“Linda Wurzel is Dalberg Enterprises,” Danielle said. “Dalberg is her maiden name. She was in real estate before she met her husband and his wealth allowed her to considerably enlarge her property portfolio.”
“So she’s the one who bought Peschel’s building,” I said. “Not her husband.”
“Yes,” Danielle said. “Though I don’t know how involved her husband was after their marriage in her real estate speculation. He might have provided more than just money. Since her husband’s death, she sits on the board of InTouchSpace and devotes the rest of her attention, and a considerable chunk of her wealth, to various philanthropic and arts organizations.”
“Where can we find her?” I asked.
“Mr. Slade made us promise to stay out of the Peschel investigation,” Monk said.
“He asked us to,” I said. “We didn’t promise. And this isn’t about the Peschel case, this is about Braddock’s murder.”
“I don’t see the connection,” Monk said.
“They are both dead, Captain Stottlemeyer is in jail, and I had a tickle.” I turned to Danielle. “So, where is Linda Wurzel?”
“She has an office downtown and an estate in Sea Cliff,” Danielle said. “And three days a week she has a standing appointment at JoAnne’s. She has one today.”
“Is that her psychiatrist?” Monk asked.
“Her beautician,” Danielle said. “JoAnne has a very exclusive salon in Chinatown.”
“That’s the last neighborhood I’d expect someone in her social class to go for manicure and a facial.” Chinatown was a historic neighborhood and popular tourist attraction, filled with tacky gift shops and great restaurants, but it wasn’t exactly known for trend-setting style. At least I thought it wasn’t.
“JoAnne’s is the place to go for the latest beauty treatments,” Danielle said. “All the socialites, heiresses, and debu tantes go there, as well as every actress and model north of LA, south of Seattle, and west of Santa Fe.”
“It’s that good?” I asked.
“That’s what all the magazines say,” Danielle replied. “I wish I could afford it. Geisha facials start at two hundred and fifty dollars and garra rufa pedicures can cost as much as two hundred.”
Thank God for Slade’s credit card.
“I suddenly feel the need to beautify myself,” I said. “How about you, Mr. Monk?”
“I just washed my hands, brushed my teeth, irrigated my nasal passages, cleaned my ears, and flushed my eyes,” Monk said. “I don’t see how you could improve on that without being hosed down and decontaminated by a certified hazardous materials team.”
“You’re about to find out,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Whenever friends of mine from out of town come to visit, they always want me to take them to Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown.
Fisherman’s Wharf has lost all of its authentic charm and become a low-end shopping center with a Fisherman’s Wharf theme. But I take my friends there anyway and reward myself for my sacrifice with a loaf of fresh, hot sourdough bread at Boudin, which is no longer the simple bakery that it once was, either. Taking its cue from the rest of the neighborhood, Boudin has become a massive attraction, complete with tour, two restaurants, and a gift shop.
It’s depressing.
But Chinatown is still pretty much the real thing, a distinct city within a city. I don’t wait until out-of-town friends show up to go there. It’s one of my favorite places.
There are lots of ways into Chinatown, but tourists always want to go through the pagoda-style, three-arched gate on Grant Avenue and Bush Street that’s adorned with ornamental dragons, carps, and lions. It’s a manufactured photo op built in 1970 and draws a clear line between the Union Square shopping district and the main street of Chinatown.
I avoid the gate for exactly that reason and I usually wander in from the opposite end of Grant Street.
Visually, Chinatown is nothing like China. It’s an American backdrop dressed up with Chinese stuff, sort of the urban equivalent of decorating a Ramada Inn banquet room with surfboards, piles of sand, suntan lotion, and seashells for a party with a beach theme. Red lanterns are strewn across streets with names like Stockton and Sacramento. Pagoda cornices, green tiles, and colorful Chinese signage are affixed to the kind of standard Edwardian stone and concrete buildings found on any Main Street in America.
But even so, it’s the real deal. There are twenty thousand Chinese people living in the neighborhood, so you’ll find some uniquely Chinese touches that will transport you, if not to China, at least to somewhere away from the familiar.
There are pagoda-styled streetlights supported by twin golden dragons whose tails twine around the poles. You won’t find that in your housing tract. In the windows of meat markets and grocery stories, you’ll see turtles, ducks, squid, pigs, and eels ready for the dinner table. You won’t find that at your neighborhood Safeway.
When you walk the streets you’ll hear a cacophony of Chinese, from people talking and yelling, movie clips playing loudly in DVD shops, and music blaring from the stores, apartments, and car radios.
And you’ll smell incense mingling with the luscious aroma of Chinese food being fried, grilled, boiled, and steamed in the countless bakeries, restaurants, and tearooms.
Chinatown is a complete sensory experience.
I like letting myself be pushed by the flow of tourists down Grant Street because it takes me past the scores of gift shops that are spilling out onto the sidewalks with things like silk ties, back scratchers, prayer wheels, Buddha statues, chop-sticks, porcelain figurines, teapots, T-shirts, pottery, sandals, wind chimes, pot holders, mah-jongg sets, bells, Hello Kitty pillows and bootleg Versace bags.
Monk hates Chinatown, of course, for all the reasons I love it. He becomes overwhelmed by the disorganization, the disarray, and the lack of symmetry. For him, it’s anarchy.
So rather than inflict Grant Street on him, I parked on the western periphery of Chinatown and we walked down one of the less busy and ornamented streets to JoAnne’s, an unassuming storefront tucked between a dim sum restaurant and a laundry.
The simple sign on the salon read, JOANNE’S, beneath what I assumed was the same thing written in much larger Chinese script. Elaborate drapes, decorated with pagodas, wa terfalls, dragons, and carp, were closed over the windows, so it wasn’t possible to peek inside. But from the outside, the salon didn’t look to me like the epicenter of chic for skin and nail treatments.
I opened the door and we stepped inside.
Based on the facade, inside I expected to see a drab neighborhood nail salon full of wizened old Chinese women sitting in torn vinyl chairs.
I was half-right.
The old Chinese women were there, but so were women of all ages, sizes, races, and ethnicities. They all wore white terry-cloth robes and sat in retro-futuristic chairs made of black leather and chrome. Their faces were being slathered with white cream and their fingernails were being buffed like sports cars by beautiful, slender young Chinese stylists with incredibly smooth skin, identical short haircuts, and one-piece white uniforms that resembled a lab coat on top and a miniskirt on the bottom.
The stylists looked so much alike that they might have been androids manufactured from a single mold.
The place resembled a nightclub more than a salon. The floors were black marble, the walls were gleaming white, and the curved-edge counters were stainless steel and it was all bathed in an otherworldly blue glow from ambient LED lighting.