Around four on a Tuesday afternoon five months after we opened in 1984, my dining room manager gingerly handed me an envelope, apprehension on his face.
“Another fan who wants me to father her child?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
THE POISON PEN
The writing on the envelope made me recoil and drop it on the floor. The contents were even more scary: details of a murder of Masataka “Masa” Kobayashi, the fabled chef and co-owner of San Francisco’s Masa’s. Then, in what sounded like acid-fueled rantings, it spoke of our taking the insurance money, getting married, raising kids, and sailing off into the sunset.
“Call North Station in case this means something later,” I said. “And put the case number on file as usual.” The police were used to these threats and loyally sent an officer by to pick up the letter. He had his usual hamburger and coffee and left. Two hours later the front-desk phone was for me.
“Stay right where you are,” a captain’s voice said. “Do not move. Don’t leave the building, we’ll be right there.” That sent me to the bar for a fast champagne. A second glass was cut off by the sight of flashing police car lights in the Redwood Alley entrance.
The captain and two officers made a beeline to me.
“Jeremiah, we want you to get out of town, and don’t pass go. Be gone for four or five days and tell no one but us where you are. Here’s the number for a private line to the mayor’s office and to North Station.”
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“Masa’s been murdered. We found his body today, but he was killed, probably on Sunday.”
The captain handed me the envelope with my name on it. “Look again,” he said. “Note the postmark.”
I looked: It had been mailed on Friday, two days before the actual murder. I dropped the letter again, this time in the captain’s hands, and had another glass: a double Polish vodka.
The officers were to see me to the airport. But I knew I would stick out a mile at any Los Angeles resort, whereas there is nothing so anonymous as being at a local hotel under a false name, cash deposit on account, and making sure to be in the bathroom when room service shows up.
While one officer got my car and another took keys to get things from my house, which would be off-limits to me for at least a week, I called a pal who managed the city’s most luxurious small hotel. I told him that I’d have to enter anonymously, that no one could know I was there, and that I’d be using cash. I told him nothing else, but the tone of my voice upset him. He said no. I went anyway, and let the police take me there. After a club sandwich and bottle of La Tâche, I calmed down, thought the whole thing ridiculous, even if the coincidence that the night before Masa was killed was the end of the season run of Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? gave me pause. Not long enough to stop me going home. After ordering a sophisticated alarm system to be delivered in the morning, I watched horror movies all night with my cat, Boy Burma. The cat had never shown fear of anything.
After an alarm with a silent panic button to signal the police station was installed, I finally slept. The next evening police, very angry at not finding me at the hotel, found me at Stars. A van had been discovered at the base of my street in Bernal Heights, the interior soaked in human blood with hundreds of little pieces of paper, torn up from larger ones with my home telephone number written on them, stuck to it.
Boy Burma and I got out of town, to a friend’s house in Inverness, a place so quiet at night that the cat growled at every sound and scared me half to death.
BACK TO BERNAL HEIGHTS
Two days later, still alive, I returned to the house in Bernal Heights and went back to Stars.
The night of the second day at home I heard a noise downstairs. Burglars, as it turns out, are like sharks. You might think you see one, but when they are there you know it. When someone is actually in the house it’s unmistakable, no matter how much you try to wish that realization away.
I wondered why the intruder was talking to himself.
Then it hit me: there were two of them.
I swallowed my fear and guessed that once you cry out and turn on the lights, burglars will run away. So I yelled that I knew they were there and turned on the lights. They didn’t run away. Now they knew where I was. Now they could see where they were going. I hit the silent panic button along with the horns that would wake up everyone for miles.
As the men came up the stairs, I threw on a pair of briefs, even at the time thinking that hiding nakedness was a stupid reason to die. I searched for a weapon and found only my twelve-inch seventeenth-century sterling silver English letter opener. I grabbed it and tried to scoop up Burma. He had taken a bulldog stance at the top of the stairs and was growling a banshee wail down at them, his raised hair making him look three times his size. Urging him on, I ran through the guest room and out a window on top of the front-entrance roof.
“Freeze!”
There were policemen everywhere. Guns pointed directly at me. Later they told me I had been an immeasurable moment from being blown away, because all they could see was a silhouette against the lighted window holding what looked like a huge knife.
The kitchen at the back of the house was under construction, so the two intruders dove through the plastic cover, fell into my vegetable garden below, dashed down an overgrown gully into the projects at the base of Bernal Heights, and disappeared.
It was time for more late-night television, expensive Burgundy, and cigars with the two handsome cops, who stayed with me until dawn. They left, saying I should tell no one of the incident. Or their staying.
“OH REALLY, JEREMIAH?”
The next day I called a real estate agent and explained my needs for the next place I would live. She showed me various plush apartments but had the same reaction to my security concerns that people have when they read about rock and roll or movie stars and their “necessary” bodyguards. “Oh really, Jeremiah!” was all she could muster. Sure enough, the gossip columns a few days later had me arrogantly demanding security that no chef could possibly need, no matter how famous. The next night another chef, still clad in his white jacket, was ambushed as he got out of his car nearby and fatally stabbed through the head with a large chef knife. His murder shut the real estate agents and gossip columnists up for a while, at least about me, although one columnist did speculate that I might be next.
Wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, there had been a funeral and lots of newspaper coverage about Masa’s murder, the fact that he had no money, and that his widow and children were penniless because Masa had died four months before his life insurance policy would have automatically reverted to him (and his wife). The principal beneficiary was rumored to be his partner Bill Kimpton, then in a heavy expansion mode. The newspapers and police were fascinated that the murderer(s) had shown up when Masa’s wife and children were out of town, on his night off—and that they’d evidently been welcomed, since there was no sign of violence, other than Masa’s being dead. So it looked as if the murderer was no stranger. I had a personal investment in knowing the motive. Would I be next?
The list of people Masa knew and trusted was small, and no, I told the police, he did not have boyfriends. Find someone who could benefit from his death, I said. I could see the list going through the captain’s head, processing the list of potential suspects. A few weeks later, I checked in as usual at the private number at the mayor’s office. The woman on the other end said she had no idea what I was talking about. I cited the case number and got the same response. There was no record. Someone had gotten to it.
I felt a connection with Masa. In early 1985, Herb Caen had reported I was about to put Santa Fe and Stars up for sale and open a place all my own in New York. I had planted that story, and had even gone to New York to look at sites, to get my partner Doyle’s attention. Certainly nothing else did, unless it was time for his lunch or a cocktail waitress. During this period I turned down the job at Stephen Spector’s Le Plaisir, despite Jim Beard handing it to me on a plate. Why not use the sous chef Masa, I had said. Then, when I turned down the job as chef of the Auberge du Soleil in Napa, Claude Rouas, whose top San Francisco restaurant, L’Étoile, was put out of business by Stars (some said), hired Masa. He and I thought we were stalking each other. So when I learned his widow was penniless, I decided to act.
I gave a fund-raiser at Stars one Sunday morning to send Masa’s widow and children home to Central America or, as her thank-you note to me said, to “ensure a stable future for my children.” When Bill Kimpton showed up for the event he approached me. “Why would you bother to do a thing like this?” he asked. I was speechless.
Later I decided the attacks—except for Masa’s—were all what Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot would call a “red herring,” that the idea of serially killing chefs had been borrowed from a famous book, movie, and TV series. I meant nothing—and neither, probably, did the chef who was knifed in the head in the Sunset. Nothing like leaving too many clues to get away with murder.
THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE . . .
Soon after Masa, Jim Beard died, on January 21,1985. At the age of eighty-one, he was a testimony that if you stay vitally interested in life, it does not matter what you eat. Or how much.
He managed to leave this planet to go organize another with most of his dignity intact, and a life full of pleasurable culinary moments. His body had not kept up with his desires, and there were long hospital stays. Vast quantities of animal fat eaten in his life tended to stick around.
A few months before he died he called me to New York. The instructions over the phone were vague, but his voice held no room for refusing. I arrived at his house on West Twelfth Street in Manhattan around ten in the morning. He offered no coffee or anything to eat, so I knew the business was serious, even when it took him almost ninety minutes to get to the point.
“Jeremiah”—his voice steely velvet—“you know you still have an enemy out there.”
Stunned, but not surprised at the statement, I waited to reply, thinking, Only one? And one so important he had to say it personally and in private?
“Of course it’s not Alice, because that would be stating the obvious. And not worth the plane ride. You wouldn’t have called me all the way here to tell me that.” After a silence I added, “You’re not going to tell me who, are you?”
He snorted his agreement.
“But it is someone whom you consider a close friend.”
Then silence again. A long one.
“I guess I can’t buy you lunch,” was all I could muster, especially since I knew the conversation and visit were over. How could any digestion follow that?
We were in the downstairs library, him sunk into a huge chair. It all seemed so formal. I leaned over him and didn’t avoid the old-man unevenly shaved, bristly wet lips.
“Good-bye, darling,” were the last words he ever said to me.