Killer

It was Friday with four days to go.

As we walked out, Nelson came up behind us. As owner, they were expecting him at the Estate Club dinner and he had to run up to the house to change his tee shirt for dinner clothes. We had been chatting, as we often did.

“Maybe a miracle will happen,” he winked at me in his Portuguese inflected English.

The woman with me winced: she was not a Trump supporter.

Nelson was always charming, and entertainment for any who visited his winery at the right hour of the day. We had been in the practice of stopping by just before Friday close of business for six years, and he had a special affinity, like Latin men do, for platinum blonde hair.

Later, I would sit and tease apart why Nelson was so interested to the ladies.

It was his inflection, his million dollar smile and his apparent delight at being with people.

We were sitting in their new club chairs, just enjoying the late Friday afternoon. His winery building was a thing apart, and Anna, his daughter had just poured from a bottle of the new cabernet sauvignon. She said Katie and Katel were both happy with the new wine.

“So Anna,” I had begun. She looked a little tired from the week of seeing to winery customers, but there was a twinkle in her eye. She liked to see us visit occasionally.

“Try the new cabernet,” she had said, “…and look: we bought some new comfy chairs. Got to keep up with the competition.”

“Where did you get them, Balfour?” I offered pointedly, for the competition was Stone Tower, a much more recent and very large winery nearby owned by the manufacturer of Balfour Furniture.

I had planned to shoot a few stills and some video of the space for social media. The big Harvest Dance was due the following weekend, and although they had had one couple short of fifty registrants, more could be accommodated.

We had sauntered over to the club chairs, and I still marveled at the place as I had done when the floor was concrete and the walls had just been framed in.

The ceiling was high, almost forty feet, and the main room spacious. The gables both were mostly glass and let daylight stream in from on high. Nelson, a former construction worker, had modified the architectural plan to minimize internal pillars, enhancing the open airy feeling of the space.

The wings to either side of the main hall included the area where we sat, with its lower fifteen foot ceiling next to a wide fireplace, giving the feeling of shelter and coziness while viewing the large room. It was set with clusters of high tables with stools, a corner set of sofas and table, and the newly added club chairs.

On the adjacent wall over which the ceiling rose on rough hewn beams, three Palladian doors looked out on a deck and beyond to the left, a small lake which mirrored the tall bright autumn foliage on its opposite bank.

The hillside in the distance bore row upon row of grape vine trellises on which the grapes now in their sixth or seventh leaf, had hung until that final week of harvest.

Up close, I knew how pathetic the fine, proud vines looked, shorn of their fruit, but from the tasting room, they gave the impression of opulence, changing color from deep green of September to hues of gold and umber, flecked with orange.

While we sat and sipped new cabernet which was well worth revisiting when there was more time, from the corner of my eye, I saw Nelson in playful banter with several of his Estate Club members as they waited for the monthly dinner to begin.

Some events were held on the floor below where tastings were held, amid the stainless steel fermentation tanks and pumps and tubing of the crush pad, but this month, the event was set in long formally set tables in the center of the upper tasting room floor.

My reverie was shaken by Nelson who had just come up, led by his gleaming grin.

Nelson’s outsized personality and perfect sense of humor by far made it easy to forget what a short, slight figure he actually was.

“Are you two here for the dinner?” he asked. He and she had bought enough wine to qualify for the Club and its discount without actually applying.

“Pizza night at our place, you know” I said. We had been neighbors almost a dozen years.

He threw his head back as was his custom when he was amused, rolled his eyes and sat down in the club chair facing us.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” he spoke to my wife, for Nelson always gravitated to lively women with platinum blonde hair.

They spoke of her Grand Canyon trip, the mesas and Sedona, and traded tales of travel when Nelson launched into the epic of moving his daughter from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco for law school.

Somehow, the topic turned to jury duty.

He, in all his seventy years, fifty four of which were here in America, had never been called to jury duty, but it had just happened.

My wife shared her story of not emphasizing her substantial academic credentials in favor of their identifying her in the role of housewife.

It looked as though she would finally succeed in making the final cut for jury until the applicants, as a final query, were asked if any were Rescue Squad members. Herr sole raised hand attracted the attention of the Judge who, by then, knew her name, and she was politely, but summarily excused from duty.

Nelson’s tale dealt with a Hispanic man, maybe twenty –five, with a large tattoo of a spider on the right side of his neck.

He spoke with a distinct unease of the young man whom they called J.C., a driver at Nelson’s construction company in Fairfax. It was the spider that lent authenticity to the tale.

J. C. was a good-looking man, and there was just something wrong about him that Nelson couldn’t put his finger on. He had worked for the company off and on, then disappeared.

Much later, the story of two rape-murders committed in California, trickled back to the attention of the company in Fairfax. The next Nelson knew, J. C. was on death row for a second spree of the murder of two more young women in Virginia.

The oddest twist in the story was what followed, right to Nelson’s door.

“It was when we were still living in Katie’s log cabin here, before we built our house,” he narrated.

He had had a visitor at his farm, a woman who claimed to be friend to someone who had once worked Nelson’s company, but she refused to give his name. She brought an appeal to Nelson to help him out of his death row predicament.

Before he answered, he insisted but she would not divulge the name. Nelson insisted she answer one and only one question by simple yes or no, if he were not to immediately terminate the interview.

“Does he have a spider tattoo right here?” Nelson pantomimed.

The plea, after checking into it, turned out to be legitimate, but Nelson had always believed in the death penalty.

He had not only his two daughters to consider but also two toddler granddaughters, and there was only one good end such a man as J. C. could come to in Nelson’s view.

“And this is why I support Trump,” he concluded.

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