The Sourdough Wars

Chapter One
    Chris Nicholson, my law partner, had a nine o’clock court date on Monday. When she straggled in around eleven, our secretary greeted her with his accustomed politeness: “Been gettin’ any lately?”
    Male secretaries are quite the thing nowadays. Lots of lady professionals revel in them. They wear fashionable narrow ties and button-down shirts. They type a zillion words a minute, they dust, make great coffee, and run beautifully oiled offices. That was the story I was hearing from some of my friends, anyway.
    Ours dressed sloppily, made lousy coffee, typed about forty words a minute, and never remembered to give us our messages. His name was Alan Kruzick, and he was my sister Mickey’s boyfriend. Also a starving actor.
    Mom had talked us into hiring him after Mickey finished her master’s and got a job at Planned Parenthood in San Francisco. Mickey and Kruzick had moved from Berkeley to the city so she wouldn’t have to commute, and their rent doubled. None of us Schwartzes liked the idea of Mickey’s supporting Alan—and Mom thought her little idea was the perfect solution.
    So far as I was concerned, he wasn’t working out, but Chris was a sucker for his smart-aleck style. Also, she was in a very good mood that Monday morning, so when he asked if she’d been gettin’ any, she said, “Bet your booty, baby.” Then she whipped into my office and sat down.
    “Very businesslike,” I said.
    “Oh, who cares. No one’s here.”
    “How was your weekend?”
    “I spent it with Peter Martinelli. I think I’m in love.”
    “Oh, Lord. How many times did you have to sit through
Sleuth
?”
    “I washed my hair during performances.”
    “Very convenient. When’s the wedding?”
    “First we have the auction. Then we worry about the wedding.”
    “What auction?”
    “We’re going to auction off the sourdough starter—like Alan suggested.”
    * * *
    The previous Friday night, Chris and I had gone to the Town Theater with Mickey and my friend Rob Burns, to see Alan play Milo Tindle in
Sleuth
. Andrew Wyke, the wronged husband bent on revenge, was played by the elegant Peter Martinelli, scion of a once-great sourdough dynasty. Afterward, Alan and Peter joined us for drinks.
    The play put us in the mood for S. Holmes, Esq. (or “the Sherlock Holmes pub,” as it’s usually known). This is an odd watering hole at the top of the Holiday Inn at Sutter and Stockton, but it’s not nearly so odd as the hotel’s doorman. Or, rather, as his appearance. He’s a heavyset, elderly black man wearing an Inverness cape and deerstalker cap.
    The pub itself features deep plush chairs and sofas, dozens of large-bowled meerschaum pipes in display cases, and a very good replica of the great sleuth’s Baker Street digs. Despite its delightful appointments, it’s hardly ever crowded, though it isn’t
that
hard to figure out why: S. Holmes, Esq., is insanely expensive. Of course Kruzick suggested it, and of course he knew we’d have to treat him to celebrate his triumph on the boards. That’s Kruzick for you.
    Chris and Peter Martinelli ended up sitting next to each other, and both of them seemed pretty happy about it. Each was tall, each was slender; she was light, he was dark. I didn’t know a thing about him, but she was on the rebound from a long-term romance.
    Chris and I used to call her former lover “the perfect man.” Larry was sweet, gentle, a good cook, a successful architect, a looker—what more could you ask? “A little backbone,” Chris said after the breakup. “He was a no-growth stock.”
    Larry was a little older than we were, and he wanted to get married. Chris didn’t; and she reasoned that if he’d really been perfect, she would have wanted marriage. So she dumped him and started looking around for someone even more perfect. At the moment, she had her blue eyes firmly fixed on Peter Martinelli. I decided to help her out.
    I fixed my own eyes on him. “Hey, handsome,” I said, “are you married?”
    He shook his head. “Never have been.” He looked at Chris: “And I’m a great catch, too.”
    “Noted.”
    He laughed. “I’m kidding. What you see is what you get. I haven’t got a penny.”
    “You can’t kid me,” said Kruzick. “You’ve gotta have bread bucks.”
    “Being a Martinelli,” said Peter, “doesn’t even get you a good table at a restaurant anymore.”
    The famous Martinelli Bakery, the oldest and by far the best of the old-time sourdough producers,