5 Blue Period (2 page)

She wasn’t alone in her thoughts
of the cuisine which did include lowbrow pork rinds and weapons-grade salsa. Usually free booze would have made for a tumultuous crowd. But these people had standards and the circulating platters remained full of wine and food. There would be no drunks throwing up behind the rose bushes after a night of wild dancing. Some of the grape growers at the party were dilettantes, retirees and hobbyists with money and a dream of owning a vineyard. Under other circumstances they would have boycotted their neighbor, but that wasn’t easy to do when you lived next to Attila the Hun.

“The canapés are
horrid. I think these are squid puffs. They are as chewy as rubber.”

“
Not squid. Alligator. Or iguana. Both are on the menu. I read the card.”

“Good God.” Juliet stared at her plate and then put it on a wrought
-iron table. It was covered in an embroidered cloth that represented all the local wineries. She had seen something like it before in a restaurant in D.C. That cloth had been a battlefield map of the Napoleonic Wars and it had looked at home with the sabers and muskets hanging on the wall. Here, it made one think of the Protestants sacking the abbeys. There was also another example of the head gardener’s horticultural torture which plagued all the formal gardens. It was a blue bonsai rose, doubtless a white rose spray-painted to match the name of the winery: Blue Period. Unnatural color aside, roses needed elbow room to sprawl and arch and climb their way to grace. Trapped in the tiny pot, the short, spiked canes looked angry and repellant.

“I doubt God had anything to do with it.
This is all manmade abomination.” But this seemed to amuse rather than appall him.

“
Quite,” Juliet agreed. “In any case, this isn’t her scene. That’s an urban predator. I wonder why she’s here.”

Raphael looked at her again.

“Yes, I see what you mean. There is something rather fanglike in that smile. I am having doubts that it is love alone that has brought her here.”

The woman was covering her pantsuit with another abomination. The coat sported a number of furs which Juliet hoped were faux, but knew in her heart were not.
This creature belonged to the brutal cult that liked animals only when they were dead and draped over their bodies. The zoomorphic interlacing of jaws clasping feet and tails resembled a crazy quilt of dead animals. It was impossible not to recall the pied piper of Hamelin and his cloak of living rat pelts.

Juliet wished passionately that she was at home with her paints and her cat, Marley.
She did not know how to deal with people like that and there were too many of them at the party. Juliet and Raphael were outnumbered. Especially Juliet. There weren’t a lot of women in the crowd exhibiting overt power or intelligence. Men, even in California, were historically cold to the idea and females aren’t stupid when it comes to reading male moods. Well, not all of them were stupid. There were a few hip-swinging bottom-jigglers in the crowd. But for the rest of the females, this male disapproval meant that the power went underground where it often got twisted by frustration.

Raphael hid his distaste
of the woman’s clothing and her ostentatiously displayed and artificially enhanced assets. Juliet hoped that she was also ready for the poker game since her host and his lady friend were headed their way. It took some effort because after a week of socializing she had wearied of connecting names to faces, or at least forms, and those forms to public identities. It was necessary because everyone there felt they were terribly important. Juliet knew that she was expected to declare that she was honored to meet them and to keep on declaring it with a believable level of sincerity. She was resigned to the social code. The only escape would be to take off her artist disguise and reveal herself as an NSA super spy. Former super spy. And that she would never do.

Fortunately she had made a career of understanding lies
and even telling them while she thought of other things. She didn’t have to work so hard these days to keep the wolf from the door, but it still lurked in the nearby woods, close enough to help her put in a good performance.

She needed the skill
of distracted lying because there was only one guest she was interested in and he was working his way toward them. He had been introduced at Jeffry Talbert. She had last known him as Thomas Herbert. She was making every effort to stay out of his way. The man was, in NSA parlance, a fixer. It was kind of like being a hit man, but usually nonlethal solutions were tried first. But this time, Talbert seemed to be without electronic aid and was contorting with the agonies of the eavesdropper who had to do things the old-fashioned way. It should have amused Juliet, but it didn’t.

But then, nothing was amusing
that evening. The blade of general social angst had taken on a personal edge. Embedded in her party manners, which insisted that she remain and make Raphael proud, was a lingering resistance to any involvement in governmental projects. And she was having a strong intuition that she was going to become involved in Talbert’s affairs if she did not depart immediately. Raphael had also recognized him and had aided her in her efforts to avoid the agent, but they had retreated as far as they could without locking themselves into the bathroom.

“We’ll make nice for a moment and then go,” Raphael promised.
“I’ll pretend to swoon or something.”

“Good.”
But Juliet found herself smiling at the idea of Raphael pretending to faint.

“Now smile pretty for the rich man.”

Juliet obeyed.

Arrogant
Carl Owens she knew how to handle, but the woman was baffling. She wouldn’t want ego-stroking from Juliet. Which was good because Juliet was at a loss about what to say or where to look. The creature wasn’t fat—far from it—but her pronounced ovoids, top and bottom, were suspiciously and unfashionably lush. While she was busy removing all expression from her face she had probably asked the doctor for JLo’s butt and Dolly Parton’s breasts. Juliet wondered if she were vain or just stupid. And would it be better for her if the creature were intelligent enough to converse, or as dumb as a post and just as uncommunicative. One thing was for certain and that was that her sense of smell had to be dead. To breathe around her was to invite suffocation by perfume.

Carl Owens dropped a stain
ed napkin on the table. There was writing on it, blurred by the wine stains. The message was upside down but Juliet could make it out:
Meet me at the old door
. Somehow it came as no surprise that Owens was being chased by some ill-advised female who thought that being near men with money could buy happiness. Wealth made even unpleasant men acceptable to some women. It also would not surprise her if he kept the assignation.

Equally, it would not surprise her if he ignored it.
Sex wasn’t Owens’ vice.

“Raphael, so glad that you could make it. You had no trouble negotiating the path?” Carl Owen
s asked as he extended his hand. That meant Raphael was deemed important. Which he was. His reputation in the art world cast a long shadow.

Juliet gave Owens credit for not ignoring Raphael’s wheelchair
and for caring that his guest had had no difficulties getting to the party. His smile also seemed genuine if aided by porcelain veneers.

“May I introduce my
present wife, Carissa?”

“Soon to be ex
if he has his way,” she muttered.

Carl ignored her
but Juliet could tell that he was annoyed that she was airing their business in public. Juliet knew that she could learn more about this impending divorce if she cared to. Relationships of the rich were community property in a small town and gossip popped up like gophers in a vegetable garden.

“
Carissa, this is the famous painter Raphael James and—should I call you Miss Henry? Miss Henry is also an artist and my champion partner at the grape stomp.”

But not a famous
artist. She was not being wooed to paint a mural in the visitor center. At least she rated a title in front of her name and recognition for an ability to squish grapes.

“We have shared a vat and are stained purple to the knees by the juice of the same grapes. I don’t think formality is called for. Please call me Juliet.”
She used her work smile on both of them. It had been mothballed for a couple of years but it was still serviceable.

Owens looked mildly amused.
Carissa’s returned smile was all teeth and no charm. She did not offer to shake hands. Possibly she was germophobic, but Juliet suspected that she had dismissed Raphael because he was an artist and in a wheelchair and was ignoring Juliet because she did not perceive her as a threat to her meal ticket. Or soon to be ex-meal ticket.

In that she was correct. Juliet had no designs o
n Carl Owens. She’d sooner bed a shark. In the dark places of her heart, she even hoped that Jeffry Talbert—or whoever he was pretending to be—was going after the vintner.

Since she was not expected to have any opinions about wine making
or about anything else of importance, Juliet let her mind wander while Owens droned on about white grapes preferring the southern end of the valley where temperatures were cooler and how he was acquiring more land in the north for his cabernet grapes. Reading between the lines, it was obvious that Owens wanted the vines at Trefoil for the prestige they would bring through his claim that he used the rarest, oldest varietals in his wines. It would also allow him to put the word “estate” on his bottles. The designation required that all grapes in the wine be grown within five miles of the winery and Trefoil was the only place where he could get them. The Napa Valley was only thirty miles by five miles and every inch was owned, planted, and defended. The “estate” labeling wouldn’t fool anyone who knew about wine, but most people were ignorant and relied on television advertising. These people were his customers and he wanted to be able to charge double for his wine. It would pay for the new aerial tramway he was thinking of installing.

While her brain was numbing
under the steady drip of Owens’ voice, Juliet noticed another man who was standing aloof from the party. There wasn’t an obvious reason why he should excite her curiosity. He was dressed the same as everyone else, had the same clothes, the same haircut and same tan. But while everybody else was smiling with spurious politeness as they chatted with neighbors, this man was standing alone in a deep shadow and smoking intently.

The smoking alone would have set him apart. People who prized their superior sense of smell—or at least who pretended to have a superior sense of smell—
would never damage their nasal passages with smoke. And when he pulled the slim cigarette from his mouth, Juliet could see the end was ragged and stained an unpleasant brown. He was downwind, so she couldn’t know for sure, but she assumed that he wasn’t smoking tobacco. If, however, it was marijuana, the weed was failing completely as a relaxant. The man remained tense and angry. His face also did not match the young man’s body. It looked worn out enough to have been used by a couple of previous generations of hard-living men before being passed on to him. He was also casting hard glances at their host.

She rejoined the conversation when Owens suggested a tour of the wine caves, but Raphael demurred. He countered with a suggesti
on of a tour tomorrow afternoon after the morning’s grape stomp since the caves would be a delightful escape from the heat of midafternoon. Then they could go to the visitor center and see the other exhibits. Raphael had unfortunately arrived late and not had the chance to see the other artists’ work.

Since that was where Owens
wanted Raphael to paint a mural and knew when it was best to stop pressing, he agreed easily and used his smile some more.

Juliet
reluctantly agreed to also join the tour when appealed to by Raphael, and having gotten what he wanted, Carl Owens left them, taking the repellant soon-to-be ex with him.

“Let’s go,” Juliet said. “I’ve had enough iguana for one night.”

“Do I need to take you out and feed you dessert?” Raphael asked.

“It couldn’t hurt. My psyche could use a little sweetening.”

The morning was pleasant with a lingering bit of lavender mist in the air. There was latent heat beyond the shadows
which would tear through the last of the fog, but it had yet to show its claws. Possibly it was saving itself for the grape stomp-off where it could do the most harm to the stupid humans.