Plum Gone: A Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mystery (Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mysteries Book 2) Read Free Page B

added. “The guy’s in his eighties and sick. Although,” he raised his shoulders fatalistically again, “he made no secret of how steamed he was about that lawsuit. Just last week I heard him ranting at the Chatham Club. Said he’d like to get his hands on the Mexican -  he used a different word - who filed it. Something about migrant worker housing...?”
    “Seasonal worker,” Emma interjected. “I think the proper term is ‘seasonal.’”
    Jack ignored the interruption. “Down in Coachella where he owns all that farmland. Substandard housing conditions. Not enough shade and water. Randall told the bartender he’d spent every summer as a teenager living in the exact same housing, working for his father under the exact same conditions – as did his son before he died. And all it did was ‘build character’. I quote.”
    “Doesn’t make it right,” Emma scoffed.
    Jack nodded. “But it does make it hard for a bitter, angry, heart-broken eighty-something-year-old to understand.”
    They had finished eating. Jack motioned for the waiter to bring the bill. He always paid for lunch.
    “You heading for the clinic?” he asked.
    Emma nodded. It was Saturday, one of the days she volunteered. The place would be buzzing with news of the murder.
    She stood up and grabbed her purse. “Yeah, I’d better run. I’m late.”
    They kissed each other lightly on each cheek, Sicilian style.
    “ Ciao bella ,” he called after her. He was learning Italian and interjected such phrases whenever he could. “And you’re right. I won’t worry about the dinner. It’s gonna be fine. Without the ex. And don’t forget tomorrow night at Sergio’s. We’re picking out the wine.”
    Emma waved back. Grateful for the reminder. She’d almost forgotten about the wine.
     
    Half an hour later Barbara, the receptionist, nodded to Emma as she stepped through the sliding glass doors of the Blissburg Free Legal Services Clinic aka the BFLSC. The cement box of a building sat in an abandoned shopping center on the outskirts of town.
    Barbara, a Blissburg native and divorced mother of five grown sons, was a rare free clinic lifer. One of two paid employees out of a transient staff of volunteers. The other paid staff was the clinic’s resident attorney, Steve Zimmer, a classmate of Emma’s son-in-law from the prestigious Cal Berkeley law school, and now Emma’s boss.
    “I’m warning you,” Barbara jerked her thumb behind her. “Steve’s bummed. You heard about Gomez?”
    Emma nodded.
    Barbara looked back down at the book she was reading. Emma noted the title, Born to Sin. On the book’s paperback cover, a hunky cowboy clad only in a Stetson and blue jeans hauled in a shapely schoolmarm by a lasso attached around her waist. At least Emma thought it was a schoolmarm, complete with wire rimmed glasses and ruffled high necked blouse. Emma acknowledged that the cross dangling around the heroine’s neck could also have signaled the preacher’s daughter.
    Barbara didn’t look anything like the women on the covers of the western romance novels she read by the truckload. That day the overweight blond wore a V-necked see-through lace tunic over khaki shorts, along with bracelets and a necklace made out of bullet casings.
    Emma walked past Barbara’s desk and entered the warren of make shift cubicles constructed out of second hand plastic room dividers. She never got over what a far cry the legal clinic was from the downtown San Francisco law firm where she’d worked as a paralegal for so many years.
    At the clinic she worked for free and loved her three-day-a-week, volunteer job. There was nothing abstract or impersonal about it. Unlike her old job. No corporate clients spewing endless downloads of documents to review, catalogue, summarize, locate - and re-create when a forgetful partner left his entire discovery binder on the Larkspur ferry.
    How could that possibly have been my fault , Emma asked herself. Wondering for the hundredth