Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (11 page)

“Do I smell bacon?” she called.

“Must be from downstairs,” I answered, feeling guilty and piggish.

Wally came into the office minutes later and stuck his head into my cubby.

“You’re up and at ’em early. Love to see that in my new hires.” He grinned.

I got up and stretched and followed him into the reception area, where Danielle passed us mugs of
coffee. “You look like you’ve hardly slept.” She batted her eyelashes suggestively. “How was your date?”

I blew on my coffee and shook my head. “I’ve had better. He’s a bit of a bully.”

“He is a cop,” said Danielle. “Occupational hazard.”

“And having my mother along didn’t help,” I said, pleating my lower lip between my thumb and forefinger and wondering how much to say about Eric. I liked my coworkers a lot, but did I know them well enough to share everything? I spilled part of it, rat-a-tat-tat, leaving out the disturbing story about Eric getting ferried down to the KWPD and how he’d retreated to his bedroom and refused to come out. I skipped right over to how I’d run into Officer Torrence this morning and how he said an arrest was imminent, based on some sort of physical evidence. Again, I didn’t mention Eric.

“I need to find out more about Dustin Fredericks. Yoshe King said that he’d had a short romance with Jonah. Everyone I took to lunch seemed to have the idea that it had ended badly, at least from Dustin’s perspective. After lunch, he got called out of the conference so the cops could ask him about the missing bird statue.”

“How did you hear about that?” Danielle asked.

“Back up just a minute,” Wally sputtered. “How many people did you take to lunch?”

“Only two,” I said. “Plus my mother. And of course I’ll pay for her meal.”

Wally glowered. “I need the receipts for anything you’ve spent this week.”

Danielle ignored him. “Definitely talk with Cory
Held. She’s a Realtor right downstairs,” she said. “She was on the advisory board for the Key West Loves Literature Seminar, but she quit last year.” She lowered her voice as if she might be heard through the floorboards. “I think Dustin finally drove her batty.”

Wally cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Hayley. I have two words for you. Ava. Faulkner.”

I blanched, feeling the breakfast sandwich churn in my stomach.

“Your beat is food, not murder,” he continued. “If you could keep that in mind, I’d appreciate it. I need a draft of your article about the legacy of Jonah Barrows by tomorrow morning. And make it a clean copy—you’re not leaving me much time to edit. I’m sure the cops can get along without your assistance. And those receipts—pronto.”

“Righto,” I said as Wally retreated to his office. But I was too worried to concentrate and the bacon, egg, and cheese continued to somersault in my gut. I grabbed my purse and a notebook and trotted downstairs to the Preferred Properties Real Estate office. The receptionist directed me down the hall to Cory Held, a small, pleasant-looking woman with dark auburn hair, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and vibrant red lipstick. She was eating fruit salad and studying the latest listing updates on her computer.

I introduced myself, explaining that I was a new addition to the
Key Zest
staff and that I’d been assigned to write articles about the food writing conference this weekend. “Danielle from upstairs said you might be
willing to give me some background information on the seminar and Dustin Fredericks.” I watched her face carefully as I said his name, looking for any telltale signs of her previous connection—any twitches, any winks, any snorts of derisive laughter.

She just nodded and snapped the lid shut on her Tupperware container. “I’m sure Danielle told you I resigned from the board this year. Are we talking unofficially?” she asked.

“Absolutely off the record,” I said, and perched on the comfortable chair in front of her desk.

“I’m sure you’ve deduced that Key West Loves Literature likes to consider itself literary.”

I nodded. It was pretty much there in the name—they hadn’t called it Key West Loves Hack Writing. And if that wasn’t clear enough, the choice of panelists made it even clearer.

“In the past, Dustin took that too far. He insisted on inviting authors who might have had the highest literary standing, but honestly, their books were so dense, they were practically unreadable. What followed from those decisions is that the program sailed over the heads of many of our prospective attendees. It boiled down to this—Dustin has been trying to hawk hypermodernist fiction to a crowd that loves Oprah’s book club picks. Attendance started to fall off over the last few years, and the conference has had trouble breaking even. But he didn’t want to hear about that. Not from me anyway.”

I wrote down “hypermodernist” and “trouble breaking even.” “But this year’s topic seems a lot more
accessible. And at least for opening night, the crowd was standing room only.”

She nodded vigorously. “He simply couldn’t afford a misstep this year. That’s why he agreed to focus on food writing. But trust me, we’ve been to dinner many times to discuss business and he’s no foodie. He orders only what’s safe—steak, chicken, chocolate. Never touches a piece of fish or a chef’s special.”

“And who’s in charge of his hiring and firing?”

“The board,” said Cory. “I’m certain they’re watching the bottom line very carefully this season.”

“And the bottom line means?”

“Filling the seats and keeping the sponsors happy.”

“And his contract—”

“Is up for negotiation in February. Whether he is invited to continue will depend very heavily on how the next two days go.”

She handed me a business card and stood up. “I have to get to a showing. But feel free to contact me if you have any other questions. Or if you’re in the market for a house or condo.” The skin around her eyes crinkled pleasantly as she smiled.

“Don’t I wish?” I said. I considered myself vastly lucky to have a rent-free room on Miss Gloria’s boat, as long as I kept an eye on her and helped her with errands. I couldn’t afford the down payment on a parking space in Old Town Key West.

As I left the real estate office, my phone rang. Wally. “I didn’t want to say this in front of Danielle, but you need to know that Ava Faulkner has insisted on a meeting first thing Monday morning. She intends to go over
everything—receipts, articles, reviews, anything to do with your position. She wants us both there. I can’t defend you if you give me nothing to go on. I can’t defend any frivolous expenses.”

“Understood,” I said, working to keep the shakes from showing in my voice. “I appreciate your confidence.”

“Huh,” he answered, and hung up. Which left me wondering how much confidence he actually had. Was he getting tired of backing me up?

I had forty-five minutes to kill before the conference. I could march back up to my office and try to fit the same five hundred words I’d been struggling with all morning into some reasonable facsimile of a hard-hitting food editorial. On the other hand, my brain felt like overcooked oatmeal. And scribbling more random words would only ratchet up the spiral of my anxiety. And thinking of anxiety made me think of Eric.

It occurred to me that he usually met with two therapy patients on Saturday mornings. If I surprised him at his office, might he tell me what had driven him into seclusion the night before? Worth a try.

I drove back up Truman Avenue, which was already alive with blasts of noise and diesel from the weekend traffic. I parked in the lot behind Eric’s office building, wondering whether to ring his doorbell. For reasons of both privacy and safety, he monitored carefully who entered, admitting only folks he expected or grilling them over the intercom first.

As I deliberated over whether surprise or a direct attack would produce better results, a UPS man rang
the bell for the upstairs law firm. I drafted in after him and settled into Eric’s outer waiting area, listening to soft classical flute music and leafing through
Modern Yachting
magazine, the latest issue. Eric developed seasickness just looking at a boat, but maybe his customers needed the sense of possible escape while waiting to spill their darkest secrets. His office door swung open and he appeared with a welcoming smile. The smile fell off when he saw me.

“Hayley. What are you doing here? I’m expecting a patient any minute.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, he’s late. If he gets here and finds you in the waiting room, we’ll have to spend the next six months talking about how I double-booked him.”

“Can I come in for a second? I swear I’ll be in and out. I just want to be sure you’re all right.”

His gaze swept the room and he looked again at his watch. “Two minutes,” he said as he whisked me into his inner sanctum. A jungle of orchids bloomed on the shelves around the window, and in the corner, a soothing babble of water washed over beach stones in his Zen fountain. I reacted the same way I had the few other times I visited—my stress dropped instantly. No wonder his patients loved him.

“I’m sorry to bust in on you like this, but we’re all worried,” I said after he’d closed the double doors behind us. “Mom, Bill, Toby, me, even Miss Gloria.”

“Please don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” he said with a tight smile.

But he didn’t look fine. His skin had a grayish pallor, his tailored white shirt was wrinkled, and his hair
stuck up in little tufts along the part line, as if he’d forgotten to comb it once he’d stepped out of the shower. Not fine. No way.

“Okay, so, what happened with the cops last night? Obviously you didn’t kill Jonah Barrows. So, what’s all the drama?” I tried to keep my voice light, thinking he’d be more likely to respond to that than to direct pressure. This wasn’t the way things usually went in our relationship—usually I was in some kind of trouble and he was talking me through it.

His eyes closed, he rubbed the back of his hand over his chin so I noticed the patches of whiskers he’d missed when shaving this morning. Then he blinked them open and focused on me.

“Hayley. The police don’t have a leg to stand on. They’re doing the usual, casting about for suspects when they don’t have a clue whodunit.” His laugh sounded thin and a little bitter. “You know what that feels like.”

“Of course I do. That’s why I’m worried. When I was a murder suspect, I had a darn good motive for the crime and no alibi. They weren’t targeting me randomly.”

He squeezed his hands together and looked away, his lips pinched into one straight line.

“Okay, what about this? Mom’s scared to death that she sicced the police on you by telling them you were getting a drink near the dipping pool right around the time of the murder. But how does that make any difference if you never met the guy? So, did you know him?”

His eyes got wide, but at that moment the buzzer rang with the arrival of his first morning patient. “Gotta go, Hayley,” he said. I stood up and he strode across the room to open the parking-lot-side door for me. He gave me a little push. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I left Eric’s office and hustled over to the San Carlos Institute, heartsick at the thought that Eric had really been involved in this murder. Gentle, thoughtful, and above all, self-contained Eric: From everything I knew about him, it was impossible to imagine.

But why wouldn’t he defend himself?

And who else might have done it? Had Jonah threatened to expose something about the conference infrastructure? And did Dustin love his job enough to consider killing a man over it—a man he’d been involved with, by some reports? Soured love was famous for inciting rage. He had certainly sounded angry the first night when I’d gone looking for him at the opening reception. On the other hand, if he’d been
entertaining a cluster of sponsors, he couldn’t very well have killed Jonah. How could he have managed to get to the other side of the Audubon House grounds, swing that statue, and mow Jonah down? It would require not only ice in his veins but lightning speed. Another puzzling question: Why would Jonah have wanted to ruin the very conference for which he was the featured speaker by disclosing its financial woes?

While I waited for my mother to show up for the first panel, I rustled through my backpack, looking for a piece of gum. I caught sight of my brand-new, unsigned copy of
You Must Try the Skate
, which I’d been carrying around for three days without a chance to read it. Most likely Jonah Barrows wouldn’t have mentioned Eric or Dustin in his memoir, but maybe I’d recognize some kind of connection in their history. Skimming through it, I was reminded that Jonah’s honesty kick was really nothing new—more of a loud revival of sorts. Like accidentally hitting the volume on the TV clicker and blasting yourself out of the den.

The first three chapters were devoted to his family and their complete lack of interest in food. His mother produced a weekly rotation of meals that began with a well-done roast accompanied by mashed potatoes on Sunday, moved on to hamburgers fried to hockey-puck consistency, and ended with “Oriental Night”: slimy chop suey glopped out from a large can to the pan on the stove top and heated to lukewarm. The only saving grace was the crunchy noodle topping. Vegetables also came limp from a can, and the family’s weekly salad consisted of a wedge of pallid iceberg lettuce doused in
bottled Wishbone Russian dressing. There was no talk about food over the dinner table—there was no talk, period. Jonah’s father had been a bricklayer who preferred to eat in silence. Cooking was one of his mother’s chores; food was fuel for the family, nothing more. There was no room at the table for a sensitive son’s passionate interest in all things culinary.

His upbringing could not have been more different than mine. Every meal that came out of my mother’s kitchen had been fresh, local, and made from scratch, except for the very occasional box of macaroni and cheese. And even that had been Annie’s certified-organic, rather than the bright orange mixture I craved because it was served at my friends’ homes. Over dinner, my parents discussed flavors and recipes and brainstormed about variations that might turn out even better. After we recovered from the tectonic shock of Dad moving out, I took over his role as appreciative food critic.