Cooking Most Deadly

by Joanne Pence

  “I’m sure you do.”

  The desk clerk reached their side. “Inspector Smith, this is Arthur Mills. Do you recognize her, Arthur?”

  “Not at all.”

  The manager handed back the photo. “Sorry, Inspector.”

  Paavo tucked it in his breast pocket. “Do either of you work nights?”

  “Our guests are rarely here only at night,” Sneed said.

  Paavo repeated his question.

  “No.”

  “What time does your night shift report? And also, I’d like to take a look at your guest register for, let’s say, the past eight weeks.”

  Paavo went through the guest register carefully, but saw nothing at all that jumped out at him as odd. Not even any repeat names. He gave the material back to the manager. “Everyone who stayed in this hotel is listed here, is that correct?” he asked.

  “Well…not exactly,” Sneed said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The city rents a suite here at all times. They keep it for special guests because it’s nearly impossible to find superior accommodations in this city on short notice. In summer, the suite is filled constantly. That’s not the case this time of year. Several of the, er, dignitaries of the city have access to the suite—keys, in other words. They come and go as they please.”

  “They don’t have to check in and out at the front desk?”

  “We ask them to. But we know they don’t all do so.”

  “Do you have a list of people with keys?”

  “We only issued one—to the mayor’s office. But I know more have been given out because the maids have told me they’ve seen different people entering or leaving on occasion. Of course, the height of propriety is always observed.”

  “Of course,” Paavo said. “Thanks for the information.”

  Angie telephoned Paavo that evening. “I’d like to go with you to Mrs. St. Clair’s funeral tomorrow afternoon,” she said.

  There was a long pause. “You know how much I enjoy having you with me, Angie,” he began, “but—”

  “My father knows Judge St. Clair. I’ll represent the family. He shouldn’t go anyway, his heart, you know. It’s not good for him to be around murder victims.”

  “I’m not going there as a social gesture.”

  “I know. You do your thing, and I’ll have enough etiquette for both of us.”

  “What’s the real reason you want to go?”

  “No real reason, other than I want to be with you. By the way, I met Connie Rogers.”

  “You what?”

  “She’s an old girlfriend of my cousin Buddy. In fact, she’s still interested in him, if I’m any judge.”

  “Where did this cousin suddenly appear from?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’ve got a lot of cousins you haven’t met yet.”

  “It means that it’s pretty convenient that your cousin’s love life involves the family of my murder victim.”

  “You are so suspicious, Inspector. Look, Tiffany’s older sister and a number of my relatives are near the same age, and all went to Catholic high schools in the city. It’s natural at least one of them would know her. How many Catholic highs do you think we have here?”

  “Obviously not enough to keep you out of my cases.”

  “Before you complain, let me tell you about ‘El.’”

  Angie told him about her conversation with Connie Rogers the previous day. After leaving Connie’s, Angie had driven straight to City Hall. She found her voting district’s supervisor and made a pest of herself until she received an in-house telephone directory that gave the names of each department head in city government, their deputies, and their mid-level managers.

  She concentrated on the department heads. Tiffany liked men with money and power. She wouldn’t have bothered with a mid-level manager, and the deputies were also iffy. Angie found four top level people whose names started with L. The chief of Police and a member of the Board of Supervisors were both named Lawrence, the district attorney was named Lloyd, and Llewellan was the chief of the Department of Sanitation. Besides them, the mayor’s executive officer was named Luis.

  Now, she needed to see how these men looked and acted—to see if any of them might seem the sort of man Tiffany could have been interested in. Since it was likely that they knew the judge, they might be at the funeral. It was a good place to check them out.

  “Hold everything, Angie. First of all, how do you know El is the first name? Why not the last?”

  “I admit it’s a guess. But all the women I know refer to their boyfriends by their first names. Maybe it’s a Catholic school thing, but last names are usually used as a joke.”

  “Before you go rushing off with this, let me talk to Manuela. If she’s the one who came up with El Amigo, it’s just a blind alley.”

  “I knew you’d help!” Angie said.

  He seemed to make a strange guttural sound before hanging up the phone.

  The next day Paavo picked Angie up at her apartment, and they rode in his old Austin Healey to the mortuary.

  “I talked to Manuela,” he said as he drove.

  “What did she say?”

  “That she knows nothing about ‘el’ and never used the term ‘el amigo.’”

  “All right!”

  A large crowd stood outside the building talking in hushed tones, and an even larger crowd was inside.

  Paavo circled the outside group, then did the same indoors, to get a sense of who was here. Angie followed, trying to get a glimpse of those on her list of L names.

  “Tell me, Paavo,” she whispered, holding his arm, “which one is your boss, Lawrence?”

  Paavo put his arm around her waist, speaking quietly into her ear as he looked over the crowd. “It wouldn’t matter if the chief of police had ten L’s in his name, he didn’t date Tiffany Rogers.”

  “How do you know?”

  “His wife would kill him.”

  “Some men can be pretty sneaky.”

  “Not from their wives—or not for long,” Paavo said. “That’s him. Blue suit, gray hair. That’s his wife in the green suit. I’ve known him for ten years, Angie.”

  “Hmm.” Angie nearly bored a hole through him trying to figure out if he looked like someone Tiffany might have dated. “His eyes are shifty,” she announced.

  Paavo turned her to face in another direction. “Forget him,” he said, but even as he said it, he thought of the Sans Souci clerk’s description of the man who bought the bracelet for Tiffany. No. Impossible.

  “Do you see any of the others?” Angie asked. “I know what Supervisor Coglin—Larry Coglin—looks like, but I haven’t seen him here. Isn’t it suspicious that he wouldn’t come?”

  Paavo frowned. “Could be. Lloyd Fletcher, the DA, is the tall, white-haired fellow near the judge.” Fletcher was another one who met the clerk’s description. Paavo thought about his strange conversation with Fletcher. How the man had insisted that he not pursue finding Rogers’s boyfriend. That it could ruin a man’s reputation and not lead to the killer, anyway. Could Angie actually be on the right track here?

  “I’ve seen him before. He wants to be mayor, I hear.”

  “So they say.”

  “And the others?”

  “I don’t know the chief of sanitation—you’re on your own there. And I don’t see the mayor’s XO.”

  “X—, oh, the executive officer. All you government types talk in letters. Say, I wonder if the L isn’t an initial for a name at all, but a job? An L? What job could that be?”

  “No government job just has one letter. Bureaucrats are always too long-winded. You know that.”

  “Considering his fling with Tiffany, how about Ladies’ Man?”

  “That’d be LM.”

  “You’re so precise, Inspector. Let’s find the—what did you call him? The XO.”

  Paavo noticed a deliveryman hovering nearby holding a bouquet of roses up in front of his face. If he never saw a rose again, it�
��d be too soon. All the flowers should have been up by the casket already, though. Why would a deliveryman—

  “Oh, look, Paavo!” Angie leaned close against him. “There’s someone new at the door. Good-looking, too. Hispanic, I think. Could he be Luis the XO?”

  Paavo faced the doorway. “That’s him.”

  “Let’s go over there. I want a better look at him.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  He turned back to check on the deliveryman. Paavo let go of Angie and slowly starting walking toward the casket. Near the side exit, he saw a bouquet of roses lying on the ground.

  He scanned the room quickly, then hurried out the exit. It led to a side alleyway. He ran down the alley to the street, to find another crowd milling about, getting into and out of cars and talking. He saw far too many of them wearing gray slacks similar to the deliveryman’s.

  The man’s upper body seemed to be clothed in beige—a sweater, most likely. But his face…

  All Paavo could remember was the sight of the roses.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Paavo picked up the crime lab report, read it once quickly, then threw it down on his desk. “No good news, I take it,” Yosh said.

  Paavo handed it to him. “They couldn’t lift any prints off the rose display, not even off the vase they were placed in. It had to have been him, standing right there, listening to me, laughing. Damn! I looked right at him.”

  “Hey, you weren’t the only one. I missed him, too. I mean, you expect to see flowers being delivered to a funeral.”

  “What if that was the way he got into Tiffany’s apartment? What if he wasn’t someone she knew at all, but just some guy delivering flowers? She might have opened the door for him.”

  “Could be,” Yosh agreed. “She wouldn’t want the flowers to die. Instead, she did.”

  “A deliveryman goes along with what the kid saw,” Paavo said. He felt a sudden chill as he remembered the roses one of Angie’s students had delivered to her.

  “What’s wrong?” Yosh asked.

  He shook away the feeling. “Nothing. By the way, who would you say is the biggest gossip in Homicide?”

  “Benson wins hands down. Why?”

  “I’m curious about our friend the DA.”

  “Careful, Paav.”

  “I know.”

  Yosh picked up the DMV report Paavo had been reading and scanned it quickly. “I thought we had him when those patrolmen wrote down the green Honda’s license number. Now I see the car’s registered to a dead man.”

  “I asked for a bulletin to go out on it anyway. I’d like to talk with this ghost driver.”

  “A hundred bucks and you can buy any kind of ID you want on the street,” Yosh said. “They make things tougher for us all the time.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Calderon muttered as he walked into Homicide, scowling harder than usual.

  “Hey, buddy,” Yosh said. “How’s it going?”

  Calderon winced. “Another robbery.”

  Paavo and Yosh jumped up and crossed to his desk. “Another fake egg?”

  “Who would have thought this city would be so lousy with phony Russian eggs? That was the fourth robbery. Some weird little guy with a fake beard and black wig. Not hard to spot, I’d say. Maybe I should transfer and help solve their cases? Those guys need lots of help if they can’t nab someone going around looking like a bearded Charlie Chaplin.”

  “In other words, no new leads on Nathan Ellis’s murder?”

  “I followed up on what the clerk at Sans Souci told you—the one who said some woman was asking a lot of questions. Seems a woman who looked like her was at this gift shop the day before the attack.”

  “Good work,” Yosh said. “It sounds like the thief is a woman.”

  “Not so fast,” Calderon cautioned. “Me and the guys in Robbery thought of that already. So, to check it out, I went into a jeweler’s that wasn’t robbed, gave the same description, and asked if a similar woman had been in the store the day before, asking questions. They, too, said yes. About five of them. In other words, women ask about Fabergé eggs. What else is new?”

  “Great,” Yosh said. “So much for that theory.”

  “Don’t rule it out completely,” Paavo cautioned. “Not yet, anyway. The reaction of the woman the San Souci clerk spoke to wasn’t normal, no matter how often women ask about such things.”

  “I guess we could track all the women who show interest in the eggs if we didn’t want to do anything else for a few weeks.”

  “We’ve got until Easter,” Paavo said. “Then the eggs disappear, and so does our murderer. A little over three weeks.”

  “We’ll get him,” Calderon said, showing more energy than usual.

  “Let’s mark the city map with the stores that were robbed,” Paavo said. “Look for a pattern.”

  “With little Easter bunny stickers,” Yosh said.

  “The only pattern is that the robberies happen on Tuesday—so far. It’s nothing I’d count on, though. Easter, good God! Who’d have thought Easter would bring out the wackos? I thought people weren’t religious anymore?”

  Just then Bo Benson walked in. “Excuse me,” Paavo said, “but I’ve got some gossip to catch up on.”

  “You’ve got to do it, Connie,” Angie said. She faced Connie across the counter of Everyone’s Fancy.

  “I don’t feel right about it.” Connie wiped dust and fingerprints from the carousel horses and tried to shut out Angie’s arguments.

  “Don’t you want to know who was dating your sister? The guy didn’t identify himself to the police, didn’t even go to her funeral. But there’s a chance he knows something about whoever killed her. And there’s always the chance he killed her himself.”

  “And the judge’s wife?” Connie said, dusting faster.

  “So the killer’s a psychopathic government big shot. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Connie wielded her Windex bottle. “It was random, Angie. It had to have been. Some serial killer. It’d be just like my sister to take up with a Ted Bundy type.”

  “Paavo doesn’t think it was random. He thinks there’s a reason those women were chosen—we just don’t know what the reason is yet.”

  “I don’t know, Angie. I hate to do anything that might mess up the investigation. Besides, I think my sister really fell for this guy. It wasn’t like her not to brag about whoever she was seeing, but she kept quiet about him. Could be because she loved him.”

  “All the more reason to find out who he is. The investigation is stalled. His own boss is trying to stop Paavo from talking to City Hall.” She paused to chew her lower lip. “Gee, I wonder what Lieutenant Hollins’s first name is? I’ll have to ask Paavo—if I can manage without him bellowing at me about it.”

  “Paavo bellows?”

  “I seem to bring out the best in him. Anyway, I know my idea won’t mess up anything. You can close the store for a couple of hours, then come back here.”

  “I don’t know. It’s close to Easter and Passover. I’m selling a lot of little gifts.”

  “Speaking of gifts,” Angie said, “you should get rid of those Fabergé eggs. Someone’s been going around the city stealing them.”

  “You’re kidding. Who’d want to steal such a thing?”

  “Nobody knows, but Paavo was involved because one of the clerks was killed by the robber.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Oh, yes. Homicide calls it the Easter Egg Murder. Let’s carry them in the back, then get out of here. Okay?”

  “I give up. Let me move the money to the safe first. Could you lock the door, Angie?” Connie waited by the cash register.

  Just as Angie was swinging the door shut, a strange-looking little man, dressed in black clothes, wearing what looked like a wig and fake beard, appeared before her. “Sorry, you’ll have to come back later,” Angie announced, then shut the door in his face and flipped the sign to CLOSED.

  The two women drove in Angi
e’s Ferrari to Tiffany’s apartment, where they spent some time going through her closets. Most of the belongings would be given to charity or sold off. Finally, they found the perfect thing.

  An hour later, they went to Tiffany’s hairdresser, who was only too happy to oblige despite a salon of customers. A big tip helped.

  “Actually,” Connie said, “it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  “Very good,” Angie said with a critical eye. The light blond color and short, stylish hairdo were a definite improvement over Connie’s mousy brown side part and fringe. Next, she meticulously applied makeup, a pair of Tiffany’s long, dangling earrings, and exchanged Connie’s low, comfortable shoes for a pair of spike heels.

  “Let’s go,” Angie said with a burst of excitement. The other woman looked uncertainly at her, but nodded.

  They started out at City Hall. Up on the second floor, they went to the mayor’s office. The reception area was large and elegant, decorated in an eighteenth century style reminiscent of the White House.

  A receptionist smiled pleasantly as Angie approached.

  “I need to see the mayor,” Angie announced.

  The gray-haired woman reached for her appointment book. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but it’s very important.”

  She gazed up at Angie. “What is it regarding?”

  “East and West Pakistan.”

  “Pakistan?” She blinked rapidly several times behind her bifocals. “I don’t believe there are East and West Pakistans any longer.”

  “I know, and that’s the problem. I’m part of the Coalition to Resurrect All Pakistans. The acronym is unfortunate, but it does not reflect on our cause! Our group believes the city of San Francisco needs to be involved in this! We are the city that knows how! We’re in the forefront of all important movements, and this, I assure you, is a most important movement.”

  The receptionist stood. “I’m sorry, miss, the mayor is out.”

  Angie squared her shoulders and smoothed the front panel of her red Ellen Tracy suit—the kind businesswomen called a power suit. “I’m not leaving until I speak to someone in authority. This means a lot to the people of this city.”