To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery

by Joanne Pence

  “If he don’t show up today,” Richie said, “we’re going to be stuck here overnight.”

  “What do you mean by that?” The horror of being stuck anywhere with Richie was more than she wanted to contemplate. “There’s a chance he’s not here?”

  “Well, see, when I was sweet-talking the lil’ gal at the post office to find out when the mail would be delivered, I casually mentioned it was for Ed Sanders—something he wanted right away. And she said that was odd because he was away. He’d told them hold his mail. But then she checked the hold and it was over today.”

  Angie gaped. “You got a postal employee to give you that information?”

  He beamed. “Women love me.”

  She bit her tongue. “I hope she was right. I don’t know how much ice cream I can eat before the owner here starts to suspect something. If she doesn’t already.” Angie again looked askance at her cousin’s outfit. At least the diner was empty, so she didn’t have to face nearby gawkers.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She was nibbling on her second banana split, while Richie had eaten two and was now slurping the end of a chocolate malt, when he stiffened, his eyes fixed on the post office. A tall, powerfully built man wearing a camouflage jacket, pants, hat, and jackboots—a real friendly looking guy—stood on the sidewalk, glancing through mail that included a fluorescent pink envelope. He stuffed it inside his jacket and started walking.

  “Okay, babe, it’s Saturday night!” Richie tossed some money on the table and was out the door, Angie chasing after him. Once on the sidewalk, he grabbed her arm and practically dragged her across the street toward Sawyer’s truck. She was too stunned to try to stop him.

  Sawyer climbed into the truck and started the ignition just as Richie shoved Angie hard against his back fender. “You bitch!”

  With a shriek, she fell to the ground.

  “You talk to me like that and you won’t say anything for a week!” His face was purple, one hand on the fender as he leaned over her. “Get up!”

  He lifted his foot as if he was going to kick her.

  “Don’t!” she screamed, her arms thrust out protectively. Had he gone crazy?

  Suddenly Richie flew about five feet into the air, to land sprawled on his stomach. Sawyer stood over him. “That’s no way to treat a lady.”

  Richie slowly sat up. “Hey, can I say ‘that ain’t no lady, that’s my wife’?” He gave a quivery chuckle.

  Sawyer wasn’t having it, but turned away from him with contempt. “You all right, lady?” he asked, holding out his hand to help her stand.

  Angie nodded. He grasped her wrist and her entire body left the ground as he pulled her to her feet. When she landed, she thanked him and brushed herself off.

  “Hey, she don’t like my new truck.” Richie, also standing, pointed to his flashy long-bed. “I don’t have to put up with shit like that!”

  Sawyer jabbed a finger into her cousin’s chest, his nose nearly touching Richie’s forehead. “Listen, rhinestone cowboy, you take your problems somewhere else. Gideon doesn’t want your kind around here.”

  “I want to go home,” Angie said, stomping toward the truck.

  Richie lifted his hands, stepping back out of Sawyer’s way. Sawyer looked from him to Angie in disgust, then got into his truck and drove off.

  “What was that all about?” she asked when Richie joined her.

  “Slight of hand. Hope I didn’t hurt you none. Follow me.”

  Just around the corner was a ten-year-old black Chevy sedan. He unlocked the doors. “Hurry.”

  Her head was reeling as she jumped into the passenger seat. Richie flipped a switch on something that looked like a radar detector and headed back to the main road, turning in the direction Sawyer had gone.

  The detector beeped.

  “Where did you get this car? And what’s beeping?” Angie asked.

  “It’s easy to pay someone to drop off a car for you,” he explained, cruising away from the town. “The rest of it, we had to do on our own—you got to be ready to improvise. You were pretty good back there.”

  She decided not to say she wasn’t acting.

  He continued. “The beep means we’re connected with a little homing device under Sawyer’s back fender. Soon we’ll know where he lives. After that, it’s up to you and your boyfriend. On the way back, let’s stop at that restaurant again.”

  “Not another banana split?”

  “No. I saw some tutti-frutti on the menu. I haven’t had any of that since I was a kid.”

  Although it was late when Angie returned to the city, she contacted Paavo and agreed to meet him in Aulis’s hospital room. She’d felt bad that a couple of days had gone by since she’d last been there. Cousin Richie dropped her off on the sidewalk, refusing to drive up to the entrance. “Hospitals are bad luck,” he said. “I leave them alone, and they do the same for me.”

  She had just turned onto the corridor with Aulis’s room when she saw a little man wearing work pants, a black watch cap, and denim jacket sneak inside. He quietly shut the door behind him.

  No guard was present. The city couldn’t afford to continue with one full-time, so Paavo’s friends on the force stopped by regularly. The stranger must be one of Aulis’s friends, she told herself, and he wasn’t being sneaky, but careful and quiet, not wanting to disturb a man in a coma…?

  Angie teetered in the hallway, torn between going to find a nurse to enter the room with her, or bursting in immediately to find out who the man was. How long would she have to wait before convincing a nurse to join her? If the man meant harm, how much damage could he do while she dickered? She had no choice.

  Hitting the door hard, she swung it open. The little man was bending low over Aulis. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  At the sound of the door flying open, he turned his head, his eyes startled. Suddenly he bolted toward her. She swung her tote bag, smacking him square in the stomach and knocking him back into the room. All she could think of was to escape—and to yell for help. She spun around and ran smack into a brick wall.

  Familiar hands caught her. “Paavo! Quick—that man is trying to hurt Aulis!”

  She jumped into the hall before looking back into the room to see the little man clutching the foot of the bed with one hand, the other pressed against his stomach.

  “Paavo?” he whispered.

  Paavo stepped toward him. “You are?”

  “Okko Heikkila.”

  They went to a Japanese restaurant with small, individual tatami rooms where they could talk uninterrupted and unobserved by others. Although Heikkila agreed to go with them, it was clear he didn’t like it. Since Paavo’s car was a two-seater, and Okko drove a pickup, they rode separately to the restaurant. Once they arrived, both Heikkila’s and Paavo’s demeanors were even more serious, and the two said little as they ordered dinner.

  No more than ten words passed between the two men until the cocktail waitress brought a flask of warm sake and small porcelain cups. She poured them each some, then left. Heikkila drank his cupful in one gulp, then poured more rice wine for himself.

  Angie hated such silence. She tried to relieve the tension by talking about the beauty of the Sierras where Heikkila lived, asking him about the level of snowfall this year compared to others, and anything else innocuous she could think of. The anxiety level at the table remained high, thickening the air.

  The waitress brought miso and replenished the flask of sake. Angie noticed that Heikkila was already beginning to feel the effect of it.

  The miso was followed by a platter of sashimi, and then the waitress heated the center hot plate for shabu-shabu, in which the diners dip paper-thin raw meat and vegetables into boiling water, cooking their food and creating a broth as they eat. It’s a leisurely, congenial meal, and soon as Angie had hoped, the food and wine began to loosen the taciturn Okko’s tongue.

  “What are you doing in San Francisco?” Paavo asked.

  “Can’t a man tak
e a vacation? I heard Aulis was hurt and came to visit him.” He glared at Angie. “Didn’t know I’d be hit by a cannonball-hurling harridan for my trouble.”

  “Well, you scared me, and then you tried to run,” she protested.

  “I don’t like strangers,” he said.

  Paavo quickly poured them both more sake. “I’m interested in Omega Computing. How it was working there for you and Mika and Sam.”

  Heikkila sipped his wine. “I’ll tell you. Those days were different. Better. People programmed in Fortran. Computers were monsters kept in refrigerated rooms. We thought IBM’s 360/65 was the greatest invention known to man.”

  Angie suppressed a smile, considering she had a Palm, a cell phone, and an electronic scheduler in her tote bag. She hoped none had been damaged by his stomach.

  “Did you and my father know each other before going to work at Omega?” Paavo asked.

  “We met at work. Mika and Sam met in college—San Francisco State. Later, Sam was also hired. He was a flaky, impulsive guy, always emotional. See, it made sense he got us mixed up with sympathizers against the Soviet government. You got to remember, it was the sixties. People had causes. Students and American-born Finns held protests, petitions, sit-ins. And meetings. Meetings to stage more meetings. Joonas, Mika, Sam—even Aulis—we hated the Soviets.” He swished some beef in the hot broth.

  “What were your ideas of support?” Paavo asked, doing the same.

  Heikkila smiled wryly. He didn’t have to say it, but Paavo heard the sentiment: smart, like your father. “While in college, Sam went back to Finland to visit family. He made connections with an underground movement, led and driven by the ‘intelligentsia,’ as he put it. Being a student with an American work visa drew attention. Sam thought of himself as an intellectual—a radical poet. He would have loved Paris in the twenties—except that he didn’t know French and he wasn’t a poet. He lived for being a radical and making contacts. That was his thing, contacts. Before long, he recruited others, especially Mika. While Sam played with intrigue and heroics, Mika was all idealism and patriotism. You know, his parents were killed by the Communists—”

  “Yes,” Paavo said softly, “I’ve heard that.”

  Angie watched his face and could see how much Okko’s simple words troubled him. Even for herself, listening to Okko made Mika and his parents so alive that she, too, felt the grief of their deaths. And Sam, she could have wrung his neck! Didn’t he ever consider what might come of his toying with people’s lives and emotions?

  “So Sam led the rest of you to the movement against the Soviets?” Angie asked.

  “That’s right. The dissidents needed communications equipment for their samizdat movement. Sam had his contacts—a group of radicals called themselves the Kalevala. The name was from the epic poem that gives the legends, myths, and folklore that make up the soul of the Finnish people. Perhaps Joonas was the old and wise Väinämöinen, a powerful seer with supernatural origins, and I was Ilmarinen, a smith, and forged the ‘lids of heaven’ when the world was created. Sam was Lemminkäinen, an adventurer-warrior and charmer of women. And Mika was the tragic hero Kullervo, who is forced by fate to be a slave from childhood and avenge his father’s death.”

  Paavo broke into the old man’s reverie. “So when Sam came back with this idea of helping this samizdat movement, what did all of you do?”

  “For a long time, our help was fairly minimal. If we could get our hands on equipment the dissidents needed, they’d give us money to buy it, and then connect us to some Russians who’d smuggle it into the USSR. That all changed after Sam met Harold Partridge.”

  “Partridge? The big name in computers?” Angie glanced at Paavo, not sure she heard right, but Paavo, too, was staring with surprise at the name Okko had just spoken.

  “See, we didn’t have personal computers then,” Heikkila said. “But Partridge had already started with his business. Before anyone knew what hit it, he swallowed up Omega and all the mainframe programmers switched to PC operating systems. But I’m getting ahead of my story.”

  Thinking of the pictures she’d seen of the diminutive, bespectacled titan of Silicon Valley and famed philanthropist and collector, Angie said, “It’s hard to imagine Harold Partridge being caught up in anything like this.”

  “He was different then,” Heikkila explained. “Young, ambitious, and greedy. Now he lives in Silicon Valley with so much money he doesn’t know what to do, other than to worry that someone somewhere might steal it. He came from a wealthy family and spent years traveling around the world looking for something to interest him.”

  “Did he find it?” Angie asked.

  “He found two things—computers and Russian art. Computers because he had enough financial savvy and vision to know they were going to be huge, and Russian art because it was the one thing he couldn’t go to a store and buy. He could only get it through devious means. And being devious was what he did best.”

  At the words Russian art, Angie and Paavo caught each other’s eyes.

  As they continued with the meal, Heikkila explained. “When Sam learned that Partridge was willing to pay good money for Russian art, he realized that if he could get his hands on Russian artwork, statues, and jewelry, he could sell them to Partridge for big bucks and buy whatever the dissidents needed. Maybe even buy from Omega at a discount. He went to his contacts about ‘exporting’ some artwork to Partridge, keeping Partridge’s name a secret from everyone. I only found out by accident, overhearing something. Before long, a man named Gregor Rosinsky showed up.”

  “Rosinsky?” Paavo couldn’t hide his shock, while Angie let out a small gasp. “The jeweler?”

  “Yes…the dead jeweler.” Okko’s eyes bored into Paavo. “He was a smuggler! One of those guys who moved goods into and out of Russia for the dissidents. He learned all about Russian artwork and jewelry doing that job, and could tell a genuine piece from a fake at fifty paces. Why not go into business?” Heikkila chuckled wryly.

  Angie couldn’t believe the stooped, soft-spoken jeweler had once been a smuggler.

  Suddenly Heikkila asked, “Do you know who killed him?”

  “Not yet,” Paavo said. “Nothing was stolen, except perhaps a Russian brooch that belonged to my mother. Angie took it to him for repairs, and it’s missing.”

  The Finn’s blue gaze went from Paavo to Angie and back. He put down his chopsticks. “That’s disturbing news.”

  “Another Russian connected with jewelry was recently killed,” Paavo added. “This one was a forger.”

  Heikkila nodded. “I know. Jakob Platnikov. He was also one of the smugglers. We mostly dealt with five of them. Rosinsky, Platnikov, Nikolai Drach, Artur Masaryk, and Leonid Boldin.”

  “How did you know they were dead?” Angie asked.

  Heikkila’s gaze shifted from her to Paavo. “It was in the newspapers,” he replied innocently.

  “Joonas thought the smugglers were part of what became the Russian Mafia. Do you agree?” Paavo asked after a pause. Angie’s attention was glued on Okko.

  “Absolutely. The mafiya, emphasis on the ‘ya’ as they say it, is the reason I live where I do. I don’t want to be anywhere near them. I don’t want them to even imagine I can be trouble for them. They’re the scariest people I’ve ever seen. I know a story of someone in the Middle East who captured a Russian businessman and held him for ransom, threatening to kill him if their demands weren’t met. They didn’t know that the businessman belonged to the mafiya. The mafiya found out who the kidnappers were and captured some of their relatives. They cut off a finger from one, an ear from another, and mailed them to the kidnappers. They said that for each day the businessman was not released, a package with another body part would be delivered. The Russian was released immediately. That’s how the Russian mafiya plays.”

  Angie felt a cold chill.

  “Why did they kill Sam and Mika?” Paavo asked.

  A weariness came onto Heikkila’s lined face, and he said, “The
Soviet government rounded up a group of dissidents and smugglers and sent them to the Gulag. The mafiya thought we gave the Soviets the names. We swore we didn’t, but they said they had proof. Next thing I knew, they killed Sam and Mika. And I ran to the Sierras.”

  “No one told the police any of this,” Paavo said.

  Heikkila gazed flatly at him. “Do you think we’re crazy?”

  “The missing brooch was a cameo of the Tsarina Alexandra,” Angie said. “Rosinsky said it was museum quality.”

  “It sounds like the type of thing we smuggled.” Heikkila shook his head with disgust. “But that was thirty years ago! No one could possibly still care about all that old history, no one but me, at any rate. It haunted my dreams for years, but in time, even I began to forget. Only once in a while, like when I saw Aulis in the hospital, does it all come back, and I replay the ideas of revenge I used to have.”

  “Revenge on the mafiya?” Paavo asked.

  “Who else? Anyway, it’s over now. I stay in the mountains because I’ve come to love them. There’s no more to it than that.”

  Chapter 24

  Paavo reread his notes on Jakob Platnikov’s case and now turned again to Rosinsky’s murder investigation. Rebecca had worked on telephone records and one annotation jumped out at him. Three days before Rosinsky was killed, he had phoned Harold Partridge’s residence. Three days…the same day his office was broken into, the same day Angie had brought him her brooch.

  Rosinsky would have known of Partridge’s interest in Russian jewelry. If Partridge were willing to pay enough to convince Angie to sell, Rosinsky easily could have received a generous finder’s fee. That would have been a legitimate reason for the phone record.