by Leslie Karst
“I got the fish,” Javier answered. He wiped down two sauté pans, set them over a high flame, and, once they were hot, poured a dipper of clarified butter into each.
I set about heating oil in two of my own pans and then grabbed a pair of duck leg quarters from the oven and laid them gently in the sizzling oil. While the duck was crisping up and browning, I took two plates from the warming oven and arranged the sides on them: potatoes sarladaise (fried in duck fat with garlic and parsley—yes, it’s as good as it sounds) and roasted Brussels sprouts with an orange-balsamic glaze.
Brandon was waiting at the pick-up window as I set the golden-brown duck legs onto the plates, and he whisked them off to his customers. That’s the thing about confit. The dish is almost a miracle with its fall-off-the-bone tender insides and crispy skin, but if you let it sit around for very long, it loses its magical crackle and crunch.
Two minutes later the server was back for the fish for the same table. While Javier arranged his orders of sole meunière on two plates and drizzled brown butter with lemon over the fillets, Brandon leaned through the pick-up window. “That guy who was asking about you finding the body?” he said. “Well, I thought you’d want to know he just came in. He’s with a woman at table six.”
After Brandon had taken the plates from Javier, I leaned through the window the other way to take a look at the man who’d asked about me. I’m almost six feet tall, so I was able to poke my head pretty far into the dining room. Which ended up being not such a great thing in this instance.
I spotted the guy, all right, but didn’t recognize him. He was about my age—around forty, I’d guess—and had gray-flecked hair, cut short. Not bad-looking, actually. His eye must have been caught by the movement of a lanky woman in a white chef’s jacket and black cap sticking half her torso out the pass window, because as I was giving him the once-over the man turned and met my gaze.
He looked away quickly, as one does in such situations, but I’m sure he could tell I was checking him out. I ducked back into the kitchen but continued to watch the man. He had turned back to his companion and was saying something to her as he nodded in my direction. Great. No doubt he was recounting how I’d discovered Gino’s body on the beach and how corpses seemed to pop up wherever I went.
Seven tickets remained on the rail and I bent to examine them. No need to fire most until I heard from the servers, as those tables had ordered appetizers, which Kris and Tomás were working on in the garde manger. But two of the tickets had no apps, so I could start prepping their entrées.
“I got the veggie special and coq au vin for table two,” Javier said.
“Great,” I answered, wiping down a pair of sauté pans. “I’ll do the scallops and duck for table five. Brian, you on those rib eyes?”
The grill cook raised his tongs above his head, revealing the orange-and-yellow flame he sported on the inside of his forearm. “Aye, aye, cap’n,” he called back.
I had just set my seared scallops with potato-and-celery root purée onto the pass and was using the opportunity to take another look at the good-looking guy at table six when I heard a raised voice on the other side of the dining room.
“Columbus Day?” A woman with spiky black hair leaned back in her chair and let out an explosive laugh. “No way,” she said, continuing to cackle. I didn’t recognize her, but I did know two of the other people at the table: a professor at the university and her artist partner. They’d come into the restaurant before, with my pal Allison and her husband, Greg.
The professor—Louise, I think her name was—joined in the laughter, and I’m pretty sure I heard her say “Solari’s” as she continued with the narrative that had triggered the other woman’s outburst. After Louise finished speaking, the table turned as one toward the restaurant line where Javier and I stood with our pans at the Wolf range.
Looking down quickly to avoid their eyes, I returned to my sauté cook duties. It was going to be a long eight days until that damn sister-cities dinner.
* * *
An hour later, most of the second seating had been served their mains and the tickets were down to just four. Javier was stirring the beurre blanc reduction for the seared scallops, awaiting Brandon’s call to fire the next course for one of the tables. As he tended his copper pot, the head chef whistled a tune that sounded a lot like Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”
I wasn’t surprised to see him in a good mood. His “friend” had been in again tonight, and Javier had just returned to the kitchen after visiting her for a few minutes out in the dining room.
“You certainly seem cheery,” I said, leaning back on the stainless steel table that ran the length of the kitchen. “And I can’t imagine why.”
He glanced my way with a self-conscious smile.
I sidled up to the chef and poked him in the shoulder. “You’re not still going to try to argue she’s just some customer, are you?”
Javier knocked his stirring spoon against the lip of the pot and set it on the counter next to the stove. The self-conscious smile spread into an outright grin.
“I thought not,” I said. “So who is she? Really.”
“Her name is Natalie, and she’s the pastry chef at the Full Moon Café.” I knew this place well—a restaurant on the East Side of town, known for its desserts and baked goods.
“Oh, man, I love their baguettes! Good choice in a girlfriend, Javier.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he replied. “Yet.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“Well, I’m actually hoping to make some progress in that direction real soon. That is…” He turned to face me. “I was hoping you’d be willing to sub for me tomorrow night. She’s asked me to go to a party with her. Even though we’ve known each other for a while now, this will be our first real date.”
“Oh, man, I’m really sorry, Javier, but I can’t. I’m hosting a dinner party of my own tomorrow. I’ve already got the fish marinating and everything.”
His shoulders slumped. “Couldn’t you maybe put it off till Sunday?”
“I have friends coming down from San Francisco and staying the night at my place, so that wouldn’t work.”
“Fine,” Javier mumbled, and busied himself with adjusting the flame under the beurre blanc. His previous cheery countenance had now been replaced by a furrowed brow and pouty lower lip.
Damn. I hated disappointing him like this. His entire life was dedicated to Gauguin. There had to be a way we could work this out. Could Tomás maybe handle the garde manger on his own tomorrow so Kris could take Javier’s place on the line?
I was startled out of my strategizing by Brandon’s voice calling through the pick-up window: “Fire tables three and five!”
“Got it!” I answered back, and Javier and I set to work searing scallops, pan-frying pork chops, and deglazing our sauté pans with butter, chicken stock, and brandy. Neither of us spoke, and Javier kept his eyes focused on his cooking.
Once Brandon had taken all the plates out to the dining room, I cleaned my hands on my side towel and leaned once more against the stainless steel table behind me. Javier wiped down his pans and stacked them between sheets of paper towels, still refusing to meet my eye.
“Look, Javier,” I said. “Maybe we could use—”
“It’s okay,” he interrupted. “I get it. You’re the owner and I’m just an employee. Why should you have to change your schedule for me or, God forbid, work a little more?” Grabbing a damp cloth from the counter, he started cleaning the top of the Wolf range.
I stared at him, tears burning my eyes. Did he really think that?
“And besides,” Javier went on, scraping at a patch of burnt matter with the metal spoon he kept in his chef’s jacket pocket, “it’s not as if you’d understand how important it is to go on a hot date.”
Chapter 10
“I bought a chocolate mousse cake for dinner tonight.” Eric wrestled with the legs of his wooden easel, yanking them out, then lowering them back down again
until they were the exact height he desired, and finally tightening down the wing nuts.
“Yum,” I answered, and clamped a backing panel onto my already-set-up easel. Unlike Eric, who’d splurged on a fancy French job with its own built-in drawer for paints and brushes and other doodads, I’d gone for a bare-bones aluminum model. Mine might not have been as sturdy, but it took mere seconds to erect.
“I had to wait in line for about fifteen minutes this morning, there were so many people there, but it’ll be worth it.” Eric flipped his box-with-legs over, set it on the ground, and opened the lid. Raising the clamp, he attached his backing board to the easel, pulled open the drawer, and set about arranging his supplies.
“Where’d you get the cake?” I asked.
“The Full Moon Café.”
“Oh.”
I must have frowned, because Eric ceased his fiddling with brushes and paint tubes. “What? You don’t like that place? Their German chocolate cake is amazing.”
“No, it’s not that. It just reminded me of something.”
Javier’s stinging words had kept me up half the night, lying in bed trying to decide if he’d truly meant them or if he’d just been so upset that they’d flown out unintended. I wanted to believe that his reproof had no basis in reality, but my logical self reasoned that for those barbs to have come so quickly to the tongue, the issues must have been eating away at him for some time. Was I indeed a selfish boss?
Not until arriving at our plein air class out on the wharf had I been able to push the event from my mind. Listening to Omar expound on brushstrokes and complementary colors and negative space, I’d finally allowed myself to shake it off and focus on the moment: the sunlight sparkling on the water, the squawk of the gulls and gentle clack of bocce balls, the aroma of fried fish mingling with the harsh smoke of the old men’s Toscano cigars.
But now Eric’s comment had brought the bad thoughts flooding back.
He was clearly waiting for more of an answer, so I forced a light smile. “That’s where Javier’s new girlfriend works is all,” I said. “And he and I had a little tiff last night about scheduling because of her.” I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to admit to Eric what the chef had said to me, and I certainly didn’t want to discuss it here with all the other art students around.
This appeared to satisfy him, however, and he returned to his futzing. For today’s painting, we’d been instructed to choose something on the wharf as our foreground, with the water and shoreline as the backdrop, and to concentrate in particular on the composition of our pieces. Most of the class, Eric and me included, had decided on the Marcella as our foreground subject, which was why Omar had chosen this spot for today’s session.
The Marcella is an old Monterey-style “clipper”—just like Gino’s—that’s been refurbished and put on display out on the wharf. From the 1930s up until the Santa Cruz yacht harbor was constructed in the 1960s, these sturdy wooden boats constituted the Italian fishing fleet and would be hoisted up in inclement weather by the davits, or cranes, that used to line the wharf. Only a few of the old cranes remain—one used by the Coast Guard, the other two by private companies that rent wooden skiffs out by the hour to fishermen and tourists.
Doing my best to shake off the bad juju Eric’s dessert choice had injected back into me, I concentrated on my composition. I selected a number four pencil from my paint box and sketched out the red, white, and green Marcella, choosing to omit the “Keep Off Boat Display” signs leaning against the wooden hull.
Next I roughed out my thumbnail of the water, sky, cliffs, and buildings beyond, once again taking artistic liberty and deleting the Dream Inn, which dominated the backdrop. I had decided to go for a vintage look, and the ten-story cinder block hotel hadn’t been constructed till the early seventies. Digging through my lead tubes of gouache paint, I was searching for the ultramarine when I noticed that Eric had come to stand next to me.
“By the way,” he said in a low voice, “I heard yesterday afternoon that the coroner’s office is now thinking Gino’s death might be a homicide after all.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know the details, but I guess the head wound was regular in shape—round, and not consistent with his being knocked against the piers. More like a baseball bat or something. So they’re now thinking he was hit on purpose and then got the mussel fragments in the wound later, after whoever it was shoved him in the water.”
“Huh.” I chewed my lip, starting out across the inlet toward the surfers bobbing in the water at Steamer Lane.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “So I just figured you’d want to know you may be right, after all, about there being foul play.”
Was this a good or a bad thing? On the one hand, if true, it would take the pressure off Solari’s for being what lawyers like to call a “proximate cause” of Gino’s death. But on the other hand, the possibility that someone had intentionally killed the old fisherman was a frightening thought.
I had finally located my tube of paint and was squeezing a line of the bright blue gouache onto my palette when I heard a shout from the direction of the bocce court, followed by a loud thunk and then a round of boisterous laughter.
I turned to see what had caused the commotion. An elderly man dressed in loose beige slacks and a white cotton shirt walked slowly from the bocce court toward the row of yellow rental skiffs leaning on their sides near the back of the Solari’s building. He knelt down and then stood back up, a candy apple red ball in his bronzed hand, and the group back at the court cheered and applauded. But instead of joining in their laughter, the man glared at his fellow players and then, without warning, hurled the red ball their way, causing them to scatter like frightened pigeons.
Whoa, what a bad sport, I thought, and was about to return to my painting when I did one of those classic double-takes. Because the natty gentleman with the silver hair and bad temper hadn’t retrieved the ball from next to the row of rental boats, but rather from under the blue-and-white boat that sat next to them: my father’s Boston Whaler 13-foot Classic. This was a limited-edition reissue of the 1960s version of the skiff, incorporating various modern amenities but retaining the cool, “retro” design and mahogany seats of the original. And my dad was gaga over the thing.
I waited until the men had returned to their game and then ambled across the courtyard to inspect the boat. Dad would not be pleased if there were now a ding in its immaculate paint job. Examining the hull and running my hand over its smooth surface, I determined that it was uninjured. Good.
As I stood back up, I glanced into the skiff and saw that one of its oars was out of place, leaning against the center bench. I shoved it where it belonged, next to the life jackets and rain tarp under the seat, and as I did so a piece of faded blue cloth poked out the other side of the bench. Was that a T-shirt of Dad’s? Reaching down, I grabbed hold of the item, but immediately dropped it again as soon as I realized what I held in my hands. Definitely not a T-shirt.
It was Gino’s fisherman’s cap.
* * *
“What were you doing over there?” Eric asked when I returned to my easel.
“Just checking on my dad’s skiff. I wanted to make sure that guy’s bocce ball hadn’t put a hole in it. But it looks fine.”
I didn’t mention the cap. After checking to see that no one was watching, I’d tucked it under my shirt, where it still lay hidden. I waited for Eric to return to his painting, and once I was sure he’d lost interest in me, I pulled out one of the green plastic bags I always keep in my pocket (dog owners—at least responsible ones—will all relate). Facing away from Eric, I slipped the hat inside the bag and shoved it into my brown leather purse.
I know I should have told him about my discovery. But I was scared. Eric was a district attorney and would have been obliged, as an officer of the court, to turn over the evidence to the police. And since I’d found the cap in my father’s boat—jammed under the seat as if it had been purposely hidden there—it looked
bad. Real bad.
Up till now, the fact that Dad had scuffled with Gino and then ejected him from Solari’s had worried me only because it showed knowledge of the old man’s drinking problem. But with this new find, in conjunction with Eric’s revelation that the cops were now treating Gino’s death as a homicide, the altercation took on far graver proportions.
Had Dad even told the police about his fight with Gino? If he had, that, combined with the fisherman’s cap being discovered hidden away in his boat, would certainly make them suspicious. And if he’d kept the information from the cops, once they found out it would look like he’d been trying to hide the event from them—even worse.
I had to talk to my dad before I did anything. No harm would come of my waiting a day or two to turn over the evidence. It was safely preserved in a plastic bag. Safer now, I reasoned, than it had been sitting unprotected in the boat.
Which just goes to show you can convince yourself of pretty much anything if you really put your mind to it.
* * *
The one good thing about discovering Gino’s cap was that it served to supplant Javier’s harsh words as my new current fixation. Nevertheless, I did my best to refocus on my painting and listened politely as Omar demonstrated how to wet our blank paper and then drop in a wash of white mixed with cobalt blue for what he called the “sky holes” between the puffy clouds rising up over the hills behind the city.
The dry, hot Diablo winds had finally dissipated and today was much cooler. I’d read in the paper that another storm would be moving in sometime the following week. We were now in that unsettled weather period between summer and fall when you never know if you should pack a tank top or a sweater and umbrella when you leave the house in the morning.
“As the paint diffuses and then dries,” Omar said, “you can lay on some thicker white where you want the firmer edges of your cloud bodies to go.” I did as directed, next dabbing in touches of gray and purple to add shadows to my clouds.
“Don’t forget to keep stepping back from your work!” the instructor called out, and the class—as if the move had been choreographed in advance—simultaneously took several paces back from our easels.