Al Roker Read online

  Especially the aftermath.

  Chapter

  THREE

  As I said, my short-lived Angeleno life began about twenty-three years ago, not long after I decided to exchange a somewhat dubious and unlawful youth for a future fueled by ambition and a strong sense of purpose. During a brief stretch in prison, I found my true calling in the kitchen. Once I’d served my time, a jobs program landed me an apprenticeship under chef Ambrose Provoste at La Provence in Detroit. I was one of three chosen to assist him in the kitchen of a restaurant soon to debut in the heart of Hollywood, owned and managed by an oily Frenchman named Victor Anisette.

  Just weeks after its opening, Chez Anisette became the favorite watering hole of a cadre of celebrities who followed in the wake of one of its daily diners, a famous, fabulously overweight director whose reputation as a gourmet was almost as impressive as his work on film.

  For nearly a year, it was a wonderful adventure. The stars, superstars, and their acolytes and fans kept the kitchen busy, and, thanks to Chef Ambrose’s kindness, I was transformed quickly from apprentice to line cook.

  I lived at the beach in a ritzy condo on the Venice–Santa Monica border. It was owned by an actress friend who was in New York, appearing in one of the few nonmusical hits of that Broadway season. The deal was a good one—I paid her monthly mortgage fee, which was not excessive, and kept the fish in her aquarium as well fed as the customers at Chez Anisette. In return, along with a furnished suite that included access to a gym and swimming pool, I was also able to hop across the hot-sand beach and treat my body to a saltwater immersion while freezing my ass off in the always frigid Pacific Ocean.

  It was, actually, paradise. But like any paradise, only temporary.

  The working relationship between Ambrose and Victor Anisette had been edgy from the jump, a classic case of genuine genius versus the self-deluded variety. It eventually deteriorated past the point of no return.

  “You know who William Goldman is, Billy?” Ambrose asked me one night at the bar at Kathy Gallagher’s, a restaurant on Third that we frequented because it stayed open several hours past Chez Anisette and its bartenders made excellent full-measure gin martinis.

  “Goldman?” I said. “Sure. He writes novels and screenplays. Including Butch Cassidy.”

  “There’s a story going around, maybe true, maybe apocryphal. A couple years ago, he wrote this script for a TV comedian who’s now a big movie star. There were disagreements, and both Goldman and the director quit. Just the other day, the comic tried to bring Goldman back on board. He was in the middle of enumerating the script changes he wanted when the writer stood up and headed for the door. The comic asked where he was going, and Goldman replied, ‘I’m too old and too rich to put up with this shit.’ ”

  Ambrose took a sip of his icy martini, swallowed it slowly, and smiled. “Earlier tonight, I said those exact words to Victor.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, though what I was really thinking was what was I going to do?

  “I am rich, in a minor way,” he said. “And a dollar goes pretty far in Louisiana real estate. Especially around my hometown of Alexandria. I’ve been thinking about opening a restaurant in Alex. It’d be like following in my old mentor Chef Louis’s footsteps.”

  Chef Louis was Louis Szathmary, a Hungarian refugee who, with his wife, began a tiny place on Chicago’s Near North Side called The Bakery that eventually expanded into one of the city’s most treasured restaurants.

  “I’ll start out small,” Ambrose said, “maybe fifty chairs. Then, as business demands, expand.”

  It struck the self-absorbed, cynical, youthful me as being something of a dream. I was familiar enough with the territory to know that unlike Chicago, Alexandria, Louisiana, was not a hotbed of gourmets. Nor was it a city where diners were open to new culinary experiences. Worse yet, it was clearly not a stepping-stone to bigger things for an ambitious young black chef, even if Ambrose was to make me an offer. Which didn’t seem to be in the cards.

  “What about Tiff?” I asked, just making conversation. Tiffany Arden was a very pretty twenty-six-year-old failed-starlet-turned-Chez-Anisette-maître d’ess and bookkeeper. She’d moved in with the twice-divorced fifty-four-year-old Ambrose about three months before.

  “She’ll come with me,” Ambrose said with certainty.

  “You’ve talked it over?”

  “Not in so many words. I really just made up my mind tonight,” he said. “But Tiff’s a trouper. They’ll love her in Alex.”

  Actually, they never got the chance. Trouper Tiff wasn’t quite ready to give up the fast life in L.A. for a city where folks like to crack crawfish for entertainment. So Ambrose returned to his hometown single-o and brokenhearted. He started a small restaurant that he called Ambrosia and, last I heard, was a new grandfather happily retired from kitchen work and teaching a course in nutrition and food preparation at Louisiana State University at Alexandria.

  As for Tiff, well, the way things turned out, her decision to stay was not a wise one.

  Ambrose’s replacement in the kitchen of Chez Anisette, and, not surprisingly, in Tiffany Arden’s bed, was an admittedly talented, if arrogant and obnoxious, young chef named Roger Charbonnet. He was a massive six-foot-three, gym-toned, ill-tempered jerk who made Gordon Ramsay sound like a food whisperer. His yelling and screaming were so loud that Victor Anisette was forced to soundproof the kitchen.

  Giving the devil his due, Roger helped me become a better chef. Mainly because he scared the hell out of me and I did not want to become one of his kitchen smash toys.

  Things went smoothly and uneventfully for nearly five months. Then, one morning, the cleaning crew arrived at the restaurant to find the front door unlocked, the cash register open and empty, and Tiffany’s body in one of the garbage bins out back.

  The crime scene technicians (perhaps they called them CSIs in those days, though I doubt it) decided that she’d been killed in the kitchen and dragged to the bin. “Death by blunt instrument” was the official pronouncement. The specific blunt instrument, discovered in another bin, was a meat tenderizer bearing Tiffany’s blood but nary a fingerprint. The time of death had been approximated as between one a.m. and five a.m. that morning.

  I and the other members of the kitchen crew testified that we’d last seen the victim when we’d left the restaurant at a little after eleven the night before. She and Victor had been toting up the lunch and dinner numbers, while Roger sat at a nearby table, scribbling his critique of our kitchen performances.

  The detectives assigned to the murder were on Roger like white on rice. He’d not only worked and played with the victim, he’d shouted and screamed at her, and she at him. And their frequent outbursts of mutual animosity had been observed by many. Roger had had the opportunity to murder Tiffany, the proximity, and the motive. A prosecution trifecta, if you will.

  But just as the case against Roger seemed a sure thing, it ran out of the money when Victor Anisette stepped up to provide him with an airtight alibi. According to the restaurateur, after we’d left that night, Roger and Tiffany had had another of their rows, this one, like the others, involving the chef’s roving eye. And other body parts.

  When Tiffany furiously declared that their romance was kaput, Victor and a morose Roger had departed together, leaving her to close up the shop. The two men had traveled by separate cars to Victor’s home in Brentwood, where they drank and discussed the vagaries of women until the early morning, when Roger passed out on the sofa and Victor went to bed.

  That had been at approximately six a.m. Victor was certain of the time, because he had set his alarm for ten a.m. When the device did its job and he awoke, Roger was still asleep on the sofa.

  Victor assured the investigators that Roger had remained in his presence during the crucial hours. Yes, both he and Roger had relieved themselves from time to time, but not for periods longer than a few minutes. It was at least a twenty-five-minute drive from Victor’s home to the
restaurant, even without traffic.

  Faced with the restaurant owner’s statement, the detectives were back at square one. They put us all through the wringer again. They even checked Ambrose Provoste’s whereabouts and that of Tiffany’s other significants, going back to her college years. But they were unable to build even a circumstantial case. And eventually they were shifted to warmer investigations.

  Life went on. Except for Tiffany’s. We of the kitchen ensemble settled back into our pre-murder routines, and a new one that Victor established to chase away our postmortem blues. Chez Anisette was dark on Mondays, so, at the close of the kitchen on Sunday nights, he broke out the booze and hosted a little end-of-the-week celebration for the staff.

  It was near the close of one of those Sunday-night soirees that I found myself last to leave, observing Victor drain the dregs of a bottle of absinthe that he’d smuggled into the country after one of his infrequent Paris visits. I’ve never been fond of the flavor of anise, so I’d sipped my cloudy cocktail and was reasonably sober. Victor, for reasons unknown, had tossed his down like Coca-Cola and had all but succumbed to the so-called la fée verte, the Green Faerie.

  After much boozy palaver about this and that, just as I was racking my brain for an excuse to get out of there, Victor shifted the subject to the feeling of loyalty he had for his Chez Anisette “family.”

  Falsely interpreting my lack of response as disbelief, he pounded the table, causing the cloudy liquid in my glass to hop. He did care about us, he shouted. Then he added, and I still remember his exact words, “If I hadn’t cared, why would I have lied to save Roger’s ass?”

  Even if I’d been swigging the absinthe, that would have sobered me. “Roger wasn’t with you the night Tiffany died?” I asked.

  “What?” He stared at me, glassy-eyed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You said you lied to save Roger’s ass.”

  “I said nothing of the sort. You’re drunk. We’re both drunk.” He stood up, weaving. “Bar’s closed. Go home, Billy. Sleep it off.”

  I went home. But I didn’t sleep it off.

  He’d said it. And I’d heard him.

  After my real father’s death, I’d spent some of my teenage years traveling across the country with my foster father, Paul Lamont, a surprisingly moral con man, but a con man nonetheless. Because of that and my incarceration, I was not exactly a stickler for law and order. But Paul had died at the hands of a villain who’d escaped legal punishment. And my feelings about murderers roaming free were still strong and raw.

  The next morning, I contacted the homicide detectives who’d been assigned the Tiffany Arden investigation, an easygoing, old-line cop named J. G. Penny who was only months from retirement, and his much less tolerant partner, Pete Brueghel, a wiry, intense hero of the Vietnam War who’d told me more than once that he believed police work wasn’t merely a job but a calling.

  Victor told them I’d been drunk and must have misunderstood or perhaps even imagined he’d said any such thing. He held to his statement that he’d been with Roger at the time of the murder.

  Penny had accepted that, but Brueghel, who was definitely not a member of Roger’s fan club, bullied his partner into reopening their investigation. What followed was a series of rigorous interviews that, in Victor’s words “formed a pattern of harassment that interfered with the operation of my restaurant and bothered my Brentwood neighbors to distraction, forcing me to secure the services of a very expensive law firm.” He told me that at work shortly after hearing from his expensive firm that the detectives had found no substantive proof that Victor had lied and therefore were closing that part of their investigation.

  With the burden of suspicion lifted, Victor felt he was able to kick me to the curb, which he did with a smile. The fact that he hadn’t fired me sooner was, to my mind, another indication of his guilt.

  Though there are thousands of restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area, the list of notable eateries was not long. And Victor Anisette had been quick to put their owners on notice about my “lack of skill and disruptive kitchen presence.”

  Still, naïvely optimistic, I persisted. Several weeks and upward of thirty turndowns later, I departed a classic Old Hollywood establishment on the Strip to find Roger Charbonnet leaning against the front of my car.

  He straightened and, nearly seething with fury, told me that he’d been in love with Tiffany Arden, that he had not killed her, and that he was not going to allow me to continue telling people that he did.

  I replied that I hadn’t told anyone he’d killed Tiffany, merely that Victor had lied about his alibi, which I knew to be the case. I added that I didn’t need him to “allow” me to do anything.

  Roger drew back his jacket, exposing a gun tucked behind his belt. He raised his right hand and hesitated, as if counting to ten before doing something he might regret. He blinked and lowered his hand. He shrugged the jacket back in place, covering the weapon. “I’ll allow you a week to leave this city. After that, if I see you, I’ll kill you.”

  I watched him cross Sunset and get into his new, shiny black Corvette. I got into my twelve-year-old formerly owned Mercedes sedan, which I still hadn’t quite paid for, and considered my options. What good were a lovely townhouse, the Pacific at your door, great West Coast seafood, fresh vegetables and fruit, and beautiful women if you were dead broke? Or worse, just plain dead?

  I went to the townhouse and phoned Ambrose. Through his auspices, I left four days later for a job in the kitchen of the Quarterdeck Club in Aspen.

  Now, twenty-two years later, I was returning to the city where the murder of Tiffany Arden was still unsolved and Roger Charbonnet had become something of a food icon, the very visible partner of a reclusive Victor Anisette in several of the better restaurants.

  I’d have to settle for other places to eat. Nothing spoils a dinner on the town more than wondering if there might be arsenic on the arugula.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  Against my better judgment, I let Des talk me into staying with him at the Malibu beach mini-mansion he was leasing with an option to buy. “My business manager said leasin’ was the way to go with the hut,” he told me on the drive from LAX. “Dekko the grounds before I lay down my nicker.”

  We were traveling by chauffeur, of course. Two limousines, he and I in the lead, Fitzpatrick bringing up the rear with the luggage and a pretty brunette flight attendant who’d caught Des’s eye on the plane.

  “ ‘Dekko the grounds’?” I asked.

  “Look the place over,” he translated. “Like I said, I’m a stranger here, mate. Max’s gofer sent me photos of this Eye-talian viller. They look pretty good, but I wanna see fah m’self.”

  “What are the criteria?”

  He smiled. “Simple. It’s gotta be the feckin’ biggest and the dearest.”

  I didn’t know how dear it was, but the Villa Delfina was definitely feckin’ big, a stunning re-creation of an elegant, Old World Italian villa resting on a large section of a gated and secluded beachfront strip of high-ticket residences known as Malibu Sands Estates.

  Two Angelenos awaited us. One, a thin, pale young man who’d been leaning against a silver Prius, hopped to attention as our limo convoy drove past the wrought-iron gate into a flagstone circular drive. The other greeter, a leather-tanned woman of a certain age, emerged from a silver Mercedes-Benz sedan and strolled to the villa’s heavy wooden door, which she unlocked with a key.

  When we got out of the car, the pale young man was right there, extending a hand to Des. “I’m Trey Halstead,” he said. “Assistant producer of the show.”

  Des gave him an airy look, hesitated, then shook the hand.

  “We’ve talked on the phone,” Halstead said.

  “Right. When Max was too busy. Guess he was also too busy to do the welcome thing, eh?”

  “He’s hoping to see you tonight. He’s got quite a few events lined …” Halstead stopped talking when he saw he’d l
ost Des’s attention.

  The comedian was watching Fitz emerge from the second limo with the airline hostess, who was sniffing a little and whose demeanor had taken on a vibrant quality I hadn’t noticed on the flight.

  Our assistant producer turned to me and frowned. “Hi, Mr. Blessing. Trey—”

  “Halstead. Right.” I shook his hand.

  “Uh, I wasn’t expecting … I thought you’d be heading toward your hotel.”

  “Des has graciously invited me to stay out here for the week.”

  “Oh.”

  This news seemed to perplex him. I got the impression young Mr. Halstead was not a fan of improvisation.

  The tanned woman had been watching us with a frown that she replaced with a professional smile when she approached.

  She was dressed in a too-tight midnight-blue business suit and a white silk shirt unbuttoned to show maximum cleavage. To my jaded eyes she seemed to have had work done on every section of her body, from her dyed fluffy blond hair to her tiny nose, and from her bulging breasts and tucked tummy to the sparkled silver polish on the toes of her sandaled feet.

  Trey Halstead opened his mouth to say something, but the woman rolled right past him and presented Des with the door key to the villa and a leather box the size of a trade paperback book. Parting her plumped lips, she said, “Welcome to Malibu Sands and your new home, Mr. O’Day. I’m Amelia St. Laurent from Crockaby Realty.”

  “Of course you are,” Des said.

  Unblinking, Amelia St. Laurent turned to me and in lieu of a leather box proffered a hand with long silver nails. It was cool and very strong. “And I know you. You’re … the man from the morning show, which I watch every single day of the week.”

  “Billy Blessing,” I said, making it easy for her. “Nice meeting you, Amelia.”

  She turned back to Des. “In the box, Mr. O’Day, you’ll find three additional sets of keys that fit the doors in the villa, and three wireless wands for the front gate. If you need anything more”—she batted her extended eyelashes—“anything, just call. My business card is in the box with the keys.”