The Riesling Retribution

Chapter 13

“You met Beau Kinkaid?” I asked. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. He was not a nice man. I remember him.”

I sat down in one of the patio chairs and stared at her. I’d just turned twenty-nine in July. Twenty-nine years ago Dominique would have been thirteen. Could she really be that certain she knew him?

“The summer you were born my mother came from France to help your mother. She brought me, too.” Dominique expelled more cigarette smoke through her nostrils. “I remember Beau came to visit your father and they had a terrible argument. He was ugly and he scared me, but his name was Beau. It seemed odd.”

Of course. In French, beau means “beautiful.”

Still, I wondered how vivid—and accurate—her recollection could be. Even after spending the last few weeks looking through family photos for the vineyard slide show Frankie and I had put together, I’d been hard-pressed to recall long-ago events with any specificity. What memories remained had been as vague and impressionistic as the blurry, out-of-focus photos I’d discarded.

“Do you remember anything else?”

She ground out her cigarette on a plate that still had remnants of what looked like melted Brie on it.

“Sorry, I’m afraid not. You know I didn’t speak English very well back then.”

She kept grinding that cigarette and didn’t look up.

“What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I’m sorry, chérie. It’s not very nice.” Her smile was rueful. “Whatever happened during that conversation, it made your mother cry.”

I closed my eyes as an image of my mother flashed in my head as clearly as if I’d been with her only yesterday. What Beau said to Leland must have devastated her. My mother didn’t cry often. Children remember those moments—the unsettling discovery that adults aren’t invincible and they can hurt enough to shed tears, too. My cousin’s story was sounding increasingly plausible.

“You have no idea what they were talking about?”

Dominique shook her head. “No, but it upset my mother, too. All that shouting.”

“Who was shouting?” I asked. “My parents?”

“Non, your father and Beau. We were sitting on the veranda when he showed up. Uncle Leland introduced us. Then he brought Beau into his office right away. After a few minutes, we could hear them hollering at each other.” She sat down across from me and lit another cigarette. “After Beau left, things got sort of crazy.”

“Crazy, how?”

“Because of you.”

There was a half-open bottle of red sitting on one of the serving tables. I got it and found two clean glasses.

“I need a drink,” I said.

Dominique took the glass I handed her. “Tante Chantal went into labor with you that afternoon so my mother and your father took her to the hospital. They left me at home to babysit Eli.”

“You mean Beau came to see Leland the day I was born?”

Dominique nodded. “I was terrified he’d return when I was in the house all alone so I barricaded the doors with furniture and went to bed. When Uncle Leland and Maman came home from the hospital in the middle of the night, they had to break a windowpane so they could open a window to climb through. I was sleeping upstairs. I never heard them pounding on the front door.”

If it hadn’t been so important, I would have laughed.

“What happened after Leland and Beau’s argument? Do you remember Beau leaving or if Leland went with him?”

Dominique drank her wine.

“I don’t know what happened. When your mother went into your father’s office after Beau left, I was sent to my room. That’s when I heard her crying through the door to the office. By the time I was told I could come downstairs, my mother said Tante Chantal was lying down and that I needed to be quiet. Your father was gone.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But Maman was furious because she had to telephone his friends until she found him so he could drive your mother to the hospital.”

I stared into my wineglass. What could Leland have done to make my mother cry over a business deal gone sour? Had he lost money? Gotten involved in some shady scam?

And where had he gone after Beau left the house?

If this was the argument Annabel Chastain had been talking about, at least I now knew for sure that Beau left our house alive. But where did my father disappear to for those few hours, leaving his wife who was distraught over the quarrel between him and his business partner and only hours away from giving birth? Did Leland track down Beau to finish the argument in private? Or did he end things between them for good?

I looked at my cousin. “You probably need to tell Bobby about this.”

She swirled around the last of the wine in her glass, a somber expression on her face.

“Or I could just let dead dogs sleep,” she said. “No one but you knows I met him.”

In the silence that fell between us, I knew she wrestled, as I did, with the impact her news would have on my father’s case if she spoke to Bobby versus saying nothing. A Hobson’s choice that had already been made, ingrained in our psyches because of who our mothers raised us to be.

“It would probably go better for Leland if you kept quiet,” I said. “Telling the truth corroborates what Annabel Chastain told Bobby, especially since no one knows where Leland went after Beau left, or what he did. Until now.”

I shrugged and shook my head. Her smile was melancholy as she hugged me.

“Shall I call Bobby now or do you think it can wait until tomorrow?” she asked.

“Better get it over with. You wouldn’t want to change your mind.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “There’s no way to sweep the rug under the carpet on this one, is there?”

“Nope,” I said, as she made her call.

The next article about the murder of Beau Kinkaid to appear in the Washington Tribune was not on the front page of the news section. Instead it showed up first thing Monday morning on the front page of Lifestyle. Lead story, this time above the fold. Pictures, too. The real kicker was the headline: “Sauterne Death: Who Killed the Victim in the Vineyard?”

I had never seen the photograph they used of Leland in his NRA cap. He’d probably been hunting and hadn’t shaved for a few days so he looked particularly scruffy. A real gun-toting wacko. Chastain Construction’s press machine had most likely provided the photo of Beau Kinkaid, who looked as all-American as a Boy Scout, sitting at a linen-covered table at some dinner event with a bank of American flags behind him. He was smiling, showing a lot of bad teeth, but even the smile didn’t hide the fact that, as Dominique said, the man was as ugly as a roach.

I read the article with growing disgust. The obvious conclusion any fool would make—though it was never explicitly stated—was that Leland, a man of dubious business acumen, blurred-edge morals, and questionable relationships, killed one of his former partners and had gotten away with it. Until now.

Frankie was the first to arrive at the villa. She came straight to my office and the guilty look on her face, when she found me at my desk with the newspaper lying open, made it clear she’d hoped to do something outrageous, like burning every copy she could get her hands on before I saw it.

“Too late,” I said. “But thanks.”

“I’m really sorry, Lucie.”

“Me, too. Anyone who still wondered whether Leland was innocent or guilty before reading this garbage won’t have any doubts now.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, her clear blue eyes filled with consternation. “They didn’t say he did it.”

“No, they just hinted, implied, insinuated, alluded, intimated…have I left any words out?”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I think I’ll take a drive over to Leesburg.” I stood up and reached for my cane.

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Do you think I should let them get away with this?” It came out sharper than I intended.

Her cheeks reddened and she pressed her lips together.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be taking my anger out on you.”

“Maybe you could just ignore it. If you dignify it by reacting, it’ll just keep the whole thing alive. Don’t go over there and roll around in the mud.”

“They’re throwing it. Besides, how much more attention could we get than this?” I waved the paper. “We’re going to be bombarded with press calls all day. Wait and see. Anyway, it’s too late to ignore it.”

She gave me a warning look. “That article didn’t have Kit’s byline on it. Be careful, Lucie.”

The Loudoun bureau of the Washington Tribune was a small redbrick house on Harrison Street on the edge of Leesburg’s historic district. I parked on Loudoun Street in front of the quaint log cabin that now housed part of the town’s museum.

The last time I’d gone to see Kit when she’d been working in the D.C. office of the Tribune, I’d been required to pass through a metal detector, send my purse through an X-ray machine, and show my driver’s license, which had been scanned—bad-hair photo and all—and became my stick-on badge for the day. Even then Kit had to show up at the front desk and escort me wherever I went. That included the ladies’ room. But here in Leesburg, life was different. I opened the front door of the Loudoun bureau without knocking or being buzzed in and walked inside. The receptionist, whom I knew from experience was working on the Times sudoku puzzle in pen, looked up as the door closed. Normally we exchanged chitchat, but today I nodded without speaking and walked straight through the large open room where reporters and photographers sat at their computers, to Kit’s office at the far end of the building.

Her door was open and she was leaning against the front of her desk, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other. Waiting for me. She’d been warned.

“I heard you left scorch marks on the ceiling on your way here,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re angry.”

I leaned on my cane with both hands. “That story was straight out of the gutter. How come you didn’t put it in the gossip column? Or maybe the comics, since it was such a joke?”

There were two pink spots on her cheeks. “I have nothing to do with Lifestyle. It’s a completely different part of the paper. Different editors, different staff.”

“Really? So where do they get their headline writers? Show up at the Comedy Club and recruit there? I’m sure that article sold a bunch of newspapers.”

The flush now stained her face and neck. “The story was supposed to run on Saturday,” she said. “I used up a lot of capital getting it delayed until today so it wouldn’t ruin your weekend and your anniversary celebration.”

We were going down a path of destruction, but now neither one of us was going to pull back.

“Too bad you didn’t use your capital getting it—what’s that journalism expression you use? Spiked?”

“There was no way they were going to kill that story.”

“It belonged in a supermarket tabloid, not a serious newspaper in a major metropolitan area.”

Kit uncrossed her legs and held on to the edge of her desk with both hands as she leaned toward me. “Believe me, I looked at that piece under a microscope when it showed up. Nothing in it is untrue, Lucie.”

“You yourself said Chastain Construction is spinning the way this story plays out.”

“I did not.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Wait.” Her voice was soft. “Let’s not leave it like this between us. Please, Luce. I wanted to come by after work today and ask you something. I was hoping…well, counting on, that you’d be my maid of honor.”

I saw the smear of lipstick on her front teeth from where she’d bitten her lip as she waited for my reply. We stared at each other across a chasm that had opened up in the few feet between us that seemed as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. Here was the one favor that symbolized what we’d meant to each other for so many years.

I struggled to control my voice. “Maybe this isn’t the best time—”

“Of course,” she said. “I understand.”

I turned and walked blindly out of her office, no longer caring that tears were flowing down my cheeks. Kit’s office door clicked shut, and a moment later I heard a muffled sound like a sob. I kept on walking, this time without even a nod to the receptionist, who said nothing as I passed her desk.

I stepped outside and closed the front door. From here, there was no turning back.