Bill Pronzini, Collin Wilcox
Twospot
“To Lee Wright, with love.”
Part One
The Private Detective
1
The old-fashioned arched sign over the entrance to the private road read:
I swung my car off the Silverado Trail and took it beneath the sign and past another one that appeared in my headlights: GUIDED TOURS. VISITORS WELCOME TASTING ROOM OPEN 10-4 • The road was narrow but well graded, and it began to climb and dip almost immediately through low rolling foothills. The hillsides were carpeted with curving rows of grape vines, most of which had been stripped clean of fruit because it was the first of November and the harvest season was all but over. Here and there were some of the big truck gondolas the pickers used, and oaks and madrone and eucalyptus dotted the terrain, but there was nothing else to see except the black-shadowed vineyards and a black moonless sky. The winery was tucked farther back in the foothills, a mile and a half from the Silverado Trail and a few miles southeast of the village of St Helena.
It was just past nine o’clock and the night was cool, but I rolled my window down a little so I could smell the good vinous, earthy scent of the vineyards. A summer fragrance, though, not an autumn one, because the drought that had plagued California for more than a year continued to linger with no signs of abatement. Even the grape leaves had not taken on their fall colors — yellow, scarlet, purple — as they would have by now if the rains had come as usual.
Alex Cappellani had told me it had been a poor harvest, one of the poorest in the Napa Valley in years. The big wineries which owned the bulk of the 16,000 acres of vineyards in the valley would survive all right on volume; but unless the drought ended soon, Cappellani and the other small cellars could be in serious trouble. They made most of their profits on vintage-dated varietals — Pinot Noir and Grignolino and Grey Riesling — and without a yield of high-quality grapes with which to manufacture these wines, they had little hope of competing in the marketplace.
This was the latest in a long series of problems that had beset the Cappellani Winery since Alex’s great-grandfather founded it in 1878. Poor harvests and labor squabbles had almost closed it down in the 1890s and in the early 1900s; Prohibition had closed it down for the duration, and there had been an added difficulty when Alex’s grandfather was arrested in 1923 and fined a substantial sum of money for illegally conspiring to produce alcoholic beverages; Alex’s father, Frank Cappellani, had apparently been more interested in reactionary political causes, and as a result of apathetic management the winery had nearly gone into receivership in the early ’60s. Frank’s death of a heart attack in 1964 put the cellar in full control of his wife, Rosa, who had turned out to be a capable and hard-nosed business woman. With the help of Alex’s elder brogher, Leo, and later Alex himself, Rosa had gotten the winery back into the black: until the drought it had been flourishing.
But the drought and poor harvest were not the only things Alex was concerned about these days, and had nothing to do with why he’d hired me three days ago in San Francisco. What he had come to me about was a man named Jason Booker, an enologist — a wine and winemaking scientist — whom Rosa Cappellani had signed on six months ago. Booker was forty-six, nine years Rosa’s junior, but they had evidently become intimates; and although Rosa insisted there was nothing serious in their relationship, Alex was convinced that Booker was pressing her to marry him. He was also convinced that Booker was a shady opportunist who cared not at all for Rosa, who wanted only to gain control of the winery through marriage. So he wanted me to run a check into this Booker’s background to see if there was anything there that would corroborate his suspicions.
You can find out a lot about a man in three days if you have a basic fact sheet on him to begin with — where he went to school, where he has lived and worked, things like that — and Alex had provided me with a copy of Booker’s job application and references from the Cappellani offices in San Francisco. Since Booker had lived in California all his life, the first thing I had done was some routine checking with police and credit agencies. Which got me nothing much; he had an average credit rating and no police record of any kind. Then I had driven up here and spent the past two days talking to people at the four wineries which had employed him during the last twenty years, two in Napa Valley and two in the Valley of the Moon. The consensus was that he was a good enologist but nothing much as a man: arrogant, ambitious, charming when he wanted to be, ruthless when he saw an advantage to be gained.
One other thing I learned was that, his job application to the contrary, he had not worked anywhere for an eight-month period in 1970. This morning, I had found out why: a viticulturist at the Sonoma winery which employed Booker prior to that eight-month gap told me Booker had left there without giving a reason but that he had let it slip he was planning to get married. There had been nothing on the job application about a marriage — he had listed himself as a bachelor — and so I had gone to Santa Rosa and checked the Sonoma County records. Married, all right, to a woman named Martha Towne in February of 1970. According to the marriage certificate, she was sixteen years older than he and a resident at that time of Petaluma.
The Petaluma address turned out to be an expensive home in an affluent west-side neighborhood. It also turned out to still belong to Martha Towne — a bitter Martha Towne who was more than willing to talk about Jason Booker, to me and to anyone else who might want to listen.
It was an old story, old and sad and ugly; and it pretty well corroborated Alex Cappellani’s suspicions. Martha Towne had been recently widowed and had inherited a considerable estate from her late husband when she met Booker at a party. She had also been lonely, and flattered and overwhelmed by his attentions, and she had married him three months later. Only to discover, after five months together, that he was far more interested in her money than he was in her. He had gotten her to open joint checking and savings accounts and had then appropriated fifteen thousand dollars for personal investments about which she knew nothing. When she found out she told him to pack his bags, and divorced him and managed to get a sympathetic judge not to grant him a community property settlement.
She had not remarried again, and all you had to do was look at her to tell that she never would. Booker had taken a lot more from her than the fifteen thousand dollars; he had taken her faith and her trust, and she had never recovered them either.
I asked her if she would sign a formal statement of what she had told me, if it proved necessary; I also told her why I might want it, omitting the names of the Cappellani family. She said she would, gladly, and her eyes shone with a kind of malice when she said it. I did not blame her much, but I got out of there pretty fast just the same.
It was after six when I called the winery from a pay phone and asked for Alex. But the woman who answered said he wasn’t there; he was expected at eight o’clock. So I ate cannellone and drank a couple of beers in an Italian restaurant on Petaluma’s main drag and then drove the fifty miles to St. Helena and called the winery again from there. Alex was in this time; he asked me to come straight out and to meet him at the office in the main cellar building.
The road wound across a stretch of bottomland, where the vines were laid out in long straight rows. I still could not see the winery from there, but beyond the crest of another low hill there was the faint glow of lights against the dark sky. The night seemed vast and still and touched with a kind of old-world serenity, and you could imagine that this was a foothill vineyard in France or Italy or Switzerland at the turn of the century. That same flavor of Europe long-ago permeated the Napa Valley; you felt and saw it not only in the vineyards and the old stone wineries, but in the quiet villages and the ancient mills and factories and railroad depots, and in the attitudes of the people who lived there.