Dead in the Dregs (6 page)

I turned back to the out-of-date
Maven
issues. It took me a while to dig through what I’d marked the night before, but I finally turned up Wilson’s treatment of Matson’s adolescent efforts. It was scathing, more devastating than anything I had read in the glossier rags.

Maybe Biddy was right, but it was hard to imagine that Matson would feel an ancient if injurious review so acutely as to plop Wilson in a fermentation tank, if he were able to get into the winery at all. Then again, who was I to say what a person whose life Wilson had ruined might do? Revenge is funny that way.

I sat down
across from my son at the picnic table.

“I need your help,” I said.

Danny closed the book. “Help with what?”

“A little investigative work.”

“Okay,” he said, his eyes lighting up. He picked up the cereal bowl and sucked the milk noisily through his lips.

“Don’t slurp it, drink it. It’s not wine, you know.” I paused. “This is serious. Something happened to Uncle Rich.”

He put the bowl down and looked at me warily. “What happened?”

“He’s dead, Danny. I’m really sorry. I thought you should know.”

His face shriveled in pain. He looked at me, then his features relaxed. “What happened?” he repeated, his hands dropping to his sides.

“I’m not sure. But your mom asked me to find out. Will you help me?”

“I guess.” He looked down at the empty bowl, a wrinkle of worry furrowing his brow. “What happened?” he said for the third time.

“Somebody killed him.”

My son’s face was opaque at first. I couldn’t tell if what I’d said registered, if he really understood.

“Why?” he asked, his face knotting itself again in innocent confusion.

“Your uncle was a very powerful man. He had a lot of enemies.”

“What are we going to do?”

“First things first. We need to talk to a few people. Get dressed.”

 

It wasn’t hard
to locate Matson’s operation. I described it to Danny and let him spot it, the weeping willow on White Cottage Road and the low buildings that stretched beneath it. A Toyota pickup was parked in the shade of the tree, and we wandered around the building to a sliding door in back that stood open. Two migrants were stacking bins of Chardonnay in the shade of the willow. A young man in muddy jeans, rubber boots, and a faded T-shirt stood wiping his forehead with a bandana, staring at the fruit. He replaced a straw hat on the back of his head.

“Michael Matson?” I said.

He nodded. “That’s me.” He had a young, sweet face that I found impossible to reconcile with the notion that he could have murdered anybody.

“Got a minute?” I asked.

“I do, if you’ll give me a hand. My wife’s getting the kids off to day care, and Jesús is late.” He paused. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I introduced Danny and myself and told him I’d heard that Richard Wilson had destroyed his career. My son looked at me in astonished horror.

“Help me hoist this,” Matson said, avoiding my eyes. He didn’t reply to my assertion. We lifted a bin of Chard and dumped the fruit onto a sorting table. “Toss anything that’s broken or looks like shit.” He looked at us and gave a tentative grin. Danny giggled at the word
shit
and started in, once Matson demonstrated the technique for him.

“It’s simple,” he said after a moment. “Wilson doesn’t like what I do. I’m a fervent traditionalist. I strive for purity of statement. The finest expression of
terroir
I can achieve. I go to crazy lengths.”

“For example?” I said.

“What we’re doing now. Each lot of fruit isolated in the fermenter. The tanks are insulated so I can control temperatures. Native yeast fermentation, cold maceration, manual
bâtonnage.
”

Matson’s hands worked on their own, incredibly fast, dexterously feeling through the fruit, picking and pitching, cluster by cluster. Danny studied him and did his best to imitate his every move.

“Work a little faster,” he said, observing my son. “You don’t have to be so careful. I mean, be careful but not
too
careful.”

Danny sped up.

“Good,” Matson said and then turned to me. “I’m obsessive, and I’m strict. I despise inflated rhetoric, inflated reputations, and inflated wine. The problem is, people don’t know what they want to make. So they end up producing wine to fit someone else’s idea of what wine’s supposed to taste like. Take Wilson: He thinks he’s championing the artisanal, but the opposite is really the case. All he’s done is fuel people’s crass commercial instinct. They end up making fat wines to get high scores to fetch top dollar. It’s sick. And it’s a vicious circle.”

“Fret no more,” I said.

His hands paused between the sorting table and the destemmer into which he’d just tossed a cupped handful of fruit.

“Wilson’s dead,” I said. “He was found in a vat at Norton a couple hours ago.”

Danny kept going. I searched Matson’s eyes as he looked from me to his new helper and back to me. He seemed genuinely shocked. We heard a car pull up outside the barn, and a moment later a petite blond woman with a face as innocent as Matson’s walked into the room through a side door.

“Hey,” she said.

“My wife, Gretchen,” Matson said.

“Babe Stern,” I said. “This is my son, Danny.”

“Gretch, Richard Wilson . . .” was all Matson was able to get out.

I told them what I knew. Danny stopped sorting. It was the first time he’d heard the story of what had actually happened.

“Pretty weird time to visit the valley,” Matson said.

“He was probably polishing copy or something,” Gretchen suggested tentatively.

“Exactly. The revised edition of his book on California was about to go to press. He wanted to retaste a few things. That’s what he said, anyway. I was with him late yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you know . . .” Matson started.

“All I know is that they lined up a few bottles for him and left him to his own devices. He was heading back to the city, then off to New York.”

Jesús, Matson’s assistant, now arrived, and the three of them got to work sorting.

“Sorry, but I’ve got to get the Chard done today,” Matson said. “I’m back at Hauberg first thing tomorrow morning.”

“One question before we take off?” I asked. Matson nodded, then looked down at his hands as they flew through bunches of glistening grapes. “Can you think of anyone who hated Wilson enough to kill him?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “After he wrote what he did about me, I stopped paying attention. Look at this,” he gestured across the pint-size barn. “We’re pretty marginal here. Hangin’ on for dear life. Last year we bottled three hundred cases. If we’re lucky this year, we’ll get three fifty, maybe four. I don’t want to take on any more than I can handle. This is about as boutique as it gets. I’m sorry Richard is dead. He was a serious person. But all I really care about is my wife, my children, and my wine.”

He looked at me. Gretchen smiled wanly as she plucked two brown-tinged grapes and dropped them on the ground. I had no reason to disbelieve Matson and excused myself.

“You’re a good worker,” he said to Danny. “If you’re around this week, feel free to come by and give us a hand.”

I decided to run through St. Helena and stop by the cop shop. When we got there, I stood in the waiting room, examining the police department’s patch collection while Mary, the dispatcher, buzzed Brenneke. She said he’d just arrived with some suspects or witnesses, she wasn’t sure. As she waved us back, Danny pointed to a teddy bear in a cop’s uniform perched on a boom box above her desk.

“His office,” Mary said.

Brenneke looked up when we walked in.

“I thought I told you I’d catch up with you later,” he said. “I have no time for you.”

“Russ, this is my son, Danny.”

Brenneke nodded.

“Who’d you just bring in?” I asked.

“None of your fucking business,” he said, then realized that a child was present. “Sorry,” he said to Danny, and turned to me. “A few of the Mexicans. Two of ’em fled. Probably halfway to Baja by now. All they need to see is a radio antenna, and they take off. We have another two of the seasonal guys locked up. They materialize every year to help bring in the fruit.”

“There was a third. He seemed more important. I saw him talking to Norton yesterday when Danny and I were at the winery. What is he, the foreman?”

“Fornes, the vineyard manager. He’s back there, too.” Brenneke paused. “You were at Norton yesterday?” he said, his eyes drilling into me.

“Yes. And the day before. Wilson dropped by the bar and asked me to go out there with him.”

He put the report he held in his hand on the desk, rose from his chair, and walked to the door.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

“What’s going on, Dad?” Danny asked.

Brenneke returned a moment later with Mary.

“Son, would you mind? I need to talk to your dad a minute. Mary’ll take you out front.”

Danny looked at me as if everything had suddenly gone terribly wrong.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ll be right there.”

He glanced at me over one shoulder while Mary placed her hand on the other and led him down the hallway.

Brenneke closed the door and took his seat, rolling it out from behind the desk to within a foot of me.

“You mind telling me what’s going on?” he said.

“Janie, Wilson’s sister, is my ex.”

“You’re just full of surprises.”

“When he failed to show for dinner the other night and didn’t return her calls, she asked me to poke around.”

“You being a well-known wine guy and all,” Brenneke smirked.

“Wilson and I were close when we were just starting out. That’s
how I met Janie. He got me my first few jobs in Seattle, around the time you and I met.” He waited for a more detailed explanation. “He looked me up the day before yesterday. There was something he wanted to talk to me about. He asked me to follow him to Norton.” Brenneke still wasn’t satisfied. “But we never got around to it,” I continued. “There were people around—Colin Norton, a woman who works in the office, a young French kid who’s doing a sort of apprenticeship—so we couldn’t talk. It was something private, and we didn’t have any privacy there.”

He fished a notebook from the clutter on his desk, folded one leg over the other, and jotted some notes.

“Let me get this straight: He never told you what he wanted to tell you.”

“Correct.”

“So, what happened?”

“I left.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know, five, five thirty, maybe.”

“What was he doing when you left?”

“Tasting with Norton. In a room off the reception area.”

“Anybody else around?”

“I couldn’t say with any certainty. The French kid took off. Fornes was probably still there, along with the crew. Their workday runs late this time of year, needless to say. Carla Fehr, the office person, may have been there, but I don’t think so.”

“Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“Because she and Wilson were having an affair.”

Brenneke looked up from his notebook.

“You know that for a fact? I thought you said that you and Wilson didn’t have a chance to speak in private.”

“Call it an educated guess. I know him pretty well. And when I called Ms. Fehr to ask if she’d seen him, she said he was supposed to come over for dinner and never arrived.”

“And what about you? What did you do that night? Go back to work?”

“No, Mulligan had the bar. I went home to get ready for my son’s visit.”

“Anybody see you?”

“No, I was alone the whole night.”

“And Wilson never called?” Brenneke asked.

“Not even the next morning, when he said he might drop by the bar,” I told him.

Brenneke’s gaze was steady. He rubbed his cheek with the butt end of his pen.

“Jesus, Stern,” he said, shaking his head. He was trying to make up his mind about what he should do next. “Look, I know your kid’s sitting out there waiting for you. He’s probably scared to death.” He thought a moment. “I’m gonna type this up and show it to Jensen. But you should know right now, he’s going to want a formal statement.”

“I realize that,” I said as if I had fully expected it. I hadn’t.

“Okay, get the fuck outta here,” Brenneke said, rolling his chair to the desk without looking at me. “Just stay behind your bar and keep your eyes and ears open. You hear anything you think I should know, you call me.”

Danny was sitting in the waiting room on the edge of his seat. The teddy bear seemed to be gazing down at me. They were both waiting for an explanation.

“It’s fine, pal,” I said, ignoring the bear. “Don’t worry about it.”

Easy enough to say to your child, but a little tougher to convince yourself of. It hadn’t occurred to me until Brenneke said he’d need a statement that I’d inadvertently set myself up as a suspect.

We stopped at
The Diner in Yountville and grabbed some lunch.

“These tacos are better than yours, Dad,” Danny said.

“I’m not surprised. The food is great here. See if you can figure out how they do ’em, and you can tell Ernesto.”

While Danny deconstructed his taco, I considered my history with Brenneke. Our paths had first crossed in Seattle. He was the kind of cop who always made you feel he had you in his back pocket. He took pleasure in pushing people around. A little sloppy and a little angry, he evinced the arrogance of power but was crippled by his own ineptitude, a quality that had led to his dismissal from the SPD. We’d done each other a couple of favors since discovering we were both in the valley, but I doubted our friendship would count for much under the present circumstances. The cops had no idea what was about to descend on them once the news of the murder of Richard Wilson got out. They’d be under enormous pressure to solve it.