Beat Until Stiff Read online

  Hmm, maybe he was getting kickbacks from some of the purveyors. Pretty standard stuff. Times were tough, with unprecedented competition from abroad since the passage of NAFTA, especially from South America. The general public has no idea how much of their food stock comes from abroad. In the winter eighty percent of your fruit is from South America. Most likely the salmon you had for dinner was bred in a Chilean salmon farm. Even the South American wine industry is making some serious inroads on the American wine market. Despite the hefty tariffs the U.S. lays on these imports, these wines are available for next to nothing.

  “So how much money, Teri? Five thousand a year, ten thousand a year?” I must have sounded impatient because she suddenly turned huffy and defensive.

  “I don’t know. But from what he said, I kinda thought it might be a lot.”

  I was so frustrated I wanted to break that beautiful platter of hers. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how this could be big money. Most businesses I know run on razor-thin profit margins. They could slip Brent the odd hundred, but not the big money Brent had boasted about. Time to talk with Brent again.

  “Teri, when are you going to see the police? You need to tell them about the money,” I said, adding gently, “or I will.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice high as a little girl’s. “I’m going in tomorrow morning. I haven’t been answering my phone in case they wanted to come over here and question me. I’m not stupid. I know Brent doesn’t care for me much. But I l…l…love him and don’t want to h…h…hurt him,” she stuttered.

  This was too painful for words. I couldn’t say anything in reply. I walked over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She might be young and naïve, but fraud is fraud. It was obvious from her distress she knew exactly what Brent was in for. They weren’t just going to slap his wrists and hand him back his saucepan.

  “Do you think he’ll get in a lot of trouble?” she whimpered.

  I didn’t want to lie anymore so I said nothing.

  She turned her back to me, lay down on the bed, and pulled her covers over her head. “Could you go now?” came a muffled voice from the other side of the bed.

  I knew from her voice she’d let loose and bawl like a banshee when I finally made my exit. The Italian ceramics and Venetian goblets weren’t going to keep him forever. It was just a matter of time before her very simplicity and vulnerability became boring and irritating. This murder ended it much sooner than she’d anticipated.

  I let myself out. I looked at my watch. Nine o’clock. I needed food right away and a twenty-four-hour Safeway was pretty close by. Bruschetta piled high with tomatoes would hit the spot right about now.

  When I got home my answering machine was blinking like mad. The first ten messages were mainly from friends chastising me for not calling them back. Those I ignored. My mother left three messages, each sounding more worried than the one before. Even though it was after ten o’clock, I phoned her right back. I knew she’d be sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me to call and driving my stepfather crazy by asking him every three minutes, “Where do you think she is? Why hasn’t she called back?” I got off the phone in record time by pleading extreme exhaustion. Message eleven was from Jim.

  “Mary, I want to talk to you for five minutes,” he pleaded. “Don’t…Look, please call me.” I’d leave a message on his machine in the morning when he was at work. I didn’t need him and my mother calling me every ten minutes to check on my whereabouts.

  The next message was from a Latino male voice I couldn’t place. “Señora Ryan?” He paused for five seconds, then hung up. His voice sounded familiar, but there was too much background noise for me to tell who it was. Gilberto maybe?

  Message thirteen was from my sister, Nora.

  “Mary, just calling to hope you’re okay. I’ll try calling back later.”

  Her kids were screaming in the background; fun screaming, not killing each other screaming. We hadn’t spoken much in the last few months. Naturally her conversations would be filled with how Laura was doing in school, Kevin’s grades, will Timmy have to get braces or not, did Dan get that big promotion. My end of the conversation was limited to the numbers of hours I’d worked that week and the grief I was getting from my therapist about not letting go of my failed marriage.

  Since my divorce, my loneliness and despair over not having any children magnified tenfold every time I spoke to her. I stopped calling her, and sent her funny cards with risqué sayings on them in lieu of real conversation. It just hurt too much to talk to her. I hoped she understood. Time to mail another card telling her I was fine.

  Message fourteen was from Juan, overflowing with mea culpas. “Mary, I am so sorry for my behavior today. You must think I have no manners. I was so distressed over the events of the last two days, I took out my frustrations on that poor deliveryman. You can rest assured it will not happen again. Please accept my most fervent apologies.”

  He went on in this vein for a while so I tuned out. I can only handle so much of Juan’s excessive courtesy. In my meaner moments I call him the Latin Uriah Heep. It goes over very well with the socialites he has to deal with on a daily basis. These people thrive on obsequious behavior, but I find it suffocating.

  Then the tone of his voice changed and caught my interest again. “And the funeral for Carlos is Tuesday morning, ten o’clock, at St. Boniface in the Mission. There will be a reception in the church hall following the service. I phoned the staff to let them know. Please call me back if you have any questions. And again, I apologize for my boorish behavior today.”

  Guilt reigned. Two minutes earlier I’d been mentally trashing this guy, now I find out he’s gone to the trouble to call all the staff and let them know about Carlos’ funeral. I must be nice to him at the church and let him know how much I appreciated his efforts.

  The rest of the messages were from other chefs begging me to call them back and let them know what the scoop on the murder was. I cleared my answering machine. I went into my dining room and poured myself a large cognac. Sitting in my dark living room, I held my own little private wake for Carlos.

  Carlos would bring me exotic fruits from markets in the Mission, prefacing his gifts with, “These aren’t as good as the kind we have in El Salvador, but…” and then shrug his shoulders. How was his family going to make it without him? Like most of the Latinos I worked with, he worked two jobs—to support his family here and to send money back to his relatives in El Salvador.

  I fell asleep on the couch and woke up around eight, my neck aching as if I’d been wearing a watermelon as a necklace all night. After fortifying myself with a couple of Motrin and a hot shower, I got dressed.

  I had a whole day ahead of me: what to do?

  The more entrenched you become in the food business, the more it consumes your whole life until your only friends are foodies, your leisure activities center on food; your idea of a good time is to eat at the latest restaurant. There’s a great line in the movie Moonstruck when Nicholas Cage, who is a baker, yells, “I have no life.” Nobody but food people gets that line; they’re rolling in the aisles. But it’s that kind of laughter with a heavy dose of hysteria attached to it.

  Vowing to do something non-food related, I picked up the paint chips piled in a heap on my dining room table. Trying to visualize different colors in various rooms forced me to look at the house for the first time in months. What a pigsty.

  O’Connor called as I was scrubbing the grout in my bathroom with an old toothbrush and bleach.

  “Hey, Ryan, you holding up?”

  “What do you want, O’Connor?” I cupped the portable phone in my ear and went back to the grout.

  “Are you going to the funeral on Tuesday?”

  “Of course I’m going to the funeral.”

  “Look, I’ll be there, too. Keep your eyeballs peeled for his brother and point him out to me if he shows.”

  I stopped cleaning the grout, the toothbrush suspe
nded in midair. “Don’t tell me you suspect his brother? I’ve worked with these guys for five years. Gilberto wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less his brother.”

  “Get rid of that attitude, Ryan. I’ve talked to everybody who works at the restaurant. Nobody’s seen this guy. Don’t you think it’s strange he’s disappeared?”

  Gilberto hadn’t exactly disappeared. I didn’t say anything about the phone call I had gotten or spotting him at the paint store. I needed to see Gilberto and talk to him.

  “Anyway, I’ll save you a seat. I’ll be in a pew in the very back row. By the way, how long has it been since you’ve been in a church, Mary?”

  “I can do without your snide remarks, O’Connor,” I snarled into the phone, but he had already hung up.

  I kept on cleaning, moving methodically from room to room. In the middle of this cleaning frenzy I realized I was beginning to feel like me again. Pre-divorce Mary. It took a murder to shake me out of this awful combination of constant lethargy and simmering anger that had imprisoned me since my divorce. I was finally paying attention to someone other than me. Carlos’ murder was the slap on both cheeks. My anger was the ultimate exercise in narcissism. Only my loneliness mattered, only my anger was justified. My voice was always on the verge of a scream. Christ, I was tired of yelling.

  For the first time in two years I felt alive, awake, not so much as a trace of bitterness in my swallow. I actually looked at things. The floors needed refinishing; the light fixtures were unbelievably ugly. I had no pictures on my walls, the piano needed tuning.

  But the best part was that I was hungry, with a glorious healthy hunger, not the kind where you fill a hole to keep on moving. I wanted a full-blown meal, not junk food. I wanted some sort of gooey pasta, a Grace Baking Stormy sourdough baguette for mopping up the sauce, and light Chianti to chase it with. I craved a simple salad of mixed greens with a tart vinegary balsamic dressing. For dessert I envisioned a slice of Gorgonzola from Peck’s, a perfectly ripe pear, and an espresso laced with cognac. I practically had an orgasm on the spot thinking about it.

  Before my divorce, I truly loved food. Not only did I love eating it, I loved making it. No matter how frustrated I’d been with my various jobs, I’d never lost that pure joy of mixing butter and sugar to just the right consistency so that the eggs incorporated smoothly and the batter wouldn’t break. Or the pleasant monotony of rolling croissants. Or the sensuous smell of chocolate wafting over you as you melt it, infusing your chef’s jacket and hair with a heavy sexy aroma so that when you brush your hair before you go to bed at night your bathroom smells like chocolate. After Jim left, all of it vanished.

  Now when I smell chocolate in my hair after a long day I want to throwup. The more I cleaned the more I realized self-revelations weren’t going to come if I was working sixty-five hours a week. I’d tell Brent next week I was quitting. I had six months’ worth of living expenses in the bank. I should be able to get my act together by then.

  I felt so empowered by these thoughts that I actually called Jim and left a semi-polite message. “Jim, it’s Mary. I feel perfectly safe. Don’t worry about me. Don’t call me again.” Click. Well, I tried to be polite.

  It was six o’clock by the time I finished cleaning my house. In honor of my industry, I decided to treat myself to a nice place for dinner. I had my car key in the lock when O’Connor pulled up. He got out of the car, his arms filled with grocery bags.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Ryan,” O’Connor ordered. “Get that skinny ass back inside and help me make dinner.”

  We met at the path to my front door. I grinned and pointed at the grocery bags. “I hope there’s food in there. I’m ravenous.”

  When we got inside, he dumped the groceries on my kitchen table and looked me over. “I figured you didn’t have any food in the house. Did you have lunch today?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said hotly. No need to tell him it was a box of Altoids.

  He looked me over and shook his head. “Skinny is not a look you should cultivate.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  My stomach grumbled in grateful anticipation as we unloaded the groceries: nestled strands of fresh linguine, paper-thin slices of pancetta, a wedge of parmesan, a big bag of mixed spring greens, a container of sungold tomatoes, a bottle of Chianti, and two large truffles for dessert.

  The greatest thing about the food evolution of the nineteen eighties was not that we got to throw our money away on overpriced restaurant food, but that it educated people and forced the supermarkets to upscale their assortment to remain competitive and attract those customers who crave something a little more appetizing than pork and beans from a can.

  “I make the pasta, you do the salad and set the table?” O’Connor brokered.

  “Deal.”

  First, I got out two Waterford crystal goblets and poured both of us a generous helping of wine. Next, I set the table with my finest china and crystal. I hadn’t had a decent meal in a long time. I mean decent in the sense of a complete dining experience where it’s not only the food that’s important, but the entire package: the crystal magnifies the luster of a wine, the china frames the food like a fine painting, and the candlelight softens everything in its gentle glow.

  The aroma of sautéed pancetta competed with the pungent odor of the balsamic vinegar as I whisked together a tart dressing.

  “O’Connor, heads up.” I popped a couple of tomatoes in my mouth, then I tossed a tomato his way and he scooped it up with his jaw. We smiled at each other as the sweet juice filled our cheeks.

  By eight o’clock we were thoroughly sated and drinking espressos thick enough to clog pipes. You can tell where my priorities are. All of my windowsills need repainting, but I’ve the latest and greatest espresso machine.

  While savoring my coffee, I began conducting this internal debate whether or not to tell O’Connor about my little adventures with Brent and Gilberto. The episode with the files in the office was bizarre.

  O’Connor coughed discreetly and broke into my reverie. I realized that I’d been staring into space with my head going right or left depending on which side of the argument I was on.

  “Your neck bothering you, Ryan?”

  I blushed. “Yeah, my neck is a little stiff. I fell asleep on the couch last night.”

  Maybe I’ll just casually broach the subject of the murder, I thought, see if anything weird had come up, and then segue into my own information.

  “So, how’s the investigation going?”

  “We talked to the wife today.”

  I stifled an urge to kick him under the table and managed to say quietly, “Her name’s Rosa.”

  O’Connor ignored me. “He had three kids under the age of four and there’s another one on the way. You wonder how they’re going to make it,” he said, echoing my own concerns of last night. “Don’t these people know about birth control?”

  The sleepy camaraderie of the last hour shattered. I slammed down my espresso cup. “I’d like to point out that these people, as you so rudely refer to them, are not the only couple I know who have three kids under the age of four,” reminding him of his own progeny.

  “My children were planned and wanted,” he snapped back at me.

  “What makes you think these children weren’t planned and aren’t wanted? Did his children look malnourished or underfed? Carlos might not have made the big bucks detectives do, but he worked like an absolute dog to support his family.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he groaned. He stood up, came over to my chair, bent down, and grabbed me by the shoulders. We locked eyes, our collective anger heating the room up by five degrees. “Can’t we sit here and have a nice meal without you turning it into some sort of political referendum? What is it with you?”

  We stared at each other for ten seconds, then he abruptly let go of me as if my shoulders made his hands burn and stomped out the front door.

  I can’t go to bed with dirty dishe
s in the sink, so I washed up, ranting and raving to myself about the stupidity of cops. I was putting away the wineglasses when the phone rang. O’Connor calling to apologize, I thought.

  I wove the stems of the wineglasses between my fingers and picked up the phone with my free hand. “Hello,” I said, trying not to smirk.

  “Mind your own business. Cunt!” a voice screamed into my ear.

  Chapter 9

  The wineglasses slipped out of my limp fingers and shattered on the hardwood floor.

  I swept up one hundred and sixty dollars worth of Waterford crystal shards and thought about the phone call. There was a lot of background noise, as if the caller were standing in a telephone booth on a busy street like Van Ness. I couldn’t detect any sort of accent, nor was the voice particularly high or low. Should I call O’Connor? Unbidden, Jim’s name popped up. Should I call him?

  None of the above. My mother? No way. If I told her about the phone call, she’d chain me to her kitchen table. Jim was out for obvious reasons. O’Connor? “No, I can’t identify the voice. No, it was too noisy for me to make out anything.” I’d sound like a moron. And the truth be told, I was still pissed off at him. Sexist, fascist, racist jerk.

  Then it came to me. Brent. He was still ticked off that I’d talked with Teri. I had a hard time imagining him using that word, but then again I wouldn’t have pegged him for tax fraud either. I didn’t need to call O’Connor. I could handle Brent.

  Getting ready for bed, I remembered a message left on my machine by someone who might have a little more insight into the financial end of things. Camille Chinamino.

  Camille and I’d gone to École d’Epicure together. Close friends in school, our relationship had dwindled down to having dinner together once or twice a year. While I went the more traditional post-graduation route by working in restaurants, she became a food writer. Currently she’s writing the weekly food gossip column for the San Francisco Chronicle. You know, what chef is cooking where, which restaurants are opening and closing, and, most important, who’s financially backing whom. Her column is as closely read as the financial writers. San Francisco is a food town, a mecca for people who like to eat. Patrons follow their favorite chefs from venue to venue, commiserate over hard-to-come-by reservations, and diss menus. There are only really three food towns in the U.S.: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. By that I mean places where you’d plan a vacation and buy airline tickets solely based on the restaurant scene. Chicago is creeping in there, but only because of Charlie Trotter’s. Ditto for Boston and Todd English.