Wildcat Wine (27 page)

Chapter 34

A wiser person
might have called Tired and waited.

But a wiser person wouldn't have left home at fifteen, weeded a marijuana patch for a living, fallen in love with Farmer Dave, and maintained a loyal connection to him long after having fallen out of love with him. Being a trial lawyer didn't necessarily mean I had overall good sense.

And if I called Tired with this new information, it might deepen the hole Dave had been digging for himself.

I wanted to think in a way driving the interstate didn't allow, so I went the back way, down Verna Road, and passed through the quaint cracker town of Old Myakka, finally hit State Road 72, and headed toward the winery.

The burning questions in my mind as I spun closer to the vineyard were why exactly had Dave gone after Mad, what exactly was Dave supposed to do with him when he caught him, and did this mean Dave had something to do with Kenneth's murder? What Mary Angel had told me suggested that Kenneth might have hired Dave to bring Mad back, and probably not to congratulate Mad on a wise career move. But despite the speed of my imagination and my high level of adrenaline, I didn't really have a refined plan. Maybe all I wanted was one final stab at making Dave tell me what he knew. Or to give him a chance for a good head start if he was in too deep.

With the rapid heartbeat of unrelieved anxiety, I turned down the dirt road to the winery with every intention of confronting Dave. But as I passed the Gift and Wine Shoppe, I saw the barn with its red-brick-bordered garden of gardenias and hibiscus and I wondered if the grape harvester that had killed Earl was inside.

Against my will, my mind flashed out a full-colored panoramic of the day Gandhi and I had found Earl under the grape harvester.

The grape picker. Big and ugly. A metal monster with long, sharp arms.

But with a white iris painted on its side. Something like a fleur-de-lis. That was French, wasn't it? The king's flower, or something.

A French symbol.

Ping, ping, ping—the dots connected with enough force to give off heat and energy. Kenneth's assets included a new contract with a French company.

Maybe Earl hadn't perfected enough changes to the original grape harvester for a patent in his own name, but no doubt the original maker of the machine would pay a lot for designs that would vastly improve its product. Kenneth would have seen this as an obvious shortcut to money.

With that shortcut in mind, it might have seemed easy to a greedy man planning on leaving the country anyway to sell Earl's plans to the original French manufacturer.

I had to take a look at that harvester. After making sure Cat Sue's white pickup wasn't anywhere around, I spun my Honda behind the barn and got out. The barn door was not locked and I pushed through it, and in the well-lit interior I spotted the grape harvester off in a corner.

In the second it took me to get to it, I also had my cell phone yanked out of my purse. Sure enough, there was the fleur-de-lis. And beside the painted flower, a metal tag affixed to the machine read “Fleur-de-Lis Harvester International.”

I punched the Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley button on my cell and wished for the hundredth time that there was a way to bypass the front desk and reach Bonita directly. Cristal answered and I asked for Bonita without greeting her.

After a pause that made me grind my teeth, Cristal said, “Lilly?”

“Yeah. Edith has you on the front desk again, huh?”

“You know Bonita's worried about you? Where are you?”

“I'm fine. Just put me through to her. Right now. It's important.”

“Okay. Sure thing. Anything else?”

“Hurry,” I said.

Fortunately for the sake of my teeth the next voice I heard was Bonita's. “Where are you? You are late,” she said, not bothering to disguise the chiding tone.

“I'm at the Stallings vineyard. In the barn. Do something real quick for me. Go to the patent website and see if a Fleur-de-Lis Harvester company has a new patent for a grape harvester.”

“What is going on, please?”

“Bonita, just do it. Call me right back.”

While waiting, I paced, I hummed, I ground my teeth until my jaw made audible popping noises, and then finally my cell rang.

“Yes. That company was granted a modification on its old patent. This happened a week before Mr. Daniels was deceased from the snakebite.”

“Call Tired and tell him that. I've got to find Dave.” I hung up with Bonita calling my name and I jammed my cell phone in my purse, on top of the Glock.

So wily old Kenneth had hired Mad to steal the engineering designs and he had sold them to the Fleur-de-Lis company, which had no doubt used them to extend the life and value of its original patent. Surely that was the French contract—the one Kenneth's CPA said provided a lump sum plus a percentage of the profits. Kenneth's final financing of his Costa Rica retirement.

That strongly suggested Kenneth had staged Earl's fake accident to cover up his theft and sale of Earl's plans.

So who killed Kenneth?

As much as I didn't want to admit it, that left Bonita or Benny or even the meek Henry as suspects, each motivated to head off Kenneth's threatened lawsuit against Bonita.

Or Dave.

Dave might have killed Kenneth for Cat Sue, the heiress with both a motive and an alibi. I didn't want to believe it. Dave had never been a violent man, but I remembered how he had looked at Cat Sue that day at the yurt while Tired and I had watched. A man that much in love might do just about anything.

I suddenly understood that it would be in my best interest to leave this barn.

But as I turned quickly away from the harvester, the door opened. Like a genie in a big bottle, Cat Sue floated into the barn, all willowy in a white gauzy long skirt.

“Oh, hi, you again. You do pop up,” she said, sounding friendly and maybe just a tad stoned.

“Is Dave here?” I asked.

“You looking for Dave in the barn?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well, I don't think he's in here.”

“Where is he?”

“So who exactly are you?” Cat Sue asked. “I mean, that you're always dropping in?”

“Dave and I go way back,” I said. “And I'm Dave's lawyer. Didn't Philip explain that I was his co-counsel?”

“That means you're bound by that attorney-client privilege thing, right?”

Technically I was not Cat Sue's attorney, though I was willing to fudge that line to her. “Exactly,” I said and smiled the particular smile of a lawyer telling a whopper. “You and Dave both. Total privilege, anything you want to tell me.”

“Far out,” she said. “So you're just . . . Dave's lawyer and an old friend?”

“Yes,” I repeated, nodding as if I wasn't plainly trespassing in a barn in the middle of a murder zone. “Where's Dave?”

“Moving out of Waylon's. Shame about Waylon, dying and all.”

“Waylon's dead?” I asked, panicked at the thought of another murder.

“Not that Waylon. The other one.”

“The other one?”

“The singer. You know . . . the singer.”

Oh, yeah, the dead singer Waylon.

“He's got my truck.”

“Waylon?”

“No. Dave.”

“So,” I said, thinking, Yeah, definitely a tad stoned.

“So,” Cat said.

Looking for a segue from so and soing, I said, “Cat Sue, I'm really sorry about Earl. He was a nice man. I could tell that from the time I met him.”

Cat's eyes puddled up a little. “Yes. He was a nice man. And smart.”

So why did you take up with Dave? I wanted to ask. But didn't. Sexual attraction had no rules. Maybe weird attracted weird. Cat and Dave both dressed like 1969. Plus Earl had that ambition about him that suggested more time in the barn with his grape-harvester models than in the house with Cat Sue, while Dave had all the free time of the barely employed to lavish upon her.

“Do you know who killed Earl?” I asked.

Cat's eyes puddled some more. “Do you?”

“Maybe. At any rate, I have some news,” I said, thinking I'd try the buddy-buddy approach, especially since I had that Glock right there in my purse. “Do you want to go up to the gift shop and talk about it? I wouldn't mind a bottle of water.”

“Sure. Yeah,” Cat Sue said, but didn't move. “So, what's your news?” Yards of that long skirt were billowing around her when I saw with a precursor of alarm that she stood between me and the only door out of the barn. I walked toward her and the exit, but she stood her ground.

Not without concern, I inhaled and said, “Earl had figured out ways to significantly improve that harvester, hadn't he?” I pointed over my shoulder toward the big machine and watched her eyes flit toward it and then back to me.

“Excuse me, please,” Cat Sue said. “But I do have an alibi for Earl.”

“I know that. Tired told me. Nobody thinks you killed Earl.”

“I got an alibi for when Kenneth was shot too,” she added. “I was in Orlando and Winter Park. Check with Tired, you'll see.”

“Yeah, shopping, I know.”

As I moved a step closer to the barn door, something not unlike an electric shock went through my entire body.

Orlando. And its nearby suburb Winter Park, the shopping mecca.

Uh-oh.

Cristal had a Visa receipt from Winter Park. Now that I thought about it, people from Sarasota didn't routinely shop in Winter Park, not when the riches of St. Armand's Circle beckoned, close at hand. Try as I might, I couldn't visualize the date on Cristal's receipt, and realized I probably had not noticed it the night I'd found the receipt while looking for Kenneth's travel forms. But Cristal had been out of the office the day Kenneth was killed, I remembered that.

My mouth dried up but my hands began to sweat. Cristal definitely had a key to the Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley office building and, what with the banker's hours Bonita and I had suddenly been keeping, it wouldn't have been hard at all to sneak in the 158 roundnoses and steal the laptop from my credenza.

Cristal of more or less the same height and weight as Cat Sue, Cristal in a dark wig and a red scarf and a hippie dress, armed with Cat Sue's credit card and a talent for forgery, could have easily created that Winter Park shopping alibi.

And Cristal surely would have been introduced at some point to Cat Sue as her boss's only local family.

Cristal with the secret private life, Cristal who didn't date lawyers. Cristal who didn't date—men.

Oh,
mierda.
Cristal the temporary receptionist who could have easily listened to my conversation with Bonita. The one in which I said I was in the barn at the Stallings vineyard.

Cat Sue shifted into an open stance, her feet well grounded, with the solid look of someone not planning on backing out of the way of the only exit.

“I'm really thirsty. And hot. Could we go to the gift shop?” I hoped I didn't sound whiney or afraid.

“Can do,” she said, but took no step toward leaving the barn. “But first, explain that attorney-client thing again. I might need some legal help.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Oh, you know. Stuff.”

“Well, then, let's do it formally. I'll draft up a retainer agreement for you when I get back to the office. We can talk fees later.” I put my right hand on the clasp of my purse, which was slung over my left shoulder, and took a couple of steps toward the door Cat Sue was blocking. “In fact, I'll drive you back to my office right now and we can get those papers signed.”

“Maybe not just yet,” Cat Sue said.

In what I hoped was as speedy a move as when I jumped out of my car faster than a rattlesnake, I jerked open my purse. I had my hand on the Glock, but the gun was jammed under my cell phone and hairbrush and I couldn't get it out quite as quickly as I'd figured.

As I struggled with the damn gun, Cat Sue swung her whole body toward me, knocking me sideways. While I tottered under the impact, she grabbed the strap of my purse and yanked so hard she pulled me down on the dirt floor of the barn. Then she sat on me, reached for my purse before I could make my arms work, and pulled out the Glock.

So, okay, spank me, I blew that. But quick-drawing guns from purses wasn't a skill I had needed much in my litigation practice.

Cat Sue and I stared at each other. We breathed hard.

“Damn,” she said. “I thought this was over.”

“You're my client now,” I said. “You don't need that gun.”

“I gotta think a minute.”

Okay, let me help Cat Sue think, I thought. “Way I got it figured is Kenneth was the bad guy all the way through this.”

“What?” Cat looked puzzled.