Nightmare In Napa

By Tony Aspler

Tony Aspler’s peripatetic wine writer/detective, Ezra Brant, cannot avoid getting mixed up with murders when he travels to Napa Valley to attend the annual charity wine auction and to hook up again with his beautiful winemaker friends-with-benefits, known as C.C.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398424470

Tony Aspler

text by Tony Aspler ; photography by Jean-François Bergeron

Book preview

About the Author

Tony Aspler has been writing about wine for 45 years. He has authored or contributed for eighteen books on wine and eleven books on food and written eleven novels. He was awarded the Order of Canada (2007) and was the first Canadian to be inducted into the New York Media Wine Writers Hall of Fame. Tony was awarded with the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and in 2017, he was awarded Spain’s Officers Cross of the Order of Civil Merit. In February 2001, Tony co-founded a charitable foundation, Grapes for humanity (www.grapesforhumanity.com), which raises money for the victims of landmines and children with disabilities.

Dedication

This book I dedicate to my Napa pal, Jim

Who asked for a limerick – or was it a hymn?

I toiled on the rhymes a number of times

In order to satisfy his singular whim.

Copyright Information ©

Tony Aspler (2021)

The right of Tony Aspler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398424463 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398424470 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

(The fourth in the Ezra Brant wine murder mystery series)

Previous titles:

The Beast of Barbaresco

Death on the Douro

Blood is Thicker than Beaujolais

The Streets of Askelon – 1972 (Secker and Warburg)

One of My Marionettes – 1974 (Secker and Warburg)

Chain Reaction (with Gordon Pape) – 1979 (The Viking Press, McClelland and Stewart)

The Scorpion Sanction (with Gordon Pape) – 1980 (The Viking Press, McClelland and Stewart)

The Music Wars (with Gordon Pape) – 1982 (McClelland and Stewart)

Madame Benoit’s Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Microwave Cooking by Jehane, with Tony Aspler. 1987

Titanic – 1989 (Doubleday)

Blood Is Thicker than Beaujolais – 1994 (Headline)

The Beast of Barbaresco – 1996 (Headline)

Death on the Douro – 1997 (Headline)

Travels with My Corkscrew – 1997 (McGraw Hill-Ryerson)

A Taste for Wine (book on tape) – 1999

The Wine Lover Cooks (with Kathleen Sloan) – 1999 (MacMillan)

Canadian Wine for Dummies – 2003 (Wiley)

The Chef’s Table (with Lucy Waverman and James Chatto) – 2000 (Random House)

The Wine Atlas of Canada – 2006 (Random House)

The Definitive Canadian Wine and Cheese Cookbook (with Gurth Pretty) – 2007 (Whitecap)

Tony Aspler’s Cellar Book – 2009 (Random House)

North American Wine Routes (with Dan Berger) – 2010 (Readers Digest)

Canadian Wineries (with photographer Jean-François Bergeron) – 2013 (Firefly)

The Five-Minute Wine Book – 2014 (e-book)

Five Minutes More – 2020 (Self Knowledge Press)

COVID Unmasked – A Survivor’s Guide – 2021 (Mosaic Press)

Taste of Evil (with Gordon Pape) – 2021 (Mosaic Press)

Nightmares can happen in broad daylight. Ezra Brant would soon learn this as he waited to board an early morning flight to San Francisco.

He usually flew to California from Toronto; but he had just been inducted into the Wine Writers Hall of Fame in New York and decided, instead of returning home, to fly direct from JFK.

Ezra made the annual pilgrimage to The Golden State in February to cover the Premiere Napa Valley live auction and to spend time with a winemaker who called herself C.C.

He knew he should have booked First Class as his bulky, six-foot frame needed the extra leg room. But his innate frugality held him back from such indulgence. Although he could afford the ticket, his grandfather’s repeated stories of the Depression had instilled in him a parsimonious mindset that had become a running joke amongst his colleagues at the Toronto Examiner. His ex-wife, Connie, had once admonished him for giving money to any charity that approached him while begrudging her the purchase of a new washing machine. Thinking of Connie, he was reminded of advice a colleague had given him: For a happy life, always marry your second wife first. There was no second wife on Ezra’s horizon although his relationship with C.C. might be heading in that direction.

Waiting patiently to board the Airbus 320, he glanced along the rows of seats at his fellow passengers. Nobody ever smiles at airports, he mused; the nervous anticipation of flying post 9/11 and the irksome business of security have throttled all the fun and excitement out of air travel. To say nothing about dozens of confiscated corkscrews he had unwittingly left in his carry-on luggage.

His gaze came to rest on a woman with eye-catching red hair cropped short like a helmet. He wondered if she had dyed it that vivid colour. She had the triangular face of a model who photographed more beautiful than she appears in real life. She was clutching to her chest a tote bag made from a tapestry-like material. What drew Ezra’s attention were the white lace gloves she was wearing although gloves hardly seemed necessary on that morning in the warmth of waiting area. The woman kept turning her head to left and right, furtively, as if she was expecting someone to approach her. When a man sat down beside her and opened a newspaper, she shrank away from him and seemed to be searching for an exit.

She must have been about thirty, of slim build with long legs made even longer by her three-inch stiletto heels. From her body language Ezra suspected she was highly strung. In other words, the kind of wounded soul his ex-wife always said he gravitated to at gatherings.

He thought no more about the woman until he was in his aisle seat, leafing through a copy of The Wine Spectator, when she stood over him, smiling.

‘I’m in there, 14A,’ she said, indicating the window seat. ‘If you don’t mind.’

Ezra rose.

‘Let me help you with that.’

‘It’s OK,’ she said, as she leaned across him to slide her carry-on bag into the rack. She squeezed by him and he caught a trace of her perfume, notes of freesia and clementine. Subtle enough to make an impression without knocking his head back.

She sat down and buckled her seatbelt, still wearing her gloves, the over-sized handbag she had been clutching to her chest at the gate now rested on her lap.

As the steward began reciting the litany of safety procedures, Ezra went back to reading his wine magazine, an article about the latest phenomenon in the California wine world. There was a full-page image of a man in his late twenties smiling directly at the camera. His outstretched arms rested on trellising wire in a vineyard, giving him a proprietary air. The sun, out of shot, had created star-like reflections in the lenses of his dark glasses, the body language exuded confidence. Grape bunches appeared to be growing out of his arms. From the shape of the clusters and the leaves they were probably Merlot, Ezra divined – the flavour of the month in California. The berries were at that point of ripeness just before harvest, plump and glossy as garnets.

The article, written by James Laube, referred to the purchase of twenty acres of rocky hillside land within sight of the Robert Mondavi Winery for which a dot.com billionaire named Oliver Bogart had paid $200,000 an acre. He had used dynamite to break up the rock to create the vineyard and heavy rains had created a mud slide that buried a neighbour’s dog. The case was still before the courts. Bogart, wrote Laube, had built himself an ultra-modern mansion that cantilevered out of the hillside with a pool on the deck that ‘seemed to float above the valley floor like a huge emerald’. The article ended with the news that Bogart was suing another neighbour over water rights.

As Ezra read, he could feel the woman’s eyes on him. She had turned her upper body toward him and was now regarding him unabashedly. He could hear the scratch of her pantyhose as she crossed her legs.

She was wearing a fire-engine red dress. Pinned to her left shoulder, above her heart was a badge that read, ‘Proud to be Red.’

‘Excuse me.’ The woman’s voice was nasal and low-pitched, a New York accent. Ezra’s attention was drawn to her earrings. They were made of plastic, inch-long black bulls. Where had he seen them before? Of course, those little Spanish bulls that dangled from the necks of Miguel Torres Sangre de Toro bottles. The woman had fashioned them into earrings!

‘Do you know when we touch down in San Francisco?’

Her eyes were blue green like the wake of an ocean liner; a gold Star of David on a thin chain hung from her neck. She was fingering it nervously.

‘11:27, if we’re on time,’ said Ezra. ‘But the tail winds are against us going west.’

‘You don’t mind me talking, do you? I hate flying and if I talk to someone it takes my mind off the noise and the turbulence.’

Ezra, who never encouraged people to talk to him on planes, set down his magazine and half turned towards her.

‘Flying can be nerve-wracking,’ he said. ‘If it were First Class, I’d suggest a glass of champagne to calm the nerves. Champagne is the only alcoholic beverage you can drink at breakfast and people don’t look sideways at you.’

The woman smiled, flashing a toothpaste commercial smile.

’My name’s Mona. Can you imagine a mother saddling a daughter with a name like Mona?

Actually, I’m a twin,’ she uttered the statements as one sentence, without taking a breath.

‘You wouldn’t believe what they called her.’

‘Who?’

‘My twin sister.’

‘Lisa?’

’Right! You’re quick. Mona and Lisa. My father thought it was hilarious. He’s a rabbi.

A liberal rabbi. Well, he was. Until he got defrocked or whatever they call it. I guess that’s what made me a feminist. Being called Mona, I mean. My sister is too, a feminist, that is. She’s brilliant. Lisa’s an ecologist, something high up in The Sierra Club,’ she said, with pride. Ezra could see that she was trembling and, in an effort to comfort her, he said, ‘Don’t worry, this airline has a great safety record…My name’s Ezra, Ezra Brant.’

‘Ezra,’ she mused. ‘Nice…Biblical.’

‘I’m from Toronto.’

‘I was in Toronto once,’ she said. ‘I visited your Don Jail. It’s not there anymore I heard.’

Ezra wondered what business could have taken her to the Don Jail, but his natural politeness kept him from asking why. Mona cocked her head on one side and studied him for a moment as if deciding whether to confide further in him. Then she opened the bag on her lap and began to rummage inside. An object that looked like a large silver bullet fell to the floor. She didn’t seem to notice so Ezra, instinctively chivalrous, bent down to retrieve it. It felt heavy in his hand.

‘I think you dropped this,’ he said, handing it to her.

‘Oh, my lipstick, bless you. I can’t tell you how many times I get stopped at airports when they x-ray my stuff because of this.’

She flipped open the side and studied herself in the little mirror, pursing her lips together. It had always fascinated Ezra, how women look at their lips and having applied lipstick roll them together to even out the application. Then Mona dropped the lipstick back into her bag.

‘Now what was I looking for? Oh yes, my card.’

She rummaged around in the bag again and withdrew a leather case from which she took a business card and handed it to Ezra.

He took the card which she proffered with both hands, Japanese style. There was a coffee stain in one corner.

Over a New York address was the name, Mona Silverman – Food Writer/Prison Visitor.

‘That’s quite a double act,’ said Ezra.

‘Well, it started with prison visiting. My dad insisted I do some charity work. Talking to the cons about what they wanted to do when they got out. But all they wanted was for me to bring them cigarettes and money.’

‘And the food writing?’

’They always complained about the food so I thought I’d do some research into institutional catering to see if I could, I don’t know, improve their meals. I’ve got a publisher interested in it.

Only he wanted me to call it ‘The Condemned Man Ate a Hearty Breakfast – Recipes from Death Row’.

‘Catchy,’ said Ezra. ‘Real talk show fodder, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

’Puns! My dad loved puns. He once taught me a triple pun. It took me years before I got it. You want to hear it?

Ezra nodded.

‘Bread is the staff of life; but the life of my staff is one long loaf.’

She threw her head back and laughed, causing the plastic bulls to jiggle in the ears. And Ezra laughed with her.

‘I see you like wine,’ she said glancing at the magazine on his lap.

‘I do it for a living,’ replied Ezra. He had been writing about wine for over thirty years, published fifteen books and was now something of an elder statesman in the wine world. He was invited to sit on international judging panels, give the opening addresses at wine conferences and was sought after to consult on laying down cellars for restaurants and hotel chains.

‘I’m here to cover the annual Napa Valley barrel auction,’ he added.

‘Then you’re just the man I need!’ exclaimed Mona. She suddenly became animated.

‘I want to give the book a broader appeal than just for the prison population. You could recommend the wines to go with my recipes. There are no coincidences. We were destined to meet. Tell me, do you collect things?’

Ezra was a pack rat. If he had three of anything, it became a collection. His office in his North Toronto home looked as if a tornado had cut a swathe through it, leaving the rest of the house untouched.

‘I collect wine labels signed by winemakers,’ he admitted, somewhat sheepishly.

‘I knew it. I could tell by the anterior inferior angle of your parietal bone. That shows you’re acquisitive…in a nice way.’

‘What takes you to California?’ asked Ezra, in an attempt to change the subject. He had no desire to get roped into Mona’s project.

‘I’m going to stay with my sister for a week. Lisa lives on the Silverado Trail in Napa.’

And then, as if she had said too much, Mona abruptly stopped talking and turned to look out the window. She didn’t utter a word for the rest of the trip.

Ezra waited anxiously at the carousel for his suitcase. He travelled a good three months a year and this was always the moment he dreaded – waiting for a glimpse of his black expanding suitcase with the red polka dot handkerchief tied to the handle for easy identification.

He glanced about him wondering what had happened to Mona Silverman. He was going to rent a car and he wondered if he should offer her a lift into the valley.

A movie crew had set up their lights and was shooting a scene at the far end of the terminal. He caught sight of Mona’s red dress; she was standing on tiptoes at the edge of a crowd that had assembled behind a rope barrier to watch. Only she was not looking at the action. Her gaze was outside as if she were looking for someone.

‘It’s Harvey Keitel!’ shouted a young girl next to Ezra. Her midriff was bare, revealing a navel the size of an olive; a silver hoop punctured her left eyebrow. She pushed past him and clopped off towards the camera on platform shoes high enough to give her nosebleeds.

At the sound of a siren and a flashing light the luggage began to trundle down the ramp and bump onto the cambered conveyor belt like so many dead animals about to be ground into dog food. Some of them looked as if they already had.

Ezra searched for the small black garment bag with red polka dot handkerchief that he habitually used for week-long trips. He always kept his washing kit, a pair of socks and underwear in his carry-on bag. From bitter experience he had learned that one in five flights they would lose his luggage – just as one in five wines he opened would probably be corked. The worst offender was Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The baggage handlers there were guaranteed to send his case off on its own magical mystery tour every time he flew to the City of Light. Frankfurt airport was another anathema. How many times had he nearly missed a flight by underestimating the time it took to reach his departure gate?

He watched the faces of his fellow passengers as they waited to be reunited with their luggage. They wore uniform expressions of boredom, impatience and anxiety; then he noticed a smile flit across their faces, transferring itself one to the next like the wave at a baseball game. Around the corner came a half-opened suitcase with women’s under-garments spilling out. The colour and fabric of the case, Ezra noticed, matched that of the bag Mona Silverman had carried with her on the plane and placed in the luggage rack above his head.

His better instincts took over and as the suitcase passed, he scooped it off the belt and began stuffing the clothing back inside. He clipped it shut and tried not to make eye contact with those around him as he waited for his own case to arrive. He willed Mona to come to vindicate him and thank him in as loud a voice as she could for rescuing her belongings. He could feel the blood rising in his face and he told himself to stay calm. This was not the worst thing that