A Cook in Time

by Joanne Pence

  “And Derrick Holton?” Connie asked.

  “A gnat. To be swatted.”

  A maggot and a gnat, Angie thought. How she’d gone from astronomy to entomology she’d never know.

  The next morning, Paavo did something he’d never done before. Instead of throwing away the Macy’s advertising supplement to the Chronicle, he went through it page by page, studying jewelry, dresses, suits, blouses, sweaters, pots, dishes, knives, and even bedding in hopes that something—anything—might trigger an idea of what to buy Angie for Christmas.

  Inspector Bo Benson passed by his desk, dropped some memos in his in tray, and focused on the underwear ad Paavo was reading. “I’m not sure which will look better on you, Paav,” Benson said, “the red lace or the black satin.”

  He howled with laughter as he continued on to his desk.

  Paavo shut the paper and dropped it into the wastebasket. Benson was Homicide’s man about town. A tall, thin, handsome African-American, he always wore fashionably cut, elegant suits in a homicide bureau where most inspectors had readily adopted California casual. As if the suits weren’t enough to set him apart from the others, he topped them with a fedora. On him, the hat looked cool. If Paavo had tried to wear one, he’d look like he was auditioning for a 1930s role with central casting.

  Paavo’s gaze followed the inspector. Benson had a lot of experience figuring out what women liked. “Bo, have you ever given a woman a Christmas present?” he asked.

  “Every year, bro. This year, I’ve outdone myself. I’ve got three women to please.”

  “Do you know what you’ll give them?”

  “Sure. I’ve given every girlfriend the same thing for years now—ever since I first discovered the reaction I got. They love it.”

  That sounded perfect, Paavo thought. “What is it?”

  “Two dozen roses and a two-pound box of Godiva chocolates. They even let me eat most of the chocolates. The secret is, see, I get them two dozen and two pounds. Then I tell them it’s because I love ’em twice as much.” He smiled broadly, well pleased with himself.

  Paavo pulled the Macy’s ad out of the wastebasket and went back to studying it again.

  When Angie awoke, she was nearly as tired as when she had gone to sleep. Things just weren’t working out the way she had hoped they would. The man who would be the star attraction for her first fantasy dinner troubled her greatly. He was fascinating, intelligent, even charismatic. But he came on too strong with her, and the issue of the worship of death, even if it was in the classic Egyptian form of Osiris, was disturbing to her on many levels, both social and spiritual.

  The bad blood between him and Derrick also concerned her. Derrick had changed a lot since she’d known him, but basically he still seemed to be the good person she had once dated. She gave store to his feelings about Algernon.

  She needed to rethink her involvement in Algernon’s party. The people around him were too strange for her taste. She would call Triana and bow out.

  Just then her phone rang.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Angie? This is Triana Crisswell.”

  She could hardly believe it. “Hello, Mrs. Crisswell, I missed you last night.”

  “I would have been there except my husband came home early and started up again about my friends. He just doesn’t understand the Prometheus Group. He gave me such a headache, I had to take to my bed! In any event, I talked to Algernon this morning. You made such a hit with him, I can’t tell you! I’ve rarely heard him so excited about anyone. Not only was he impressed with you, but with me, too, for finding you. You’re a pro, Miss Amalfi. I’m going to tell all my friends about you.”

  “Oh.” How was she going to bow out now? “Thank you, but—”

  “No need to thank me. We’re up to three hundred people already! And I haven’t done any publicity to speak of. This party is going to be bigger and more important than ever.”

  “I’m really sorry, but—”

  “Don’t be! It’s so much more exciting this way! It means your hard work will be seen and valued by even more people. Your name will be made with this event, sweetie. You better believe it.”

  That was exactly what she was afraid of.

  “One more little thing,” Triana continued. “Algernon wants to get together to discuss this party with you personally.”

  “He does?”

  “This is such an honor! He’s even willing to come to your house. He, uh, suggested that since I’m so busy, I don’t need to be there, so don’t worry about me. What would be a good time for you?”

  So that’s his game. “Why, Mrs. Crisswell, I couldn’t possibly meet with him unless you were there as well,” Angie said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Oh, isn’t that sweet of you, Angie! I’d love to join you both—if you’re sure. Algernon sounded as if he thought I might not be needed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

  “Don’t be silly. You couldn’t possibly be anything but a welcome addition. Maybe in a couple of days? Give me a call when you both settle on a time.”

  “I’ll be in touch, Angie. One last thing: How is the planning coming?”

  “Wonderfully, just wonderfully. We’ll talk about it when you’re here,” she added quickly, hoping Triana wouldn’t ask for details.

  “I’m so pleased. Call me if you need me. Ta-ta!”

  With that, she hung up.

  Angie just sat for a few minutes staring at the phone. How had she gotten into this fix? All she wanted to do was to have a simple little business. Cater some fun dinners for people. Throw a few parties. That was all. Instead she was going to end up feeding all the nut cases in the Bay Area.

  And one very sexy Egyptian god.

  Triana was right about one thing, though. The people attending this party would be the crème de la crème of San Francisco. They might be wacko crème, but crème nonetheless. And crème always gave big dinner parties, needing to hire people just like her to help out.

  She might make a go of this business yet.

  She wandered into the den and saw the stack of Roswell books on a lamp table. She had put them there when she returned from the science fiction convention and hadn’t looked at them since. The events there certainly caused strong reactions from people. She thought of Elvis’s awe and Kronos’s anger at the mention of the name.

  She picked out the one the man behind the booth had pulled out of his briefcase, a well-thumbed book with some underlining and some asterisks. She sat down on the daybed, put her feet up, rearranged the pillows, and began to read.

  On July 3, 1947, strange sightings began over the vast, empty desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

  She looked at the date and wondered if the whole controversy had been caused by too much Fourth of July celebrating. She continued reading.

  The guided-missile base at White Sands had monitored the bizarre activity on radar, but could not explain it. Two days later, word reached the U.S. Army’s 509th airfield of a crash in a remote area. Investigators were sent out, and the next day, the base commander approved a press release saying a flying saucer had crashed. The Associated Press picked up the story.

  Angie chortled. There went the base commander’s career.

  Immediately, the army changed its tune. The next day, they announced the fuss had been a mistake caused by a weather balloon that had broken up. One of the men who had been to the crash site was the base intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel. He was neither a fool nor a psychopath. Other weather balloons had fallen and none had ever been mistaken for a flying saucer.

  So, Angie thought, the army wasn’t any better at covering up things fifty years ago than it was these days. She continued reading.

  The army sent a convoy of soldiers to the crash site to pick up every single scrap. That material was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, headquarters of the 8th Army Air Force. From there, the most important materiel continued on to the Air Materiel command at Wright Field in Ohio: four
extraterrestrials. Three were dead, and one was still alive.

  She frowned. How could anyone believe such garbage? Nonetheless, she couldn’t bring herself to put down the book.

  A shave-and-a-haircut knock on the door to her apartment came as a welcome distraction. Stretching as she walked to the door, she was surprised that nearly two hours had passed. Maybe this was true time-warp alien-abduction stuff—wasting time reading made-up, albeit entertaining, stories about UFOs.

  “Stan! What in the world?” She stared at her neighbor from across the hall, then backed up as he entered her apartment.

  “Angie, I’m desperate. Do you have anything to eat? I can’t go to a restaurant looking like this. In fact, not even to the corner grocery. I haven’t eaten all day today.” In each ear, Stan had stuck a piece of aluminum foil, twisted into the size and shape of a cigarette.

  “Tell me, Stanfield,” Angie said, “why do you have tinfoil stuck in your ears?”

  “I can explain … after I’ve eaten.” He gave her a doe-eyed, hollow-cheeked look, like a starving waif in a Keene painting. Angie knew he was anything but starving, considering that he mooched meals throughout the apartment building, and probably from people at work as well.

  “Check the fridge.” Angie waved her thumb toward her kitchen, although it was nearly as familiar to him as to her. “My mother—”

  “What? You’ll have to speak up a bit,” Stan said, his back to her as he dashed toward the kitchen. “The foil, you know.”

  “My mother sent my sister Bianca over with a care package for me—some leftover cannelloni from a big dinner party. If you aren’t interested in that, there’s some yogurt. Or you can open a can of tuna, throw in some curry powder and sour cream, and—”

  “No, no.” Stan shuddered at the thought and pulled open the door of the refrigerator. “I have nothing against leftovers.” As he stuck his head inside to check out the goodies, one of the pieces of foil hit the side and fell to the floor. He straightened up and reattached it. Then, squatting slightly, he continued his search for the cannelloni—pasta tubes filled with ricotta and Parmesan cheese, chunks of chicken, ground veal, and spices, then covered with a red sauce and teleme cheese—along with any other food that might find its way to his stomach. “I wonder if I dare use your microwave with this tinfoil?”

  “I think you’ll be fine as long as you don’t stick your head in it,” Angie replied dryly. “Why are you wearing those things, anyway?”

  “Headaches. I couldn’t even go to work the other day because of them.” Clearly deciding to brave the dangers of the microwave, he put the pasta in and set it on high for three minutes.

  “So you’re trying to prove your case for disability benefits, is that it? If you don’t get them for physical, you will for mental.” With the microwave oven on and the aluminum foil in his ears, he didn’t seem to hear her.

  He got himself a fork, a napkin, and a glass of red wine. He liked wine with Italian food.

  She mixed a green salad with a simple olive oil, onion, garlic, oregano, and balsamic vinegar dressing for him and brought it and the wine out to the dining room table, closely followed by Stan, gingerly carrying the hot plate of food.

  He sat down and took a big bite. “Delicious. You’re a good cook, Angie, but your mother is really outstanding.”

  “Uh-huh.” She’d heard that before. More times than she could count. It didn’t do her attitude about Stan any good to hear him praise the food she’d been saving for her own dinner later that night.

  Maybe this was God’s way of telling her to start the diet she’d been thinking about ever since she and Paavo returned from a most peculiar cruise to Acapulco.

  Although she had more important things to do than to pay attention to Stan, her curiosity got the better of her. “Why do you think tinfoil will stop a headache?” she asked, even while knowing the answer would probably make little sense.

  “It blocks radio waves,” he said.

  As predicted. “Now, wait a minute. You think radio waves give you headaches?”

  “I was listening to the radio, Art Bell’s show. He was interviewing this scientist about the abduction of some lecturer. One of those millennium things, you know? Anyway, as the scientist was talking, he mentioned all the strange stuff that goes on in the world that we have no explanation for. The explanation, he said, is that it’s all being controlled by aliens. They’re working with the government. And one of the ways they control us is with radio waves. The more sensitive among us feel them and get headaches.”

  “And you’re one of the more sensitive, I take it.”

  “I’m afraid so, Angie.” He sighed under the weight of all that fragility. “I figured the tinfoil would work like a lightning rod, capturing the waves at the tips and destroying them. Clever of me, don’t you think?”

  “How do you know it doesn’t work like an antenna—sending the waves right through you?”

  “Well, if it did that, I’d be hearing programs in my head all day long. Can you imagine what I’d be like if the program was Howard Stern’s?”

  She couldn’t stand it. “Stan, radio waves do not give people headaches! It’s all this new-millennium talk that’s making people worry about the craziest things. Including aliens! Has the whole world gone completely psycho?” She tried to calm down. “Listen, if you’re getting a lot of bad headaches, that could be serious. You need to find out why. The foil won’t help.”

  “It’s helped already,” he said. A satisfied look filled his face as he polished off the cannelloni.

  She had to change the subject before she smacked him. “You said those people on the radio were talking about a lecturer who was abducted. Has he reappeared yet?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “How weird. Do you remember who was talking?”

  “I’m not sure. Some guy. I think they said he was once some big astrophysicist. For NASA or something.”

  “Derrick Holton?” she asked, troubled by Stan’s saying he was once an astrophysicist and not still one.

  “I don’t remember. Look at it this way, Angie: If a guy like that takes this stuff seriously, there’s got to be something to it. Hey, that isn’t the guy you went out with the other night, is it?”

  “It is. I was there when the lecturer disappeared.”

  “No shit!” he murmured, staring at her as if she’d turned green with bulging black eyes and little antennae sprouting from her forehead.

  She nodded.

  “It’s dangerous hanging around people like that. Very dangerous.” He jumped to his feet. “Sorry to eat and run. I just thought of some important stuff I’ve got to do tonight. Thanks for the dinner.” He dashed out the door so fast he didn’t even grab a chocolate-covered macaroon. That meant he was truly upset.

  Much as she hated to admit it, Stan might have been right. Derrick and his friends were strange. Could they be dangerous, too? She had thought she knew and could trust Derrick, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  She particularly didn’t want Connie to get more involved in any of this. Connie had been a little too intrigued by Derrick and Algernon both.

  She and Connie needed to have a heart-to-heart.

  She picked up the phone and called Everyone’s Fancy. Lyssa answered. “Connie’s gone,” she replied to Angie’s question.

  “Gone? Where has she gone?”

  “To buy a new dress. She’s going to some meeting tonight and she wants to look good.”

  “What meeting?”

  “I’m not sure. I think she said something about UFOs. I didn’t listen. It sounded, like, far out there, you know?”

  Angie hung up. What had she gotten Connie into?

  14

  After someone leaked a report to the San Francisco Chronicle on the mutilated body found at the Giants’ new stadium, causing more than a little paranoia in an already nervous city, calls about missing persons began.

  The homicide inspectors were always amazed at the number of people who
had gone missing but whose disappearance had never been reported to the Missing Persons Bureau. People didn’t want to hassle with answering all the questions missing-persons inspectors asked, but they were willing to call and ask if the murder victim fit the description of their missing loved one—or not-so-loved one.

  Paavo and Yosh followed up on each call, but none matched the victim. They had to wait until a fingerprint ID came in. When it did, it provided a name, Felix Rolfe, but nothing more except that he’d been given a dishonorable discharge from the army.

  When people drop off the face of the earth that way, there’s usually a good explanation. At the city’s social services agency, they found it. Rolfe was a drifter who lived on Supplemental Security Income disability. He’d drifted all through the Southwest and finally came to California, where the weather was milder and the SSI state supplement more generous. Most of his SSI money went to drugs and alcohol, which contributed to the liver disease that gave him the SSI disability, which allowed him to continue with his drug and alcohol habit. The consensus was that all in all, if he hadn’t been murdered, he wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway.

  The only address on record was his mother’s—a rooming house on Third Street. As Paavo knocked on the door to her room, he braced himself to deal with a distraught mother. He should have saved himself the trouble.

  He sat on a wooden chair with plaid-covered foam rubber cushions on the seat and back. Maureen Rolfe sat on the bed. She was an enormous woman with gray hair cut ragged below her ears. Huge thighs forced her knees wide apart and caused the skirt of her worn blue dress to ride up too high. Black socks and men’s shoes adorned her feet, and she smoked the butt of a stogie.

  “Felix’s killer carved the number five on his chest. Does that number mean anything to you?” Paavo asked after a short talk during which he gave his condolences for Rolfe’s untimely death. She shrugged them off.

  She sucked on the cigar. “Number five? Why’d anyone want to cut up Fe?”