Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Page 12

  Errol speared some of his lamb and waved his fork. “She wanted to report something that may have concerned Bobby. Fish?”

  “Sea lions,” I said. Errol and Minna looked at me expectantly. “Ariel filed a report with the SPCA in mid-August. She saw some sea lions in distress.” I told them about yesterday’s visit to the SPCA Wildlife Center and what Marsha Landers told me. “You’ve heard about the pelican mutilations.”

  Minna nodded. “That was six or seven years ago. You mean it’s happening again?”

  “I’m afraid so. Donna and Marsha Landers asked if I’d look into it, though I don’t know what I can do.”

  “There are some thoroughly sick individuals in this world. But you and Errol know that.” Minna reached for the wine bottle and poured a little into each of our glasses, the last few drops going into her own. “Well, that’s a dead soldier.”

  After we’d finished our entrées, the server cleared the table and brought coffee, as well as dessert menus to tempt us. Errol and Minna debated the merits of strawberry rhubarb crisp and crème caramel, but I’d already decided. I had just ordered the lemon chocolate tart when Mrs. Grady screamed.

  I turned and saw the gray-haired woman struggling to her feet, napkin clutched to her mouth. Both Mr. Grady and Karl Beckman looked startled as they pushed back their chairs. Lacy reached for Mrs. Grady, who shoved herself away from the table, the back of her chair banging against the chair at the table behind her.

  Evan the bartender and Rachel the dining-room manager appeared at the top of the steps. Behind them I saw Mother running from the kitchen, her white coat flying around her. Two servers and a busboy moved quickly toward the table as Mrs. Grady screamed again.

  I was on my feet now, certain the older woman was choking. But you can’t talk and choke at the same time. Mrs. Grady was talking. She spat out one word, over and over, as her husband put his arms around her.

  “Disgusting! Disgusting!” Mrs. Grady repeated. Lacy Beckman and Mr. Grady led her away through the full dining room of patrons sitting or standing in shocked silence. The ones closest to the table were beginning to mutter, a sound that grew in volume. Karl Beckman, my mother, and I stared down at the table.

  I don’t know which of Café Marie’s exquisitely prepared entrées Mrs. Grady had ordered, but I was quite sure it wasn’t supposed to include a dead mouse.

  Fourteen

  “IT DIDN’T COME FROM MY KITCHEN,” MOTHER SAID, much later that evening.

  She sat at a small table in the bar of Café Marie, holding a mug of peppermint tea. She looked as though she needed something stronger. Julian Surtees slumped on a nearby stool, elbows on the bar. He’d opted for straight scotch, consuming it with morose single-mindedness.

  Mother looked from me, seated at the bar, to Errol and Minna Seville, who had joined her at the table. Behind us Evan the bartender was trying to be invisible and quiet. From the kitchen I heard the clatter of pots and pans as the dishwashers finished their evening cleanup.

  “I just had the health inspectors in, for God’s sake.” Mother gulped down a mouthful of tea. “They didn’t find any evidence of rodent infestation.”

  “Someone put it there,” I said. “The question is who.”

  I looked up at Julian Surtees, who appeared to be more interested in downing the amber liquid in his glass. I had two other questions to go along with who—why and how.

  “They’ll be back,” Mother said, worry lines creasing her tired face. “The Gradys will report it, first thing Monday morning. I’ll have the health department breathing down my back.”

  I recalled the earlier tumult in the dining room of Café Marie after Mrs. Grady found the mouse. Mother moved quickly, doing what she could to salvage the situation in the face of this latest disaster. She tossed one of the turquoise napkins over the offending plate and waved at the nearest server and a busboy, directing them to clear the table. Karl Beckman escorted the rest of the party up the steps toward the bar. I saw Lacy Beckman put her arm around Mrs. Grady’s shoulder, shepherding the older woman down the hallway to the rest room. Minna Seville was right behind them. I looked around for Errol and found him at my elbow.

  “Save the mouse,” he said.

  I seized the plate before the busboy could whisk it away and carried it back to the kitchen.

  “What the hell is all that commotion?” Julian growled. He had remained in the kitchen, poised over the stove with a saute pan in one hand and a large fork in the other. Perspiration dampened his face beneath his chef’s toque, causing his dark curly hair to stick to his skull.

  “A mouse.”

  Julian frowned. “Running through the dining room?”

  “In the middle of one of your entrées.” I pointed at the napkin-covered plate I held.

  “No way,” he exploded. He set down the utensils with a clatter and strode toward me, lifting the napkin to examine the plate. “No bloody way.”

  “Save it,” I told him. “The whole thing.”

  He looked at me like I’d taken leave of my senses, then pushed past me, heading for the storage area, where he grabbed a large plastic storage bag from a drawer. Together we slipped the plate—entree, mouse, and all—into the bag. I sealed the bag and labeled it with a pen I found dangling from a ribbon near the kitchen telephone extension. Julian made room for the evidence in the refrigerator.

  “Cover it with a napkin,” he said abruptly. “So we don’t have to look at the damn thing.” One of the servers obliged with yet another square of turquoise linen.

  By the time I returned to the dining room the table was clear and Mother stood in the reception area with Mr. Grady and Karl Beckman. Of course dinner was on the house, she told them, not knowing what else to say. Karl laid a sympathetic hand on Mother’s arm and murmured something in her ear.

  Finally Mrs. Grady came up the hallway from the rest room, still looking shaken. Lacy Beckman held her right arm and Minna Seville was on her left. When the Gradys and the Beckmans had departed, Minna and I returned to our table. Our server swooped down on us with a frown and the desserts we’d ordered before the drama began. “More coffee?” he asked in a subdued voice.

  “By all means,” Minna Seville said cheerfully, as though nothing had happened.

  It was unfortunate that Mrs. Grady had been so vocal about the situation, not that one could blame her. After the initial shocked silence, voices buzzed and hummed, spreading news of the incident quickly throughout the restaurant There was a noticeable exodus as people called for their checks. I saw several half-full plates cleared from nearby tables. As Errol, Minna, and I lingered over our coffee and dessert, it appeared to us that Café Marie emptied more rapidly than usual for a Saturday night

  Although Minna had headed for the rest rooms right behind Lacy and Mrs. Grady, she hadn’t learned anything other than that the older woman was understandably revolted, vowing never to eat at Café Marie again.

  “She said she just looked down and it was there,” Minna said. “I should think if it had been sitting there like a garnish, everyone from the cook to the server would have noticed.”

  “Tucked under something, perhaps.” Errol polished off his strawberry rhubarb crisp and helped himself to a bite of my dessert. “We should question the staff. And I want a closer look at that mouse.”

  “I’ll skip the postmortem,” Minna said. “Give me your wallet so I can pay for dinner. I’ll wait for you at the bar.”

  Errol and I trooped back to the kitchen to examine the plate. Mrs, Grady’s entree was simple—a marinated chicken breast that had been grilled with spices, arranged on a pillow of fettuccine tossed with several varieties of mushrooms, circled by grilled vegetables. So the mouse hadn’t fallen from a cupboard into a cooking pot. As Errol had suggested, the tiny rodent appeared to have been neatly slipped onto the plate at some point after its preparation. Design, not accident. But was the mouse’s destination random or specific?

  Random would mean that someone in the kitchen added
the mouse to a plate—any plate—without any idea which unsuspecting customer would encounter the surprise. That could mean anyone who’d been in and out of the kitchen during the evening, from Julian down to the busboys. Specific meant Mrs. Grady was the target, and those in her party were suspects.

  When the server brought our entrées, Errol, Minna, and I had been concentrating on our own dinners and conversation. So I hadn’t been watching the movements of the Grady-Beckman foursome, other than to note their positions at the table. The Gradys sat next to the window and the Beckmans had taken the outside seats. Mr. Grady had faced his wife, but unless he had a hidden agenda or a warped sense of humor I couldn’t see him reaching across the table to drop a mouse onto his wife’s plate.

  Karl Beckman sat right next to Mrs. Grady, on her left. He was the closest the one with the best opportunity to deposit something on Mrs. Grady’s plate. Lacy Beckman sat on Mr. Grady’s left, diagonally opposite Mrs. Grady, a long and obvious stretch. Lacy had left the table for a few minutes. I’d seen her standing near the bar after she came out of the rest room. She’d been looking into the kitchen, at Julian. Or had I imagined that? I hadn’t seen anyone else leave.

  How could any of these people have slipped the mouse onto Mrs. Grady’s plate without the others at the table noticing? And why? I didn’t think Karl or Lacy Beckman were interested in alienating paying customers like the Gradys. I couldn’t think of any motive other than to blacken Café Marie’s reputation. Which led me right back to why.

  As the evening fizzled out, Errol and I quizzed the entire staff but none of the fifteen people who were working tonight had any idea how the mouse came to its current resting place. Finally we came to this uneasy gathering in the bar.

  Julian set down his glass and slipped off the bar stool. “Go home, Marie. I’ll close up.”

  “I agree,” I said, standing up. “We’ve done all we can tonight. We’ll continue this tomorrow.”

  “The older woman did get up and leave the table,” Linda Ravella told me Sunday.

  It was just after noon. Linda, Warren, and I were having coffee on Linda’s front porch. The sun sparkled on the blue water of Monterey Bay, dotted here and there with sailboats.

  I wanted to know if Linda and her fiance had seen anything of the Grady incident from their corner table at Café Marie the previous night. There had been three tables between theirs and the Grady-Beckman party, and Warren’s back had been to the dining room, but Linda had a clear view. She recalled two things I hadn’t seen, two things that helped me clarify the movements of the foursome.

  “I don’t know why I glanced up at that moment,” Linda said, “but I saw her leave the table. She was dabbing at her dress with her napkin, as though she’d spilled something on it.”

  I mulled this over for a moment. “How long was this before she screamed?”

  Linda shook her head. “I’m not sure. Five, ten minutes.” She looked at Warren and smiled. He was seated next to her on the sofa, his right arm flung behind her, the fingers of his left hand twined with hers.

  “What about the other people at the table?”

  “I think Karl was leaning toward Lacy, as though they were whispering together. The older man—Mr. Grady—he wasn’t there.”

  “He wasn’t? When did he leave?”

  Linda frowned and thought about it, as though she were playing the scene in her mind, at a slower speed. “He stood up when his wife did,” she said. “Did he sit down again? No, he turned to speak to someone at another table.”

  That’s the trouble with eyewitness testimony. Five different people can look at the same scene and see it five different ways. They will remember all of it or just bits and pieces of the whole. As an investigator it was often my task to distill these recollections and form a reconstruction of what happened. How accurate? Hard to say. I’d been in the restaurant last night and I hadn’t seen Mrs. Grady leave the table.

  Linda told me she thought the spill occurred before she and Warren had been served, but she could have been mistaken. Saturday night had been busy at Café Marie, with the dining room full of customers, and the staff bustling in and out of the kitchen.

  Gene, the server who’d waited on the foursome, told Errol and me last night that both Mr. and Mrs. Grady had gotten up to talk to some people at another table, but he thought that was before the Beckmans arrived. He hadn’t said anything about a spill, though Linda assumed from Mrs. Grady’s behavior that she’d gotten something on her dress. I’d ask him again when I got to Café Marie. I planned to go from here to the restaurant to continue the interviews Errol and I began last night.

  A car door slammed and I heard voices, one deep, the other high-pitched. Linda disengaged her fingers from Warren’s hand and stood up as Bobby came up the sidewalk with their son.

  Nicky seemed to have grown six inches since the last time I’d seen him. He’d turned eight during the summer, a wiry little boy with Bobby’s curly dark hair and lively brown eyes. I didn’t think he’d remember who I was, but he did. I was Cousin Marie’s girl Jeri. He grinned at me and chattered away, telling Linda about his Saturday night.

  “Me and Dad went to Gianni’s and had pizza. This morning we had breakfast with Grandma and Grandpa and we went to mass.” Nicky’s voice took away some of the awkwardness that had crept in when Bobby climbed the porch steps behind his son, acknowledging Linda’s fiance with a polite nod.

  Bobby didn’t look any better than he had when I left him at his apartment Friday afternoon. The dark circles under his eyes looked harsh in the bright afternoon sunlight. His mouth had a pinched, painful look.

  Bobby knelt and gave Nicky a hug. “You take care of yourself, sport, and I’ll see you next weekend.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” I said.

  We went down the steps together. When we reached the curb where his dark blue T-bird was parked behind my Toyota, Bobby sighed and rubbed his eyes. It must have been difficult for him to mask his feelings from Nicky. Yet he’d wanted to spend some extra time with his son and with his parents. My cousin didn’t want to be alone.

  “You look exhausted,” I told him. “You’d better get some sleep before you go take the boat out tonight.”

  “I’m not going fishing tonight,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door of the T-bird. “Ariel’s funeral is tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re not going?” I framed the words as a question, even though I knew the answer.

  “Of course I am,” he said quietly.

  “Bobby, you know people have you pegged as a suspect in her murder.” My words were blunt and I saw him wince. “Do you think it’s wise to show up at the services?”

  “Jeri, I loved Ariel. I don’t care what people think, I didn’t kill her. I have to say good-bye to her.” Bobby smiled but it was a pale imitation of his usual grin. “Don’t worry about me, cuz. Donna said she’d go with me, to protect me.”

  I sighed. “I’ll go with you, too.”

  Fifteen

  “FOUR CANCELLATIONS ALREADY.”

  Mother was in her office when I arrived at Café Marie later that afternoon, her face tired above her loose melon-colored shirt. This fatigue wasn’t surprising, since we’d both had less sleep than we needed. “Three dinner reservations and a catering job. And I’m sure there will be more. I told you it wouldn’t take long for word to get out.”

  The phone rang and she reached for it. “I hope it’s not another one.”

  I walked back toward the entrance and encountered Rachel Donahoe, sitting at the bar with the cordless phone. She was leafing through the reservation book as she drank a soda. “Marie told you about the cancellations?” I nodded. “This is bad news in the restaurant biz, Jeri.”

  “I know. Listen, we went over this last night, but tell me again what you saw.”

  “The reservation was for seven o’clock,” Rachel said, pushing the reservation book aside. “The Gradys were early. Their table wasn’t quite ready, so Mr. and Mrs. Grady s
at right about here and ordered drinks from the bar. When the table was cleared, I seated them.”

  “Who left the table, and when?” I asked.

  “I can’t say for sure.” Rachel frowned. “I was back and forth to the kitchen, and waiting on other customers. Mrs. Beckman left. I assume she went to the rest room. And Mr. and Mrs. Grady got up to talk to some people at another table.” Rachel added that she hadn’t seen anything get spilled, nor had she seen the older woman go to the rest room. Last night the server who’d waited on the party had told me much the same thing.

  The phone rang and Rachel picked it up. I left the bar and went down the steps into the main dining room, empty of people, ghostly with its array of white tablecloths, the twisted turquoise napkins like sentinels rising from the wineglasses at each place setting. I stopped at the table where the Gradys and Beckmans had been seated last night, mentally placing people in the now vacated chairs, then moving those phantoms according to what information I’d gleaned so far.

  Both Lacy Beckman and Mrs. Grady had gone to the rest room, at different times. Mr. Grady had either turned away from the table or stood up to talk to someone. And what about Karl Beckman? Did he leave the table?

  I went back up the shallow steps to the entry way and the bar, then down the hallway to the rest-room doors. I surveyed the layout of the hallway and the doors. The rest rooms were just a few steps from the kitchen entrance, with its wide shelf where the cooks placed food ready for pickup by the servers. The restaurant staff needed access to the toilet facilities. But it also meant that anyone who went to the rest rooms might gain access to the kitchen or the waiting plates.

  The staff would notice if someone strolled into the kitchen, someone who didn’t belong there, someone who wasn’t wearing a white coat. Wouldn’t they? The servers didn’t dress like cooks. Nor did the bartender.

  All along I’d been assuming that the saboteur was a member of the staff. It was the logical place to start looking. After last night I wasn’t so sure. There were three opportunities for that mouse to come to its final resting place on Mrs. Grady’s plate. One was while the entrée was in the kitchen. The second was while it sat on the shelf, waiting to be picked up. The third was after it had been served, which meant one of Mrs. Grady’s dining companions put it there. I shook my head slowly as I considered each scenario, none of them entirely satisfactory, each with flaws.