Authors: Jerrilyn Farmer
T
WELVE HOURS EARLIER
…
There are very few things as invigorating as trying to coordinate the efforts of a dozen wacked-out, overly sensitive, testosterone-driven gourmet chefs on the afternoon of a large dinner party. At the moment six of my prep chefs were ready to kill the other six. And I suspect those other six were ready to kill me. What would life be like without its little challenges?
“Philip,” I chided, “the soup is supposed to be black and white, not brown and white.” We were preparing two soups, a white cheddar cream soup and a black bean soup, which would be simultaneously ladled into the same shallow bowl until the two met in the middle, and then garnished with heirloom tomato salsa and sour cream just before it was served. It was to be the perfect start of our evening’s meal, as it fit the black and white and “re(a)d” headline theme of the Jazz Ball.
“I know that,” Philip Voron said, looking vexed.
“See what you can do to darken the black bean soup, will you?”
“I told you it was supposed to be blacker! Idiot!” Philip Voron spat out at his neighbor.
I moved on.
Across the room, Wes smiled at me and pointed to his watch. We had to keep moving. We were due at the Tager Auditorium, the site of the evening’s party, in a few hours, but I took half a second to appreciate just where I was. On this party day, the day of our final prep for the Woodburn fund-raiser, our industrial-style kitchen could explode the senses of even the most seasoned caterer. The large white-tiled room, with its commercial-grade stainless appliances and high ceiling, was currently filled with the pounding sounds of chopping blocks punished by a dozen chefs’ aggressive knives, the intoxicating perfume of freshly crushed garlic and just-picked basil, the heat of gas flames firing high under enormous bubbling stockpots. I love these sounds and scents and sights.
“Mad,” called out Holly from near the sinks. She was helping two women who were rolling out our fresh angelhair pasta. We planned to cook it later when we got to the Tager kitchen, quickly so it would remain al dente, right before serving it to our six hundred guests. The thing that made it interesting was adding the black ink we’d removed from the sacs of ten dozen cuttlefish, which we’d had flown in from the Mediterranean that morning. Cuttlefish are a sort of squid. Sautéed, they taste a lot like softshell crab. My partner, Wes, and I often lament the less than adventurous palates of most banquet planners, but this time, at least, we’d be out on the inky culinary edge. Our hostesses, the women of the Woodburn Guild, were taking the black-and-white theme seriously.
“I’ll be right back,” I called to Holly. I had to run out to my car, where I’d left a phone number for the ice sculptor who was carving jazz instruments out of black-tinted ice.
I ducked through the butler’s pantry, both sides of which were made up of floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted cabinets. There, in the backlit cases, we displayed the hot-turquoise-and-lemon-yellow
vintage pottery collection we often use, the serving platters and bowls we bring to our more informal events. The pantry led from the kitchen to the office that Wes and I share and then out to the front door by way of Holly’s reception-area desk.
Outside, I started down the flight of stairs that takes you from my hillside home to the curb. It wasn’t until I was halfway down that I noticed something was wrong. The street below, a quiet cul-de-sac where Whitley Avenue dead-ends right up against the retaining wall of the Hollywood Freeway, was covered in trash and papers and the like. What was up with that?
As I began to process the scene, I became angrier with the mess. Dozens of papers had been dumped in my driveway and beyond, like someone had maliciously emptied a wastepaper basket out their car window as they drove by. I had been out front only ten minutes before with Wesley and Holly, and the street had been quiet and neat and clean. Few people come all the way up this street, anyway, since there is no outlet. So whatever was this paper attack about?
I opened up the back of my old Jeep Grand Wagoneer and pulled out an empty carton marked louis roederer 1995 Brut, removed the inner cardboard partitions that had cushioned and separated the champagne bottles a few months back when I first bought them for a wedding shower, and then, with distaste, began picking up trash off the asphalt. As I tossed handfuls of paperwork into the carton, I was thankful the stuff wasn’t filthy. In fact, it was an odd assortment of officelike documents.
Hey, now. Wait a minute. Was that an actual U.S. passport tucked between the sheets of paper I just dumped? I pawed through the pages and fished out the navy blue booklet. Amazing. It looked real. I flipped it open and stared at the two-inch photo of a vital, lean man in his early sixties, judging
by his iron-gray buzz cut and allowing for the standard ten years one must always add to the estimated age of anyone one meets in Hollywood. The name on the passport was Albert Grasso. His date of birth proved I could peg ages in this town with the best of them. He would be sixty-three next month. His address was on Iris Circle, the next street up the hill.
I leaned against my Jeep, resting the carton on the hood, and filtered through some of the other items I’d just gathered into the box. There was a handful of framable-size photos that had clearly fallen out of a manila folder marked photos. I quickly sorted them so they made a neat stack and all faced the same direction, but I could barely finish the task once I caught a glimpse of the glossy side of one of the pictures. It was an eight-by-ten color print, a glamorous studio shot of a seventies icon, autographed
To Albert
—
singing your praises! With love, Cher.
Cher. I mean,
really
! Whose trash
was
this?
Another photo was signed “Love, Michael,” and showed a very young Michael Jackson. A third featured the cast of the Oscar-winning movie musical
Chicago.
Everyone in the cast had signed it to “Albert,” offering an assortment of warm thanks and good wishes. Look at that. Richard Gere had mentioned their mutual interest in the Dalai Lama.
I became more enchanted with my trash find by the minute, shuffling through photos of David Bowie, Avril Lavigne, and Charo. The last of the photos proved more intriguing still. It was a shot of two people, one famous, one not. The young, dark-haired girl, maybe twenty or so, was smiling into the camera so hard you could see her back teeth. The older man with his arm around her had a face no one could help but recognize. It was President Clinton. They were standing close together in the Oval Office. The picture had a personal inscription,
To Teresa, with thanks.
And then the initials
B.C.
Wesley’s voice came from far away. I looked up and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. He was standing up at the top of the landing by the open front door. “Hey, Mad,” he called down. “What’s up? You need some help?”
“You’ve got to see what I found. All this stuff was littered all over the place. It seems to belong to a guy on Iris Circle.”
“What is it?”
“Private papers and photos.” I picked one item at random from the carton, a letter, and read it aloud.
Dear Mr. Grasso,
Enclosed please find my report on your psychiatric condition. You’ll note the diagnosis code represents a diagnosis of anxiety-stress disorder, for which I’ve been treating you for the past seven years. If you have any questions, or if your insurance carrier requires any further information, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Dr. Stan Bradley, M.D.
“You have some guy’s psychiatric files?”
“Apparently,” I said, unable to resist paging quickly through a document that was clearly none of my business.
“And you’re standing out in the street reading them?”
I looked back at Wes without a trace of guilt. “Hey, how am I supposed to know what all this stuff is? It was littered all over my property. Littering is a crime. I am simply investigating, aren’t I?”
“Maybe you can put off your CSI inquiry until after we finish with the party tonight?”
I looked up from the thick psychiatrist’s report on the
many issues that had been vexing Mr. Grasso and nodded. Wes was right. I had to get my focus back. “Aye aye,” I said, snapping to attention. “Do you think I should try to find this guy’s phone number? He’d want his stuff back, I’d imagine.”
“Can we do that tomorrow? We are under the gun here, timetable-wise.”
“You’re right. You’re always right.” I put the last of the papers back into the carton and hauled it up the stairs. “But, Wes, how do you think all these personal photos and documents ended up on my lawn?”
Wes relieved me of the box as I reached the top of the steps. “I’m sure you’ll find out all about it. After the Jazz Ball.”
F
rankly, fund-raising is social warfare and the gentle ladies who volunteer to run the show are its generals. I had worked on several such events in the past, and I had the battle scars to prove it.
The committee in charge of this year’s Jazz Ball was aiming to outdo all other elite L.A. fund-raisers in the cutthroat art of separating dollars from donors. To this end, each party decision was argued over by the Jazz Ball planning committee. Endlessly. Luckily, Wes and I have steady nerves. The theme had been changed up and back and up again a halfdozen times. But in the end, the newspaper design theme of black and white, with a touch of red, captured the final vote, and judging simply by the number of guests paying five hundred dollars a ticket, the gala appeared to be a hit. This was the largest turnout in the event’s forty-two-year history.
No detail of the party was too small to delight one faction of volunteer women and cause an uproar of seething disapproval in another. Victory in such details took on way too much importance to be healthy, but this was not my call. For instance, one group heavily favored a traditional engraved invitation. Formal. Black on heavy cream stock. However, the chairs of this year’s event were bored silly by the memories of too many staid and stuffy charity dinners. They
wanted people to talk about this party. In a good way. And despite the disapproval of some of the older members of the committee, the distinctive invitations to the “Headliner’s” Jazz Ball had gone out eight weeks ago.
The invitations had been written up in a parody of the style of newspaper articles, printed on authentic newsprint under the banner the
Woodburn Daily Jazz,
rolled up like the morning paper, tied with red grosgrain ribbon, and tossed onto the pool-table-perfect lawns of the city’s most generous: those heads of private foundations and leaders of civic-minded corporations and individual donors who kept L.A.’s cultural wheels turning. Naturally, the families of the Woodburn’s young musicians and the staff of the school were also invited.
In my role as creative consultant and caterer to the Jazz Ball, I had made many suggestions to Dilly Swinden and Zenya Knight, the cochairs of the fund-raising gala. I have found that timing suggestions is crucial. As an event draws closer, decisions must be made. I have learned to wait for just the right moment to bring up many items in order to prevent committee-itis from draining the energy out of every last creative impulse. It had gotten to the stage where we had to have some final decisions on the look of the event. We were discussing how much of their budget the ladies wished to spend on decorating the Tager Auditorium’s grand foyer, where the dinner was to be served. Dilly and Zenya were both savvy to the bottom line. While they wanted to put on a spectacular party, they also wanted to raise the most money for the Woodburn. They asked what we could do that would cut down on costs but make the biggest splash.
We had been sitting in my office, sipping white wine and going over the numbers again. “Can you imagine,” I wondered aloud, “if everyone at the ball were to dress up in our color scheme? Hundreds of gowns in black or white, with accents here and there of red?”
Dilly and Zenya glommed on to the idea like the purebred shoppers they were.
“I love it,” Dilly said, turning to Zenya.
“Everyone wears black, anyway,” Zenya responded. “The men are no problem. Black tie. White shirt. Tux. They’re done.”
“Who doesn’t have a black gown?” Dilly added.
“Who doesn’t have two or three?” Zenya asked. “Not to mention something white. Or they could wear a black-and-white print. Or something red. I love this.”
Dilly giggled and sipped her Chardonnay. “Oh, please. Who are we kidding? We all buy something new for the ball, anyway. But I just love telling everyone what they must go out and buy.”
It was settled just like that. Dilly looked at her watch and shrieked. “Sorry. I have to run.”
Zenya, at least fifteen years younger than her cochair, but no less busy, checked her own jeweled wrist and gasped. “Me, too. Let’s meet on Tuesday at ten. Will that be all right, Madeline?”
I nodded as the women rushed out. These ladies were always on the go, their Palm Pilots filled with appointments. Dilly had a session with her Pilates trainer across town, and Zenya was running late to meet the manicurist, who was making a house call, so Zenya’s second grader’s nails could be changed to a new shade of pink. I try very hard not to judge. Very, very hard.
The ball’s elegant black-and-white dress code had actually been one of the easier decisions. Dilly had by that time managed to achieve a stranglehold on the rest of the committee. By pairing with a sweet-natured yes-girl like Zenya, she was making all the power decisions. It was they who had approved the gourmet black-and-white menu, daring to move beyond traditional banquet bland. And I had to admire
their resolve to make this ball distinctive, both in food and in appearance. Sometimes, clients don’t really get it. But these two did.
As I stood in the grand foyer, two hours into their fabulous Jazz Ball, I noticed Dilly Swinden a short distance away. She was standing with her husband; he in a black Armani dinner jacket, with snow-white shirt and a red bow tie; she in a simple, floor-length strapless dress covered in jet-black beads. Her delicate neck was circled in the largest rubies I’d ever seen. The presence of so many couples dressed all in black and white made for a stunning effect, lending the party a more artistic ambience than any amount of swag draping or flower arrangements alone might have done.
Scattered in the crowd, twenty-five young Woodburn kids had volunteered to work at the event. These children left their instruments at home for the evening and were dressed as turn-of-the-century paperboys, wearing black caps with a white sack over one shoulder filled with “newspapers.” Guests could purchase a “paper” for twenty-five dollars and take their chance at winning a great prize. The auction ladies had solicited donations from vendors all over the city and each of the “newspapers” in the sacks represented a donated item. One might find their newspaper raffle item was a certificate for a dinner for two at Patina Restaurant, a free eye exam by Dr. Stuart Milliken, or a seven-day Mexican cruise, the grand prize.
The party had been in full swing for more than two hours and I noted that most of our paperboys had done their jobs well. Their sacks were empty and they were ready to go home. They had done their greatest “business” while the guests were arriving and the hors d’oeuvres and cocktails had been served in the grand hall. Then, at seven-thirty, both paperboys and ticket-holding guests found their seats in the
Tager Auditorium for the all-star jazz concert. The event featured twelve of the Woodburn School’s very top jazz students, who got to play with some of the country’s greatest contemporary jazz musicians. A tremendous silent auction and the black-and-white dinner followed. As my waitstaff moved efficiently among the sixty tables of ten, I kept an eye out for anyone gesturing for more coffee.
Holly joined me. “So far, so fabulous.” She was dressed as all our female servers, in black pants and a white lace camisole with a red rosebud pinned to one strap.
“And we’re on schedule.” I looked at my watch. “In just a minute Dilly and Zenya will start the live auction.”
“Are you going to bid on anything?”
I gave Holly an amused smile. “Like I could afford any of this stuff.”
“Everyone at Table 23 is talking about the Selmer saxophone,” Holly reported. “They say it’s priceless.”
“Oh, yes?”
“They say there hasn’t been one of this type available for years. Something about the year it was made or the registration number. I’m not sure. But two of the guys were getting kind of steamed at each other.”
I looked at Holly. She was grinning, adding, “Bidding war. Mark my words.”
“That will be good for the Woodburn.”
The auction committee had been ruthless in extracting donations to the cause. Every upscale business in town had been solicited and many had come through with splendid items for bid, most of which went into the silent auction. During the first hour of the ball, guests mingled among the overflowing tables and signed their names to bidding sheets, upping the bids on everything from a lavish basket filled with hand-embroidered baby clothes donated by a Brentwood
children’s boutique, to a certificate for six flying lessons, to a week’s stay at Disney World, to four floor seats at a Lakers game along with a ball signed by the entire team.
The full fury of a silent auction is hard to describe. In the final few minutes before the bidding closes, the most competitive bidders hunker down beside the bid sheets of the items they covet most. Earlier this evening, with only sixty seconds to go, I’d seen two elegant women toe-to-toe. They were outbidding each other, back and forth, for a series of twelve facials donated by a hot Beverly Hills aesthetician so in demand, she was unlisted and unbookable. No sooner would one write down $3,600 than the other would fill in the next blank with $3,700 and so on until, battle-weary but determined, they finally called a truce. One suggested they simply split the prize up and each take six sessions. And all would have been settled if at the very last second a man hadn’t come up to the bidding sheet and stolen it for $4,000.
I turned to Holly. “If the silent auction is any indication, I expect the live auction to be brutal.”
The auction committee saved its most desirable and biggest-ticket items for live bidding. This evening, they had chosen a professional auctioneer from Sotheby’s along with a celebrity auctioneer to handle the work. The celeb was Brianna Welk, a sunny-dispositioned news anchor on one of the local channels. I had noticed Brianna paying some serious attention to our martini bar throughout the evening and said a silent prayer for the best.
“I wonder how much money the luncheon we donated will raise?” Holly asked.
“Lunch for twenty women? Maybe five thousand?” I guessed, trying to factor in how much money those two women had been willing to pay for some facials.
“You think?” Holly looked excited. We had been asked if
we would like to make a donation to the auction, and Wes had suggested we offer up a private party. He suggested we provide flowers and vases and he and Holly could give a flower-arranging class for twenty followed by a Mad Bean Events catered lunch.
Wes appeared and we welcomed him to our huddle.
“Wes, how much do you think they’ll get for our lunch?” Holly asked.
“Maybe six grand,” he predicted, showing more confidence than I had. “Hey. You guys see the smoke? Think I should beef it up?”
We all looked over to the side of the grand foyer, past the sixty white-draped tables filled with black-and-white-dressed guests. Next to one of the entrances we had set up a smoking martini bar that Wes had designed, using enormous glass blocks with hidden wells that provided pools in which he had floated dry ice. Smoke swirled lightly around the bar and the bartender as he worked. I noticed Brianna Welk standing there, wearing a short, flaming red sequined dress, in line with some of the gala’s most serious drinkers. They were getting refills of our special concoction, a new drink we discovered in Europe.
The “smoking martini” was a near-lethal mix of Ketel One vodka, dry vermouth, and a splash of Glenlivet. We couldn’t help giving in to the drama of pouring bottles of vodka into a crystal tub and adding a large chunk of dry ice. That Ketel One really smoked. And it was quite safe, since the bartender ladled the spirits into long-stemmed martini glasses, carefully avoiding any dry ice. It definitely upped the party’s pizzazz quotient.
“Well, for me,” Holly said, “you can never have enough smoke.”
“Say, did you see the seating chart?” Wes handed me a
sheet. The party organizers had printed them up and placed one at each plate, thoughtfully encouraging guests to locate friends and/or enemies, the better to greet and/or avoid.
I love to see who’s who. “The mayor is here,” I noted, checking the names quickly. “And Tom Selleck? Table 30.” I craned my neck. “Man, I never even saw him. I’ll have to saunter by.”
“And check out Table 10,” Wes suggested.
I put my finger on the table and read the tiny print that offered the names.
“Wait.” I reread the name and looked up at Wes. “Albert Grasso?”
Holly looked, too, but the name didn’t register with her. “Who’s Albert Grasso?”
“He’s the guy…” Wes answered. “The guy who left all his private papers on Maddie’s doorstep.”
“That’s amazing,” I said, dazed to think the man would actually be at my gala. “But, Wesley. Now I feel so guilty. I should have called him. What if he’s all worried about his missing paperwork.”
“Madeline. We have hardly had a minute to breathe…” Wes started, but I didn’t wait to hear the rest of his reassurances.
I headed for Table 10. Just then, a spotlight blinked on the small stage at the front of the hall. Dilly Swinden, in her jet-black beads, and her younger cochair, Zenya Knight, wearing a tight white silk gown, approached the microphone and smiled out at the crowd as the guests began to quiet down. The live auction was about to begin. Right on schedule. My eyes swept the room and I saw our crew prepare to serve dessert, black-and-white mini-cheesecakes, formed in the shape of musical notes, the black desert plates decorated with a touch of red—giant strawberries dipped in the darkest
dark chocolate, each hand-monogrammed with a swirled white chocolate
W.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome you all to…”
Squeezing between chairs that had been slipcovered in a black-and-white pinstripe satin, I made my way into the heart of the tight cluster of tables.
“Excuse me. Mr. Grasso?”
The face from the passport photo I’d examined earlier that afternoon looked up at me and smiled a perfect capped-teeth smile. Albert Grasso checked me out and appeared to like what he saw. He took in my slinky halter dress, his eyes lingering on my bare shoulders. I had to bend slightly to be heard over the auctioneers, who had just been introduced. Brianna, I noticed, was sloshed. When I turned my attention back to Table 10, I immediately regretted the deep V of my gown, as it now offered up my cleavage at exactly Albert’s eye level. Albert’s wife/girlfriend/whatever was on alert. She was a pale woman in her forties with a recently tucked chin and a short blond hairdo.