Too Many Cooks (22 page)

Angie fully intended to stay
away from the LaTours, but the next day Lacy telephoned her, sobbing so hard and sounding so drunk she could hardly speak. “Angie, it's terrible. Henry's been arrested!”

“Lacy, have you been drinking?”

“Only to settle my nerves. I can't take it, Angie. Not another second. What will I do if Henry's in prison?”

“What was he arrested for?”

“Karl's murder! Oh, Angie, you've got to help me.” She hiccuped loudly. “It was that detective, the one you brought to Karl's memorial service. I thought he was a friend! Now I don't know what to do. Maybe if you talked to him, told him Henry would never hurt Karl. Henry's a darling! You know that.” She started crying loudly into the phone.

“Pull yourself together, Lacy. Drink some black coffee. I'm sure Paavo's just talking to him about something.”

“But he was read his Miranda rights. At least, it sounded like Miranda rights.”

“Did you call your lawyer?”

“No. Henry said he'd handle everything, that I shouldn't worry.”

“He's right.”

“But, what about the radio show? How can I handle Chef Henri's part? I don't know anything about cooking! I might ruin Henry's career!” Lacy cried with unabated hysteria.

“It's nothing to worry about.”

“But it is! The thought of being on the radio scares me to death. And…and I had a little vermouth. Just a thimbleful, mind you. But since I never drink, it's gone straight to my head.”

Godzilla's thimble, Angie thought.

Lacy rambled on. “What if I say something foolish or something that upsets Henry? What if the police keep him and I have to go, day after day, back to the radio station, trying to answer questions from callers, trying to be witty like my Henry, to keep his listeners?” An onslaught of sobs got in the way of her words.

“I've got an idea,” Angie said.

“Oh?”

“I could do it for you. I know the answers to most of the questions, and I've never been tongue-tied. I can hardly remember ever being nervous, come to think of it.” Visions of the expressions of the station executives after listening to her witty, knowledgeable, fast-paced, exciting radio show made her whole body tingle. “Sure, I'll go on for you. I'd love to do it.”

“Oh, God, would you? You're not just being nice, are you?”

“Heck, no. This is an opportunity made in heaven.”

“An opportunity?” Lacy sounded shocked.

Angie guessed she hadn't been her most diplomatic. “To be helpful,” she added quickly.

“Ah! In that case—”

“Wait!” A vision of Paavo waggling his finger and warning her to stay away from the LaTours flashed in front of her. “Let me just make a couple of phone calls to be sure I have the time.”

“The time? But you were planning to be there anyway with Henry, weren't you?”

“You never know,” Angie said. “I'll call you right back.”

With that, she hung up.

 

“Homicide Department, may I help you?” the nasal voice intoned.

“Inspector Paavo Smith, please.”

“One moment.”

It didn't take long for the woman to tell Angie that Paavo wasn't answering his phone. Angie asked to speak to Inspector Yoshiwara.

“Hey there, Angie.” Yoshiwara's voice boomed. “How's it going? Seen any good movies lately?”

She winced. “That's sick. Look, I need to reach Paavo. Any idea where he is?”

“He's not here. Can I take a message for him? Or, maybe there's something I can help you with? Hey, the big P.S. told me about you finding out someone's been skimming the take at LaTour's. Good work!
You might be going into the private eye trade before you know it.”

“I don't think so. Is he with Henry LaTour?”

Yosh hesitated a moment, then said, “You guessed it.”

“Are they there?”

“I think they're talking at LaTour's restaurant.”

“Was Henry arrested?”

“Not as far as I know.”

It took Angie less than a second to decide. Lacy was drunk and Paavo was probably gathering the last bits of evidence to use against Henry. What danger could there be?

“Thanks, Yosh. Would you do me a favor and tell Paavo that I'm doing Henry's radio show? Lacy called. She's upset and has been drinking and is in no condition to go on the air. I volunteered to go on for her.”

“The radio show, huh? Pretty brave, Angie, old girl.”

“Or pretty foolish.”

“Anyway, I'll let him know. Let's see, that's a twelve o'clock show, right? I'll try to listen to it. Paavo too, if he's free.”

“Great. I'll give you a special hello.”

 

After calling Lacy back to tell her everything was set, Angie went to KYME. She'd never noticed it before, but the call letters looked distinctly like “cwyme,” as in the way Elmer Fudd would say “scene of the cwyme.”

Angie arrived early so she'd have plenty of time to tell the station manager and his assistant that she'd
be doing Henry's show today, and possibly several days in the future, due to a personal problem. But it was near lunchtime, and she'd learned they'd gone to McDonald's.

Well, she'd go ahead without their okay. Since
Lunch with Henri
was ranked seventy-eighth in the greater Bay Area, she figured no one really cared who ran it. Or
if
they ran it. The old Conelrad Alerts had had higher ratings.

Angie picked up her reference cookbooks and waited outside the studio booth for the show ahead of Henry's to end. A man whose name Angie could never remember held a lively talk show on fly-fishing. The fact that almost no fly-fishing was done in the Bay Area didn't seem to bother him, nor did the fact that he got even fewer callers than Henry. Maybe it wasn't Henry's fault his show did so poorly. Maybe the fly fisherman put the audience to sleep.

Since she wouldn't have any call screener, she realized she'd have to take the phone calls blind. She just hoped she didn't get the funny little man who called at least three times a week to ask if this were Marvella's French Laundry. After politely telling him no every time, Angie had finally replied that if he called one more time, she'd donate his clothes to the nearest homeless shelter. He'd remembered her threat for two days and then called again.

Ten minutes until showtime.

The station engineer, sitting at his console in a separate glassed-in area, paid no attention to her.

At five minutes before the hour, to her surprise, she saw Lacy go into the engineer's booth. The engineer nodded sagely as she spoke to him.

A short while later, Lacy joined Angie. “I'll screen your calls,” she said.

The woman looked awful—almost as bad as she'd sounded earlier on the phone, in fact. Her hair was uncombed, her makeup smeared and caked, and she had put on a plaid blouse with a striped skirt, no nylons, and black flats. “Are you sure you feel up to being here, Lacy?” Angie asked.

“I want to be.” She looked ready to cry.

Angie felt sorry for her and knew how important it was to take her mind off her man troubles. “Well, good then. I was sitting here thinking about all the kooks who call. I had one guy who phoned all the time and insisted he speak to Rush Limbaugh. I finally told him I was the chief feminazi and he never called back.”

Just then, the fly fisherman left and Angie and Lacy went into the studio booth. Lacy tucked a loose strand of hair behind an ear. Her hands shook. “Let's move these partitions so you won't be distracted by the engineer or others who might walk by.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Oh, yes. You want to do your best.”

They moved the screens.

Angie sat in Henry's chair and watched as the clock's minute hand pointed straight up and then the second hand ticked off the remaining time until noon. She pressed the earphones close against her ears, but she couldn't hear
The Teddy Bears' Picnic
.

“There's no music,” she whispered to Lacy.

Lacy turned toward the engineer's booth but she couldn't see him, because of the screens. She leaned toward Angie. “That's because it's Henry's music, not yours.”

Angie looked stricken. She glanced at the clock. Time to start talking,
past
time to start, in fact. She sat up in her chair feeling badly rattled, as all the great opening lines she'd practiced flew right out of her mind.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I know I don't exactly sound like Chef Henri, and that's because I'm not.”

She glanced at Lacy, who was busy chewing a stubby fingernail. Angie licked her lips and went on.

“My name's Angelina Amalfi, sitting in for Chef Henri, who's having a very special lunch today. I've spoken to many of you in the past when you've called in to ask Chef Henri about food preparation.”

For some reason, she glanced at the microphone. Just as they tell mountain climbers never to look down, seeing the microphone made the full impact of what she was doing hit her. There she sat, with every word she spoke going out over the airwaves all over the greater Bay Area, whether anyone was listening or not. Her mouth grew dry, perspiration beaded on her forehead, and her mind went blank.

“So…so now, instead of talking to you on the phone, I can sit here and talk to myself like Chef Henri does. I mean, talk into this mike, without any feedback. I don't mean talk to
myself
, of course….”

Angie swallowed hard. She'd never, ever make fun of Henry again.

“Well, why don't we go to the phones?” She glanced at the monitor. Not a single call had come in. She wiped her forehead. “Let me give you those numbers, first. Today, why don't we talk about all the good things we can get right here in San Francisco? Being a port city and all. I mean, I've met people from the
middle part of the country who've never eaten an artichoke. Can you imagine? Probably not even a kiwi. Now, on the East Coast there are a lot of different kinds of fruits and vegetables, but I don't know what they are.” Oh, me, she sighed. Should she slash her wrists now or later?

The call monitor was lit up, but Lacy hadn't handed her the name of the caller or the topic. “Oh, a caller,” Angie said. At least someone was there. She hit the open-line button. “Welcome to
Lunch with Henri
. This is Angie. How may I help you today?”

The light on the line went out.

“Hello?” Angie said once more and then looked again at the microphone. “I must have hit the wrong button, folks.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “Whoever it was, be sure to call back, and we'll put your call right to the front of the line! No waiting for you. No sirree.”

The line remained empty.

“Angie.” She looked up. Lacy stood before her, then reached over and shut off Angie's microphone. “No one's going to call.”

“What are you doing?” Angie took off her headphones.

“I'm sorry. I should have stopped you earlier, I guess, but I was afraid you'd walk out. I couldn't let you walk out.”

“I don't understand.”

“I…I changed my mind about you doing Henry's show. I told the engineer to spend the hour playing golden oldies.”

Angie stood. “What?”

“I had to see you alone—because of this.” She took a gun out of her purse.

Angie backed up until she bumped into a partition. “Lacy, no!”

 

Paavo sat on one side of the desk in the small office at the back of LaTour's restaurant and faced Henry. “I appreciate your willingness to discuss these accounts with me,” he said. Henry had stacked books of payables and receivables on the desk before them.

“No problem. Anything I can do to cooperate in finding the murderer of our fellow chefs is fine with me. Especially since, I hasten to remind you, Inspector, I too was threatened.”

Paavo studied Henry as he spoke those words. The man looked and sounded surprisingly sincere. Of course, Paavo had also witnessed more than one murderer declare his innocence in equally compelling terms. “I remember, Mr. LaTour. Now, before hiring Mark Dustman, were you the head chef at your restaurant?”

“I still am, actually. But I spend much time on the sidelines, so to speak, doing my radio show and writing cookbooks.”

“Who orders the food for the restaurant?”

“I do—er, did. Now, I leave it up to Mr. Dustman.”

“Let's look at these books.”

Henry put on his reading glasses and still had to hold his head back abnormally far in order to see the columns.

“As you can see,” Paavo said, “each month since
November, your expenses have exceeded your income.”

“Yes. It's the recession, you know.”

“I'm sure. Let's check that.” Paavo looked at the gross income figures for the past six months and saw they were surprisingly consistent. “If gross income is consistent, it must be that your expenses have increased.”

Henry looked puzzled. “If anything, we've been doing all we could to economize. I've even taken to going to”—he shuddered—“places like Costco to get some standard supplies. Please, don't let word of that get out!”

“Generally you deal with a set group of food and restaurant wholesalers?”

“Yes. DMP Distributors, Rose's Kitchen; you know them, don't you? We go to markets for special items, not the routine.”

Paavo didn't know them at all, but that was okay; at least he'd managed to turn Henry's attention to the food expenses. He was curious to see if Henry would notice the same kinds of things Angie did—if Angie was right. She knew food, but she'd never worked in a restaurant before this little stint at LaTour's—not that he knew of, anyway.

“See, here are the food expenses,” Henry said. “I hadn't had time to make many changes in my menu since August, so these items will be remarkably consistent. I hardly had to think about them, in fact. I had standard orders for most deliveries.” He began to flip through the pages. “Let's start with August. The bottom line is all we need. Here's September, about the same as August. Same for October. Just like I told you. And now, November—”