Cook's Christmas Capers (The Angie Amalfi Mysteries) Page 4

The words to the song came to her. "If I could save time in a bottle..."

  How did she know that? She didn't remembering knowing the song or its syrupy words. How could the words come to her now?

  She must have made a noise or something, because the musician abruptly stopped playing, turned, and looked at her.

  "Hello," he called, scrambling to his feet. "What a surprise to see you. I hope I didn't disturb your visit to the park today."

  He was a middle-aged man, overweight, with graying blond hair combed straight back from his forehead, and heavy black-rimmed glasses.

  "You didn't disturb me," she said. "I was enjoying it. I didn't mean for you to stop."

  "It's okay. Now I have a chance to wish you a very nice day." He bobbed his head as he spoke, his voice low.

  He seemed somewhat mentally challenged. "You play very well," she said with a smile.

  He stepped a bit closer. "Did you feel the earthquake?"

  "Oh, my God! You felt it, too?" Elation filled her. Was she back to her world? Her time? Had she finally awoken from a bizarre nightmare?

  "Yes. Of course. I hope my mother's all right. She lives in Santa Rosa. I wanted to call her but there's no pay phone around here. I think she might be worried about me."

  Oh, dear. "You need to find one because you don't have a cell phone, right?" she asked hopefully.

  "A what?"

  Her thin hope crashed. "Nothing."

  "Can you play the saxophone?" He lifted it high. "You can borrow mine if you want."

  "I don't play."

  "It's not hard. Not if I can do it. I was in the war, you know."

  "Vietnam?"

  "No. I was in Korea. I flew a plane." He stretched out his arms and ran in circles like a little kid playing "airplane." When he stopped, he stood beside her. He was a surprisingly large man up close. Much taller and broader of shoulder than she expected.

  For some reason, she felt uneasy, and tried to brush it off. If he was once a pilot, he had to have been quite bright and sharp before the war did this to him. "That's very good," she said, forcing a smile. "You must be proud."

  "My name's Tim Burrows." He played a quick riff of notes on his sax, and she smiled. "What do you do?" he asked.

  She nearly said "nothing" since all her recent attempts at a job had been colossal failures. "A little of this, a little of that."

  "That sounds very important." His gray eyes were small under thick glasses. "I don't have a job. People won't hire me. I have a plate in my head, and sometimes it makes it hard to think. People say it happened to me because I was in the Air Force and I killed people. Everybody hates the military. They say I got what I deserved." He looked puzzled. "Maybe so."

  Angie was horrified. "I'm sorry that's been your experience."

  "You're a nice lady."

  Lady...there was an old fashioned word no one used anymore. "Thank you," she said. "I'd better get going. Good-bye, now!"

  She started to walk away along the path.

  "Have a nice day!" he called, and soon after started playing "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay." It made her smile. How could he have worried her?

  She was only about half way back when she saw Paavo approach. Not the real Paavo, but the leisure-suited, long-haired, mustachioed interloper who had taken the place of the man she loved.

  "How did you find me?" she asked when they met.

  "It wasn't too difficult. When you ran off, I was tempted to let you go, but then I started to worry about you. I saw you turn west toward the ocean and decided to come looking. I didn't want to hear that you reached the water and kept on going!"

  She shuddered at the image his words conveyed. "No, I should think not. But you really don't have to worry about me. I know I'm nothing to you." She turned away from him.

  "Angie!" he called.

  She didn't want to face him and hurried ahead.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" Paavo asked, catching up quickly.

  No! I'm not! She pivoted in the opposite direction from him, leaving the path and blindly rushing into the shrubbery that lined it. As she did, her eye caught something blue and pointy under a bush. She recognized the odd shape and stopped, staring.

  "What is it?" Paavo asked.

  She pointed. It looked like the heel of a woman's shoe. She flashed back to her apartment, to finding a man's body….

  Paavo pushed aside some of the brush. "My God!" He grabbed Angie's arm and roughly spun her around. "Don't look!" he said, then lurched into some shrubs a few feet away and threw up.

  Angie stared in shock. Paavo never threw up. "Ol' iron guts," his homicide partner, Yosh, called him.

  "Paavo?" she whispered.

  "There's so much blood and.... She was stabbed, I think." His face was white; his hands shook. "Let's get the hell out of here!"

  "Wait! No! We've got to call the police."

  "No way. The bacon boys don't like me and I don't like them. Besides, this has nothing to do with us." He grabbed her hand. "Come on!"

  Open-mouthed, she gaped, barely comprehending what she'd just heard. "Paavo, the woman was murdered!"

  "Yeah, and when the cops show up, they'll question us. You act like you hardly know your own name. How will you answer their questions?"

  He was right.

  He half dragged her back to the parking lot. "I'm calling Connie Rodgers. She'll know how to keep us out of this. It's not like we've ever been involved with any other murders, right?"

  Uh, oh! "Paavo," Angie said meekly.

  "Yes?"

  She cleared her throat. "When you tell Connie about this dead body"—Angie swallowed hard, realizing how bad her next words were going to sound—"I've got some additional rather hard-to-believe information you ought to give her."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Connie Rogers stood in the apartment Angie Amalfi claimed was hers and looked at the body on the floor.

  She didn't know how anyone ever became accustomed to this job. This was her fifth dead body since being detailed to Homicide, and it hadn't gotten any easier. Three of them had died at home, the causes quickly determined to be natural. The fourth was a little kid who had choked on a toy. She would never forget that heartbreaking case. And now this.

  The medical examiner inspected the corpse and declared the man had been poisoned. Maybe he concluded that because of the green foam around the man's mouth, but she couldn't be sure.

  In fact, she didn't think she wanted to know, which wasn't a good idea for someone who hoped to become a homicide inspector. It was the highest rung in the Bureau of Inspectors, the area that good cops with a talent for analysis and stick-to-itiveness aspired to. But the thought of homicides made her stomach flip-flop.

  When the coroner began muttering something about rigor mortis, Connie felt so woozy she went into the den.

  A retired professor of sociology, Aloysius Starr, rented the apartment. A driver's license photo as well as the apartment manager, Rosa Calamatti, identified him as the dead man. He had no known relatives in the area.

  The den was filled with his books, and on the desk sat an IBM Selectric with the little metal balls that bounced around and around as you typed, and you could easily pop one out and drop a new one in to change the font. Connie had wanted one until she saw the price.

  She opened the middle drawer of the victim’s desk and saw a stack of business cards in one corner. The first card in the stack was that of Alan Trimball, chef at Nona's, A Restaurant. Connie hated the pretentious sound of "a restaurant" tacked onto the name. What else should it be? A horse food factory?

  The chef's name, however, seemed familiar.

  With gloves on, she picked up the phone and called Bruce Whalen, the homicide inspector who was assigned to mentor her. "It's Connie. What was the name of your murdered chef?"

  "Alan Trimball. Why?"

  As Connie explained where she was, and told him about the corpse before her, his question echoed in her head. Why? The two men apparently knew each other, and now
both were dead.

  Why?

  o0o

  "Oh, no!" Paavo wailed as he put down the phone. Angie had never heard her fiancé wail before. She had to admit it was more than a little annoying. She was waiting to hear from Connie who was investigating the body in Angie's apartment at the same time as two of the more senior inspectors—two men Angie had never heard of—went to Land's End.

  Listening to Paavo, however, it was clear he wasn't talking to Connie.

  "What's wrong?" Angie asked as soon as he hung up the phone.

  "Nona's been arrested," he said. "Poor baby!"

  Baby…again! Angie fumed, arms crossed. "So, what are you going to do? Bail her out?"

  "I'm not sure she can be bailed out. Not for a while, anyway, according to her attorney. He said she's going to have to go through an arraignment. The case is serious—double homicide."

  "Double homicide? What are you saying?"

  "It was her cooking that killed both Alan Trimball and Professor Starr—that's the name of the dead man in what you say is your apartment." He quickly told Angie all he had learned about Aloysius Starr and about Nona's chef being found dead a short distance from her home.

  Angie couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Her cooking is fairly hideous, but it is not fatal. Are you saying Nona knew Professor Starr, too?"

  "That's the thing. She claims she doesn't. But her food killed him. It was her recipe for boiled Brussels sprouts, black soy beans, and tofu, all mashed together. According to Connie, the food was laced with arsenic. The murders are connected, and Nona is the prime suspect."

  "What are you going to do?" Angie asked. She didn't like Nona, but Nona was no killer. Well, that might not be true. Nona in her lifetime wasn't a killer. This Nona, she had no idea of…and that recipe did sound lethal.

  "Nona asked me to keep her restaurant going until she gets this cleared up. It's the least I can do for her." Paavo sat down and ran his hands through his long, wavy hair. "But how I'm supposed to it with her cook dead and Nona in prison, I have no idea. I wonder if the dishwasher can cook. Or one of the waiters? Do you think customers would notice if I bought a bunch of TV dinners?"

  "What kind of food does she serve?" Angie asked.

  "Macrobiotic," Paavo said. "Lots of brown rice, barley, millet, tofu, and vegetables. Not a prime rib or thick steak to be found. The truth is, I don't much care for it."

  That, Angie thought, was the most sensible thing he had said yet. "Tell you what. You get some of her favorite recipes for this macrobiotic food from Nona, and I'll cook them."

  "You will? Do you know how?"

  "More than you'll ever imagine. In fact, since I haven't eaten anything much since I've gotten here, why don't I cook you something you'll really like, my carbonara with prosciutto dish, for example?"

  "I don't think I've ever eaten prosciutto. It's Italian ham or bacon, right?"

  "Ham. Bacon is pancetta. Trust me, you'll love this dish. You always have."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Angie went with Paavo to Nona's, A Restaurant and helped him put up signs saying the restaurant would reopen the next night. Christmas lights had been strung around the front entrance, and a small Santa statue sat by the cash register. The dining area was fairly small, with eight tables set up for four people at each. The kitchen was also small, with aged but adequate appliances, although Angie realized that everything looked aged to her these days.

  As Paavo walked aimlessly around trying to figure out what to do, Angie went through the macrobiotic menu to see what she needed to prepare. She was appalled. How did Nona expect to make any money off this so-called food? To forbid the use of butter, cream, cheese, eggs—not to mention meat or fish—or anything else that raised recipes from merely adequate to great, made no sense to her whatsoever.

  She tossed the menu and came up with her own ideas. She remembered a time, early in her relationship with Paavo, when she had to deal with macrobiotic food at a bed and breakfast. She had managed to work with it then, and she could do so again.

  Spices were her friend, and she wrote down ideas for curries using coconut milk to make the sauce creamy. White rice was frowned on, but brown wasn't very tasty in her opinion. She decided to offer customers a choice of jasmine rice or na'an…let their conscience be their guide.

  Along with the curries, she planned dishes with chopped vegetables, peppers, onions, and garlic sautéed in olive oil, using a variety of seasonings—some Italian, some Mexican, some Chinese. With the Italian, she would serve homemade bread with little plates of olive oil and balsamic vinegar; with the Mexican, steamed tortillas; and no matter what Nona thought, white rice with the Chinese.

  She was creating her own menu when a good-looking, tall, svelte, age twenty-something man walked in. He had thick brown hair, combed to sweep luxuriously back from his brow, and piercing navy blue eyes. Paavo introduced him as Lorenzo McCaffrey, one of Nona's two waiters.

  "I came by to see if the place was open, or if somebody was here who needed help," Lorenzo said.

  "That was thoughtful," Angie told him as Paavo went off to the dining room. She explained about the menu and her role in the restaurant, and then she said, "I'm sorry to hear about your chef's murder. It must be hard to deal with. Were you close to Alan Trimball?"

  He shrugged. "Not really."

  "Did he ever mention Professor Aloysius Starr?"

  "Starr? No, not that I recall." He took out the flatware and began polishing it to wipe away water spots.

  "Did Nona talk about Starr?" Angie put down her pen.

  "No. Why do you want to know that? Who's Starr?" Lorenzo rubbed the fork tines until they shone.

  "He was a sociology professor at U.C. Berkeley. I thought Alan might have mentioned him, that's all."

  "Oh…yeah, well Alan did study sociology at Berkeley, but I don't remember him saying much about it."

  Angie was surprised to hear that. "He went to U.C. Berkeley?"

  "He did." Lorenzo shut the drawer with the flatware and faced her. "Alan used to say that if he'd been smart instead of ethical, he could have made a fortune after college."

  "Really?" Angie was surprised. Sociology was hardly a high-paying field. "Doing what?"

  "He never said, but he would look at Nona and say she threw away her money, and then shake his head."

  "What did he mean?"

  "I'm not sure. She had gone away for a week to some self-help seminar and it really set Alan off. I guess he thought it was a stupid way to spend a vacation, but maybe there was more to it than that." He put on his jacket, ready to leave.

  "Self-help?" She tried to remember what she had heard about those times. Was EST of that period? She wasn't even sure what EST meant, come to think of it.

  "ISMI," Lorenzo said, heading towards the door.

  "Is me? What's me?" Angie asked, going after him.

  "No, not is me, I.S.M.I. It's pronounced 'is me.' But really, where have you been? Everyone knows about it. The Individual System for Meaning Institute. Hell, it's put Mendocino on the map! That's where Nona went for her vacation."

  Angie was about to ask him more questions when the restaurant's phone rang. Lorenzo left as Paavo answered it.

  He quickly handed the receiver to Angie. "It's the police," he said. "They want to question you. Right now."

  o0o

  Angie sat in Homicide's interview room. Across the table from her were Connie and Homicide Inspector Bruce Whalen. Whalen looked like he was in his late thirties or early forties, somewhat stocky, with thinning black hair. He was a plain man, but Angie suspected he was an okay guy…when he wasn't treating you like a potential murderer.

  "There must be some reason why you thought that was your apartment," Bruce repeated for the tenth time.

  "I don't know what more to tell you." Angie held her head. How many ways could she say the same thing? "It just seemed like it was. I have no idea why. As I said, I must have some bizarre type of amnesia."

  "Probably brought on
by the trauma of having killed a man!" Bruce shouted.

  "I didn't kill anybody."

  His gaze was hard and unflinching. "First, you and your friend, Paavo Smith, report finding a body out at Land's End. Now we will admit that it appears to be the work of the Zodiac—the multiple knife wounds…and other things…his MO all the way. But the real question is, why were you the one to find it? And then, you just happen to mistakenly think you live in an apartment where another person is found dead. What are you, a corpse magnet? Few people find one dead body in an entire lifetime, and you find two within hours of each other."

  "I can't explain it!" Angie cried. "I'm not even supposed to be here! None of this makes any sense to me!"

  "Which sounds like you're already trying to build an insanity defense. Well, let me tell you, that 'I'm crazy' stuff doesn't work in this city!"

  "But 'I ate too many Twinkies' does?" she said with a sneer, thinking of the infamous Twinkie defense when City Superintendent Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and gay-activist City Superintendent Harvey Milk.

  Her interrogator frowned. "What?"

  Oops, wrong time period. "Nothing," Angie said. Dan White ended up getting only two years for the two assassinations based on the defense of "the sugar in Twinkies made me do it," and San Francisco juries have been a laughing stock ever since. But the world has a way of righting wrongs, and Dan White took his own life not long after being released from prison.

  "Let's go outside," Bruce said to Connie.

  A chill went from down from Angie’s spine. What did they want to discuss that couldn’t be said in front of her?

  o0o

  Connie was glad to see the questioning stop. She had no idea why, but she actually felt sorry for Angelina Amalfi. The woman seemed nice, but terribly confused.

  The coroner had said that judging from the state of Aloysius Starr's body, he had been dead more than twenty-four hours, which put his death a few hours after Alan Trimball’s. The manager of the apartment building remembered Angie from earlier that afternoon. Mrs. Calamatti had turned her away, but obviously Angie had found a way to get inside through the roof.