A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  “But the board of adjustments did decide against you.”

  “Influence, pure and simple. Wining and dining. Mitchell knew the mayor; he had contributed to his campaign. Mitchell wasn’t about to lose.”

  “Because he needed the extra revenue?”

  She shook her head. “It was more than that. Mitchell hated to be beaten. He was like a child, a brat. He’d go into a rage and turn purple. I saw him do that when another student made a fool of him. It only happened once, thank goodness, and that was before the rest of the students arrived for class. There were only two more classes that semester, and he and Laura skipped them both. Laura told me later that if he had seen the young man again, he would have had the same extreme reaction. But by the beginning of the next semester it had all been forgotten, which was certainly good. I couldn’t have that kind of behavior in my seminars.”

  “Mitch was your student?”

  “Two semesters. I should have remembered Mitchell’s childishness when I went to the hearings. I shouldn’t have expected fairness. I should have been prepared for Mitch using every bit of influence he could. He knew how to work the media. He had friends with money. It’s the same old story.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t expect it to happen in Berkeley.”

  “And it made you angry,” I said.

  “Not foolhardy enough to kill him, if that’s what you’re leading up to.”

  It was. “Without Mitchell Biekma, there’d be no influence.”

  Wagging her finger at me, she said, “If I’d killed him, I would have done it before the hearings, not after. It won’t do me any good now.”

  Outside I could see Parker’s light moving back and forth against the fence in the neighboring yard. I glanced around the room, trying to get the feel of it, to understand this woman who had swallowed her surprising defeat here. On the desk, she had cleared spaces every three or four feet, but the books and papers had impinged on most of them. It was the desk of an obsessive; it was not the desk of a woman who would give up a righteous cause when one board turned her down. “Why didn’t you appeal?”

  She leaned back against the chair. She half closed her eyes momentarily, as I’d seen teachers do when choosing a strategy. “I was too sick,” she said. “Laura and Mitch invited me for dinner over there. To make up, they said. I was poisoned.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “YOU WERE POISONED AT Paradise!” I exclaimed to the still extant Rue Driscoll. “How?”

  “Food poisoning. I don’t think they intended to kill me. But I was nauseous for thirty-six hours. I couldn’t leave the house. I regurgitated six times, and I haven’t done that in fifty years.”

  I tried to recall a newspaper evaluation of Rue Driscoll’s mental state. Had her obsession with Mitchell Biekma led to delusions? Or could this bizarre accusation have some basis? “And that was after the board decision? Were you planning to appeal?”

  She shrugged. “I hadn’t considered it yet. I was astounded by the decision. The probabilities had been so clearly in my favor. … Foolish as it sounds, I hadn’t given thought to proceeding if the board’s decision came down against me. In any case, it was only three days after the last hearing that Laura invited me to dinner.”

  I nodded, trying to conceal my surprise.

  I mustn’t have been entirely successful, for Rue Driscoll said, “My reaction was the same as yours. I should have honored it. But you can’t suspect Laura of anything evil, she’s just too fine a person. She was my best student, so quick, so interested, willing to do the research to back up her theories. Laura insisted the invitation was for a reconciliation dinner. She said all the things nice people say in those circumstances, that we’d been friends too long for this to come between us permanently, that they would do whatever they could to minimize the noise, that they never intended to disturb me, that they appreciated me finding them the house the restaurant’s in, and—”

  “You found them this house? You’d better backtrack to the beginning. Did you first meet the Biekmas in one of your classes?”

  “They were in my last seminars on Virginia.”

  “The state?”

  She stared at me in amazement. Then waving a hand at the desk and the bookshelves, she said, “Virginia Woolf, young lady. I taught all the Woolf courses. Apparently, you did not matriculate from the University of California at Berkeley.”

  I hadn’t. My undergraduate days had been in Virginia, the state. I could have told her that my ex-husband had been a graduate student in the English department at Cal, but I didn’t. “When, exactly, was this seminar?”

  “Six years ago.”

  “Who was in it?”

  “Mitchell, Laura, Ashoka Prem, Marilyn Winters, Dana Arndt, Don Ellis, Jivan Mehra, a young man from Bombay, and Noriko Yamamoto from Kobe.”

  “Isn’t that a rather small number for a seminar?”

  “It was the second semester.”

  “How does the seminar connect with your finding them the house for Paradise?”

  She hesitated, and for a moment I thought she was going to say they asked her to keep an eye out. Shifting in her chair, she said, “The seminar met here. Mitch and Laura told me they were looking for a place to live and work. They didn’t mention a restaurant or I would never have dreamed of putting them next to me. I have my work to consider. I need uninterrupted quiet. But Mitch and Laura should have been perfect neighbors. Mitch was a full-time student. Laura was taking two classes to finish up. She had taken a job handling customer complaints at the water company until Mitch found work.”

  “Then what were their plans?”

  Rue sighed deeply, the sigh of one who has considered a situation too many times and been stymied every one of them. But the effect of that sigh was more mental than physical. Her back remained erect, her shoulders didn’t slump any more than they already had (which was considerable); only her face seemed to slacken, and that in dismay rather than relaxation. “When Mitch got his degree it was to be Laura’s turn. She would go to chiropractic school. That was years ago, you understand, before every corner in town boasted two chiropractors. I have friends with back problems—not serious like mine, of course—who have never paid to see a chiropractor. They just check the ads and go for the free visit the new ones offer. They’ve done it for years.”

  “So Laura Biekma planned to become a chiropractor,” I said, herding her back to the topic. “And that affected your finding them the house.”

  “They wanted a place where they could live upstairs and use the ground floor for her office. It needed to be on a main street, in a good neighborhood, and not be too expensive. At the time, the house fitted all three criteria.”

  “Did they spot it on their way to your class?”

  “Yes. And they knew right away it was what they wanted.”

  I nodded, silently noting that Rue Driscoll had taken great credit for this boon of circumstance.

  As if reading my mind, she raised a forefinger. “They wouldn’t have gotten it without me. The old man who was selling it had lived there twenty-three years. We were good friends. He had other offers, but I convinced him to sell to Mitch and Laura, even though it meant carrying a bigger loan. He wouldn’t have done it for anyone but me.”

  “Surely Mitch and Laura”—I was beginning to think of the Biekmas as Mitch and Laura—“realized that.”

  “Of course. Then, they had no plans to disrupt my work. Then, I didn’t have the same kind of work to disrupt. And for years they didn’t make a sound. Mitch and Laura bought the house, and rented the upstairs where they live now.”

  I was tempted to bring the interrogation back to the question of why she thought she had been poisoned, but I decided to let her follow this train a bit longer. I would have to know about the Biekma’s background anyway. “What happened after your seminar ended?”

  “They all graduated. Noriko went to graduate school at Columbia. She was a bright girl. She wrote an incisive paper on anti-Semitism and its effects on Virginia�
�s work. Dana left for some monastery outside Katmandu. I think she was planning to hike up there from Calcutta. Jivan went back to Bombay. He was applying to graduate school, but I don’t believe he was accepted, at least not then. His family had money; he could wait a year. And he wasn’t a dedicated student. Sometimes I thought he just came for the food.”

  “The food?” Maybe I was letting this go too far afield.

  “They brought food. You see, we’d been together the whole year. And during the first semester the eight of them had discovered their common interest in cooking. Jivan’s father owned a restaurant in Bombay, quite a famous one, I believe. Noriko was intrigued by Occidental food, and at the time, I thought the others just liked to eat. Whatever their initial interest, they got into the habit of bringing desserts, or hors d’oeuvres, or snacks—not pretzels, but elaborate cooked things like individual pizzas with salmon and sun-dried tomatoes. Exquisite things. I’ll tell you, if the topic had been anything less fascinating than Virginia, the focus of the class would have altered.”

  “So they were already interested in cooking.”

  She jerked forward. “Don’t you tell me I should have known, young lady. I’ve already heard that from Mitchell. Smug as could be, he was. Laura understood the importance of my work. She was very accommodating. She insisted they’d do everything possible when they opened the restaurant so I wouldn’t be disturbed, that I would be welcome to have free meals there anytime. But Mitch, he just said I should have known.” Bracing on the arms of her chair, she lifted up an inch, leaned forward, and lowered herself down, presumably settling on a more acceptable part of her anatomy. “I pointed out the fallacy in that argument. How could I have known? They didn’t know then. Even when Mitch went off to France, to cooking classes, they didn’t tell me they planned to open their own restaurant. I thought Mitch was just going to visit Jivan and Ashoka. I didn’t realize till he’d been there for six months that he was enrolled in classes too. And even when he got back, it was three years before he opened here. How could I have known?” she insisted in a voice that made me sure she secretly suspected Mitch was right—she should have known.

  “So Paradise opened,” I prompted.

  She shook her head. Gray hairs that the clasp had bitten through spun like kite tails. “And since that point I haven’t gotten a decent day’s work done.”

  “Mitch’s is only open for dinner. Couldn’t you work during the day?”

  “They serve dinner after six o’clock. They get deliveries all day long. The trucks park on Josephine and drivers wheel their carts down the alley, cloppety-clop. Sometimes they come two at a time, and they yell to each other. Or they yell to Adrienne, the cook, to open the door. Some of them even yell to me when they pass. Think they’re being friendly,” she muttered in exasperation. “The garbagemen come every day, at the crack of dawn. There’s no way they can be quiet. And that’s not even counting the customers themselves.”

  “I can understand—”

  “Understand nothing! Tell that to scholars fifty years from now. Which will be more important, their half-drunken cavorting, or Virginia Woolf’s Berkeley letters?”

  “This Berkeley?” I asked in amazement. I was hardly a scholar; indeed, for two years after my divorce from an aspiring English professor, I hadn’t read anything more intellectual than the L. L. Bean catalogue. But there had been a time before that when I’d read Virginia Woolf, and a time since when I’d picked up the Quentin Bell biography. And even from that bit, I knew Woolf had never set foot in the United States. “Who was she corresponding with here?”

  “A woman named Florence Crocker. Now before you say anything, I’ll tell you that I know these letters may be apocryphal, indeed probably are apocryphal. Nothing in her published letters or diaries mentions Florence Crocker. Nothing suggests she had an acquaintance here, or any interest in acquiring one.”

  “Then how—”

  “According to Florence Crocker’s grandson, she met Woolf when she was in London in nineteen thirty-nine, just before the war broke out. They corresponded for the next two years, until Virginia’s suicide—that is, according to the grandson,” she added. “I know it’s a long shot. It’s one chance in a hundred, or a thousand, or more. But suppose the letters are not a fraud. Can you imagine what a boon they would be, particularly since they cover that period when she was working on Pointz Hall? It’s too important to let go without proper investigation.”

  I knew enough about the competitive world of professors to realize that even after retirement, the possibility of making a mark in their field would be more than many could resist.

  “It’s very painstaking, precise work, not work you can do half-asleep,” she said. “It was bad enough when the customers left at ten. You know, young lady, it’s not good for the body to be fed that late. The blood shouldn’t still be in the stomach with the digestive juices when you lie down to sleep. Very unhealthy.”

  Choosing to ignore that—“unhealthy” eating habits were not a topic I wanted to consider—I said, “What I don’t understand, Ms. Driscoll, is this. You got food poisoning in Paradise. Did you go to a doctor?”

  “Yes, he confirmed it was food poisoning.”

  “So you had proof?”

  “Oh, yes. I am a scholar, young lady. I don’t make statements without data to support them.”

  “So, you could have taken action against the Biekmas. As the owners of Paradise they’d be liable. It would have given you a position from which to negotiate, to get some concessions, maybe even an earlier closing. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “I probably should have. But Laura came over. She was so apologetic. She really felt terrible. She’s such a sweet girl. They’re all in love with her over there, you know. And she had put so much into the restaurant. It was just beginning to make a profit. She was just starting to work in the kitchen—training, she said. She realized she had a talent for cooking too. She decided to focus on that. It was too late to be a chiropractor, she said, but she could be a cook, a fine cook. I understood that. It was to her, what Virginia’s letters were to me. I couldn’t ruin Laura. So I let it drop.”

  I sat, letting the silence lengthen. Despite the electric heater aimed at Rue’s back, the room was cold. It was definitely a heat-for-one setup. I recalled the single-mindedness with which my ex-husband had pursued his Yeats studies. What would it have taken for him to let them go? More than his attachment to me. Certainly more than one to a friendly neighbor. “I don’t buy that, Ms. Driscoll. You wouldn’t sacrifice your work that easily.”

  She glanced around at the papers strewn on the long desk, as if pondering a scholarly spring-cleaning. “You’re free to draw your own conclusions.”

  “Of course,” I said firmly. “But that’s not the end of it. Failing to cooperate in a murder investigation is a serious offense.”

  She jerked forward. “Are you threatening me, young lady?”

  “I’m telling you that I will get to the truth. If you don’t cooperate, it will take me longer. I will have to come back here again and again”—I paused—“or have you come to the station.”

  The small lines around her eyes tightened till they seemed ready to squash the eyeballs back into their sockets. “All right,” she said. “It wasn’t entirely for Laura, though I was quite honest with you in saying I am fond of her. We spent many pleasant afternoons discussing Virginia and her work. It was Laura whom I first told about the Berkeley letters. She was almost as thrilled as I.”

  “But that wasn’t the reason,” I prodded.

  “No. Look, the letters aren’t scholarly; they’re chatty reminiscences and observations. But the work of authenticating them is exhausting. It could take me years, years I may not have. I haven’t the resources to hire the caliber of assistants I need. The great Woolf mania has faded. If they’re authentic, the letters would be published by a scholarly house; anything connected with Virginia would be. But they would be presented as a small addendum to the great works of schol
arship. The more commercial publishers who put out the popular works wouldn’t find these letters worth their investment. And even if they were published, they wouldn’t get the publicity they deserved. Not unless …”

  I began to see. “Unless the author creates some interest in them herself.”

  She nodded, her lips pressed tensely. Even the stray hairs seemed to move reluctantly.

  “And nothing increases interest like publicity. Did Mitch offer you his TV connections or his publishing ones?”

  The doorbell rang. I held Rue with my gaze. “Which?” I demanded.

  “Both,” she said, pushing herself up, clearly relieved to escape this distasteful topic.

  I followed her to the door. She pulled it open to reveal Lopez.

  “It’s the sergeant,” he said. “He says he’s had Earth Man in the dining room as long as he’s going to. He says it’s too cold with the windows open, but it stinks too much with them closed. And if you plan to talk to Earth Man here, you’d better … well ...”