by Leslie Karst
Which was the main reason I’d been putting off the task.
Then, at around three, I had to head down to Solari’s. I’d promised my dad I would spend the evening helping him with the braised meat course and anything else that needed doing for the Saturday dinner. Since the restaurant would be open tonight and tomorrow for its regular dinners, having an extra pair of hands there to work on the sister-cities meal was pretty much a necessity.
The recorder’s office was unfortunately once more a bust. Nothing had been filed in the past three days in Gino’s name. I considered texting Eric to see if he wanted to meet me again for coffee but decided against it. Better to go home and get to work reading that Gauguin manual.
Buster jumped up and smothered me with kisses as soon as I came through the front door, even though I’d only been gone about a half hour. Dogs are wonderful for the self-esteem of their caretakers.
I’d just sat down and opened Letta’s manual when the doorbell rang, setting Buster off once more—this time barking as if every criminal from America’s Most Wanted were trying to break down my door all at once.
I peeked out the window to see who it was. Ah, the UPS guy. No wonder he was excited. Dogs love to bark at delivery people. It’s something about the uniform and the big, loud truck. Plus, you have to admit, the tactic works: every time they bark at those uniformed people who come to your door, the folks immediately leave. So why not continue with such successful behavior?
I opened the door just wide enough to accept the package, keeping the frantic dog inside with my legs held stiff, then examined what he’d given me. It was from Speedy Hair Analysis.
Hot diggity dog! I’d forgotten that the report on Gino’s hair was supposed to arrive today. Sitting down on the couch, I ripped open the envelope and pulled out the papers it contained.
There was a long paragraph of introductory text: “… not for clinical diagnostic purposes … we cannot be held liable for mistakes contained in this analysis, or any damages arising therefrom,” blah, blah, blah. Skipping over this, I turned to the next page, which contained a chart with the results. A list of toxins, heavy metals, and essential elements ran all down the page, but I zoomed in on the one I was interested in.
There it was: “LEAD (Pb)—Result: 8.7 μg/g; Reference Range: < 5.0 (children), < 10.0 (adults).” I wasn’t positive what “μg/g” meant (something per gram?), but I could see that Gino’s levels were within what was considered normal limits for adults, even if they were a bit on the high range of the norm.
Damn. So much for my theory.
I dropped the report on the coffee table and got up to make myself some lunch. Locating a can of tuna in the pantry, I mixed the chunks of albacore with chopped celery, cumin, garlic powder, mayo, and salt and pepper, then made myself a sandwich with soft, white bread and lots of crispy lettuce.
I set the plate down on the kitchen table, took a seat, and opened my laptop. How hard was it to get lead poisoning, anyway? A website about the toxicity of heavy metals told me that small children were particularly at risk for lead poisoning because of eating paint off old toys or eating chips of old paint around the house. But, the article noted, since lead had been outlawed for most paints since 1978, the frequency of this sort of toxicity was far less than it used to be.
The page went on to discuss other heavy metals that can be toxic at high levels, including arsenic, mercury, copper, and cadmium. Laying my half-eaten sandwich back on the plate, I went to the living room to fetch Gino’s hair analysis report. There’d been a list of other elements tested for besides lead. Could any of those levels have been elevated?
I sat back down and read through the list of elements and Gino’s results as I finished my sandwich: aluminum, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, calcium, copper—
Wait, that one was slightly high: “COPPER (Cu)—Result: 137 μg/g; Reference Range: 10–100.” I dropped the paper and turned once more to my computer.
The same website I’d consulted for lead poisoning had a section about copperiedus (i.e., copper toxicity). Tainted drinking water was one of the primary causes of high copper levels in the body, and birth control pills (estrogen) as well as IUDs were considered culprits by some in the online community.
I hadn’t heard that Santa Cruz had a particularly high level of copper in its water, and besides, if that were true, we’d all have had copper toxicity, not just Gino. And he clearly hadn’t gotten it from birth control. But then I read the next paragraph of the article: “Copper cookware, when not lined with a non-reactive metal, is a common cause of copper toxicity, particularly if used to cook or store highly acidic foods, as the acid can cause copper to leach into the food.”
I stopped reading and thought back to the rack of gorgeous copper cookware I’d seen hanging from the pegboard in Gino’s kitchen. They hadn’t been simply copper-bottomed, like Revere Ware pots, but were copper all over. More like the kind Julia Child famously had hanging in her kitchen.
I knew that most all-copper pots generally had a thin lining of tin inside to protect the copper from leaching into food. But what if the pots were old—as Gino’s no doubt were—and the lining had worn off, exposing the copper underneath? Angelo had told me that Gino used to make salted tomatoes as well as conserva, both highly acidic. If he’d prepared pasta sauces with these tomato preserves in his copper pots and the tin in the pots had worn off, that could easily explain the high levels of copper in the hair sample the lab had tested.
I went back to the copper toxicity article and scrolled down to the part about symptoms. There was a long list, similar to the lead poisoning symptoms Eric had read that day in my backyard. Many of them could be mistaken for intoxication and could also have caused Gino to become ornery and combative: confusion, fogginess, insomnia, irritability, lack of concentration, memory loss, mood swings, nausea, paranoia and hallucinations, spaciness.
So maybe I wasn’t that far off after all. Maybe Gino had suffered from long-term poisoning—just from copper rather than lead.
I had to tell Eric.
I pulled out my cell and was about to press “Call” for his contact number when I had a thought and set the phone back down. If I told Eric about the results of the hair test, I’d have to tell him about the hair. Which meant I’d have to tell him about finding the cap and not turning it over to the police. Not only would he be furious with me for suppressing evidence, but he’d force me to take it down to the police station immediately.
And if I did turn over the cap, I’d be obligated to tell them not only where I found it, but also about Dad taking his boat out fishing the morning after Gino disappeared. Not to mention his altercation with the old fisherman just two days earlier.
Even though I knew my father couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Gino’s death, the police would never take such a generous view. There was no getting around the fact that this evidence made Dad an obvious suspect.
No, I couldn’t tell the police—or Eric—about the cap yet. I needed just a little more time to figure out what had really happened to Gino.
* * *
Several hours later I locked up the T-Bird out at the end of the wharf and dashed across the street. Taking cover under the Solari’s awning, I shook the rain off the hood of my yellow rain slicker.
No sign of the protesters, thank God. I’d have to ask if they’d been here during today’s lunch. Dad had emailed me in the morning to say that they had shown up last night, but that they’d been well behaved and had kept out of the way of the customers. As I watched other people darting through the rain to and from their cars, it occurred to me that maybe they’d been scared off by the storm.
But this thought, instead of cheering me up, only served to remind me of that damn tent, which in turn sent my mood spinning downward once more. Because without a tent, we—far more than the demonstrators—were going to be in a world of hurt if the rain continued through the weekend. What I really needed to do was march right inside and tell my dad
that there was a good chance we’d be serving dinner to a host of waterlogged customers come Saturday night.
That’s what I should have done, but I couldn’t. Instead, I was just going to have to find a tent, even if it killed me. Because if I told Dad, that’s pretty much what would happen anyway.
I was mulling my dilemma and psyching myself up to greet my father when I saw Bobby jump out of his enormous truck. He locked the door and made a run for the shelter of the Solari’s awning, coming to stand beside me.
“Damn,” he said, brushing the water off his hair. “Was this storm even predicted? I’d been planning on going fishing this morning, but that sure didn’t happen.”
“Yeah, it was in the newspaper. They think it’s supposed to last a few days, but hopefully not into the weekend.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that dinner thing this weekend? My parents are going to it.”
“That’s nice.” And you might want to warn them to bring slickers and umbrellas. “So, you been working at the store again today?”
“Uh-huh,” Bobby said, aiming a kick at a paper plate someone had dropped on the ground. “Just got off my lunch break.” He stared out at the rain for a moment, then let out a slow breath. “I guess I should be heading back there.”
“Before you go, there was something I wanted to ask you.”
“What?” He continued to stand under the awning, but the rapid tapping of his foot signaled that he was anxious to get going.
“I’ll be quick,” I said. “It’s about Gino. You know all those copper pots that are in his kitchen?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was wondering if he used them much. Did you ever see him cook anything in those pots?”
“Why the hell do you care about that?” Bobby asked. The tempo of the tapping had increased.
I told him my theory that the old fisherman had gotten copper poisoning from using his cookware, and how that would explain his behavior over the past several months—being more out of it and seeming intoxicated even when he hadn’t had much to drink.
“And get this,” I added. “One of the other symptoms of copper poisoning is erratic and irrational behavior. It can even make you have hallucinations. So my thinking is, maybe Gino was acting totally deranged that night he disappeared. And maybe because of that, he ended up getting into a fight with someone. The busboy at Solari’s saw Gino arguing with an old man that night behind the restaurant. Maybe, if Gino did have copper poisoning, he got so crazy that he attacked that old guy.”
Bobby stared at me for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Really? You think he might have been poisoned by his pots?”
“Okay, I know it sounds weird, but if a pot is old and worn away so the copper comes through on the bottom, and if you cook a lot of acidic food in it—something like tomato sauce—you really can get copper poisoning, I swear.”
The tapping stopped and Bobby’s eyes got wide. “Gino did use those copper pots a lot,” he said, “especially for red sauce. Like almost every day.”
Chapter 19
Now I had to call Eric.
As soon as Bobby went on his way to his dad’s gift shop, I dashed out to my car where I could talk in privacy. But once the phone started to ring, I realized my choice of location for the call had been a mistake. The rain pelting the T-Bird’s canvas ragtop sounded like my high school marching band’s percussion section pounding out a drum cadence six inches from the top of my head.
“Hi, Sal,” Eric said.
“Hey, you. So, I have an update about Gino.”
“What’s that noise?” he asked. “It sounds like you’re inside a machine shop.”
“I’m in my car and it’s kind of raining out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re not driving, are you?”
“No, Mr. DA, I’m parked outside Solari’s. I just didn’t want a bunch of people hearing what I have to say.”
“That good, is it?”
“You tell me. It looks like Gino was suffering from copper poisoning when he died.”
I wasn’t positive, because it could have been the wind howling outside my car windows, but I was pretty sure Eric’s response was a long, exasperated sigh. “Okay, I’ll bite,” he finally said. “And why, exactly, do you think this?”
Now for the tricky part. Was there any possible way I could tell him about the hair analysis test without mentioning how I’d found Gino’s wool fisherman’s cap?
No, there wasn’t. Nothing for it but to jump right in and hope Eric didn’t immediately home in on that portion of my story.
“Okay, remember how we talked about the possibility of Gino getting lead poisoning from painting his boat? Well, I sent some of his hair to—”
“His hair? Where the hell did you get any of Gino’s hair?”
So much for his not homing in on that fact. “Hold your horses; I’ll get to that in a sec. Anyway, so I sent it to one of those online labs to test it for lead, and the results came back today.”
“But wait, you said copper poisoning, not lead.”
“I did. Because the analysis showed his levels of lead as being within the normal range. But his levels for copper were kind of high. And when I looked up copper poisoning online, I found out that a bunch of the symptoms are similar to lead poisoning and would explain a lot of Gino’s behavior of late—his acting drunk, getting angry, just generally being really out of it. And here’s the kicker: one of the most common causes of copper poisoning is using copper pots to cook highly acidic food, and I have it on good authority that Gino used to cook tomato sauce all the time in his copper pots.”
“You know those online hair analysis tests are considered to be exceedingly unreliable,” Eric said in his lecturing voice, “if not out-and-out scams. They just take your money and—” He stopped. “Hold on. Don’t think you can sidetrack me from the important question here. Where did you get this hair sample, anyway?”
“Uh, yeah … I’d been hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”
“Okay, Sal, fess up.”
“It was in Gino’s cap. Which I, uh … found…”
“Oh, Jesus.” There was a pause, and I had an image of Eric laying his head on his office desk as he silently cursed my name. “You mean to tell me you found Gino’s cap—a piece of highly relevant, possibly vital evidence—and did not turn it over to the police? What were you thinking?”
“I know, I know. But it’s only because of where I found it.”
“And where, pray tell, did you find it?” Eric asked in that way people do when they’re pretending to be patient and reasonable but the opposite is actually true.
“In my dad’s fishing skiff, shoved under the middle bench. I found it that day we were out there painting with Omar’s class and I went over to see if that guy’s bocce ball had dented the boat. I was so freaked out about finding Gino’s cap there that I didn’t tell anyone.”
“But I don’t get it. Why would you be freaked out by that?”
“Because it turns out Dad went fishing in that boat the morning after Gino disappeared. So, with finding the cap lodged under the seat like that, it looks like Gino must have been in the boat. And I’m afraid the police will take it one step farther and accuse Dad of killing Gino and then using his skiff to take the body out to sea and dump it.”
“Whoa, girl. That’s making an awful big jump. Why on earth would the cops suspect your father of killing Gino?”
I told Eric about my dad forcibly ejecting Gino from the Solari’s bar the day before he disappeared, and how Gino had thrown a punch at him in front of several witnesses. “And then the morning after Gino disappears, my dad goes fishing early in the morning, after which Gino’s cap is discovered hidden away in the boat? Not good.”
“Oh, boy.” Eric was quiet a moment. “Look,” he said, “the cops aren’t going to suspect Mario just because he threw Gino out of the bar. It’s a pretty weak motive for a murder, after all. And besides, you know they have to have other far bet
ter suspects by now.”
“You think so? Have you heard anything around the office?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh.” So he was just trying to be sweet. Which was nice, actually, because right about now I could truly use some support. But what I needed far more than emotional support was a real live suspect—other than my father.
“That doesn’t mean they haven’t got other suspects, though,” Eric added. “It’s not my case, so I wouldn’t necessarily hear.”
“Yeah, I know. But here’s another thing that makes it look even worse for Dad. I know you said the cops think that Gino was knocked on the head by someone and then thrown off the wharf, because of the mussel shell they found in his wound. But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If that’s what happened, how could his body have ended up on Its Beach? The wharf tides wash into shore, to Cowell’s, not around the point.”
“Hmmm…” Eric considered this a moment, and I listened to the sound of the rain on the ragtop, which had thankfully now decreased from its previous pounding to a mere patter.
“Wait,” he said, jarring me from the meditative state the rhythmic percussion had lulled me into. “This was the Monday night he disappeared, right? And just a few days later we got those Diablo winds.”
“So?”
“So, they’re offshore winds. If Gino ended up drowning in the water off the wharf, he would have pretty much immediately sunk after he died. The body would then have stayed where it was for at least several days until the gases that form inside after death made it float back up to the surface.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, let’s assume it took four days for that to happen, which I think is realistic, given the temperature of the ocean this time of year. By then, the offshore Diablo winds had come up, which would have caused the current to reverse, taking Gino’s body out to sea. After that, it could easily have washed up on Its Beach.”