Dead on the Vine: (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries #1 (A Cozy Mystery)) (2 page)

“De Montagne,” he said testily as he climbed out of the jeep. “What are these men doing standing around? If there is no work for them, they should go home.” He is forever watching the bottom line, concerned that I am too generous with the temporary laborers, and the permanent staff of two, including himself. I insisted on our profit sharing arrangement after he refused to take a wage, a percentage of the business or any other form of payment. Samson thinks of himself as my surrogate father and guardian.

“There’s a problem—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I know. The nights are not cool enough and the days are too warm, but no reason for men to stand idle. There is work to do,” he added, casting his eyes over the vineyard. “The 2009 cabernet needs racking, but, of course, that is for
me
to do
only.
But I cannot do
everything.
I see that the compost has not been mixed into the soil as I suggested. I see cutting that needs to be done. I see… What is that?” His eyes had fallen on the motionless figure of Kevin Harlan, forty feet away. Samson is old, but there’s nothing wrong with his hearing or eyesight, a fact that many a chastised worker could attest to. “A joke of some foolish kind?”

“Samson,” I cut in, “it’s Kevin Harlan—“

“Well, I can see it is Harlan, but what is he doing leaning on the trellis like that? He will break the new canes. If he wants to break canes, he can go to his own vines.”

“He’s dead, Samson,” I replied. “Murdered.”

“Murdered?” He spoke the word as if he had never heard it before, but then it was a word neither of us had used in reference to someone we knew. It was a word for gangsters and drug dealers, for the streets of LA or New York, not for a stony hillside vineyard in Napa. “Here?”

“I don’t know.” I replied honestly, just as a sheriff’s cruiser pulled in behind Samson’s old Jeep. Two more followed.

“This won’t be good for business,” Samson muttered as I stepped toward the foremost police car and the emerging figure of our Sheriff, Ben Stoltze.

I grew up with Ben Stoltze, back when St Helena was a tiny farming community, the local winemakers made cabernet that sold for two dollars a jug and most grapes were grown for the table. Times have changed, and so have I, but I swear Ben still looks like the roughneck right tackle I remember from the high school football team. Ben is an attractive man, tall and a bit stout, with wide shoulders and bowed legs. His face is deeply tanned and lined from too much sun. He looks more like a cowboy from a cigarette ad than a policeman. His stiff-as-straw blond hair is always tousled and his suit is always rumpled, but he possesses an aura of quiet competence.

After high school, while I was entering into a marriage soon to go sour, Ben went to Southern California on a football scholarship. He lasted two semesters before he returned to Napa and joined the police force. I don’t know why he left college, and I never asked. We weren’t that close. The last time I spoke to him was at our thirty-year class reunion two years ago. Not long after that his wife Sarah, a charming woman who had raised three attractive, well-mannered sons, passed away from colon cancer. I had attended the funeral along with three hundred others. Ben had looked bad that day, drained and confused, and I was sad to see that he still wore the shadow of that expression.

Ben walked over, his rundown cowboy boots crunching gravel, his eyes straying to Kevin Harlan’s body. Behind him came two detectives dressed in suits and ties, one tall and carrying a camera, the other fat with a tomato-red face. The heavy one had a hand thrust into his waistband in a futile attempt to adjust his too-tight pants. Behind them were a pair of deputies in khaki uniforms.

Ben stopped beside me as the other officers continued purposefully down the row.

“Claire,” Ben said, glancing at me for a split second with sun-faded blue eyes, then back at Kevin. Ben nodded at Samson.

“Hello, Ben,” I replied, crossing my arms to hide my shaking hands.

“You find him like that?” Ben nodded at Kevin.

“Victor did,” I replied.

“Better get Victor out here, I’ll need to talk to him. When’d he find the body?”

“A few minutes before he called you,” I answered, watching the tall detective snap photos of Kevin’s corpse. The detective looked young for the job. He had blue-black hair cut in a bristly buzz-cut and his suit looked expensive. The fat detective was several years older, balding with a curly black fringe of hair. His clothes looked cheap, and slept in. Neither man inspired my confidence.

“Hola, cómo está?” Ben called to the three Mexican men as he walked their way.

They watched Ben’s approach with hesitant smiles. Many of the migrants who work the fields have a natural aversion for the police. These men, I assumed, were legal immigrants. If they weren’t they probably would have bolted before the police arrived. I personally don’t care, legal or not. Not because I want cheap labor (I pay a fair wage) but because I find fault with the policy of drawing an imaginary line in the sand and expecting millions to live in poverty on one side while we prosper on the other. Most of the migrant workers are at least half Native American and have more right to be here than I do.

“This is bad,” Samson said as Ben spoke to the three men. “A body dead on the vines? That will hurt sales plenty, let me tell you.” He shook his head.

“I’m more concerned about Kevin,” I snapped. “Not a profitable concern, I know, but—” I didn’t finish because I couldn’t. If I had, I would have started crying and I’m not much for public tears. Before Samson could say anything further I headed for the house, leaving him staring after me in confusion.

I flopped into a chair at the kitchen table, held my head in my hands and thought about Kevin. My life would be less rich for his loss. We’d shared so many good times. The harvests and crushes, the planting and tastings. Even the bad times seemed precious now. The times when equipment failed or the rains didn’t come or came in a flood. It was then that I thought of Laurel, Kevin’s wife.

“Oh, no,” I said as Victor walked in from the dining room.

“What?” Victor asked, anxiety carving deep lines in his face. “What’s the matter?”

“Laurel,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”

“Oh,” Victor said. Laurel was a cold and beautiful woman who had married Kevin seven years ago. Many nights I had listened to them argue inside their converted barn, which is less than two hundred yards from my home. With me, she was saccharine sweet and full of complaints. Either my workers were lying under ‘Her’ almond trees and crushing ‘Her’ grass or the smell of freshly picked grapes in the gondolas was just too much and could I have them moved downwind? It was never ending. With Victor she was snotty and hot-tempered. One day last fall, during the height of the crush, she had ordered Victor to have one of the pickers move his pickup off the road in front of her house. She would have told the picker herself, she rudely explained, except she didn’t “speak wetback.”  Victor calmly told her she didn’t own the road and she countered with a threat to call immigration if it wasn’t gone in five minutes. Kevin was apologetic after these incidents, but it did put a damper on our relationship.

“Ben or one of the other cops will tell her,” Victor replied shortly.

I nodded, but felt like I wasn’t showing Kevin the respect he deserved. No matter how bad it made me feel, I wasn’t going over there to deliver the bad news. If she and I had been friends I would have insisted on being there. For the first time I was almost grateful she was such a witch. 

We were interrupted by a tapping at the kitchen door jamb. I turned to find Ben Stoltze’s frowning face thrust through the still open door.

“Need you out here, Victor,” Ben said. They needed no introduction - Victor’s family has been in the valley longer than Ben’s or mine. Longer than any Anglo. More importantly, both Ben and Victor are natives of the Valley and remember a time when everyone knew everyone. And everything about everyone.

“Coming, Ben,” Victor replied and Ben disappeared.

“Jess is doing fine,” Victor told me as he trailed Ben outside. I nodded my thanks, but I assumed he was lying.  I doubted that Jessica had recovered so quickly from the shock of seeing Kevin’s corpse. I knew I hadn’t.

I followed Victor to the door and stopped there. Out in the vineyard the detectives were measuring something with a roll-up tape measure while the deputies duck-walked around Kevin’s body, combing through the short clover with their fingertips. Kevin was still hanging from the trellis, mimicking the cruciform shapes of the sturdy rootstock from which the grape canes grow. Ben, Victor, Samson and the three Mexican men were standing on the patio talking in Spanish. Ben had a small notepad and a stub of pencil in his hand. It was a scene straight out of a television police drama.

I waited for a break in the conversation before I spoke. “I’m going to take a shower and change clothes. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“All right,” Ben replied. “I want you to come with me to the Harlans. I’d like somebody the widow knows there when I give her the bad news. Then we’ll need to talk.”

“Great,”
I said, and Ben shot me a look. I didn’t care. “Ten minutes,” I said grudgingly and went back into the house, cursing under my breath, mentally asking Kevin to forgive me.

I’ve never been one of those women who take two hours to do their hair and another two to dress. Maybe it’s because I never have time, or maybe I just can’t be bothered. My two indulgences in the feminine grooming vein are bubble baths and perfumes. There’s nothing like a long soak with a good book and an even better glass of wine. And the smell of fine perfume can put me into a rhapsody as great as sipping one of my own wines.

I was rinsing under a hot jet of water when I remembered Victor telling me about the broken cellar door. The thought set my heart racing and I was out of the shower in a flash, still soapy and dripping. I pulled on jeans, ratty tennis shoes and a purple sweatshirt, ran a comb through my hair and headed downstairs.

I took the stone steps from the kitchen to the wine cellar two at a time. The cellar vault is actually a cave cut into the hillside where the natural temperature controls of the earth keep it cool. A thermometer at the rear of the cellar reads a constant temperature of fifty degrees, summer, winter or fall, while the front of the cellar, where the fermenting tanks are located, hovers between seventy and seventy-five degrees.

The cellar was built by the bankrupt-banker and with one look you can see where his money went. Three thirteen foot tall, 6,000 liter stainless steel tanks take up a large part of the front of the cellar. These tanks are the primary fermentation vats where the must (crushed grapes, including some of the stems, seeds and skins) is allowed to go through its first fermentation, which takes two to three weeks. Stainless steel piping brings the must down from the de-stemming/crushing machine located on the open-air crush pad thirty feet overhead.

The tops of the tanks have pneumatic lids, but for red wine we leave the tops open throughout the primary fermentation process. The stems, seeds and skins float in a cap on top of the juice, to which we add yeast cultures. This cap is punched down twice a day to keep the skins in contact with the wine as the yeast converts the grape’s sugar to alcohol. Most people don’t realize that grape juice is clear and that red wine draws all of its color and much of its flavor from the skins.

Beyond the tanks, in the cool darkness of the cave, are rows of large oak barrels fire-toasted on the inside to encourage oak flavors in the cabernet. This is where the secondary fermentation process takes place. This usually takes several months to a year, sometimes longer. During this time the wine is racked (siphoned off the top) twice, leaving the lees (sediments) behind. The wine is then racked into smaller oak barrels where it ages until it reaches maturity, usually a year or two. The decision on when to sell is made by me on a vintage by vintage basis.

In the cellar, Samson was perched on top of a ladder leaned against one of the fermentation tanks. A hose was unwound across the floor and Samson was rinsing the inside of the tank with a mixture of water and sterilizing solution. He does this once a month between harvests to keep the tanks clean. Otherwise, any microorganisms or bacteria in the tanks would find its way into the flavor of the wines. And moldy cabernet isn’t a big seller.

“The sheriff is still outside, and no work is being done,” Samson paused long enough to complain, then went back to rinsing. Nothing can take Samson’s attention from winemaking for long, not even the murder of a neighbor. His life revolves around wine and grapes. Violet Vineyard cabernet, Victor and myself are his only friends, and I’m pretty sure I don’t rate as high as the cabernet. This suits Samson. He needs no company, has no interest in news or gossip. He doesn’t even own a television, but he’s on the mailing list of almost every wine magazine and newsletter in the country. If it isn’t wine, it isn’t worth knowing, is his general philosophy.

“Samson,” I said. He didn’t take his eyes off the swirl of water in the tank, but I knew he was giving me perhaps ten percent of his attention. “Have you noticed anything damaged or out of place?”

“What?!” His head snapped around and he almost fell off the ladder.  “Why would that be?” He turned off the hose and his eyes probed the dark recesses of the cellar as I explained about the cellar door being kicked in by whoever killed Kevin.

“Damn that Harlan,” he spat, one of the most insensitive things I have ever heard from my gruff old winemaker, but I didn’t rebuke him. I was just too stressed to worry about Samson’s rotten attitude.

Samson climbed down, cursing in Greek, and began roving over the cellar. He looked behind an aging winepress coated in a fine layer of white calcium, and under and around the primary fermentation tanks. He lifted the dusty canvas covers off of the bottling machinery and the destemmer and tried the door handle on the small cave where I keep my private stock of wine. He walked back into the vault, past rows of oak barrels, looking at and under each one. He reached the end of the cave and came back to where I stood looking at the broken lock on the cellar door.

“Everything is fine,” he said, eyes still peering into the dark corners of the cellar. “It should have been locked. Every night!” He said, poking the air with an emaciated finger.

“It was locked. They kicked it in,” I sighed.

“A stronger lock must be bought! I keep records here. Valuable information!” He hurried on his skinny legs to a rickety desk shoved into the far corner of the cellar where he doodles on notepads and chews on cheap cigars that he never lights. He pulled open the top drawer and rummaged through a mess of useless papers and free promotional pens.

“Samson, not many people read Greek,” I tried to reassure him.

“There are translators at the university,” he reminded me as he took an ancient stub of cigar from the drawer and stuck it in his mouth. Chomping angrily on the withered stogie, he held a yellowed piece of paper at arm’s length. I left him there, muttering, squinting at his spiky scrawl, and went to meet Ben.