Death by the Dozen (11 page)

“It won’t help him for you to get frostbite,” he said. His voice was kind, and Mel felt Tate reach out and pull her close.

The crowd was silent as the men went to work. The paramedics looked as grim as the security man who had tried to help. Mel felt her throat close up. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to watch this.

A soft cry sounded from the crowd, and Mel turned to see Grace Mazzotta escorted by the volunteer. Her eyes were huge and her body was aquiver.

“Vic?” she asked. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

The paramedics had placed Vic on the stretcher. Mel noticed that they had no equipment hooked up to him. They began to wheel him through the crowd, looking more like pallbearers than emergency medical technicians.

The head of security stood with Grace. He caught her arm when she looked like she might go down in a heap. She watched as they wheeled her husband past, and Mel could only describe the look on her face with one word,
shattered
.

“How did it go?” Oz asked as they trooped back into the bakery a few hours later.

Mel didn’t answer. She supposed it was rude to leave the poor kid hanging, but she was beyond basic manners at the moment.

She heard Angie telling him about the day’s events in hushed tones, and she heard Oz’s shocked exclamations of disbelief.

She sat on a stool at the steel worktable in the kitchen, feeling equal amounts of shock and regret. How could Vic be dead? She had been so angry with him. She hated that her last thoughts of him had been ones where she wanted to kick his patoot.

“Hey, Mel, how are you doing?”

Tate shouldered his way in through the swinging door and gazed at her with such empathy that she burst into tears.

She folded her arms on the table, laid her head down, and wept. Tate stepped forward and put his large, warm hand on her shoulder.

“Let it out,” he said as his hand ran up and down her back. Mel did as she was told, and although she cried for what seemed like a very long time, she knew there would be more tears to follow.

When her father had died ten years ago, she had discovered that grief had a bottomless quality to it. Every time she had thought she’d hit the bottom, she discovered that another labyrinth of pain lay beneath the last just waiting for her to fall into it.

“Come here,” Tate said when her tears had subsided into hiccupping snuffles.

He helped her to sit up and dabbed at her face with his handkerchief. Mel let out a wobbly sigh, and he pulled her into his arms in a bear hug that threatened to squish her ribs.

Mel laid her head on his shoulder and soaked in the comfort of his warmth. She knew she would never forget the hardened coldness of Vic’s body, whether from being frozen or from rigor mortis, she didn’t know, but it gave her the shivers all the same.

The kitchen door swung open, and Angie strode into the room. Her eyes went wide as she took in the sight of Mel in Tate’s arms.

“Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.” She turned and dashed back into the bakery.

“No, Angie, wait!” Mel stepped away from Tate. But it was too late. She was gone.

“Oh, damn,” she said. She turned to look at Tate.

He was watching the door swing on its hinges, as if trying to figure out what had just happened. Then he turned to Mel and shrugged.

“You’re my oldest friend,” he said. “Of course I’m going to hug you and let you cry on me when you just discovered your mentor frozen to death.”

“But Angie may have gotten the wrong idea,” she said.

“Then she’s an idiot,” he said. “A lovable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.”

“I need to call Uncle Stan,” Mel said. “Maybe he’ll have some information. I don’t want to bother Grace.”

“Are you sure you’re up for that?” Tate asked.

“Yeah, it’s better to know,” Mel said. She patted his arm. “Thanks for helping me through this. You’re a good friend.”

“‘It’s an insane world, but in it there is one sanity, the loyalty of old friends.’”

Mel reached up and patted his cheek. “
Ben Hur
. Good one.”

Tate looked pleased with himself. He watched as she went into her closet-sized office and shut the door. She knew she should probably go and talk to Angie, but really, what could she say?

Angie had been convinced since they were kids that Tate carried a torch for Mel. It was ridiculous, since Mel had always loved Tate like the older brother she’d never wanted, but Angie refused to believe it.

The irony was, of course, that Tate was in love with Angie but hadn’t gotten up the courage to tell her yet. Sometimes Mel felt like she was watching a train wreck in slow motion, and she wondered what would be left of the three of them when the collision finally happened.

She shrugged off these thoughts and picked up her office phone. Uncle Stan was a veteran detective with the Scottsdale Police Department, and since south Scottsdale was his beat, she knew he would have heard about the body at the festival by now.

He answered on the third ring. “Cooper, here.”

“Hi, Uncle Stan,” Mel said. “Did you hear—”

“About the Food Channel guy in the freezer? Yeah, I got tapped for the case. I was just heading over to the medical examiner’s,” he said. “Why?”

“Uncle Stan, it was Vic Mazzotta,” she paused. “He was a friend of Dad’s and mine.”

Uncle Stan was quiet for a couple of beats. Then he cleared his throat. “Ah, hell.”

“He was my teacher at the institute,” Mel said. “He was the one who wouldn’t let me quit after Dad died.”

She heard Stan blow out a rough breath. “I’m sorry, Mel, this has to be brutal for you.”

“Yeah, especially since I was there when they found him,” she agreed.

“What?” he asked. He sounded as though he was flipping through some paper. “I have a bartender named Daniel and a bar back called Pete listed as first on the scene.”

“Well, yeah,” Mel said. “Tate, Angie, and I were there getting margaritas . . .”

“At what time?” he asked. He had his cop voice on, which meant he didn’t want to hear any whining or excuses.

“Oh, I guess about one o’clock,” she said.

“In the afternoon?” he asked. He sounded incredulous. “Little early in the day for a cocktail, don’t you think?”

“I had just finished competing, and I was hot,” she said.

“I hear lemonade is mighty refreshing.”

“Last time I checked my ID, I was of age,” Mel said. “Now moving on, the door to the refrigerator truck was stuck, and Dan and Pete had to pry it off and out came Vic.”

“Nasty business,” Stan said. “Freezing a man to death.”

“Was he murdered? Oh my god,” Mel’s voice trailed off.

“No, no, I don’t know anything for sure,” Stan said quickly. “That’s just speculation on my part. Listen, I’m headed over to the medical examiner’s now. I’ll call you when I know more, and Mel, I really am sorry.”

“Thanks, Uncle Stan,” she said. She hung up the phone and glanced up to find Angie standing there, wringing the bottom of her pink apron in her hands.

“Are you all right?” Angie asked.

“I’ve been better,” Mel said with a sigh.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Angie said. “I didn’t mean to make things awkward.”

“You didn’t,” Mel said. “Tate and I are just friends, you know.”

“Not my business,” Angie said. She raised her hands as if Mel were holding a gun on her, and Mel shook her head. When it came to who was the bigger fathead, she was hard pressed to choose between Tate or Angie.

“Except that I’m dating your brother Joe,” Mel said. “So, yeah, it is your business.”

“So, did Uncle Stan have any information about Vic?” Angie asked, clearly changing the subject.

“He’s on his way to the ME’s right now,” Mel said. “He seemed to think Vic was frozen to death.”

“On purpose?” Angie asked.

“Well, it seems unlikely that he fell into the freezer trailer by accident,” Mel said.

“Then he was . . .”

“Murdered.”

Mel didn’t hear back from Uncle Stan that night. She assumed it was because he didn’t have anything to report. This was not conducive to sleep, and a little after midnight, she slipped out from beneath Joe’s protective arm and crept down to the bakery.

She rarely had insomnia, but when she did, it required the elixir of a batch of Moonlight Madness cupcakes. This was her go-to cupcake, a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream rolled in shredded coconut and topped with an unwrapped Hershey’s Kiss.

She set to work, losing herself in the whir of her pink KitchenAid mixer and the smell of baking cupcakes. She was not at all surprised when there was a knock on the back door.

She glanced through the window. There was Angie. Her long brown hair was sporting a fine case of bed head, and she was wearing her black Sewers T-shirt over her pajama bottoms. She looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink. Mel unlocked the door, and Angie barreled inside.

“I can’t sleep,�� she said.

“Looks like it’s contagious.”

“Moonlight Madness?” Angie asked, and Mel nodded. “Yay, I was hoping you’d be making those.”

The cupcakes were cool enough to frost, and they both set to work with a rubber spatula and a bowl of shredded coconut. While they topped them with unwrapped Hershey’s Kisses, neither one of them mentioned that it was a “one for the cupcake and two for me” sort of deal.

When the last cupcake was finished, Angie looked at Mel and said, “What do you think will happen to the challenge to the chefs?”

“I don’t know,” Mel said. “I think they have to finish it. Bake-Rite cake flour is sponsoring it, and I heard they put a lot of money into advertising, not to mention the ten-thousand-dollar grand prize. I can’t think they’ll be happy if the festival committee cancels it. Probably, they’ll just keep Jordan as a substitute judge.”

“Do you want to withdraw?” Angie asked, and Mel appreciated that she was leaving it up to her.

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I can’t imagine staying in, but I’m afraid Vic will haunt me if I back out now.”

“He’d make a fearsome ghost,” Angie said.

“Indeed,” Mel agreed. A sob bubbled up, and she tried to swallow it down.

“It’s okay,” Angie said. “I know how important he was to you.”

She stood up and circled the table and hugged Mel in her strong arms. Mel hugged her back fiercely. At the moment, she felt as if she were being buffeted about on a rough sea and her friends were her life preservers.

The back door opened, and Mel knew who it was before she turned around. It was hard to say whether it was her sadness or the smell of the fresh-baked cupcakes that had drawn him to the kitchen, but either way, she heard him whisper, “How’s she doing?”

“She’s tough. She’ll be okay,” Angie said as she stepped back and studied Mel’s face as if to confirm what she’d just said.

“I’m right here, you know,” Mel said, but her voice was teasing.

“I know, but I didn’t want to break up any cathartic keening,” Joe said. He took Angie’s place and pulled Mel into his arms.

“I think I’ve dried out for the moment,” she said. She hugged him tight, just like she had Angie. She wanted the people closest to her to feel how much she loved them. Vic’s death was a sad reminder that she didn’t tell the people she cared for often enough how very much she did love them.

“I know Vic wasn’t perfect,” she said. “Far from it, but he was always there for me, always. It’s hard to think of my life without Vic Mazzotta in it.”

“I know,” Joe said. “I’ll help you through this any way I can.”

“Me, too,” Angie said.

“Well, right now you can help me eat these cupcakes,” Mel said, pushing out of his embrace. “The cooler is full, and I have no idea what I’m going to do with all of these.”

“Say no more. I am the man for the job,” he said.

He took a seat and chose two cupcakes. Mel and Angie did the same.