Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [21]
“And?” Patti said, opening her eyes wide and flailing her arms as if to say come on already! “I swear to God, Mark. He is the slowest storyteller in Bergen County. Quit prattling!”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but the details are very important here,” Mark said and continued. “So we’re at Le Bernardin getting ready to lay waste to some mighty fine black bass and I’m reading the wine list. I said to Patti, gee, honey, remember that Pomerol we bought for like fifty bucks a bottle back in ’94? She says, yes, dear, although I’m not entirely confident about her honesty on that one. You know? I mean, yes, dear is pretty much thrown around the house without a lot of veracity attached to it.”
“Puhleese!” Patti said. “He thinks he’s the only one who remembers anything about our wine collection. Believe me! I know what the man spends.”
“And I know what you spend, too!” Mark wagged his finger at Patti. “Well, anyway, don’t you know it was four hundred dollars! The same maker and the same year!”
“Basically, what he’s telling you is that . . .”
“Ahem!” Mark said. “This is my story, not yours.”
“Sorry,” Patti said. “Just get to the point! Jeesch!”
“Cate? You’re sitting on a gold mine downstairs. Addison’s cellar is probably worth a hundred thousand dollars! Maybe two.”
“Maybe four!” Patti said.
“So what are you two thinking? That I should run out in the snowstorm and sell it on the corner? Don’t you know that the sheriff said they were sending a special wine mover with a refrigerated truck to get it?”
“A sommelier repo guy?” Patti said. “I didn’t know they had those.”
“I’m not saying that you should sell it!” Mark was getting excited.
“He’s thinking you should swap it,” Patti said. “It’s kind of ingenious, really.”
“What? Swap it?”
“Listen, the liquor stores open at nine. I’ve got the Expedition, right? That thing can go anywhere in any kind of weather.”
“Yep, it sure can,” Patti said.
“I’ll go pick up twenty cases of something decent and we just switch it! How clever is that?” Mark was smiling from ear to ear. “We put your wine in our cellar temporarily, sell it either to a broker or at auction later on down the line, and that’ll put a cool twenty-five thousand in your pocket. Maybe fifty! So what do you think? Smart, right?”
Silence hung between us for a moment while I tried to figure out if they were serious.
“Can you drive the Expedition to hell? ’Cause that’s where y’all are going.”
“What do you mean?” Patti said, completely mystified by my apparent lack of enthusiasm for their plan to send me to jail on top of everything else.
“Do you understand fraud? Great God, Patti! Mark, if we switch the Chateau Magnifique 1980 for the House of Mediocre Rat Piss 2010, it’s fraud, it’s a felony, and it probably breaks about another twenty laws. Good grief, y’all!”
All the air left the room in a great whoosh to be immediately replaced with yesterday’s heavily laden gloom.
“She’s right, Mark.”
Mark, looking crestfallen as I pulled the plug on our adrenaline-pumping life of crime, shook his head in agreement.
“Damn it all! I thought it was such a great idea,” Mark said. “I mean, wine? What regular judge in a New Jersey bankruptcy court knows jack shit about the value of rare wine? You know those guys don’t drink anything but whiskey. Probably. Maybe single malts.”
I was now doubly appalled that my heretofore saintly brother-in-law would assert that those learned gentlemen of the bench, in whom our society places a powerful sacred trust, were to be found after hours down at some seedy pub on the corner, knocking back shots of Jack Black and perhaps even doing something as commonplace as playing darts. Shocking.
“But maybe not. Come on, Mark. That’s a very dangerous assumption to make. With all the business they’re doing these days? You said it yourself. Bankruptcy courts are