A Dinner to Die For

by Susan Dunlap

  I raced toward him. My feet slapped the pavement. The shoulder holster slammed against my ribs. I couldn’t make out Yankowski anymore. Nothing showed around the sides of the trash can. I cut to the left to get a better angle, to flush him back toward the main yard. Still, my light showed only the can, the benches, the wooden support poles. Had he moved to the other side? Was he still behind the can? Or had he scuttled behind the shield of the benches? I slowed to a walk. The wind whistled past. Listening for that hiss, I froze.

  “Devlin!” I called. “Over here!” Shining the light toward the ring of benches under the center of the umbrella, I moved slowly northward, passing beside the near support pole. Behind me feet hit the pavement as Devlin ran toward me. I closed in on the circle of benches, aiming the light at the hollow in their center. It would be a fool’s cover. I stepped closer. It was empty.

  The hiss shrilled ahead. Revolver poised, I moved toward the heavy, weighted trash can, twenty feet away. “Stand up slowly, hands raised, Yankowski!”

  Nothing moved. Outside the yard a car screeched to a halt. I sidestepped, edging in closer. The light beam caught Yankowski’s bare elbow.

  “I said stand up!”

  Slowly, that bald pate, that thin pale hair, that twisted nose appeared. Then the trash can lifted up and flew forward, at me. I stared, mesmerized, in a world of slow motion, watching it float nearer. I could feel its breeze when I leapt to the side. It struck my shoulder, flinging me back onto the macadam.

  I let out a gasp. My hand struck hard against the ground; the flashlight went flying, but I held fast to the gun. My body shook with pain. I looked up to see Yankowski disappear over the edge of the yard, down the thirty-foot incline to the playground.

  “What happened?” Devlin panted.

  “Down the hill, there.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, dammit,” I snapped, grabbing his arm to pull myself up. “I’ll take the north, you go south.” I ran slowly, the pain one great blur. At the top of the stairs I stopped, looking down into the beamless dark. Yankowski could have been anywhere down there, hidden by trees, behind the pool house, or crouched behind the pillars and platforms of the playground.

  There was a cement slide beside the staircase. I put on the safety, and holding the revolver with both hands, leapt feetfirst onto the slide, hitting one of the banked walls, ricocheting off into the other wall, going faster down into the dark, keeping my feet together, my hands steady on the revolver, scanning the dark for Yankowski. The slide leveled out, but I was going too fast to stop; I shot off the end and hit something with a thud.

  The impact knocked me back, banging my elbows against the cement, crumpling me to the cement as they collapsed. The pain exploded inward. I couldn’t stop the shaking. My breath roared in my head. A groan cut through. And another. It was a moment before I realized they were not my own. My fingers tingled weakly. I could barely feel the butt of the gun. From memory I forced myself to tighten my grip. Then releasing one hand, I pushed myself up, and looked down at the mound beneath the slide. What was it I had hit? “Yankowski?” I said with more hope than expectation.

  “No,” the breathless form forced out.

  My eyes were adjusting; the black didn’t seem so dark now. I could make out my victim’s face. The face was thin, the hair dark and plentiful, the nose shallow but straight. It was not Yankowski; it was Murakawa.

  CHAPTER 12

  I’D LET HIM ESCAPE! I’d had Yankowski fifteen feet from me; I’d had him at gunpoint and he’d gotten away! Again! Maybe Inspector Doyle was right; maybe it was too soon for me to come back to work. Maybe I should put in for a desk job where I couldn’t do any damage.

  I spent the next half hour looking for Yankowski in the underbrush on the slope; around the pool, the playground, the track; and back in the school yard. If he handled dirty dishes as adroitly as he had eluding me, he must have been the best dishwasher in town.

  The sky was growing lighter. But fog shrouded the dawn. At quarter to six I walked back to Paradise. The pain in my lower back had receded to a heavy ache that throbbed with each step. It felt ominously familiar, the same ache that had been there for weeks after the helicopter crash. My ribs and shoulder still stung. Gritty dirt streaked my face and sweat matted my hair. I thought longingly of my house with its many-headed shower, its sauna, hot tub, and Jacuzzi. Great, Smith, just go home and loll in the tub; that’s about what you’re good for.

  I picked up my purse from inside Paradise, fished out a Wash ’n Dri my mother had given me to use on the plane, and wiped my face. Even though the wipe was thoroughly brown after I finished, I suspected that my face still wasn’t anywhere near clean. But at least now it wouldn’t cause people to stop in the street.

  Parked behind Mitch Biekma’s vintage black Triumph in the Paradise driveway, the sector sergeant sat in his car. Grayson was leaning against the window. He glanced up.

  I eyed him hopefully.

  “Nothing new,” he said. His voice had no note of triumph. He hadn’t beaten me; I’d beaten myself.

  “I’ve already dismissed some of the backups,” the sector sergeant said. “We’ll give the rest of the guys till the end of shift.”

  I could tell how much hope he held out. I shrugged and headed down the driveway toward the front yard and Mitch Biekma’s metal garden. In the pale morning light I could sympathize with the neighbors’ complaints about this artistic statement. The metal sculptures, which last night had thrown ominously undulating shadows on the dark, fiery wall, now looked like a collection of garden paraphernalia left out in the fog too long. They looked not so much avant-garde as tacky.

  “Which one was it Biekma fell over?” I asked the patrol officer on guard. He pointed to the sculpture nearest the door. It looked like a three-foot-high spear whose point had broken into five narrower, but equally sharp, segments—the bird of paradise. Moving closer, I could see the telltale dark stain on the tallest point.

  Behind me a car pulled into the driveway. “Not the press,” I muttered. Was it possible for this day to get worse? A front-page photo of the bloodstained sculpture, along with an article on the suspect’s escape, would do it.

  But the car was a black and white. The driver was opening the door for a blond woman who looked to be a few years older than I, maybe thirty-five. She wore faded jeans and a thin white shirt under an overlarge man’s V-necked cardigan that seemed to be hanging onto her shoulders by friction alone. Clearly, she was exhausted. Everything about her sagged: her blond hair hung in limp curls; even her freckles seemed to weigh her skin down. She climbed slowly out of the car, and rested a hand on the top of the door. The muscles in her face stiffened as she stared at the metal flowers. “Which one?” she asked the patrol officer.

  He looked confused.

  I walked up. “I’m Detective Smith. Are you Laura Biekma?”

  “Mitch was so proud of this garden.” She shook her head. “He saw a beauty—no, that’s not it. No, a stylishness—that’s it—a stylishness that most people couldn’t. At first I wondered if he was just saying that because he’d committed himself and didn’t want to look a fool. But no, he really loved it. It’s almost fitting that he should die …”

  Laura Biekma was the one person in the kitchen Yankowski had approved of. She, if anyone, might know where he’d hide. But I couldn’t attack her with questions on the sidewalk. “Come inside,” I said gently, nodding at the patrol officer. I walked with her up the steps, and stood between her and the dining room as she paused in the entryway. Raksen was gone. Grayson was still outside. The only signs of an investigation were Lopez standing by the kitchen door, and the chalk outline of Biekma’s body on the other side of the partition. I didn’t want Laura Biekma to see that. She was shaky enough without that kind of shock. I didn’t know how much longer she would hold together. Six to twenty-four hours was the rule with family members. When I worked on my first homicide as a beat officer, I assumed the husband of the victim would fall ap
art as soon as he heard the news. He didn’t, not for a full fifteen hours. Then he went to pieces and couldn’t be interviewed for days. Laura Biekma had had more than six hours. She had worked a full day yesterday, and been up all night. It spoke well of her that she’d held herself together this long. If she could just make it long enough to give me a lead to Yankowski.

  I followed her up the stairs. The bottom seven, beneath the Plasticine door, were thickly carpeted. Behind the door the top six steps had rubber stair-runners. The walls beside them were scuffed and the moldings coated with greasy dust. It was clear that this apartment, where the Biekmas had lived for six years, was tantamount to a place where they stored their off-duty bodies.

  “Come into the kitchen,” she said. There was a low-pitched drag to her words, almost a hoarseness, as if they were coming from a tape played at too slow a speed. “I’ll make you some toast and coffee. It’s Acme Bakery bread.”

  I lowered myself gingerly into a director’s chair, at the tiny table that folded down from the wall. Pain clamped my back.

  Watching Laura as she poured water through the Melitta and cut slabs of bread for the toaster oven, I could see her relaxing in the arena she controlled. It was almost as if she had forgotten that she was the bereaved.

  “Cream?” she asked, setting a sturdy white mug in front of me.

  “Thanks.”

  She set a small bottle on the table, the type of milk bottle I had seen only in nostalgia ads. “It’s so unfair. Why did he have to die now, just when he’d finally found his place?”

  “What do mean, Mrs. Biekma?”

  She sighed, a long shaky sigh that could easily have turned into tears. “Maybe Mitch was too talented. Nothing ever challenged him. In school he went through eight majors. There were always five or six half-done projects lying around our apartment. Before he’d finish, he find something else and be all enthusiastic about it. I thought that’s the way our life would be, just scraping by, me working at the gas company all day and making all the practical decisions at home. Then he decided to open a restaurant. And it was as if overnight he grew up. I’ll tell you, when he went to Paris to cooking school, I thought it was just another hobby, and when he came back, wouldn’t have bet on it lasting a month. But he stuck with it. He even took courses in accounting and business management, and if you knew Mitch you’d know how much he hated stuff like that. And then, just when people recognized that Paradise was the best ...” She sniffed back tears, swallowed hard, and then, concentrating all her attention, lifted her coffee cup and drank.

  I waited until she set the cup down. “I know it’s been a long night for you, Mrs. Biekma. There are just a few things that have to be dealt with now.”

  She nodded slowly. Now that they were no longer busy, her hands were shaking. I decided to ease into the point at issue. “Tell me about Frank Yankowski.”

  She looked up, surprised. Doubtless it was an odd-seeming question to someone who didn’t know about Yankowski’s disappearance. I held my breath, mentally backpedaling to prepare for her questions. But the moment passed. She didn’t demand to know why. With a sigh, she picked up the coffee cup and held it an inch above the table. She had taken off the sweater. Her short-sleeved white shirt was blotched with tomato and oil stains. Her arms rested on the edge of the table just below the elbow, the surprisingly muscular flesh barely spread by the pressure of the table. “Frank has been with us about six months,” she said in that near-hoarse voice. “He’s the best dishwasher we’ve ever had. He never misses a day.”

  “Where was he before?”

  Eyeing the cup, she considered. “He must have had references. We don’t hire without them. We have enough problems with them.”

  I checked her hands. Was the shaking greater? How much time would I have? I didn’t want to jar her fragile concentration. I’d go with her train of thought. “What kind of problems?”

  “Some pilferage, but it’s not a big problem with Mitch handling the checks. Mostly, it’s just irresponsibility. Like tonight, the sous-chef didn’t turn up. He said his tires had been slashed. We’ve heard that one before. We’ve heard them all. He didn’t call till four P.M.”

  “Couldn’t you get a replacement?”

  “Not that late. If it had been noon, Mitch or I would have gone through the list.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “Sometimes they don’t call at all. It’s one of the inherent problems in the business. In a way, I’m not surprised,” she said with a shake of her head. Moving the cup to her lips, she took a long swallow of coffee, and set the cup down with a sigh. This was not the “survivor” exhaustion she had exhibited a few minutes ago, but the in-the-business weariness of one who had dealt with, and complained about, employee problems on a day-to-day basis. Routine—making coffee, or serving coffee, or sitting here in her kitchen where she had had this discussion many times before—was taking over. “There are plenty of responsible salad chefs around. But restaurant work attracts transients. People are always deciding they want to go to L.A., or back to school, or they want to work in the place their lover does, or someplace where they get better money, or better hours, or which is closer to home, or has a different atmosphere. Or they’ve had a fight with their lover who also works there; then neither of them shows. If you don’t feel like coming in one day, well maybe your boss will just have to lump it; if not, there’s always another job—if you’re young and reasonably presentable.”

  “What will happen with this sous-chef?”

  “I’ll hear from him; he’s got nearly two weeks’ salary coming. Then I’ll see if his story is legit. If not”—she shrugged—“I’ll have to start calling around.”

  “So you’ll keep Paradise open then?”

  “For now, I suppose. I haven’t thought about the future.”

  I took down the name and address of the missing sous-chef, then said, “Frank Yankowski seems like a bright guy.”

  “He is.” Her voice was sharper.

  I could almost see the demand forming in her mind. Quickly, I said, “He doesn’t seem like someone who wants to spend the rest of his life in the dishpan.”

  “No question.”

  “But he said he didn’t want to be a waiter. Why?”

  Her eyebrows pushed in, creating a hump above the bridge of her narrow nose. “Why are you asking me these questions? Why about Frank? My husband is dead. Why are you asking me about Frank?”

  “Because he’s disappeared. He ran out of Paradise before I finished questioning him.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “We have to find him.”

  “But you don’t think … but of course you do, you think he was involved in Mitch’s death, don’t you?”

  “He didn’t make himself look good.”

  She pressed the sides of the coffee cup. “I can understand how you see things, but if you knew Frank … he’s not a man who would kill. Mitch wasn’t holding him back. He wanted him to be a waiter. He told Frank that he could make four or five times what he did now.” The hoarse quality was gone from her voice, replaced by a sharp urgency.

  “Then what was?”

  “I hope this won’t cause Frank problems,” she said; then, realizing the ludicrousness of that possibility, she said, “I guess things are so bad now, whatever I say can only help him.”

  I smiled.

  “It’s Frank’s ex-wife—Sarah, her name is. She dragged him into court four times over her alimony. Frank didn’t like to talk about it.”

  “But he did,” I prompted.

  “Well, he had to, to explain why he didn’t want to be a waiter. He didn’t want anyone to recognize him.”

  “His divorce was local then?”

  “No, it seemed like it was in the Midwest, St. Louis or Chicago, maybe. I don’t know that he ever said.”

  “Why would anyone spot him here? Back alimony isn’t a crime they send sheriffs across country for.”

  “Someone might have come across him by accide
nt. His isn’t a face you’d forget.”

  “That could have happened on the street, unless he’d stayed inside all the time.”

  She sighed. “I guess so. But this Sarah sounded like the type who would make it a point to find him.”

  “Because there was so much money involved?”

  “I don’t know.” She stared down at the coffee cup.

  “He lives in the Hillvue Hotel, right?”

  She nodded.

  The Hillvue was not the type of place that anyone who could afford to live elsewhere would choose. And no Hillvue tenant would merit a nationwide search for back alimony. The whole thing sounded fishy.

  “Is he using?”

  Her pale eyes widened. “You mean drugs?”

  I nodded.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Now her eyes narrowed and in that expression I could see the woman who directed the running of a successful restaurant. “Detective, I make it my business to recognize the signs. Sometimes, I’m wrong. But I’m not wrong for six months. Frank has missed only one night’s work. Every other night he’s been here, on time. He doesn’t take his breaks in the bathroom. He doesn’t drop the china. If he’d been using, he’d have been gone five months ago, leaving half the dishes on the floor and the till empty.” The force of the statement seemed to exhaust her and she sank back into the director’s chair, letting the cup rest on the table.

  “What does he do with his free time?”

  “Movies,” she said quickly. “He has a pass to the U.C. Theatre. He sees both features on his days off.” The U.C. changed its bill daily.

  “Regardless of what they are showing?”

  “He just loves films.”

  I made a mental note to send someone to the U.C. They should remember Yankowski. Like Laura Biekma said, he wasn’t someone you’d forget. Perhaps he was there to pass his hours innocently, but a large dark theater may provide not only entertainment but also a good place for commerce.

  Still, he wouldn’t be at the U.C. at six in the morning. Trying another tack, I said, “Who is Yankowski friendly with?”