Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (16 page)

Five tables seating eight had been laid out perpendicular to the water. As the wind died down to a whisper, the voices eddied louder. I picked out the deep bass
of Dustin Fredericks, Olivia Nethercut’s husky alto, and Sigrid’s piercing soprano. There was no way to judge how much these folks tended to drink at a social gathering, but most of the dinner party appeared to be on their way to sloshed. And maybe to be fair, the drinking was a by-product of two deaths in one weekend. Certainly my head was throbbing with all I’d seen and heard.

A black-haired waiter offered me a flute of champagne and I floated to the nearest group of guests, none of whom I knew. It didn’t take long to realize that two writers were dominating the conversation, still playing to their conference audience, telling funny stories about food in their lives. But the anecdotes felt brittle and flat and the attention of the listeners was drifting.

I moved on to another cluster of guests, including Olivia and Sigrid, where the talk was all about Yoshe’s death. It sounded like many of them had squirmed under Bransford’s crime-fighting microscope today. His questions seemed to have centered on whether her friends and associates would have described her as depressed or morose. Did she have any personal problems they were aware of? In other words, did she take her own life?

A tall blond woman clinked a fork against her water glass and asked us to take our seats. I found my place in the middle of the second table, identified by a name tag written in fancy calligraphy. Olivia Nethercut took the seat beside me, offering a quick smile that gave the impression she still had no idea who I was. Dustin remained standing as the blonde clanged her glass again.

“I’m pleased to introduce Christine Russell, who will be your hostess this evening,” he explained. “We are delighted that you chose to partake in one of our special dinners. I wish I could stay because the menu looks incredible.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, duty calls and I must make appearances at the other dinners taking place around the town tonight.
Bon appétit!
”

“Thank you,” Christine said as he left the room. “We’ll be enjoying a pairing of wine with each course of dinner. These wines hail from the Dennis Jensen Vineyard, down the road from Solvang, California, a town most famous for the movie
Sideways
. After tonight, I trust you’ll remember our wines rather than the movie.” She waited for the polite laughter from the guests to die down. “I’ll describe each of them as the night progresses, leaving time to answer any of the questions I’ve neglected to cover.”

I groaned inside. I could listen to descriptions of food forever, but someone droning on about how long a wine sat in a cherry-flavored oak barrel shaped like a mushroom bored me to weeping.

“Boring,” said Olivia, snorting softly. She unfolded a white napkin edged in white crochet and spread it across her purple pants.

“I’m Hayley Snow. We met in Santiago’s Bodega?” I said, not wanting to go through the embarrassment of having her fail to recognize me. Again.

“Of course,” she said, vague recognition finally crossing her face. “I’m so upset about the news of poor Yoshe—my synapses just aren’t firing clearly. One day we’re having a lovely time visiting a tropical island and the
next—two of my colleagues are dead.” She chopped a finger across her neck, shiny pink nails flashing, nearly knocking over my wineglass at the finish. “I can hardly think or talk about anything else.”

“Horrible,” I agreed, noticing her struggle to keep her lips from quivering. “Did you know her well?”

“All of us food writers are on the speaking engagement circuit together,” she said.

“There’s a food writers’ circuit?” I asked.

Olivia nodded. “A group of us were at the Greenbrier last fall—not Jonah, of course—he would have been too big for something like that.” She made air quotes with her fingers around “too big.” “I had the most heavenly spa treatment involving a salt rub and a big hose. But anyway, don’t let me drone on about that silliness. The point is, we know one another. As much as you can know someone from watching them yakking onstage or drinking coffee in the greenroom before an event or wine in the bar after.”

She paused. Maybe realizing her description was on the harsh side?

“Yoshe was an exceptionally talented cook and writer. Not in the realm of Julia Child or Jonah Barrows, but definitely top tier. It would seem she had a lot to live for, but one never really knows….” She cocked her head. “I haven’t seen you around much.”

“I’m very new to this business,” I admitted. “I was hired as
Key Zest
’s food critic right before the holidays, so I’m still getting up to speed. It’s been amazing to spend the weekend with all of you guys.” I swallowed my last half inch of champagne, hoping I wasn’t
chattering stupidly with anxiety and especially wishing I’d quit mentioning my neophyte status.

“So you didn’t know Miss King?”

“Barely—my mom and I did have lunch with her yesterday. Mom was a big, big fan. Sigrid Gustafson joined us too.” I tipped my head to the end of our table where Sigrid was slathering butter on a piece of bread and loudly describing her recipe for kick-butt goulash. Her tips included browning the cubes of meat in a full stick of butter—never olive oil—adding extra onions and garlic, and simmering for hours.

“That must have been telling,” said Olivia. “Get those two women together, and the competitive juices fly.”

“Thinking back, there was some talk about the fat content of each dish Sigrid considered ordering,” I said. “Yoshe tried pretty hard to steer her toward a salad.”

“And that would make Sigrid certifiably loony,” said Olivia, sotto voce. “She’s been on every diet known to mankind and some you’ve never heard of. And still she’s big as a house. And trust me, those caftans don’t disguise anything. She couldn’t stand the fact that Yoshe seemed to eat so much and stay so slender.” She patted her own plywood-flat belly. “And Yoshe’s books sold much better than hers too. Have you read her novels?”

I shook my head. “I read the first one, but I haven’t gotten to
Dark Sweden
.”

“Two words,” Olivia said. “Deadly. Tedium.”

A trio of waiters circled around us to fill our second
set of wineglasses with a white wine and deliver the first course. “Stone crab with Ibérico ham and calamondin,” the second waiter muttered as he set the plate in front of me. I had no idea what the last item was, but I certainly wasn’t going to inquire within earshot of Olivia Nethercut. I already felt like a food nincompoop in her company.

“We are pouring you our signature sauvignon blanc,” said Christine the wine maven. “See if you notice the penetrating aroma of melon, and lemon verbena, which is grown in the field next to our vineyard.”

I kept my gaze pinned on my plate to reduce the chance I’d roll my eyes and embarrass myself by snorting with laughter in front of the other diners, who seemed to be taking the wine talk more seriously than me.

“This particular sauvignon blanc is aged for seven months in French barrels, which adds a gentle oak integration to the wine. We chose it to complement the stone crab, of course.”

The room fell mostly silent except for the scrape of forks on heavy-duty china. I gobbled the crab and the Spanish ham, determining that calamondin must be a kind of citrus with a fancy name. The combination was delicious and the wine wasn’t bad either.

Olivia laid her fork on her plate and patted her lips with her napkin. “Did the chiseled detective call to inform you about Yoshe’s death as well?”

I startled, then smiled at her description of Bransford. “‘Chiseled’ is a good word,” I said, thinking it applied to both his chin and his body. “But it was much worse than that. My mother and I discovered her body.”

“No way,” said Olivia. She touched slender white fingers to her throat, which pulsed like a captured bird.

I nodded, taking a gulp of wine and feeling again the horror of that moment, as that colorful pile of rags had come into focus. “It’s true. And the police were pressuring my mother pretty hard, poor thing. She was absolutely devastated when we spotted Yoshe on those rocks.” I shivered and nodded to the waiter who’d circled around the table with another bottle of wine. “Mom came down for a vacation and instead she stumbled into the middle of a murder investigation.”

“Murder? I heard it was suicide,” Olivia said, her eyes widening.

“What do I know, really?” I said. “But it wouldn’t have been easy to throw yourself over that railing. Though I suppose she could have stood on a chair. In that case, the cops would have found the chair positioned on her balcony.” I shuddered. “If that’s true, imagine how desperate she would have been feeling.”

Olivia turned a little more pale—it must have felt dreadful to have a colleague in that much distress and have noticed nothing.

I added quickly, “But I can’t say what avenue the cops are pursuing.”

We worked our way through hogfish and shrimp steamed in lettuce, duck breast with capers and marrow, plus a chardonnay and a pinot noir. Our plates were cleared yet again and a fourth course delivered, along with glasses of red wine. “Braised oxtail with potato gnocchi,” the waiter whispered.

“Our Insignia wine combines cabernet sauvignon,
petit verdot, and merlot wines,” said Christine. “The grapes are harvested early in the morning and soaked for five days. After that comes forty days of maceration and twenty-four months of aging. See if you recognize the hints of dark-roasted coffee and graphite.”

Feeling slightly hysterical after a little too much wine and way too much ornate description, I choked back a rush of giggles. Who wanted to taste graphite in expensive wine? This dinner was, if nothing else, a good reminder to keep food jargon to a minimum in my reviews. I took a sip of the excellent wine and started in on the braised oxtail. Better than any beef stew I’d had in years. Even rivaled Mom’s.

The woman across the table from me addressed Olivia. “Tell us more about your Bread for Kids Foundation. It sounds like such a marvelous idea.”

Olivia laid her fork down and smiled. “Over the past few years I realized how much money gets poured into the high end of our food industry. For example, there are people who will pay forty dollars a pound for ham, or a hundred fifty bucks a head to eat out at a restaurant without blinking an eye.” She said that with a straight face—we’d all paid close to that for tonight’s dinner. “Shouldn’t we make sure that some of this money trickles down to the kids who don’t have enough to eat on a daily basis? It’s that simple. A hundred percent of our income goes to feed children—and best of all, no politicians are involved.” Laughter rippled around the table and she resumed eating.

“Sounds wonderful,” said the woman who’d asked the
question, and then excused herself to visit the restroom.

Olivia swirled one last fat lump of pasta through the deep brown gravy on her plate. “If they think it was really a murder, do they have any leads?” she asked me, the pale white skin of her forehead gathering into lines. “That detective wouldn’t tell me much.”

“Their technique is a little heavy-handed,” I said. “Just because you were the last person to see the dead person alive doesn’t mean you did her in.”

She looked horrified.

“That sounded bad. What I mean is, they seem to be pressuring people who have nothing to do with the crime. First my friend Eric. And then today my mother. Actually I don’t think they have a clue. But two deaths in one weekend—they must be related, don’t you think?” Now I was really blathering—this was exactly what I warned my mother not to say. Even if I did think it was true.

“I can’t imagine what those two would have had in common, other than food, of course,” Olivia said. “Yoshe was controlling and particular and meticulous about how she dressed and spoke. You could tell she cooked exactly by the book. Jonah, on the other hand, threw in a dash of this and a pinch of that. And I doubt he ever spent a minute thinking before he spoke.” Then an odd expression flitted across her face, but before I could ask anything else, Christine broke into our conversations again.

“For dessert and our final wine, we are asking some of you to switch places so you’ll have a chance to experience
the company of others at your table.” She came around and tapped some of us on the shoulders and had us trade places.

After a few minutes of chaos, we were reseated with new napkins, plates, and cutlery. This time I found myself at the table next to Sigrid, who was holding forth on her own theories about the deaths of Yoshe and Jonah.

“I suspect both of them could have been killed by rabid fans,” she said. “No offense to anyone here, of course.”

She cackled with laughter and I fidgeted with my fork and shifted uncomfortably, thinking of the e-mails Jonah had rebuffed.

“I don’t suppose the franchise he was talking about will get off the ground now,” she said.

“The franchise?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “it was an utterly plebeian idea. He wanted to take what’s best about Key West cuisine and bring it down to the lowest common denominator.”

“I didn’t know him personally,” said a woman across the table, “but that doesn’t sound like a project Mr. Barrows would endorse.”

Sigrid rubbed the tips of three plump fingers together. “Anything for the right price. Besides, Jonah was always trying to stir something up,” she continued. “No wonder at all that someone had it in for him. He looked for whatever mattered most to somebody else and then stabbed holes in it. You should have seen the review he wrote on my first novel. My agent had to talk me off the ledge on that one—she’s the one who
helped me realize that a scathing review reflects a whole lot more on the person writing than the author of the book. And it turned out to be excellent publicity.”

“Sure, Jonah loved controversy,” said the man on the other side of Sigrid, a twig in comparison to Sigrid’s spreading live oak. “But I wouldn’t say the same about Yoshe. She was a lady.”

Sigrid twisted the white napkin, her pink cheeks flushing darker. “She was no lady. She was simply more subtle than Jonah. Unless you were the target of her commentary, you might hardly notice how vicious she was.” She put the napkin down, picked up her dessert fork, and plunged it into the apple praline tart that had just been delivered. “Nothing subtle about that.”