A Dinner to Die For Read Free

four bedrooms. Briefly, I considered sleeping in the guest room. No, if I was going to take my life by the horns now, I might as well do it in the master bedroom, where I would need to pad just ten or twelve feet, across carpet thick enough to lose my ankles in, to the Jacuzzi-equipped tub for two.
    Looking at the bed in there—king-sized, of course; anything smaller would have looked ridiculous—I felt the weight of the day’s tension land on my back, as if it had been released from a sack above me. It was only six P.M., still light, even through the fog. I extricated a nightshirt from one of my suitcases and crawled into the bed—and found myself shaking.
    I pulled the covers closer around my chin, and thought of Howard—Howard who, after a month’s separation, hadn’t met me at the airport. I wasn’t angry. I was too drained for anger. Was I disappointed? Maybe. No, not so much disappointed as relieved.
    I wasn’t ready to deal with Howard. And I didn’t want him to see me yet, not shaky like this. Still, through the increasing fogginess of my mind I couldn’t help wondering what kind of sting he was running. Was it so vital for him to be there? Or was he having qualms about me, too? Or was … but the warmth of the down comforter reassured me, blurred the thoughts till they evaporated into sleep.
    It took three rings for me to realize the phone was ringing, another to find the light, and a fifth and sixth to ferret out the receiver. (It was in a mahogany box on the bottom bedside shelf.) Dropping the lid on the carpet, I pulled out the phone.
    “Sorry to wake you at one A.M. ,” the dispatcher said, “but I got the word that you were back. You okay?”
    I swallowed, trying to get the sleep-congealed juices moving in my mouth. “I’m fine. All my bruises are healed, and if I still have any black and blue marks, they’re hidden under my superb tan,” I said with a lot more bravado than I felt. “What have you got for me?”
    “DOA at Paradise—not the place where the corpse is heading—the restaurant,” he said. “One of the gourmet restaurants. Not exactly your kind of place, huh, Smith? It’s at—”
    “I know where it is, Dillingham. I’ve been to dinner there.”
    Dillingham whistled. “They serve gourmet donuts?”
    I slipped my feet over the side of the bed. “They have three entrees per night. What I had was good, real good, but there were lots of things on my plate—odd greens and tiny vegetables—I haven’t seen before or since. It was kind of like eating on Saturn, at sixty dollars a head.” I didn’t need to add that I had been there only once, for a very special occasion. Dillingham knew me well enough to assume that.
    Overcoming the urge to prolong this conversation—this interlude in which I could still consider the murder just a crime, unconnected with a real person, and his or her real friends and relatives—I said, “Do you have any particulars—name, cause of death, time?”
    “Check with Doyle. He’s in his office.”
    Before I could comment, the phone clicked as Dillingham tried to transfer my call, always a chancy operation. But at one-oh-nine in the morning, the chances were better. I barely had time to clear my throat before Inspector Doyle came on the line. “Smith?”
    “Yes?”
    “You’re up.” He meant next on the rotation. “I’ve got the doctor’s release. He says you’re fine. That right?”
    “One hundred percent.”
    “Sometimes those doctors don’t see everything, you know,” he said with a hesitancy I hadn’t heard in his voice before.
    “Thanks for your concern, Inspector, but I’m fine.” Fine except for that ridiculous fear of descending, and I wasn’t about to admit to that.
    “You sure? It was a bad crash.”
    “Yes,” I snapped, “fine.”
    “Okay then,” he said, all business now. “You’ve seen Mitchell Biekma, haven’t you?”
    “The owner of Paradise? Everyone in the Bay Area’s seen him on the news. Half the