“Is he your only son?” I asked Ladington when we were alone.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
I didn’t comment on the callousness of the statement, and if I hoped he wouldn’t have more to say about his son, I was disappointed.
“Got his mother’s genes—that’s for sure. Weak-willed, half a backbone, no spunk.”
“What ah ... which of your wives is his mother?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t but having decided that what would be considered inconsiderate to most other people probably didn’t apply to Ladington.
“Second, I think. Wasn’t the first—I’m sure of that.”
“How many ...”
“How many women have been Mrs. Ladington?” he said with a laugh. “Tennessee’s number eight. I finally got lucky and found somebody who wasn’t crazy or drugged or drunk, and who wasn’t after my money.”
Quite a testimonial to seven previous women,
I thought.
“He married that pitiful excuse for a woman,” Ladington added, referring to the woman who’d just left. “Ever see anything so pathetic? Got the personality of a dead clam.”
I was spared having to respond when an older woman of Latino origin entered the dining room from a door at the far end. She carried a tray on which a selection of breads was displayed, placed it on the table, and left without saying a word.
“That’s Consuela. She and her husband, Fidel—like Castro—they help around the house, do some gardening, help out in the kitchen. They were here back before I bought the place. Didn’t think it would be right to can ’em, although I was tempted. They don’t do a hell of a lot.”
It was the first expression of compassion from him since I’d arrived.
We had just stepped outside again when a man almost as tall and wide as Ladington, and wearing gray coveralls and knee-high green rubber boots, came up onto the patio from a set of steps on the pool side.
“What’s up, Wade?” Ladington asked.
“I need you down at the press, Bill.”
Ladington said to me, “You’ll have to excuse me, Jessica. This is Wade Grosso, my vineyard manager.”
“Ma’am,” Wade said.
Ladington went to the open door and bellowed, “Hey, Tennessee, come on out here and keep Jessica Fletcher company.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “It’s lovely out here. You go ahead and ...”
A woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall, almost six feet, and had a mane of blond hair that exploded from the top of her head and cascaded down over her shoulders. She was heavily made up, her lips enlarged by an overuse of crimson lipstick. She wore a leopard-skin blouse with the top four buttons unfastened, and tight black slacks. Open sandals exposed rather large feet with polish the same shade as her lips. A cigarette dangled from long, talon-like fingers with inch-long red nails.
“Say hello to Jessica Fletcher,” Ladington said. “Got to tend to some business.”
He walked off with Wade Grosso, leaving his wife and me facing each other.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, dropping the smoldering cigarette to the brick patio and extinguishing it with the heel of her sandal. “His majesty said you were coming for lunch.”
“ ‘His majesty?’ ”
“The great man, William Ladington.” She laughed. “He likes to be called that. Come on inside. I’ll give you a house tour.”
“A castle tour would be more apt,” I said under my breath, following her inside.
Twenty minutes later, after I’d been shown the bedrooms, baths, library, and a few other spaces, Tennessee Ladington led me to a series of rooms segregated from the main house. “The offices for the winery,” she said, lighting another cigarette and plopping down behind a desk in a high-back red leather office chair. “Sit down,” she said. “This is where his majesty rules his domain.”
Her constant snide remarks about her husband, delivered with apparent humor but pointed nonetheless, made me uncomfortable, and I silently wished he would return. I tried to make small talk: “Must be challenging to run a winery like Ladington Creek,” I said.
She responded by puffing on her cigarette and adding it to an already overflowing ashtray.
“You’ve garnered so many awards for your wine,” I said. “I took a wine-appreciation course before coming to California. The instructor is quite a fan of your wines, especially the cabernet.”
Tennessee Ladington was spared having to join the conversation when a man entered the office. “Hello, Tennessee,” he said.
“Hello, Roger.”
Roger, who wore a greenish suit that was slightly too big for his slender frame, started for a door leading to another office, stopped, turned, and said to me, “Aren’t you that writer, Jessica Frazier?”
“It’s Fletcher, Roger,” Tennessee said. “Jessica Fletcher. Bill invited her for lunch.”
“Honored to have you,” he said, coming to where I sat and extending his hand. “Welcome to Ladington Creek.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m pleased to be here.”
“See you later,” he said, disappearing through the door and closing it behind him.
“Roger Stockdale,” Tennessee said. “He’s our business manager. Bill thinks he steals.”
“Oh, I ... I, ah ...”
She smiled, her first since I’d met her. “Bill thinks everybody’s stealing from him, including me. He carries paranoia to new heights. I assume you noticed the moat when you arrived.”
“Yes, I did. I’d never seen a real moat before.”
“Stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Cost a fortune to have it dug. Made us the laughingstock of the valley.”
I started to say that I’d been told Ladington Creek had an impressive tasting room—I had a sudden urge for a glass of wine, alone—when loud voices in the hall caused me to turn in that direction. The dominant voice belonged to Bill Ladington, who yelled, “I’ll be damned if that mealy-mouthed low life is going to intimidate me. You go back and tell him I’ll break his damn neck if he tries it again.”
Ladington’s large frame filled the open doorway. He said to his wife in the same bellowing voice, “Jenkins is out there telling Wade he’s going to bring in some new French rootstock and plant it alone, no grafting to American stock. Damn fool will kill every vine in the valley if he does that.” He looked at me: “Tennessee take care of you?”
“Oh, yes. I had a tour of the house—the castle—and—”
“You hungry? I sure as hell am. Tennessee, tell the cook to get things moving. We’ve got a hungry guest here. Can’t have a hungry murder-mystery writer, can we? Where the hell is Raoul with those books? Bruce back yet?”
Ladington continued to bark questions and orders as he led me back to the dining room where his son, Bruce, and daughter-in-law, Laura, stood where they had when I first encountered them.
“Hey, Mercedes, let’s get some food out here,” Ladington shouted through an open door to an unseen person.
Roger Stockdale, the vineyard’s business manager, joined us along with Wade Grosso, who’d removed his rubber boots and replaced them with carpet slippers. As expected, Ladington took his place at the head of the table and we occupied chairs on either side. Tennessee sat to my left, the seat furthest from her husband.
A woman who I assumed was Mercedes appeared from the kitchen followed closely by Consuela. Both carried platters of food that they placed before us. One platter overflowed with meaty ribs and chicken glazed with barbecue sauce; the other contained steaming vegetables, a large bowl of mashed potatoes, and a silver gravy boat with extra barbecue sauce. I looked across the table at Laura, who looked as though she might become ill at any moment.
“Come on, dig in,” Ladington said, attacking one of the salads that had been put on the table earlier.
“Do you always eat this big a meal at lunch?” I asked, laughing.
“Always,” Stockdale said.
“Do you serve American food at your restaurant?” I asked.
“Of course,” Ladington replied through a mouthful of food. “It’s a steak house. Steak and lobster and chicken.
“The chef is Greek,” Tennessee said.
“But no Greek food,” Ladington said. “Not at my steak house. His name’s Nick. Never can tell what he’ll come up with for lunch. Ladington’s Steak House is the best damned restaurant in the valley. When Nick’s cooking for me, he keeps it simple, like ribs and chicken. He whips up lunch for us here at the castle, then heads over to the restaurant to make dinner. I’ll take you over there myself tonight, Jessica, let you see for yourself.”
“That’s kind of you,” I said, “but I have dinner plans.”
“With who?”
“Maybe Mrs. Fletcher doesn’t want to—”
Ladington interrupted his son with, “Don’t be telling me what to ask anybody, Bruce.”
“Sure, Dad, I—”
“Where the hell is Raoul with those books?” Ladington growled as he filled his plate with ribs and chicken.
It didn’t take me long to adapt to the conversational flow at the table, which was virtually nonexistent. Ladington pontificated while we listened. I asked a few questions early in the meal but soon stopped and ate in silence along with the others. Laura Ladington nibbled on a small piece of roll before excusing herself. “I’m not feeling well,” she said, which prompted Ladington to say when she was gone, “Of course she doesn’t feel good. How the hell can you feel good if you don’t eat? Just eats vegetables and all that organic garbage. One of those health Nazis we’ve got all over California.”
If Bruce had a defense of his wife, he kept it to himself.
Over dessert, talk turned to vineyard business. I would have preferred to absent myself and yearned to be taken back to Cedar Gables, but there didn’t seem to be an appropriate moment to make that request. As I sat there and heard Ladington lodge a series of complaints directed at everyone, I wondered what had possessed me to accept his invitation. He’d said on the phone he wanted to discuss something with me, but that was probably a ruse to get me to agree to come for lunch. Could it be, I wondered, that William Ladington was starstruck and simply wanted a well-known writer to be his luncheon guest? If so, was it to impress his wife, or some of the others? I decided that might be a good possibility, considering how much he wanted autographed books for his shelves.
Raoul arrived as we were about to vacate the table. He’d purchased two of my novels in hardcover, prompting Ladington to berate him for not buying more.
“The others were in paperback,” Raoul said. “You said to only get the ones with hard covers.”
Raoul departed with the others, leaving Ladington and me alone in the dining room. He placed the books before me and I signed them to him and his wife.
“You just sold a couple of your books, Jessica,” he said. “You made a few bucks coming out here today.”
“Yes, I suppose I did. Could Raoul take me back to the inn now?”
“Nonsense! You haven’t been here long enough to get to see the place. Come on, I’ll give you a tour of the vineyards, show you how good wine is made.”
I was tempted to insist upon leaving, but remembered that I’d intended to learn about wine making as a possible backdrop for a novel. Besides, I still had time to kill before George would arrive.
“All right,” I said. “Show me how good wine is made.”
Chapter Nine
“... and that’s what makes a truly fine cabernet, Jessica.”
We’d been walking through one of his vineyards for almost an hour. During that time he’d pointed out with pride certain aspects of the Ladington Creek approach to growing grapes and turning them into award-winning wine. He showed me how to use a refractometer, a handheld instrument that allows light to pass through a drop of grape juice. “See?” he said as I read a graduated scale on the refractometer. “It reads in Brix units, the percent of sugar concentration in the juice. The sugar molecules bend the light and give the reading. It’s up to sixteen now.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means it’s time to keep a close eye on the grapes. Close to time to harvest them now. Maybe another week, ten days. That’s when the picking crew will come in. I don’t use machines to do the picking. No, sir. All by hand, and at night, too, when it’s cool.”
His demeanor had changed from what it had been during lunch and the hour leading up to it. Then, he’d demonstrated brusqueness and arrogance bordering on outright meanness. Now, as the sun slipped lower into the western sky, casting long shadows over the land, he became increasingly reflective, almost gentle in his comments.
“You see,” he said as we stood at the far end of the vineyard devoted to grapes for his award-winning cabernet sauvignons, “the key is to
care
about the wine you produce, treat it like the precious thing it is, not be satisfied with taking shortcuts to produce more of it to rake in bigger bucks. Hell, I could modernize this place so you’d think it was DuPont or some other big chemical factory. But that would rob my cabernet of its uniqueness. I turn out only about three thousand cases of cab every year. That’s a spit in the barrel compared to the big boys in the valley.”
“You’re obviously very proud of what you’ve accomplished here,” I said.
“You bet I am, but I’ll be even prouder once I get hold of a piece of that mountain over there and plant some of my new rootstock on it,” he said, pointing to the gray and gold slope of Halton Mountain. “See, Jessica, grapes love rock, especially shattered rock. You’ve got to use dynamite to shatter that rock, give it lots of crevices where the roots can grab hold. There’s soil a couple of hundred feet deep on that mountain, and down below there’s a gravel swath a couple of hundred feet wide. Used to be a riverbed. Most perfect spot on this earth to grow grapes. When you grow grapes under stressful conditions, you improve the taste. The grapes are smaller but sweeter, packed with flavor.”
“I understand you’re not the only vintner who wants Halton Mountain,” I said.
“You’ve picked up a lot in a short time.”
“Well, actually I’m hoping to learn more, a little first-hand research I might use in my next mystery.”