Death By the Glass #2 (8 page)

He gave her a grin. “You think like that all the time?”

“Too many
Perry Mason
reruns when I was a kid,” said Sunny. She held up an olive. “This is about the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. It’s like the best pickled thing and the best salty thing and the best deep-fried thing all in one.”

“They’re dangerous,” said Nick. He looked up the bar, where one of the servers was waiting to put in an order. “Don’t go anywhere.”

A few minutes later he came back. “You come up with anything?” he asked.

“Not yet.” She sipped her wine. “I think we have another problem. I don’t think a lover would bring a bottle of wine to a guy whose business is wine, especially when she must know that he would have had plenty to drink by the time she got there. Besides, she’s already playing rent-a-babe delivery service. She wouldn’t bring a bottle of wine on top of it.”

“Especially not that wine.”

“Why, what was it?”

“Auction house material. It was a 1967 Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque. The good stuff too. Premier Grand Cru Reservée made by Michel Verlan. It’s a pretty chunk of change for a bottle like that, if you can even get your hands on one. They never make much of it, and to find a bottle that old is really unusual. It’s definitely not your typical booty-call red. Personally, I usually bring a six-pack of Corona and call it done.”

Sunny nodded. “Can I get a glass of water?”

Nick filled a glass and put it down in front of her, then held up a finger and went to tend to customers down at the other end of the bar.

Sunny sipped the water. It was the same wine, the wine she and Andre drank, the really expensive, old, rare French wine. The phrase
booty-call red
kept running through her mind like a mantra of disaster. She was slightly nauseous. There was a possibility, small but growing, that she would regret the dish of deep-fried olives with anchovy. She needed a moment to think and get her head together. She decided to take refuge in the ladies’.

It seemed to take forever to cross the dining room, and the stairway leading downstairs looked impossibly far away. With
each step she became more conscious of the placement of one foot in front of the other, making it more and more difficult to walk. The buzz of conversation in the dining room receded and she heard instead the rasp and click of her heels on the floor. They struck the polished concrete loudly with each step and after a while that was all she could hear.

The bathroom at Vinifera
had a foyer decorated like a bachelor pad. Sunny sat down on a white leather bench and put her head between her knees, staring at the zebra print rug under her feet and hoping no one would come in. Breathing heavy little breaths, she sorted through the facts, putting them in order, trying to figure out what they could mean.

It seemed to go like this: On Saturday night, Nathan Osborne came home from Vinifera late, died in his living room, and had a mysterious visitor who left behind a very expensive bottle of wine. On Sunday, Andre Morales used a forgery of the same expensive bottle of wine as an excuse to get her to come home with him (not that he needed much of one). Nick Ambrosi didn’t find Nathan until Monday morning, but whoever visited Nathan on Saturday night would have known all day Sunday that he was dead. She thought about family meal out on the back patio at Vinifera Sunday night, with Andre sitting next to her. He had seemed relaxed enough. He was the one who asked where Nathan was. She remembered Remy Castels reaching over them to refill their glasses. Remy had been cordial, even cheerful that night, at least compared to his demeanor when they’d met him in the wine cellar. Rivka had been sitting beside her, and across
from them was Dahlia, the pagan waitress with the blue hair. Nick had been there. He was the one who’d said Nathan hadn’t called for his car that day and that Nathan was feeling no pain by the time he took him home on Saturday night. There were a dozen faces at the table, and more at the other table. There was the guy who made the crack about Nathan going to live at some other restaurant, and there was the co-owner, Eliot Denby, who’d been pouring himself a glass of wine behind the bar as she and Andre left. It made her head thud to imagine one of them might have stood in Nathan’s living room Saturday night, witness to his death, and told no one.

The existence of those two very unusual bottles of wine in such close proximity to Nathan’s death was too coincidental. The scene in Nathan Osborne’s living room late Saturday night was growing darker by the minute. There had to be a connection, and it was ominous. The thing to do was call Sergeant Harvey right now and enlighten him about the existence of the second bottle. It could be the break in the case he was looking for.

But her late-night activities would land center stage in an investigation of what was starting to look a lot like murder, and Andre Morales would be right in the spotlight. New lovers were hard enough to find without turning them over to the local law enforcement agency at the first sign of trouble. He couldn’t be involved. But what if he was? What if Andre knew about the wine being phony? What if he was involved in its production? What if he knew more about Nathan’s death than he was saying? That Andre might be involved in murder was impossible to even contemplate. What made more sense, if any of this made sense at all, was that Nathan had discovered the fraudulent wine and had been killed to keep him quiet. In that case, Andre might be in danger as well, especially if word got out that he’d
had his hands on the bogus Marceline. There were more leaps and assumptions than she was comfortable with, but there were too many coincidences and she had to start somewhere. The important thing now was to find out where the phony wine came from, who knew about it, and if it had anything to do with Nathan’s death. If Andre was involved, she wanted to know exactly how before she said anything about it to the police—and before she got further involved with him. Regardless of what she ultimately discovered, the faster she moved, the better. One thing was certain, there was more to Nathan Osborne’s death than heart disease.

Sunny went over to the mirror, hoping the ritual of freshening up would calm her down. While she combed her hair unnecessarily, smoothed powder over her nose, and glossed her lips, she wondered how much she really knew about Andre Morales anyway. She knew he was born in September, had a promising career as a chef, and lived in the kind of house where the sheets and towels coordinated nicely with the rugs, duvet, and curtains. She knew he was born in Mexico, had tiger eyes, and wore a leather jacket that smelled like pine pitch and campfire smoke. She knew that one of his kisses could open a view to a wide landscape of desire, and that his biceps, round and full, were good places to let her hands come to rest. All of that was sweet and lovely, the stuff of pleasant daydreams, but it didn’t tell her where he got that Premier Grand Cru Reservée or if he had anything to do with dropping the second bottle in Nathan Osborne’s living room.

He would probably be waiting for her when she got back upstairs. She foraged for a mint, as though fresh breath would help her think of what she would say to him, and walked out rehearsing excuses. A server coming out of the wine cellar nearly
ran into her as he pushed out the door and jogged upstairs without a second look. She looked at the cellar door. Almost before the idea occurred to her, she slipped inside.

She didn’t bother checking the racks in the middle of the room. What she was looking for was bound to be locked away in one of the alcoves. Nathan and Andre had at least two things in common, namely Vinifera and Château de Marceline. It stood to reason that both bottles probably came from Vinifera’s cellar, which would be the closest, most convenient source. It was worth having a look, at least. Sunny walked around a mountain of boxed cases to the other side of the cellar, where she peered through the grating on the locked alcoves at the bottles laying down inside. All she could see were the logos stamped into the foil at the end of the bottles on the first rack. There was almost no chance she would see anything useful in the gloomy light without a key to the grating, but she looked into each alcove anyway, hoping to find something. She was at the far end of the cellar, near the last of the alcoves, when the door opened and she saw Remy Castels come in with another man walking behind him.

She froze in the shadows, hoping they wouldn’t look in her direction and quickly trying to think of a reason for her to be there. If they noticed her, she could always say she was curious about their wine collection in a professional capacity and wanted to make some notes. That might not suggest the best manners, but it was at least plausible. She watched them walk over to the main racks and turn down one of the rows. They wouldn’t see her unless they walked to the end of it and looked to the right. She crept over to a far stack of boxes, walking on the toes of her shoes like Catwoman, and sunk down behind them. She listened to them moving around the cave. The man
said something she couldn’t hear. Remy’s reply was too muffled to make out. They rounded a corner and she could hear them more clearly. Remy said, “I’d have to check, but I don’t think we’ve bought any in months. He made those bottles last.”

“At that price, I’m sure as hell glad he did,” said the other man. His deep voice resonated in the stone chamber.

“He drank very little of that kind of thing lately,” said Remy.

The man chuckled. “You’d never know it.”

They turned down another row and Remy said, “What did you need, the ninety-four?” and the other’s voice said, “Ninety-six.”

“Take the ninety-four. Tell them it’s worth the extra fifteen dollars. If they resist, give it to them at the same price as the ninety-six.”

“Will do.”

She heard heavy footsteps and then the door, presumably the other man leaving. Remy’s shoes made a soft, coarse sound as he moved down the rows of wine. His steps grew louder as he walked toward her, along the corridor that went past the alcoves. She edged further away, crouching low and hugging the card-board boxes of wine. He stopped and she heard the jangle of keys and a lock opening on one of the grate doors. A few minutes later it shut with a loud metallic clang and he walked back across the cellar to the main door and out. She exhaled with relief and walked around the far end of the cases toward the door.

All that adrenaline was a waste of time. If she was going to find a bottle of Marceline in this place, she was going to need those keys. She was trying to think of ways that that might happen when, off to her left, a stack of boxes caught her eye. Several cases had been set aside on a pallet and secured with the wide plastic wrap used to hold shipments of cartons together. One
of the boxes was labeled “Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque.” Forget the keys.

She went over to have a closer look. The box on top had been opened. Looking around first to make sure she was alone, she lifted one of the cardboard flaps and pulled up a bottle. The foil was red. The label said “1967 Premier Grand Cru Reservée,” with “Michel Verlan” spelled out in red capital letters near the bottom, an etching of a château faint in the background. She lifted the other flap. Two bottles were missing from the case. She let the flaps drop and stepped back. A piece of paper with “Do Not Touch—Reserved for Wine Club” written on it in black marker was taped to the boxes and sealed over with cellophane.

Her heart was beating hard as she went upstairs and walked back to the bar. She waited for Nick to work his way over to her. When he got there, she asked him to tell Andre she wasn’t feeling well and had gone home. He said for her to wait just a second and he would go get Andre so she could tell him herself, but she said, no, she needed to leave right now, and would call him later.

He gave her a concerned look. “All right, whatever you say. Are you okay?”

“I don’t think it’s serious. I just don’t want to get sick again,” she said. People left you alone when your stomach was threatening, she found.

On the way out she stopped at the hostess stand and introduced herself to the woman on duty, saying she was interested in talking with someone about Vinifera’s wine club.

“You’d want to speak to the sommelier, Remy Castels, about that. It’s not really a Vinifera thing. All we do is provide the space,” said the hostess. “I can give you his card.”

“That would be great.”

“He has a group that comes in once a month. They do a tasting and he recommends wines for them to cellar.”

“And they buy the wines from him?” Sunny asked.

“I believe so, but you’ll have to ask Remy for the details.”

“Thanks, I will.”

Sunny smiled and shouldered her little handbag. As she reached the curtain she glanced back at the bar. Andre still had not come out of the kitchen. In a few steps she was out the door and into the night, where she exhaled a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

Certain small but potent pleasures
made living alone bearable, even enjoyable. High on Sunny’s list was the freedom to come home late at night, sit cross-legged on the work-table in the middle of the kitchen, eat corn flakes, and watch bad TV, sans remorse. She sat there for the first bowl without turning on the television, staring at the milky gray screen, thinking about Remy Castels. No wonder he didn’t like anyone poking around in his cellar. She was ready to believe he knew all about that case of wine.

She got up to refill her bowl from the box of corn flakes. Was anything really sans remorse? She shook the box doubtfully and poured another bowl. Nothing was simple anymore. What she’d grown up thinking was the most basic food, the corn flake, was not what it appeared to be. For some time now, a person’s standard equipment hadn’t been sufficient to do its job of identifying what was good to eat and what wasn’t. The factories did an excellent job of fooling the senses. It might look like a corn flake, smell like a corn flake, and taste like a corn flake, but it was probably made from a fish-corn Frankenstein hybrid, some part of which had been milled, extracted, mashed, strained, bleached, and irradiated until it tasted like cardboard and lasted twice
as long, then doctored up to imitate what it might have started out as in the first place: corn. Gene-spliced seeds, irradiation, fungicides—there was no way to know anymore what you were soaking up even if you grew it yourself. All you could really do was light a candle for the immune system and soldier on.