A Dinner to Die For (9 page)

What might he have been like if he had had decent psychiatric care along the way, if there had been money for private help rather than the county clinics that were too overburdened to offer much more than drugs? Would it have helped? Or would it have been too late even then? I said, “Officer Parker will get you a couple of donuts at the station.”

“Donuts!” he said, dropping the trunk. His appalled expression was the same Mitch Biekma might have had.

“The gravy train’s over.”

“Come on,
donuts!
You know what’s in those things?”

“Take it or leave it.” Whichever, I just hoped he wouldn’t take the last one. I didn’t feel like eating now, but by the time I got back to the station a donut might be very tempting. “Earth Man, the note that told you to come back. What happened to it?”

“Gone.”

“Did you take it off the door?”

“I didn’t need it. I knew what it said. I left it there. When I came back it was gone.”

I pressed Earth Man, but the only thing he added was that the note had been tacked on the door. I checked outside. There could have been a note tacked there tonight. From the pockmarks on the door, there could have been five hundred.

Lopez and Parker were standing inside the dining room, Lopez with his arms crossed over his chest in disgust, Parker with an expression that could have meant any of ten conflicting things. “Lopez,” I said, “the time has come. Take Earth Man to Parker’s car to wait for him.”

I thought Earth Man might go into passive resistance, fall to an unappealing heap on the floor. But he shrugged, as if to say he had given a decent meal his best effort and, having failed, was prepared to deal with donuts.

When he and Lopez had left, I motioned Parker to sit. He smiled, and settled opposite me, an average-looking man in an average chair. There was nothing outstanding about Parker—medium brown eyes, light brown hair just long enough to save him from a charge of conformity. He reminded me of the stranger on the bus, the unfamiliar priest in the confessional in a distant parish: the faceless listener.

Parker laughed. “I’ve had some very strange entrees here. There are times when I think it’s all a game in these places, that someone comes into the kitchen in the afternoon, hands the cook any two items, like turnips and maraschino cherries—the odder the paring the better—and says, ‘Betcha can’t make a main dish from these.’ ”

“I didn’t know you were into gourmet food.”

“Sparingly, on a cop’s salary. But, Biekma was such a character. Half the fun of coming here was seeing him perform. The word is that ‘San Francisco Mid Day’ was considering him for a guest host; they were that impressed with him the times he was on. A friend of mine said there were researchers from the show at the next table one night when she was here. She said Mitch was in rare form.”

“I’m not surprised. He was great the time I was here.” Turning my attention back to the issue at hand, I asked, “How far did you get on the yards?”

“The catty-cornered one’s done. Not much in it. Cement, deck chairs. Easy. The other—the Driscoll woman’s—is a mess. I went over it but it’ll take daylight to find anything.”

“This is becoming a very peculiar case,” I said.

Glancing at the doorway through which Earth Man had passed, he said, “I can imagine.”

“Biekma took poison, then fell over his metal flower. Rue Driscoll says she got food poisoning here, but not till
after
the extended-hours hearings were over. And now Earth Man claims he was poisoned from a handout here.”

“Makes you wonder what’s been going on in the kitchen, doesn’t it?”

“If it were just one of them … Rue Driscoll saw a doctor after the poisoning. She didn’t exploit the incident publicly, but she did use it to get Biekma’s help publicizing her book.”

“Was he going to have her on ‘San Francisco Mid Day’ when he guest-hosted?”

“He said he’d use his connections. Or so
she
said he said. It would have been interesting to see what came of that.”

“Right. Somehow I just can’t picture Mitch sharing the spotlight.”

I nodded. Neither could I. And I wondered if Rue Driscoll, who had already seen Mitch Biekma turn on her three times—in opening Paradise, in extending the hours, and then in mocking her on television—had come to the same conclusion. “Still, Parker, she’s an intelligent woman. She didn’t gain anything by telling me about the poisoning. All she did was make herself look suspicious.” I waited for Parker’s assessment. But he said nothing, merely sat, staring at my Styrofoam cup.

Now that Earth Man was gone, the pungent smell from the kitchen struck me again. And the cold, damp breeze flowing through the window Grayson had opened chilled my neck. To Parker I said, “Take Earth Man’s statement and give him a donut. Then drive him home and search his room.”

“For?”

“The food that poisoned him, two months ago.”

He shook his head.

“Or vomit,” I said. “Or both. Whatever they gave him he’s still got, in one form or the other.”

When Parker left I sent Lopez upstairs for Murakawa. He would keep an eye on the dishwasher long enough for Murakawa to brief me, then bring him down.

I called Inspector Doyle, and summarized what I had. For his part he had interrogated the waiters, the busboy, and Laura Biekma—“Seemed like a nice woman, exhausted but trying to hold herself together.” We compared notes on the kitchen interchange; Laura Biekma’s account squared with Earth Man’s. Doyle had the cook waiting. I started to hang up.

“Smith?”

“Yes, Inspector.”

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“Inspector, it’s after four in the morning. I’m in as good shape as the next guy here.”

He didn’t reply. I could hear his labored breathing;
he
didn’t sound so fine.

“Look,” I said, “you don’t need to baby me. If I can’t do my job I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, Smith. No need to fly off the handle. Just watch yourself. You have a history of taking chances.”

Like the helicopter crash.

“If you need help, Smith, ask Grayson. He’d be glad to help.”

I’ll bet he would.
“I’ll watch myself,” I said and hung up. I couldn’t let Doyle’s doubts get to me. Taking a long, slow breath, and then another, I pushed the thought of Doyle away, concentrating on the sound of radio squeals, of Grayson questioning the patrol officer who had been guarding the front yard, of Raksen’s flashbulbs popping.

I pictured Paradise as it looked the night Howard and I had come, with the chartreuse tablecloths, the muted lights, and the glittering Plasticine stair railing that led the eye inevitably to the closed plasticine door.

“Ah, Monsieur Howard,” Mitch Biekma had said in the worst French accent this side of Newark. “I have seen you pictured in the paper,
n'est-ce pas?
” By now even he was grinning. “Our own Inspector Clouseau.” At which point he had feigned a slapstick stagger. From someone less appealing, to someone with less of a sense of humor, the reference might have been unappreciated. But either Biekma was a good judge of character, or he had checked on Howard. (Howard, at six feet six, with curly red hair, was the department’s most photographed officer. It wouldn’t have been hard for Biekma to find out that he was also one of its most avid practical jokers.) “
Permittez-moi
to offer you a bottle of wine while you wait on tier three with the lovely mademoiselle.” Then, with bottle and glasses, he had shown us to the third step on the staircase, where we sat for the next half hour.

Howard and I had eaten together many times in our four years on the force, but mostly burgers and fries after work, at Priester’s on Telegraph. Those evenings we had been caught up in cases, bitching about recalcitrant suspects, or plotting strategies. They were dinners any two buddies might have had. Or almost.

But this had been different. Here, dressed in our out-to-dinner clothes, where people treated us like a couple, we eyed each other warily, searching vainly for the familiar and finding it stifled beneath our formal behavior. We drank nervously, discussing the wine in greater depth than our interest or knowledge supported. And by the time our table was ready, we had finished the wine. And conversation—he type of conversation we’d been having for four years—had run dry. And that was the last dinner we had had together.

The Plasticine door midway up the stairway opened with a squeak, momentarily revealing a scuffed beige wall, and the lanky figure of Paul Murakawa rushed down. “How’s it going, Smith?” Murakawa asked, shifting from foot to foot, as if he had just completed the first mile of a fifteen-mile run and was eager to move on. Even at four in the morning, only a few strands of his dark hair had slipped down over his forehead. He had a shallow nose but a wide mouth. When he smiled his grin filled his face.

“What do you have on the dishwasher?” I asked.

“The minimum. It was like he was paying us a buck for every word he uttered,” he said in disgust. “Name’s Frank Yankowski, age forty-six. Rents a room in the Hillvue Hotel on University. No children, never married. Grew up in Chicago, dropped out of high school, and has been bumming around ever since. Or so he says.” Murakawa shook his head.

“Did he shed any light on Biekma’s death?”

Murakawa looked down at his notes. “Said he never left the sink from six-thirty on.”

“Then he saw Biekma get whatever poisoned him?” I asked in amazement.

Murakawa sighed irritably. “He could have. According to him, he was in the kitchen when Biekma came in. But, according to him, he didn’t see anything. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t pay attention to Biekma. According to him, he doesn’t know anything.” He flipped the notebook shut. “He’s lying, Smith.”

R
AKSEN BENT OVER THE
kitchen sink scooping a glop of brown into a plastic bag. I said to him, “I’m going to bring the dishwasher in here in a few minutes. Anything still sacred?”

His face dropped. “Do you have to, Smith? I haven’t finished. Don’t let him touch anything. And don’t move anything. There are a couple more samples I need to get. And keep him away from the pantry. Can’t you interrogate him in the dining room?”

I smiled. “I’ll tell him to keep his hands in his pockets.”

Two officers hurried in the front door. Grayson was standing by the foyer partition. “Start on the neighbors,” he said to them. “Take the ones on either side, Acosta. You, Leonard, go across the street, to everyone who has a view of the front yard here. I want to know any unusual sound they heard, anything they saw out of the ordinary. Be thorough. Let them tell you too much. Got it?”

Acosta and Leonard nodded, and turned, nearly smacking into Lopez and his charge at the foot of the stairs. As one, Acosta and Leonard stopped, stared at the dishwasher, steeled their faces, and moved on out the door. The dishwasher was a giant. He must have been six four, almost as tall as Howard and a good fifty pounds heavier. His light brown hair would have hung from the edge of his bald pate to his collar—had he been wearing a collar. Instead, he had on a gray T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, exposing arms thick with muscle. He looked like an ex-linebacker, ex for a while. I noted the bleach spots on his T-shirt, his jeans, and even the tan wool cap that protruded from his pocket; he seemed to have spilled with abandon. All in all, he looked like the last person anyone would hire to deal with wet dishes.

Glancing at his hands, I saw my assessment was wrong. His fingers were long, and the veins on the backs of his hands were swollen into the reddened skin. Dishpan hands. Like his hands, his face looked as if it had been grafted on the wrong body. Under his long forehead, thin, pale eyebrows arched over wary brown eyes. But it was his nose that grabbed attention. Perhaps this man
had
been a linebacker—that would have explained the angle of that narrow, highly arched nose. Halfway down it turned right, as if one of the opposing linemen had grabbed it through the face mask and given it a twist—a permanent twist. It was a snout Earth Man would have loved for his collection. Its angle was so sharp that I found myself staring, wondering if it was possible for its owner to breathe out of both nostrils, wondering why he chose a job in a hot, steamy kitchen. “Have a seat, Mr. Yankowski.” I motioned him to a table near the kitchen door.

He moved with surprising lightness, as if he were dancing through rows of tires, and settled silently on a straight-back chair.

Yankowski looked like a man used to dominating. It was not the role I intended for him here. Sitting opposite him, I said, “I’ve just gone over your statement, Yankowski. You’re lying.”

“About what?” he asked, in that adolescent tone that means
So?
The effect was heightened by the wheeze that accompanied his words.

“You tell me.”

He shrugged, his thick neck almost disappearing between the pads of his shoulders. His expression said
Make me!

“You’ve got no work history, no family, and tonight you say you were in the kitchen when Mitchell Biekma got the soup that killed him and you didn’t notice his movements. Come on.”

He shrugged again, this time his shoulders barely lifting.

“We’ll wear you down. It’s just a question of how long it takes, Yankowski. You’ve been around the police enough to know that, right?”

He hesitated, then muttered, “I haven’t got a record.” The wheeze muddied the last words. It was a moment before I realized that rather than a true wheeze, the sound was the result of the odd angle of his nose. It was not quite a whistle, closer to that labored hiss of a teakettle just before it releases and sings.

“Too smart to get caught, huh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What time did you get to work tonight?”

He just sat.

I had the urge to kick him—and the feeling that I’d break my foot. Few things were more frustrating than interrogating the strong, silent type. I had chosen the wrong tack with him. Straight-on confrontation was what he must be used to. He’d know how to deal with it—strongly and silently. I let a minute pass, then leaned forward, adopting a more relaxed tone: “Look, I was just asking you what time you got to work.”