A Dinner to Die For (11 page)

Revolver in one hand, I aimed the flashlight alongside the outbuilding to my right. The beam skimmed the ground till it was eaten by the fog. No Yankowski.

The sirens sounded closer, coming in from all directions.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I moved forward, my rubber-soled shoes silent on the macadam. As I rounded the corner of the school, the wind whipped loose strands of hair in my face. I pushed it away and stared ahead at the deserted acre and a half of school yard. There were a hundred places to hide here, around the corners of the wings, under staircases, behind dumpsters, behind the outbuildings; or in the woody underbrush on the east side, in the backyards of the houses to the west; or around the pool, the playground, the trees that edged the track to the north. If he crossed Hopkins Street into the residential area with its maze of backyards, we could spend hours—and half the manpower in our department—and still not come up with him.

I flashed the light back into the black vee between these two thrusting wings of the school, but Yankowski wasn’t there. The wind iced the sweat on my face and neck. Standing still, I listened for the slap of moving feet, for that labored hiss of Yankowski’s breath. On King Way a car screeched to a halt, then started up. I noted the pitch of the sirens, trying to judge how close they were. Murakawa would be circling to the west. He should be rounding the corner soon onto Hopkins and coming up by the pool.

I stepped out farther into the yard. Headlights threw gray-white cones onto the macadam.

I peered across the yard toward the buildings at the north side. They were too far away for the flashlight beam. I could just see outlines through the fog, filling them in from memory. Near the gym was a small garage-sized structure, beside it a smaller storage shed. West of that was a large wooden umbrella with wings extending out on two sides; during the day seventy-five students clustered on the benches there out of the sun, lobbing scrunched-up papers in the general direction of the heavy, weighted metal waste-bins. To the west the earth had been humped up to create two small bare hills. I eyed them, for variations, a suggestion of a head peering over the top. Yankowski could be anywhere.

To my left the headlights of the patrol car threw long fuzzy beams. I paused, waiting for them to come nearer, and bathe the yard in their strong light. They didn’t move. The car had stopped. Of course, the gate was locked; the driver would be climbing over as I had. He’d have called Grayson. Grayson would have notified the dispatcher, who would be trying to get hold of the school custodian. Fat lot of good! By the time the custodian got here, Yankowski could be in San Francisco.

A flashlight beam shone around the corner of school wall. I flicked my light. It fell on a uniform. Devlin? He flicked back. He would finish at the building.

My beam just made the unlit yard blacker. Turning it off, I started across the pavement, letting my eyes reaccustom themselves to the dark. I glanced back at the mounds of dirt, trying to see them as separate from the leaves waving in the distance. The mounds sat dark and unmoving. I shifted my gaze to the umbrella, checking along the extension toward the gymnasium. One of the support poles widened. Was there a trash can behind it? I flicked on the light. There
was
a trash can. And behind it, not shielded by the trash can, was Yankowski’s thick arm, bare beneath the ripped edge of his gray T-shirt.

I raced toward him. My feet slapped the pavement. The shoulder holster slammed against my ribs. I couldn’t make out Yankowski anymore. Nothing showed around the sides of the trash can. I cut to the left to get a better angle, to flush him back toward the main yard. Still, my light showed only the can, the benches, the wooden support poles. Had he moved to the other side? Was he still behind the can? Or had he scuttled behind the shield of the benches? I slowed to a walk. The wind whistled past. Listening for that hiss, I froze.

“Devlin!” I called. “Over here!” Shining the light toward the ring of benches under the center of the umbrella, I moved slowly northward, passing beside the near support pole. Behind me feet hit the pavement as Devlin ran toward me. I closed in on the circle of benches, aiming the light at the hollow in their center. It would be a fool’s cover. I stepped closer. It was empty.

The hiss shrilled ahead. Revolver poised, I moved toward the heavy, weighted trash can, twenty feet away. “Stand up slowly, hands raised, Yankowski!”

Nothing moved. Outside the yard a car screeched to a halt. I sidestepped, edging in closer. The light beam caught Yankowski’s bare elbow.

“I said stand up!”

Slowly, that bald pate, that thin pale hair, that twisted nose appeared. Then the trash can lifted up and flew forward, at me. I stared, mesmerized, in a world of slow motion, watching it float nearer. I could feel its breeze when I leapt to the side. It struck my shoulder, flinging me back onto the macadam.

I let out a gasp. My hand struck hard against the ground; the flashlight went flying, but I held fast to the gun. My body shook with pain. I looked up to see Yankowski disappear over the edge of the yard, down the thirty-foot incline to the playground.

“What happened?” Devlin panted.

“Down the hill, there.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, dammit,” I snapped, grabbing his arm to pull myself up. “I’ll take the north, you go south.” I ran slowly, the pain one great blur. At the top of the stairs I stopped, looking down into the beamless dark. Yankowski could have been anywhere down there, hidden by trees, behind the pool house, or crouched behind the pillars and platforms of the playground.

There was a cement slide beside the staircase. I put on the safety, and holding the revolver with both hands, leapt feetfirst onto the slide, hitting one of the banked walls, ricocheting off into the other wall, going faster down into the dark, keeping my feet together, my hands steady on the revolver, scanning the dark for Yankowski. The slide leveled out, but I was going too fast to stop; I shot off the end and hit something with a thud.

The impact knocked me back, banging my elbows against the cement, crumpling me to the cement as they collapsed. The pain exploded inward. I couldn’t stop the shaking. My breath roared in my head. A groan cut through. And another. It was a moment before I realized they were not my own. My fingers tingled weakly. I could barely feel the butt of the gun. From memory I forced myself to tighten my grip. Then releasing one hand, I pushed myself up, and looked down at the mound beneath the slide. What was it I had hit? “Yankowski?” I said with more hope than expectation.

“No,” the breathless form forced out.

My eyes were adjusting; the black didn’t seem so dark now. I could make out my victim’s face. The face was thin, the hair dark and plentiful, the nose shallow but straight. It was not Yankowski; it was Murakawa.

I
’D LET HIM ESCAPE!
I’d had Yankowski fifteen feet from me; I’d had him at gunpoint and he’d gotten away! Again! Maybe Inspector Doyle was right; maybe it was too soon for me to come back to work. Maybe I should put in for a desk job where I couldn’t do any damage.

I spent the next half hour looking for Yankowski in the underbrush on the slope; around the pool, the playground, the track; and back in the school yard. If he handled dirty dishes as adroitly as he had eluding me, he must have been the best dishwasher in town.

The sky was growing lighter. But fog shrouded the dawn. At quarter to six I walked back to Paradise. The pain in my lower back had receded to a heavy ache that throbbed with each step. It felt ominously familiar, the same ache that had been there for weeks after the helicopter crash. My ribs and shoulder still stung. Gritty dirt streaked my face and sweat matted my hair. I thought longingly of my house with its many-headed shower, its sauna, hot tub, and Jacuzzi. Great, Smith, just go home and loll in the tub; that’s about what you’re good for.

I picked up my purse from inside Paradise, fished out a Wash ’n Dri my mother had given me to use on the plane, and wiped my face. Even though the wipe was thoroughly brown after I finished, I suspected that my face still wasn’t anywhere near clean. But at least now it wouldn’t cause people to stop in the street.

Parked behind Mitch Biekma’s vintage black Triumph in the Paradise driveway, the sector sergeant sat in his car. Grayson was leaning against the window. He glanced up.

I eyed him hopefully.

“Nothing new,” he said. His voice had no note of triumph. He hadn’t beaten me; I’d beaten myself.

“I’ve already dismissed some of the backups,” the sector sergeant said. “We’ll give the rest of the guys till the end of shift.”

I could tell how much hope
he
held out. I shrugged and headed down the driveway toward the front yard and Mitch Biekma’s metal garden. In the pale morning light I could sympathize with the neighbors’ complaints about this artistic statement. The metal sculptures, which last night had thrown ominously undulating shadows on the dark, fiery wall, now looked like a collection of garden paraphernalia left out in the fog too long. They looked not so much avant-garde as tacky.

“Which one was it Biekma fell over?” I asked the patrol officer on guard. He pointed to the sculpture nearest the door. It looked like a three-foot-high spear whose point had broken into five narrower, but equally sharp, segments—the bird of paradise. Moving closer, I could see the telltale dark stain on the tallest point.

Behind me a car pulled into the driveway. “Not the press,” I muttered. Was it possible for this day to get worse? A front-page photo of the bloodstained sculpture, along with an article on the suspect’s escape, would do it.

But the car was a black and white. The driver was opening the door for a blond woman who looked to be a few years older than I, maybe thirty-five. She wore faded jeans and a thin white shirt under an overlarge man’s V-necked cardigan that seemed to be hanging onto her shoulders by friction alone. Clearly, she was exhausted. Everything about her sagged: her blond hair hung in limp curls; even her freckles seemed to weigh her skin down. She climbed slowly out of the car, and rested a hand on the top of the door. The muscles in her face stiffened as she stared at the metal flowers. “Which one?” she asked the patrol officer.

He looked confused.

I walked up. “I’m Detective Smith. Are you Laura Biekma?”

“Mitch was so proud of this garden.” She shook her head. “He saw a beauty—no, that’s not it. No, a stylishness—that’s it—a stylishness that most people couldn’t. At first I wondered if he was just saying that because he’d committed himself and didn’t want to look a fool. But no, he really loved it. It’s almost fitting that he should die …”

Laura Biekma was the one person in the kitchen Yankowski had approved of. She, if anyone, might know where he’d hide. But I couldn’t attack her with questions on the sidewalk. “Come inside,” I said gently, nodding at the patrol officer. I walked with her up the steps, and stood between her and the dining room as she paused in the entryway. Raksen was gone. Grayson was still outside. The only signs of an investigation were Lopez standing by the kitchen door, and the chalk outline of Biekma’s body on the other side of the partition. I didn’t want Laura Biekma to see that. She was shaky enough without that kind of shock. I didn’t know how much longer she would hold together. Six to twenty-four hours was the rule with family members. When I worked on my first homicide as a beat officer, I assumed the husband of the victim would fall apart as soon as he heard the news. He didn’t, not for a full fifteen hours. Then he went to pieces and couldn’t be interviewed for days. Laura Biekma had had more than six hours. She had worked a full day yesterday, and been up all night. It spoke well of her that she’d held herself together this long. If she could just make it long enough to give me a lead to Yankowski.

I followed her up the stairs. The bottom seven, beneath the Plasticine door, were thickly carpeted. Behind the door the top six steps had rubber stair-runners. The walls beside them were scuffed and the moldings coated with greasy dust. It was clear that this apartment, where the Biekmas had lived for six years, was tantamount to a place where they stored their off-duty bodies.

“Come into the kitchen,” she said. There was a low-pitched drag to her words, almost a hoarseness, as if they were coming from a tape played at too slow a speed. “I’ll make you some toast and coffee. It’s Acme Bakery bread.”

I lowered myself gingerly into a director’s chair, at the tiny table that folded down from the wall. Pain clamped my back.

Watching Laura as she poured water through the Melitta and cut slabs of bread for the toaster oven, I could see her relaxing in the arena she controlled. It was almost as if she had forgotten that she was the bereaved.

“Cream?” she asked, setting a sturdy white mug in front of me.

“Thanks.”

She set a small bottle on the table, the type of milk bottle I had seen only in nostalgia ads. “It’s so unfair. Why did he have to die now, just when he’d finally found his place?”

“What do mean, Mrs. Biekma?”

She sighed, a long shaky sigh that could easily have turned into tears. “Maybe Mitch was too talented. Nothing ever challenged him. In school he went through eight majors. There were always five or six half-done projects lying around our apartment. Before he’d finish, he find something else and be all enthusiastic about it. I thought that’s the way our life would be, just scraping by, me working at the gas company all day and making all the practical decisions at home. Then he decided to open a restaurant. And it was as if overnight he grew up. I’ll tell you, when he went to Paris to cooking school, I thought it was just another hobby, and when he came back, wouldn’t have bet on it lasting a month. But he stuck with it. He even took courses in accounting and business management, and if you knew Mitch you’d know how much he hated stuff like that. And then, just when people recognized that Paradise was the best ...” She sniffed back tears, swallowed hard, and then, concentrating all her attention, lifted her coffee cup and drank.

I waited until she set the cup down. “I know it’s been a long night for you, Mrs. Biekma. There are just a few things that have to be dealt with now.”