A Dinner to Die For (6 page)

The study corresponded to the rear portion of Paradise where the booths were, but was ten feet wider because the kitchen didn’t impinge on it. A wall of windows overlooked her backyard, and Mitch’s. Beneath those windows, running the considerable width of the room, was a built-in desk. The wall opposite was hidden behind floor-to-ceiling shelves, with books lined up in tight rows, books stacked in front of those volumes, two or three piles to a shelf. From the look of it, there were books in the back that hadn’t been seen in years. The desk, too, was strewn with books, as well as, piles of papers, and notes file cards in four colors.

She motioned me to a captain’s chair. I moved a stack of papers to the floor and sat, watching her push two buttons on the side of an electric radiator. “The damp and cold aggravate my sciatica, otherwise I’d never have heat at this time of year,” she said almost apologetically. “There were years I didn’t turn the furnace on at all.”

I smiled. Whereas Minnesotans or Upstate New Yorkers boast about the blizzards they have survived, some Northern Californians demonstrate their heartiness indoors. Clutching cups of hot tea, they sit in their fifty-degree living rooms, wrapped in silk turtlenecks, Aran sweaters, chamois shirts, and two pairs of socks, as they boast not only that their heat is off, but that the pilot light hasn’t been lit yet this year.

“Now tell me about Mitchell,” Rue Driscoll said in a tone that reminded me she had taught at the university for years.

“He died tonight.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t see anything. And I’ve been here in the study since noon. I even ate my dinner in here.”

From her study Rue Driscoll had a view of the Paradise backyard and of Grove Path leading to the restaurant’s back door.

“Think. Have you seen anything odd here recently?”

“Nothing more than usual. Not unless you mean something like yesterday, when that van pulled up and they tried to deliver health club equipment to Paradise. But there were reporters here before they could get a box out of the truck. Mitch was on the evening news. He was making a show of laughing about it, but I could tell he was furious that anyone would mistake his restaurant for a health club.”

I made a note of that. “Was there anything else? Any person who shouldn’t have been here, or who was acting odd or suspicious or inappropriate?”

“Inappropriate! Half their customers act inappropriate. They don’t have to leave till midnight now, and they don’t. I don’t know what time they come, whether they just like to eat late, or they sit around after dinner drinking. Restaurants don’t hurry them out; that’s where they make their money—on the liquor and desserts. I told the city that, for all the good it did.” She shrugged. “These backyards are only ten feet deep. The noise carries. But that’s not the worst of it. When those people do leave they’re laughing and calling to each other. Sometimes they screech out a song. And where do you think they’re doing that? On Grove Path, right under my window. The regulation says they have to be out of the restaurant by midnight, but there’s no law to keep them from standing there for half an hour. I’ll tell you, just like I told the city, many a time when I’m working, like tonight, I keep my shades pulled and my ears plugged. It’s when I’m in bed—that’s the real problem. They don’t care that they wake me up. I’ve put on my light and hollered out to them, and I’ve asked them nicely to quiet down, and to knock it off. Makes no difference. They’ve spent a fortune for dinner, and had a couple of bottles of wine; they figure they’ve paid for a big night and they don’t care who they bother doing it.” Her face was flushed, the gullies in her skin pulled taut, so that the folds of skin between them hung looser in contrast. Her breath came in quick pants.

“But the board of adjustments did decide against you.”

“Influence, pure and simple. Wining and dining. Mitchell knew the mayor; he had contributed to his campaign. Mitchell wasn’t about to lose.”

“Because he needed the extra revenue?”

She shook her head. “It was more than that. Mitchell hated to be beaten. He was like a child, a brat. He’d go into a rage and turn purple. I saw him do that when another student made a fool of him. It only happened once, thank goodness, and that was before the rest of the students arrived for class. There were only two more classes that semester, and he and Laura skipped them both. Laura told me later that if he had seen the young man again, he would have had the same extreme reaction. But by the beginning of the next semester it had all been forgotten, which was certainly good. I couldn’t have that kind of behavior in my seminars.”

“Mitch was your student?”

“Two semesters. I should have remembered Mitchell’s childishness when I went to the hearings. I shouldn’t have expected fairness. I should have been prepared for Mitch using every bit of influence he could. He knew how to work the media. He had friends with money. It’s the same old story.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t expect it to happen in Berkeley.”

“And it made you angry,” I said.

“Not foolhardy enough to kill him, if that’s what you’re leading up to.”

It was. “Without Mitchell Biekma, there’d be no influence.”

Wagging her finger at me, she said, “If I’d killed him, I would have done it before the hearings, not after. It won’t do me any good now.”

Outside I could see Parker’s light moving back and forth against the fence in the neighboring yard. I glanced around the room, trying to get the feel of it, to understand this woman who had swallowed her surprising defeat here. On the desk, she had cleared spaces every three or four feet, but the books and papers had impinged on most of them. It was the desk of an obsessive; it was not the desk of a woman who would give up a righteous cause when one board turned her down. “Why didn’t you appeal?”

She leaned back against the chair. She half closed her eyes momentarily, as I’d seen teachers do when choosing a strategy. “I was too sick,” she said. “Laura and Mitch invited me for dinner over there. To make up, they said. I was poisoned.”

“Y
OU WERE POISONED AT
Paradise!” I exclaimed to the still extant Rue Driscoll. “How?”

“Food poisoning. I don’t think they intended to kill me. But I was nauseous for thirty-six hours. I couldn’t leave the house. I regurgitated six times, and I haven’t done that in fifty years.”

I tried to recall a newspaper evaluation of Rue Driscoll’s mental state. Had her obsession with Mitchell Biekma led to delusions? Or could this bizarre accusation have some basis? “And that was after the board decision? Were you planning to appeal?”

She shrugged. “I hadn’t considered it yet. I was astounded by the decision. The probabilities had been so clearly in my favor. … Foolish as it sounds, I hadn’t given thought to proceeding if the board’s decision came down against me. In any case, it was only three days after the last hearing that Laura invited me to dinner.”

I nodded, trying to conceal my surprise.

I mustn’t have been entirely successful, for Rue Driscoll said, “My reaction was the same as yours. I should have honored it. But you can’t suspect Laura of anything evil, she’s just too fine a person. She was my best student, so quick, so interested, willing to do the research to back up her theories. Laura insisted the invitation was for a reconciliation dinner. She said all the things nice people say in those circumstances, that we’d been friends too long for this to come between us permanently, that they would do whatever they could to minimize the noise, that they never intended to disturb me, that they appreciated me finding them the house the restaurant’s in, and—”

“You found them this house? You’d better backtrack to the beginning. Did you first meet the Biekmas in one of your classes?”

“They were in my last seminars on Virginia.”

“The state?”

She stared at me in amazement. Then waving a hand at the desk and the bookshelves, she said, “Virginia Woolf, young lady. I taught all the Woolf courses. Apparently, you did not matriculate from the University of California at Berkeley.”

I hadn’t. My undergraduate days had been in Virginia, the state. I could have told her that my ex-husband had been a graduate student in the English department at Cal, but I didn’t. “When, exactly, was this seminar?”

“Six years ago.”

“Who was in it?”

“Mitchell, Laura, Ashoka Prem, Marilyn Winters, Dana Arndt, Don Ellis, Jivan Mehra, a young man from Bombay, and Noriko Yamamoto from Kobe.”

“Isn’t that a rather small number for a seminar?”

“It was the second semester.”

“How does the seminar connect with your finding them the house for Paradise?”

She hesitated, and for a moment I thought she was going to say they asked her to keep an eye out. Shifting in her chair, she said, “The seminar met here. Mitch and Laura told me they were looking for a place to live and work. They didn’t mention a restaurant or I would never have dreamed of putting them next to me. I have my work to consider. I need uninterrupted quiet. But Mitch and Laura should have been perfect neighbors. Mitch was a full-time student. Laura was taking two classes to finish up. She had taken a job handling customer complaints at the water company until Mitch found work.”

“Then what were their plans?”

Rue sighed deeply, the sigh of one who has considered a situation too many times and been stymied every one of them. But the effect of that sigh was more mental than physical. Her back remained erect, her shoulders didn’t slump any more than they already had (which was considerable); only her face seemed to slacken, and that in dismay rather than relaxation. “When Mitch got his degree it was to be Laura’s turn. She would go to chiropractic school. That was years ago, you understand, before every corner in town boasted two chiropractors. I have friends with back problems—not serious like mine, of course—who have never paid to see a chiropractor. They just check the ads and go for the free visit the new ones offer. They’ve done it for years.”

“So Laura Biekma planned to become a chiropractor,” I said, herding her back to the topic. “And that affected your finding them the house.”

“They wanted a place where they could live upstairs and use the ground floor for her office. It needed to be on a main street, in a good neighborhood, and not be too expensive. At the time, the house fitted all three criteria.”

“Did they spot it on their way to your class?”

“Yes. And they knew right away it was what they wanted.”

I nodded, silently noting that Rue Driscoll had taken great credit for this boon of circumstance.

As if reading my mind, she raised a forefinger. “They wouldn’t have gotten it without me. The old man who was selling it had lived there twenty-three years. We were good friends. He had other offers, but I convinced him to sell to Mitch and Laura, even though it meant carrying a bigger loan. He wouldn’t have done it for anyone but me.”

“Surely Mitch and Laura”—I was beginning to think of the Biekmas as Mitch and Laura—“realized that.”

“Of course. Then, they had no plans to disrupt my work. Then, I didn’t have the same kind of work to disrupt. And for years they didn’t make a sound. Mitch and Laura bought the house, and rented the upstairs where they live now.”

I was tempted to bring the interrogation back to the question of why she thought she had been poisoned, but I decided to let her follow this train a bit longer. I would have to know about the Biekma’s background anyway. “What happened after your seminar ended?”

“They all graduated. Noriko went to graduate school at Columbia. She was a bright girl. She wrote an incisive paper on anti-Semitism and its effects on Virginia’s work. Dana left for some monastery outside Katmandu. I think she was planning to hike up there from Calcutta. Jivan went back to Bombay. He was applying to graduate school, but I don’t believe he was accepted, at least not then. His family had money; he could wait a year. And he wasn’t a dedicated student. Sometimes I thought he just came for the food.”

“The food?” Maybe I was letting this go too far afield.

“They brought food. You see, we’d been together the whole year. And during the first semester the eight of them had discovered their common interest in cooking. Jivan’s father owned a restaurant in Bombay, quite a famous one, I believe. Noriko was intrigued by Occidental food, and at the time, I thought the others just liked to eat. Whatever their initial interest, they got into the habit of bringing desserts, or hors d’oeuvres, or snacks—not pretzels, but elaborate cooked things like individual pizzas with salmon and sun-dried tomatoes. Exquisite things. I’ll tell you, if the topic had been anything less fascinating than Virginia, the focus of the class would have altered.”

“So they were already interested in cooking.”

She jerked forward. “Don’t you tell me I should have known, young lady. I’ve already heard that from Mitchell. Smug as could be, he was. Laura understood the importance of my work. She was very accommodating. She insisted they’d do everything possible when they opened the restaurant so I wouldn’t be disturbed, that I would be welcome to have free meals there anytime. But Mitch, he just said I should have known.” Bracing on the arms of her chair, she lifted up an inch, leaned forward, and lowered herself down, presumably settling on a more acceptable part of her anatomy. “I pointed out the fallacy in that argument. How could I have known? They didn’t know then. Even when Mitch went off to France, to cooking classes, they didn’t tell me they planned to open their own restaurant. I thought Mitch was just going to visit Jivan and Ashoka. I didn’t realize till he’d been there for six months that he was enrolled in classes too. And even when he got back, it was three years before he opened here. How could I have known?” she insisted in a voice that made me sure she secretly suspected Mitch was right—she should have known.

“So Paradise opened,” I prompted.

She shook her head. Gray hairs that the clasp had bitten through spun like kite tails. “And since that point I haven’t gotten a decent day’s work done.”

“Mitch’s is only open for dinner. Couldn’t you work during the day?”