A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  “No. When we started to cart him off, he kicked up a fuss. He kept screaming he didn’t want to leave here.”

  “How come?”

  But Grayson just shrugged.

  I could have asked what someone like Earth Man was doing at Paradise to begin with. He was hardly a candidate for its sought-after dinners. But I balked at giving Grayson the satisfaction. The patrol officer who’d had the undesirable job of dealing with him so far could tell me. “Where do you have him?”

  “Squad car around the corner.”

  “Bring him in.”

  CHAPTER 5

  AGITATED AS I HAD BEEN when I’d arrived at Paradise, I might have expected to be completely unsettled by the set-to with Grayson. Instead, I found my stomach had settled down. I would have liked to think that I was comforted by the routine of investigation, by doing something I knew I did well, but I had to admit that my squalid bureaucratic victory over Grayson had heartened me.

  I could, of course, have interrogated Earth Man immediately. But I decided to look over the scene first.

  Briefly, I checked the upper floor, the three rooms the Biekmas lived in. I didn’t expect to find much there, and Evans, who was conducting the in-depth search, hadn’t come up with anything incriminating either. But he was only on the front room. In the back room Murakawa was doing the initial interrogation of one of the suspects.

  I came downstairs and walked slowly through the dining room, recalling its gracious atmosphere on the night Howard and I had come here for dinner. Then the scratched wood tables were covered with pale chartreuse cloths. Wisely, Mitchell Biekma had resisted any temptation to carry the Plasticine theme into the dining room. When you’re paying over a hundred dollars a couple, you don’t want your table winking at you. Also wisely, and in the tradition of Berkeley establishments, Biekma had used mismatched wooden chairs, and silverware. The effect had had its charm, and the temptation for a diner to “liberate” a generic fork was not so great as to pocket one engraved with “Paradise.” Tables for two to four filled the front and main sections. Only in the rear, along the back wall, were there wooden booths.

  Mitchell Biekma had been on one of the afternoon talk shows while I was in the hospital. Then I watched whatever would divert me. In the afternoon, talk shows were the cream of the crop. And Mitchell Biekma was la crème de la crème. He had regaled the audience with tales of the frenetic soap-opera atmosphere that prevailed in gourmet kitchens, where chefs were at once impresarios and czars, where one such tyrant fired his sous-chef for using the great one’s butter brush, where cooks raced to get twenty individual soufflés ready at once, only to find that the party had left after the appetizer, where romance bloomed near the torrid heat of the pastry oven, flamed near the Cherries Jubilee, and wilted by the greens left out of the fridge overnight. There was the time when the dishwasher and cook were in love with the same waitress; the dishwasher had won out, and in a fit of pique the cook thrust him headfirst into the onion soup. Biekma had told of restaurants, not his own of course, where tips were paid in coke, where snagging a reservation was not the problem, but getting into the bathroom was. And he’d talked about the crises—when a neighboring cat got into the kitchen and lapped the cream off the food critic’s almond crème torte, when the white asparagus around which the entire menu was planned didn’t arrive, when two waiters fell in love and left without notice for a tryst in New Orleans. He had looked like a rubber man as he leapt up to parody a customer who had arrived at nine on a Saturday night for a seven o’clock reservation, with eight people instead of the four, and was devastated at being asked to wait. Biekma, mimicking him, had dropped his face into a mask of tragedy, smacked his hands to his heart, and crumpled into the chair behind him. The audience had loved it. I had loved it.

  I peered through the kitchen doorway. Inside, Lopez, a rookie, guarded the scene.

  “What’s the word here?” I asked.

  “It looked like this when I arrived,” he said, waving a hand around. There was a look of proprietary embarrassment on his long, narrow face. In the thirty minutes he’d been on guard here, it had become his room; and admittedly his room was a mess. Soaking pans filled the sink, gummy handles poking up in all directions. The counter next to the sink was nearly invisible under a tower of dishes that looked as unstable as Mitch Biekma in his parody. And the dishes themselves were almost entirely cloaked by mounds of congealed food that had run together and down over the sides. I didn’t know Lopez well, but I could guess that no one walked into his kitchen at home and found it like this.

  He said, “ID tech hasn’t started taking samples. He’s only taking pictures. He almost had a cow when the dishwasher wanted to finish up here. He said not to touch anything, literally.”

  I nodded. Raksen would covet every globule on every dish. “Did someone take the dishwasher to the station?”

  “No, he’s upstairs, with Murakawa.”

  So that’s who Murakawa was interrogating. He didn’t look like a dishwasher.

  I glanced down the length of the room, surprised at its size. It ran beside the middle and rear dining rooms, probably thirty feet, and was about ten feet wide. It was, I realized, with a certain amount of shock, nearly the size of the apartment-cum-porch I had just vacated. Kitchens, as everyone was eager to remind me, were not my area of expertise. There was a time when I had made toast for breakfast, but no toasters last a lifetime, particularly ones that come as wedding presents. A toaster can be deemed a success if it outlives the marriage. When mine ceased to pop (long after the marriage had), I considered the options. I could have bought a new one. Toasters were still only ten bucks. But the station had a supply of fresh donuts each morning. So my sole foray into the culinary arts ceased.

  I looked around the kitchen. Both the outside wall and the front wall boasted stoves the size of a steamer trunk, with hoods big enough to suck up a lifeboat. Thick latticed rubber mats covered the floor, the spaces between the latticework filled with trampled salad greens, jellied cream soup, and hardened mousse. A giant electric mixer stood next to a wooden cutting board and open shelves holding bowls and stacks of cleaned, but hardly sparkling, pots and pans, as well as implements whose use I couldn’t guess. Beside the shelves was a huge gray-metal fridge. Using a handkerchief, I pulled open the door. But if there was something damning in there, it was going to take more than a cursory glance by someone as unknowledgeable as I to ferret it out. The rear of the room held the exit door and the double doors to a pantry three times the size of the closet in my old flat. A couple of patrol officers would devote the rest of the night to checking every can and recording every onion. This was, after all, where Biekma’s suspicious horseradish had been kept.

  Nodding to Lopez, I walked out the back door, down three steps, and found myself nearly face-to-face with five huge rubber garbage cans that formed the rear boundary of the lot. The only illumination came from a bulb placed over a shed on the end of the building. In the shadowy light the garbage cans looked like a quintet of linebackers wearing sun hats. The thought amused me, but I had no doubt that the brimming garbage did not bring smiles to the neighbors. No wonder they had complained. The trash didn’t smell now, but by morning it might. It could also make the day, or the night, of a wandering dog, or a troop of raccoons from the hills.

  Next to the house was a small flower garden. Between the garden and the trash cans was an empty space about four feet wide. A rookie stood guard.

  Between Paradise and its neighbor, and the two houses behind them, Grove Path ran from Martin Luther King Jr. Way (formerly Grove Street) to Josephine Street, giving Mitch’s customers an inducement to park on Josephine, and giving the Josephine Street residents a big headache. I followed the path to Josephine. Despite the commotion at Paradise, both houses were dark. Either the residents had gotten bored watching the rookie stand outside the wine shed, or they were in the crowd on the sidewalk in front. Both houses were protected by tall fences. The one catty-cornered from Mitch’s w
as covered with ivy, the one behind the restaurant was bare redwood. I peered over both fences into the tiny backyards; both were dark and empty. Overcoming the urge to march in and remind Grayson that they needed to be checked, that I would have had them checked already if I had been supervising the scene, I sent the rookie in to pass the word. Chances were slim to the point of nonexistent that anything would be found in either yard, still …

  In less than a minute the rookie tramped back down the steps, followed by Len Parker, the beat officer I’d requested. Parker was one of those people who fit in anywhere, with whom everyone found something to identify—a very handy quality when conducting an interrogation.

  “You don’t waste time, eh, Smith?” Parker said. “I didn’t even realize you’d gotten back, much less you were on a case. You all mended?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “And staying high up in the hills, eh?”

  “I’m going to see how the other half lives. In a week you won’t recognize me.”

  He glanced at my wilted turtleneck and wrinkled cords. “Nah, Smith, you’ve got your reputation to uphold. Wealth won’t corrupt you.”

  I smiled. “Maybe not. You take the house behind the ivy. Take statements, and check the yard. I’ll see the neighbor behind, and tell her to expect you in her yard.”

  “Wasn’t she involved in the protest last winter?”

  “Involved? She led it.” Mitchell Biekma had given his account of that on the talk show too. The description he had given of his adversary wouldn’t be one she’d use as a reference. “He characterized her as a batty academic verging on senility, and self-absorbed to boot.”

  “From what I’ve heard of her I’m surprised she let him get away with mocking her like that.”

  “Slander is damned hard to prove.”

  “I guess. Well, Smith, maybe she couldn’t get back at him then. By now she should have had ample time to stew. And you should be the beneficiary of that stew. I’ll bet she has plenty she’ll be delighted to tell you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GATE TO THE brown shingle house behind Mitch’s opened off Grove Path. I climbed two steps to the stoop, rang the bell and waited, trying to recall the newspaper coverage of Rue Driscoll and her campaign to keep Mitchell Biekma from extending his closing hour. It wasn’t unusual for neighbors to be wary when a restaurateur applied for a liquor license or a bookstore owner wanted to double his floorspace. Many Berkeleyans had come from cities that had been modernized in the fifties and sixties, and where, before they realized it, landmark buildings had been demolished, row houses replaced by apartments, offices, or shopping centers. City councils had been cozy with developers. The landscapes of their childhood had vanished. They had come to Berkeley determined that that wouldn’t happen here. And in their determination, they eyeballed every “Notice of Intent,” chewed over every change of ownership, sniffed around every building permit. There were neighborhood organizations in each part of the city. The board of adjustments had heard from nearly all of them, from some many times. But few campaigns had had the vehemence of Rue Driscoll’s. I tried to recall the newspaper stories on Mitch’s fight for later hours. Biekma, of course, had had to post a notice of intent. Had there been no protest, the change in hours would have been approved by the board of adjustments automatically. But Rue Driscoll had gathered the signatures of all the neighbors on her block and the one facing it. She had garnered something like sixty percent of the residents along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a coup when dealing with apartment dwellers on a crowded crosstown thoroughfare. She had convinced a lawyer to check precedents, a teacher to devote half her summer vacation to wading through records in a search for similar cases where later hours had been denied. She even found someone—someone in our department, the speculation went—to give her figures on the increase in crime in places where later hours had been approved. She had brought neighbors to complain about the noise, about the garbage, about the smells from the kitchen; and most effective, she’d picked up the cry that had led to the Gourmet Ghetto Ordinance and complained that with restaurant customers filling the few vacant parking spaces for blocks around, residents couldn’t park their second cars near their own homes.

  It had been an impressive campaign, and how Mitchell Biekma overcame it was a mystery to me, as it had been to the reporter who covered the hearing.

  “It’s after three in the morning,” a scratchy female voice called through the closed door.

  “Police. We’re investigating the death of your neighbor. I need to talk to you.”

  “Show me some identification.”

  “Just a minute.” I fingered through my purse for my shield.

  “Slip it through the mail slot.”

  “No way,” I muttered under my breath. “I’ll hold it against the window.” Two years before, a patrol officer had slipped his shield through a mail slot; it had been mauled by a pit bull. He was still known as “Bull.”

  I pressed the shield against the pane. The beam of a flashlight framed it. It was a good minute before the door opened, revealing a woman who looked to be in her late sixties. Her gray hair was thick, long, and caught with a clasp at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were closer to gray than blue, and the lids drooped at the sides to correspond to the set of her mouth.

  There is a typical retired Berkeley matron like Rue Driscoll—not about to dye her hair or dabble in plastic surgery, but having no intention of growing old with quiet grace either. She can be seen striding along Shattuck or College Avenue in Birkenstocks, on her way to a meeting to preserve public access to San Francisco Bay, to fight Medicare cuts, or to plan another protest at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. Or she may be spotted walking to Safeway despite the car that sits in her driveway, or headed to the Yoga Room or the local swimming pool. She lives by the dictum of “use it or lose it.” “Little old lady” is something she has no intention of becoming.

  Now as she glared at me, Rue Driscoll’s lips pressed together in impatience as if ready to denounce me for commandeering the time she had allocated for sleep. I had seen this expression in her news photos when she marched her neighbors to the board of adjustments.

  “I’m Detective Smith, Homicide Detail.”

  “Homicide?”

  “We handle all suspicious deaths.”

  She nodded.

  I took down her full name, Mary Ruthe Driscoll. I’d need it to run her through files.

  “Who died?” she demanded.

  “Mitchell Biekma.”

  “Mitchell!” she gasped. If her shock was real, it held sway only momentarily. Stepping back, she said, “You’d better come in. This way, to my study.”

  The layout of her house was the mirror image of Mitch’s, except that here the front door lead one off Grove Path into a foyer between the living room and dining room. With a quick glance into the book-strewn oak-paneled living room, I followed her through the dining room to the back. There were newspapers and magazines spread haphazardly on the dining table too, but neither the dining room nor the living room held the array of clutter that overwhelmed her study.

  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.