A Dinner to Die For (2 page)

The plane vibrated mightily. Metal rattled. I forced my gaze down. Brighter lines of white—the runways. Black—the bay. My stomach lurched, bile shot into my throat, my fingers ached from the pressure on the armrests. The engine’s roar cut silent. My eyes closed. I tried to force them open. They didn’t move. The plane bounced. It was down. The impact slammed me forward against the seat belt. I heard a gasp. It had to be my own. The plane had landed. Safely.

“Please remain seated till the aircraft has come to a stop,” the stewardess begged in vain.

Sweat sheeted my back, dripped from my armpits, coated my face. I inhaled into lungs still locked in fear. Slowly my eyes opened. The man in the aisle seat jumped up, and popped open the overhead luggage rack. The man next to me undid his seat belt and slid into the aisle seat. And then the overhead lights were on, everyone was up, everyone was talking to everyone else, squeezing into the aisles.

I slumped forward, my head throbbing with humiliation. I had had my chance and I had blown it.

There would be other chances; I wasn’t going to live my life as a coward. But, for now, all I could do was carry a sponge and pail for the sweat, and make damn sure no one on the force found out.

O
N THE CAB RIDE
from the airport I grumbled to myself about Howard’s not meeting me. “Out on a sting,” his message at the airline counter had said. How important was this sting? My question made me realize how long I’d been away. The implicit demand that he postpone collaring the perpetrators is one no cop should make. Least of all to Howard.

Howard is the department’s great sting artist. He loves them. He sets them up like a quarterback drawing the defensive backs in closer and closer with each running play, each short drop pass, watching with glee as each play pulls the defensive perps in tighter, till, barely able to contain his glee, he steps back in the pocket, pumps and then pulls the ball back in, watches the defensive perps blitzing in toward him, scrambles left and lets go with the bomb. He’s the Joe Montana of Vice and Substance Abuse.

I sat back in the cab, watching the foggy June streets of Berkeley pass. Spring and fall are supposed to be our best seasons. Winter is cold and rainy, summer cold and foggy. This year June must have joined summer.

The cab turned off University Avenue and began climbing into the north Berkeley hills toward the address Connie Pereira had given me. As she had said in her letter, I would be living out of my element, house-sitting for an investment banker friend of hers. It wasn’t till the cab pulled up that I realized what kind of friends she had. The house was a palace. In the driveway my Volkswagen that Connie had delivered looked like a toy.

I spent the first half hour just wandering from room to room to room. The living room alone could have held the ten-by-forty converted porch I had lived in for two years, and still have had half its space free to hold the baby grand piano, the two Herendon sofas on either side of the stone fireplace, and the “conversation pod” at the far end of the room. The dining room looked like a set from “Masterpiece Theatre.” And the kitchen! There would be no more rinsing out coffee cups in what had been the basement utility sink. Now my decision was whether to pour from the Mr. Coffee, use the Melitta, or find out how to work the espresso machine; whether to pour the coffee into the silver pot and carry it down to the family room, or back to the bay window in the dining room that overlooked San Francisco (or would have if the fog hadn’t been so thick), or drink it in the kitchen while pondering the Cuisinart, four ovens—standard, wall, and microwaves, regular and mini—and the freezer that held enough food to stake a Gourmet Ghetto restaurant for a night. But I’m not the best person to judge—I don’t cook. There are things that the average person takes for granted that I’ve never cared to learn—the meaning of sauté, for instance. Junk food is fine by me. But even I realized the stuff in the freezer was gourmet. This was definitely out of my element.

Then there was the breakfast nook, the lanai, the sauna, the hot tub-Jacuzzi, and the four bedrooms. Briefly, I considered sleeping in the guest room. No, if I was going to take my life by the horns now, I might as well do it in the master bedroom, where I would need to pad just ten or twelve feet, across carpet thick enough to lose my ankles in, to the Jacuzzi-equipped tub for two.

Looking at the bed in there—king-sized, of course; anything smaller would have looked ridiculous—I felt the weight of the day’s tension land on my back, as if it had been released from a sack above me. It was only six
P.M.,
still light, even through the fog. I extricated a nightshirt from one of my suitcases and crawled into the bed—and found myself shaking.

I pulled the covers closer around my chin, and thought of Howard—Howard who, after a month’s separation, hadn’t met me at the airport. I wasn’t angry. I was too drained for anger. Was I disappointed? Maybe. No, not so much disappointed as relieved.

I wasn’t ready to deal with Howard. And I didn’t want him to see me yet, not shaky like this. Still, through the increasing fogginess of my mind I couldn’t help wondering what kind of sting he was running. Was it so vital for him to be there? Or was he having qualms about me, too? Or was … but the warmth of the down comforter reassured me, blurred the thoughts till they evaporated into sleep.

It took three rings for me to realize the phone was ringing, another to find the light, and a fifth and sixth to ferret out the receiver. (It was in a mahogany box on the bottom bedside shelf.) Dropping the lid on the carpet, I pulled out the phone.

“Sorry to wake you at one
A.M.
,” the dispatcher said, “but I got the word that you were back. You okay?”

I swallowed, trying to get the sleep-congealed juices moving in my mouth. “I’m fine. All my bruises are healed, and if I still have any black and blue marks, they’re hidden under my superb tan,” I said with a lot more bravado than I felt. “What have you got for me?”

“DOA at Paradise—not the place where the corpse is heading—the restaurant,” he said. “One of
the
gourmet restaurants. Not exactly your kind of place, huh, Smith? It’s at—”

“I know where it is, Dillingham. I’ve been to dinner there.”

Dillingham whistled. “They serve gourmet donuts?”

I slipped my feet over the side of the bed. “They have three entrees per night. What I had was good, real good, but there were lots of things on my plate—odd greens and tiny vegetables—I haven’t seen before or since. It was kind of like eating on Saturn, at sixty dollars a head.” I didn’t need to add that I had been there only once, for a very special occasion. Dillingham knew me well enough to assume that.

Overcoming the urge to prolong this conversation—this interlude in which I could still consider the murder just a crime, unconnected with a real person, and his or her real friends and relatives—I said, “Do you have any particulars—name, cause of death, time?”

“Check with Doyle. He’s in his office.”

Before I could comment, the phone clicked as Dillingham tried to transfer my call, always a chancy operation. But at one-oh-nine in the morning, the chances were better. I barely had time to clear my throat before Inspector Doyle came on the line. “Smith?”

“Yes?”

“You’re up.” He meant next on the rotation. “I’ve got the doctor’s release. He says you’re fine. That right?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Sometimes those doctors don’t see everything, you know,” he said with a hesitancy I hadn’t heard in his voice before.

“Thanks for your concern, Inspector, but I’m fine.” Fine except for that ridiculous fear of descending, and I wasn’t about to admit to that.

“You sure? It was a bad crash.”

“Yes,” I snapped, “fine.”

“Okay then,” he said, all business now. “You’ve seen Mitchell Biekma, haven’t you?”

“The owner of Paradise? Everyone in the Bay Area’s seen him on the news. Half the country’s heard him on ‘Good Morning Whatever.’ I read an article about him and Paradise and the Gourmet Ghetto on the plane. His picture was on the first page. He looked amused.”

“Well, he won’t again. Body’s still in the restaurant. Grayson’s out there supervising the scene. He’s got a couple of patrols bringing some of the witnesses in. I’ll handle things here. You check out the scene.” He sounded tired, not just one
A.M.
sleepy; his was the weariness of one who had long abandoned hope of refreshing sleep. He would be up all night tonight, but he wouldn’t catch up on his sleep over the weekend; he’d just sink down a notch toward lassitude. Many cops retire before they reach Inspector Doyle’s age. There are no desk jobs in Homicide Detail; being an inspector just means carrying your share
and
supervising. Why Doyle stayed on was a question batted around the squad room. It was one that none of us were about to ask. “Smith,” he said, pausing as if to reconsider.

“Yes?”

“Mitchell Biekma got a lot of publicity in the last year. He’ll get even more now. Every newspaper’s got his picture in their morgue, all the TV news crews have film on him and his garden. They’ll jump at the chance to pull it out and rerun it. This case is going to be a bonanza for them. You hear what I’m saying? Everyone in Berkeley, no, not just Berkeley, everyone in the Bay Area is going to have his eyes on you. It’s a situation we can look very good in, Smith, or very bad. If Eggs and Jackson weren’t snowed under. … You sure you’re up to this?”

Was I? I had assumed I would ease back to work through a few days of paperwork; I hadn’t planned on starting with a murder. Maybe I wasn’t ready; maybe I did need some time.

“Smith?”

The inspector hadn’t wanted a woman in Homicide; but when I had handled a few murders he had changed his opinion. I wasn’t about to give him reason to change back. “I can handle it, Inspector! How much help can you get me?” There had been a time when beat officers did all the legwork for any case on their beat, be it shoplifting or murder. That was before the reorganization, before the staff cuts. Now homicide detectives did their own legwork, and getting a patrol officer assigned to assist was like winning the lottery. “How about Pereira and Murakawa? Or Parker?” I suggested without much hope.

“I’m ahead of you, Smith. You can have Pereira in the morning. Murakawa’s already there and Parker’s on his way.”

That, more than anything he had said, underlined the importance of this case. And his hesitations about giving it to me. “What about the particulars?”

“Not much yet. The wife called an ambulance. But Biekma was DOA. Body’s still at the restaurant. Grayson will fill you in on the rest.”

I hung up, took a shower (spigots on two walls) that was closer to a baptism, pulled out a pair of too-wrinkled, too-thin-for-this-weather brown cotton pants from a suitcase (my Berkeley clothes were still stored at Howard’s), and put on the beige turtleneck and tweed jacket I’d worn on the plane. I penciled eyeliner under my gray-green eyes, ran a comb through my hair, plucked two errant long brown hairs off my sweater, and headed out.

The fog was thick enough for the wipers. I sat, letting the Volkswagen engine warm, staring at the wet windshield, fog-streaked like the helicopter’s, and seeing Mitch Biekma as he had been pictured in the airplane magazine—tall, with that spiked strawberry-blond hair and that amused grin. My stomach churned. I swallowed hard, but that didn’t help. There was a line of sweat at my forehead.

Damn! How long was this absurd fear going to control me?

I turned on the ignition and backed the Bug out of the driveway, slamming on the brakes inches from a dark car across the street. “Two blocks to Cedar and then down,” I muttered as I shifted into first and headed more slowly toward Cedar. Cedar was steep, but empty at this time of night. It took less than five minutes to drive down from the Berkeley Hills to the flatlands and Paradise. But I was sweating through my Florida tan when I got there.

Outside of Paradise red pulser lights from the patrol cars and the ambulance turned the two-story white stucco building fiery red, and shone on the metal flowers that filled the front yard. The flowers weren’t the soft, pretty types like roses or delphiniums, but spiky tropical birds of paradise, with long stems and flowers that resembled birds frozen in the fury of flight, with orange wings poised at their apex ready to thrust downward, and blue tail feathers lifted skyward, sharp enough to sever a hand.

The bronze garden had been one of Mitchell Biekma’s early entrees in his preopening smorgasbord of publicity events. The opening of another gourmet restaurant in the Gourmet Ghetto was as newsworthy as another morning of fog. But the metal garden was something else. Biekma had commissioned the most controversial metal sculptor in the East Bay to create it. And controversy was what he got.

Before the last spiky bird of paradise had been “planted,” neighbors had complained to the city council. Several had threatened to dump trash in their own front yards “in an effort to have a unifying theme on the block.” In response, Biekma had raced to the city council chambers, pictures of garden in hand, and invited the council members, the neighbors, and every reporter in hearing range to be his guests on opening night.

Before that controversy had died down, twelve members of the North Berkeley Art Association had arrived, surveyed these ultimate perennials, and delivered twelve varying critiques. “Genius” and “junkyard” were the two most frequently heard evaluations, though the ones chosen to headline the story were “Front Yard of Paradise, or Foyer of Hell?”

By the time Paradise opened, color photos of the bronze birds of paradise had blossomed in all the Sunday supplements. Reporters had interviewed the sculptor, the neighbors, and, it seemed, anyone who had ever held a soldering iron or a garden hoe. But mostly they had interviewed Mitchell Biekma. With his tall, thin body, his long, mobile ruddy face and spikes of strawberry-blond hair, Biekma resembled one of blooms in his garden. By the time he made the television news, he had taken command of the situation. It was he, not the reporters, who had laughingly rattled off the less flattering descriptions of the garden and announced that the baby carrots and tiny cucumbers he featured in his salads had been called the embryonic vegetables. Then his mouth had twisted halfway up his cheeks, giving him the same puckish expression he had had in the airplane magazine picture. Seemingly overnight, Mitchell Biekma had become a Berkeley hero—a restaurateur who could poke fun at gourmet pretensions while serving meals the pretentious would queue up for.