Dying for Dinner (A Cooking Class Mystery) (19 page)

"You said Monsieur was a scam.
Like all the other scams
. That's what you said. Do you think it's possible that any of those other scams has anything to do with Greg's death?"

He scratched a hand through his hair. "I don't see how."

"But you knew the killer was looking for you, and not Greg." I didn't say this like it was a question, but I was hoping for confirmation nonetheless.

Norman gave it to me with a brief nod. "That's why I've been hiding out," he said. "He wanted to talk to me. And I saw what happened to Greg. I'm not a brave person, Annie. If that guy gets ahold of me . . . well, I can't even think about it without having a panic attack. That's why I ran out of here the night Greg was killed. I was so upset, I didn't know what to do. By the time I calmed down and decided to go home, there were cops at my place. I wasn't sure why. I didn't know if they thought I shot Greg. I was so scared, I couldn't think straight. I spent that night just driving around and the next day after the cops were gone, that's when I came back here. I figured it was the last place anybody would look for me, the cops or"--he gulped--"the guy who killed Greg." Embarrassed, he looked away. "I thought I'd get up the nerve to go to the cops, but I haven't. I don't know if I ever will. I thought--"

"What? That you could hide up here forever?"

He answered with a shrug.

"Like it or not, you're going to have to talk to the police eventually. They'll protect you. You're a witness." When Norman didn't reply, I looked at him closely. "You are a witness, aren't you?"

He gave me another shrug.

"This is getting us nowhere!" Frustrated, I pushed back from the table and looked around the room. There was a stack of paper on a nearby countertop and I went over and grabbed it along with a pen. I plunked both pen and paper on the table next to Norman.

"We need to work our way through this thing, and as far as I'm concerned, there's only one place to start. Let's go out on a limb here and say I'm right. That guy was after you, Norman, and I'm thinking that if we try hard enough, we just might be able to figure out why. Go ahead." When he didn't make a move to pick up the pen, I handed it to him. "Write down the ones you can think of."

"The scams?" It was hard to look at the man seated in front of me and not think of him as the jolly Frenchman who had influenced so many people--including Jim--with his flair for food. When he looked up at me, he no longer looked larger than life. He was an ordinary guy. An ordinary guy named Norman. A little befuddled, he asked, "All of them?"

There was more frustration than resignation in my sigh. "We're not going to figure out what's going on otherwise."

Norman agreed, and while he worked on the list, I sat back down to finish my soup and another piece of bread.

Just for the record, he might really be Norman from Allentown, but the owner of Tres Bonne Cuisine knew a thing or two about food, all right. Sherry in potato soup is a very good thing.

I FINISHED THAT BOWL OF SOUP AND A SECOND ONE.

Norman had rummaged through the supplies upstairs and come up with what he needed to make chocolate mousse for dessert. Let's face it, nothing is going to keep me away from chocolate. Not even my shock, my surprise, and the fact that I was just plain annoyed at Norman and all he'd put us through. I dished up the mousse and, in a rare moment of culinary inspiration, added a few raspberries. Apparently, Norman had been sneaking out to the open-all-night grocery store. The fridge in the cooking school cleanup room was far better stocked than mine at home.

Good thing my mood was mellowed by the endorphins the chocolate had triggered in my brain. Otherwise I would have lost it as I read through the list of Norman's scams.

"You're kidding me, right?" I asked him, glancing up as I finished page three and flipped to page four. "You sold fake doctor's excuses to people so they could get out of work? A fake doctor selling fake excuses? People really fell for that? There's no way."

He slipped into the Jacques Lavoie personality and accent effortlessly and tossed out the Gallic hand gesture with a casual, "I am a genius, yes?"

I slapped the pages on the table. "You're a crook."

"Come on, Annie." Norman tasted his mousse and nodded, satisfied. "I didn't really hurt anybody with any of my scams. Yeah, I sold people a bill of goods. But hey, I didn't cheat anybody who didn't want to be cheated. Would you believe there's a magic cleaning fluid that can change your life?"

"Of course not, but--"

"Would you pay somebody to write you a doctor's excuse, just so you could get out of work?"

"Never, but--"

"Would you buy a college paper? I mean, if you were a student, would you pay money for a paper and turn it in as your own work? In any class? Would you pay somebody to write your paper on eighteenth-century English poetry? Or geology? Or--"

"You know enough about eighteenth-century English poetry to write papers about it?"

Norman grinned. "That's
paper
, singular. I only ever wrote one and I'll bet it's been turned in at least once on every college campus in America. The Internet is a wonderful thing. And college students are young and stupid and more concerned with partying than studying."

"And they have their parents' money to spend."

He winked. "You bet!"

I tapped the papers into a neat pile and set it down on the table. "Well, I don't think Greg was killed because of some eighteenth-century English poet, do you? It doesn't make any sense." My mellow chocolate mood was fading and I was getting crabby fast. Then again, by that time it was three o'clock in the morning, and I am not a night person. "There's got to be something you can think of, something that would explain--"

"Shh!" Norman put a finger to his lips and, just like he did, I bent my head and listened.

I heard exactly what he heard--the sounds of someone moving around downstairs in the shop.

For the second time that night, my breath caught and my pulse pounded triple time in my ears. In spite of the fact that I told myself there was nothing to worry about--that there was no way anyone knew we were up there and that even if they did, there was no way they could get to us--I thought of the nervous way Norman had looked at the front window while we talked downstairs. And the sight of Greg's body lying in a pool of blood.

"There's someone downstairs." Norman mouthed the words and pointed. "Don't move. We can't let them know we're up here."

It was the perfect plan and it actually might have made me feel secure if the next sound we heard wasn't the door at the bottom of the cooking-school steps creaking open.

"We've got to hide." That was me, mouthing the words and gesturing wildly, like we were playing some kind of weird version of charades. I looked around the cleanup room, but except for a big walk-in cooler that took up most of one wall, there really was no other place to hide.

And there was no way on earth I was going to hide in a walk-in cooler.

With no other options, I did the only thing I could think to do. I motioned Norman to one side of the door that led into the room and I took up position on the other side--but not before I armed myself with the copper pot Norman had used for the soup.

When the door snapped open, I was ready.

I raised my arm, swung, and--

"Annie!"

"Don't do that to me!" Since Jim was the one who'd nearly gotten beaned by the soup pot, I probably wasn't completely justified screaming at him. I clutched my chest to keep my heart from beating its way through my ribs and fell back against the wall. "What on earth are you doing here? Why didn't you let me know it was you? Why didn't you call?"

"I did call. A dozen times at least," he said. It was the first time I remembered my purse--and the phone in it--was still down on the front counter of Tres Bonne Cuisine. "I thought something was wrong. I thought something had happened, and I looked all around the shop. And then I found your purse, but not you. Annie, you gave me quite a fright."

There was no easy way to tell him the surprises weren't over.

Rather than try, I turned Jim around. For the first time since he'd walked in the room, he saw Norman.

Jim's mouth opened and closed. He smiled. He looked to me for confirmation that he wasn't seeing things, and when I nodded, he raced forward and pulled his old friend into an enormous bear hug.

"It's you. It really is. You're not dead. You're alive. You're well. Annie found you."

"Not exactly." I didn't like to take credit where none was due. I stepped into the touching reunion scene. "This is Norman Applebaum," I told Jim, and it was a good thing he was in on my yearbook thievery; at least I didn't have to explain this part of the story. "Norman's been hiding out up here in the cooking school since soon after Greg's murder."

"Here? In the school?" I could tell exactly when Jim's relief turned to anger, just as mine had done. That would have been right about when his accent got so thick I could barely understand him. "And ye're tellin' me that all this while, we were a-frettin' and a-worryin' and thinkin' you'd been killed like poor Greg was, and Annie's been chasin' here and there and all this time . . ." His outrage choked him, and all Jim could do was stare at Norman in wonder.

"There's a lot I need to explain," Norman said. As understatements went, that one was a doozy.

BY THE TIME THE SUN PEEKED OVER THE HORIZON, I
think we'd heard it all. Norman told us how, growing up, he'd always been antsy, eager to see the world. He explained that soon after he graduated from William Allen High, he went out to Vegas.

And did he come to a bad end out there?

When I asked, at least Norman had the decency to look embarrassed.

He told us that he worked in a tiny bar far from the neon lights of the Strip, and as a way to make a little extra cash on the side, he rigged a couple of the countertop slot machines.

MaryAnn the waitress was right. Norman's story did not have a happy ending. He was caught and did jail time for his crime, eighteen months to be exact.

When he got out . . .

Well, Norman didn't make any apologies, and though I may have expected a few, I guess I could understand. It was hard for a guy with a record to find a decent job, so Norman did the only thing that was logical. At least in his mind.

He became Bill Boxley. And Fred Gardner. And all the other people I'd found IDs for. And he'd run a series of scams along the east coast and the west, until that fateful day when the cooking skill he'd learned at the Nevada State Prison led him to the opportunity to own his own gourmet shop.

"The rest . . ." Norman filled our wineglasses--again. "Like they say, the rest is history. I always liked cooking, and when the idea hit that I could own my own shop, well, I decided that would be like heaven on earth. I've established a great business, and I love doing what I'm doing. Tres Bonne Cuisine is my life. This is where I belong. I've given up the scams . . . well, except for the Vavoom! I started an honest business and I want nothing more than to keep it going. I even thought about turning over a whole new leaf and letting the world know who I really am." He shook his head, dismissing the thought just the way he must have when it first occurred to him. "How can I? Would you shop here if you knew I was a con? Would anybody pay the least attention to a guy who learned to cook in prison?"

We'd been seated around the table for hours, and Norman got up and stretched. "I've never been happier," he said. "Until--"

"Until somebody walked in here and blew Greg away." Even the taste of the expensive wine Norman poured couldn't sweeten my words.

Norman shivered. "Just thinking about it makes me sick," he said. "I swear, I don't know what the guy wanted. He just walked in--"

"You saw him come into the shop?" Wine or no wine, late hour or not, I'd waited a long time to ask him these questions, and I wasn't about to let the opportunity pass. "Did you recognize the man?"

"I never got a good look at his face." The gesture Norman made reminded me of the old Monsieur Lavoie nonchalance. Except that now, Norman didn't look nearly as debonair as he did confused. "Tall. Dark jacket. Jeans. That's pretty much all I could see from the back office." This time his shrug was all about despair. "I can't really describe him. I wouldn't recognize him again if he walked in here right now and asked to sit down."