Killer Summer

19

Walt had Brandon to thank, and he was not about to do it. Brandon had apparently correctly written down the registration to the car driven by the wine-party crasher. Walt had feared it would come back a rental, but to his surprise it was a Blaine County plate registered to Nick Gilman. The mailing address was a post office box in Hailey, but the residence was in the Starweather subdivision.

Having transferred the Adams bottles to a safe-deposit box in a Ketchum bank following the tasting, Walt headed down valley.

Walt knew Nick and L’Anne Gilman well enough to say hello. He was a builder; she owned an art gallery on Sun Valley Road. They had three kids, the oldest in fifth grade along with Walt’s daughters.

The Gilmans had installed a controversial steel sculpture, a nude giving birth to the earth, on their front lawn that had twice been vandalized, requiring investigation by his office. She had also installed a quarter-million-dollar cairn of rocks on the back lawn by a British landscape artist, which had fueled rumors of unexpected wealth. Not just anyone in the valley could afford to fly in British stonemasons to stack rocks. And those stonemasons, being big brutes and not averse to ending the day with a few pints at the local pub, had made themselves known to the Sheriff’s Office by putting their rock-hard fists in the faces of some locals who found it necessary to deride them for their thick accents.

It was those brawls-three in all-that had introduced Walt to the Gilmans. And Nick, having a welcoming smile, and L’Anne, having an abundance of confidence and shrewd negotiating skills, meant the masons had been cleared of all charges. By way of thanks, L’Anne had sent Walt a tin of toffee at Christmastime.

The Gilmans lived in a sprawling log home on the Big Wood.

Walt was greeted at the front door by a female employee of the Gilmans’, who introduced herself as Betty. He was told the Gilmans were attending one of the wine-auction preview dinners.

Walt asked about the whereabouts of their Toyota Land Cruiser, having its registration number in his top pocket.

“Janet has it,” Betty answered, “a friend visiting from California, a grad student at UC Davis. She’s staying in the Sheep Wagon. The Land Cruiser goes with the Sheep Wagon.”

“Sheep Wagon…?”

“I’m sorry. L’Anne names everything.” Betty pointed up the drive. “It’s the guest cabin. Your first right, on the way out, you’ll see a sheep wagon. Turn there, keep going until you see a cabin… Is everything all right?”

A uniform always generated curiosity. People had no right to ask, but they always did.

“Nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not sure she’s around. I thought I heard her leave a while ago,” Betty said, “but maybe I’m wrong. I could tell her to call you.” She was fishing for information.

Walt thanked her, told her there was no reason to bother the Gilmans about his visit, and drove off in search of the Sheep Wagon.

He found the Land Cruiser parked beside the cabin, if one could call an eighteen-hundred-square-foot log home a cabin. It appeared to have been dropped into the middle of the aspen grove where it stood, the white-barked trees seemingly glowing in the darkness. It also abutted the Big Wood, the gurgling river reminding Walt of his aborted fly-fishing with Kevin. He owed the kid a rain check.

Walt was about to knock on the cabin’s door when a blur of movement caught his eye. He froze, believing it an elk or deer or even a moose watering at the river. He cherished such sights-one of the reasons for living here. But the shadow moved again. It was clearly a human being.

“Hey!” Walt called out, instinctively reaching for his sidearm.

A trespassing fisherman, maybe. But with a woman in the cabin he couldn’t rule out a Peeping Tom, and that required a discussion. A thief would go for the main house, not a guest cabin. Or a transient, one of the dozens of mountain men who squatted in the national forest during the summer, causing his office no end of trouble.

He eased his hand off of his weapon. He might be able to run this guy down, or at least run him off the property.

As the shadow took off, so did Walt, his Maglite in hand. The light briefly caught the man from the back, but it was enough to spot the gloves he was wearing. Gloves in late July.

Walt dodged through the maze of white-barked trees.

“HALT!” he shouted.

Back at the cabin a floodlight came on and the trees made prison-bar shadows.

The man slalomed through the aspens, increasing his lead.

Walt, who prided himself on his fitness, pushed hard but failed to catch up. He broke out of the aspen grove, stumbling over an asphalt curb and falling down hard, and found himself on a neighbor’s driveway.

The whine of a car engine starting interrupted the river’s growl. By the time Walt made it to his feet, the sound grew smaller.

He took hold of his radio but had nothing to call in-no description of the suspect or vehicle. He stubbed his boot into the driveway’s gravel. “Shit, shit, shit!”

Walt wiped his sweating face with a handkerchief and banged on the cabin’s front door. The same young woman he’d seen at the wine tasting answered the door, her reaction to his uniform typical.

“Janet…?”

“Yes?”

“Walt Fleming, county sheriff. I was at the reception tonight.”

For the moment, Walt held off telling her about the man outside her cabin.

Janet had a sharp Roman nose, some faint acne scarring in her sunken cheeks. Her pale eyes were a remarkable grayish blue. She appeared tired, even drained. He wondered if she might be ill.

“I crashed it, I know. Guilty. Okay? I didn’t realize I’d broken a law. Is there a fine, or what?”

“Or what,” he said. “I’d like to talk with you about Arthur Remy.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

She waved him inside. The cabin would have qualified as a Native American extension museum.

“Blackfoot?” he asked, looking around.

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Northern Paiute,” he said, correcting himself, identifying an impressive horsehair basket. “Bannock, probably. Uto-Aztecans.”

“Are you a collector?”

“I dabble. An uncle of mine-kind of an uncle, not by blood-is a Blackfoot. He got me interested in the culture.” He fingered a blanket, wondering if the Gilmans knew it was a fake, and studied two pieces of pottery in a glass case.

“Your interest in Mr. Remy is…?” he asked.

She’d taken a seat in a willow-branch chair on the other side of a walnut-slab coffee table. She motioned for him to take the couch, but he declined and continued studying the collection.

“Arthur Remy,” Walt repeated.

“Did he lodge some kind of complaint?” she asked. “What a jerk.”

“No complaint. Should he have?”

Her forehead creased.

“I didn’t catch your last name,” Walt said.

“Finch… Janet Finch. What’s this about, exactly?”

“My office is providing security for the Adams bottles,” Walt said.

“Well, then, you’re wasting your resources.”

“Because?”

“There are no Adams bottles. Something Arthur Remy does not want to hear evidently.”

“Okay. You’ve got my attention,” he said. He took a seat across from her.

“I’m a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis, Sheriff. Oenology… wine-making,” she finally said, answering his blank expression. “My thesis concerns the Jefferson collection.” She searched his face. “Are you familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s obsession with wine?”

“The Adams bottles,” he said, “they were a gift from Jefferson, right?”

“Fiction,” she scoffed. “That’s Arthur Remy’s story, but that’s all it is, a story.”

“I’m listening.”

“The so-called Jefferson bottles were discovered by Arthur Remy in nineteen eighty-five and were sold at auction for nearly two hundred thousand dollars, in part because the wine was judged to have survived the centuries… no easy feat. Remy claims the Adams bottles are also from Jefferson’s Parisian cellar, which is, like… totally far-fetched. And quite frankly brings into question the authenticity of the original find.”

She made eye contact. “They’re fakes, Sheriff. It’s a hoax. An elaborate and expensive hoax, but a hoax just the same.”

Walt heard the compressor of the kitchen refrigerator kick in. There was a TV or radio playing upstairs.

“I don’t imagine that’s a popular opinion,” he said.

“All I’m asking for is access to the bottles, and the test results. I want to know that I haven’t wasted nearly three years of my life. The point is that Arthur Remy is a liar and a cheat, and everyone is so carried away by the story he’s invented that they’ve blinded themselves to this hoax he’s perpetrated. He’s going to make off with a zillion dollars for some Rothschild bottled as something quite different.”

“You’ve requested access, I take it?”

“A dozen times. And isn’t it just a little bit curious that he won’t even so much as take my calls?”

“Calling something… someone… a fake is quite an accusation.”

“I understand that. Were the bottles vetted and tested? Of course they were. And by some of the best. But you want to take a guess at how many ‘experts’ ”-she drew air quotes-“there are out there who could authenticate a find like this? Very, very few. And, trust me, he got to them. I don’t know how, but that’s not my problem. One of those guys is dead, by the way… killed. That should interest a sheriff, right? Stabbed to death, in Amsterdam. Has any connection been made to Remy? No. Will it ever be made? No. But how convenient the man who signed off on the authenticity of the engraving-the glass and the method used to cut it-ends up stabbed to death in the doorway of a brothel. And guess what? He was gay. He didn’t even belong in a brothel.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she continued, “I suspect Remy’s Jefferson bottles are legitimate. But these Adams bottles? I’m sure the glass is from eighteenth-century France, the cork is Portuguese, the label is the right paper. I’m sure all the facts support Remy’s claims. The bottles wouldn’t be on the open market otherwise. But my work on Jefferson reveals no such bottles. Did you get that? The Adams bottles aren’t accounted for anywhere in Jefferson’s inventory. I think Remy saw a good thing and jumped on it, not fully realizing that Thomas Jefferson was a freak of nature who inventoried every bottle, cataloged every wine he served with every dinner. No one knows Jefferson’s wines the way I do. There are a total of three people in the world who’ve studied his collection the way I have and the other two did so before we had the science we have today-the spectrometers and electron microscopes, specifically. Arthur Remy is not one of those other two, I promise you.”

She was red in the face, the veins in her neck protruding.

“But you lack proof,” Walt said, “because you don’t have access.”

“There you have it.” Janet Finch drew in a deep breath. “The wine industry is based on relationships. Dealers, brokers, consumers, collectors, and connoisseurs. Those relationships are carefully protected. Scholars like me, we’re sought out when authentication is needed and we’re thrown to the wolves when we raise suspicions. Remy claims the Jefferson and Adams bottles were found in two different cellars in Paris. Okay, fine, I’d like to know which cellars. I know where Jefferson lived in Paris, I know where he cellared his collection. I know when and where he moved the collection. If these are, in fact, authentic-and I’m willing to go there if that’s how it proves out-then I need to include them in my thesis if it’s to be complete. I’ve worked forever on this, Sheriff. I’m not going to give up now.”

“The killing in Amsterdam…?” Walt said.

“Investigated and closed. A random act of violence.” Janet studied him. “You actually believe me?”

“If you’re right, you’d cost Remy a heck of a lot of money.”

“It’s his reputation he’s worried about, believe me, not the money. If I’m right, he’s ruined. And I am right.”

“Ms. Finch, I think you’d be well advised to seek other lodging.”

“No thanks. The price is right. L’Anne’s a friend from grade school.”

“When I approached your cabin just now, I scared off a prowler.”

“You what?”

“I pursued, but the individual fled and escaped.”

“There was some guy out there? Are you serious?”

“In light of what you’ve told me, I think it would be smarter if you stayed in the main house, or took a hotel room, or even left the valley.”

“Remy? Are you kidding?” She mulled this over. “Good God! You are totally freaking me out. It could have been someone fishing or just walking the river. Right?”

“Maybe,” Walt said, not sounding convinced. “But still, you might consider staying over with the Gilmans for a few nights.”

“I can’t do that. I gave Remy the phone number here at the cottage. He’ll either call or he won’t. And if not, I’m gone by Sunday morning.”

He didn’t like the idea of her staying here alone but was powerless to do anything about it. “The bottles would be heavily insured,” he said.

“Of course.”

“And if stolen”-En route to the wine auction, he thought but did not say-“the insurance would pay out, and the bottles, as well as any questions of their authenticity, would disappear.”

“I suppose. Why?”

“Call-forward that line and stay in the main house,” Walt said. “And I’m not asking.”