The Chardonnay Charade wcm-2 Read online

  “I had no idea.”

  “It’s not something we broadcast.” The reproach was still there, but milder. “But you know Ross. He doesn’t have much tolerance for following the rule book, if it doesn’t make sense. I like that about him.”

  “I do, too,” I said. “I’m sorry if it came out sounding judgmental. Anyway, the real reason I stopped by was to see what I could do to help for the wake or funeral.”

  “Just be there for him,” she said. “He’s under so much stress because Marta and Emilio are gone. We’ve asked around, but no one’s talking. Who knows if they’re in Salvador or Sterling?”

  “Ross didn’t kill Georgia, Siri. Even if they’re gone, the police will figure it out.”

  She nodded, eyes dark with worry. “I hope so. By the way, Ross left something for you. It’s on his desk. I’ll get it.”

  She returned with a large sealed envelope with my name scrawled in Ross’s familiar doctor’s chicken scratch. I thanked her and said I’d see her tomorrow. “Tell Ross everything’s going to be fine.”

  Siri smiled thinly. “Sure.”

  I let myself out and headed to my car, which I’d parked out front. Marty Gamble, the medical examiner who’d taken care of Georgia and volunteered at the clinic part-time, was just sprinting up the stairs to the front porch, sweat-drenched in a T-shirt and running shorts.

  I called his name and waved. He came back down the steps.

  “Lucie! What are you doing here?”

  I liked Marty. He and one other doctor were the only medical examiners the county had. The county paid him the princely sum of fifty dollars a body, so he once said he reckoned he had two volunteer jobs when all was said and done. Fortunately, they had the appropriate gallows humor for their work. “You stab ’em, we slab ’em” was Marty’s off-the-record motto.

  He said the joking kept him from falling apart on the tough cases—especially children and the tragic deaths. Georgia must have been one of the tough ones, but I hadn’t had a chance to ask.

  “I was in Leesburg, so I thought I’d stop by and see Ross,” I said to him. “I heard he’s at the church.”

  “Yep.” He pulled off his shirt and wiped his sweaty face. I tried not to stare. Marty was in great shape. “You’re coming tomorrow, of course?”

  I knew he meant the wake and funeral. “Of course. How was your run?”

  “Not bad. Ross and I are going to do the marathon again this year. Our tenth together. When the funeral is all over and done with, it’ll do him good to get back to training.”

  “Does the sheriff still think he did it? Siri just told me he’s a basket case because he can’t find Marta and Emilio.”

  “You know I can’t talk about this,” he said carefully. “But he isn’t out of the woods.”

  “What about that note he found? Someone wanted to meet Georgia the night she died. Ross thinks Randy Hunter wrote it and he was pretty sure he and Georgia were having an affair,” I said. “Plus she had sex with someone right before she died.”

  Marty nodded as the light went out of his eyes. “Yep. She did. No surprise, frankly.”

  He bent to fix the lace of one of his running shoes. The sudden silence lay heavily between us. He was still fiddling with a lace that needed retying, deliberately avoiding my eyes.

  “Why wasn’t it a surprise?” I asked quietly. “You know who it is, don’t you?”

  He straightened up and a muscle twitched in his jaw, as if he were trying to keep some emotional reaction in check. “I withdraw the remark. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But you did,” I said. “So you knew she was having an affair with Randy?” His eyes answered for him.

  “How did you find out?” I persisted. “From Ross?”

  “Lucie…” he warned. “I don’t want to talk about it. I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

  “Did Ross tell you?”

  “God, no!”

  “Then how did you find out?”

  He rubbed his forehead with both hands as if trying to excise something from his mind. “Because I treated her for a little infection she’d picked up. She told me it was Randy. This one was.” Now his eyes met mine. “It wasn’t the first time I took care of her, either. She came to me for the others.”

  “Oh, God. The others? Ross has no idea?”

  His voice was flat. “Of course not.”

  I closed my eyes. “Don’t tell him now.”

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  “Why you?” I asked. “She could have gone to a doctor in D.C. and no one would ever have known.”

  He didn’t answer. Just stared at me with eyes filled with sadness. And something else.

  Shame. He’d been one of her lovers.

  “She wanted you to know?” I asked. “Didn’t she?”

  He nodded and said, still in that monotone, “Georgia could be a very cruel lover. I broke it off after we slept together a couple of times. I couldn’t keep doing it to Ross. Or to Tina.” He began twisting his wedding ring, but when he spoke he was bitter. “It seemed like the honorable thing to do, even though I was still so crazy about her. So to punish me, to let me know there were others, she made sure I was her doctor of choice for all her female problems. At least I never had to help her with an abortion. Thank God she couldn’t have kids.”

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

  “Couldn’t. She had the surgery so she’d never have to worry.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Don’t repeat this, Lucie. Ever.”

  “Of course not.”

  He laid his hand heavily on my shoulder, like he was suddenly weary, and draped his shirt around him like a collar. “I have to live with myself for what I did,” he said. “So I figure I’ve been punished enough. Maybe now I’ll get some closure, now that she’s dead.”

  “Sure,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  He turned away and headed toward the clinic without looking back. Closure, maybe. But didn’t that confession give Marty a motive for murder, too?

  Chapter 12

  I drove slowly back to the vineyard. Sometimes there’s nothing worse than being alone with your own thoughts. Marty’s secret hung around my neck like a noose.

  I called Quinn from the car and asked if he needed me in the barrel room. He sounded surprised. “I thought we were gonna sort out the Chardonnay once and for all. You sound weird. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I’ll be there.” I disconnected before he had another chance to quiz me.

  But Quinn, like me, also seemed distracted as we made the final decisions about yeast and sugar content. “There’s not going to be enough oak in the finish,” he said. “So I think we ought to hang the chips in the tanks for a while.”

  My mother and Jacques had been purists. They produced our wine based on the grapes God gave us and the decisions they’d made in the barrel room ever since harvest. When it was time to finally bottle it, they believed you worked with what you had. So there was no excessive fiddling or changing the wine they’d ended up with. Hanging a bag of oak chips in one of the stainless-steel tanks was the speed-dial equivalent of making unoaked wine taste like it had just spent the past nine months gracefully aging in oak barrels—in about an hour. Jacques would have thought it was cheating. Quinn thought it was brilliant.

  Today I didn’t feel like disagreeing with him. “Fine,” I said, “we’ll do it that way.”

  “We’ll bottle Friday,” he said. “I’ve got to get the bottling equipment in tomorrow. Plus the rootstock is arriving.”

  “If we’re done here I think I’ll head back to the house to change before everyone shows up later,” I said.

  “Shows up?”

  “Austin’s reception. You reminded me about it this morning.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  There is a French expression my mother often used when someone was behaving oddly or out of character. Il n’est pas dans son assiette. Literally it means, “He’s not
on his plate.” It didn’t translate too well in English, but right now it described Quinn and me perfectly. Neither one of us was on our plates.

  I had no idea where we were.

  I tore Ross’s envelope open as I walked through the front door of my house. A brochure from a company that made orthotics. He’d circled one of the models, a clunky affair that wrapped around the ankle and foot like a molded plastic boot. I stared at it. How did you wear shoes—normal shoes—with a contraption like that? I shoved the brochure back in the envelope. No way. If I wore one of those, I’d look crippled.

  I started to slowly climb the stairs when Mia appeared at the top of the landing. Dressed in a short blue jean skirt, white camisole, and high-heeled beaded sandals, she looked pretty and fresh. She froze in midstep when she saw me.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I live here. Going somewhere?” I shouldn’t have let my anger over what Kit had told me about the police blotter show, but I was tired. This would be another showdown.

  “Out.”

  Might as well get right to it. “I heard about the misdemeanor charge for public drunkenness. Nice going.”

  She stomped down the stairs until she stood a step above me. It gave her the psychological advantage of looking down on me. “Who told you?”

  “Kit gave me a preview of tomorrow’s weekly police blotter.”

  Her face grew pale. “Oh, crap. That’s just great. It’s going to be in the newspaper?”

  “Yep.”

  “It was just a stupid fine. I paid it already. So it’s not like I had to go to court or anything.”

  “Yeah, but next time you will go to court and you will spend a night in jail.”

  “No, I won’t.” She banged down the last few stairs in the high heels and then across the foyer, long-legged as a colt, ponytail bouncing like an angry exclamation mark.

  “Hey!” I called. “Are you coming home tonight? Or are you still sleeping over at Abby Lang’s?”

  She spun around. “I’m not sleeping at Abby’s, that’s for sure. Neither is she. I don’t know what we’re doing tonight.”

  I stared at my sister. That last remark sounded more desperate than threatening. She meant it that she really didn’t know what she was doing. Kind of a leitmotif for her life right now. But it would probably be whatever came easiest in the heat of a what-the-hell night.

  “Come home, Mimi,” I said gently. “Please?”

  She seemed to waver. “I don’t know. I’ll see. Anyway, we’ve got plenty of places to stay.”

  “Why isn’t Abby sleeping at her house anymore?”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “Because her dad is so totally flipped out about the cops showing up and asking him about Georgia Greenwood. And he’s, like, going nuts because he wants to get nominated to be vice president. Abby’s going to the convention in San Francisco and she might take time off from school to campaign with him. She says it will be so cool.” She splayed her feet sideways like a young girl would do and it made her seem infinitely more vulnerable. “But this Georgia stuff could wreck everything if it gets out about him being with her the night she was murdered.”

  “Are you saying Georgia was sleeping with Abby’s dad?”

  Mia looked disgusted. “God, no. He didn’t even like her.”

  “Then why did he support her campaign?”

  “I dunno. Why don’t you ask him?” She pulled out her mobile phone from a tiny purse and looked at the display. “It’s five-thirty already. I gotta go. See you maybe tomorrow.”

  “Please be careful with the drinking. The next time you get caught—”

  “Lucie,” she said impatiently, “give it a rest. I have no intention of getting caught again. ’Bye.”

  The door slammed and I heard her car engine start a moment later.

  It wasn’t until I was standing in the shower with the water sluicing over me that I thought again about what she meant by that last remark. She wasn’t going to stop drinking.

  She just wasn’t going to get caught when she did.

  I was surprised to see Bonita setting wineglasses on the bar when I arrived at the villa. The college-kid outfit she had on this morning when I first saw her had been replaced by an elegant black and white knit top, cropped black pants, and slingbacks. She’d pulled her hair back in a loose knot and wore a light floral scent. Altogether, she looked lovely and very sophisticated.

  “Thanks for setting up,” I said. “Where’s Quinn?”

  “At his place. I saw his car as I drove by. I figured I should get here, you know, a little early. Quinn’s so busy now that he’s working two jobs. You guys need me more than you thought.” She smiled, sounding cheerful.

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, with him working for that British guy.” Her smile froze.

  “Quinn is working for Mick Dunne?” There was no point trying to act like I knew. My face gave away completely that I had no idea.

  “Well, not exactly working for him, I guess,” she said uneasily. “But he, like, agreed to help him.”

  “You mean as a consultant?” When did that happen? This morning Quinn had been as friendly as a Rottweiler toward Mick.

  “Yeah. A consultant.” She knew now she’d let the cat out of the bag. Maybe a lot of cats and a lot of bags. She added, “You seem pretty mad, Lucie. I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth, but I figured you knew.”

  “Looks like it slipped his mind to tell me.”

  “Oh, God. Please don’t say I did. Could you act surprised when he brings it up?”

  “Sure.” Me and my telltale face. “I’ll do that.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.” She sounded relieved. “Because I think he’d, like, kill me.”

  Not before I, like, killed him. “I wouldn’t worry,” I said.

  I kept my word about not saying anything to Quinn when he finally showed up a few minutes later dressed in khakis and another in his extensive collection of Hawaiian shirts. This one was multiple shades of blue with fish swimming all over it.

  “That is such a cool shirt,” Bonita said. She went over and fingered the fabric of one of his sleeves. “I totally love it.”

  Quinn looked down at her and something twisted in my heart as I watched the way he smiled at her. No doubt about it. He was falling under her spell, fascinated by her transformation from college kid to beguilingly sexy woman.

  “It’s vintage,” he said, still smiling. “One way you can tell the quality of a print like this is by the size of the fish’s lips. This one is kind of special.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said. “That is so awesome.”

  “Sorry to interrupt this discussion about fish lips,” I said, “but do you think we have enough bottles of wine open? I just heard the Goose Creek Catering truck pulling up.”

  They both turned around. Bonita let go of Quinn’s shirt and blushed. Quinn’s dark eyes held mine for a long moment. What was in his made me feel like an overbearing schoolteacher yanking her fun-loving pupils back in line, which wasn’t too far off the mark. I don’t know what he saw in mine, but I hoped it wasn’t wistfulness.

  “I think we’re fine,” he said. “But just in case, I’ll get more glasses. They’re in the barrel room. Excuse me.”

  He held the door for Dominique’s new assistant and two waitresses. When he came back a few minutes later, we were almost done setting out the hors d’oeuvres. Besides our just-released Cabernet Sauvignon and an older barrel-fermented Chardonnay, Austin had asked for champagne, which we’d bought from Harry Dye since we didn’t do any sparkling wines of our own yet.

  I checked my watch. “What time are they coming?”

  “Now,” Quinn said. “Three limos just pulled up.”

  Austin Kendall had rounded up the region’s wealthiest citizens and it was immediately clear why when he walked into the room with his arm clapped around Hugo Lang’s shoulder. For a man who’d been questioned by the sheriff so recently, Hugo looked like he
didn’t have a care in the world as he worked the room, slapping backs, shaking hands, and leaning in for the kind of whispered confidences that implied an inner sanctum aura of power and influence.

  The mission tonight was to raise money for the upcoming campaign, so Hugo would have even more to bring to the table in San Francisco with his campaign war chest and platinum-plated connections. A nimble-minded Southern senator who chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and spoke with the charismatic eloquence of Bill Clinton, he’d be a definite asset to the ticket.

  Quinn was right that Hugo bore a resemblance to President Kennedy, whose memory still had plenty of cachet around here, especially for the old-timers. People still talked about the Kennedys as neighbors, since they’d once owned a home in Middleburg while JFK was president. Afterward, Jackie returned often to ride with several of the local hunt clubs and a pretty pavilion on Madison Street was dedicated to her memory. Hugo had the same Kennedyesque striking good looks and strong profile—though he was now gray-haired—but his most magnetic feature was an irrepressible boyish smile. He flashed it often and it never failed to dazzle whoever he was with.

  “How are you this evening, Lucie?” He came up to me after drinks had been served and Austin had proposed a toast to Hugo and “our worthy cause.”

  “Fine, thanks, Senator. Congratulations.”

  He smiled. “That’s probably a little premature, but thank you.”

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked. “I won’t take long, but it’s important. It’s about your daughter and my sister.”

  Dark clouds replaced the sunshine. He took my elbow. Somehow I didn’t think he was going to be surprised by what I had to say. “Why don’t we go out on your terrace?” he murmured. “We’ll have more privacy there.”

  “Hugo…?” Austin looked questioningly at both of us. “Going somewhere?”

  “Be right back, buddy,” Hugo said. “I need a moment.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  We walked over to the railing. Hugo leaned against it, his back to the panoramic view and the Technicolor sunset. He was all business. “Let’s hear it.”