Cook's Night Out

by Joanne Pence

  The gun went off, hitting the bag and blasting it open. Money exploded into the air, raining down on Angie and Connie as they grabbed each other’s hands and ran as fast as they could, screaming and shrieking for all they were worth. The gunshot, the screams, and the sight of dollars floating to the sidewalk caused brakes to slam and people to disgorge from cars, frantically crawling about to snatch up the fluttering bills.

  Angie and Connie, though, never looked back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Oh, my God! He’s not here!” Angie cried. She and Connie screeched to a halt in the doorway of the Homicide Bureau’s inner office, where the inspectors’ desks were located.

  “Where is he?” Connie wailed, shaking from fear and panting hard from their run from the parking lot to the Hall of Justice. “What if somebody followed us here? You said he’d take care of us!”

  “Stop! You can’t just barge in there!” Betty, the secretary, jumped up from her desk in the outer office.

  Angie turned to Connie in horror. “He kept hinting that they might fire him,” she gasped. “What if they have?”

  “Oh, no! How could they do that to us?” Connie shrieked.

  “Or to him?” Angie wailed.

  “Ladies, please!” Betty said. “I must ask you to…” She stopped speaking, shocked, as one of the bag ladies took off her granny glasses and wiped the tears from her dirty face. “Angie?”

  “That’s Lieutenant Hollins’s office, isn’t it?” Angie asked, pointing to a side door.

  “Yes, but you can’t—Wait!”

  Angie burst into the office. Hollins sat at his desk chewing his cigar and reading the sports page. At the sight of two wig-wearing bag ladies bursting into his office, his mouth dropped open and the cigar fell out.

  “How’d you get in here?” he asked, jumping to his feet.

  “What did you do with Paavo?” Angie demanded.

  “Who will help us?” Connie cried.

  “What do I care?” Hollins bellowed. “Get out!”

  “You moron!” Angie yelled. “You did fire him, didn’t you?”

  Hollins’s whole face, up to and including his high, balding forehead, turned purple. “What the hell are you talking about?” he thundered. “I’ll have you arrested.”

  “Arrested? Who cares about arrested? We were nearly killed!” Angie slammed her hand on his desk. “Not that the police department gives a fig what happens to its citizens!”

  “Not about some of its citizens, that’s for sure! Betty!” he bellowed for the secretary.

  Angie waggled her finger under his nose. “You had the best homicide inspector in the whole country and you let him go! Your brains should be sautéed and served with eggs for lunch!”

  “Get out now or I’ll have you fumigated!”

  “You don’t scare me! I just faced down a killer. You’re a nothing. A wart on a pig’s snout. A pickled herring among barracuda. A chicken gizzard in a filet mignon world!”

  “Angie, uh…cute hat.”

  “Ducks’ feet in…” She whirled around, and her jaw dropped. There was no mistaking it. There he was, standing tall in the doorway, a quizzical expression on his face. “Paavo! What are you doing here?”

  “I was at the photocopy machine. Betty came and found me.”

  “Oh, God!” She rushed over and grabbed his lapels. “We were nearly killed! Van Warren shot at us but hit Lili’s bag instead. Money flew all over and there was a near riot on the Embarcadero, and we were so scared and ran right over here and then we thought that you were…” She glanced back at Hollins and blanched in horror at the thought of what she’d just said to Paavo’s boss. “I…I thought you’d been…fired.”

  His face was hard. “Van Warren shot at you? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.” Glancing at a very red-faced Lieutenant Hollins, still standing at his desk, she smiled nervously at him, put the granny glasses back on her smudged nose, and fluffed her wig.

  “Somebody tried to kill me,” she said sweetly, giving him a big smile. “I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I shouted at you like that.”

  Hollins glanced from her to Connie to Paavo, his face growing redder by the moment.

  Paavo turned her toward the exit. “Sorry for the interruption, Chief. I’ll explain it all later.”

  “In triplicate, Smith!”

  Arms circling their waists, Paavo quickly ushered Angie and Connie down the hall, away from Hollins and the little knot of homicide inspectors crowded in the doorway gleefully taking in every word.

  “Paavo,” Angie said as they waited for a down elevator to arrive.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “Do you really think this is a cute hat?”

  After taking off their wigs, washing their faces in the ladies’ room in the Hall, and making themselves look reasonably presentable again, Angie and Connie went into the coffee shop to join Paavo.

  In a babbling, excited chorus they told him all about trailing Lili to the old man’s house just off Twenty-second Street, the Macy’s bag switch on the BART train, and finally Van Warren’s sudden appearance, foiling their attempt to steal the bag from Lili.

  Paavo was so furious with them for taking such a chance—not to mention a peccadillo like mugging Lili Charmaine—that he sent them home in squad cars.

  He and Yosh retrieved the U-Haul and scouted around for the missing Safeway shopping carts. He felt the streets of San Francisco would be safer if Angie didn’t try to return the truck by herself.

  After returning the U-Haul, Paavo and Yosh went back to the part of the Embarcadero where Angie and Connie had told him Warren stood when he fired at them. Paavo was fiercely determined to find the bullet Warren fired. With ricochets, it could have ended up almost anywhere. But if it had hit a car or pedestrian, they would have heard, so chances were good that it was still somewhere on that particular city block.

  Nearly two hours later, Paavo found the bullet about ten feet off the ground, lodged in the wall of a building. Yosh boosted him up while he played Spider Man, splayed against the side of the wall and digging the bullet out with a penknife.

  Back at the Hall, Paavo gave the bullet to the crime lab to see if they could match it up with bullets found in the murdered numbers runners or the bookie Paavo had found murdered. Then he went to his desk and used the cross-directories to find out who lived in the house Lili had visited. Fortunately, he had more luck than either he or Yosh were having trying to find the elusive Gretchen.

  It was a rental. The renter’s name wasn’t given, but the owner’s was.

  He called the owner, stated who he was, and asked for the name of the renter. “Ruiz Buyat,” he was told.

  Buyat…the name sounded familiar.

  He took out the file of the interviews he’d held since beginning the numbers cases and went back over them.

  There it was. Ruiz Buyat, sixty-four years old, Filipino, an employee of the StayBrite Janitorial Service—the outfit that held the Hall of Justice contract. He’d worked for the company twenty-five years and been a supervisor for the past eight. Paavo had spoken with him briefly when he was investigating access to the Property Control Section and trial case evidence.

  Buyat had insisted that the janitors were prohibited from entering secure rooms unless someone responsible was present and watching. On the other hand, the service apparently had master keys to all the rooms. It would have been easy for a trusted supervisor to get his hands on the set of master keys.

  A longtime janitorial supervisor could have easily watched the Property Control Section staff to find out where keys and combinations to the storage cabinets and evidence lockers were kept. Someone might even have figured out how to sneak in and switch some evidence.

  A break at last, Paavo thought, fighting to contain his excitement. It was all still conjecture. He needed answers to a few more questions, and so he went down to the basement. The janitors’ central duty station was located there—the spot where they che
cked in to work and kept their cleaning supplies and the smocks they wore over their clothes.

  “Is Ruiz Buyat working tonight?” he asked the man behind the sign-in booth.

  “Not tonight, sir,” the fellow said.

  “By the way, do you have a key to room B-fortyeight?” That was where the Property Control Section’s locker room was located.

  “B-forty-eight. Let me see.” The man rummaged through some keys and found it, but then put it back down. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you in there. It’s a restricted area.”

  But the key was available to the janitors. Restricted, sure. Restricted to some, but perhaps not to a janitor who chose to sneak in.

  “That’s okay,” Paavo said. “I understand. Oh, by the way, do you know if Mr. Buyat worked the fourth floor recently? Or, more specifically, room four-fifty, in Homicide?”

  “Since he’s a supervisor, he can check up on any crew he wants. Mostly his charges are in the basement, but he can go up to four anytime. There’s no way to tell. Is there a problem?”

  “No. None at all. Just wondering.”

  “Should I tell Buyat you were looking for him?” the man asked, suddenly uneasy at the pleased look on the big homicide inspector’s face.

  “No need,” Paavo said. “I’ll call him at home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “The smell of your chocolate is filling my apartment,” Stan said. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to come over and help.”

  “Help me cook it or help eat it?”

  “Your wish is my command, Angie.”

  Angie leaned against her door, blocking his entrance. She really didn’t want to deal with Stan. She didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone ever again. Yesterday, between Van Warren’s trying to kill her and then Paavo’s sending her home like a naughty child, she was ready to give up on the human race. Humans were either too dangerous or too foul-tempered.

  On top of that, she was so scared, her bed had shaken all night—and she’d been alone in it.

  “Aren’t you ever going back to work?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a new problem.” He lifted a limp wrist. “Carpal tunnel syndrome.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you could get it from using a TV remote control.”

  “How’d you guess?” He peered past her into her apartment. “Where’s your cohort in chocolate?” he asked.

  “She had to work today. Listen, Stan, I’m really busy.”

  “I can imagine. Cooking chocolate all by yourself! Never fear, though. I’m here to help.”

  She gave up and stepped aside. He scooted into the living room. “I don’t need help,” she said, shutting the door. “What I’ve got to do is to figure out my angelina. Reverend Hodge will let me use it as a centerpiece during the auction. That would be great publicity—a big boost for my career as a chocolatier.”

  “A piece of chocolate candy?” Stan peered back over his shoulder at her. “What’s it a centerpiece for? Ants?”

  “That’s the problem, exactly! I wanted my angelina to be something small, not huge. But I thought I might be able to come up with an oversized version of it…whatever it is.”

  “Maybe that’s too much to ask of a centerpiece?”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing, I’m afraid.”

  “On the other hand,” Stan said, his voice annoyingly enthusiastic, “you haven’t had the genius of Stan the Man at work on the problem. I even amaze myself sometimes with the remarkable ideas that pop into my head.”

  “Oh?”

  “I might come up with something you never dreamed of,” he said. “What have you thought of so far?”

  “That’s the trouble,” Angie sighed. “Nothing. And I’ve got only today and tomorrow to come up with something. The auction’s only two days away!” She turned and walked back toward the kitchen, Stan following close behind. Cookbooks and magazines were spread all over.

  “Where’s the candy machine?” he asked.

  “I shipped it back.”

  “Really? I thought you had a good thing going.”

  “You’re sick.”

  He walked over to the counter by the sink. “You think I’m sick? What about you? Look at all these cabbage leaves! You’ve painted them with chocolate. Really, Angie, I know you have a recipe for chocolate cake with sauerkraut, the thought of which gives me near-terminal shudders, but if you put raw cabbage in your angelinas, I really don’t think anybody’s going to want to buy them.”

  “The cabbage isn’t to eat, silly. I’m using it to make molds.”

  “Molds or moldy?”

  Angie rolled her eyes and grabbed a magazine off the counter. “Look at this picture,” she said, thrusting the magazine at him. He stared at a photo of cabbage-leaf-shaped chocolate pieces put together in a large roselike design. “I’m trying to learn how to make it,” Angie explained. “I used a pastry brush to spread the chocolate onto the backs of some leaves and the fronts of others, then I let the chocolate harden. The tough part is to leave all the ribbed markings of the cabbage on the chocolate when I pull off the leaf.”

  “And that’s supposed to look good?” Stan said, holding the photo out at arm’s length and shaking his head.

  To demonstrate, Angie tried peeling off the cabbage for the first piece. The chocolate cracked into tiny pieces. “See what I mean?” she moaned.

  She tried the second one, this time more carefully, and had better success. By the third piece, she was starting to get the hang of it. But on the fourth piece, the chocolate shattered again. “Guess I’d better not get too cocky,” she said to Stan, who was hanging over her shoulder watching with growing fascination.

  When she’d finished peeling off the cabbage leaves, she bunched the small molded chocolate pieces in the center, then added increasingly larger pieces around it, until the whole thing began to look like a rose. When she’d finished, she stepped back and admired her handiwork. “How’s that for an angelina?”

  “It’s pretty,” Stan admitted. “It’d look nice as a centerpiece. Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s no angel-ina. It’s a cabbage-ina!” He roared with laughter. Angie didn’t find it funny in the least.

  Angie took her cabbage rose centerpiece to the mission. She wanted reactions to it from Reverend Hodge and the other volunteers. It didn’t grab her the way she’d hoped a centerpiece would, but on the other hand, with all the madness around her—especially her worry that Warren might realize she was the bag lady who had tried to mug Lili—it was amazing that she’d come up with any kind of centerpiece at all. If all else failed, she’d buy a big floral arrangement. Who’d know the difference?

  “Miss Amalfi!” Reverend Hodge walked toward her with open arms. “Only two more days. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better about the auction,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know if I feel good because it’s still to come or because it’ll be over soon. But whichever, I’m a lot more relaxed. So, what’s that you’re carrying?”

  “I thought it might be my centerpiece.” She put the box on a table and lifted off the lid.

  He peered in the box. There was a long pause. “Chocolate cabbage leaves?” he asked finally. “We were poor when I was a kid. We ate lots and lots of cabbage. I don’t get it.”

  She put the lid back on the box. “You’re right. I have to work on it a bit more.”

  He walked away scratching his head.

  Maybe the problem was that he recognized the leaves, she thought. Perhaps if they didn’t look so cabbagey…

  “Hey, Angie.” Lili bustled into the office. “I heard you brought a centerpiece, but it wasn’t awesome. The Rev thought maybe you want help.”

  “News sure travels fast around here,” Angie said.

  “Yeah. ’Specially when it’s bad.”

  Angie took the lid off. “I thought it was pretty,” she said, a little apolo
getically.

  Lili cocked her head. “Cabbage leaves? Hello-o-o. Who wants to look at cabbage?”

  “Maybe you’re right. I could make it look more like a floral sprig.”

  “Heck, no. You’ve got to do something that people way in the back can see. An idea is raging in my head! Tell you what—if you can’t find anything else, I’ll let you borrow something I’ve got. People will be, like, all amazed when they see it. I think it’s a miracle. Axel said I’m all whacked-out about it, but still, he can’t explain it either. I even told Reverend Hodge that I thought it was, like, a miracle, and he said if that’s what I believed, he couldn’t say I was wrong.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a big bottle, and inside it…you’re going to think I’m lying, or I’ve been drinking or something…but inside is a great big ship. It’s got all the sails and everything. I mean, like, the whole thing is in there. And the bottle has a little bitsy mouth. And no seams. I’m not talking no glued-back-together bottle. I checked it real good for that. And then I spent hours and hours trying to figure out how somebody built that big ship inside the bottle, but I can’t.”

  “A ship in a bottle?” Angie couldn’t believe Lili’s enthusiasm about such a traditional item.

  “It’s way cool, Angie,” Lili said, her eyes wide.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Angie said dismissively, but then something niggled in the back of her mind. Was it what Lili was talking about…or what Stan had said? Forget it, Angie told herself. The two of them didn’t know much about centerpieces. “If I need it, I’ll let you know.”

  Lili looked at the chocolate cabbage leaves again. “Well, you’re going to need something.”

  Paavo and Yosh knocked on the door to Ruiz Buyat’s house. Paavo had called and stopped by the house last evening, and called again this morning, but there had been no answer. He and Yosh thought it was worth another try this afternoon.