by Susan Dunlap
“He’s not friendly. He takes a long time to know.” The hoarse quality had returned to her voice. How much longer could she hold up?
“What about the staff? The cook?”
She lifted her cup and sipped slowly. “A lot goes on in a kitchen. People are thrown together so much; we’re always racing to get the food out. Everyone’s wired. It’s like the volume’s all the way up all the time. Every attraction is great romance, every cooling of affection is tragedy. But Frank was different. He washed his dishes and kept his back to the melodrama.”
“Mrs. Biekma, he’s running from something. He’s making himself look real bad. If we have to spend days looking for him, it’ll be worse. Where would he hide?”
She stared down into the cup.
“When they’re desperate, people do dangerous things, things that are harmful to themselves. You would be a friend to Frank by helping us find him. You said yourself that he couldn’t have killed Mitch. So there’s nothing to be gained by his hiding.”
Slowly, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”
But she had hesitated too long. I felt sure she had some idea. Yankowski had tossed me aside like a used junk-food bag—twice. I wasn’t about to leave him on the loose. “Mrs. Biekma, this is your husband’s murder we’re investigating. You do want his killer found, don’t you?”
She sighed. “Of course I do. But it’s not going to change anything. Mitch will still be dead. I’m so tired. I’ve got so much to do. I’ve got to talk to Adrienne. We’ll have to close for a few days. There are notices to get out, reservations to cancel, orders to cancel so we’re not inundated with rotting vegetables. So much to do.”
Her eyes were losing their focus. She wasn’t one of the ones who would suddenly become hysterical; she would just drift further and further from the topic. I’d get only a few more answers. “Who would want to kill your husband?”
“I don’t know. The inspector asked me that. I don’t know.” She clutched the cup. “Things were just beginning to click for Mitch. He was so excited about his talk show shots. He loved that. And he was good. Have you seen him?”
“Yes. He was a natural. I heard they were considering him for a guest host on ‘San Francisco Mid Day.’ ”
She nodded slowly. “That sounds a little more definite than it was. They did have researchers out here. But what the producers actually said was that Mitch needed a little more exposure to prove himself, to prove to them he could continue to draw an audience. Then they’d consider him. To Mitch it was definite, but, well, you know how those things are.” Her breath caught. She pressed her lips together. “It’s not fair that he should die. Why him? Why now?”
I shrugged. I’d heard those questions too often. There was no answer. Laura closed her eyes and breathed in—long, calming breaths. When she opened her eyes I asked, “What about the cook, Adrienne? She and Mitch didn’t get along any too well, did they?”
“Sure, Mitch and Adrienne fought. They both needed to be in charge. You can’t order a great chef around, and Adrienne is a genius.”
“Is she above anyone you could have gotten to replace her?”
“Oh yes.”
“Did Mitch think so?”
“Well …”
“Then if he wanted someone he could have more control over and he thought there were other cooks of her caliber around, why didn’t he replace her?”
She lifted the cup and seemed surprised to find it empty.”Well, it was financial. It takes a lot of money to open a restaurant, any restaurant. No less than a hundred thousand dollars. Paradise, with the building, and the garden, well, it ran a lot more than that. My salary was our biggest ongoing asset. Even with a loan from my father, we didn’t have enough. So Adrienne owns a third.”
“Of the restaurant and the building?”
“No, just the restaurant.”
“Isn’t that giving her a lot of power?”
“There was no way to avoid it. In the beginning, we thought we’d have enough money. That was before he finished cooking school in France. We were just naive then. We never considered taking a partner. But when we realized we’d have to, dealing with Adrienne seemed much better than with a stranger, with someone we couldn’t be sure would understand what a really fine kitchen required.”
“Wasn’t Mitch the chef for a while?”
“Both of them were. It didn’t work out. Too much conflict, like I said.”
“Mrs. Biekma, this conflict, how strong was it?”
She laughed, shrilly, wavering on the edge of hysteria. “Adrienne might kill him, but she wouldn’t poison him in her own kitchen.”
CHAPTER 15
A PATROL OFFICER SAT at the desk outside Inspector Doyle’s office. “He’s waiting for you, Smith,” he said in a tone that suggested it would be tidy of me to take a box to catch my head.
I rapped perfunctorily on the glass door of the inspector’s office, looking through the window in the upper half. His head was tilted down, as if he were studying a microscopic clue poised on the edge of his desk. When I had first seen him his hair had been carrot red, but now, four years later, gray had muted it to unripe strawberry. His liver-splotched skin hung even more limply than usual, as if it were merely tossed over the flesh rather than being attached to it. Compared to him, Laura Biekma had looked ready for the Olympic Trials. Only his jaw showed life, and it was set in anger.
“I thought you’d be here an hour ago,” he growled.
“I was interviewing the widow. She could fall apart any minute,” I said quickly. Inspector Doyle’s tirades were legendary. His enraged voice had often been heard well down the hall, his face still red twenty minutes after his victim had slithered away. He was said to have chewed out two officers involved in a botched knifing investigation so thoroughly that they quit law enforcement altogether, one after nineteen years on the force. I didn’t believe that story, but my skepticism provided me little comfort.
“Sit down, Smith.”
I sat, careful not to give any sign of the pain that grabbed my back with each movement, or to twist enough to loose the hot, searing knife into my shoulder; I couldn’t disguise my reaction to that. I didn’t want to give him legitimate grounds to wonder about my health.
His gaze didn’t rest on me, and it didn’t change, but I suspected he had given me the once-over and made his assessment.
“Did you see the press outside, Smith?”
“I came around back.”
“Ah, well, I wish I could come around back and steer clear of that mob. The press conference isn’t for another hour. By then we’ll be renting a hall.”
I didn’t respond.
“And what is it I’ll be telling them then? My detective let a suspect, the chief suspect, wander off. I can tell them we’ve taken six cars off the streets, leaving our local burglars free to help themselves all over north Berkeley. And what have we turned up? Zip.”
I still didn’t reply. He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t already told myself. Losing Yankowski was no one’s fault but my own.
He leaned forward onto the heap of papers that covered his desk. “Holy Mother, Smith, I asked you if you were well enough to handle this, didn’t I? If you’d only told me you couldn’t—”
“I would have told you, if I’d felt—”
“The suspect escaped!”
“The guy was a giant! He tossed the rookie in the backyard aside like an empty sack.”
“Smith, you let the suspect escape twice!”
“I chased him. I caught up with him in the school yard.”
“And you lost him, again!”
“He threw a garbage can at me!”
“You should have been out of his range.”
“That can weighed over a hundred pounds, Inspector. They weigh them down so the kids don’t roll them all over the school yard. I was fifteen feet away from Yankowski. I didn’t figure I was dealing with Atlas.”
Doyle stared, face redder than his hair
, cheeks quivering. In the silence I realized we had both been shouting. I didn’t wait for him to continue. “I lost him, Inspector. No one’s angrier about it than me. But dammit, it wasn’t because I’m sick. Or”—I waited till he looked up—“because I’m a woman. Bubba Paris wouldn’t have stopped him!”
He stared at me, the loose flesh on his cheeks still pulsing, his breathing almost as labored as Yankowski’s had been. As always, his expression revealed nothing. I couldn’t tell whether he was convinced by my argument, surprised at its vehemence, or just taken aback by my invoking the name of the 49ers’ offensive tackle. Or, more likely, I had hit on the underlying issue of sex, the issue he wasn’t prepared to raise.
“Inspector, I know his identity, I’ve got the charge”—felonious assault, three counts, one for the rookie in the backyard and two for me—“and we’re in hot pursuit. I’ll get a Ramey warrant as soon as a judge is in this morning. Yankowski’s not going to knock me around and walk off free. You can count on that.”
Leaning back in his chair, he said, “All fine and good, Smith. What about Yankowski? Did Biekma’s wife give you any leads on where he’d go to hide?”
“She said she didn’t know. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say.”
“You think there was something between the Biekma woman and Yankowski?”
Considering Laura Biekma in that light, I wondered if rather than fighting exhaustion to answer my questions, she could have been drawing out her replies to keep me occupied, to keep me from Yankowski’s trail. “Each one of these people saw Laura as an ally. Rue Driscoll told me Laura understood the importance of her research. Laura made a fuss over Earth Man’s dinners. And Yankowski gave Laura a story about an ex-wife he’s supposed to be hiding out from. According to her, he wasn’t one to confide, but he confided in her. And he was plenty pissed off about Mitch Biekma.”
“More personal than a disgruntled employee?”
“Sounded like it.”
“So maybe Yankowski decided to take matters into his own hands, huh? Or maybe the wife did. What’s your assessment of her, Smith? You think she was playing these people?”
“I don’t know. The impression I get is that she was just balancing Mitch’s self-centeredness.”
“Still, she owns two-thirds of the restaurant now. And she lived right above the kitchen.”
“The thing is, Inspector, the poison was almost certainly in the horseradish. And anyone could have gotten to that.”
“Which leaves us nowhere. And it’s twenty-five to eight,” he said, fingering a sheet of paper on his desk. Quarter-to was Detectives’ Morning Meeting.
I didn’t move. “There’s another odd thing. Rue Driscoll, the woman who led the fight against Paradise’s later hours, says she got food poisoning there.”
“I don’t recall that in the news.”
“It was after the hearings.”
“After? How does she seem to you? You buy her story, Smith?”
I hesitated. “That part, yes. There’s no reason for her to make it up. Besides, that’s not the oddest thing. There’s been another food poisoning there.”
“Corroborating?” He dropped the paper and grabbed a pencil. “Who’s this?”
“Earth Man.”
“Mother of God, Smith, what is this, a circus? I’m trying to find some redeeming factors in this fiasco, and you’re giving me a crusader, a giant, and a crazy.”
I sighed. “I wish there were better facts to give you.”
He shook his head, and sighed. Fingering the paper, he looked blankly at it, then looked back at me. “I’m leaving you in charge, Smith, for now.”
I stared. I had misjudged the whole conference here. I’d thought we were assessing the case. But he was assessing me!
“But you’re going to get me something fast.”
“My in-box should be clear.”
“And Smith, you’re going to have to handle it with less help.”
“Inspector?”
“Murakawa. He may have a cracked rib.”
As I put my hand on the door handle, Inspector Doyle said, sotto voce, “It’s going to make them a great story.”
I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say. It was indeed going to make great reading in the afternoon editions.
“The city’s most flamboyant restaurant owner is impaled on his own brass flower,” he went on. “The suspect gets away, and instead of catching a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound fugitive, my detective crashes feet first into a patrol officer.”
I pulled the door toward me.
“They’re going to have one word for this.” His hands clutched the armrests.
“What?” I said, holding my breath.
“Keystone.”
CHAPTER 14
DETECTIVES’ MORNING MEETING STARTS at 7:45 promptly. I checked my in-box—the in-box I had so innocently thought would be empty—and my share of the “in custody”s from last night were waiting. Murder or not, the suspects in the holding cells had to be processed, and it was the four of us in Homicide-Felony Assault who did the processing. Monday mornings were the worst, when the whole weekend load was waiting, but today, there were only two “in custody”s. I picked up the sheets and began the tedious process of checking to make sure I had the right names, then getting personal file numbers, county booking numbers, arresting officer numbers, and case numbers. I looked over the paperwork in each folder. The ID technician’s reports were there. The arresting officers’ reports were complete, though one was handwritten and barely legible. There was a typed report from Lieutenant Davis, my watch commander when I had been on beat, in the case he had gone out on. That one had two reports, also typed, from officers called on assist. But in the other folder the assisting officer’s report was missing. “Damn.” I glanced at my watch: 7:40. I headed through the bull pen to the patrol sergeant’s desk.
He looked up, his brow wrinkling when he saw who it was. “Welcome back, Smith, if that doesn’t sound too sarcastic.” He made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a snort, as if unsure whether his reaction to my losing a suspect should be sympathy or pretense of ignorance. He then moved on to safer ground: “You get yourself all healed up in the Florida sun?”
“Yes. But it seems like a year ago now.” I pointed to his transfer tray. He nodded. And I riffled through. The report wasn’t there.
7:42. I checked the transfer tray for Report Review. It was half full. But luck had thrown me a morsel this time; my case was on top. Grabbing it, I headed back to my office, and shoved it in the folder. These two cases were simple assaults. I needed only to drop them off with the liaison officer. With felony assaults, we hand-carried them to the DA’s and explained the background information the standard phrases on the forms couldn’t relay. Did “serious disfigurement” mean a gash at the hairline that would be almost unnoticeable in a month or two, or did it refer to a slash across the face that could change the victim’s life? Had a perpetrator broken a victim’s cheekbone with only one punch, or had he aimed on smashing it to paste? Was the eighteen-year-old perp a true first offender, or did he have a long juvenile record? It always amazed me how so much paperwork, which took so much time to complete and required so many copies, could leave so many questions unanswered.
At 7:44, I slid into an empty seat at the conference table. Across the table was Grayson. What was he doing here? He wasn’t a detective. It wasn’t customary to have the scene supervisor report. A few seconds later, Clayton Jackson, one of the other homicide detectives, took the seat to my left, proffering a cup of coffee brewed by his son Pernell. Pernell and I had initiated a deal in the spring semester, when he had been dropped from the junior varsity swim team: I would coach him swimming; he would make me a thermos of coffee each morning. Between my accident and my convalescence here and in Florida, Pernell hadn’t benefited much. On the other hand, he hadn’t had to get up early to make coffee either. But now, the deal was back in full swing. Tuesday night he would be in t
he pool working on flip turns. Jackson rubbed his finger across my tanned arm and grinned. “Lookin’ good. Another couple of weeks and you’d be one of the family.”
“Couple of years is more like it!” Jackson was ebony black.
Howard made it to his chair just as the captain walked in. Howard grinned. I smiled. I hoped he had thought to bring some of the clothes I’d left with him. The turtleneck I had on, which I’d donned yesterday morning in Florida, was streaked with dirt and matted with sweat.
The usual items on the agenda—the hot car report, the “watch-for”s from Night Watch—went quickly. Most of Night Watch had been on the Yankowski search. Givens from Auto Theft gave a recap on the Walnut Square thief. “He, or she, steals a car three days a week, up in the hills. Some days it’s near the Oakland line, others it’s all the way over near El Cerrito. Old cars, new cars, stick shifts, automatics. Looks like he takes whatever’s available.”
“You mean what’s left unlocked.” It was Washington from Crimes Against Property. Unlocked doors drove him crazy.
“Or open windows. I figure he just cruises along till he finds his mark. There’s no consistency in his pickings. If we have to nab him in the hills, we’ll be looking till every car above sea level is parked at Walnut Square. That’s where he leaves them.”
“Dude must have better luck parking there than I do,” Jackson muttered.
“If s not so hard parking there if you’re willing to leave your car in a twenty-minute spot or a red zone.”
“No quarter in the meter, huh?” Jackson asked.
Givens shook his head. “Too smug. And why shouldn’t he be? By the time we get out there, he’s sitting on the bus to San Francisco.”
“But why Walnut Square?” Washington asked.
“Peet’s coffee,” came the chorus.
Givens nodded in disgust. “I can just see the smug bastard stealing a car, driving it down the hill, buying a cup of Garuda Blend, and a Chronicle, and waiting for the bus to the city.”