Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “River’s too high for the fishing to be really hot,” Gordon said, “but we didn’t do too badly under the circumstances.” He looked down at the water. “Another four or five weeks, when most of the snow has melted, this should be perfect.”

  “I’m not complaining. Though I’m kind of zonked from the wind and sun.”

  “It was pretty intense.” He looked at his watch, which said 3:45. “We should be back at Stanhope House by five. That’ll give time to shower and change before our cocktail engagement. I’m beginning to look forward to it.”

  BRUNO GARBINI had come to Forest County in 1947, when they were building the dam that created Año Nuevo Reservoir. There weren’t enough local men to do the job, so the construction firm had created a tent city for workers imported for the effort. They had to be fed, and Bruno — 25 years old at the time, with three years of Navy cooking experience behind him — was hired to run the kitchen. When he heard complaints about the sameness of the fare, he wrote to his mother and got her recipe for spaghetti for eight. Multiplying the recipe by a factor of 50, he served mom’s spaghetti one Wednesday night, and it immediately became a camp tradition. By the time the dam was finished, he had proposed marriage to the bank teller who deposited his paycheck each week and noticed that Arthur had no Italian restaurant. His eponymous establishment filled that market niche, and for 20 years did a booming business.

  As the logging industry declined, so did Garbini’s, but by then, Bruno had paid for the building, paid off his house, and had such a low nut it was impossible not to at least break even. So for the past quarter-century, he had preserved it as it was — a 1950s style Italian-American restaurant, with red-checked tablecloths, candles in red glass holders, photographs of Sinatra, Dean Martin and Joe DiMaggio on the wall, and music from their era playing softly over the sound system. Certainly it was true that the wallpaper could stand to be replaced, and that some of the booths had duct tape patching up gashes in the upholstery. But at the same time, the food was good (in an old-school sort of way), the drinks were honest and the prices were reasonable, and that was enough to attract sufficient customers. Every night at five, Bruno took a seat at the bar, close to the front door, ordered the first of two glasses of wine his doctor permitted, and waited to greet the dwindling number of customers he still knew personally.

  Gordon and Peter walked through the door exactly at six. Bruno was at his perch, halfway through the first glass and agonizing over whether to take another sip now or hold off a few minutes longer. Two men sat at the bar, desultorily watching a baseball game on TV; a couple in their fifties had just finished their salad at one of the booths; and it was quiet enough that the sound of Dean Martin singing “Houston” filled the air. Gordon was immediately carried back to a summer vacation his family had taken when he was five or six. It had seemed that song was on the radio every 15 minutes, and his father sang along, knowing the words by heart. It had been nearly 30 years now since he’d heard it. Gordon pulled back the cuff of his button-down blue shirt with white pencil stripes and looked at his watch. Bruno stood and moved to greet them.

  “You wouldn’t, by chance, be the gentlemen meeting El Sundstrom tonight?” he asked.

  Gordon nodded.

  “Welcome to my place. I’m Bruno Garbini.” He shook hands with both of them. “She said if you got here first to put you in the back booth. I guess you have some business to discuss.”

  He led them to a booth against the far wall. They slipped in facing each other, with Gordon looking toward the front door.

  “If you’re friends of El, the first drink is on the house. What’ll it be?”

  Gordon and Peter looked at each other.

  “Thanks, but we’ll wait for the ladies,” Gordon said.

  “Suit yourselves, but do have one. I’m only allowed to have two glasses of wine a night, so I have to get my pleasure from watching my customers drink. Damn doctors.”

  “I know,” said Peter sympathetically. “They’re terrible. Always telling you not to have any fun, and that it’s for your own good.”

  “You got that right.” He leaned over conspiratorially. “Two glasses of wine, but they didn’t say anything about grappa. I have a little slug of that at closing. Helps me sleep better. And I figure that what the doctors don’t know doesn’t hurt them.”

  “Always been my philosophy,” Peter said.

  Bruno walked back to his stool, took a small sip of wine and looked morosely at his glass.

  “You’re not very loyal to your profession,” Gordon said.

  “But it’s true. I can’t do half the stuff I tell my patients to do. Most of us can’t.”

  Elke Sundstrom walked through the front door. She was dressed as she had been in the office that morning, but had removed the baseball cap, allowing her hair to reach her shoulders, and had added a pair of teardrop turquoise earrings. Bruno stood to greet her, gave her a hug, and sent her to the booth with a pat on the butt. Gordon stood up to let her move in next to him and introduced Peter as Dr. Peter Delaney.

  “Oh, what kind of doctor,” she said, sliding into the booth.

  “General surgeon now. Before that, I worked emergency room for quite a while.”

  “You must have all kinds of stories to tell.”

  “Only to people I know well.”

  Another woman came through the front door. She was in her early fifties, a bit plump with a kind face and short, straight hair, and was wearing a pale blue blouse and a peasant-style skirt with a blue, black and brown print, reaching to mid-calf. She began walking toward their booth, and Gordon, guessing the party was now complete, rose to greet her. Peter did the same. She introduced herself as Gina Lindsay, and Gordon and Peter introduced themselves.

  “I guess you’re sitting here with me,” Peter said.

  She gave him a quick, appraising glance.

  “I’ve done worse.” And with that she scooted into the inside spot on Peter’s side.

  “Dr. Delaney is a surgeon in San Francisco,” El said.

  “A good-hands man, eh? Just to clear the air, are you married?”

  “Any particular reason for asking?”

  “I just want to know what I might have to climb over if I have to get out of a tight spot.”

  “Not at the moment,” Peter said.

  “But you have been?”

  “Five times.”

  Gina considered that for a moment. “That’s impressive. You don’t see too many men these days who are willing to make a commitment.”

  The conversation was fortunately diverted by the appearance of a middle-aged waitress wearing a bright-white blouse and black pants, who took their drink orders. Gina had a glass of Bruno’s special Chianti, El ordered a Pinot Grigio, Peter (who had been three months without alcohol) a ginger ale, and Gordon a club soda with a twist. Gina looked at Gordon after the waitress left.

  “You’re having a Lenny Briscoe,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “Lenny Briscoe’s the detective on Law & Order, played by Jerry Orbach. He’s a recovering alcoholic, so every time he goes into a bar on an investigation, he orders a club soda with a twist.”

  Gordon wasn’t sure how to answer that. El pulled up her shoulder bag, opened the flap, and took out the manuscript Gordon had given her that morning.

  “Now that we’ve dispensed with the preliminaries,” she said, “let’s get down to the business at hand. Gordon came to the newspaper office this morning with quite a story.” She turned to him. “Why don’t you tell it yourself?”

  He was beginning to tire of the story, but told it again anyway. He must have sped through it, because he finished as the waitress arrived with drinks.

  “What do you think, Gina?” said El, when he was done.

  “I don’t think anything,” she said. “I know. They’re saying a pile of oily rags spontaneously combusted in her service porch. Baloney! Baloney on two counts! First of all, Charlotte was utterly hopeless with machinery of any kind. At
school, we ran for cover when she tried to use the photocopier. There’s no way she would have been doing anything that would have gotten a rag oily to begin with. And second, if for some mysterious reason she had, there’s no way she would have left a pile of dirty, smelly rags on the floor for more than 30 seconds. God bless her, she was the biggest neat freak I’ve ever known. I don’t know anything else about it, but I know that fire was no accident, and somebody must have gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like one.”

  A brief silence followed her outburst, then Peter spoke.

  “We seem to have a consensus. The question is what do we do about it.”

  “I think Gordon, or maybe Judge Fletcher had the right idea about that,” El said. “People come to the newspaper because they hope we can do a story that will drive people in power to take action. We need to get as much information as we can and have a story in next week’s paper that raises these questions. Maybe that’ll get our sheriff off his ass.”

  She looked around and saw shrugs and nods of approval.

  “The problem is, I can’t do it all by myself. One reporter and I have to get all the stories for each week’s paper, and that’s a full-time job and then some. I can write the story when the time comes, but I need all of you to help me run down the information in the next few days. Can you do it?”

  “I’m in,” said Gordon.

  “Absolutely,” said Gina.

  Everyone turned to Peter, who seemed to be looking at something over Gordon’s shoulder. Finally, he sighed.

  “Sure. Why not? It’s not like I’m going to be going fishing or anything.”

  “All right, then,” said El. “We have a team.”

  Peter lifted his ginger ale glass. None of them had touched the drinks yet.

  “Then a toast: To our investigation. May it see justice done.”

  They clinked glasses all around. The waitress reappeared.

  “How are you doing on drinks?” she asked. “Could I bring you a menu?”

  Gordon looked around the table.

  “You’d better bring some menus,” he said. “I think we’re going to be here awhile.”

  A TUREEN OF MINESTRONE arrived, and the waitress ladled out bowls for all of them. After a few minutes of eating in silence, Gordon turned to El and said:

  “The soup’s good. I take it you come here often.”

  “Often enough. Have been ever since we got here.”

  “And when was that? I’m guessing the two of you (he looked at Gina) have been here awhile. I’d like to hear your stories.”

  He looked back and forth between the two women.

  “You first,” said Gina.

  El sighed and set her spoon down in the soup bowl.

  “It was a long time ago, but it seems like yesterday. I think I told you (she turned to Gordon) that in 1970, I was hanging out with a group of people who would have been called hippies, though we never used the word ourselves. Several of us lived in a townhouse on Judah Street in San Francisco, near Kezar Stadium, if you know where that is. It wasn’t too far from the Haight, but of course the Haight had changed by then. The drugs and crime were worse.

  “There were about eight of us in the core group and usually about as many more around the edges, though they came and went. In November of 1970 (and I remember, because I decided I was not going to go home to my parents for Thanksgiving), Andre Franklin moved in. Oh my God, he was gorgeous! Tall, thin, curly brown hair over his ears and down to his shoulders. The first time I saw him I thought I’d die if he didn’t ask me to go to bed with him.

  “And with a little encouragement on my part, he did. It was on Thanksgiving Day, actually. Those of us who stayed in the house, including Andre, cooked Swanson frozen turkey dinners. Afterwards, he invited me to his room and played the guitar for me. He had a gift with music. And afterwards … well, we were a couple from then on. Soul mates, really, or so I thought at the time. And not a Thanksgiving has gone by since that I don’t think about what happened in his room that night.

  “Andre worked for a health food store, and because he was stoned less often than the other staff, they trained him to keep the books. I’d taken journalism classes at Cal and was working for the Bay Guardian, as a copy editor at first, because nobody wanted to do that, then they let me do a couple of stories. That worked pretty well, and I started to move up. It didn’t pay much, but you could still live fairly cheap in San Francisco then. Not like now. At the end of 1972, I got pregnant. Our daughter, Anna, was born in late July of 1973. Andre and I talked about getting married, but decided a marriage certificate was just a piece of paper.” She took a sip of wine. “My father was not happy.

  “The year after Anna was born, Andre’s aunt died. She’d married a well-off businessman, and they lived in Hillsborough, but they never had any kids. She was very fond of Andre and left him a quarter of a million dollars, saying she hoped he’d buy or start a business with it. That changed everything.

  “It was getting more expensive to live in San Francisco, and we weren’t sure we wanted to raise our daughter there. A lot of people we knew had moved to the country or to small towns and tried to live a simpler life. We thought maybe we’d do the same. So in the fall of 1974 we drove around Northern California in our VW bus, sleeping in it most nights, and looking for a town we might move to. We got to Arthur in mid-October, and the weather was nicer than usual, warm and clear, though the nights were chilly. Then one morning we were in the Shotgun Café, and we heard someone at the next table say the newspaper was up for sale.”

  The waitress cleared the soup bowls and set salads in front of them. Garbini’s was one of the few places left that served both soup and salad before dinner. El took a bite of salad and continued.

  “We took a drive all the way around the lake after breakfast and talked about it. Andre could run the business side and I could be the editor. By the time we got back to town, we knew we were going to go for it. We offered ten percent under the asking price, and the owner accepted. Later, we realized we probably paid 20 percent too much, but to us it was a dream, not an investment.

  “The old owner wanted to work until July of the next year when he’d be 65 and could collect Social Security. That was fine with us. It gave us a chance to make plans.

  “When we got back to The City, Andre proposed to me. He said if we were going to move to a small town, we had to be respectable. We also had to give up marijuana. That was fine by me. I’d pretty much been leaving it alone since I got pregnant with Anna, anyway. But he said we could drink, since that was legal and everybody in town did it. If only I’d known then.”

  She stopped to swallow the last of the Pinot Grigio.

  “We took over the paper in the summer of ‘75, and I went real slow about making any changes. We had to become accepted in the community first. And I’ll have to say, after writing about police brutality and social problems at Hunters Point, it took some doing to get used to writing about ribbon cuttings and school bake sales. That winter, the high school basketball team won the league championship and three games in the state playoffs. We covered the hell out of it and basked in the glow of their achievement.

  “But something else happened that winter. First of all, there was the winter. It didn’t snow much that year, but it was cold and dark, and we weren’t used to it. Andre took it harder than I did. And the other thing was that he’d started drinking regularly, and it was a problem. Pot he could handle. Smoked a bit and got mellow and horny. But it turned out he couldn’t handle alcohol at all. If he took one drink, you never knew when he was going to stop, and it was almost never early. By next April he was drinking every night, and I was feeling like a grass widow.

  “It didn’t help that the paper was having cash-flow problems. We had great accounts receivable, and that was what we were looking at when we bought it. The problem was, a lot of them took their time paying, and Andre wouldn’t lean on them. After a while, he didn’t even care.

  “One night in D
ecember of 1976, we had a huge fight just before dinner and he stomped out. It had happened before, and I figured we’d make it up later. I waited up for him, then finally went to bed. I was fast asleep when the doorbell rang, and the clock on the nightstand said 2:30. I thought Andre had locked himself out, so I ran to the door, flipped on the porch light, and opened it.

  “It wasn’t Andre. It was a Highway Patrol officer, who’d come to tell me Andre had run off the road and into a tree and been killed. He’d clearly been drinking. Thank God, he didn’t hurt anybody else. And now, 20 years later, I’m still here.”

  The table was silent for a moment.

  “I never knew that — about your husband, I mean. I’m sorry,” Gina said. “That was before we got here.”

  “And when was that?” Peter murmured.

  “My story isn’t nearly as interesting, but I’ll give you the short version. I grew up in Southern California, normal family, suburbs, all that. Went to school at San Jose State, got my teaching credential, and got hired in Sacramento. One night in a bar (I had to clean the story up for our kids), I met a cute guy who worked for Crocker Bank. One thing led to another, and Ken and I got married. We had two kids, Jason and Jennifer, and I quit teaching to take care of them.

  “Ken was getting tired of Sacramento and talking about moving somewhere more quiet for the kids’ sake. One day he saw an ad that Cascade Pacific Bank needed a branch manager in Arthur and applied. He got the job, and we moved here in the fall of 1979. A year later, I felt the kids were old enough that I could go back to work.

  “I didn’t realize how much of a strain it would be. I was out of the groove on doing lesson plans and grading papers and tests, so I was putting in long hours. Ken started working late, too, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I guess I was the last one in town to find out that ‘working late’ meant doing a little double entry with one of the tellers. It blew up, finally. I got the house and they left town. And now the kids are gone, and I’m still here.”