A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) (12 page)

- Thirteen -

I heard a sound next to me, a low rumbling like the first warning growl of an earthquake. It took me a minute to realize it was coming from Wayne. Then the rumble took the form of words.

“No,” he declared, his voice deep and vibrating. “Not here.”

He stood, staring at the thing on the door, his whole body trembling. But why was he so upset by a plaster cockroach? And then instantly, I knew, and I was trembling too. Wayne had inherited La Fête à L’Oie from the man for whom he had acted as bodyguard for years. The man whose murder he had failed to prevent. At least, that’s how Wayne saw it. For Wayne, this restaurant/gallery and the others he had inherited were a sacred trust. And that sanctity had been violated.

I took his hand in mine. It was cold with shock. I rubbed it between my own hands, not knowing what else to do.

“It’s all right,” I whispered. “We’re alive. We have each other.”

He swiveled around to face me so quickly that I stopped breathing for a moment. There was real anger on his homely face. The face that had given him a job as a bodyguard. A frightening face, a frightener. And then, just as quickly, his anger dissolved. And he took me in his arms, so gently I might have been a pile of fallen leaves and not one leaf would have moved. Too gently, I thought. How much was he holding back? What was he holding back?

“Thank you,” he whispered gruffly.

And that was all. He released me from his arms as gently as he had embraced me and turned back to the door to remove the plaster cockroach.

“The police?” I asked once he was done.

He shook his head, his eyes on the cockroach in his hands. He was still angry, no matter what he wasn’t saying or doing. I could smell it on him. Just a scent, but I had lived long enough with this man to identify it.

We opened the door and entered the foyer-cum-gallery of La Fête à L’Oie to the muted orchestration of Vivaldi and the not-so-muted aroma of sautéed garlic. But the art that met the eye overshadowed sound and smell. La Fête à L’Oie was as much about art as it was about food. That was one reason Gary Atherton was so useful to Wayne. Wayne knew how to cook, but he was probably no more attuned to the contemporary visual arts than I was. Not that either of us was disinterested, but neither of us were art experts. Or enthusiasts. Wayne had inherited another man’s passion, and he kept it alive. Vigilantly. But he never really felt it, much to his constant guilt and shame.

Gary Atherton, on the other hand, was the real thing. A real artist. He’d met Wayne while trying to place his paintings in La Fête à L’Oie’s gallery. They were strange disturbing paintings in layers, the top layers like gorgeous sunsets complete with pastel luminosity, but beneath that luminosity always a glimpse of hard, backlit objects in stark primary colors. The paintings sold fairly well for all their strangeness, but Gary was still a starving artist, at least until he became the manager of La Fête à L’Oie.

The art gallery today displayed the work of three almost major artists. One was a sculptor whose headless torsos had hearts that you could peek into, like the sugar Easter eggs I’d received as a child. Except that the scenes in the torsos’ hearts were much less sweet. The other was a “composite” artist, or maybe a compost artist, whose works used bits of city artifacts like discarded beer cans, bus transfers, shoelaces, and smashed Styrofoam. The third was a black-and-white photographer whose subject matter seemed secondary to her extraordinary sense of light and dark. And then there were two of Gary’s paintings. That was in the contract.

Wayne and I were early enough that only two couples were viewing the works. Well-dressed and quiet, they stood and peered, occasionally exchanging hushed comments. These four must have been real supporters of the arts, six o’clock being far too unfashionable an hour for a San Francisco dinner.

Wayne glided silently through the gallery, through the dining room, and into the kitchen with me gliding a little less silently behind him.

“Gary,” Wayne said softly, and Gary Atherton turned from supervising a woman and a man in tall chefs’ hats as well as a troupe of lesser players, chopping, slicing, and pulling foodstuffs from giant refrigerators.

“Wayne,” greeted Gary, his handsome face registering surprise at his boss’s presence.

Wayne pulled the plaster cockroach from beneath his arm and held it out in front of him. Did he suspect Gary of putting it on the front door?

Gary’s head reared back and then came forward again to scrutinize the thing.

“What’s that?” he asked. “Someone’s idea of art?”

Not Gary, I decided. Wayne seemed to come to the same conclusion.

“No,” Wayne answered quietly. “Probably someone’s idea of a joke.”

Then he threw the plaster cockroach in the garbage.

“Kate and I thought we’d eat here tonight,” Wayne announced, his voice a little less strained. Everyone else’s shoulders in the kitchen seemed to stiffen though. A challenge.

This was the reason I didn’t eat very often at La Fête à L’Oie. I knew as a vegetarian that I was a royal pain to these people who had their hands full keeping the restaurant’s four-star reputation alive and well without having to cater to a woman who didn’t eat animal products. True, there were a few items on the regular menu that were vegetarian, but they were mostly salads and appetizers. However, when Wayne brought me, here he expected the best. My sweetie became a tyrant. And I knew better than to argue. I inhaled garlic to keep the vampire of guilt at bay and decided to enjoy my meal.

The food was a gustatorial delight, complete with the silken asparagus mousse as promised, white bean pàte with the flavor of basil, thyme, and something that might have been brandy, on crisp rounds of toasted French bread, as well as roasted eggplant. Yum. And more.

But conversation left something to be desired. I’m quite capable of handling both sides of a conversation by myself under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances.

Wayne picked at the vegetarian food he shared with me and ignored my oohs and ahs of pleasure.

“All right, Wayne,” I hissed finally. “Spit it out.”

My timing might have been less than perfect, since his mouth was full of blueberry sorbet right then, but he did at least answer me. Or try to.

“Can’t do anything right,” he mumbled through the blueberries.

That’s what I’d thought. In a crisis, Wayne always blamed himself. For everything. He was probably busy blaming himself for not solving Sam Skyler’s murder, for the appearance of the cockroach, for our not being married. Not to mention the depletion of the ozone layer.

I jumped up from the table, scattering linen and silverware.

“God damn it, Wayne!” I threatened. “I won’t let you start this, this…stuff again.”

At least I got his attention. Not only was I threatening him in a public place, it was his public place.

He made frantic sit back down motions with his napkin, turning his head to see if any patrons or waitpersons had heard me.

“Not till you promise,” I told him, my voice back into normal but easy to hear range.

“Promise what?” he whispered, an entreaty for mercy in his vulnerable brown eyes.

“That you’ll stop beating yourself up,” I told him, lowering my voice so only he could hear me now. “If you want someone to beat you up, I will. But nobody else.”

“Okay,” he muttered, his eyes on his plate.

“What was that?” I demanded, drill-sergeant style.

“Okay,” he enunciated, quietly but clearly. “I will not beat myself up. I am a good and worthy person. I know so because you’ve told me.” His voice went almost subvocal again as he added, “about a million times.”

We were halfway back to Marin under the orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge when he asked, in his slinkiest growl, “Would you really beat me up?”

“You betcha,” I growled back and in a few minutes we were discussing the possibilities of a primal scream wedding. Progress. Real progress.

However, by the time we drove through the rainbow tunnel, Wayne was serious again.

“Should talk to Sam Skyler’s ex-wife, Helen,” he reminded me.

I looked at my watch. It was a little before eight.

“How about now?” I suggested. “We can stop at a pay phone and call her.”

Helen Skyler was in. And she was perfectly willing to talk. She told us Nathan had called to let her know we might be visiting. Her deep, musical voice was welcoming over the phone, a voice that sounded as if it had laughed a lot.

“I already like her and I haven’t even met her,” I told Wayne as I slid back into the snug decadence of the Jaguar.

“At least she isn’t a suspect,” he pointed out. “You can let yourself like her.”

But I couldn’t allow myself to like any of the people who might have murdered Sam Skyler, I reminded myself, wiggling my aching shoulders, not so comfortable anymore despite the snug seat. No wonder I felt so cranky. It was hard to talk to people you couldn’t allow yourself to like. And we’d had a day of it. It would be a good antidote to visit Helen Skyler, I assured myself. At least I hoped so.

We heard Helen’s house as much as saw it, a small architectural gem on a hill in Tiburon. Somewhere inside, a cello was being played and a dog was howling. The dog was winning.

The woman who answered the door still had her cello bow in hand. Her brown hair was pulled back in a severe knot at the nape of her neck. The eyes that peered out at us from beneath thick glasses were her son Nathan’s eyes. But now I could see what all his fur probably covered—if he’d inherited his mother’s lovely, perfectly oval face with clear, radiant white skin.

“Come in, come in,” she ordered, tossing her head theatrically toward the room behind her.

Within minutes, Wayne and I were seated on a too-plush red velvet couch, while Helen Skyler and her Great Dane, Huzza, perched across from us, their respective hands and paws crossed in an amazingly similar manner, on what appeared to be a former park bench sprayed in gold paint. Whimsy was the theme of Helen’s decor. Upside-down romance novel covers, pop star posters, jeweled scepters, and Van Gogh reproductions all shared space on the lavender-tinted wall across from us.

“If you want the story on Sam,” she told us, “you’ve come to the right place.” She shook her head for a moment, sadness in the gesture, but then threw her head back again. All her gestures seemed limited to her head and neck. Maybe everything below was saved for the cello.

A stocky red-haired woman came into the room, holding scissors and smelling of fresh rosemary and something roasting. Potatoes, maybe? And chicken?

“Ah, you must meet Mary,” Helen told us with another toss of her head. “My reason for living.”

“Oh, hell,” said Mary, her skin pinkening beneath freckles. “Music is your reason for living.”

They laughed in unison and Huzza howled in agreement.

“Has Helen told you she’s the lead cellist with the San Ricardo Symphony Orchestra?” Mary asked then.

We both shook our heads. I felt a twinge of guilt. I was far too ignorant of the music world thrumming around us. I didn’t even know San Ricardo had a symphony orchestra.

“And that she’s the director of the Zantano Music Workshop in—”

“Enough, enough!” Helen cried dramatically, but I could see the happy squint in her eyes underneath her thick glasses as Mary went back to the kitchen.

“Mary writes romances,” Helen whispered once her reason for living had left the room. “She makes a lot of money doing it too, but she won’t talk about it.” She winked largely. “Sam wrote romances too, before he made it in the human potential movement. But he wouldn’t talk about it either. Would you believe I was married to a man who wrote romance novels for a living, and now I’m married to a woman who writes the same kind of books for a living?”

“Romances?” was all I could say.

I guess Wayne was stunned too. I hadn’t heard a word from him since we’d been swallowed up by the red velvet couch.

“Sam was into every New Age movement that came around the sacred peak. For years,” Helen continued cheerily. Maybe she was used to stunning her guests. “TM, Ram Dass, Open Encounter, est. But he was always a bridesmaid, never a bride. He ‘assisted.’ He wrote pamphlets. He even ghosted biographies for some of the biggies. But he never really got his career off the rocks until Sally died. So he wrote romances for the money.”

“Sally—” I began.

“Oh, all that stuff about Sally,” Helen admonished, lowering her head and rolling her eyes over the rims of her glasses. “Sam never hit me. He wouldn’t have dared. But Sally! Jesus, that woman was mean. Always swinging her fists at him. That doesn’t really excuse Sam’s swinging back, but hell, what do you expect? ‘Course, it served Sam right. He married Sally for her money. Her inherited money. Sally sparred with her previous husband regularly, but he was some twenty years older than Sally, and in a wheelchair. He certainly died conveniently enough. But Sam, Sam was a lot bigger than Sally. He could have restrained her without hitting back.”

“Did Sam—” I began again.

“Push Sally over the balcony?” Helen finished for me. She furrowed her elegant brow. “I was never sure. But he did really grieve for her. He even went to a grief therapist.”