Wildcat Wine (20 page)

So I blabbed. “It's possible that Kenneth was working on a patent application for Earl.”

“How do you know that?”

“We found this today. It's a file with research on filing for a patent. Plus a good deal of info about modifications on an existing patent.”

Tired took the file, looked at the label, and opened it. “I went through his office already,” he said, the hint of an accusation in his voice.

“Yes, I know. Cristal guarded the office until you got the warrant.”

“Cristal,” Tired said and blushed.

Whoa, boy, I thought, you're way over your head there. Cristal didn't even date lawyers, so I doubted she would date law-enforcement types. Especially plump ones with a baby. In fact, now that I thought about it, Cristal, despite being cover-girl beautiful, didn't seem to date anyone. I started to say something to Tired to gently dissuade him from the thoughts I imagined produced his blush, but he shifted back to work mode too quickly.

“So this wasn't in his office? Or I missed it?”

“The law clerks had it in a file in the library.”

Tired sighed. “You people have so much paper.”

“We're lawyers.” Then I basically told Tired what little I had learned from the paper EStall file, even as he studied it. And then I shared my suspicion that Earl had perhaps consulted Kenneth about the ins and outs on filing a patent application for a sulfite-free wine process.

While I watched Tired ponder the significance of this new information, I asked him, “Okay, fair trade. Was Earl murdered or careless?” Tired hadn't been too sure one way or the other that day at the vineyard when Gandhi and I had found Earl's body.

“My money is on murdered,” he said. “The autopsy showed trauma to the back of his head consistent with somebody bashing him with a heavy object. Not enough to kill him, but to knock him out. Then the grape harvester did the rest.”

I physically shuddered at the image of that big machine with its metal tentacles rendering Earl asunder. “So somebody knocked him out and rigged the scene to look like an accident?”

“I think so. But there was a big rock right under his head when we found him, so if he fell on that, it could have been the source of the trauma,” Tired said. “So, maybe he did fall off the harvester while working on it, hit his head on that rock, got knocked out and mauled.”

But Tired sounded skeptical.

A rock? I thought. Earl's vineyard was clean. I had admired that about the place. “Tired, I had a good look around at that vineyard and I don't remember any rocks.”

“No, ma'am. Me neither.”

“So, somebody planted the rock?”

“A well-staged murder scene. There was some thought in it.”

“Do you think Cat Sue might've had something to do with it? She seems a tad unstable,” I added. “Plus that property ought to be worth a fortune if she were to get it and sell it.”

“That's the obvious. But we looked into it. That property, the vineyard, all of it is heavily mortgaged. Earl didn't have any kind of mortgage insurance to pay it off at his death either. Without Earl, the bank'll probably end up with it. Or a forced sale that'll bring her pennies on the dollar.”

“Okay, so greed wasn't a motive.”

“Nope, none obvious. Plus, Cat Sue's got a tight alibi. She was meeting with different potential wine buyers in and around Orlando all day, all those snooty little shopping towns around there with their high-rent liquor stores. She was trying to get some more outlets for the wine. We've checked it out and several of the wine merchants remember her.”

“She would stand out,” I said, thinking of the red scarf around her long hair and her floor-length billowy hippie dresses.

“Bottom line, she was three hours away about the time Earl got killed.”

“Thank you for sharing,” I said.

“Thank you for the file.”

“Are we square now?”

“If you'll let me get your fingerprints?”

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe. Okay?”

Tired walked me to my car, and thanked me again for telling him about the patent angle. As we stood in the parking lot, in the bright light of the afternoon, I wondered if my extreme ruckus over Tired ripping up my okra was the reason he was now with the sheriff's department instead of the city police.

“Tired, did you get into trouble with the police department over my complaint? You know, over the okra. Is that why you switched to the sheriff's office?”

“No, ma'am, not your fault. Not anybody's fault. I just didn't fit in there with all those guys from up north with master's degrees in criminal justice. I got me a B.A. out of Troy State, you know, south Alabama, and got tired of them looking down their noses at me. People at the sheriff's office are just as smart, smarter maybe, but not so stuck up.”

“I can understand that,” I said. For reasons not wholly clear, I felt a sudden warmth toward the man. He'd had a hard lot in life and he was carrying his load with some dignity. And with good manners.

I offered him what I could.

“You should ask Susie out. Take her to play tennis some weekend. To Ringling Art Museum, to eat at a nice place with fish and vegetables.”

“Susie?”

“Yes. Susie.”

“Look, the body count's pretty deep right now, and the high sheriff keeps sticking his finger in my eye,” Tired said. “Little hard to think about dating.”

“All the more reason,” I said, and smiled my own version of a world-weary smile, and got into my car and drove off.

Chapter 30

That night
, I awoke from my sleep when a deep, male voice spoke to me and said, “Follow the bullets.”

Had the voice given me a message like “Teach the children,” “Love your weird neighbor,” or told me where the Holy Grail was, I might have thought the voice of God had spoken to me.

As it was, I wondered why my subconscious sounded like James Earl Jones.

And I wondered why I hadn't thought of this before. It was pretty obvious, now that my subconscious had handed it to me. I mean, yeah, okay, Philip was working on the trail of the murder weapon, but regardless of where the gun had been between Dave's backpack in my house and the trunk of my car, we all knew where the gun was
now:
in the custody of Stan the constitutionally unenlightened and Tired Rufus the beleaguered.

But that box of 158-grain roundnose bullets might still be in the custody of Kenneth's killer.

James Earl Jones seemed to suggest this.

The gun and the bullets would have traveled together, at least for a while. I knew this because I knew, thanks to Philip and his spies in the sheriff's office, that six 158-grain roundnose bullets had plowed into Kenneth.

I thought about that box of 158-grain roundnose bullets in Dave's backpack at my house. Okay, so what happened to them after that?

Obviously Dave hadn't carried the backpack with him to the jail or there would have been quite the discussion there about the gun and the bullets. As a convicted felon, Dave wasn't supposed to be toting around guns and bullets with him. So that meant that the backpack was probably left at Waylon's duplex.

Or, and I didn't like the next thought, they had been left in Benny's truck and Benny had taken them.

If Benny had taken the backpack, and found the gun, and borrowed my car from Bonita, and . . . Or, if Bonita had found them . . . Bonita, who was quite firm in not voluntarily giving Tired her fingerprints . . . Bonita, who had a reason . . .

No, I couldn't complete these thoughts.

But I would have to ask Benny and Bonita about that box of bullets.

I looked at the clock by my bed. Four in the morning, the witching hour, the hour we wake and wonder, and the lucky take a wiz and go back to sleep, while the rest of us wrestle with our demons.

Or we get out of bed and do something.

Crawling over Bearess, on the floor, I got up, drank a glass of double-filtered water, and pondered my options, or perhaps my targets—Dave, Benny, or Philip.

Well, Philip had said to call him anytime.

After several rings, a sleepy-sounding Philip answered, not with hello, but with, “This better damn well be an emergency.”

“More or less.” Everything at four in the morning had the shadowy feel of an emergency.

“Lilly? Damn, don't you sleep?”

“Not so much since I stopped the Xanax and Percocet.”

He muttered something I couldn't make out.

“I need to know. What about the gun and the box of bullets?”

“What about them?”

“Track them for me, can you do that? I mean, you told me that you were going to work on the trail of the gun. But what about the box of bullets? They were in Dave's backpack, and he took the backpack the night he and Benny went to Waylon's and he got arrested. Where'd it go from there?”

“What box of bullets?”

Uh-oh, I hadn't mentioned that, had I? “The box of 158-grain roundnose bullets, they were in Dave's backpack, with the gun.”

“You didn't tell me about that.”

“Oh.” Well, excuse me, I had had a lot on my mind and was still suffering from some confused notion of protecting Dave by not broadcasting that information. Not wasting any time in chastising myself, I told Philip all I could remember about the bullets. To his credit, Philip grasped the point much quicker than I had.

“So whoever had the .38 and the box of bullets loaded the weapon with six and then had a nearly full box left,” Philip said. “This person then planted the weapon in your trunk. But what would this person do with the box of bullets?”

“Yes. Exactly. If we find that box of bullets, we might find Kenneth's killer.”

“The most sensible thing for the shooter to do with the box of bullets would have been to dispose of them. They might well be at the bottom of Philippe Creek.”

“Maybe. But maybe not. Track the gun for me. What did Dave say about the gun? Where'd it go after he took it from my house?”

“I asked him that. Precisely that. Several times. I've been trying to track that weapon since I first learned about it.”

Philip sounded fully awake now. Good, nothing an insomniac likes better than other people who can't sleep.

“And?” I asked the easiest question I could.

“Dave offered an incomplete explanation.”

“What?”

“He doesn't know, or he is not fully elucidating what he does know.”

“Would you cut the crap and tell me what he said?” I mean, come on, who uses words like
elucidating
at four in the morning?

“Lilly, if I ask you nicely, would you please refrain from using that word? It is not at all ladylike.”

What word? Crap? Bypassing any linguistic debates, I asked, “What the hell did Dave say about the gun?”

“That he didn't know what happened to it. The backpack was apparently left at Waylon's duplex. It was gone when Dave was released from the jail and went back for it. He assumed, apparently, that Waylon had taken it with him to Lakeland. I have spoken to Waylon over the phone and he denied ever seeing the .38 and is emphatic that he did not take it. So Dave said he didn't know where the gun was. That is, until it showed up in your trunk. He has no explanation for that.”

“Why are you saying apparently the backpack was left at Waylon's?”

“Because the first time I asked him, Dave said he thought he had left the backpack in Benicio's truck. But then he backed off that.”

Frigging great. That left us with myriad equally worrisome options: Benny had taken the gun; Waylon had taken the gun; someone who had access to Waylon's duplex or Benny's truck had taken the gun; or we flat out didn't know.

“I'll go ask Dave myself,” I said, assuming Dave was at the yurt.

“Now?”

“Yes. Shouldn't be that much traffic this time of the night.”

“Lilly, it's the morning. Four in the morning. Go back to sleep.”

Easy for him to say.

While I was right about the lack of traffic and Dave being at the yurt, he was less than gleeful to see me at four-thirty
A.M
.

“Sum'n wrong?” he asked, bleary-eyed, slack-jawed, and wild-haired.

Behind him in the doorway, Cat Sue looked at me, radiant in her long hair and her gauzy nightgown, her face somehow both alert and bewildered.

“May I please speak with Dave? Alone?” I looked directly at Cat Sue, watching her.

“Come on in.” Cat Sue spoke the polite words in a slightly singsongy, but pleasant way, which Dave heard. But behind his body, she glowered at me.

As I went in, Cat Sue floated back to the futon and I grabbed Dave's arms and pulled him into the kitchen space and whispered, “I've got to know, and don't be bullshitting me, but where did your gun go after you left my house on Saturday?”

“Don't know.”

“Dave, this is me. Tell me.”

He rubbed his eyes, and shoved his hair, wavy from his braids, behind his ears, and he squinted as if he was outside in the bright sunlight, and then he said, “I don't know.”

“Damn it, Dave. Tell me.”

“Man, I tell you what, best I can recollect, I took the backpack with me in Benny's truck. I didn't have it at the jail, so either I left it in his truck, or I carried it in to Waylon's and left it there. Same as I told Philip.”

“That's the truth?”

“Lilly Belle, sweetheart, would I lie to you?”

In a heartbeat if the need was there. “Dave. This is me, Lilly. You know I'd never betray you, even if you killed Kenneth. Besides, I'm your attorney, I can't tell anyone anything you tell me. Same as with Philip. Attorney-client privilege, and all.”

“Now why would I kill Kenneth? I'd never laid eyes on the man. And, you know what, I sure could use that money back.”

I stared at Dave until I was sure there wasn't going to be anything else I could learn from him, and then I said good-bye, and I drove to Bonita's house, where I woke her up, but when I asked to see Benny, she told me he was asleep.

“Let me wake him up. I need to ask him something. It's important.”

Bonita stood back and let me in.

Together we walked down the hallway, then knocked on Benny's door. And knocked. And knocked, and finally Bonita opened the door and we walked in.

When Bonita flipped on his light, Benny's eyes opened and shut a few times and then he looked at me and Bonita and said,
“Mierda.”
And he snatched up his sheet to cover his skinny legs and plaid boxer shorts.

I waited for Bonita to correct him for cursing, but she didn't.

“Benny, what happened to Dave's backpack? The night he was arrested? He left my house with the backpack, and you in tow. When he got arrested, where was the backpack?”

Benny glowered at me and then said, “I don't know. Now get out of my bedroom.”

“Benny,” Bonita said, just the slightest hint of chastisement in her tone.

“
Please
get out of my bedroom.”

“I will. Sorry to have disturbed you. But first, make sure. Think about it. When did you see the backpack last?”

“Don't know.”

“Did Dave carry it with him into Waylon's duplex? Or leave it in your truck?”

Benny frowned and looked at Bonita, which made me look at her, and then Benny and I looked at each other.

“I don't know. Things happened fast. I don't remember.”

Having awakened him, I figured I'd caught Benny without defenses or pretenses. In other words, I believed him. Thinking I was going to have to track down Waylon in Lakeland and ask him, I sighed, apologized, and then left.

It never occurred to me that the little boy I'd watched growing up, difficult as his last years had been, would lie to me.