A Dinner to Die For (15 page)

Footsteps approached, and slowly the door opened to reveal a man in his fifties or his eighties—there was no way to tell. His long curly unclean gray hair hung over the shoulders of his work shirt, and the shirt hung loose over his fragile frame. Once he might have been nearly six feet tall; now he wasn’t much more than my five seven. Whether the cause was age, drugs, ill health, or, more likely, the coming together of all three, I couldn’t guess. He didn’t bother to ask for my ID. He probably hadn’t bothered in twenty years.

“What room is Earth Man in?”

“Earth Man? You don’t want him.”

I was in no mood for this. “What room?”

“Listen, lady—”

“
Detective.
Skip the defense. What room is he in?”

“Okay, but you’re making a mistake. It’s one eleven,” he said, slamming the door.

I had been in my share of seedy hotels when I had the Telegraph beat. In some of those places families lived in the one or two rooms meant for offices. They used the toilet by the stairs. For their children the hallways were the Indianapolis of big wheels. But there were no children here, no smells of garlic or cilantro. The smells here were ones Earth Man would feel at home with. The walls were no cleaner than his cloak, and there was a puddle in the stairwell that didn’t bear too close examination. With each door I passed, I had the sense of flipping from one radio station to another.

Room 111 was at the end of the hallway, facing one of the airshafts. Automatically, Heling moved to the far side of the door. I knocked. There was no sound inside. I waited, then knocked again. “Earth Man, open up!”

It was the door behind me that opened, a crack. Whiny sounds of country music flowed out. Three feet away I could smell the cotton-candy perfume. Mixed with the La Maison smells, it was nauseating. From the darkness a gravelly female voice said, “Whadya want with him?”

“It’s okay,” I said, leaning closer to Earth Man’s door, listening for footsteps.

“He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone. With him, who knows?”

But I figured with her I didn’t know either. I knocked on Earth Man’s door again, four times, the police knock. “Open up, Dana!”

“You’re wasting your knuckles,” the woman said, and slammed the door, sending the perfume toward me in a final gust.

I sighed. Chances were she would be proved right.

I was about to leave when the door opened a sliver.

“Did you get your donuts last night?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s you.” The door opened. At first I thought Earth Man was standing by the opposite wall. But it was just his cloak standing by that wall—draped on something life-sized, I fervently hoped. I didn’t want to think how dirt-encrusted it would have to be to actually stand alone. With its beaks and snouts and elephant trunk, it wasn’t a garment to be folded in a drawer. Earth Man himself was wearing a gray sweatsuit. If it hadn’t been for the aureole of blond hair surrounding his thin face, if it hadn’t been for the residue of white paint and glitter on his thin, high-bridged nose, he might have looked like any Berkeleyan ready for an afternoon’s run or read. I realized, with amazement, that unlike the odoriferous cloak, his hair was clean, and he didn’t smell at all. How he tolerated being inside the cloak was something I would find out soon enough.

It was clear from a glance at the rumpled bed that we had indeed awakened him.

“I need to see your cloak, Earth Man,” I said softly.

“You saw it last night.”

“I need to look at it again.”

He scrunched his eyes in thought.

The longer we stood in the hall, the greater the chance of a hassle. “Earth Man, now!”

He stepped back. I followed him in and walked to the cloak. But it wasn’t supported by grime alone. As soon as I touched the chest, I could feel the form beneath it—a dress form. The type grandmothers had in their bright, starched-curtained sewing rooms. I almost laughed. But I should be thankful for small favors, I reminded myself. The cloak needed all the airing it could get.

Turning away, I took a breath, and bending down, peered up the inside of the elephant trunk. Darkness. Feeling much the same revulsion I would have in dealing with a real elephant, I stuck my finger up the trunk. Beside me Heling pressed her lips together hard. “Cloth,” I said. “Solid cloth at the end.”

“The hole could have been sewn closed,” Heling said, her voice breaking as she tried to control herself.

To Earth Man I said, “I’m going to have to see this from the inside.”

Earth Man looked as appalled as I felt.

I didn’t dare make eye contact with Heling. “Take it off the dummy,” I said to Earth Man.

For a moment he didn’t move; then, frowning with worry, he took the shoulders of the cloak and inched it up over the dress form. Halfway off, the fabric caught. Earth Man’s eyes widened in horror. Swallowing her grin, Heling grabbed the hem and lifted the cloak free.

Then she handed me her flashlight. I took a last breath and ducked inside. It was close, hot, and smelled like a bear cave at the end of winter. I flashed the light slowly, systematically back and forth, inch by appalling inch. I took short breaths, as if their shallowness would filter the smell. Sweat beaded my forehead, ran down my back and sides, adding nothing to the congeniality of the environment.

“No holes,” I said when I emerged.

“Oh, no,” Earth Man said. “I’m very careful with it. It’s very fine wool, you saw that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. I had expected him to be offended or even frightened by my invasion of his garment, but instead he continued to smile as if my sojourn in the cloak had created a bond between us.

To Earth Man I said, “Is this your only cloak?”

Heling stared in amazement. But Earth Man merely nodded.

A survey of the room would have answered the question. There was no place to put another cloak. The one tiny closet would have squashed one.

La Maison hadn’t been converted from apartments, or toned down from a tourist hotel. It had never been much more than it was now. Earth Man’s room was about ten by fifteen. To say that the two dirt-encrusted windows provided light would be serious exaggeration; they just added two paler gray rectangles to the bare floor. Against the inside wall was a bed covered with a Madras spread, its orange, red, and purple having run together so many times that it was virtually a homogeneous shade. At the foot of the bed was a small TV—black and white. On the near wall, by the door, was a bookcase stuffed with pamphlets. Earth Man must have collected every one ever issued on air pollution in the state. And between the bookcase and the bed, next to the TV, was a sink and a hotplate unit that sat atop the world’s smallest icebox. Looking at it, I realized that it couldn’t have held more than the three dishes Parker had taken, which meant that Earth Man had considered the dish from Paradise worth a third of his fridge space.

Any dinner from Paradise would have been worth a third of this fridge. How had Earth Man come by that dinner and the others he was given? Paradise didn’t feed other poor people, Earth Man had admitted that himself. What did he have that the rest of the poor lacked? A friend in the right place.

I dismissed Heling, then said to Earth Man, “There are a few more things I need your help with.”

He sat on the bed and motioned me to a padded chair by the window. The chair was covered with a piece of cloth that vaguely resembled the bedspread. I settled gingerly on the edge.

“So Yankowski arranged for you to get dinners at Paradise,” I said conversationally.

“Yes.” He smiled.

“Why did he do that?”

“We were friends. He supported my work.”

“Financially?” I asked, suppressing my amazement.

He nodded, his blond corkscrew curls bobbing. In the light that filtered through the windows, a smattering of gray hairs was visible amid the blond. “Sometimes,” he said. “But he didn’t have much money either. They don’t pay dishwashers much. Some places split tips—he told me that—but not Paradise. We talked about that, being poor. He doesn’t like it either, but he’s not really poor, you know? He’s just passing through poor. But me, like I told him, I’m lifetime poor. Even without my work, I couldn’t wash dishes all night. I’d go crazy in one place like that.”

“About the dinners,” I prompted.

He nodded. The muted sunlight reflected off the gold flecks on his nose. “We were talking one night about what we would buy if we had a hundred dollars. And I said I’d start with a really good meal. You know when you’re poor, you don’t get healthy food. Not if you don’t cook. You get a lot of junk with lots of sodium, and red dye, and grease and sugar. Like those donuts you cops tried to fob off on me.”

I forced back a smile.

“I used to eat that stuff. I mean, I’m poor, and I’d get hungry and I’d see half a donut left on a plate. Or someone would give me a candy bar as a donation. And I ate it. It was very bad for me; my stomach suffered. That’s why I sewed the handholes closed on my cloak.” He pressed his arms to his sides. “See, no temptation.”

“So what did Yankowski do for you?”

“A couple of days later, he told me the restaurant would bring me dinner every night for a month.”

“In return for?”

“Nothing.”

“Earth Man, nobody brings you dinner for nothing.”

“She did.”

“Laura Biekma?”

“Most times. Sometimes she couldn’t get away and someone else brought it. Twice it came by cab.” He grinned, showing two rows of even, surprisingly white teeth. “You should have seen the driver’s face when he got here.”

I could imagine.

“Did they have a reporter come out?”

“No. No one came except the people who brought the food.”

“Are you sure? Last night, you told me they fed you for the good publicity.”

“The only person besides her and the cab drivers was one of the waiters. I saw him at Paradise later, after they stopped bringing the food here.”

“What about on the street? Did reporters ask you about dinner there?”

“No, no! I told you no reporters talked to me.” His face reddened around the white nose. It looked like a ball of red salsa with a blob of sour cream. “I was waiting. I thought they’d come. I had things to tell them.”

I could imagine that too. Still, it was a puzzle. Why would Mitch Biekma have fed Earth Man, if not for the publicity?

“What did Frank Yankowski get out of this?”

Earth Man stared me straight in the face. “The pleasure of helping a friend,” he said. “Frank got his meals at work.”

I decided to drop that line of questioning. Whatever Yankowski got from this deal, he wouldn’t have gotten it from Earth Man. “Where is Frank now?” I asked, hoping to slip that in.

“Isn’t he in his room?”

“No. Where else would he go?”

“The movies.”

“Besides that?”

“No place. He’s poor.”

“He could be visiting friends, couldn’t he?”

Earth Man’s face lighted up. “Oh, yeah,” he said, pleased to be able to offer something. “He’s got a friend down the hall.”

“Who?”

“Sam, the manager.”

I pressed Earth Man, but clearly there was no more to squeeze out.

On the way out, I pounded till Sam, the manager, answered; but if he had any idea where Yankowski might be, he was playing dumb.

I walked back to my car, wondering what had brought about those unpublicized dinners. Had Yankowski made the arrangement out of the goodness of his heart? Had he paid for them himself? Not on his salary as a dishwasher. But even if the dinners had been paid for, I couldn’t imagine Mitch Biekma sending his food to La Maison de Flop. How could Yankowski have convinced Mitch? And why did he do it?

As I started the car, I thought of Earth Man standing nearly nose to nose with Mitch Biekma and his bowl. He was close enough to pour the poison in. Close enough, but his hands were sewn inside his cloak. Besides, the poison was in the horseradish, and Earth Man didn’t have access to that at all.

What had gone on between Mitch Biekma and Frank Yankowski? Frank had vanished and Mitch was dead. But Laura was still around, and Laura, who had been willing to discuss her murdered husband, had been strangely reluctant to tell me about Yankowski. And now it might be too late to question her.

But it might not. Pereira was at Paradise going over the books. She could give it a shot. I called her.

By the time I got off the phone, I realized that what I really needed to do was talk about Laura, and Yankowski, and Biekma and Earth Man, and the cook, and the temporary
sous
-chef, and the string of poisonings. How many breakfasts had we downed while we hashed over our cases? There was a time when I’d feared that was about to end. But it hadn’t. If I called Howard, odds were he’d be sitting in Wally’s Diner when I got there.

I
STOPPED AT
Y
ANKOWSKI’S
room in the Hillvue Hotel, which backed up to La Maison. I’d called from outside the judge’s office, to notify the manager of the warrant. By now, whatever was inside room 209 would have been viewed and catalogued. Whoever was guarding the room would be delighted to have company. I knocked. “It’s Jill Smith.”

The door opened. Sapolu, a patrol officer the size of Yankowski, smiled wearily. Beyond him I could see a room no bigger than Earth Man’s, furnished in the same manner, minus the television, bookcase, and standing cape. “What did you find?” I asked Sapolu.

“Not a whole lot. But what we’ve got isn’t going to make your day, either. You want the grand tour here?”

“Sure.”

The closet was small. Yankowski would have had trouble hiding in it. But his clothes didn’t fill half of it. On hangers were a navy pea jacket and a dark ski sweater, the thick kind meant to be worn outside. Suspended from a hook was an insulated ski cap, and on the floor were duck boots. I looked more closely at the sweater. There was a sharp dip at each side where the hanger ended. If I took the sweater off the hanger and held the sleeves out, there would be bulges. “What we’ve got here is Yankowski’s storage closet. He’s packed away his winter clothes. He must be wearing his summer whites.”

Sapolu stared, mystified.