Too Many Cooks

by Joanne Pence

  They were probably right. What did he know about women anyway? Turkey, Calderon had called him. Well, at least he was aptly named.

  In silence, he drove back to the Hall of Justice and pulled Angie’s car into the parking lot near his own. He was ready to open the door and get out when she turned to him. “Paavo, why don’t we talk?”

  He folded his hands, staring out the windshield instead of looking at her. “No. It’s no good, Angie. Everybody knows it. It’s time we faced it too.”

  “Because of Nona?”

  “No, damn it! I don’t even like the woman. It’s because of you and me and how different we are.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But I do care.” Saying that, he got out of the car. He glanced back at her and saw her eyes glisten with unshed tears. Quickly, he hurried toward his small Austin. He heard the roar of the Ferrari’s engine and didn’t even turn around as Angie drove away.

  “I don’t know what to do, Papa,” Paavo said, looking at the small white-haired man seated across the wooden table from him. Aulis Kokkonen, born in Finland, had left for the West during the 1950s. He traveled to San Francisco, where he found a job working for a carpenter.

  Paavo always felt Aulis would have done a lot better for himself in this country if Paavo’s mother had not dropped him and his sister off at Aulis’s apartment one day and never come back for them. Aulis had raised them from that day on and always said he never regretted it for a moment.

  “If Angie says she loves you, son, why not believe her? Why not give her, and yourself, a chance at happiness?”

  Paavo stood and rubbed the back of his neck. “She doesn’t know what it means. Everything comes too easy to her, even love. How can I believe she’ll feel the same way in a year? Hell, in a month? Breaking it off now is probably the best thing I can do for her.”

  Aulis’s turquoise eyes studied the proud man his ragged little boy had become. He, more than anyone else, understood where Paavo’s reserve came from and why he feared so much to open his heart. He still remembered how, years ago, four-year-old Paavo had sat by Aulis’s apartment door day after day, his jacket in his hand, insisting that his mother would come back to get him. Jessica had never waited for their mother’s return. She was only nine but already much too wise about the harsh side of the world. She never expected anything from it.

  Then, one day, Paavo stopped talking about his mother, stopped asking about her. That day, Aulis realized, Paavo had decided not to put his faith in anyone anymore. It took years for Aulis to get Paavo to trust even him. The only person Paavo truly loved was Jessica. And then she died.

  Aulis put his hand on Paavo’s shoulder. “There are no guarantees. But sometimes you have to put your heart at risk. Only you can decide if she’s worth it.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is, then? You worry, I think, that you’ll just be together a short while. That what you have now won’t continue for eternity. But tell me, do you wish Jessica had never lived at all? Because if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t have had to lose her, either.”

  “Of course I don’t feel that way.” Paavo ran his fingers through his hair. After Jessie’s death, it had taken nearly ten years for the nightmares to stop, the visions of Jessie as she’d been at age nineteen, laughing and beautiful, going on a date with a strange man, a man he’d never seen before, a man with small brown penetrating eyes and a large black beetlelike mole on the side of his face, a man whose hand lingered a little too long on Paavo’s hair as he ruffled it when they met. Then Paavo’s uneasiness when Jessie didn’t return that night, his search for her and, finally, finding her dead from an overdose of heroin. “She died and, much as I wish I could have done something to stop it, there was nothing. This is different. I’ve got control. But I’m not sure what I should do.”

  16

  Straight through the weekend, Paavo and Rebecca worked together on the books for Wielund’s and Italian Seasons. They didn’t find a single thing in the Italian Seasons accounts, but Wielund’s were another story.

  “Look at this, Rebecca,” Paavo said. “I may have finally found something. Look at this increase in money going into Wielund’s personal account. Where does it come from?”

  “It isn’t coming from the restaurant, that’s for sure.” Rebecca scooted her chair closer to his to study the figures Paavo had before him. “In fact, look at this: a couple of weeks after money goes into his personal account, his restaurant shows a profit at the same time as his personal account takes a dip.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  “He’s moving money into the business—laundering it, perhaps, by running it through his operation. Who knows where it’s coming from? But when you look at all he’s buying for the restaurant, it’s pretty clear where it’s going. He might not, in fact, be laundering it at all. It might be that to run a top-notch restaurant and make it big in this town, it simply takes this much time and this much money.”

  They turned their heads back to the books, watching carefully for that money, and in time a pattern developed. For the past three months, a ten-thousand-dollar increase would show up briefly in Wielund’s personal account; then, a week later, his business would have an upsurge in receipts. But only one week out of the month did he do so well, and that week was always the week after money went into and then out of his personal account. The amount wasn’t huge but it was steady.

  Nothing at all was unusual in Chick Marcuccio’s books.

  On Monday, Paavo and Yoshiwara talked again to Never-Take-a-Chance Bill, reminding him that he’d been the lead inspector in the Sheila Danning murder investigation. Her death could be the key, but the man remembered far less than Rebecca did about the case. According to Bill, if witnesses and friends could be believed, the woman had been such a loner she must have raped and strangled herself.

  So far, every one of the restaurant owners, workers, and chefs that Paavo and Yosh talked to had an alibi for the hours when the midday murders of Wielund and Greuber took place, and almost none had an alibi for the early morning murder of Marcuccio. There had to be some fact he was overlooking. What could be the connection between the death of a porno actress, Wielund’s pictures, and those two restaurateurs?

  It didn’t take Paavo long to realize that Never-Take-a-Chance had done a piss-poor job of investigating Danning’s death. Paavo and Rebecca would have to start over.

  First, Paavo looked over Danning’s birth records, then contacted the authorities in Tacoma to ask if they could find out anything about her life there that might connect her to the murders taking place here now.

  The police in her hometown, fortunately, had done a thorough job investigating her background at the time of her death. Family, school friends, employers, old boyfriends—the picture that emerged was of a wild, ambitious girl with above-average looks and below-average brain power, who wanted to make her mark in the world if it killed her. And it did.

  Her life had become a blank after she moved to San Francisco. Paavo and Rebecca went to Danning’s rooming house to interview the landlady who had reported Danning missing. Danning had been found in the morgue and, with no fingerprints on file, had been listed as a Jane Doe.

  The landlady remembered that Sheila received many phone calls, but she never had visitors. At times, though, the landlady did notice that Miss Danning would get a ride home from a man in a big blue car.

  Karl Wielund had owned a big blue Lexus.

  Paavo and Rebecca went to Dupries’s restaurant once more to talk to the other cocktail waitresses.

  Tiffany Carson said Sheila’s main interest was to make it big in movies, and she seemed willing to do anything to get a break. And she did mean anything. She was quite sure Sheila would willingly make sleazy pictures if she thought it would help her career. Once, Tiffany had invited Sheila to a party because she felt sorry for her not having any friends, but she never asked her again.

  “Why was that?” Paavo asked.

  “I
don’t like to talk badly about the dead, but I’ll make an exception here. We went to the party, as I said. We weren’t there ten minutes when a good-looking fellow who said he was writing a movie screenplay asked her to dance. Now, I know this fellow. He’s been working on the same screenplay for six years and doesn’t have a chance in hell of selling it. It’s awful! Of course, Sheila didn’t know that. From what I could see, they didn’t even finish the dance but went into the bathroom—together. Well, that didn’t leave anything to my imagination. I’m a liberated live-and-let-live woman, but that was a little too much for me. So I never invited her to anything else. Never felt sorry for her again, either.”

  Paavo took the name of the ersatz screenwriter, Jared Albright, and went to pay him a visit.

  Albright lived in a small apartment on Twin Peaks. He remembered Sheila Danning, all right, and wasn’t surprised she’d been murdered. “She lived on the edge. I dated her a couple of times, but after the second date she asked for money. I thought she did what she did because she liked me. She laughed and said she didn’t think anyone living in this town could still be so naïve. I gave her some money and never saw her again. Last I heard she was having a torrid affair with her boss.”

  “Her boss?” Rebecca asked. “Don’t you mean Karl Wielund?”

  “No, her boss. Albert Dupries.”

  “Henry,” Angie said, after their lunchtime show ended and they were in the studio putting things away until the next day.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about how much you know about food and its preparation.” What she didn’t say was that the restaurant world was abuzz with the news that Mark Dustman had gone to work at LaTour’s.

  Henry glanced smugly at her. “Oh, really? That’s very complimentary of you, Angie. Yes, I do have quite a store of knowledge. But then, look at how white my hair is. Had to learn something in all those years.”

  “I can’t help but wonder if having a restaurant isn’t the key to learning so much.”

  “You want to buy a restaurant?”

  “Maybe someday. But for now I wouldn’t mind working in one.” Especially one with a fine chef like Mark Dustman, she thought, but didn’t dare say. After all, Dustman had worked with Wielund; Chick went to see Henry the day he was killed, and now Chick was dead. Perhaps from inside the kitchen she could learn what was behind all this. Once, a lifetime ago, she would have relied on Paavo to figure out who killed Chick. But no more. The mere thought of Paavo made her heart contract. She had to focus her attention, her energy, on finding Chick’s killer.

  “It’s hard work, believe me,” Henry said.

  “How about as an apprentice for a little while? For you, Henry. I wouldn’t expect you to pay me anything. Just let me come into the restaurant’s kitchen from time to time and soak in the knowledge and atmosphere that surrounds you and Mark Dustman. I’ll chop, clean vegetables, even wash dishes if it’d help.”

  “That’s very flattering, Angie, but surely that’s not the sort of thing for a young woman like you to want to get involved in.”

  “I certainly would. All the best chefs in Europe have apprentices, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, whatever. Let’s try it for a day or two, okay? If it doesn’t work out—well, that’ll end it. Is it a deal?”

  “If you really want to.”

  She smiled and quickly turned around so he wouldn’t see her face. Angie was sure the restaurants were a factor in the murders of Karl Wielund and Chick Marcuccio. And she was going to find out why.

  Another week dragged by. Paavo and Yosh spent hours talking to Chick Marcuccio’s friends and associates, just as they had previously spent hours talking to Hank Greuber’s and Karl Wielund’s.

  Wielund was egotistical, secretive, greedy, ambitious, a womanizer, and he had a nasty streak besides. Everyone hated him. Although Dustman said he liked him, he seemed more upset by the closing of the restaurant than by Wielund’s death.

  Marcuccio was clever, hard-nosed when necessary, but fair, and everyone loved him. He was divorced, and his girlfriend was a food editor who’d commissioned an article on Wielund. Nona, who wrote the article, might play the femme fatale, but she was sharp and shrewd. If Wielund had been involved in something weird, she’d probably have noticed.

  Greuber was retired, cranky, and a busybody. Everyone said he probably stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and got himself killed. They were surprised it hadn’t happened years earlier.

  Paavo had passed the name of the porno studio Angie had visited to the Berkeley Police Department, but that too was a dead end. The Berkeley PD announced the place made legitimate dirty movies. There was no crime against that activity. At least, not in Berkeley.

  The studio’s owner, Axel Klaw, admitted that Danning’s photos were taken at his studio but said she was known to them by her professional name: Sharon Sharalike. He didn’t know her real name and didn’t know she was dead. No way to prove otherwise.

  Paavo asked the Berkeley PD to keep an eye on the place anyway—especially if a certain small, mischievous, brown-haired woman driving a white Ferrari showed up. He could tell by the silence on the phone that the officer thought he’d taken leave of his senses, but then, that man hadn’t met Angie.

  17

  Mark Dustman pulled tin after tin of canned food off the shelves in LaTour’s kitchen and tossed them into the industrial-size garbage can beside him.

  “Excuse me.” Paavo stepped through the side alleyway door that led straight into the kitchen. Yosh followed behind him.

  Dustman spun around, peas in one hand and canned peaches in the other. “I didn’t hear you. Look at this! Cans! How does the man expect to serve quality food with inferior ingredients? This is totally unacceptable!” He dumped the cans into the trash along with all the others.

  “Where is everyone?” Yosh asked, walking around the big kitchen.

  “We’re closed Tuesdays. I just came in to get the stock in some kind of order. I guess Henry did his own buying, but he let his pocketbook get in the way of his menu.”

  Locks of sandy brown hair fell on Dustman’s forehead, and he flicked it back, off his face. In marked contrast to his demeanor just a few short weeks ago, he looked calm, at peace with himself and the world despite Henry’s cheap food.

  “Good of you to take the time to see us today, Mr. Dustman,” Yosh said. “We appreciate it, we really do.”

  “I always have time to help find whoever killed Karl. You do still think he was murdered?”

  “We know he was murdered, Mr. Dustman,” Paavo replied.

  “Call me Mark, please. It’s such a terrible thing. I keep wishing someone would figure out that it was a mistake, but now, with Chick dead too, I guess that’ll never happen. Has there ever been a serial killer of cooks before?”

  “There’s no indication of a serial killer yet,” Paavo answered.

  “Well, leave it to San Francisco to come up with another first.” Dustman glanced at the rows of canned foods on the shelf. “Do you mind if I continue working? I’ve got to get rid of these abominations and restock if we’re ever to be a competitive restaurant.”

  “Sure,” Yosh replied. “Can I help?”

  Dustman chuckled. “I doubt it.” He got on a stepladder to reach the highest shelf. He pulled down a dusty can of chopped black olives and made a hook shot right into the garbage can. “Two points.”

  “Can you tell us,” Paavo began, “when you last saw Mr. Marcuccio?”

  Dustman stopped rummaging. “I wasn’t expecting any questions about him. I hardly knew the man. Let me think. I guess it was at Karl’s funeral service.”

  “Do you know how well he and Mr. Wielund knew each other?” Paavo asked.

  “They were on friendly terms but had little interaction.”

  “What about Mr. Wielund’s assistant, Mrs. Powell? Did she know Mr. Marcuccio very well?” Paavo continued.

  “Eileen Powell had the title o
f assistant manager, but she was really a glorified secretary. I doubt if she knew Marcuccio well enough to do more than say hello.”

  “Why would a secretary be sent to Paris on a buying trip?” Paavo asked.

  Dustman shugged. “Her competence was more in her own mind than Karl’s, but she has an eye for what’s popular and for what sells in this country. Also, of the three of us, she was the most expendable. Naturally, Karl sent her to Paris. Not to buy, though, just to look.” He said this with an air of hauteur that exaggerated his own importance and diminished Eileen Powell’s. He seemed to have gotten over the trauma of Wielund’s death quickly enough, Paavo thought.

  “Did she keep the restaurant’s books?”

  “Karl did his own bookkeeping.”

  “Did he ever have a partner?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “Did anyone ever want to go into partnership with him?” Yosh asked.

  “Well, I heard once that Greg McAndrews, who owns Arbuckle’s, suggested some kind of partnership. German seafood? I have no idea. Anyway, Karl told him in no uncertain terms that he was nuts. McAndrews never forgave him.” Dustman looked from one inspector to the other.

  Paavo took the next stab in the dark. “How long did you work for Wielund?”

  “About nine months.”

  “That isn’t very long, considering how well you say you know him.”

  “As I’ve mentioned, I met him in Paris. Here, when Karl first started the restaurant, he did his own cooking. He was a master chef, you know.”

  “You’ve mentioned that, too.”

  “He was the most superb cook. I learned so much from that man.”