Just Add Salt (Hetta Coffey Mystery Series (Book 2)) Page 4

  “Lard? Lard?” her voice edged toward hysteria with each, “Lard.”

  “No, not really lard. Lard-o. It’s a Tuscan delicacy, with garlic, rosemary, sea salt and pepper. It takes months to make, you know.”

  She turned over the package and read the ingredients. “This is pure fat. Very tip top of the food pyramid. A little of this stuff contains your entire caloric intake for a day.”

  “But no carbs, and laced with nutritional herbs. A little goes a long way. You only use a teensy teaspoon on a slice of bread.”

  “There is no justifying this, this,” she shuddered, “pig fat! And you can’t have bread.”

  “But, I paid sixteen bucks a pound for it, it can’t just be pig fat.” As my gourmet hoard plummeted into the garbage bin, I pleaded, “For the love of God, Pammy, have mercy.”

  Pamela fixed me with an evil eye, tossed a brand new bag of Mrs. Field’s Double Chocolate Macadamias after the lardo, and then she spied a huge box of See’s Candy. Jan came on board just as I screamed.

  “What on earth? Oh hi, Pamela. I see you’re exorcizing the place. About time, I’d say. Probably found the lardo, huh? Here, Hetta, wipe away those tears, I brought you some nice, crunchy, broccoli.”

  “I hate broccoli.”

  “I also brought cheese sauce. You can have cheese sauce on Atkins.”

  Well, at least that.

  “And you can have a nice steak,” Pamela perked. “After our jog.”

  “Oh, we’re going jogging?” Jan said. “Great, let me get my gear from the car. Where are we going?”

  “How about you two run on up to Canada, while I watch Wheel of Fortune?” I growled.

  “Now, Hetta, it’s for your own good,” chirped Pamela. You may have noticed that Pamela never, ever, says anything. She perks, chirps, cajoles. “I thought we’d do Lake Merritt. Nice and easy-like on our first day out. Only five miles.”

  “Five miles? I can’t do five blocks.”

  “We’ll mostly just walk fast. You can do it.”

  “You two have nine-foot legs,” I whined. “I have to take three steps to your one. I have a great idea, let’s trot over to the First and Last Chance Saloon. I’ll buy.”

  “No alcohol, Hetta. Not for the first two weeks. Ready to go now? It’ll be fun.”

  So it was that I, short chubby redhead, spent the next two hours being herded by two Amazonian blondes around Lake Merritt. I was passed out on the settee, dreaming of carbohydrates, when Jenks called.

  “Hi, honey, get my fax?”

  “Don’t call me honey. It makes me hungry.”

  “Dieting again?”

  “None of your bidness.”

  “Touchy, aren’t we? Hetta, you do not need to lose weight, you are just fine like you are. I’ve told you that a hundred times. And I never lie.”

  “Easy for you to say, Slim. I’m sorry for being so grouchy. I’m just tired. That trainer, Pamela? She’s a demon from Hell. She threw away my Lardo di Colonnata.”

  Jenks chuckled. “Thank goodness. I don’t see what you see in it, anyhow. Or her. Fire her. You’re way too hard on yourself. I really miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. When are you coming home?”

  “Uh, well, that’s what I called about. Looks like we might be here a couple of weeks.”

  “Surprise, surprise. Jenks, we are running out of time here.”

  “I know, and I’m doing my best to move things along. Did you get my fax?”

  “Boy, did I,” I groused. “And I ordered several million dollars worth of spares today. Why don’t we just buy another identical boat and drag it along behind for parts?”

  “Good idea. I’m putting together another list that I’ll fax in a few minutes. I’m on my way to a meeting.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s morning over there. Another list? What now?”

  “Outboard spares, and you do want e-mail on board, right? We’ll need a TNC for my ham radio. Speaking of, are you studying your Morse code? The test is in two weeks.”

  “You know, I heard they are getting rid of the code portion of the test.”

  “Not soon enough for you. So, are you practicing?”

  “Yeah, sure I am. Let’s see DAH DIT DIT DIT-DIT DIT- DAH-DIT DAH DAH-DIT. How’s that?”

  “I hope you can spell more than ‘bite me’ in code, but at least you’re learning, and anyhow, it’s great to hear your voice. I can’t wait to get back home. We’re going to have a great trip to Mexico, so don’t fret. Gotta run. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  He hung up and I tried to go back to sleep on the settee, but tossed and turned and worried. Somehow, I just knew the trip was in jeopardy. I turned off the TV, went to my cabin and crawled into my big, empty bed.

  …- - - … In case you have never seen a prisoner of war movie, that means SOS.

  Chapter 4

  After a night of thrashing about and popping ibuprofen, I dragged my aching self back to Pam the Punisher for my morning pillorying, then attacked Jenks’s new list. I had just hung up with yet another overpriced boat parts vendor when my business phone rang.

  “Hetta Coffey Corp, how may I direct your call?” I answered with an adenoidal snap that, evidently, failed to enhance my verisimilitude as a secretary.

  “Want a job?”

  “Hey, Trob. Nope.” I can be just as verbally abbreviated as Fidel Wontrobski. I have noticed though, that since he married my friend, Allison, he’d become practically wordy. For him.

  “Don’t you at least want to hear about the job?” See what I mean? A complete sentence.

  “Wontrobski, I have a job which, thankfully, ends very soon. I then plan to be gleefully unemployed for at least three whole months. Unemployed, and out of the country to boot.”

  “It’s short. Pays well. Good deal.”

  “Do I need red high heels and black mesh stockings?” Silence. I should know better than to joke with the Trob. I was getting ready to tell him to look elsewhere for some hired help when I spied my much-abused American Express card on the desk.

  “Uh, Fidel, how short? And how much? And if it’s such a good deal, how come your employers, the internationally greedy firm of Baxter Brothers, doesn’t want it?”

  “E and PI,” he said.

  “And so, the job being environmentally and politically incorrect, my name just naturally came up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, you have my attention. Where, when, how long and how much?”

  “Mexico. A month from now. Three weeks. Top dollar, all expenses.”

  “Wontrobski, could you please narrow down ‘Mexico’? It’s a big country.”

  “Magdalena Bay.”

  Sigh. With about a million miles of beach front and at least that many bays, this could be a very long conversation. “Where. Is. That?”

  “Don’t get huffy.”

  “Wontrobski,” I growled, “just tell me where the damned job is and I won’t huff.”

  I swear I heard him giggle. “Baja. Pacific side.”

  “Really? Hold on, let me get a map.” I rummaged in an ever- growing pile of maps and charts and came up with one for western Mexico. “Got it.”

  “North of Cabo, look for a large bay and a town named San Carlos.”

  I found it and did a fast calculation in my head. “You say they want someone there in about a month?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, Wontrobski, you just might have your girl. If we move up our schedule a tad, skip a few ports on the way down, Jenks and I could make it there in time.”

  “Uh, problem Hetta.”

  “Problem? What’s the problem?”

  “Jenks.”

  The Trob might be an engineering genius, but carrying on a non-technical conversation with him is like getting a root canal. Calling Fidel Wontrobski—his father was a Polish Communist, thus the name—a genius, is like calling his namesake slightly left-of-center. His galactic IQ, though, somehow insulates him from learnin
g some of the small things we all take for granted. Social abilities, for instance. His lack of personality and verbal skills, along with borderline agoraphobia, would make him a total loser if it weren’t for his puppy-like loyalty to those who treat him well.

  Loving someone who looks and dresses like a giant bird of prey wasn’t easy at first, but I now consider him among my very best friends. When he married one of my female friends, a gorgeous, savvy black lawyer with political ambitions, no one was more flabbergasted than I. Matter of fact, a year later, I was still in shock.

  “You there?” he finally asked, when I absolutely refused to question what he meant by, “Jenks.”

  “And getting grayer by the minute. Okay, I give. What do you mean, ‘Jenks’?”

  “He won’t be there.”

  “Do I have to come over to that think tank penthouse of yours and strangle some meaning out of you?”

  “Sorry, Hetta. I, uh, kinda hired Jenks. In Kuwait.”

  “Okay, Wontrobski, here’s what I want you to do. Go to your door, open it and lean over. I’m on my way over to kick your ass.”

  I practically flew across the Bay Bridge, in spite of the twenty-four hour crappy traffic that semi-flows in both directions. I longed for the days before the earthquake when I'm told there were actually ideal commute times. Why on earth would all kinds of people move to San Francisco after such a disaster?

  The Baxter Brothers security guard gave me the promised pass and a suspicious look. It hadn’t been all that long since I was persona non grata in these hollowed halls of engineering, so maybe the rent-a-cop remembered me. Or maybe, in my Birkenstocks and jeans, I looked like a Democrat. He reluctantly escorted me to an elevator not normally graced by mere mortals, especially female ones, and I was whisked upwards, in ear-popping opulence, to Fidel Wontrobski’s aerie.

  Fidel had already placed his dominoes box, the jade one I bought him in Hong Kong, on the conference table alongside a pile of tuna sandwiches. You really, really gotta love the guy; he can order anything on this earth from the company chef and he gets us tuna on Wonder.

  The Trob, a few years my junior and at least two feet taller than moi, looks like a buzzard. His posture, despite his wife’s daily threats to put him in a corrective corset, remained as bent as his hooked nose. Flappy dark clothes and a scruffy black topknot of frizzy hair portrayed a bonkers bird of prey persona, but his engineering wizardry overcame his apparent buzzardry, for he was afforded access to acmes denied we, the brain cell challenged.

  His penthouse office topped an exclusive floor otherwise reserved for the brothers Baxter and a cadre of former highly placed politicians. It was the Trob’s brilliance, I had no doubt that kept him entrenched in this Republican bastion in spite of his recent marriage to Allison. A lawyer, his new wife was everything Wontrobski was not: petite, self-assured and, worst of all, a Liberal. Or perhaps it was simply that the brilliant Trob was so politically and socially apathetic the Baxter Brothers, as well as former Secretaries of State and their minions, overlooked his unfortunate union with what they most likely considered a communist.

  The Trob had very little interaction with regular employees and the Baxters certainly never let him get too near clients. A virtual prisoner of his own intelligence, the mid-thirties wunderkind ate lunch alone in his office and, until he met Allison, dinner was delivered there as well. Now, at least, he had moved from his hotel room into a trendy new condo, but since he only sleeps four or five hours a night, he still eats breakfast in the company cafeteria. Which, being an early bird myself, is where I first met him.

  Since that time, he and I had become dear friends. He bailed me out of several jams involving my crappy habit of annoying my employers. Before I was canned from Baxter Brothers, it was our habit, after breakfast, to go back to his tower of wisdom and play dominoes until I had to join the lesser grunts at eight. My win record is 0 for about a million.

  Today, however, I was in no mood for dominoes.

  “Are you gonna tell me how it is that you have hired Jenks without his knowing it? I talked to him last night and he said nothing. Jenks does not lie to me.”

  “I’ll tell. After a game.”

  “Blackmail.”

  “Come on Hetta, just one.”

  I sighed and plopped into a down feather and leather chair the size of several cows, and winced when he emptied the dominoes, with a crash, onto the lustrous rosewood conference table. A table that probably cost more than my boat.

  “Killer or regular?” he asked, wanting to know which game I was up for.

  “Oh, I think Killer is quite appropriate today.”

  He actually grinned. Or smirked. Anyhow, his lips sort of moved upwards. Marriage was obviously good for him.

  “How’s Allison?”

  “Meeting with the mayor.”

  “What for?” I flipped over a six-five, so of course he got the double six. I mixed the dominoes, he drew his and then I took mine.

  He studied his tiles, moved a couple around and then repeated, “Mayor.”

  “You go first. You already said she was meeting with him. Why?”

  “Dunno. Think she’s running.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he played, in succession, all six dominos. “Vershemmult,” he brayed, using our private word for a blitz.

  “I quit.”

  “Awww, Hetta. You can still catch me.”

  “Fidel, I don’t want to play. I want you to answer my questions. What’s Allison up to with the mayor? And what do you mean you ‘hired’ Jenks. Nary a single domino will be played until you tell me both. Besides, I’m hungry. Let’s eat. Rather, I’ll eat and you talk.”

  “Then we can play?”

  “Yes, then we can play. If, that is, you are still alive.” Another grin. Good grief, if Allison can accomplish this much with Wontrobski, maybe she should be mayor. Lord knows, San Francisco needs someone who can work miracles.

  He launched into, for him, a long account of how Allison Wontrobski, a black liberal lawyer from Houston, was being wooed by certain folks in high places who thought she might stand a chance to become the next mayor of San Francisco, since the present one was retiring.

  “They really think she can win?” I asked, awed that I had a friend who might actually take on such a formidable task. I scanned my memory banks for indiscretions in Allison’s past. For the twenty years I’d known her, she’d been pretty well behaved, for one of my friends. If I hadn’t been so anxious to move on to topic number two—Jenks—I might have pondered how I had remained buds with such a good girl. I stifled a laugh. Just wait until those politicos got a gander at Mr. Allison.

  “She’s got my vote. Now, what about Jenks?”

  “We need him in Kuwait.”

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged. Actually, he bobbed; his head dropped as his shoulders rose, making him look as though he’d just dropped a piece of carrion. “Uh, three months?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m definitely going to kill you. I finally, after all these years, find the man of my dreams and you send him to Timbuktu.”

  “Uh, Kuwait City. Timbuktu is in—”

  I cut him off. “I know Timbuktu is in Mali, Wontrobski. Don’t get cute with me. Why him? Why Jenks? Keep Lars,” I shrieked, and immediately felt guilty. Jan was my very best friend and I was offering her boyfriend as the sacrificial lamb instead of mine. Very nice, Hetta.

  “We want them both. Big. Big. Bucks.”

  “And, of course, the brothers Jenkins jumped at it.”

  “Not yet, exactly. I haven’t asked them. The are working for our competitor right now, but then we want them.”

  “What? You told me you’d hired Jenks.”

  “I sorta lied. I thought I should ask you first. If you really don’t want me to, I won’t say anything to Jenks.”

  “Since when, Fidel Wontrobski, have you become so devious?”

  “Since you taught me.”

  I had to lau
gh. It was true that when we first met, Fidel Wontrobski was the most wide-eyed innocent I’d ever encountered of anyone over five. Cocooned by his brain, he had been protected, coddled and, in my opinion, brainwashed into the corporate mold. Oh, how I wished to be a fly on the wall when the Baxters met Allison. Apoplexy comes to mind. I sincerely hoped the Trob told them that it was me who introduced the lovebirds. I still held a grudge against the corporate SOBs who canned me for just one little indiscretion. But that was history and I wanted to get on with the future.

  I walked to the window and looked down on Beale Street, then out at the bay. “You know damned well I am not going to stop you from making the offer. I also know, with Jenks’s practical nature, he’ll take it. So, on to the next subject: Mexico. And me.”

  “Hey, you said if I told you about Allison and Jenks, then we’d play dominoes.”

  I gave him an evil smirk. “I lied.”

  He gave me a quick project description and we went back to our game, but my mind reeled. Jenks, I knew, couldn’t turn down Kuwait and I would be nuts to pass on the Mexico thing. It was, pressed the Trob, perfect for me: fast, simple, lucrative. So far as I could tell it involved a down and dirty study, requiring only that I check out a site, do a preliminary proposal and a logistics study. No design work. There would be research to do because I wasn’t up on Mexican law and politics, but I could get a pulse on both from the Internet.

  After the Trob skunked me, I realized I smelled skunk. “So, if this thing is so easy, what makes it environmentally and politically incorrect? And what makes me so perfect for the job?”

  “Tanuki.”

  “What! After my mess up in Japan, Tanuki won’t touch me with a ten foot pole.”

  “Actually, they asked for you.”

  “Now I really smell a skunk. Let me summarize: I am being hired to do a job deemed untouchable by Baxter Brothers, at the request of a former client who got me fired from the aforementioned BBs? This is sounding better by the minute.”

  “I thought you’d like it. Cookie?”

  Pondering my situation while trapped in bumper-to-bumper on the eastbound span of the Bay Bridge, I longed for my former Beamer. Now my candy apple red convertible belonged to Allison Wontrobski, and I was stuck in my old grungy tan VW. I knew, on a practical level, that selling the BMW instead of parking her in the salty air near the boat was wise, but a dab of regret lingered. Here I sat in my junker with nary a Blaupunkt to soothe my ears, dwelling on my usual nightmare when stuck on the bridge: A seven pointer on the Richter that would send me and my car plunging into the cold, shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay. I shook off my paranoia and began planning my future. Which, it seemed, was to remain manless.