Free Dying for a Taste by Leslie Karst Page B

San Francisco? How could you?!!
    It’s time to switch your menu to humanely raised meat and sustainable seafood! Do the right thing— NOW !
    We’ll be watching you.
    There was no signature.
    Wow. I set the paper down and exhaled. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t condone either cruelty to animals or the overfishing of our oceans. I buy free-range eggs when I can, and it’s been years since I’ve ordered Chilean sea bass at a restaurant. But whoever wrote this letter seemed to be pretty, well . . . fanatical . And that last sentence sure was disturbing—all the more so given the letter’s anonymity.
    I read it again. Of course I knew what factory-farmed chicken was: those big sheds with thousands of birds all crammed together. But what the hell did “CAFO” stand for?
    I reached for the second envelope and found another letter inside in the same style:
    Shame!
    It’s been over four months and still no change at all to your menu! Serving industrial pork is odious ! Particularly when done by someone like yourself, who knows better ! Pigs are sensitive, intelligent creatures. Do you have any idea what it would be like to live your entire life in a farrowing crate ?
    Maybe someone needs to teach YOU a lesson and give you a taste of just what, by supporting the heinous practices of corporate ag, you are guilty (just as guilty as them!) of inflicting on all those poor, helpless, suffering animals.
    Change NOW . Or we won’t just watch anymore.
    Oh my God . Could this be the reason she was murdered? I’d heard that some of those animal rights people could be pretty nuts. But would they really go so far as to actually kill someone?
    I set the letter down and pulled my phone out of the back pocket of my cycling jersey. I had to find out if Letta had said anything to Javier about getting these letters.
    After four rings, I figured I was going have to leave a message, but then he answered, in a groggy, sleepy voice.
    “Mmmm . . . hullo?”
    Oh, shit . What time was it, anyway? Eight thirty? Nine? Of course he would still be asleep; I knew enough about chefs’ hours to know that.
    “Uh, hi, Javier. It’s me, Sally. Sorry to call so early . . .”
    “It’s okay. I had to get up anyway to answer the phone.” His laugh turned into a cough—that early morning smoker’s hack so common in restaurant workers—and then he cleared his throat. “So what’s up?”
    “I’m down here at Gauguin, going through some of Letta’s things, and . . . well . . . I found something weird. I was wondering, did she ever mention to you anything about receiving anonymous threatening letters?”
    “No, she never told me anything about that. Why? Did you find some?”
    “Yeah. And they’re kinda creepy.”
    “So, uh, what exactly were they threatening her about?”
    “Food.”
    “Food?” Javier sounded incredulous—and surprised, too, as if he been expecting a different answer.
    “Yeah, food. Whoever wrote the letters wanted Letta to stop serving factory-farmed meat, endangered fish, you know, stuff like that.”
    “Oh, those people. Huh.” Javier lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and then coughed again. “You know,” he said, “we did talk about putting some of that—what’s the word?—grass-fed meat on the menu a while back after some customers had complained to her about it a couple times. I guess one of them was a real jerk. But when she found out how much it cost, she decided not to do it. Our entrées are already pretty expensive,even with the regular meat, and it woulda pretty much doubled the price.”
    “You remember when that happened? How long ago?”
    He took another puff. “Sometime last fall, maybe? It’s been awhile.”
    Right around the time of that first letter . “Did you get a look at any of the people that complained?”
    “Nuh-uh. But Letta told me about it afterward.”
    “Well, did you ever see anyone strange at the restaurant—you know, visiting Letta or hanging around the back of