A Dinner to Die For Read online

  “DOA at Paradise—not the place where the corpse is heading—the restaurant,” he said. “One of the gourmet restaurants. Not exactly your kind of place, huh, Smith? It’s at—”

  “I know where it is, Dillingham. I’ve been to dinner there.”

  Dillingham whistled. “They serve gourmet donuts?”

  I slipped my feet over the side of the bed. “They have three entrees per night. What I had was good, real good, but there were lots of things on my plate—odd greens and tiny vegetables—I haven’t seen before or since. It was kind of like eating on Saturn, at sixty dollars a head.” I didn’t need to add that I had been there only once, for a very special occasion. Dillingham knew me well enough to assume that.

  Overcoming the urge to prolong this conversation—this interlude in which I could still consider the murder just a crime, unconnected with a real person, and his or her real friends and relatives—I said, “Do you have any particulars—name, cause of death, time?”

  “Check with Doyle. He’s in his office.”

  Before I could comment, the phone clicked as Dillingham tried to transfer my call, always a chancy operation. But at one-oh-nine in the morning, the chances were better. I barely had time to clear my throat before Inspector Doyle came on the line. “Smith?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re up.” He meant next on the rotation. “I’ve got the doctor’s release. He says you’re fine. That right?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Sometimes those doctors don’t see everything, you know,” he said with a hesitancy I hadn’t heard in his voice before.

  “Thanks for your concern, Inspector, but I’m fine.” Fine except for that ridiculous fear of descending, and I wasn’t about to admit to that.

  “You sure? It was a bad crash.”

  “Yes,” I snapped, “fine.”

  “Okay then,” he said, all business now. “You’ve seen Mitchell Biekma, haven’t you?”

  “The owner of Paradise? Everyone in the Bay Area’s seen him on the news. Half the country’s heard him on ‘Good Morning Whatever.’ I read an article about him and Paradise and the Gourmet Ghetto on the plane. His picture was on the first page. He looked amused.”

  “Well, he won’t again. Body’s still in the restaurant. Grayson’s out there supervising the scene. He’s got a couple of patrols bringing some of the witnesses in. I’ll handle things here. You check out the scene.” He sounded tired, not just one A.M. sleepy; his was the weariness of one who had long abandoned hope of refreshing sleep. He would be up all night tonight, but he wouldn’t catch up on his sleep over the weekend; he’d just sink down a notch toward lassitude. Many cops retire before they reach Inspector Doyle’s age. There are no desk jobs in Homicide Detail; being an inspector just means carrying your share and supervising. Why Doyle stayed on was a question batted around the squad room. It was one that none of us were about to ask. “Smith,” he said, pausing as if to reconsider.

  “Yes?”

  “Mitchell Biekma got a lot of publicity in the last year. He’ll get even more now. Every newspaper’s got his picture in their morgue, all the TV news crews have film on him and his garden. They’ll jump at the chance to pull it out and rerun it. This case is going to be a bonanza for them. You hear what I’m saying? Everyone in Berkeley, no, not just Berkeley, everyone in the Bay Area is going to have his eyes on you. It’s a situation we can look very good in, Smith, or very bad. If Eggs and Jackson weren’t snowed under. … You sure you’re up to this?”

  Was I? I had assumed I would ease back to work through a few days of paperwork; I hadn’t planned on starting with a murder. Maybe I wasn’t ready; maybe I did need some time.

  “Smith?”

  The inspector hadn’t wanted a woman in Homicide; but when I had handled a few murders he had changed his opinion. I wasn’t about to give him reason to change back. “I can handle it, Inspector! How much help can you get me?” There had been a time when beat officers did all the legwork for any case on their beat, be it shoplifting or murder. That was before the reorganization, before the staff cuts. Now homicide detectives did their own legwork, and getting a patrol officer assigned to assist was like winning the lottery. “How about Pereira and Murakawa? Or Parker?” I suggested without much hope.

  “I’m ahead of you, Smith. You can have Pereira in the morning. Murakawa’s already there and Parker’s on his way.”

  That, more than anything he had said, underlined the importance of this case. And his hesitations about giving it to me. “What about the particulars?”

  “Not much yet. The wife called an ambulance. But Biekma was DOA. Body’s still at the restaurant. Grayson will fill you in on the rest.”

  I hung up, took a shower (spigots on two walls) that was closer to a baptism, pulled out a pair of too-wrinkled, too-thin-for-this-weather brown cotton pants from a suitcase (my Berkeley clothes were still stored at Howard’s), and put on the beige turtleneck and tweed jacket I’d worn on the plane. I penciled eyeliner under my gray-green eyes, ran a comb through my hair, plucked two errant long brown hairs off my sweater, and headed out.

  The fog was thick enough for the wipers. I sat, letting the Volkswagen engine warm, staring at the wet windshield, fog-streaked like the helicopter’s, and seeing Mitch Biekma as he had been pictured in the airplane magazine—tall, with that spiked strawberry-blond hair and that amused grin. My stomach churned. I swallowed hard, but that didn’t help. There was a line of sweat at my forehead.

  Damn! How long was this absurd fear going to control me?

  I turned on the ignition and backed the Bug out of the driveway, slamming on the brakes inches from a dark car across the street. “Two blocks to Cedar and then down,” I muttered as I shifted into first and headed more slowly toward Cedar. Cedar was steep, but empty at this time of night. It took less than five minutes to drive down from the Berkeley Hills to the flatlands and Paradise. But I was sweating through my Florida tan when I got there.

  Outside of Paradise red pulser lights from the patrol cars and the ambulance turned the two-story white stucco building fiery red, and shone on the metal flowers that filled the front yard. The flowers weren’t the soft, pretty types like roses or delphiniums, but spiky tropical birds of paradise, with long stems and flowers that resembled birds frozen in the fury of flight, with orange wings poised at their apex ready to thrust downward, and blue tail feathers lifted skyward, sharp enough to sever a hand.

  The bronze garden had been one of Mitchell Biekma’s early entrees in his preopening smorgasbord of publicity events. The opening of another gourmet restaurant in the Gourmet Ghetto was as newsworthy as another morning of fog. But the metal garden was something else. Biekma had commissioned the most controversial metal sculptor in the East Bay to create it. And controversy was what he got.

  Before the last spiky bird of paradise had been “planted,” neighbors had complained to the city council. Several had threatened to dump trash in their own front yards “in an effort to have a unifying theme on the block.” In response, Biekma had raced to the city council chambers, pictures of garden in hand, and invited the council members, the neighbors, and every reporter in hearing range to be his guests on opening night.

  Before that controversy had died down, twelve members of the North Berkeley Art Association had arrived, surveyed these ultimate perennials, and delivered twelve varying critiques. “Genius” and “junkyard” were the two most frequently heard evaluations, though the ones chosen to headline the story were “Front Yard of Paradise, or Foyer of Hell?”

  By the time Paradise opened, color photos of the bronze birds of paradise had blossomed in all the Sunday supplements. Reporters had interviewed the sculptor, the neighbors, and, it seemed, anyone who had ever held a soldering iron or a garden hoe. But mostly they had interviewed Mitchell Biekma. With his tall, thin body, his long, mobile ruddy face and spikes of strawberry-blond hair, Biekma resembled one of blooms in his garden. By the time he made the television new
s, he had taken command of the situation. It was he, not the reporters, who had laughingly rattled off the less flattering descriptions of the garden and announced that the baby carrots and tiny cucumbers he featured in his salads had been called the embryonic vegetables. Then his mouth had twisted halfway up his cheeks, giving him the same puckish expression he had had in the airplane magazine picture. Seemingly overnight, Mitchell Biekma had become a Berkeley hero—a restaurateur who could poke fun at gourmet pretensions while serving meals the pretentious would queue up for.

  For Mitchell Biekma, and for Paradise, the garden had served its purpose. For us at the Berkeley Police it was an attractive nuisance. Drivers screeched to a halt in both lanes of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, causing a flurry of minor accidents and one rear-ender serious enough to put a woman in traction.

  But now a patrol officer guided traffic around the four patrol cars, one unmarked car, and the ID tech’s van double-parked in front of the building. Through the open car windows the staccato crackle of the radios poked into the night. Two patrol officers held the crowd back. On both sides of the yard the red pulser lights flashed on groups of onlookers with down jackets wrapped over jeans or night-clothes, turning their drawn faces crimson as they stood shivering in the thick fog. Startled at each attack of light, some had the wary but transfixed look of those who might, indeed, be in the front yard of hell. Others hung back, dividing their attention between a TV reporter describing the scene on camera and the restaurant door through which Mitchell Biekma’s body would be carried. They vacillated, unwilling to miss the drama, and equally unwilling to be spotted gawking at it when they turned on the morning news.

  Hurrying past before the reporter spotted me, I headed up the path to Paradise. A bitter spice aroma floated out through the open door.

  The front door—a Plasticine box surrounding a free-form grate meshed with coils of orange and blue lights—was open. For a moment it looked like any restaurant after closing time.

  I nodded at Sergeant Grayson, the crime scene supervisor. He was a short, barrel-chested man with thick black hair, thick black eyebrows, and a thick mustache that hung down far enough to hide any curl of his lip. He pointed to the other side of the partition that separated the foyer from the front section of the dining room. The sickening stench of vomit and feces struck me. Taking a long last breath of night air, I remembered Mitch Biekma as I had seen him on TV, laughing with reporters, urging them with unbridled glee to taste his special lemon cucumbers or his red and gold nasturtium salad. More than one reporter had been caught up in that enthusiasm. Mitchell Biekma had been an appealing man; he had made Paradise a place you wanted to like.

  I swallowed hard, and walked around the partition to Biekma’s body. There was no remnant of Biekma’s fervor now. His eyes were wide with horror. Vomit, thick with unchewed onions and baby carrots, clung to his cheeks and chin. It had sprayed over his shirt and hands, and down the front of his blue corduroy pants.

  Then the stench of bile, garlic, and horseradish really hit me. My stomach lurched. Swallowing harder, I turned back to the open front door and took a long, deep breath. It was a moment before I looked back at Biekma’s body. The spiky strawberry-blond hair that had been part of his Tom Sawyerish appeal now hung limp and matted. His ruddy complexion had paled in death; in contrast, his hair appeared garish red. His hands were clenched but they held nothing. The only things I had missed on my first look were the dark stain right above his belt, and the sturdy gold chain that peeked from inside his neckline. I bent down and pulled it free. On the end was a key, a very ordinary brass key that could have been to a very ordinary door. I glanced up questioningly at Grayson.

  “To the wine cellar.” He pointed to the door beside the desk. “That’s the only key. No one but Biekma got near the wine.”

  “I’ll need it. Have the tech look at Biekma’s neck first. Any idea why there’s only one key?”

  He shrugged. “Some restaurants have a problem with the staff drinking up the profits.”

  “They’d have to choose the best, and drink fast to make a dent in Biekma’s profits.”

  “Guess Biekma wasn’t taking any chances. One of the waiters said Biekma kept it round his neck in the shower. Probably slept with it on.”

  “He sounds overly suspicious to me,” I said, looking back down at Biekma’s vomit-stained body, “but then you could argue he had good reason to be. What did the medics try with him?”

  “No point in doing anything. He was good and dead when they got here. Biekma ate half a bowl of soup. After that, he didn’t have time to do much more than upchuck and die.”

  CHAPTER 3

  BIEKMA’S BUILDING HAD ORIGINALLY been a typical Berkeley house. To transform the ground floor for Paradise, Biekma had turned the living room, dining room, and den into one large L-shaped dining room that ran from front to back, with a door to the kitchen midway on the north side near the foot of the L. Across from the front door a heavily carpeted stairway led to another Plasticine door. Patrons, undeterred by hour-long waits, would seat themselves on these steps, glasses of white zinfandel in hand, as they congratulated themselves on snagging a reservation. The railing was a Plasticine coil filled with the type of tiny white lights usually associated with tabletop Christmas trees. At the lower end it angled down to form the front of the desk where reservations were acknowledged and credit cards processed.

  Next to the desk was the door to the wine cellar. Grayson had unlocked it and turned on the light. I walked down the short flight of stairs to a room that could more accurately have been described as a closet. Basements are rare in the Bay Area, and it was clear that this room had not been part of the original house. One wall was covered with a wine rack, the other with a unit that resembled a refrigerator. I pulled open the door and glanced inside at ten rows of wine. About a third of the slots were empty. Closing the door, I surveyed the open rack. It was slightly fuller. On the wall beside it hung a clipboard. Beneath the clipboard was a wooden box containing a soldering iron, a couple of roots and bulbs, and garden implements—all apparently for Mitch’s gardens, metal and natural. Everything in the room would have to be catalogued, then we’d lock it up. There had to be well over a thousand dollars in wine here. I didn’t want any questions later.

  I climbed back up to the dining room. The dishes had been cleared and the linen stripped, baring scraped and stained pine tables that would have looked more at home in the Salvation Army dining hall. A two-foot-high Mexican vase stood by the kitchen wall; the drooping shasta daisies and pampas grass, and the almost plastic-looking birds of paradise mixed in with them, were half again that high. The arrangement must have been striking when Paradise opened at six P.M., but now, after long, hot hours in the glare of too-bright lights, it looked like a spray of flowers left on a grave overnight.

  Grayson stood next to Biekma’s body, his jaws pressed hard together behind the shield of his mustache, his arms crossed over his thick chest.

  “Any leads?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Witnesses?”

  “Yes and no.” There was an edge to Grayson’s voice. His mustache twitched. Grayson had been one of the candidates for the Homicide slot that I got. According to rumor, he had claimed sexual bias. But he hadn’t said that to me. In fact, in the four years I’d been with the department, I doubted we had exchanged two sentences. But his resentment now screamed through his stance. “You just got back from sick leave, right, Smith?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You up to handling a murder?”

  “As up as anyone ever is.” My stomach still churned; my legs felt shaky. I locked my knees and leveled my gaze at him. “What does ‘yes and no’ mean?”

  His black mustache twitched, then subsided, signaling a swallowed retort. When he did speak his voice was controlled. “The kitchen was full when Biekma got the soup. The cook, the under chef, the wife—she was acting as salad chef—the dishwasher: they were all busy cleaning up. They all heard
Biekma come in, they all saw him scoop out a bowl of soup from the pot, go back to the pantry, and take out a jar of horseradish. He was turning away from it, horseradish jar in one hand, soup dish in the other—this according to the dishwasher—when there’s this crazy knocking on the back door. Matthew Timothy Dana by name, one of Berkeley’s resident crazies. Seems Biekma’s wife was in the habit of feeding Dana, but Biekma was no bleeding heart. When Dana opens the door, Biekma starts carrying on about Paradise not being St. Anthony’s dining hall, not being in business to feed every ne’er-do-well in town, and so on.”

  “Biekma was standing there, clutching his soup and his horseradish, and telling Dana he couldn’t feed him? Definitely, no bleeding heart.”

  “According to the dishwasher, Biekma screamed at the crazy. He worked himself up till he turned purple. The wife tried to calm him down, pointed out it was twelve-thirty in the morning, they had enough food for the staff and him too, that Dana was poor and hungry. Then she said the magic words, which were: ‘We have to feed him. How would this look if word got in the paper?’ ”

  “So Biekma had his soup right next to Matthew Dana. Biekma’s back was to the kitchen, right?” I didn’t wait for Grayson’s nod. “Biekma’s body had to block the view for some of the witnesses. How much would it have taken for Dana to slip some arsenic or whatever into the soup? If he was as crazy as you say, Biekma’s tantrum could have set him off.”

  Grayson glanced toward the kitchen, then let a beat pass before he said, in a “gotcha” tone, “Dana was wearing a cloak.” He let another beat pass. “No zipper. No buttons. The kind that slips over the head. And the handholes were sewn closed.”

  “Sewn closed! How was he planning to eat, lick the food off the plate?” I shook my head. “Only in Berkeley!”

  Grayson shrugged, tacitly saying that was my problem.

  Ignoring that in the face of the greater problem, I said, “So we’ve got a kitchen full of people who see Biekma scoop his soup out of the pot. And we’ve got one person who’s close enough to poison that bowl of soup, and his hands are imprisoned behind his cloak.”