To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery Read online

  Standing in the kitchen, sipping the wine, he gave her a brief recap of his visits with Bond and Mrs. Florian. “Cecily Campbell was a clerk,” he concluded. “It’s a dead end, not worth pursuing. What happened thirty years ago doesn’t mean anything now, anyway.”

  Despite his words, his disappointment was obvious. “You don’t know that yet.” She tried to be encouraging. “Her old boss might remember. Did you try to find him?”

  “I did, with no success. Bond said the guy’s ‘troubled.’ He could be anywhere—new name and everything.”

  “Hmm, he sounds like Cecily,” Angie observed. “What if she ran off with him?”

  “I would imagine Bond would remember a scandal like that. He’s convinced Cecily’s dead. He’s probably right.”

  “It sounds like Mrs. Florian thinks Sawyer’s whereabouts are shown in her planner. You should find him.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Cecily left. Why should I care what the reason was?” Paavo’s voice turned hushed. “I never should have started this wild-goose chase.”

  Angie turned her back on him as she put on water for tea. His conflict between wanting to know his past and dreading it was clear. “I also did a little…checking…myself.” She glanced back at him. Sure enough, a dour expression was on his face.

  “You did what?”

  “I went to the apartment Aulis lived in when Cecily was a neighbor. Unfortunately, no one there remembered him, let alone her.”

  “You saw the old house?”

  “It was pretty, an area with lots of steps instead of sidewalks.” Their eyes met. Could that have anything to do with the quick, obvious appeal this neighborhood had for Paavo? Some harkening back to his childhood?

  The tea was soon ready. Over mu shu pork, bok choy with beef, chicken chow mein, and Hunan-style prawns, Angie told about her visit with the Eschenbachs, and the wife’s strange warning. “He said Aulis had several young Finnish friends. Do you know about them?”

  “The only Finnish friend I know is Joonas Mäki, but he lives a few hours away, up the coast in Gualala.”

  “Well, there were more.”

  Together they cleared off the table. Then, as Paavo put on after-dinner coffee, Angie hooked up her camcorder to the VCR so she could watch her restaurant videos on the thirty-one-inch TV.

  “Maybe I should try to track down Sawyer,” he said, joining her in the living room. The coffee maker hissed and gurgled as it brewed. She simply loved how domestic Paavo was becoming.

  “It couldn’t hurt,” she said.

  “What’s that?” He stood behind her, watching the TV.

  “I wanted a behind-the-scene shot of a restaurant’s kitchen. That’s the chef’s butt—”

  “Gross.”

  “Like bread dough that rose too far. This part is a little shaky because I was moving to another can to see better.”

  “Another can?”

  “Don’t ask. This is—Hey, wait!” She hit Rewind.

  He moved closer. “Did I see what I thought?”

  Her heart was pounding. “I think so.” She played the tape again, then hit Pause at the key frame.

  As she had struggled to keep her balance and still take a video of the kitchen, the camera swung wildly in her hands, capturing the surrounding alleyway on tape. A man stood in a doorway watching her, with light from a streetlamp illuminating his features. He must have been the man she’d heard laugh and run away.

  He was also the man who had been killed outside Aulis’s apartment, right next to her Ferrari.

  With horror, she now had proof of being watched…followed. And she had no idea why.

  Chapter 16

  “Here it is, Inspector.” Mrs. Florian’s daughter handed Paavo her mother’s planner. He sat in the living room of the modest home.

  “It’s more than a calendar,” Jill Florian said. She was attractive, with a small, upturned nose, pouty mouth, and large brown eyes. Her long, black hair hung free and reached nearly to her waist. “My mother used to carry it back and forth to work every day. She would write notes and reminders, and often said if she ever lost it, she may as well shoot herself.” The daughter’s eyes filled with tears. “No wonder she was so agitated when she couldn’t find it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  The planner was one of those five-by-eight multiringed binder types with lots of tabs that sort your life into a variety of categories—appointments, priorities, projects, finances, and one for addresses and phone numbers. He turned to the calendar section. It was dated 1994. “Is this when she retired?”

  “No. She retired in eighty-four. She bought replacements for ten years, but as you can see, there wasn’t much to fill them with.”

  He flipped to the address portion. The pages were yellowed with age, and the ink for the top entries on each page had faded into browns and purples, while those near the bottom were darker. The planner looked like it might have been used for a good portion of Mrs. Florian’s career.

  The S section was several pages long, with crossouts and additions, asterisks and arrows from names to addresses and annotations. A short way down the first page the name “Sawyer, Eldridge” was shown, with a South San Francisco address and phone number. He copied down the information, then hunted for a more recent entry for the man. There was none.

  He thumbed through the pages until he found the C section. Near the top of the page was Cecily Campbell. The whole entry had a diagonal line over it. He wondered if Mrs. Florian did that after Cecily died.

  The first address shown was on Ocean Avenue. It had been X’d out and an address on Liberty Street added below it. That must have been where Angie went. He wrote it down.

  Cecily’s name had an asterisk beside it. At the bottom of the page was the referral “*C’s friend, Finland expert—Prof. Susan White,” and a San Francisco phone number. He copied them down as well. C’s friend…

  If Cecily had been a research clerk, and it was her job to contact professors and such, why was only this one noted in the planner? On the other hand, she must have had a lot of contacts, so why was any such contact noted?

  He looked through other addresses, finding lots of names and companies and experts and cryptic notes. An entire career’s worth of contacts existed here, carefully noted by a secretary with dreams of becoming one of Mr. Hoover’s special agents.

  Paavo took a long detour back to Homicide, all the way to South San Francisco and Eldridge Sawyer’s house.

  Except for color, the small, plain house perfectly matched every third one on the block. The elderly owners had bought it from Sawyer nearly thirty years earlier. It hadn’t been an easy purchase, they told him. Sawyer demanded he be paid in cash, and he had refused to allow his Social Security number or driver’s license number to be added to any of the documents. “The guy was unhinged,” the homeowner stated bluntly.

  Back in Homicide, Paavo ran more checks on Sawyer, but still came up blank.

  Then he did the same with Professor Susan White.

  To his surprise, she had a rap sheet. There was nothing recent, but in the late sixties she had managed to get herself arrested on three occasions. Twice in Vietnam War protests, and once outside the Soviet consulate.

  The Soviet consulate. A Russian brooch. Two dead Russian men. No—his mind was finding connections that couldn’t possibly exist.

  Could they?

  Paavo’s shoes echoed in the empty hallway as he searched for room 308C, the office of Professor Susan White. It had been surprisingly easy to find her. When her old phone number didn’t work, he called San Francisco State College, the University of San Francisco, and finally U.C. Berkeley, where she was listed as a tenured professor in the History Department. Her specialty was twentieth-century Soviet and Eastern European history.

  She agreed to meet him after her last class ended. The heavy Bay Bridge traffic made him late. He knocked on the frosted glass door.

  “Come in.”
/>   A woman in her sixties sat at a large desk, a computer behind her. She wore light makeup and her blond hair pulled up in a loose knot. She had the well-toned look of a woman who pays close attention to her body and her diet.

  “Inspector Smith, S.F.P.D.” He held out his hand to her. “Thank you for waiting.”

  She removed her reading glasses and studied him with such absorption, it took a moment before she noticed his hand. “Inspector, you weren’t one of my students, were you? You look familiar.”

  “I’m afraid not.” He explained that he was trying to find out about someone she may have known long ago, Cecily Campbell.

  “Cecily?” Her hazel eyes caught his. “I remember her well. We used to meet all the time at the library at SF State.”

  “At the library?”

  “Yes. She was a law clerk, and I was a new professor at my first job.”

  He was confused. “A law clerk? I thought she worked for the FBI.”

  White’s eyebrows rose. “Good God, I don’t think so. She was as opposed to government policies as the rest of us back then. She didn’t work for them.”

  “I must be wrong. What can you tell me about her?”

  The professor’s intelligent gaze assessed him a moment before she responded. “She was about my age. That’s what started us talking. Most of the professors were ‘old, white guys,’ and the students much younger. I learned she was widowed with a young daughter, new to the area, and I was divorced. She was fascinated by politics and European history—my specialties.”

  “Finland, right?”

  She cocked her head. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “What else can you tell me about her?”

  “Probably not much. She was bright and witty, I know that. Over time, after I took the job here in Berkeley, I lost contact with her. I heard she died a few years later.”

  “Do you know how she died?” he asked.

  “An accident, I assumed.”

  “In the Bay Area?”

  Large, questioning eyes captured his. “I don’t really know.”

  It was a long shot, but he had to ask. “Did you know Aulis Kokkonen?”

  She pursed her lips. “The name sounds familiar. I’ll ask again—why?”

  “Just trying to tie up some loose ends.”

  She leaned back in the chair. “It was a long time ago. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can remember anything more.”

  “It’s important, if you can help—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He stood, not even sure why he had come here. What had he expected to learn? He handed her his card. “If you remember anything, call me.”

  She read it. “Paavo?” Her head jerked up. The tone of her voice stopped him at the door. An eternity passed as the two regarded each other and slowly the furrows on her brow smoothed. She tapped the card against the desktop a moment, as if unsure how to begin. “You came all the way to Berkeley for a reason. Now, why don’t you sit back down, please, and tell me what this is really all about?”

  The tautness of her posture, the intensity of her gaze, made him decide to tell her the truth. He sat and faced her squarely. “I’ve recently learned that Cecily…Cecily was my mother. I’m curious about her. I heard you were her friend.”

  “Oh, my,” she whispered. “You don’t know anything about her?”

  He shook his head. “What I thought I knew seems to be a far cry from the truth.”

  “Yours is possibly the strangest request of my career.” She pressed her fingers to her cheek a moment. “I don’t know how much I can help you, but let me start at the beginning.”

  He sat stiffly, scarcely breathing.

  “As I mentioned, Cecily shared my interest in the Soviet Union,” Professor White began. “A number of us on campus sympathized with the dissidents there and in the Eastern European satellite nations who wanted to be free. Cecily joined us. She particularly talked about Finland and its sub-rosa dissident movement. I knew some Finnish students, well, former students by the time she met them. It turned out there was a vacancy in the building where two of them lived, and she needed a bigger place, so I brought her along to see the apartment and meet them. She fell in love with both.”

  Her expression silently questioned if this was the kind of information he sought. He nodded.

  “Where was the building?” he asked.

  “In a nice area up near the top of Sanchez. A small street.”

  “Liberty?”

  “Yes! That’s it. This all took place so long ago….”

  “Please continue.”

  Her hands folded atop the desk. They were strong, capable hands, without rings. “Aulis Kokkonen—since you mentioned his name, I do remember him—lived in one of the apartments, but he was older, not caught up in helping the dissidents. The samizdat movement was going on at that time. Do you know what that was?”

  He shook his head.

  “I am a professor, so now here comes a lecture—I’ll be quick.” She smiled. “It simply means ‘self-published.’ Essays and newspapers against the government were being illegally copied in Russia so the dissident movement there could grow. To get equipment to make the copies—keep in mind, Inspector, that typewriters, let alone mimeograph machines and small printing presses, were nearly impossible for common people to own in that country—the dissidents looked to sympathizers in the West for help.”

  “And the Finns were such sympathizers?” Paavo asked.

  “Correct. They believed that only by undermining the Soviet government itself would Finland and Communist bloc countries become free. As history proved, they were right.”

  Paavo nodded, absorbing the information. “Who were the Finns?”

  “I’m trying to remember their names. There were four of them, thick as thieves. Let’s see. Of the four, one Americanized his name—Sam? Yes, I’m sure that was it—he was quite the live wire. One was quiet, a little guy. One was tall and thin and had thick eyebrows that went straight across his face. He was a little older than my former students—although not as old as Aulis.”

  “Joonas Mäki?” Paavo asked, his voice hushed.

  “Joonas. That sounds right. Then there was the fourth man.” She gazed at Paavo with a strange smile. “My God, when he and Cecily met—I remember that evening—I think it was love at first sight. The two had eyes only for each other. Me and Sam and the little guy kept jabbing each other in the ribs, watching the two of them stare at one another, yet scarcely saying a word.” She chuckled. “They never even noticed us.”

  “What was this fourth man’s name?”

  She pressed her fingers to her brow, her eyes shut, trying to dredge it up. After a while, she dropped her hands in exasperation. “It’ll come to me in time. I know it will.”

  “Can you describe him, or tell me what he looked like?”

  A touch of sympathy, then resignation, came into her eyes, and she reached for her purse. After rummaging around inside it, she took out a small mirror and handed it to him. “Look.” Her voice was gentle. “Now I know why you’re so familiar to me.”

  Chapter 17

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your seeing me,” Angie said as she walked into the elegant Pacific Heights home of retired de Young Museum curator Donald Porter. Her jeweler at Tiffany’s, the man who’d suggested she bring her brooch to Gregor Rosinsky, had contacted Porter on her behalf after she told him the brooch was now missing. Porter had a particular interest in Russian artwork.

  He led her into a living room crammed with antique furniture and nineteenth-century paintings. She paused in the doorway to catch her breath at the opulence before her.

  “May I offer you some sherry?” he asked, crossing the Sarouk carpet to an ornate mahogany liquor cabinet.

  “No, thank you.” She sat on a Chippendale armchair and handed him an enlarged sketch of her brooch, annotated with its dimensions. “I wish I were a better artist,” she said. “I added as much detail as I could remember. Gregor R
osinsky was quite surprised to see it and seemed to think it was very valuable.”

  “I knew Gregor well,” Porter remarked, studying the drawing. He stood tall, with a thick head of pure white hair. “It was a great tragedy that he was killed. He did fine work. You said he had this brooch, and it’s now gone?”

  “I believe it was the only thing taken in the robbery,” she said.

  He, too, sat. “Well, if this is authentic—and if Gregor said it was, I’d imagine he was correct—the thieves made off with something that could easily be valued at upwards of a half million dollars.”

  “You’re kidding me!” she cried.

  “I never joke about art.”

  “How could something so valuable end up in”—how should she put this?—“private hands? I mean, it was a gift to me from someone who had no idea of its value.”

  “I must confess, you have me intrigued, as well, about the brooch’s history. I’ll go to my sources to see what I can find out. I will say, if it was in a Russian museum, they’ve been rather thoroughly looted over the past half century, as have many churches and private estates. Smuggling is a huge business in Russia, as it was in the former USSR.”

  “I’ve heard a little about some samizdat movement,” she added tentatively, recalling Paavo’s words.

  “Oh yes, many of the dissidents stole artwork and had it smuggled to the West to get money for their activities. That was quite common.”

  “Do you think this could have been smuggled out in that way?”

  He gave her a toothy smile. “That’s as good an explanation as any.”

  “I remembered!” The woman’s excited voice all but sang over the phone. “This is Professor White.”

  Sitting at his desk in Homicide in the morning, Paavo felt his heart begin to pound, and his hand tightened on the receiver. “Yes?”

  “I was watching Leno on TV last night and a commercial came on for Formula One racing. One of the drivers is Mika Häkkinen. That jarred my memory.”