Cook's Night Out Page 16

  “I thought you just said you don’t even know this guy’s name,” Connors chided.

  “I don’t. Everyone knows my phone number is out there with these numbers runners—”

  “You know all about numbers runners, don’t you, Smith?” Davis asked.

  Paavo was sick of these two and their accusations. “Look, we’re wasting time. Let’s go downstairs and find Snake Belly. He’ll explain to you that I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Snake Belly? Nice guys you hang around with, Smith.”

  “Present company excepted,” he said.

  Connors frowned, then held out his hand. “Give me your gun.”

  Paavo took it from his holster and turned it over to him. “You can see it hasn’t been fired. I want it back.”

  Connors pocketed it. “I don’t think so. We’re going to run a few tests first.”

  “Let’s go find your friend,” Davis said, stepping aside.

  Paavo pushed his way past the two men and hurried down the stairs. They followed him out the door to the corner.

  “He’s not here,” Paavo said, pacing in a small circle, feeling caged by the two hovering close by. “Even if he was here, seeing you two goons wouldn’t make him want to show himself. I’ll have to find him. I’ll get him to come in and explain what’s going on.”

  Davis and Connors glanced at each other.

  “What? Am I under arrest or something? Is that what this is about?”

  “Not yet,” Connors said. “First we’re going to go have a nice, long chat down at the Hall.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Connie stood beside Angie, her forefinger lightly tapping her cheek as she studied the contraption in the middle of the kitchen. Finally she dropped her hand and made her pronouncement. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

  A shave-and-a-haircut knock sounded at the door, followed by a “Yoo-hoo, Angie!”

  “Oh, no,” Angie groaned. “Not today. If we’re quiet, he might go away.”

  “Is that your neighbor?” Connie asked. “He seemed harmless enough. Kind of cute, as a matter of fact. Why not let him in?”

  “I’m warning you, that’s like the Trojans deciding to let in the horse,” Angie said.

  “He can’t be that bad.” Connie grinned.

  Angie rolled her eyes as she went to the living room and opened the door.

  “Hey there!” Stan bounded into the living room, not waiting for an invitation. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Stan,” Angie said, still holding the door open. “What did you want?”

  “I thought I heard voices in the hall earlier, like someone came to visit. Someone female,” Stan said as he headed for the kitchen. “Wow! What’s that?”

  Angie shut the door and followed.

  “Hi! Your name is Connie, right? Remember me? Stan the man!”

  “Of course I remember you.” Connie smiled coyly, to Angie’s horror.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before,” Stan said, circling the machine. “Except in mad-scientist movies.”

  “Want to guess what it is?” Connie asked.

  “Is there a prize?”

  “No.”

  “I give up, then,” he said.

  “It’s a candy maker.” Connie smiled. “Angie bought it.”

  “Hey, neat,” Stan said, touching the knobs and flaps that blanketed the machine. He glanced at Angie. “Does it work?”

  “I hope so,” she replied. “I saw it on TV—a home shopping program. They showed someone pour in the ingredients and push a button. Next thing, they showed a box of perfectly formed chocolates. It must work. There must be some truth in advertising, right?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve heard of any lately,” Connie said.

  “Anyway, it’s got to be lots easier than making them by hand,” Angie added.

  “You did great, Angie!” Stan bent over to look underneath the thing at all the moving parts. “I could go for some chocolates myself, especially at this price.”

  “Here’s a cute mold,” Connie said, digging through a box of implements. “It looks like a chestnut.” She held up two small shaped metal cups that when fitted together formed a chestnut.

  “I don’t have any marron flavoring,” Angie said, “but I think we could try a simple mocha filling along with the chocolate. Sound okay to the two of you?”

  They nodded. Stan licked his lips.

  Angie mixed together the ingredients for the mocha cream filling and then decided on semisweet chocolate for the outside.

  They plugged in the machine. It began making humming noises, punctuated with random metallic hiccups.

  The first test of the candy maker was to melt the semisweet chocolate at just the right temperature to temper it—to let it reach a shiny consistency without turning grainy—and then let it cool down enough to work with it.

  The chocolate tempered beautifully, shiny and buttery smooth. Angie beamed. Connie was impressed. Stan kept making taste tests.

  When the chocolate thickened to a consistency that was moldable, Angie pressed a button and the candy maker burped a dollop of semisweet chocolate into each little chestnut-shaped cup. To her amazement, the molds began to spin, causing the chocolate to creep up the sides and cover them evenly.

  Next a blob of mocha cream was dropped into each mold, then the left and right molds smacked together, sealing the mocha inside. The mold was thrust into the chiller, where it remained for five minutes. When it slid back out, the two halves opened up, and out dropped a piece of candy. It looked perfect.

  Stan said it tasted delicious.

  Angie pushed the button and the process began again. Five minutes later, a second piece of chocolate dropped from the mold.

  “These chocolates take too long to make,” Stan said. “You’ll be here forever just filling a one-pound box.”

  “The instructions say this lever will make it run a little faster,” Connie said, reading the manual. “Should we try?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Angie said. “The chocolates are coming out well at this speed. I doubt it can work much faster.”

  “But Stan’s right about its being way too slow. We might try moving it just a little,” Connie suggested. Angie gave the okay. Four minutes later, a third piece of chocolate dropped out.

  Since Stan had eaten the first two pieces, they couldn’t be sure the third piece was as well formed as the others were. It looked a little runny.

  “Nobody invents a machine that runs so slow,” Stan said, his hand on the lever. “Let’s give it some juice.”

  “Stan, no,” Angie said, but too late. He had pushed the lever forward to the fastest speed.

  Two squirts of chocolate gushed into the molds, which whirled at warp speed, causing a funnel cloud of chocolate to fly up the sides of the mold, off the top, and out over Angie’s kitchen, splattering all three of them. The machine chugged on.

  Mocha cream plummeted into the molds. In a blur, the molds hammered together, lurched into the chiller, and exploded back out. Then the molds burst open and catapulted the still-sticky chocolate across the room to land on a cabinet door.

  Angie, Connie, and Stan stared, slack-jawed, at the blob on the door.

  “I’ll slow it down,” Stan said, and grabbed the speed lever. It came off in his hand. “Uh-oh.”

  The machine wobbled and shook with newfound freedom, the molds started spinning, and then the whole contraption began to bounce like a helicopter ready for takeoff. When it banged against the wall, Angie and Connie grabbed it, but they couldn’t stop it from bouncing.

  A torrent of chocolate shot into the molds, but now they were spinning so fast, the chocolate sprayed into the air. Angie shrieked and jumped back. Connie whirled around, trying to cover her hair with her arms.

  The harder Stan worked to fix the machine, the faster the chocolate squirted out of it, showering them like a burst water main. Every so often it pitched a chocola
te-covered wad of mocha cream with the speed of Greg Maddox.

  “Unplug it!” Angie yelled over the noise of the machine banging against the wall and bounding off the floor, along with the whistle of mocha cream sailing by her ears.

  “I can fix it,” Stan cried.

  “No, you can’t! Unplug it, now!”

  “I’ll fix it. Trust me!” He shoved the lever onto the machine. “Success!”

  A stream of chocolate sprayed Angie in the face like water from a hose. She shut her eyes and waved her hands in front of her, trying to stop the attack. “Unplug—ulp!” A glob of chocolate shot into her mouth.

  “If that’s success,” Connie shrieked, “I’d hate to see failure!”

  Stan flexed his chocolate-smeared muscles. “No machine’s ever gotten the best of Stan the Man,” he cried, pulling a butter knife out of a drawer to attack the appliance, since Angie didn’t have any screwdrivers in the kitchen.

  “I’m not taking a minute more of this just so you can play Mr. Macho,” Connie announced, marching defiantly toward the machine. Her shoe landed on a thick lump of wet chocolate and her foot slid out from under her. She ended up sitting on the floor right beside the rocking monstrosity. Chocolate dribbled off the sides of the machine, plastering her blond hair down as though she were getting a dye job from a demented hairdresser.

  Stan pointed at her and laughed uproariously, grabbing his stomach and rocking back and forth. She stood up, balanced precariously on the chocolate-covered soles of her shoes, grabbed a wad of gooey chocolate off the floor, and smacked Stan square in the face with it. He tumbled over, grabbing Connie for support, and they both landed in a heap.

  Angie scrambled under the table, reached up, and pulled the plug. The machine shuddered and died to the sound of grave internal disorder.

  Angie, Connie, and Stan sat on the floor facing each other, with chocolate dripping from their hair and smeared over their faces and clothes.

  “Well, if I can’t come up with an angelina that people want to eat,” Angie said, looking at her friends, “I can think about developing a chocolate-flavored facial mud pack.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Paavo and Yosh parked across from the Random Acts of Kindness Mission and watched to see who went in or out. They’d taken to doing that every so often, but despite Angie’s fear that numbers running was going on there, the only people they ever saw—besides Hodge, Klaw, and Klaw’s cohorts—were some society women showing up to do volunteer work. If Klaw was running numbers, the mission wasn’t a drop site.

  Paavo was glad to sit here and think about something other than the dead bookie and the grilling he’d gotten from IA. Finally, with no proof against him, they’d let him go.

  “Hodge is driving me crazy,” Paavo said. He pried the plastic lid off the Styrofoam cup of coffee. He hadn’t been able to eat or sleep lately, his mind and emotions on overload, and had taken to living on coffee. “I can’t find a single thing on the guy. It’s as if he dropped out of nowhere.”

  “It might not matter.” Yosh added Coffee-mate and three sugars to his coffee. “Even though we know Lili’s an ex-hooker and Warren’s a hired gun, with no charges against them we can’t do a thing. So even if we knew about Hodge, it might not help.”

  “At least we’d know what we’re dealing with,” Paavo said. “Any luck with Klaw’s mystery woman Gretchen?”

  “Not yet. The reverse phone directory didn’t list any Gretchen or G in that building, but lots of women living alone don’t use their own names or initials in a listing. Wouldn’t you know, the building’s got about twenty apartments in it? I’ll do a door-to-door soon as I get some time.”

  “I’ll fit some time in, too. I’ll take top down, you go bottom up.”

  “Got it.” Yosh took a sip of his coffee. “Christ, still too hot. Did you ever think that this Gretchen might just be a nice girl Klaw likes to mess around with?”

  “No.” Paavo stared at the mission, lost in thought, before he said, “Klaw has a reason for every move he makes—money or power. I’ll see him tonight at a supper club with Angie. It’ll be interesting to see what he’s up to.”

  “That might be dangerous. Maybe I should come along to watch your back, just in case?”

  “Thanks, Yosh. I’m sure there’s no need. When he and I do finally finish this thing, it’ll be a well-planned encounter, not some chance meeting at a club. I’ll be all right tonight.”

  That evening, Angie studied herself in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, carefully assessing whether she’d achieved the right effect. She’d always wanted to be a flapper. The Roaring Twenties seemed like a great time to have lived. The war to end all wars had been fought—and won. There was no Depression, no Cold War, no atomic bomb, no terrorists blowing up planes, buildings, and buses for causes no one understood. People just had a good time.

  Yesterday, after leaving the mission, she’d gone to a vintage clothing store and found a sheath dress completely covered with silver sequins. It was sleeveless and had a low-cut square neckline. She’d found pale shimmering gray hose, silver shoes, light gray over-the-elbow gloves, and a long, wide silver ribbon for her hair.

  Now she arranged thick bangs across her forehead, pasted big round spit curls against each cheek, and plastered the whole thing in place with the ribbon, letting her bangs and curls peek provocatively beneath it. She crimped the rest of her hair into a frizz until she looked more like Clara Bow than herself, which wasn’t too hard to do, since the hot water and harsh soap she had used to get the dried chocolate out of her hair left it a frizzy mess anyway.

  A bright red Cupid’s-bow mouth completed the picture.

  She glanced at the clock. It was nearly eight o’clock.

  The doorbell rang. Paavo was right on time.

  She pulled the door open. He wore a dark gray suit—she hadn’t asked him to wear a 1920s outfit, knowing what his answer would be. No matter. Whatever he wore, he’d always be Valentino to her. But a pale under-cast to his skin and a pinched tenseness to his mouth told her something had happened. “Would you like to talk about it?” she asked.

  “About what?” he asked. Then, gesturing at her clothes, he said, “Not bad.” She took that as high praise and decided not to pursue whatever had made him so unhappy.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  She hung back. Ever since Lili had first mentioned the club, despite her bubbly nonsense, the fact remained that Klaw and Paavo would be face-to-face once again. Angie found it scary. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I do.”

  The supper club was above a nondescript American-style restaurant. Once inside, though, one flight up, nothing was the way it appeared from the street. Paavo showed the pass Lili had given them, and a door opened to another world.

  A huge man wearing a wide-lapeled pinstriped suit, a white stand-up collar, and a bow tie stood at the door making sure only invited guests were allowed in. In his hand was a very realistic-looking tommy gun—so realistic, she caught Paavo frowning at it more than once.

  Tables were beautifully set with white tablecloths and crystal glassware that sparkled under the bright lights. Other women were also dressed in waistless dresses, many with big bows tied at the crotch, topping short pleated skirts that flipped up as they danced. The “Varsity Rag” was blaring.

  Angie was surprised at the guests in the room. Some of the big-name, big-money people from Pacific Heights, Sea Cliff, and Presidio Heights—the best addresses in the city—were there, as well as several from Marin and the South Bay. Not only that, but there were more men than women. In fact, almost half the tables were all male.

  Paavo seemed to study everything, particularly the goonish-looking men standing near the doors and by the liquor tables. Angie didn’t like the way their jackets bulged. “I don’t know about this,” she said.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” he replied. When the band began to play “Somebody Loves Me,” he took her hand and led her to the dance floor.r />
  The meal was one of the best Angie had ever had. The entire menu was flawless—braised sweetbreads in puff pastry with truffle sauce, accompanied by a beet-and-arugula salad and steamed vegetables, finished off with a lemon-almond meringue. Paavo, though, barely ate anything.

  When the food was cleared, a bar was set up and the diners moved en masse toward it for after-dinner aperitifs, cigars, and cigarettes. “I guess we need to follow,” Paavo said, leading Angie toward the others.

  “I wonder what’s going on,” she murmured. They had barely gotten out of the way when the waiters began to cover the dining tables with an assortment of gaming paraphernalia—felt for blackjack, poker, baccarat, faro, roulette, and craps. In no time at all, the club had been transformed into a casino.

  The man at the bar began selling tokens for the games. Mounted on the wall was a list of prizes, donated by wealthy patrons, that the winning tokens could buy. Clever, Paavo mused. By making its money through the sale of the tokens, the supper club could claim that, technically speaking, it was not profiting from illegal gambling.

  Paavo had an idea, though, that if he scratched the surface, he’d easily find a different story. The people at this gathering weren’t interested in winning a set of Tupperware or a VCR. They already had one. Or two or three. And they weren’t intimidated by the law. They were the type who could make sure no one at the Hall of Justice would press charges, no matter how open or illegal the gambling. Another example of this being a city of laws—one set of laws for the politically powerful, another for everyone else.

  While Angie went off to the women’s room, Paavo wandered over to the bar. He bought ten tokens—at five dollars a pop, this was not a poor man’s club. Then he ordered a whiskey sour for Angie and a Scotch and water for himself. As he waited for the drinks he had a strange feeling of something happening behind him, something that gave him a chill. He turned around.

  At almost the exact moment Axel Klaw also turned. Their eyes met. Klaw nodded and crossed the room. “So we meet again, Inspector Smith,” Klaw said. “I’m surprised to find you here. But suddenly I think I know why Lili couldn’t find her pass. Your sneaky girlfriend must have stolen it. I blamed poor Lili and made her stay home.”