Free A Dinner to Die For by Susan Dunlap

taking small careful breaths, as if they would keep the air from flowing too far up my nostrils. “You found Mitchell Biekma’s body,” I said. “Now I want you to start at the beginning. What were you doing here?”
    His eyes narrowed. Was he were trying to decide on a strategy, or merely attempting to recall why he was here?
    “I was passing by.”
    “Here? What were you doing in this part of town at midnight? You don’t live here.”
    “I was visiting a friend.”
    I stared, amazed. In my four years on the force, I had never seen him involved in a give-and-take conversation. “Who were you visiting?”
    He shrugged.
    I caught his gaze and held it, repeating, “Who?”
    He wriggled back in his chair, lifting up the coffee cup with cloak-covered hands. As he leaned forward, a red and turquoise beak on his chest dipped toward the coffee.
    “Who, Earth Man?”
    “Well, I wasn’t really visiting. I was just walking around.”
    “At midnight?”
    “Time’s relative.”
    But it wasn’t that relative. I knew which of the Avenue regulars were nocturnal wanderers. Some we kept an eye on, some we made use of. But Earth Man was not one of them. His obsessions were played out in front of people. And by ten at night Telegraph Avenue looked like a movie studio back lot. I shook my head. “Listen, Earth Man, you know me from the Avenue. Look at me. We’ve talked before.”
    He stared, his brow wrinkling with the effort of placing me. I wondered how long a thought remained in his head, and if his periods of seeming lucidity were just another mask of craziness. “Remember when you wanted to block off the Avenue to traffic, and that gang of kids tried to rip off your car?” Earth Man had been dressed in a cardboard Toyota, suspended by straps from his shoulders. “I got you away then, remember?”
    He leaned in toward me, his dark eyes widening. A smile covered his face. “You were the cop.”
    “Right. I helped you. You can trust me now. Tell me why you came here.”
    He lifted his coffee cup, sucked at the coffee, and glanced warily to both sides. Then he leaned closer, inches from my face.
    I held my breath.
    “Okay,” he whispered, “but I don’t want this to get around.”
    “Right.” I forced myself not to move away.
    “I came for a meal.”
    I almost said “Here?” Then I realized. “You mean they gave you food?”
    He jolted up in his seat. “People leave whole pieces of chicken. They don’t eat their corn. People are starving all over the world.”
    He could have been a mother. Take a bite for the starving children overseas. “How many people like you did they feed?”
    He shrugged. “Just me. I don’t tell people.”
    Indeed like a mother, with the same lack of benefit for Berkeley’s hungry as the children overseas. “So how exactly did this work? Did you just come to the back door and knock?”
    “No.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I come at eleven. It’s my time.”
    “But tonight you were here after midnight.”
    “I came at eleven. But they told me to come back at twelve-fifteen. I did. Twelve-fifteen exactly.” He looked up at the Plasticine railing, following it with his gaze down to the end of the stairs, across the front of the desk, and then back up to the door where it started. If Mitch Biekma had wanted to seduce a diner with his glittery decor, he’d found his man. For Earth Man, clearly the sparkling lights had blotted out the rest of reality.
    “Who told you to come back?”
    “No one.”
    “You came at eleven. You said someone told you to come back later. Who?”
    “No one. There was a note on the back door. It said ‘Earth Man, dinner at twelve-fifteen. Come back then.’ I remember all the words. I read it four times.” He shook his head. “It was a long time since breakfast. It’s cold out there. I was real hungry. I was smelling the food, thinking about what Laura was going to make. Yesterday Laura saved me a piece of chocolate cake. I was thinking there