“Well, this is your brother calling you. You need to get out of this now, start going another way. Jim’s going to need you these next weeks at least. I’m going to need you for him. Maybe even Wyatt will wind up needing you.”
“Wyatt won’t ever need me. He never did. And now he’s mad at me.”
“He’s never said one word about being mad at you. If anything, he’s worried. But not even slightly mad. He blames himself, is what I think. For hiring Craig in the first place, for keeping him on, for you guys getting together.”
Tamara looked up at the ceiling and seemed to be gathering herself. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a long sigh.
The waitress appeared and placed a small dish in front of each of them, then a plate of six pot stickers down between them. “Kung pao shrimp coming right up next,” she said.
Mickey picked a pot sticker up with his chopsticks and put it on the dish in front of his sister. “If you eat, you’ll feel better,” he said. “Promise.”
4
Saturdays, Mickey went to his cooking class at La Cuisine, located in a large Victorian house on Webster Street between Clay and Sacramento. He was already halfway through his six-week Professional Series course-“Knives and Butchering,” his eighth formal class in the past three years. At his present rate, he could expect to get his Certified Culinarian ticket, the lowest professional ranking, and possibly get hired to cut onions or sift flour for eight hours a day, in only another two or three years.
But it was working toward something that he loved. By the time he was thirty, if everything worked out, he’d be working in a kitchen; at forty he’d have his own place. Maybe a small one, but his own.
It was a timeline he could live with.
His class began at the stroke of eight o’clock, and if you were late, you weren’t admitted. No excuses tolerated, even if you’d paid your entire tuition up front, even if you couldn’t find a parking place, your uncle died, all of the above. Marc Bollet, the maître, locked the front door at showtime sharp, and didn’t unlock it again for five hours. “You want the experience of working in a professional kitchen?” Marc said more than once in his still-pronounced French accent. “You must learn never, ever to be late. Never to be sick. Don’t plan on too many days off, or vacations. La cuisine is not a career. It is a vocation, a sacred thing. Never be less than at your very best. Or you will find yourself without a job. Because there is always, always, someone who wants your chance.”
Now Mickey, a full twenty- five minutes before class was to begin, courtesy of the best parking spot he’d ever found, got to the stoop with his cup of Starbucks and was somewhat surprised to see that, even this early, he wasn’t the first of his classmates to arrive. Ian Thorpe looked up with an easy, crinkling, blue-eyed smile under a wispy blond mustache. He wore chef’s clogs, a pair of stained khaki shorts, and a blue fisherman’s sweater with white horizontal stripes. “Hey,” he said. “I was hoping I’d catch you before class.”
“Me? You caught me. What’s up?”
“I saw you on the tube last night.”
Mickey broke a small smile. “Me too,” he said. “But only four times. After that it got boring.”
“They identified you as a private investigator.”
“I know, but they didn’t get that part exactly right. I just work in the office, more or less the grunt. Answer phones, get the coffee, like that.”
“Damn.”
“What?”
Thorpe blew out. His eyes scanned the street behind Mickey for a moment. “Nothing, really. I was hoping maybe… well, maybe you could talk to your bosses…”
“Boss. Singular. Wyatt Hunt. The Hunt Club. You need a private eye?”
“I don’t know what I need, to tell you the truth, but somebody like your boss might be a good place to start. I need somebody who knows something about the law and how it works and who isn’t a cop. And it’s not for me. It’s my sister. She worked for Dominic Como.”
“She did? What’d she do?”
“She was his driver.”
Mickey’s mouth all but hung open. “You’re kidding me?”
“No. Why do you say that?”
“ ’Cause that’s what my grandfather did for him too.”
But just at this moment, another pair of their classmates showed up at the corner. “Maybe we can talk a little after class?” Thorpe said. “You be up for that?”
Mickey shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
After class, back at the nearest Starbucks, Mickey removed the plastic top from his cup, blew over the coffee, and took a sip. “So,” he said, “your sister.”
Thorpe nodded. “Alicia.”
“Younger?”
“Three years. She’s twenty-five. Maybe I care about her so much because she’s my only family, actually.”
Mickey put down his cup. “I’ve got a sister who’s pretty much my only family, too, except for a grandfather.” He didn’t see any reason to include his boss, Wyatt Hunt, an adopted foster child himself, who, on his own time, back when he’d been working for the city’s Child Protective Services, had tracked down Jim Parr and convinced him to meet with his all-but-forgotten and abandoned grandchildren, a meeting that had eventually led to Jim’s job as Dominic Como’s driver and then Jim’s adoption of Mickey and Tamara less than a year later. Mickey went on. “Anyway, my dad disappeared for good when I was like two. My mom overdosed when I was seven. Heroin.”
“Heroin,” Thorpe said. “I hate that shit, and you’re talking to one who knows.” He lifted his eyes, his voice suddenly flat. “My dad shot my mother and then killed himself when I was twelve. It wasn’t much fun.”
“No. Doesn’t sound like it.” Mickey took a beat, let out a short breath. “That’s a worse story than mine, or damn close. And I don’t hear them too often. And now we’re both training to be chefs. Somebody should do a study. Orphans and chefs.”
“We want to cook for people ’cause there was nobody to cook for us.”
“Good theory. So you guys didn’t have other family?”
“One aunt in Texas. An uncle in Florida. Neither interested.”
“So how’d you and your sister stay connected?” Mickey asked.
“Alicia, mostly, not giving up. We both bounced around a lot. Foster homes, you know? You too?”
Mickey shook his head. “We didn’t have that. My grandfather-the one who drove for Como-showed up and took us in. Saved us, no doubt. Maybe himself in the bargain.”
“Well, Alicia and me, we got split up and farmed out to different families. I got into some bad behavior mixed with drugs and wound up at the youth work farm till I was seventeen. Alicia, she moved in with three or four different families, but she had some issues of her own-guys, mostly-and none of the family units took. But somehow she kept up on me, where I was, and finally talked me into the Sunset Youth Project.”
Mickey nodded. “One of Como’s charities.”
“Right. Actually, the main one. So, anyway, between that place and Alicia keeping me honest, I eventually straightened out, got back into school, and then even college. A miracle, really.”
“But now you say your sister needs a private eye around Dominic’s death?”
Thorpe nodded. “She volunteered out at Sunset and got pretty close to him in the last few months. The cops came by and talked to her yesterday. She got the impression that she was some kind of a suspect.”
Mickey sat with that for a moment. At last, he picked up his coffee and sipped at it. “How close was pretty close?”
“I don’t know, not for sure.”
“But what would you guess?”
Thorpe made a face, then shrugged. “I’d say it wouldn’t be impossible that they were having an affair, though Alicia’s always said she’d never go out again with a married guy.”