Fed Up (21 page)

“Sure. How about nine o’clock?” Then he asked the last question you’d expect to hear from a grieving widower: “Uh, by the way, not that it matters, but do you know if these donations are tax deductible?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they are.”

I drove to Leo’s house on Tuesday morning, my energy fueled by two large cups of coffee and a zest for snooping. This time, I parked in his driveway and checked out the yard: an overgrown privet hedge thick with maple saplings, a few rhododendrons and azaleas, a couple of peonies clinging to life, and—damn!—nothing even remotely like foxglove. If there’d been foxglove here, the police would have found it by now, wouldn’t they? Yes, almost certainly.

I opened the trunk of the car and grabbed a cardboard box and the garbage bags I’d brought for Francie’s clothing. Feeling superstitious, I avoided the front door, the one through which Francie’s body had been carried, and went to the back door. I rang the bell and waited several minutes for Leo to answer.

“Chloe. Hi. Excuse my shirt. It never occurred to me to learn how to do laundry. Isn’t that stupid?” Leo looked dreadful. His eyes were puffy, his hair unruly. His shirt was not only dirty but buttoned wrong. Had he relied on his wife to align buttons and buttonholes? Once I’d entered the kitchen, it was clear that laundry was far from the only kind of housework left undone. Every surface of the kitchen was piled with dirty dishes, empty and half-empty take-out containers, newspapers, junk mail, and tons of other debris, including four grocery bags that hadn’t been unpacked and, scattered all over the floor, what must have been at least two pounds of coffee beans. Leo waved his arm around. “Sorry about this. I had no idea how much Francie did around the house.”

“Really, it’s no problem. I don’t know what to say after what you’ve been through. I’m glad I can do something,” I said in my best social worker voice. “Why don’t you show me where Francie’s closet is, okay?”

“Sure. It’s up here,” he said as he started for the stairs. “But I’ve got to warn you. Avoid the bathroom where, uh, where Francie, you know . . .” Leo stammered. “The police spent hours up there, but they didn’t . . . It hasn’t been cleaned. Can you believe that? It’s their job to find out what happened to my wife, and they leave that filth in there for me?”

As if it were a police job to scrub the bathroom for him! Leo might reasonably want to avoid sanitizing the area himself, but couldn’t he have hired a cleaning service? Or some sort of company that specialized in hazardous waste? It was obscene that the mess had been sitting there for over a week now. Was Leo just going to seal off the bathroom forever? I tried to remember the exact words I’d used in offering Leo my help. I prayed that I hadn’t been foolish enough to tell him that I’d do absolutely anything. As we passed through the dining room and the front hall, I noticed yet more litter as well as the need for dusting and vaccuming. The mess seriously detracted from what was otherwise a beautiful house. The multitude of large and brightly colored art pieces on the walls were so cheery that I momentarily forgot this was the scene of the crime.

“Leo,” I said speedily, “there are companies that can be hired to clean anything. I can help you find one, if you like.”

“Really? That would be wonderful. I just haven’t known what to . . . Here you go.” We entered the master bedroom. “Thank God there’s another bathroom off the master suite. That’s Francie’s closet.” Leo pointed to an oversized walk-in closet with sliding doors that were partly open. “Please, take anything you think these women could use. Francie has enough clothes to outfit a hundred homeless women. I’ll be back in a minute.” Leo left the room.

Because of the condition of the rest of the house, I was surprised to find the bedroom tidy. Amazingly, the bed had been made, and Leo had taken care to arrange the bright blue bedding and pillows to resemble a guest room at a Vermont inn. Expensive off-white Berber carpeting was stain-free, and the four windows that let bright light into the room gave it a fresh, unsullied appearance.

Leo’s promise to be right back suggested that he intended to stay while I gathered Francie’s clothes. Since I couldn’t order him to leave so that I could tear the house apart looking for clues, I had to make the most of my time. Leo’s return would require me to go through the closet. Consequently, I took advantage of his absence to peer under the bed, where I found nothing but a few dust bunnies, and to take a quick look at the night tables, on each of which sat a small lamp. The table on the left-hand side had nothing else. The second night table had, in addition to the lamp, an empty bottle of mineral water, a box of tissues, a clock radio, and a stack of magazines, with a recent issue of the
New Yorker
on top.

Afraid of getting caught, I turned to the closet, which was jammed full of women’s clothes. Every one of its many shelves, drawers, hangers, and shoe racks was occupied by some item of clothing. Tall boots and plastic storage containers teetered at the edge of the top shelf; I resolved to keep an eye out for falling objects. I set down my cardboard box, shook out a garbage bag, and started to remove clothes from hangers. Francie had had a large wardrobe in a narrow range of colors and styles. The predominant shades were brown, beige, and gray. The boldest color was dark navy. Many items were conservative pieces from Talbots. I was learning nothing that would contribute to my amateur investigation, but the good news was that many of Francie’s things would work perfectly as interview outfits for the women at the shelter. I folded simple sweaters, blazers, and dresses and collected at least twenty-five pairs of nondescript dress shoes.

Toward one end of the heavy wooden rod that supported the hanging clothes were several large zippered plastic clothing bags. Unzipping one, I was nearly blinded by color. The outfits in this bag were radically different from everything else I’d seen. Yanking the bag open, I fingered through a slinky pink outfit, an ugly flower-print dress, a series of short skirts, and even a man’s suit. I unzipped the next bag and found additional outfits as outrageous as those I’d just examined. I stood on tiptoe and pulled down a printed storage box that turned out to contain hats. Checking another box, I found high-heeled shoes, brooches, eyeglasses, and scarves, all in styles radically different from the dull, conservative look of the clothing displayed openly in the closet. Yet another box contained wigs: long hair, short hair, curly hair, blonde, brunette—you name it, and Francie had a wig for it. I sat on the floor of the closet surrounded by a mound of bizarre . . . outfits? No, not outfits. Costumes. These had to be costumes. But why? Why had Francie been dressing up as other people?

“Francie’s little secret.” Leo’s voice made me jump.“I guess I should have warned you,” he said. “The things in the boxes won’t work for the homeless women, will they?” He produced an almost hysterical-sounding laugh. “Or maybe they will! Oh, what the hell does it matter now?” Leo tossed his hands up as he spoke. “Maybe you’ll think it’s funny. What the heck! Francie wrote restaurant reviews. You may have heard of her. The Boston Mystery Diner? She got the idea for the costumes from Ruth Reichl. You know that food critic from the
New York Times
? Francie made reservations under false names, and she’d go to dinner all gussied up in one of these outfits. Sometimes I’d go with her. I’ve got some, uh, costumes, I guess you’d say, too.” Although I tried to keep my face neutral, my expression may have been what prompted him to add, “She wanted to do fair reviews and not get recognized as a reviewer every time she walked into a restaurant.”

Francie? Francie, of all people, was the notorious Mystery Diner? Unbelievable! And fair reviews? Those I’d read had been ruthless, unforgiving, and cruelly unfair.

“Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. For some reason I’d always assumed that the Mystery Diner was a man. Everyone does, I think. I don’t know why. Wow,” I said again.

“She was the most prominent food critic in Boston. She was very astute and had high standards, so her praise meant a lot to local restaurants.”

Praise?
I wanted to ask.
What praise?
Well, maybe in reviews I hadn’t seen.

“Please, Chloe,” Leo continued. “Don’t tell anyone.” He spoke earnestly, even urgently. “Francie was proud of what she did and so proud of not being recognized. She took her job seriously, loved what she did, and there’s no reason to spoil her game now.”

“Of course. Sure.” I nodded.

Nothing about Leo’s statements or demeanor even began to hint at any comprehension of how violently his wife was hated in the restaurant community. As far as I could tell, he believed that Francie’s reviews had been admirably honest, and he failed to comprehend the damage and devastation they had inflicted on the hardworking staff of the restaurants she had trashed.

As quickly as possible, I finished packing the clothes I wanted and left behind the wild costumes. No woman at the shelter needed to set off for a job interview sporting a neon dress and a blonde wig or, heaven forbid, a man’s suit; the shelter did not encourage employment in prostitution, nor did it seek to promote cross-dressing. Before I left, I thumbed through a phone book that Leo dug up, copied down the numbers of a few cleaning services that could take care of the bathroom situation, and left Leo the task of making the calls.

During the entire drive home, I puzzled over the revelation that Francie had been the Mystery Diner. I’d previously seen Francie as a harmless, innocent victim. In contrast, the Mystery Diner’s reviews I’d read had been downright vicious. Of course, I hadn’t looked at the Mystery Diner’s complete works, so to speak; maybe from time to time she’d lavished praise on a chef. And I was baffled by Leo’s apparent obliviousness to the impact of the reviews and the anger they generated. Or was he playing dumb? And if Leo had murdered his wife, why was he keeping her secret identity a secret? The Mystery Diner’s reviews had provided many chefs and restaurant owners with a potential motive for murder. If the Mystery Diner had torn Josh to pieces, I’d have felt like killing her myself! Why wasn’t Leo pointing the finger of suspicion at the restaurant people whom Francie had enraged? Why wasn’t he deflecting suspicion to people who’d hated her?

Marlee had a defaced copy of the Mystery Diner’s beastly review of Alloy pinned up in her kitchen. Someone, probably Marlee herself, had stabbed that review with a knife. Digger, too, had had a rotten review. His attitude was more mixed than Marlee’s; he seemed torn between anger at the review and acceptance of it as an inevitable part of the restaurant business. Still, Francie’s reviews had excoriated both Marlee and Digger, both of whom had had the opportunity to add digitalis to the food that Francie had eaten. According to Leo, Francie’s identity as the Mystery Diner was a secret. Oh, really? Just how secret had her secret been? Leo had revealed it to me readily enough. Had he told others during Francie’s lifetime? Had she?

Robin. Yes, if Robin had had a prior relationship with Leo, he might have told her that Francie was the Mystery Diner, and Robin absolutely could have passed that information on to her good friend, Marlee. What’s more, Robin could have let it slip to Marlee that Leo was going to be the shopper chosen for the filming of
Chefly Yours.
If so, Marlee would have known ahead of time that she’d be in Francie’s kitchen and would thus have the opportunity to poison food that Francie, the despised reviewer, would eat.

I peeled into my parking space, left the clothes in the car, flew up the stairs to my condo, rushed to the computer, and searched for Francie’s reviews online. I’d only glimpsed the review posted in Alloy’s kitchen; I hadn’t really read it, in part because the knife sticking out of the center had distracted me. The review I found on the Web was worse than I’d imagined, far worse than merely scathing. As I read it, one damning sentence after another hit my eye:

 

Good God! What a horrible review! And, unfortunately for Marlee and Alloy, it was all the more horrible for being accurate—or at least consistent with my own experience. Perhaps the Mystery Diner’s reviews—Francie’s reviews—had, after all, been fair, just as Leo had claimed. Mean and nasty, yes, but on target. Still, it would have been possible to critique Alloy honestly yet tactfully, whereas Francie had clearly prided herself on snarky, savage reviews that titillated readers and sold newspapers.