The Sourdough Wars

by Smith, Julie

  “Neither do I, but I’m hoping to find out. He’s agreed to an interview.”

  “Today? But you don’t work on Saturday.”

  “Dammit, I’m on special. Want to come or not?”

  Of course I wanted to come.

  Thompson had asked Rob to meet him, not at his friends’ place in the Castro, but the Stanford Court Hotel. Its lobby bar looks like a St. James Street men’s club, and during the day the guests use it for business meetings. It’s one of my favorite places in San Francisco—elegant without being snooty. Thompson, suited and tied even though it was Saturday, looked as if he belonged. He said, “Mornin’, Rebecca. I’m glad you could join us. Once I started working again, I moved back here—the baby was keepin’ me up.”

  I was sure Rob hadn’t asked permission to bring me, or even mentioned that he intended to. Thompson was a gent, and I had a momentary pang of guilt for thinking him a murderer.

  “Sit down, sit down,” He gestured as if the lobby were his own living room. “Glad to see you, Mr. Burns.”

  We made ourselves comfortable and ordered coffee. “I guess you’re wonderin’ why I agreed to this interview.”

  Rob said nothing.

  “It’s just that I felt kind of stupid about what I did and I wanted to kind of explain. Sort of make a public apology.” We nodded. “It was a dumb-ass thing I did—cowardly. My daddy wouldn’t have been proud of me.”

  “Finding the body must have been pretty nerve-wracking,” I said. “I know, because we did it, too.” Thompson shook his head. “You don’t understand. I didn’t exactly find the body.”

  “But I thought you phoned in the tip.”

  “She was still alive when I got there.”

  Rob took charge of the interview: “I think you’d better begin at the beginning.”

  “I’ll be glad to, Mr. Burns. You see, I went there because it looked as if the Martinelli starter had slipped through my fingers—Conglomerate’s fingers, that is. But I’d heard Miss Devereaux’s sourdough was better than any other on the market, so I told the folks in New York about it.”

  “Your bosses?”

  Thompson nodded. “They thought maybe this was a great opportunity. We could ‘discover’ Sally Devereaux, you know? She was a pretty gal, and we thought she might be promotable. We could have her do our TV commercials and talk about bakin’ bread, and we could call our bread Sally Devereaux—it would have been like our competition, Sara Lee, only Sally was a real person.”

  My stomach turned over as I realized how much Sally would have loved that. If she’d lived she might have had the kind of success she never even had the nerve to wish for.

  “So, anyway,” continued Thompson, “I went up to Sonoma to taste her bread and talk with her. I didn’t make an appointment—didn’t want to get her hopes up until after I was sure the bread was really as good as folks said it was.

  “When I got there, I didn’t see anyone in the place. But there was a funny smell, like somethin’ was burnin’. And there was somethin’ that looked like a burned ball of dough on the counter.”

  “We saw it, too. Along with some lighter fluid and matches.”

  “Yes. I could still smell the burned smell, so it seemed as if someone had been there pretty recently. I thought they still were—in another room or a bathroom, maybe. I was still tryin’ to get my bearin’s when I heard a moan. So I stepped behind the counter and”—he turned up his palms in a helpless gesture—“there she was.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I bent down over her. She had that big knife stickin’ out of her, so I knew I had to get help right away, but—I don’t know, your first instinct somehow isn’t to go to the phone first thing. So I bent down and she took my hand. I don’t know if she knew who I was or not; maybe she didn’t care. She just knew I was a person. She told me she had to go to the bathroom.” His eyes filled up and so did mine. There she was dying with a knife in her chest and her last conscious thought was that she had to go to the bathroom. It didn’t seem fair.

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “Yes.” An odd look came over Thompson’s face. “She said she needed a gun.”

  “A gun!”

  “Strange, isn’t it? I think she wanted to kill the person who stabbed her. She didn’t say that, though. She just said she needed a gun and a bathroom. Oh, and she mentioned Peter’s name, too.”

  “In what context?”

  Thompson shook his head, looking very sad. “None. She just said his name and then she died. I was so shook up all I could do was get out of there. I got in my car and started drivin’.”

  “You’re sure she was dead?”

  If Thompson sometimes struck me as a bit of a wimp, he didn’t then. His eyes were marble-hard. “Dead sure, Mr. Burns. Her hand came out of my hand, and her breath left her. It wasn’t something you could mistake.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thompson. Did you phone the police before you got in your car?”

  “Nope. Didn’t even think of it till I was a good ways down the road.”

  “If you were calm enough to call the cops, why didn’t you just give them your name and come clean?”

  “Could I answer that off the record?”

  Rob hated those last words. He twitched a little, but he nodded.

  “Well, I was still panicked, but I knew I’d better call the police. I mean, I was raised right and I knew I had to. But, frankly, I didn’t see any reason in hell for gettin’ involved. The murder wasn’t my fault, I didn’t know one thing that could possibly shed any light on anything whatsoever, so why not take advantage of the situation I was in—away from the scene of the crime, I mean—and keep on stayin’ away?” He smiled the smile of a man who knows he has acted in a wholly human, if not wholly admirable, way. “I didn’t know y’all were going to spot me.”

  “The police told you we were the ones who saw you?”

  “No. I guessed. All I had to do was read the Chronicle and put two and two together.”

  “That brings up something I’ve been wondering about,” said Rob. “Who was the guy in the car with you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Burns. There was no one in the car with me.”

  “Rebecca, didn’t you see someone with Mr. Thompson?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “And so did I.”

  Thompson looked as if his kid were trying to tell him an heirloom vase had sprouted legs, jumped off the mantel, and busted itself. “I can’t think what you two are talking about. You can ask the highway patrol if you don’t believe me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  That creep Rob left me again—well, he let me buy him lunch and then he left me—something about getting his story written—and I felt strangely at odds. I was unhappy and didn’t want to be alone. I decided to visit my sister.

  Mickey and my ace secretary lived in the Noe Valley—having moved from Berkeley—in one of those very San Francisco apartments with big rooms, high ceilings, and two bathrooms—one for the toilet and one for the tub. Since they’d both started working, they’d replaced some of their Goodwill furniture with new stuff from Macy’s, and the place looked close to presentable. It might stay that way this time—Mickey’s gotten a wicker sofa her cat can’t shred.

  Kruzick answered the door. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not. No floors, no windows, no weekends. Find a Kelly boy.” As usual, I just wasn’t in the mood, but I must have been even less so than usual—even Alan noticed. “Oh, all right,” he said, waving me inside, “I guess I could make you some coffee, since you love it so much when I do.” He shook a finger at me. “But no dictation; not in your lap, anyway.”

  Mickey turned off the vacuum and came running to kiss me. “What a great excuse not to clean house.”

  Alan grabbed a dust rag, which looked strangely alien in his grasp. “I have to do everything around here.”

  Mickey rolled her eyes and went to make the coffee he’d promised.

  While
I waited on the new wicker couch, I curled up with Lulu the cat, thinking about Sally. When Mickey got back, I filled her in on the few details of my recent activities that hadn’t been reported in the Chronicle.

  “Let’s think,” she said. “Why would anyone want to kill Sally?”

  “Let’s do indeed. Somehow, I just assumed Clayton Thompson had done it until the cops let him go.”

  “Thompson?” Alan stopped pretending to dust and looked around. “That redneck who came to the auction?”

  “He’s no more a redneck than Chris is—he’s just Southern.”

  “He came to the play the other night. With a cute boy.”

  “Aha!” said Mickey. I was kicking myself too hard to answer. Of course Thompson was gay. That was why he’d been staying in the Castro, and why he claimed there’d been no young man in his car, and why he was so nervous the day of the auction. I remembered trying to make small talk with him that day. He’d even acted twitchy when we asked him about sightseeing, and now I knew why—the sights he’d seen were confined to Castro Street. He had a wife and kids and he was Southern, even if he did live in New York—he couldn’t afford to come out of the closet. But he was no doubt making the most of every second in San Francisco, the homosexual capital of the world—or of the West, anyway.

  And of course he’d gone to see Sleuth. He knew all about it from reading Rob’s articles on Peter, but they didn’t say Alan was in the play, so he didn’t know he could blow his cover there. Had Peter known him before? It seemed impossible—how could he have?

  Mickey ran a hand through her unaccustomed short curls. The hairdo was as new as the sofa, yet another sign of her urbanization. Her mind returned to the original subject. “Just because the police let him go doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Sally. Maybe he saw you on your way to Sonoma, figured you’d tell the cops he’d been there, and made the phone call so he’d look clean.”

  “Oy.” Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  “Maybe he did it,” she continued, “because he was the burglar and Sally found out about it.”

  “Why else do it?” I said, thinking aloud. “Why would anyone kill Sally? I just don’t get it.”

  “Maybe the murder hasn’t got anything to do with sourdough,” said Mickey. “Maybe her boyfriend did it.”

  “Or maybe Bob Tosi did it—maybe he never got over her leaving him for Peter, which would also argue that he killed Peter and made both crimes look like sourdough murders. Or maybe he did it because he wants custody of the kid.”

  “I like it,” said Mickey. “He’s the only one who hasn’t seemed very interested in getting the starter—no one would ever suspect.”

  “It won’t work—he’s got a great alibi.”

  “What?”

  “The kid. Sally’s own kid.”

  “Maybe not.” She looked very excited. “It takes an hour to drive from here to Sonoma, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, how long is it by bus?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because that must be how she sent the kid—and the bus must take at least an hour, probably longer. So, look—here’s what he does: He knows he’s supposed to pick up the kid at, say, four. Does that sound right?”

  I nodded.

  “So he drives to Sonoma, watches Sally put little Bobby on the bus, follows her back to the bakery, stabs her, and drives home in time to pick up the kid. He might have to speed a little, but I doubt it—the bus probably takes an hour and a half.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t like it? Are you kidding? It’s perfect. It’s like the Five Red Herrings."

  “Oh, the timing’s perfect, all right. And the brilliance of the theory is dazzling. But you don’t know Bob Tosi.”

  “I thought you said he was a jerk.”

  “He’s arrogant, anyway. But he’s sane.”

  “What do you mean? He’s used to getting everything he wants. He’s probably a spoiled brat who’ll do anything to keep it that way.”

  I shook my head. “He’s gotten a lot of things, but they’ve been handed to him. The truth is, he’s had an easy life and he hasn’t had to scratch to get ahead. I don’t think he’s very competitive.” I stood up. “But I’m going to see him, anyway.”

  “How come?”

  “You gave me a great idea. I’m going to find out who Sally’s boyfriend is.”

  The idea I had wasn’t exactly pretty, I’m afraid. Bluntly speaking, it involved the exploitation of a small child. But the point was to catch his mom’s murderer, I told myself. Yes, Rebecca, but that’s the job of the police, my conscience told me.

  That did it. Could I entrust an important job like this to the likes of Martinez and Curry? Certainly not. I looked up Bob Tosi in the phone book.

  He lived in Grosvenor Tower, in my opinion a weird choice for a person with choices. It was a very pricey place, indeed, with saunas and other amenities, but it was as impersonal as a Holiday Inn. The apartments I’d visited there looked as if they were occupied by people in transition—just divorced and about to get engaged. Come to think of it, Bob Tosi might fit that category. He was certainly recently divorced, and from all accounts, including his own, he didn’t seem the sort who gave matrimony a lot of thought before taking it on.

  However, contrary to my expectations, he’d given his apartment a lot of thought. Or at least he’d given thought to his own comfort. Like his office, the place wasn’t “decorated,” but it was full of things that looked used and enjoyed—things like books and records, a chess game on a coffee table, and a few of little Bobby’s toys. On the walls, which had been painted a friendly forest green, hung good paintings like the ones at his office—another Mary Robertson, paintings by other California artists, and a Haitian primitive, a jungle scene that seemed to dominate the room.

  Bobby was sitting on the floor, untangling a kite string that was seriously snarled.

  Bob greeted me—oddly, I thought—with a hug, and invited me in without question. He sat on the floor next to Bobby and started to help him with some of the worst tangles. “This is Miss Schwartz,” he said.

  Bobby looked up: “Hi, Rebecca.”

  I said to Bob, “We met when Chris and I went up to Sonoma.” And then I addressed them both: “How’re you two doing?”

  Bobby didn’t look up at that. “Okay,” he said, in a voice that belied it.

  “We’re having a hard time,” said Bob. “We’re glad to see you.” The look he gave me was almost pleading—he would have been glad to see the Creature from the Black Lagoon, anything to distract him from his son’s grief. I wondered if he had his own grief as well, and he answered the unspoken question: “It’s hard for us without Sally. I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

  “If there’s anything I can do—”

  He waved a hand, cutting me off. “We just have to live through it. We went out and flew Bobby’s kite, and that helped, didn’t it, kid?”

  “I guess so.” Bobby still kept his eyes on the floor. “I just wish I hadn’t come here, that’s all.”

  Bob’s pain showed in his face. “You couldn’t have done anything, son.”

  “I wish I hadn’t been on that bus.”

  “Bus?”

  “Somebody killed her while I was on the bus. I figured it out.”

  “You couldn’t have known that would happen.”

  “I could have stopped it.”

  “Bobby, lots of people who were close to your mother wish they could have stopped it. It’s not your fault.”

  Tears started to run down his face, and Bob reached for him, to hug him, but he pulled away. “I’m the only one. Nobody else was around. And I wasn’t around when I should have been.”

  “Her boyfriend couldn’t stop it,” I said, hating myself. Bobby looked up at me now, hope struggling through the tears. “Boyfriend?”

  “If anyone could have, he could have. And he would have wanted to as much as you do.”
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  “And so would I,” said Bob fervently.

  But Bobby ignored him; perhaps he didn’t believe him. “Did my mom have a boyfriend?”

  “Of course she did. You know him, don’t you?”

  He shook his head, apparently puzzled. “She had a boyfriend once. Right after we left here, Dad. But that was a long time ago.” The tears came more freely. “And now he’s dead, too. Will we all die, Daddy?”

  Bob reached for him again and this time, sobbing, the boy melted into his dad’s embrace. “Of course not, Bobby. Of course not. We’re going to be all right. It’s all going to be okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  While this was going on, I felt like a nematode. A drunken, derelict, tramp of a nematode, shunned, and rightly so, by all decent nematodes. Bob, apparently, was too much in shock to notice what I was doing. If he’d figured it out, he’d probably have booted me out by then. I hated myself, but I was in too deep to stop. “Your mom’s boyfriend is still alive,” I said. “Don’t you know who I mean? The guy who was backing her in the sourdough auction. You must know him.”

  Unaccountably, Bobby started laughing. “She didn’t have any boyfriend. Did Mom say that?”

  I didn’t answer, not sure at all what was going on. “Mom was like that. She liked people to think things sometimes that weren’t true. She didn’t have any boyfriend, Rebecca. No one could have helped her but me.”

  I saw the truth of what he was saying. Sally had been a great one for appearances, and appearing desirable was important to her. There hadn’t been any backer at all. She hadn’t a prayer of winning the auction. Or maybe she thought she could bid high and then find a backer to make good on the bid if she won. Her fantasies had just gotten away with her. I felt like a very stupid nematode.

  “Bobby,” I said, “I’m sure your mom would have been proud of you for being so brave about wanting to save her.” I stood up. “You’re a good boy.”

  Bob said, “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

  When we were in the corridor, he thanked me for trying to make Bobby feel better, and I thanked the God of Moses and Abraham for somehow keeping my real motives from him.