Sharpshooter (4 page)

Wade loaded his plate with pasta. “How goes the war on bugs?” he said to Charlie, who was carving a leg off the roast chicken.

“It’s going pretty well.” Charlie speared a potato and a couple sections of carrot. “Nothing so far, at least in the sharpshooter department. No news is good news.”

“I missed the last ag board meeting. Are they still planning to poison us when the new leafhopper comes to town?” Wade asked.

“Possibly. I’d say the meeting went pretty well if you’re in pesticide sales and application. Profits are likely to be way up. They talked about a full-force mandatory application of carbaryl across the county as soon as there’s a sharpshooter on the radar.”

“I thought we talked them out of that last time,” said Wade.

“The big guys are still pushing for it pretty hard.”

“Well, at least one of them won’t be pushing for it anymore,” said Wade.

“Yeah, I guess not,” said Charlie.

“You mean Jack?” asked Rivka.

“He was a big proponent of broadcast pesticide application,” said Wade. “Very persuasive in front of the ag board. Beroni and two or three of the other big wineries basically pay their salaries and then some, so the board listens. The program they’re pushing would mean door-to-door nerve poison delivery, residential included. They’d spray every yard, garden, farm, and park, in addition to all the vineyards. It’s amazing that there hasn’t been more of a protest about it. People around here seem to be okay with the idea of having their homes dipped in nerve poison so that the big wineries can stay in business.”

“People don’t think it’s a real threat. I mean, I don’t actually believe that the county would try to spray my place,” said Monty.

“Believe it. They did it in Sacramento and Fresno already. And it didn’t do a damn bit of good, by the way. The bug is as entrenched there as it ever was. Did anybody bring that up at this last meeting?”

“Ben Baker did,” said Charlie. “Then the spray lobby pointed out that Fresno and Sacramento didn’t get to it in time and that’s
why it didn’t work. It actually strengthened the argument to do it at the very first sign of infestation.”

Wade looked incredulous. “That’s great. So some guy dressed like an astronaut in a biosuit is going to pull up with a tanker truck of nerve poison, knock on your door, and say, ‘Throw a tarp over the dog because your yard is about to be doused.’ It amazes me they’re even considering it. We’re not talking about a threat to the general public here. This is not an outbreak of West Nile Virus. This is a little leafhopper that just happens to spread a disease that just happens to kill grapevines and not much else.”

“Even the Beronis won’t get that through around here,” said Rivka.

“I wish you were right,” said Wade. “But don’t forget that very big money is at stake. Every wine-related job in the valley is on the line. We’ve got the bumblebees and the ladybugs on one side and a six-billion-dollar wine industry on the other. I can take a pretty good guess at who is going to win that argument.”

They were quiet and Wade went back to his plate, hunching over it and stacking his fork with chicken, pasta, and potatoes.

Charlie spoke. “The big wineries are scared. They saw what happened in Southern California and they know the glassy-winged sharpshooter could be the end of them. I was down in Orange County last week and it’s pretty spooky stuff. They treated some of the vines that are still alive down there with white kaolin clay, trying to save them. Frankly, it hasn’t worked and it does almost as much damage as Pierce’s disease because it impedes photosynthesis and you get a lot of defoliation. But at this stage, it’s their only hope.” He looked at Wade. “Imagine your entire vineyard covered in white chalk. It looks like a ghost world.”

Wade chewed and swallowed. “Better that than carbaryl. That stuff goes everywhere. Drifts half a mile from where they
spray it, sinks into the soil and the water, gets taken up in the roots of every bush, tree, and blade of grass. Kills the bees and all the other beneficials. It’s bad stuff, I don’t care what they say about how it’s as safe as chewing gum. That said, Pierce’s disease will wipe me off the map. There is probably a place for pesticides in this fight, but not at the first sighting and not the whole valley.”

“The county needs to put their energy into inspecting the incoming plants,” said Monty. “It seems like the most logical approach is to keep the bug out in the first place. If they can keep the garden suppliers from delivering the sharpshooter right to our door, Charlie’s friends up in Davis might have enough time to cook up a solution. The Department of Viticulture and Enology has saved our butts before. Give them time and they’ll engineer a vine that’s resistant to Pierce’s disease or has a sharpshooter repelling gene in it. They’re already planning to release a wasp that eats glassies in the meantime, right?”

“It’s not quite ready yet,” said Charlie, sounding cautious. “You never really know the ramifications of releasing a new predator into an ecosystem.
Gonatocerus triguttatus
didn’t seem to cause any problems in Florida and Texas, but the researchers need to take a closer look to be sure. And they’re going to need time to test it locally, release it in a controlled area and watch what happens. Plus there’s more than one wasp option, so they’ll want to look at which one will have the least impact on the environment. There’s one kind of parasitic wasp, for example, that paralyzes the sharpshooter, then buries it and lays its eggs on top of it. When the baby wasps hatch, sharpshooter breakfast is waiting for them. That’s okay. Then there’s the other tiny one, the GT they’re using down in Florida and Texas, that’s a little guy about the size of a grain of polenta, that lays eggs inside the sharpshooter’s eggs. When they hatch, they eat their way out.”

“Ugh,” said Rivka. “The sharpshooters alone are bad enough. They’re so ugly. But I hate wasps.”

“Better to have wasp babies eating sharpshooters than sharpshooters eating grapes,” said Wade.

“And the viticulture and enology people are going to need years to get anything genetically engineered to market,” said Charlie. “That’s not really an option for a long time. Like a decade or so.”

There was a pause in the conversation as people concentrated on eating and drinking. Sunny kept looking over at Wade to see how he was doing. She was trying to convince herself that there was nothing to worry about, but the look on his face wasn’t helping. He was eating, but he seemed worried, and a few times when she looked over he seemed lost in some unpleasant thought. Yet it was perfectly reasonable for the police to question Wade. After all, he was the Beronis’ closest neighbor. It was also perfectly reasonable for them to question her, since she was with Wade on the night of the murder. He probably wasn’t even a suspect. Probably they were just covering their bases. She pointed her fork at Monty. “Lenstrom, you know everybody who’s ever set foot in this valley. Who do you think killed Jack Beroni?”

“Who says it was someone in the valley? It was probably a random psychopath on his way through town,” Monty replied.

Sunny shook her head. “No, it’s gotta be a local. Who else is even going to find that gazebo way out there in the sticks, let alone in the middle of the night with Jack standing in it. I say it was somebody from the valley, somebody he knew, maybe even somebody he agreed to meet out there in the gazebo. Think about it. Who’d stand to gain from his death?”

It was the question they’d been avoiding all night, or at least some of them had. Now that it was on the table, Monty was
taking it seriously, judging by his expression, which resembled that of an oracle priest mulling over a question of state. He put down his knife and fork and ran his fingers over his shaved head thoughtfully. He’d developed the habit of smoothing his fingers over his scalp when he was perplexed, perhaps because he’d recently switched from keeping what was left of his hair very short to shaving it entirely. Rivka poked at a puddle of wax developing under one of the candles.

“Plenty of people disliked Jack,” said Monty slowly, as though delivering an impromptu eulogy. “I didn’t particularly like him, but of course I didn’t hate him, and I certainly never thought of killing him. He was simply not pleasant to know. He was born to privilege, and he used that privilege in the most self-aggrandizing manner. He was Napa royalty, and he was unapologetic and even arrogant about what that entitled him to. He was handsome, intelligent, rich, and poised, but he was not a gentleman, and he didn’t even go to the trouble to behave badly enough to be a scandal, which might have been interesting to watch at least. He was intimidating and generally considered to be dishonest. Where his father was shrewd, he was conniving. Where Al was tough, he was mean.”

“To the point, please,” said Rivka, striking a match and lighting a cigarette.

“The point is, Madam Smoker, that I could make a list of at least twenty people who had good reason to put a few pins in their Jack Beroni voodoo dolls, ranging from insult to injury to underhanded business practices, but I can’t imagine any of them killing him.”

“That’s almost exactly what Steve Harvey said today,” said Sunny. “But of course it did happen, so somebody is capable of more than we think they are. I never knew everyone hated him so
much in the first place.” She motioned to Rivka, who handed over the cigarette. Sunny took one drag. She didn’t allow herself whole cigarettes anymore, just one puff now and then after dinner.

“Not hate, more like quietly but persistently loathe,” said Monty, “and not everyone.”

“What about his sexy girlfriend?” said Rivka.

“Larissa? Why would she want Jack dead?” said Monty.

“From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t exactly faithful to her. And he dated her for five years without asking her to marry him.”

“I truly hope that is not justification for murder,” said Monty.

“If she was desperately in love with him and he kept yanking her chain,” Rivka said, “it could be if it went on long enough. At the wine auction last year, he put his hand on my backside like he owned it. This was while Larissa was standing about ten feet away.”

“And?” said Monty, smirking.

“Don’t give me trouble, Lenstrom. You know you can’t handle me.”

“Napa’s most eligible bachelor comes on to you and you didn’t respond?” said Monty.

“I don’t date other women’s boyfriends. And he wasn’t my type. Too pretty and too sleazy. I like a boy with dirty hands and a clean heart.”

“I have the dirty hands at least,” said Monty.

“I meant dirty from working outside,” said Rivka.

“Oh,” said Monty. “The construction worker complex again. It’s pervasive. When are you girls going to get over the he-man thing?”

“It just shows that you never really know the whole story about a person,” said Charlie. “You think you do, but then there’s all this behind-the-back stuff going on.”

Rivka gave him a look and stabbed into the roast chicken on her plate, spearing a bite.

Charlie stopped and blushed slightly when he realized the double entendre. “I mean, he seemed honest and straightforward, but maybe he forgot to pay somebody, maybe he got in somebody’s way.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Monty. “The Beronis have always been thoroughly legitimate. They maintain plenty of influence up in Sacramento, but they don’t have the criminal ties like some of the old families did before the corporate wave came in, back in the eighties. The Beronis make overpriced, mediocre wine and throw big fancy parties and that’s about it, as far as I can tell.”

“It wouldn’t have to be the Mafia,” said Charlie. “It could be anything. Drugs, gambling, the wrong kind of friends.”

“This is all speculation,” said Sunny. “The truth is, we have no idea what happened and probably never will. Somebody shot him and walked away.”

Monty spent some time aligning an errant spear of asparagus with the others on his plate. “It’s terrible,” he said, “but my first thought when I heard about the murder wasn’t sympathy for Larissa or Al and Louisa. My first thought, I’m ashamed to admit, was that Beroni Vineyards had lost its heir. Jack was Al and Louisa’s only child, and he wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids. The only other family is Ripley Marlow, and she’s a cousin through Al’s mother, so she’s not even a Beroni. There may be other cousins or distant relations somewhere, but I’ve never heard of them. I can’t even imagine what Beroni is worth, and now there is nobody to inherit it, no one to take over running it when Al retires, which I’m sure he was hoping to do soon.”

“You bet,” said Wade. “This could be the end of Beroni Vineyards, at least as a family business.”

They went on talking about the murder for some time after dinner, compulsively driven to recount where they had been when they heard the news and what their first response had been. It was as if repetition of the details would lead to some understanding, or to a way to make the events more real. When they’d finished eating, Sunny pulled the cork on a slender bottle of Sauternes
Botrytis cinerea
Sémillon, a gift from Monty, and served slivers of the pear tart she’d brought home from the restaurant. The cool, deliciously sweet flavors of the wine almost made them forget their curiosity about Jack Beroni’s death.

Later, sitting on the couch, Sunny recognized the signs of being very tired. She felt suddenly slow and heavy, like someone had turned up the pull of gravity. She stared at Charlie Rhodes’s wide, tan hands. She thought that after everyone left she would soak in the bathtub and then sleep late into the morning. When she woke up, she would call Steve Harvey, get the results of the ballistics report, feel tremendous relief, and go over to Wade’s place to celebrate. After that, as sad an event as it was, Jack Beroni’s death would not be her concern anymore and she would forget about it. Life would go back to normal.

She realized she hadn’t heard anything that had been said for several minutes. Monty and Wade were talking about who they could recruit to help with the harvest at Skord Mountain, and Rivka was giving a capsule version of the action flick she and Alex had seen the night before. After a while, Rivka and Monty got up to do the dishes, telling Sunny not to even think about trying to help. Wade sat in the big comfortable chair quietly.
Sunny sat up and looked at Charlie. “The county wouldn’t really go around spraying people’s yards, would they? I mean, there’s been talk about it, but they won’t actually do it, will they?”