Dead in the Dregs (28 page)

I parked on the gravel in front of the police station on rue des Blanches Fleurs. An officer directed me to an office at the rear of
the second floor where Sackheim stood at a bulletin board. Just as I expected, he wasn’t pleased to see me but waved me in and gestured for me to take a seat.

“Feldman is the key,” he was saying to Ponsard. “And, of course, there’s Wilson. But Napa has the body, so this won’t help us.”

“
Sans sa main
,” Ponsard pointed out.

“
D’accord
,” Sackheim admitted. “Yes, they must find the hand. But Kiers, Kiers . . . is interesting.”

Ponsard dutifully awaited his further edification, as did I.

“You recall what Carrière said. He called the body ‘
dur
,’” Sackheim continued. “But if Kiers was shot just that morning, rigor mortis had barely set in. And it was covered with leaves. Did you notice that?”

Ponsard and I looked at each other.

“How can the body be covered with leaves if he is shot the same morning?” Sackheim asked.

I ventured the obvious: “Whoever killed him put leaves around the body to make it look as if he’d been there a while.”

“
Bien sûr, précisement.
And who would do such a thing? Kiers was seen at the public tasting Saturday by many people. And Ponsard confirmed that he was at the
fête
chez Frossard that night. Only someone who hadn’t seen him would try to disguise the time of death.”

“Or someone who’d been there but wanted to hide the fact,” I said.

“
D’ac
,” Sackheim nodded appreciatively. “Tell us, my friend, you are experienced, a sommelier, someone who’s been around these writers, and now you have met some of the
vignerons.
You have read the journalism of Wilson and Kiers. Is there anyone who seems to have a motive for wishing these men dead?”

They trained their eyes on me. I took a moment to reflect.

“Wilson certainly made a lot of enemies, but not in Burgundy. Not in a long time, anyway. He gave it up several years ago. It’s too complicated to explain, but that’s why he hired Jacques Goldoni to cover this area.”

“But if that’s the case—and you are here to find Wilson’s murderer—why come to Burgundy at all?” Sackheim expected an answer.

“Because I wanted to talk to Feldman and Goldoni, and I knew they’d be here. And because Jean Pitot was at Norton when Wilson was killed.”

He thought about this for a moment, then said, “And Kiers?”

“Kiers specialized in Burgundy. I haven’t read all that much, but he certainly might have written some reviews that could have angered a
vigneron
or two. He also wrote human interest stories—you know, about families, conflicts, that sort of thing.”

Even I realized how little help that was. But, then, Kiers hadn’t really been on my radar. How was I to know that he’d get himself killed?

“This Jean-Luc Carrière, I don’t trust him,” Ponsard interjected.

“
Oui
, there are inconsistencies,” Sackheim said. “We have to continue our interrogation of him, and we must locate Jean Pitot. He is Carrière’s protégé. He was in Napa when Wilson was murdered, as you say. We must unravel the mystery of
le jeune
Pitot and find him before another wine writer turns up dead.”

“Are there any left?” I asked. “Other than Goldoni?”

Sackheim smiled ruefully, then nodded, a signal that sent Ponsard to the blackboard on the wall.

“
La généalogie
, as you requested,” Sackheim said.

There Ponsard copied a simple diagram from a page he held in his hand.

“
Alors
,” he began, “you have Henri Pitot.” He wrote the name in the uniform longhand French schoolchildren learn and never seem to lose. Next to the name he wrote 1945. “His brother, Gilbert,” and wrote the second name out beside the first, “born 1949.” He drew a little looping line. “Henri marries Françoise Ginestet and,” he paused to draw a descending line, “in 1975 they give birth to a daughter, Eugénie.”

“A disastrous vintage,” Sackheim remarked.

“And, in 1978, Jean is born,” Ponsard continued, writing his name and connecting it to Eugénie with a horizontal line. Ponsard returned to the top of his chart. “The father, Etienne, is born in 1919 and is killed in an automobile accident in 1974.” He paused, then said softly, “
Une famille qui est dans le malheur.
”

“The family has such bad luck,” Sackheim translated for me. He needn’t have. “You see, Babe,” he went on, “we have the birth records. Your theory about Jean’s paternity, I think it is mistaken.”

I gazed at the diagram.

“Anything else?” Sackheim said.

“
Oui.
I inquired of some men in the village,” Ponsard said. “For reasons that we cannot understand, Etienne favored his younger son, Gilbert.”

“Nonsense,” Sackheim interrupted. “It is perfectly clear: ’49 is a legendary vintage, while 1945 was a disaster. Although tradition would favor the older son, the father associates his offspring with the material conditions of the year in which he was born. It is guilt by association. Henri can never escape the stigma that attaches to him from the quality of the wine made in the year of his birth.”

“An interesting theory,” I interjected, “but you’re off by a year. It was ’46 that was the disaster; ’45 was spectacular.”

“Ah,” Sackheim sighed, crestfallen. “Too bad. Forgive my interruption, Ponsard. Go on.”

“
De toute façon
,” the lieutenant said, “the management of the domaine goes to the older son as his patrimony. But he is no good at it. Etienne gives all his instruction, pays all the attention, to Gilbert. All the men said the same thing last night. ‘The old man loved Gilbert and despised Henri.’ The rivalry between the brothers is bitter. The domaine falls into ruin, and after the father’s death the family must sell off some property to pay the estate taxes.”

“They lost the farm,” I said.

“
Exactement
,” Sackheim said. “Now Henri has nothing. A few poor pieces of land and a son who hates him.”

“And maybe hates Americans even more. But why would he blame the Americans?” I asked, feeling a little defensive.

“We are French,” Sackheim said. “We blame the Americans for everything. Nothing is our fault.”

The three of us stared at the blackboard.

“What a tortuous path,” I said.

“
Mais oui
, and it leads to Jean Pitot,” Sackheim concluded. “One can only imagine the resentments he heard at his father’s kitchen table.”

“
C’est tragique
,” I said.

“
Oui, c’est ça
,” Ponsard agreed.

“Ah, well, let us end this tale,” Sackheim said, rising. “It is time for the
dénouement.
You will drive with us,” he said to me.

As we passed through the outer office, Sackheim instructed two of the officers who’d been at the Bois de Corton the day before to follow us.

We drove north. The day was lovely: cold and crystalline, the colors in the vineyards brilliant, the air fresh and cleansing. The crows were out again, cackling and fighting for the leftovers from the harvest, and a few workers straggled over their wheelbarrows, completing their pruning and burning. Traffic was light, a few trucks racing up and down the highway. The officers followed Sackheim’s car in their matching Renault Laguna, their lights spinning in silence.

“You are very quiet, Babe,” Sackheim now said to me.

“I still think Jean could be Richard Wilson’s son,” I said. Ponsard turned in his seat, and Sackheim glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I think Goldoni knows this. And maybe Monique, too. On the other hand, maybe he’s just a screwed-up kid trying to make a life for himself.”

“
Ça suffit
,” Sackheim said, sorry he had prompted me to say anything that might distract him, and I kept my mouth shut.

“When we arrive,” he finally said, “follow us but stand back. You never know.”

At Nuits we turned off to the east and followed the road to the edge of the village. We parked outside the fence chez Pitot, and Sackheim gathered his team.

“Let us be swift, professional, correct,” he said. “
Allons-y
!”

An eerie hush hovered over the property. Even the crows seemed to have abandoned their endless haggling. Sackheim pushed open the gate; it creaked on its rusted hinges. He and his men walked single file across the dirt and dead grass that covered the yard. I followed at a discreet distance. The wooden lid had been pulled from the top of the well, and as Sackheim stooped, picked it up, and reached to put it back in place, he looked down. He was suddenly frozen. We all stopped.

“
Mon Dieu
,” he whispered hoarsely, shaking his head. Then, very
calmly he said, “Ponsard, call for help.” He searched out my face. “We are too late.
Quel dommage.
”

I walked up and peered over the lip of the well. Twenty feet below, the figure of Jean Pitot lay facedown, bobbing on the surface of the murky water, his limbs twisted and broken by the fall.

I looked at the house. Françoise Pitot stood at the window, staring at us from behind the faded lace curtain. She screamed then, her cry rending the silence. A flock of crows took off from a vineyard, cawing madly.

“Why did Jean kill himself?” Sackheim mused. “
Did
he kill himself?”

He looked toward the house. Françoise Pitot dropped the curtain and disappeared.

 

For the second
day in a row, they brought the K-9 unit from Dijon. The handler worked his dog systematically over every inch of the courtyard, and when he failed to turn anything up, Sackheim instructed him to go down to the cellar. There the animal’s nose went crazy, his senses confounded by the overlapping scents—the rot and mold and fermentive stink sending him off on fits of barking that we could just hear from the yard—but when the officer ascended, he approached the colonel and said, “
Rien.
”

It was only when the man walked the dog outside the property to the edge of the field behind the house to let the poor creature relieve himself that the German shepherd produced a definitive yelp, three barks in quick succession, and the cops raced around back. Sackheim put a team to excavate a low mound of earth, its surface darker than the soil that lined the plowed field of stubble, not twenty feet from where I had hidden the night I had gone to snoop around. Even in the cold they sweated, their shovels appearing over the piles of dirt as they dug deeper.

Sackheim joined me by the well.

“Did you not notice that Françoise Pitot screamed when she saw us standing here?” he said. “She already knew. But how?”

Sackheim lit a tiny cigarillo and offered me his lighter. We smoked in silence.

An hour into it, one of the men called out and Sackheim went to
look. I watched from a distance as one of the cops turned around and vomited into a furrow. A forensics team that had arrived disappeared into the hole. After half an hour they carefully pulled a decomposing body up and laid it onto a stretcher.

Before they pulled the plastic sheet over him, I got a good look. My own stomach gave a severe turn. Pieces of skin and flesh had been cut and peeled off the torso, bits of muscle and bone left exposed, worms crawling and twisting over and into the tissue. His skin had been notched dozens of times as if with the tip of a knife, the cuts tiny slashes of black clotted with blood and bits of earth. His left hand had been severed at the wrist. I had to look away. Two hay bales were stacked at the far edge of the field. The shaft of an arrow stuck out of the upper bale, its stiff red feathers like a blood-soaked, trifoliate coxcomb, and I wondered whether Jean Pitot had, in fact, tried to kill me that night near the trailer. Maybe there had been more than one deranged young man in the neighborhood.

No one asked me this time to make a positive identification, but had they done so, I’d have told them it was Eric Feldman.

I walked back to the entrance to the house. Standing at the gate, I looked out at the train tracks and lit another cigarette. Sackheim materialized at my elbow.

“Do you know, was Monsieur Feldman left-handed?”

I tried to picture the morning we had tasted together, recollecting the crabbed handwriting, and closed my eyes to reconstruct the scene.

“Yes, I think he was. No, definitely. I remember now.” I paused. “It’s very strange,” I said.

“
Qu’est-ce qu’il y a
?” Sackheim said.

“It sounds bizarre, I know, but I’m fairly certain Pitot did this to make wine. He tried to peel Feldman, like a grape, though from what I could see, he didn’t do a very pretty job of it.”

Sackheim squinted. “And then?” he said.

“Pressed the skin and flesh. But why didn’t the dog find anything in the house?” I continued. “Nothing in the shed, at that old wine press? Where did he make the wine?” I paused again, but Sackheim didn’t respond. “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out, though he probably washed down the equipment,” I said.

He turned away and ordered Ponsard to call for a truck to have the ancient press taken in as evidence.

I lingered at the car, then walked the edge of the field as the police completed their horrific job. Sackheim spent some time questioning Madame Pitot. Her husband, informed of their son’s death, promptly descended to the cellar, cursing at the top of his lungs, no doubt intent on drowning his sorrows. He’d be soused by the time Sackheim got to him.

The work took a couple hours. Other cops arrived, and I saw Sackheim speaking to one in particular at length. After twenty minutes or so, he came up behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder.

“So, what do you know now that you did not know before?” Sackheim said.

“I can’t think. It’s impossible to take it all in. I feel like a walk-on in some Grand Guignol.”

“I agree, my friend, but you must force yourself,
s’il vous plaît.
”