A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  “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.

  CHAPTER 8

  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.”

  “At midnight?”

  “Time’s relative.”

  But it wasn’t that relative. I knew which of the Avenue regulars were nocturnal wanderers. Some we kept an eye on, some we made use of. But Earth Man was not one of them. His obsessions were played out in front of people. And by ten at night Telegraph Avenue looked like a movie studio back lot. I shook my head. “Listen, Earth Man, you know me from the Avenue. Look at me. We’ve talked before.”

  He stared, his brow wrinkling with the effort of placing me. I wondered how long a thou
ght remained in his head, and if his periods of seeming lucidity were just another mask of craziness. “Remember when you wanted to block off the Avenue to traffic, and that gang of kids tried to rip off your car?” Earth Man had been dressed in a cardboard Toyota, suspended by straps from his shoulders. “I got you away then, remember?”

  He leaned in toward me, his dark eyes widening. A smile covered his face. “You were the cop.”

  “Right. I helped you. You can trust me now. Tell me why you came here.”

  He lifted his coffee cup, sucked at the coffee, and glanced warily to both sides. Then he leaned closer, inches from my face.

  I held my breath.

  “Okay,” he whispered, “but I don’t want this to get around.”

  “Right.” I forced myself not to move away.

  “I came for a meal.”

  I almost said “Here?” Then I realized. “You mean they gave you food?”

  He jolted up in his seat. “People leave whole pieces of chicken. They don’t eat their corn. People are starving all over the world.”

  He could have been a mother. Take a bite for the starving children overseas. “How many people like you did they feed?”

  He shrugged. “Just me. I don’t tell people.”

  Indeed like a mother, with the same lack of benefit for Berkeley’s hungry as the children overseas. “So how exactly did this work? Did you just come to the back door and knock?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I come at eleven. It’s my time.”

  “But tonight you were here after midnight.”

  “I came at eleven. But they told me to come back at twelve-fifteen. I did. Twelve-fifteen exactly.” He looked up at the Plasticine railing, following it with his gaze down to the end of the stairs, across the front of the desk, and then back up to the door where it started. If Mitch Biekma had wanted to seduce a diner with his glittery decor, he’d found his man. For Earth Man, clearly the sparkling lights had blotted out the rest of reality.

  “Who told you to come back?”

  “No one.”

  “You came at eleven. You said someone told you to come back later. Who?”

  “No one. There was a note on the back door. It said ‘Earth Man, dinner at twelve-fifteen. Come back then.’ I remember all the words. I read it four times.” He shook his head. “It was a long time since breakfast. It’s cold out there. I was real hungry. I was smelling the food, thinking about what Laura was going to make. Yesterday Laura saved me a piece of chocolate cake. I was thinking there might be more. Then I saw the note. I didn’t want to wait. But I thought she’d make me something special.”

  “Why?”

  “Laura told me to come back later before, once, because she was making me a quiche, not a slice, a whole one just for me.”

  “Did she tell you to come back later any other time?”

  He frowned. “No. They laughed at her, the other people in the kitchen. I guess she didn’t want that. She didn’t do it again.”

  “Does Laura always make your dinner?”

  “She understands. She doesn’t hassle me. The cook, sometimes she’ll let me have what’s left over, but she’ll yell at me if I sit on the stoop to eat. I have to take my plate into the yard back there, in the dark. And the guy who owns the place, he’d like to hear I’d starved somewhere else, so I wouldn’t be ruining the neighborhood here. I ran into him and Laura on the street one day and he started screaming as soon as he saw me. You’d think it was him who was the crazy.” Earth Man laughed, such a normal laugh that he could have been any one of us in the room sizing up the situation. Suddenly, he snapped his mouth shut and shrank back in his chair. “Look, Officer, I knew enough to stay out of his way, but that don’t mean I killed him.”

  I nodded. “But his wife gave you dinner?”

  His cheeks twitched, and it took me a moment to realize he was smiling contentedly. It was not an expression I had seen on his face often. “She didn’t just dump whatever was around on a dish, like that cook did. She fixed me a plate, like she would to take to someone who was sick. She gave me a couple vegetables, more than I wanted, but she told me they were good for me. And she was sorry I couldn’t sit on the stoop.”

  I made a note of that. “So tonight, what happened?”

  Again, his eyes narrowed.

  “Come on, Earth Man, don’t try to second-guess me. Just tell me what happened.”

  “More coffee.”

  I nodded at the patrol officer, but didn’t let the diversion distract me. “Earth Man?”

  “I came up the path from Josephine, like always.”

  “Why from Josephine? King Way would be closer for you.”

  Earth Man shook his head. “Biekma told me to. It was part of the deal. I understood. He didn’t want a weirdo hanging around. He didn’t want his expensive customers strolling out, full of champagne and pâté, and running into me.” He laughed.

  “And then?”

  “I saw the note, and I left. I know not to hang around. I went to the park and waited. I have a watch. One of my supporters gave it to me. It runs good if I wind it.”

  “So you came back at twelve-fifteen. By way of Josephine?”

  “Twelve-fourteen I walked up the path, then up the steps. I knocked.”

  “Do you always knock?”

  “Don’t have to. She’s usually in the kitchen. She knows what time I get there. Sometimes she even looks out the door for me. But tonight she didn’t have time. He was too close.”

  “Biekma?”

  “Yeah.” Earth Man leaned toward me. I forced myself not to move back. “He was crazy, you know,” he whispered. “He started screaming like I was going to hold up the place. But then the cook screamed at him.” He grinned. “She screamed about the noise! He screamed back. There was a lot of noise. Laura tried to make them be quiet, but they didn’t listen. Then he charged out.”

  I stood up. “Show me exactly what happened, in the kitchen.”

  He took a long swallow of coffee, then sat back staring at the cup.

  “Leave it,” I said. “It’ll still be here when you get back.”

  Still, he hesitated. In his world a promise like that was a fifty-fifty proposition. Then he stood and followed me around the corner into the kitchen.

  “Hands!”Raksen screamed. “Keep your hands off things, off everything. I haven’t started dusting or collecting samples, Smith.” He was propping the pantry door open with a hip, camera hanging from his neck, as he swung around to face us. He stared in horror at Earth Man. “Don’t rub anything.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I assured him. “But we do need to be at the back door.”

  I waited while Raksen dusted the door handle, then called the rookie guarding the backyard to stand at the bottom of the stoop. I put Earth Man outside the door, even though the wind was blowing in our direction. Steeling myself, I said, “So you knocked on the door and Biekma opened it. How close were you to him? Show me. Pretend I’m Biekma.”

  “Come forward,” he said. I took a step. “More.” Holding my breath, I inched forward. “Closer.”

  “Are you sure?” I couldn’t imagine Biekma electing to be this near. Earth Man hadn’t smelled any better an hour ago.

  He grabbed my arms through the wool of his cape and pulled me forward. “This close.” My face was a foot from his. A beak pointed to my breast, a trunk to my waist.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “He was yelling at me. His spit hit my face.”

  “Okay, then what happened?”

  “The cook yelled.”

  “Where was the cook?”

  “At the stove, there.” He pointed to the stove next to the sink on the outside wall.

  “What did she say?”

  “ ‘Shut up, Mitch. Take your soup and get out of my kitchen.’ That’s a quote,” he said proudly.

  “What did Mitch say?”

  It was a while before he admitted, “I don’t re
member.”

  “Where were the other people while this was going on? The dishwasher?”

  “At the sink.” He pointed to the sink.

  “The sous-chef?”

  Earth Man looked puzzled.

  “The other man in the kitchen?”

  “Oh him, the stranger. He was at the chopping block, there by the refrigerator, when Mitch opened the door. But he caught on fast. He went back to the stove where the cook was. He stood next to her, like she was going to protect him. I guess he knew what Mitch was like.”

  “And Laura?”

  “Laura?” He smiled. “She was standing by that table there, by the door to the dining room.”

  “Are you saying no one was near you and Biekma?”

  He nodded. “No one wanted to be near him. I didn’t either.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Laura told them both—Mitch and the cook—to stop screaming at each other, that they had to give me dinner. Mitch screamed some more, then he stomped out past her. Then she got a bowl and put some soup in it and then she broke up a couple of pieces of French bread in it, like croutons. Then she spread some Parmesan cheese over it. The cook yelled at her about the cheese, but the cheese smelled real good. When she gave me the soup, she said I could come back for more. I stood outside a while. I had to decide what I should do. Sometimes it takes me a while to think. I have to be careful, you see. I figured I’d better not eat on the stoop tonight. I didn’t want to sit in the backyard either, because the cook was so pushed out of shape about the soup and I didn’t want her to bring anything out to the garbage and find me there. So I thought I’d take the bowl out front and go down to that empty lot where the gas station used to be.” He shook his head. “That was a bad mistake.”

  “How so?”

  “Because I heard this groan—no, more like a grunt—in the front yard and I looked over. I thought my eyes were going. I almost didn’t stop, but then I looked again and …” he shrugged.

  “And?”

  “I came up to him. Biekma. He wasn’t moving. I almost lifted him up, but I’ve been in enough emergency rooms to know that you don’t move people. So I came to the door and pounded, and the cook opened it. She ran out. She looked at him and screamed. She didn’t do anything, she just stood there and screamed until people came running from inside, and someone lifted him off, and then two of them carried him inside.”