To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (4 page)

Angie grasped the lip opposite Connie. “Why?”

“Now, duck!” Connie yelled, pushing with all her might. The can began to tip.

“Noooo!” Angie’s world tilted. As the sidewalk rushed up at her, she bobbed down. Garbage sloshed over her like a great, smelly tidal wave.

On its side, free from the confines of the other cans, Angie’s had room to roll. And it did.

A high, slightly gurgling wail filled the night air.

Connie watched in mute horror as the can bounced down the hill, accelerating with each roll like some great planet spinning madly on its axis. Scraps of garbage whirled out onto the pavement, tracing a trail down the alley.

Connie ran down the hill after it, waving her arms. “Angie! Stop!”

The wail grew higher and louder.

Finally the can smacked into a lamppost and, with a small, dying teeter, came to rest.

Connie dropped to her knees beside it, afraid to look inside. “Angie?” she squeaked. She gave it a little tap. “Angie? Are you still alive? Can you talk to me?”

Slowly, painfully, Angie crawled onto the street.

Suddenly a male laugh erupted, then cut off as quickly as it began, followed by the sound of running footsteps.

“The nerve of some people,” Angie said, wiping from her face and hair coffee grounds, eggshells, all manner of once-green vegetables, and what looked like inner parts of a crab.

“Is there anything I can do?” Connie blubbered, wringing her hands.

“One thing.” Angie sat woefully on the sidewalk. “Next time I ask you to help me…”

“Yes?”

“Refuse.”

Monday morning, Paavo sat in Lieutenant Ralph Hollins’s office on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice. Although the room was minuscule, tucked in a corner of the fourth-floor Homicide bureau, the Hall itself was massive, ugly, and overlooked a freeway. It was not your high-class real estate. By comparison, the new city jail built behind it looked like Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome.

He told Hollins about the break-ins at his and Angie’s homes. “I can’t figure out what they want, what they were looking for, or why they tore up my place after giving Angie’s the kid-glove treatment. It’s like they were pissed off, or irritated that they couldn’t find what they wanted. Whatever it was.”

Ben Chan finally had found time to check Paavo’s house, but so far had nothing to report. The only good news was that his cat had come home.

“It sounds weird,” Hollins said. In his fifties, with gray hair and a protruding stomach, he was in charge of Homicide, which gave him a close acquaintance with Rolaids. “Take the time you need and keep me posted. I don’t believe in coincidence either.” An unlit cigar was held firmly between his
lips. He couldn’t light it—not with San Francisco’s no-smoking policy—but he could pretend. “Any leads yet on Friday’s Tenderloin murder?”

“No leads, but I found something interesting,” Paavo said. “The vic had a record. Served time for armed robbery, burglaries, was even accused of some killings, but they were never proven.”

“Killings? Plural? You talking organized crime?”

“Not sure. He seems like a loner—a guy who, now and then, got in over his head. We were told his name was Jacob Platt, but it’s really Platnikov. Jakob-with-a-
K
Platnikov. He was born in Russia, came over here in the sixties. I haven’t heard that there were Russian gangsters in this country back then.”

Hollins quietly watched cars zip by on the freeway. “These Russian mafias are fairly recent, but there’s always been a criminal element. He could have been part of it. Hell, I’ve heard their black market worked better than the Communist party. That’s why it survived while the party went to hell.”

“We’re trying to find out what Platnikov was involved in, if anything. Based on something his granddaughter said, he might have been making forgeries of good jewelry. Whoever killed him might have been looking for the good stuff. We found no jewelry—real or fake—in the apartment, so my guess is that they found what they were looking for.”

Hollins took the cigar from his mouth. “Jewelry? Have you talked to Mayfield about her new case?”

Rebecca Mayfield…the one Angie called the “little helper bee.” “Not yet. Why?”

“She’s got a dead jeweler on her hands. A well-known and respected jeweler. The jeweler’s name was Gregor Rosinsky—another Russian.”

As much as Angie welcomed living with Paavo for a few days, staying at a hotel was extravagant.

Especially when he walked out and left her alone each morning. There was duty, and then there was suffering from being enjoyment-challenged.

She was walking a little slowly this morning; the bumps and bruises she’d gotten rolling around in garbage had stiffened over night. She took a couple of Advil, then made an appointment for a locksmith to meet her at her apartment. New, maximum-security locks would make it safe for her and Paavo to simply stay at her place until his new bed was delivered. A couple of days under Sal Amalfi’s roof shouldn’t bother him too much.

As she approached her apartment building, her nerves jangled, and her mind replayed Paavo’s reaction to the break-ins. He was usually pretty sanguine about things, but this robbery attempt seemed to shake him up. That troubled her.

When she reached her block, she scrutinized the sidewalks, the doorways, the parked cars. Being this close to home, she’d expected her uneasiness to dissipate, but it didn’t. Driving slowly, she continued past her building. Around the corner, situated with a view of the main entrance to the apartments and the garage, two men sat in a dark blue Mercury. One raised a newspaper higher as she drove by.

Was it to cover his face?

What kind of people sat in their cars to read newspapers in a residential neighborhood? She didn’t think she wanted to know.

As she circled the block, she called Stan on her cell phone.

“Look out your window,” she said when he
answered. “Two men are sitting in a dark blue sedan at the corner. Do you see them? Do you know if they’ve been there long?”

“Gee, Angie, I don’t make it a habit to sit at my window and ogle parked cars.” She heard him moving about. “I see the car. So what? Where are you?”

“I’m a couple blocks away. I’m just being a little paranoid, okay? I want to be sure those guys aren’t waiting for me.”

“A
little
paranoid? You’ve hung out with that cop too long. This is not normal behavior. I know you had a break-in, but—”

“Humor me. I’m going to park and walk slowly toward the building. If you see those guys get out of the car, tell me, and I’ll run back to my car and get away.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why don’t you park in the building’s garage like you always do? It’s secure.”

“Not secure enough. If anyone is after me, I’m not entering some dark, creepy garage. Now, will you just watch, please?”

“All right. I’m watching. If I were you, I’d just put more locks on my door.”

The only open parking space was a half block from her apartment. She took it, then unclipped the keyless-entry remote and left the key in the ignition. She might have to make a fast getaway.

“You still there, Stan?” she asked as she neared the building.

“I’m here. I see you. I can’t see the guys in the car, but I see the car.”

She froze. “
What do you mean, you can’t see the guys in the car?
”

“Not from this angle. But if they get out, I’ll see the doors open.”

“Oh. Okay.” She slowly began walking again. “So far nothing?”

“Nothing.”

She was just two doors from her building, with each step feeling more self-conscious and foolish for having asked Stan to help.

“Angie,
stop!
” Stan’s voice was hushed, urgent.

Her feet felt glued to the pavement. “What?”

“I moved to the bedroom to look. The blue car is empty. Of course, it could mean nothing.”

Or it could mean…She bit her lip, clutching the phone. How paranoid was she? They could be anybody. Two men looking for an apartment to rent, checking the want ads. Or…

Oh, hell! She could meet the locksmith another day when her nerves weren’t as wound up as a Slinky toy.

She turned back toward her car.

“Angie, run!” Stan yelled.

Aches and bruises forgotten, she didn’t even stop to look back, but hurled herself at her car, jumped inside, and slammed down the door locks. All she could think of was to turn the key, throw the transmission into drive, and stomp on the gas.

Heart pounding, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the backs of the men’s heads as they hurried toward their car.

Her Ferrari left them in her dust for the moment, but she wasn’t sure how long it would be before they caught up with her.

“Hello? Hello?” Stan yelled.

Her hands were too tight on the wheel to pick up the cell phone. She careened wildly down Russian Hill, tearing across level intersections and then feeling the car become airborne as the pavement dropped steeply after each cross street. The jarring as the wheels bounded onto the roadway made her wince, both for her car’s body and her own. She felt like a stunt driver in a Hollywood action film.

“Angie? Angie? Where are you? Can you hear me?” Stan was sounding desperate.

She glanced again in the rearview mirror. No dark car followed. With shaking fingers, she lifted the phone from the floor where it had fallen. “I’m here.” She was breathless. “Did you see them follow me?”

“No. They went back to their car, sat awhile, and then drove off.”

“Thank God!”

“I tell you, you made a faster getaway than Bonnie and Clyde.”

Homicide Inspector Rebecca Mayfield walked into the detail and sat at her desk.

Hangdog eyes that always made Paavo slightly uncomfortable peered up at him as he approached her. If it hadn’t been for Angie coming into his life, the two of them probably would have been a bureau item. She was the type of woman who had attracted him in the past, the type everyone who knew him believed was right for him. On some gut level, he knew Rebecca and the bureau matchmakers had a point.

The way things were, though, this was one bureau romance that was never going to happen. He couldn’t see past Angie—outwardly wrong for him in every way. His colleagues in Homicide knew that, too. For all their apparent incompatibility, he felt more alive when with her than at any other time in his day. He trusted in that.

Rebecca gave Paavo the files he’d requested on Gregor Rosinsky, the jeweler whose murder she and Never-Take-A-Chance Sutter had been investigating. Their too polite and all too professional discussion denied Rebecca the conversation she really wanted.

Back at his desk, Paavo began to read.

Rosinsky was seventy-two when he was killed. He’d been in the U.S. fifty years. After World War II, he had left the USSR by way of China, working his way to Japan and finally to California.

He seemed to spend his early years in the U.S. walking a fine line between legality and crime. His rap sheet showed several arrests, but he had spent less than a week in jail, and that was at the county level for passing bad checks. He probably would have been given a suspended sentence for the crime, except that he’d been allowed so many chances in the past.

Then his arrest record suddenly stopped. That meant he had gone straight or had found protection.

Rosinsky was married, with two sons and a daughter. His wife didn’t work; all three children were married. The daughter had moved to Phoenix and was a realtor, one son lived in Los Angeles where he worked as a cameraman at Warner Bros., and the other, the oldest, was still in San Francisco, now calling himself “Rosin” and working as an attorney.

Twenty years ago, Rosinsky had opened Rose Jewelry, Ltd. Small and exclusive, it had earned a reputation for quality jewelry and fine workmanship.

Nothing in the file indicated why Rosinsky ended up on the wrong end of a bullet.

His death occurred at approximately eight o’clock in the evening. The store was closed, and he apparently had stayed to do paperwork. Rosinsky’s wife had called her son late that night, worried when she couldn’t contact her husband. She’d been particularly anxious because three nights earlier, someone had broken into the store. They must have been scared off because nothing had been stolen.

This time, strangely, there were no signs of a break-in. Rosinsky’s body had been found in back of the shop. Whoever killed him may have entered from the back door, but if so, Rosinsky must have opened it for him. Paavo couldn’t see a jeweler opening any door after hours unless he knew and trusted the caller. Rosinsky had known his killer.

If whoever killed him had stolen some of the jewels, the crime would have made more sense. That, at least, would have been a red herring and thrown the police off on motive. Right now it looked like an execution.

Paavo read through the crime lab reports. A lot of fingerprints had been lifted in the back area. He doubted anything conclusive would show up, though. Since he knew no one had whacked Rosinsky as part of a conventional robbery, it couldn’t be investigated as that kind of a case. Paavo’s instincts told him that this had been a professional job. Someone had wanted the jeweler dead.

Paavo read through Mayfield and Sutter’s reports on talks with friends, neighbors, and associates of the victim, but nothing there was helpful. Something niggled at him as he read, and he turned back to the beginning of Rebecca’s write-up.

Then he saw it. Rosinsky’s wife had said the store was broken into three nights before he was killed. Angie’s and his homes were burglarized the very next day. It was an interesting coincidence, but nothing more, he was sure.

While Angie directed, Paavo drove her Ferrari nearly to the top of Telegraph Hill, and parked on Montgomery Street near Filbert. While most of the hill sloped gently down from Coit Tower to Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach, the east side dropped steeply to the Embarcadero. Streets were no more than footpaths and stairways, and ended abruptly at retaining walls, hillsides, or parapets. Sections of unpaved landscaping and terraced, private gardens made the area green and lush.

Angie could have danced with excitement, but kept mum about where they were going or why. After telling Paavo about the two men watching her apartment building, she knew she wouldn’t be returning there until this situation was settled. He seemed to assume she’d move in with her parents for a while. She had a better idea.

The block of Filbert they walked down had no paved roadway. Instead, wooden stairs and walkways zigzagged along the hillside, surrounded by trees, vines, ferns, and a lush central garden.

About a third of the way down, she opened a small wooden gate and stepped onto a stone walk-
way through a tiny fern garden to a white cottage. Paavo wore a bemused but curious expression. Many of the homes on this hill had been miners’ shacks when first built, but had withstood the big earthquake and fire of 1906, and by way of age and location, were now worth nearly as much as one of the mines might have been.

As she pulled a key from her purse and dangled it in front of him, he murmured, “Home sweet home.”

“You figured it out!” Wearing a big smile, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.

“I don’t believe this,” he said.

In almost no time, she showed him the little foursquare house. The front door opened to a pleasant parlor, with casement windows overlooking the Filbert gardens, and a brick fireplace on the righthand wall. Beyond the living room an archway led to a dining area with French doors that opened to a deck. The kitchen was to the left of the dining area. The sole bedroom was to the left of the front door. Like the living room, it also looked out onto the Filbert steps and central gardens. A bathroom had been built off the bedroom, probably as an after-thought many years ago.

Angie could have put two of these cottages into her apartment.

“My cousin Richie, who’s in real estate, owes my father a favor,” she said. “When I told him what happened to me, he gave me the place for a month. Two if we want it.”

“You’ve never talked to me about your cousin Richie before.”

She shrugged. If she were to tell him about all her relatives, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Paavo didn’t pursue it. “So where is he going to live?”

“He doesn’t
live
here. It’s one of his rentals. It’s vacant now, that’s all.” She couldn’t explain why the place was nicely furnished and stocked with food. Some things were best not to question.

“I don’t know about this,” Paavo muttered. Despite his uncertainty, he seemed to find the little house appealing. It invited comfort and relaxation. As he peered out the window at the Filbert steps and the lush, green garden that gave it a secure, almost tropical feeling, she thought he was weakening. “This is nice, but it would make more sense for you to leave the city and stay at your parents’ house.”

Her gaze gripped his. “Is that really what you want?”

“No,” he admitted.

She smiled with relief. “It’s settled, then. We’ll stay here, safe and comfortable, while you find out what’s going on.” Taking his hand, she led him through the French doors to a postage-stamp-size deck filled with containers of flowers. The hillside dropped away beneath it. “Look at how pretty the geraniums and impatiens are, even at this time of year. It’s like a touch of springtime, right in the heart of the city. This place will be good for us.”

“To find out how incompatible we really are?” he asked.

Her arm circled his waist. “We know that already. Siskel and Ebert had nothing on us.”

She’s right about that
, Paavo thought. He draped an arm over her shoulders. “It sounds like you’ve made up your mind.” He knew a steamroller when one hit him—even if only a hundred ten pounder. He had to admit the thought of living here with Angie on a trial basis appealed to him. He even had to admit that living with Angie on a permanent basis was something he dwelled on at length.

“We’re here. Let’s enjoy ourselves.” She faced him, her back against the railing. “I stopped at the grocery. How do grilled strip steaks with olive and oregano relish, pine nut and basil rice, steamed zucchini, and a romaine salad with Parmesan dressing sound to you? I thought it would be nice to stay home for dinner.”

Home…He liked the sound of that. He placed his hands on her small waist.

“And after dinner we can go to your place and pick up Hercules,” she added.

“Can I trust you not to spoil that cat, Angie?”

“Nope.” She grinned wickedly. “And I’ll spoil his master, too, if given half a chance.” He moved closer, very much liking the gleam in her eye, and quite ready to let himself be spoiled any way she wanted.

Her cell phone began to ring. Her voluminous tote was on the pine table in the dining area. She dug around in it until she found the phone. After listening for a minute, her face paled, she murmured, “Okay,” and handed the call to Paavo. “It’s Yosh. I thought he was still on vacation. Your phone is switched off or the battery’s dead. That’s why he tried me. He says it’s urgent.”

Paavo took the phone, a thousand questions going through his head at the word his partner used.
Urgent
in police lingo meant very bad news.

“Yosh, what’s up?” he asked.

“It seems there was a break-in,” Yosh replied. “At your stepfather’s.” A long moment went by before Yosh added, “He was shot.”

Seventy miles south of Tucson, US Highway 19 crossed the Arizona border into Mexico at Nogales. Other Arizona crossings were smaller, like the mountain pass from Douglas to Agua Prieta about a
hundred miles east, or the blistering, barren desert crossing at Sonoita, over a hundred miles to the west. Around Nogales, the land consisted of rough desert, parched ranchland, a few paved roads, and lots of footpaths for illegal crossings.

On an expanse of land on the Mexican side, thirty miles southeast of the border checkpoint, in an area so remote and desolate not even illegals dotted the landscape by night, stood a two-room adobe. The house and garden were ringed by a four-foot adobe wall with a flat overhanging stone along the top, and a solid wooden gate. Such a wall helped keep down the number of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas that made it into the house.

A woman walked out of the gate and shut it firmly behind her. Her tooled leather boots crunched on the umber-colored rock and gritty sand as she continued along the well-worn path from the gate to the nearest saguaro. She was tall and angular, her muscles toned from a daily routine of weights and running. Her gray hair was clipped short. Her eyes were also gray, but tinged with green—the color of the cholla and Mexican sage that dotted the Sonora Desert she had learned to call home.

She didn’t know if she could ever learn to truly love the desert. She’d grown up along the eastern seaboard, Maryland as a child, then to Massachusetts while a teenager, until she moved south again. She missed the greenery of that area, the thick foliage of the trees and bushes in spring and summer, the bright colors of autumn, and the peacefulness after a fresh snow. But most of all, she missed the water. Beautiful, blue, cool water. She missed the streams and ponds, lakes and rivers, of her childhood.

She had learned to respect the desert in all its
craggy intensity, its harshness, and its desolation. It constantly tested, and had made her stronger. The desert, more than anything she had ever known, taught her to abide.

A square metallic target holder hung from an arm of the cactus. She attached a new paper target to it. Then, just for the hell of it, she reached into the yellow straw pouch she carried, and lined up five tin cans in a row on the ground beneath the target.

The day before, she’d made her weekly jaunt across the border to the main Tucson post office to pick up copies of the
San Francisco Chronicle
and
Examiner
. The papers had no routine delivery to any location in southern Arizona, and having them mailed directly to a small town closer to home would have caused too much local curiosity. For that reason, she subscribed to them as “Jennifer MacGraw”—as good a name as any. Tucson was big enough, and so full of sun-seeking out-of-towners, that such mail deliveries received little notice there. And if anyone was sufficiently curious, let them try to find Jennifer MacGraw with her shoulder-length platinum-blond hair and heavy makeup.

Last evening, after a simple dinner of refried frijoles, chorizo, and tortillas, she’d settled down to read the news. For years now, she’d found nothing of importance in the papers, and never expected last night to be any different. Force of habit kept her at it. With some shock she noted the murder of a jeweler during a robbery. It wasn’t an unexpected occurrence, she realized, even if the jeweler was Gregor Rosinsky.

Ironically, she’d almost overlooked the tiny article tucked deep in the
Examiner
, near the obituary page, about the murder of another old man—Jacob Platt.

Only as she read about that second murder did
her heart begin to drum and her nerves turn raw and tight.

She wondered if the authorities had found out yet that the victim’s name was really Jakob Platnikov. And if they had, did they realize what it meant?

She paced off exactly twenty steps from the target. Keeping her back to it, she placed her gear on the ground and picked up each item in turn. She first put on the polycarbonate wraparound safety glasses, then fitted the shooting muffs over her ears and slung her magazine pouch over her shoulder. Last, she removed the Glock 19 from her shoulder holster, dropped the half-used magazine, and slapped in a new ten-rounder. The 9 mm compact was less than seven inches long and five in width. It fit easily into her handbag, and was comfortable in her hand. She knew it intimately, knew every nuance of its high-impact-resistant polymer grasp. She’d used it to practice with on numerous occasions. Soon she would use it for more than practice.

She breathed deeply, head bowed slightly, feet wide apart, clearing her mind of the distractions of the day. A blue-black buzzard circled overhead. Near a dry creek bed, two cottontails scampered. She saw none of it, saw only the real target, not her phony paper one.

In one fluid motion, she spun to face the target, formed the isosceles position, and fired ten rounds. The completed magazine dropped out and she slammed a new one into place, then began moving leftward. As she did, she fired another ten rounds, then ten more as she worked her way back to her starting place.

Twenty-five of the shots were bull’s-eyes, the other five missing by scarcely an inch.

Last of all, she straightened, one arm extended, eye on the sight. She shot the five cans, watching
with satisfaction as they
pinged
and flew up into the air, dropping down to land on the ground like so many dead men.

Gray-green eyes, cold and hard, swept the barren landscape. She shoved another magazine into the Glock. She knew what she must do.

Cops were easy to find.

So were dead men.

She had waited long enough. It was time to act.