Beat Until Stiff Read online

  Before I called her back, I mapped out a plan so I’d get the answers I needed, but not make her unduly curious. I was in luck, she was home.

  “Camille, it’s Mary.”

  “Mary, I’ve called and called. Where have you been? I’ve called you about fifty…Jasper, I’ve told you for the last time, your food is over there.” I heard plaintive meowing in the background. Camille adopts stray cats and then pesters her friends to give them permanent homes. Inevitably, she’ll turn into one of those old women who leave their estates to the SPCA. “Cleo, stop that. What’s the latest? My deadline is tomorrow morning, and my editor would be the cat that ate the canary if I had something original.”

  An interesting choice of words considering she was knee-deep in cats.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Camille. I really don’t have any more information than what your own paper printed.” Despite gorging myself at dinner, I was starving. I perched the phone on one ear and started slicing into what was left of the baguette. “It was one of my pastry guys, but the cops still don’t have a motive.”

  “Mary, are you there? This phone connection is terrible. I can’t hear you. It sounds like someone’s sawing wood.”

  “Uh, let me punch some buttons.” I sliced through the rest of the baguette and put down the knife. “Is that better?”

  “Yeah, these portable phones. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Here’s your dinner, Mouser.” Camille’s love affair with animals was a constant reminder to me about the pitfalls of being single. When cats become your only bed partner, it’s time to start running singles ads in every paper within two hundred miles. “Call up Jim. What are ex-husbands who happen to be a homicide inspectors for?”

  “Camille,” I admonished, “you know that Jim and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms. Besides, I can’t tell you anything about the murder itself. The detective in charge would cut off my ears and sauté them for his breakfast if I told you the crime scene details. I called because I’ve a big favor to ask of you.”

  I lathered the bread with a two-inch slab of sweet butter. “This probably isn’t very newsworthy, but do you think you could put a paragraph in about what a nice guy Carlos was, how he’s going to be missed, and so on. He had a great sense of humor and was always smiling, despite the fact he worked two jobs.”

  “Sure, no problem. I can squeeze it in below Wolfgang’s newest place opening in Vegas.”

  “There’s more. This is the biggee, Camille. Could you set up some sort of fund through the paper to help his family? He’s got…had three kids and his wife’s pregnant.” I had to stop for a couple of seconds to pull myself together. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  “No problem, kiddo. I think I can bump the paragraph I was writing about the mayor getting pied in the face again. I can tell from your voice, you really liked him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did. He worked his ass off for me. If I had asked him to plunge his right arm into a deep fat fryer he would have.”

  I needed to change this train of thought or I’d be guzzling the cognac again.

  “Camille, while I have you on the line. I’ve a question about backers. I’m toying with the idea of opening my own bakery. I read your column last week about Norm and Polly opening up their new place. How did they get the money? They had Lars design the restaurant, for chrissakes, and he doesn’t come cheap. And the last time I checked, those Italian hand-built bread ovens are pretty pricey.” I took a big bite of bread. Ummm, heaven on earth.

  “Well, Polly has family money and Norm charmed some Silicon Valley millionaires. I talked to them a couple of months ago. They told me construction costs had ballooned to four million by the end. Fortunately, they got a good review last week. Otherwise I bet they’d be sharpening their knives right about now to cut their throats. The light fixtures Karlsen designed for the dining room were a thousand apiece.”

  Opening a restaurant is big business these days. Nobody rounds up used bentwood chairs and covers tables with red-checked tablecloths anymore. If you hire a restaurant designer chances are you’ll sink anywhere from one to two million bucks into the place even before you open the door. Of course, the irony is that eighty percent of all restaurants fail within two years of opening. The restaurant business is the toughest game in town.

  “When Brent opened American Fare, I completely ignored that part of it. I should get more involved in the financial end of things. Do you know who financed him? I’ll see him at the funeral, but since I have you on the phone…” I took another big bite.

  “Beats me. He said something vague about profits from some investments. Who’s his broker, Hillary Clinton? Every time I brought it up, he changed the subject. Did you guys use Lars? I can’t remember.”

  “No, Brent didn’t want anything too stylized. He went to France and visited about a hundred different bistros trying to come up with a timeless look.”

  “You guys swamped?”

  I thought about the hours of overtime I’d be putting in over the next couple of months. The cords in my neck started to clump in tight knots.

  “Of course, with more fresh hell in store. I don’t know how long I can muster up the energy to do this.”

  “That’s why I went into food writing. With my bad back I figured a career actually cooking was short-lived. It amazes me that Brent has the energy to have all those affairs. Is he still fooling around with that rich blonde?”

  I haven’t seen any statistics, but I bet the divorce rate for chefs is up there with doctors and lawyers. The food business attracts young people because they’ll work for the low wages restaurants typically pay, and they have the superhuman energy needed in a kitchen. This means middle-aged chefs hit on a lot of twenty-year-old women. I don’t know if older women chefs are hitting on young virile waiters; it could be now that there are more women in the profession, but I doubt it. As a woman chef you have to work even harder to prove yourself. I doubt whether any of my fellow female chefs have the energy.

  “Yeah, among others.”

  “Are you seeing anyone? Oh, just a minute.” The phone made a sharp thunk. I could hear her faintly, as if she was in another room: “Don’t shred Mommy’s new Coach handbag, Mittens. It’s vewwwy expensive,” she admonished in an Elmer Fudd voice.

  I’d better make that dinner reservation fast. Camille needed to get out more. As far as I was concerned, speaking to cats in cartoon voices is one step away from believing National Enquirer headlines.

  “Sorry about that,” Camille apologized. “Cats, you’ve got to love them. So, are you dating yet? And don’t give me that line about how you’re not ready. It’s been almost two years.”

  “These days I barely have the energy to brush my teeth, Camille. I just can’t be nice to anyone right now. I’m seriously thinking of quitting and taking some time off. Of course, I’ll let you know when I give notice so you can put it in your column. This murder has made me stop banging my head against the wall. I want to rebuild my life. I owe you dinner. At Masa’s no less.”

  “It’s creepy isn’t it? That they never found out who murdered him.”

  Masa Kobayashi was the chef in San Francisco, if not the entire United States, during the nineteen eighties. One of the top chefs in the world, no contest. Until he was found murdered, beaten to death, in the corridor of his apartment building. An unassuming man with an almost ungodly ability with food, he had no known enemies. The rumor around the cooking community was that he got behind in some gambling debts. Moral of the story, do not mess with the Chinese gangs in San Francisco.

  “Yeah, it had me looking over my shoulder for a few days. Hey, thanks so much for the plug about Carlos.”

  “No sweat. My editor loves human-interest stuff every now and then. Keeps the column from being just a series of advertisements plugging new restaurants. I’ll let you know about how the fund is doing in a couple of weeks.”

  “Sounds great. We’ll set up our dinner dat
e then. And before you ask, I’m not taking any cats.”

  “Seriously, Mary, it might help with the loneliness. I’ve got two wonderful little kittens…”

  “Maybe later. Bye.”

  While wolfing down the rest of the baguette, I mulled over our conversation. Instead of getting answers, I was stuck with more questions.

  What I told Camille was true. I hadn’t thought about all the money it must have taken to put American Fare on the map. We hadn’t hired Lars, but Brent had still spent a fortune on the dining room and a fortune-plus on the kitchen. Every appliance, every ladle was top of the line. He gave me carte blanche to order any equipment I wanted. At the time I was like a kid in a candy store, picking out heart-shaped pie pans, Spode china to showcase my desserts, Swiss chocolate molds, whatever caught my fancy.

  But where had the money come from?

  Brent doesn’t talk about his childhood much, but from the little he’s said, I gained the impression his family was pretty poor. Brent’s father worked the oil rigs throughout Colorado and Texas. The work wasn’t steady, and it sounded like Dad had a major problem with the sauce. Brent had worked in greasy spoons the minute he was tall enough to push a broom, earning money to help feed the family. I doubt “family money” would apply in this case.

  Dismissing that ludicrous story about investments, who actually owned American Fare?

  I spent all day Sunday working on my yard. Although gardening is one of my passions, I hadn’t so much as turned over a single dirt clod the entire year I had lived in this house. Somehow the grass was surviving my total neglect.

  While ripping out a bunch of tired geraniums, I searched my memory for any conversations Brent and I’d had about opening up American Fare and the financial setup. I couldn’t come up with a single one, which is not to say they didn’t happen. We probably talked about it at length, but I’d tuned it out. I find money boring; I barely bother to reconcile my own checkbook. He might keep that information from Camille. She’d have blabbed about his business affairs to every chef from here to New York. But why keep it a secret from me? I might not remember the money part, but a partner I’d remember.

  Where could I find out about the financial setup? I couldn’t exactly ask Brent; clearly he thought I was already a little too involved in his affairs as it was. It hit me. Right after Camille and I graduated from school, we started a weekend catering business and had to get a business license at the Office of Consumer Affairs. I’d go to City Hall and search their files. All that stuff should be public record.

  After working hard in the garden all day, I slept like the dead and was up at dawn. I made myself a latte to go and hit the doughnut shop on my way out of town. I was at City Hall at nine. No sign of a blue van in the rearview mirror.

  The room where the business license records were housed was painted that government issue, pukey, pastel green. A long Formica counter bisected the room, and a maze of cubicles sat behind the counter. No sounds of life, not even the click of computer keys. I pushed down on a bell ringer like the crudely hand-lettered sign indicated. I was on my best behavior today.

  I counted to ten. No one appeared. I pushed the bell again. Twice.

  A head peeped around the corner of a cubicle wall. A woman in her late forties with a home frost job and bad Farrah Fawcett haircut glared at me. Her face had that gray-white pallor of someone who smoked two packs a day and considered potato chips a vegetable.

  “Hi,” I smiled. “I need to get some information about business licenses?”

  “Fill out forms 601b and 603c. Ring when you’re done,” she ordered in a gravelly monotone, and her head immediately whipped back behind the cubicle. The computer voice that gives out phone numbers when you dial 411 had more personality.

  “Excuse me,” I said in a loud but polite voice. She couldn’t have walked out of earshot. The room wasn’t that big. “I don’t want a business license, I want to look up some public records.”

  No head.

  “Excuse me?” I said louder, still in polite mode, although I felt a big ass frown pulling at the sides of my mouth. I counted to ten again.

  Still no head.

  Sigh. These days polite doesn’t get you anywhere. Time for evil Mary to make an appearance. I began singing and dinging “It’s a Small World” on the bell. It’s toss-up what’s more annoying, the song or my voice, which has been likened to the sound chickens make as they’re being killed.

  I got through only two lines before she reappeared, stomping out from the labyrinth of cubicles, her pallor thrown into stark relief by the twin spots of rage on both cheeks.

  “Sorry to disturb your solitaire game,” I apologized. “But I don’t need to fill out any forms. I want to look up a business license.”

  She raised her arm in a stiff, Ghost of Christmas Future manner, and pointed in the direction of a computer at the far end of the room. Then she scooped up the ringer, narrowed her eyes in a glare that would crack an egg, and stomped back to her desk.

  “Thank you so much for all your help,” I yelled to her back.

  For all my recent bitching about the cooking world, I found myself silently counting my blessings. Instead of caramelizing apples over the stovetop for tarte tartin, the aroma of the burnt sugar tickling my nose, it could be me working in a four-foot by six-foot cubicle, repeating the same instructions over and over again to snotty women with attitude. The highlight of my week would be to win twenty games of solitaire as opposed to the nineteen I won last week.

  Fortunately, the computer was designed for techie-challenged individuals like myself. I was so pumped up I could barely keep my butt in the seat while waiting for the information to come up on the screen.

  The computer groaned and complained at the typed requests, and finally coughed up what I needed. I searched through all the little boxes of information and finally found the box listing the owner.

  Goddamn it, Brent was indeed an owner, but there was a second owner: Vino Blanco Corporation.

  Over the years, Brent had inundated me with his plans for the restaurant he would one day own: what it would look like, the menu, even the type of cutlery he wanted. But never in all this pie-in-the-sky talk had he once mentioned Vino Blanco. Who could forget White Wine Corporation? It sounded like a think tank for Tenderloin winos. Fortunately, there was an address on Mission Street, somewhere around 17th Street judging by the number.

  Time to check out Vino Blanco in person.

  City Hall isn’t far from the Mission and luckily I found a parking space just off 17th.

  I love the Mission. It’s the only place left in San Francisco with street life. North Beach has sacrificed almost all its ethnicity in pursuit of chic. The death knell began tolling when the U.S. Restaurant closed its doors and will finish when Molinari’s goes dark. There are still a few cafes where you can hear Italians arguing with each other, but by and large it’s a lot of people dressed in black talking on cell phones. And while Chinatown can’t be beat for its produce, everyone is in a rush. They have to get home or go the store or catch the Stockton bus. Mothers silently hustle their children down the street. The only sounds you hear are chickens squawking and shoppers haggling with storekeepers.

  In the Mission, people saunter, they loiter. Men check out the chicas, the chicas flirt with the men and reapply their lipliner every fifteen minutes. The smell of cooked goat wafts out of the doors of funky taquerias, the sort of places that you know are going to give you the runs the next day, but you eat there anyway because it smells so good. Rap pours out of car windows and from random boom boxes. Fruit and vegetables pyramided in makeshift produce stands line the sidewalks. Kids squeal and laugh at their own antics as their mothers gracefully weave them in and out of the crowds. You can walk seven blocks and never hear a word of English.

  The Mission was two coffin nails from extinction during the dot-com frenzy of the nineteen nineties. Computer start-ups spilled out of South Park hungry for rental s
pace. Car mechanics, small manufacturers, sheet metal shops, and cheap outlet stores found their rents tripling and quadrupling when their leases were up. The implosion of the dot-com phenomenon has temporarily halted the Mission’s demise. When a Starbucks appears I’ll know the Mission will be virtually dead, gentrification only a frappucino away.

  I stopped in front of the address I’d written down on my wrist. I checked it again. In front of me was a particularly divey taqueria. I could see three tables and four chairs through the open door, all mismatched. The windows didn’t look like they’d been washed since the Kennedy Administration, and the awning leaning over the windows was tattered. It didn’t even have a name.

  The taqueria was empty. I walked in. Two older Latino men stood behind the counter, one desultorily chopping up grilled flank steak and the other dicing tomatoes. They both had that hunched-shoulder look from a near lifetime of keeping their heads bowed and their mouths shut.

  Neither man looked up when I approached the counter.

  This was going to be tough. Not for the first time did I curse myself for not taking some basic Spanish classes. My Spanish was very limited.

  “Hola,” I said in a chirpy, isn’t-it-a-lovely-day voice. “Por favor, Señor?” No reaction; both of them went on chopping. They didn’t raise their heads one inch.