Sooner or Later (5 page)

“It’s his signature, an ego thing. My guess is he’s done it before. You might check records, see what nut has just finished a prison sentence and hit the streets again.”

“Thanks a lot, buddy.” Piatowsky could have used that drink and the companionship of his colleagues in the nearby saloon, but he had a long, hard night in front of him. “Why don’t you take your smart-ass FBI profiling outta here and go to your own farewell party.” He shook Dan’s hand, slapping his shoulder affectionately. “Wish I could get there, but as usual, I’m stuck with the body.”

Now the time had come, Dan hated like hell to leave. “I’ll have that guest room all set for you in sunny California.”

“I’ll bring my fishing rods—and the kids.” Piatowsky turned back to the crime scene.

Dan knew friends like Piatowsky didn’t cross your path often in life. Straightening his shoulders, he walked into the crowds and the anonymous night.

He returned to the precinct, turned in his badge, shook hands all round and headed to the saloon to drown his regrets with his colleagues.

E
LLIE POUNDED HER FISTS INTO THE BALL OF BREAD
dough, kneading it until it was smooth and elastic enough to satisfy her standards. Dusting it with flour, she covered it with a cloth and set it near the warm stove, to rise. She cleaned off the marble worktop, fetched butter from the refrigerator, and began to prepare the pastry for the
tarte tatin.
The apples were already sliced and the aroma of sugar syrup caramelizing gently on the stove filtered pleasingly through the kitchen.

It was eight-thirty in the morning and she had already been to the wholesale produce market at six to collect the day’s vegetables. The chef, Chan, would take care of buying the meats and later he would telephone her and they would discuss the day’s specials. Depending on what he’d bought, she would write up the menus, then rush down to Kinko’s to get copies made, dash back again and open up in time for the lunch trade at eleven, for which she did the cooking and Jake acted as server.

Jake was dark, handsome, and an actor. In L.A. everybody was really somebody else, Ellie thought. Even herself.
She was a baker, and also a waiter and a manager and a girl Friday. Anything but the proper chef she had been trained as, because lunches were mostly omelets and soups and salads. Meanwhile, as usual, she would open up at nine-thirty and serve coffee and muffins, eggs and toast, a simple breakfast that brought in a nice bit of trade and added to the weekly takings. Except the darned coffee machine wasn’t working again.

The phone rang. Dusting her hair back with a floury hand, she picked it up. “Ellie’s Place.” Her deep sweet voice had a rising intonation that always made her sound as though she were happy to hear from whoever it was. Even Chan.

“Morning, Chan.” She steeled herself, waiting for the daily barrage of complaints from the chef.

“They had no veal this morning. D’you believe that?
No veal.
What kind of butcher is this, anyway? We get another supplier today, or I quit.”

“Chan, they are the only ones whose quality you say is perfect. So they don’t have veal today. Why not try pork instead?”

“Pork? Mmm, maybe I do some ravioli, like Chinese dumplings, with a special hoisin sauce….”

“You got it, Chan. Just tell me what it’s called, then I can go to Kinko’s.”

“It is ravioli Chan.”

Ellie rolled her eyes, what else would he call it? She wrote down the list of dishes he proposed for the evening’s menu. “See you later.” She rang off, thankful to have stalled him from quitting for another day, then walked through the cafe, switched on the lights and turned the
Closed
sign to
Open.
It was, she thought, sighing happily, just another day.

Back at the workstation, she poured the caramelized sugar into the cast-iron
tatin
skillets, arranged the apple
slices in concentric circles over it, then topped them with the pastry, ready to be cooked and served warm later that evening.

She was thinking about Chan. He was half Asian, short, black-haired and dark-eyed, talented and temperamental, but he gave the French cooking an exotic edge that lifted it above the usual. His assistant, the twenty-year-old sous-chef, Terry, with the short-cropped blond hair, bland blue eyes and solid methodical ways of his German ancestors, came from Minnesota, and Ellie thought he probably would have worked anywhere, just as long as he could stay in sunny California. “I can’t believe there’s no snow,” he’d say, amazed, when everyone else was grumbling about the few days of rain.

There was also a dish stacker, busboy, washer-upper, cleaner-upper, who changed so often they’d given up trying to remember a name and whoever was employed this week, was known, generically, as “the kid.” Then there was Jake, who came in to help at lunchtimes, and whenever they were shorthanded. And, of course, there was Maya. She had been her friend since college and for a while they’d shared an apartment together in Venice, while they “found” themselves.

Maya was a blond goddess, a knockout, with a helmet of golden hair, whiskey-brown eyes fringed with long, dark lashes, and a voluptuous tightly toned body, which turned heads no matter how she disguised it in trailing skirts and long sweaters. Ellie said Maya attracted more customers to the cafe than the food, the four days a week Maya worked there. The other three days she was working on a screenplay. Something about evil this week, she’d said. Soon, she knew she would sell it; then she’d give up waitressing forever.

“Then I’ll just come and spend my money here,” she’d told Ellie. “And I’ll make sure to bring all my
important new friends with me. You’ll have it made, just you wait and see.”

Meanwhile, they were both waiting, and waitressing, and hoping.

Dan backed his brand-new white Explorer into a tight spot on Main Street. The California sun blazed down, bronzed people in shorts and T-shirts whizzed by him on rollerblades or simply took it easy at sidewalk cafes, and the parking meter still had half an hour left on it. It was early April and he’d seen the weather back east on TV: they’d just had another two inches of snow. Feeling that life wasn’t too bad after all, he strolled into Ellie’s Place.

The red-haired young woman behind the coffee machine gave him a dazzling smile of welcome that seemed to spread from one pretty diamond-studded ear to the other.

“Be right with you,” she called. “The coffee machine’s acting up again though, so if it’s caffeine you’re after, you might want to try Starbucks. It’s on the next block.”

“Juice is fine. It’s eggs I really want, scrambled with a toasted bagel.”

“Okay.” She wrote the order and headed toward the kitchen in the back.

It was just a tiny storefront cafe done out like a Parisian bistro. The mirrors covering the walls were old and foggy, the bronze sconces were verdigrised, the tables were marble and the chairs cane. A scattering of fresh sawdust covered the tile floor and lace curtains hung from a brass rail halfway up the window, on which the name
Elite’s Place
was inscribed in green shadowed with gold.

Cute, he thought. Like the waitress. She came back
carrying cutlery, napkins and a basket of fresh bread covered with a green-checked cloth, and he quickly amended that statement. You could never call a woman as tall as she was “cute.” And she was no cookie-cutter California girl either.

She gave him another glancing smile as she set the bread in front of him and he noticed a smudge of flour on her cheek. Her eyes were the pale bluish-gray of opals, her nose was freckled and her red hair was bunched through a black baseball cap in a long curly ponytail. It was odd, but he felt he’d seen her somewhere before. He guessed it was because she looked a bit like Julia Roberts.

“Out here on vacation?” She arranged the tablemat and cutlery and folded the green-checkered napkin. Her voice was deep and soft as melted chocolate.

“How do you know I don’t live here?”

She put her hands on her hips, regarding him. “It’s that East Coast pallor. It’s a dead giveaway. Most people out here have a tan, even if it’s fake.”

Dan laughed. “You mean I’ll have to apply bronzer in order to qualify as a native?”

Her long legs covered the distance to the counter in three strides. She picked up the glass of juice and brought it to him. “Oh, a couple of days at the beach and you’ll be fine. Better watch it though. I know it’s only April, but the sun is strong.”

He watched her walk back to the kitchen to get the eggs. “How come you’re so pale then?”

“That’s my grandmother’s doing. She always made me wear a hat when I was a kid, never let me sunbathe. She said with my red hair and freckles it would be like frying myself. And you know what? She was right. Now I’m older and wiser, I thank her every time I look in the mirror. No lines, no sunspots. I’m a lucky woman.”

Ellie smiled at him again as she put the plate of eggs in front of him. Back behind the counter, she cast him a speculative glance.

Cute, she thought, if you could call a guy that rugged “cute.” Deep blue eyes that looked as though they had seen it all; thick dark hair, a hawkish nose and blue-stubbled jaw. Lean, broad-shouldered, muscular.

She shrugged regretfully. She didn’t have time for men anyway. A career girl was what she was now, and forever would be. She was determined to make her way in the world. Ellie’s Place was only her first venture into the restaurant trade; she already had steps two and three planned.

Dan finished his eggs in record time. He glanced at his watch, then went to pay his check. “Thanks,” he said with a smile, “I enjoyed it.”

“Enjoy your vacation,” she called as he strode to the door.

He stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, taking in the street scene before getting into the white Explorer. Ellie thought he surely had a great walk, confident, sexy.

Putting the thought of sex determinedly from her mind, she concentrated on the problem of the coffee machine. She had already been on the phone twice yesterday, this would make the third call. Maybe today they would send someone out to fix it.

When Jake arrived, she had to dash to Kinko’s with the menu. Then she had to go over the week’s orders, find out why there was so much waste in the fresh produce. Then there would be the busy lunch trade. After that she would set up the tables for dinner and check with Chan to make sure he was coming in. She would help with the preparations, take a half-hour break for coffee and a muffin, go home, shower, change, and be back at five for the evening stint as waitress, wine steward,
dish stacker, and any other job that nobody else wanted.

Sometimes she wondered if she was in the right business. Then when she’d had a good week, or even a good day, she knew she was. And every night when she fell into bed, exhausted—and alone—she told herself it would all be worth it and that, one day, she would be the owner and proprietor of a Michelin-starred restaurant.

So there was absolutely no time, or room, in her life for a cute, blue-eyed rugged guy just passing through on vacation. Or anyone else for that matter. She had her grandmother to take care of and she definitely didn’t need a man to complicate her life.

D
AN DROVE UP THE COAST, ENJOYING THE WAY THE NEW
car handled, slowing here and there to admire the scenery. The road curved alongside the ocean and he stopped to watch the surfers, remembering when he was sixteen and had spent as much of the year as he could in the water. His mother told him she wondered why his brain wasn’t waterlogged, and then, when he’d married his high school sweetheart at the age of nineteen, his father told him he was sure it was. Dan guessed he’d been right.

Running Horse Ranch lay just to the north of Santa Barbara in an area of gently rolling green hills that in summer would be scorched to the color of crusty French bread by the hot California sun. He drove past other wineries, admiring their orderly rows of vines, already bursting into leaf, and the attractive wine-tasting facilities set in manicured gardens, luring travelers to pause and picnic beneath shady oaks while sipping a glass of the house product.

Running Horse Ranch was not quite like that. He got
out of the car, and stared at the slopes of shriveled vines, then picked up a handful of earth, let it trickle through his fingers. It was dustbowl-dry and looked as though it would blow away in the breeze. The tangle of rose bushes at the edge of the rows of vines were an old-fashioned warning signal; aphids attacked the roses first, then the vines. These were covered in bugs of every color, black, green, red, white.

He groaned out loud. It seemed the only thing he’d got right was when he’d calculated Running Horse would take all his money, plus whatever the banks would lend him, plus all his time and a lot of hard work.

Squaring his shoulders, he climbed back into the car and bounced over the potholes to the top of the hill to inspect his new home.

He’d thought he’d bought a neat little New England-style farmhouse, but this was more Addams Family than Norman Rockwell. The square wooden house hadn’t seen a coat of paint in a decade and had faded to a dead gray. A sagging porch ran round it and every window was cracked. He stood for a minute, taking in the rusting remains of the tractor dumped in front, and the pile of debris, swirling in a sudden gust of wind that shook the tall pepper tree, showering him with leaves. When the wind stopped, there was just silence. No birds sang, nothing moved. He thought it was a long way from the streets of Manhattan.

The porch steps creaked ominously as he walked across and unlocked the door, wincing when the hinges screamed in rusting agony. Years of dust covered the few bits of broken furniture and ominous trails of droppings led to holes in the baseboards. Standing at the bottom of the rickety staircase, gazing into the eerie shuttered dimness, he could just make out the broken banisters of the
upper hall. He canceled the Addams Family. This was more like something from Stephen King.

Pete Piatowsky’s words echoed in his head. “You’re buying a pig in a poke, man,” he’d warned. “You don’t know what you’re really getting until you get there.” Was he ever right.