The Chardonnay Charade (7 page)

He said brusquely, “I know you don’t want Davis’s image tarnished, but there’s always been speculation about this. Just no concrete proof, one way or the other. Now there is. I’ll get it authenticated by a third party, of course. But I know I’m right.”

Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to get him talking about this. I tried to shift the conversation to safer ground. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I haven’t decided.” He still sounded annoyed. “Like you said, it’s bound to stir up a lot of controversy and right now…” He lifted his martini glass and drained what was left. “I’ve got to start planning Georgia’s funeral.”

I went back to the sofa and sat next to him, laying my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have upset you more than you already are. I know you know what you’re talking about.” My voice grew unsteady. “Ross, I am so…so terribly sorry about what happened. I feel like it’s partially my fault that Georgia’s dead because we left that methyl bromide out where her killer could get to it.”

For a long moment he played with the stem of his glass, twirling it between his fingers. “Thank you for saying that,” he said, finally. “But I don’t blame you for anything. You shouldn’t blame yourself, either.”

“I want to know who did it,” I said. “I want to know what happened.”

“We all want to know.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“A lot of people aren’t sorry Georgia’s dead,” he said. “I’m under no illusion about that. She was a controversial and complicated woman. But as a matter of fact, I may know who killed her. I think he wrote her a letter. It arrived about an hour ago.”

I watched him, stunned, as he walked over to a large bay window overlooking the swimming pool and the impeccably manicured gardens beyond. The underwater light in the pool had been turned on. Against the dusky blues of the twilit garden and the darker-hued sky, the brilliant turquoise water shimmered like a tropical jewel.

“What do you mean, the killer wrote her a letter?” I asked.

“Sometimes it’s the stupidest things.” He looked at me musingly. “I loved Georgia very much. As different as we were, I adored her.”

“I know.” I knew better than to rush him. Ross took his time with his stories.

He gestured to the Jefferson Davis letter. “Sometimes I get too caught up in my work. If I’m not at the clinic, I’m chasing down papers at an estate sale or on the phone with a historian or an auction house…you know how I can be.” He smiled ruefully. “I think Georgia got the idea to run for state senator because she wanted a project, a crusade…something to do since I wasn’t around that much. At first I was all for it. But then it turned out that we really never saw each other. And I think she was…” He paused, searching for words. “I think she was seeing someone else. It may not have been the first time, either.”

I held the bowl of my wineglass with both hands. It would be good to have a drink to get through what was turning into an auto-da-fé. As though he read my thoughts, he walked over to the bar and picked up the Chardonnay bottle and held it up.

“Yes, please.” I lifted my glass. “Do you know who it was?”

He poured my wine and strained what was left in the cocktail shaker into his own glass. “I do now,” he said. “The delivery boy from the dry cleaner’s just dropped her clothes off. There was a plastic bag attached to one of the hangars because they’d found some personal effects in one of her pockets. Including this.”

He pulled a small folded paper out of his pocket and passed it to me.

No signature. I turned it over. Nothing written on the back.

“Do you know who wrote it?”

“My guess is Randy Hunter.” He looked deep into his martini glass as if he’d found the answer there. Then he raised his eyes and said steadily, “I, ah, had a pretty good idea that they were having an affair. All of a sudden we were getting groceries from that new store in Middleburg. All the time. I think Randy delivered them. And stuck around for his tip.”

“Oh.”

I thought of the box of condoms at the barn. If the police had told Ross about them, he wasn’t saying—and I didn’t want to bring that up.

He added, “At least it gives somebody besides me a motive for killing her.”

“You?” I said, startled. “What are you talking about? You were at the hospital delivering twins. That’s a rock-solid alibi.”

“Unfortunately not.” He returned to the sofa and sipped his martini. “My patient wouldn’t go to the hospital, so I went to her boyfriend’s place. Marta Juarez and Emilio Mendez. Illegal and scared, the pair of them. Especially after Marta’s teenage son got involved in a gang fight a few days ago. The cops showed up, but the kid managed to get away, so he didn’t get picked up. Marta was afraid they might be looking for the boy, so after I delivered the twins, they bolted. I have no idea where they went.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Find them,” he said. “I have to or I’m in trouble.” He cocked his head. “I hear a car. That’s Siri…and Mick. Excuse me. I’d better get the door.”

I heard Siri’s musical voice, caroling, “Here he is!” followed by a deep, well-bred British voice saying Ross’s name, then a murmured exchange. A few minutes later, the three of them walked into the study.

“I’d like you to meet someone, Mick,” Ross was saying. “Lucie’s one of my patients, but she’s also a good friend. Lucie, meet Michael Dunne.”

I’d met Ross’s friends before. Most of them were just like he was—low-key, reserved, a bit scholarly. Not Michael Dunne, who walked into the library like he owned the place—occupants included. His frank stare was unnerving. I stared back. Well dressed, sophisticated, urbane. And he knew it.

I am always leery of spending much time in the company of men like that. You feel like a third wheel because you’re dealing with the life-sized ego that goes everywhere with Mr. Wonderful. Still, there was something arresting about those startling green eyes and the way they held mine.

“It’s Mick,” he was saying. “I’ve heard so much about you, Lucie. Nice to finally meet you.” He took my hand in both of his.

I’d never heard anything about him. I pulled my eyes and my hand away and glanced inquiringly at Ross. He wore the stricken expression of a deer in the headlights. Great, just great. What, exactly, had he told Casanova here?

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said neutrally to Mick.

“How about a drink, everyone? Mick? Siri? Lucie, there’s still some more wine left.” Ross didn’t fool anybody with the fake heartiness, but at least it worked as a subject-changer.

“Lovely,” Mick was saying. “Great idea.”

After two glasses of wine I did not want—or need—more alcohol. Mick Dunne unbalanced me and it seemed like a good idea to keep my wits about me. Or what was left of them.

“How about if I start dinner and let you all have your cocktails?” I said. “If I have another glass of wine, we’ll never eat, and I’m sure Mick must be hungry after that flight.”

I could tell, without looking, that he was still studying me.

“I’ll help,” Siri volunteered immediately. “Let the boys talk.”

“Who is he?” I asked when we were alone in the kitchen. “I never heard anything about him. He comes at you like a freight train. And it felt like he was mentally undressing me, the way he kept staring.”

Siri blushed and ran a hand self-consciously through her hair. So he’d done it to her, too. “Yeah, he does give that impression, doesn’t he? He and Ross went to boarding school together. They were roommates for a year. Lost touch, then hooked up again at some medical convention in Florida.”

“Roommates? They’re like night and day.”

“Ross says Mick used to be really shy.”

“He’s not shy anymore,” I said. “When he walked into Ross’s office it felt like he sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”

“I know what you mean, but he I think he’s harmless. The rich playboy act is part of his charm. Besides”—she raised an eyebrow—“he’s really good-looking.”

“In a kind of aging-rock-star way, I suppose,” I said, “with that longish hair and too-perfect tan. Nice eyes, though. But I’ve kind of had it being around men who got shot with the testosterone gun too many times.”

Siri grinned. “You mean Quinn?”

“Quinn owns his own gun. Uses it daily.”

It didn’t take long to get dinner ready. We ate in the dining room because the wind had picked up, making it too cool to eat on the terrace, though thankfully there were no freeze warnings tonight. I lit new candles in the silver candelabra and everyone helped bring the food and dishes to the table. Ross opened the dinner wine, a California Cabernet Sauvignon.

“No Virginia wine tonight?” Mick asked, surprised.

“Lucie brought the wine,” Ross said. “In fact, she brought the whole dinner.”

“Why California?” Mick persisted. “Don’t you drink your own vintage?”

“Of course,” I said, “but drinking too much of your own wine gives you what’s called a ‘cellar palate.’ We try a lot of different wines. We’re always analyzing bottles from other vineyards.”

He picked up his glass and looked at it. “You’d analyze this?”

“Sure. Test it, compare it to other Cabs. If I were home, I’d probably take the rest of the bottle to our lab so we could figure out what the winemaker did to it. What yeast was used, how much it was sugared, if anything was added in case the smell had gone funky…”

“It’s a chemistry experiment?”

I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or disappointed. “In the lab, yes. Here, it’s the wine to enjoy with our dinner.”

Someone’s mobile phone rang.

“Mine.” Ross twisted around to get it off the sideboard and glanced at the text in the window. “Marty. Excuse me.”

I heard him say, “What’s up?” as he left the room.

“Who’s Marty?” Mick glanced from Siri to me.

“One of the doctors from the clinic,” Siri said. “He moonlights for the medical examiner’s office. Ross asked Marty to let him know when the autopsy was finished.”

“Marty didn’t do the autopsy, did he?” I asked.

Siri shook her head. “No, the chief ME did it in Fairfax. But Marty was at the crime scene. Ross asked especially for him. He wanted Marty to take care of her.”

“I thought they already determined the cause of death,” Mick said.

“Not until they finish the autopsy,” Siri told him.

No one spoke after that until Ross walked back into the dining room. He picked up his wineglass and drained it. I’d been watching him this evening and, though I didn’t intend to, had been counting how many drinks he’d had. Too many.

“The ME is finished,” he said, and this time the alcohol leached through into his speech, which was sounding a bit slurred. “The PERK exam showed she had sex before she died. And whoever killed her knocked her out first. They found a bruise on the back of her head. She was struck with something.”

We were all silent. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ross.

Finally Mick cleared his throat. “Any idea what it was she got hit with?” he asked.

“No.” Ross glanced around the room and his eyes rested on me. They were dull and cloudy with booze. My heart ached for him. “I’m sorry, Lucie, but you’re going to have the sheriff’s department at the vineyard tomorrow morning, tearing the place apart. They’re going to take another look around since they didn’t find whatever it was the first time.”

I nodded.

We had five hundred acres of land. A lot of territory. Although it seemed whoever killed Georgia had stayed within the perimeter of the vineyard, rather than venturing into the woods and fields beyond.

Which meant Ross might be right. Randy Hunter, who’d supposedly been having an affair with Georgia, could very well find himself right in the middle of the sheriff’s crosshairs. Except for one thing.

He was gone.

As Ross warned, the sheriff’s department showed up the next morning in full force. Bobby had called the night before after I got home from Ross’s, as a courtesy. “My officers are going to walk the crime scene grid again,” he said. “We’re going to take a closer look at your equipment buildings, places like that. See you bright and early.”

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” I asked.

“Sure,” he sighed. “A needle in a haystack. We didn’t find anything first go-round. We might not find anything this time, either. But we gotta look. And I want to talk to your crew again, too.”

A couple of the officers who showed up the next morning spoke Spanish, but Bobby wanted Hector and Quinn to interpret because our crew looked so scared.

Afterward I sat with Quinn on the stone wall in the courtyard staring at the comforting view of the serene Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance and the well-ordered rows of vines in the foreground. The cloudless sky was so sharply blue it hurt my eyes and the air was clear and sweet. Hector’s wife, Sera, had just finished planting all the flowers now that the frost danger had passed and the weather had become more springlike. Everywhere I looked, halved wine barrels overflowed with pink, white, and purple petunias, and the mossed baskets, which hung throughout the loggia, spilled over with dark red fuchsia and lacy white geraniums. The courtyard looked lovely.

“The guys were afraid Bobby was going to yank their green cards. They didn’t believe he only wanted to know about Georgia.” Quinn pulled a cigar out of a shirt pocket. Yet another Hawaiian design, part of the extensive collection that had become his trademark fashion statement. This one, yellow and brown with dancing monkeys and bananas all over it, had to be a favorite, since he wore it so often.

“The police didn’t find the murder weapon this time, either,” I said. “Maybe Randy took it with him.”

Quinn unwrapped his cigar. “You really got Randy pegged for this?”

“Looks like you were right about him and Georgia having an affair. Ross confirmed it. Last night he showed me a note that came back with Georgia’s dry cleaning. Someone asked her to meet up at ‘the usual place’ after the fund-raiser,” I said. “Ross is pretty sure Randy wrote the note. Apparently he came by all the time to deliver groceries. That’s when Ross reckoned it started. The note said something about an apology. I bet it all went south and maybe Randy lost his temper.”

“Ross has a note from Randy?” Quinn lit the cigar and puffed on it. “Pretty convenient, don’t you think? Deflects suspicion from the husband.”

“Ross did not kill Georgia,” I snapped. “He was delivering twins that night. Look, I like Randy and I don’t want to believe it, either, but Georgia’s dead and he’s gone.”

“I thought you told me this morning the medical examiner said she had sex with someone before she died. Not the thing you do before you kill somebody, is it? At least, I don’t.” He tugged on a thick gold chain he wore around his neck. I used to think it was odd he wore more jewelry than I did, but I’d finally gotten used to it.