by Susan Dunlap
“A gourmet car thief!”
“So, Givens, you looking for volunteers to stake out Peet’s?” Jackson asked, laughing.
“Yeah, Clay, but you’re a big shot now, too important for stakeouts. I’ve got a patrol officer who’ll do undercover nicely.”
The captain broke up the laughter. “Smith, the Biekma murder.”
I glanced at Inspector Doyle, but he shook his head—nothing worth passing on. I recounted the case. “Mitchell Biekma, the owner of Paradise, was poisoned last night,” I began. Another time, with a case that hadn’t embarrassed the department, someone would have said, “I thought only the prices were poison.” But the humor in the room had vanished as totally as Yankowski. I described the scene in the kitchen when Mitchell Biekma got his soup and screamed at Earth Man. I told them of Earth Man’s claim that he had been poisoned, and of Rue Driscoll’s.
“And now Biekma?” Washington asked. “Same poison?”
I glanced at Raksen, who, like Grayson, was doing a “guest shot” at the meeting. Raksen, edgy any time he wasn’t discussing camera angles or processing chemicals, looked small and wiry, like a mustachioed miniature schnauzer set on a chair he’s not allowed on, desperately wanting to jump off but afraid to disobey the command to stay. Next to him Howard looked like the family golden retriever who settles wherever he chooses and waits for a scratch behind the ears.
“The lab reports aren’t in yet, of course. They won’t be back till next week at the earliest,” Raksen said.
I nodded. Everyone knew that. “Can you give us an educated guess?”
“Better than that. It’s aconite. No doubt about it. I don’t know how I missed it last night. The guy was eating horseradish! It’s not in the soup, but the jar; it’s full of it—straight aconite. Stupid! I can’t—”
“Aconite,” the inspector prompted before Raksen slipped into prolixity.
Raksen swallowed. He recognized his tendency to get carried away. He knew the rest of us did too. “Aconite is the root of monkshood, Aconitum napellus,” he said stiffly. “But the whole plant is poisonous. The leaves look like parsley, and the tuber—the root—is often mistaken for … horseradish!”
“Bingo!” Jackson said.
Raksen shook his head. “How could I have missed it? It’s an alkaloid. Tincture of aconite is a skin irritant in liniments. Initially it stimulates the myocardium, then it depresses the central nervous system. The tinctures and liniments have been used for relieving toothache, neuralgia, and rheumatism. But it’s toxic enough to be poisonous when absorbed through the skin. Aconite has a long history; one of the Roman emperors made it illegal for citizens to grow it, and the Greeks called it ‘stepmother poison.’ ” Gone was the wary miniature schnauzer look. Engrossed in the explication of one of his favorite topics, Raksen balanced on the edge of his chair, eyes glowing, mouth tensed—now like a full-grown standard schnauzer about to pounce on a fat rabbit.
“Raksen, what are the symptoms of aconite poisoning?”
“Nausea, vomiting—”
“Like Biekma,” Grayson put in.
“Numbness and tingling of the mouth, throat, and hands, blurred vision—”
“That would cause him to run into that metal bird of paradise in the garden,” Grayson summed up proprietarily.
But Raksen wasn’t through. “Fall of blood pressure, convulsions, and respiratory failure. And, here’s the clincher.” He paused, glancing around the table. “With a dose of one to two milligrams, death can come in eight minutes.”
“Pay now, go now!” Howard said.
“Raksen,” I said. “Did you, by any chance, check on the poison in Earth Man’s food?”
Raksen grinned like I’d put the rabbit next to his water dish. “Of course.”
“And?”
“Bingo. Of course, you won’t hear that from the lab for a while.”
“But you’re sure they’re the same?”
“As sure as I can be without waiting for the test results. But I did some testing on aconite in school. I know I’m right.”
“Good work.”
He threw up his hands and grinned. “Nothing any obsessive wouldn’t do.”
“That’s fine,” Inspector Doyle said in a tone that indicated anything but fine. “But I don’t want this speculation to leave this room. As far as the public perception of the case goes, we still don’t have anything more than a corpse and a missing suspect.” Turning to Grayson, he asked, “What’s the status of Yankowski?”
So that was why Grayson was here, subbing for the sector sergeant.
“Still missing,” he said. “It’s like the man vaporized. Doesn’t have a car, but he might as well have. The man’s too big to miss. No one reported a possible sighting, not all night long. Wasn’t on the street, wasn’t on a bus, didn’t call a cab. We had twelve cars circling King School till seven. I still have six. I had Morning Watch alert Parking Enforcement and the school crossing guards. I’ve got a man on his hotel, and”—Grayson looked at me for the first time—“the U.C. Theatre.”
I told Morning Watch! I got a man at the theater! Grayson certainly took substituting for the sector sergeant seriously. In a minute he’d be denying the sergeant ever coordinated the chase.
“Good work,” the captain said. To me, he added, “Anything else we should know about the suspect?”
“There’s no record of him in files. He’s not known to Corpus—no arrests, or PIN—no warrants. I’ll check with DMV as soon as they open.”
It was Inspector Doyle who had the last word. “I’ve got a press conference in half an hour. And I can tell you, what we have here is a lot of speculation, and a lot of manpower to account for. But as for solid leads, we’re batting zero.” To me he said, “Check with me after lunch.”
I had been planning to go home, shower, change, maybe catch a nap. But there would be no time for that. I was just glad I had slept when I got in last night. Doyle might think I was too battered to manage the investigation, but apparently he didn’t consider sleep a cure. When I came into his office after lunch, he’d be expecting me to bring something.
CHAPTER 15
I HURRIED OUT OF the conference room, not that anyone was likely to stop me. The office I shared with Howard was morning dark. The small slatted window on the west wall was closer to a decoration, albeit a tasteless one, than a purveyor of light. And what sun it did admit wouldn’t come till afternoon. The room was barely more than six feet wide. If Howard had lain across the floor, his head would have been up the wall. As it was, the desks filled all but a narrow path, and when I pushed my chair back, I first had to turn to make sure Howard’s desk drawers were closed.
Leaving the light off, I slumped in my chair, pulled out the phone list, and squinted till I found the number for Motor Vehicles.
It wasn’t till I had dialed, and sat listening to the phone ringing at DMV, that I felt the throbbing in my back. Had I blocked it off with fear, anger, determination during the interview with Doyle and the Morning Meeting? If so, it was having its revenge. I shifted my weight to the right; the pain eased momentarily, then seeped back like water wetting a cloth. I shifted again, but it didn’t help. Sandpapery fingers squeezed my lower back. Bed rest, the doctor had told me after the accident. But I couldn’t rest now.
“California Department of Motor Vehicles,” a morning-chipper voice said. It took two transfers and ten minutes for them to tell me they had no record of Yankowski. He hadn’t been cited for a violation, hadn’t been a victim, hadn’t applied for a license.
“He has no California driver’s license?” I repeated. “He’s lived here at least six months; he should have taken the test.”
“Of course he should have,” the clerk snapped. “They all should. But these guys drive on out-of-state licenses for years. You’d think we were asking them to hand over the family jewels, instead of a year-old Oklahoma license. They keep on renewing them from parents’ or friends’ addresses in Enid or Norman. Either they’re af
raid to take the test, or they’re too lazy, or too cheap. And they’re not the worst,” she said, warming to her grievance. “The worst are the ones from Jersey and Connecticut. They’re not about to give up their precious licenses. They think they’re worth more than ours. I’ve had them tell me that to my face.”
I smiled, having been one of the holdouts, afraid that if I returned to Jersey they would scoff at a license from a state like California where wimpy drivers rarely blew their horns, or blocked intersections trying to make left turns. I had no intention of going through the hassle of taking the road test in Jersey again.
I put down the receiver and turned to find Howard sitting upright in his chair. Connie Pereira and Clay Jackson stood inside the door. And Al “Eggs” Eggenburger, senior even to Jackson in Homicide, shifted from foot to foot by the small slatted window. No matter what his surname, with his pale ovoid face he would have been called Eggs. The four of them looked not quite right. Normally, Howard leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest, feet angled across the room, so they rested near the door. Normally, Pereira perched on his desk, and rested her feet on the bottom drawer. Normally, Jackson and Eggs didn’t come in here together.
“You got yourself a real stinker, Smith,” Jackson said. “One way or another it’s going to make you one famous lady.”
“Infamous the way things are going,” I said, shifting in my chair.
“There are enough reporters out front to cover a summit,” Eggs said. “And for them Mitchell Biekma is—you should pardon the mundane expression—their bread and butter. He didn’t lift a spoon without someone writing a column. Last month he broke one of his metal flowers in that garden of his and the trauma was reported on the six o’clock news. Wednesday someone delivered health club equipment there by mistake and it made page three in the Chronicle.”
“That was on the evening news too, or so Rue Driscoll told me.”
“I saw it. Biekma said at first he was affronted that the delivery drivers hadn’t heard of Paradise. Then, he said, after they left he got to thinking maybe he should convert his upstairs into a spa so his customers could work off dinner.” Eggs smiled in reminiscence. “The guy did a great interview. He even had the reporters laughing. The press is going to miss him, or they would if his murder weren’t such a great story.”
“I get the picture. I know the longer this case takes, the greater the pressure, from the press, the city council, the chamber of commerce. Like you always say”—I looked at Howard—“it could make the department, and me, look real good, or real bad.”
“You think Yankowski’s your man, Jill?” Howard pushed a pile of papers back from the corner of his desk.
Connie Pereira settled on the cleared spot. Her short blond hair was slightly curled, and her makeup so skillfully applied that only someone who had been in the bathroom with her would realize she was wearing it. Her tan uniform was crisp and fresh, and she looked eager and interested. She looked like the “After” photo, compared to me as the “Before.” Of course she hadn’t been up all night either. She’d barely been at the station long enough to discover I had commandeered her, and to get a handle on the case. “Why would he poison Rue Driscoll, Earth Man, and now Biekma?”
“There some connection between these three?” Jackson asked.
“I don’t see them as Athos, Porthos, and Aramis,” Eggs said.
“Or Rhett, Scarlett, and Ashley,” Howard said.
“The only similarity,” I said, “is that I can’t imagine any one of them deigning to be in the same room with the other two.”
“But someone poisoned all three of them,” Pereira insisted. “And Earth Man was worried enough about being poisoned to save the dish for two months.” She waved Parker’s report on the retrieval of the dish. “In case any of you are considering cryogenics, Parker tells me the marvel of refrigeration can only do so much.”
“The smells coming from Earth Man’s room must have made a hit with the neighbors,” Eggs said.
“La Maison’s not that kind of hotel,” Pereira put in. “Believe me. Spoiled food is like a continental breakfast there. Parker says when he went for that revolting plate of green fungus Earth Man was saving, he couldn’t be sure which one it was. Earth Man had three dishes sheathed in Saran Wrap. Parker took them all and left Earth Man with his beaks flopping up and down in fury. He swore that two of those plates were from this week. But according to Parker, they all looked the same—like dog food left on the counter for a week.”
“According to all the witnesses, Mitch hadn’t touched the horseradish since he’d doctored his soup Wednesday night. He used it only in the soup; he ate that only after the customers had left. So the poisoner had twenty-four hours to add the aconite to his jar,” I said.
“But he couldn’t just mosey into the kitchen and make the switch. He’d have to have watched for the right moment. That might not have come for hours. And when Mitch was in the kitchen, no one was near him and his jar,” Howard said.
“No one but Earth Man. He was standing nearly on top of Biekma and his soup,” I said.
“Could have dropped that poison right down through his trunk, huh?” Jackson laughed. “Police work. You do get into the nitty-gritty.”
Howard could barely control himself enough to speak. “Take the press, Jill. They’ll be impressed with how thorough you are when they see you with your finger up the trunk.”
“Okay, out, all of you. I’ve got paperwork to do. And for the first time, paperwork looks good.”
When they had cleared out I started on the affidavit for the Ramey warrant. The advantage of the Ramey is that the judge requires only enough documentation to support the charge, in this case the felonious assault charge. If I’d had to present all the paperwork from the Biekma case the judge would have left for the day before I’d been ready. As it was, it took me forty-five minutes, and another half hour to check it over with the DA, before I took it to the judge’s office. I was prepared for his questions—hot pursuit can be a touchy issue—but this time there were none.
It was ten-thirty before I walked back to the patrol car. The morning fog still wedged itself between buildings, holding the night-cold air close to the earth. On the plane I had hoped that June would still be spring here, with spring’s warm, clear days. Too late. It was already summer, with nights of fog that didn’t burn off till ten in the morning or—like today—even later.
I turned west on University Avenue, which connected the campus to the bay, slowing down as I passed a Volkswagen beetle decorated with bright blue paint, life-sized fruits in place of bumpers, and on the roof a globe topped with a wildly spinning windmill. On the sidewalk a street person pushed three supermarket carts tied together, each lined with four-foot-high cardboard and crammed to the top. Whatever was on the bottom of those carts probably hadn’t been seen since in months. I smiled, suddenly flushed with delight at being back in Berkeley, in a city intent on protecting its harmless eccentrics.
For years Telegraph Avenue—with its array of head shops, Asian import outlets, and street artists who sold tie-dyed shirts, incense, and feather earrings—had symbolized Berkeley. But Telegraph had changed in recent years. Now cookie franchises, sportswear franchises, computer franchises were the norm. And it was University Avenue that preserved the essence of the Berkeley that had drawn so many of us: University, with its used-clothing stores, its sari shops and Indian outlets, where you could buy garam masala or statues of Shiva, the Destroyer; University, where you could take your wheelchair in for repair, or have pipe tobacco blended specially; University, where you could find a bookstore-cafe combo, or the U.C. Theatre, which changed its bill daily. It was here that people like the cart pusher and Earth Man felt at home.
I was halfway to La Maison before it occurred to me that while I had kidded with Eggs and Jackson this morning, and had stopped by Pereira’s desk on my way out to ask her to go over the Paradise books, I hadn’t said anything to Howard. I hadn’t said I was glad to see h
im. I hadn’t even asked about my clothes. Lumping him with Jackson, Eggs and Pereira, I had simply shooed him out of the office—the office that was half his.
CHAPTER 16
LA MAISON WAS KNOWN to its inhabitants as La Maison de Flop. It was a rectangular building that occupied half a block on Addison Street, backing onto University. The facade had once been painted green, but that had been some time around World War II. In the intervening years fog and wind and pollution had worn through the paint to reveal splotches of beige stucco. But La Maison was a clear example of the adage “Sloth pays.” With more years of neglect, dirt and exhaust had covered the building so completely that it was impossible to distinguish the stucco from the paint.
La Maison extended back nearly to the edge of the property line, as did Yankowski’s hotel. There was just space to walk between the buildings. And there were two common airshafts about the size of the Paradise kitchen, long and narrow. A lot went on in those airshafts. They were known as the chambers of commerce.
An unmarked car pulled up across the street from La Maison. I recognized Heling at the wheel. Even at this distance I could see her familiar sigh as she settled back against the seat to watch the hotel doorway. I walked to the car. “I’m going to need a backup on this.”
“Sure, Smith, any diversion.” She followed me across the street, kicking a broken green bottle out of the way. Had it been in Jersey City, or Newark, the exterior of the hotel would have reeked of urine; paper cups, napkins, hamburger bags, and Styrofoam boxes would have matted against its walls. But here, the strong winds that pulled the quilt of fog in off the Pacific at night kept the air clean and dispersed the litter.
But the wind didn’t reach beyond the door—to the stench of dried urine and ammonia, to the dirt, dust, and grease that covered the floor and walls. There was, of course, no desk at La Maison. The manager’s apartment was next to the door. I knocked. I wasn’t surprised when there was no answer. The television continued to chatter. I pounded. “Police, open up!”
