Add a Pinch of Murder

by Joanne Pence

  “Today we’re going to make a no-knead ciabatta bread. It’s one of the easiest bread recipes I’ve ever used. You’ll love it! Now, I’m going to make a huge family-size loaf. Remember you can always cut the recipe in half if you’d like.”

  She put a Mason jar on the cart, plus an open sack of flour, a bowl, and a mixing cup. “In this recipe, you can use yeast or a sourdough starter. Being from San Francisco, I love sourdough bread, so that’s what we’re going to make.”

  She lifted the Mason jar. The inside was half-filled with a beige paste. She held it up. “It’s this, the sourdough starter, that gives the bread its unique taste. What is a starter, you might ask? Well, it’s actually nothing but flour that has begun to ferment. You add a little water, and then let mold and bacteria and fungus and all those weird things that are floating around in the air we breathe every day in this city—along with our San Francisco fog—settle onto it.”

  She unscrewed the lid and lifted it from the jar. “Mmm. You can smell the sour.” She held it near the camera for a close-up.

  Stan clamped his hand over his mouth, his gag reflex activated by the pungent aroma.

  She scowled fiercely at him, but as soon as she realized how bad that must look on the videocast, she stopped and forced a smile. “Some people liken the smell to dirty socks. But what do they know? Anyway, what I love about this recipe is that you don’t have to first use the starter to form into what’s called a sponge, or more properly, a poolish. Not foolish, but pooooo-lish. Instead, you work directly with the starter.” Suddenly, the horrifying idea that she might have overemphasized the “poo” in poolish stuck.

  Trying to tell herself she was being overly anxious about all this, she again stuck the sourdough starter near the camera for a close-up. Stan looked like it was all he could do to choke back a cough. He covered both nose and mouth, and backed up to the wall.

  She did her best to ignore him. “I should mention that if you do decide to buy or make yourself some sourdough starter, you have to feed it to keep it alive. Remember, I said it’s filled with living organisms to make it ferment, and anything living has to be fed. After all, you don’t want it to starve to death, do you? Ha, ha!”

  Stan, she noticed, wasn’t laughing. Not even smiling. Now, he was green.

  She tried not to roll her eyes. “Okay, on with the recipe. Into a large bowl, you put a little starter, a couple of tablespoons, or if you prefer, a quarter teaspoon of active dry yeast. Then you add three and a half cups of bread flour.” She began to add the flour. By the third cup, the bowl was fairly full, so when the flour hit, it caused a little puff into the air. By the last half cup, the little puff turned into a cloud of flour. As surreptitiously as she could, she waved the flour-cloud away like a bothersome fly.

  “Add warm, not hot, water and salt, and then stir it together. Then let it sit overnight.”

  She shoved the bowl she’d been using off to the side and reached for another sitting on a nearby counter. Once more, she nearly tripped over that damned light stand cord.

  She angled the second bowl toward the camera. It was filled with bubbling, yeasty dough. “See how puffy and bubbly it is. Now, you flour your banneton thoroughly and—”

  Stan was looking at the little basket she used to shape the bread and raising his hands in the air as if to say “What?”

  She stared at him a long moment, then she got the message. “Oh, a banneton. Yes, it’s a little bamboo basket used for shaping bread dough.” She held it up. “After dusting it with flour, put the dough into it”—she scooped the bubbling dough out of the bowl and plopped it into the banneton—“and let it rise a couple of hours.”

  She pointed to her oven. “In the meantime, preheat the oven to four-hundred ninety-five degrees. Who knew an oven could get that hot?” She opened the oven door to show a pizza stone sitting on the bottom rung. “I always use a baking stone when I’m making bread.”

  She shut the oven door again. “Now, once the oven is hot enough, you put some parchment paper on the cookie sheet or pizza peel—the giant spatulas used to put pizza into an oven. Heaven only knows why they’re called peels. Anyway, the next step is simplicity itself. You turn the banneton upside down to let the dough fall out of it and onto the parchment paper, then slide both dough and paper onto the baking stone, throw some ice cubes into the oven to create steam, and bake.”

  She put some ice cubes from her freezer into a cup. “That’s right. I said throw ice cubes into your oven. It causes steam which helps make a beautiful crust. You’ll see how it works. But you’ve got to act quickly.”

  She put parchment paper onto a cookie sheet, and turned the banneton upside down on it. When she lifted the banneton, the dough remained stuck inside it. She shook the banneton. The dough didn’t budge.

  She smiled at the camera, then used a knife all around the edges of the banneton. Upside down it went, and when she lifted it, the dough was still stuck. She shook really, really hard this time, but the dough still didn’t move, much in the manner of setting concrete.

  She slid her fingers between the banneton and the dough and tried again. This time, nearly all the dough came out of the banneton onto the parchment paper, except for one strand which stayed firmly stuck to the inside of the basket. As she pulled the banneton away, the strand of dough became longer and longer until it finally snapped apart like an overstressed rubber band.

  She took the long strand of dough and smacked it onto the top of the bread dough, making a strange little clump. She then took a razor blade and made three crosswise slits on the top of the bread, “to allow it to expand when cooking.”

  Finally, again remembering to smile at the camera, she said, “Isn’t this fun?”

  She put on oven mitts, opened the oven door, slid the parchment paper with the dough on it into the oven, then took her cup of ice cubes which, by now, had begun to melt, and tossed them into the bottom of her oven. Immediately, a rush a hot steam poured out of the oven.

  Angie jumped back, away from the scalding spray. As she did, her leg caught the light stand cord, and she lost her balance. Arms wheeling, she crashed backward into the cart. The cart shot away as she landed in a sitting position on the kitchen floor. Unlady-like words were now being recorded.

  The cart kept going, smashing into the tripod and upending it. The video camera popped off the tripod and flew into the air. Stan went airborne to save it. As his feet left the floor, the cart careened into him, causing him to nearly drop the camera as, arms flailing, he whacked the sack of bread flour still teetering on the self-driving cart. The open sack toppled over and flour shot out of it, straight off the cart, and onto the fallen Angie.

  Stan laid on the floor clutching the camera after his acrobatics, muttering about being pained, strained, sprained, and floured.

  Angie slowly stood, fuming, brushing nearly five pounds of flour off her hair, chef’s cap, shoulders, arms, and legs, and then reached for the an already baked loaf of bread—golden brown, crusty, and clumpless. Looking somewhat ghostly, she lifted the bread and held it toward the spot where the camera once stood and began speaking. “This is what you’ll end up with by following this very simple recipe. Be sure to tune in next time for more recipes from Angie’s kitchen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Denny White, one of the men who attacked Rico, lived in a motel. Across the street from it, a grocery store had a security camera in its parking lot that caught the motel’s entrance. Fortunately, it was an old system and the manager kept a stash of video tapes. It took about a month before any were recorded over.

  Paavo took a week’s worth of tapes and went through them looking for any lead as to White’s movements. He caught White buying beer, going to his room at night, leaving in the afternoon, but nothing of particular interest or note until three days earlier. At that point, who should appear going into White’s room but Ted Redmund, dressed the same as he was when found stabbed to death in the bushes near Angie’s apartment.

&nbs
p; Shortly thereafter, the two of them left together.

  Paavo sat back in his chair to ponder this surprising turn of events. Up to this point there had been no hint of a connection between his two cases.

  But now, since Redmund was connected to the men who attacked Rico, it no longer seemed to be a “coincidence” that he had been found near Angie’s apartment, particularly since someone knew where she lived. Someone had not only stuffed a note in her mailbox, but delivered a dead fish to her door.

  Angie represented no danger to anyone, so why was someone going after her? It seemed someone had been trying to scare her away from Madrigal and the mysteries around her. But Redmund was a hired assassin—an assassin who had been killed before the goldfish was delivered to Angie.

  Why? What was the connection? It didn’t make sense to him.

  He pulled out cell phone records from Ted Redmund’s phone and then records from the three men who were involved in Rico’s attack: Denny White, Chris Davis, and potentially, Harlan Yarborough.

  White and Davis most likely used burner phones, but the other two, Redmund and Yarborough, didn’t. Tracking the latter phones, Paavo found an unlisted phone number used in calls to Yarborough as well as to Redmund. And the last call took place thirty minutes before Redmund showed up in the security footage at White’s motel room.

  As Paavo studied the video of the two men side-by-side leaving the motel, he realized Redmund didn’t have the tough demeanor or swagger that White did. He held himself very stiff, almost like a person with back problems. Paavo remembered seeing someone else walking that way recently.

  With that thought, he went back to the video tapes of the gala reception. After about thirty minutes, a newcomer entered the reception—a well-dressed, clean-shaven Ted Redmund. He was wearing a tuxedo and must have had his gray hair permed or curled because it was quite fluffy and curly around his head rather than the long, scraggly, greasy look it normally had.

  He watched Redmund walk stiffly across the room, getting champagne and hors d’oeuvres as he went. He had finished his second glass of champagne when he approached Kevin Blithe. The two shook hands and then stood around and talked a while. They again shook hands as Blithe walked away. A little while after that Kevin sipped his champagne and within minutes was dead.

  Paavo didn’t see Redmund slip anything into Blithe’s drink, but because of the way they stood and moved at times their backs were to the camera. Also, Redmund stood on Blithe’s left side and Blithe’s glass was in his left hand. Redmund could have easily dropped cyanide into the glass while Blithe shook hands with someone else or was otherwise distracted.

  The videotape didn’t have definitive proof, but one easy explanation for all Paavo had found was that Yarborough had asked White to find a hired killer to get rid of Kevin Blithe. Ted Redmund was the man hired to do it.

  And now, Redmund was dead.

  Paavo had a major problem, however. He had no proof, and he had no a motive, just a load of circumstantial evidence.

  o0o

  “Farlee is dead after all,” Paavo said to Angie that night in her apartment. “I wonder if her plans went wrong or if someone killed her on purpose.”

  Angie had spent most of the afternoon washing the flour off her kitchen, herself, and out of her hair. She did try sweeping up most of it and was glad she’d been able to because as soon as she added water, the flour-water mixture made paste. Warm, sticky paste. It required many sudsings to wash away. The flour in her hair was especially hard to try to get rid of.

  As Paavo spoke, she noticed that some of the flour had wafted into the dining area and gave her dining room table a dusty sheen. More to clean. But his words slowly worked their way past her floury haze and sunk in. “Someone killed her? You’re sure?”

  “All I know for sure is that your hunch about her attempting to run off was right. She, or someone, paid Manny Carville to pick her up on his fishing boat when she jumped off her husband’s yacht. He was leaned on by the Santa Barbara Police now that we know Farlee Cambry is dead. They told him he was a suspect in her murder, so he not only talked, he sang at that. He said he was contacted by phone by a man who told him he knew he needed some money and offered fifty grand to use his fishing boat for a strictly legal but secretive purpose. The man told him he would be helping a woman escape from her rich, abusive husband. He was given half the money just for agreeing to help and the other half when he delivered the woman safely to Ensenada. The man swore nothing illegal was necessary except to hide the woman from authorities. The fisherman agreed. He was given the money, got a permit to enter Mexican waters in case the Mexican Navy picked him up as it patrolled, and then he waited for the right night to pick up the woman.

  “At two a.m., as directed, a woman climbed down from the yacht into his rowboat and he quietly rowed her to his fishing boat. She spent the next day hiding on his boat while he talked to the local police, saying he saw and heard nothing. That night, they took off for Ensenada. For this, he was paid. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He swore Farlee was alive and well when he left her in Ensenada.”

  “After she arrived at Ensenada,” Angie said, “did you learn what she did?”

  “No idea, except that she ended up dead,” Paavo said.

  “A man helped her …” Angie murmured. “There’s only one person, from all we’ve heard, that she’d trust and might be involved in a plan like this. Harlan Yarborough.”

  Paavo nodded. “True. And now, he’s here and she isn’t.”

  Angie frowned. “That doesn’t say much for Farlee’s taste in men, does it?”

  “I’ll see if I can track Yarborough’s movements during that time,” Paavo said. “So far, we’ve got a lot pointing in his direction except proof.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Angie was thrilled to receive a call from Clyde the contractor the next morning saying he and his crew would be out to the Sea Cliff house that afternoon. She decided to get over there before he did to make sure everything went well.

  Besides that, she didn’t want to stay home and realize that her latest idea, a series of videocasts, might not be as easy to pull off as she had assumed. That morning, she’d looked at the recording to see what her debut at video demos was like before the disaster struck. She learned they didn’t exist.

  She hated the way she looked. The chef’s hat and apron made her look like an Italian version of the Pillsbury dough boy, and her voice was wretched. She had always thought her tone was low and melodious. On the recording, it came across as too high and girly. Where had that come from? Nerves?

  All in all, going to her new house and talking to ghosts—or to herself—whichever it turned out to be, was a much happier pursuit than staying in her apartment lamenting her non-starter of a career that had gone off in a cloud of flour.

  This close to her wedding wasn’t exactly the best time to think about a career move in any case. Maybe she’d look into writing the Haute Cuisine article rather than dismissing it out of hand. After making sure everything was fine at her house, and that Clyde and the guys could work without being scared half to death, she would go over to the “Maharishi Pasta” restaurant and talk to a few people about Indian-Italian fusion food.

  But first, her house.

  She arrived before the contractors did. She went inside and opened up the drapes. No little doggie in sight.

  In fact, nothing was changed from the way it last looked. “All right,” she announced to everyone and no one, “the workers are coming back this afternoon to make me—us—a beautiful new kitchen and I expect everyone to leave them alone. They have work to do. I don’t want to see any workmen running out of here, got it?”

  There was no answer. To tell the truth, she was glad of that. She didn’t quite know what she’d have done if there was one.

  She went out to the yard. At least it was sunny. She took the few steps from a generously-sized deck down to the lawn area. The lawn and garden were going to need a lot of weeding and fe
rtilizer to look lush again. She walked around taking everything in and thinking about where she might want to put an herb garden, and even a little vegetable garden. Store-bought tomatoes, for example, didn’t taste nearly as good as those that were vine ripened.

  Everything was kind of spindly at the moment. She really didn’t know much at all about gardens or plants that grew in this chilly climate. But it was going to be fun to learn.

  As she went, she looked around for the little white dog, but he was nowhere to be seen. Must be with his owners today, she told herself.

  Since she had no lawn furniture, she sat on the edge of the deck. From around the side of the house, the little white dog came running toward her.

  “Hello, doggie,” she said. She looked at the area he’d come from. A high redwood fence separated it from the street as well as from the neighbors. She had looked over that area as she walked around the garden, but hadn’t seen him. She had no idea where he could have been hiding.

  “You’re a sneaky little thing, aren’t you?” she said. “Let’s go figure out how you got in here.”

  She walked to the side yard, the dog trotting behind her. She saw no openings in the fence and no holes. She even tested the boards to see if one of them was loose, but found no way for the dog to get into the yard. And the fence was way too high for the little guy to jump or even climb over.

  She studied the house, but that side of the house seemed to have no openings whatsoever. Not even any windows for him to have come out of.

  How did he do it?

  She went back and sat down on the deck again. “How do you manage to show up here, doggie?”

  He sat on the lawn and looked up at her.

  “I wonder if you should have a name. It’s not right to call you doggie all the time, is it?”

  His tail wagged.

  “I will not call you Jock, however.” That was the name of the dog owned by Eric and Natalie Fleming, the couple shot to death in that very yard.