Dying for a Taste (15 page)

“Stranger things have happened,” I said. “Just look at what Alfredo did to Letta’s namesake in
La Traviata
.” We’d seen this opera together several years earlier—a local, somewhat amateurish performance.

“Sure, in Opera Land people will do all sorts of crazy things. And anyway, he was wildly jealous of Violetta. Wait!” Eric sat up straight. “Did the letters come before or after Kate found out about Tony?”

“The first came months before; the second, I’m not sure—around the same time, I think.”

“Oh. Dang.”

“Yeah.” I chewed my lip and thought for a minute. “Okay, assuming Kate didn’t write the letters, then whoever did is suspect number . . .”

“That would make four. And if the man in the photo Letta took at Gauguin is a different person, then we have five. And there’s also that guy who visited Kate. Could he be the man in Letta’s photo, I wonder?”

“No. Not unless Kate is lying, that is. She said she didn’t recognize him. So the guy in the muscle car would be number six. Though I’m not sure exactly how his visiting Kate makes him a suspect for Letta’s murder. It was Kate he was harassing. Plus, you gotta ask, what was that all about, anyway? I mean, why would some mystery man suddenly show up at her farm? It makes me wonder if maybe she simply made the whole thing up. Though again, I’m not sure why she would.”

I stared across the basement at the tools hanging on the wall and then started to giggle.

“What?” Eric asked.

I nodded toward the thingamabob/whassis/widget. “I think we’d better add Nonna to the list.”

Eric followed my gaze. “Oh man, you are so right,” he said with a laugh. “Just check out the blades on that thing. Hmmm . . . Now what would be her motive?”

“She did always like Dad best. And then there’s the fact that Letta hardly ever came to Sunday dinner—”

I stopped speaking when the door at the top of the stairway opened, throwing a bright shaft of light down upon us.

“Ohhh . . . jus’ look at these two!” We turned around to see Nonna’s short frame silhouetted by the light with my dad standing behind her. “So sad to stop your lovey-dovey,” Nonna said with a broad smile, “but your
papà
is now here, and is time for
mangiare
.”

“Just don’t let her handle any knives,” Eric whispered to me. “You can cut the bread, okay?” Grinning, he grabbed the bottle of Salvatore’s wine, and we stood and climbed back up the stairs into the bright, aroma-filled kitchen.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I’m an excellent waitress. I can remember every order for a table of eight without having to write anything down, juggle five plates of chicken cacciatore without spilling a single drop, and muster a winning and charming smile with even the most truculent customers. After all, I’ve been waiting tables since I was a teenager.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

For Monday’s lunch shift, however, that’s what I was doing at Solari’s. As manager of the front of the house, I was usually able to schedule staff in such a way that I wasn’t one of the servers, but Elena had covered for me over the last weekend, and now it was payback time.

Setting down two orders of pasta primavera at table twelve, I asked if they needed anything else and then headed back to the steam tables to ladle out a bowl of minestrone for the woman at table five.

But my mind was not on the job. As Sean and I cleared away the mess of bread crumbs and spattered Bolognese sauce
that a table with three small children had created, I couldn’t help thinking about the list of suspects Eric and I had come up with the previous afternoon. The three mystery people, in particular, were driving me bonkers. Who the hell had visited Kate at the farm? And who had sent those horrible letters? And what about that guy who came to Gauguin? Letta had obviously been concerned about him, enough to take his picture and show it to Ruth. And then she had gone out and bought a can of pepper spray. Could any of these three be connected with the murder?

On Tuesday morning, after spending much of the previous night staring at the ceiling unable to sleep, I finally decided I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to take some kind of decisive action. Grabbing my phone, I punched in Kate’s number.

“Hullo!” she said. It was almost a shout, and I could hear the loud whine of machinery in the background.

“Hi, Kate. It’s Sally.”

“Who? Sorry, but it’s hard to hear!”

“I said, it’s Sally! But I guess maybe now’s not a good time to talk?”

“Yeah, I’m right in the middle of something here. Can I call you back later?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Okay, great. Bye.” There was a click, and the line went quiet. I replaced the receiver with a dejected sigh.

***

It was almost six and I had settled down at home with a drink after doing some grocery shopping when Kate called
back. I’d sent her an e-mail earlier in the afternoon explaining why I’d called and saying that I’d be free to talk that evening.

“Sorry to bother you earlier while you were working,” I said, walking over to the CD player to turn down the volume on R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” (If that had been a vinyl record, the grooves would have been well worn by now, given the hundreds of times I played it during college.)

“No problem. It’s just that I was in the middle of spraying the beets in the greenhouse, and it’s pretty loud with the air compressor on.”

“You spray your vegetables? I thought all your stuff was organic.”

“I do, and it is. We were just applying sulfur, which I can assure you is totally kosher, organically. It’s for the goddamn powdery mildew that’s trying its best to make my life miserable.”

“Ah. Right.” I went back into the kitchen to refresh—gotta love that euphemism—my glass of Jim Beam. “So the reason I called earlier, as I said in my e-mail, was ’cause I was wondering if maybe you’d had any luck finding out who sent those letters to Letta?”

Kate chuckled softly. “As a matter of fact, I did have some luck in that regard.”

“Yeah?” I set down my glass and grabbed the pen and pad of paper sitting by my landline.

“Yeah. It was apparently this guy who calls himself ‘Noah.’ No last name.”

“Let me guess: he’s an animal rights activist. Clever.”

“Yep.” She didn’t appear to notice the sarcasm in my voice. “He’s the friend of some political types I used to hang around with, and they put me in touch with him.”

“So how do I get hold of him?”

“You don’t. He won’t talk to you.”

“What do you mean? I
have
to talk to him.”

“And he only talked to me on the condition that I not tell you how to find him.”

Great
. So I had to take Kate’s word on what he said. “So what did you find out from him?”

“Well, first of all, it’s obvious that the whole murder thing has got him really spooked. That’s why he wants to remain anonymous. He knows those letters, coming when they did, implicate him.”

No shit, Sherlock
.

“And also,” Kate went on, “I gather he’s been involved in a variety of, shall we say, legally questionable activities? Hence the alias.”

“Did he say anything about the letters he sent Letta? Like, why her? I mean, there must be thousands of restaurants in the Bay Area whose menus don’t meet his standards.”

“I guess he had some sort of connection to her, though he didn’t specify exactly what. And I didn’t need to ask him why he wrote the letters. I think that’s pretty obvious, don’t you?”

I didn’t respond to this question.

“Noah did say he was sorry that Letta had been killed.” Kate lit a cigarette—I could hear the click of the lighter—took a puff, and exhaled. “But he also said that he had to admit he was glad someone else was taking over the restaurant. When I
told him about you, he asked me to tell you to check out the Eat Wild and Seafood Watch websites.”

Yeah, right. The last thing I needed was this jerk telling me how to run Gauguin.

“For what it’s worth,” Kate added, “I don’t think he had anything to do with Letta’s murder in case you were wondering. He really did seem truly sad about her death.”

Too bad I just didn’t trust her.

After we hung up, I set about making dinner. I opened the packet of chicken, mango, and jalapeño sausages I’d just bought, removed two from their wrapping, and dropped them into the cast-iron skillet I had heating on the stovetop. Listening to the plump sausages sizzle in the pan, I was once more taken back to an evening I’d spent with my Aunt Letta. So much of what we’d done together had revolved around food. Would I forever more be reminded of her each time I cooked myself a meal?

We had come back to her place after a frenzied buying spree at the farmers’ market, arms loaded with sacks of produce: rainbow chard, leeks, eggplant, red peppers, French beans, and tiny zucchini squashes with their bright-orange flowers still attached. Letta had fired up the barbeque, and we’d feasted on grilled veggies and spicy Merguez sausages, made with lamb from a friend’s ranch, and then stayed up talking until almost midnight.

That was the night I’d told her that Eric and I were breaking up. When she asked why, the reasons I gave were pretty superficial. “It just seems like all we do anymore is fight about stuff,” I remember saying. I explained how I was still a new associate and obsessed with my billable hours and how Eric
would pout when I didn’t take a Saturday off to hang out together. And I’d be equally upset when he’d work late without calling, leaving me waiting at home with an overcooked pork roast.

But Letta had seen through me. “There has to be more to it than that,” she’d said. “I’ve seen you two together enough times to know that can’t be the real reason you’re splitting up.” And so we’d talked it through, and she’d helped me articulate a more fundamental issue: my tendency toward unbridled enthusiasm was simply at odds with Eric’s need to control the things around him. I couldn’t stomach his attempt to dictate how I lived my life, and my over-the-top zeal about something like a dinner party, or working nonstop on an appellate brief at the law firm, would drive him nuts.

“It seems to me,” Letta had remarked, “that, in some ways, the problem is that you two are actually too much alike—the obsessive and the control freak.”

A wise observation. But it had also made me reflect on her life and how she had yet to hook up with anyone (as far as I knew at the time, that is; this was before Tony). And now that I was privy to more about her personal life, it was obvious that she had never done relationships well. Just goes to show that being able to give sage advice to others about their love life doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at your own.

My sausages were now crispy and brown, and I set them aside on a paper towel to drain. Slicing up half an onion and a red bell pepper, I tossed them into the hot pan. While these were frying, I toasted a split
francese
roll under the broiler. The resulting sandwich—slathered with hot mustard—looked
dangerously messy, so I grabbed a stack of paper napkins before sitting down at my laptop.

Time for some research, to see if I could find out anything regarding the “Noah” guy Kate had told me about. I thought for a moment and then typed “noah animal rights activist” into the Google search box.

This produced about a zillion entries. Apparently, there was some Norwegian animal rights organization called NOAH, and they were almost all related to it.

I took a bite of my sandwich, wiped the sausage grease off my fingers, and then added the words “san francisco” to narrow my search.

Now we were on to something. Near the top of the list was an article from the
San Francisco Chronicle
with the headline “Rash of Threatening Letters Alarms Bay Area Restaurateurs.” Scanning through it, I saw that someone calling himself Noah had taken credit for sending letters similar to those Letta had received to a variety of restaurants in San Francisco and Berkeley. Some had been signed, some had not. I scrolled back up to the top to see the date of the article: July of last year.

There were several similar articles in the Google list, all from the previous summer and fall and all concerning letters to restaurant owners from a character called Noah, threatening violence if the restaurant didn’t stop serving factory-farmed meat and unsustainable seafood.

Then I noticed an entry mentioning “food contaminants.” I clicked on this link. “Police Believe Food Contaminant Incident Connected to Letter-Writing Noah,” the piece was titled. According to the article, dated January of this year, an inordinate amount of rat droppings had been found in a produce
delivery to a high-end bistro in the East Bay. “Authorities are working on the assumption that the contaminant was intentionally added and that whoever did this was attempting to induce a bout of food poisoning among the restaurant patrons, as rodent feces can transmit a variety of diseases to humans,” the article reported. “A source from the Berkeley Police, who requested not to be identified as the investigation is ongoing, stated that the prime suspect is ‘Noah,’ the author of a series of threatening letters received by various restaurants last summer.” Apparently this bistro had been the recipient of one of those letters.

Interesting. But scary, too. If he was still out there, he could well try the same tactic with Gauguin. I’d have to talk to Javier about being sure to check out the produce deliveries carefully when they came in.

Taking off my Monterey College of Law sweatshirt—another annoying hot flash—I used its sleeve to dab the sweat that had formed on my brow and continued my search, trying to find out if they’d ever caught this Noah or at least figured out his identity.

Nothing.
Damn
. How the hell could I find the guy? Kate was my only link, but it didn’t look like I was going to get anything else out of her.

I was about to log off when I noticed a new e-mail message from Kate—a reply to the one I’d sent her that afternoon. Maybe she’d had a change of heart and was going to tell me more?

I opened the e-mail and was momentarily confused. It didn’t look like a message to me. And then I realized that it wasn’t, in fact, meant for me:

Holy crap! How could Kate have made such a huge blunder?

And then I realized what had obviously happened. It was originally my e-mail to Kate—I could see my message to her at the bottom, and the thread had the subject line I’d given it. She’d clearly meant to forward my message to this Ted guy but had hit the “reply” button instead by accident. Amazing how easy it is to do dumb stuff like that with e-mail.

I read the message again. So “Noah” was really someone named Ted. And Kate knew him after all—how readily she’d lied to me! What else was she lying about? She hadn’t reacted when I’d shown her the photo of the man who’d come into Gauguin, but maybe it was this Ted guy, and she’d lied about that, too. Maybe that’s how she’d known to contact him.

But what the hell had he done to “betray” her?

Well, at least now I had a lead to try to track him down. A Google search for Slow Food told me they had several chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area. I checked out the websites of the most likely ones: San Francisco, East Bay, Marin-Petaluma, and Alameda. There seemed to be only one dinner event going on this coming weekend: in Berkeley on Sunday at five. It was a brown-bag wine-tasting dinner (i.e., bring your own bottle to share) to raise funds for kitchen gardens in local schools. That had to be the one.

I clicked on the button to buy tickets.