Lethal Vintage (6 page)

The situation demanded an emotional response. Tears, ideally, and lots of them. Uncontrollable sobs. Collapse. Something to indicate she was human and felt human grief and compassion. Sunny McCoskey had never been the type, as much as she would have liked to be. She knew it was strange. It felt strange even to her. One of her oldest friends was dead and her eyes were dry as cork. Nothing. Not even a tingle. She’d always been this way. Emotionally powerful situations rendered her calm, cool-headed, and oddly devoid of emotion in direct proportion to the severity of the impact. The more serious the incident, the calmer the state of mind. After the crisis passed, and usually at an oddly irrelevant moment, she would finally feel the punch of grief, doubling up with sobs over a particularly moving beer commercial or the sight of a dog locked in a car.

It was an effort to keep still. Her pulse was racing. She wanted to sprint up the dry trail behind the house, to run and claw and pull herself through the scraping bushes all the way to the top. She wanted her lungs to pump air until they burned and her legs and arms to work and sweat until they quivered with exertion. The worst was having to sit in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee and wait. The police had asked them not to talk to one another, not to
go anywhere, not to contact anyone, not to use their cell phones. An officer was left to watch over them while one by one they went into the improvised police headquarters set up in one of the guest rooms to tell their stories.

It was a relief not to have to talk. Franco tried to discuss the situation, but the officer guarding them asked him to refrain from unnecessary discourse. He resorted to sighs and the occasional disgruntled expletive as he settled and resettled himself in the chair. Once he glanced over at Sunny with a look of such penetrating sorrow that she almost got her wish. Her throat tightened and it took a great effort to arrest the welling up of tears.

They sat around the kitchen in a grim parody of the previous day’s festivities. Troy Stevens, looking even paler and more disheveled than yesterday, slumped in the corner of a built-in seat in his black T-shirt and jeans, staring out the window. In the other corner, Jordan cried quietly but profusely. Every few minutes she took a wet ball of tissue from the pocket of a terry-cloth tracksuit and blew her nose. Sunny, Franco, and Jared sat at one end of the kitchen table. Molly stood outside the sliding glass door in her black skirt and heels, smoking, and Jared watched her. Cynthia sat at the other end of the table staring at her hands. Andre and Marissa occupied two of three barstools at the island, leaving one empty between them. Andre kicked back and forth on the stool, checking his watch. Sunny had heard Marissa tell Franco that Keith had returned to San Francisco late last night. Oliver had been in the guest room with the police giving his statement for more than an hour. Sunny’s stomach growled. On cue, a cop arrived with a pink box full of doughnuts and a jug of reconstituted orange juice. The stuff confessions are made of.

“She was murdered, obviously,” said Franco, squeezing sunscreen into his palm and rubbing it over his face and neck.

They were out by the pool, waiting. It was almost two o’clock. Sunny, like the others, had described her experiences of the day and night before to the police in detail, though one could argue that she’d left out the juicy bits. She had skipped Keith Lachlan’s offer of a pick-me-up. She left out the late-night hot-tub session and interrupting Molly and Jared in flagrante delicto, as well as her surprise upon discovering that Andre Morales had joined the party after she went to bed. The manic energy she’d felt earlier had worn off and now she was in a daze. She stared at the water of the barely rippling pool as if she was watching television. Her hangover had probably, she now reflected, clouded her judgment. The events she had skipped over would come out eventually. Even if she didn’t mention getting into the hot tub, someone else would. The police were going to come back to her and she would have to explain. At least by then her stomach wouldn’t be lurching and sloshing like hide tide at the boardwalk. At the time of the interview, none of it had seemed terribly relevant. She thought describing the seedier aspects of the night would only embarrass her and shock Sergeant Harvey, who had seemed to grow sterner and angrier with every question. It was hard to say how much such stories offended him. Where did drugs, sex, and rampant affluence fall in his moral universe? Well outside, she assumed. Sergeant Harvey liked rules, and not just because he was a cop. He was order and regulation and discipline from his neatly trimmed nails to his gleaming black boots.

Franco moved on to his chest and shoulders, rubbing the lotion in with brisk, glancing blows to his deeply tanned skin.

“You must learn to face it,” he said, “because this is not going to end today. We are all in for a bit of trouble over this poor girl’s death.”

Sunny was silent.

“Do you think I’m wrong?” he continued. “They interrogate us, keep us here like we are under house arrest. I am not to leave the country or even this town until otherwise informed or else they will find some way to make my life difficult.”

The police couldn’t keep them from leaving, but they had firmly suggested it would be better if everyone stayed until they were done gathering as much preliminary information and evidence as possible. It was a polite and hospitable prison, but a prison nonetheless. Out front, it looked like a major operation. The police had moved their headquarters to the “command van” parked in the driveway, and a truck had arrived in addition to several police cars. Officers were busy removing items from the house and loading them into the truck.

“It is quite clear the police have decided little Anna’s death was no accident,” said Franco. He settled into his chaise. “I hope Oliver has a good lawyer.”

“He has Keith,” said Sunny.

“I mean a criminal lawyer. Keith is a businessman.”

“Do you think they will accuse him?”

“They always accuse the lover. Besides, you heard them fighting. Everyone heard them. It doesn’t look good to people.”

“How well do you know Oliver?”

“Well enough.”

“Do you think he loved her?”

“Anna? Of course. But I’m not so sure she loved him.”

“She thought he was unfaithful to her.”

Franco chuckled. “Who knows? And was she faithful to him? I find it difficult to imagine.” He looked at Sunny with the alarming blue eyes that had startled her when they first met. “Faithfulness is overrated. If the love is there, that’s the important part.”

She felt her face flush with embarrassment. So, it was known. Everyone must know by now. Everyone except Keith Lachlan. He
was back in San Francisco, blissfully ignorant of both Anna’s death and his girlfriend’s unfaithfulness. Now she and Keith Lachlan had something in common.

“That is an interesting philosophy,” said Sunny. “The European approach to relationships, right? I don’t think it would work in America.”

“It is the old man’s approach. Believe what you want, people are nothing more or less than human. But if the love is not there”—again, he looked into her eyes—”then it doesn’t matter, does it? A husband and wife should be first in each other’s hearts. After that, you just live and hope and try not to hurt each other.”

“But Anna and Oliver weren’t married.”

“They would have been eventually. He talked about getting married. I told him to marry her, or choose someone else. I don’t agree with this American propensity to delay adulthood. What is so great about adolescence? Only in America do they prolong it to middle age. Everywhere else in the world, young people can’t wait to grow up. To make their own decisions and become independent. All the best pleasures of life happen to adults, and take it from me, they’re better enjoyed in youth. To be the young husband of a young wife is the greatest pleasure in the world. To be a young father, a young mother. To buy your first house, take your first vacation as a family. I honestly do not understand why Americans work so hard to avoid adulthood. Are movie theaters and nightclubs so much fun? You would think they would die of boredom by the time they’re thirty.”

He offered her a cigarette and she shook her head. No more of that. Yesterday she’d let go of her own better judgment from start to finish, thinking maybe someone else knew better. Maybe all those rules could be broken and everything would still be fine.

Franco looked at her. “How old are you?”

“I’ll be thirty-three in a week.”

“Too old to marry in Italy and most of the world. In America there’s still time. This guy you’re with now, he’s nothing. You need to find someone more substantial. Someone who isn’t afraid to be a man and give his word. You don’t want to end up like this poor girl we’re going to bury.”

“You don’t look too shook up about it,” said Sunny irritably.

“I’m like you. I don’t show my emotions. They attack me later when I least expect it. Over coffee on a nice new morning when I’m not thinking of anything remotely sad. They wait until I let my guard down and then they clobber me like a robber in a dark alley.”

On the subject of Andre Morales, Sunny’s mind went blank. No feelings, no words, nothing. Her mind was as simple and white as a boiled egg when it came to her boyfriend of six months standing in a bedroom with a scantily clad Guamanian princess. Andre, for his part, was nonchalant. Earlier he had pulled up a chair next to her and sat overlooking the vineyard and peeling an orange as though nothing had changed. He offered Sunny half.

“Don’t you want to save some for Marissa?” she said. “Maybe you should divide it into thirds.”

“You’re angry.”

“I don’t think there is a word for what I am, but anger is certainly part of it. Does that surprise you?”

“Look, Sunny, I’m sorry this happened. I certainly didn’t plan for this to happen.”

Sunny held up her hand. “Not now. Don’t do this right now while Anna is stretched out somewhere on a gurney thanks to exactly this sort of thinking.”

“What do you mean by that? I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Anna. I’ve never even met her.”

“I’m talking about rules, or the lack thereof. There are no rules in this house and now Anna is dead. I don’t want to hear your excuses. You broke the most basic rule of being together and you know it.” She sounded slightly hysterical even to her own ears.

“What, are you going to tell the teacher on me? Sunny, please grow up. I’m not going to apologize for unwinding with friends after a long night. If you want to make more of it than that at a time when we all have more important things to think about, be my guest.”

“And I’m not going to listen to you pretend to be honest. I want to be with a man who isn’t afraid to give me his word and stand behind it.”

In the late afternoon, Sergeant Harvey called them into the living room, where the crimson Rothko and the nudes presided. Cynthia had been the last to give her statement and her eyes were bloodshot. She blew her nose and pressed a wadded-up Kleenex to her eyes. Molly Seth and Jared Bollinger sat next to her on the couch. Jared’s boyish face looked sad and sweet, as if he was eager to help but didn’t know how. Molly had pulled her blond hair back in a tight bun. She had her arm around Cynthia, rocking her like a child. Marissa, Andre, and Troy sat off to the side in chairs around a coffee table. Sunny chose a place as far away from Andre as possible, slumped in the same armchair as last night, still in her bikini and cover-up and flimsy skirt. Franco and Jordan sat on the oversized ottoman in front of her, holding hands. There were several police officers Sunny didn’t know, and a man she assumed was Mike
Sayudo, the gardener who’d found Anna. Oliver Seth stood in back by the fireplace with his arms crossed. He seemed to have grown thinner and paler in the night. His eyes were rimmed in red and a purplish shadow lay beneath them. He looked extremely tired.

“Before we let you go today, I wanted to take a moment to reiterate that this is an open investigation,” said Sergeant Harvey, pacing in front of them like the principal of a school for derelict students. “While we won’t know exactly what we’re dealing with until the autopsy report and preliminary investigation are complete, I would like to ask your cooperation in not speaking about this matter any more than absolutely necessary, whether to each other or to people outside this room. Some facts will become public knowledge soon, such as the fact that a death occurred and the cause of death is being investigated. I would appreciate you keeping more detail than that to yourselves until further notice. Meanwhile, rest assured we will pursue every aspect of the case in order to establish exactly what transpired last night and this morning, and how those events may have contributed to the death of Ms. Wilson. We have more than fifteen officers dedicated to investigating the matter, and there may be more as leads come in, evidence is analyzed, and theories are developed.”

“Does that mean you think she was killed?” asked Molly.

“It’s too soon to determine anything right now. For the moment, we’re just gathering information, trying to establish exactly what might have occurred.”

“But you know how she died,” she persisted.

“We’ll have a better idea once the autopsy comes back in a day or two.” He looked around the room at each of them. “Before you leave, you will be given a card with an officer’s name and contact information on it. You should feel free, and depending on the situation, obligated, to contact this officer immediately should you learn
of or recall any new piece of information you think might prove useful to the investigation.”

Sunny’s mind was awash with emotion. Anna’s death and Andre’s betrayal folded into each other and it was impossible to know where her response to one left off and the other began. She only wanted to go home to her own kitchen. She’d had enough of the cloying softness of the chair she was sitting in and the carpet underfoot and all the other soft and shiny and luxuriously unmarred and unused surfaces of Oliver Seth’s home. She wanted to go to work. She did not arrive at the restaurant each day hoping lunch would appear. She made it happen. If there were impediments, she overcame them. At Wildside, she reigned supreme, god of a small kitchen. Here she could do nothing but wait, wonder, regret. Anna, what happened to you?