Cook's Big Day

by Joanne Pence

  “Paavo, stop! Our wedding reception venue is the crime scene.”

  He gawked at her. “No.”

  “Yes. La Belle Maison. The place I worked like a dog to get for our reception; the place I finally had to ask Cousin Richie for help in finding a space for us on their calendar. It's now the crime scene, and if the murder isn't solved by Saturday at 4 p.m., no, actually they'll need time to set things up—if it isn't solved by Saturday at noon, we won't have a place for our reception. We have three hundred people coming to see us get married, and we have no place to feed them.”

  As the full impact of what she was saying hit, as he thought of the untold hours she had spent obsessing over her Big Day, Paavo shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Angie.”

  “Sorry?” she cried. “Paavo, you've got to fix this.”

  He gaped. “I don't know if I can.”

  “You've got to. Find the killer. Open up the crime scene. Or even if you don't find the killer, you can surely get CSI to finish what they're doing before Saturday. I mean, how long can it take to spread around a little fingerprint dust?”

  He rubbed his temples. “I don't know.”

  “Does Mayfield know it's the place for our wedding reception?”

  “I don't know, Angie.”

  Angie folded her arms. “Surely, she wouldn't want to mess up your wedding day, would she?”

  “Angie, you know Rebecca isn't like that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Ask Cousin Richie. He seems to like her well enough,” Paavo said.

  “Richie likes women. Enough said. Anyway, what if we, I mean, if Rebecca finds out who killed Bridezilla before Saturday, will that free up La Belle Maison so we could still have our reception there?”

  “If she gets a confession, and no trial, perhaps. But the chance of all that happening in forty-eight hours is close to impossible. I suggest you start looking elsewhere. Speaking of Cousin Richie, he’s got a nightclub.”

  “Yes, a nightclub, not a wedding reception venue. And I had my heart set on La Belle Maison! I don’t want to even consider moving until all else fails.”

  “Do we need a reception?” he asked.

  She looked at him with horror, and then tears filled her eyes. “I had wanted this to be perfect. Everything to be perfect—for you, as well as me.” She brushed away foolish tears. “I'll call my sisters. We'll start making phone calls right away. Maybe we'll be lucky and some couple will have had a big fight and canceled their wedding. Or, we can at least hope.”

  Paavo stood and helped her to her feet. “All right,” he said. “I'll track down Rebecca and Bill and find out what's going on. I'm sure we'll be able to work out something. Go home, and don't worry.”

  He walked her to the elevator, where he kissed her and held her and told her their wedding reception would be fine. The elevator doors opened, and she got on.

  “Thank you,” she said with a bright smile. “That's all I needed to hear.”

  “Oh, but just in case”—he called as the doors drew shut—“you'd better make a back-up plan.”

  Chapter 6

  Thursday, Noon – 2 days, 3 hours before the wedding

  As soon as Angie left, Paavo phoned Rebecca and learned she was at the victim's apartment looking for anything that would give her some clue as to who would want to kill Taylor Redmun-Blythe, aka Bridezilla. He told her he’d like to come over.

  “Why am I not surprised,” she said, and hung up.

  The apartment was located near the waterfront, just off Broadway Street, which sounded a lot better than it actually was. Wharf rats, the four-legged kind, were common in the area. The apartment itself was tiny with worn furniture, not the sort of place he expected for someone whose wedding had been held at the very expensive La Belle Maison. He guessed the groom was the one with money.

  Rebecca folded her arms as Paavo walked into the apartment. “So, Angie called in the cavalry, I take it. Richie called to warn me that her wedding reception is at risk, and I seem to be the road block.”

  He was stunned. “Richie knew before I did?”

  “He said something about the owner talking to him. It’s not important.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “But you know Angie. She had her heart set …” He stopped talking. As Rebecca’s frown and irritation seemed too grow, just as had happened earlier when he tried to calm Angie, he realized every word he said was having the opposite effect from what he had hoped. Why, he wondered, was it always so much easier to talk to his partner, Yosh? “I’m only here to see if there’s anything I can help with, anything I can do to speed this up—”

  “No.” She went back into the bedroom to continue going through the victim’s closet.

  Paavo followed. “Where's Sutter?”

  “He's talking one more time to the groom's parents,” Rebecca said.

  “Have you learned anything about the victim that gives some idea of why she was killed?”

  Rebecca shut the closet door. She had found nothing in there. She walked over to a nightstand, but before opening the drawer faced Paavo. “Not yet. But it was actually a strange wedding. Each of her bridesmaids was surprised to have been asked to take part. None were close friends with her. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who was—other than the groom. Her own family hadn’t bothered to attend.”

  He thought of Angie’s relatives flying and driving in from all over the country. And many of them were people he’d never even heard her mention. “That’s surprising.”

  “Her sister lives in Berkeley. Sutter and I went to visit her early this morning to break the news to her. She was sad more for her parents’ sake than anything. Her parents live in Chicago, Taylor’s hometown, but they haven't seen each other in years.”

  “Did the sister say why?”

  “Nothing specific. To paraphrase, ‘Taylor was a selfish bitch, and always has been’.”

  Paavo nodded. He’d heard similar tales about families plenty of times. Considering his own miserable experience with family, and what he’d seen on the job, how well Angie’s family got along with each other actually surprised him. “Any ideas as to who might have killed her?”

  “No, nothing other than it was almost certainly someone in attendance at the wedding. At least, no one saw any strangers enter or leave the building, and it was a small group so someone not belonging would most likely have been noticed. But I’ve requested the venue’s security cameras as well as any other in the immediate area to double check that. In any case, at the moment, we have two theories. Either Taylor went to meet someone in the anteroom—a sort of a pantry that leads to the service elevator downstairs to the kitchen—and that person killed her; or she decided to use the elevator instead of the stairs to go down to the women's room, and someone waited in the anteroom for her to return and killed her. My gut tells me the last is less likely. Too much left to chance.”

  “Who would she be meeting in secret at her wedding?” Paavo asked.

  “I have no idea. Yet.”

  He nodded. “Looking at the wedding party and the guests, does anyone stand out?”

  “The main thing standing out is that everyone was family or a friend of the groom, or a business associate of the bride. The business associates—her agent and people involved in a movie Taylor was going to be in—seemed to hardly know her. After a murder, people usually talk about what a saint the deceased was. In this case, they talked about how they wished they hadn’t come to the wedding, except that it was on a Wednesday night and they didn’t really have an excuse not to. Apparently, in ‘show biz,’ as one of them said, you never know when someone’s career will take off, so it’s best not to burn bridges.”

  “Sounds like a caring bunch,” Paavo said.

  “Very. But it also sounds like a bunch of people with no reason to kill her.”

  “Unless someone saw her as potential competition.”

  “Could be.”

  “What are you doing next, Rebecca?”

  “I a
sked the members of the wedding to be at the bureau at one. Sutter and I will interview them individually. That might help us get to the bottom of this mess.”

  “And the crime scene unit?”

  She shook her head. “The knife was from the kitchen, brought to the ballroom to carve the roast beef, and somehow ended up in the bride’s back. Her fingerprints are all over the facility, including the kitchen, and they’re trying to determine who else’s were with her.”

  “Has anyone looked into the caterer?” Paavo asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “If you can use the help …”

  Before she answered, her phone buzzed. It was Homicide’s dispatcher. After talking a moment, she shook her head. “Great. Another dead body. This one was found under very mysterious circumstances—and she’s wearing a wedding dress.”

  “What?” Paavo could hardly believe it.

  “Sutter and I are the on-call team this week. We’ll have to go over there.” San Francisco Homicide used a system where two-person “on-call” teams handled all homicides in a given week or weekend, and then concentrated on working those homicide cases until their next on-call turn came up. Only rarely did so many unrelated homicides occur in any given period that the on-call team couldn’t handle them.

  Paavo knew that if Rebecca and Sutter went to look into this new case, the Redmun-Blythe murder investigation would take a temporary back seat. Even if they found that this latest call didn’t involve a murder, it could chew up enough time to make it almost impossible to solve the Redmun-Blythe murder before Saturday.

  “If you’d like,” he said, “Yosh and I will handle the call for you. But if there’s any way the death is connected with this bride—”

  “You mean like some deranged wedding-hating serial killer running through our city?’

  “Exactly, God-help us. If that’s the situation, we’ll work the cases together.”

  “You know I really should tell you to take a flying leap and keep your nose out of my cases,” she said, hands on hips.

  “But you understand that this is a rare circumstance, and I’m a truly desperate man.”

  She nodded, and seemed unable to stop a smile from playing across her lips. “Yes. And, I’ve come to understand the Amalfis a bit. Not, let me say, that I particularly like them, but I can sympathize with what you’re facing.”

  All he could say was, “Thank you, Rebecca.”

  o0o

  Paavo contacted Yosh and met his partner ten minutes later in the area known as the Western Addition. It was near downtown, and some of it had been gentrified over the past few years, while other parts had fallen into decay and neglect.

  Toshiro Yoshiwara had become Paavo’s partner some time earlier after transferring to San Francisco from Seattle—and after Paavo’s former partner had been murdered. Yosh, as everyone called him, was large for a Japanese, tall, with broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a head that seemed a little small for all that body. He wore his hair in a short buzz cut, and looked like he could split a house in two and not raise a sweat. He was also the extrovert to Paavo’s introvert. He shook hands, shot the bull, and easily conversed with people, winning their confidence and getting them at ease enough to talk. He could work a room in a way Paavo had never seen before, and—to use one of Yosh’s favorite phrases—people ate it up like a Hershey bar.

  Now, a group of mostly African-Americans stood on the sidewalk watching the police. They stepped aside to open a corridor for Paavo and Yosh to enter the large, public housing apartment building. Yosh, as usual, greeted everyone as he walked by, while Paavo kept his expression stern. The uniformed policeman guarding the crime scene introduced them to Benny Simms, the building manager, who had called the police earlier that day. Simms was white, probably in his forties, a forlorn forties, with a chalky complexion, and none-too-clean dark blond hair.

  He led Paavo and Yosh through the basement to the store room where the body had been found.

  As soon as Paavo saw the corpse, he realized that if the same person had killed Taylor Redmun-Blythe, the perpetrator’s rage against brides had lasted a long time, and his MO had completely changed.

  “My God.” Yosh gazed with disgust and more than a little horror at the sight of the desiccated female. She lay on her back on a filthy bed wearing a bridal gown with a white bridal veil covering some of her black hair, but not her face.

  The worst part was the thick pink lipstick on her mouth—lipstick that looked moist and eerily fresh.

  “How did you find her?” Paavo asked.

  Simms twitched as he spoke. “I never come down here ‘less a furnace conks out or some such. Most all these rooms is kept locked up.”

  “What is this room?” Yosh asked.

  “It’s s’posed to be empty—a store room, but people here don’t have nothing much to store, so it ain’t used.”

  “Why did you look inside?” Paavo asked.

  “One of the tenants told me somebody was hanging around down here. I figured I’d better check it out. Junkies and homeless try to break in all the time. Make it a crib, you know? Get out of the cold, away from the cops. Kids, too. Or gangs. I don’t know. Anyway, when I was checking things out, I found her.”

  “Any idea who she is?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Who else had access to this room?”

  “Anybody who lives here could come down,” Simms said. “Or their friends. Or whoever wants to break in. It ain’t hard.” A thin sheen of nervous perspiration glistened on his upper lip and brow. “It ain’t my fault if somebody gets in. I mean, managers might have had a duplicate key made and kept it. I got two, but I never give none to nobody.”

  “Did you ever see anyone down here? Any of your tenants, or other people?” Paavo asked.

  Simms used his fingers to wipe the sweat trickling along his temple, then wiped them on his jeans. “No. I don’t think so. Not that I remember, anyways. Nobody has no reason to come down here ‘less it’s for no good.”

  Paavo nodded at Yosh to take over the questioning as he perused the storeroom.

  “Was the door to the storeroom locked?” Yosh asked.

  “No. I locked it last time I was here. But this time, somebody left it unlocked,” Simms replied, eyeballing Paavo who was walking around the room.

  “When were you last in here?” Yosh asked.

  “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe six, seven months ago. Like I said, it’s supposed to be empty. No reason for me to come in here.”

  “Which tenant told you he heard someone down here?”

  “Hell, man, I don’t know. I got a note. People here don’t talk much, especially not to rat out each other. It’s a rough neighborhood.”

  Yosh was growing increasingly irritated. “How long have you been manager?”

  “Uh … about nine months, I guess.”

  “How did you get the job?”

  “I heard, if I did it, I didn’t have to pay no rent. I went down to City Hall. Nobody else wanted it.”

  Paavo wasn’t surprised at that answer. He could understand no one wanting to be responsible for trying to keep tenants in a building like this happy. It would be a thankless task. He faced Simms, and gestured towards the high, transom window. “Why is that window black?” he asked.

  The landlord looked at it and gaped. “Oh, shit. I didn’t even notice.”

  “Are all the windows down here painted?”

  “Maybe. I never paid no attention.”

  They heard footsteps and talking outside the door, and soon Evelyn Ramirez, the M.E., stepped into the room. As usual with Evelyn, when she entered a crime scene with her bustling entourage of assistants, the attention turned her way. She walked up to the corpse. “What’s this? Someone have a grudge against marriage?” She bent close. “If so, the grudge has gone on for a long time.”

  “Any chance to get fingerprints?” Paavo asked.

  She looked at the hand. “I’ll try to rehydrate the skin. So, yes, there’s a c
hance. Just not a big one.” She shook her head. “Poor Paavo. What a pair of murders to face the week before your wedding day!”

  “I know,” Paavo said glumly. “And the one last night was at the place Angie chose for our reception. I don’t know what we’re going to do. It’s a big hall and it’s all now a crime scene. Angie’s having fits.”

  “You’ve got time,” Evelyn said. “Things have a way of working out for the best sometimes.”

  “I hope so,” Paavo muttered.

  He and Yosh stepped outside the storeroom, leaving it for the M.E. and the Crime Scene Investigators. They knew they had a lot of work to do, canvassing the tenants in the apartment and the neighborhood to see if anyone saw anything that might give some clue as to who the woman was, and who had visited her recently enough to apply some lipstick that hadn’t yet dried out.

  Chapter 7

  Thursday, 2 p.m. – 2 days, 1 hour before the wedding

  Angie went to the Wings of an Angel restaurant on Columbus Avenue in the North Beach area. It was owned by three older men, ex-cons, who had become good and true friends to her. She sat over a plate of their signature spaghetti, one with a surprisingly delicious sauce. Angie had been shocked to learn the secret, completely non-Italian ingredient they used in it: Spam®. But this afternoon, the noodles might have been string for all the attention she gave them.

  “Whatza matter, Miss Angie?” Earl White, one of the owners, sat down across from her as soon as the last of the lunch crowd left the restaurant. Earl was in his sixties, and wore a thick, curly-brown toupee so stiff it looked as if it had been shellacked. He’d once worked as a bouncer in Las Vegas. But the job didn't last too long, since, tough as he was, five-foot-five bouncers sometimes got bounced themselves.

  “A murder was committed at the place I plan to hold my wedding reception,” Angie explained. “Now, the whole building is a crime scene. For me to use it, Homicide will need to release the scene by noon on Saturday. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it.”