it was a juvenile delinquent. A juvenile delinquent who leaves the XM Radio player but makes off with sweaty workout clothes? Until then all of Stanley’s crimes had been junior-league vandalism and DUI’s, but that night I had sensed depths of violence in his words and actions that frightened me for my daughter’s safety.

As bad as I might have looked in my rumpled pajamas, my short silver hair pointing in every direction, every wrinkle on my face deepened by lack of sleep and aggravation, eyes bloodshot, Victor looked even worse. He was dressed in blue jean cut-offs and a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt. His long stringy hair was down in his face, but did not conceal the panic in his eyes. His face was beaded with sweat despite the chill of the early morning and his hands were shaking.

Victor has been my foreman since 1999. A hippy of the old school, he wears his hair long and favors jeans and flip-flops over slacks and pressed shirts. He’s an outspoken advocate for the migrant workers who pick fruit for the farms around the Valley, a fact that has made him unpopular with many growers. I have seen Victor calmly address hostile council meetings and growers’ forums, ignoring the angry stares and whispered hatreds as he pointed out the poor living and working conditions, but his cool demeanor was lacking that morning.

“Claire,” he panted, looking over his shoulder and out the door. “Jesus Christ!” He swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and shook his head. “I can’t believe this. Jesus!”

I was out of my chair and moving before the second ‘Jesus’ was out of his mouth. My first thought was that someone was hurt. So many things can happen to people on a farm or vineyard. Every year people are maimed or even killed. Machinery designed to harvest, crush and press grapes can do the same to human flesh.

“Kevin’s dead,” Victor exploded, shoving his hair out of his eyes. “I can’t believe this!”

I tried to step past Victor to the open door, but he grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Don’t,” he yelled, spraying me with spittle. I barely noticed. My mind was grappling with what he had said. Kevin Harlan dead? I had seen him yesterday at a Growers’ Lunch in St. Helena. It wasn’t possible!

“We need to call the cops!” Victor’s boney fingers dug into my shoulders. “The wine cellar door was kicked in. He must have caught them breaking in!”

“The phone’s right there,” I croaked around the chunk of fear lodged in my throat, pointing at my cellular lying on the kitchen table. I pried his hands off and tried to step around him. “Call the—” 

“Don’t go out there, Claire.” Victor grabbed me by the arm and jerked me to a stop. “You don’t need to see that.”

“Victor,” I snapped. “Let go of me and call the Sheriff. I’ll be right back.” I never argue with men when they’re trying to protect me, I just ignore them. I had to see for myself. Not out of morbid curiosity, but in hopes that Victor was wrong. What if Kevin was only badly hurt, perhaps barely alive? I’m not a nurse, but after raising a child, tending to her scrapes and breaks and also caring for the workers in my vineyard, I knew I could be more help to Kevin in the vineyard than on the phone.

Victor stopped arguing. He’s used to taking orders from me. As he fumbled with the phone, I grabbed the first aid kit out of the cabinet above the sink and ran out the back door and across the patio shaded by a trellis of wisteria dripping with lavender flowers.

It was a beautiful day. The sweet-purple smell of the wisteria permeated the air touched with a taste of sea salt blowing up-valley from the Pacific. Mist clung to the green vines with their pale clusters of grape flowers and the rising sun forged miniature rainbows between the rows.  The sky was a cloudless blue from mountaintop to mountaintop, but the valley below was shrouded in a sea of fog with treetops, rocky crags and the roofs of wineries and homes jutting through. The unreality of the situation shook me. Death seemed so out of place with the beauty surrounding me. It couldn’t be true.

Then I saw Kevin.

He wasn’t alone. Near him stood three Mexican day workers in stained jeans and T-shirts who had been hired to thin the grape-flower clusters and prune back the vines. They were staring at the body, their expressions more curious than horrified. They didn’t know Kevin Harlan. For them it was like rubbernecking an accident on the freeway, but we who had lived close to the always-smiling young man would feel his loss for a long time to come. Especially Victor. He and Kevin had been drinking buddies since Kevin had moved out here to rebuild the vineyard his grandfather had planted in the fifties.

Victor was right, Kevin was dead. I could see that from twenty feet away. The back of his head was almost flat and caked with drying blood. He was leaning back against the sagging top wire of the grape trellis, his arms draped over it, holding him up.  His knees were splayed, ankles crossed. His head was bowed forward as if in prayer, his face streaked with blood. As I got closer I caught the glint of a tiny gold crucifix on a broken chain lying at his feet. Blood-splattered vines poked out around his legs and across his chest. He looked like a mutilated scarecrow. Only the fact that I knew him made the scene horrifyingly real.

I had known Kevin’s parents since forever. In fact, my father had leased twenty acres of Chardonnay vines from Kevin’s grandfather forty-five years ago when land was still cheap in the valley. While Kevin and I hadn’t been close friends (the age difference made that difficult) we were good neighbors. Our many conversations had been about growing conditions, market prices, tonnage and vintages. In my mind I saw him, lean and tanned, working in the fields beside his men, drinking cold beer with them under the overhang of the barn he had converted into a home. Kevin was a generous and friendly young man that half the women in the county lusted over for his dark good looks and reserved charm. Last November, he had helped unclog my drip lines, laughing it up when Victor and I were splattered with purple juice. We drank several bottles of good wine that day in front of a blazing fire. Perhaps if I had been younger I would have been like the drooling tribe of females who eyed him like a rare sirloin, but he was my daughter’s age, and the son of high school classmates and therefore not an eligible bachelor but a child.

I looked at the first aid kit in my hand and almost broke into hysterical laughter. My hands were trembling and my breath was caught in my throat. Tears stung my eyes. I crossed myself and whispered, “Mother of God have mercy on your son.”

“Senora,” a man spoke in my ear, spooking me so bad that I dropped the first aid kit and hopped three feet.

“Why don’t you return indoors,” the oldest of the Mexicans said in accented English. “This is not for a lady to see.” He was in his sixties, maybe older, with kind brown eyes surrounded by sunburned wrinkles.

I nodded dumbly, stooped and picked up the first aid kit, wondering why the tears didn’t come, why the horror I felt wasn’t translating itself into an emotional outpouring. Shock, I guessed. It was then that I thought of my daughter. Victor had said that the wine cellar door had been kicked in, and the door between my kitchen and the cellar is never locked. So, whoever broke in had access to my home! I hadn’t seen Jessica that morning and my blood went cold with fear. A fear only a mother knows. The irrational fear of unknown dangers that can rob her of her children.

“Senora, the old man spoke again. “I will walk you back.” He put his rough brown hand on my forearm.

“Oh, no,” I whispered, barely hearing him. I broke away and ran for the house, leaving the old man staring after me. I told myself that Jessica was okay, that I was acting crazy, but the dead man on the grass was proof enough that I wasn’t. I ran through the open kitchen door in time to see Victor replacing the phone on the kitchen table and my half-awake daughter entering the kitchen through the dining room door.

“Thank God!” I grabbed her in a ferocious hug.

Her eyes filled with fear. She grabbed my forearm and her nails dug in.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded. “What‘s happened?” She was dressed in a baggy T-shirt and white knee socks. The T-shirt and her face were both wrinkled by sleep. “Is it Stanley? Is he okay?”

At the mention of her boyfriend’s name my grief flared instantly to anger. After all he had done to ruin her life, he was still her first concern.

“I’m sure that cretin’s fine,” I snapped. “But Kevin Harlan’s dead. Murdered. He’s hanging out there with his head bashed in.”

“Kevin?” she gasped and I was instantly sorry. I started to explain, but Jess wasn’t listening. She shoved me aside and bolted out the kitchen door before I could say another word.

“Jess!” I yelled, but she was already racing down the row toward Kevin’s corpse.

The Mexican men looked up in alarm. Two of them backed away while the gentleman who had spoken to me stepped forward, hands raised to block the aisle. But, Jessica didn’t make it all the way to the corpse, she stopped short halfway down the row. I ran up behind her and put myself between Jessica and Kevin.  

Jessica shuddered, turned away from me and vomited into the clover, heaved and vomited again. She tottered, eyes streaming tears, throat gulping on strangled sobs. “Oh, Mom,” she said and dropped into my arms, almost knocking me off my feet. I tried to hold her up but she slipped through my hands and hit the ground just as Victor ran up.

“What happened?” he panted. “Is she all right?”

“She fainted. Help me get her up,” I said, my own legs feeling rubbery. Together, we hauled Jessica to her feet. Her eyelids were fluttering and she was breathing shallow and fast, almost hyperventilating.

Victor and I carried her between us, dragging her feet through the clover.  She started to come around as we pulled her up the kitchen steps. We put her in a chair at the kitchen table where she slumped, still breathing too fast for my liking.

“Jessica,” I said, shaking her gently. “Are you okay?”

She nodded once, stood on her own, then doubled over and retched. I started to sit down beside her but stopped short when I heard a car rolling across the gravel drive out back.

“That’ll be the police,” Victor said. “I’ll take care of Jessica if you’ll talk to them.” He and Jess are very close. With all the late hours we put in at Violet, Victor spends almost as many nights under my roof as he does his own.

“All right,” I said with a dead-weary sigh. “I’ll talk to the police.” I would rather have stayed with my daughter and made sure she was okay, but the vineyard was my responsibility, not Victor’s.

I stood, taking one last look at Jess, then stepped back outside. Already the mist had begun to burn off, revealing the patchwork of farms and wineries and the town of St. Helena in the valley below. A hawk screamed in the woods above Violet Vineyards, and another was circling a few hundred feet below, but still several hundred feet above the valley floor.

The Mexican workers had walked up from the vineyard and were standing at the head the rows, in the shade of a row of twenty almond trees planted to protect the vines from the harsh winter winds. They were looking at a battered gray, mud-caked Jeep Cherokee that had just pulled up.

It wasn’t the police. It was Samson, my cellar foreman and master wine maker, and the biggest reason that Violet Vineyards cabernet is a respected wine both in Napa and abroad. Only the year before, we had taken a silver medal at the International Tasting Competition, where some of the greatest palates voiced their appreciation.

Samson arrives every day promptly at 6:30, dressed in one of a number of hopelessly style-less suits complete with 1950’s vintage skinny-tie and a sweater vest. Samson is pop-eyed with a receding chin, a nose like a red horn bulb, a grouchy disposition, and a big place in my heart. He came to Napa straight from Greece in the 1940’s to work in the vineyards. Over the ensuing decades he became a master winemaker working on commission for some of the most prestigious houses in California. But more importantly, he was my father’s best friend and I’m proud to say he’s one of mine. Now, semi-retired, he works solely for me on a percentage-of-profit basis.