DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER--The Wine Ecdysiast

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 11 The Wine Ecdysiast

It must have been a root day for Biola Dynamic. She was urging me to plant my seed, anyway. My office was a mess. I hadn’t had sex on a desk since my last appointment at the DMV. I was confused about Organ Donation. Biola was something of a wildcat. Her claws left scratches on my back that looked like Chinese tasting notes of counterfeit Margaux. Her screams of pleasure set off the smoke alarm. Her sexy lisp saying, “Oh HosthMaster, oh HosthMaster, you’re so thick…” briefly confused me. Then I remembered--I can be sick.

A few hours later when it ended, Biola lay in a puddle on the floor. Damn, I needed to see a urologist for that bladder thing. As she slept, the trace of a smile on all her lips, I sat at my desk and stared guiltily at the photograph of Avril Cadavril. Where was she? And what would she think if she found out I’d buried my testosterone horns in Biola Dynamic? Would she know the truth? That I’d done it for her? I knew that in order to get inside the murders of MW candidates, I had to get inside MW candidates. Judging from Biola, I’d passed the service part of the exam.

It was time to go looking for Tiny. I tossed my coat over Biola to keep her warm while she slept. I’d gotten what I needed from her, a free ride on the sommelier Slip ‘n’ Slide. From what she’d told me, people were out to kill Mallory O’Lactic; and it was probably the same killers who’d put Crystal Geyser in an early recycling bin. Biola would be safe in my office. I locked the door behind me, and headed down the stairs.

When I came to at the bottom of the stairs, having forgotten that my pants were still around my ankles, I tried to figure out where Tiny might have gone after leaving Avril’s office with some of her paperwork. He couldn’t have gone far. Tiny moves about as fast as Lodi Zinfandel by-the-glass, and with the body type of a concrete egg, I knew he’d find a place to stash those mysterious papers as quickly as he could. So I knew that even if I found Tiny, and that wouldn’t be hard, about like finding a haystack in a needle, he probably wouldn’t have Avril’s papers on him. And he’d most certainly lie about it. But Tiny knows just about everything that goes on in the underbelly of Healdsburg. His own underbelly provided shade for six Mexicans on a hot harvest day.

There was a time when Tiny was one of the most powerful wine critics in the country. He didn’t talk about it much now. But twenty years ago, a high score from Tiny meant your wine would sell out quickly. As it turned out, Tiny would sell out quickly, too. In his newsletter, The Wine Ecdysiast, Tiny awarded wines from one to five Pasties. Five Pasties guaranteed a wine would become highly collectible. Two Pasties? Well, two Pasties were for boobs. At first, Tiny had been incorruptible. He paid his own way, he was completely independent. He tasted every wine he rated completely blind. He worked sixteen hour days tasting wine—he put the “fat” in indefatigable.

But Tiny got greedy. He was working long hours and not really making that much money. Yet everywhere he went, he’d see people selling wine off his reputation. Pasties were everywhere, but Tiny was still broke. The Wine Ecdysiast began to sell advertising. At first, it was just for wine novelties. Wine gizmos, wine vibrators, wine ben wa balls, wine ticklers, things like that. Then the big boys started advertising in The Wine Ecdysiast. Spending thousands of dollars for full-page ads. A busty woman working the pole with the caption, “We think you’ll like our Treasury chest of wines.” A shot of the night sky over Napa Valley, only the stars were sparkly Pasties, and the caption just read, “Constellation.” And deep in his congestive heart, Tiny must have known that the big boys expected tit for tat.

It wasn’t long before an intrepid investigative reporter working for Juggs uncovered the whole scandal. Tiny was taking money for Pasties. When the news broke, The Wine Ecdysiast was finished as a wine publication. Tiny had a big following, and a loyal fan base. They spent most of their time on Tiny’s chat room, colloquially called eBoob. At first, most of them refused to believe what was apparent to everyone. Tiny was corrupt. Pasties inflation had been growing. More and more wines were getting four, and even five, Pasties. Wines from Constellation. Wines from Treasury. Even Bronco had to change the nickname of their biggest selling wine to “Three Suck Chuck” to honor its Pasties. But Juggs brought Tiny down. He put on weight, and a lot of it. He wasn’t welcome at any winery in the world. He became a figure of scorn. So, normal stuff for a wine critic. It had been twenty years since The Wine Ecdysiast folded. Tiny was bitter and defeated. He still drank wine, but, as far as the business was concerned, he no longer stayed abreast.

It was approaching the dinner hour, so I knew Tiny would be hungry, and probably headed to one of his usual places to eat. I started walking around the Healdsburg Square glancing into all the restaurants to see if I could see Tiny taking up a table for six. Hell, he was a table for six.

When I’d first moved to this wine country town, the restaurant scene was pretty dismal. None of them had any Michelins, though they almost all had skid marks. Now the place was overrun with fancy eateries featuring organic local ingredients, extensive wine lists, sommeliers, and other rodent infestations. I knew Tiny wouldn’t go anywhere near those joints. He couldn’t afford them. He’d be at a more local hangout, or maybe one of those new, trendy Food Wagons. Food wagons. Where I come from, food on wheels is called a dumpster.

Across the square I spotted Tiny. There were four men around him, and they were gesturing frantically, and it appeared angrily. Tiny was just shaking his head. I watched for a few minutes, ready to intervene if the discussion became violent. Just as it seemed the argument was beginning to escalate, a limo pulled up to the group. A woman got out of the limo, her long legs first, a brief flash of panties as she emerged from the limo hurriedly, without the help of the invisible driver. Everything began to move in slow motion, like the service at a Napa Valley tasting room. With my eyes locked on her panties, I almost missed the gun she was holding.  I screamed out a warning. Two shots rang out, a bullet whistled past my ear, and I took off running toward the woman.

She glanced at me as she got back into the limo. She seemed to recognize me. I shouted for her to stop, but the limo was already speeding off. I was momentarily in shock.

Whoever she was, she had a beard.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER--A Really Good Bladder Press

It's been a long time since I wrote a chapter of my continuing, shaggy dog/pulp fiction/detective novel Dial M.W. for Murder, but the disappearance of Avril Cadavril has been haunting me, so I decided to find out what happened to her. Those who want to start from the beginning can go to my Compost Heap (in the left hand column) and read the previous nine chapters of Dial M.W. that lead up to this. Some babes worth looking at! I made a silly attempt at a recap in the first paragraph, but, as regular readers know, plot isn't the strong point anyway.


A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 10 A Really Good Bladder Press

Here it is Chapter Ten and I hadn’t had sex with a woman yet. Oh, there were plenty of babes around, they kept showing up at my door like horny Jehovah’s Witnesses asking me if I’d found Jesus, which I had, he was outside Home Depot waiting to get a paying gig. Only the first bombshell, Crystal Geyser, was dead, plugged by an unknown M.W. candidate in drag. Not Jancis Robinson, though he was still on my suspect list. The love of my life, Avril Cadavril, was missing, and every clue I had to her disappearance led down a blind alley. I was getting really tired of blind alleys. Just once I wanted to be led down a Wine Spectator alley, you know, an alley that’s supposedly blind but isn’t really. Only I might run into James Laube in that alley digging through dumpsters looking for his reputation. I’d also been instantly attracted to Mallory O’Lactic, though that may have been because she was wearing Avril’s bracelet, the one I’d given Avril, the one that had been left on my desk after Mallory, and the guy who’d thrown her unconscious into my office and minutes later clubbed me into a coma, had also vanished. And now I had yet another damsel in distress, Biola Dynamic, in my office, her slight lisp somehow sexy, every syllable sibilantly escaping her lips like the slow leak of hot air from Harvey Steiman, or the warning hiss of an angry snake, if there’s a difference, with an interesting story of being asked by some unnamed M.W.’s to kill Mallory O’Lactic. I needed a vacation. Two weeks in Avril, wet bar included, the HoseMaster bedroom—sweet.

While I was summarizing this so-called plot in my head, Biola was killing the time looking at the photos on my desk. There aren’t that many. I’m not really a sentimental guy. There’s my autographed photo of Rudy Kurniawan, signed with his usual tagline, “Things go better with Koch.” And a very rare and collectible photograph of Nicolas Joly with his mouth shut. But Biola was staring at my photograph of Avril Cadavril.

“Who is this?” she wanted to know.

“That’s Savanna Samson, a former porn actress who makes Brunello. Spends three years with wood. So does the wine,” I lied. “I met her at a wine judging. Man, can she gargle.”

“No,” Biola said quietly, “who is she? I know her. I was just in a limo with her. She’s beautiful, and she smells like Chuck Roast. Chuck Roast, M.W. You know him?”

“Beefy guy?”

It seemed everyone who’d been in that limo had been in my office the last couple of days. Crystal, Avril,

Avril Cadavril and Chuck Roast

Mallory, and now Biola. I needed to find out who everyone was in that limo, and who’d rented it. But there are more limousines in wine country than there are Republican winery owners—both are hard to see through, but when you do, all you see is sex, money, and soundproof glass to keep out the chattering of the 99 Percent. And I also needed to track down Tiny, find out what he’d taken from Avril’s office when I’d found him there going through her papers. Somehow, Tiny was in on all this. He’d do anything for money, and anything else for Nacho Cheese Doritos. But I also needed to make sure that Biola didn’t disappear from my life like Avril, Crystal, Mallory and self-respect had.

“No, not really. He’s kind of skinny. Chuck Roast! Surely, you’ve heard of him. The first American to earn both an M.W. and a Tony Award?”

Of course, I’d heard of Chuck Roast M.W. And, damn, was he good in “La Cage aux Folles.” He created the character of Blanche. Sort of dull, but that’s what you’d expect from “Folles” Blanche. But there was something about Biola Dynamic I didn’t trust. Maybe it was the lisp. It seemed fake, like the bubbles in Sofia sparkling wine, or like Obama giving Rush Limbaugh an award—two ways of introducing gas. But I needed Biola, I needed her to lead me to Avril, and I needed her to help me find out who was killing M.W. candidates, and why. And I sure as hell needed a woman to have sex with by Chapter Fifteen, and the pickin’s were getting slim.

“Is he the guy who wants you to kill Mallory O’Lactic?”

Biola went silent. She turned her back to me, still holding the photograph of Avril, staring down at it. It sounded like she was weeping. I took the opportunity to look her up and down. From behind, she reminded me of Napa Valley. The seams of her black nylons running parallel up her legs like Highway 29 and the Silverado Trail, smooth and straight most of the way, but then getting bumpy. Might be the ass fault. Her skirt covered the valley between her lush Spring Mountain and her slightly more exposed Howell Mountain, and I knew I’d happily dedicate a lifetime trying to grasp each of them, until I knew from the very first whiff their distinct terroir. But the further I went, the more I could feel the chill of Carneros, and I began to feel guilty for seeing Biola as just another sexual appellation for me to learn the boundaries, began to feel that, like the wines of Carneros, I was just another brut dying to be disgorged.

I walked over to Biola and put my hands on her shoulders. Her silky smooth hair had the texture of Dehlinger Pinot Noir, and I detected the slight aroma of her perfume, Savannah-Chanelle No. 5. Pretty cheap crap for a budding M.W. to wear, I thought.

“Don’t worry, Biola,” I told her, “I’ll help you. I’ll take care of you.” There he was, that stupid knight in shining armor who showed up whenever a babe with long legs and a nice set of lung balloons needed assistance. I snuggled up as close as I could behind Biola, my arms wrapped around her waist, my body pressed against hers as she continued to quietly sob. Sometimes the best thing for a gentle crush, I thought, is a bladder press.

And the next thing I knew, it was Chapter Fifteen.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER Chapter Nine

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 9  Yeast the Size of Nerf Balls

It had been a while since I’d last lost consciousness. I’d forgotten how much I liked it. The way you wake up and your mouth feels like you could dry Moscato in it and make Passito di Pantellaria. And how you also Passito a little bit in your own Pantellarias.  I think the last time I’d lost consciousness was reading Lettie Teague. Which will teach me not to read the Wall Street Journal in the car. Damned air bags save your life, but they smell like James Suckling’s blow dryer. Funny how a nasty blow to the head makes your mind wander. I was wondering what wine went with head trauma and wanted to call Alice Feiring because I knew she’d know. Her work sounded like she had been trying to find out through trial and error. Maybe a nice red blend of Barbaresco and something from Croatia. A nice, big CroBar. That’s what I’d been hit with, I thought. And why does it take so long for wine to ferment? Wouldn’t you think it would just take three or four days? Maybe we need bigger yeast. Like the size of Nerf balls. Though it’s getting harder and harder to find Nerfs that will drop their pants. Whoa. Who hit me?

It took me a few minutes to gather my thoughts. One of them was way in the corner covered in dust. But I wasn’t surprised; I have a lot of dirty thoughts. Mallory was gone. The look in her eyes right before somebody did a punch down on my skull cap told me that she knew the person. It wasn’t just fear on her face, but also recognition. Like when you see Silver Oak on a wine list. My hunch was that whoever had cold-cocked me had also taken Mallory O’Lactic. Or had she gone along voluntarily?

I used my desk to help raise myself from the floor, and, there, right in the middle of my blotter, right next to my autographed picture of Veuve Clicquot (“HoseMaster, You put the Yellow in my Yellow Label. Love, Veuvie”), was Avril’s bracelet. Just to make sure it was Avril’s I checked for the inscription I had had engraved in it. It was there alright. “Avril—Happy Trails to You, Till We Meat Again.” Still made me tear up.

The bracelet left behind was clearly meant to deliver a message. I was getting the bracelet back, but not Avril. At least, that’s what they thought. Whoever they were.  

A shadow appeared beneath my office door. Someone was outside. After several minutes, there was a knock.

“Come in,” I quipped.

Biola Dynamic

She was a knockout. So I knew I was in trouble. Beautiful babes bring trouble like Santa brings gifts, and Pancho Campo brings cash. You think they’re going to be worth the trouble, but they never are. Like opening a wine with a waxed capsule. Sure, you can get in, but when you pull out it’s a big mess. But I had been having nothing but trouble since Chapter 1, so more wasn’t going to make much difference.

“How can I help you?” I was looking her up and down, reading her like a wine country map. I’d already figured out a few places where I wanted to stop and taste.

“Are you the HoseMaster?” Even her voice was sexy. She had a very slight lisp, so the “s” slipped out with just the slightest hiss, like uncorking a great Champagne, or when Tim Fish walks into a winery.

“I am. But I’ve just awakened from a blow to the head from my previous visitor, so you’ll have to excuse me if I seem a bit dazed. Who are you?”

“My name is Biola Dynamic.”

“So you’re a natural blonde.”

“Yeah. Look, HoseMaster, I don’t have a lot of time. There are some men after me, bad men, men who want to hurt me. I need your help.”

“I’m sorry Ms. Dynamic, I don’t have the time right now. I’ve got more problems than a one-armed sommelier with his corkscrew in the wrong pocket. You know I knew a one-armed sommelier once. Lefty Zraly, M.U. Bastards wouldn’t give him a W. Worked at Hemingway’s Bar and Grill. His nickname was Farewell to Arm. Better than the ugly waiter, For Whom the Bell Troll. But I digress. I’m pretty sure my girlfriend has been kidnapped, my last client was murdered, and I just got a free concussion. I wish I could help, but…”

“Did you say sommelier? That’s why I’m here, in Healdsburg, to study for my M.W. But everything’s gone wrong. Those people are evil, HoseMaster. If they think you’re going to pass their exams on the first try, they kill you! I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. They’re the most powerful people in the wine business, and the power has driven them insane. And if you do pass the first level, somehow avoid being murdered beforehand, maybe because you’re a gorgeous blonde and they think you’re stupid, then they want you to kill for them. You have to help me. They want me to kill an M.W. candidate. And if I don’t, they’ll kill me. Please, HoseMaster, I’ll do anything.”

I didn’t like where this was going. But I knew that somehow it would lead to Avril Cadavril and Mallory O’Lactic and the stink at the center of an M.W. I didn’t see that I had a choice.

“OK, Biola, I’ll help. Tell me who they want you to kill. We have to warn him.”

“Mallory,” she said. “Mallory O’Lactic.”

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER--MY 100 POINT BABE

My 100 Point Babevril

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 8  My 100 Point Babe

I’ve been a dick for a long time. I passed my test to be a dick a long time ago. Yeah, that’s right, I passed the WSET. I met Avril Cadavril on my first murder case. I’d been hired to find out who had killed a famous local winemaker, not that he hadn’t deserved it. He’d produced a series of wines that had received 100 point scores from critics, so everyone hated him. 100 point wines are supposed to be perfect, like priests, or all you can eat shrimp, if there’s a difference. Only problem is, the palookas who judge these wines are famously old, their olfactory skills needing a walker while their taste buds wonder where everybody went. Someone had stabbed the guy 100 times, one puncture for every point. He’d have been better off with the Davis scale. Which would be a first. Those critics had killed him just as surely as they’d killed the pleasure in drinking wine with their hypocritical scores and limited vocabularies. They’d gotten away with it, but their time was coming to a close. Soon they would be replaced; most of them now at the Old Wine Critics’ Home, alone and unwashed, reeking of alcohol and fecal matter (“Must be Brett,” wink, wink), babbling on and on about Brix and yields and clones. So business as usual for them.

It was Avril who had showed me the winemaker’s corpse. He had more holes than an M.S. meeting. He was a meat piñata, a 100 point voodoo doll, and it was Avril who laughed when I lost my lunch. I hadn’t liked her that first day. She’d expressed a butcher’s admiration for the carving job done on the winemaker. “He deserved it,” she said. “He made twenty different single-vineyard Pinot Noirs.” She had a point.

But my dislike for Avril turned into a grudging respect. She could handle meat like a Congressional page. Whether at her day job as butcher, or as coroner, Avril was a wonder. Is a wonder. Wherever she was.

It was when she dropped a lot of weight that I fell for her. Yeah, the HoseMaster, jaded and broken, a tired old dick trying to clean up the miserable wine business he so desperately loved, his heart open to no one, like a cult wine mailing list, only one that no one cared about any more, Bryant Family or Merus—the HoseMaster had fallen in love with Avril Cadavril. The way she smelled like a great vintage of Côte-Rôtie—all I wanted to do was Landonne her meatiness. The way she kissed me the first time we kissed, her mouth opening up like a great white Burgundy, giving me a raging Corton. The way she looked in the morning, fragile and transparent, like Riedel’s planned obsolescence. She was perfect--my 100 point babe.

Avril wouldn’t marry me, I knew that. No one marries wine connoisseurs, not knowingly--they're pale and marinated, and they only screw clockwise. Those who do marry a connoisseur live to regret it, like joining a Wine-of-the-Month Club. You keep expecting to be turned on, but it’s the same old tired crap month after month until you wake up and cancel your membership. So I bought her a bracelet. I thought it was a choker, but the neck on a butcher/coroner is impressive. So it’s a bracelet. And there it was, right in front of me, on Mallory O’Lactic’s arm. Not Avril’s. I had to find out how it had gotten there. And where was Avril? I didn’t care about who’d killed Larry Anosmia, or Crystal Geyser. I didn’t care how many more M.W. candidates would die. The world has too many idiot Masters of Wine, like it has too many political pundits and cable channels and wine blogs. It’s the noise I hate, the ignorant, unfeeling noise, the sound of too many people talking about crap that doesn’t matter while the crap that does slips away. I wasn’t going to let Avril slip away.

“Crystal’s dead? No. NO! Tell me you’re making that up.” Mallory was awake and slowly putting her clothes back on. I’d been forced to search her while she was passed out. I thought I’d lost my lunch again. She didn’t have it.

“I wish I were making it up. Damned bloody, heartless wine business. I’m tired of all the death, of all the lies, of all the know-it-alls and experts with letters after their names, of winemaker dinners and tasting rooms that look like whorehouses, even if they are whorehouses. I’m just tired, dammit, and I want Avril back.”

“Avril?” Mallory whispered. “Do you know Avril Cadavril?”

She looked scared. I didn’t think Avril had frightened her. Maybe it was my little rant, but, dammit, I was tired. Tired like ten-year-old Santa Barbara Merlot; tired like a Blinky Gray opinion; tired like another pulp fiction parody. But I was about to get a long rest. Mallory wasn’t scared of me. Nope. She was scared of the guy standing behind me.

The guy who pistol whipped me into next Tuesday.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER--Love is Phylloxera

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 7  Love is Phylloxera

First of all, I need to start locking my office door. The body on the floor began to moan. So she wasn’t dead, I surmised. She didn’t even seem hurt. She seemed drunk. And not just a little drunk, she was bachelorette party drunk. If you’d searched for her with GPS it would show her location as Obliterated. I’ve been there. Nice town, but blurry. I have a second home there. I use it on weekends.

She was lying face down, her spectacular ass in the air sporting a perfect southern exposure. Nice spot for a picnic, I thought. She seemed to be trying to get up, but wasn’t having any luck. I decided to give her a hand. The applause seemed to get her attention. I have to say, a drunk babe on the floor is solid entertainment. Ask any Britney Spears fan. And then she vomited.

I lifted her pretty head off the carpet, got my arms underneath her, and wrestled her into a chair. She was only barely conscious and she reeked of wine, though it was expensive wine, probably aged in French oak and from a cool climate. I was pretty sure it was Syrah, though the smell of new bile could have been influencing me. She was pretty nubile herself. She looked young to me, mid-twenties, and was probably beautiful underneath all that alcoholic haze. What the hell was she doing in my office? She couldn’t have walked up the stairs without some help. Who had helped her up the stairs? And what did the HoseMaster have to do with any of this? Yeah, I like free drunk babe home delivery as much as the next guy, but next time bring me one that isn’t so well done.

It took a couple of hours, but I got enough coffee into her to sober her up enough to speak. To be careful, I’d patted her down. And she had plenty of down. I patted it several times. I wondered if she liked her wines natural too.

Mallory O'Lactic

“Thanks, HoseMaster,” she managed to mumble, “thanks for cleaning me up.”

“So you know who I am. Now who are you, and who brought you here?”

“My name is Mallory. Mallory O’Lactic.” Irish. I should have known. She certainly had the classic red hair. Her hair was the color of Grignolino, which made sense. Seeing her sprawled on my office floor, it was obvious she’d descended from great Heitz.

“Nice to meet you, Mallory. You made quite an entrance. You messed up my carpet.”

“Feels like you messed up mine, too.” She was quick. I was starting to like Mallory.

“Do you live around here?” I asked her, trying to change the subject.

“No. Not at all. I’m from Chicago. I’m here studying for an M.W. test I’m going to be taking next month.”

I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe in a lot of things. I don’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or Karen MacNeil—in reality, those are just three empty costumes. I don’t believe in aliens from outer space. If they existed, they’d be here taking jobs from Americans. I don’t believe in love either. Love is like phylloxera. Just another louse that attacks your roots. And then you die.

“You know, Mallory, it seems like you take this studying a little too seriously. You should learn to spit.”

“I wasn’t studying last night. I was out with a bunch of other M.W. candidates and, well, I guess we got carried away. The last thing I remember I was getting in a car with this beautiful blonde woman, Crystal something, I think, and a bunch of other people. And then I don’t remember anything until I wake up and you’re like lousy Chardonnay--going through Mallory O’Lactic. Which is the yeast of my problems.” Yeah, I liked Mallory a lot.

“So you know Crystal Geyser?” I didn’t want to be the one to break the news to her that Crystal was deader than a winery floorstacked at Trader Joe’s. That was some party they’d had last night.

“Sure, everybody studying for an M.W. knows Crystal. She hangs around all the guys. Strange woman, though.”

“Strange? How do you mean?”

“Just strange. She told me last night, I must have been sober still, that she was sure she was going to be murdered. That’s strange, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. But, Mallory,” I told her gently, “she was right.”

And it was only then, when she fainted and I caught her before she hit my floor again, that I noticed she was wearing Avril’s bracelet.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

 

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 6 That Big Spit Bucket in the Sky

The woman I was going to have sex with in the middle of the book was lying in a bloody puddle on the floor of Avril’s office. This didn’t seem fair. Hell, I’d just come out of the closet, like Sally Ride, only I’d gotten burned on re-entry. My sudden entrance had startled Crystal’s killer into discharging his weapon. Also, his gun went off. I slipped in the discharge, and the killer escaped. I knelt down to check Crystal’s pulse. I couldn’t find one in either breast. She was dead. Like print wine publications. Like Cabernet/Syrah blends. Like the look I’d first seen in her eyes.

I sat with her for the longest time. There’s something about spending time with dead people that clears the mind, which is why I like winemaker dinners. Crystal had come to me for help. Four of her lovers had been murdered, and now she had joined them in that Big Spit Bucket in the Sky. It wasn’t my fault, but I felt guilty anyway. I was determined to get to the bottom of this mess, even though my only paying client was lifeless on the floor in front of me, unmoving and cold, like sex with Martha Stewart.

Crystal was dead and it seemed to have something to do with the pursuit of letters after the names of wine jerks. As though having those letters validated your addictive pursuit of the holy grape, proved your importance in a world that just doesn’t care that you know the difference between Pierce’s Disease and tattoo infections, as though an M and a W could make an otherwise arrogant and profoundly lonely person somehow admirable. It made me sick to think about it. The big M.W. and M.S. machines, the prestige-craving lot of them, waving around their credential as though it’s an achievement to know a lot about overpriced, overvalued, fermented grape juice in a world that needs another wine expert like it needs another reality TV star. Maybe killing candidates before they qualified wasn’t such a bad idea. But Crystal was an innocent bystander, and I knew then and there, my eyes filling with tears as though I were judging orange wines, that I had to get to the bottom of this whole rotten business, this crummy, corrupt wine business.  

I must be losing my touch. It seemed like every clue I needed in this case kept escaping my grasp. Avril was still missing. Tiny had left her office with something in his possession I had a hunch was important. And Crystal’s killer had also managed to get away. I put in an anonymous call to the police telling them they needed to check on Avril’s new office carpet, took a few minutes to get rid of any traces of my presence at the scene, and I left. I wasn’t doing Crystal any good just staring at her perfect breasts, magnificent as the twin peaks of Côte-Rôtie, Brune et Blonde, the thought of which made me nervously Guigal, and I didn’t want to have to explain my presence to the cops. I hightailed it out of there like Mitt Romney at an NAACP conference.

I went back to my office on the Healdsburg Square. I guess I was hoping that there might be a message for me from Avril. There were a few messages on my voicemail:

“BEEP…HoseMaster, it’s Crystal. I’m leaving town. I don’t know when I’ll be coming back, or if I’m coming back. Forget about the job. I’ve decided Larry did commit suicide. There’s nothing for you to investigate. Thanks, anyway. Oh, and you’re a lousy kisser. I’ve had better tongue from a deli case.” Unnecessary.

“BEEP…Hello, this is Fred from NothingsBiggerThanMyHead asking for your vote in the Wine Blog Awards. Please, I’m begging you. If you don’t vote for me I’ll…why, I’ll…I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m just so desperate for acclaim… Please vote for me, please, please, please…” Idiot.

“BEEP…HoseMaster, we’ve got Avril. Sheesh, what a pain in the ass. You do her? Man, you’ll stick that thing anywhere. If you want to see her alive again, HoseMonster, drop the M.W. case. We catch you snooping around, gumshoe, Miss Cadavril ends up like cow horns at a Biodynamic winery; she's already full of shit, we'll just bury her." The guy was good, he could use semicolons while talking.

The last caller sounded like he meant business. I admit, my hands began to sweat, my heart pounded and my balls migrated north into the Jarvis cave to turn off the waterfall. And that was from the second message. Jackass.

It was clear that if I was going to keep investigating Crystal’s murder, I was going to have to do it on the sly, and I’d need my family stones. The people I was dealing with meant business and would stop at nothing. Killing Crystal had been an accident, I thought, but not Anosmia and God knows how many others. I needed to find Tiny, find out what he took from Avril’s office.

I was just about to go looking for the big man when the door to my office opened. I turned just in time to watch the body hit the floor.  

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 5: God Gives Your Life a 78

Every day in this miserable world people disappear and no one cares. The lost, the lonely, the unloved. They board alien spacecraft, or they empty their bank accounts, leave their belongings behind and just get on a bus to nowhere, say Suisun Valley. If you believe you might end up one of them, take the spacecraft. They can be gone weeks before anyone notices, if anyone notices. People you might see on a regular basis in your daily life—at the grocery store buying one pork chop and Boner in a Can, sitting in the park feeding lit cigarettes to squirrels, in the bookstore tearing the pages out of every Jay McInerney book as a public service—and then one day you remember you haven’t seen them for months. And you don’t give it a second thought. You believe their family and friends are looking after them. But they are not. The world has swallowed them up--the heartbreak and loneliness, the sorrow and the weariness, the failure and the futility, the miserable and relentless part of our existence slowly eats away at them and they surrender. They disappear, just so many 78 point scores in a world that demands a minimum of 95. Life is arbitrary, just like wine scores. You do the best you can with the materials you’re given, you hope and pray that all of your hard work leads you to be “Highly Recommended,” but God gives your life a 78, writes “Nothing to like here, off aromas and very little taste, best to avoid,” and no one ever cares again about what happens to you. My advice? Ask God to retaste.

I was pretty shaken up by Tiny’s news that Avril had disappeared. First of all, it didn’t make any sense. I’d just slept with Avril the night before, slipping my big Bob Parker into her bearded Jay Miller while she gently tickled my Pancho Campo, so where could she have gone, and why was she already considered a missing person? How did Tiny know about it before I did? That was easy. Tiny knew everything that happened in Healdsburg before anyone else. But why was he rummaging around in Avril’s office? What was he looking for? Her lunch scraps?

“Hey, Tiny, what the hell are you doing here?” He seemed to be trying to hide something behind his back. Actually, most of the room was behind his back.

“Oh, nothing, HoseMaster,” Tiny wheezed, “I just came here looking for Avril, some clue about where she might have gone, or who might have taken her.”

It’s easy to tell when Tiny is lying. His lips are moving. “What’s that in your mitt?” I asked him. That’s when he decided to make his move. Of course, only Harris Ranch can move that amount of meat in a short amount of time. Tiny moves about as quickly as a floor stack of $25 Syrah. You can time him with a sundial. I let him go. Tiny’s pants were drooping pretty low, and I could see something stuck in the crack of his ass. Could have been a dachshund. But, really, it looked like a bunch of Avril’s files, and a Baby Ruth. But I had better things to worry about than Tiny’s shenanigans. I had Avril to find.

I thought as long as I was in Avril’s office I’d grab the report on Larry Anosmia’s suspicious death. I quickly rifled through her file drawers, but couldn’t find it. There were reports about lots of other wine country deaths, Copia (suicide) and “Crazyboy” Ascentia (mob hit) and Crushpad (liver failure), but no Anosmia. Had to be Tiny’s doing. Or else Avril had it with her when she disappeared. A little voice in my head kept telling me that Anosmia’s death and Avril’s disappearance were connected, and that Crystal knew a lot more about this than she was telling me. And that Tiny had had Italian for lunch that day. Avril’s office smelled like garlic burps.

I was still searching Avril’s office when I heard footsteps approaching. Sounded like two people, a man and a woman, both wearing heels. I ducked into Avril’s dark room, she didn’t develop photographs there, it was just a dark room, and left the door open a crack.

Crystal entered the room first. She looked nervous, even scared, like a wine judge facing fifteen Proseccos. Behind her was a man I didn’t recognize, wearing heels and a dress, pointing a nasty looking pistol at Crystal’s back. From his outfit, I guessed he was an M.W. candidate, and probably a British one at that. I remembered that this is how they dress when they’re taking their final exam. It’s never publicly disclosed, but it’s very well-known in the industry. Candidates have to pass three tests to qualify for an M.W., a written exam, a blind tasting, and the evening gown competition. It’s why there are so few women M.W.’s. The guys show more leg.

“I don’t know where she put it,” Crystal said, her voice cracking like a hot and sexy Stelvin. “I told you, it’s not here.”

“You’d better hope it’s here, Geyser,” the mystery man said, pulling his dress down a bit with his free hand—really, buddy, wear a thong—and poking Crystal with his gun. “It’s going to get really ugly if we don’t find it and destroy it.”

“But I don’t know where it is! Avril must know where it is. Ask her!”

“Miss Cadavril is, well, indisposed right now, and I have an exam in a few hours. I didn’t put on these pantyhose to impress you. I’m trying to pass. And that fucking Oz Clarke always makes me bend over and whistle ‘God Save the Queen.’ Now start looking.”

And that’s when I felt something crawling up my leg, I crashed through the dark room door, and the gun went off.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE™ PULP FICTION CLASSIC

Chapter 4: The Bodily Fluid Fandango

Master of Wine. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? But what does that make us? They’re Masters, we must be servants. That’s certainly how they look at it. But what is it they’ve really mastered? Memorization and taking tests, primarily. Or maybe it’s more like the Masters Golf Tournament. Only there are a lot more holes when it comes to M.W.’s, and they think the more strokes the better. There is always a parade of sycophants lined up to sit for the M.W. exams. Yeah, “sit.” They also learn “beg,” “roll over,” and “when you’re done licking yours, lick mine.” I was glad Larry Anosmia was dead. But now that I’d accepted the case, his murder was getting under my skin, like a James Suckling video, or a tick. I’m creeped out by that kind of insect. I don’t like ticks much either.

I needed to learn more about Anosmia’s murder. Why did the cops think it was a suicide? Yes, they’re small town cops, and not really familiar with murder. The usual crimes in Healdsburg are drunk driving, jaywalking and being Mexican. The cops don’t see a lot of dead bodies unless they visit the Ferrari-Carano tasting room and talk to the hospitality crew. And a murder means an investigation, means gathering evidence, means chasing someone capable of slashing a guy’s throat with a piece of glass. They’d just as soon a dick like me does that. The more I thought about it, the more this case made me nervous. It was already starting to smell worse than a four dollar Argentinian Malbec, the ones that retail for forty. And I’d only just started.

Avril Cadavril

I decided I needed to talk to Avril Cadavril about Anosmia’s death. Avril and I had been doing the bodily fluid fandango for several months now, ever since she had dropped more blubber than Captain Ahab. She was a whole new woman, not afraid to show off and share that magnificent new poopdeck of hers. And I had just the seamen to do it. Avril only worked part-time as the city coroner. The rest of the time she worked as a butcher. The girl could handle meat.

Was I in love with Avril? Love doesn’t exist in the world I live in; neither does justice or honor or truth. I live in the dark underbelly of existence. I deal with betrayal, dishonesty, violence, hatred, and BevMo’s 5 Cent Sale. At the end of my day, I can’t wash the smell of evil off my skin, not even with Drew Barrymore Pinot Grigio and water. Which adds up to hot water. And now I was wading into the M.W. cesspool. Maybe Anosmia wasn’t the suicide, maybe I was. There are quick suicides, like a gunshot through the roof of your mouth, or jumping off the top of Thomas Keller’s ego-inflated toque; and then there are the long, slow, but every bit as deliberate suicides—smoking cigarettes, binge-drinking, and, maybe for me, listening to M.W.’s.

Avril wasn’t at Big John’s, where she usually worked as a butcher. She was quite the draw now that she’d become a babe. Guys were lined up at her meat counter. I guess you could say the same about Crystal. Rather than drive over to the coroner’s office to see if she was there, I dialed Avril’s cellphone. My call went directly to voicemail. “Hello, this is Avril. If you have a dead body and want to know where the night deposit box is, press 1. For roasts, prime ribs, rack of lamb, and all your butchering needs, press 2. If you want to pork loins, please leave a message at the beep.” I don’t leave messages, so I hung up and headed over to Avril’s office.

When I got to her office, the door was open. That made me suspicious. Avril always kept the door locked, even when she was there. Quietly, I pushed the door open. I didn’t want to scare her, but I also didn’t want whomever was in the office, in case it was someone other than Avril, to hear me. It was one of those moments when I wished I carried a piece. Not a gun, a hair piece. But I’d forgotten it. I was beginning to think there would be hell toupee later.

I had one foot in the door when I heard heavy breathing. It wasn’t Avril. I knew what her heavy breathing sounded like, we’d done the tongue triathlon tango enough times that I’d know her panting anywhere. This was much heavier breathing. It sounded more like Robert Parker walking all over Jay Miller. And then I knew who it was.

Tiny. The local gossip columnist for the Healdsburg Herald-Flatulence. Nothing happens in Healdsburg that Tiny doesn’t know about. The first half of that sentence could stand alone. As did Tiny. All 400 pounds of him.

“Hey, Tiny,” I said, “what are you looking for? Avril’s diet books?”

Tiny didn’t even seem surprised to see me. “HoseMaster, man, haven’t you heard?”

“Don’t fill me with all of your stupid gossip. I want stupid gossip, I’ll read wine blogs.”

“Well, I guess you haven’t heard,” Tiny said, with a smirk on that fartyface of his, “Avril’s disappeared.”

From the pounding of my heart, I thought maybe I was a little in love with the butcher babe. Maybe she’d finally tenderized my meat.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE PULP FICTION CLASSIC

CHAPTER 3  Three Feet Under

Nothing cheers me up faster than a dame pointing a heater at my melon. Crystal was still sporting that dead smile, and the way she handled her piece I knew she’d had plenty of experience with guns. I was as nervous as Marvin Shanken at a harpoon factory. But I was having a change of heart about not wanting Crystal Geyser for a client. I was also definitely needing a change of underwear.

“Please, HoseMaster, I need your help. If  you don’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do!” And with that, she aimed the gat at herself, the barrel gently pressed against her temple. I didn’t think she’d actually pull the trigger, splatter her brains all over my walls like a Jackson Pollack label for Mouton. But I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Put the gun down, Crystal. I’ll take your case. I know I’m going to regret this. The whole M.W. game stinks like orange wine. But, hell, I’ve got nothing going on right now, maybe I can finally nail some of those pompous bung sniffers.”

I slowly stood up and walked over to Crystal. She let me take the gun from her hand. I could see in her perfect brown eyes, the color of 40-year-old Tawny Port, 20-year-old per eye, that she hadn’t planned on killing herself. There was a lot going on behind those eyes, a cold calculatedness that sent a shiver down my spine, like watching a sommelier walking toward you with a wine list. You want to run, but you don’t. And you end up enduring a long speech about the wonders of Grüner Veltliner, how versatile it is with food, which it is, if your dinner of choice is Tender Vittles. You should run. I should have run.

Crystal put her arms around me and pretended she was about to faint. I could feel my Tender Vittles tingling. She pressed herself against me; it was a very gentle press, and I was briefly fearful I’d release some free run juice. I could smell her skin, it had lovely minerality, like a Grand Cru Chablis, or maybe not, it was Les Clos call. She pulled me closer and I knew she wanted me to kiss her. Her lips were slightly parted, moist and beckoning. I knew it was wrong, but I kissed her. Her tongue threw out the Welcome mat and invited me to her tonsils. I explored the inside of her mouth like a lingual spelunker. My meat thermometer was harder than a barrel sample of Madiran. I could have taken Crystal right there in my office, but I have a rule about sleeping with clients. Not until the middle of the book.

“Thank you, HoseMaster, thank you. I knew you’d help me. When can you start?”

“Start? Hell, I’m almost finished.”

“I meant on my case.”

“Oh, I guess I can start right away. What was your friend’s name? The one who was murdered?”

“His name was Larry Anosmia.”

I was shocked. I knew Larry Anosmia. He was an M.S. I’d run into in an earlier case. Ran around with midgets. He even got shot because of me. And now he was dead, six feet under. I wondered what happened to the midget. Maybe he was dead, too. Three feet under. So Larry had decided to pursue an M.W., somehow met up with Crystal, was undoubtedly spraying his gunite in her wine cave, and ended up getting his throat slashed. Can’t say I’d miss him. Though at least now he’d finally become a good M.S. But I didn’t want Crystal to know I’d met Larry Anosmia before. I still didn’t trust her. I just hoped she was still going to be around in the middle of the book. Crystal was better endowed than Stanford University, and had probably received as many incoming freshmen.

“And this Larry Anosmia, where did you meet him?”

“At one of my wine tasting parties. I invite men who are studying for their M.W. over to my house and open rare wines for them. To help them study. It’s how I met all my friends who were murdered.”

“How many ‘friends’ of yours have been killed, Crystal? What kind of madness is going on with the M.W. program?”

Crystal’s eyes began to moisten. This time I didn’t think she was faking it. Had she really loved Larry Anosmia, and all the others? What kind of pathetic soul would fall for a bunch of wine dweebs? And how much could it be simple coincidence that Crystal had been involved with so many victims? And, why, I wondered most of all, was she so insistent about the HoseMaster being her private dick?

“Larry was the fourth.”

I didn’t want to be it, but I needed a fifth.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE PULP FICTION CLASSIC

CHAPTER 2  Ticket Out

Why do babes always seem to need dicks? It’s like they have a hole, right in the middle of their being, that only a guy like me can fill. I’ve seen ‘em all. The babe who thinks her looks are going to last forever, only to look in the mirror one day and see more sag than a Russ Meyer movie. The babe who bad luck follows around, like the saps who keep betting on Syrah to be the next big thing, as if a horse that always finishes last is suddenly going to find a way to get to the finish line first. Good money being thrown after bad—like buying a second bottle of Prosecco. The babe who thinks she’s got life figured out, only to end up deader than a Matt Kramer opinion. But I wasn’t sure what kind of babe Crystal Geyser was, except the kind that men want. And not just men, M.W.’s too.

“So your friend was murdered. And other friends of yours have been murdered too. You’ve got more dead friends than Lou Foppiano’s FaceBook page. Care to tell me how that happened?”

Crystal just stared out my window onto the Healdsburg Square, small tears developing in her dead eyes. Hell, I thought, the Square isn’t that ugly. Unless it’s Barrel Tasting Weekend. Then it’s filled with the saddest of self-deceiving humans. The ones who think that if you go to a bar from 11 to 4 you’re a drunk, but if you go wine tasting you’re a connoisseur. The lifeblood of our little town. The whole town blows. It blows a .15.

Crystal slowly sat on my luxuriously appointed office couch. I could hear the bedsprings creak. I couldn’t help but notice her tight skirt sliding up to her as yet unapproved appellation—the Petaluma Gap. The nights are cold there, I thought, but there’s a warm patch if you know where to look. I knew where to look. Just above the dark wind tunnel.

“Look, HoseMaster, I confess, I’ve got a thing for guys who know a lot about wine. Yeah, they’re the worst lovers, always drunk, and softer than a five dollar Moscato.” She stared at me, but I knew what she meant. But it’s nature’s way of making sure M.W.’s don’t reproduce. The male M.W.’s anyway. The women? Yeah, well. They're for blind tasting.

“But since I was a teenager I’ve fantasized about them,” Crystal continued, her voice rising like the price of 2009 Bordeaux--that is, fueled by stupidity. “I didn’t know then what I know now. I just lusted for a man with a silver cup around his neck, like Sammy Davis, Jr, only always white. When I found out that M.W.’s existed I was smitten. These were the men I wanted, in the worst way, these Gods among us. Yet I knew that many, many bimbos threw themselves at these men. Hugh Johnson groupies, Michael Broadbent groupies, Tim Hanni groupies…OK, not so much Tim Hanni, but you get my drift, don’t you, HoseMaster?”

“Sure, you got the hots for wine boors. Guys who can explain terroir with a straight face and a forked tongue. What’s that got to do with your friends you claim were murdered?”

“Don’t you see, HoseMaster? I couldn’t have any of them, not a single real M.W., they weren’t interested in women, not unless you owned a Burgundy domaine or dressed like Angelo Gaja, as if they make women’s clothes that small. So I went after boys sitting for the M.W. exams, hoping to fall in love with one who ultimately passed, who maybe even passed because I inspired him.”

“So your friend who just had his throat cut, he was studying for his M.W.?”

“Yes.” She was whispering now. She had a stunned expression on her face, the kind of dead stare you see on people listening to Alice Feiring speak. But something didn’t seem right. “He was about to sit for his exams. Everyone knew he’d most likely pass on the first try. I thought he was my ticket out of this miserable, lonely life.”

“And, instead, you were his ticket out.” OK, sure, it was a cheap shot, but I wanted to wipe that dead smile off her face, see if there was something underneath that cold exterior. Like how you warm up a cold glass of Vinho Verde with your hands, only you find out what it had going for it was that coldness. So you end up with a glass of warm, fresh from the bladder.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess I was.”

“Miss Geyser,” I said, “I don’t believe you for a minute. I don’t know what your game is, Girly-girl, maybe it’s some weird wine game, Shoots and Lattices, maybe Monopole. Whatever it is, I don’t want anything to do with it. Now get out of my office.”

Babes. Always trouble. All I could think about was heading down to the Square, cruise for drunk tourist cooze. I wanted nothing to do with anything M.W.

But Crystal had pulled a piece, and it was pointed at my spacious forehead.

DIAL M.W. FOR MURDER

A HOSEMASTER OF WINE PULP FICTION CLASSIC

CHAPTER 1  Dead Smile

It always starts with a babe. Hell, it usually ends with one, too. But isn’t that life in a nutshell? We squirt out of a babe the day we’re born, and one drives us into our grave. The circle of life I think they call it. They being morons.

The wine business is my specialty. I’m famous. I’m the biggest dick in the wine business. I go by HoseMaster. That’s not the name on my birth certificate. That’s Squirt. Not really, but it seems like a joke. There’s a lot more death in the wine business than you’d think. Most of it goes unreported. A cellar worker dies cleaning a stainless steel tank. A wine critic is murdered for a lousy review. A woman dies of cirrhosis, sometimes of the liver, sometimes from sleeping with Australian winemakers. It happens all the time. You just don’t hear about it. But I do.

I’ll never forget the gloomy day she first walked into my Healdsburg office. It was one of those dark winter days when vineyard managers pray for rain and depressed winery owners think about tossing lit winery cats at the propane tank and waiting for the insurance money. I’d just finished doing Avril Cadavril on the slab at the local morgue so I was tired. Avril, our local coroner, and I had been having a torrid affair. When we had sex at her office I always felt like there were several pairs of eyes on me—because there were. She was a sloppy coroner. But she was a perfect lover for me. She knew how to handle dead things. I was asleep at my desk reading wine blogs. They give a lot of insight into disturbed minds. And vacant ones. I was awakened from my snooze by a gentle tap at the door. I composed myself, quickly putting a bottle of Silver Oak on my desk to appear sophisticated and overpriced, and asked my visitor in.

When she walked into my office you could have used her buttocks to destem Cabernet. She had perfect legs, two of them, and where they met seemed like the perfect place to plant Pinot Noir. I know I badly wanted to check the soil. My eyes ran up and down her body like Kobe Bryant on a basketball court—only, unlike Kobe, I knew I’d try to make a pass. The skirt she was wearing was tight enough I could see her Geneva Double Curtain, and her blouse could barely contain her. If most women sport barriques, this woman was packing foudres. I finally remembered to look at her face.

“Hello,” I quipped, “what can I do for you?”

“Are you the HoseMaster?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Crystal. Crystal Geyser.” I liked the sound of that. She’d Peaked my interest.

“And why are you looking for me?”

Crystal seemed nervous. Her beautiful brown eyes, the color of old Madeira, were darting from the door to the window. I told her to put them back in her head. There was a slight sheen to her forehead, more charlie than martin, and she seemed out of breath. At least her chest was heaving, and after my session with Avril I was close to heaving myself. I wish Avril didn’t insist we make love in the morgue. It was the only way she could climax, surrounded by a bunch of stiffs. Yeah, stiff, I remember that. Crystal was bringing my meat thief back to life.

“A friend of mine was murdered,” she blurted out, “and the cops won’t believe me when I tell them he was murdered. They say it was an accident, but, really, how do you accidentally cut your own throat with a Riedel Pelaverga Piccolo glass? It’s not like they break easily. I know he was murdered. I know it!”

“Wait,” I told her, “slow down. You’re talking nonsense. There’s a Riedel Pelaverga Piccolo glass?!”

“Not any more. I just told you. Someone broke it and slashed my friend’s throat.”

“And you want me to find out who.”

Crystal just stared at me with those gorgeous brown eyes. I tried to guess her age, but she wouldn’t let me look at her rim. She had begun to compose herself and for the first time since she’d walked into my office, that day I’ll always regret, always remember, never tell the whole truth about, like judging at a wine competition, she smiled. I felt unnerved. Crystal was a woman who had always had her way with men. Had her way and then discarded them, like Wine Advocate employees. Something was starting to smell funny, and it wasn’t the formaldehyde on my stripper pole.

“I think if you find out who murdered my friend, HoseMaster, you’re going to learn a lot about your precious wine business.” She continued to smile that smile. That smile still haunts my dreams, like a Cheshire cat that wants me dead. “He wasn’t the first of my friends to be murdered, just the one who meant the most to me. It seems a lot of my friends end up dead.”

“Just friends, or lovers?”

“Is there a difference?” she said in a flat tone. “Is there a difference between organic and biodynamic? Is there a difference between unfined and unfiltered? Is there a difference between Jordan Cabernet and that Silver Oak on your desk? Sure. But the difference is about lies. Like the wine business, like M.W. exams, like all of it, this whole crummy life.”

She had a point. And that dead smile. And like the augur on a corkscrew for dimwits, I was headed down the RabbitTM hole.