A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 2: Death by the Glass Page 7

  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.

  8

  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.

  She hit the flakes with a dose of creamy whole milk, dumped in a tablespoon of sugar, and turned on the TV. PBS was showing a rerun of the Antiques Roadshow that she’d seen twice already. She tweaked the rabbit ears. For weeks PBS seemed to be running nothing but ARS, or the BBC documentary about George Mallory’s final trip up Mount Everest. Sunny could watch the Everest show over and over. What did happen to Mallory and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine? Did they make it to the top? What went wrong?

  For years she’d sworn off the glowing box. It was only a couple of months ago, when the neighbors upgraded the mini-set they kept in the bathroom and left their old one on top of the garbage cans, with rain clouds gathering, that she decided to alter her policy. Rather than let the little TV fill with water and take a one-way trip to landfill, she had carried it inside and plugged it in.

  Sunny added another spoonful of sugar to her cereal and, riveted, watched a mustached man, probably in his late forties, hand over an African spirit healer’s mask from the seventeen hundreds. The priceless mask was assessed to be a skillful reproduction of modest value. The owner tried to appear indifferent, but his cheeks flushed pink and his eyes darted left and right, searching for a safe place to rest. He said he had always liked the mask for its intrinsic virtues anyway, that he had always been fond of the looks of it, regardless of its material value or authenticity. Sunny didn’t believe him. It was quite obvious that he had never liked the mask and couldn’t wait to get rid of it, and now hated it all the more for its falseness. People would lie spontaneously, almost involuntarily, to escape the most minor of embarrassments.

  Catelina Alvarez, the Portuguese grandmother who had lived across the street from Sunny throughout her childhood, had been a tireless hunter of lies. She loved to catch one and expose it.

  “A lie is the sound a hollow heart makes,” she would say, frowning and waggling her finger in warning. She would look at Sunny with eyes that made it clear that it was no use hiding or twisting words and say, “The truth is like water, Sonya. It might trickle away and hide, but it’s not gone. It’s just waiting until the right moment to bubble up. The truth is always there, waiting for a chance to get out, and there is nothing that makes it want to come out more than a lie. The more lies, the more the truth pushes and pushes toward the light.”

  At midnight, Sunny turned off the television. Lies. Who was telling lies? Where was the truth waiting to bubble up?

  She’d start with the wine. In vino veritas. Truth in wine. But if at least one bottle—maybe a case, maybe more—was a lie, the person behind the wine must be the one doing the lying. She decided it was time to talk to Remy Castels.

  She found his address online easily enough. With luck, it was the current one. Buoyed by relief earlier in the day—what now seemed like a far-off, happier time—she’d brought her laptop home to hunt for cheap airfares for a spring trip, possibly to southern Italy. Instead, she was doing exactly what she swore she would never do again, getting involved in trouble that was none of her business. Except that she was already involved and it had become her business the minute she met Andre Morales.

  Sunny rummaged in a cabinet for a decent bottle of wine and extracted a Green and Red Zinfandel from a few years back. Too good for a night like tonight, when a glass was all she wanted. Finally she settled on a newish bottle of Turnbull someone had brought to a dinner party.

  She opened the bottle and filled a glass with the inky red wine. So, she’d go to Remy’s house in the morning, unannounced. That ought to make him very friendly. And she would accuse him of wine fraud or imply as much, another great way to make a new friend. She needed to tread lightly and not alienate him with hasty accusations. She might be jumping to the wrong conclusion altogether. It was possible that he didn’t know anything about the wine and was duped himself, in which case he might be grateful for the information. Monty Lenstrom had spotted the mistake just by looking at the cork, but maybe Remy had never had that chance. Since he was reselling it, he may never have opened one. The only way for him to tell would have been the color of the foil, and that could have easily slipped past him. He may not have even looked at the wine. Anyone might have opened the box and removed a couple of bottles. On the other hand, if he was guilty, letting him know she was on to him wouldn’t help matters. It could even be dangerous.

  The phone rang and she went to have a look. The caller ID said Vinifera, meaning it was Andre wondering where she was and why she wasn’t getting back to him. There was no good answer to that question right at the moment. She let it ring.

  She wanted to have something to drop off as a pretense for her visit to Remy tomorrow morning, not that it would make her intentions any less obvious. A casserole was the traditional food of bereavement, but that wouldn’t be terribly appealing at seven-thirty in the morning. She opened a few cupboards and examined the supplies on hand. There were the basics for baking and not much else. Biscotti was an option, or maybe morning buns. She noticed a Ball jar filled with apricot pits that had been on the counter for several months. Maybe it was time to use them. Remy Castels would know how much work it was to extract the tiny kernels inside the pits, called noyau, and he might even appreciate the effort. Well, probably not, but it was hard to imagine anyone turning away a plate of morning buns with noyau frosting, which would smell and taste like sweet almond. The project also had the benefit of keeping her hands busy, and it might help focus her thoughts. At the moment her mind was leaping with the kind of questions that would stand squarely in the way of sleep.

  She found the nutcracker and w
ent to work. The apricot pits released their seal with a woody crack, revealing the tiny, smooth seed inside. When there was a tablespoon of them in the bottom of the mortar, she ground them into a coarse powder and added it to a saucepan of simmering heavy cream. After cooling and heating the mixture several times, she put it in the refrigerator. The cream would continue to soak up the essence of the ground noyau until it was strained away.

  The morning buns were a simpler task. She mixed up a batch of the sweet, stretchy dough and set it aside to rise.

  With the preparations done, she ran a bath and settled in. Remy was onto a good thing with his wine club, she thought. It would be relatively easy to fake a bottle of wine, especially if you were certain that no one would open it for ten years. All he would have to do is soak the bottle in soapy water overnight and the label would slide right off. She did it herself whenever she wanted to keep a label for her wine journal. Then all he needed to do was scan the label from the more expensive wine, print it out on a good printer, trim it, and stick it on. Up at Skord Mountain, she’d helped Wade put plenty of labels on bottles. There wasn’t anything fancy about the process, it was just paper and glue. Some wine labels had gold lettering, embossments, and other flourishes, but Marceline didn’t. Its label was very plain, stoic.

  She added more hot water to the bath. A certain scenario kept running through her mind. Assuming Remy was the one who doctored the wine, suppose that Nathan Osborne found out about it and threatened to expose him. Remy then silenced him in the most permanent way. But how could Remy induce a heart attack without leaving any trace in the body? If that was the plan, and assuming there was a way to execute it, wouldn’t it be smart to create rumors of heart trouble? Maybe there wasn’t time. Maybe Nathan had threatened to expose his crime right away. She thought about Remy, remembering the few times she’d seen him, searching for signs of what he was capable of. He had a sour, persnickety disposition, but he was French and a wine connoisseur. An uppity demeanor was practically mandatory. There was more than that. He seemed sneaky and surreptitious. Did that mean he was capable of murder?

  It was all speculation, and none of it explained how Andre got hold of his bottle of the phony wine or who smashed the other bottle at Nathan’s feet. If she went to Sergeant Harvey, what she knew together with what he knew and wasn’t telling her might point to the killer, assuming there was a killer. It might also point to Andre, though, who could be smack in the middle of some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, or look like he was. Even if everyone at the restaurant were innocent, if it was Osborne Wines or the importer who had forged the wine, the publicity was sure to hurt Vinifera and Andre. He would look at her as the one who called in the cops to check out his restaurant. She couldn’t risk going to Steve without a clearer and more convincing reason to do so.

  By the time she got out of the bath and put on her fleece hoody and warm-ups, the dough was ready to be worked. She kneaded it into one smooth ball, then into Hacky Sack–sized buns. With each one she rolled and placed on the baking sheet, she thought of another question for Remy Castels.

  It was almost three o’clock in the morning by the time she pulled the last tray of morning buns out of the oven, three-thirty when her head hit the pillow, and six when the alarm went off.

  9

  Meyer lemons were scattered on the lawn under the tree in front of what Sunny supposed was Remy Castels’ house, a tidy white bungalow sitting demurely back from a quiet Napa street. She walked up to the porch carrying the plate of morning buns and stood listening, half hoping he would be home, half praying he wouldn’t be. She looked at the morning buns with regret, wishing she’d eaten one on the way over, and maybe chosen a different plate. It wasn’t her best plate, but it wasn’t her worst either, and she was a little sorry to see it go. The buns smelled sweet and buttery. The idea occurred to her that she could still turn around and get back in the truck, eat a couple of morning buns, drink some coffee out of the thermos, and head into work like nothing bad ever happened in Napa Valley. She could forget what she knew about the case of fake Marceline and go on with her life. Of course, that might mean she would never find out where it came from or if Andre Morales had anything to do with it.

  She rang the doorbell. The sound of water running in pipes suggested someone was home. She rang again and waited. After a while, she heard footsteps and the door opened. Remy Castels stared at her from his bathrobe and pajamas, both cotton and reminiscent of a Japanese bathhouse.

  “Yes?” he said, looking at her blankly.

  “It’s Sunny McCoskey. We met on Sunday,” she said, “at Vinifera.”

  “I know who you are,” said Remy, looking behind her as if he expected to see someone else there. “Why are you here?”

  “I know how upset you must be about Nathan’s death,” she said with determination. “I did some baking last night, and since I was on my way to work, I thought I would stop by and leave you a few morning buns for breakfast.”

  “Morning buns,” said Remy dryly.

  “With noyau frosting,” said Sunny.

  “Noy-au,” said Remy. “Not no-yau. Let me get this straight. You drove twenty minutes out of your way at seven o’clock in the morning to try to poison me.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, smiling curiously at what she was sure must be a joke.

  “Noyau are toxic,” he said. “Poisonous.”

  “Yes, well, that’s technically true,” she said slowly, “but only if you eat the seed itself, and lots of them. It’s only the flavor in the icing. The seeds are strained away. It’s perfectly safe. I’ve made noyau frosting and ice cream for years.” She hadn’t even thought about the poison seeds, at least not consciously.

  “But is it a nice gift, to give someone food that might be poisonous?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, with a small laugh. “Noyau is poisonous the way nutmeg is a hallucinogen. If I brought you a pitcher of eggnog, would you think I was trying to drug you?”

  “How did you find out where I live?” he said, not lightening up.

  “I found your address on the web. I decided to take the risk that you wouldn’t mind the intrusion.”

  He stared at her with a look of appalled disbelief she hadn’t seen since she started eating before grace at Heather Prine’s house in sixth grade and Heather’s parents had gawked at her like she’d driven a knife into the table.

  “Is this your usual method of making new acquaintances?” he said, frowning. “Invading their privacy at the crack of dawn?”

  He was having a fine time making her feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she deserved it for trying to hide her real motive for coming to see him. All the more reason to get to the point quickly.

  “It’s my method when I need to speak with someone urgently about an important matter,” said Sunny.

  “What important matter is that?”

  “I was hoping we could talk for a moment about your wine club. Specifically, I would like to talk about the case of 1967 Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque Premier Grand Cru Reservée set aside for your wine club in the cellar at Vinifera.”

  “An exceptional wine,” he said, an icy look in his eyes.

  “I wouldn’t know. But I am interested in where it came from.”

  “You can buy it from any distributor. It may take some weeks, but anyone should be able to get it, for the right price.”

  “I don’t want to buy it. I don’t think many of my customers would spend that kind of money on wine at lunch. I was just curious about where that particular shipment came from.”

  “Curiosity,” he said, “is a nice word for a nasty habit. In France, curiosity is for old ladies who have nothing better to do than peek out of windows. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time? I should think running your own restaurant would keep you busy enough.”

  She felt the heat of anger rising in her cheeks, but it didn’t matter what he said. Snippy was fine. Rude was fine. As long as he kept talking and didn’t slam the
door in her face, she was in business. She looked over her shoulder. The neighborhood was beginning to stir. She could hear a garage door opening nearby, and across the street a man with a briefcase and a mug of coffee was getting into his car.

  “Let’s just skip where it came from for the moment,” said Sunny sternly. “Because you and I both know the answer to that. The more important question is, how are you going to keep me from contacting the police about it?”

  Remy frowned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I can show you,” she said.

  Her heart was beating fast and her hands had started to shake so that she had trouble keeping the plate of morning buns steady. She fished in her jacket pocket with one hand and took out the cork from the bottle of Marceline that Andre had opened Sunday night and held it up for Remy to see.

  “Is this the cork from a bottle of 1967 Château de Marceline St.-Quinisque Premier Grand Cru Reservée?” she asked.

  He took it and examined the stamp.

  “It is from a bottle of Marceline, I couldn’t be sure which one. A red wine, obviously.”

  “But you think it could be from a bottle of Grand Cru?”

  “Who knows? It might be, it might not.” He looked at her questioningly and handed the cork back. Was it possible he really didn’t know? She didn’t believe it.

  “I wonder what I would find,” she said, “if I visited the people who belong to your wine club and had a look at the collections you helped them build? I wonder what an expert might notice about the expensive wines they’ve bought from you? Would odd little details jump out at him? Like that the topping foil is the wrong color, the corks aren’t quite right, and the wine doesn’t taste exactly like it ought to?”

  She realized she was getting a little carried away, stretching what she suspected about one case of wine into a whole pattern of fraud, but this was her shot at Remy, and she had the element of surprise.