Wildcat Wine (29 page)

“Those modifications on the harvester, were they really worth plotting a double first-degree murder?” I asked, recoiling at the depth of Kenneth's greed. Out of the corner of my eye, I gazed at Cristal, who alternately watched me and Cat Sue.

“Yes. A grape harvester that wouldn't bruise the grapes, why that'd be like the cotton gin. It would reduce labor costs significantly. With a sixteen-inch bucket conveyor, a good harvester like the one Earl was perfecting could handle twenty tons per acre. Big market for such a machine in California and Michigan, as well as France, Chile, and Israel.” Cat Sue suddenly had an earnest-businesswoman tone for someone so recently camped on my stomach.

But I didn't care so much about profit margins as I cared now about keeping Cat Sue and Cristal talking, because as long as they were explaining things to me they weren't stuffing me in a wine barrel. “What exactly happened at Kenneth's?” I asked in my best cross-examination mode.

“Kenneth answered the door with his gun out and admitted he killed Earl so he wouldn't get in trouble for stealing Earl's plans and chasing Mad to his death. Then, like, after that, the man had balls enough to offer to pay me off, give me half. Like I would trust him, kin or not. Like I'd let Kenneth get away with killing Earl. See, Earl was a good man and he didn't deserve to die and I was tired of Kenneth doing shit and getting away with it, and I knew it was just a matter of time before he'd kill me too, so I pulled out Dave's gun and I shot him.”

“But Tired said Kenneth fired a round too,” I said.

“Yeah, but that man couldn't shoot straight. Even close up. The kick on the gun threw him off. Lucky for me that gave me time to shoot him.”

“So, he fired first. It
was
self-defense.”

“Yeah,” Cat Sue said and nodded again.

“I already told you, nobody will believe it because we set up the alibi first,” Cristal said, sounding just a tad put out.

Okay, so the self-defense bluff was pretty much over. “Why didn't you just turn Kenneth in to the sheriff instead of killing him?” I asked, seeing no further need to wordsmith as only physical action and karmic intervention were going to save me now, but even at death's door I was terribly curious.

“Money,” Cristal said. “I destroyed all copies of a will Kenneth drew up himself. Do you know, he left everything to the National Butterfly Association?”

Kenneth had left his fortune to bugs with wings?

Then it hit me: Cristal the certified paralegal, Cristal the forger. I was probating her will, not Kenneth's.

“I did a good job on that will,” she said, not shy in her own praise. “I prepared and signed it, leaving nearly everything to Cat Sue. Forged a couple of witnesses' signatures. With a token in the will for Kenneth's brother. I mean, the brother wasn't close at all, so I didn't think he'd contest anything. Also I heard from Ashton he was coming back soon, so I figured he'd be the perfect PR. I mean, he certainly wouldn't get a handwriting expert to examine it. Then Cat and I would have all of Kenneth's estate, plus the Fleur-de-Lis contract to pay off the debts on Earl's place.”

Okay, money would do it. I wondered idly if Kenneth's greed had been contagious and Cristal had caught it like the first winter flu through an office. Or, is greed just the human condition?

Cat Sue turned to Cristal, saying, “Attorney-client or not, I say she's gonna rat us out for sure. I can't go to jail. Cristal, sweetie, you just know I wouldn't do good in a prison. Not with my heart murmur.”

“Damn. We need to think,” Cristal said. But then she added, “Come on, Lilly, let's go to the winery.”

“You take good care of her,” Cat said as Cristal pointed her gun at me.

I walked out in front of her. Okay, what
would
Willie do?

Stomp, stomp, stomp. Whoa, what was my hurry? I stopped walking and turned around to face Cristal, planning a last-ditch appeal. But as I stared at Cristal's tense face, Bonita materialized from behind a giant hibiscus by the barn.

As sweat poured down my face, Bonita, the good Catholic mother, picked up a brick from the hibiscus-garden border and threw it at Cristal, hitting her solidly in the back of her shoulder and spinning her around. Cristal stumbled to the ground, stunned, but her hand still held her gun.

Grabbing for the gun was too big a gamble, especially with an armed Cat Sue just inside the barn. I dashed at Bonita, grabbed her arm and screamed, “Run,” as if that wasn't the obvious option.

Chapter 35

We ran.

And we ran, and we ran, taking the ground in front of us in giant leaps. Down the path between the rows of grapes, we galloped. More intent on protective cover than pavement, I steered us toward the wooded fringe of the vineyard rather than down the dirt road to the highway. With the armed and deadly girlfriends presumably coming after us, I didn't want the clear target of our backs out in an open space. No, I wanted dense trees and foliage.

So we ran, and ran, deeper into the woods, following no path, but spinning our way through the underbrush into the live oaks and cypress woods, thick with moss-hung trees and grounded with a spongy, wet floor, green with lichen and ferns, and we ran deep enough that we began to pass from the trees into the scrubs and thickets of a Florida hammock. We were nearing the edge of Myakka River State Park, where the Myakka River would soon make a swamp of the hammock. We were gasping for air. I put out my hand and stopped Bonita, there in one of the last great expanses of true Florida wilderness.

We needed to breathe. We needed to see where we were. We needed to listen for sounds of a gang of girl killers following us. I looked around. Standing as still as I could while catching my breath, I listened, but didn't hear any thrashing in the bushes or other sounds of anyone chasing us.

Before us lay the palmetto scrubs where rattlers and boars and the myriad forms of wildlife that were capable of harming a person lived their lives, but also where the scrub jays, white-tailed deer, and gopher tortoises went placidly about their gentle lives. Perhaps a panther or a jaguarundi might still prowl, wholly unaware of the monster housing developments working their way toward their meager habitat, guaranteeing their eventual extinction.

Florida wilderness is nothing if it isn't the ultimate example of the yin and yang.

But I was too scared to be philosophical. I wanted to keep running until I was safe in the protective custody of a sheriff's deputy. First, though, I gasped out what I had been wondering as we ran. “How did you know?”

Her face flushed, Bonita peered over her shoulder. Apparently satisfied that no crazed killers were immediately behind us, she said, “Cristal presented me with a bottle of Earl's wine for a Christmas present last year. Since I do not drink, I gave it to Gracie, but then I remembered that and thought about it—Earl's wine is not sold anyplace yet except at his winery.”

“So you figured Cristal and Cat Sue and Earl knew each other?”

“Yes. But I was not sure how any of that mattered until you ran out of the office that day with those old bullets.”

“Like we talked about, it had to be somebody who could have gotten the bullets from Dave's backpack but who also had access to my office. But how'd you—”

“The laptop.”

“Kenneth's laptop?”

“Yes. You see, while Cristal was working the front desk this morning, I happened to find occasion to search her office.”

“She wouldn't leave the laptop in her office?”

“No, she put it back in Kenneth's office.”

Oh, what better place to hide something other than where it belonged. Kenneth's laptop in Kenneth's office. Especially after Jackson and Officer Tired Johnson and I had already searched it. Talk about your “Purloined Letter” concept.

“So, okay, when you found the laptop, you figured Cristal was part of the puzzle,” I said. “And then when I called you from the barn, you put it together.”

“Not immediately. I was standing at my desk calling Officer Johnson when I saw through the window that Cristal was running to her car. So I hung up and followed her. She got away from me in the traffic, but I believed I knew where she was going. It made sense to me that she had listened in on our conversation and had gone to do you harm.”

If I hadn't been so hot and breathless, I would have hugged Bonita.

Looking about her, Bonita pointed to a greenish log with lidded eyes on the bank of a branch of tea-colored water. “That's an alligator, isn't it?”

“Yes, but you aren't a small wading bird or a toy poodle, so it won't hurt you unless—”

“We should leave this place,” Bonita said. “Now.”

Yes, we should, I thought. As we started walking, swarms of flying, biting bugs fogged us as we moved deeper into the cypress swamp.

Though we were walking fast enough that chatter was hard, I had to ask, “Who was Benny protecting? I mean, that night at your house, when he said he wasn't a tattletale?”

“It is complex.”

“Hey, I'm a lawyer. We love complexities.”

“He probably meant he was protecting me. But he also might have meant Dave. Maybe even Cat Sue, because he'd promised.”

“How so?” I asked, and swatted a devil's walking stick out of my way with the back of my hand, but still drew blood from the thorns.

“I think we should not go deeper into this swamp,” Bonita said, and picked her feet through some muck and rubbed a spiderweb off her face.

“What? You want to go back?” But as I turned around to look at what going back meant, I realized I didn't know. I mean, okay, a swamp looks pretty much the same in any direction, especially when you're running. The ooze and underbrush had closed behind us, leaving no appreciable trail marking our passage.

“So,” I said, “the bad news is, we're lost. But the good news is, Cat Sue and Cristal probably can't find us.”

Bonita sighed, rubbed her cross, and started walking toward a modest high spot in the expanding dankness. “The night the deputies arrested Dave and Waylon, Dave told Benny to take his backpack to Cat Sue. Apparently there were sirens as the law went out to Waylon's, so Dave had time to arrange things. Not much time. But enough. Dave also gave Benny a suitcase full of money.”

So despite my telling Benny not to tell his mother about the money, he obviously had.

“Dave told Benny he could keep half the money for all his . . . trouble. But Benny said Dave was clear that he wanted Cat Sue to have the backpack,” Bonita said. “Benny had promised Dave not to tell anyone.”

“How'd he know where to go?”

“Benny's finding the yurt was easy. They were already near it and he needed only to drive east on State Road 72 until he saw the winery sign.”

So Benny had taken Cat not only the money, but Dave's gun and his 158-grain roundnose bullets. “And?”

“Cat Sue was at the yurt, and Benny told her about the dead man and what Dave had said. He said she was very agitated. But she let him in and let him take what appeared to be about half of the money.”

Bonita stopped, tilted her head as if she were hearing the sounds of pursuit, and stood still.

I looked around and listened. Still no sounds of the crazed girlfriends.

“What happened then?” I asked, and flicked a tick off my arm.

“As Benny was trying to leave, Kenneth was driving up the road in his Hummer. Kenneth blocked the road and wouldn't back it up. So Benny got out of his truck and asked to pass. They recognized each other and Kenneth demanded that Benny explain himself, so Benny told him he was just out driving around on a Saturday night and had tried to buy some wine for a party. Then Kenneth threatened Benny that if he told anybody, he, Kenneth, was there at the winery, he would hurt me.”

Poor Benny, I thought, though I gave him plus points for the quick, inventive lie.

And then I realized that Kenneth, bent as he was on a killing spree so he could retire to Costa Rica financed by Earl's harvester designs, could well have killed Benny. I wondered if Bonita had thought of this. Maybe killing children was too much even for Kenneth.

“Benny and I, in trying to understand, did not believe that Kenneth at that time yet knew the welder was dead in the swamp, but we do not know.”

Something suddenly crashed behind us and Bonita and I both yelped and jogged a few steps and then turned. A large, wild hog stood behind us. A boar with gray tusks protruding from its long snout, looking for all the world like something out of a Tarzan movie. Or hell. Two more hogs crashed out of the scrubs and milled around the first one.

Oh, frigging great. Where was Percy Ponder the wild-hog hunter when we needed him? As Bonita and I began a hasty backing up while watching the feral hogs, they crashed on through the wet underbrush and went their way.

“Let us, please, concentrate on getting out of here,” Bonita said.

“Maybe we should follow the boar,” I said. “You know, the wild hogs and deer make trails and if we find one, the walking will be easier, plus the trail might cross a real road somewhere.”

“I am not following those pigs,” she said.

While I contemplated pointing out that I was closer to a rural survivalist expert than she was, Bonita turned back to the direction she had already chosen and marched forward. So, okay, she was the one with all the saints, I thought, and followed, still trying to get my mind around what had happened the night Benny took Dave's gun to Cat Sue at the yurt. I mean, if we were going to die in the outreaches of Myakka State Park, at least I wanted to understand the events that conspired to drop me in this wet jungle full of things that could hurt me.

“So, that thing with the lawsuit,” I said, connecting a few more dots, “that was Kenneth threatening you to guarantee that Benny didn't tell Tired about seeing him that night at Cat Sue's?”

“Yes.”

I could only guess why Kenneth had gone back out to Cat Sue's that night; he must have been looking for word about Mad. Possibly he was planning to kill Mad if Dave had dragged him back alive. Maybe Cat Sue told Kenneth I had Mad's cash, or maybe he followed Cat Sue when she brought the money to me and had waited for me so he could knock me over the head and steal it back. Talk about not knowing when to leave bad enough alone!

We might never really know precisely what had gone down, but if Bonita and I got out of this quagmire of gators and pigs alive, and Dave didn't go to jail, then I'd settle for a murky big picture.

And speaking of murky, there was still that question of why Kenneth's threat had scared Bonita. “So, okay, what was that nonsense about some of your children not being Felipe's?”

Bonita walked in silence for a long time. I had about given up on an answer when she said, “My sister, Gracie, was a nun in El Salvador. She smuggled children out.”

I let the implications of that splatter against me like a face full of raw eggs.

“Wow,” I said, stunned back to my adolescent vocabulary. That's why Armando looked more like an Indian and not at all like Javy, his so-called twin. And Benny? Benny, who at least looked like Javy. That is, in a general, wiry, dark-haired-boy sort of way. “What about Benny?”

“Benny, Javy, and Armando are all El Salvadorans. Armando was rescued half starved from a destroyed native village. Javy and Benny were children of what the government considered a dangerous radical. If they had stayed there, they would probably have died with their father.”

“But how?”

“Gracie was part of a mission, a group of rescue people, and they all knew skilled men who could create birth certificates. Gracie's people smuggled the three of them into Mexico while Felipe and I lived there, but we could not adopt the children because they were illegal babies. So we hired the men to make us the forged papers and planned to move so the neighbors would not talk and create trouble. What Gracie's men prepared was good enough to get us all in this country when the orange-juice factory wanted Felipe as one of its engineers. Of course no one challenged any of us at that point because the American company wanted us to come.”

“Carmen and Felipe,” I said, remembering the vastly pregnant Bonita lumbering around.

“Yes, after we were here in this country, they were born, after Gracie had been expelled from El Salvador, and we were all living here, thinking we were safe.”

“Benny knows this?”

“Now he does.”

He was just a kid. But I thought Benny had taken all this pretty well. Then I remembered Benny dodging me, Benny skipping school, Benny locking himself in his bedroom, Benny shutting his mom out, and Benny hiding behind his Walkman's noise. Tough little kid that he was, he'd done some hard adjusting after finding out his life was based upon a nun's act of mercy and some forged papers.

But the burden on Benny was not as hard as the one on his mother. Obviously Bonita had been afraid that if Kenneth messed around with his lawsuit, the immigration people would deport her children back to El Salvador.

Frankly, I didn't know if they could have been deported or not. I would hope not. But I'd read some scary stories in the papers over the years about our government deporting worthy people, even children, over minor technicalities and with what appeared to be capricious whim. So I could see where Bonita would be afraid to risk it. I wondered if this was why Bonita had never become a naturalized American citizen. Maybe she didn't want immigration taking a second look at the papers on her children.

“Do Armando and Javy know?”

“No. I will tell them when they are sixteen.”