The Sourdough Wars (18 page)

The second call was tougher—it meant I had to disappoint myself. The all-new, spiritually improved Rebecca who wasn’t going to torture children anymore called Bob Tosi’s house and asked for young Bobby. “Remember,” I said, “when I asked you about your mom’s boyfriend? The one who was backing her in the sourdough auction?”

Bobby said he remembered.

“And remember how you laughed?”

Bobby did.

“Well, I’ve been kind of wondering—what was so funny about it?”

Bobby gave me the answer I didn’t want to hear.

So now I had a terrific little theory with no more holes in it. I went over it again and again in my head and I couldn’t poke any. Then I typed something I needed. And I went into Chris’s office and told her I knew who had killed the man she was dating.

I told her the theory, step by step, and asked her if she could poke any holes in it. “Only one,” she said, and her voice had a bitter edge to it. “There’s no way in hell to prove it.”

“Yes, there is.” I showed her the thing I’d just written and outlined a little idea I had.

It was close to nine o’clock when we drove to the elegant redwood house in San Anselmo. Like so many Marin County houses, it was on a hill and we had to climb up about a hundred rough wooden steps to get to it.

When we were on a deck about ninety steps up, we saw that we were actually at the first-floor level of the house, looking into one of its windows at a cozy study. Anita Ashton was seated at the desk, looking out at us. When she saw who was coming to visit, her bewildered look changed to one of pleasure.

She stood and pointed up toward the second floor, where the front door was. We kept climbing and she met us at the door. “What’s up?”

She ushered us in even as she spoke, ever the efficient user of time. The foyer had two camelback couches in it, each covered in shrimp-colored cotton, each attended by its personal ficus. The living room was beyond. Anita was wearing a sweat suit in the same color as the upholstery. It could have been a coincidence, but it was the sort of studied touch she was fond of. She probably had eight or ten sweat suits, all color-coordinated with her furnishings so she’d always look good around the house and never have to spend time thinking about it.

We’d decided that I’d do most of the talking, so I spoke first, introducing Chris.

“I guessed. What can I do for you?”

Anita was leading us down the stairs to her study. It was rigged up to resemble some baronial library, with yards and yards of books lining the walls and looking as if they’d been bought that way—by the yard. There were also wing chairs and a fireplace with a healthy blaze in it. The concept was pretentious, but it was nevertheless a comfortable room. A bowl of freesias scented it, the only personal touch—possibly in the whole house. Hiring a decorator took so much less time than choosing one’s furniture.

“We think,” I said, “that we know who killed Peter.” Her brown eyes flashed, just for a second, before she shifted them back to neutral. “Sit down.”

“We think it was Sally.”

“I see. But why not tell the police?”

“Because we think if we did, they might get the wrong idea. They might think you were her accomplice.”

“Me? But why on earth would they think that?”

“Because we think the murder weapon is in your house.”

She sank into one of the wing chairs. “I guess,” she said, “you’d better start at the beginning.” She sighed as she said it, and looked at her watch. Apparently, solving her brother’s murder was going to take too long to suit her.

“Before Sally died,” I began, “she said something.”

“Before?” Again, Anita glanced at her watch. “When before? A week before? A month before?”

“With her last gasp.”

Anita produced her own gasp.

“One of the sourdough bidders, Clayton Thompson, found her with the knife in her chest, and she spoke to him before she died. These were her last words, as he understood them: ‘Peter.’ And then she paused. Then she said ‘I need a,’ and then she paused again. Then she said the word ‘gun.’ And then she paused again, and she said ‘I need a’ and again she paused. Her last word was ‘bathroom.’ So what he heard was something like this: ‘Peter… I need a… gun … I need a… bathroom.’ A strange thing for a dying person to say, don’t you think?”

Anita shrugged.

“But suppose she weren’t really saying ‘I need a’ but ‘Anita’? Where does that get us?”

Again, she didn’t answer.

“Not too far. But suppose she were trying to say, ‘Anita’s gun’ and ‘Anita’s bathroom.’ ”

Now I had her attention. Her head jerked up and she stared, looking very alarmed. “I lent her my gun. I remember now. Oh my God, it was when she first moved up to Sonoma. She said she heard noises at night. But that was ages ago.”

“She never returned the gun?”

“No. I forgot about it till now.”

“I think what she was trying to say is that she hid it in your bathroom.”

“Why would she do that?”

Anita was a no-nonsense person, so I didn’t mince words. “Frankly, Anita, I think she was trying to frame you.”

Her shoulders tightened and she gripped the chair arm, but otherwise she kept as cool as ever.

“Would she have had the opportunity?” I asked. “Could she have gotten into your house?”

“She was my houseguest at the time.”

“The time of the murder?”

“Yes. She stayed with me when she came down for the auction. Sally and I go back a long way—Peter and I grew up with the Tosi boys, you know, so when Bob married Sally, she and I became friends. We were the same kind of people, in a way.”

“Do you have a guest bathroom?”

“Yes—off the guest room. Shall we look there for the gun?” She stood up and led the way. Chris and I followed her into a frou-frou bedroom done up in a Laura Ashley print—bedspread, chair, pillows, curtains, all in the same pink print on a cream background. It was the kind of room I dreamed about when I was a teenager.

The bathroom was compact and had about a million hiding places in it. We looked through the towels in the linen cabinet and peered in the medicine chest and rummaged through all the drawers of the dresser and didn’t find the gun. Anita seemed to cheer up during the process. What I’d been saying finally seemed to hit her—that her friend had killed her brother and may have tried to frame her. The part about framing her was the only part that really seemed to make any impression, and now that it didn’t seem too likely, relief was coming out of her pores like sweat.

But Chris wasn’t satisfied. She opened everything and looked again. Then she shrugged, walked back into the bedroom, and, just as abruptly, turned around again. “Wait a minute.” She went back, opened the linen cabinet and removed a box of Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads. She stepped back, startled. “This is it. Feel.” She handed the box to me. It was the heaviest box of pads ever made.

I looked at Anita. Her shoulders had tensed again and something was flickering in her eyes. But she nodded, setting her lips. I ripped off the top of the Maxi-Pads and saw that the box was about half-full. I took out the first layer of pads, and there it was—a little handgun lying in a cuddly pad-nest. Anita reached for it, but I stopped her. “No. It might have her prints on it. We’d better not touch it.”

“But it might be loaded.”

“Let’s just leave it alone for right now.”

She nodded in agreement, and I put the box on the bathroom dresser. “Let’s go back to the study.”

Again, she led the way, shaking her head. “I just don’t get it. How did you figure any of this out? I mean, I get it about the dying message, but…” She stopped.

When we got back to the study, she said she needed a brandy and poured one for each of us as well. When we were comfortable, she finished her thought. “How do you know I wasn’t Sally’s accomplice? Or for that matter, maybe someone else was, and she just happened to hide the gun in a convenient place.”

“I think she put the gun there because she wanted leverage with you. Otherwise, why not just toss it in the bay?”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“Here’s what I think happened. First of all, here’s what we know. Chris spent the night before the auction with Peter, and sometime in the middle of the night he got a phone call. The next day he said he had an appointment at ten. Chris and I think that whoever made the phone call made the appointment with him, turned up at ten, and killed him.

“Couldn’t the phone company…?”

I interrupted her. “The call came from a hotel. Somebody wasn’t taking chances. We think Sally was afraid she couldn’t outbid everyone else. So she wanted to stop the auction. First she tried to stop it by making threatening calls to the other bidders to try to scare them off. But that didn’t work. She turned up at Peter’s, pretending to have gotten a threatening call herself, took in the situation, and saw that the calls weren’t going to stop the auction.

“So that night she called Peter. We think she got hysterical, probably confessed to making the threatening calls, and begged Peter to sell her the starter and call off the auction. She thought he might because Sally really believed that
she
had dumped
him
years ago and that he was still in love with her. She had that kind of capacity for self-deception. But we think what really happened is that Peter just never cared much for Sally. By all accounts—including Chris’s—he was a very passive and not very forthcoming person. So when Sally made a play for him, he went along with it but never really got interested in her. He hardly even noticed there was a romance, I think. It was simply a fling, and he withdrew from it so gradually that neither he nor Sally really noticed consciously what was happening. But at some level Sally did see it happening and she started withdrawing, too. But she made herself think she’d been the first to do it. It’s complicated, but I think that’s the way Sally was. She was so egotistical, she had to believe she dumped him. What do you think?”

“I saw it happen,” Anita said. “It was exactly like that. Peter never really got excited about anybody—I beg your pardon, Chris. Maybe you were an exception.”

Chris smiled sadly. “A minor one, I think. If we’d gone on seeing each other, he probably would have lost interest pretty quickly. I’ve come to see, I think that his real interest in me was the momentum I started about the auction. That was sort of the glue that held us together. But I didn’t see it at the time.”

“And Sally,” I said, “didn’t see that her own aggression was the glue—to use your word—that held her and Peter together. But the difference was that she never saw it in retrospect either. So she thought she could influence Peter. However, when she called up in hysterics, he heard not the woman he loved begging him to take her back, but a crazy lady who admitted trying to stop his auction with threatening phone calls. So we think he not only told her he wouldn’t stop the auction but also forbade her to participate in it. He finally agreed to see her the next day to get her off his back. Incidentally, the fact that he met his visitor in his robe argues it was someone he knew well.

“I think Sally brought the gun—your gun—to scare him, as a last resort. I don’t think she came there intending to kill him. I think she tried to seduce him. And when that failed, I think she tried cajoling, hysterics again, anything to get him to change his mind. And in the end, I think she did threaten him with the gun and he tried to take it away from her—his apartment was a mess, you know. Anyway, she ended up killing him and hiding the gun in your bathroom.”

“I don’t even use Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads,” said Anita. Chris giggled at the non sequitur. I think I must have looked confused. “If I’d thought about it,” Anita explained, “I would have seen they didn’t belong there. But I don’t see why she put the gun there. Why
my
bathroom?”

“As insurance,” I said. “She told us she had a backer, and we leaped to the conclusion that it was a man. But I tried to find out from her kid who her boyfriend was, and he laughed. He’s a very smart kid. He said his mom was likely to say she had a boyfriend even if she hadn’t. Later, I realized that even if she didn’t have a boyfriend, she still might have a backer. So I called Bobby and asked him why he laughed. And he said, ‘Because the backer was Auntie Anita.’ ”

Anita looked betrayed. “But, Rebecca, that was no secret. If you’d asked, I’d have told you that.”

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to ask until now. Peter wouldn’t sell you the starter, so you were going to get it with Sally’s help. You were her backer. But there was a catch—you’d be stuck with Sally. She’d gotten you to agree to invest in her bakery if she got the starter, and you weren’t really going to have your own bakery, which was what you wanted.”

“Rebecca, you sound so accusing. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was the best deal I could make, and I was willing to go through with it. Why are you coming at me this way?”

I pulled back a little. “I’m sorry. I guess I was coming at you. But Sally saw, too late, that with Peter dead, you wouldn’t need her. You’d inherit the starter and you could simply dump her. So that was why she hid the gun in your bathroom. As insurance. If you tried to back out, she’d accuse you of the murder and threaten to tell the cops the gun was in your house.”

“It wouldn’t have worked. I had a perfect alibi.”

“But Sally didn’t
know
that. That’s how I know you weren’t her accomplice in the murder.”

“How pathetic of Sally.”

“Yes. It was. But she was a very determined woman. She wanted revenge on Bob Tosi for what she considered years of mistreatment. In fact, I think he was just an average Joe from a macho Italian family who didn’t realize what was going on with Sally.”

“She told him all the time.”

“Like so many men of that generation who got their ideas about what the world was like from adoring parents, he was practically in a coma. He literally couldn’t hear her. I think he’s changing now, but it took a divorce and a couple of murders to jolt him out of his complacency. The point is, Sally was deeply hurt by him and she wanted to prove she was as good as he was in business, or better, no matter what the cost. I expect you can identify with that. You had a similar situation in your own life.”