Death at the Bodega, page 14
When they got back to receiving, they found themselves alone together and apparently with a few minutes to spare. Osvaldo was still buzzing around, bringing bins to the yard. Tomás had disappeared, as had his hand crates of grape bunches, which would be added to the vats in a single layer once the slurry reached a certain level.
“What happens next with the police?” asked Gael. “Did they tell you anything?”
“I guess we’re off the hook for now. For good I hope, unless they can come up with some sort of evidence a year after the fact. Which leaves me to live with the distinct fear they could come knocking on my door again at any point in the future. It would be so much better if we could get closure on this.”
“Closure is necessary,” said Gael. “Otherwise, what’s it going to be like to keep on working here? And to live in this community? Everyone will have their theory about what happened and gossip about it.”
“It’s going to harm the bodega’s reputation regardless. We’ll always be known as the winery where the migrant got murdered.”
“And made into wine. Yeah, not good for the reputation to say the least.”
Just then Alexandra came out of Gustavo’s office and climbed the steps to receiving. She wore a black sweater and spectacles, and had her long dark hair tied back. She grinned and waved but did not come to greet them. Instead she marched briskly across the yard, maintaining a wide berth before she turned through low-bay towards her office.
“There’s a peculiar one,” said Felipe.
“She does seem to be quite a bundle of nerves,” said Gael. “Nice, but nervy.”
“I think I know why.”
“Why?”
“She wasn’t always like this,” said Felipe. “Well, she’s always been a little like this, but she’s gotten worse in the last couple of years.”
Gael suppressed the urge to say that’s what Thiare told me, and instead said, “Really? I wonder if she’s having some personal problems.”
“Money problems, more than likely. Personal ones.” Felipe frowned, looked away, and said softly, “This whole thing has got me to thinking.”
“About what?”
He motioned for Gael to follow him closer to the wall, where they stood next to a stack of plastic harvest crates. In a quiet voice, he said. “I saw something in the office once. It was last year, towards the beginning of the vintage, before we’d gotten busy. I had some free time so Gustavo told me I could go to the office and work on the employee safety manual and the statement of workers’ rights, which he was letting me spearhead. So, I spent some time at the computer at the spare desk there, the one the auditor uses.”
“Did you see something on the computer?”
“Not on that computer.” Felipe’s voice went softer. “On Alexandra’s computer.”
“Oooh! Was it porn?”
Felipe smirked and nudged his shoulder. “As you know she smokes, and she has to go outside to do that. During one of the times she was gone, I needed to staple some papers I wanted to take home. I didn’t find a stapler in the desk, so I went over to hers. I couldn’t help seeing her screen, which had some kind of spreadsheet on it, and I noticed her browser was minimized. I didn’t see her standing outside, and I became curious. I don’t know what came over me, but I clicked on the browser button—”
“To see what kind of porn she likes!”
“Stop it,” said Felipe, chuckling. “What popped up was a cryptocurrency account, called Basecoin or something. The account was in her name, it said ‘Hello, Alexandra’ in the upper right corner, and wow, she had more than seventeen thousand luka in there! I was surprised she had that big of an investment in her own name. Then I got an even bigger surprise.”
“Was it gaining in value?”
“On that day it was. That column was in the green by a few hundred luka. But there was another column—I didn’t have much time to look, I knew she’d be coming back any second—and it was in the red. By a lot. It was the overall gain or loss for the account, and it was in a percentage, and I distinctly remember it was more than negative thirty percent.”
“Ouch,” said Gael. “Crypto investing is not for the faint of heart.”
“Thirty percent of seventeen thousand luka. That means she’d lost—”
“Actually it would be fifty percent of seventeen thousand luka, if you want the amount of her initial investment that she’d lost.”
Felipe looked upwards and squinted. “Eight and a half thousand luka, down the drain,” he said after a moment. “Enough money to replace my truck.”
“I’m not surprised she’s stressed out,” said Gael. “That’s a tidy amount of university tuition.”
“Maybe Gustavo knows, maybe he doesn’t,” said Felipe, keeping his voice hushed. “But my main question is: where did she get the money to fund that account? It’s not like she has an inheritance. Both her parents are still alive. Gustavo makes a decent salary, but it is expensive to raise a family in Chile, and Gustavo is from the village here just like me. His parents’ house is next to my mom’s.”
“Maybe she borrowed the money,” Gael said, looking towards Gustavo’s office. The Head Winemaker had appeared in his doorway, talking loudly on his phone. Gael could hear his voice, but no details of what he was saying.
At that moment Tomás came through the translucent doors carrying two pitchforks and a white plastic shovel. Simultaneously, in a crescendo of forklift noise, Osvaldo zoomed around the corner of the two-high stacks of grape bins, with a bin held in the forklift blades, and set it down in front of the de-stemmer.
“Who gets to go first?” Gael asked Tomás, jovially.
Tomás, composed in resting bastard face, said not a word but pressed a calloused finger into the center of Gael’s chest, causing him to step back a pace.
“Right,” said Gael, accepting the shovel and one of the pitchforks. He went to retrieve the tie-off belt from where it was draped over the de-stemmer, and put it on. Then, placing a hand on the rim of the grape bin, he hopped over and in, his black rubber boots crunching down on the fresh bunches of País.
Felipe, meanwhile, gave the pressure washer a test blast. That was his domain, having toppled out of a bin several seasons ago while pitchforking, in the days before the tie-off belt, and cracked his head open on the concrete. Now he was exempt from doing any work up high due to lingering problems he had maintaining his balance, and it worked out well for him to command the pressure washer.
By midmorning Joaquín finished the inside work and came out to help pitch grapes. This made it possible for Osvaldo to peel Gael off to go inside and begin draining two of the small closed tanks, the skins of which would be combined into a single castle for an afternoon pressing. Before heading in, Gael swung by the breakroom, ostensibly for a quick cup of Nescafe, but his real goal was to touch base with Martina.
When he reached the open laboratory door with his cup of Joe in hand, she was doing the procedure where she boiled a clear mixture in a globular beaker containing some bright blue beads, which acted as some sort of catalyst. The beads looked beautiful in the morning light streaming through the window beyond her Bunsen burner, jumping and bubbling within the clear glass.
Stepping over Cholo, he said, “Good morning, Martini!”
“Good morning, my American Brother! How is the crush?”
“You know as well as I do. You see and hear everything through your window.” In a lower voice he added, “Gustavo has his door closed, so we’re free to talk.”
“Good. Any updates?”
“Well, Inés told me she doesn’t remember who worked on which tank that week after Easter. I’m not sure I believe her, but I can’t blame her if she doesn’t want to tell me. One thing she did mention was that Pasqual was on site the morning Eder went missing. For the sake of completeness we’ll have to include him on our list of suspects, along with Benjamin and Don Ignacio.”
“That does not mean much, actually,” Martina said, swiveling on her stool. “It is not unusual for Pasqual to make an appearance in the bodega when he is here working in his office.”
“But he didn’t make an appearance in the bodega. Inés said he was acting funny that morning. He peeked into the fermentation hall several times from low-bay, but he didn’t go in and greet people like he normally does. Inés was on top of the tanks and saw everything.”
“That is a little strange,” said Martina, jiggling the beads. “Normally when Pasqual comes into the bodega he makes himself seen.”
“He goes onto our list solely for the sake of completeness,” Gael said, coming to stand next to her. “I can’t imagine any reason why he would want to kill Eder. Can you?”
As he said this, he hoped for some sort of confirmation from Martina regarding the Thiare-Eder rumors. However, none came. Martina showed little reaction to his question, and shook her head as she continued jiggling her flask. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, “Oh! I have an update for you. Something odd that happened the day after Easter which I only just remembered. It is just a little thing, probably nothing, but it popped up in my mind.”
“What happened?”
“It was early the Monday morning after Easter. I was making my rounds to measure densities and temperatures. The placard on one of the vats indicated a wetting had been done the previous day, and I thought, oh good, that means it will be easy for me to remove my sample.”
Gael nodded in understanding. When fermentations reached their final days in the vats, no pushdowns were required. Instead the skins were left to float undisturbed, except for needing to be wetted once or twice a day with some of the wine underneath. To do this, you dug a hole through the cap using a plastic beaker, and then dipped the beaker into the wine to toss and splatter it all over the cap to make it good and wet.
Martina continued. “I removed the white cloth and got up on a ladder, but there was no hole in the cap. And I thought, oh no, somebody forgot to do the wetting. This turned out to be true for the next two vats as well, which had also needed wettings. Gustavo walked by at that moment, and I asked him who had worked the vats on Sunday, and he told me Eder had come in, at night. This was before we had figured out he was gone. I didn’t want to get Eder in trouble, so I didn’t say anything to Gustavo about the missed wettings. I decided to do them myself while making my measurements. It only takes a minute or two to wet a cap, after all.”
As Gael listened, his eyes grew wide. “Wow,” he said when she finished. “This is big, Martina. This means Eder didn’t complete his work the night he disappeared. Nor did his killer complete it for him.”
He walked in a circle around the lab, his hand on his chin.
“In fact,” he added, “It’s possible that none of his work got done that night—no pushdowns, no wettings, no remounts. We can’t even be certain he entered the bodega. Not alive, at least.”
Gael felt disappointment rise in his chest. He’d thought he’d nailed down the time and location of the murder, but it was possible this was still wide open.
They stared at each other.
“Did you tell the police about this when they interviewed you?” asked Gael.
“I did not. I only just remembered it. Do you think I should?”
“Maybe wait a little, and see how their investigation pans out. See if they actually perform an investigation.”
Martina nodded. Gael turned to go begin draining the tanks.
“Wait. There is more,” she said.
He turned back.
“Since I needed to dig the holes myself, I needed gloves. Do you know those green rubber gloves, the ones that go up to the elbows? I love those gloves.”
“Yeah, they’re nice. They’re usually kept in the supply room on the shelf above the bags of sodium metabisulfite.”
“Yes. I went to get them so I could dig the holes. But I could not find them. I remember feeling annoyed at that point, at Eder for forgetting to do the wettings, and at whomever had used the green gloves and did not put them back where they belonged.”
“Point noted,” said Gael, although he didn’t see one. He turned again to go.
“Then,” Martina said dramatically. He stopped and turned back. “It must have been several weeks later, because it was colder and the rains had begun. The technicians from the municipality came to sample the pH at the spillover pond below the bodega, like they do every month, and—"
“Spillover pond? Isn’t that near where the quartz mine comes out?” asked Gael.
“Yes. Anyway, after they finished making their measurements, one of the men came to the laboratory here and asked me if anyone had lost a glove. And he brought me one of the green gloves!”
“That’s weird,” said Gael.
“Then, a few weeks later, the other glove turned up somewhere in the men’s locker room. I never learned who had taken them. I was just glad they were back.” Martina shrugged and stared at her flask. “Not that this has anything to do with anything. It just happened at around the same time.”
Gael rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. “All good stuff to know. Okay! I need to go. The tanks await. I have to say, I’m glad everyone is back at work. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through another day like yesterday.”
Martina smiled. “Soon we will be past peak vintage. And when it is over, before you go back to America, you are invited to come to the beach place with Thiago and me. It is all torn up, but it is beautiful. How I love walking on the beach there!”
“I’d like that very much,” said Gael, while thinking, although I won’t be going back to America. He didn’t know where he’d be going, only that America wasn’t an option. He couldn’t explain this to anyone of course, and his mood dipped momentarily on remembering it, but he shrugged it off and said, “Thiago told me that when he finishes fixing up the house, his next project will be to build a boat so that you and him can paddle to Tahiti.”
Martina chuckled and turned off her burner. “Crazy man. You thought he was joking, but he was serious. He has already begun building something beneath the back deck there.” She rolled her eyes. “He thinks I do not know about it, and I am going to let him continue thinking that.”
Chapter Ten
“WHAT’S THIS I HEAR about a quartz mine at the bodega?” Gael asked his teammates as they sat around the lunch table. Everyone had pretty much finished eating except Inés, who still had a way to go on her second link of sausage, immersed in Florencia’s marvelous white bean soup. They were going to be there for a while.
Osvaldo piped up from the end of the bench. “Runs directly beneath it. Dug in the 1840s.”
“You mean the bodega is sitting on top of a quartz vein?” asked Gael.
“That might be why Fernando’s presence remains so strong,” said Martina.
“Have you ever gone inside?” Gael asked Osvaldo.
The foreman’s eyes widened and he shook his head firmly.
“Why were they mining quartz?” Gael asked the table. “What was the motivation?”
“They were hoping to find gold or gemstones mixed in with the quartz,” said Gustavo, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “But they had to settle for just quartz.”
“How do you get in?” asked Gael. “Is it that opening in the hill near the spillover pond?”
“That’s a portal, but it was only for draining and ventilating,” said Gustavo. “It’s too small for a person to crawl through, particularly a person like me!” He patted his belly and laughed.
“Go out past receiving,” Osvaldo said, “And look down. The entrance is there.”
Gael visualized a place across the receiving yard where they stacked old wooden pallets and other unneeded materials. Beyond it, a rather steep and narrow ravine cut between charred trees. “Have any of you ever gone inside?” he asked, looking around the table.
Nearly everyone reacted in the negative with varying degrees of intensity. Alexandra was the most forceful, vibrating in her seat and shaking her head vigorously. Tomás merely frowned. The exception was Inés, who didn’t react at all, and instead continued slicing her sausage thinly.
“I tried once,” Joaquín said. “But I chickened out. It was too scary! I climbed down there, which was scary enough, and then I didn’t have the guts to go in. The place was dark and full of water, maybe waist deep! I didn’t know what kind of creature might grab me and eat me.”
“I think the Peruvian went in there,” Tomás said gruffly.
“Did he find Fernando’s treasure?” asked Osvaldo, raising his eyebrows.
“He didn’t say nothing to me,” replied Tomás. “You should ask Felipe.”
“I wasn’t aware he’d gone in,” said Felipe. “But I know he was curious about it. He told me he loved secret places, and that the mine had to have the best secret place of all.”
“Oooh, secret place!” said Joaquín. “Sounds like he may have found it!”
“Wait, wait,” said Gael, his curiosity piqued by the mention of Eder. “What are you guys talking about?”
Martina leaned in to explain. “There is a legend that Fernando hid two special bottles of País in a secret place, somewhere near the end of the mine. No one who has gone in has ever been able to find them, and as far as we knew, the bottles were still there. But now maybe they are not!”
“Go and check, Gael,” said Joaquín. “Tell us what you find!”
“Yes, go,” said Felipe, grinning and nudging Gael with his elbow. “It could be a fun treasure hunt for you, something to tell your friends about in America.”
“It could be wine in those bottles, could be something else,” said Osvaldo, ogling his eyes.
