The Sourdough Wars

by Smith, Julie

  “The time of the murder?”

  “Yes. She stayed with me when she came down for the auction. Sally and I go back a long way—Peter and I grew up with the Tosi boys, you know, so when Bob married Sally, she and I became friends. We were the same kind of people, in a way.”

  “Do you have a guest bathroom?”

  “Yes—off the guest room. Shall we look there for the gun?” She stood up and led the way. Chris and I followed her into a frou-frou bedroom done up in a Laura Ashley print—bedspread, chair, pillows, curtains, all in the same pink print on a cream background. It was the kind of room I dreamed about when I was a teenager.

  The bathroom was compact and had about a million hiding places in it. We looked through the towels in the linen cabinet and peered in the medicine chest and rummaged through all the drawers of the dresser and didn’t find the gun. Anita seemed to cheer up during the process. What I’d been saying finally seemed to hit her—that her friend had killed her brother and may have tried to frame her. The part about framing her was the only part that really seemed to make any impression, and now that it didn’t seem too likely, relief was coming out of her pores like sweat.

  But Chris wasn’t satisfied. She opened everything and looked again. Then she shrugged, walked back into the bedroom, and, just as abruptly, turned around again. “Wait a minute.” She went back, opened the linen cabinet and removed a box of Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads. She stepped back, startled. “This is it. Feel.” She handed the box to me. It was the heaviest box of pads ever made.

  I looked at Anita. Her shoulders had tensed again and something was flickering in her eyes. But she nodded, setting her lips. I ripped off the top of the Maxi-Pads and saw that the box was about half-full. I took out the first layer of pads, and there it was—a little handgun lying in a cuddly pad-nest. Anita reached for it, but I stopped her. “No. It might have her prints on it. We’d better not touch it.”

  “But it might be loaded.”

  “Let’s just leave it alone for right now.”

  She nodded in agreement, and I put the box on the bathroom dresser. “Let’s go back to the study.”

  Again, she led the way, shaking her head. “I just don’t get it. How did you figure any of this out? I mean, I get it about the dying message, but…” She stopped.

  When we got back to the study, she said she needed a brandy and poured one for each of us as well. When we were comfortable, she finished her thought. “How do you know I wasn’t Sally’s accomplice? Or for that matter, maybe someone else was, and she just happened to hide the gun in a convenient place.”

  “I think she put the gun there because she wanted leverage with you. Otherwise, why not just toss it in the bay?”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  “Here’s what I think happened. First of all, here’s what we know. Chris spent the night before the auction with Peter, and sometime in the middle of the night he got a phone call. The next day he said he had an appointment at ten. Chris and I think that whoever made the phone call made the appointment with him, turned up at ten, and killed him.

  “Couldn’t the phone company…?”

  I interrupted her. “The call came from a hotel. Somebody wasn’t taking chances. We think Sally was afraid she couldn’t outbid everyone else. So she wanted to stop the auction. First she tried to stop it by making threatening calls to the other bidders to try to scare them off. But that didn’t work. She turned up at Peter’s, pretending to have gotten a threatening call herself, took in the situation, and saw that the calls weren’t going to stop the auction.

  “So that night she called Peter. We think she got hysterical, probably confessed to making the threatening calls, and begged Peter to sell her the starter and call off the auction. She thought he might because Sally really believed that she had dumped him years ago and that he was still in love with her. She had that kind of capacity for self-deception. But we think what really happened is that Peter just never cared much for Sally. By all accounts—including Chris’s—he was a very passive and not very forthcoming person. So when Sally made a play for him, he went along with it but never really got interested in her. He hardly even noticed there was a romance, I think. It was simply a fling, and he withdrew from it so gradually that neither he nor Sally really noticed consciously what was happening. But at some level Sally did see it happening and she started withdrawing, too. But she made herself think she’d been the first to do it. It’s complicated, but I think that’s the way Sally was. She was so egotistical, she had to believe she dumped him. What do you think?”

  “I saw it happen,” Anita said. “It was exactly like that. Peter never really got excited about anybody—I beg your pardon, Chris. Maybe you were an exception.”

  Chris smiled sadly. “A minor one, I think. If we’d gone on seeing each other, he probably would have lost interest pretty quickly. I’ve come to see, I think that his real interest in me was the momentum I started about the auction. That was sort of the glue that held us together. But I didn’t see it at the time.”

  “And Sally,” I said, “didn’t see that her own aggression was the glue—to use your word—that held her and Peter together. But the difference was that she never saw it in retrospect either. So she thought she could influence Peter. However, when she called up in hysterics, he heard not the woman he loved begging him to take her back, but a crazy lady who admitted trying to stop his auction with threatening phone calls. So we think he not only told her he wouldn’t stop the auction but also forbade her to participate in it. He finally agreed to see her the next day to get her off his back. Incidentally, the fact that he met his visitor in his robe argues it was someone he knew well.

  “I think Sally brought the gun—your gun—to scare him, as a last resort. I don’t think she came there intending to kill him. I think she tried to seduce him. And when that failed, I think she tried cajoling, hysterics again, anything to get him to change his mind. And in the end, I think she did threaten him with the gun and he tried to take it away from her—his apartment was a mess, you know. Anyway, she ended up killing him and hiding the gun in your bathroom.”

  “I don’t even use Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads,” said Anita. Chris giggled at the non sequitur. I think I must have looked confused. “If I’d thought about it,” Anita explained, “I would have seen they didn’t belong there. But I don’t see why she put the gun there. Why my bathroom?”

  “As insurance,” I said. “She told us she had a backer, and we leaped to the conclusion that it was a man. But I tried to find out from her kid who her boyfriend was, and he laughed. He’s a very smart kid. He said his mom was likely to say she had a boyfriend even if she hadn’t. Later, I realized that even if she didn’t have a boyfriend, she still might have a backer. So I called Bobby and asked him why he laughed. And he said, ‘Because the backer was Auntie Anita.’ ”

  Anita looked betrayed. “But, Rebecca, that was no secret. If you’d asked, I’d have told you that.”

  “Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to ask until now. Peter wouldn’t sell you the starter, so you were going to get it with Sally’s help. You were her backer. But there was a catch—you’d be stuck with Sally. She’d gotten you to agree to invest in her bakery if she got the starter, and you weren’t really going to have your own bakery, which was what you wanted.”

  “Rebecca, you sound so accusing. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was the best deal I could make, and I was willing to go through with it. Why are you coming at me this way?”

  I pulled back a little. “I’m sorry. I guess I was coming at you. But Sally saw, too late, that with Peter dead, you wouldn’t need her. You’d inherit the starter and you could simply dump her. So that was why she hid the gun in your bathroom. As insurance. If you tried to back out, she’d accuse you of the murder and threaten to tell the cops the gun was in your house.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked. I had a perfect alibi.”

  “But Sally didn’t know that. That’s how I know you weren’t her
accomplice in the murder.”

  “How pathetic of Sally.”

  “Yes. It was. But she was a very determined woman. She wanted revenge on Bob Tosi for what she considered years of mistreatment. In fact, I think he was just an average Joe from a macho Italian family who didn’t realize what was going on with Sally.”

  “She told him all the time.”

  “Like so many men of that generation who got their ideas about what the world was like from adoring parents, he was practically in a coma. He literally couldn’t hear her. I think he’s changing now, but it took a divorce and a couple of murders to jolt him out of his complacency. The point is, Sally was deeply hurt by him and she wanted to prove she was as good as he was in business, or better, no matter what the cost. I expect you can identify with that. You had a similar situation in your own life.”

  Anita nodded. “I can, yes.”

  “Sally wanted that starter no matter what. She saw it as her ticket to being a person of value. It was literally about that primitive. So she stole it from the cryogenics firm. She heard about the control starter, and it never occurred to her to look for it anywhere but the main warehouse. She didn’t have a subtle mind, but sometimes that worked in her favor. You don’t know this yet, but Tony Tosi stole the original starter—it’s been in his bread for two years.”

  Anita nearly jumped out of her chair. “That bastard!”

  “When he found out about the control, he bribed someone to tell him where it was and he tried to steal it too. However, the control had been moved back to the vault where the original starter was kept. Sally went unwittingly to the right place and got it.”

  “But how could it help her? She was already baking the best bread in northern California—she couldn’t just mix it in like Tony Tosi did, for good luck or something. She thought she needed it for its publicity value. And she couldn’t have that if it was stolen.”

  “She held it for ransom.” I stopped to watch her reaction. But she didn’t react. She just sat there, politely waiting for the professor to finish her lecture. So I finished. “She got you to agree to meet her on Friday, after she’d put her kid on the bus for San Francisco. You went to her bakery and she tried to extort an agreement to go into business with her.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would I agree to such a thing? All I had to do was call the police.”

  “Oh, I think you tried. But she ripped the phone out. Then she gave you a little demonstration—using lighter fluid and a ball of bread dough—to show you what she’d do to the starter if you left the bakery. She’d have plenty of time because the police would have to get a warrant to search for the starter. She’d simply burn it up before you got back.”

  “This is too ridiculous. All I had to do was agree and—”

  I finished for her: “And later say you’d been pressured into it and sue. But you didn’t think of it then. You picked up a bread knife and killed her with it.”

  Anita didn’t miss a beat. “Prove it.”

  I brought out the little piece of paper I’d typed up before Chris and I had left the office that afternoon. It said For Immediate Release at the top, and the date was February 14, the day Sally was killed. The text announced the partnership of Anita Ashton and Sally Devereaux in the Plaza Bakery of Sonoma.

  “Rob got this in the mail this morning. She was a woman who took precautions.”

  The tense shoulders sagged. Anita’s eyes and mouth and cheek muscles all came suddenly under the spell of the law of gravity. If I ever saw defeat, I saw it in that face.

  “I need another drink,” she said, and walked to her desk to get the decanter. With one hand she picked it up, and with the other she opened the drawer of her desk. It came out with a gun.

  Chapter Twenty

  “This is why I forgot I lent Sally my gun. You see, I have two. Now give me the paper.”

  “It won’t matter if I do. Rob has a copy.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “What are you going to do? Shoot us here in your study? How are you going to explain that?”

  “Just give me the paper.”

  “Tell me something first, Anita. Was I right?”

  Her eyes darted back and forth between Chris and me. “Did you two record this?”

  “No. We didn’t even think of it.” Which shows how smart we were.

  “Open your purses and empty them.”

  I looked at Chris. She shrugged, picked up her purse, and upended it. I did the same. No recorders spilled out.

  “Okay,” said Anita. “I killed her. It doesn’t matter if I tell you, because you aren’t going to be repeating it. And I’ll tell you something else. I’m sorry about it. Yes, she stole my starter, and yes, she tried to threaten me into going into her damned partnership. But, like you said, I identified with her. We were ‘friends’ if people like us—ambitious people, people to whom achievement is the most important thing in the world —ever really have any friends. I didn’t feel close to her, but I identified with her. I knew what she was like. Because I’m like that.”

  I was so bowled over by this unexpected display of self-knowledge that I almost forgot our predicament. She’d gotten one thing wrong, though: I would have described Anita and Sally as people to whom the way other people saw them was what it was all about. She kept talking. “Sally killed Peter, and I killed Sally. Because we both wanted sourdough fame. Crazy, isn’t it?” She laughed. “It might be crazy, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting it. I’ve known for a long time what I am. Some people say I’m driven. You know how my ex-husband put it? He said I was driven by evil chauffeurs.” She laughed again. When we didn’t, she said, “I thought it was rather good. So I’m driven by evil chauffeurs. It’s just the way I am, that’s all. Maybe I could go get my head shrunk and I wouldn’t be, but if I did that, I’d be giving up a part of myself, wouldn’t I?”

  Chris said, “People say they go to shrinks to find lost parts of themselves.”

  “Listen to Little Miss Schoolmarm. I don’t know how Peter could stand you. I like what I am, do you understand that? I like being famous and making thousands of dollars for lectures and having everybody coming up afterward and acting like I’m some kind of guru or something. I love it. That’s fulfillment, ladies. Don’t let anybody kid you.”

  “So why do you need to run a bakery?”

  “Fame and money are the best things I’ve had so far, but they aren’t enough. Fulfillment and peace aren’t the same thing. The bakery would give me peace—exorcise my childhood demons. That’s what I need instead of some tweed-wearing shrink.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If you exorcise your demons, won’t you be giving up part of yourself? The evil chauffeurs you like so much?”

  “Maybe. But I’ll do it my way.”

  “It won’t work, Anita. Once you get it, it still won’t be enough. You’ll be just as empty as you are right now.”

  “Shut up! Give me that paper.”

  She took a step forward and I stepped backward. “You’ve got too much sense to shoot us. This is your house—how are you going to explain how we came to be dead on the broadloom?”

  “That’s my problem. Give it to me, dammit.”

  “No.” I stepped backward again and she took another step forward. Chris now had a clear path to the door, and she took it. She was out of the room before Anita could whirl around. When she finally turned, I attacked from behind—throwing my arms around her in what I believed to be a viselike, arm-paralyzing grip. She whapped me with one of the supposedly paralyzed arms, and, stunned, I fell backward, still holding on to her with one hand.

  She whipped around to face me, and then we were both on the floor, struggling like two galoots in a western, rolling over and over, me trying to get the gun and she holding on to it, never getting it into shooting position. We knocked the fire screen away and rolled closer to the fireplace.

  “Hold it, Anita,” said Chris. I was on the bottom, but I could see her standing in the doorway, poin
ting Sally’s gun. “Drop the gun,” she said. Anita dropped it.

  “Now get up.”

  Anita shifted her weight off my body, and then Chris yelled, “Roll, Rebecca. Your hair’s on fire!”

  I smelled it just as she said it. I rolled, and as I did, I could see flame at the ends of my pageboy. I caught the hair in my hand and mashed it into the rug, rolling over on it, hoping I wasn’t just burning up the back of my neck. I didn’t feel anything, but I guess I was still on fire, because suddenly Chris fell on top of me, smothering the flames with a pillow. The smell was vile.

  Anita recovered her balance and dived for the gun she’d dropped. Chris’s knee came up just as I sat up, hoping to get in Anita’s way. Bone crunched against bone—Chris’s kneecap and my jaw—and I lay back down rather hard.

  There was nothing to do but shoot, so Chris did. Or, rather, she tried to. She hadn’t taken the safety off Sally’s gun, or maybe it wasn’t even loaded—I couldn’t tell at the time. All I know is there was a very anticlimatic little click. And then Anita jumped on both of us again and all three of us were rolling.

  My hip landed on something hard, and then it was under the small of my back, digging in and nearly killing me. “Ow,” I yelped, and reached down to grab it. It was the gun, of course, and if I hadn’t yelled, I would have been the first one under my back, but I’d alerted the enemy and her hand got there first. She pulled at it, and I rolled off the gun toward her, hoping to knock her off-balance, but the gun went off. I stopped in midroll. The bullet had only gone through one of Anita’s nice walls, but the noise had frozen Chris as well as me. That gave Anita the split second she needed. She was in control again, the gun pointed at both of us.

  She got up warily, first on one knee, watching us like a mongoose watching two cobras. “Stay where you are,” she said, and sat on the edge of her desk, catching her breath. We stayed.

  “Rebecca,” she said at last. “Don’t bother giving me that paper. Pick it up and throw it in the fire.”

  The paper was crumpled on the floor. I didn’t move. The gun went off again and I could have sworn I felt the bullet whizzing past my cheek, but it sank into the wall about two feet to my left, so I guess my imagination was working overtime. However, I took her meaning.