Blood Will Have Blood (26 page)

Spraggue didn't expect any welcoming committee at the San Francisco International Airport. He'd already deplaned from a blissfully boring coast-to-coast 747, strolled down miles of featureless corridor, and was tapping his foot in the Hertz line when he glimpsed Philip Leider, gesturing wildly from a hundred yards down the hallway. No one else answered the fat man's frantic semaphores, so Spraggue waved in return.

“Thought I'd missed you,” Leider gasped, his bulk heaving with the exertion of moving two hundred and fifty pounds of middle-aged man.

“How are you, Phil?” Spraggue shook hands and gave Leider a chance to catch his breath.

The fat man beamed. “Just fine.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I spoke to Kate this morning on the phone from the county jail. Asked if there was any way I could help. It's all over the valley by now, you can imagine. She told me you were on the way, so I volunteered to fetch and carry.”

“I could've rented a car.” Spraggue dismissed with little regret thoughts of the portable tape recorder he'd brought along, the lines he'd vowed to memorize on the drive to the valley. “You must be up to your eyeballs in grapes at your place—”

“Waste of money, renting cars. Kate's got transport you can use. Luggage?”

Spraggue hefted a carry-on duffel. “Just what you see.”

“Good. I'm double-parked. Impossible to find a space.”

Spraggue followed Leider's bobbing head out into the pale sunshine. He doubted that Leider had made any attempt to park legally. For such an important winery owner, they ought to reserve a private space. With a doorman.

“To tell you the truth,” Leider said, patting the trunk of a deep-red BMW 633 CSi before unlocking it, “I wanted to run down in my new toy. Like it?”

Spraggue nodded appreciatively and Leider opened the passenger door with a flourish. “The small winery owners of Napa have to stick together,” he said.

Spraggue prepared for a gut-wrenching journey. It was obvious even before they got to Highway 101 that the fat man was an incompetent driver. He attacked the gearshift with exasperating clumsiness. Spraggue felt sorry for the car.

“Shocking.” Leider mumbled the word under his breath.

“Traffic?” Spraggue hazarded. All rotten drivers like someone else to blame.

“Arresting Kate Holloway like that. Like some cheap thug.”

“She probably talked back to somebody.”

“She would.” Leider grimaced. Spraggue wished the man would keep his eyes on the road. “But it
is
ridiculous. The killer'll turn out to be some nut. They're everyplace, especially around here. Those sixties' kids who flocked to the sunshine to find the answers and can't even remember the questions. You see them everywhere: vacant faces hitching rides to nowhere. Scary-looking sad-faced zombies. I don't pick up hitchers any more. And hitchhikers, they're taking a gamble every time they get in a car with a stranger.”

“With all those loonies to choose from, why do you suppose the cops picked on Kate?”

“Sheer laziness. She was there on the spot. What could be neater? Our sheriff's an elected official, you know. The Honorable B. Ridley Hughes.”

“You sound less than enthusiastic.”

“
B
for bonehead. But don't worry. He won't come out unless there's a chance for a lot of favorable publicity. You'll deal with some deputy or other.”

“Comforting,” Spraggue said, clinging to the padded arm rest.

“All this violence,” Leider muttered, his stubby fingers drumming the steering wheel. “Crime on the streets, in the movies, on TV—”

A Toyota gave a yelping honk as Leider cut it off with a quick unsignaled lane change.

“On the roads,” Spraggue said quietly.

The corner of Leider's mouth twitched. “But it's not the
violence
on TV I'm most concerned about. Oh no. It's the damned wine ads. Orson Welles hypnotizing people with that gorgeous voice. ‘Wine-tasting' schools. Chic little parties with sophisticated guests all drinking swill!”

Spraggue laughed.

“It's serious! They work. Big business is raking it in. Coca-Cola, by God! General Foods! The industry's getting away from us. Small owners are in hot water. Every day you hear about another corporate takeover. Advertising's ruining everything.”

“The jug-wine market's booming, agreed. But there's still demand for premium varietals—”

“Your average yokel can't tell Mouton from grape juice. He listens to those shills who tell him McDonald's hamburgers are better than the food he cooks in his own home.”

“Not everyone listens.”

“Labor and production are both skyrocketing. And now advertising costs! And all those new wineries keep springing up! They're going to saturate the market. The little guys have got to stick together.”

“How little?” Spraggue asked. “I hear you're getting pretty substantial yourself.”

“Personally or professionally?” Leider stared down at his expansive stomach and laughed. The BMW came perilously close to a dirty white van displaying a
SAVE THE WHALES
bumper sticker. Spraggue resolved not to speak to Leider while he was within five car-lengths of any other vehicle.

Instead he stared out the window at the parched brown hills. This year's drought hadn't been as severe as last year's, but the visitor expecting lush greenery would have been disappointed. The landscape was broken up by fences and power lines, railroad tracks and distant lonely houses. Spraggue read the signs with their Spanish place names, relived past California vacations, nights in Carmel and Monterey with Kate.…

The fat man let Spraggue scramble for the 40-cent Carquinez Bridge toll.

He'd met her in England, contriving to fall practically into her lap when the crowded underground jerked to a halt at Sloane Square Station. That had been well over a decade ago, when he was still a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She'd been a tourist, and London was just a stopover on the way to Paris. That stopover grew into a two-day fling, then into a week, a month, six months. Even now he had only to catch the scent of a certain perfume in the wake of some passing woman to conjure up Kate as she'd been that first day in the tube … that short white skirt against long tanned velvet legs.…

Despite the air-conditioning, the car was getting warm. Spraggue cracked the side window down an inch.

After six months she'd moved on to Paris. They wrote letters that scorched the stationery, made wild plans, and met for scattered hurried weekends. Distance had begun to sour their reunions long before Kate met another man. In all the intervening years of anger and friendship, platonic and romantic, they'd never recaptured that initial spark or successfully said good-bye. Their business partnership was only partly the reason.

“
Good-bye, darling
,” she'd said before hanging up.

Spraggue turned reluctantly back to the present. He wasn't on his way to the county sheriff's office to rekindle old flames.

Leider, now breezing along at a triumphantly illegal seventy-five miles an hour, flashed Spraggue a cheerful grin. They whizzed around an orange VW bug with six inches to spare, and Spraggue decided to risk a question.

“Have you seen Lenny Brent recently?”

Leider started. The steering wheel jumped in his hands. “Isn't he the one—Isn't Kate in jail for—”

“The corpse hasn't been identified.”

“Oh. Well, I haven't seen him since he ran off to Holloway Hills—five, six months ago. You got a damn fine winemaker.”

“No hard feelings?”

Leider shrugged, took his hands completely off the wheel. “Brent and I were overdue for a split. He's not the easiest guy to work with.”

“He made you some fine wines.”

“He
helped
. I'm not exactly a stranger to winemaking.”

“No offense.”

“None taken. I appreciated Lenny's talent more than his personality. In a lot of ways he was a pain to have around. Agreed?”

“You wouldn't find anyone who'd disagree.”

“He gets along with Kate.” Leider gave him a sidelong glance and turned off the freeway at First Street. The change in roads meant no change in speed. Not to Leider.

“Kate's not hard to get along with,” Spraggue said.

Leider needed silence to negotiate the narrow Napa streets. Spraggue played tourist. Napa had always been a jog to the left on Route 29 for him, never a destination.

The red BMW pulled up sharply in front of a small shop. The sign overhead proclaimed
BAIL BONDSMAN
.

“Sheriff's across the street. Want me to drop your bag at Kate's?”

“I'll take it with me.”

With a grunt, Leider freed himself from the steering wheel, stood up, walked around, and opened the trunk. “I won't go in with you. Plenty of work to do. But say hello to Kate for me. And tell her to call when she gets out. About the tasting. She'll know which one.”

They shook hands. Leider's was puffy and soft.

Spraggue crossed the dusty street and walked up the concrete path.

He hadn't expected the high-rise modern office building. On one of the tall glass doors a hand-lettered sign read
JAIL
. The bold arrow underneath pointed off to the left. Spraggue hesitated for a moment, then chose the center door.

Chill, refrigerated air hit him in the face. The whole first floor of the place seemed, at first glance, to be a reception area. A counter topped with a slab of orange formica kept outsiders at bay. “Restricted” signs decorated the doors behind the counter.

“Yes?”

“Sheriff …” What the hell had Leider said his name was? “Sheriff Hughes, please.” That was it.

“The sheriff's not in at the moment. What is it in regard to?”

They must have taught her that phrase when they hired her, Spraggue thought. “I'm here at the request of Kate Holloway.”

“Holloway.” The woman tucked the tip of her tongue firmly between her teeth, ran her finger down a list affixed to a clipboard. “Deputy Enright is handling that investigation.”

“Then I'd like to see Deputy Enright.”

“I believe he's using the sheriff's office. Why don't you go in there—that door marked
ADMINISTRATION—
and see if his secretary can help you?”

“Thanks.”

A glass window peered in at the sheriff's outer office. That, too, had an orange counter blocking access. The decor was Holiday Inn: gold carpet, spindly turquoise chairs. Wall-to-wall vulgarity.

Spraggue pushed open the door.

The room had its own atmosphere, a bluish haze of cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke. The lone secretary's desk boasted two huge ashtrays, one jammed with butts, the other issuing smoke signals from a lipstick-stained filter tip.

Spraggue gave his name to the sweet-faced graying woman behind the desk and asked for information about Kate. She nodded, puffed her cigarette, and pointed vaguely to a chair. He set down his carry-on bag and moved a chair upwind of the desk, to a vantage point where he could almost see around the corner of the L-shaped office. The secretary frowned at his rearrangement, but refrained from speaking.

“Are you going to tell someone I'm here, or do you use telepathy?” he asked mildly after a five-minute silence. He'd finished checking out a two-by-four board on which someone had mounted every imaginable kind of illegal drug paraphernalia. A larger board decorated with illegal weapons, from sawed-off shotguns to wicked-looking spiked chains, kept it company.

“I pushed the bell,” the secretary said firmly. “Did you know that all those weapons were confiscated right in this county?”

“Push it again,” Spraggue said. “Use the code for hostile people in a hurry.”

She puffed furiously at her cigarette. “Are you the Holloway woman's lawyer?”

“No.”

“Oh.” There must have been a special code for lawyers. She shook her head sadly. “I've informed the deputy in charge. I'm sure he'll be glad to see you as soon as he's available.”

“Give me a hint,” Spraggue said. “Is he eating lunch? Manicuring his toenails? Is somebody else in there with him?”

She retreated behind a wall of smoke, leaving Spraggue to work on a new approach. Sometimes making yourself unpleasant in waiting rooms got you into main offices faster—the get-rid-of-the-nuisance response. Sometimes the offended secretary kept you cooling your heels even longer—the get-even response. Sometimes the only effect was an inner one: you felt better. Or you felt like a fool.

Spraggue got up, marched to the window, opened it.

“The windows in these offices are to remain closed. Open windows interfere with the air-conditioning system.”

“Cigarettes interfere with breathing. Would you care for an earful of insights from an intriguing Japanese study on the harmful effects of nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide—”

She stalked away from her desk, disappeared around the bend in the L. Spraggue strained to hear distant whispers.

He leaned out the window, took a deep breath. No California health freaks in this office. No bean-sprout sandwiches in the sheriff's domain.

It was lucky there was no doorway between the sheriff's office and his secretary's. The man who entered the room would have taken the sides of the door down with his shoulders. Maybe the transom, too, with one blow from his shiny-domed forehead. Probably never notice the destruction in his wake either. Whereas Phil Leider was fat, this man was just
big
. He was the source of the cigar smell. Didn't have one on him now, but the stink came into the room like a cloud around his massive body.

“Name?” he asked, towering over Spraggue. His voice was tenor, rather than the bass it should have been. From his tone, Spraggue expected a speeding ticket.

“Michael Spraggue.”