The Gossiping Gourmet

by Martin Brown

  Rob took a sip of his coffee. “You must have a Plan B.”

  “Yep, and Plans C, D, and E. Whatever nastiness Bradley fell into, it’s reasonably certain it happened before he arrived in Sausalito. But unfortunately, we can’t trace him through any government fingerprint data bank. The killer might have kept Bradley’s hands and the prints that went with them for that very reason. Therefore, we can’t know if in the past he worked one of a dozen different jobs that they fingerprint people for as part of standard personnel procedures. Not to mention new government programs like the TSA’s airport security pre-check.”

  “So, what’s your next step?”

  “I think it’s time for us to take a little jog together—say, five-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  Rob groaned. “Why so early?”

  “Because we’re going on a little hunting expedition up to Warren Bradley’s. When we were called to the scene and my two colleagues from the Sausalito PD scattered to different parts of the house, I ‘accidentally’ took a spare key to Warren’s cottage that was sitting atop the refrigerator. I could go through channels, but A, I don’t know what it is we’re looking for, which is something you never want to tell your superiors; B, an authorized search means taking two or more of Sausalito's Keystone Cops along. Instead, I’m up for a little snooping while I’m off the clock.”

  “Can’t we drive up there this evening? I can wait in the car while you snoop around.”

  “More convenient, for sure. But there’s a good chance that a neighbor will see the lights on, or see a flashlight and call our friends at the SPD—which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.”

  “And why do we want to keep the SPD out of this?”

  “Because, if you remember, its officers and staff are the original town gossips! How do you think Bradley got on the trail of everyone’s favorite suspect, Grant Randolph, in the first place? I don’t know which one of those chuckleheads babbled about Randolph’s arrest for assaulting his wife, but I’ll bet you a week’s salary that was Warren’s original source for his story. If we got caught up there, we’d be the talk of the town forty-eight hours later! We need to fly under the radar while we’re there.”

  Rob watched the sky brighten over the East Bay as he strolled down his driveway Monday morning. He had just paused for a moment when Eddie came running up. The way they were dressed, they looked like any other early morning power joggers.

  They took a circuitous route, winding through the Sausalito hills. Part of their jog took them along Glen Drive. They followed it as it curved uphill onto Santa Rosa Avenue, then onto San Carlos, Spencer, and finally onto Prospect.

  By the time they had reached the end of Prospect, it was nearly six o’clock and they had come to the mutual conclusion that they should consider jogging the hills of Sausalito more often.

  “Helluva workout,” Eddie panted. Rob nodded breathlessly in agreement.

  The sun was peeking up over the East Bay, and the air was sparkling fresh.

  Eddie reached into his pocket. “Oh, damn! I forgot the key.”

  As the color drained out of Rob’s face, Eddie punched him lightly on the chest. “I’m just screwing with you, man.” He pulled the key out of his pocket and smiled. He then shifted his gaze toward the neighboring homes. After seeing that not a single soul was stirring, he murmured, “Let’s do this.”

  Parts of the house were wrapped with the bright yellow CRIME SCENE tape that was put up the night Warren was wheeled away. It covered the door about six inches above the simple doorknob lock that provided the home’s only security.

  Eddie kneeled down below the tape, slipped the key in the lock, and smiled at Rob as it turned and popped open. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out two pairs of surgical footwear covers, and two pairs of blue nitrile gloves.

  “Put these on, Robin,” Eddie said.

  “Whatever you say, Batman.”

  They slipped carefully under the yellow tape and into the house; quietly closing the single hinged French door behind them.

  Warren’s cottage held the chill of Sausalito’s night air. Enough daylight came in through the windows to provide the needed amount of light.

  Eddie’s first suggestion was that they walk through each room of the small home and consider where they might want to begin their search. “I’d like to be out of here by seven at the latest. But, let me say, if anyone comes tapping on the door, from nosy neighbor to Sausalito PD, I do the talking. Agreed?”

  “Absolutely! You got any idea what you’d say?”

  “That’s easy. If you see anyone pull up, or a neighbor comes walking toward the house, strip off your gloves and booties. We were jogging together and noticed that the front door was ajar. I stepped inside to see if anything seemed to have been disturbed before calling it in.”

  “Wow! You are smooth, Eddie.”

  “In my line of work, you better be ready to spread a little bullshit at a moment’s notice.”

  "In my line of work as well! I guess we have more in common with politicians than we ever thought," Rob said with a smile. “Okay, tell me again what you think we might find.”

  “Bradley might have wanted, or needed, to obscure his past. But most people hold on to certain things out of sentimental attachment or any of a dozen other reasons. I doubt everything in his life that was more than twenty-five years old was thrown out. It could be one of a dozen different things. Maybe it’s an original birth certificate or a picture of him with his parents or siblings. In other words, look for anything that gives us a key to who he was before he became the Warren Bradley the Ladies of Liberty adored.”

  They wandered separately through the cottage. The wood paneling throughout the house had absorbed the aromas of many meals created in the small, neatly arranged kitchen, which still showed the signs of Warren’s last night of entertaining. Two dinner plates, two dessert plates, and two wine glasses had been washed, placed in the dish rack, and left there after his last supper.

  “Interesting, isn’t it, Rob? The killer wanted us to know that Bradley had a dinner guest. No prints anywhere in the place, and no DNA evidence on discarded food scraps, or cloth or paper napkins, but obvious signs that a guest had been here. I’m telling you this place was as clean as any murder scene I’ve ever seen. Of course, with the Sausalito police being the first here, there might have been a slice of chocolate cake on the sideboard that one of their geniuses ate.”

  “If they did, it was after I left and went home because, from the time they arrived, no one ever thought to go inside the cottage until the deceased’s hands were discovered missing."

  Eddie laughed. “I'm sorry I wasn't here until later. That must have been one memorable moment!”

  “Trust me Eddie, it’s one I’ll never forget.”

  They wandered back and forth through the combined living room, dining room, kitchen area, and then around the bedroom with the small nook that Warren used to write his now-infamous column.

  Afterward, Eddie and Rob stood back to back and considered where they would look in the relatively brief time that they had left.

  Eddie wanted to start by going through the Chippendale oak wood curio cabinet. It had a variety of plaques and awards from various cooking contests and “volunteer of the year” framed certificates from a variety of Sausalito organizations. He carefully slipped them out and looked behind each one.

  Inside of one frame that had a back that quickly slipped off was the picture of a kid Eddie guessed to be about twelve to fourteen. From the washed-out colors of the photo and the clothing the boy was wearing, it was probably twenty-five years or older.

  Perhaps it was a son Bradley left behind?

  Eddie’s curiosity was heightened when a second photo revealed another boy—maybe four to five years younger, sitting in the back of a rowboat tied to a crumbling wooden dock.

  He slipped both photos into his pocket.

  Rob’s search focused on an antique mahogany bedroom dresser and the battered
old Queen Anne desk in the bedroom nook. He took out each of the desk’s two narrow and deep side drawers. One by one, he turned them over and emptied their contents onto the floor. He quickly looked through every scrap of paper, hoping to find something that placed Warren somewhere, anywhere, other than Sausalito.

  He found nothing.

  He piled the papers back into what he hoped was their original drawers, but then he realized that it was highly unlikely anyone alive today would know what papers went where. Just knowing that he was a few feet from where Warren may have been suffocated and later mutilated sent a shiver down Rob's spine.

  He pulled out the third drawer—the widest and flattest, from below the center of the desktop—when his hand felt something strange on the drawer’s bottom, backside. It was enough to make Rob’s heart skip a beat. Excitedly, he flipped over the drawer.

  A blank white plastic card was taped to the aging wood.

  “Eddie, get in here! I think I found something important.”

  Eddie came running. When he saw what Rob was indicating, he took the small penknife that was attached to his house keys and carefully cut the tape around the card’s edges. On the flip side of the card was the photo of a man they both barely recognized as Warren Bradley, probably in his mid-thirties. This Warren had no gray hair, no bushy salt and pepper mustache, and no tired eyes. But after a few moments of careful consideration, they were both certain this was Warren, only several decades younger.

  The card was an ID badge from the department of biomedical research at Northern Arizona University. There was no date of issuance on the card, but there was a name:

  William Benedict.

  They both stood and stared in silence for a few moments.

  Finally, Eddie put his arm around Rob’s shoulder and pulled him in close. “Rob, say hello to William Benedict. He must have had some shirts he liked with ‘WB’ on the cuffs. I guess he didn’t want to give up his old initials.” He handed his find to Rob: the photos of the two young boys. “Now, take a look at these! You’re not the only one to come away with a prize.”

  “Do you think they might be Bradley’s kids?”

  “Could be,” Eddie said. “Hopefully, William Benedict will be able to tell us who he was, and who these boys are as well.”

  “Eddie, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Just what I was about to say.”

  Carefully they checked that everything was put back as they found it, with the only items removed being those only Warren Bradley likely knew were there all the time. Eddie relocked the door and they both removed their surgical shoe covers and gloves, which Eddie slipped back into his pocket.

  “Remember when I told you that you have to keep pulling at all the different threads until you find the one string that causes all the others to unravel? In this case, let’s hope William Benedict is that string.”

  When Rob got home, he quickly shaved, showered, and got ready to head down to the office for the official start of his workweek.

  “First a break of dawn jog, then you’re ready to hustle down to the office before eight? My God, you’re a new man!” Karin said teasingly. But from her tone, he could tell she was curious about what he and Eddie had been doing since the first light of day.

  Rob smiled innocently and waved as he went out the door. In truth, he was bursting to tell Karin about the discovery he and Eddie had made sixty minutes earlier, but he knew that no one could know about that for now—not even his life partner.

  As usual, Holly was in the office before Rob arrived. She greeted him with the question: “What did you decide to do on the Bradley retrospective?”

  “I have to punt. We’ll pull together file photos and story clips of Warren doing his cooking and serving bit for every volunteer group in town. Other than that, as far as I can tell, the guy was dropped here one night by an alien spacecraft.”

  “That’s a plausible theory. Still, you probably shouldn’t put it into print.”

  “All I’ve got now is a senior citizen who was born twenty-five plus years ago. And I’m not making that my lead paragraph.” Rob felt guilty holding back on Holly, particularly knowing how much the news regarding William Benedict would have thrilled and delighted her.

  Rob couldn’t imagine how big a story Eddie might uncover. At the same time, he had complete confidence in Eddie that, whatever the outcome of this strange case, he and his readers would be the first to know the whole story; hopefully in time for the next edition of The Sausalito Standard.

  With that university ID badge in hand, Eddie was also confident that Warren’s real story—and perhaps even the identity of his killer—were within reach. Finding William Benedict in Northern Arizona University’s databank clinched it.

  More shocking was his discovery of Benedict’s arrest on a charge of homicide—something that for now, he needed to keep from Rob.

  Eddie regularly had to remind himself that his closest friend’s chosen profession made it that much harder to share with him potentially explosive information. No matter what else he turned up, the very knowledge that Warren Bradley—the persistent persecutor of Grant Randolph, Carrie Kahn, and so many others—had been tried for homicide would be enough to have Rob aching to get to his keyboard and begin writing a blockbuster story. Expecting his friend to sit quietly on that information would have been like placing a boulder atop a volcano in the hope that it would stay put in an eruption.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Four days after they searched Warren’s home, Eddie got his department’s approval for out-of-state travel expenses.

  After landing in Phoenix, he planned to pick up a rental car and driving the three hours north on Interstate 17 to Flagstaff—home of NAU, Northern Arizona University.

  Rob would have happily paid his expenses to go along, but, faced with putting another week’s editions on press, he waited anxiously for Eddie’s call.

  All day Friday, Rob had an edge in his voice.

  “Maybe you should head over to Smitty’s for an early end of the week happy hour,” Holly groused after Rob snapped at her one too many times over a missing photo or a typo.

  “You’re probably right. I could use a beer, but I’m skipping it this week. Eddie had to go out of town on some work thing. I’m going straight home after work.”

  “Why don’t you join me at the No Name for a drink?”

  As grumpy as he’d been all day, she was owed at least an end of the week cocktail. But then he remembered the rest of this weekend’s itinerary. He shook his head. “Thanks, Holly, but Karin and I are going to try to leave by noon tomorrow for an overnight at her folks’ place up in Calistoga. We’ve got errands to run before that, so we’ll have to get an early start tomorrow.”

  “Okay, suit yourself. Maybe I’ll get lucky and meet Mr. Right tonight.”

  That’s not too likely, Rob thought, considering that the same gang can be found at the No Name Bar just about every night of the year.

  “The first round is on me,” he said, as he handed her a ten-dollar bill.

  Holly snatched it up. “I should complain about your being grumpy more often,” she giggled as she went out the door.

  It was nearly five-thirty by the time Holly made the three-block walk up Bridgeway to her destination. She walked into the No Name and was unhappy to see the same old early evening crowd.

  As busy as it already was, Holly was lucky to find a seat at the bar. She caught the bartender’s attention—Alberto, a handsome thirty-something guy who worked behind the bar and made it a point to know all his customers.

  “Hangar 1 martini, two olives, one onion—right, Holly?”

  Holly gave Alberto a seductive wink. “I guess you know me, huh?”

  As she waited a few moments for the bartender to work his magic, her eye caught a familiar face she had difficulty placing. When Alberto put her drink down in front of her and asked with a warm smile if she needed anything else, Holly said, “Yes I do. How about the name of that cute guy
over there, blue shirt, blond hair?”

  “That’s Chris Harding. He's a patrol officer with the Sausalito police.”

  She smiled. “Do you think I can get him to lock me up?”

  “I guess that depends on how badly you behave,” Alberto responded with a laugh and a wink as he hurried off to serve another customer.

  Holly absentmindedly stirred her martini. Where had she seen Hottie Harding before? Oh yes—she’d met him and Officer Steve Hansen at the reception after Bradley’s memorial service.

  Eventually, Holly caught Chris’s eye. They exchanged smiles and an air toast.

  A few minutes later, Chris walked over to her side of the bar and stuck out his hand.

  He had a firm but deliberately gentle grip. Holly liked his smile, along with the rest of him.

  “I feel sure we’ve met before,” Chris said.

  “Well, Sausalito is such a small town that—”

  “Wait a minute; I know where…It was at the reception after Warren Bradley’s service.” His smile faded. “That was a sad day, wasn’t it? He was such a talented guy. Not to mention a fantastic cook!”

  “Yes, he was one in a million.” Holly took it as a good sign that she didn’t have to remind him exactly where and when they first met.

  After a few minutes of small talk, Holly’s mating mind clicked in. It confirmed her initial interest. Chris was probably mid-thirties, which made him a little younger, or a little older, than her—check. He had great features: blond hair, blue eyes, handsome face, and adorable dimples on his cheeks, which appeared each time he smiled—double check. And clearly, he had an impressive build underneath that soft blue cotton shirt he was wearing.

  Yep, right age, good job, great body, and an adorable smile.

  He was Holly's boyfriend trifecta.