A Dinner to Die For (3 page)

For Mitchell Biekma, and for Paradise, the garden had served its purpose. For us at the Berkeley Police it was an attractive nuisance. Drivers screeched to a halt in both lanes of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, causing a flurry of minor accidents and one rear-ender serious enough to put a woman in traction.

But now a patrol officer guided traffic around the four patrol cars, one unmarked car, and the ID tech’s van double-parked in front of the building. Through the open car windows the staccato crackle of the radios poked into the night. Two patrol officers held the crowd back. On both sides of the yard the red pulser lights flashed on groups of onlookers with down jackets wrapped over jeans or night-clothes, turning their drawn faces crimson as they stood shivering in the thick fog. Startled at each attack of light, some had the wary but transfixed look of those who might, indeed, be in the front yard of hell. Others hung back, dividing their attention between a TV reporter describing the scene on camera and the restaurant door through which Mitchell Biekma’s body would be carried. They vacillated, unwilling to miss the drama, and equally unwilling to be spotted gawking at it when they turned on the morning news.

Hurrying past before the reporter spotted me, I headed up the path to Paradise. A bitter spice aroma floated out through the open door.

The front door—a Plasticine box surrounding a free-form grate meshed with coils of orange and blue lights—was open. For a moment it looked like any restaurant after closing time.

I nodded at Sergeant Grayson, the crime scene supervisor. He was a short, barrel-chested man with thick black hair, thick black eyebrows, and a thick mustache that hung down far enough to hide any curl of his lip. He pointed to the other side of the partition that separated the foyer from the front section of the dining room. The sickening stench of vomit and feces struck me. Taking a long last breath of night air, I remembered Mitch Biekma as I had seen him on TV, laughing with reporters, urging them with unbridled glee to taste his special lemon cucumbers or his red and gold nasturtium salad. More than one reporter had been caught up in that enthusiasm. Mitchell Biekma had been an appealing man; he had made Paradise a place you wanted to like.

I swallowed hard, and walked around the partition to Biekma’s body. There was no remnant of Biekma’s fervor now. His eyes were wide with horror. Vomit, thick with unchewed onions and baby carrots, clung to his cheeks and chin. It had sprayed over his shirt and hands, and down the front of his blue corduroy pants.

Then the stench of bile, garlic, and horseradish really hit me. My stomach lurched. Swallowing harder, I turned back to the open front door and took a long, deep breath. It was a moment before I looked back at Biekma’s body. The spiky strawberry-blond hair that had been part of his Tom Sawyerish appeal now hung limp and matted. His ruddy complexion had paled in death; in contrast, his hair appeared garish red. His hands were clenched but they held nothing. The only things I had missed on my first look were the dark stain right above his belt, and the sturdy gold chain that peeked from inside his neckline. I bent down and pulled it free. On the end was a key, a very ordinary brass key that could have been to a very ordinary door. I glanced up questioningly at Grayson.

“To the wine cellar.” He pointed to the door beside the desk. “That’s the only key. No one but Biekma got near the wine.”

“I’ll need it. Have the tech look at Biekma’s neck first. Any idea why there’s only one key?”

He shrugged. “Some restaurants have a problem with the staff drinking up the profits.”

“They’d have to choose the best, and drink fast to make a dent in Biekma’s profits.”

“Guess Biekma wasn’t taking any chances. One of the waiters said Biekma kept it round his neck in the shower. Probably slept with it on.”

“He sounds overly suspicious to me,” I said, looking back down at Biekma’s vomit-stained body, “but then you could argue he had good reason to be. What did the medics try with him?”

“No point in doing anything. He was good and dead when they got here. Biekma ate half a bowl of soup. After that, he didn’t have time to do much more than upchuck and die.”

B
IEKMA’S BUILDING HAD ORIGINALLY
been a typical Berkeley house. To transform the ground floor for Paradise, Biekma had turned the living room, dining room, and den into one large L-shaped dining room that ran from front to back, with a door to the kitchen midway on the north side near the foot of the L. Across from the front door a heavily carpeted stairway led to another Plasticine door. Patrons, undeterred by hour-long waits, would seat themselves on these steps, glasses of white zinfandel in hand, as they congratulated themselves on snagging a reservation. The railing was a Plasticine coil filled with the type of tiny white lights usually associated with tabletop Christmas trees. At the lower end it angled down to form the front of the desk where reservations were acknowledged and credit cards processed.

Next to the desk was the door to the wine cellar. Grayson had unlocked it and turned on the light. I walked down the short flight of stairs to a room that could more accurately have been described as a closet. Basements are rare in the Bay Area, and it was clear that this room had not been part of the original house. One wall was covered with a wine rack, the other with a unit that resembled a refrigerator. I pulled open the door and glanced inside at ten rows of wine. About a third of the slots were empty. Closing the door, I surveyed the open rack. It was slightly fuller. On the wall beside it hung a clipboard. Beneath the clipboard was a wooden box containing a soldering iron, a couple of roots and bulbs, and garden implements—all apparently for Mitch’s gardens, metal and natural. Everything in the room would have to be catalogued, then we’d lock it up. There had to be well over a thousand dollars in wine here. I didn’t want any questions later.

I climbed back up to the dining room. The dishes had been cleared and the linen stripped, baring scraped and stained pine tables that would have looked more at home in the Salvation Army dining hall. A two-foot-high Mexican vase stood by the kitchen wall; the drooping shasta daisies and pampas grass, and the almost plastic-looking birds of paradise mixed in with them, were half again that high. The arrangement must have been striking when Paradise opened at six
P.M.,
but now, after long, hot hours in the glare of too-bright lights, it looked like a spray of flowers left on a grave overnight.

Grayson stood next to Biekma’s body, his jaws pressed hard together behind the shield of his mustache, his arms crossed over his thick chest.

“Any leads?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Witnesses?”

“Yes and no.” There was an edge to Grayson’s voice. His mustache twitched. Grayson had been one of the candidates for the Homicide slot that I got. According to rumor, he had claimed sexual bias. But he hadn’t said that to me. In fact, in the four years I’d been with the department, I doubted we had exchanged two sentences. But his resentment now screamed through his stance. “You just got back from sick leave, right, Smith?”

“Yesterday.”

“You up to handling a murder?”

“As up as anyone ever is.” My stomach still churned; my legs felt shaky. I locked my knees and leveled my gaze at him. “What does ‘yes and no’ mean?”

His black mustache twitched, then subsided, signaling a swallowed retort. When he did speak his voice was controlled. “The kitchen was full when Biekma got the soup. The cook, the under chef, the wife—she was acting as salad chef—the dishwasher: they were all busy cleaning up. They all heard Biekma come in, they all saw him scoop out a bowl of soup from the pot, go back to the pantry, and take out a jar of horseradish. He was turning away from it, horseradish jar in one hand, soup dish in the other—this according to the dishwasher—when there’s this crazy knocking on the back door. Matthew Timothy Dana by name, one of Berkeley’s resident crazies. Seems Biekma’s wife was in the habit of feeding Dana, but Biekma was no bleeding heart. When Dana opens the door, Biekma starts carrying on about Paradise not being St. Anthony’s dining hall, not being in business to feed every ne’er-do-well in town, and so on.”

“Biekma was standing there, clutching his soup and his horseradish, and telling Dana he couldn’t feed him? Definitely, no bleeding heart.”

“According to the dishwasher, Biekma screamed at the crazy. He worked himself up till he turned purple. The wife tried to calm him down, pointed out it was twelve-thirty in the morning, they had enough food for the staff and him too, that Dana was poor and hungry. Then she said the magic words, which were: ‘We have to feed him. How would this look if word got in the paper?’ ”

“So Biekma had his soup right next to Matthew Dana. Biekma’s back was to the kitchen, right?” I didn’t wait for Grayson’s nod. “Biekma’s body had to block the view for some of the witnesses. How much would it have taken for Dana to slip some arsenic or whatever into the soup? If he was as crazy as you say, Biekma’s tantrum could have set him off.”

Grayson glanced toward the kitchen, then let a beat pass before he said, in a “gotcha” tone, “Dana was wearing a cloak.” He let another beat pass. “No zipper. No buttons. The kind that slips over the head. And the handholes were sewn closed.”

“Sewn closed! How was he planning to eat, lick the food off the plate?” I shook my head. “Only in Berkeley!”

Grayson shrugged, tacitly saying that was my problem.

Ignoring that in the face of the greater problem, I said, “So we’ve got a kitchen full of people who see Biekma scoop his soup out of the pot. And we’ve got one person who’s close enough to poison that bowl of soup, and his hands are imprisoned behind his cloak.”

“Uh-huh.” Grayson’s smile was one of triumph.

Trying not to get caught up in Grayson’s competitiveness, I said, “Then what?”

“Like I said, Biekma worked himself into a state. Cooks said his face was red, he looked like he was going to burst. So worked up he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get his words out. Meanwhile, the wife’s trying to calm him down.”

“Where was she?”

“At the warm table by the dining room door, fifteen feet away.”

“Go on.”

“So Biekma sort of chokes on his words. Then he gives up, pours the whole container of horseradish in his soup and stomps out.”

“Pours? You don’t
pour
horseradish, you spoon it out of the bottle.”

Grayson shrugged. “That’s how it works for you and me, Smith, when we get our horseradish at Safeway. But say Safeway to these people and they start screaming libel. They don’t buy things like horseradish and catsup, they buy ingredients, and even those they don’t get from groceries. The cook was carrying on about their own special farmer who raises their chickens, and the one who grows the lettuce—not the same farmer, either. God forbid their meat man should try his hand at vegetables. When I asked her about their horseradish, she got all indignant and said they don’t
keep
condiments
around
—like I was saying their shelves were covered with mold.”

“But they did have the horseradish around.”

“Not
they, Biekma.
It was Biekma’s private reserve,” Grayson said with a twitch of the mustache. “Seems he made it specially, which is no special thing here, and reserved it for himself alone. He even sterilized the jar each time before he put the horseradish in.”

“That sounds pretty special.”

“They all said he used it to clear his sinuses when he had a cold. According to the dishwasher, he was just getting over a cold.”

“So
he
kept it around.”

“Only since last night. Made it fresh every two days.”

I nodded. “And his special horseradish is thin enough to pour.”

“Right. From the look of the cook, using thick horseradish is like …” He threw up his hands.

“Like spreading cheese food product on your crackers?”

“Yeah.” He started to smile, but caught himself.

A crime scene supervisor who has it in for you can mean waiting days for reports, or spending hours chasing him down to confront him. I wanted Grayson on my side. I smiled and said, “So Biekma poured the horseradish on his soup. Did he get anything else to eat?”

“No.”

“Just the soup? Not much of a meal after a long night.”

“It was an hors d’oeuvre, Smith. Guy had a habit of getting something to nibble on while he went over the receipts. Then, when the rest of them were done cleaning up, he got a couple bottles of wine and they all had dinner together.” Before I could comment, he added, “He was a big guy, Smith, and wiry, the type that burns a lot of fuel.”

“Okay. So then he stomped out of the kitchen?”

“The wife gave the crazy some soup. The crazy took his plate out to the backyard. Dana smells like he’s been scooped out of the bay. I guess even Biekma’s wife, the peacemaker, didn’t want him inside.” Grayson’s mustache twitched as he almost smiled. “So you don’t have to ask, Smith, I’ll tell you how Dana got the food outside. He was holding his bowl, palms up, through his cloak.”

Interviewing Dana sounded like the death knell for a stomach like mine, but I wasn’t about to let on in front of Grayson. “So he went out to the yard. Alone, I assume?”

“Unless there were raccoons out there.”

“What about Biekma?”

“He picked up his soup bowl, took it to the reservations desk, ate enough to feel sick, and ran a few steps and died. So, Smith, in a nutshell what you’ve got is that they were all there in the kitchen, they all saw Biekma get his food, and no one saw how he could have been poisoned.”

“What about the cooks? How close were they?” I asked without much hope.

“Never near enough. Nor the dishwasher. The only ones near the bowl were Biekma and Dana—”

“And Dana’s hands were sewn inside his cape.”

“Right.”

“What about the soup? What was in it?”

“Leeks, baby carrots, greens, eggplant, onions, and dill.”

I sighed. “Is that all?”

“Looks like it. His bowl’s still half-full. ID tech’s got it—exhibit one.”

“No wine?”

“No glass.”