A Dinner to Die For Read Free Page B

empty at this time of night. It took less than five minutes to drive down from the Berkeley Hills to the flatlands and Paradise. But I was sweating through my Florida tan when I got there.
    Outside of Paradise red pulser lights from the patrol cars and the ambulance turned the two-story white stucco building fiery red, and shone on the metal flowers that filled the front yard. The flowers weren’t the soft, pretty types like roses or delphiniums, but spiky tropical birds of paradise, with long stems and flowers that resembled birds frozen in the fury of flight, with orange wings poised at their apex ready to thrust downward, and blue tail feathers lifted skyward, sharp enough to sever a hand.
    The bronze garden had been one of Mitchell Biekma’s early entrees in his preopening smorgasbord of publicity events. The opening of another gourmet restaurant in the Gourmet Ghetto was as newsworthy as another morning of fog. But the metal garden was something else. Biekma had commissioned the most controversial metal sculptor in the East Bay to create it. And controversy was what he got.
    Before the last spiky bird of paradise had been “planted,” neighbors had complained to the city council. Several had threatened to dump trash in their own front yards “in an effort to have a unifying theme on the block.” In response, Biekma had raced to the city council chambers, pictures of garden in hand, and invited the council members, the neighbors, and every reporter in hearing range to be his guests on opening night.
    Before that controversy had died down, twelve members of the North Berkeley Art Association had arrived, surveyed these ultimate perennials, and delivered twelve varying critiques. “Genius” and “junkyard” were the two most frequently heard evaluations, though the ones chosen to headline the story were “Front Yard of Paradise, or Foyer of Hell?”
    By the time Paradise opened, color photos of the bronze birds of paradise had blossomed in all the Sunday supplements. Reporters had interviewed the sculptor, the neighbors, and, it seemed, anyone who had ever held a soldering iron or a garden hoe. But mostly they had interviewed Mitchell Biekma. With his tall, thin body, his long, mobile ruddy face and spikes of strawberry-blond hair, Biekma resembled one of blooms in his garden. By the time he made the television news, he had taken command of the situation. It was he, not the reporters, who had laughingly rattled off the less flattering descriptions of the garden and announced that the baby carrots and tiny cucumbers he featured in his salads had been called the embryonic vegetables. Then his mouth had twisted halfway up his cheeks, giving him the same puckish expression he had had in the airplane magazine picture. Seemingly overnight, Mitchell Biekma had become a Berkeley hero—a restaurateur who could poke fun at gourmet pretensions while serving meals the pretentious would queue up for.
    For Mitchell Biekma, and for Paradise, the garden had served its purpose. For us at the Berkeley Police it was an attractive nuisance. Drivers screeched to a halt in both lanes of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, causing a flurry of minor accidents and one rear-ender serious enough to put a woman in traction.
    But now a patrol officer guided traffic around the four patrol cars, one unmarked car, and the ID tech’s van double-parked in front of the building. Through the open car windows the staccato crackle of the radios poked into the night. Two patrol officers held the crowd back. On both sides of the yard the red pulser lights flashed on groups of onlookers with down jackets wrapped over jeans or night-clothes, turning their drawn faces crimson as they stood shivering in the thick fog. Startled at each attack of light, some had the wary but transfixed look of those who might, indeed, be in the front yard of hell. Others hung back, dividing their attention between a TV reporter describing the scene on camera and the restaurant door