The receptionist quivered all over. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?” Murray asked innocently.
“The general, an accident yesterday. The general is, he would hate me telling you this, he was such a stickler for going through channels. Maybe I should call someone.” The receptionist looked at Murray’s innocent face. What could it hurt? “The general is dead,” she proclaimed.
Murray looked alarmed. He looked surprised. He was a good actor. “Dead! How terrible! You’re right, maybe you should call someone. I’ve come a long way. The general was going to show me the whole operation. This is just awful.” Murray looked at the nameplate on the desk. “Diane, I bet you are all just sick about this. I’m surprised you’re even open if this happened yesterday.”
“Oh, the general would have wanted us to carry on. That was one of his favorite sayings, carry on. I’ll call his assistant in the test kitchen. He didn’t have a personal secretary. Said he didn’t have a personal life so why would he need a personal secretary. Oh, dear, I’m babbling.”
“No you’re not, Diane. I would sure appreciate getting to talk to that assistant, maybe still getting to take the tour of the laboratory and the research you’re doing here, since you are carrying on. I’ll just read this milling magazine and let you get back to your work.” Murray made a pretense of picking up a magazine off a small table that was between two chairs in the area. Before he sat down, of course, he acted like he had just remembered his manners. “Oh, by the way, what happened, a car accident?”
“Car accident? Oh, the general. Oh no, it was right out in back. Just a minute. I’ll call the lab, then, well, it was just awful. There were all these fancy bakers here for a tour and it happened with everyone looking on. I’ve never been questioned by the police before.…”
“The police, you’ve got to be kidding,” Murray broke in, wide eyed. He waited while she put in her call on his behalf.
“He says he didn’t know anything about you coming, but that’s no surprise; the general didn’t always tell us everything. The general said information was on a need-to-know basis. So he’ll be out in ten minutes.”
Murray grinned like a Cheshire cat. “Thank you for interceding for me. Now tell me about the police. Say, do you by chance have any coffee around here, Diane? I’m buying.”
* * *
Heaven swung into the parking lot of the Westport Library. She had not gone to lunch with the ARTOS group, opting to stop by the cafe and make sure everyone was present and accounted for. They had been slammed with guests for lunch so she had taken off her fancy black Italian leather jacket and put on her chef’s coat. She slipped out of the high heels and put on her kitchen clogs, the ones she bought in Paris at the chef’s-wear store. For an hour she worked the line, pushing grilled salmon with berry sauce and chicken crepes out to the dining room. Then she changed her outfit again and slipped out the back door.
She needed ten minutes at the library, then she would meet up with ARTOS at the next event, the sourdough workshop. Since Heaven really wanted to learn to make good sourdough, she certainly didn’t want to be too late. It was one forty-five, the session started at two and she was shooting for being there by two-fifteen. She hurried inside the library.
* * *
By the time Heaven arrived at the kitchens of the Hearth and Home Bakery, the sourdough session had already started. One of the owners of Hearth and Home was a nationally recognized sourdough expert. The group was at rapt attention, with five or six bakers up front, ready to do hands-on demonstrations. Chairs were stuck everywhere around the big production room. Heaven found one and sat down. She could see Pauline and Dieter near the front.
“Sourdough is alive. It is a mass of fermenting yeast, flour, and water that leavens and flavors a larger dough,” the speaker was explaining. “You make sourdough by combining water with organic whole grain flour and allowing the natural yeasts present in the air and the flour to grow and multiply over a period of time. Sourdough takes time and patience.” The speaker turned and looked intently at the BIG BREAD representatives. “That’s why those in the mass-production of bread have never jumped on the sourdough bandwagon. Yes, time is an ingredient, just as sugar, flour, and butter can be. Time gives us a culture of sour, tangy dough strong enough to raise a larger mass of dough.”
Heaven found her mind wandering. She wanted to learn about sourdough, she really did. Her hand slipped into her bag and she pulled out the photocopied pages from the library. Now what would make a person’s tongue turn black?
The speaker went over to a covered crock that one of the bakers pushed his way. He peeled back the film covering the top of the crock and a yeasty, sour aroma came from the opening. A murmur of recognition went through the crowd. “Sourdough is the oldest leavener known. What did mankind do before there were cute little packages of yeast at the grocery store? Communities used their own sourdough or ate unleavened bread. We artisan bakers know we could buy predictable yeasts through the commercial bread manufacturing channels, but we reject that method.” This statement was followed by a look at the BIG BREAD forces who were starting to shift uncomfortably in their chairs. “The wine-making industry in California had their fling with these test tube yeasts that were supposed to bring consistency to their wines. But now, more and more wine makers have gone back to using only the natural wild yeasts in the air to ferment their wines and their customers like it. So it is in bread making, each one of us has a truly unique tasting sourdough bread because of the different spring waters and wild yeasts in our home areas. Even the air brings different organisms with it to the culture. And like the wine makers, we’ve found that customers appreciate the added flavor this natural process gives the bread.”
Heaven, her attention divided, looked down at her papers. According to the reference book at the library, silver nitrate will turn the skin black. Heaven wasn’t really sure that tongue skin would have the same rules as regular skin but you had to start somewhere. What was silver nitrate? Another reference book had revealed it to be an irritant compound, AgNO3, that in contact with organic matter turns black. It’s used in photography and in medicine as an antiseptic and caustic. As an amateur photographer, Heaven knew how strong those chemicals were. Had the general swallowed his developing fluid? Maybe he had burned his tongue on something and had used silver nitrate; no, Heaven stopped herself, that made no sense. You didn’t put some nasty tasting chemical compound on your tongue for a burn. In fact, you usually did nothing for a tongue burn, she realized. You usually just let it be sore for a day or two until it was better.
“We have started the process of making sourdough by making a chef. A chef is a piece of aged dough that has captured wild yeasts. To make this chef is a four-day process, and we have an example of the chef as it looks each day here on the counter for you to examine. The chef, as you all know, is the seed that will grow your sourdough starter. We have used organic stone-ground flour and spring water to form the chef,” the speaker said as the first rows of ARTOS bakers got up and went up to the front of the room to look at the various specimens.
Heaven pulled another copied page from the bottom of the pile in front of her. This list looked a little more promising: The causes of necrosis, or dead tissue, were varied. Heaven recognized about half of them, reasons like brown recluse spiders, cobras, and rattlesnakes. There were a few surprises such as Tylenol and sea anemone and several words Heaven wasn’t familiar with. The Tylenol surprised her the most. Could the general have overdosed on over-the-counter pain relievers until his tongue turned black and gone off the grain elevator like a stock trader during the depression?
“One of the hardest things about the use of sourdough is maintaining the chef so you don’t have any days of down time when you have no sourdough. For the home baker this isn’t usually crucial but for us, it can mean a loss of revenue. We all know that to maintain your chef you must add more water and flour to the original. But how much flour and how much water? Now is the time
for you to get out your calculators and I will show you my simple formula,” the speaker said as he flipped on an overhead projector and a screen filled with figures.
Heaven had been circling the words she needed to look up on the necrosis list. The sound of bakers shuffling in their chairs for paper and pencils and calculators brought her back to the task at hand. She crammed her library papers in her bag and brought out the appropriate tools, paper, pencil, and calculator. She really did want to learn to make sourdough, really.
* * *
Murray drove down the avenue that led from the area around Kansas State University to the Riley County Hospital, where Diane had told him he would find the county coroners office and the morgue. Diane had turned into a fount of information. She had assured a testy assistant that Murray should be treated with respect. Murray had, in turn, asked Diane to have lunch with him, after his tour of the lab, of course.
Murray had a feeling about the general now, he had a mental picture of the man. From what he had learned, Murray wasn’t leaning in the direction of the general committing suicide, that was for sure. The general Diane described was confident, focused, driven. He was a stickler for details, like proper maintenance of equipment. If it turns out that there was a malfunction of the elevator lift, Diane said, it won’t be a mechanical problem. No, Diane insisted, it will be a human problem, someone tampering with the lift.
Murray wouldn’t go along with Diane on the conspiracy theory yet, but he did know something wasn’t right. He decided to try his luck with the coroner.
As Murray circled the hospital he spotted a separate door marked Coroner’s Office. Taking bereaved relatives in where living patients were still fighting for life must have seemed too cruel to the city fathers of Manhattan, Kansas. Murray parked as close as he could and headed for that door. It surprised him when the door was unlocked, leading to a neat, tidy waiting room. Maybe no one wants to physically attack the medical examiner around here, Murray thought, remembering a bad case he covered in New York where a medical examiner was mutilated. Murray pushed a buzzer next to a reception window.
* * *
Heaven walked toward the front of the production room, heading for Dieter and Pauline. The group had a ten-minute break, then they were going to make sourdough starter with the finished chef, and eight or ten hours after that, they could finally make a loaf of bread.
Heaven slid into a chair beside Dieter. “Now I understand why this conference has to last five days,” she said. “It takes that long to get one batch of sourdough bread baked.”
Pauline and Dieter smiled the knowing smile of experienced bread bakers. “Time is an ingredient, just like the man says,” Pauline said with only a slight air of condescension. “Oh, Heaven,” Pauline continued, “look at these photos of yesterday’s disaster. One of the pastry chefs took them and has already sold one to the Associated Press.”
Heaven looked down at the stack of snapshots. The one on top, the showstopper, was of the general in midair, toppling to his death. “Boy, it takes the nerves of a war correspondent to take photographs at a time like this. It’s a good shot though. It should make a front page or two.” Heaven pulled the stack of photos over in front of her. “What else have we got here?” she asked idly.
Dieter and Pauline weren’t paying attention to Heaven. They were already gabbing, deep into a comparison of wheat and rye sourdough. They had either gotten past the moral dilemma of photographing someone on his way out of this life or they never had those kinds of confusing thoughts in the first place.
Heaven looked at the images of panic after the fall, the grain pouring down on the general, Dieter looking like a superhero digging through the grain to uncover the body, the two assistants who had shoveled the wheat out of the truck, frozen in time in their hazmet suits and their breathing masks. Heaven picked up that shot, looking hard at the two men. In that getup, you couldn’t really tell who they were, but Heaven did remember only one of the guys driving the truck away from the elevator before the accident. Maybe the other masked man stayed behind to jimmy the elevator lift.
It was the eyes. The eyes of one of the masked men gave Heaven a vague feeling of remembrance. The eyes looked familiar. Quickly, Heaven glanced at Dieter and Pauline to make sure they weren’t watching her. They weren’t. Heaven slipped the snapshot into her bag. It wasn’t a good composition and it didn’t have the victim front and center, so she was willing to chance that the photographer, whoever that was, wouldn’t miss one shot from a thirty-six exposure roll. She wanted to look at those eyes once more with a magnifying glass.
* * *
Murray, where the hell have you been?” Heaven yelled out the pass-through window where diners’ orders would soon be grabbed by frantic waiters. It was only six in the evening but Murray usually showed up between four-thirty and five so he could get the lay of the land, as he put it, before it got busy. Friday night was always busy.
Murray walked into the lion’s den—the kitchen—and grabbed a crisp green bean and chomped. “As a matter of fact, my fair leader, I’ve been in Manhattan, Kansas. I don’t know what happened. I think I must have been kidnapped by those aliens you always hear about. I was on my way to 43rd Street and the next thing I know, I’m at the Milling and Grain International Studies Laboratory. Fascinating place. I loved the fat-free donut girls.”
Heaven had stopped working after the first sentence. She was jumping up and down in place, looking very excited. Her red hair was glowing and the spikes were bouncing. “Murray, you dog. I got sourdough 101 and you got to go sleuthing. Somehow I think you got the best end of the deal. What did you find out?”
“Well, I thought I might have to come back to Kansas City empty-handed. Oh, I got an impression of him, the general, at the lab. And I had lunch with the receptionist, and she gave me more big-picture stuff. Seems this alliance with BIG BREAD has brought in a boatload of cash for the lab.”
Heaven squinted her eyes, as if she could see Manhattan, Kansas, if she squinted. “So, how does that fit in to the, quote, accident, end quote?”
Murray bit into another green bean. “That’s just it. The general and BIG BREAD didn’t seem to have a beef. They were still on a business partner’s honeymoon. This new breakthrough with the perennial wheat could make everyone very rich, at least that’s the impression I got from Diane, the receptionist.”
“Did they tell you any more about the perennial wheat?”
“Oh, no. The fellow who worked closely with the general and who took me on the five-cent tour was very close-mouthed. I even mentioned that I had heard rumors about this tremendous new strain of wheat and that my editors were very interested in such topics. He said any talk of a new genetic strain was very premature, that much more testing had to be done first.”
Heaven smacked her Chinese cleaver down hard on the work table, smashing garlic cloves in the process. “I knew it. I knew the general was just saying that stuff about perennial wheat to get Walter Jinks in an uproar. They probably don’t have a…”
Murray jumped in. “Oh, I think they are working on it. Diane knew all about it so it couldn’t be in the top-secret stage. I think everyone is telling a little of the truth. Yesterday, the general announced something that is still in the experimental stage because he wanted to look good to the star bakers and, yes, to get Walter Jinks where he lives. My tour guide was being cautious and yes, there most likely is more testing to be done before this thing is ready to be planted worldwide. Diane hears the scuttlebutt in the employee lunchroom and sees dollar signs and yes, it will make money for whoever controls it eventually.”
“Oh, and I forgot the news we heard at the Board of Trade today. BIG BREAD has applied for a patent for the wheat clone,” Heaven said, squinting her eyes again.
“That could be because of what happened yesterday. Even if they weren’t ready to patent this, this plant, after the general spilled the beans they were trying to cover their ass.”
Heaven looked hopefully at Murray.
“And they were so mad at him, and there is so much money at stake, they killed him.”
“Nah, that’s not how I see it. I think we should check out the arrangement between the International Grain lab and the BIG BREAD guys, but my nose for news doesn’t itch. Aren’t you going to ask me if I saw the killer elevator?”
“Murray, I know you saw it, by hook or by crook. Which was it? I bet the powers that be kept you away but you snuck around when everyone was at lunch. Did you find anything?”
Murray shook his head. “Wrong on both counts. The powers that be thought I was a reporter for the New York Times who had a legit appointment with the general.”
Heaven threw a green bean in Murray’s direction. “Well, that’s the truth now, Mr. Letters from the Interior. Nothing could be more interior than the breadbasket of the country and Manhattan, Kansas, is right in the middle of it. So what if you didn’t get the idea to write about this until the general was dead. The lab folks don’t need to know that.”
“I told them I had to tell the story like it was today, not how it would have been last week. I needed to talk about how the top man died, didn’t I? The team leader, who had worked with the general when they were both in the army, took me out back, showed how the gizmo works, wheat goes in below, then up and in the silos. He rode up the very same lift that the boss man rode up, it worked like a charm.”
“They could have replaced the broken parts,” Heaven shot back. She wasn’t ready to give up on the BIG BREAD patent death theory.
“There was still a policeman on duty. There was a police guard all night. The policeman said his boss, the lieutenant, had taken the lift to the top himself, no problems. The guard was staying right there until a team of experts from the elevator company got there to check it out.” Murray had a grin on his face that wasn’t compatible with the sad subject of their conversation.
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