The Sourdough Wars
Read The Sourdough Wars Online
Authors: Julie Smith
Praise for THE SOURDOUGH WARS, the SECOND book in the Rebecca Schwartz series by Edgar-winning author Julie Smith:
“An interesting new detective personality… Smith shows an Agatha Christie-like capacity for making much ado about clues, concocting straw hypotheses, and surprising us, in the end…. Smith’s crisp storytelling, her easy knowledge of local practices, and her likable, unpredictable heroine will make readers look forward to more of sleuth Schwartz’s adventures.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“A delightfully modern sleuth.”
—
Minneapolis Tribune
“Rebecca’s lively first-person narration brands her a new detective to watch.”
—
Wilson Library Bulletin
“An attractive and amusing heroine.”
—
The San Diego Union
DEATH TURNS A TRICK
THE SOURDOUGH WARS
TOURIST TRAP
DEAD IN THE WATER
OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS
The Skip Langdon Series
NEW ORLEANS MOURNING
THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ
JAZZ FUNERAL
DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK
(formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)
HOUSE OF BLUES
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION
(formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)
82 DESIRE
MEAN WOMAN BLUES
The Paul Mcdonald Series
TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
HUCKLEBERRY FIEND
The Talba Wallis Series
LOUISIANA HOTSHOT
LOUISIANA BIGSHOT
LOUISIANA LAMENT
P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF
As Well As
WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK
NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)
SOURDOUGH WARS
A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery
By
JULIE SMITH
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, LA
The Sourdough Wars
Copyright © 1984 by Julie Smith
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover by Nevada Barr
ISBN: 9781617507922
Originally published by the Walker Publishing Company, Inc. in 1984
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: October 2012
eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for
booknook.biz
For Betsy Petersen, without whom
none of this would have happened
Chapter 10
*
Chapter 11
*
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
*
Chapter 14
*
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
*
Chapter 17
*
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
*
Chapter 20
*
Chapter 21
Sign Up
...
Chris Nicholson, my law partner, had a nine o’clock court date on Monday. When she straggled in around eleven, our secretary greeted her with his accustomed politeness: “Been gettin’ any lately?”
Male secretaries are quite the thing nowadays. Lots of lady professionals revel in them. They wear fashionable narrow ties and button-down shirts. They type a zillion words a minute, they dust, make great coffee, and run beautifully oiled offices. That was the story I was hearing from some of my friends, anyway.
Ours dressed sloppily, made lousy coffee, typed about forty words a minute, and never remembered to give us our messages. His name was Alan Kruzick, and he was my sister Mickey’s boyfriend. Also a starving actor.
Mom had talked us into hiring him after Mickey finished her master’s and got a job at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco. Mickey and Kruzick had moved from Berkeley to the city so she wouldn’t have to commute, and their rent doubled. None of us Schwartzes liked the idea of Mickey’s supporting Alan—and Mom thought her little idea was the perfect solution.
So far as I was concerned, he wasn’t working out, but Chris was a sucker for his smart-aleck style. Also, she was in a very good mood that Monday morning, so when he asked if she’d been gettin’ any, she said, “Bet your booty, baby.” Then she whipped into my office and sat down.
“Very businesslike,” I said.
“Oh, who cares. No one’s here.”
“How was your weekend?”
“I spent it with Peter Martinelli. I think I’m in love.”
“Oh, Lord. How many times did you have to sit through
Sleuth
?”
“I washed my hair during performances.”
“Very convenient. When’s the wedding?”
“First we have the auction. Then we worry about the wedding.”
“What auction?”
“We’re going to auction off the sourdough starter—like Alan suggested.”
* * *
The previous Friday night, Chris and I had gone to the Town Theater with Mickey and my friend Rob Burns, to see Alan play Milo Tindle in
Sleuth
. Andrew Wyke, the wronged husband bent on revenge, was played by the elegant Peter Martinelli, scion of a once-great sourdough dynasty. Afterward, Alan and Peter joined us for drinks.
The play put us in the mood for S. Holmes, Esq. (or “the Sherlock Holmes pub,” as it’s usually known). This is an odd watering hole at the top of the Holiday Inn at Sutter and Stockton, but it’s not nearly so odd as the hotel’s doorman. Or, rather, as his appearance. He’s a heavyset, elderly black man wearing an Inverness cape and deerstalker cap.
The pub itself features deep plush chairs and sofas, dozens of large-bowled meerschaum pipes in display cases, and a very good replica of the great sleuth’s Baker Street digs. Despite its delightful appointments, it’s hardly ever crowded, though it isn’t
that
hard to figure out why: S. Holmes, Esq., is insanely expensive. Of course Kruzick suggested it, and of course he knew we’d have to treat him to celebrate his triumph on the boards. That’s Kruzick for you.
Chris and Peter Martinelli ended up sitting next to each other, and both of them seemed pretty happy about it. Each was tall, each was slender; she was light, he was dark. I didn’t know a thing about him, but she was on the rebound from a long-term romance.
Chris and I used to call her former lover “the perfect man.” Larry was sweet, gentle, a good cook, a successful architect, a looker—what more could you ask? “A little backbone,” Chris said after the breakup. “He was a no-growth stock.”
Larry was a little older than we were, and he wanted to get married. Chris didn’t; and she reasoned that if he’d really been perfect, she would have wanted marriage. So she dumped him and started looking around for someone even more perfect. At the moment, she had her blue eyes firmly fixed on Peter Martinelli. I decided to help her out.
I fixed my own eyes on him. “Hey, handsome,” I said, “are you married?”
He shook his head. “Never have been.” He looked at Chris: “And I’m a great catch, too.”
“Noted.”
He laughed. “I’m kidding. What you see is what you get. I haven’t got a penny.”
“You can’t kid me,” said Kruzick. “You’ve gotta have bread bucks.”
“Being a Martinelli,” said Peter, “doesn’t even get you a good table at a restaurant anymore.”
The famous Martinelli Bakery, the oldest and by far the best of the old-time sourdough producers, had had to close down a few years back. It was the old story—a small family business that expanded too fast, hit a recessionary period, and got in too deep. A few years after it went bust, the elder Martinellis—Peter’s parents—were killed in a mudslide. Every San Franciscan knew the story.
“Oh, come on,” said Kruzick. “There must have been a house or something. Stocks and bonds, maybe.”
“No stocks, no bonds. My sister got the house.”
“Didn’t you get anything?” Kruzick can be unbelievably obnoxious, but somehow he gets away with it.
“Sure I did. I got the starter.”
“Huh?”
“When my folks closed the bakery, they never gave up the idea that they’d be able to reopen it some day. So they had the starter frozen. You know what cryogenics is?”
“Sure,” said Kruzick. “It’s like in
Sleeper
, when Woody Allen dies and has himself frozen. Then he thaws out in the next century or something.”
Peter shrugged. “That’s what they did with the starter. Got a cryogenics firm to freeze it, just in case. At that time, there
were
some stocks and bonds. Dad thought he could sell them and borrow some money, maybe get some investors.” He shrugged again. “But he never got it together.”
“So you got the starter.”
“Yes.”
“Well, what’s that?” Kruzick is from New York and harbors pockets of ignorance.
“It’s what you need to make sourdough,” said Rob. “San Francisco’s unique sourdough French bread,” he continued, “is the stuff of myth and legend. Yet the Martinelli loaf, with its familiar thick, dark crust and chewy, fragrant interior, was the acknowledged pride of San Francisco bakeries, a legend unto itself.”
“Hey,” said Peter, “I remember that. That’s what the
Chronicle
said when the bakery closed.”
“I know. I wrote the story.”
“But what’s the starter?” said Kruzick.
Rob went on quoting himself. “Sourdough first surfaced during the Gold Rush of eighteen-forty-nine. Perhaps the forty-niners brought it with them; maybe they developed it here. No one knows for sure. Some say the city’s cottony fog gives the bread its sour taste; some say there’s a certain yeast that grows only in San Francisco. But one thing is certain—you can’t make it from scratch. You have to have sourdough to make sourdough.”
“I think,” said Kruzick, “I’m catching on.”
Rob nodded. “A mixture of flour and water called the mother sponge, or the mother sour, is the starter you need before you can bake your bread. Each bakery ‘builds’ its starter several times a day by adding more flour and more water to a portion of it, which must then rise and rise again. Each rising takes seven hours. And then the loaves are popped into the oven.”
“So what’s so special about this dough sponge?”
“It’s just one of those ineffable things,” said Mickey. That was the way she usually handled Kruzick—by using words he couldn’t understand.
“It is indeed,” said Rob. “The bread’s only as good as the mother sour.”
“So is there a special yeast?” said Mickey. “Or what?”
“It’s said that the old-time bakers used to make the loaves by shaping the dough in their armpits,” said Rob. “And that’s what gave it its special flavor.”
“Oh, quit teasing us.”
“Well, there
is
a special yeast.” He was talking like himself again. “It’s called
Saccharomyces exiguus
, but you can find it lots of places. The Italians use it to make
panettone
, for instance. It’s the reason the bread takes so long to rise—it’s what scientists call a poor gasser.”
“But if they have it in Italy,” asked Chris, “why can you only get sourdough in San Francisco?”
“Ah, because you also need a bacterium that really is found only around here. It’s called
Lactobacillus sanfrancisco
. During the long rising, a sugar called maltose is formed. The bug works on the maltose to form two acids—seventy percent lactic and thirty percent acetic, which gives the bread its sour taste. Other bacteria won’t produce that much acetic acid, and other yeasts won’t tolerate that much. So you need both to make sourdough.”
“So, Peter,” said Kruzick, “you gonna start a bakery?”
Peter shook his head. “I’m lousy at business. Listen, I’m a starving actor. I live on what I make from commercials.”
“How about if the theater paid you a salary?”
“Ever since the state funds got cut, the theater can’t even pay for parking.”
“But suppose someone established a foundation for the theater, and the foundation paid you a salary? I mean, someone who knew about the plight of the theater and wanted to save it—someone, say, who’d make a great artistic director. We’re gonna need one when Anton leaves. You’d be great.”
“I’ve applied for the job. The only thing is, there’s probably not going to be a job. The theater’s not going to last long and you might as well get used to it, Alan.”
“So why don’t you save it?”
“I don’t have any money.” Peter turned out his pockets. “What does it take to make you believe me?”
“What I mean is, why don’t you auction off your starter?” We were on our second drink by that time, and no one was thinking too fast. Everyone was silent for a moment.
Peter spoke, finally. “No one but my sister ever wanted to buy it, and I’d sell it to Russia first.”
“No one knows how valuable it is, so we’ve gotta tell ’em. See, here’s what we do. We make it a media event. We get Rob to write a story about you and how you’re trying to save the theater. You announce publicly that you’re going to auction off your starter, and Rob writes some purple stuff about how great the Martinelli bread was. And you invite people to bid.”