Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (21 page)

I nodded sympathetically. “So you had a good view.”

“Good enough. Those branches”—he pointed to the
big tree in front of his house—“keep things private so I can look out without everyone in the world peeping in.”

Nodding again, I said, “I’m sure it gets crazy here most evenings, lots of people trooping by. Did you notice anyone who seemed out of place?” Leading the witness, but so far, he wasn’t following.

His eyes lit up and he swiveled his wobbly head and pointed a trembling finger at the sidewalk behind me. “Right here a young man came barreling down that sidewalk so fast he would have run me down if I’d been out there.”

“Are you sure it was a man? Would you be able to describe him?”

He scratched the back of his neck and scowled. “More tall than short.” He touched the rim of his heavy tortoiseshell frames, so old-fashioned they were coming back in style. “With glasses.”

Which really didn’t narrow things down in the way I had hoped. If he’d said a heavyset woman, I’d have thought of Sigrid. Or a tiny Asian woman—Yoshe. Or a stocky, lumbering, round-faced man, Dustin. Unfortunately, tall with glasses fit Eric’s description. But then I remembered Fritz, the meat poet. He wore glasses too, like a lot of men. This old man’s recollection didn’t have to mean anything about Eric. I tore a deposit slip from my checkbook, blacked out the account numbers, and jotted my name and cell phone number on the back of it, reminding myself to remind Danielle that I needed more
Key Zest
business cards. Assuming I still had a job at the magazine come Monday.

“In case you think of anything else.” I handed over the paper, leaned down to stroke the dusty tomcat, and then wished the man good night. If he’d seen one person running down the street in the space of forty-five minutes, chances were there’d been a dozen more. And that man could have been anyone. Going anywhere. And coming from any place, not necessarily the Key West Loves Literature opening night party.

On the way back to the office to collect my bike, I passed a raucous crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk from Sloppy Joe’s Bar. A woman in shorts too small for her ample behind was waving at the webcam and shouting into her cell.

“Can you see me now?” she shrieked. “I’m wearing jean shorts and a white top. You should have come. We’re having the best time!” A florid-faced man stumbled out from the bar to join her, thrusting a bottle of beer at the camera and handing a second bottle to his lady friend.

“I don’t ever want to come home!” the woman yelled at the camera. The couple clinked their drinks and toasted their missing friend.

I skirted around her, thinking of how many thousands of people in the cold North had been subjected to the braggadocio of sunburned tourists over the years. I’d done the same thing when I first moved here—called up everyone I knew to insist they look at the Duval Street webcam so they could see me in summer clothes while they suffered in their winter parkas. I walked back to the office to get my bike, and then decided I would stop in to regroup. I vaulted up the stairs.
Danielle’s reception area was dark and quiet, but Wally’s form was silhouetted through the blinds that shielded his glass-enclosed office.

“Your restaurant piece is terrific,” he called out to the reception area.

Feeling a momentary rush of euphoria, I paused in his office doorway on the way to my cubicle to bask in his praise. A pool of light spilled from the lamp on his desk, illuminating neat stacks of articles, a steaming mug of coffee, and several newspapers. Should I mention Olivia’s
New York Times
review of Santiago’s Bodega? I was terribly afraid mine would look tired and amateurish in comparison. On the other hand, what if I said nothing and he discovered it later? Or even worse, what if Ava Faulkner found it and used it against me? I couldn’t stand feeling like a fraud. Best to spill it right out.

“Thanks,” I said. “I was worried you might not want to use the review because Olivia Nethercut beat me to it.”

He waved a couple of dismissive fingers over his head. “I’m going to make a few little edits and we’re good to go. What’s really strong about the writing is the way your status as an outsider who now lives here allows you to see the food and the setting in a way an insider might miss. Someone who grew up here might not feel the same excitement about the flavors of Key West worked into the tapas. But you’ve been here just long enough to understand our culture without taking it for granted. Olivia Nethercut missed the importance of the local angle altogether. For her, everything is
compared to New York. She seems to think she never left.”

He grinned and then glanced up. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen Hemingway’s ghost.”

I heaved a great sigh and slumped in the wicker chair beside his desk. According to Danielle, he’d refused a tropical upholstered chair like the ones in the reception area because he didn’t want visitors lingering. But I needed to talk to someone. And he’d asked….

“I’m worried about everything,” I said.

“Such as …?” he said.

So I filled him in about the latest on the two deaths and what I’d learned about the folks at the conference and why they might have wished either Jonah or Yoshe dead. I skipped lightly over Eric’s arrest, assuring Wally the police were way off the mark on that one. I only left out the part about the detective making a dinner date with Olivia—way too humiliating to discuss with my boss. And also Dustin’s stinging remarks about me stalking Jonah. Ditto on the humiliation factor. I wrapped up with the troubling fact that my mother was not answering my calls and had not appeared at lunch as planned.

“My mom’s like me: she doesn’t miss meals,” I added with a shaky smile.

“You need to get organized,” Wally said.

He pulled a new yellow legal pad from his drawer and began to sketch out a chart, with the names of the two dead writers across the top of the page and the people with connections to them down the left margin: Yoshe, Sigrid, Dustin, Fritz, Olivia, and finally Eric.
“The two deaths may be related or may not, correct? For example, it could have been Yoshe who killed Jonah and someone else who did her in.”

“Possible,” I said. “But hard to imagine. She was so tiny. Hard to picture her swinging that bird statue with enough oomph to knock him out.”

He jotted
physically small
in the box where Jonah’s name intersected with hers.

“And Yoshe’s death could have been a suicide or an accident, but not Jonah’s. On the other hand, if they were both murders, neither seems meticulously planned,” Wally said. “Especially the first one. You couldn’t assume you wouldn’t be seen whacking Jonah—there were hundreds of people at the party, no?”

“Yes. But if it was an accident, or the person didn’t mean to hit him—or at least not that hard—why not let someone know? Get help and limit the damage? Maybe even save the man’s life.” I flashed back to my feeble attempts at CPR and how dreadful it felt to have failed.

“People do this all the time—act in some utterly stupid way and then panic and try to hide it.” Wally lined the pad up with the edge of his desk and tapped his pen on Jonah’s name. “On television, it’s all about love, money, or revenge. With politicians, it’s power.”

I nodded, trying to massage away the headache that had begun to brood behind my forehead. “So if I could figure out what each of them came to the weekend hoping would happen,” I said, “maybe I’d have an answer.” I closed my eyes and ran my mind over what I thought I knew. “To begin with, every one of them
appeared to need a career boost.” I described Yoshe’s troubles with her new manuscript: the deep shame she would feel if it failed—or if the editor refused to publish it at all. And Sigrid’s tanking book sales and bad reviews—she’d flat-out told me her career rested on this new novel. And Dustin’s waning performance as the director of the seminar. Where would he find refuge on this little island if his dream crashed? And Fritz’s dreadful meat-themed poetry: In spite of his audience at lunch, it had to be going nowhere fast. No one had specifically pointed to him as a suspect, but good Lord, poetry about protein? Deadly.

Wally wrote summarizing notes in each square on his grid.

And Eric? His practice seemed to be in fine shape, and his relationship with Bill humming along … but who knew? He simply wasn’t talking. “I can’t think of anything for Eric,” I said. “I thought his life was going just fine.”

“How about Olivia?” he asked.

“The only thing Olivia needs is a man,” I answered grimly. “And it looks like she’s on the way to snagging one.” I drummed my fingers on the notepad. “Though why she’d be interested in a small-town Key West cop is beyond me.” Wally scribbled
single and desperate
in her section, which made me smile until I realized the same words could be applied to me.

“A couple of folks mentioned a Key West restaurant franchise that several of these writers hoped to invest in.” I explained about the proposed fast food restaurant
that the founders had hoped would spread paradise from Pasadena to Providence.

“I hate that idea,” said Wally. “Either you’re in Key West eating something wonderful or you’re not. It’s like eating Italian or Chinese in the airport. No one believes that’s real ethnic food—just something you have to tolerate if you forgot to bring your own sandwich. Why would a perfectly wonderful chef or writer want to tag onto a project like that?”

“You sound like Jonah,” I said. “Only less crazy.” I grinned. “I think the only plausible answer is money.”

Wally added dollar signs to the notes he’d made in Yoshe’s, Jonah’s, and Dustin’s columns. “So, why do you think Jonah was killed?” Wally asked. “Some vague threat about honesty doesn’t seem like enough of a reason.”

I thought back to the first night, the food writers arranged onstage behind him like a Greek chorus. And the palpable discomfort that radiated from the writers when he turned to them with his warning:
“Caveat emptor—my policy of utter transparency will be in full effect.”

“I got the feeling he planned to be quite specific. He hated the path today’s food writers are taking and he believed he could change it by exposing their truths this weekend. He was going to go even further than he had in the memoir. He told us that on opening night.”

“Someone felt so threatened by what he
might
say that they killed him?”

“Something like that.” I squirmed, thinking about the editorial letter I’d stolen from Yoshe’s briefcase. I
wanted to show him, but it felt wrong. It
was
wrong—he might very well fire me for lousy ethics.

Instead, I described my conversation with the elderly man next door to the Audubon House—how he thought he might have seen a man with glasses running from the direction of the party, past his little house and on toward Duval. And then another idea clicked in. “What if the killer was captured on the Duval Street webcam?” I sighed, my enthusiasm ebbing away as quickly as it had rushed in. “We’ll never know. The police could access the archives, but they certainly aren’t going to show them to me.”

“You don’t need the cops for that,” he said. “You need access to the right Web site. Or a friend with that access.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned, then typed in a Web address on his computer. A photo of the sidewalk outside Sloppy Joe’s came up on the screen, along with a bar for choosing the time interval you wished to view. “When would this person have been running?”

“Say it was nineish when I found Jonah? Maybe as late as quarter to ten. Let’s start fifteen minutes before that.”

For the next ten minutes, we squinted at the antics of tourists and street performers passing down Duval Street, but recognized no one. In the background, the noise from the bar roared in a fuzzy way, with occasional blasts from car horns and mufflerless motorcycles passing by. Then came a familiar figure. More tall than short. With glasses. Walking quickly, almost at a trot, looking horribly worried.

I felt sick to my stomach, really sick. Like the night I ate an entire order of bad oysters and spent the next eight hours hugging the toilet. And the twenty-four hours after that lying in bed like a wet rag.

Eric. I shrugged carelessly, hoping that nothing showed on my face.

“Oh well, I can look at this later, make sure none of our suspects passed by. But even if they had, it doesn’t mean anything, really.” I sprang up from Wally’s folding wicker chair. “Right now I better get back to work. My boss is a bear and I owe him a big article,” I said.

I closed my office door, even though doing so shut out the only natural light and usually left me quivering with claustrophobia. I woke my computer and typed in the Duval Street webcam address again. I watched Eric trot down the street several more times, reentering the time and date stamp, trying to decipher the look of panic on his face. And the way he kept looking over his shoulder. He did not look like a man who’d come down with a sudden migraine. Had he seen something he shouldn’t have that scared him badly? Or had he done something awful? But if that was the case what possible reason could my friend have had for killing Jonah?

My iPhone buzzed.
Private caller
came up on the screen—usually the sign of a badgering telemarketer, or worse. But I couldn’t take the chance of missing news about my mother. “Hello?”

“Hayley Snow?” The words quaked and shimmered. “You told me to call you if I thought of something else.”

“Who is this?” I barked. Then I recognized the raspy voice of the old man who lived next door to the Audubon House. “Yes, thanks so much for calling.”

“I did think of something I forgot to mention. The cats and I had breakfast early the other morning, just like always. I shouldn’t give them milk—my daughter says it’s bad for their digestion, but they look forward to it.”

“A tiny splash won’t hurt them,” I said, trying to be patient while his story unfolded. “My Evinrude loves milk almost more than he loves me.”