Рита Браун - Sour Puss

"I'm with you." She was, too.

"Many states ban direct shipment of wine to consumers. Obviously, this puts a huge dent in profits."

"So if a person from Missouri calls Kluge Vineyard for a case of wine, Kluge Vineyard can't send it to a private customer?" Harry asked.

"Right. It's outrageous." His voice rose. "Of course, we have no way of knowing how the court will rule, but the case is about to come up. If it rules that banning direct shipment is unconstitutional, that will be a huge victory for everyone in this country who makes wine. It's a victory for the consumer, too. Instead of going through a middleman with their markup, we can ship directly to the customer."

"Any idea how the court will rule?"

"No." His voice deepened, the register became less emotional. "The Supreme Court is erratic. Then again, I'm not a lawyer, thank God. I have to be rational or I lose business."

Harry laughed. "Thank you, Rollie. I knew you'd know. I guess a ruling in favor of direct shipment means business will boom and land prices will shoot up higher."

Pleasure purred in his voice. "Oh, yes."

"You're sitting in the catbird seat."

"Is that a good thing?"

She laughed. "Sure is. Ever look up in a tree and see where the catbird sits? Best place, and no one can get him."

"Well, then, you're right."

After a few more pleasantries, Harry hung up, then called Cooper. "Hey."

"Hey back at you," Cooper, in the squad car, answered.

"Need any more help over at the house? I can come over tonight and tomorrow, too. Fair's going to be making late calls tonight."

"He needs to take in a partner or even two."

"Yes, he and I will have that discussion when we go on our vacation end of July."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"No, we're really going. BoomBoom will take care of the horses and Paul de Silvasaid he'd help, too. Of course, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker will go along with us."

At the sound of their names the two cats opened their eyes.

"Vacation?"Pewter murmured. "Where?"

The tiger rolled on her side. "Kentucky. They're going to a horse show and to look at horses."

"That will be nice."Pewter noticed another little bit of peppermint candy by the tack trunk. "Think they have good tuna in Kentucky?"

"Pewter, there's good cat food all over the country."Mrs. Murphy lifted her head to listen to Harry.

"Coop, I've been thinking about the two murders and Hy's suicide. I know Rick thinks I get in the way—"

Coop interrupted. "Let's just say that since you don't have to follow police procedures, you can find things that are critical to us, but you can also put yourself in harm's way. Furthermore, Harry, you can compromise evidence."

"I know, I know. Well, I haven't been in the way about the grape murders—that's how I think of them."

"Because you're still recovering fromgetting remarried. Obviously, you're returning to reality." Coop laughed. "Not that being married to Fair isn't wonderful."

Harry laughed at herself. "God, am I that obvious?"

"Yes." Coop pulled off the road behind White Vineyards. "What's up?"

"Toby's storage room in his barn contains an unusually large amount of flypaper."

"It did seem like a lot, but he must have been someone who buys in bulk. He had enough paper tablets, toilet paper, pencils, and aspirin for the next year." Coop and Rick had combed Toby's property.

"What about Hy Maudant's place? Did you find boxes of flypaper there?"

"No. In fact, I'm on the dirt road behind White Vineyards now. Harry, most people who keep horses or cattle in a barn resort to flypaper." Cooper was amused.

"You're going to walk up in the back of the grape rows, right?"

A pause followed. "I am. You're really waking up, aren't you?"

"Looking for sharpshooters?"

"Yes." Cooper knew there was no point lying to Harry.

"Anything else? Like black rot?"

"I'm not too well versed on these things, but if the vines are diseased or the young leaves spotted, I'll find out what's wrong."

"But if there is something wrong, Arch and Rollie would know."

"And they'll take measures. They're over there a lot."

"When you went through Toby's and Hy's files, was there material about the sharpshooter?"

"Not in Hy's files. All he had was one sheet of laminated paper with photos. Toby's computer was bursting with information on every possible enemy to his grapes."

"Hmm, was there an extra large amount about the bugs?"

"The problem is, I don't know what an extra large amount is, given the sheer volume of information he had on everything, and I mean everything."

"What about Professor Forland's files?"

"We've been working with the Blacksburg authorities. Professor Forland had the latest research, like Toby, on everything."

"What I was wondering is, was Professor Forland secretly working on a mutation? Not to harm our crops but if our government wanted to use biological warfare against someone else?"

"No." Coop's voice was firm. "He didn't work for our government. He was called in as an expert by the wine lobby to testify before House and Senate subcommittees."

"Ah."

"Harry?"

"I think this is about revenge. I don't know who was trying to destroy whom first, Hy or Toby. It escalated. Maybe Professor Forland found out Toby's intentions, which would have hurt everyone, and Toby killed him. Hy caught Toby later or figured it out. Hy knew his stuff. He made the big mistake of confronting Toby."

"And then finally overwhelmed with what he'd done, Hy shoots himself? It's all plausible, Harry, but it's not proven."

"But you've thought of this, too?"

"We have."

"Have you thought of why the sharpshooters were in my peach orchard?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"The intention was for you to find themand sound a warning—I think. Again, this is conjecture."

"Didn't work. The scare tactic. No one sold their vineyards because of it, although it's early in the game."

"Yeah, but, Harry, it was a red herring. At least that's what I think. Once you do the research, you find out there's no way that sharpshooters, those little stealth bombers, can live here. So a true vintner wouldn't panic and sell out, but latecomers to making wine might."

"The sharpshooters were brought up from farther down South." Harry paused. "There's no other way they could have gotten here."

"Clever."

"Somehow this gets back to me. I don't know why." Harry's frustration mounted.

"What do you know that I don't? Why would you be a target with three men dead, one apparently by his own hand?"

"I don't know. You said 'apparently.'"

"Forensics has a small question mark because of the nature of the powder burns. It was Hy's gun. Registered in his name. Like I said, it's a small question mark. We aren't yet treating it as a suspicious death,but the coroner sent his photographs to Richmond for a second opinion." Coop, with her window down, inhaled the fragrance of the earth.

"I keep coming back to those darned sharpshooters."

"Okay, listen to me. There is a very good chance that in some tangential way, you are... involved is the wrong word, but you know what I mean. If the tactic was simply to scare another grower, it seems putting the bugs in their vineyards would make more sense. But again, you would make sure to find out what the sharpshooters were and you'd go to the right people. It's a little more sophisticated than dumping bugs in White Vineyards, for example."

"Maybe my peach orchard was the experiment. They didn't want to use their vineyard or peach grove if they have one. And maybe I stumbled on it a day early. I don't know. I'm trying to think of everything."

"/ found the stealth bomber." Pewter sat upright.