Ellen McKenzie 03-And Murder for Desser (2 page)

Chapter Two

“Sign here.” I pushed the contract in front of Mark Tortelli, Sabrina’s husband. He looked down at it dubiously.

“Are you sure this is the best we can get?” he asked for the fifteenth time.

“Yes,” I answered, trying hard not to grit my teeth. I didn’t do rentals, my office didn’t do rentals, and finding them this little house had cost me several still-to-be-paid back favors. “We’ve been over this, Mark; there are very few rentals, and practically none who will take dogs. Especially standard poodles. He’s big. Landlords worry. And this rent is fair. Sign.”

He scowled at the paper, but he signed. “You’re sure this is a month to month?”

“Yes.” We’d been over that point just as many times. Why it was so important to Mark, I didn’t know. I thought he and Sabrina were both thrilled with their jobs and planned to stay around for some time, so a lease would have been better, but Mark had been adamant.

“Sabrina,” he finally said, “here, sign right under me.”

Sabrina obediently signed, and I picked up the rental agreement. A month of Mark’s mood swings and Sabrina’s nervous attacks was about to end. I should have been relieved, and part of me was. Another part, a much smaller part, was going to miss them. Mark wasn’t easy. He was charming one minute and ready to bite someone’s head off the next. Anyone’s but Sabrina’s. He treated her with a tenderness that astounded me. She was simply a nervous wreck. She was startled at the ring of the phone or knock at the door, and she clung to Mark like a drowning sailor does to a life preserver. But not all the time. Sometimes she was fun, laughing, joking, helping Mark in the kitchen, where he delighted in showing off his not inconsiderable cooking skills. That part I’d miss. The rest of it…

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll drop this off on my way to the office and we’ll all be back here for the big dinner. Oh, I need the deposit check as well.”

Mark opened his desk drawer, pulled out his checkbook and started to write. “How do I make this out?”

I told him and turned to go, stepping over Paris, who was stretched out in the middle of Mark’s office floor. Snowy white coat, coal black eyes, and the personality of a born clown, he was the main reason it had been so hard to find Mark and Sabrina Tortelli a rental. Dogs, especially dogs the size of a standard poodle, were not universally welcomed by landlords or by cats. My yellow tom, Jake, would be ecstatic on moving day.

“Ellen.” Sabrina’s soft voice stopped me.

I turned, prepared to wait. It sometimes took a minute or so for Sabrina to get out what she wanted to say and this time was no exception.

“I wondered,” she started, “ah, if you, ah, had to get back to the office right now. You know, if you had an appointment or anything.”

As it happened, I didn’t. I was planning on using the afternoon to do my nails, wash my hair, and make sure the zipper on the dress I had planned to wear tonight still was willing to go to the top. And I made the mistake of saying so.

“Well, if you have a little time, I was wondering if, you know, if you wouldn’t mind, I thought…”

I found Sabrina’s insecurities irritating, but anyone who had spent a lifetime with my sister was bound to have some. I tried not to let my impatience show. “What do you need, Sabrina?” I tried to make my voice reassuring.

“Well, Melanie is home sick. She thinks it’s a cold, but it might be the flu, and we certainly don’t want her around if she’s sick…”

I broke in. “You need help? Is that it?”

“If you don’t mind. The tables take so much time, and I really want them to be, you know.”

Light brown hair pulled tightly into a ponytail, huge brown doe eyes filled with anxiety, faded jeans threatening to fall off of skinny hips, she looked like an abandoned waif. I’ve never been good at saying no to waifs, abandoned or not, and this time was no different. Tonight’s Harvest Festival Dinner at Silver Springs winery had been a constant source of nervous conversation since Mark and Sabrina had arrived. It seemed to be some kind of milestone for them, so table setting was obviously in my immediate future.

“Of course, I don’t mind,” I replied, pushing thoughts of a leisurely tub bath out of my mind. “What do we do?”

She immediately brightened. “Oh, thank you. We’ll start with the glasses. I’ll get them down from the attic and…” She broke off and looked around. “Let’s get going.”

Mark pushed himself back from his desk and came around to gather Sabrina in his arms. He dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. Still holding her, he reached out and, a little awkwardly, patted me on the arm. “Thanks, Ellen. Tonight needs to, we told you, after tonight everything’s going to be fine.” He squeezed Sabrina again. “Gotta go find Hector.” He hurried out of the office.

“Mark’s not very good at handling stress,” Sabrina said with a little sigh. “It’s just got to be perfect. I don’t think I could handle starting over again.”

Mark wasn’t good with stress? He wasn’t the one I would have picked. And starting over? Again? Did their jobs really depend on this dinner? I found that hard to believe, but it would account for Sabrina’s bad case of nerves and Mark’s hair trigger temper. I’d wondered why they had left Napa so abruptly, but my gentle probing had gotten me nothing but evasions. Had something gone wrong with the job up there? They obviously didn’t want to talk about it, and it was none of my business anyway. But I had become fond of both of them in the month they had stayed with me, in spite of all the mystery and mood swings, and I wanted them to be happy. However, I was more than glad they were going to be happy in their own kitchen and not mine.

“Okay,” I repeated. “I don’t have much time. First, point me to the fax machine so I can get this contract over to the owner of your house. We don’t want someone else to get in before us. I’ll drop the check off on my way back into town. Second, where are those glasses?”

I watched Sabrina straighten up, smile, and grab a clipboard off of Mark’s desk. “First, go find Hector and have him bring up the wines for tonight. Here’s the list.” Her tone was almost brisk. “You’ll find him on the cellar floor. The stairs are that way. Then come into the tasting room. I’ll be there.”

I faxed my contract, wondering a little at Sabrina’s abrupt switch to competent manager, a side I hadn’t seen much of until today. Odd, I thought as I walked down the corridor between the offices and the kitchen on my way to the back stairs that led to the cellar floor. I could hear agitated voices behind the closed door that led to the kitchen, one high-pitched voice in particular, and thought Mark and Sabrina weren’t the only ones on edge about tonight’s dinner. The corridor ended, and steep stairs led down to the cellar floor. The odor of fermenting wine filled my nostrils, and the chill in the air made me shiver. It was ninety degrees outside on this early fall day, but wine isn’t fond of heat so the storage room and fermenting tanks were never allowed to bask in it. I wondered how I was supposed to locate Hector in this stainless steel maze, but Sabrina had made it clear that she needed the wines on that list. Some were to be served with dinner but most were for sale. Evidently wine sales after a successful dinner could be substantial. I’d looked at the menu and the different wines that she planned to pour that evening, and had no trouble believing that, for a number of people, budget concerns would be poured away with the wine.

I had no idea what Hector did down on this cold cement floor. Huge stainless steel tanks surrounded me, each with a nozzle at the bottom that looked like a fitting for a fire hose. There was a wheel on each one but I didn’t know what it opened, and a glass valve ran up the side. I guessed it must tell how much juice was in the tanks. They all sat on the concrete floor, and running around the huge room, in front of the tanks, was a small open drain. The floor was damp with what looked like water, but there was red liquid in some of the drains. Tasting? Testing? I must remember to ask someone, but first I had to find Hector.

“Looking for us?”

I recognized Mark’s voice, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I turned around and peered into the cavernous room adjoining the cellar floor that held stack after stack of wine barrels on one side and pallets of boxed wine bearing the famous Silver Springs label on another.

“Up here.”

Amusement was evident in Mark’s voice. I looked up toward the high ceiling, and there he was, standing on a catwalk with a black-haired young man, both grinning down at me. I hadn’t noticed the catwalk before, probably because it ran high along the wall and was partly obscured by the tanks.

“What are you doing up there?” I shouted.

“Pumping over the juice.”

“What?” I shouted up, convinced I’d heard wrong. Pumping over?

“I’ll explain later. Are you looking for Hector?”

“Yes. Sabrina wants the wines on this list up in the tasting room.”

“Be right down.” Hector started along the catwalk, much too quickly in my opinion, and ran down a steep staircase located next to huge roll-up doors at the end of the building. Mark stayed where he was. “Want to come up and see the tanks, Ellen?” he hollered down.

I waved at him and shook my head. No way was I going to scramble around up in the air on that treacherous-looking narrow board. Hector took my note, grinned at me and headed for a forklift. I headed back the way I’d come. There was a wide, well lit staircase close to the roll-up doors that led up to the tasting room and I looked at it longingly, but I had left my fax to run through by itself and wanted to make sure it had been received before I joined Sabrina, so up the back stairs I went.

The door to Mark’s office was closed, but the door to the room used by the office staff was wide open. Only the person intently staring at the computer monitor shouldn’t have been there.

“Carlton Carpenter, what are you doing here?” I walked into the office and stood in the middle of the room, hands on my hips. Carlton always had that effect on me.

He didn’t even have the decency to jump. “Hello, Ellen,” he said, swinging around in the office chair. “I didn’t know you worked here.” He managed to work a little sneer into that statement.

“You know I don’t.” I tried not to let impatience show. “I’m helping Sabrina set up for the Harvest Festival dinner tonight.”

“That’s right,” he said thoughtfully. “She’s your niece, isn’t she? Catherine’s daughter. Yes. Sweet girl. Not a bit like her mother. Not too efficient, though. And her husband. What do you know about Mark Tortelli? Does he seem like an honest man to you? They’re living with you, aren’t they? Have you noticed anything suspicious about him?”

“What?” Surprise caught me short, and it took a moment to respond. “What are you talking about? It’s none of your business who’s living with me or anything else, and, I repeat, what are you doing here?”

I wasn’t very polite to Carlton, but then, I never was. We’d grown up together, gone to Bible study, grade school and high school, and during all that time, he’d never given me a reason to change how I thought about him. He was pond scum. Handsome, admittedly, but still, pond scum. Carlton really didn’t care what he did as long as it benefited him and he didn’t get caught. For years he had managed to stay out of trouble by flashing that perfect white-toothed smile and using his leading-man good looks and his smarmy charm. He’d been in a number of “businesses” and seemed to have a sixth sense about when to get out before a hole opened up and he fell in it. If someone else fell in, oh well. Currently, he ran a one-man real estate office. Every old-time agent in town avoided him, but there were plenty of new people in town to prey on. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. “Carlton,” I said, trying to sound threatening. If he didn’t answer soon, I’d start tapping my foot.

“I have a perfect right to be here. I’m a partner in the winery.” I got the white-tooth flash, but was too stunned to respond.

“What?” Originality had fled, at least for the moment. “You? How did you?” I was about to ask where he got the money but stopped myself in time. Carlton was always either rolling in it or dead broke. Depended on how big he’d dug the current hole. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask whom he’d fleeced lately, so I changed my sentence in mid-structure and asked instead, “How did you do it? I mean, how does anyone become a partner?”

He gave me a patronizing look, the one that always made me want to hit him with a shovel, and said “Mildred Banks.”

That cleared things up nicely. “Mildred Banks?”

“Yes. Remember her husband, Henry, died a little over a year ago?”

I’d never heard of the Banks. However, I wanted to hear what they had to do with Carlton’s partnership, so I nodded, and Carlton went on.

“Henry had bought a few shares in this winery, and Mildred needed money. I went over to talk to her about maybe selling her house.” (I inwardly groaned at this. I didn’t know Mildred but sure hoped she hadn’t trusted her sale to Carlton.) “I ended up buying her shares instead.”

“Did Mildred list her house?”

Carlton frowned. “No. She managed to keep the house. Why? You aren’t thinking of going out to see if you can get a listing, are you? Keep away from her. She’s my client.”

I wanted to tell him that I had plenty of clients of my own and that I didn’t need to arm-wrestle poor old widows to get listings, but I had something more pressing to ask Carlton. “Okay, you’re a partner. Do all of the partners mess around with the computers?”