How to Dine on Killer Wine: A Party-Planning Mystery (17 page)

“What’s wrong?” Dennis said. He reached over and held my arm. “You look as if you’re about to faint.”

“I’m fine…,” I said, waving away his hand. “It’s Rob…he’s been officially arrested.”

“Whoa,” Dennis said. “The police have enough evidence to charge him?”

I nodded, still numb. “And Marie…she’s in the hospital.”

“What?” he said. “How…what happened?”

I met his eyes; his were filled with concern.

“Rocco said she took an overdose of pills.”

“God, no.” He shook his head in disbelief. “She tried to commit suicide? Poor Marie.”

“I have to go,” I said, shaking off the numbness, and headed for the open office door.

“Does Allison know?” came Dennis’s voice behind me.

Allison? I suddenly remembered the note I’d read that was tucked in his desk drawer. The one that said, “Call Allison. Urgent!” I turned back to Dennis and said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?” I left him standing openmouthed in his office and went in search of my mother.

I panicked when I didn’t see her perusing the knickknacks for sale around the tasting room, but thanks to an alert staff member who’d spotted her leaving, I found her outside, looking down into a nearby pond and breaking off bits of a gourmet cracker for the few ducks that floated about.

“Mallards. Aren’t they beautiful?” she said when she saw me. “You usually see them in pairs. The male is the prettier one, with the bright green feathers. The female is that plain brown one. They pair up in the fall and stay together until spring, when the female lays
her eggs. Then the male takes off and fools around with other females who are unattached. Typical.”

Mother could tell you anything you wanted to know about animals, but she couldn’t remember the names of my three cats. Such was the insidious disease of Alzheimer’s.

“Mother, we have to go. Something has happened and we need to get back to the Purple Grape.”

“What is it, Presley?”

She quickly crumbled the rest of her cracker into the pond and brushed off her hands. I filled her in as we walked back to the car, hoping the news wouldn’t upset her too much. But to my surprise, she took it matter-of-factly. “Well, we’ve got to hurry, then, so we can help Marie when she comes home from the hospital.”

Ten minutes later we pulled up to the Purple Grape. To my relief, Brad’s Crime Scene Cleaners SUV was already there.
Thank God,
I thought as I helped Mother out of the car. We hurried up the path through the garden area and around the crime scene tape to the front door and entered without knocking. I heard voices and followed the sound to the kitchen, where I found Brad talking with Rocco.

Rocco looked disheveled in his jeans and white CCC collared T-shirt. The wisps of hair on either side of his balding head were mussed and part of his shirt was untucked. He held a cup of coffee in both hands.

“Did you tell him?” I asked Rocco, then looked at Brad in his Crime Scene Cleaners jumpsuit, his rubber gloves sticking out of one of the pockets, to see if there was any sign he’d heard the news. I knew by his frown and pressed lips that Rocco had indeed filled him in.

“You all right?” Brad asked me as he came to my side. He glanced at my mother.

“I’m fine. So glad you’re here.” I would have kissed him, but it just wasn’t the time. I turned to Rocco. “Have you heard from Rob? Or Kyle?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“What happened?” Mother asked, looking bewildered. Had she forgotten what I’d told her, or was she just asking for details?

Rocco took a deep breath, set down his coffee, and began. “I came back to get one of the platters I left behind. Gina noticed it was missing. When I got here, I thought I heard Marie cry out from down the hall, so I went looking for her. I found her in her bedroom, white as a ghost, still holding her cell phone as she sat on the bed. I asked her what was wrong and she told me Kyle had just called and that Rob was being held for the murder of JoAnne Douglas. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Poor thing,” Mother said, shaking her head and biting her lip.

“How did Marie end up in the hospital?” I asked Rocco, puzzled at how she got from her bedroom to the emergency room.

“After she hung up, she said she wanted to lie down,” Rocco said. “I offered her a ride to the police station, but she said Kyle had told her it would be pointless and to wait because she wouldn’t get to see him for hours. He promised to call when he could arrange a visit. So she asked for a glass of water and I brought it to her. I watched her take a couple of what I assumed were Valium or sleeping pills that were on the nightstand. Then she lay down on the bed and told me to
close the door on my way out. It…it never occurred to me that she might…take the whole bottle.” Rocco grimaced at the thought.

“How did you find her?” I asked.

“By chance,” Rocco said. “When I got back to Gina’s place, she told me I’d picked up the wrong platter and had brought one of Marie’s instead. The ones from the Culinary College are Fiestaware, like Marie’s, but they use the burgundy, not the plum. Marie’s are plum. So I came back to switch them and thought I’d check on Marie while I was here. I peeked in, and that’s when I noticed the overturned bottle. When I picked it up, all the pills inside were gone. I tried to rouse Marie, but she was unresponsive, so I called 911.” His hands trembled as he recalled the experience of finding Marie.

Brad brought me a cup of coffee, and one for my mother. He offered Rocco a refill, but Rocco shook his head, then went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of white wine. “I need something more medicinal,” he said, pouring the wine into a stemmed glass. Eschewing his usual wine-tasting standards, he essentially gulped it down, then closed his eyes and visibly melted into the effects of the alcohol.

“I needed that,” he said, smacking his lips.

“Presley,” Mother said. “I’m going to go lie down for a few minutes. I have a bingo game tonight. Will you all excuse me?”

She took her coffee with her and ambled down the hall to her room. After she was gone, Brad took me by the hand. “Come here. I want to show you something I found.” We left Rocco sitting on a bar stool, enjoying his “medicine,” and went outdoors to the table where
we’d discovered the body of JoAnne Douglas only that morning.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Normally the police do a thorough job before they leave the scene of a crime,” Brad said. “But I asked to handle the cleanup since I was already here.”

I glanced at the site just beyond the crime scene tape. “I remember. So what did you find?”

Brad ducked under the tape and pointed to a bed of bright red geraniums just beyond where the body had lain. I followed him and knelt down and lifted some of the ruffled leaves and petals.

“There’s nothing here.” I stood up.

Brad knelt down and pointed to a metal rod poking out of the ground.

“A sprinkler head?” I asked. “So?”

“Check again.”

I looked closely at the silvery object. While it appeared to be similar in size, color, and material to the many sprinkler heads that protruded out of the ground, this one was definitely different. It was shorter and smoother and there were no openings at the top.

I reached for it.

“Don’t touch it!” he said.

“Why not? What is it?”

He leaned over to access one of his pockets and pulled out a metal object. He held it up for me to see.

“That’s one of the Christophers’ cheese knives,” I said, recognizing it instantly. I’d seen several on the serving tables, lying next to the cheeses. A light went on. I looked down at the metal object poking up from the dirt. “You mean…that’s a cheese knife?”

“Yep. Camouflaged by those flowers, it looks like another sprinkler head. Easily missed. I happened to notice it while cleaning up the area.”

“You think it’s important?” I said, rising to standing.

“Could be. One of Detective Kelly’s men is on his way to pick it up.”

I thought for a moment, trying to visualize what might have happened. “Are you thinking that someone stabbed JoAnne with the cheese knife first, and then inserted the corkscrew?”

“Possibly. We should know more when the ME’s report comes back.”

“But why?”

“Good question.”

“Can they get fingerprints from it?” I asked, my mind spinning at this new turn of events.

“They should be able to get at least a partial print, maybe more.”

“And what if it has Rob’s print on it? Won’t that just make things worse for him?”

“But what if it doesn’t?” Brad suggested. “What if it has someone else’s print?”

I looked at the knife stuck in the ground. “Then Rob is off the hook.”

“Bingo!” he said.

I shook my head at his play on words. At the moment, I’d had just about all the bingo I could take.

While Brad showed the newly arrived officer where the cheese knife was, I went in and checked on Mother. I found her lying on her bed watching
Cupcake Wars
on the TV provided in her room. Brad had suggested we
head to the Napa Police Station to see what we could find out about Rob’s arrest. I told her our plans and that if she was hungry, there were plenty of leftovers in the Christopher refrigerator.

“Will you bring me back a cupcake?” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“I’ll try,” I said, knowing she would forget her request by the time I returned. Still, if I ran into a cupcake along the way, I’d get one for her. And two for me.

Brad drove us downtown in his SUV and pulled into the tree-lined parking lot of 1539 First Street. We got out and headed for the gray concrete building that the police shared with the fire department, located next door to city hall. When we arrived, past five, the office had reduced staff, but Brad had called ahead and he held his ID up to the window for the officer to check. I recognized Detective Ken Kelly immediately.

Once we were let inside, Brad and Ken shook hands, and Detective Kelly led us back to his office behind a set of locked doors. He took a seat behind a cluttered desk and gestured for us to sit opposite him in a couple of metal chairs. I glanced around, curious about the kinds of crimes the detective might be working on, but there were no whiteboards filled with suspect names or “Wanted” posters of dangerous felons visible. Just walls of smoked windows that looked onto the parking lot, a serene view without a hint of criminal activity.

“I’m talking to you as a courtesy,” Detective Kelly said to Brad, ignoring me, “because you work with SFPD. But I can’t tell you much, other than what you already know. Rob’s being held on murder one. He’ll be arraigned on Tuesday. Until then, I can’t discuss the case.”

“I understand,” Brad said. “Thanks for seeing us. You say you found fingerprints on the vic’s shoe—and the shoe was hidden under Rob and Marie’s bed, right?”

The detective nodded, tight-lipped.

“Don’t you think that’s kind of strange? If Rob killed JoAnne, why would he take her shoe off and then hide it in his own room, under their own bed? Likewise with the corkscrew. Sounds like a setup to me.”

“We’ve considered that,” the detective acknowledged. “But after working this job for over twenty years, I’ve found most criminals don’t belong to Mensa. They do stupid things, especially when they commit crimes that are spur-of-the-moment, like this one appears to be.”

“You’re right about stupid criminals,” Brad said, “but Rob seems pretty intelligent. I heard he graduated from UC Davis. So why would he be so careless about something so potentially harmful to himself?”

“Like I said, in states of panic or stress, criminals don’t always plan things logically.”

“But how could he have planned it? He didn’t know she would be at the party. If he killed her, why not just stab her with a cheese knife and leave it at that? Why use the incriminating corkscrew?”

The detective looked down at his desk. He wasn’t telling us something.

“What?” I spoke up after listening to all of this. “Is there something else?”

Detective Kelly pressed his lips together, then said, “The ME said she was hit over the head with something blunt and heavy before she was stabbed. I’m
guessing it was a wine bottle. My guys are searching the trash bins at the Purple Grape.”

“A wine bottle?” I asked.

“I figure Rob killed her sometime during the party,” the detective continued, “first by bludgeoning her, then stabbing her with that knife you found, and finally with the corkscrew—to send a message. Her shoe must have fallen off at some point, so after she was dead, Rob grabbed it and hid it, thinking no one would suspect him of being a murderer. Unfortunately, his prints were all over the corkscrew and the shoe. And I’m betting they’re all over the cheese knife you found, as well.”

He placed his hands on his desk as if he were about to rise. “By the way, I’m only telling you this because you work with Luke Melvin,” he said to Brad.

Up until this point, I’d pretty much been ignored. Now that we were about to be excused, I said, “Can we see Rob?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s over at the Napa Country Department of Corrections. Right now he can only see his lawyer.”

I knew we weren’t going to get anything more from this tight-lipped, by-the-book detective. Not even Brad would have much influence on him, since he hadn’t worked with the Napa Police Department. I wondered if his friend Detective Luke Melvin of SFPD could find out more.

“Okay, well, thanks,” Brad said, standing. He leaned over and shook the detective’s hand. I kept my hands to myself.

I had a sinking feeling about the cheese knife. If the
cops found Rob’s fingerprints on it, that would only increase his chances of being convicted of this crime. But Brad, having once been a cop himself, would never consider withholding evidence from the police. Then again, what if Rob had actually committed the crime, in spite of what anyone else thought?

The phone rang just as we reached the office door.

“Kelly,” the detective said into the phone.

I turned back to listen to the detective’s end of the conversation, wondering if it might be something about Rob.

“Yeah…,” he said. “You sure?…Good work.”