The Sourdough Wars

sculptured cut, using her comb viciously, as if she were angry at her own hair. “You don’t know anything about Italian families, do you?”
    “Maybe Jewish families aren’t that different. But I don’t have any brothers.”
    “Well, be glad of it—I’ll bet you’d have wound up a social worker if you did.”
    “My sister—” I began, but she interrupted.
    “I could never get my parents to see what I was, do you understand that? I guess Peter had the same problem, only in reverse, but that wasn’t my concern. I had my own troubles. I wanted to be appreciated for being who I am, smart like Anita, not cute and flirty like someone I wasn’t. It was wrong. It was unfair.”
    “I get the idea you resented it.”
    “Resent! I would have killed—” She stopped in mid-sentence. Oddly, she let the hair dryer drop and her voice shook. “I
didn’t
kill him. I thought there was nothing I wanted more than to get that starter and start up the Martinelli Bakery again.” She seemed not to believe her own words but to be trying them out to see if they fit. “But now, I don’t know…”
    “You don’t know what?”
    “I
think
I miss Peter. I
think
I’m sorry he’s dead.”
    “I thought you were glad.”
    “I am, but I’m not, too—does that make sense?”
    “It’s a little complex.” I started to get dressed.
    “I really hated him, you know that? I wanted to humiliate him the way my parents always humiliated me—I wanted to show him up as incompetent. So you know what I did? I let it get in my way. If I’d offered him decent money for the starter, he’d have sold it to me and we’d both have been happy, but I had to control him into the bargain.”
    “Peter mentioned something to that effect.”
    “I
hated
him, Rebecca. But now I’m starting to feel funny inside, sort of empty, like I’ve lost something important.”
    “Well, you have lost the starter.”
    She smiled, apparently relieved at having some subject besides Peter to occupy her. “Maybe that’s it. Incidentally, why do you want to know all this?”
    “I’m looking for anything that might help find the murderer. The real question is why you’ve been so free to talk to me about it—I’m only a former student, after all.”
    “Yes, but you showed great promise. Besides, I needed a tennis partner.”
    “You could have picked one up.”
    “Okay. I needed someone to talk to, I guess. I was feeling odd and not sure why. I wanted to talk to someone who was almost a stranger; otherwise I’d be making myself too vulnerable.”
    “Even to your boyfriend?”
    She nodded. “I’m a very clamped-down person. I want to thank you for this.”
    And she actually shook my hand, in gratitude for letting me ask a lot of impertinent questions.
    While I went home and changed back into my gray suit and silk blouse, I tried to figure her out. She was right about one thing—she
was
a very clamped-down person. Maybe too clamped-down to be having a sudden change of heart about a brother she’d hated for thirty-odd years.
    On the other hand, it’s only human to change your mind about someone who’s dead; she could have killed him and then started to miss him. Except that she had an airtight alibi.

Chapter Six
    After two sets of tennis and a sauna, I felt healthy enough for three people and hungry enough for a dozen. I had no qualms at all about scarfing down an entire frozen pizza before hitting Montgomery Street again.
    “I know,” said Kruzick when I went in. “What a dump, right? Listen, you want a lawyer with a fancy office, see Mel Belli, okay? Don’t complain to me—I only work here.”
    “Alan, I’m warning you—I can get a Kelly girl.”
    “You may go in now, dear. Miss Nicholson’s expecting you.”
    “Maybe not a Kelly girl—maybe a tommy gun.” I whipped past his desk as I said that, with a rustle of skirts and a click of heels. Then I gave him a withering look over my shoulder. But he was already typing, the picture of serenity, as if his conscience were clear as a mountain stream. I was afraid I’d kill him one day—sooner rather than later, probably. But, remembering I had a question for him, I put it off for a few days. “Esteemed employee,” I said.
    “Yes, ma’am, Miss Schwartz, ma’am.”
    “That’s more like it. Was Peter gay?”
    “What do you mean? He was taking Chris out, wasn’t he? Didn’t they… you know…” He made a two-fingered circle and put another finger through it.
    “Alan,