Strange Brew Part 9

"Now smell," Anna said. "Can you tell what makes a Belgian ale different? Smell the apples and pears?"

"Sort of," Bucky said, sniffing at the rim of the gla.s.s.

"Take a small mouthful," she said. "Watch."

She took a sip and rolled it around in her mouth before swallowing. "You're looking for both the flavor and the feel of the beer," Anna said, her eyes shining with intensity. "Belgian strong ale should be medium-bodied, which this is. You should be able to discern the faint fruity notes. Then swallow, take a quick sip of air, and you'll notice the after-taste, or what we like to call finish, of the beer resonating in the back of your throat and up into your nasal pa.s.sages.

"Got it?"

"I think so," I said. Not bad, this Belgian stuff.

"Excellent," Bucky p.r.o.nounced, slamming his gla.s.s on the table. "I could drink this stuff all night, but I better not.

"So," he said, leaning closer to Anna. "How did a nice girl like you end up making beer in a place like this?"

Anna made a sour face. "Do you realize how many times a day I get asked that question?"

"It's still a good question," Bucky persisted. "It's better than 'What's your sign?' or 'Come here often?'"

"Since you asked," Anna said quietly, "there really aren't all that many women brewmasters these days. There were only two in my cla.s.s at brewschool."

"You have to go to a brewschool?" I asked.

"If you want to learn to do it right," Anna said. "My great-uncle and grandfather were brewmasters up in Pennsylvania. They had their own bottling line, even. But that closed in 1962. Way before I was ever born."

"Is that where you got interested in making beer?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Not really. My family has been out of beer a long time. I was working as a bartender at a nightclub in Oregon about five years ago. They got bored with country and western line dancing, decided to turn the dance floor into a brewhouse."

She ran a finger around the fine tracery of white foam left in the gla.s.s. "They didn't know squat about beer. Spent half a million dollars to buy their setup, then brought in a corporate guy from California and proceeded to make six different kinds of Bud Lite."

"That's bad?" I happen to like Bud Lite.

"Why not just buy Bud Lite, if that's what you want?" Anna said. "The whole point of craft-brewing is to go back to the great beers that used to be made before everything got pasteurized and sanitized. Beers with regional differences. Something unique."

"Where did you go to brewschool?" I asked. My own version of brewschool had been the time I'd spent at the University of Georgia, where I'd experienced a four-year-long keg party. Not that I remembered all that much of it.

"UC Davis," Anna said proudly.

"That's California?" Bucky looked confused. "I thought they were into wine out there."

"Beer, too," Anna said. "You'd be surprised. They grow hops in California, you know. In some places, people are ripping out their grapevines and planting hop vines in their place."

"It's a brew-volution," Bucky said jokingly.

She gave him a level gaze. The chick was serious about this beer business.

"It is a revolution," she said. "Microbrewing is the major restaurant trend of the nineties."

"I believe you," Bucky said. He looked around the room. "You've got some setup here. Are you, like, one of the owners?"

"Sort of," she said, following his gaze. "You could say that."

"Who does own it?" I asked, unable to keep my curiosity at bay. The Blind Possum reeked of not just hops and cigar smoke, but money. Lots of money. Anna Frisch hadn't seen thirty yet. Where did a chick who'd been a barmaid only five years ago suddenly get the money to buy into something like Blind Possum? A whole string of places, if what Bucky said was true.

"Blind Possum is owned by Blind Possum Brewers, Inc.," Anna said. "Just some people who know food and restaurants. And me-because I know how to make beer."

She stood up, tossed her hair over her shoulder. "Time to circulate."

"What about Jackson Poole?" I blurted. "Did he know about the restaurant business? Is that why he was involved in Blind Possum?"

Her hand jerked and sent one of the half-full beer gla.s.ses spinning over the varnished tabletop. Beer pooled over the remains of our dinner and began dripping to the floor.

"Jackson? You knew him?"

"We met," I said. "Before he was killed."

Anna hurried to the bar and came back with a stack of paper towels. She started mopping up the beer, stacking plates and silver haphazardly on top of each other. "How did you know Jackson was involved in Blind Possum? He was in charge of the Little Five Points store. It wasn't even open yet."

"I live in the neighborhood," I volunteered.

"Here," Bucky said, standing up to get out of her way. "Let me help."

"What about you?" she asked him. "Why are you so interested in craft-brewing? You didn't really know Jackson, did you?" The flirty little smile had suddenly turned flinty.

"I'm a police detective," Bucky said. He took his billfold out of his hip pocket and handed her a business card. Much more discreet than flashing a badge.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed the card away from him, and as she read it, her face paled.

"Aren't you supposed to tell people you're a police officer before you start interrogating them?"

Bucky shrugged. "Interrogating? Nah. We were drinking beer, talking shop."

She bit her lip. "The company's lawyers told us we shouldn't talk without consulting them..." A strand of the long hair fell across her face and she brushed it away impatiently.

"I can't discuss Jackson," she said sharply. "I've got to check my fermentation barrels."

She threw the beer-soaked towels onto the stack of plates and walked quickly away, back toward the brewroom.

"That was subtle," Bucky said, turning on me.

"You notice how quickly she got busy once I brought up the subject of Jackson Poole?" I asked.

"I noticed she was friendly and helpful right until the moment you stepped up and opened your big mouth," he said. "Great timing, Garrity."

12.

The silence in the car was glacial. Bucky's jaw muscles were taut, but he was too angry at me to speak. Until we saw the throbbing blue glow of the lights from the police cruisers at the corner of McLendon and Moreland. Then we heard the sirens. "Sounds like at least three units," I said.

"Four," Bucky corrected me. "What now?"

He stomped on the accelerator and the Miata responded accordingly. Bucky was still talking to the dispatcher on the car radio when we pulled up to the intersection at Little Five Points. The two cruisers were parked across McLendon at Moreland, and two more were parked across Euclid. A uniformed officer was directing the line of backed-up cars away from the intersection, which was clogged with people.

Bucky swung around the line of cars in front of us and pulled into the middle of the intersection, holding his shield out the window so that the cop could see his ID.

The uniformed officer, a trim black woman with a gold cap on her front tooth, bent down and looked in the window, frowning until she recognized Bucky.

"Hey there, Tanya," Bucky said. "What's going on?"

Tanya Peeples pointed across Euclid, in the direction of the Yacht Club. "Got a body in a van, back there in the alley. White female. That's all I know."

But I knew. I knew whose van was in this alley, whose body had been found.

"Christ," I said. "It's Wuvvy."

"Who's working it?" Bucky asked Peeples.

"Major Mackey showed up as soon as they called in the homicide. I heard he was looking for you."

Bucky glanced over at me, his face set. "Here's where you get out," he said.

I knew better than to argue. I wasn't even out of the car completely before the Miata was rolling through the intersection, heading up Euclid toward the Yacht Club. I tucked my pocketbook under my arm like a football and sprinted across McLendon, right behind his car.

I had to push my way through the crowd on the sidewalk. The night was unexpectedly warm, the air greasy and stale. A guy with dreadlocks was sitting on the curb, whaling away at a set of African drums; somebody else was tootling away on a flute. It was all just annoying background music to accompany the buzz of shock and excitement death brings when it happens in a public way.

Hap and Miranda stood outside the Yacht Club, huddled close together, watching the street circus as it whirled around them. Hap had a protective arm drawn around Miranda's shoulder; her eyes were red-rimmed, and the hand that held a cigarette out to her side was shaking badly.

"Wuvvy?" I asked.

Hap nodded. Miranda tossed the cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with the toe of her boot. She gave me a half-smile, turned, and walked back inside the bar.

"Miranda found her," Hap said. "Christ, what a mess."

"What happened?"

"We had a case of lemons go bad. It was stinking up the whole kitchen. Miranda took it out to toss it in the Dumpster. She saw the van nosed back in those woods on the other side of the alley. There's a little sort of pull-through in back of the Dumpster, but it's all grown up with weeds and s.h.i.t. People from the neighborhood think it's their private dump, always leaving old refrigerators and mattresses and tires and s.h.i.t the city won't pick up. We have to pay to have it hauled off, and it ain't cheap. Miranda didn't realize at first that it was Wuvvy's van. Then she walked around to the back of it, to see if there was still a tag on it, and that's when she realized whose van it was. She took a look, ran inside, and called me."

Hap rubbed his jaw. He needed a shave, and I noticed the stubble on his chin was mostly gray. It was November, but he still wore baggy cotton shorts, a faded Yacht Club T-shirt, and leather Birkenstock sandals. His arms and legs were thin, covered with fine dark hair. He reminded me of some old pirate, marooned on a desert island.

"She blamed me for losing the store," Hap said. "You heard her in here Friday night, didn't you?"

I nodded. "She was drunk. Stoned, too."

He sighed. "We've been friends a long time. I never knew she'd been in prison. I never knew any of that s.h.i.t. Not that it would have mattered. I'd have helped her if she'd asked. You know that, right?"

I hesitated. "Was it suicide?"

"Carbon monoxide, I guess. There was a piece of hose attached to the exhaust pipe. She'd run it in through the window. I guess she'd been there a while, 'cause the motor wasn't running when we found her. When I saw the hose, I didn't get any closer. Came in the bar and called 911."

A burly guy in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt came bustling up the sidewalk toward us, his head swinging from side to side, taking it all in. He held his hand out to shake Hap's.

"Hap! Man, what's goin' on?"

Hap kept his hands in the pockets of his shorts. "You know Wuvvy? The chick who owned YoYos?"

"Nah," the biker said. "I just come over here to drink." He laughed at his own little joke.

"She killed herself tonight," Hap said bluntly.

The biker blinked. "Radical," he said. He turned and pushed through the door of the Yacht Club.

More cruisers blocked the entrance to the alley, and a uniformed officer was stationed at the Yacht Club's rear entrance. I could see Bucky over near the Dumpster, walking around, squatting, taking notes. It was as close as I could get. I stood at the edge of the crowd, watching, finding myself becoming oddly detached from the fact of Wuvvy's death.

It got colder, and finally people moved on. One of the uniformed officers remembered me from my days on the burglary squad, and let me move to a spot out of the wind, close to the Yacht Club's back door. Around one A.M., two paramedics wheeled a gurney carrying a neatly zipped body bag out to the waiting ambulance and loaded it aboard. It pulled out of the alley, lights flashing but no siren. No real emergency now, after all.

Bucky finished his note-taking and had a final chat with Major Mackey. Mackey got in his unmarked city unit and drove away, too. Bucky looked over in my direction and gestured for me to join him.

"You need a ride home?"

"Yeah," I said. "Like you said, the neighborhood's going to h.e.l.l."

A dozen questions ran through my head, but I couldn't think what to ask first. Bucky saved me the trouble.

"Asphyxiation," he said, sliding behind the Miata's steering wheel. "She wasn't taking any chances either. The attendant at the gas station across the street said she pulled in around eight o'clock, bought twenty-four dollars' worth of high test. He said he'd never known her to buy more than five dollars' worth of gas before."

"Was there a note?"

"Not really. She had a plastic bag fixed up, left it on the pa.s.senger seat. Her papers, I guess. The letter from the governor, commuting her prison sentence, t.i.tle to the van, her high school diploma, stuff like that. Like she wanted to make sure her body was properly ID'd."

"It was Wuvvy, right?"

"It was her," Bucky said. "You know she had an old eight-track player in that van? The tape was still playing when the first uniform got here."

"What was the tape?"

"Rolling Stones," Bucky said. "Sympathy for the Devil."

13.