Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (18 page)

“Is that right?” my mother was saying, a shocked
note in her voice. “When he lived in New York? And you’re certain his name was Jonah?”

She murmured into the phone for several more minutes. “No, no, I can’t think that it would help for you to run down here.” Bill made a wild slashing motion across his neck and my mother smiled and nodded. “I swear, Edna, we will get to the bottom of all this. We will make sure Eric doesn’t go to jail.” She finally hung up and let out a big whoosh of air. “That was something,” she said. “More than I expected, really.”

“Tell us,” I said.

“Well. Edna says that Eric had a connection with a man named Jonah that went way back. She isn’t sure what exactly their relationship was—Eric was in graduate school in New York and he didn’t tell her much about his life. He was coming out back then and it was hard on everyone, especially him. And her.” She smoothed the fabric on Bill’s shoulder and looked at me. “You probably don’t remember, but he was on an honesty binge for a couple of years. He began to needle his mom about family secrets and the way she and his father never talked about things that were important and difficult. He told her that keeping quiet because it was easier was just wrong.”

“He’s mellowed since then,” I said, thinking this sounded an awful lot like what Jonah had preached to the opening-night crowd.

Within a few minutes, we’d hammered out a plan with a new urgency. None of us could believe that Eric was involved with Yoshe’s death. He had little interest in Asian cooking. He was not a celebrity stalker. Their lives would not reasonably have intersected prior to this weekend. But if we could find out what had happened to Yoshe, we might find out what really happened to Jonah, and thus clear Eric.

Bill would stay home to field phone calls with potential news. Someone needed to stay put, and frankly, he seemed flattened by Eric’s arrest, drained of vitality like a root vegetable that had spent too many months in the crisper. Mom would ride over to the Key West library and do some research on Yoshe’s background,
looking for a possible connection between the deaths, including the franchise that Sigrid had mentioned. Before this, Mom had felt awful about Yoshe’s death. But now she was on a personal mission: No neighbor of hers was going to suffer with her son in prison if there was anything she could do about it. For my part, I would return to
Key Zest
, finish my review, and surf the Web for information about Jonah’s activities in the late 1990s, back when Mrs. Altman thought Eric might have met him.

After half an hour glued to my keyboard, I finished the review draft for Santiago’s Bodega. I e-mailed it directly to Wally so I couldn’t obsess any further or make grim comparisons between my own work and that of Olivia Nethercut. When I’d been in the business as long as she had, I could beat myself up about the speed and brilliance of my writing. Now it felt like a victory just to get a story finished.

I typed “Jonah Barrows” into the Google search bar and came up with the usual potpourri of intriguing but useless links—a kid with a similar name had won a chocolate-pudding-eating contest. Samantha Barrows had appeared as a character on
Days of our Lives
. And Jonah Barrows himself had ten thousand something fans on his Facebook fan page, and twice that number of Twitter followers. Sidestepping the temptation to get sucked into reading all the posts and tweets these fans must have generated, I skimmed over news headlines from the 1990s about the crack epidemic in New York City, various murders, and the death of a New York
University undergraduate. How could any of this be related to Eric? Waste of precious time. I set up a Google alert so I would be informed of any new developments that came along about Jonah.

Then, wishing I wasn’t so curious but unable to stop myself, I typed “Detective Nathan Bransford” into the search bar. I scrolled through several pages of news about crimes and public relations in Key West before coming across this headline: “Miami Rookie Police Officer’s Wife Held by Hostage.”

The article explained that a Miami drug dealer out on bail had gone to the home of the arresting officer and taken his wife hostage. After twelve hours of failed negotiations, a SWAT team entered the home through a basement window and shot the alleged dealer to death after a barrage of gunfire was exchanged. Officer Nathan Bransford’s wife, Trudy Bransford, was not injured in the incident.

Whoa. I couldn’t imagine the guilt and rage that he must have experienced, realizing that his wife’s trauma and then her decision to leave him were directly connected to his work. This was much worse than a garden-variety nasty divorce.

Stomach gurgling a hungry lament, I rummaged through the office refrigerator, looking for something else to tide me over to lunch. Wally had tucked a tin of mixed nuts into the far reaches of the bottom shelf with his name printed on the label in neat block letters. Clearly off-limits. I scooped out a small handful and smoothed over the top to disguise my looting. With my brain feeling slightly fortified and a little less sluggish,
I returned to the computer and brought up the Match.com Web site. Spying, yes—and I would have melted from embarrassment if anyone caught me. But I couldn’t help myself—I’d been dying to look ever since Mom had mentioned this last night.

A small colored box popped up on the screen, asking for my age range and zip code. I typed in forty to fifty, and 07922, my mother’s information. Another box materialized, asking me to register with the site to begin trolling for prospects. But a page was shadowed behind the registration form, including photos, screen names, ages, and cities of local prospects. My mother was one of the prospects: LetItSnow, 46—Berkeley Heights. I groaned and closed the window on the computer.

Pacing around the small office, I tried to force my focus back to helping Eric. Obsessing about Bransford and my mother’s dating life was not helpful. Then I thought of calling Stan Grambor, the psychologist who shared Eric’s office space. We’d met at Eric and Bill’s open house after their recent home renovation. I remembered finding him low-key and approachable—the kind of shrink I’d consider hiring if I ever considered hiring a shrink to replace Lorenzo. Not likely.

He answered the phone on the first ring. “Stan, it’s Hayley Snow. I’m a friend of Eric Altman’s.” I explained how we’d met and then plunged right in to describe Eric’s arrest and what had happened to Jonah Barrows. If anyone could keep a confidence, it ought to be Eric’s suitemate.

“That’s dreadful! I’m stunned. How can I help?”

I explained that my team and I were collecting information that might help the cops find the real killer. No need to tell a psychologist that my team consisted of me and my mother. And Bill, who was essentially deadwood at the moment. And that the cops couldn’t be less interested in my theories.

“The problem is, he refuses to exonerate himself. So I’m wondering how he seemed to you over the past few days.”

“He was quiet this week,” Stan said. “And busy. He didn’t have time to schedule lunch as we often do. Houseguests, he said. You know how that goes!” He brayed with laughter.

I sure did—Mom. “Can you think of any reason why he wouldn’t try to defend himself?”

Stan cleared his throat a few times. “Let me puzzle over that a minute. Hmmm.”

In my limited experience, shrinks don’t jump to conclusions quickly. They like to sift through all the data and then generate a tentative hypothesis and then—

“The best question might be, whom is he protecting with his silence?” Stan said. “It could be himself. But more likely, someone close to him?”

I thought of Bill, who was acting almost as oddly as Eric himself. Eric would do anything for Bill. But since Bill had never entered the Audubon House grounds, I didn’t see how he could have killed Jonah. Nor did he know him. “Maybe Eric was quiet this week for some other reason. Was he especially worried about any cases? I know you can’t tell me specifics.”

Stan hummed tunelessly to himself, like the hideous
canned music you’re subjected to when you’re put on hold trying to straighten out a bill. He stopped humming and said, “He asked me in passing if I’d ever lost a client.”

“And then?”

“I haven’t, but I told him what a supervisor once told me—if you stay in this business long enough, it’s bound to happen. Some folks you just can’t save. They are too far down the tunnel and simply can’t see the smallest flicker of light.” He clicked his tongue and sighed. “Then my ten o’clock came in and I never did get to ask Eric why he’d inquired. I’m sorry. It sounds like I should have been paying better attention. I hope I didn’t miss anything—I haven’t seen news about a suicide in the
Citizen
.”

“Speaking of that,” I said, “there was a second death related to the food writers’ conference—a woman found on the rocks below her third-floor balcony.” I felt my throat close up with the memory of finding the body. “We’ve been trying to imagine what frame of mind she’d have had to be in to throw herself off.”

This was the kind of question I’d have asked Eric, had he been available. Only I wouldn’t have been reluctant to let him see and hear how sick I felt about finding Yoshe. How the horror of crawling across the rocks to confirm her identity seemed to mushroom as the hours ticked by. And he would have known the things to say to ease me forward. But Dr. Stan didn’t know me and I couldn’t expect that from him.

“Terrible—I’m so sorry to hear that!” A bit of silence on the phone again. “If this was a suicide attempt,
she didn’t think it through,” Stan said. “Not like hoarding pills for weeks or months, for example, and then swallowing them with a fifth of whiskey for good measure. Nor would it be a certain death—she could have escaped with broken bones, no? Or even snapped her back and ended up a paraplegic. If it was a cry for help, without true intent to die, it reeks of desperation and a histrionic personality. Are you certain it was a suicide?”

“Not really,” I said. “We’re not certain about anything.”

“Any problems in her life that might have looked insurmountable?”

“I don’t know enough to answer that,” I said. In the background, I heard the dull buzz announcing the arrival of one of Stan’s patients.

“My patient’s here. Please do call if you have any other questions. And I’ll keep an eye on Eric when I see him next,” he promised. “I’m certain this will all turn out to be a terrible misunderstanding.”

I hung up, wishing I could borrow his optimism, and tried to imagine whom Eric might be protecting. Had he actually been arrested for the death of one of his own clients rather than Jonah? I felt certain that wasn’t what Bransford had told me. Was Bill so distressed that he’d completely butchered the story?

I twirled in my desk chair until I felt dizzy. And feeling dizzy made me think of Sigrid. There had been no love lost between her and Yoshe—that much was clear from the lunch we’d all shared. Or Sigrid and Jonah, for that matter. If I ever had a book published, I didn’t think I’d be quite so willing to talk to strangers about
getting lousy reviews. Even the ones I thought were agenda-driven garbage. I pulled Amazon.com up on my computer screen and typed “Sigrid Gustafson” into the search bar. One of the featured reviews for her new novel had been written by Jonah and was titled “Fictional Culinary Buffoonery.”

“The concept is intriguing, a novel set in Sweden depicting a dysfunctional family whose problems are reflected through their dinner preparations over a long holiday weekend, and then a murder mystery. But Gustafson loses her way and her readers by stooping to a combination of cliché and melodrama. Her attempts at humor fail to enliven the plot, just as lingonberry jam fails to lighten a heavy stew. The characters exist merely as a vehicle for the author’s ramblings about Nordic food archetypes. The execution is dry and the recipes, drier still. The plot is thin in a way that the author herself can never aspire to.”

Whew. I would have felt the stirrings of a murderous rage after reading this excoriation of my novel—I was willing to bet Sigrid had too. And it wasn’t one of her older books, as she’d told me at the dinner party last night. It was
Dark Sweden
, the newest—the one her career trajectory now rested on. What might have happened the first night of the conference between her and Jonah? The review was dated earlier this week, so likely this would have been the first time she’d seen him since its publication. With a flash of insight, I remembered her being in the bathroom as I attempted to chat with Olivia. Had she looked flushed or sweaty or otherwise guilty? I couldn’t recall the details. But I
could honestly picture her losing her temper, grabbing the metal bird, and swinging it at Jonah. Maybe surprising herself when she connected. But why not report the incident as a terrible accident?

If she’d been terrified to confess, she must be terrified about being exposed. Did Jonah hold a secret of hers worse than the lousy review? Suppose she feared that Yoshe had learned some ruinous truth about her. Suppose she marched to her room a day later and pushed her off the balcony. I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. I knew a little about everyone and not enough about anyone. If Sigrid had killed Jonah, what could be her motive for killing Yoshe? Rude comments made at lunch? Ridiculous. Why even assume both writers were killed by the same person?

I glanced at my watch—eleven thirty. I still had an hour before I was due to meet my mother. Where would the underemployed food panelists be hanging out? Most likely at the scene of the conference, hoping to sell a few last books to the foodie enthusiasts who might stop by. Maybe Sigrid would be among them.

I walked from my office to the San Carlos Institute on Duval, figuring the exercise would balance out consumption of an extra cookie or two at lunch. Wally’s mixed nuts and Danielle’s half a muffin were not holding me over very well—I was starving. And feeling terrible that I’d thrown a dart at my mother about lifetime alimony. The financial dealings between my parents were none of my business. Though, on the other hand, I couldn’t picture how a person would justify dating one man while living on the largesse of another.