Wildcat Wine (26 page)

“Yes,” I said, and leaned out of reach of Redfish, who was aiming at my hair.

“My daddy used to make wine, over in Fort Lonesome, he got him enough wild scuppernongs, that is, he made us kids pick 'em enough, to make a few gallons of wine.”

Scuppernongs. I nodded, and thought of the wild vines of bronze grapes back home. Earl had cultivated a darker cousin and called them muscadines, but at the root center they were the same southern natives.

“That wine would flat knock you on your butt, I tell you what. When folks would ask my daddy what he did to give his wine such a kick, he'd tell 'em that he added a cup of wildcat pee, wildcats being about as common out in the scrub near Fort Lonesome as damn Yankees on the Tamiami Trail. Said he put wildcat pee in the wine to give it bite.” Tired giggled.

Wildcat wine? Well, okay. That made me think of my grandmom, my real one, and how she made this concoction she called peach wine, with which she was prone to liberally dose Dan and Delvon and me at the first sign of a sniffle, a tummy ache, or when we made too much noise during
As the World Turns
. Once on a sleep-over visit, my normally sober father had drunk a couple of glasses and got flat drunk. The next day, as he gathered up my brothers and me to take us back to the cluttered gloom of our own house, he had asked his mother-in-law what she used to make her wine so strong. She'd told him with a perfectly straight face that she added mule urine to give the wine kick.

Thinking of my grandmom and her mule-peach tall tale, I laughed until tears ran down my face. When I recovered, I apologized to Tired.

“No, ma'am, don't say you're sorry. You're supposed to laugh at that story. I told it to some folks in Sarasota at the PD, and they looked at me like I was some sorry redneck who don't wear shoes or use toilet paper.”

Tired's mistake, I thought, was that he told that wildcat-wine story to carpetbaggers, people from the great urban North, who came to plunder Florida for its jobs, its developmental riches, or its natural resources, and who didn't understand the natives like Tired.

“Well, Tired, you ought to know by now that crackers have a different kind of humor than all those city people from up North.” I knew he would know I didn't mean offense by using the term
cracker,
not when I was just one speech-and-diction coach up from being an obvious Georgia version myself.

“Yes, ma'am.”

I looked at Tired's face, young but aging in the sun of his native state and the stress of looking at dead bodies and trying to raise a child on his own, and my heart softened.

“You know Bonita didn't have anything to do with this, don't you? Cobalt blue car or not.”

“Yes, ma'am. It's just that the high sheriff, he keeps poking his finger in my eye and telling me to arrest somebody. Kenneth was a big shot. The press is gonna eat the sheriff up if we don't get somebody quick.”

“You've got to look past Bonita, then. You don't have a motive for her anyway, do you?” I wanted to test the waters on that as I wondered if Tired had heard any hint that Kenneth had been threatening Bonita.

“No, ma'am, no motive. I'll give you that. But motive doesn't always count for a lot. Not when you got good, tangible evidence.”

“Like prints on a murder weapon?”

“What?”

“Prints on the gun, you know. That's why you wanted my prints and Bonita's?”

“No, ma'am, you're gonna have to fuss at your spies. You got some bad information.”

No prints on Dave's gun? And here I'd nearly beaten myself up over the fear that I had accidentally framed myself and Bonita for murdering Kenneth.

“Then what . . . why'd you want our prints?”

“Fingerprint on the doorbell. Just as nice and pretty a latent print as you've ever seen. Thought it might be worth looking at yours and Bonita's. Don't match Dave's.”

“Well, it's not going to match mine or Bonita's either. You can just quit barking up that tree.”

“Bad as I don't want to, I gotta do more than take your word for it.”

“Yeah, but, Tired, come on. You know me now, and you're getting some feel for Bonita. We're not stupid. We're not going to ring a man's doorbell, shoot him, and then run off in a distinctive car. Okay? We'd drive a rented car, some commonplace American sedan, wear gloves, go late in the night, and—” Suddenly I thought this might not be the tack to take.

“Yes, ma'am. I'll give you that it doesn't make good sense. But whoever shot Kenneth, shot him in a panic. Six shots. Four of them pretty wild, one hardly hit him at all. But two got the job done. So that tells me whoever shot him was scared, and scared people don't think good.”

“Scared lawyers think good, though. It's our finest trait, nothing like a little flight-or-fight juice to rev up our brains. And that goes for Bonita too. You don't raise five children and be a legal secretary without the ability to function well under pressure.”

Tired sighed. “I don't think it's either of you, truth told. Don't you tell anybody I said that.”

Tired looked so woeful, I leaned over and pecked his cheek with a little kiss and damn if Redfish the opportunist didn't snatch a handful of my hair and yank it for all he was worth.

But long after Tired and Redfish left, I thought about that perfect print on the doorbell.

And I thought about how adamant Bonita had been that day I'd suggested we voluntarily give Tired our prints.

Then I wondered how long before Tired got Bonita's prints from immigration.

Chapter 33

My hair was still damp
the next morning when I hurried out the door, pointing my ancient little cobalt blue car toward Old U.S. 301 and a trip to the address Kenneth had listed on his reimbursement form.

Traffic being minor at dawn, I was there in no time. The address was a large warehouse-type building with a sign out front that read: “Mike Daniels's Welding.”

Not surprised by the sign, I parked my Honda modestly out of view on the side of the warehouse and got out for a good look. Temptingly, the front entryway was a jalousie-style door, a design popular in the Florida ranch houses of the fifties and sixties, along with terrazzo floors and an orange tree in the backyard. Notoriously easy to break into, these jalousie doors were a configuration of narrow panes of overlapping glass, styled from a safer time when homes were not the common target of anyone who needed a spare buck.

I stuck my fingers between the panes of glass on the door and pried them open, then ripped through the screen with a metal nail file from my purse, reached in and turned the doorknob, and entered Mad's office.

It crossed my mind that this was my third breaking and entering in the last two weeks, and I hoped I hadn't made some sort of subconscious decision to revert to my days of traveling left of the strictly legal. Being Dave's marijuana gardener in my adolescence was one thing, something forgivable and without hard prison time for a first timer. But three B&Es, that was something I needed to think about. Was there a twelve-step program for burglary, I wondered, a B&E Anonymous that met in the library on Thursday nights?

But I pushed that from my mind to worry about later. Now I needed to see what I could find.

What I found were guy things. Tools. Piles of paper and piles of guy things.

Finally, under a greasy drop cloth I found a filing cabinet. I rummaged through the records, mostly receipts, bills, and primitive contracts for welding jobs, but found nothing about Earl or Kenneth. Then I checked under the cabinet and found an envelope taped to the bottom of a drawer. I tore into this, but it turned out to be nothing but some crude pornography. Apparently Mad had a thing for women with big butts. I hoped that meant he and Mary Angel had been happy together in that department, as her bottom certainly qualified. I tossed the stuff aside and started crawling under what passed for a desk, looking for more taped envelopes.

While I was on my hands and knees, rear toward the door, someone banged into the warehouse and I hit my shoulder jerking myself up and around as quick as I could.

There wasn't any lie that was going to cover this, so I hoped for luck or speed as I finished crawling out from under the desk to face Mary Angel standing over me with a very big handgun.

“What in the Sam Hill are you doing in Mad's office?” she asked.

“If you'll just put that gun down, I'll tell you.”

“Lester called me, said somebody in a bright blue car was snooping around in here.”

Well, good for Lester. “Lilly Cleary,” I said. “You might remember me, from yesterday, at the market. Earl's lawyer.”

“I remember you.”

While her tone didn't suggest fond memories, she did put the gun down. “What are you looking for?”

Okay, to the point. I could respect that. “Something that would explain to me why Kenneth Mallory had this address on his mileage-reimbursement sheet for two days in January.”

Mary Angel walked toward me, her gun hanging at her side, until she saw the pornography. She picked it up and threw it in a garbage can. “I told him not to bring that trash in the house. But a man's office, well, that's a man's office.”

I nodded.

“Mad wasn't a bad man.”

“No, ma'am, I haven't seen any evidence of wrongdoing on his part,” I said. “But I think he might have been sort of murdered.”

“Murdered? Man stepped on a snake.”

“Anybody tell you his car was chased off the road, into a ditch, on Clay Gully Road?”

Mary Angel looked like she was trying to remember something, or maybe just make up her mind. “Yep. Deputy with the little boy told me it looked like somebody was chasing him, and he might've lost control or something.”

“Did anybody tell you Mad had a suitcase full of cash with him when he ran into the swamp?”

Eyes to eyes, Mary Angel took my measure. After a considerable moment, she asked, “Where's the money?”

Her tone of voice told me a hard-core business deal was at hand and I need not bother with charm or bullshit. “I've got half of it. The boy who found Mad and called the police has the rest.”

“I don't want to smear Mad's good name in this community. But truth is, I need that money.” Mary Angel paused, apparently weighing the pros and cons, then spoke, signaling her decision. “You'll get me that money back, won't you?”

“As soon as you tell me what you know.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” Mary Angel's practical side was, no doubt, honed from years of retail sales.

“I don't bring you the money, you report me to Tired for breaking and entering.”

“Tired ain't got no jurisdiction in Oneco. I'll report you to our own sheriff.”

“All right. Deal—the money for the truth.”

“Mad's not used to doing bad, that's why this went wrong.”

“What happened?”

“Some lawyer fella from Sarasota, probably that Kenneth Mallory, I could describe him, but I never got no name from him.”

“What did he look like?”

“Forty-something, regular build, salt 'n' pepper hair, glasses, wore a damned pink shirt, nice enough looking 'cepting he was real . . . ordinary, I guess, had butterflies on his tie.”

“Yeah, that'd be Kenneth.”

“Well then, it was Kenneth came out here, looking Mad up and all, asking him about stealing the engineering plans to Earl's grape picker and offering to pay him for them. Best I could tell from what I overheard and what Mad told me, the lawyer fella was some kind of kin of Earl's and Earl had bragged to him that he was fixing to have a new, improved grape harvester that'd be worth a lot of money.”

“You mean the harvester that Earl got killed with?”

“No, not that one. But like that one, only better. I mean, he and Mad had what Mad called a prototype, only a couple of little 'uns. Like models, you know. Earl was so proud of those models he'd showed them to that lawyer kin of his. That's how he knew about Mad having the specs and all.”

“That would be those models in Earl's barn. Looked like
Star Wars
toys, only bigger than kids' toys?”

“I reckon. I never saw 'em. Earl started from the grape picker he had and kept tinkering on it 'cause it mashed up the grapes something terrible. He'd made a bunch of changes to it and was planning on getting him a patent someday.”

“So, Mad stole Earl's plans and sold them to Kenneth?”

“Yep. But you remember, Kenneth put him up to it.”

Hardly a case for entrapment, I thought, and then pondered this new information. “But—”

“Near as I can figure it, Earl never knew diddly-squat about the stolen plans. Least Mad didn't think he knew. But the more Mad thought about it, the more afraid he got of going to jail. I told you, Mad wasn't any good at bad ways. Got where he couldn't sleep he was so scared of what'd happen to him in a prison. He weren't no big man, you hear? So Mad up and run off.”

“You think Kenneth chased Mad as he was fleeing? Why?”

Mary Angel ducked her head. And didn't answer.

“You might as well tell the rest of it.” I made my voice sympathetic.

After a hard stare at the floor, Mary Angel sighed and looked up. “I don't know what good it'll do anybody, but I'll tell it. Mad figured since he had to leave town that the lawyer fella hadn't paid him enough. So he was going by his house and get him to give him some more money. Next thing I heard was a state trooper knocking at my door, saying Mad was dead.”

I nodded. In a slack sort of way, some of this was making sense. Kenneth learned about the potential value of Earl's designs, hired Mad to steal the plans, and then when Mad tried to blackmail him something had happened at Kenneth's house that led to the car chase down Clay Gully Road. That had to be how it had gone down.

But after Mad crashed his car and ran into the Myakka wilderness, why didn't Kenneth follow him into the swamp and finish the deal?

I thought about Kenneth, prissy, well-dressed Kenneth in his pink shirt, his macho Hummer, and his butterfly garden. Money hungry, and crazy, and mean. But not brave enough to run into a swamp full of snakes and wild hogs and alligators and swarms of poisonous bugs and plants.

No, you'd need a man like Farmer Dave to run into a dangerous wilderness and drag back a man with a suitcase full of cash.

With a clarity that felt like bad mayonnaise in the gut, I realized that Dave finding Mad and the money wasn't just Dave's karma. No, Dave must have gone looking for him.

I had to go. I promised Mary Angel to bring her the money as soon as I cleared up a few things, and I started to leave.

Then I asked, really nicely, if I could borrow her gun.

“You know how to handle this? It's a Glock.”

“Yes. I grew up in rural Georgia and I can handle a gun.” Dave and my grandmother had seen to that.

“Awright. I'll sell it to you then.”

“Take Visa?”

“Cash.” She named what I'd guessed was a fair price.

I gave her what cash I had on me and promised the rest. Mary Angel took me at my word that I'd make good on the difference.