A Dinner to Die For (17 page)

“Free dinners for customers who’d had meals that weren’t up to Paradise’s standards?” Howard asked.

“Standards of nontoxicity,” Pereira explained.

I swallowed a mouthful of salad and asked, “How was Laura Biekma, Connie? Could you get anything out of her?”

“She was in bed. I don’t often feel bad about waking up a suspect, but she looked like she was the one who’d been poisoned—you know that jaundiced look you get when you’ve thrown up?”

“But you didn’t let your better instincts inhibit you, right?” Howard said, spearing olive, tomato, and lettuce.

Ignoring Howard’s jibe, she said, “I started in about Earth Man. Even half-asleep, she gave me the line that she and Mitch had given him dinner as a publicity gimmick, to counter the view that they were elitists.”

“But they
didn’t
publicize those meals,” I said.

“Earth Man didn’t exactly fit the image Mitch had had in mind when he concocted the idea. Mitch, it seems, had a few failings, like getting carried away with an idea and leaving the work involved to someone else. He wanted to be seen giving meals to the deserving poor. He just didn’t take time to check out his recipient.”

Howard laughed. “Afraid Earth Man would steal the show?”

I said to Pereira, “So Yankowski set up Mitch, huh?”

“Got it. How come, you may be asking? Well, it seems that Biekma was on this talk show with two nationally known chefs. Each of them had his cookbook out on the bookstore shelves—Biekma’s is only in the manuscript stage—and Biekma was hot to score over this big-time competition. So he pulls out all his best stories, and adds a few new ones, and one of those includes a description of their giant dishwasher with the twisted nose cowering in the kitchen.”

“Clear enough description for his ex-wife to recognize him?” I asked, forking a piece of cow. It tasted better as “Mexicana Suprema Salud.”

“Apparently Yankowski thought so.”

“And so,” Howard said, gleefully, “he gave Biekma Earth Man to get even!” This was right up Howard’s alley.

“Mitch couldn’t fire Yankowski because he was the most reliable dishwasher around,” I said.

“And not only did Biekma never get his publicity for being a good guy, but he couldn’t stop feeding Earth Man for fear Earth Man would complain to the press about him breaking his promise, right? It’s a masterwork,” Howard pronounced.

“But,” I said “even if there came a time when the threat of bad publicity wasn’t enough, Mitch couldn’t get rid of Earth Man, because Earth Man had the evidence of the poisoned food. I’ll bet it was Yankowski who told him to keep that food.”

Pereira grabbed the biggest fry on Howard’s plate. “Wait. Here’s the clincher. If Earth Man had gone public, you know what would have come to light?”

I nodded. “All those dinners the Biekmas wrote off! The ones you found in their books.”

“Exactly,” she said triumphantly, scanning both our plates before helping herself to Howard’s pickle. “Seems people have been getting sick there every couple of weeks.”

I put down my fork. “So what did Laura say about that?”

“Said they were very upset, for one thing. Seems Mitch went wild trying to find the culprit. Fired the waiters, the salad chef, the
sous
-chef, the busboy, everyone but Yankowski and the cook—”

“Who he couldn’t fire because she owns a third of the place,” I said.

“So Mitch starts poking around trying to figure out who’s behind it,” Howard said.

To Pereira, I said, “We’ve got to get a list of which staff members were there the night of each poisoning.”

She grinned. “I’m way ahead of you. Mitch had the same idea. Here’s the rundown. Laura was there on and off. Ashoka Prem, last night’s
sous
-chef, helped out a few of those nights. There were three salad chefs and four waiters during that time. Yankowski was there all but one day. And Adrienne the cook was there every single night. And here’s another interesting thing,” she said, plopping the remainder of pickle in her mouth.

I waited while she chewed.

“I had a look at the partnership agreement. Not only do all three of the partners have right of first refusal if the others choose to sell, but each one has veto power over any prospective buyer.”

“So no one would get greedy and sell their share to a burger chain, huh?” Howard asked.

I took another bite of my salad, then put down the fork and pushed the bowl in front of Pereira. “I’d say it was time I had a talk with Adrienne.”

“P
OISON!”
A
DRIENNE
J
ENKS SHOUTED
. She was a tiny woman with shoulder-length brown hair that stood out from her head in bursts of thick wiry curls. Even the net she would have to wear in the kitchen wouldn’t hold that mass down much; and wearing it, she would look like a saint whose halo had darkened with age. But now, a saint was the last thing she resembled. She glared at me with dark eyes, and in a startlingly deep and loud voice, demanded, “Poison? Are you crazy? I’m the chef. Food is my art. Do you understand what that means?”

“But you know about the food poisonings at Paradise,” I said. We were in her studio flat, a large room that had once been a partial basement of the house above. The Berkeley Hills, part of the Coast Range that run the length of the state, rise from the fault line gently in some places, abruptly in others. This house had been built at a corner, on a down-slope so steep that the front door was at street level; but here in the back, Adrienne had to climb down six steps from her converted basement to the yard. Unlike the “garden” that had been outside my old flat, one forever in the planning stage, Adrienne’s yard sported a bed of day lilies, two tall pines, and a four-foot-high hedge beside the sidewalk. A walkway bisected the hedge. “You do know about the food poisonings at Paradise,” I repeated.

“Know, of course I know. Everybody knows.”

“There was nothing in the papers.”

“Oh, that,” she said, dismissing the media with a wave of the hand. “Everyone in the business knows. It’s a disaster. They’re all talking about it. Our business is way down.”

“How far?”

She paused a moment. I had the feeling that figures and specifics were too pedestrian for her. Great flourishes of emotion seemed more natural. Lowering her voice, though there was no one around to hear, she said, “You could almost get in without a reservation.”

Like dinner at Wally’s, I restrained myself from commenting.

“It’s all people talk about,” she declared. She was wearing a red smock with huge purple flowers, and pipe-leg jeans. She looked like a Popsicle. Smacking each small foot against the floor, she began to pace briskly across the twenty-by-thirty room. It was not to be an easy journey. To one side of the doorway, where I was still standing, a red and purple print sofa and three stuffed chairs covered in sea blues and bright green were grouped around a low oak table. Straight ahead, a potted ficus the size of a family Christmas tree stood like a traffic cop. And to the left, a violet and green double-bed sized sleeping mat lay between the front wall and a large worktable—a board balanced on two two-drawer file cabinets. Strewn behind it were a padded office chair and two stools. To make it from one wall to the other required a couple of moves worthy of a wide receiver. “And you know what people are saying, don’t you?”

“No.”

“No?” She flung her arms in the air. “They’re saying I’ve lost my touch, that’s what. It could kill me. Do you know how I’ve worked to get some recognition?”

“Sit down and tell me,” I said, motioning her to join me on a soft couch with throw pillows that reminded me of her smock.

She sat. “I don’t have money like Ashoka.”

“Ashoka Prem, Mitch’s friend from the English class?”

“Yeah. Ashoka’s family has oodles. Had it for years. Being a chef is a hobby for Ashoka. Hell, life is a hobby for him. He can dabble till he’s eighty and it won’t matter. And Mitch, well, he had Laura to support him. I wish I’d had a wife to stay in California and work her tail off so I could spritz around some tourist cooking school near the Left Bank. Those places cost a fortune. Rich American dabblers come to spend money, they figure.” She threw up her hands, looking very French.

“That’s where you went?” I asked, amazed.

She jumped up. “Not me. Mitch and Ashoka.”

I motioned her down again.

“I went to the best school in Paris. I saved for five years to pay for tuition, and fare, and living expenses. I applied three times before they would consider me. I took French classes for years; they don’t speak English. I had to hock my soul to start Paradise. Look, this is the best place I’ve lived since I left my parents.”

“But it’s worth it, isn’t it? You’ve been written up in the paper. Everyone in Berkeley knows your name.”

“I’m not after fame. I’m not looking to write a cookbook like Mitch. I’m not hot for the talk show circuit. I want people to savor my creations and to know that this is the best it can possibly be.” She assessed my reaction. “How can I make you see. It’s like art. I don’t want to be just El Greco or Modigliani; I want to create the Mona Lisa. Or in music—”

“I take your meaning.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, deflated.

“About the poisonings ...” I prodded.

“I might as well never lift a crepe pan again.” She sank back into the pillows, her small drawn face looking paler and sharper in contrast to their lush shades. Pushing herself back up, she rested her elbows on her thighs and stared directly at me. “It would be one thing if people had really been poisoned. If they’d died. Then everyone would know that there was a lunatic loose. But what I’ve got is the customers complaining that the food tastes funny. Funny! They feel lousy later on. What’s that? It doesn’t sound like a lunatic. There are homicidal lunatics; there aren’t indigestive lunatics. ‘Funny’ sounds like the milk has gone bad, or the spices came out of a jar. ‘Funny’ is how dinner tastes if your kid makes it. So no one’s going to think of a conspiracy. Everyone just assumes the problem is with me. Of course they’re not saying it to me, but I can tell. People shy away. It’s like I’m, well, poison.”

I knew the feeling. “Why would anyone indulge in that type of poisoning?”

I was prepared for the type of tentative reply Pereira had gotten from Laura Biekma, but Adrienne didn’t hesitate. “To destroy me.”

“What about Mitch, it couldn’t have done him any good.”

“He wasn’t the chef. Everyone in the business knew that. He never came in the kitchen till after the customers had left.”

“Because you wouldn’t let him, right?”

She gave me a quick nod.

“Why?” I insisted.

“Why? Because there can be only one chef in the kitchen. He hired me to be chef. I’m the chef. I can’t be bothered with him futzing around tasting the soup, tossing in a handful of cilantro—he did that once, in
my
soup! Or he’d say the wine sauce needed scallions instead of shallots. I can’t put up with that.”

“But if you had an agreement …”

“
Had
is the word. For Mitch, the agreement lasted while he was making it.” She reached out and put a hand on my arm, then, as if remembering the nature of our interview, drew it back. “Look, Mitch and I got along, in our way. He didn’t mean any harm, far from it. Mitch thrived on being liked. That was the problem. He was so busy concentrating on being liked
now
that the past slipped away.”

“Criticizing your food was hardly the thing to make you like him.”

“But the customers, if he made their dinners better by adding cilantro, they’d like him. And they did, they loved him. He was on their side, making sure they had the best dinners in town. If the food did taste funny, the only question they had about him was why he didn’t get rid of me. And then, they excused him that because I own a third of the place. He couldn’t fire me.”

“Couldn’t he have bought you out?”

She shrugged, “He might have thought about it, but he didn’t have the money. Besides, I would never have sold. Not the way things were. That’s what I’m telling you; now I couldn’t
get
another position. No one would hire me even as
sous
-chef, much less give me free rein.”

“Free rein?”

“Look, Mitch might have been an egomaniac, but he wasn’t a fool. He caught on real soon in Paris. He knew he’d never be great. Ashoka never understood that. He still thinks he’ll open a restaurant that will transform Indian food. But Mitch got it quick. He knew if he was going to make a splash he needed an artist. And he knew enough to realize I was an artist. So we had a deal.”

“So Mitch was never the chef?”

For the first time Adrienne hesitated. “Not really. No. He cooked. He even created some dishes, sometimes they were good, but just
good,
not superlative. And good’s nothing. In Berkeley, good is what you get on any corner.”

“Then what is it he put in his cookbook?”

“What do you think?”

“Your recipes?”

“You got it.”

“Why did you allow that?”

Scowling, she squirmed, reached behind her, and yanked out the offending lump—a bleach-spotted tan wool cap—and tossed it angrily to the floor. “Stupidity. Greed. Innocence. Take your pick. It was part of the agreement. I wanted security, a place where I could create, where no one would tell me what to cook or how to cook it, and no one could fire me. And I got that. No matter what happens, I stay at Paradise.”

“Suppose Mitch and Laura had decided to sell their shares? You have right of first refusal. Would you have bought them out?”

“Before this poisoning business, I’d have jumped at the chance. I could always have gotten backing. People would have been lined up for the honor.”

“And now?”

“Now only an insecticide company would take the chance.”

“And if the Biekmas had wanted to buy you out?”

“They wouldn’t. I am Paradise. Without me it would be nothing.”

“But suppose.”

“They could shove it. Particularly now.”

“What did Mitch get out of the deal?”

“Fame,” she said with disgust. “He got his restaurant. He got the notice of being the cook there. The deal was that for publication we were both chefs for the first year. And he got the recipes. I didn’t care. What’s one year? I’ll be cooking for the rest of my life. What I created last year is gone. I’m not interested in that. I care about what I’m creating now. So as long as Mitch presented the recipes right, and he did do that, he was welcome to them. He could have his picture on the cover, he could do the signing circuit, he could hold press conferences, he could angle for Johnny Carson: that was all fine. I didn’t want any of that, and frankly, he was damned good at it. Talk shows were his thing. I saw him on a couple. He loved being the guest chef. But he could as easily have been the guest lion trainer. He wasn’t a chef, he was a personality.”