The Last Heir by Chuck Greaves

Author:Chuck Greaves
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466844322
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

16

After driving yet another lap around the packed parking lot, we settled for a makeshift space on a shady strip of grass on the north side of the winery building. The crowd that had gathered by the entrance to the Visitor Center consisted mostly of media types, but with a surprising number of tourists jostling for position among the tripods, cables, and open equipment cases.

Many of them, I had to believe, had been drinking.

The object of their attention—a portable wooden podium bristling with microphones—stood empty as yet, looking almost forlorn in the high afternoon sun.

“Where do you suppose she got the lectern?” Mayday asked as we threaded our way through the cars.

“Beats me. I know it wasn’t from Philippe.”

We took up positions at the back of the crowd. I craned my neck, searching for familiar faces, and spotted Terina Webb’s to the left of the podium. The L.A. anchorwoman was talking with another blow-dried blonde in a business suit, both women thumbing away on their BlackBerries.

“I wonder if Philippe is watching from somewhere,” Mayday said, lifting her gaze to the glass façade of the Visitor Center.

“Maybe through a sniper scope on the roof.”

When Lourdes finally made her appearance it was not, as the crowd had expected, from the glass doors of the lobby, but from around the south side of the building. She wore her black widow’s dress, this time without the veil, but with a pair of oversized shades. Her progress—slow and unsteady—would later be attributed to reticence, but I credited the stiletto heels that seemed to catch and twist in the soft grass of the lawn. Fortunately for Lourdes, Andy Clarkson walked beside her, his guiding hand on her arm.

The reporters pocketed cell phones and stamped out cigarettes as they moved into position, and what cameras weren’t already mounted on the spindly forest of tripods were hefted onto shoulders as the crowd inched forward to listen.

“Hey,” said a voice behind me. “You must be Jack.”

The speaker was a kid of around twenty-five. He wore baggy shorts and flip-flops and a patchy three-day beard.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Ethan Scott,” he said, lifting his Ray-Bans and offering his hand. “Antonio told you I was coming, right?”

Around me, heads were turning toward the voice—first a few, then a few more, the effect like ripples spreading outward in a pond.

Good afternoon.

Lourdes’s amplified voice echoed in a metallic reverb across the crowded parking lot as she unfolded a sheet of paper.

Thank you all for coming today.

By now Ethan Scott’s ripple of recognition had reached the cameras up front, a couple of which turned from the podium and began shoving backward through the crowd. Meanwhile, a throaty revving of diesel engines—a low chorus of rumbling and growling—rose up from the direction of the winery.

Lourdes was reading now. As you know, she began, her voice rising against the noise, my husband, Phil Giroux, lost his life on Sunday evening, in what police are calling a homicide …

Three yellow forklifts appeared from the side of the Visitor Center, lurching and trundling on the sidewalk.

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