Wildcat Wine (2 page)

“Let's go then, son.”

Bonita put a hand on Benny's shoulder. “
No conoces tu aquel hombre
.”

“Yeah, but
I
know him, known him all my life,” I said, overlooking for the moment how much trouble I'd gotten in with Dave when I was fifteen. “He's cool.” That Dave was cool was true, but largely irrelevant from a mother's point of view.

Bonita gave me the same look she'd given me when I bought Benny the truck.

“I'll take care of him, have him back by night,” Dave said.

As Benny reached for his jacket and his keys, Bonita reached for him. “Do not drink or smoke anything.”

“While your momma finishes the don't dos, I'll get my gear and bring it in,” Dave said. “No sense letting it bake in that truck.” A minute later, Dave dropped a worn-out backpack on the floor and handed me a ring of keys. “Hang on to these, will you? I'm always losing 'em. And here's the truck key. Don't lose that, you hear?” And he handed me a single key on a U-Haul plastic key ring.

I followed Dave and Benny to the door. “Did you get your teeth fixed?”

“Yeah, looks great, huh? Delvon and me had some loose cash after—”

I cut my eyes to Benny.

“Ah, after our, er, last harvest,
apple
harvest.” Grin, grin at me. “Hey, sweetheart, I'll take good care of your boy here.”

As Dave and Benny drove off, Benny steady at the wheel, Bonita fingered the gold cross on the chain around her neck and moved her lips in prayer. “I should not have let him go, but he is so, so . . .
obsessed
.” Bonita stopped and looked at me as if obsessive behavior was contagious. “He is so intense about seeing a jaguarundi.”

The phone rang, and this time I answered it.

“I've called the police on that truck. You've got to move it, now.”

“Got that nursing-home application filled out yet?” I snapped, and hung up. Mrs. Covenant Nazi had reported me to the police a number of times before. Imagine how it improved my mood to come home after ten hours at the Smith, O'Leary, Stanley whipping post to find that a member of the city police force had pulled up my okra plants after the Nazi next door told them I was growing marijuana. I still had a pending damages claim.

“He'll be all right,” I said to Bonita, and washed my hands and poured coffee for Bonita and me, then went back to the den where the floor was covered by perfectly organized piles of stuff we still had to do.

Well, okay, maybe I'm not the Mother Teresa of godmothers, but honest, I wouldn't have let Benny go if I'd had any idea that they would find a dead body and a suitcase of money in the outreaches of Myakka.

Chapter 2

There's just something
about setting aside a day for the peaceful, quiet preparation of an appellate argument that signals the lesser cosmic gods to rain down phones and doorbells.

Every ten minutes, the phone rang. I timed it. Covenant Nazi, I figured. The phone would ring six times, stop, and then start again in ten minutes. When this started, I had stomped to the phone, snatched it up and plunged it down with a bang, and cursed it, thus inviting Bearess's protective nature. Now when the phone rang, Bearess barked at it.

“Want me to answer it?” Bonita asked, then sighed low down and deep.

“Better idea,” I said, and snapped the phone line out of the wall. The now-silent phone puzzled Bearess, who continued to sit by it and growl even though it didn't ring.

Somewhere in there was the perfect analogy to practicing law, but I didn't have time to work out the pieces just now.

You can unplug a phone, but not a front door. After highlighting twelve pages of my summary-judgment hearing transcript, the doorbell rang again. Bearess was so intent on growling at the not-ringing phone, she hadn't issued her early-warning bark.

I figured it for the Nazi Next Door and went to answer it, my irritation crowning. Wrenching the door open, I perfected a leave-me-the-hell-alone stare.

Instead of my neighbor, my client stood there. The very man responsible for my having to spend a beautiful May afternoon inside with small hills of paper and a secretary who kept sighing and rubbing her gold cross.

My client. A dyed-hair, salon-tanned man wearing a long, bright-yellow silk Nehru jacket over white pants. Gandhi Singh thrust a bouquet of gladioli at me. “You are going to have troubles,” he said, and walked in before I invited him.

“Gandhi,” I said, “how'd you find out where I live?” My phone and address were unlisted, and I never gave clients either. And Covenant Nazi's imprudent calling habits illustrated the folly of having let a few neighbors know my number.

“I'm a psychic,” he said. “You forget?”

What he was, was a fraud. At least that was my assessment. The blackness of his hair was too perfectly consistent to be natural, his perpetual tan had an undertone of orange, suggestive of a cheaper brand of those self-tanning lotions, and even his eyes were brown because of colored contacts. But he was my client, and at least he wasn't boring.

“Mr. Singh,” Bonita said, rising from her yoga mat with grace and offering her hand. “Good day to you. May I offer you a drink? Coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Gandhi Singh walked through my living room and into the kitchen, opened a cabinet where I had a crystal vase that had been my aunt's, got it out, filled it with water, and put the glads in it.

Gandhi turned back to me. “I've come to warn you, but I haven't got a clear picture of the danger yet. It will come. I wouldn't have come over to your home, but I've been trying to call. First someone slammed down the phone and then it rang, and rang. I got worried.”

Well, isn't that sweet, I thought, eyeing the glads and wondering how he knew where the vase was.

What I said was, “I'm busy, getting ready for your oral argument. The phone is off the hook because the Nazi next store keeps calling.”

“You have a Nazi next door?”

But before I could answer him, Gandhi said, “I had a Holocaust victim for a patient once. He survived a concentration camp. Very troubled man.”

Well, no doubt. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to encourage conversation. I wanted Gandhi to leave.

“He was very old. He died before I could get him to release his hatred of the Nazis through forgiveness.”

“The woman next door to Lilly is not a Nazi,” Bonita offered. “They just had a misunderstanding over some okra.
Curandero,
you should work with Lilly on forgiveness.”

Bonita considered Gandhi a
curandero,
a healer, while I thought his chosen profession was ripping off gullible people, usually middle-aged rich women from Longboat Key who thought they could talk to their dead husbands and their live cats through Gandhi. His most recent specialty was counseling women who thought they had been kidnapped by Martians and had lingering emotional problems as a result. Oddly, there was quite a pod of such women on the Key, a barrier island off Sarasota's coast that attracted the rich carpetbaggers who were taking over the state.

“You are busy, yes? I will leave. Our appellate argument is Tuesday, and I will see you that morning. Do take care.”

“You are not going with me to that argument,” I sputtered, a point I'd been making repeatedly since the notice for the argument had come in the mail. Clients rarely go with lawyers to oral arguments, and if they do, they invariably add nothing but another level of stress.

Gandhi stepped to the door and opened it. “You said you would leave by six-thirty, so I will see you a few minutes before.”

Quickly, I calculated. The drive to the appeals court in Lakeland could take anywhere from one hour to two depending on the vagaries of back-road Florida travel. I needed to be at the court house to sign in by eight-thirty, and I'm never late. But getting there too early is not a good idea, as years of the collective anxiety had created a kind of freak-out miasma that could make even the normally calm Bonita nuts.

Okay, I thought, I will leave by six
A.M
., an extra few minutes of pacing the sacred halls of justice being the lesser projected evil than having my client tagging along in a yellow Nehru jacket and fake tan.

Gandhi stood in my doorway, looking out. “That truck. I think it has something to do with your troubles. You should get rid of it.”

Well, Mrs. Covenant Nazi next door would agree with that.

After Gandhi left, I made another pot of coffee, wondering as I did if I should buy a bigger French press, and Bonita and I were sipping and snipping and working, and the sun was beginning to set in the west when the doorbell rang again.

“Did you put an open-house notice in the paper, or what?” I said, snapping at Bonita as if she was personally responsible for the repetitive invasions of my planned preparation time.

Bearess trotted to the door with me. A very big man stood there, his brow furrowed. He was dressed in a black T-shirt with “These Colors Don't Run” on top of an American flag and the Kmart house brand of jeans, worn over Frye boots. His T-shirt emphasized the gallons of beer he had drunk in his life. In other words, he was the generic male of my hometown in Georgia. Bearess was trying to dance away from my grip on her collar, and barking and doing a fiend-dog routine. I took a quick look to make sure this man wasn't holding a weapon, and his worn hands told me that in any crisis he would have the right tools and know just what to do.

“I'm Waylon,” he said.

Well, of course you are, I thought, and tightened my restraining hand on Bearess. In a fair fight, Waylon might be able to put a hurt on her.

“That dog bite?” he asked.

“Yes.” In truth, I'd never known Bearess to bite anyone, but she seemed ready to learn a new trick.

“Well, no need of that. You jes' calm it down. Dave sent me to pick up that truck there.”

After I patted Bearess and whispered her into a wary calmness, I asked Waylon how he knew Dave.

“Dave and me drove them rock-hoppers out of Lakeland,” Waylon said. “Till we up and quit. Now we both work at a vineyard, out in east county. Cool gig, working in a vineyard.”

“How'd you know Dave was going to be here?”

“He told me. Look, Dave and me work together, awright? He said he was coming by here, even got me your address 'cause it ain't in the book.” Waylon pulled out a page torn from a phone book with my name and address scribbled on it in Farmer Dave's distinctive handwriting. “In case I needed to pick up the wine, which I do, 'cause he called, and—”

“Yeah, okay.” It didn't make a whole bunch of sense, but Farmer Dave operated in a different sphere from most of us, and at least Waylon knew him well enough to have a sample of his handwriting. So, more or less satisfied, and wanting Waylon and the truck of wine to leave, I said, “Cool. Take it. But Dave said I could have a couple cases of the wine.”

Okay, so, spank me. Dave had only offered me a bottle, but Dave was off in a cypress swamp turning my secretary's son either into a delinquent or an ace tracker and couldn't challenge my version.

“Yeah, sounds good,” Waylon said, and held out his hand. “Key?”

I gave Waylon the key Dave had left with me and Bonita and I followed him out to the truck, then each of us carried a case of organic muscadine wine back inside my house. Then we went back outside to watch Waylon depart.

A white pickup, which I assumed Waylon had driven up in, was parked in my driveway. Inside its cab, a woman wearing a red scarf hippie style over her dark hair watched, and then started the truck and followed Waylon as he drove off.

Bonita and I went back inside. A muscle in the back of my neck twitched when I saw Dave's dirty backpack dumped on my clean floor. Touching as little of it as possible, I picked up the backpack, took it to the bathroom where I got a clean towel, and then carried the pack to my second bedroom and put the towel on the futon, then the pack on the towel.

But little snoop bells of curiosity went off. I peeled back the cover flap and perused the contents. Most of it was pretty ordinary stuff, though there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of dental-cleaning paraphernalia, plus the usual stash of sativa, aka pot, which I smelled appreciatively and otherwise left alone. The thing that gave me pause was the gun at the bottom of the pack, carefully wrapped in a soft chamois cloth. A cardboard box of bullets, labeled “158-grain roundnoses,” was stuffed under the gun. The box looked old when I pulled it out and opened it. Yeah, bullets, huh? As I was putting the roundnoses back in Dave's pack, I saw that someone had scribbled JEB on the side of the box.

I picked up the gun, which looked like a perfectly ordinary .38, and saw that someone had scratched JEB on the side of the handle. There were oily smudges on the gun, which I polished off with the cloth, admiring the practical appeal of the sturdy little gun. I checked the cylinder and saw that the gun was not loaded. After pretending to shoot out my own window, I was putting the weapon away when Bonita stuck her head in the room.

Whatever she was going to ask me, she didn't, opting instead for, “Is that a gun?”

I bit back the obvious sarcasm, as I've learned over the years that Bonita never thinks I'm as clever as I do. “It's a classic. Not loaded. Want to see it?” I offered the gun to her.

Bonita took the pistol gingerly. Then she held it with more assurance and pointed it at the same window I had. She shuddered. “Dave wouldn't have a gun with him, not with Benny, would he?”

“No,” I said, though not having a personal clue as to the truth of that. Winging it, a trial lawyer's specialty, I added, “This is just . . . for . . . long road trips and stuff. You don't need a gun to go hiking in Myakka State Park. Plus, it's illegal.” Oh, yeah, like that would stop Dave.

Bonita handed the gun to me, and I put it in the backpack while she fingered her cross and watched me. I guessed from her expression that she was regretting her decision to let Benny go off with Dave.

“It will be all right,” I said, hoping fervently that it would be.

“Si Dios quiere.”

Shutting the door on the gun and the backpack, we headed back toward the kitchen.

I didn't know which bothered me more, the thought of a potentially unarmed Dave in the cypress swamp with Benny, or the thought that he might have another gun on him.