“Please, Ryan. I’m begging. It’s for charity. And, uh, one other favor? I’d like you to be the auctioneer. We need a pro now. You’d be terrific.”
I could hear him drumming something on the top of his desk, a pen or a pencil, while he thought about it. The rat-a-tat stopped. “You paying for my expertise?”
“Of course.” I should have seen that coming. “What’s your fee?”
“I’ll cut you a break,” he said, “since it’s for charity. Pay me a thousand and I’ll handle the catalog and raise a bundle for your charity. Deal?”
I wondered what his noncharity price tag was. Everyone else was doing this for free.
“Deal,” I said.
“Okay, get me a list of everything you’ve got and shoot it to me in an e-mail. I’ll start figuring out your floor prices.”
“I’ll get you the list, but do you think maybe you could come over here instead?” I asked.
“Why do I have to come over there?” He sounded ominous. I was on my third favor and thin ice.
“I just want to make sure the donations we’ve got are the real thing. So I’d like you to actually look at the bottles.”
“If you want me to do that, I need to ask twelve-fifty.”
I hadn’t even bargained on paying him the thousand, but I couldn’t afford to lose him. “Okay, okay. Twelve-fifty. We’ll pay you after the auction. From the proceeds.”
“Yeah, fine. I know you’re good for it.”
“How about coming by tomorrow evening?”
“Hang on.” I waited, probably while he scrolled through his electronic calendar. “Looks like I could do five.”
“Five’s good. See you then.”
“How come you didn’t corral Jack Greenfield into doing this? Or Shane Cunningham?” he said. “You know Shane’s running Internet wine auctions now. He and Jack do this stuff all the time.”
Shane was Jack’s business partner. I knew about the wine auctions but I’d been too busy with harvest to check out what he was selling. Might as well come clean and tell Ryan the truth before he got here tomorrow.
“Because one of the bottles I’m worried about is the Washington wine and I can’t ask Jack or Shane.”
He barked a laugh. “Well, you can relax about that one. I did look that bottle over when Jack had it. I guarantee you, it’s the real deal.”
“You’re sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? What’s up?”
“Valerie Beauvais said there was something I didn’t know about its provenance. She was on her way here to look at it the morning she died. I never found out what she knew.”
Ryan snorted. “Valerie—God rest her soul—wouldn’t have known provenance if it walked up and slapped her upside her head.”
When I was silent he said, “Okay, sorry. That was rude. When I’m over there tomorrow, I’ll show you why I’m so sure you don’t have anything to worry about. Satisfied?”
I said “yes” but he’d already hung up.
He seemed to know a lot about Valerie Beauvais. And he’d been astute enough to recognize the source of the plagiarism in her book as Joe’s dissertation—something he’d had to go looking for at the UVA library.
But if it were true that Clay Avery had been thinking of hiring Valerie to write for the Washington Tribune, then Ryan couldn’t be too sorry that she was dead and no longer a thorn in his side. And if she were right about the Washington bottle, he’d look like a fool for having staked his reputation on its authenticity.
Which gave him—even more than Joe—more than one motive for murder.
Chapter 6
Another big crowd came through the winery on Sunday as the glorious weather continued to hold. It had only been two weeks since the sun moved from the northern to the southern hemisphere on the autumnal equinox, but the longer, lower rays of sunlight already bathed the vines and fields with a gilded light that came only at this time of year.
We had moved the tasting outside to the courtyard to take advantage of the view and the weather. Francesca Merchant had hired a string quartet to play chamber music for the afternoon.
“I know you like this classical stuff, but it just doesn’t do it for me. Frankie says they’re good musicians, but everything sounds like the same guy wrote it. Vivaldi, Beethoven—whoever,” Quinn said to me as we stood in the shade of the loggia and watched Gina hand out tasting sheets and explain our wines to three older men who’d arrived in a limo with three good-looking young women.
The quartet was playing a baroque piece by Telemann.
“There’s a big difference between Beethoven and Vivaldi. You just don’t pay attention.” I fingered the collar of yet another of his Hawaiian shirts, this one with skimpily clad girls in grass skirts and postage stamp bras, swaying, presumably, to a hula. “Couldn’t you have worn a different shirt?”
“Why, is there a stain on this one?”
“Never mind.”
My brother Eli showed up midafternoon without my sister-in-law Brandi and my one-year-old niece Hope. As always he looked a little too dapper and even a bit feminine. I knew why. Brandi now picked out all his clothes, like Barbie dressing Ken. She favored pastels so I was getting used to seeing Eli in sherbet colors like the pale yellow shirt and matching linen trousers he wore now.
“Hey, babe,” he said. “Thought I could sponge off you this afternoon. What’s to eat? The girls went to my in-laws’ for the weekend.”
“Tapas. I’ll make you a deal. Help us out for the next few hours and I’ll send you home with leftovers.”
Eli pushed his Ray-Bans up so they sat on top of his perfectly gelled hair. “I guess I could stick around for a while.” He placed his hands on the complacent paunch that had once been his washboard stomach. “I could use a bite now, though. Woke up too late for breakfast and spent all morning at Jack and Sunny Greenfields’.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Jack’s renovating his wine cellar.”
“Moonlighting?”
Eli suddenly looked weary. “Helps pay the bills.”
I knew he was just scraping by. He adored Brandi and couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell her the money tree had been picked clean. Last I’d heard he’d borrowed the equivalent of the GNP of a small country to cover what they already owed.
He walked over to one of the tables, returning with a plate filled with enough food for three people. “Good stuff.” He stabbed a sausage with a toothpick. “Where’d you get these?”
“The organic butcher in Middleburg. What’s Jack doing to his wine cellar?”
“Everything.” Eli spoke through his chorizo. “Installing a security system, upgrading the cooling system—really shelling out the bucks for glass murals, limestone flooring, redwood wine racks, map drawers showing where the wine comes from. The whole caboodle. And a computerized inventory—finally. Shane’s handling it. Jack’s been paying insurance out the wazoo for years without knowing the actual value of his collection.”
“Why does he need a security system all of a sudden?”
Eli licked his fingers. “Got a napkin? I don’t want to get grease on these clothes. First time I’ve worn them.”
I handed one to him.
“Jack’s got, oh, easily thirty thousand bottles. He wants to protect his investment.” He picked up a fork and dug into a small mountain of marinated piquillo peppers. “Plus he heard about those wine cellar thefts in California. Decided he needed something more than a padlock on the door. The security guy came by this morning and did his spiel, explaining all the things they can do. I felt like James Bond when M demonstrates the toys.”
“It’s Q. M is his boss. Q does toys.”
“Whatever.”
“If you’re done with your snack, James,” I said, “how about helping me pour wine in the villa?”
“Shaken not stirred,” he said. “Just let me grab some more chorizo.”
Frankie stood behind the bar in the tasting room when Eli and I walked into the villa. A pretty strawberry blonde in her early fifties, I liked her low-key, capable ways and gentle, dry sense of humor. So, apparently, did our customers. Since she joined us, she’d acquired a small but faithful group of regulars who dropped by on weekends, claiming they came for the wine. I knew they came to talk to Frankie. You could find an ocean of compassion in those clear blue nonjudgmental eyes.