The Sourdough Wars

the interview: “I think you’d better begin at the beginning.”
    “I’ll be glad to, Mr. Burns. You see, I went there because it looked as if the Martinelli starter had slipped through my fingers—Conglomerate’s fingers, that is. But I’d heard Miss Devereaux’s sourdough was better than any other on the market, so I told the folks in New York about it.”
    “Your bosses?”
    Thompson nodded. “They thought maybe this was a great opportunity. We could ‘discover’ Sally Devereaux, you know? She was a pretty gal, and we thought she might be promotable. We could have her do our TV commercials and talk about bakin’ bread, and we could call our bread Sally Devereaux—it would have been like our competition, Sara Lee, only Sally was a real person.”
    My stomach turned over as I realized how much Sally would have loved that. If she’d lived she might have had the kind of success she never even had the nerve to wish for.
    “So, anyway,” continued Thompson, “I went up to Sonoma to taste her bread and talk with her. I didn’t make an appointment—didn’t want to get her hopes up until after I was sure the bread was really as good as folks said it was.
    “When I got there, I didn’t see anyone in the place. But there was a funny smell, like somethin’ was burnin’. And there was somethin’ that looked like a burned ball of dough on the counter.”
    “We saw it, too. Along with some lighter fluid and matches.”
    “Yes. I could still smell the burned smell, so it seemed as if someone had been there pretty recently. I thought they still were—in another room or a bathroom, maybe. I was still tryin’ to get my bearin’s when I heard a moan. So I stepped behind the counter and”—he turned up his palms in a helpless gesture—“there she was.”
    “What did you do next?”
    “I bent down over her. She had that big knife stickin’ out of her, so I knew I had to get help right away, but—I don’t know, your first instinct somehow isn’t to go to the phone first thing. So I bent down and she took my hand. I don’t know if she knew who I was or not; maybe she didn’t care. She just knew I was a person. She told me she had to go to the bathroom.” His eyes filled up and so did mine. There she was dying with a knife in her chest and her last conscious thought was that she had to go to the bathroom. It didn’t seem fair.
    “Did she say anything else?”
    “Yes.” An odd look came over Thompson’s face. “She said she needed a gun.”
    “A gun!”
    “Strange, isn’t it? I think she wanted to kill the person who stabbed her. She didn’t say that, though. She just said she needed a gun and a bathroom. Oh, and she mentioned Peter’s name, too.”
    “In what context?”
    Thompson shook his head, looking very sad. “None. She just said his name and then she died. I was so shook up all I could do was get out of there. I got in my car and started drivin’.”
    “You’re sure she was dead?”
    If Thompson sometimes struck me as a bit of a wimp, he didn’t then. His eyes were marble-hard. “
Dead
sure, Mr. Burns. Her hand came out of my hand, and her breath left her. It wasn’t something you could mistake.”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Thompson. Did you phone the police before you got in your car?”
    “Nope. Didn’t even think of it till I was a good ways down the road.”
    “If you were calm enough to call the cops, why didn’t you just give them your name and come clean?”
    “Could I answer that off the record?”
    Rob hated those last words. He twitched a little, but he nodded.
    “Well, I was still panicked, but I knew I’d better call the police. I mean, I was raised right and I knew I had to. But, frankly, I didn’t see any reason in hell for gettin’ involved. The murder wasn’t my fault, I didn’t know one thing that could possibly shed any light on anything whatsoever, so why not take advantage of the situation I was in—away from the scene of the crime, I mean—and keep on stayin’ away?” He smiled the smile of a man who knows he has acted in a wholly human, if not wholly admirable, way. “I didn’t know y’all were going to spot me.”
    “The police told you we were the ones who saw you?”
    “No. I guessed. All I had to do was read the
Chronicle
and put two and two together.”
    “That brings up something I’ve been wondering about,” said Rob. “Who was the guy in the car with you?”
    “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Burns. There was no one