“And then this crack private detective team you run on the side here at Cafe Heaven found out that his body had traces of LSD which I assume you think wasn’t something the general would take on his own?”
“You think right. He was the former head of mess halls for the army, very straight and very focused, to say the least. The police checked out the lift right after the accident. It worked perfectly. Tell me Bonnie, is someone guilty of murder if they give another someone drugs like LSD and then the second someone does something foolish like think they can fly or become one with the bread dough?”
Bonnie thought for a moment. “Good question, and I’ll have to find out the answer. But the question isn’t are they guilty, the question is can they be charged with murder? Big difference. But back up a minute. So Thursday the general, and today, the German. Today you all are having a tour of the bread plant, and one of your bread bakers goes to the john. The next time you see him, he’s upside down in a thousand pounds of bread dough with a rig of insulin in his hand. Do you think this is like ol’ Pigpen Hopkins, who got beaned over the head, then tossed in his barbeque sauce?”
Heaven smiled. “I don’t think so. I do get caught up in the strangest food disasters, don’t I? I couldn’t see any wounds on Dieter. Of course he was pretty sticky when they took him away. He could have had a gunshot wound, and I don’t think we would have seen it. The dough would have stopped any blood flow.”
“Of course, the police were called?” Bonnie asked.
“Of course, but as of the time they took Dieter, or the body away, it seemed like a tragic accident. And I guess it still could be, but I doubt it.”
“You don’t think it was just that dough drunk thing, and he toppled in the bin? By the way, Heaven, this dough drunk business is bizarre. Don’t tell me Pauline gets tipsy every morning?”
Heaven shook her head as she seasoned the salad dressing. “You have to be in an enclosed space with lots of dough. Now I’m not saying Dieter didn’t suffer dizziness from the ethanol in the room. But he would have the sense to get out of there if he’d been, you know, in his right mind. And if he was diabetic, who knows what the LSD would do to him.”
Bonnie took a swig of her beer and sighed. “So, at the very least, you want me to make sure the coroner checks for LSD. This Dieter, did he act loaded before he took off for the men’s room? It takes a while for that stuff to work, as you probably know better than I.”
Heaven almost complained about that assumption, then thought better of it. “He gave a speech at noon, and I didn’t talk to him after that. He was excited when he made the speech, but I thought it was nervousness. We spoke briefly at the bakery. It was about two-thirty when we got there. I seem to remember that two and a half hours would be enough time to get pretty high, if it were LSD and not a combination of dough drunk and the wrong amount of insulin.”
Bonnie went to the pass-through window. “Hey, Chris, Joe, somebody. Get me another beer, will ya.” Soon the bartender, who had heard Bonnie, sat a full bottle on the window and Bonnie turned back to Heaven.
“So, what is going on with the bread bakers? Surely after two deaths, the ARTOS gang must be getting nervous. Are they planning to get out of Dodge, so to speak?” Bonnie asked.
“Actually, the conference will end a day early. Everyone decided to bake Dieter’s breads tomorrow, from the chef he brought from Germany, and bring them to the party here tomorrow night. That will be the last event instead of the big French bread bake-off that was planned for Monday.”
“Great,” Bonnie Weber said. “You’re having another one of those Sunday night parties for visiting chefs. Those are always a disaster. And what did you just say about baking bread from the chef he brought with him from Germany? What chef? Isn’t he the chef?”
Heaven ignored the last question and responded to the insult first. “Always a disaster? We only lost one barbecue queen at that party, Bonnie. Surely your years on the homicide beat have given you more stamina than that. This should be a piece of cake, so to speak. The bakers are supplying bread and sweets. I’ll do the savory stuff. It will be more like a wake for Dieter. And the “chef” in this case is also called the “mother”. It’s the sourdough starter.”
Bonnie punched Heaven’s arm with the beer bottle. “Insider names. I guess you couldn’t be talked into just letting everyone go home without the memorial party, could you? I really didn’t like the part where someone put a pair of poisoned rats in your van. Took a lot of planning and thought. And as you know, those are my least favorite criminals, the ones that think.”
Heaven dipped a portion of penne pasta in a pot of boiling water and at the same time flipped some scallops and shrimp over in a hot sauté pan. “Once this conference is over, we won’t have a chance to figure out what happened. Everyone will go back to their lives.”
“Not the general or Dieter, babe,” Bonnie said as she headed for the backdoor of the cafe kitchen. “I’ll speak to the medical examiner’s office, but we won’t know anything until Monday. Try to get through tomorrow in one piece.”
Just then Murray stuck his head through the pass-through. “Detective Weber, are you sneaking out the back? Heaven, Sal told me to tell you that you can patent plants.”
“No way! That doesn’t seem right, does it?” Heaven asked.
Bonnie paused on her way out the door. “Remember H, big companies don’t just do research for the betterment of mankind. There has to be a way of making a buck, or they wouldn’t be interested.”
“Yeah,” Heaven said, “I guess that’s why the big chemical companies are getting into the grain business too. One of them, Monsanto or Dow, develops soybean seeds that are receptive to the herbicides and pesticides they also manufacture. They get it coming and going.”
Bonnie waved as she walked out, throwing her empty beer bottle in the big trash container by the dishwashing machine. “That makes BIG BREAD look pretty tame by comparison, doesn’t it.”
* * *
Tame definitely wouldn’t be a word to describe Cafe Heaven that night. It was busy from seven to eleven nonstop. A married couple had a knock-down-drag-out fight in the dining room, and the wife not only poured a drink on the husband but tried to break a wine bottle over his head. Murray had to stop the husband from strangling the wife. He called a girlfriend of the wife’s to come pick her up.
Then a new busboy just disappeared. One minute he was on the floor, struggling to set up five tables that turned all at the same time, the next minute he had vanished. The waiters had to set their own tables, something that led to grumbling out in the alley, where everyone went to smoke cigarettes.
About eleven, Heaven was about to step out in the alley to make sure everyone was still speaking to everyone else. In the old days she would have smoked with them but she had stopped smoking about a year before. Even so, she had only smoked when she was at the restaurant. It was a food service trap. Lots of cooks and front-of-the-house people smoked as a way of socializing. Heaven had too. But one day she went out and stood in the alley where everyone smoked and drank a glass of ice water while she talked to the troops. After that she always drank water instead of smoking.
Ice water in hand, she ran into her daughter coming in the back door. “Hi, honey. I didn’t know you were coming in tonight. Do you want to eat?”
Iris nodded. “I’m starved. I went to the nine o’clock movie with some of my high school buddies and before that we had drinks and nachos at one of the Mexican places down on the Boulevard, but that was hours ago. A couple of the girls are coming here to meet me. Where are you going?”
“Just out with the waiters, honey. Go have Murray get you a table, I should be able to leave the kitchen pretty soon and I’ll come out and say hi to the girlfriends.”
“Mom, don’t let me forget to tell you about the patent stuff I found out this morning. I read more,” Iris said as she slipped out the door to the dining room.
Heaven went back to the alley but the staff had actuall
y gone in to do their jobs. She sat on a stack of wooden crates and sipped her water, alone in the dark. What was it about kids that made your heart ache, even when they were perfectly fine? Iris had just been home for maybe the last summer vacation of her life. She was an adult, a lovely, well-adjusted young woman. Still, the sense of loss was overwhelming. She doesn’t need me anymore. I’m not her shelter from the storm. Why didn’t I have more children? I could adopt, I suppose, if only the truly physically dependent will make me feel complete, those who need you to change their diaper and feed them. Heaven jumped up. Wait a minute. She almost had that inside the restaurant, people who depended on her. Some depended on her for their livelihood, some just for an hour or two of solace and a good meal. What was the matter with her? Iris was still her child. She would still depend on Heaven for a mother’s love, no matter how old she got.
As Heaven started for the kitchen door, it opened. Walter Jinks stood there, hesitating.
“Walter, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’d planned to spend the rest of the weekend up here. I’m staying with friends, and they insisted on taking me to that fancy place on the next block. I just slipped down here while they were at the bar smoking cigars, the women too. I don’t get this new cigar craze the country is in.”
“Well, I do get a kick out of all these macho guys holding phallic objects in their mouths,” Heaven said with a grin.
“Heaven, I just came down here because, well, Dieter’s death really bothered me.”
“Everyone of us could say the same, Walter. This bread conference will be one that the ARTOS members won’t forget. I bet the next time they want to experience the heartland of America, they’ll go to Chicago.”
“Heaven, what do you think?”
“About?”
“About the chances of two people out of a small group of a hundred and twenty dying in two freak accidents?”
Heaven thought about telling Walter about her LSD theory but decided against it. Someone known for his activist work in the late sixties probably knew plenty about LSD. Walter would be the likely suspect once again. It all seemed a little too pat for Heaven’s taste. Still, she didn’t want to be the first one to mention LSD to Walter. Better let a trained law enforcement person do that, if indeed Dieter had been dosed too. “I know what you mean. Something’s rotten in Denmark, like my grandad used to say. Even if the two deaths were honest accidents, something’s not kosher.”
Walter laughed. “Well, good, we agree about that. I can’t for the life of me fit the two accidents together in any pattern.”
Heaven led Walter back into the kitchen. It was steamy and the heat felt good. It was getting a little chilly outside. Heaven shivered. “Always the scientist, eh, Walter, looking for that link, that pattern that will shed light. Well, let’s hope you don’t find it because I would much rather the two things weren’t part of some bigger picture. I’m still in shock from learning about our missing topsoil. And before you get going on that subject, I’m going to declare our worry session over. Come out front with me, and I’ll buy you a shot of some wonderful tequila.”
“Is it 100 percent agave spirits?”
Heaven pushed Walter through the swinging doors to the dining room. “Of course it is, and aged at that. Tell me what you know about distilling tequila, Walter.”
As Heaven and Walter talked small talk about tequila, Heaven tried very hard to study Walter realistically. Could he be the one causing all this trouble? Heaven knew she had been wrong before, but she felt so easy around him, comfortable. She would trust him to do the right thing for the world. Of course, in his mind that could include doing some very twisted things, Heaven kept reminding herself, like destroying those who didn’t believe the same things he did about grains. She wondered if Walter was married. He was kind of cute in an intellectual, nerdy sort of middle-aged way. Maybe it was something as trite as physical attraction that was behind Heaven’s bias toward Walter.
When they had their shots of Reposado Herradura, she raised her glass. “Here’s to the topsoil, wherever it may be,” she said as she sipped her liquor. This stuff was so smooth, you wanted to savor it. “Come over and say hi to my daughter. You met her on Thursday. Then you better head back down the street. Those cigars are close to butts by now.”
Walter left shortly, followed by Iris’s friends. Twenty minutes later, Iris and Heaven headed for 5th Street, Iris following her mother home in her rusted pickup truck. As they parked beside each other in the garage, Heaven asked, “What do you want me to do with the pickup? Sell it?”
Iris looked sternly at Heaven. “Over my dead body. Mom, I didn’t say I was never coming back, just that I wasn’t returning here to live after college. Don’t be such a drama queen.”
Heaven had to grin as they walked in the house. “Do you remember how excited we were when we found that truck, parked on someone’s farmyard with a “For Sale” sign stuck on it?”
Iris nodded. “It was near Strong City and it cost $700. I remember we had to borrow $300 from Uncle Del. We were poor that year.”
Heaven stopped at the wine rack and grabbed a bottle. “I think we need a glass of red wine to end the evening. This Truchard Syrah should do the trick. Yes, we were poor that year, but I didn’t want to ask your Dad for the money. I wanted to buy you that perfectly rusted Ford myself. I paid Del back $50 a month. Who knew it would outlast several other vehicles that have lived in this garage.”
“Well, I don’t ever want to get rid of the truck, Mom. Why don’t you drive it for a while? Hank, thinks you need a break from the van. Speaking of Hank, is he coming home soon?” Iris grabbed two wine glasses. “Should I get a glass for him?”
Heaven went up the stairs at a gallop. “No,” she called back. “He’ll be at the hospital all night. Let’s get our jammies on.”
Heaven and Iris got into their favorite sleeping tee shirts, Heaven’s from the Aspen food festival she had attended in June, and Iris’s from the latest Rolling Stones tour. They jumped into Heaven’s bed with the wine. “I’ve got news for you,” Heaven said, “and I’m sure it’s going to upset you. This afternoon, when we were at the bread factory, Dieter died. Now, I’ll tell you everything about Dieter, but then you have to tell me about the patent stuff.”
“As if any patent stuff was important after that announcement. Mom, this is too weird. What happened?”
And so Heaven told her. When she was done, Iris grabbed her mother’s hand. “Mom, I mean it. When I go back next week you have to promise me you’ll leave all this bread stuff alone. Someone is nuts.”
Heaven kissed her daughter’s cheek. “So what did you learn about patents, young lady?”
“You’re ignoring me but I’ll keep reminding you to butt out. In the meantime, I read some more in your law book. Didn’t you say BIG BREAD had applied for a patent for what the general and his staff had developed?”
“Yep,” Heaven answered.
“According to that book, only the inventors can apply for a patent. If an inventor is dead, their legal representatives or guardian can apply. If one person had the idea and the other financed its development, only the person with the idea can apply,” Iris recited.
“If the general developed it and BIG BREAD financed it, then BIG BREAD couldn’t apply for a patent? Surely the BIG BREAD lawyers know that,” Heaven said.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Iris said. “I’m sure it won’t be the first time an unscrupulous company ended up with a patent they didn’t really deserve.”
“You sound very worldly, little girl. Don’t tell me the bad guy might win.”
Iris jumped out of bed and blew her mother a kiss. “Call me anytime for a reality check, Mom. I’ll straighten you out.”
“Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
Iris stuck her head back in her Mom’s room. “That used to scare the shit out of me when I was little. Bed bugs. Gross.”
Vegetable Root Bake
1 lb.
each turnips, parsnips, sweet potatoes, new potatoes. Other options are ‘Granny Smith’ apples, rutabagas, butternut squash, acorn squash.
Apple cider
Heavy cream
Parmesan cheese
Kosher salt and white pepper
Slice the root vegetables and layer them in a non-stick sprayed casserole with the apples somewhere in the middle. Season with salt and pepper on each layer and cover roots with apple cider. Cover with foil and bake for 60 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove from the oven, uncover and add enough heavy cream to cover the vegetables. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and cook to tender, uncovered, about 30 more minutes.
Twelve
It was early morning. Heaven tried to stay in bed and wait for Hank to get home from the hospital, but she was too full of energy to stay still. She was going through her dirty clothes, throwing the ones she had already examined on the floor when Hank came up the stairs.
“What are you doing, H?” Hank said as he lay face down on the bed, clothes on.
“Looking for that photo that I, that someone gave me from the bakers’ tour on Thursday,” Heaven said, her head down in the clothes hamper.
“That reminds me, I looked up all your dead-tissue causes. They’re down in the car, honey. I forgot them. We had a hell of a night. One of the kids from down here, a Viet kid that I’ve known since I was five, came in with his wife in premature labor. They lost the baby. We had two gunshot wounds last night too. Lost one of them.” Hank had rolled over and was in the process of taking his clothes off without getting up.
Heaven stopped tearing the house apart. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Hank. “How horrible. A friend loses his baby. I don’t see how you can work in ER, honey. All that grief.”
“I don’t see it like that. I see all the people we help. Honey, would you pull off my shoes?” Hanks long legs were dangling off the bed. Heaven knelt down and kissed his knees as she untied his shoelaces.
“I was thinking about having a baby today,” Heaven said. “Actually it was yesterday I started thinking about it. I mean, I know we could never have one of our own. I had my tubes tied years ago. But we could adopt. Of course it wouldn’t be like you having your own child.”
Bread on Arrival Page 15
