The Sourdough Wars

by Smith, Julie

  Praise for THE SOURDOUGH WARS, the SECOND book in the Rebecca Schwartz series by Edgar-winning author Julie Smith:

  “An interesting new detective personality… Smith shows an Agatha Christie-like capacity for making much ado about clues, concocting straw hypotheses, and surprising us, in the end…. Smith’s crisp storytelling, her easy knowledge of local practices, and her likable, unpredictable heroine will make readers look forward to more of sleuth Schwartz’s adventures.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A delightfully modern sleuth.”

  —Minneapolis Tribune

  “Rebecca’s lively first-person narration brands her a new detective to watch.”

  —Wilson Library Bulletin

  “An attractive and amusing heroine.”

  —The San Diego Union

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  THE SOURDOUGH WARS

  TOURIST TRAP

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

  Also by Julie Smith:

  The Skip Langdon Series

  NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  JAZZ FUNERAL

  DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK

  (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

  HOUSE OF BLUES

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION

  (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

  82 DESIRE

  MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  The Paul Mcdonald Series

  TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

  HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

  The Talba Wallis Series

  LOUISIANA HOTSHOT

  LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  LOUISIANA LAMENT

  P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  As Well As

  WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK

  NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)

  THE

  SOURDOUGH WARS

  A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery

  By

  JULIE SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, LA

  The Sourdough Wars

  Copyright © 1984 by Julie Smith

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  ISBN: 9781617507922

  Originally published by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc. in 1984

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: October 2012

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  For Betsy Petersen, without whom

  none of this would have happened

  Contents

  Chapter 1 * Chapter 2 * Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 * Chapter 5 * Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 * Chapter 8 * Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 * Chapter 11 * Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 * Chapter 14 * Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 * Chapter 17 * Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 * Chapter 20 * Chapter 21

  Sign Up...

  Guarantee

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  Also by Julie Smith

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chris Nicholson, my law partner, had a nine o’clock court date on Monday. When she straggled in around eleven, our secretary greeted her with his accustomed politeness: “Been gettin’ any lately?”

  Male secretaries are quite the thing nowadays. Lots of lady professionals revel in them. They wear fashionable narrow ties and button-down shirts. They type a zillion words a minute, they dust, make great coffee, and run beautifully oiled offices. That was the story I was hearing from some of my friends, anyway.

  Ours dressed sloppily, made lousy coffee, typed about forty words a minute, and never remembered to give us our messages. His name was Alan Kruzick, and he was my sister Mickey’s boyfriend. Also a starving actor.

  Mom had talked us into hiring him after Mickey finished her master’s and got a job at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco. Mickey and Kruzick had moved from Berkeley to the city so she wouldn’t have to commute, and their rent doubled. None of us Schwartzes liked the idea of Mickey’s supporting Alan—and Mom thought her little idea was the perfect solution.

  So far as I was concerned, he wasn’t working out, but Chris was a sucker for his smart-aleck style. Also, she was in a very good mood that Monday morning, so when he asked if she’d been gettin’ any, she said, “Bet your booty, baby.” Then she whipped into my office and sat down.

  “Very businesslike,” I said.

  “Oh, who cares. No one’s here.”

  “How was your weekend?”

  “I spent it with Peter Martinelli. I think I’m in love.”

  “Oh, Lord. How many times did you have to sit through Sleuth?”

  “I washed my hair during performances.”

  “Very convenient. When’s the wedding?”

  “First we have the auction. Then we worry about the wedding.”

  “What auction?”

  “We’re going to auction off the sourdough starter—like Alan suggested.”

  * * *

  The previous Friday night, Chris and I had gone to the Town Theater with Mickey and my friend Rob Burns, to see Alan play Milo Tindle in Sleuth. Andrew Wyke, the wronged husband bent on revenge, was played by the elegant Peter Martinelli, scion of a once-great sourdough dynasty. Afterward, Alan and Peter joined us for drinks.

  The play put us in the mood for S. Holmes, Esq. (or “the Sherlock Holmes pub,” as it’s usually known). This is an odd watering hole at the top of the Holiday Inn at Sutter and Stockton, but it’s not nearly so odd as the hotel’s doorman. Or, rather, as his appearance. He’s a heavyset, elderly black man wearing an Inverness cape and deerstalker cap.

  The pub itself features deep plush chairs and sofas, dozens of large-bowled meerschaum pipes in display cases, and a very good replica of the great sleuth’s Baker Street digs. Despite its delightful appointments, it’s hardly ever crowded, though it isn’t that hard to figure out why: S. Holmes, Esq., is insanely expensive. Of course Kruzick suggested it, and of course he knew we’d have to treat him to celebrate his triumph on the boards. That’s Kruzick for you.

  Chris and Peter Martinelli ended up sitting next to each other, and both of them seemed pretty happy about it. Each was tall, each was slender; she was light, he was dark. I didn’t know a thing about him, but she was on the rebound from a long-term romance.

  Chris and I used to call her former lover “the perfect man.” Larry was sweet, gentle, a good cook, a successful architect, a looker—what more could you ask? “A little backbone,” Chris said after the breakup. “He was a no-growth stock.”

  Larry was a little older than we were, and he wanted to get married. Chris didn’t; and she reasoned that if he’d really been perfect, she would have wanted marriage. So she dumped him and started looking around for someone even more perfect. At the moment, she had her blue eyes firmly fixed on Peter Martinelli. I decided to help her out.

  I fixed my own eyes on him. “Hey, handsome,” I said, “are you married?”

  He shook his head. “Never have been.” He looked at Chris: “And I’m a great catch, too.”

  “Noted.”

  He laughed. “I’m kidding. What you see is what you get. I haven’t got a penny.”

  “You can’t kid me,” said Kruzick. “You’ve gotta have bread bucks.”

  “Being a Martinelli,” said Peter, “doesn’t even get you a good table at a restaurant anymore.”

  The famou
s Martinelli Bakery, the oldest and by far the best of the old-time sourdough producers, had had to close down a few years back. It was the old story—a small family business that expanded too fast, hit a recessionary period, and got in too deep. A few years after it went bust, the elder Martinellis—Peter’s parents—were killed in a mudslide. Every San Franciscan knew the story.

  “Oh, come on,” said Kruzick. “There must have been a house or something. Stocks and bonds, maybe.”

  “No stocks, no bonds. My sister got the house.”

  “Didn’t you get anything?” Kruzick can be unbelievably obnoxious, but somehow he gets away with it.

  “Sure I did. I got the starter.”

  “Huh?”

  “When my folks closed the bakery, they never gave up the idea that they’d be able to reopen it some day. So they had the starter frozen. You know what cryogenics is?”

  “Sure,” said Kruzick. “It’s like in Sleeper, when Woody Allen dies and has himself frozen. Then he thaws out in the next century or something.”

  Peter shrugged. “That’s what they did with the starter. Got a cryogenics firm to freeze it, just in case. At that time, there were some stocks and bonds. Dad thought he could sell them and borrow some money, maybe get some investors.” He shrugged again. “But he never got it together.”

  “So you got the starter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what’s that?” Kruzick is from New York and harbors pockets of ignorance.

  “It’s what you need to make sourdough,” said Rob. “San Francisco’s unique sourdough French bread,” he continued, “is the stuff of myth and legend. Yet the Martinelli loaf, with its familiar thick, dark crust and chewy, fragrant interior, was the acknowledged pride of San Francisco bakeries, a legend unto itself.”

  “Hey,” said Peter, “I remember that. That’s what the Chronicle said when the bakery closed.”

  “I know. I wrote the story.”

  “But what’s the starter?” said Kruzick.

  Rob went on quoting himself. “Sourdough first surfaced during the Gold Rush of eighteen-forty-nine. Perhaps the forty-niners brought it with them; maybe they developed it here. No one knows for sure. Some say the city’s cottony fog gives the bread its sour taste; some say there’s a certain yeast that grows only in San Francisco. But one thing is certain—you can’t make it from scratch. You have to have sourdough to make sourdough.”

  “I think,” said Kruzick, “I’m catching on.”

  Rob nodded. “A mixture of flour and water called the mother sponge, or the mother sour, is the starter you need before you can bake your bread. Each bakery ‘builds’ its starter several times a day by adding more flour and more water to a portion of it, which must then rise and rise again. Each rising takes seven hours. And then the loaves are popped into the oven.”

  “So what’s so special about this dough sponge?”

  “It’s just one of those ineffable things,” said Mickey. That was the way she usually handled Kruzick—by using words he couldn’t understand.

  “It is indeed,” said Rob. “The bread’s only as good as the mother sour.”

  “So is there a special yeast?” said Mickey. “Or what?”

  “It’s said that the old-time bakers used to make the loaves by shaping the dough in their armpits,” said Rob. “And that’s what gave it its special flavor.”

  “Oh, quit teasing us.”

  “Well, there is a special yeast.” He was talking like himself again. “It’s called Saccharomyces exiguus, but you can find it lots of places. The Italians use it to make panettone, for instance. It’s the reason the bread takes so long to rise—it’s what scientists call a poor gasser.”

  “But if they have it in Italy,” asked Chris, “why can you only get sourdough in San Francisco?”

  “Ah, because you also need a bacterium that really is found only around here. It’s called Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. During the long rising, a sugar called maltose is formed. The bug works on the maltose to form two acids—seventy percent lactic and thirty percent acetic, which gives the bread its sour taste. Other bacteria won’t produce that much acetic acid, and other yeasts won’t tolerate that much. So you need both to make sourdough.”

  “So, Peter,” said Kruzick, “you gonna start a bakery?”

  Peter shook his head. “I’m lousy at business. Listen, I’m a starving actor. I live on what I make from commercials.”

  “How about if the theater paid you a salary?”

  “Ever since the state funds got cut, the theater can’t even pay for parking.”

  “But suppose someone established a foundation for the theater, and the foundation paid you a salary? I mean, someone who knew about the plight of the theater and wanted to save it—someone, say, who’d make a great artistic director. We’re gonna need one when Anton leaves. You’d be great.”

  “I’ve applied for the job. The only thing is, there’s probably not going to be a job. The theater’s not going to last long and you might as well get used to it, Alan.”

  “So why don’t you save it?”

  “I don’t have any money.” Peter turned out his pockets. “What does it take to make you believe me?”

  “What I mean is, why don’t you auction off your starter?” We were on our second drink by that time, and no one was thinking too fast. Everyone was silent for a moment.

  Peter spoke, finally. “No one but my sister ever wanted to buy it, and I’d sell it to Russia first.”

  “No one knows how valuable it is, so we’ve gotta tell ’em. See, here’s what we do. We make it a media event. We get Rob to write a story about you and how you’re trying to save the theater. You announce publicly that you’re going to auction off your starter, and Rob writes some purple stuff about how great the Martinelli bread was. And you invite people to bid.”

  We stared at him.

  “They’ll come running.”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” said Rob. “I love that old sourdough stuff. I could write about it day and night.”

  “Then when we get the money,” said Kruzick, “we’ll build this great new theater—and we’ll have guest artists and everything, plus our own company, in original plays by local playwrights.”

  “You get to be the star of every play,” said Mickey. “Because it was your idea.” Like I said, we were on our second drink. So it went on that way for a while. We had a high old time planning rosy futures for Alan and Peter, but no one took it seriously. Chris and Peter hardly listened. They just kept touching each other whenever they made conversational points. If you ask me, they had only one thing on their minds.

  Chapter Two

  “Chris, listen,” I said. “Forget this auction idea. The moon was full last night. You’re just feeling a little funny, that’s all. It’ll go away in a day or two.”

  “Think about it, Rebecca. What’s wrong with it? Pick holes in it. Really try.”

  I thought about it. I really tried. And I couldn’t come up with any objections. “I guess,” I said, “the worst that could happen is it might not work. I mean, maybe no one will want to bid.”

  “Exactly! And what harm would that do? None. Listen, Peter wants us to set it up. He’s our client.”

  “He doesn’t need a law firm. He needs a business manager or a financial consultant. Something like that.”

  “He wants us.”

  “He wants you.”

  She patted her hair. “The things I do to get clients.”

  “Oh, stop. He’s really serious about our setting it up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to consult a consultant.” I picked up the phone and dialed a friend who was one and who owed me a favor. He told me exactly how to do it, and I told Chris. Then I called Rob to see if he still wanted to do the story. He said he’d get back to me, and he did, in five minutes.

  “The city editor loves it,” he said. “Thinks it’s the greatest Chronicle yarn since sliced muffins.”


  “Don’t you mean sliced bread?”

  “Rebecca,” he said, “your brain’s going. Don’t you remember the sliced-muffin story?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “It was in 1967.”

  “I was a little young at the time. Possibly not even born. Refresh my memory.”

  “There’s nothing worse than a sliced English muffin, you know what I mean? You’ve got to tear them apart, so you get a nice uneven surface with big craters for butter to drip into.”

  “So?”

  “So the local English-muffin makers started slicing the goods. We ran it on the front page for a week. In the end, they went back to the good old way. Hottest story since ‘A Great City Forced to Drink Swill!’ ”

  I did remember that one—or at least I remembered hearing about it. I was a tyke at the time. The Chronicle had exposed the fact that city restaurants were serving terrible coffee. That was it—the whole story. It was the greatest little circulation booster of the decade. That was the kind of city San Francisco was and the kind of morning paper it had. So of course the city editor went bonkers for sourdough.

  The story ran the next day, in a wiggly-rule box above the fold on page one. The box also contained a mouthwatering three-column picture of a sourdough loaf broken open so you could see the famous dark crust contrasting with the tempting chewy interior. I bet everyone in the city had sourdough for lunch that day, and those who didn’t had it for dinner. But then, that was about the way San Franciscans ate on an ordinary day. Sourdough with fresh salmon. Sourdough with cracked crab. Sourdough with shrimp Louie, chef’s salad, pasta, petrale sole. Burgers on sourdough rolls. My mind was wandering, and I mentally congratulated Mr. City Editor. This was bigger than sliced muffins. It might be the biggest thing since the earthquake.

  Rob’s story made Peter sound very naive and charming. It outlined the history of the Martinelli Bakery, referred movingly to the tragic death of Mom and Dad Martinelli, and portrayed the youthful Peter as a sensitive child who never had any interest in business, much to the despair of his parents. He had been an artistic child from the first, and his teachers had recognized his talent, but the Martinellis had done their best to squash it and turn him into a baker. Peter had suffered enormous guilt when Mom and Dad died, but, as he put it, “that didn’t make me any smarter in business.” So he had pursued his acting career, and Rob mentioned three or four local triumphs and a couple of movies he’d been in. The story ended like so: