Софи Райан - A Whisker Оf Trouble

His response was to yawn.

“You may not be impressed, but I thought I was going to have to coerce Sam into hanging it down at the pub.”

I looked at my watch. “Mac and Rose should be back anytime now,” I said to the cat. His ears twitched and he lifted his head to look around.

I wondered what Rose would think of Mr. P.’s new line of inquiry.

Then in some kind of unexplainable thinking process, my brain lined up the last things I’d said to Elvis. When I didn’t immediately say anything, he nudged me with his furry head.

I reached over to stroke his fur. “I’m stupid,” I said to him.

He murped softly.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I said, “but I am. We could have called Sam.”

Elvis blinked his green eyes at me. He had no idea what I was talking about.

Sam knew everyone and he ran a bar. The odds of him knowing someone who knew someone who could tell us more about the two wine dealers had to be good. I didn’t know Ronan Quinn, but I wanted the person who had killed him caught. And I wanted the person who had scammed Edison Hall caught. I wanted whoever it was to pay—hopefully financially so Ethan’s wife, Ellie, could have that operation she needed. I liked it when the world was fair, when the bad guys got what was coming to them. Even though it didn’t always happen, I wanted it to.

Sam answered the phone on the third ring. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I need to pick your brain,” I said. I leaned back in the chair and Elvis took that as an invitation to climb down and settle himself in my lap.

Sam laughed. “Whatever I have is yours.”

“What do you know about wine?” I asked.

“Box or bottle?”

I laughed. “Very funny.”

“I’m more of a beer guy, but I like a good California merlot,” he said. “Does that help?”

“I was thinking about something a little more high-end,” I said. I explained about Ronan Quinn.

“That’s the guy whose body you found at Edison Hall’s old place.”

Elvis laid his head on my chest and I began to stroke his fur. “That’s him. We’d like to know a little more about him. Do you maybe know someone?” I didn’t finish the sentence.

“We?” Sam said.

“Stella Hall hired the Angels to look into Quinn’s death. She thinks it might be connected to all those bottles of wine that Edison bought that turned out to be worthless.”

“So you’re in the detective business again?”

I could picture him behind his own desk in his office, feet propped on the corner of the desk.

“No, I’m helping, that’s it,” I said. I leaned back a little in my chair and Elvis gave a small sigh of contentment. “I like Stella.”

“So do I,” Sam said. “I can think of a couple of people I can call. Can you give me some time?”

“Take all the time you need,” I said. “I appreciate this. Thank you.”

“Hey, I’m happy to help.”

I pictured him smiling because he was the type of person who really was happy to help anyone.

We said good-bye and I leaned over and hung up the phone.

“Sam is on the case,” I told Elvis. He started to purr, which probably had more to do with the fact that I was scratching behind his right ear than his enthusiasm for Sam’s help, but I decided to rationalize it as the latter anyway.

I spent the next hour downstairs in the shop helping Charlotte with customers. We sold another guitar, a wooden rocking chair and a bread pail. Charlotte spent several minutes explaining the bread-making process to the young man who bought the pail, even writing out her favorite recipe on a piece of paper.

I put my arm around her shoulders once we were alone in the shop. “I’m so glad you were here,” I said. “The only thing I could have told him about bread was to read the best-before date on the little plastic tag before you buy it.”

Charlotte shook her head, smiling at the same time. “You can’t use that ‘I can’t cook’ line anymore. Your gravy last night was very good.”

“It came from a package.”

“So does my angel food cake,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with using some shortcuts.”

“True,” I said. “But you make the strawberry/rhubarb sauce. You even grow the berries and rhubarb yourself.”

She smoothed the front of her apron. “And at Thanksgiving I chopped a few dried-up leftover cranberries from the bottom of my vegetable crisper, microwaved them with half a bottle of marmalade that was in the gift basket I won at the animal shelter fund-raiser and added what juice I could squeeze out of half a wizened lemon, and you all thought I spent half the afternoon in the kitchen.” She smiled at me. “Things are seldom as perfect as they appear, and that includes cooking.”

I was at the workbench taking the paintings I’d bought from Cleveland out of their frames when Sam called back.

“Linda Fairchild,” he said, reciting a telephone number. “She’s a lawyer in New Hampshire—Manchester, I think—and she’s been involved in a couple of civil lawsuits over all this fake wine business. She’s expecting your call.”

I leaned against the workbench and pushed my hair back out of my face with one hand. I should have called Sam much earlier. I’d had no idea it would be so easy. “Thank you,” I said. “I owe you big-time.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “You owe Vince, although I don’t think you need to give him a kidney or anything. I think if you buy him a beer next time you see him, he’ll call it square.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Vince? Vince Kennedy?”

“How many other Vinces do you know?” Sam asked.

“Uh, none, but I didn’t know he knew anything about wine.”

I heard the creak of Sam’s old desk chair. “Neither did I, but it turns out he actually knows a little. And more important, he knows a lot about playing guitar.”

“And the two are connected, how?”

“Vince put some learn-to-play-guitar videos up on YouTube. They’ve turned out to be pretty popular. This lawyer found them, thought they were great and got in touch with Vince to say thank you. They struck up an online friendship and maybe a little more. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I know they’ve met in person several times.”

“I had no idea Vince was seeing someone,” I said. “Let alone a lawyer.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure how much of her he’s seen and I don’t think I really want to know.”

“You and me both,” I said. “Tell Vince thank you and I’m buying next time I see him.”

“I will, kiddo,” Sam said. “I hope you get what you need.”

I had scribbled down the phone number on the back of an old envelope that Mac had left on the workbench. Sam had said the lawyer was expecting my call. Mr. P. would say “no time like the present.”

I decided this was a call best made from my office. I went back into the shop. “Can you handle things here for a little while?” I asked Charlotte. “I need to make a phone call.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Rose and Mac are on their way back and I can always get Avery to come in if I need help.”

I called Linda Fairchild’s office and when I gave the receptionist my name I was put directly through to her office.

“Hello, Sarah,” she said. “Vince said you have some questions about Ronan Quinn.” She had a warm, husky voice. I knew Vince well enough to know he would have been intrigued by the woman the first time he heard her speak. He wasn’t the first musician I’d met to have a thing about voices.

“I do,” I said. “I appreciate you talking to me.” I explained how we were clearing out the house for Stella and how all of Edison’s savings had gone into his wine collection. And I told her about Ellie’s need for surgery without going into too many details that would violate her privacy.