PW01 - Died On The Vine (14 page)

Without further ado, we dived in. In the catalog of Guilty Pleasures, nothing quite beats rootling through someone else’s file cabinets. With minimal organization, we each grabbed an armful and started flipping.

Mary seemed drawn to the schedules and payment listings. She pulled a small notebook from her purse and began making cryptic notes.

Calgary frowned at this and then sighed. “Let me know if you ladies need anything,” he told us, and left us to desecrate the files in peace.

My stack seemed to be reports from various sources, mostly in the Orient. The reports were written in quasi-military intelligence style, with an appalling number of typos and misspellings. None of them seemed to be very recent.

Julia had drawn several bulging folders of miscellaneous clippings. Although many dealt with the MIA issue and quite a few were local papers reporting on the speeches by Winslow, there were also some oddballs that seemed to be included for no particular reason.

Mary looked up from her notes and lighted upon a battered tin ashtray. “Ah-hah!” she exclaimed triumphantly, and lit up.

She leaned back and released a spiral of smoke toward the ceiling. “These reports are really going to spice up my book. It seems pretty clear that the fundraising was a perpetual motion machine that allowed Winslow to travel in style and speak before adoring audiences. In the past few years, there’s been almost no real attempt to get information out of Viet Nam. I’m starting to favor ‘The Life and Death of a Scoundrel’ for a title. What do you think?”

Julia looked up. “Huh? Never mind that. Get a load of this!” She held up a clipping. The headline read, “In rural Passatonnack County, a retired bureaucrat recreates Bordeaux.”

I recognized it at once; there is a framed copy in our tasting room. It was Jerome Wither’s Post piece about the opening of our winery.

THIRTEEN

Mary eagerly crowded over, reading the clipping over Julia’s shoulder. Of course, I had read it many times before.

I pointed to what had to be the operative phrase that must have warranted the piece’s inclusion in the folder. “ – the charming and gracious Mrs. Rayburn, known to her friends as Cissy, tragically lost her first husband in Viet Nam – “

Mary took the article from Julia and skimmed it rapidly. “Hmm. Two hundred acres, et cetera et cetera, gravelly soil, da da, wonderful old farmhouse. What the hell is a ‘flinty Chardonnay’?”

“You’d have to taste it, I’m not much good at describing tastes,” I said apologetically.

“Well,” Mary looked up. “This seems to show us how Winslow heard of you. But we still don’t know why you were targeted. There must be thousands of people in Virginia who lost loved ones in the war.”

Julia held up another clipping. “Looky here.”

This one was headlined, “Squatter evicted from national wildlife preserve.” The very article we had earlier discovered in the library.

While Julia and Mary were looking at the new clipping, I seized a photograph that had been beneath it. “Look, it’s Jimmy!”

And it was. It was the official photograph from Jimmy’s service record. I felt my throat close around a lump. God! He was younger than Peter is now.

Julia placed the photograph beside the newspaper picture of Craig Southern. “There is a certain superficial resemblance,” she admitted.

Mary’s eyes were shining. “Anatomy of a scam! Keep looking. See if there’s anything else that might indicate what he was up to.”

But we could find nothing else that might indicate what Winslow’s plan had been.

Finally, about a pack of cigarettes later, Mary sat back. “I think we’ve milked this place dry. Let’s call it a day.”

“Okay, it’s a day,” Julia agreed.

As we exited the office, I was behind Julia and Mary. Giving in to a sudden larcenous impulse, I picked up an address book on the desk and slipped it into my purse.

In the outer office, Lisa was nowhere to be seen. Calgary had his feet up and was reading a magazine. Not Soldier of Fortune, I noticed, but Business Week. The man obviously needed a change of career.

Mary smiled sweetly, doing the innocent young thing that probably gets her many quotes that sources later regret. “Mr. Calgary, we’d like to take a few of these clippings if that’s alright with you.”

Calgary nodded. He rose to his feet with keys in hand. He had obviously just been waiting for us to finish so he could lock up and go home. “You take whatever you want, Miss. As far as I’m concerned, Lest We Forget is out of business.”

In the car driving back, I began to page through the address book. Julia glanced at me in the rear view mirror. “What have you got there, Cissy?”

“Winslow’s address book,” I answered, unable to keep a trace of smugness out of my voice.

Mary whirled around. “An address book! Mary, where is your investigator’s nose these days? I can’t believe I missed that. Gimme.”

I held it out of her reach. “I saw it first.”

It was a most unenlightening document, to me at least. I’m sure that Mary, with her research background, would glean much more from it. But dammit, I did see it first, and I was going to look at it first!

Then I did find an interesting entry, in the Ns. “’Li Nguyen’,” I read aloud. “Mary, is this your mother?”

Mary whirled again. “Jeez, is she in there?” She gave a little shiver. “I find that kind of – creepy.”

“And Winslow never contacted your mother?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“But this says Fairfax. I thought your mother lived in Tacoma.”

“She moved out east when I was accepted to J school. Went in with Uncle Dho when he opened a – guess what?”

Julia and I chorused, “An ethnic restaurant.”

“Bingo.”

I handed the little book to Mary. “Maybe you can get something out of this.”

It was dark when we finally turned off onto River Road. Past Julia’s, I pointed to an unfamiliar sight. “Look, there’s a light in the trailer.”

“You suppose Craig found his way here?”

“Let’s find out.”

We pulled up the dirt track on the far side of the Cabernet Sauvignon. I could see a shadow moving against the light inside. “You two stay here. If it is Craig, I don’t want to spook him.”

I mounted the step and knocked on the door.

It was Craig. He opened the door holding a battered copy of
Return of the King
. Behind him, I could see a pan simmering on the small kitchen range. Chili, my nose said. A small suitcase lay on the old sofa. Craig was in residence.

“Hello, Miz Rayburn.”

“Hi, Craig. I won’t bother you. I’ve been gone all day and saw the light on.”

He nodded. “Your husband let me in. He’s a nice guy.”

I thought someone as quiet as Jack would appeal to Craig. “Yes, isn’t he? Well, let us know if you have any problems.”

“Will do.”

I walked back to the car. “Yep, it’s Craig,” I reported as I got in. “Heating chili and reading Tolkien. Jack let him in.”

Back at the house, Mary collected her Miata and drove off. After she pulled away, Julia waved me over to the driver’s window. She leaned out and said, “So now we have Mama Nguyen within striking distance. Let’s put that in our pipes and smoke it.” Then she too drove off.

In the kitchen, a welcome sight greeted me. The blue cheese was sitting on the table under its plastic dome, achieving room temperature. Beside it a bottle of Cissy’s Own Cabernet was shaking off the cellar’s chill. And Tough Stuff was addressing a saucer which contained a few crumbs of blue cheese.

Jack came into the kitchen and gave me a bear hug.

I squeezed back and asked, “Are you sure that’s good for him?”

“I’m sure he really really wanted some, “ Jack answered. “I only gave him a little bit. McCavity too.”

McCavity glared down at us from the top of the refrigerator. His saucer was wiped clean.

Jack produced the “butler’s friend” and eased the cork from the Cabernet. I seated myself regally and accepted a glass, swirling it to watch the “cathedral windows” snake down the inside of the glass.

Tough Stuff came over and stuck his snout into the glass, sampling the nose. He wrinkled his own little nose and backed away in disappointment.

“Silly cat, you don’t know what’s good,” I told him.

Cissy’s Own Cabernet is an annual present to me from Jack. After our first crush of Cabernet Sauvignon had aged for twelve months in oak barrels, Jack and I sampled the contents of the barrels, using a little gadget called a wine thief to remove small quantities of wine through the bung. Jack was planning to blend the barrels before bottling, mixing the American oak aged wine with that aged in French oak to achieve the level of oakiness that American palates prefer.

But I fell in love with the luscious velvet of the pure French oak. The next day I noticed that one of the French barrels had been labeled in chalk ‘Cissy’s’.

That barrel was bottled separately as Cissy’s Own Cabernet, and the contents were absolutely mine to do with as I wished.

And every year from then on, one of the barrels was mine. A fifty-five gallon barrel makes two hundred and seventy-five bottles of wine, leaving me with plenty of bottles to give as gifts. But Cissy’s Own is a private reserve, so don’t come to Passatonnack Winery expecting to buy a bottle. It’s mine, all mine!

This was the ’88. Wonderful stuff, just approaching a thoughtful maturity. I sipped and beamed at Jack over the glass.

“I see Craig found his way here,” I observed.

“He showed up a little after noon. I gave him the key and left him to settle in. I told him I’d show him how to tie off the vines if he wanted to earn a little extra money.”

“So that’s alright, then.”

I dived into the blue cheese and crackers and filled Jack in on our discoveries of the day. When I was finished he frowned. “With all these characters, I’m getting confused. It sounds like Billington Smith could have done the murder, but not following Winslow on his visit here. And this Mrs. Griffith, what about her movements? Or Calgary?”

I sighed. “Maybe we could get Julia to add their movements to her famous timeline. But I’m not sure how we go about asking these people to account for their movements on the night in question.”

“The police probably already did that,” Jack pointed out.

“Good thought. I wonder if Dawson is still feeling guilty enough about the software piracy to answer a few questions?”

“It’s too late to be asking him tonight. In face, it’s too late for most things. Not for everything, however,” Jack answered, pulling me out of my chair.

And the rest of the evening is nobody’s business.

Next morning, I slept in. When I woke up, the warm body next to me was Polly.

Now, Polly knows she’s not supposed to sleep on the bed. But she thinks that rule only applies in the dark. Once the sun has risen, she figures, “If you’re going to be a lazy slugabed, then so will I.” Right now she was in a ridiculous posture, on her back with her feet in the air and her head to one side.

She opened one eye, saw me looking at her, and smiled ingratiatingly. Then rolled over, heaved a luxurious sigh and closed her eyes again. Succumbing to peer pressure, I dozed off again.

When I finally put in an appearance downstairs, it was ten o’clock. Jack was long gone, but he’d made coffee, bless his heart.

I devoted myself to coffee and a bagel. I noticed the phone machine was telling me it had a message.

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally give in and get an answering machine. Now I wouldn’t live without it. It’s my little electronic butler, accepting visitor cards with white gloved courtesy and allowing me to go on with my life. I call it Mister ‘Udson.

I pressed the play button, metaphorically accepting the call from ’Udson. It was Mary. “Cissy, come over to Washington House when you get a chance. This you’ve got to see.”

What was especially intriguing was the suppressed giggle in Mary’s voice. Something told me that what I had to see wasn’t a clue.

So I was curious. So Washington House does a great little lunch. So I went.

Washington House is a big rambling old brick Colonial set on what is probably the highest hill in the country. On either side of the drive, huge lilac thickets will make an impressive lavender show in a few weeks, and the bushels of blossoms Beverly Washington will harvest will perfume the house as the thickets perfume the hill.

Beverly and Dave Washington are no relation to the more famous Virginian of that name, even though he is reputed to have stayed in the house once. Supposedly, he was on his way to one of those disorganized skirmishes that have collectively come to be known as the French and Indian War.

Some people question whether the house was actually even built before the Revolution, but that Washington slept in the Washington House is an article of faith in Passatonnack County. Personally, I don’t see that it matters one way or the other.

The Washingtons are transplanted New Yorkers who saw an ad for the house in a slick city magazine just when they were tiring of their urban yuppie existence. Beverly calls it karma; she’s very New Age.