Ellen Crosby - The Chardonnay Charade

After two glasses of wine I did not want—or need—more alcohol. Mick Dunne unbalanced me and it seemed like a good idea to keep my wits about me. Or what was left of them.

“How about if I start dinner and let you all have your cocktails?” I said. “If I have another glass of wine, we’ll never eat, and I’m sure Mick must be hungry after that flight.”

I could tell, without looking, that he was still studying me.

“I’ll help,” Siri volunteered immediately. “Let the boys talk.”

“Who is he?” I asked when we were alone in the kitchen. “I never heard anything about him. He comes at you like a freight train. And it felt like he was mentally undressing me, the way he kept staring.”

Siri blushed and ran a hand self-consciously through her hair. So he’d done it to her, too. “Yeah, he does give that impression, doesn’t he? He and Ross went to boarding school together. They were roommates for a year. Lost touch, then hooked up again at some medical convention in Florida.”

“Roommates? They’re like night and day.”

“Ross says Mick used to be really shy.”

“He’s not shy anymore,” I said. “When he walked into Ross’s office it felt like he sucked all the oxygen out of the room.”

“I know what you mean, but he I think he’s harmless. The rich playboy act is part of his charm. Besides”—she raised an eyebrow—“he’s really good-looking.”

“In a kind of aging-rock-star way, I suppose,” I said, “with that longish hair and too-perfect tan. Nice eyes, though. But I’ve kind of had it being around men who got shot with the testosterone gun too many times.”

Siri grinned. “You mean Quinn?”

“Quinn owns his own gun. Uses it daily.”

It didn’t take long to get dinner ready. We ate in the dining room because the wind had picked up, making it too cool to eat on the terrace, though thankfully there were no freeze warnings tonight. I lit new candles in the silver candelabra and everyone helped bring the food and dishes to the table. Ross opened the dinner wine, a California Cabernet Sauvignon.

“No Virginia wine tonight?” Mick asked, surprised.

“Lucie brought the wine,” Ross said. “In fact, she brought the whole dinner.”

“Why California?” Mick persisted. “Don’t you drink your own vintage?”

“Of course,” I said, “but drinking too much of your own wine gives you what’s called a ‘cellar palate.’ We try a lot of different wines. We’re always analyzing bottles from other vineyards.”

He picked up his glass and looked at it. “You’d analyze this?”

“Sure. Test it, compare it to other Cabs. If I were home, I’d probably take the rest of the bottle to our lab so we could figure out what the winemaker did to it. What yeast was used, how much it was sugared, if anything was added in case the smell had gone funky…”

“It’s a chemistry experiment?”

I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or disappointed. “In the lab, yes. Here, it’s the wine to enjoy with our dinner.”

Someone’s mobile phone rang.

“Mine.” Ross twisted around to get it off the sideboard and glanced at the text in the window. “Marty. Excuse me.”

I heard him say, “What’s up?” as he left the room.

“Who’s Marty?” Mick glanced from Siri to me.

“One of the doctors from the clinic,” Siri said. “He moonlights for the medical examiner’s office. Ross asked Marty to let him know when the autopsy was finished.”

“Marty didn’t do the autopsy, did he?” I asked.

Siri shook her head. “No, the chief ME did it in Fairfax. But Marty was at the crime scene. Ross asked especially for him. He wanted Marty to take care of her.”

“I thought they already determined the cause of death,” Mick said.

“Not until they finish the autopsy,” Siri told him.

No one spoke after that until Ross walked back into the dining room. He picked up his wineglass and drained it. I’d been watching him this evening and, though I didn’t intend to, had been counting how many drinks he’d had. Too many.

“The ME is finished,” he said, and this time the alcohol leached through into his speech, which was sounding a bit slurred. “The PERK exam showed she had sex before she died. And whoever killed her knocked her out first. They found a bruise on the back of her head. She was struck with something.”

We were all silent. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ross.

Finally Mick cleared his throat. “Any idea what it was she got hit with?” he asked.

“No.” Ross glanced around the room and his eyes rested on me. They were dull and cloudy with booze. My heart ached for him. “I’m sorry, Lucie, but you’re going to have the sheriff’s department at the vineyard tomorrow morning, tearing the place apart. They’re going to take another look around since they didn’t find whatever it was the first time.”

I nodded.

We had five hundred acres of land. A lot of territory. Although it seemed whoever killed Georgia had stayed within the perimeter of the vineyard, rather than venturing into the woods and fields beyond.

Which meant Ross might be right. Randy Hunter, who’d supposedly been having an affair with Georgia, could very well find himself right in the middle of the sheriff’s crosshairs. Except for one thing.

He was gone.

As Ross warned, the sheriff’s department showed up the next morning in full force. Bobby had called the night before after I got home from Ross’s, as a courtesy. “My officers are going to walk the crime scene grid again,” he said. “We’re going to take a closer look at your equipment buildings, places like that. See you bright and early.”

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” I asked.

“Sure,” he sighed. “A needle in a haystack. We didn’t find anything first go-round. We might not find anything this time, either. But we gotta look. And I want to talk to your crew again, too.”

A couple of the officers who showed up the next morning spoke Spanish, but Bobby wanted Hector and Quinn to interpret because our crew looked so scared.

Afterward I sat with Quinn on the stone wall in the courtyard staring at the comforting view of the serene Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance and the well-ordered rows of vines in the foreground. The cloudless sky was so sharply blue it hurt my eyes and the air was clear and sweet. Hector’s wife, Sera, had just finished planting all the flowers now that the frost danger had passed and the weather had become more springlike. Everywhere I looked, halved wine barrels overflowed with pink, white, and purple petunias, and the mossed baskets, which hung throughout the loggia, spilled over with dark red fuchsia and lacy white geraniums. The courtyard looked lovely.

“The guys were afraid Bobby was going to yank their green cards. They didn’t believe he only wanted to know about Georgia.” Quinn pulled a cigar out of a shirt pocket. Yet another Hawaiian design, part of the extensive collection that had become his trademark fashion statement. This one, yellow and brown with dancing monkeys and bananas all over it, had to be a favorite, since he wore it so often.

“The police didn’t find the murder weapon this time, either,” I said. “Maybe Randy took it with him.”

Quinn unwrapped his cigar. “You really got Randy pegged for this?”

“Looks like you were right about him and Georgia having an affair. Ross confirmed it. Last night he showed me a note that came back with Georgia’s dry cleaning. Someone asked her to meet up at ‘the usual place’ after the fund-raiser,” I said. “Ross is pretty sure Randy wrote the note. Apparently he came by all the time to deliver groceries. That’s when Ross reckoned it started. The note said something about an apology. I bet it all went south and maybe Randy lost his temper.”