To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (17 page)

After calling it a day in Homicide, Paavo went to visit Aulis.

His condition hadn’t changed any. The doctors were growing increasingly alarmed about his continued inability to wake up.

Fear and frustration flooded through Paavo as he stood in that sterile hospital room and watched over the man who had raised him, now looking so small and shriveled under the white sheets. Usually Paavo didn’t notice the lines on Aulis’s face or the thinness of his white hair. He still saw Aulis very much as he had appeared when Paavo was growing up: an older but spry man. Now Paavo observed all the changes, and thought about the fact that someday he was going to lose the one who’d been there almost forever for him.

He wondered what Aulis had known all those years about Cecily and Mika, and why in God’s name he had kept it hidden.

He sat alone by the bed for about twenty minutes. But then he realized it didn’t make any sense for him to just sit there and do nothing. Once Aulis awoke, he’d want to know who had done this to him, and had the assailant been caught? Paavo
didn’t want to have to answer, “No.”

After about five more minutes, he decided it was time to go home.

Home
. He wished he didn’t get a kick in the gut each time he thought about the cottage. He liked being there more than he ever dreamed he would, and more than he really wanted to admit. He had found a place away from the world’s cruelty and losses where there was love and laughter, and he wondered how long he could accept it, or if he would soon want to retreat to his own quiet solitude once more.

In no time, he’d driven across town and parked on Montgomery Street, right in front of a four-story apartment house that looked like a ship, and had been used in an old Bogart and Bacall film,
Dark Passage
. Maybe, someday, he’d rent the movie and see what all the fuss was about.

He fairly ran down the Filbert steps to the little house, and burst into the living room to find Angie sitting on the sofa, Hercules on her lap, staring at the wall. She didn’t look at him, didn’t say a word.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Angie was not one to sit silently. Usually she greeted him with a hug and a kiss.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Sure, and there’s no ice in the Arctic
.

She sighed heavily and mumbled something about coffee. He followed her into the kitchen. “You can tell me about it,” he said as she filled the carafe with water.

She silently measured coffee into the filter.
We’re together
, he wanted to say,
so we can talk to each other when we’re unhappy or disappointed or just need a shoulder to lean on
. He didn’t say that, though. He didn’t quite know how. Instead, he waited.

“I blew it,” she murmured, and flipped the On switch.

He captured her. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I was awful.”

“Awful? You mean you did something awful?” he asked, confused. “What did you do?”

“I went on television. Oh, God! Why, why, why did I ever dream I could do TV? I’m just not Barbara Walters. Not even Carol Metcalf.”

“Who?”

“She’s on
BayLife Today
.”

“Ah.”

She covered her face. “I was so hideous! My mind went blank. I couldn’t get the words out. What came out was like listening to a tape that someone had slowed down. I can never show myself in public again! Heck, I don’t even want to see me!”

He gathered her closer. “I’m sure you weren’t as bad as all that. You’re always your own worst critic.”

“If I wasn’t so bad, why did Carol kick me?”

He had no answer.

She made her hands into fists. “I should have seen it coming, but did I? No! Not until it was too late. Then I saw it. Here I go again, I said to myself. Angie Amalfi, looking foolish. Why do I do it?”

“You aren’t foolish, Angie.” He stroked her hair.

“I so much want to do interesting things,” she said, burrowing against his chest. “I want to be accomplished, an achiever. I want to be a person who is independent and successful, and good at her job—not daddy’s privileged little rich girl. Not that that’s so tragic. But I’m more than that, aren’t I?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll take that as an enthusiastic yes.” She sighed heavily. “I know I try too hard sometimes. Maybe a lot of times. I know I push it. Occasionally I even leap before thinking. It’s fun sometimes, but not when I disappoint myself.”

He placed his hand under her chin and forced her to look at him. “You never disappoint me, Angie. Promise me you’ll never change.”

Those were the words she needed to hear. They held each other in the lengthening silence. “Maybe I should just go to bed,” she said finally. “This won’t look so bleak in the morning.”

“Want company?” Paavo offered.

She glanced up at him. He grinned. She couldn’t help herself and smiled back. “I’ll turn off the coffee.”

A loud bang woke them both. Paavo was on his feet while Angie clutched her pillow, probably trying to figure out if she was dreaming or if the roof had just fallen in. She lifted her head and looked at him. “What was that?”

He pulled the bedroom drapes aside to see a strange glow in the sky.

“Call nine-one-one. Tell them it’s a fire,” he said as he put on trousers and shoes, then grabbed his badge and gun.

As he pulled a heavy sweater over his head, Angie put on her bathrobe and followed him to the door. “Don’t go out there,” he ordered. “Call.”

He ran up the Filbert steps to Montgomery Street, not believing the sight before him.

Angie’s Ferrari was a ball of fire, flames stabbing the night sky. Behind him, others emerged, sleepily confused and chattering, a few venturing too close to the burning car. He held up his badge. “Police officer! Stay back! Go back inside!”

The crowd wasn’t about to disperse, but they didn’t move closer. He walked around the car to its far side.

A man’s body lay on the ground. The body must have been close to the car when it exploded, and had been flung aside like a rag doll. The clothes were still burning. Paavo turned away. One look and he knew there was nothing that could be done for the man. His hair was gone, his facial skin black and charred, his eyes dark pits. The smell of burnt flesh hit Paavo’s nostrils.

“Oh, my God!”

Paavo spun around at the sound of Angie’s voice. She had put on slippers and stood at the top of the stairs. He ran to her and grabbed her arm, not wanting her to see the horror on the far side of the car.

“What happened?” she cried.

“I’ll tell you when I find out. Right now, go back inside.”

“No. It’s my car! My beautiful car!” Then she seemed to notice people’s reactions to something on the opposite side of it. Paavo stopped her from approaching.

“Don’t,” he ordered. “A man’s dead. Burned. You don’t want to see him.”

Shock and horror filled her face. Fire sirens and the shrill sound of police cars could be heard over the crackle of flames and murmurs of the still-gathering crowd. She backed away from the street and waited.

The police and fire trucks arrived at the same time. The firemen immediately began hosing the car with heavy water pressure.

Paavo met the uniformed officer and showed his badge. “The car is, was, my girlfriend’s. I can give you the particulars. We were asleep when it happened. I don’t recognize the victim.”

“Does she?”

“The way he looks right now, I don’t think his own sister would recognize him. I haven’t asked her to look.”

The policeman glanced at the victim, then nodded.

Once the car fire was out, Paavo moved closer to the burned man. A couple of patrol officers joined him. “Looks like a car bomb went off,” one of them said. “I wonder if the vic was just passing by and unlucky, or if he’d been trying to rig a bomb up and had slippery fingers.”

“Or if something caused an accidental detonation.” Paavo pointed to a small hole in one side of the dead man’s skull, and a larger hole opposite it. It looked like entry and exit wounds from a large-caliber handgun or rifle.

Instinctively the officer looked over his shoulder. Up Filbert were more steps and, a little beyond that, the circular road to Coit Tower on the very top of Telegraph Hill.

“That’s right,” Paavo said. “A shooter could have easily stood anywhere up there and found a clear shot. The question is, who was he?”

“There’s another question, too,” the officer said, looking at the shell of the car. “Who wants your girlfriend dead?”

“We have a make on the marshmallow,” Yosh said to Paavo, hanging up the phone. Yosh had returned from vacation and had quickly been brought up to speed on Paavo’s cases, and also on Aulis’s condition.

Toshiro Yoshiwara, a second-generation Japanese-American, was Paavo’s partner. They’d had an uneasy start when Yosh first joined Homicide and was given the spot that had been held by Paavo’s best friend and partner of many years, Matt Kowalski. Matt had been killed while investigating a murder, and Paavo had been reluctant to establish deep ties to a new partner. Since then, Yosh had proven himself to be an outstanding detective, a good partner, and an even better friend. He was a big man, “from the sumo wrestler part of Japan,” he liked to say, with close-cropped hair, a thick neck, and powerful chest and arms.

“He was a Russian with ties to organized crime,” Yosh said. “His name was Yuri Krakovar.”

“Christ! Aulis being targeted was bad enough,” Paavo said, “but now it’s Angie. If I knew who was behind this, I’d say here I am, come and get me and leave the others alone. But I don’t know how to stop
it.” The crime scene technicians had determined a plastic explosive device that would have been set to the ignition had blown up Angie’s car.

“These Russians are scary,” Yosh said. “You’ve got to get Angie out of there before they come back. Better yet, get her out of town.”

“I brought her over to her friend Connie’s house this morning. We need to figure out what to do. I don’t want her family or friends mixed up in this.”

“Any idea how the Russians found her?”

“She was on live TV yesterday evening. Apparently they were running promos about the show all day long. Someone who knew they were interested in Angie might have heard about her appearance. I’m guessing it was just a lucky break for them—not for Angie, though.”

“She was on TV?”

“She did a restaurant review. Someone could have had her followed when she left the studio and went home. Or”—he thought of the photos she’d taken of Stavrogin sitting in restaurants where she’d been—“they’ve been watching her all along and for some reason decided to take action last night.”

“This is weird, pal. First someone shoots at you, then a Russian enforcer warns you off, and the next thing, another Russian’s trying to blow up Angie’s car. I thought the Cold War was over. What the hell is this all about? Why would anyone go after Angie?”

“She’s been asking questions about this case, about the past. Maybe she’s getting closer than we realized.”

“Don’t worry, pal,” Yosh said. “We’ll find out who’s targeted her.”

“That’s half of the million-dollar question,” Paavo said.

“Half? What’s the other half?”

“A bullet killed the bomber before he rigged it up to the car. Who pulled the trigger?”

Yosh nodded. “That’s right. Whoever did had to have been a good shot.”

“They found the slug—identified it as a Federal Premium hollow-point. It’s high-powered rifle stuff—a sniper’s weapon. Just like the slug that ended up in my front door.”

“You don’t see many people walking around San Francisco with one of those.”

“That’s what I would have thought, but all of a sudden we seem to be holding a convention for them, starting with Leonid Stavrogin.”

“Why would Stavrogin try to take out his own man?”

“He wouldn’t, unless there’s been a falling out within the mob.”

“Shoot,” Yosh said, rubbing his temple. “With friends like that, who needs enemies? I don’t want to have a war going on in the middle of this city between those guys.”

“A cat-and-mouse game with the Russian Mafia is too dangerous to play. And I won’t have Angie being the goddamn mouse. I’ve got to get her out of the way, then go after them directly. I want a piece of those bastards!”

“Whoa, Paavo. You’re making this personal.” Yosh eyed his partner steadily. “We know personal gets cops killed. Watch yourself.”

“Yosh, it
is
personal.”

“I don’t want to do this, Paavo,” Angie insisted. “Filbert Street is home now.”

He didn’t like it either. He had come to love the cottage and the garden-filled Filbert steps that led to
it. But it was known that Angie lived there, and he couldn’t take any chances.

“And I don’t want you dead.” He hustled her and her luggage into the enormous red, gold, and marble lobby of the Fairmont. He chose a big hotel where they could enter from a number of entrances and not be noticed. A place in which she could simply get lost among the crowds of tourists.

Angie had called ahead from Connie’s for a reservation, then registered as Mrs. Nancy Yoshiwara, using one of Yosh’s wife’s credit cards. The desk clerk looked questioningly from her to Paavo, but didn’t say a word.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Angie repeated quietly while the clerk stepped away to process the registration. “I want to be with you!”

Paavo didn’t answer as the clerk returned with the key-card for the room.

They headed toward the tower elevators. “You can leave as soon as I know it’s safe,” Paavo said. “In the meantime, keep out of sight. I don’t want you in any more danger.”

They stepped onto the elevator. Angie pushed floor eight.

“It’ll be hard for me to travel very far anyway, with no car,” she said moodily.

“Good!”

They stopped talking as others got on. On the eighth floor, Angie had a question the minute they got off. “Will you come back tonight?” she asked.

“I’ll try, but if I don’t make it, be ready to leave early tomorrow to pay a visit to Eldridge Sawyer.”

She frowned. “What about Aulis? Can I go see him?”

Paavo found the room and unlocked the door. He went in first. “They know you’ll be wanting to go
there,” he said as he checked closets and the bathroom. “They’ll be watching his room. I don’t want them following you the way they did when you were on TV.”

“You don’t know that’s what they did.”

“I don’t for sure, but it’s a good guess. Keep away from Aulis. He’s in a coma and won’t know if you’re there or not. If he wakes up and you still can’t see him, I’ll explain why not. He’ll understand.”

Angie sat on the bed. The hotel room was lovely, but it wasn’t her apartment, or Paavo’s house, and not even the bungalow they’d shared. “I don’t like this, Paavo. I feel lost here.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s better you feel lost than I lose you.”

She gazed up at him. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “That’s why I want you here and safe.”

He kissed her, then left the hotel room. She put the dead bolt on the door, and turned around to face the tiny room alone.

If Paavo thought she was going to cower in some hotel room, he still didn’t know her very well. She spent a while thinking through her plan, stopped in the Fairmont gift shop for an
I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO
hooded sweatshirt, and headed for the hotel entrance where taxis flocked like hungry vultures.

As she rode across the city she kept glancing through the back window. She quit looking when the cabbie started staring at her in his rearview mirror. Judging from his smirk, he must have thought she was completely paranoid.

When the cab stopped outside Aulis’s apartment, she paid the fare, pulled the sweatshirt hood up, and ran indoors.

Aulis had hidden Cecily’s letter in a Ford mailer. Other important clues could be lying all around, waiting for someone to find them.

She began with the drawer filled with important papers. An hour later, she’d gone through every envelope, then continued on to the rest of the bureau, checking under clothes and even pulling out drawers to look under and behind them. She found nothing.

In the living room Aulis had a small desk where he kept bills and such. Going through each item there met with the same result.

Several cabinets lined the kitchen walls, but the house contained only one large closet. She headed for the bedroom.

Two boxes leaned against the back wall of the closet. Christmas decorations filled the first one. The next held yearbooks, report cards, and class projects from Paavo and Jessica’s school years. Angie was awestruck as she went through them, the latest on top to the earlier ones farther down, glimpsing this part of Paavo’s childhood. He was so skinny during early adolescence, she wondered that he didn’t stab himself with his elbows. His haircut was probably cool at the time, but it made her laugh now. She had to force herself to stop reading school papers or she’d never get through this.

At the bottom of the box was a large paper bag. When she opened it, her heart lurched. She lifted out a little boy’s blue and white striped T-shirt and jeans. They had a slightly gummy feel to them as she unfolded them and smoothed them over her lap.

Next she took out a pale yellow T-shirt, larger than the blue and white one, but not big enough for
an adult. Girl’s jeans, light blue tie-dyes, were under the T-shirt.

She checked the sizes, ten for the girl’s clothes and six for the boy’s. Didn’t lots of boys wear that size when they were about four years old? The significance of the clothes—of the age—hit her.

“Oh, my!” A little brown stuffed bear, only about six inches tall, lay in the bag, right next to a half-dressed, scraggly-haired Barbie doll. She picked up the bear. One black-button eye was loose, and the red ribbon he wore around his neck was limp and bedraggled. He looked like an often-played-with little bear. Angie’s chest tightened. He must have been a well-loved bear besides.

She smoothed his bow and felt tears form in her eyes. Could these have been the toys, the clothes, the children brought when they came to Aulis? Or an extra set Cecily sent with them? Was that how they ended up forgotten in this box?

Angie gazed at the spotless clothes. The memory came to her of how Paavo once described his childhood. That he was the boy in school whose clothes were too big or too small, who wore sneakers with holes, and socks that didn’t match. He said he was the boy who other kids stayed away from. How different his life would have been had his mother lived—or stayed with him.

She put her hands in the pockets of the little boy’s jeans. A Bazooka bubble gum was in it, plus a shiny black rock. Her hand tightened on them.

In the girl’s jeans pocket was a pink plastic wallet with 101 Dalmatians on it. She found herself smiling as she looked inside. A picture of Paavo and Jessica was covered in clear plastic, in the spot where “big people” would put a driver’s license. It was an adorable photo—Paavo, about age three, sat on a carousel pony, Jessica behind him, her arms around
him, holding him in place. She leaned forward, cheek to cheek with him. They were both smiling broadly.

She searched the other compartments in the wallet, but all she found were three movie-stub halves, one adult and two child tickets, with the letters LOVE S before the tear, and BHT plus a string of numbers along the other edge of each.

What movie could the children have gone to back then with that title?
Love Story?
An odd choice for kids, but maybe Cecily had wanted to see it, and brought them along. Jessica probably appointed herself the keeper of the tickets. Angie had liked to be similarly “in charge” when she was a child.

She tried to remove the photo from the wallet, but it stuck to the plastic cover. In the kitchen she found a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag, put Paavo’s pocket treasures in it, then placed it and the wallet in her tote bag. She picked up the bear and put it in as well. Paavo should see these things again. It wasn’t all misery and sadness in his childhood. Happiness existed, too, and he shouldn’t dismiss it so readily.

And it just might be good for Paavo to know his mother had a romantic streak and saw movies like
Love Story
. This wasn’t the time to talk to him about love and romance, or to think much about them, but day by day in the little cottage, she could see the word
marriageable
appearing on his forehead with more and more clarity—no matter how much he outwardly dismissed it.

From Aulis’s house, she took a taxi to the hospital.

She firmly believed that even though Aulis was in a coma, he had awareness, at some level, of what was happening around him. The idea that this man could be lying there feeling frightened and abandoned was more than she could handle.

The moment she realized she was going to go
against Paavo’s wishes and leave the hotel room, she decided to visit Aulis as well. For the sake of his recovery, calming his fears and letting him know how much he was loved and cared for was important.

When she reached the hospital, the knowledge that she’d been followed in the past caused her to pull up the sweatshirt hood and draw the strings tight around her face. On the main floor, she slipped into the women’s room near the cafeteria and removed the sweatshirt, black chinos, and running shoes she’d been wearing, and changed to a jersey jumpsuit and heels. She put the running shoes into her tote bag, and the other clothes, rolled up, under her arm. She hoped to have a chance to speak with Aulis’s doctors. Although in the great scheme of things, it didn’t matter how she dressed to meet with them, for whatever reason, it did to her.

She left the bathroom and rode the elevator to Aulis’s floor.

In his room, she put her tote bag and clothes on a chair in the back, then walked to the side of his bed and took his hand. He looked thin and terribly frail, yet the way his eyes were closed and the peaceful look on his face made it seem he was simply asleep.

“Hello, Mr. Kokkonen,” she said. “It’s Angie. I know it must seem like it’s been a while since I was here last. Believe me, I came back as soon as I could. Your doctors are wonderful. They keep Paavo and me informed of how well you’re doing. You’re going to be fine very soon. They’ve assured us of that. You know how Paavo is. He wouldn’t let the doctors get away with anything less than your full recovery. It will take a few more days, though. You have to be patient. We all do. We’re so much looking forward to you coming home once more. I’m sure you are looking forward to it as well.”

She bent over and kissed his cheek. The doctors weren’t nearly as upbeat as she had just said, but it would do Aulis no good to hear the truth. What he needed now was hope, and it was her job to give it to him.