Too Many Cooks

by Joanne Pence

  Yosh looked long at his partner. “You know what, Paav? I think you ought to meet Nancy.”

  Yosh reached over as if to slap him on the back, but then, as his gaze caught Paavo’s frigid eyes, he withdrew his hand and did nothing more than smile.

  “Look,” Yosh continued. “I know I open my mouth too much sometimes and say a lot more than I should, but it’s because I care about you, partner. I don’t want to see you eating your heart out. None of us do. How about tomorrow night?”

  “What about tomorrow night?”

  “Didn’t you know? It’s Hollins’s twentieth anniversary with the force. He tried to keep it quiet, but I found out anyway. Everyone’s coming by the house. Nancy’s cooking. You don’t have to stay. Don’t even have to eat dinner. But, maybe just a minute to give congrats to the chief. What do you say?”

  Paavo respected Hollins. If it were a gathering for anyone else, he wouldn’t hesitate to refuse. But Hollins was different. “All right.”

  “Terrific! Oh, by the way, Rebecca can make it too. She’s a great gal. All the guys think so. Solid, dependable, like my Nancy. And she really likes you. So what if she doesn’t have lots of money? Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

  “Yosh!” Paavo stood up. He’d had it. Yosh had spouted one cliché too many.

  Yosh grabbed his jacket and headed toward the door, shouting to Paavo as he went. “Nancy’ll be glad to meet you both!”

  7

  Angie’s elbow rested on the work station filled with radio paraphernalia, her hand cupping her chin as she despondently looked at the array of lights and switches on the call monitor in front of her. Henry had decided this was the day she’d begin to do the call screening for him. The trouble was, today she didn’t feel like talking to anyone.

  Since Paavo had gone back to work there’d been a strange undercurrent of something wrong between them. But what? Maybe she’d just imagined it. Still, when he left her Sunday night, everything seemed fine—or as fine as things ever got when dealing with a neurotic male—but when he telephoned Monday evening, he was a different person. He’d even sounded strangely guilty that he’d gotten the okay from Hollins for the Placer County Sheriff’s Department to do an autopsy on Karl Wielund.

  Then he said he couldn’t come by to see her, and when she asked if he could make it tonight, he said he was going to Yoshiwara’s house. Yoshiwara! Paavo gave her the impression that eight hours of his new partner was as much as he could take in one day. But he’d chosen Yoshiwara over her.

  Why didn’t he want to see her?

  He was crazy about her, wasn’t he? He should be. She ticked off her attributes: money, wit, good looks. But then, Paavo didn’t place much importance on money as long as he had enough for his simple lifestyle; he had a dry wit of his own and scarcely needed her smart-alecky one; and good looks wasn’t nearly as important to him as good character. So what did he like about her?

  Lunch with Henri’s new theme music, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” ended and Henry began talking to the people who made up his radio audience. All five of them.

  Forget worrying about Paavo, she told herself. Concentrate on screening Henry’s callers. It should be simple enough. She’d find out what the caller’s question was, look it up in a cookbook, mark the page, and hand it to Henry. Talking to callers off the air was better than not talking to them at all, she reasoned—and a step closer to talking to the callers on the air, besides.

  There was just one problem. So that she could talk to the callers and not be heard on the air, she no longer sat with Henry in the glassed-in soundproof studio booth. She now sat just outside it, beside a sliding window that she had to open and shut quietly to hand him pieces of paper with names and notes as well as helpful cookbooks.

  She felt ostracized, like a poor relation left out in the cold, forced to peer in at the golden age of radio—almost as ostracized as she felt with Paavo, in fact.

  Why think about Paavo? There was nothing she could do if he didn’t want to see her. Everything had been fine between them once and would be again. She couldn’t be so dull he preferred other cops to her. Could she?

  Henry’s opening monologue was winding down. Quickly, she pushed the button on the phone system. “Lunch with Henri radio show. Are you calling to speak to Chef Henri?” she asked.

  “Hi, there! I sure am,” an exuberant voice answered.

  Why would anyone sound so happy to talk to Henry? “Your first name and where you’re calling from, please.” She felt like Ernestine, ready to burst into “one ringy-dingy” at any minute.

  “My name’s Barbara, and I’m calling from Novato.”

  Angie wrote down the name and location on a big yellow tablet. “Hello, Barbara. I’m Angie, and while you’re waiting to talk with Chef Henri, I’ll jot down the question you’re planning to ask him.”

  “Okay. Let’s try it. My question is: I’ve got a recipe here that I want to use to make some oyster beef. It says to put in a teaspoon of five spices, but it never tells me what the five spices are. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”

  Her life was in an upheaval, and someone wanted to talk about oyster beef? Angie sighed. What was she supposed to do when the man she loved…her eye caught the question she’d written on the tablet. With a start, she forced her thoughts back to the radio show, tore off the paper, slid the window open, dropped the paper into Henry’s tray, shut the window, and sat back down with a sigh. “Actually, there’s no problem, Barbara. The recipe doesn’t mean to use five spices. It means, use the seasoning called ‘five spices.’ It comes in a jar already mixed for you. You can find it in any grocery store with a well-stocked Chinese food section.”

  “Oh? That’s all? Geezo-petes, why didn’t the recipe say so? Well, let me hang up, I don’t want to ask Chef Henri something so dumb. Thanks so much, Angie.”

  Angie stared at the telephone. Geezo-petes? Suddenly, she hit the phone line button again. “Barbara, wait!” All was silent.

  Damn! That did it. She’d lost a caller. And Lunch with Henri had so few of them, losing one was a minor disaster. Never again could Angie allow some stubborn, moody, unwilling-to-discuss-it-properly man get in the way of her job.

  A minute later, miraculously, another call came in. She jabbed the phone button.

  “Hello!” she shouted.

  “Is this the radio?”

  She forced herself to sound cheerful. “Yes, lucky caller. This is the Lunch with Henri radio show. I’m Angie, and I’m here to write down your name and your question for Chef Henri. Welcome!”

  “Oh, why—um, my name is Anthea.”

  Angie wrote it down. “What’s your question for Chef Henri?”

  “Am I on the air?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh. Good. I want to ask about pizza bread dough. I like to make my own pizza toppings, but I hate making the bread. Yeast is so much trouble. Does Chef Henri have any simple recipes?”

  “Oh, that’s a great question. Let me just finish writing it here.” She jotted it down, then dropped it in Henry’s tray. “Chef Henri will love it. I’m sure he’s got lots of ideas. I’ll never forget the time my boyfriend—my sort-of boyfriend, that is—brought me a pizza. He thought he was bringing me Italian food—which is like coals to Newcastle, as they say—but really, it’s so American, I had to laugh.” She remembered Anthea’s question. “I used to make pizza for him using frozen bread dough.”

  “What a great idea!”

  “After it was defrosted, he would help me stretch it over the pizza pan. That was fun. We’d talk, and as the yeast warmed up, the dough would rise, and he’d warm up, and he’d rise…. Oh, well, I’m sure Henri will have lots of good ideas for you.”

  “I can’t imagine anything easier than what you just said. Thanks.”

  To Angie’s surprise, the phone went dead. She shrugged, then glanced at the monitor. No one else was waiting to have their call screened.

  “And now,” Henry said, “it’s time to go
to our phones so that you, our callers, can ask me anything your hearts desire about cooking. Our first caller is Barbara from Novato. Hello, Barbara.”

  No answer. “Barbara?”

  Angie vigorously shook her head. Henry noticed and frowned. “Uh, Barbara seems to have been cut off. How about Anthea from…hmm. Anthea? Hello. Hello? Hell—oh.”

  Angie’s head shaking was a little slower this time. Henry’s face turned purple.

  “We seem to be having a bit of trouble with our phone lines.” His voice was choked. “Let me give you the numbers to call once more, then we’ll take a little station break, and when we get back I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  He looked ready to break Angie, rather than a mere station broadcast.

  “You didn’t have to come by, Paavo,” Angie said, as she opened the door. “I know you have to go to Yosh’s tonight.”

  “It’s all right.” He put his arms around her. “How are you doing?”

  She leaned against him, enjoying the comfort he offered. “Better, I guess. That man is so hateful, I should just quit! In fact, I think I will. First thing tomorrow.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It is. One—well, two little mistakes, and the way he carried on you’d think I’d murdered Betty Crocker.”

  “You can’t have done anything that terrible.”

  She lifted her head and met his gaze. “I didn’t.” Then she stepped away and paced, her steps faster and her arm movements wider as she spoke. “I just answered questions. I mean, I’ve always answered questions. Even when I was in kindergarten and the teacher would ask the class a question, and most kids would sit on their hands, guess who always raised her arm?”

  “Angelina?”

  “You’re darn right. My teachers expected it of me. They praised me for it. So did my parents. Everyone could count on me to say something. Well, no more. I’ll be mute. A regular Marcel Marceau. Charlie McCarthy without Edgar Bergen. Milli without Vanilli.”

  “Who?”

  She breathed a weary sigh, then plunked down in her yellow antique Hepplewhite chair. “It doesn’t matter. I’m quitting tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure Henry will get over it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Give him another chance, Angie.”

  “Give him another chance?”

  “He needs you, remember?”

  “He does?”

  “Why else would he have hired you?”

  She perked up. “That’s right. To think, I’d forgotten. You’re absolutely correct! How could I forget? Paavo, you’re wonderful.”

  He didn’t quite know what to say. Wonderful wasn’t an adjective he’d often heard applied to him. Maybe never before, in fact.

  “There’s something else I almost forgot,” she called, as she dashed into her bedroom. “I was so upset today that I went shopping. I found something for you.”

  “For me? You went shopping?”

  She came back carrying a large City of Paris box and handed it to him. “I didn’t go shopping for you, but when I saw this I couldn’t pass it up.”

  He stared at the box in his hands. “It’s sure big.”

  “Open it, silly.”

  “It’s not my birthday or anything. And Christmas just passed.”

  “And all I got you for Christmas were those silly suspenders. I mean, I should have known you don’t wear suspenders, but they were so adorable.”

  He remembered the blue and yellow floral braces. Adorable wasn’t quite what he’d call them.

  With more than a little trepidation, he took the lid off the box. Inside was a double-breasted camel-hair overcoat. His heart sank and he could only think one thing—it looked expensive. He couldn’t stop himself from touching the material along the collar, though. It felt like velvet.

  “Try it on.”

  He swallowed. “I can’t accept this.”

  “Of course you can! Let’s see how it looks on you. You can take it back and they’ll tailor it, of course, but I described to the man just how you were built. How wide your shoulders are, and how long your arms are, and he adjusted it a bit already….”

  As she talked, he put the coat on over his sports jacket. She smoothed his collar and ran her hands over the shoulders and then downward, against his broad chest. “Perfect,” she said, adding a sigh over how handsome he looked. “Come see.” She took his hand and led him to the full mirrors on the sliding closet doors in her bedroom.

  He stood and stared at the rolled collar, the perfect fit of the coat. He’d never worn anything like this before.

  “You look dressed for the Top of the Mark on a winter’s eve. Wow! I knew that coat was you, I just knew it.”

  He raised his arms, holding them right out in front of him. So often when he did that, the sleeves of his jacket would nearly bare his elbows. This coat scarcely showed the cuff of his shirt. He loved it. Quickly, he took it off and handed it back to her. “It’s too much.”

  “Too much what?”

  “Money.”

  “Money! It’s a gift. What do you mean?”

  “I mean, hell, anyone sees a cop with a coat like that, they’ll figure I’m on the take for sure.” He slid his hands in his trouser pockets, not giving in to the temptation to touch the soft material once more.

  “That excuse is so lame, Inspector. When fog and biting breezes come in off the ocean, even a cop can get cold. Take the coat. Please.” She held out her arms.

  He shook his head, unable to find the words to explain that as much as one part of him was warmed and touched by her present, another part was troubled. He rarely received any presents at all. And for sure, no one had ever given him a present this expensive. Not ever.

  She laid the coat on the bed, then looked up at him. “Did you know I was beside myself when I got home today? I didn’t know what to do. I felt like such a failure…again. Then I called you, and despite your plans to go to Yosh’s house this evening, you stopped here first. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

  “It was nothing,” he said awkwardly.

  “You’re wrong, Inspector. That coat is nothing. How one person makes another feel inside, that’s what’s important.” She touched his arm. “That’s everything, Paavo.”

  He gave her a long look. She was right. She was being generous and warm and caring; he was the one being petty. He glanced again at the coat, then nodded. “I guess I can wear it if I ever take you to one of those operas you’re always talking about.”

  Her face lit up. “You’d go with me to the opera? That’s wonderful. In fact, I’ve got a friend who’s offered me a couple of tickets to Götterdammerung.”

  “To what?”

  “Wagner. The twilight of the gods. Four and a half hours. Valhalla’s destroyed and Brunhild rides a horse into her lover’s, who’s also her nephew’s, funeral pyre. There’s so much loss, it’s wonderfully emotional!” She waltzed out of the bedroom. “I’ll go check the schedule.”

  Paavo picked up his new coat, not quite sure how they went from a heart-to-heart to the twilight of the gods. The time on the clock-radio showed it was time to go to Yosh’s, but Paavo gave a quick glance at Angie’s lacy comforter-covered bed before following her into the living room. “I can understand loss,” he murmured. “I sure can.”

  The Placer County Coroner’s Office identified Aconitum columbianum, a poisonous plant found along the Pacific Coast, as the cause of Karl Wielund’s death. As little as seven drops could cause a burning sensation, followed by swelling of the tongue, then paralysis and death in ten to sixty minutes. Consciousness, though, often continued to the end. The plant was commonly known as monkshood.

  The coroner also noted that, undigested in Wielund’s stomach, were eggs, Gruyère cheese, piecrust, and honest-to-God truffles. The man went out in gourmet style.

  Wielund had been dead for at least five or six hours before his body began to show the effects of being in the snow. Most likely, Paavo reasoned, he’d
been killed in San Francisco and then dumped in the mountains, where the heavy snows meant there was a good chance he wouldn’t be found until the spring thaw. But even if he was found, everyone would think he’d been in an auto accident and not pursue it any further. That’s almost what had happened.

  Paavo put down the phone and waved at his partner, who was getting a morning cup of coffee. “Just got word that an autopsy on Karl Wielund showed he’d been poisoned.”

  “An autopsy on who?”

  “A big restaurant owner. I went to his memorial service with Angie, and a lot of people there talked about the guy being disliked. They were right.”

  “Is this our case?”

  “His house was in San Francisco. He was dead hours before his car went off a mountainside in the Sierras.”

  “Unless dead men drive, sounds like it’s our case.” Yosh listened while Paavo called Missing Persons.

  Within a half hour the report from Missing Persons was on Paavo’s desk. He ran off a copy for Yoshiwara. Karl Wielund was a German national who’d taken up permanent residency in this country and owned a popular restaurant. No news there.

  Wielund had been reported missing by his chef, Mark Dustman. Dustman said Wielund never went off without leaving strict orders on running the restaurant, plus word on how to reach him in case of emergency. Dustman had thought Wielund was ill and, when he got no answer by telephone, went to his house to check up on him. Wielund wasn’t there. After twenty-four hours, Dustman had called the police.

  “Where do we start?” Yosh asked.

  “His house.”

  Paavo located Wielund’s landlord, Hank Greuber, and broke the news of Wielund’s murder. Greuber’s only question was whether that would mean he couldn’t rent out the house as soon as he’d planned to. Greuber offered to meet the inspectors at the small house on 45th Avenue in the Sunset District.

  Yoshiwara slowly steered their unmarked police car, a tan Chevy, across the city. As he cruised into a parking space on 45th Avenue, Paavo saw a wispy thin man, with a clump of Woody Woodpecker stand-up straight white hair on the very top of his head, waiting beside a big green Buick in the driveway of the house Karl Wielund had rented: Hank Greuber. He was jiggling his key chain impatiently.