How to Dine on Killer Wine: A Party-Planning Mystery (26 page)

“Marie!” Allison yelled as soon as she reached the outside of the building.

Another scream.

Allison ran in the direction of the sound, which led her—and me—to another storage building behind the garage, where the Christophers kept their winemaking equipment. I followed her as she darted past giant metal tanks, large glass jugs, wine bottles, siphons, funnels, oversized rubber stoppers, and what looked like a complicated printing press.

Marie stood in the center of the room, her back to us. She appeared to be staring into a large metal vat, about the size of a hot tub.

Allison slowed her pace as she neared her sister.

“Marie! What is it? What’s—”

Allison choked on her words as she looked down into the vat.

I caught up with them and peered inside.

My stomach lurched.

A body was floating facedown in a pool of red wine.

It wore a flannel plaid shirt. A straw hat lay at Marie’s feet.

“Oh my God!” I croaked, unable to find my voice.

“Javier,” Allison said, recognizing her co-worker. The back of her hand covered her mouth.

Marie grabbed her sister’s arm. “I just found him here…floating…,” Marie said through tears. “I came in looking for him, and saw his hat…then, there he was…Javier…” More tears flowed down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook.

I stepped back, not wanting to see the horrible scene anymore, and pulled out my cell phone with shaking hands. I punched 911, waited for the operator, and said, “We have an emergency. A man has drowned.” I gave her the particulars and hung up, my hands still trembling.

I was about to call Brad when I noticed there were two phone messages I’d apparently missed. No wonder, considering the day I’d had. Both had come from the same caller—a number I didn’t recognize. While Allison guided Marie outside to wait for the police, I
pressed the button on my phone and listened to the first message, in case it was Brad calling from someone else’s phone.

“Ms. Parker,” the Spanish-accented male voice said. “This is Javier Montoya, Mr. Christopher’s winery manager. I know you have been working to free him from jail. I have some information that could help. Can you come to the winery today so I can talk with you? You can call my cell phone when you get here and I will meet you. Please do not tell anyone of this. Is very dangerous.”

He left his number and hung up.

I shuddered, remembering the disturbing scene I’d just witnessed.

Javier had called me sometime before he died!

I checked the time: nine ten a.m. He must have called during my drive to Napa. I’d had the radio on and hadn’t heard the phone ring.

I listened to the second call from the same number. Nine fifteen. A hang-up.

He’d phoned back only minutes later. Why?

Javier had wanted to tell me something. Something urgent, if he’d called twice. Was it about the murder? What had he known?

And how had he gotten my number?

“Presley!” Allison called from outside the storage building. “Would you mind waiting for the police? I’m taking my sister inside.” She wrapped her arm around Marie’s waist as she walked to the house.

I dialed Brad. No answer. He often couldn’t answer the phone while he was on a cleanup job, with his gloved hands full of chemicals. I left an urgent message
asking him to call me back ASAP but decided not to offer the details until I could talk to him in person.

After hanging up the phone, I stepped back to the entrance of the building and looked around for anything that might explain what had happened. Obviously this was no accident—a person didn’t just fall into an open vat of wine and drown.

So how had Javier ended up there?

The barrel was at least six feet across, four feet deep. There were no steps to climb on, if a person suddenly wanted to take a wine bath, but one could lean over and perhaps try to take a sip. But who would?

I moved in closer, avoiding the sight of the body, and instead focused on the floor around the vat. I saw the hat and some wine stains, but there were no weapons lying about. I glanced at the shelves nearby and spotted plenty of solid, heavy objects the killer could have used to clobber the victim—a steel bar, a metal tool, a heavy piece of equipment. But none of those lay near the vat. Did the killer grab one of the objects and hit Javier over the head, then carefully replace it, making it a needle in a haystack for the cops to find? A careful killer would probably have wiped off any fingerprints as well.

But if the killer beaned Javier first, wouldn’t he have to drag the body over to the vat, lift it up, and dump it in? That took muscle. And would surely cause a splash. There would be wine stains on the killer’s clothes, as well as on the floor around the barrel. There were plenty of stains around the vat, but all appeared to be dry.

I’d have to see what the police found before spinning
my wheels any further. All I knew at this point was that Javier had had something urgent to tell me and had wanted to meet.

And now he was dead.

A light went on in the fog of my brain. Rob couldn’t have killed Javier—he was in jail. That meant Rob could be released—right? It didn’t clear him of JoAnne’s murder, but it had to be the same person—didn’t it?

Or would the police think there were two killers running around Napa Valley?

I heard sirens and stepped out of the storage area into the daylight. Two police cars pulled up, followed by an ambulance and a crime scene van. Detective Kelly stepped out of the car.

“You again?” he said by way of hello, and signaled his men to go inside. “What happened this time?”

“I don’t know,” I said, then nodded toward the storage building. “Allison and I were in the building next door and we heard a scream. We came running and found Marie hysterical, staring into that vat of wine. She’d discovered her manager, Javier, floating inside.”

The detective entered the crime scene building while I waited in the doorway, not wanting to see the body again, yet hoping to overhear any discoveries the police made. After a preliminary search by the detective and crime scene techs, the EMTs began removing the body from the vat. I turned my head, not eager to view Javier’s wine-soaked corpse. Again I wondered what he had been planning to tell me. Was it something that could have saved his life?

After the body was placed on a stretcher and taken to the ambulance, one of the officers searched the shelves. I thought he might be looking for the murder weapon, but instead he picked up a long-handled sieve the size of a butterfly net. He rolled up his shirtsleeve and dipped the sieve into the barrel, dredging the wine. After a few moments, he raised the sieve. Inside was a small round object.

Shaking off the wine residue, the officer retrieved the object from the net and handed it to Detective Kelly.

“What is it?” I asked, stepping in closer as the detective examined it.

“It looks like a class ring,” he said, squinting as he turned the object around in his hand. He pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket, put them on, and read the details aloud: “UCD, Class of ‘89.” Peering inside the ring, he continued. “To Marie, Love Robert.”

Huh.
What was Javier doing with the ring Rob had apparently given to Marie?

My cell phone rang. I answered it, hoping to hear Brad’s voice.

“Hello?”

“Where the hell are you?” I recognized Kyle’s voice. Crap. I’d forgotten all about meeting him.

“I’ve…been detained,” I said softly, and stepped away so the detective wouldn’t hear me.

“I want my check, Presley!” he demanded. “If you don’t bring it over now, I’m going to the police.”

I thought about telling him the truth, then changed my mind. I took a deep breath and said, “You know, Kyle, I don’t think you’re going to do that. I have a hunch that check—written against Angus McLaughlin’s
personal account—isn’t something you want anyone, including the police, to know about.”

Dead silence on the other end.

I continued. “I’ll meet you, but meanwhile, something’s come up that might help your client get out of jail free. I suggest you talk to the police. I’ll see you at the station in half an hour and we can have a little chat.”

I hung up. That felt good. I should pretend to have blackmail materials more often.

But I still had questions I wanted Kyle to answer—like why he had a check from the CEO of Napology. For now, Javier’s body trumped that. Either we had a new killer on our hands, or the person who’d murdered JoAnne was still on the loose and had just doubled his count.

Detective Kelly came out of the house, where I assumed he’d been taking statements from Marie and Allison.

“Ms. Parker,” he said, holding his notebook at the ready as he reached me.

Before he could pounce, I blocked him with my own question: “How’s Marie?”

“Upset, as you can imagine. Two murders on her property in less than a week. Her sister gave her a sedative, which cut my questioning short. She’s lying down.”

I thought about Allison giving Marie more drugs. Was that a good idea? Marie was already fragile, and I didn’t trust Allison to medicate her, since there seemed to be some animosity between them.

“Did
Marie say anything about seeing Javier before he was…murdered?” I asked.

Detective Kelly looked at me. “Detective Melvin warned me about you. You like to moonlight as Agatha Christie, don’t you?”

“More like Nancy Drew,” I said. “Listen, Marie asked me to help out. I may know something that will help you. Quid pro quo?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “If you’re withholding evidence—”

“I’m not!” I said. “But I’ve learned a few things that maybe will help you with your investigation.”

“Like what?”

“Like JoAnne had threatened quite a few people in this town. Like Allison had been selling the Christophers’ wines under a false label. Like Kyle Bennett is involved in unethical lawyering, or whatever you call it.”

The detective cocked his jaw.

“So what did Marie say?” I asked.

He sighed and glanced at his notes. “She said she was taking a walk around the vineyard, looking for Montoya. She wanted to ask him about something. That’s when she found him floating in the wine barrel.”

“It must have given her quite a shock,” I said, remembering her screams. It had certainly given me a shock. “Did you ask her about the ring you found?”

He nodded. “She said it had gone missing a few days ago.”

“During the party?”

“Before that.”

“Did she say she lost it, or it ‘went missing’?”

The detective looked at his notebook again. “She claims she kept it in her jewelry box, along with some other valuable pieces. When she went to retrieve a necklace a few days before the party, she noticed it was gone.”

“Did she say anything else was missing?”

“As a matter of fact, she mentioned diamond earrings and a diamond tennis bracelet.”

I sucked in a breath. “Did she suspect Javier of stealing her jewelry?”

“She was pretty surprised when I told her what we found in the vat of wine. She said she didn’t think Javier would do anything like that, but she couldn’t explain why we found it with his body.”

I thought a moment. “Okay, I could understand Javier stealing the diamond jewelry in these hard times, especially since he’d been losing work. But why a class ring, since it was engraved—and probably not worth enough to make it worth his while?”

“Diamond studded,” the detective said.

It still didn’t make sense. “Then why did he end up floating in the wine barrel?”

The detective shrugged. It was becoming his favorite mode of communication. “Maybe he was a fence and planned to keep the money himself.

“Any marks on him?”

“Yeah, the EMT noticed a contusion at the back of his head. Looks like someone hit him first, good and hard, just like JoAnne. Then somehow the perp got him into that barrel and let him drown—or held his head under until he drowned.”

I shuddered at the details of his death, as if a wind had swept through me. What had the killer used to bean him?

“Well, if anything,” I said, “this lets Rob off the hook, doesn’t it? Obviously he didn’t do it since he was in jail.”

Detective Kelly flipped his notebook closed. “Not so fast. True, he didn’t kill Montoya, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Douglas. We’ll hold him until we hear back from the ME and the crime scene techs. We may have a second killer who could have been working with Rob on the outside.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I said. “Rob’s not some mastermind gang leader. He’s a winemaker who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You can’t possibly still think he’s guilty.”

“I don’t know what to think yet, Ms. Parker. But if you’ll let me do my job, maybe I’ll figure it out. And by the way, what I’ve told you is in confidence. Melvin said I could trust you to be discreet. Annoying, but discreet.”

With that, the detective got in his car and drove away, leaving the techs behind to pick over the scene, and me to wonder what the hell was going on in the wine country.

I decided to check on Marie and Allison and make sure there were no suspicious cups of tea or empty pill bottles lying around. Allison was on her cell phone in the kitchen, talking mushy baby talk to someone on the other end. I couldn’t make out the words, but her flirtatious tone was clear. I wondered who was on the receiving
end of the call. One of her sugar daddies? It seemed awfully inappropriate, considering the recent circumstances. But I expected nothing less of Allison.

I tiptoed past the kitchen entry and walked to Marie’s room, hoping to talk to her before she was completely zonked out. I opened the door and peered inside the dark room. The shades had been drawn. Marie lay on her back under a thick comforter that was patterned with grapes and leaves. When I heard her rhythmic breathing, I took a step back, prepared to leave.

“Allison?” Marie’s scratchy voice whispered. Her eyes blinked open and she looked at me as if trying to place me.

“It’s me, Presley, Marie. I just came to check on you and see if you need anything. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Allison?” she repeated.

I stepped inside and neared her bed. “No, it’s Presley Parker. Allison’s in the kitchen. Can I get you anything?”