A Dinner to Die For (25 page)

In the forty-five minutes that followed, I drove down three terror-filled times: the first, staring compulsively at the pavement ahead to distract myself; the second, with the car windows closed, radio blaring; the third, swearing the entire way. In those three drives the only thing that decreased was the altitude, certainly not my fear. Each failure to shake it made it worse. Maybe I needed help, a psychiatrist—hell, a lobotomy.

I stepped on the gas and drove slowly along the gently sloping streets to the Albany pool.

Lack of sleep, and a stomach full of omelet, toast, coffee, wine, all churned in fear, are not the prerequisites of good lap swimming. But I needed the exercise. More than that, I needed some mental distance from the Biekma case, and from myself.

One of the fast lanes in the center of the pool was empty. I slid in, adjusted my goggles, and pushed off, feeling the soft embrace of the cool water. The weight of breakfast hit me in the second lap. My stomach knotted. My arms felt as if they were inside a ski sweater. My legs flopped behind me, refusing to coordinate, as if they were controlled by opposing teams. I gasped for breath, taking a wide-open turn at the end of the lap, keeping my head above water to get my breath. I pulled harder, catching the water at the top of each stroke, pulling it swiftly down to my side. And when that came more easily, I focused on my kick, and then the breathing. By the time I hit the half-mile mark, everything had come together—the pull, the kick, the breathing. The water felt thick and fast beneath, supporting me as I skimmed above it. I was making flip turns, somersaulting to bring my feet to the wall and pushing off to a glide that took me nearly a quarter of the lap before surfacing.

I finished my mile, climbed out virtuously on shaky legs, and stood under the pelting hot shower, feeling the water massage my neck, letting my breath relax, only slowly allowing thoughts about the case to creep back in. There’s a focus to every case. Sometimes the focus is the killer. It’s his anger or craziness that is the key. But with the Biekma murder, the focus was Mitch himself. What had he done to precipitate his own death? He had poisoned his customers. But why? I couldn’t believe Mitch had been willing to destroy Paradise just to discredit Adrienne, as she and Yankowski suspected.

I squeezed some ChloroCleen shampoo—overoptimistically touted to remove chlorine buildup—onto my hair, and let it sit. Mitch had built Paradise from nothing. All his money, as well as Laura’s and Laura’s father’s, was tied up in it. Mitch wasn’t a financial innocent. How would he live if Paradise failed? On Laura’s salary? That would barely cover the house payment. On the royalties from his upcoming cookbook? I doubted that. One book does not a lifetime support. And without Paradise, there would be no sequel.

I scrubbed my skin with the ChloroCleen soap, which vainly promised to get the chlorine smell out of my pores, then rinsed my hair, and finally added ChloroCleen conditioner, which assured me it would make my hair soft once again. ChloroCleen also made body lotion, and skin toner for swimmers who chose to delude themselves after they got out of the shower. But Mitch had poisoned the customers. Why? Why would he go to such lengths to destroy his own income? He hadn’t been promised a TV job; that was still just a possibility. What was he going to use for income in the meantime? The answer had to be where the financial answers were—in the books at Paradise.

As I walked down the steps outside, I glanced at my watch. Still too early to call Pereira. I drove to the station, picked up the last jelly donut from the desk man’s box, got a cup of machine coffee and the newspaper. A picture of Paradise’s metal garden was on page 3. The headline read,
NO PROGRESS IN BIEKMA SLAYING.
The subhead added, “Escaped witness found.” Found! Like he’d been left in a basket on our doorstep! A glob of red jelly fell on the text. It seemed appropriate. I tossed the paper in the trash.

At ten o’clock I called Pereira.

There was no answer. I slammed down the phone. So much for consideration! I’d waited too long and she’d gone out. Unless, God forbid, she was away for the weekend.

I got another cup of coffee from the machine, came back and tried Pereira again. Still no answer. Irritably, I pulled out my notes from Thursday night’s interrogations. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t fill my time dictating. I’d have to do it soon.

But I didn’t move. Pereira had told me about the Paradise books. The only things she had found odd were the payment from Bump and Grind to Mitch, and Mitch’s double payment on the kitchen equipment. I picked up the phone book and fingered through to the B’s. But there was no listing for a Bump and Grind. I called Information. No help. What was Bump and Grind? It could be an exotic dance studio, but it could as easily be a crowded coffee house.

I dialed Pereira again. Again, no answer.

Okay, the equipment company. I flipped through my notes.

Saturday was not the best time to contact a leasing company, either. Had it been another type of company, I might have been out of luck entirely. But Reli-Quip provided a twenty-four-hour repair service. I called the number, and after one round with the dispatcher, and another with the owner, I got the bookkeeper.

I explained who I was. “I’m investigating a murder.”

“Biekma, huh? I saw the newscast. Guess you guys need all the help you can get, huh?”

“We always appreciate the public’s cooperation,” I announced in a frigid bureaucratic tone. “What you can tell me now is why he made a double payment this month?”

“That all? It’s a penalty because he was breaking the contract. He had another six months to go on it. But he decided to return the equipment—the whole kitchen will be back here the tenth of next month.”

“Was he dissatisfied?”

“How do I know? I’m just the bookkeeper. As long as they pay their bills, I assume they’re satisfied.”

I called Pereira. Still no answer. There was nothing I could do till I got her. And suddenly, I realized, I was exhausted. I left a note on Pereira’s desk on the off chance she stopped in, and headed for my car.

I swung by her apartment and put another note on her door, telling her to call me. Ten minutes later I was home and in that wonderful king-sized bed.

It was seven-thirty when she called.

“What is it that’s so important, Jill?”

“Biekma,” I said without introduction. “He canceled the lease on all his kitchen equipment. Was he negotiating with another company?”

“Hey, wait a minute. I just got home. Give me time to put my purse down?”

“I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

“Lucky for me I went out, huh?” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Okay, back to Biekma. The answer is no. He hadn’t leased new equipment. There was no contract. And I would have noticed an initial payment that size. Believe me, there wasn’t any.”

“You’re sure? He could have stuck a contract anywhere. As for the payment, isn’t there some way it could have been entered in the books that you would have glanced over? After all, you weren’t looking for that.”

“Jill,” Connie said, sighing, “I am positive. If there had been a payment to a new company in those books, I would have spotted it. But I am also a realist. I know you. So I might as well go and look through those books again now.”

It was less than an hour later when Pereira called to corroborate her conclusion—there was no payment on order for new equipment. In that hour I had had time to make some almond-tahini-butter toast and coffee, and settle back in bed with them. Expecting Pereira’s statement, I had considered the consequences of Paradise’s closing.

“Mitch couldn’t sell Paradise without Adrienne’s okay,” I said to Pereira when she called. “And Adrienne wasn’t about to give it unless she ended up with control.”

“No backer would put up that kind of money and not maintain control, Jill. It would be suicide.”

“So Mitch sends back the kitchen equipment and doesn’t order more.”

Pereira laughed. “Guess that’ll show Adrienne.”

I dragged the other pillow across the bed and bunched both behind my back.

“Well,” she said, “there’s only one reason he would return the kitchen equipment.”

“Because he was planning to close the restaurant.” I pushed myself up against the pillows.

“But why would he close? If he wanted the time for his cookbook, or his television appearances, why wouldn’t he just bow out? Paradise could get along without him. He wasn’t even allowed in the kitchen as it was.”

“Connie, how long had Adrienne barred him from the kitchen? About three months. What else had been going on nearly three months?”

“The food poisonings?”

“Right.”

“But why?” she asked. “Was he getting even with Adrienne?”

“There was more to it than that. My guess is he would never have done anything so drastic as destroy his own restaurant just for revenge. Think about Mitch Biekma. He spent years preparing to open Paradise. He was obsessed with it. Nothing came before Paradise. He fought with his neighbor, he used his friends—and his wife—he lived crammed in between his desk and file cabinets. When he planned Paradise he figured he would become known as a great chef. But it didn’t take him long to see that he would never be in the same league with Adrienne. What he was, was an amusing host. Then he realized that he liked publicity a lot more than he liked cooking. He wasn’t satisfied entertaining one small roomful of diners.

“Suddenly, Paradise became an albatross. He’d gotten what he wanted from it: fame. He was ready for the big stage. Then the danger was that people—TV people—would discover he had never been the culinary genius behind Paradise to begin with, and that the recipes in the cookbook were Adrienne’s, not his. Talk show researchers had already been to Paradise. They knew he wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. So if the word got around that the food at Paradise was improving without him, these researchers would wonder. Soon they’d question whether the recipes in the cookbook were actually his.”

“So Mitch couldn’t let Adrienne shine, right?”

“Hardly. What Mitch needed was for the kitchen to decline without him. With the poisonings he made sure it did. Adrienne realized the implications of that type of food poisoning; it wasn’t serious enough to attract suspicion of anything more than bad food preparation.”

“Still, that can’t have done Mitch any good. After all, it was his restaurant. If the kitchen wasn’t clean, he was responsible.”

“But he could have said he did everything possible. He fired everyone but Adrienne, and kept her only because of their contract. He could have come up looking like a martyr, betrayed by his cook, who didn’t keep the kitchen toxin-free.”

“If anyone could have pulled that off, it would have been Mitch Biekma,” Pereira said.

“All he needed was a little time, a little more exposure, to be considered seriously as host of ‘San Francisco Mid Day.’ So he decided to make Paradise fade away. And, in doing so, Mitch not only planned to protect his budding TV career, but to pay back Adrienne for banning him from his own kitchen. And by getting her he’d get her boyfriend, Yankowski, who had made a fool of him with Earth Man. How’s that for a scheme?”

“Sounds like the Mitch Biekma we’ve all come to recognize. No one on the staff mentioned the closing, though, did they?”

“No. No one mentioned Mitch telling them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t find out.”

“How, how would they have found out?”

I lowered my feet to the floor. “There had to be hints. Mitch did the books himself. Adrienne never saw them. Even Laura didn’t. So he was covered there. But maybe he didn’t order some kind of food he normally would for next month, or something like that. Some small omission that would alert a person who was already wary because of the poisonings. Something that happened recently.”

“The boxes!” we said in unison.

“It was on the news, in the papers,” Pereira said, “those crates of weights, and benches, and Nautilus machine parts.”

“The health club equipment that was delivered to Paradise ‘by mistake’ Wednesday,” I said.

“I saw Biekma on the news, Jill. He was laughing, saying it was a great faux pas.”

“That must have been one of his better performances.”

“It was. No one would have guessed he was hiding anything. The guy was a real pro.”

“So,” I said, standing up, “Paradise will become a health club.”

“The Bump and Grind. That explains that payment. It also explains what Mitch planned to live on. Mitch and Laura own the building. Bump and Grind was making a rent deposit.”

“And their equipment just arrived a bit early.”

“And you think that was enough to tip off the killer?”

“Oh yeah. Everyone in the kitchen has been in a turmoil over the food poisonings, thinking they were destroying business and reputations. Then this health club equipment arrived. What happens with a dead business? It gets replaced.”

“By a health club that will close by ten and not bother Rue Driscoll.”

“And Paradise’s demise will leave a slot for Ashoka Prem’s restaurant to fill.”

“Guess Adrienne and Yankowski don’t think Laura Biekma’s such a nice lady after all.”

I sat back on the bed and wriggled a foot into a running shoe. “You know, Connie, at first this seemed like your classic laid-back murder. Like it could have happened any time; the murderer just put the poison in the jar one night and waited. But in fact the plan could only have worked when it did, at a few minutes after twelve the day after those health club boxes were delivered.”

I could hear Pereira’s impatient breath against her receiver; she was waiting for me to go on.

“The killer needed a day to get some aconite. But to wait more than a day to use it would have been to chance Mitch feeling too well to bother with horseradish. His cold was almost gone.”

“And it was in the few minutes after twelve that Mitch added the poison to his soup?”

“And when Earth Man came to the door. His presence was the catalyst that made the scheme work.”

H
AD
I
NSPECTOR
D
OYLE BEEN
home, I would have gone over my conclusions with him. Now I would tell him after the killer was in custody. I called Howard and outlined my reasoning. The rest I could tell him when he got to our office.