A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  She tried to thrust her elbows back, but I had her too tightly.

  In the yard Howard or Prem groaned.

  “Let go!” Adrienne yelled.

  I shoved her forward across the landing. “Get back inside.”

  “No!” She slammed her heel down on my instep. I yelped, and squeezed in on her ribs. She let out a grunt. I loosened my arms and squeezed sharply, harder. She groaned. Then I could feel her inhale, brace her feet. “Laura!” It came out a harsh, raspy cry.

  Laura raced down the steps.

  I shoved Adrienne forward. She looped her foot around my ankle. I stumbled, grabbed the railing, fell to my knees. Adrienne was on my back. I slammed my elbow up into her stomach. She gasped.

  A car door slammed.

  I pushed myself up, grabbed the stair railing, and jumped to the ground. Adrienne grabbed for my jacket. I hit her arms. She reached for the railing, missed. I jumped to one side as her shoulder hit the ground. She screamed in pain.

  The engine started. Loud, rough. The Biekmas’ Triumph. Where was Pereira? No time for that. “Stop!” I yelled as I ran across the yard, skirting Howard as he yanked Prem to his feet. “I’m going after her. Get me backup. And get Pereira on Adrienne.”

  A burst of exhaust fumes hit me as I raced through the break in the hedge to the sidewalk. Across the street, a light came on upstairs.

  The sportscar jolted forward, up the hill toward Spruce. I ran for the patrol car. It was facing the wrong way. I hung a U, and when I reached the corner she was two hundred yards ahead of me, going uphill on Spruce. I stepped hard on the accelerator. The car sprang forward, narrowing the gap. Spruce was relatively straight. I turned on the pulser light and floored the accelerator. Her sportscar was no match for the powerful patrol-car engine. It wouldn’t take me long to outrun her here.

  She must have realized that. At the first corner she veered left, brakes screeching.

  I turned on the siren, and pressed the accelerator harder, pushing for the last ounce of power before I had to brake for the turn. On those narrow hillside streets with their sudden cutbacks, my big engine would be useless. There the sportscar would have all the advantages.

  I braked, then hit the gas as I turned down into the dark, that familiar fear leaping in my stomach. A canopy of trees blocked out any lights. Without warning, the street twisted. I pulled hard left, barely missing a truck parked halfway across the narrow lane. The siren rent the dark night air. I pulled the wheel back, braced my feet to brake. My hands were sweaty against the wheel cover. My pulse pounded in my throat. There was nowhere to look away now. I stared ahead at the road.

  In the distance, I spotted the two red dots of Laura’s taillights. They disappeared; she had turned. I stepped harder on the gas. These hillside lanes snaked into each other unexpectedly. Laura knew them from visiting Adrienne. This had never been my beat; to me it was a maze.

  At the corner I turned sharply, the screech of the wheels louder than the siren. No sight of her. But nowhere else to go. I yanked the wheel left at the next corner, looping back. In the distance her brake lights flickered; she turned right. A drop of sweat fell in my eye. I shook my head sharply. Hitting the gas, I took the corner, barely missing a van parked too near. I caught a flash of lights as she made another right. She was almost out of sight. At the corner I yanked the wheel right.

  The block ahead was divided, our lane ten feet above the downhill one. I could see the red lights way ahead. I hit the gas, surging forward, steering the car next to the center divider, away from the eccentrically parked cars along the curb. The car bounced over the bumps and jolted into potholes.

  She slowed at the corner. I was closing the gap. She turned right onto the Arlington, another divided road, another straight one. I could catch her there. I would be able to free a hand to call the dispatcher. He could call the Kensington P.D. to assist.

  I pulled hard right and hit the gas. The siren strained for its high note. Laura was a hundred and fifty yards ahead now, heading for the block of shops and restaurants. At this rate, I would catch her on the far side of them.

  Laura was no fool. She’d see me closing the gap. There were two breaks in the divider at either end of the shopping block. On the far side of the street, halfway between those breaks, was a half-circle parking lot. Two winding hillside roads converged there. Once she got on either road, Laura would be gone.

  She passed the first divider break. Was I wrong? Would she keep on straight, up the Arlington? If I followed her and she hung a U at the second divider break, I’d lose her in the hillside cutbacks. To have any chance at stopping her, I’d have to cut through the first divider. If she went straight, I’d lose her. I had to make my choice before she committed herself.

  She was a hundred yards ahead now, halfway between the divider breaks. I slowed. I couldn’t signal her by turning too soon.

  Between the dividers the other lane dipped. Our lane was twelve feet above it, supported by a cement wall.

  She was almost at the second cut. Her taillights held steady; she wasn’t braking for a turn. I had to choose now. I pulled the wheel hard to the left, speeding across the downhill lane. Just before the parking lot, I slammed on the brakes and screeched to a stop two feet away from a light pole.

  And watched as Laura’s Triumph spun out in the narrow divider break. Tires screeching, the little car skidded onto the lawn of the building beside it, seemed to stop momentarily, then jerked back into the street. She’d overcompensated. The car hit the cement divider wall, bounced, jumped the curb, spun sharply, and died. The driver’s door sprang open.

  I grabbed the mike and called for an ambulance. Then, gun in hand, I ran for the wreckage.

  She could have been dead. She could have been covered with blood. She could have had broken bones and enough soft-tissue injuries to leave her black and blue. But by the time I got to the Triumph, she was shaking her head slowly, and reaching for her seat belt.

  She’d fastened her seat belt! Christ, she could be the centerpiece of the Highway Patrol’s buckle-up campaign. “Fasten Your Seat Belt Every Time You Drive, Especially in a High-Speed Chase! Safety Pays!”

  She unclasped the belt and moved her feet slowly around to the ground.

  “Don’t take the chance of moving,” I said. “The engine’s off, you’re okay there.”

  The Kensington fire department was less than half a mile away. Already their sirens cut through the cackle of my radio. When they got here the medics would check her out. If she could wait, I’d call the dispatcher and we’d roll our own ambulance to a Berkeley hospital. And we’d roll our own tow truck for the Triumph.

  Laura looked up. The pulser lights turned her face alternately brick red, then gray. Her fingers rattled against the door handle. She stared at them as if they were an anomaly of the automotive design, then looked away. “They didn’t know.”

  “Who?”

  “Adrienne and Ashoka. I want to be sure you realize that. I killed Mitch, just me. They didn’t know till tonight. They figured it out then.”

  “None of them had seen enough to know how Mitch would react, right? Only you knew how to make sure he swallowed all the poison.”

  She flinched at the word poison. “Yes,” she said softly. “They didn’t know. They didn’t help me. Only just now they tried to protect me, because they’re friends. It’s like that when you cook together—all or nothing. They didn’t plan to attack you; they just reacted. I want to be sure you understand that.”

  I shook my head. Laura really was Mrs. Nice. From memory I recited her rights.

  “You didn’t have to bother,” she said. “I killed him. Bastard! I gave up my dreams for him, for Paradise. I put everything into Paradise. Mitch never told me he was closing it. I didn’t know till I saw the boxes. Goddamn him. I deserve to go to jail. Not for killing him. For being stupid enough to put up with him all those years. He said I was essential to him; I wasn’t essential, I was just useful.” A tear hovered momentarily at the cor
ner of her eye, then plunged down her cheek. She didn’t seem to notice. “I could have been a good chiropractor; I could have healed people. I could have been a decent chef. And what am I? A killer.”

  The sirens shrieked through the suburban night. In a minute the ambulance would be here. In another, passing cars would stop, neighbors would peer out of windows, or hurry up the street. I had time for one question. I said to Laura, “Why did you use aconite?”

  “Because it’s like horseradish. Horseradish was the only thing I could be sure Mitch would eat.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I PULLED A BOTTLE of white Riesling from my refrigerator. Howard got the glasses.

  It was six o’clock Sunday morning. The aftermath had taken us hours. Laura Biekma was in the hospital. We had booked Adrienne Jenks and Ashoka Prem; they were still in holding cells, refusing to say anything. And there were more reporters around the station than there had been at the Reykjavik arms talks. As was too often the case, I felt not elated by a big collar but sad. Just as everyone else had, I liked Laura Biekma. I couldn’t bring myself to condone poisoning her husband, but I could understand what drove her to it.

  Howard must have been thinking the same thing. “It’s hard to picture Laura as a killer.”

  “Mitch took everything she had, then he tossed it aside. She had put her own ambition to be a chiropractor on hold, and by the time she could have afforded to go back to school, it was too late. So she decided to concentrate on Paradise, to enjoy being a good cook at a great restaurant. And then Mitch destroyed Paradise.”

  “Real charmer.” Howard uncorked the bottle. “Still, everyone at Paradise knew what he was like. Why did she put up with him all that time?”

  I shook my head. It was the question I had been asked after my divorce—why did you stay with him so long? The only time you talked was to argue. Everyone knew your marriage was doomed. Why couldn’t you see it? To Howard I said, “When you’re in a situation long enough, it takes on a sense of normality. It takes a shock to make you recognize what’s really going on. For Laura that shock was seeing those health equipment boxes.”

  Howard nodded slowly. I couldn’t tell whether he was recalling a similar experience or just trying to understand. It was a moment before he said, “But Jill, how could you be sure it was Laura who killed him?”

  “She was the only one who could have predicted Mitch’s reaction to Earth Man. Rue and Ashoka saw him go into a rage at her class when another student made a fool of him. They knew how he hated to be shown up. But they didn’t know that Yankowski had used Earth Man to set him up. They might have found it odd that Earth Man was being fed at Paradise, but they had no way of knowing why it was. Even Earth Man didn’t know that. Mitch ran into Earth Man in the street once and started screaming at him, but he could only guess why. Even if he’d been told, he would never have comprehended that he was the wrong kind of poor person for Mitch’s free meals.”

  “What about Yankowski?”

  “Yankowski had never seen Mitch go into a rage; he might have suspected Mitch would be angry if he saw Earth Man and was reminded of Yankowski’s little victory, but he couldn’t have guessed Mitch would fly into a rage, turn purple, and end up with his sinuses blocked. No one in the kitchen had seen Mitch react to Earth Man, because Laura made a point of having Earth Man come at eleven, an hour before Adrienne allowed Mitch in the kitchen.”

  Howard poured the wine, and stood, still holding the bottle. “I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, Jill, but from everyone’s description of her, it’s hard to picture Laura Biekma deciding on a death sentence, much less carrying it out. She was the peacemaker, right? The one they all depended on.”

  “But they counted on her because she could make decisions. They all thought of her making choices in their favor; what they forgot or never bothered to recognize was that those decisions often went against someone else. Rue was sure Laura would agree she needed quiet. If that meant that the owners of Paradise would lose money, she didn’t think about it. These people saw in Laura what they wanted to see. They forgot that she was the one who canceled orders, who made the decision to fire people. She handled complaints at the water company. She was used to dealing with bad situations and making decisions.”

  “Still, it’s a shame.”

  I nodded.

  “Laura will get a lot of sympathy. She’ll make an appealing defendant. The DA’s going to be on your back till her trial’s over. I’ll tell you, Jill, no matter how clear the evidence is, that’s one prosecution I wouldn’t touch.”

  “Me either. But knowing that is kind of a relief.” I smiled, not just at relief for Laura, but at my own. Laura had been in the ambulance before it occurred to me that I had driven down the hill. But this time there had been no pavement to contemplate, no music to listen to; there had been only the driving. No way to avoid it.

  When I stopped I was covered with sweat, as usual, but I wasn’t shaking as I had been when I drove down Marin those three times. And I knew then that the next time I drove downhill I would be sweating, I would be afraid, but it wouldn’t be quite so bad. I had faced the fear full on. I wouldn’t be afraid of being afraid again. It might be months before I drove downhill calmly, but I would do it.

  “You want anything to eat?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then shook his head, ordinarily a very un-Howardian response.

  I poured the wine and handed him a glass. He let his fingers rest on mine a moment longer than necessary.

  “What did Doyle say?” he asked. “Did he redeem himself with you?”

  “He didn’t think I was too weak to make it in by quarter to eight tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, Jill, it’s tough to be tough.” Howard grinned and held his glass up to toast that thought. “That all he said?”

  “Oh, no.” I put the bottle down.

  “Well?”

  “ ‘Smith,’ he said, ‘a chase like that, you could have been killed.’ ”

  Howard nodded. He was still wearing that striped rugby shirt. It hung loosely off his sinewy shoulders. He had a slender, well-defined chest.

  “Doyle?” he prompted.

  “Oh.” I took a sip of wine. “Well. He said I could have been killed. And if I had been, we’d have no case because I haven’t done the paperwork.”

  Howard laughed.

  I drank some of the wine.

  He leaned back against the counter.

  Suddenly, I was aware of the silence, a silence unlike any of those in the four years we had been friends. The Tibetan Buddhists talk about pockets in time. I doubted this was exactly what they meant. Maybe this wasn’t a pocket, but time was moving so slowly it was as if I could hear each second tick off. I put down my glass. Howard reached behind him, fumbled for the edge of the counter, and slid his glass on the counter. Our hands met, and for what seemed a very long time I felt the warmth of his flesh, the thick mounds at the base of his fingers, the hollow of his palm, the tension throbbing right below the skin. I reached out between those long thin fingers, and felt the pressure and the restraint as they clasped in around my hand.

  Together we leaned forward, letting the touch of our bodies come slowly, savoring each new sensation. It was Sunday; we had the whole day.

  Acknowledgements

  With special thanks to Inspector Stan Muller of the Berkeley Homicide Detail and Officer Karan Alveraz of the Albany Police Department for their help and patience in answering my questions.

  A Biography of Susan Dunlap

  Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

  Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally t
o Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

  One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

  After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

  Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

  In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.

  Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”

  Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.

  In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”