The Sourdough Wars

by Smith, Julie

“Come on. I’m on the edge of my chair.”

  “The starter wasn’t there.”

  Chapter Five

  Sometime—who knew when?—the starter had apparently been stolen. Whether before or after the murder was anybody’s guess. Or whether this year or last year. The starter had been freeze-dried very fast, in small pellets, in a vacuum—that was the only way you could be sure of keeping both microorganisms alive. It was stored in little vials in a chest freezer charged with liquid nitrogen to keep it extra cold. Anyone could have taken it out in a liquid-nitrogen vacuum bottle, the type used for transporting bull sperm. These, Rob explained, were aluminum and stainless steel containers about the size of large thermos bottles. You could keep the starter frozen indefinitely as long as you kept the thermos charged with liquid nitrogen. So maybe someone had taken it recently, and maybe not.

  As for Anita, she’d become the number-one suspect in Peter’s murder. Rob said the cops were still talking to her but hadn’t booked her yet. He figured they probably would, sometime that night, and the Examiner, the afternoon rag, would get the story first. He was pretty mad about that. It was one insult right on top of another, because it was already too late for the Chron to get the missing starter story in Wednesday’s paper. That meant that was the Ex's story, for sure, even if the cops let Anita go. But they wouldn’t, said Rob, not in a million years. Airtight case, he said. Some cop buddy had told him so.

  Next morning, about ten-thirty or so, I raced out to get the first edition of the Ex. I was surprised they were playing the missing starter story below the fold—I guess they’d decided it was a Chron extravaganza, a bit beneath their dignity. I scanned the story quickly, looking for news of Anita. But there wasn’t any.

  I called Rob for late-breaking details. She’d been released.

  * * *

  It was this way. A divorced lady, she’d spent Monday night at her house with her long-term lover. He’d driven her to her offices. At about nine-thirty, just as they were leaving, a neighbor came over to borrow something. The boyfriend dropped her off to teach a class at ten o’clock. Since she lived in San Anselmo, across the Golden Gate Bridge, there was no time for her to have killed Peter between nine-thirty and ten. Even if the boyfriend were lying for her, she had other witnesses to support her at both ends of the half hour.

  Much as I hated to admit it, it looked as if she was innocent. Chris was in court, so I took matters into my own hands. I phoned Anita, wondering whether she’d remember me.

  She did. “Rebecca Schwartz. Have you licked it yet?”

  “Have I licked what?”

  “Procrastination. You’re a terrible procrastinator.”

  “No, I’m not. I mean—I guess I have licked it.” I hadn’t procrastinated in so long I hardly remembered doing it—Anita’s course had done me a lot of good.

  “Good work. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Chris Nicholson’s partner.”

  “Oh, you’re that Schwartz.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Let’s see….” I could almost see Anita consulting her digital watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now and I was planning to play tennis at lunch—I was hoping to pick up a partner, but you’ll do. That is, if you play. Do you?”

  “Am I from Marin County?”

  “Good. Noon at the Golden Gateway Tennis Club.” She spoke so briskly that a person who didn’t know her could get the idea she was being rude. But she wasn’t—she just didn’t have any time to waste. Of course Anita would play tennis at lunchtime. Of course she’d belong to the Golden Gateway club—which was close to her office—instead of the San Francisco Tennis Club, which was south of Market. And of course she’d combine tennis, lunch, and a talk with a lawyer about her dead brother. She hadn’t gotten where she was by wasting time.

  I just had time to go home, get into my tennis togs, and get over there. I wasn’t going to like playing on an empty stomach, but then Peter Martinelli probably didn’t like being dead.

  I was glad I’d dressed at home. Anita was already warming up. She had a good figure, skinny for an Italian. Her bones were not so fine as Peter’s, and she had rather an ordinary, darkish face. But her expensive haircut made the best of it. It also revealed a tightness in her jaw that wasn’t sexy but probably worked to her advantage in business. She looked slightly intimidating—very much the crisp, no-nonsense businesswoman.

  She consulted her watch. “You’re two minutes late.”

  “Mea culpa.”

  “No, that’s not bad. It’s okay, really. I always allow for the other guy being five minutes late. Have you ever noticed how few people are punctual?”

  “Often, ever since I took your course.”

  “You’re a good student. Want to warm up?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s just play.”

  She had a strong serve and terrific focus. Her small brown eyes were everywhere at once. Oddly, her hair seemed not to move as she whipped around the court, even after it was dripping from perspiration. Which it was after about ten minutes. Mine was, too. We were almost well matched—at any rate, I was able to keep her moving, a good trick with my stomach growling the way it was. But I couldn’t win. Each game was a struggle, going in and out of advantage, but the final point was always hers. We played two sets and I didn’t win once.

  In the sauna afterward, she asked again what she could do for me.

  “Background,” I said, “I guess. My partner and your brother were lovers.”

  “I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. Especially when she turned out to be female.”

  “Peter was gay?”

  She shrugged her naked shoulders. “I don’t know, really. I guess not if he was seeing your partner.”

  “Let me go over this again. You don’t know whether your own brother was gay or not?”

  “I didn’t see him much.” She was silent for a bit. “He had women friends, yes. It was just an idea I had—that he might be bi. Didn’t it occur to you?”

  “It did, come to think of it.”

  “Well, if you want to know for sure, I can’t help you.”

  “You don’t seem very broken up about his death.”

  “Why should I be?” She stepped into the shower and turned it on, spritzing the fancy hairdo, then working shampoo in. “I hated him. I’ve hated him ever since I can remember. Whoever killed him did me a good turn.”

  “Why did you hate him so much?”

  “Rebecca, did your family encourage you to become a lawyer?”

  “Not exactly. They wanted me to be a doctor.”

  She laughed, and the sound was rather nasty. “You can’t identify with me at all, can you? You have no idea what I was up against.”

  “I don’t really see what you’re saying.”

  “I haven’t said it yet.” She washed the soap out of her hair. “Would you say I have business sense?”

  “No more than, say, the president of IBM does. How many mil’ are you worth, anyhow?”

  She looked right at me, and I noticed how small her eyes were—that hairdo really did wonders. “Several,” she said. “And I made every penny without the slightest encouragement from my warm, loving Italian relatives.”

  “But Peter was poor—how could he have helped you?”

  “By not existing, that’s how!” She spoke venomously. “It’s true what he told that reporter—he’s got about as much of a head for business”—she looked around—“as that bar of soap.” She kicked it and it skidded across the tiled floor. “But just because he had a wing-wang, and I didn’t, he got the starter.”

  “Wing-wang?” I was feeling a little lost. Also, I was starving.

  “Because he was a boy, dammit! Let’s go.”

  I followed her out to the anteroom and lay down on one of the benches. She rang for a hair dryer and began reshaping the sculptured cut, using her comb viciously, as if she were angry at her own hair. “You don’t know anything about Italian families, do you?”

  �
��Maybe Jewish families aren’t that different. But I don’t have any brothers.”

  “Well, be glad of it—I’ll bet you’d have wound up a social worker if you did.”

  “My sister—” I began, but she interrupted.

  “I could never get my parents to see what I was, do you understand that? I guess Peter had the same problem, only in reverse, but that wasn’t my concern. I had my own troubles. I wanted to be appreciated for being who I am, smart like Anita, not cute and flirty like someone I wasn’t. It was wrong. It was unfair.”

  “I get the idea you resented it.”

  “Resent! I would have killed—” She stopped in mid-sentence. Oddly, she let the hair dryer drop and her voice shook. “I didn’t kill him. I thought there was nothing I wanted more than to get that starter and start up the Martinelli Bakery again.” She seemed not to believe her own words but to be trying them out to see if they fit. “But now, I don’t know…”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I think I miss Peter. I think I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  “I thought you were glad.”

  “I am, but I’m not, too—does that make sense?”

  “It’s a little complex.” I started to get dressed.

  “I really hated him, you know that? I wanted to humiliate him the way my parents always humiliated me—I wanted to show him up as incompetent. So you know what I did? I let it get in my way. If I’d offered him decent money for the starter, he’d have sold it to me and we’d both have been happy, but I had to control him into the bargain.”

  “Peter mentioned something to that effect.”

  “I hated him, Rebecca. But now I’m starting to feel funny inside, sort of empty, like I’ve lost something important.”

  “Well, you have lost the starter.”

  She smiled, apparently relieved at having some subject besides Peter to occupy her. “Maybe that’s it. Incidentally, why do you want to know all this?”

  “I’m looking for anything that might help find the murderer. The real question is why you’ve been so free to talk to me about it—I’m only a former student, after all.”

  “Yes, but you showed great promise. Besides, I needed a tennis partner.”

  “You could have picked one up.”

  “Okay. I needed someone to talk to, I guess. I was feeling odd and not sure why. I wanted to talk to someone who was almost a stranger; otherwise I’d be making myself too vulnerable.”

  “Even to your boyfriend?”

  She nodded. “I’m a very clamped-down person. I want to thank you for this.”

  And she actually shook my hand, in gratitude for letting me ask a lot of impertinent questions.

  While I went home and changed back into my gray suit and silk blouse, I tried to figure her out. She was right about one thing—she was a very clamped-down person. Maybe too clamped-down to be having a sudden change of heart about a brother she’d hated for thirty-odd years.

  On the other hand, it’s only human to change your mind about someone who’s dead; she could have killed him and then started to miss him. Except that she had an airtight alibi.

  Chapter Six

  After two sets of tennis and a sauna, I felt healthy enough for three people and hungry enough for a dozen. I had no qualms at all about scarfing down an entire frozen pizza before hitting Montgomery Street again.

  “I know,” said Kruzick when I went in. “What a dump, right? Listen, you want a lawyer with a fancy office, see Mel Belli, okay? Don’t complain to me—I only work here.”

  “Alan, I’m warning you—I can get a Kelly girl.”

  “You may go in now, dear. Miss Nicholson’s expecting you.”

  “Maybe not a Kelly girl—maybe a tommy gun.” I whipped past his desk as I said that, with a rustle of skirts and a click of heels. Then I gave him a withering look over my shoulder. But he was already typing, the picture of serenity, as if his conscience were clear as a mountain stream. I was afraid I’d kill him one day—sooner rather than later, probably. But, remembering I had a question for him, I put it off for a few days. “Esteemed employee,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Schwartz, ma’am.”

  “That’s more like it. Was Peter gay?”

  “What do you mean? He was taking Chris out, wasn’t he? Didn’t they… you know…” He made a two-fingered circle and put another finger through it.

  “Alan, you’re disgusting!”

  “Hey, everybody does it—you ought to try it sometime.”

  “What I meant was, was there any gossip about Peter at the theater? Like there was about Nick Dresser, remember? The one who was married to a lady named Carla but always turning up with a cute boy named Bob.”

  “Oh, Nick. He was bi, no question about it. Once he asked if Mickey and I wanted to—”

  “Alan! What about Peter?”

  He was silent for a minute, thinking about it. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem out of the question, does it? But I always thought he was just a loner.”

  “He didn’t go out with women much?”

  “Hardly ever. Hey, I think I see what you’re getting at—you think he had a gay lover, huh? And the guy got jealous of Chris and perpetrated a crime of passion. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Once again I whipped past him, doing a fair imitation of an imperious boss putting an upstart in his place.

  “Hey, employer.”

  “What is it now?”

  “There’s something fishy about that starter theft. I think the cryogenics firm might be up to something.”

  I sighed. “And what, pray tell?”

  “Well, look. If you’re going to pay a bunch of money to have your starter frozen, shouldn’t there be some guarantee? I mean, what if the warehouse burned down or something?”

  “You’d be out of luck.” I started walking toward Chris’s office.

  “Rebecca, listen to me a minute.”

  He sounded so serious, for once, that I did.

  “A firm like that ought to have a control.”

  “A control?” I was beginning to see what he was getting at. “You mean, not one but two frozen starters—in two different places?”

  “Go to the head of the class.” And he went back to typing.

  Chris came out of her office. “Did I hear what I think I did?”

  Alan smirked. “Hee-hee. Idiot-child only one with smarts.” He scratched his armpit and made gorilla noises. Chris and I retreated.

  “What,” asked Chris, “is Pigball’s name again? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Fail-Safe,” I said, understanding instantly. Chris used made-up words when she couldn’t remember real ones—which was often. Fortunately, her memory never seemed to fail her in court, but her close friends had to be good at interpreting.

  She swung a phone book over to her side of the desk, turned to F, and dialed the cryogenics firm. The manager apparently was a Chronicle reader. From what I could gather, he was very sorry Chris had lost her client but awfully hungry for details of the murder. Chris gave him a few and then reeled in her reward.

  “I understand the starter has been stolen … I was wondering about a control…ah. I see.” A couple of other questions, then good-bye.

  When she hung up, the spark had returned to her eyes for the first time since Peter’s death. “There is a control. Apparently, the underling who helped Anita didn’t know about it. Panicked when he discovered the loss. The manager, having heard that Anita is not being held for murder, has been trying to get her to tell her. It seems he was out of town, only got back a few hours ago, and couldn’t be sorrier for the inconvenience. If he’d been there, it certainly wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Where’s the control? In San Francisco or somewhere else?”

  “He wouldn’t say. I don’t really blame him, do you?”

  “I guess not. I just got back from playing tennis with Anita. I expect that’s why he couldn’t get her. It seems she hated Pete
r, but now she misses him, and even though she’s glad he’s dead, she’s sort of sorry.”

  “How disappointing. She’s supposed to be the sort of woman who knows her own mind.”

  “There’s more.”

  “I can’t say I’m thrilled about your tone of voice.”

  “It’s not pretty.”

  “I’m sitting down, okay?”

  “She’d already guessed you and Peter were together, but before she talked to you, she thought you might be a man.”

  Chris stared, unbelieving. “Peter was bi?”

  “Anita doesn’t really know; she just had a feeling.”

  “Oh, God, I should have had the same feeling! What was I thinking of?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He just—I don’t know. He wasn’t that interested in sex.”

  I breathed a little sigh of relief, glad that was all. “I guess lots of guys are like that.”

  “I guess I better get tested.”

  “Didn’t you—uh—”

  “Use condoms? Yes.” She shrugged. “Last I heard they weren’t foolproof.”

  “Well, I did ask Kruzick for the gossip on him. I’m happy to say there wasn’t any. He apparently didn’t truck with comely young men and was hardly ever seen with a woman.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “The only thing is—”

  “I know. Maybe he had a gay lover and maybe we’ll run into him. You know what I’m going to do about that? Pretend I’m Scarlett and think about it tomorrow.” Her smile was looking a little too brave.

  “You okay?”

  “I can take it, Schwartzie.”

  “Don’t call me Schwartzie. Or I won’t tell you my idea.”

  “Yes, you will, if you’ve got one. What is it?”

  “I think we have a professional duty to perform, as Peter’s attorneys. Inasmuch as four people came to our offices expecting to bid on a sourdough starter, and inasmuch as we were in charge of that ill-fated auction, I think it’s up to us to keep the four people up to date.”

  “Go on.”

  “They probably all read the Examiner and therefore think the starter’s been stolen. When actually another batch exists.”