Death at the bodega, p.15
Death at the Bodega, page 15
“You guys are out of your minds!” said Gael. “No way am I going near that place! I’m claustrophobic.”
“Well, you wanted to know about it, and now you know,” said Tomás.
“If it is wine in those bottles, it probably is not any good to drink after all of this time,” said Martina.
“Exactly,” said Gael. “So I’ll stick to my jug of Indominable, and to whatever other above-ground treasures I find.”
Shortly after lunch, Gael had the two tanks drained and ready for shoveling. Osvaldo moved them to the dock and positioned the castle on its dish alongside them. These tanks had domed tops with manways in their centers, and it was a two-person job to empty them. One person went inside with a shovel and a bucket, while the other person stood on top and lifted out bucketfuls of grape skins using a rope tied to its handle.
Gael had leaned a portable ladder against the side of one of the tanks, and was wondering who his partner in crime was going to be, when Tomás appeared through the doors of fermentation carrying a shovel and the bucket with the rope tied to its handle. Oh joy, Gael said to himself. To Tomás, he said, “Do you want me to go in first?” He figured they could trade places for the second tank.
Tomás shook his head and pointed to his feet, which were fitted with black galoshes. Without saying a word, he climbed the ladder and lowered himself through the manway.
They proceeded without talking. Repeatedly, Gael dropped the bucket down to rest on the skins, observed the bald spot on Tomás’s head as he shoveled, and lifted the bucket out to heave its contents into the castle. It was a magnificent arm workout, better than going to any gym. As they proceeded, Gael knew this was a golden opportunity to talk to Tomás about the murder. However the job didn’t lend itself to easy conversation, and Tomás wasn’t exactly chatty Cathy.
Gael was pleasantly surprised when, five minutes later, Tomás poked his head through the manway, frowned intensely, and growled, “Load of crap.”
“Yep!” said Gael. “Buckets of it!”
“I’m talking about this Eder business,” he said, rubbing his nose. Before Gael could coax him into saying more, he added, “Everyone thinks I did it! But the truth is I liked the guy. We got along fine. I never had no problem with him, but everyone thinks it was me. Load of crap!”
He took some breaths in preparation to go back down. As he did, Gael watched his face move through what looked like a mixture of conflicting emotions: anxiety, frustration, fear, and what was maybe tenderness. For the first time, Gael saw Tomás not as a grumpy middle-aged man but as the fresh-faced, optimistic campo boy he must have once been.
“It’s hard for me to believe anyone here did it,” said Gael.
Tomás’s face hardened back into its crusty default expression. “Had to be someone, and everyone thinks it was me. It’s not fair! Especially when other people around here have much more of an inclination for doing shit like that. A track record even!”
“Other people?”
“Yeah,” Tomás said. “Like your good friend Felipe.”
With that he was gone, down inside the tank.
Gael resumed hoisting the bucket, all the while hoping Tomás would come up for more air. He wanted to give his arms another rest, but moreover he wanted Tomás to continue talking. His opportunity came a moment later when the guy poked his head through the manway again.
“It’s true Felipe and I are friends,” Gael said. “But mostly we’re coworkers. I don’t really know him all that well.”
“You bet you don’t. I’ve known that idiot my whole damn life. Grew up with him.” Tomás wiped his brow with a black-gloved hand and left a purple smear across his forehead. “Damn leftists. They’re just as selfish and prejudiced as anyone else. They chatter on about equality and brotherhood and all that shit, but deep down they’re human beings same as the rest of us.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gael, resting the empty bucket on the tank top. “I don’t know Felipe all that well, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t prejudiced.”
“Pretty sure? What the hell do you know? Were you here when we was kids? Do you have any idea what he was like?”
Gael shook his head.
“Felipe bullied other children. Bullied me some too, but in particular he bullied migrant children.”
“I have a hard time picturing that,” said Gael.
“Kids can be cruel to each other, you gotta know that,” said Tomás. “I wasn’t no exception, I admit it.”
“You joined in?”
Tomás shrugged. “We were products of our time. Back then it was normal to call people names ‘cause of what they looked like or where they came from. Our parents didn’t teach us no different, in fact, they were the ones who taught us to do it!”
Gael nodded, remembering some taunting exchanges he’d participated in as a kid, back in the schoolyard in Portland.
“But Felipe,” said Tomás, “He was the worst of us. He was the ringleader. There was this little boy named Ayun whom he was particularly awful to.”
“Ayun was a migrant?”
“Ayun was Mapuche, from somewhere down south. He was a few years younger than us. His father came in the summers to work in the Galáz pumpkin and onion fields, and they stayed in one of the old workers’ quarters near the river. I never knew if he had a mother, it was just him and his dad who came. He’d help in the fields in the mornings, but he was just a little kid, and his dad let him run around in the afternoons. Of course he wanted to play with us, but Felipe refused. He teased the shit out of him too, called him names, made fun of his dark skin and narrow eyes. He’d throw rocks at Ayun whenever he tried to come near us, and one time he hit him in the head and made him bleed and cry.”
“That’s horrible,” said Gael.
“That isn’t the worst of it. One summer, Felipe told us he was going to play a trick on Ayun. He pretended to have a change of heart, and told him he could play with us so long as he proved his bravery by swinging on the rope swing all by himself. We had this big swing down by the river, where you jumped off a cliff holding the rope and swung way out over the water. It was scary as hell.”
“Oh no,” said Gael. “Did Ayun fall off?”
“We don’t know for sure what happened. Only Felipe and Ayun went to the river that day, and only Felipe came back. He said that when it was Ayun’s turn, the piece of wood or whatever it was we sat on came loose or broke or something and he fell into the water. Felipe said he tried to swim out and get him, but by the time he got there he was gone. It took a few days to find the body.”
“Oh no,” said Gael. He sat down on the tank and put his head in his hands.
“One thing we all remember is Ayun’s father saying, over and over again, that he didn’t understand. That his boy was such a good swimmer. And we remembered how Felipe had said he was going to play a trick. Maybe someone told their parents, because word got around and Felipe never really lived it down. People still suspect him of killing that boy.”
Gael rubbed his eyes and looked at Tomás.
Tomás’s eyes widened and he held up his hands. “I don’t know! I wasn’t there. But now we have this Eder situation, and all I’m saying is that if people want to suspect me, they have to suspect others too. I liked the guy. I had no problem with the fact that he wasn’t Chilean.”
Gael nodded and got to his feet.
“And It’s not like we all couldn’t have used some goddamn money!” Tomás continued. “Especially Felipe, what with his daughter now at Saint Catherine’s.”
With that, Tomás ducked into the tank.
Gael lowered the bucket slowly. They needed to hurry up and empty these tanks, but his heart felt heavy.
Tomás looked up at him through the manway. “By the way, do you think I even knew there was any money in that office, let alone where they kept it? No way! But I know someone who did, someone who’d been working in that office. Felipe!”
He rammed the shovel blade into the skins and flung the skins into the bucket.
By the time the tanks were empty and Osvaldo had moved the castle to the press, it was time for the second round of pushdowns, wettings, and remounts. Osvaldo stayed on the dock to rinse the two tanks with hot water, which for some reason was a pet task of his, one of the few that got him out of the forklift. “Go do the remounts,” he told Gael, as he held a hose over the manway of a tilted tank and water gushed out its bottom port into the cement trench beneath the dock. “Joaquín will operate the press.”
Gael walked through the fermentation hall, and when he passed the translucent doors he looked out to see Felipe pressure washing the de-stemmer. He had his headphones on, and was blasting steaming water into the open crushing chamber’s teeth. Then he bent down to shoot water up through the exit hopper. As he did this, Gael studied his calm, intelligent face, focused on the task at hand. He’d grown accustomed to Felipe being a warm and comforting fixture of the bodega, and never had he imagined that a cruel remark could issue from him, let alone that he could do something evil.
An hour later found Gael setting up for a thirty-five minute remount on tank number twenty, one of the five largest fermenters lining the east wall. He moved the pump into position, attached the inlet hose, and climbed to the platform carrying the discharge hose and the green noose-rope. Feeding the hose through the manway, he secured it with the rope and got ready to recirculate wine for thirty-five minutes while trying not to breathe too much fermenter off-gas.
He was good at this by now. He had a system. He started by wagging the hose back and forth like a pendulum, adjusting the direction every few wags to splash wine over different parts of the cap all the way out to the edges, while counting the seconds in his mind to two minutes. Then, for two more minutes, he waved the hose in circular motions of varying radii. Then he looked around to confirm no one was watching, and stepped back for a one-minute break to rest his arms and not breathe gas. Then he repeated.
He was on his third round of wagging, his arm through the manway and cheek pressed against the tank top, feeling woozy from fumes that were a bit sweeter and with stronger accents of acetone than average, when he spied movement at the far end of the hall. Through a cloud of tiny insects, some of which flew in and out of his nose, he saw Alexandra standing next to a cloth-covered vat. She gestured with her arms and moved her mouth, but he couldn’t hear anything she was saying over the whine of the pump and the splatter of the hose. Clearly she was having an intense discussion with someone.
Gael lifted his head and craned his neck, but couldn’t see anyone else. Then he heard the familiar voice of Gustavo, except much muted. The Head Winemaker stepped forward from behind a vat and continued speaking, in a voice much lower than the one that normally carried across the bodega. Gael heard the words “money” and “account” but not much else. Alexandra cut in, gesturing more and looking agitated. Gustavo spoke again, indiscernibly except for one word that reached all the way across the hall: “Eder.”
At least that’s what Gael thought he heard.
He let go of the hose and slid to a seated position on the platform, where the dome of the tank obscured him from view. His brain spun and swam in a familiar fume high, one that was not as intense as they had been earlier in the vintage.
Peering around, he watched Gustavo jerk his head to look in the direction of low-bay, and saw Alexandra turn and do the same. Immediately Alexandra pivoted and headed up the central passage, then out the translucent doors. Gael got a good look at her disturbed face as she did this. A second later, Inés entered the hall from low-bay, pulling a hand truck with a bottle of nitrogen on it twice as tall as she was. She nodded at Gustavo and proceeded to roll the big bottle down the length of the hall, maneuvering it around the running remount pump without looking up at Gael.
It was interesting how no one ever noticed he existed when he was on top of a tank.
Later, on the floor, while recirculating sodium metabisulfite to sanitize the pump and hoses, he heard a sharp, “Gael!”
It was Gustavo, now in full vocal form.
“I need you to remove juice from today’s crush. Two hundred and forty liters from each vat. Transfer it to egg number three. Joaquín will help you.”
This was a tricky and messy two-person maneuver that Gael had mostly mastered. Sometimes after a crush, some liquid was removed to adjust concentrations as well as provide some juice to make rosé with. This involved rolling a rectangular tub fitted with a screen to the vat in question, attaching a fat hose to the vat’s outlet valve, and laying the other end of the hose over the screen. One person’s job was to manipulate the valve to send grape slurry gushing forth over the screen. The other person’s job was to make sure the hose didn’t jump off the screen, while at the same time frantically scoop skins off the screen by hand and throw them into buckets. The liquid that fell through the screen became rosé. The skins were returned to the vat.
Gael had just gotten everything set up when Joaquín appeared, voicing his standard, “Gay-EL!” as he came through the doors into low-bay. The day had warmed up substantially and his green knit cap was gone, freeing his straight black hair to flop over his brow. He wore a red tee shirt with a big soccer ball on the front, and had eschewed the bodega-issue polyester pants for sagged jeans.
“How’s pressing?” asked Gael.
“Tomás is finishing up. Grumpy as usual. Can’t appreciate not being in jail, like me!”
“He’s always got his undies in a bundle.”
“And what undies he’s got!” Joaquín laughed. “Here, I’ll show you. Promise you won’t tell nobody?”
Joaquín manipulated his phone and held it up to display a photo of the locker room, and specifically a green metal locker with the name Tomás stenciled on the door, which was open partway. Inside, a pair of pale pink lacy panties lay atop some other contents.
“What the heck?” said Gael.
“I know! I went in there a couple weeks ago and his locker wasn’t shut correctly. I saw something pink, and reached in and pulled it out. And, wow! I laid it on top so I could take this picture. Then I stuffed it back under and shut the door before anyone saw me.”
Gael chuckled. “Oh my, the plot thickens. Those are definitely not for Edna.”
“Nope! At last, Tomás has got himself a girlfriend. You’d think that would make him happier.”
“Girlfriends can be trouble,” said Gael. “And expensive. He’d be better off sticking to whole lotta Edna, in my opinion.”
“He can’t, he’s got to compete with everyone else in the manliness department. He’s so mad that Osvaldo has a wife plus a girlfriend and he doesn’t. Or didn’t.”
“Well, good for Tomás now,” said Gael.
Joaquín nodded, pocketed his phone, and they got to work. Joaquín operated the valve while Gael madly gathered grape skins and threw them into buckets. At one point the hose leapt off the screen and shot a thick stream of purple grapes across the floor before Joaquín could shut the valve. “Shit!” they both shouted.
As they crouched side by side, scooping grape skins off the concrete with their gloved hands, Gael said, “I feel kind of bad for Tomás. He complained to me today about how everyone thinks he killed Eder. He’s upset that people suspect him just because he’s an asshole.”
“Well, somebody’s got to be suspected,” said Joaquín, flinging skins into a bucket. “And that somebody isn’t me. I’m off the list.”
“How do you figure? I mean, I know you didn’t do it, but how come you’re off the list?”
“Because I didn’t work the tanks that week. I was going to, in fact Bastián and I were just getting ready to shovel tank nineteen the morning after Easter.”
“Nineteen,” said Gael, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“Yeah. We got it drained, and we were just about to open it up when Osvaldo came and pulled me off. Said he needed me to drive the forklift because his tailbone hurt.” Joaquín grinned his beautiful smile. “You may not know this, but I am an ace forklift driver.”
“I’ve seen you driving it from time to time,” Gael said, feeling his breaths get shorter. “So, you did that, and you didn’t shovel the tank? Osvaldo shoveled instead?”
“Yeah. For that day and the next day. Until his ass felt better.”
“Who worked the crushes with you?” asked Gael.
“I’m not sure about the second day, but the first day it was Felipe and Tomás, quarreling as usual. Felipe can lift and lower the bins, but he doesn’t know how to drive the forklift around. I had to do that part. It was Tomás and me pitching grapes, and Felipe washing.”
“Did you tell this to the investigators?”
“I didn’t want to! I didn’t want to tell them nothing. But I had to, otherwise how would it look, later, if I needed to say it to defend myself?”
“That was smart of you,” said Gael. “Because later they would have said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us before, you must be lying.’ But here’s my question: can you prove beyond a doubt that you did not shovel those tanks?”
Joaquín’s brow furrowed. “No. But it’s the truth, and other people have to remember that and back me up. They have to remember and they have to tell the truth.”
Gael looked at the profile of his young coworker, scooping skins off the floor and throwing them into a bucket, and he wished this were true.
With twenty-five minutes remaining before six o’clock, it was time to take out the cake. If it came out easily, Felipe would have just enough time to pressure-wash the castle before cutoff and prevent it from sitting purple-coated and sticky all night long.
Through the open doors of fermentation, Gael watched Osvaldo pass by out on the dock, carrying the cake-filled castle suspended by chains from the raised forklift blades. He hastened to collect the cast-iron cake removal shaft from the tool storage area, a fifteen-kilogram beast with one end flattened like a giant screwdriver. With the weighty shaft on his shoulder, he jogged towards the dock. By the time he got there, Osvaldo had the castle suspended off the edge, above the compost trailer parked below.
