Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Read online

  On any given night, it looked as though there would be a total of fifteen people on staff. Seven of these would be in the kitchen—the chef, three cooks who sautéed, grilled, and created salads, the pastry chef, and two dishwashers. In the dining room there would be the bartender, four waiters, two busers, and Rachel Donahoe, Mother’s longtime dining-room manager, who handled the reservations.

  I began my investigation in Mother’s tiny office, looking through the employment records for both the kitchen staff and dining-room staff. Then I interviewed people, not an easy task since everyone was occupied with cleaning up after the luncheon and getting ready for dinner. Now, a couple of hours later, I’d gotten to Julian Surtees. He wasn’t pleased about being questioned.

  “This is a waste of time,” Surtees said, curling his lip at me. “I have work to do.”

  “I told you why I’m here. I want to find out more about these incidents that have been happening here at the restaurant.”

  Surtees waved one long-fingered hand. “Marie’s overreacting. Accidents happen all the time in restaurants. When I was in L.A.—”

  That was the third time Surtees had prefaced a remark with the phrase about Los Angeles. Evidently he found the Monterey peninsula to be a tad provincial, not up to his big-city standards. If things were so terrific in L.A., why had he left?

  His attitude, and he had lots of it, made me want to find out more about Julian Surtees. As Mother had told me last night, most of the people who worked for her had been at Café Marie for several years. Other than Surtees, the most recent hire was a young Hispanic man who worked busing tables and was training to be a waiter. He’d been at the restaurant since before Thanksgiving of last year. Surtees, on the other hand, arrived in May, a month before the incidents began.

  I opened my mouth to ask him a question. The phone at my elbow rang and I looked down to see one of the three lights stop flashing as someone answered. Then it blinked again as the call was put on hold. A moment later Rachel Donahoe appeared in the office doorway, looking over Surtees’s shoulder. “Telephone, Jeri,” she said.

  “We’ll continue this later,” I told Surtees, who did not look thrilled at the prospect. He gave me a withering look from his heavy-lidded eyes, pushed back his chair, and strolled toward the kitchen, moving like a rangy tomcat.

  As I watched him go I thought about the possibility that a disgruntled former employee might be responsible for the sabotage at Café Marie. But Mother hadn’t fired anyone lately. There had been one waiter that she’d asked to leave, because she didn’t feel his work was up to her standards. That was over two years ago, according to her records. As far as she or any other members of the staff knew, the guy had left the Monterey area. Still, it was worth checking out. But how could someone who didn’t work here gain access to the kitchen to tamper with the knife storage drawer?

  I liked Julian for it. He was a monumental egotist, quite unabashed in his admiration for his own skill as a chef. He thought he could do everything better than Mother, except as far as he was concerned, cooking for tourists and what passed for Monterey society was beneath his talents. In his words I detected condescension toward my mother, a woman who’d entered the restaurant game late in life. So why had he left L.A. to come to work for her? Was he escaping from his past, a lover, spouse, or loan shark? Did he have a motive, like taking over the restaurant after driving Mother out in disgrace? Julian just didn’t fit, and I planned to find out why.

  I focused on the blinking phone extension and reached for the receiver. “Jeri Howard,” I said.

  “Hi. It’s Donna.” My cousin sounded unusually subdued.

  “What’s up?”

  “Just got a call from my source at the sheriff’s department,” Donna said, biting off the words. “The coroner finished the autopsy on Ariel Logan. She didn’t drown. No salt water in the lungs. She was bashed over the head with something.”

  I leaned forward with a sigh, elbows on the desk. My eyes fell on a restaurant-supply catalog and I stared at the cover without registering what was on it.

  “She could have hit her head on the rocks when she went into the water.” For some reason I wanted Ariel’s death to be an accident, and even as I said the words I knew she’d been murdered.

  “The right side of her skull was caved in,” Donna said wearily. “Listen, Jeri, I have a meeting. I can’t get away. I couldn’t find Bobby earlier. Talk to him, before anyone else does.”

  I left downtown Monterey, driving past the U-shaped lake called El Estero and St. Johns Cemetery, where my Doyle grandparents and several generations of Ravellas were buried. Bobby lived near Del Monte Beach and the wharf, in a one-bedroom apartment tucked into the eaves on the second floor of a wood-frame Victorian.

  I parked on the street and walked up the double driveway where the T-bird was parked, its dark blue finish gleaming as always. I climbed the stairs at the back of the house. On the second-floor landing, a small porch held a mop stuck into a plastic pail, a stack of newspapers tied with twine, and a pair of filthy shoes that stank of fish.

  I knocked on the door. I didn’t hear any movement inside, so I knocked again and called his name. Finally the door opened. My cousin, barefoot and clad only in a pair of blue-striped boxer shorts, stood framed in the doorway.

  “I was asleep,” he mumbled, running his left hand through his black curls as he squinted at me. “What d’ya want, Jeri?”

  “To talk.”

  “Christ, Jeri, it’s—” He looked over his left shoulder. “It’s damn near four o’clock. I’ve been up all night. We didn’t get the boat unloaded and cleaned up until after two. I’m exhausted. Can’t it wait?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said quietly, looking at the lines of weariness on his face and the shadows under his dark eyes.

  He released the door and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Suit yourself,” he said, moving away from the door.

  I followed him through the small kitchen, with its speckled yellow linoleum floor and white-painted cabinets, into the living room. A door on the left led to the bathroom, and in front of me I saw into the bedroom, where the sheets on a queen-size bed were in disarray. The living-room windows looked down onto the driveway.

  The apartment had hardwood floors, covered here in the living room with a brown-and-gold area rug. I recognized the dark brown sofa on the wall that divided the living room from the bedroom. It was a hand-me-down from Bobby’s parents. His mother had crocheted the afghan draped over the back of a faded blue wing chair in front of the windows. A shelf on the opposite wall held TV, VCR and CD player, a stack of CDs, and a few books. Next to it was a round table with four chairs, unopened mail scattered on one of the place mats. A low table on this end of the sofa held a telephone, an answering machine, and an eight-by-ten-inch picture frame, facedown on the wood surface.

  Bobby sat down on the sofa, leaning forward, his head in his hands, eyes staring at a spot on the rug. “What do you want to talk about, Jeri?”

  “Ariel.” He didn’t say anything. His eyes moved to the frame on the end table. I picked it up. She was beautiful, with long blond hair and intelligent brown eyes, her face glowing with humor as she smiled into the lens of the camera. I set the picture on the table and looked down at my cousin.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Bobby’s voice sounded dead, too.

  “They identified the body this morning. It looks like she was murdered, Bobby.”

  Still he said nothing. He moved his head upward, so that his chin rested on his hands, and he looked at me with his brown eyes, blinking several times as he tried to control the tears now streaming down his face.

  “Oh, no,” he said finally, his voice a ragged cross between a whisper and a sob. He covered his face with his hands. I sat beside him on the sofa and put my arm around him. He leaned into my shoulder and cried.

  The telephone began to ring, a jangling intrusion that stopped as the answering machine kicked in. It was Nick. He left a terse message for hi
s son to call him. No sooner than he’d hung up, the phone rang again. This time whoever was calling didn’t bother to leave a message. Bobby reached past me and jerked the phone cord from the wall.

  “I loved her,” he said, huddled on the sofa. He shivered as though he were cold. “We were talking about getting married. I mean, I asked her to marry me. She said yes, but she wanted to finish grad school first. This was her last year. We talked about it a lot. Where we were gonna live, and having babies, and—” His voice broke and quavered. “God, Jeri, I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  “We have to talk.” I tried to soften my words. Bobby needed time to grieve and he wasn’t going to get much. “We have to find out who killed Ariel. You know you’re a suspect. You knew it even before Sergeant Magruder showed up at the wharf yesterday. Now that the autopsy points to murder he’ll come looking for you again. You and Ariel had an argument in a very public place. There’s a lot of talk and finger-pointing going on. I heard some of it earlier today, over at Mother’s restaurant. What were you and Ariel quarreling about?”

  Bobby’s jaw tightened. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Did you kill Ariel?”

  He jumped to his feet. His hands tightened into fists and his brown eyes blazed at me, suddenly hot and angry. “Hell no, I didn’t kill her. Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Then tell me about the fight.”

  Bobby smashed one fist into the palm of the other hand. “I can’t, Jeri. I can’t. I made a promise. I owe someone a favor and it’s complicated. You have to understand that.”

  “Is the favor still owed, now that Ariel’s dead?” I asked. He nodded. “So you owe somebody else. Can you tell me about it later?’

  “Yeah. I have to look into a few things first.”

  “I’m a private investigator, remember? I can help you do whatever you have to do.”

  “It’s something I have to do myself,” he said, shaking his head, that stubborn look on his face.

  “All right,” I said slowly, not completely convinced this was the right path. “You do it your way. For now.”

  Nine

  I MADE SLOW PROGRESS IN THE FRIDAY-AFTERNOON stop-and-go traffic on Del Monte Avenue. The four-lane road was crowded with cars as locals contended with tourists arriving for a weekend on the peninsula. Finally I escaped into the parking lot that stretched between Wharf Two and Fisherman’s Wharf. I parked near the harbormaster’s office and walked along the sidewalk past the marina, where sailboats and salmon boats bobbed on the gently rocking water of the harbor.

  Near the entrance to Fisherman’s Wharf the organ grinder and his monkey were packing up after a day’s work, heading for home. By now it was five-thirty in the evening, and many of the sightseers had dispersed, except those who sought a meal on the wharf. I dodged a foursome of tourists, two men and two women, on just such a quest, as they moved back and forth across the wharf, examining the menus posted at competing restaurants.

  Ravella’s closed at six. Since I’d been at Bobby’s apartment when Nick had called, I wanted to let him know that Bobby was okay, even if that wasn’t true. As I approached the deli and fish market I saw Nick at the counter, clearing away ice. Tina was behind the counter on the deli side, putting supplies in cabinets. They were talking to a man whose big frame filled the passageway between the two counters. When I entered Ravella’s he looked up and I recognized the fair, blunt-featured face. It was Karl Beckman.

  “Hello, Jeri,” he said, greeting me with an easy grin and an outstretched hand. “We didn’t get much of a chance to talk at the luncheon. I feel as though I know you already. Marie’s told me so much about you.”

  “Has she?”

  I shook the hand he offered, wondering just what my mother had told him. Karl Beckman seemed to be a friendly, affable, and attractive man. I could see why Mother was attracted to him. There was no logical reason for me to dislike the man. Yet I did.

  The illogical reason was that he was dating my mother. Was my reaction negative because he was so much younger? Why was I having such a problem with that particular detail? I had certainly dated men younger than I was. With just a few years between us, though, not ten. Karl Beckman was surely in his late forties, fifty at the most. Mother would be sixty on her next birthday.

  Or was it because my relationship with my father was the closer, deeper one? I hadn’t seen my mother’s face light up that way around Dad, certainly not in the last years of their marriage.

  Whatever the reason for my intense negative reaction to Karl Beckman, I’d have to mask my feelings. I knew Mother would mention him frequently during my week in Monterey, and I didn’t want a confrontation with her.

  I turned to Nick. “I was with Bobby when you called. He doesn’t want to talk with anyone right now.”

  “Not even his own father?” Nick stopped cleaning the counter, sighed, and shook his head, wiping his hands on a rag. Tina’s face mirrored her husband’s concern.

  “The boat was late getting in again today,” Tina said. “After the crew unloaded and cleaned up, Bobby didn’t even come over to see us like he usually does. He’s so upset about Ariel.”

  I nodded. It wouldn’t take long for the general knowledge that Ariel’s death was murder rather than an accident to percolate through the community. And when it did, the suspicion I’d already overheard this afternoon at Café Marie would be underscored, with fingers pointed at my cousin. Why was Bobby being so damned closemouthed about his quarrel with Ariel?

  “What a tragedy,” Karl Beckman said in his pleasant bass, shaking his head. “Ariel was such a lovely young woman. She was just a few years older than my own daughter.”

  I filed his mention of a daughter in my mind for further investigation, asking a more immediate question. “You knew Ariel Logan?”

  “Oh, yes.” The laugh lines around his hazel eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Bobby introduced us. Brought her over to the boatyard in August A lively, intelligent girl. She asked lots of questions about our day-to-day operations. She was curious about every aspect of the yard, from transporting boats to how we recycle our paint cans.” He paused, and his face grew thoughtful. “It’s a damned shame. She was good for Bobby. And he cared for her a great deal.”

  “Do you know my cousin well?” I asked him.

  Now Beckman smiled again, the laugh lines deepening on his broad face. “Why, Bobby and I are good friends. I remember him as a youngster, going out on the boat with Nick. Beckman Boat Works has been repairing Ravella fishing boats as long as I can remember.”

  “How long has your family been in Monterey?” It sounded as though I were grilling him but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Since the thirties,” Beckman said. “Not quite as long as the Doyles and the Ravellas, but long enough. Pop and Mom came to this country right after the Nazis took over. Pop never talked about it much but I guess he saw the writing on the wall and decided to get out. He was an independent old cuss. The brownshirts would’ve thrown him into a concentration camp.”

  “Old Hans was a character, all right,” Nick said, nodding his head. “A genuine original.”

  “Pop was a tough old salt,” Beckman continued. “He grew up in Hamburg and knew his way around boats. So when he and Mom wound up here in Monterey, he started the boatyard down on Cannery Row. The canneries were going full bore by then. Mom had a bakery, right down there at the foot of Alvarado Street.”

  Beckman waved his thumb in the direction of downtown Monterey. The area he was talking about had long since been torn down, the old San Carlos Hotel, the pawnshops, cafés, and other small businesses replaced by chain hotels and the conference center.

  “Mom was famous for her apple strudel.” He shook his head. “I haven’t tasted strudel like that since she died.”

  “I remember,” Tina said. “Nobody could make strudel like Ella Beckman. My mother once asked her for that recipe but she wouldn’t give it out. Said you had to be German to make strudel properly.”

&
nbsp; Beckman grinned. “That reminds me of the time Nick’s dad tried to teach Pop how to play bocce. Dominic finally threw up his hands and gave up. Said you had to be Italian to figure it out.”

  As the three older people laughed over this memory I studied Karl Beckman, wanting to find out more about him. He had a daughter, but I assumed that my mother wouldn’t be dating a married man. At least I hoped not. So Beckman must be divorced or widowed.

  “Is your daughter here in Monterey?” I asked.

  “Kristen? Oh, no. She’s in her junior year up at Stanford.”

  Costs a lot of money to keep a kid in school at Stanford, I thought, recalling what the women at the luncheon had said about financial difficulties at Beckman Boat Works. They’d also mentioned Lacy. According to my mother, this was Karl Beckman’s sister-in-law, his dining companion several weeks ago when he’d become sick while eating at Café Marie.

  “I understand your sister-in-law is involved with the operation of the boatyard.” Something flickered over Karl Beckman’s face, enough to pique my curiosity.

  “Lacy takes care of the office. She also transports boats.” He glanced at Nick. “That’s something new we started this summer, to bring in more revenue. Seems to be working out.” Evidently Karl Beckman didn’t feel like discussing his sister-in-law. He looked at his watch, then at me, his hazel eyes friendly. Had I imagined something in those eyes when I mentioned Lacy?

  “I’ve got to go take care of a few things down at the yard. Jeri, it was nice seeing you again. I’m sure we’ll see more of each other during your visit.”