A Dinner to Die For (7 page)

“They serve dinner after six o’clock. They get deliveries all day long. The trucks park on Josephine and drivers wheel their carts down the alley, cloppety-clop. Sometimes they come two at a time, and they yell to each other. Or they yell to Adrienne, the cook, to open the door. Some of them even yell to me when they pass. Think they’re being friendly,” she muttered in exasperation. “The garbagemen come every day, at the crack of dawn. There’s no way they can be quiet. And that’s not even counting the customers themselves.”

“I can understand—”

“
Understand
nothing! Tell that to scholars fifty years from now. Which will be more important, their half-drunken cavorting, or Virginia Woolf’s Berkeley letters?”

“This Berkeley?” I asked in amazement. I was hardly a scholar; indeed, for two years after my divorce from an aspiring English professor, I hadn’t read anything more intellectual than the L. L. Bean catalogue. But there had been a time before that when I’d read Virginia Woolf, and a time since when I’d picked up the Quentin Bell biography. And even from that bit, I knew Woolf had never set foot in the United States. “Who was she corresponding with here?”

“A woman named Florence Crocker. Now before you say anything, I’ll tell you that I know these letters may be apocryphal, indeed
probably
are apocryphal. Nothing in her published letters or diaries mentions Florence Crocker. Nothing suggests she had an acquaintance here, or any interest in acquiring one.”

“Then how—”

“According to Florence Crocker’s grandson, she met Woolf when she was in London in nineteen thirty-nine, just before the war broke out. They corresponded for the next two years, until Virginia’s suicide—that is, according to the grandson,” she added. “I know it’s a long shot. It’s one chance in a hundred, or a thousand, or more. But suppose the letters are not a fraud. Can you imagine what a boon they would be, particularly since they cover that period when she was working on
Pointz Hall?
It’s too important to let go without proper investigation.”

I knew enough about the competitive world of professors to realize that even after retirement, the possibility of making a mark in their field would be more than many could resist.

“It’s very painstaking, precise work, not work you can do half-asleep,” she said. “It was bad enough when the customers left at ten. You know, young lady, it’s not good for the body to be fed that late. The blood shouldn’t still be in the stomach with the digestive juices when you lie down to sleep. Very unhealthy.”

Choosing to ignore that—“unhealthy” eating habits were not a topic I wanted to consider—I said, “What I don’t understand, Ms. Driscoll, is this. You got food poisoning in Paradise. Did you go to a doctor?”

“Yes, he confirmed it was food poisoning.”

“So you had proof?”

“Oh, yes. I am a scholar, young lady. I don’t make statements without data to support them.”

“So, you could have taken action against the Biekmas. As the owners of Paradise they’d be liable. It would have given you a position from which to negotiate, to get some concessions, maybe even an earlier closing. Why didn’t you do it?”

“I probably should have. But Laura came over. She was so apologetic. She really felt terrible. She’s such a sweet girl. They’re all in love with her over there, you know. And she had put so much into the restaurant. It was just beginning to make a profit. She was just starting to work in the kitchen—training, she said. She realized she had a talent for cooking too. She decided to focus on that. It was too late to be a chiropractor, she said, but she could be a cook, a fine cook. I understood that. It was to her, what Virginia’s letters were to me. I couldn’t ruin Laura. So I let it drop.”

I sat, letting the silence lengthen. Despite the electric heater aimed at Rue’s back, the room was cold. It was definitely a heat-for-one setup. I recalled the single-mindedness with which my ex-husband had pursued his Yeats studies. What would it have taken for him to let them go? More than his attachment to me. Certainly more than one to a friendly neighbor. “I don’t buy that, Ms. Driscoll. You wouldn’t sacrifice your work that easily.”

She glanced around at the papers strewn on the long desk, as if pondering a scholarly spring-cleaning. “You’re free to draw your own conclusions.”

“Of course,” I said firmly. “But that’s not the end of it. Failing to cooperate in a murder investigation is a serious offense.”

She jerked forward. “Are you threatening me, young lady?”

“I’m telling you that I
will
get to the truth. If you don’t cooperate, it will take me longer. I will have to come back here again and again”—I paused—“or have you come to the station.”

The small lines around her eyes tightened till they seemed ready to squash the eyeballs back into their sockets. “All right,” she said. “It wasn’t entirely for Laura, though I was quite honest with you in saying I am fond of her. We spent many pleasant afternoons discussing Virginia and her work. It was Laura whom I first told about the Berkeley letters. She was almost as thrilled as I.”

“But that wasn’t the reason,” I prodded.

“No. Look, the letters aren’t scholarly; they’re chatty reminiscences and observations. But the work of authenticating them is exhausting. It could take me years, years I may not have. I haven’t the resources to hire the caliber of assistants I need. The great Woolf mania has faded. If they’re authentic, the letters would be published by a scholarly house; anything connected with Virginia would be. But they would be presented as a small addendum to the great works of scholarship. The more commercial publishers who put out the popular works wouldn’t find these letters worth their investment. And even if they were published, they wouldn’t get the publicity they deserved. Not unless …”

I began to see. “Unless the author creates some interest in them herself.”

She nodded, her lips pressed tensely. Even the stray hairs seemed to move reluctantly.

“And nothing increases interest like publicity. Did Mitch offer you his TV connections or his publishing ones?”

The doorbell rang. I held Rue with my gaze. “Which?” I demanded.

“Both,” she said, pushing herself up, clearly relieved to escape this distasteful topic.

I followed her to the door. She pulled it open to reveal Lopez.

“It’s the sergeant,” he said. “He says he’s had Earth Man in the dining room as long as he’s going to. He says it’s too cold with the windows open, but it stinks too much with them closed. And if you plan to talk to Earth Man here, you’d better … well ...”

“Haul ass?”

Lopez grinned. “Close enough.”

I glanced back at Rue Driscoll. I wasn’t satisfied with her explanation, but like the Woolf mania, the moment to press her had passed.

I
STOOD FOR A
moment on Grove Path, letting Rue Driscoll’s house protect me from the fog blowing in off the bay. In the distance I could hear the foghorns, sighing with an intensity similar to Rue Driscoll’s. I could hear Parker much closer in the tiny Driscoll backyard, shuffling through ivy, grumbling as he moved his flashlight inch by inch. The staccato burst from the patrol-car radios came from Martin Luther King Jr. Way. I glanced back at Rue Driscoll’s study. The light was still on; she wasn’t going back to bed, at least for the moment. I had given her too much to think about.

Had she gotten food poisoning at Paradise? Apparently, something in that meal had disagreed with her. Apparently, Mitch Biekma had taken her seriously enough to try to placate her. But there were plenty of reasons he might have done that. Laura, the wife whom “everyone loved,” might have convinced him to be generous. He might just have wanted to avoid any more negative publicity. The original battle with Rue Driscoll had been long and tough, and a lot of Berkeleyans had sided with her. The mantle of Berkeley Hero he had come to enjoy had been pulled lower with each skirmish. By the end of the hearings, Mitch Biekma was in serious danger of being viewed as just another businessman. Well, I thought, that was one danger death had spared him. No one would ever recall him now without thinking that the bird of paradise in his front yard had been his road to the ultimate paradise.

Stopping halfway on the stoop, Lopez pulled open the kitchen door.

The pungent aroma of unfamiliar spices greeted me. My tongue mimicked the taste; at three
A.M.,
it had been a long time since the lunch on the plane. At the rate things were going, it would be a long time till breakfast. I climbed the two steps to the stoop and walked into the kitchen.

If I had had any questions about my contest with Grayson, they vanished. By leaving him with Earth Man, I had won. Even in the kitchen I was overwhelmed. The aroma of spices was a thing of the past. All I could smell now was the unmistakable cologne of street living—months of dirt, embedded in months of sweat, smeared with spoiled and rotten food.

As I walked into the dining room, Grayson’s fringed lip quivered with anger. Then as he glanced toward the restaurant foyer, the corners of his mouth moved sharply up into a smile. “He’s by the door, Smith. And he’s all yours.”

Had I, by some miracle of nasal blockage, overlooked Earth Man, one glance at him would have corrected that. His floor-length cape was covered with plastic noses. From his well-soiled green cloak protruded trunks, muzzles, proboscises, and snouts in an array of colors. Toucan beaks decorated his shoulders like epaulets. But the most eye-catching was the trunk that protruded suggestively from the general area of his navel.

Earth Man was clearly in his nose period. More than six feet tall, he couldn’t have weighed over a hundred and thirty pounds, and a couple of those pounds were accounted for by his thick blond hair. From the look of it, he had hacked it himself. It stood out in clumps two to three inches from his gaunt face, forming an aureole around his boney arched nose. And that, the pièce de résistance of this ensemble, was painted white and accented in glitter. Between the beaks and bills he had pinned a sign—
BREATHE FREE, BREATHE DEEP
. It was the last thing I wanted to do.

Earth Man had been a fixture of the Telegraph Avenue scene since the sixties. He had discovered LSD early on. Later, he had diversified. He had passed some years in a state hospital before the Reagan Administration closed most of them and sent the inmates home to depend on community mental health facilities that had never been adequately funded. Many of his companions from that era had died. Those who were nominally still alive spent their days leaning against walls, watching day fade to night and night lift to day, or stumbling along the Avenue past the tables and blankets where street artists sold their hand-tooled leather belts and cloisonné earrings. As the end of the month approached and their Social Security checks ran out, they begged for spare change along the Avenue with the same hopeful stance they’d adopted nearly twenty years ago. But times had changed. The days when it was de rigueur to contribute to the Free Clinic and the free clothes box had passed. Twenty years ago, the undergraduates who now traversed the Avenue hadn’t been born.

Berkeley wasn’t New York. No one froze to death overnight here. But even the most inviting doorway couldn’t keep the penetrating Pacific fog from seeping beneath the skin hour after hour. But Earth Man was more together than some; he wasn’t dependent on a weekend in the jail or a fortnight in the county hospital, “the poor man’s spa,” for a break from the street. As long as I had known him, from my days on the Avenue beat, he had had a room in one of the transient hotels, and no matter how spaced out he got, somehow his rent was always paid.

“You want some coffee?” I asked.

He hesitated.

I wasn’t sure where coffee fitted into his present campaign. When I had been a beat officer on Telegraph Avenue, I’d seen Earth Man daily. I’d watched as, dressed in a series of appropriate costumes, he’d harangued whoever would listen to protect the trees, save the seals and whales, clean the air. He was more of a town landmark than Paradise, as much a folk hero as Mitch Biekma. He was in his own bizarre but unquestionably sincere way, symbolic of one Berkeleyan article of faith—total commitment to saving the environment. And those who gave less to Friends of the Sea Otter, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace than they spent on a dinner at Paradise, viewed Earth Man, for all his craziness, with a guilty respect.

Looking at him now, I wondered what was behind those dark eyes that stared so piercingly—eyes that, without seeming to move or change, suddenly lost their power and looked no more keen than the plastic eyes that could have come with any of his snouts or beaks.

“Coffee?” I repeated.

“Fresh brewed?” he asked hopefully.

“Fresh brewed.” Only in Berkeley would the street people disdain instant. I nodded to the beat officer, and waited till he brought two cups. Beside the open window, at the rear of the dining room, Grayson grinned. In the bathroom Raksen’s flashbulbs went off.

I would have taken Earth Man outside and interrogated him on the stoop, but I wasn’t about to give Grayson the satisfaction. Instead, I motioned Earth Man to a table by the front window, and sat down, taking small careful breaths, as if they would keep the air from flowing too far up my nostrils. “You found Mitchell Biekma’s body,” I said. “Now I want you to start at the beginning. What were you doing here?”

His eyes narrowed. Was he were trying to decide on a strategy, or merely attempting to recall why he was here?

“I was passing by.”

“Here? What were you doing in this part of town at midnight? You don’t live here.”

“I was visiting a friend.”

I stared, amazed. In my four years on the force, I had never seen him involved in a give-and-take conversation. “Who were you visiting?”

He shrugged.

I caught his gaze and held it, repeating, “Who?”

He wriggled back in his chair, lifting up the coffee cup with cloak-covered hands. As he leaned forward, a red and turquoise beak on his chest dipped toward the coffee.

“Who, Earth Man?”

“Well, I wasn’t really visiting. I was just walking around.”