The woman said, “What’s the matter?”
“Alex Cappellani,” I said. “He asked me to come out to see him tonight. He was supposed to be in that office when I got here, waiting for me.”
She understood right away what I meant. “My God,” she said, “you don’t think that man might have done something to Alex?”
I did not answer her; there was nothing to say. I just turned and started back toward the dirt-and-gravel road, not running because of my lungs but moving pretty fast just the same. After the first few steps the woman was right beside me.
3
When we got down to where I could see the yard in front of the cellar, the figure of a man appeared there, walking toward the entrance doors from the direction of the Cappellani house. I tensed a little — but there was nothing furtive about his movements. He noticed us at about the same time, slowed and then stopped in the light from one of the night globes burning above the archway.
The woman and I left the road and hurried across the yard. The man stood with his arms at his sides, watching us approach. He appeared to be in his forties, wiry and pinch-faced, and he was wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt and slacks, all of them dark-colored. His expression was one of curiosity at first, but as we came up and he got a good look at what was in our faces, at the condition of my clothes, it changed into an anxious frown.
He blinked at me and said to the woman, “Shelly? Is something wrong—?”
I went right by him, and she did the same thing without offering a response. The dark winey coldness enveloped me again as I stepped inside; I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging. I went at an angle across the foyer, into the corridor to the north and along it to where the office was. Echoes from my footfalls and the woman’s bounced hollowly off the stone walls. On the floor up there the spilled wine gleamed blackly, like blood, amid the shards from the broken bottle.
When I got to the open office door, the woman — Shelly — said, “There’s a light switch on the wall inside, to your right.”
I reached in there, fumbled around and located the switch and flipped it. Bright fluorescent light from a pair of overhead tubes consumed the blackness; the sudden glare made me squint. Behind me I hear the sharp intake of Shelly’s breath.
Alex Cappellani was lying face down in the middle of the floor, and there were streaks of crimson matting the curly hair on the back of his skull.
I moved to him and went down on one knee, pressed fingertips against the artery in his neck. There was a pulse, irregular but strong enough. I let out the breath I had been holding, started to shrug out of my jacket.
Shelly leaned down next to me. “Is he — alive?”
“Yeah. But he needs a doctor, fast. That head wound—”
“Good God!” a man’s voice said. It was the pinch-faced guy; he had followed us inside, and he was standing now in the doorway with his eyes wide and shocked. “Alex! What’s happened to him?”
“Somebody cracked him over the head,” I said.
“Hit him? But who? Why?”
Shelly said, “Logan, for Christ’s sake.” Then, to me, “I’ll call the hospital in St. Helena.”
I nodded as I covered Alex with my jacket. “But we’d better not touch anything in here. There another phone close by?”
“In the sales room.”
The pinch-faced guy was still standing in the doorway, gawking. He said to Shelly, “Who is this man? What’s he doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came down to talk to Alex.” He looked me up and down. “He’s been in a fight—”
“Never mind that now,” Shelly said, and crowded past him into the corridor. “Mrs. Cappellani had better know what’s happened. And Leo.”
The guy blinked at her. “Yes, you’re right.”
“Then don’t stand around here, go tell them.”
He did not like her commanding tone — the resentment was plain in his expression — but he didn’t give her any argument. When she turned toward the sales room, he glanced at me again, briefly, and then hurried after her along the corridor.
There was nothing else I could do for Alex. You don’t move somebody who has been badly hurt, if you have any sense, and you especially don’t move somebody with a head injury. I straightened up and backed over to the door, stopped there to look around the office. Cluttered mahogany desk set against the far wall, between two filing cabinets; an oversized phone on the desk with two rows of buttons on its base unit; a couple of round-backed chairs and a table with a wine rack on it full of dusty bottles. The wine rack told me where the bottle came from that the attacker had used on me, that he had probably used on Alex as well. But there did not seem to be anything out of place in there. The file drawers and desk drawers were closed, nothing was strewn around anywhere on the floor, and the clutter of papers on the desk had a natural appearance, not as if someone had been rummaging through them.
So maybe I had interrupted the assailant before he could steal anything. Or maybe he had found what he was after with a minimum of mess. Or maybe he had not come to steal anything in the first place. That scraping sound — why would a thief, why would anyone, have been dragging Alex across the floor?
Well, Alex himself had the answers, if anyone did. It was not up to me in any case; the matter was a police one.
I went down the sales room. Lights blazed in there now, illuminating shelves and displays and stacked cases of wine, and Shelly was behind a counter along one wall, speaking into a telephone receiver. That telephone, too, was oversized and had the two rows of buttons on its base; when I came up and looked at the buttons I saw that two of them were marked “Open Line” and the rest were numbered. Which meant that the winery buildings, and no doubt the main house too, were interconnected by a series of private lines, so you could call directly from one extension to another.
When Shelly finished talking to the hospital I took the handset from her and dialed O and told the operator I had a police emergency. She put me straight through to the sheriff’s office. I identified myself to the officer who answered, gave him a brief account of what had happened; he said they would be out as quickly as possible.
Somebody had left a package of Kools on the counter, and Shelly helped herself to one and then extended the pack to me as I dropped the handset back into its cradle. I looked at it longingly for a moment, felt the lingering tightness in my chest, and thought: Just like putting a knife in my lungs, just like committing suicide.
“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”
She lighted hers, blew a long sighing stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I suppose it was necessary to call in the sheriff,” she said, “but I wish you hadn’t done it.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t like cops much.”
“Oh? Any particular reason?”
“I was married to one once.”
She said that as if it were a complete and final explanation. But her voice was matter-of-fact, without any trace of bitterness. I wondered, not altogether relevantly, what she would say if and when she found out I was a cop of sorts myself.
This was the first chance I had had to take a close look at her, and I saw that she was around thirty, that she had gray-green eyes, that her close-cropped hair was a dark auburn color and very fine, like a child’s. But there was nothing childlike about her features. They were strong, intelligent, maybe a little hard around the mouth — the face of a woman who has not had an easy life but who knows exactly who she is and what she wants. A survivalist. Tough and probably cynical about some things; nothing much in this world would suprise her anymore. For all that, though, she was more than a little attractive. Not beautiful, certainly not pretty, but very damned attractive.