To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

by Joanne Pence

  A woman with hair shorter than Paavo’s, wearing a beige smock tied around her much like a butcher’s apron, ran up to her. “Miss Amalfi?”

  “Oh!” She put her hand to her chest. “You recognize me!”

  The woman looked at her strangely. “Well…you are the only guest on the show tonight. I’ll take your restaurant-review tapes to the producer. You can sit over there. You’ve got a half hour before the live show. Any questions?”

  Angie looked at the chair the woman pointed at. It was in a dark corner. “Aren’t we going to rehearse?”

  “Rehearse? No. We like spontaneity.”

  “Aren’t we at least going to run through my videotape?”

  “No need. You know what’s on it. You tell us when to run it, and we will. Then you explain to the audience what we’re seeing. It’s simple.” The woman smiled.

  Angie had her doubts about how simple it would be. The first inklings of panic began to tickle her. “Where’s makeup?”

  “Makeup? You’re fine.” She dashed off and left Angie clutching her makeup case.

  She always wore makeup, and wore it with care so that it didn’t look like she had it plastered to her face. TV makeup was different, or should have been. She thought it was supposed to look plastered so that when the lights washed out the color, she would look alive rather than ghostly pale.

  In the women’s room, she darkened her makeup, then returned to the studio to sit and wait. She practiced her opening lines—a clever, witty little speech about who she was and what her video restaurant reviews were all about. She wished she could talk someone into a teensy-tiny rehearsal.

  The technicians were running about shouting incomprehensible jargon at one another, and the woman who took her tapes was nowhere to be seen.

  Carol Metcalf, the star of BayLife Today, suddenly appeared and stepped onto the set, the lights bright on her face. One instant, people dashed in frenzy, and then the next, all fell silent. The program began.

  Angie could scarcely breathe. Hers was the third segment. She sat, without moving a single muscle, through the endless television ramblings and bad jokes until she heard the announcer say, “Next, San Francisco’s own restaurant reviewer, Angelina Amalfi, will be here to present a video restaurant review. We’ll see for ourselves the restaurant Angie went to, and hear what she has to say about it! Stay tuned!”

  Her legs wobbled as she approached the set and sat beside the star. Carol turned to her. “Now, remember, keep your answers short, and be as outrageous as you wish.”

  “What?” Angie looked at her blankly.

  “No speeches,” Carol ordered. “And be controversial.”

  Angie nodded, taking deep breaths. The opening she’d prepared was a bit lengthy, but surely she could introduce herself. No one would object. Nevertheless, she grew so nervous, she was sure perspiration glistened on her face. She remembered a scene from an old movie in which a guy had spent his entire career thinking he could be a news anchor on TV. When he finally got his chance, he sweat so much, viewers began to call the station thinking he was having a heart attack. She prayed she wouldn’t be like that.

  When a production assistant called out, “Five seconds!” her mind went absolutely blank. Her only coherent thought was Get me out of here!

  She was hyperventilating when Carol Metcalf began speaking into the camera. “Angelina Amalfi is, herself, a gourmet cook and frequent restaurant reviewer for Haute Cuisine magazine, published here in the Bay Area. Angie, which restaurant did you go to?”

  “Thank you, Carol,” she said. Her mouth felt like it was filled with uncooked Quaker Oats. “I—” Her voice came out in a high squeak and she just hoped it would drop an octave. Or two. She began her introduction. “I’m here to give a video restaurant review. I—”

  “Yes!” Carol interrupted. “I’ve never seen one before. So you went to an interesting restaurant, I take it?”

  “I did.” Her eyes caught the camera and all she could think of was all the people in the Bay Area watching her at that very moment. She tried to return to the introduction she’d practiced. “Video restaurant reviews are a new concept.”

  Carol frowned.

  Angie hurried on. “They’re something I just dreamed up for this very program. For you. And for your viewer…viewers.” She was dying inside. She wished she could die on the outside; then at least she’d get sympathy instead of being laughed at.

  “How nice, Angie.” The woman’s jaw was tight. “Where did you go?”

  Panic set in as she noticed that the veins on Carol Metcalf’s neck were beginning to protrude. She threw away her set speech, but nothing filled what now felt like a huge, empty gap where clever bon mots and turns of phrase should have been. “I went to a restaurant that is called”—Oh, God, what, what, what?—“Pisces. It is a zodiac that features seafood.” She took a deep breath. Time for the videotape. “Here are some scenes from it.” I hope.

  Like magic, her video began to roll.

  She tried to think of what Carol had said. Short answers. Controversial. “See how pretty it is. See the waiter. See the customers. See them eat.”

  Carol Metcalf kicked her.

  She was ready to cry.

  “Did you like the restaurant, Angie?” Carol asked.

  “Yes. I liked it very much. This is my waiter now. He is bringing me steamed lobster with a saffron-tomato broth.” Angie racked her brain for something interesting and controversial to say. She definitely wanted to make it big on TV, and she had to make up for her blown introduction. The camera stared at her. “The lobster was a little mushy and a little stronger than lobster should be. Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? And…” Her voice rose. “There was too much thyme in the broth. It overwhelmed the saffron. Usually there’s not enough thyme for anything…ha, ha. Get it? Time…” Oh, Lord!

  Carol looked stricken. “How was the dessert?”

  “I had a hazelnut torte à la mode.” Controversial! Be controversial! “It was, um, um, uh, a little stale. A little like chalk. Here is my waiter bringing me my dessert.” He slammed it onto the table—the camcorder had irritated him, Angie recalled—and the ice cream slid from the torte and off the plate onto the tablecloth. He scooped it up, stormed away, and soon was seen bringing her another plate. He made faces at the camera, then left.

  “He must have thought this was a Candid Camera revival, ha, ha!”

  Carol gave her a long, withering stare, then signaled the camera to focus on her. “And now, for our weather report. Here for an expanded report is our meteorologist…”

  Angie stopped listening. All she wanted to do was curl up and die. Thank God she hadn’t told Paavo she was going to be on TV tonight. Unfortunately, she did tell her parents, her four sisters, several girlfriends, a number of cousins, the grocer, her hairdresser, the woman who did her nails, and some guy selling newspapers on the corner. When would she ever learn to keep her mouth shut?

  Chapter 29

  After calling it a day in Homicide, Paavo went to visit Aulis.

  His condition hadn’t changed any. The doctors were growing increasingly alarmed about his continued inability to wake up.

  Fear and frustration flooded through Paavo as he stood in that sterile hospital room and watched over the man who had raised him, now looking so small and shriveled under the white sheets. Usually Paavo didn’t notice the lines on Aulis’s face or the thinness of his white hair. He still saw Aulis very much as he had appeared when Paavo was growing up: an older but spry man. Now Paavo observed all the changes, and thought about the fact that someday he was going to lose the one who’d been there almost forever for him.

  He wondered what Aulis had known all those years about Cecily and Mika, and why in God’s name he had kept it hidden.

  He sat alone by the bed for about twenty minutes. But then he realized it didn’t make any sense for him to just sit there and do nothing. Once Aulis awoke, he’d want to know who had done this to him, and had the assailant been caught? Paavo
didn’t want to have to answer, “No.”

  After about five more minutes, he decided it was time to go home.

  Home. He wished he didn’t get a kick in the gut each time he thought about the cottage. He liked being there more than he ever dreamed he would, and more than he really wanted to admit. He had found a place away from the world’s cruelty and losses where there was love and laughter, and he wondered how long he could accept it, or if he would soon want to retreat to his own quiet solitude once more.

  In no time, he’d driven across town and parked on Montgomery Street, right in front of a four-story apartment house that looked like a ship, and had been used in an old Bogart and Bacall film, Dark Passage. Maybe, someday, he’d rent the movie and see what all the fuss was about.

  He fairly ran down the Filbert steps to the little house, and burst into the living room to find Angie sitting on the sofa, Hercules on her lap, staring at the wall. She didn’t look at him, didn’t say a word.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. Angie was not one to sit silently. Usually she greeted him with a hug and a kiss.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  Sure, and there’s no ice in the Arctic.

  She sighed heavily and mumbled something about coffee. He followed her into the kitchen. “You can tell me about it,” he said as she filled the carafe with water.

  She silently measured coffee into the filter. We’re together, he wanted to say, so we can talk to each other when we’re unhappy or disappointed or just need a shoulder to lean on. He didn’t say that, though. He didn’t quite know how. Instead, he waited.

  “I blew it,” she murmured, and flipped the On switch.

  He captured her. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I was awful.”

  “Awful? You mean you did something awful?” he asked, confused. “What did you do?”

  “I went on television. Oh, God! Why, why, why did I ever dream I could do TV? I’m just not Barbara Walters. Not even Carol Metcalf.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s on BayLife Today.”

  “Ah.”

  She covered her face. “I was so hideous! My mind went blank. I couldn’t get the words out. What came out was like listening to a tape that someone had slowed down. I can never show myself in public again! Heck, I don’t even want to see me!”

  He gathered her closer. “I’m sure you weren’t as bad as all that. You’re always your own worst critic.”

  “If I wasn’t so bad, why did Carol kick me?”

  He had no answer.

  She made her hands into fists. “I should have seen it coming, but did I? No! Not until it was too late. Then I saw it. Here I go again, I said to myself. Angie Amalfi, looking foolish. Why do I do it?”

  “You aren’t foolish, Angie.” He stroked her hair.

  “I so much want to do interesting things,” she said, burrowing against his chest. “I want to be accomplished, an achiever. I want to be a person who is independent and successful, and good at her job—not daddy’s privileged little rich girl. Not that that’s so tragic. But I’m more than that, aren’t I?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll take that as an enthusiastic yes.” She sighed heavily. “I know I try too hard sometimes. Maybe a lot of times. I know I push it. Occasionally I even leap before thinking. It’s fun sometimes, but not when I disappoint myself.”

  He placed his hand under her chin and forced her to look at him. “You never disappoint me, Angie. Promise me you’ll never change.”

  Those were the words she needed to hear. They held each other in the lengthening silence. “Maybe I should just go to bed,” she said finally. “This won’t look so bleak in the morning.”

  “Want company?” Paavo offered.

  She glanced up at him. He grinned. She couldn’t help herself and smiled back. “I’ll turn off the coffee.”

  A loud bang woke them both. Paavo was on his feet while Angie clutched her pillow, probably trying to figure out if she was dreaming or if the roof had just fallen in. She lifted her head and looked at him. “What was that?”

  He pulled the bedroom drapes aside to see a strange glow in the sky.

  “Call nine-one-one. Tell them it’s a fire,” he said as he put on trousers and shoes, then grabbed his badge and gun.

  As he pulled a heavy sweater over his head, Angie put on her bathrobe and followed him to the door. “Don’t go out there,” he ordered. “Call.”

  He ran up the Filbert steps to Montgomery Street, not believing the sight before him.

  Angie’s Ferrari was a ball of fire, flames stabbing the night sky. Behind him, others emerged, sleepily confused and chattering, a few venturing too close to the burning car. He held up his badge. “Police officer! Stay back! Go back inside!”

  The crowd wasn’t about to disperse, but they didn’t move closer. He walked around the car to its far side.

  A man’s body lay on the ground. The body must have been close to the car when it exploded, and had been flung aside like a rag doll. The clothes were still burning. Paavo turned away. One look and he knew there was nothing that could be done for the man. His hair was gone, his facial skin black and charred, his eyes dark pits. The smell of burnt flesh hit Paavo’s nostrils.

  “Oh, my God!”

  Paavo spun around at the sound of Angie’s voice. She had put on slippers and stood at the top of the stairs. He ran to her and grabbed her arm, not wanting her to see the horror on the far side of the car.

  “What happened?” she cried.

  “I’ll tell you when I find out. Right now, go back inside.”

  “No. It’s my car! My beautiful car!” Then she seemed to notice people’s reactions to something on the opposite side of it. Paavo stopped her from approaching.

  “Don’t,” he ordered. “A man’s dead. Burned. You don’t want to see him.”

  Shock and horror filled her face. Fire sirens and the shrill sound of police cars could be heard over the crackle of flames and murmurs of the still-gathering crowd. She backed away from the street and waited.

  The police and fire trucks arrived at the same time. The firemen immediately began hosing the car with heavy water pressure.

  Paavo met the uniformed officer and showed his badge. “The car is, was, my girlfriend’s. I can give you the particulars. We were asleep when it happened. I don’t recognize the victim.”

  “Does she?”

  “The way he looks right now, I don’t think his own sister would recognize him. I haven’t asked her to look.”

  The policeman glanced at the victim, then nodded.

  Once the car fire was out, Paavo moved closer to the burned man. A couple of patrol officers joined him. “Looks like a car bomb went off,” one of them said. “I wonder if the vic was just passing by and unlucky, or if he’d been trying to rig a bomb up and had slippery fingers.”

  “Or if something caused an accidental detonation.” Paavo pointed to a small hole in one side of the dead man’s skull, and a larger hole opposite it. It looked like entry and exit wounds from a large-caliber handgun or rifle.

  Instinctively the officer looked over his shoulder. Up Filbert were more steps and, a little beyond that, the circular road to Coit Tower on the very top of Telegraph Hill.

  “That’s right,” Paavo said. “A shooter could have easily stood anywhere up there and found a clear shot. The question is, who was he?”

  “There’s another question, too,” the officer said, looking at the shell of the car. “Who wants your girlfriend dead?”

  Chapter 30

  “We have a make on the marshmallow,” Yosh said to Paavo, hanging up the phone. Yosh had returned from vacation and had quickly been brought up to speed on Paavo’s cases, and also on Aulis’s condition.

  Toshiro Yoshiwara, a second-generation Japanese-American, was Paavo’s partner. They’d had an uneasy start when Yosh first joined Homicide and was given the spot that had been held b
y Paavo’s best friend and partner of many years, Matt Kowalski. Matt had been killed while investigating a murder, and Paavo had been reluctant to establish deep ties to a new partner. Since then, Yosh had proven himself to be an outstanding detective, a good partner, and an even better friend. He was a big man, “from the sumo wrestler part of Japan,” he liked to say, with close-cropped hair, a thick neck, and powerful chest and arms.

  “He was a Russian with ties to organized crime,” Yosh said. “His name was Yuri Krakovar.”

  “Christ! Aulis being targeted was bad enough,” Paavo said, “but now it’s Angie. If I knew who was behind this, I’d say here I am, come and get me and leave the others alone. But I don’t know how to stop it.” The crime scene technicians had determined a plastic explosive device that would have been set to the ignition had blown up Angie’s car.

  “These Russians are scary,” Yosh said. “You’ve got to get Angie out of there before they come back. Better yet, get her out of town.”

  “I brought her over to her friend Connie’s house this morning. We need to figure out what to do. I don’t want her family or friends mixed up in this.”

  “Any idea how the Russians found her?”

  “She was on live TV yesterday evening. Apparently they were running promos about the show all day long. Someone who knew they were interested in Angie might have heard about her appearance. I’m guessing it was just a lucky break for them—not for Angie, though.”

  “She was on TV?”

  “She did a restaurant review. Someone could have had her followed when she left the studio and went home. Or”—he thought of the photos she’d taken of Stavrogin sitting in restaurants where she’d been—“they’ve been watching her all along and for some reason decided to take action last night.”

  “This is weird, pal. First someone shoots at you, then a Russian enforcer warns you off, and the next thing, another Russian’s trying to blow up Angie’s car. I thought the Cold War was over. What the hell is this all about? Why would anyone go after Angie?”