Murder Alfresco #3 (26 page)

“What about Dean Blodger?”

“Why don’t you tell me about him.”

Sunny sighed. “Harbormaster at Liberty Dock. Said to have had a crush on Heidi. Drives the white truck with mismatched
taillights I saw leaving Vedana Vineyards the night of the murder. Leaves his keys clearly visible in his office, which is often left open. Is that enough, or shall I go on?”

“If you’ve got more, be my guest.”

“Spotted recently by me around St. Helena, twice. Turned up at the Ferrari event where Vedana Vineyards was a sponsor. He was tailing somebody, whether it was me, the Knolls, or the Obermeiers, I don’t know which. And speaking of the Obermeiers, what do you make of Ové?”

“The winemaker? Once again, I’d like to hear your thoughts first.”

“He’s lecherous enough to be overtly inappropriate in a formal social setting. He spent an entire dinner winking at me across the table. He may not be dangerous, but he is certainly motivated and daring when it comes to women. He’s a pathological winker. How deep his impulses run is another question. There, I’ve spilled my guts. Please tell me you’re looking into the white truck at least.”

“
At least.
Have a little faith, McCoskey. I don’t make it my top priority to keep you informed on my investigations. But since you ask, yes, we’re working on linking up the white truck. Yes, we’ve talked with Dean Blodger, several times. Yes, I am aware that Mark Weisman owns a boat named
Vedana
and was in a pickle with his wife and his mistress, with whom he had recently had a nasty quarrel overheard by at least three people. And yes, I picked up on the concept that Ové appreciates the company of the ladies, maybe even a little more than is healthy. What else have you got?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Can you tell me who I should arrest and why?”

“No, I can’t. But I do have something else.”

“Spill it.”

“Has Kimberly Knolls contacted you recently?”

“Ms. Knolls? No, she hasn’t contacted me. We interviewed her a couple of times after the body was discovered, but that was over a week ago.”

“If she talked with someone else, another police officer, would you hear about it?”

“You mean about this case?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’d hear about it. I get cc’d on anything related or potentially related to my cases, especially Heidi Romero. Why would Kimberly Knolls need to contact me?”

“I was just curious.”

“Do you have any other curiosities you would like to float, or can I go back to Mr. Callahan and his Zen handgun of justice?”

“Just one more. You never talked to Joel Hyder.”

“True, we have not spoken as yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’m keeping an eye on him, don’t you worry. Sometimes you don’t gain anything by talking. Sometimes it’s better to wait and watch, see if somebody will make a move on his own. Believe me, Joel Hyder isn’t going anywhere that I won’t know about.”

“How is that?”

“Little run-in he had outside a bar in Oakland last year. He’s still on probation.” Steve paused. Sunny waited. She had the impression the TV she could hear in the background had caught his attention. After a moment, he went on. “I’ll tell you what, Sunny. You’re worrying too much about all this. We’ve got it under control. Not that I don’t appreciate your insights and contributions, but it sounds like you’re letting this thing get under your skin. I can understand that, and I’m sympathetic.
But you’ve gotta understand that murder investigations can go on for a very long time. You’ll wear yourself out thinking about it, and if you get yourself involved you could easily mess up the investigation. Unless you join the police force or remember something you forgot to tell me about that night, it’s better to just forget about Heidi Romero and get on with your life. We’ll handle it. When I’ve found the responsible party and the evidence I need to prove it, you’ll read about it on the front page of the
Napa Register.
Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Get some rest. You sound tired.”

“Right. Will do.”

She hung up the phone and sat staring at the empty fireplace. Steve was right, she should go to bed. There was nothing she could do. He already knew everything she’d discovered, except for what Kimberly had told her. She would wait one more day. If Kimberly hadn’t talked to the police by then, she would call Steve, make her very last disclosure, and be done with it. She stretched out on the couch and put her feet up. Everything had its price. The price of a day of anonymous sex was about to come due for Kimberly Knolls. That was the last thought she remembered before the sun shining in the living room window woke her six hours later.

“Jason, you know, the blackberry dude, called me last night, late. We had this amazing conversation about how when you have sex with someone, it’s not two people in bed together, it’s really four,” said Rivka, right before she shoved a bowl of crepe batter under the mixer and hit the switch.

Sunny waited until the machine stopped and she could hear again. “Explain.”

“He was saying how our brains are made up of different sections that handle different tasks. You’ve got the base brain that all animals have. The brain stem. They call it the lizard brain because it goes back to the reptilian age, when we were all lizards and there weren’t any big thinkers around. The lizard brain is the part that handles subconscious impulses, like breathing, eating, and procreating. The basics. Then you have the higher brain where conscious thought happens. That’s the lumpy gray part. What he was saying is, when you’re in bed together, there are really four minds jockeying for position. Two lizard brains trying to get their freak on and make a new generation of lizards, and two higher minds trying to form a deep and lasting spiritual bond, move in together, maybe buy a house. The lizard brain and the cerebral cortex are essentially in conflict. They have conflicting objectives. Lizard is single-minded, knockdown kink. Lumpy gray is all love and harpsichords. That’s why sex is so confusing and full of contradictions.”

“Is it full of contradictions?” said Sunny, wishing they could wrap up the subject swiftly and move on. These conversations with Rivka inevitably made her feel like she’d been doing it wrong all these years, or possibly had missed the point entirely and never really done it at all.

“It is in my experience. Part of me wants the guy to bring flowers and kiss my hand and read me Pablo Neruda. The other part wants him to throw me on the bed and get busy. I always wondered what was up with that. Now it turns out the reason it feels like there are two people in my head who want two different things is that there really are two minds in there with two
different sets of goals. Three actually, since there’s also the middle brain controlling emotions. That’s the part that really messes things up.”

Rivka disappeared into the walk-in and came back with an armful of stainless-steel bins covered in plastic wrap. She left again and returned with a bag of onions and a bottle of red wine vinaigrette. “I mean, I always wondered about that stuff, but I never really thought about it. Then last night when we were on the phone he started talking about how the rift between our sexual minds and our conscious minds gets bigger and more confusing and full of contradictions all the time. Because our conscious minds are getting more and more refined and sophisticated, but our lizard brains are still as primitive, carnal, and violent as ever. Our basic nature is fight, eat, fuck, repeat, not necessarily in that order, meanwhile the guy driving thinks he’s above it all. He just wants his strawberries and cream.”

“That’s a refreshing perspective,” said Sunny. “I thought we all agreed that we were basically devolving and becoming more violent as a species, as demonstrated by cable television and spring break in Baja. I kind of like the idea that we’re getting more refined.”

“Maybe we’re not improving overall, but we’re definitely becoming more intellectual, more centered in our heads. We identify with our higher brains, not our reptilian brains. Which is as it should be, otherwise we’d still be living like lizards, but it’s getting more exaggerated all the time. The more we focus on the higher brain with its cerebral pursuits and primness and detachment from the physical, the more alienated we become from this other very basic part of ourselves. We’re never going to escape the fact that we are animals, and that sex is this very physical, basic, grungy, unequal, aggressive scene that is an
undeniable part of us, no matter how superior and moral we might think we can become. I can be as eloquent and influential a feminist as I want to be, but somewhere inside me I’m still going to hunger for a big, strong man. It’s hardwired into the brain stem. To deny it leads to repression, which leads to frustration, shame, anger, and ultimately violence.” Rivka cut into another onion, trying to turn her head away from the fumes. “The whole topic came up because we started out talking about how Americans lose their minds if somebody shows a breast on television, but it’s okay to show bodies being pulled out of rubble, people being shot and tortured, maniacs hitting each other in a ring. You know, how various aspects of American culture—our Puritan heritage, for example, but also the more recent hero-savior complex—have repressed the erotic impulse. Shoved down under the surface, it festers and turns into shame, frustration, and anger, then reemerges as an addiction to violence.”

“Here, let me take a turn,” said Sunny. Rivka went to throw cold water on her face and Sunny took over dicing onions. “You talked about all that last night?”

“Yeah,” she called from the sink. “We were on the phone for at least an hour. It was incredible.”

“You think he’s trying to tell you something? I mean, other than that he’s an insightful conversationalist?”

“You mean like he’s some kind of wild lizard-man in the sack?”

“Exactly.”

She looked up from the paper towel she was using to scrub her face dry. “I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

Sunny finished the onions and went back to her station. She took out the three knives she liked to use for butchering. One was eight inches long, slender, and gently tapered like a blade of grass. The other was six inches and narrow, shaped with a curve
at the end for hooking under joints and skin. The third was a classic chef’s knife for chopping. All three were marvelously sharp. The Italian shop in San Francisco where Andre had taken them sharpened knives to perfection. With knives this sharp, a piece of meat surrendered all resistance.

She started with the chicken. The smell of raw meat was still a problem, as was the cold touch of it. Only time would strip away the associations of that night. Someday, she reassured herself, the sight of a pristine pink salmon fillet or a pale, tender pork loin would make her smile with anticipation again. She took up the meat shears, deftly snipping at the tendons and cartilage of the chicken on the block in front of her, rendering it neatly flat for roasting. “Joel Hyder call you anymore?” she said.

“Not since Saturday.”

“Good.”

A strange sourness deadened her senses gradually. By the end of the day, her arms and legs felt leaden. In her mind, darkness reigned. Rivka’s talk from the morning haunted her with violent visions, with scenes dominated by primitive cruelty. Humanity seemed a barely contained tide of murderous, purposeless aggression, brimming up under a meager surface of civility and kindness. She longed for the past. For Catelina Alvarez’s warm kitchen filled with the good smells of cooking, and for her certainty in the way life should be lived. Catelina went to bed at nine and rose at five. At five-twenty, the kettle sang and coffee was made. Food brought everyone together in a daily communion. There was no talk of the right or wrong of meat. Meat was god’s gift to mankind, a bounty to be gratefully enjoyed, like the fruits
and vegetables and all the other goodness from the land. The sin was to be ungrateful, to be critical and shun what was given.

She sat in her office in the diminishing light and thought of such tender memories, of the simplicity of her mind in those days. Good and bad were separated by a wide, unbreachable barrier. Was it only because she was a child? Had it been difficult for Catelina to sustain her confidence in her beliefs, to avoid the undertow of chaos? Did she fight against trends away from it? She did. She had often railed against the direction society was taking. She got on her soapbox on plenty of occasions, the subject anything from the deplorable state of supermarket produce to the downfall of manners in the general public and the naïve dependence on modern medicine. Sunny picked up the phone and dialed the Santa Rosa number. Catelina answered immediately.
“Cara menina!”
she said in her ancient, delighted voice. “I knew it would be you. Tell me about your life.”