A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  “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.”

  “Well something in here killed him. Make sure the ID tech gets samples of every substance in the place—kitchen, bathrooms, garden supplies.”

  Grayson’s mustache twitched downward. “I know how to run a scene, Smith.”

  “I’m sure you do.” I smiled. “Oh, and don’t forget the horseradish jar,” I said, aware I had just trampled on all that rapport I had hoped to cultivate. I only had to look at Grayson’s rigid stance to know he wasn’t going to give me anything now. Any other data I would have to ask for piece by piece.

  I walked back to Biekma’s body and stared down. In the minutes Grayson and I had talked, the vomit had solidified on Biekma’s shirt and pants. It looked darker. I knew it was too soon in this warm room for rigor mortis, but Biekma’s body looked like it had hardened under the vomit, as if it had become part of a scene in a wax museum.

  I gave my head a shake to clear the image; then, holding my breath, I bent down over the body, printing in my memory Biekma’s mobile face. His forehead was creased in anguish. His mouth was open wide as if he had tried to holler for help—but what had come out was not sound but vomit, like the final scene of a nightmare. “Grayson, what’s this?” I asked, pointing above Biekma’s belt to the dark brown oval, partially camouflaged by a spray of vomit. “Blood?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Blood?” I snapped, not bothering to hide my anger. “Grayson, I thought you said he was poisoned?”

  “He was.” Even the mustache didn’t cover his satisfied smile.

  I took a breath and said slowly, “Then why the blood?”

  When he didn’t answer immediately, I bent down within inches of the stain. But there was no raw edge of skin. The poison hadn’t eaten through his stomach lining. In the middle of the blood was a perforation hole.

  “Stabbed,” Grayson pronounced.

  “Poisoned and stabbed?”

  “Right.”

  I stood up, taking a last look at Biekma. “Are you telling me Biekma was stabbed in the dining room of his restaurant, next to a kitchen full of people, and no one noticed?”

  “No, Smith, that’s not what I’m saying. Biekma didn’t die here. This is just where they brought his body.”

  I stopped trying to picture what might have happened. “Grayson, I don’t have all night. What went on here?”

  Grayson waited till I turned to look at him. “From the look of that vomit, he was poisoned all right. He grabbed his throat or maybe his stomach. Maybe he tried to scream. Then he dropped the bowl and ran outside, into that junk garden in the front. Into one of those birds of paradise. The bird of paradise, it gutted him.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “YOU WANT TO SEE the bird of paradise that speared Biekma?” Sergeant Grayson asked.

  I eyed him, trying to decide whether his offer could have been as innocent as it sounded, or if he was angling to set me up. But Grayson was well schooled in bluffing; his dark eyes hadn’t narrowed, his full cheeks hadn’t risen a millimeter in an anticipatory smile. “Not now,” I said. “All we need is for those reporters to spot us eyeing that, and realize Biekma was speared by his own garden. Can’t you see the headlines—‘Biekma Beaked’? No, we’ll check it out after they leave.”

  Grayson shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t the way he’d run an investigation. Having made his point, he folded his arms and leaned back against the partition that separated the foyer from the front part of the dining room, wh
ere Mitchell Biekma’s body lay.

  By the front window Raksen, the ID tech, stood tapping a finger against his camera. He looked like a miniature schnauzer, dark-eyed, wiry-haired, frenetically eager to get going.

  Photographing the dead was not everyone’s choice of what to do at two in the morning. But Raksen loved his work. According to the book, the tech photographs the body from intersecting directions, so that by checking the two prints an observer can discern where the body is in relation to doors, windows, furniture, etc. No tech I knew of took just two photos; no one was that confident, or foolhardy. No one else took the number that Raksen did, either. His goal was one print so definitive that it would answer any question any expert could conceive, any challenge any lawyer could attempt. In his effort to get that masterpiece, Raksen used more film than a portrait photographer photographing an ugly child. He was always in hot water with the auditor. The captain had given up preaching moderation. And though the definitive shot still eluded Raksen, his work had clinched a case more than once.

  I had seen him balancing precariously on wobbly chairs or hanging over rickety railings, to get the right angle. I’d seen him checking and rechecking each measurement, dusting for a print with the loving care of an archaeologist uncovering the Ten Commandments, pondering urine samples like a wine connoisseur.

  “Poison?” Raksen savored the word. Grayson had briefed him. Without pause for a clean breath, he bent down close to the body.

  “Any guesses?” I asked. Raksen wasn’t an expert, but it would be days or weeks before we got a report from one. No autopsy, no matter how vital, could be expected in less than twenty-four hours. Three days was more likely. Lab tests took an average of three weeks. And no matter how important the deceased, how much pressure you got from the press, from the inspector, or from the city council, lab cultures grew at their own rate. The best you could hope for was an educated guess from the coroner, and he, a twenty-year survivor at the job, was too wise to stick his neck out.

  “Amount of the vomit and the evidence of convulsions are consistent with poisoning, but, of course, not conclusive.”

  I nodded. Unintentionally, Raksen mimicked the coroner, word and intonation. Raksen had applied to medical school three times.

  “On the other hand, the metal spear pierced the skin, and may have caused severe internal damage,” Raksen continued, managing to avoid committing himself in classic coroner fashion.

  I sighed. “This could give us a lot of trouble in court.”

  “Right,” Grayson said, “unless we want to put the metal stalk behind bars.”

  “Any idea where the poison came from?” I asked.

  “In a restaurant?” Raksen laughed, his thin, schnauzer-like body shaking. “Listen, they tell you the bathroom’s the most dangerous room in the house. But the kitchen! If you knew what could be there, you’d never eat again. Just for starters, there are mushrooms. Mushrooms grow wild all over the Berkeley Hills. A place like Paradise, into exotic food. The chance to introduce an exotic fungus …” He opened his hands in delight. I should have remembered that Raksen’s enthusiasm extended to the lethal possibilities on every table. I’d sat next to him at one Christmas party when he’d discussed the carcinogenic potential of every ingredient in the fruitcake I was about to eat.

  “Wasn’t eating mushrooms,” Grayson muttered.

  “Well, the amount of vomit would suggest an irritant. Maybe cashew-nut oil. It’ll cause vomiting and diarrhea. Or mustard-seed oil—a single drop can cause blindness.”

  “He was eating carrot soup from the pot,” I said. “If the poison was in that, there must have been a shovelful—”

  “Or very potent,” Raksen said.

  “And it must have been added after the last customer ate. None of the customers complained,” Grayson said.

  “Wait! Dana’s bowl of soup. You said Mrs. Biekma gave it to him after Biekma left. Did Dana react?”

  “He didn’t eat it. He dropped the bowl.”

  To Raksen I said, “To get back to the horseradish, it was Biekma’s own recipe.”

  “From a ceramic jar he brought back from France,” Grayson added. “Looks like something you could pick up at Pay Less, but the word is it’s an original, signed by the artist.”

  “Grayson,” I snapped, “you didn’t tell me that before.”

  “You didn’t ask. Sorry.”

  “This jar, was it rare?”

  “One of a kind. Wait till you see it, you’ll understand why the artist didn’t bother to make two.”

  “Well, that’s the first break we’ve had. At least no one’s likely to have been substituting jars.” I made a note to have someone check up on that jar. The artist could have had a back room full of disasters, each to be sold to a rich American as unique.

  “About the horseradish,” Raksen prompted.

  “Made with a dash of chili he had imported from Thailand,” Grayson announced. “They tell me that chili is so hot the Texans grab for water.”

  He hadn’t told me that either. “Grayson, this isn’t Twenty Questions. I expect you to tell me what’s gone on here. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he snapped.

  Raksen paled. “People think poison is poison,” he said quickly. I had never seen anyone connected with the police department as unnerved by conflict as Raksen. “I’ll tell you,” he went on, rushing his words as if Grayson or I would plunge viciously into any pause, “there are as many kinds of poisons as there are people. There are corrosives, metallics, hydrocarbons, alcohols. There are stimulants and depressants. You’ve got your poisons that take hours and you’ve got ones that cancel you so fast you’re lucky to know you’re on your way out.”

  When neither of us responded, he said, “You think the poison was in the horseradish, don’t you?”

  “It’s all he added to the soup. But make sure you test any of his Thai chili peppers that are left. Could be something in them, couldn’t it?” I asked.

  “I’ll check everything. Are you through with the body?”

  I thought a moment, hesitant as always to let the body be moved. But there was nothing more it would tell me there. “Go ahead. The sooner it gets to the coroner the better.”

  “Right.” Raksen lifted his camera.

  Grayson stood unmoving, his face taut. I would have liked to ignore him and get on with my own survey of the premises before I started on my share of the witnesses. Even with patrol officers doing the initial interviews and sharing the task of reviewing them with Inspector Doyle, it was going to be a long night. But practicality told me not to leave Grayson like this.

  “One more thing,” I said to the two of them, as members of the investigating team, “there’s another odd point in this case. Biekma gets his soup and carries on with the guy at the door, then he pours in the rest of the horseradish, stomps in here to the desk, and stands there and gobbles down enough to feel sick, right?” I looked at Grayson.

  Stiffly, Grayson nodded.

  “And then Biekma runs outside. Why would he run outside? Why not the bathroom or the kitchen?”

  “Bathroom could have been occupé,” Raksen said.

  “But he could have thrown up in the kitchen. It just meant shoving someone aside.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want anyone seeing him throwing up,” Raksen said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it didn’t sound like he had time for modesty. If the poison worked as fast as everything indicates, Biekma just had time to react. You’d think he would have run for the nearest sink, to the place where someone would help him.”

  “Maybe, Smith”—Grayson crossed his arms and sighed—“he wasn’t the type to want help.”

  “May-be,” I said, mimicking his condescending tone. I could understand refusing help, but not when you were as sick as Biekma had been. “Even so, what would make Mitch Biekma run out front of all places? He owned this restaurant. The last thing he’d do would be to throw up in the front yard where someone might see him.” I l
ooked from Grayson to Raksen, waiting for a theory, but Raksen’s interest was not in something as incorporeal as the psyche. And if Grayson had a theory, he was not about to offer it. “Well,” I said, “maybe the person who found him can tell us something. Who is that?”

  Grayson shook his head, but there was a twitch at the corner of his mustache. “Earth Man.”

  “Earth Man!” Earth Man was one of the well-known Telegraph Avenue eccentrics. “We’re really batting zero. Earth Man and the guy at the back door, Dana, too.” I shook my head.

  “One in the same,” Grayson said.

  “The same? Dammit, Grayson, you mean Earth Man is Dana, the guy at the back door? The guy with his handholes sewn shut, he’s the one who found Biekma’s body?”

  “Yeah, closest thing to Biekma not being found at all.” He nodded slowly. The edges of the mustache moved more firmly upward. “They say, Smith, that you’re good with these people,” he said, laying out the challenge.

  Ignoring that, I demanded, “What else are you holding back?”

  “Nada, detective.”

  “Grayson, the role of the scene supervisor is to assist the detective. If you can’t plan to cooperate in my investigation, I’ll get someone else to supervise the scene,” I said, keeping my voice carefully even. I didn’t need this hassle, not tonight. “What’s your decision, Grayson? Can I assume you’ll do your job?”

  His expression didn’t change; his half-closed eyelid didn’t lift, the sideways tilt of his head didn’t alter, only a slight twitch of his mustache showed his anger and the effort he was making to mask it. He nodded.

  “The reports on the scene—yours, Raksen’s, the patrol officers’—see that they’re on my desk at eight tomorrow morning. And Grayson,” I said, pulling the pettiest of rank, “I’ll need yours typed.”

  Grayson’s mouth opened, then slammed shut.

  I was willing to bet he wasn’t a touch typist. And budget cuts had so reduced the clerical staff that it was unlikely he had enough clout to get them to help, not without my okay. It might be petty, but what was petty power for if not situations like this? “About Dana, is he at the station?”