“That the suicide over on Cleveland Avenue?”
“The police are calling it a suicide, yes. Can you e-mail me a copy of the prelim? Sooner rather than later?”
My friend hesitated; there’d been many favors over the years. There’d be a price.
“Can you get me four bottles of Sciortino’s 2006 Mourvèdre?”
Our ’06 Mourvèdre goes for about forty-five dollars a bottle. I did the math. “I’ll drop them off this evening.”
I drove to Sciortino’s that afternoon to attend a staff meeting and pick up the wine. Traffic was light on I-15 for a change and I arrived early. I wandered the grounds looking for my boss. Maybe he’d approve an employee discount.
Joe Sciortino wasn’t in his office. The vineyard supervisor said he wasn’t out among the trellises. I walked by the crush pad; no Joe. I checked the barrel room. When I opened the door, a sensual bouquet curled into my nostrils: the Angel’s Share. That’s what those in the business call the portion of wine that evaporates from the barrels during the aging process, while the remaining product soaks up oak vanilla tannins. Over the years, 5 or 10 percent of the wine will diffuse into the air, filling the tightly sealed barrel room with potent ambrosia. The angels know a good thing when they see it, and sip their share when no one’s looking.
I located Joe among the barrels and negotiated a deal on the Mourvèdre.
That evening I deposited four bottles at my reporter friend’s apartment. He handed me a sheaf of papers. “I e-mailed these too. I’ll update you every few days for a week. Fair?”
“Fair. Happy uncorking.”
At home that night I studied the report. There had been nothing unusual about the condo; no packed boxes, no suicide note. In fact, the only note was a handwritten to-do list on Betty’s kitchen table. The list had seven items on it. The first was: Take garbage out. That item was checked off, and the police confirmed that garbage had, indeed, been taken out.
The second item was to change the settings on her satellite dish receiver—the favor she’d asked me to help with. To SDPD’s credit, they had called her satellite dish company to see if there’d been a problem. There had. The company had advised her to try a new setting configuration, and if that didn’t work, to bring the receiver back to the office and exchange it for a new one. SDPD had removed the satellite dish and tagged it as evidence, although evidence of what I wasn’t sure.
Betty never got to items 3 through 7.
The police had called Betty’s closest living relatives, a younger brother and an older sister back in Muncie. They told police that Betty was an unhappy, immoral woman, alienated from church and family. That, along with the Prozac prescription, led SDPD to the suicide verdict, but I still wasn’t buying it.
I poured myself three fingers of Irish whiskey on the rocks. I work for a winery, but sometimes I need something stronger than sour grapes to take the edge off.
After a few sips I returned to the report. It seemed blatantly obvious to me that the fall had been an accident. Women aren’t jumpers, not in my experience. To validate my intuition, I Googled women and suicide methods and discovered that only 3.5 percent of female suicides in the U.S. are jumpers.
I needed to see Betty’s roof and its safety wall for myself. I was wondering exactly how to accomplish that when my phone rang.
“Some friends of mine own a condo in the building where Betty lived. I know you want to snoop, so I wrangled us a dinner invitation for tomorrow.”
Betty may have longed for my attention but Caterina knew how to get it.
She was in fine form for dinner with her friends the following evening. There was an uncharacteristic chill in the air, enough that I wore a black leather vest over my shirt. She selected one of her new pashmina shawls in jade green and a long, loose skirt. The outfit complimented her lithe body and she knew it. She flirted wickedly throughout the meal. Her friends, Glenn and Mike, wondered aloud if she’d met her match.
At the earliest acceptable moment, I excused myself, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and found the roof access door. No crime scene tape barred entry.
Out on the roof I paused to breathe the cool air. The western horizon over San Diego harbor was slashed by bands of neon scarlet, gold, and fuschia. To the east, the sky was the color of blue pen ink. City lights outshone the stars.
Betty, was this the venue of your chosen farewell?
The roof was flat; no angle jeopardized my safety. The material beneath my feet offered good grip, a skid-proof surface. A thirty-inch parapet did, indeed, encircle the roof. I knew from the police report where the satellite dish had been located and it was nowhere near the roof’s edge. Even if Betty had slipped and fallen, the officer was right: she might have slid into the parapet, but it was very unlikely she’d have gone over it.
I scanned the roof looking for indications of a scuffle, for any signs that Betty might have slipped or that someone might have given her a shove. No oil or grease on the roof surface. Lots of footprints, but no distinct skid or scuff marks. Nothing much except bird droppings and sewer vents. My inspection was punctuated by the caterwauling of an ambulance coming from the direction of Mercy Hospital.
As the sky deepened to octopus ink, I clicked on my flashlight and turned to go.
Behind me stood a slender man in his thirties, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved camo shirt. He must have entered the roof while the siren was blaring. Anxious and twitchy, he carried a day’s worth of beard and was attractive in a rough-hewn way.
“Hello,” I said, walking up to him, hand extended. “I’m Nikki. Thought I’d come up and check out the view.”
He shook my hand. “Caleb Trout.” He looked me over with an expression that was hard to read. Was he a nosy neighbor who wanted to see where Betty had fallen? Was he keeping an eye out because he suspected something about her death? Was he a meth addict waiting on the roof for someone to deal his next fix?
Suddenly Caleb asked, “Find anything interesting while you were here?”
I looked him in the eye. “Now that the sun has set, there’s nothing here to see, Caleb. Nothing here to see.”
I had one more errand before I returned to the dinner party. Caterina would fuss about how long I’d been gone. Let her.
The parking garage was a vault of shadows and exhaust. I heard soft laughter and the scrape of shoes coming from the next row of vehicles. In Betty’s assigned parking space sat a blue Ford pickup. Her silver Jetta was parked in a nearby visitor’s space. I wrote down the Ford’s license plate number, and made my way back to the dinner party.
In bed that night Caterina wore violet silk, and I wore quite a smile.
The next day I drove to Sciortino’s to give a PowerPoint presentation on the marketing event I’d come up with: The Grapes of Ra, a wine-tasting party where we’d decorate the grounds with hieroglyphs, stuffed crocodiles and cobras, and cheap statuary of Horus and Osiris. We’d hire a belly dancer to perform. Guests would be encouraged to dress like ancient Egyptians. And, of course, the guest list would be restricted to people who could afford half a case of Tempranillo!
I must’ve sold the idea well because everyone bought into it. Sometimes I wonder about people.
That evening I took Caterina out to dinner at the City Deli, a hallmark eatery that was popular even when Sears ruled the hood.
Afterward we went for a walk. Caterina was in an interesting mood. She talked about remembering the smell of violets in her grandmother’s basement when she was a child. She confessed to wearing braces until her sophomore year. She told me her favorite flower was the black Baccara rose, a rose noir. Perhaps this conversational intimacy was provoked by the incident with Betty. Maybe she did a bit of soul-searching herself.