Dead in the Dregs by Peter Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

bowl, a wrinkle of worry furrowing his brow. “What happened?” he said for the third time.
    “Somebody killed him.”
    My son’s face was opaque at first. I couldn’t tell if what I’d said registered, if he really understood.
    “Why?” he asked, his face knotting itself again in innocent confusion.

    “Your uncle was a very powerful man. He had a lot of enemies.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    “First things first. We need to talk to a few people. Get dressed.”
     
    It wasn’t hard to locate Matson’s operation. I described it to Danny and let him spot it, the weeping willow on White Cottage Road and the low buildings that stretched beneath it. A Toyota pickup was parked in the shade of the tree, and we wandered around the building to a sliding door in back that stood open. Two migrants were stacking bins of Chardonnay in the shade of the willow. A young man in muddy jeans, rubber boots, and a faded T-shirt stood wiping his forehead with a bandana, staring at the fruit. He replaced a straw hat on the back of his head.
    “Michael Matson?” I said.
    He nodded. “That’s me.” He had a young, sweet face that I found impossible to reconcile with the notion that he could have murdered anybody.
    “Got a minute?” I asked.
    “I do, if you’ll give me a hand. My wife’s getting the kids off to day care, and Jesús is late.” He paused. “Do I know you?” he asked.
    I introduced Danny and myself and told him I’d heard that Richard Wilson had destroyed his career. My son looked at me in astonished horror.
    “Help me hoist this,” Matson said, avoiding my eyes. He didn’t reply to my assertion. We lifted a bin of Chard and dumped the fruit onto a sorting table. “Toss anything that’s broken or looks like shit.” He looked at us and gave a tentative grin. Danny giggled at the word shit and started in, once Matson demonstrated the technique for him.
    “It’s simple,” he said after a moment. “Wilson doesn’t like what I do. I’m a fervent traditionalist. I strive for purity of statement. The finest expression of terroir I can achieve. I go to crazy lengths.”
    “For example?” I said.
    “What we’re doing now. Each lot of fruit isolated in the fermenter. The tanks are insulated so I can control temperatures. Native yeast fermentation, cold maceration, manual bâtonnage. ”

    Matson’s hands worked on their own, incredibly fast, dexterously feeling through the fruit, picking and pitching, cluster by cluster. Danny studied him and did his best to imitate his every move.
    “Work a little faster,” he said, observing my son. “You don’t have to be so careful. I mean, be careful but not too careful.”
    Danny sped up.
    “Good,” Matson said and then turned to me. “I’m obsessive, and I’m strict. I despise inflated rhetoric, inflated reputations, and inflated wine. The problem is, people don’t know what they want to make. So they end up producing wine to fit someone else’s idea of what wine’s supposed to taste like. Take Wilson: He thinks he’s championing the artisanal, but the opposite is really the case. All he’s done is fuel people’s crass commercial instinct. They end up making fat wines to get high scores to fetch top dollar. It’s sick. And it’s a vicious circle.”
    “Fret no more,” I said.
    His hands paused between the sorting table and the destemmer into which he’d just tossed a cupped handful of fruit.
    “Wilson’s dead,” I said. “He was found in a vat at Norton a couple hours ago.”
    Danny kept going. I searched Matson’s eyes as he looked from me to his new helper and back to me. He seemed genuinely shocked. We heard a car pull up outside the barn, and a moment later a petite blond woman with a face as innocent as Matson’s walked into the room through a side door.
    “Hey,” she said.
    “My wife, Gretchen,” Matson said.
    “Babe Stern,” I said. “This is my son, Danny.”
    “Gretch, Richard Wilson . . .” was all Matson was able