To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

by Joanne Pence

  The block of Filbert they walked down had no paved roadway. Instead, wooden stairs and walkways zigzagged along the hillside, surrounded by trees, vines, ferns, and a lush central garden.

  About a third of the way down, she opened a small wooden gate and stepped onto a stone walk-way through a tiny fern garden to a white cottage. Paavo wore a bemused but curious expression. Many of the homes on this hill had been miners’ shacks when first built, but had withstood the big earthquake and fire of 1906, and by way of age and location, were now worth nearly as much as one of the mines might have been.

  As she pulled a key from her purse and dangled it in front of him, he murmured, “Home sweet home.”

  “You figured it out!” Wearing a big smile, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said.

  In almost no time, she showed him the little foursquare house. The front door opened to a pleasant parlor, with casement windows overlooking the Filbert gardens, and a brick fireplace on the righthand wall. Beyond the living room an archway led to a dining area with French doors that opened to a deck. The kitchen was to the left of the dining area. The sole bedroom was to the left of the front door. Like the living room, it also looked out onto the Filbert steps and central gardens. A bathroom had been built off the bedroom, probably as an after-thought many years ago.

  Angie could have put two of these cottages into her apartment.

  “My cousin Richie, who’s in real estate, owes my father a favor,” she said. “When I told him what happened to me, he gave me the place for a month. Two if we want it.”

  “You’ve never talked to me about your cousin Richie before.”

  She shrugged. If she were to tell him about all her relatives, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

  Paavo didn’t pursue it. “So where is he going to live?”

  “He doesn’t live here. It’s one of his rentals. It’s vacant now, that’s all.” She couldn’t explain why the place was nicely furnished and stocked with food. Some things were best not to question.

  “I don’t know about this,” Paavo muttered. Despite his uncertainty, he seemed to find the little house appealing. It invited comfort and relaxation. As he peered out the window at the Filbert steps and the lush, green garden that gave it a secure, almost tropical feeling, she thought he was weakening. “This is nice, but it would make more sense for you to leave the city and stay at your parents’ house.”

  Her gaze gripped his. “Is that really what you want?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  She smiled with relief. “It’s settled, then. We’ll stay here, safe and comfortable, while you find out what’s going on.” Taking his hand, she led him through the French doors to a postage-stamp-size deck filled with containers of flowers. The hillside dropped away beneath it. “Look at how pretty the geraniums and impatiens are, even at this time of year. It’s like a touch of springtime, right in the heart of the city. This place will be good for us.”

  “To find out how incompatible we really are?” he asked.

  Her arm circled his waist. “We know that already. Siskel and Ebert had nothing on us.”

  She’s right about that, Paavo thought. He draped an arm over her shoulders. “It sounds like you’ve made up your mind.” He knew a steamroller when one hit him—even if only a hundred ten pounder. He had to admit the thought of living here with Angie on a trial basis appealed to him. He even had to admit that living with Angie on a permanent basis was something he dwelled on at length.

  “We’re here. Let’s enjoy ourselves.” She faced him, her back against the railing. “I stopped at the grocery. How do grilled strip steaks with olive and oregano relish, pine nut and basil rice, steamed zucchini, and a romaine salad with Parmesan dressing sound to you? I thought it would be nice to stay home for dinner.”

  Home…He liked the sound of that. He placed his hands on her small waist.

  “And after dinner we can go to your place and pick up Hercules,” she added.

  “Can I trust you not to spoil that cat, Angie?”

  “Nope.” She grinned wickedly. “And I’ll spoil his master, too, if given half a chance.” He moved closer, very much liking the gleam in her eye, and quite ready to let himself be spoiled any way she wanted.

  Her cell phone began to ring. Her voluminous tote was on the pine table in the dining area. She dug around in it until she found the phone. After listening for a minute, her face paled, she murmured, “Okay,” and handed the call to Paavo. “It’s Yosh. I thought he was still on vacation. Your phone is switched off or the battery’s dead. That’s why he tried me. He says it’s urgent.”

  Paavo took the phone, a thousand questions going through his head at the word his partner used. Urgent in police lingo meant very bad news.

  “Yosh, what’s up?” he asked.

  “It seems there was a break-in,” Yosh replied. “At your stepfather’s.” A long moment went by before Yosh added, “He was shot.”

  Seventy miles south of Tucson, US Highway 19 crossed the Arizona border into Mexico at Nogales. Other Arizona crossings were smaller, like the mountain pass from Douglas to Agua Prieta about a hundred miles east, or the blistering, barren desert crossing at Sonoita, over a hundred miles to the west. Around Nogales, the land consisted of rough desert, parched ranchland, a few paved roads, and lots of footpaths for illegal crossings.

  On an expanse of land on the Mexican side, thirty miles southeast of the border checkpoint, in an area so remote and desolate not even illegals dotted the landscape by night, stood a two-room adobe. The house and garden were ringed by a four-foot adobe wall with a flat overhanging stone along the top, and a solid wooden gate. Such a wall helped keep down the number of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas that made it into the house.

  A woman walked out of the gate and shut it firmly behind her. Her tooled leather boots crunched on the umber-colored rock and gritty sand as she continued along the well-worn path from the gate to the nearest saguaro. She was tall and angular, her muscles toned from a daily routine of weights and running. Her gray hair was clipped short. Her eyes were also gray, but tinged with green—the color of the cholla and Mexican sage that dotted the Sonora Desert she had learned to call home.

  She didn’t know if she could ever learn to truly love the desert. She’d grown up along the eastern seaboard, Maryland as a child, then to Massachusetts while a teenager, until she moved south again. She missed the greenery of that area, the thick foliage of the trees and bushes in spring and summer, the bright colors of autumn, and the peacefulness after a fresh snow. But most of all, she missed the water. Beautiful, blue, cool water. She missed the streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, of her childhood.

  She had learned to respect the desert in all its craggy intensity, its harshness, and its desolation. It constantly tested, and had made her stronger. The desert, more than anything she had ever known, taught her to abide.

  A square metallic target holder hung from an arm of the cactus. She attached a new paper target to it. Then, just for the hell of it, she reached into the yellow straw pouch she carried, and lined up five tin cans in a row on the ground beneath the target.

  The day before, she’d made her weekly jaunt across the border to the main Tucson post office to pick up copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. The papers had no routine delivery to any location in southern Arizona, and having them mailed directly to a small town closer to home would have caused too much local curiosity. For that reason, she subscribed to them as “Jennifer MacGraw”—as good a name as any. Tucson was big enough, and so full of sun-seeking out-of-towners, that such mail deliveries received little notice there. And if anyone was sufficiently curious, let them try to find Jennifer MacGraw with her shoulder-length platinum-blond hair and heavy makeup.

  Last evening, after a simple dinner of refried frijoles, chorizo, and tortillas, she’d settled down to read the news. For years now, she’d found nothing of importance in the paper
s, and never expected last night to be any different. Force of habit kept her at it. With some shock she noted the murder of a jeweler during a robbery. It wasn’t an unexpected occurrence, she realized, even if the jeweler was Gregor Rosinsky.

  Ironically, she’d almost overlooked the tiny article tucked deep in the Examiner, near the obituary page, about the murder of another old man—Jacob Platt.

  Only as she read about that second murder did her heart begin to drum and her nerves turn raw and tight.

  She wondered if the authorities had found out yet that the victim’s name was really Jakob Platnikov. And if they had, did they realize what it meant?

  She paced off exactly twenty steps from the target. Keeping her back to it, she placed her gear on the ground and picked up each item in turn. She first put on the polycarbonate wraparound safety glasses, then fitted the shooting muffs over her ears and slung her magazine pouch over her shoulder. Last, she removed the Glock 19 from her shoulder holster, dropped the half-used magazine, and slapped in a new ten-rounder. The 9 mm compact was less than seven inches long and five in width. It fit easily into her handbag, and was comfortable in her hand. She knew it intimately, knew every nuance of its high-impact-resistant polymer grasp. She’d used it to practice with on numerous occasions. Soon she would use it for more than practice.

  She breathed deeply, head bowed slightly, feet wide apart, clearing her mind of the distractions of the day. A blue-black buzzard circled overhead. Near a dry creek bed, two cottontails scampered. She saw none of it, saw only the real target, not her phony paper one.

  In one fluid motion, she spun to face the target, formed the isosceles position, and fired ten rounds. The completed magazine dropped out and she slammed a new one into place, then began moving leftward. As she did, she fired another ten rounds, then ten more as she worked her way back to her starting place.

  Twenty-five of the shots were bull’s-eyes, the other five missing by scarcely an inch.

  Last of all, she straightened, one arm extended, eye on the sight. She shot the five cans, watching with satisfaction as they pinged and flew up into the air, dropping down to land on the ground like so many dead men.

  Gray-green eyes, cold and hard, swept the barren landscape. She shoved another magazine into the Glock. She knew what she must do.

  Cops were easy to find.

  So were dead men.

  She had waited long enough. It was time to act.

  Chapter 8

  Angie hurried alongside Paavo from the parking lot to San Francisco General Hospital, a massive complex of old brick and modern cement-gray buildings. Her chest ached with fear. Aulis was the only family he had left.

  Apparently a neighbor had found his stepfather and called for an ambulance. The police were contacted, and the responding officer knew Paavo. When he couldn’t reach him directly, he phoned Yosh. The blue brotherhood in action, she thought, not wanting Paavo to find out about Aulis from some stranger.

  The hospital was chaotic. Most of the city’s emergency and trauma cases arrived there, hundreds each day, plus over a thousand scheduled patients. To simply get the desk nurse to direct them to the proper waiting room presented a challenge.

  Seated on an aluminum and blue plastic chair in the bright yellow room, Paavo leaned forward, elbows on thighs, hands folded, and stared silently at the gray linoleum floor.

  “Aulis will be all right,” Angie said gently. She sat beside him, her hand lightly rubbing circles on his back.

  His complexion had a sallow cast to it, his eyes filled with sadness. “Not many eighty-year-olds can survive a gunshot wound.”

  She had no words to ease his pain and blinked back tears. “I’m so sorry, Paavo.”

  His hands clenched. “Damn it! I should have thought of Aulis when they hit your place, then mine!”

  “Don’t! You can’t blame yourself for this. Any connection between you and me makes some sense. Or between you and Aulis. But you and me and Aulis? There isn’t any. It’s got to be chance coming up all wrong—one of those horrible, random things, so much a part of city life, that end up touching all of us.”

  “I’ve worried about him living alone at his age.”

  She rested her hand atop his. “He’s surrounded by friends and longtime neighbors, as he’s told you whenever you’ve brought the subject up. He’s happy in his home. This isn’t your fault!”

  He pulled his hand away and clenched it. “I’ll know if that’s true, once I know what caused this to happen to him.”

  “He’s going to be all right.” She tried desperately to give her voice conviction, but she failed. Like Paavo, she knew Aulis’s age was against him. A head wound…She shuddered.

  Needing to do something more than sit helplessly and wait in the excruciating silence of the waiting room, she went in search of coffee. Near the waiting room, a canteen area held a coffee machine. On the first floor was a large, busy cafeteria. The coffee tasted weak and oily in both.

  Paavo was talking on his cell phone when she returned. He soon hung up and eyed the Starbucks label on the paper cup she handed him. “I was wondering where you’d gone off to.”

  She offered some lemon tarts and almond bear-claws, but he shook his head.

  “Has the doctor talked to you yet?” she asked, sitting in a plastic chair beside him.

  “No one has,” he said bitterly, “except to say the doctors are with him. I tracked down the patrolman who took the call to go to Aulis’s place. He said the apartment had been pretty well trashed, and that Aulis had lost a lot of blood.”

  Angie’s outrage nearly spilled over, but she forced it in check. Paavo had always been her Gibraltar. She was the one who got emotional, and he would rationally calm her down. Now he was the one hurting, and she had to help him. She wasn’t sure what to say or do, so she placed her arm across his broad back and silently held him.

  After a while, a buxom, middle-aged nurse entered the waiting room and walked toward them. Paavo’s face paled. He slowly stood.

  “You’re Mr. Kokkonen’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand no one has given you much information yet. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded quickly.

  “Fortunately, the bullet did not enter Mr. Kokkonen’s brain. But it did graze the skull and caused some bone damage and considerable swelling from the impact. We will have to see how much trauma the brain suffered. He’s in a coma. With his age, and this type of wound, I’m afraid the situation is extremely critical. You need to prepare yourself for that.”

  He nodded again, not answering. Angie watched his hopes fall when the nurse said there was swelling.

  “The doctor will probably be with him another hour or so. You might want to grab a bite to eat, then come back later when we’ll be able to tell you something more substantial.”

  “I see,” Paavo murmured.

  “Also, we’ll need Mr. Kokkonen’s insurance papers. Medicare will cover some of the expenses, but you might want to know all that he’s entitled to and what it will cost. I suggest you bring his policy into the hospital as soon as possible so that our billings staff can go over your options with you.” She shoved a set of papers as thick as the city’s phone book into his hands. He just stared at them as she walked away.

  “Christ almighty!” Paavo collapsed into the chair again, then slapped the papers onto the empty seat beside him. “He might be dying and she wants me to worry about insurance forms.”

  “The world is going crazy.” Angie reached over, grabbed the papers, and stuffed them into her tote bag.

  “You go and eat,” Paavo said. “I’m not hungry.”

  She gazed at the doors the nurse went through. Aulis was back there, alone and hurt, fighting for his life, and Paavo here, his heart aching.

  “We’ll wait.” She took his hand.

  “You, then me, now Aulis,” he whispered, his hand tightening painfully on hers. “Why, Angie? It doesn’t make any sense. What could we have that would make anyo
ne interested in us, and why in hell would anyone want to hurt a sweet old man like Aulis?”

  There were no words she could say. They sat in silence, Paavo’s hand in hers, and she hoped the connection brought some comfort beyond his dark, lonely thoughts.

  “Rosinsky and Platnikov are dead!” Harold Partridge screamed into the phone, his voice growing shriller with each word. “Do you realize what this means? Do you?”

  “We’re sorry, sir.”

  “Sorry? That doesn’t begin to say what you’ll be!” He had a strangle hold on the phone and wished it were their necks. “I still don’t have the brooch. It’s got to be with the woman.”

  “She seems to be hiding. She hasn’t returned to her apartment.”

  “I’m surrounded by complete, utter morons! Do I have to do everything myself? Her boyfriend’s a cop, goddamn it! A homicide cop. Find her through him!” Partridge’s voice was raw from yelling. It was good his office was soundproof.

  “I guess we can try to find him and put a tail on him.”

  “Hell, if you can’t find him any other way, you can always kill someone, then wait while he shows up to investigate!” He hung up, his heart beating so hard and fast he feared for his blood pressure.

  Rosinsky and Platnikov. He took off his glasses and shut his eyes, fear and dread drenching him with sweat.

  He wasn’t about to let it start again; he would stop it, one way or the other.

  Chapter 9

  Paavo parked in the driveway of Aulis’s apartment building. As he and Angie got out of the car, the area seemed eerily quiet. Usually neighbors milled about on the street chatting with each other, children played, dogs barked, and low-rider cars generated a pulsating thump-tha-thump from bass speakers as they cruised by.

  They were about a block from Mission Dolores, built by Spanish padres with Ohlone Indian labor at the same time as the Revolutionary War was erupting on the other side of the continent. This part of the city was a touch of Mexico in the heart of the city, filled with los restaurantes y las abarroterías.