Dead in the Dregs_ A Babe Stern Mystery - By Peter Lewis Page 0,1
wine. “I feel badly that Janie’s been strapped with this.”
“Somebody’s got to do it. You’re not about to put your life on hold. At least this way he’s close. She can keep an eye on him, make sure he gets proper medical attention.”
It was an accusation, an indictment, and made for an uncomfortable silence.
“What about Janie?” I asked. “Any time for her this trip?”
“I was supposed to have dinner with her last night,” Wilson said.
“Supposed?”
“Something came up. I couldn’t make it, but I’ll try to catch her tomorrow before I take off.”
“What about tonight? You could see Danny. I know he’d love to see his uncle.”
He sidestepped the suggestion. “You remember how crazy we were, way back when?” he said, lifting his gaze but refusing to look at himself in the mirror that lined the back of the bar.
“Yeah, pretty intense,” I said, sniffing a glass that reeked of detergent and buffing out a water stain.
“As if our lives depended on what we could detect in a glass of wine,” Wilson mused.
He took a turn into the room, walked to the pool table, and rolled the cue ball across the manicured lawn of felt.
“I’m headed for Europe in a few weeks. You should bag all of this and come with me,” he said. “It would be like old times.”
One of the regulars looked at me as if I were about to walk out the door. And it was tempting, tempting to walk away, to disappear, to leave the bar to my partner, Frank Mulligan, leave my son to Janie, to pretend I was twenty years younger, without a care in the world.
“I’m not going to do that to Danny,” I said. “Owning this place is bad enough. I seem to have less time now than I did in Seattle.”
“You own this dump?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “It’s a waste of your talents.”
“It’s impossible to waste yourself on your child,” I said. “A kid changes everything.”
He turned his gaze on me, but his eyes seemed to look straight past me, through me, to the bar-length mirror.
“Why’d you quit? What happened?” he said.
“After your sister left me, I thought I could deal with it. I used to love my work. Those early years. I picked up where you and I left off, tasting everything I could. I think I memorized whole swaths of Lichine and Broadbent.”
“I sent you those books.”
“Did you? I don’t remember. Maybe you did. You were very generous. I’m sure your letters got me the distributor job and my first gig as a sommelier. You were already famous.”
“Hardly. I’d only just started the newsletter.”
“Well, people knew about it,” I said, carefully peeling a lemon in a single, continuous spiral with a stripper. “Anyway, something changed after Janie split. Everything and everyone irritated me. I finally snapped one night. A customer I knew pretty well, a typical venture capital type, had his nose stuck in one of your newsletters and wanted to quibble that the bottle I’d brought to the table had failed to fetch ninety points.”
Wilson smiled, pleased with himself. “What did you say?”
“I told him I knew you, that we tasted nearly every week together when we were kids, that there was a whole style of winemaking you write off.”
“That’s nonsense,” he protested.
“I told him to get his head out of his ass and his nose out of your newsletter and trust me.”
One of the old drunks who was eavesdropping couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“You ever hear the maxim ‘The customer’s always right’?” Richard was offended by the story, but it wasn’t the customer’s happiness that concerned him. I had impugned his reputation. “So, what happened?” he asked.
“He was about to get up from the table to speak to the manager, but I told him to relax, beat him to it, and tendered my resignation.”
Wilson shook his head, woefully disappointed in me. Digging his nails into a rut on the scarred oak of the bar, he dropped his voice and said, “Listen, there’s something I need to talk to you about.” He glanced around the room, aware now that the barflies were following our conversation. “In private. If you’re not coming to Europe, can you at least run down to Norton with me? We could talk.”
“You gonna drive?”
“I can’t bring you back. I’m already late, and I have . . . an engagement tonight.”
The way he said it suggested a woman might be involved. He tapped the stem of his glass impatiently with a fingernail.