Guilty as Cinnamon (25 page)

Bring in a recipe once, and forever after, Jane would recall what you'd made. She couldn't remember to update personnel files, but she knew what spices you'd needed for which dish for your book club two years ago.

“I'm afraid I'm too blunt sometimes,” she continued. “He
was the cook; she was the baker. When I gushed over the cake, he scowled and dismissed it as not traditional. Acted as if it were her fault that I praised her dish and not his.”

“Like she was showing him up.” I bit my lower lip.

“Exactly. They left, and I saw them outside—him yelling, her cowering. I wanted to intervene, but what could I say that wouldn't have made things worse?” She paused, and I heard her sipping tea. “Not long after, I heard she'd left him. Left town. I felt guilty—I never saw him hit her, though I suspect he did. If his ego was too fragile for honest criticism, he shouldn't have asked for it. And he certainly shouldn't have blamed her.”

“Straws and camels' backs,” I said. “Sounds like your compliment gave her the courage to leave. Check your e-mail in about five minutes and call me.”

I sent her the two photographs—Ashley and Ashwani outside the Blue Poppy, and Tamara Langston from last week's newspaper. She wouldn't have seen the story—her indifference to business extended to the daily news as well.

Then I called the electrician who'd sued Patel for nonpayment.

“Deadbeat. First he wouldn't pay, then he had the nerve to say my work was substandard. I've been wiring commercial kitchens and restaurants in this city for twenty-five years. My work is second to none.”

Why was I not surprised? “Were you working on the build-out next door? For the new restaurant called Tamarack?”

“Yeah. Screwy deal. We scoured that place from top to bottom. Couldn't recreate the problems, couldn't find the cause. With these old buildings, you don't always know what's in the walls—”

As I was discovering, myself.

“—but if there's something wrong there, we'll fix it.”

“One more question. Did you ever talk with the little lady who works out front, at Patel's place? His grandmother, maybe?”

“Never saw her.”

I thanked him and hung up, grabbing the phone a minute later on the first ring.

“Are they twins? Cousins?” Jane's voice was tremulous, high and worried. “Pepper, what's going on?”

I only wished I knew.

In Tudor England, nutmeg—bought from Venetian merchants who acquired it in Constantinople from traders who got it who knows where—was used to treat colds and flatulence. But when physicians prescribed nutmeg pomanders to treat the plague, the seeds of
Myristica fragrans
became precious as gold.

—Giles Milton, in
Nathaniel's Nutmeg, or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History

The possibilities screamed through my brain. I could take the fuzzy picture to Zu Wang or the house-painting neighbor and ask if Tamara was Ashley Brown reincarnated. Show it to Danielle, to the women in the salon, or if I was ultra, uber brave, to the little woman I thought of as the crazy Indian grandmother. The woman who'd first told me about
bhuts
.

But the face in the photo was so small and shadowed.

And I could think of only one person—besides Patel—who'd known them both.

*   *   *

NOT
long before I met him, the local paper ran a feature on Alex, showing the great man posing in the restaurant and in the kitchen. After this ordeal—assuming he came through unscathed—they might want to do another, focusing on his office. If
GQ
had a design section, he would be the poster boy. Other folks worked here, too—after all that had happened, I'd dared come up only because Ops, her assistant, and the accountant would be close by. But in style, the place was all him. And the decorator.

He gestured to the dark cherry Windsor chairs paired in front of the very tasteful cherry desk—not too large, but not too small—and glanced briefly at his own padded brown leather chair before taking the seat next to mine. A photo on one of the matching bookcases behind the desk stood out: Chef Alex Howard attending the James Beard Awards dinner, the year he was nominated for Best Chef Northwest. I had never seen him so genuinely happy.

“How's business?”

“Good, good,” he said, rapid-fire. “Never thought I'd miss the kitchen so much. Or all the idiots who work for me.” He grinned, but his heart wasn't in the gibe.

“According to everything I've heard and dug up, Tamara worked in just two restaurants in Seattle, both yours. A bit of a surprise.”

His face remained neutral, but a vein in his neck throbbed.

“Alex, did you know when you hired her who she was?”

I'll give him credit for this: Most people would have acted astonished, pretending they didn't know what I was asking. Not Alex.

“Of course I did. That's why I hired her. Pepper, you know the restaurant community. Everyone knows everyone. Oh, not the diner or pizza people, or the brand-new prep cooks.”
He waved a hand at those unseen worker bees. “But if you've cooked in this city at this level for six months or more, I want to know you, so I can steal you away.”

The heavy double doors opened, and a young woman brought in a coffee tray, the French press working its magic. She set the tray on a cherry buffet along the redbrick wall and left. Alex rose and poured for us both. He handed me a hot cup and sat, cradling his own. Murder is a chilling topic.

“She couldn't have reinvented herself without our help,” he said. “She didn't want to be driven out of town—her town—because her husband turned out to be a creep.”

“Did you hire her as Ashley Brown, or as Tamara Langston?”

“Tamara. She changed her name legally, but not in Seattle, because she didn't want him to find her. She was living in Snohomish County and working in my Eastside bistro. Worked like a fiend, learning every station.” He eyed me over the rim of his cup.

“But you said everybody knows everybody. He was bound to find out.” Had Danielle known, and not told me? Had Spencer and Tracy discovered the switch? “Especially when she opened up next door. That, I don't get.”

“Me, neither.” He squinted, beating his chin with the side of his fist. “Part of the reason I thought she would stay is that we sheltered her—Ops, Glassy, and me. We kept her secret. We didn't put her picture on our website. We didn't brag that our new sous had run three Seattle restaurants, that she was a prizewinning pastry chef, that she knew Indian food inside out but could conquer any cuisine.”

“Right. The article about Blue Poppy exclaimed over her deft touch, and said she combined Indian spices with French pastry sensibility. And Jane called Patel's food bland and overcooked but raved about Ashley's baking. That was years ago, but Jane thinks she might have set him off.”

“A man who will hit a woman is only looking for an excuse,” Alex said.

I shuddered, knowing he was right. “A lot of women don't report abuse. Even if she had, it would have been as Ashley Brown, so the detectives wouldn't connect her to Tamara. Or Tamara to Patel.”

He fixed me an intent stare, an I-need-you-to-understand stare. “I admit, I lost it when I discovered she'd decided to leave. I'd gone out on a limb for her. My whole organization had. And she didn't bother to tell me.”

“Maybe she wanted to protect you.”

He jerked his head back, his eyes hooded in disbelief.

“Maybe she finally felt strong enough personally and professionally—as a full-service chef, not just a pastry cook—to do what she really wanted. To challenge him,” I continued. Laurel had often lamented that women with chefly ambitions get shunted onto the pastry track, which never garners the same respect as meat or fish. “Maybe she wanted to get all her ducks in a row before telling you, so that you couldn't stop her. So
he
couldn't stop her.”

“But why go to Danielle?” An unfamiliar note of hurt crept into his voice. “If she wanted to prove that she could survive his abuse and come back stronger, why not let me open up next to him, with her at the stove?”

“Because she wanted to do this on her own. You didn't want a partner. I don't mean this as criticism, Alex, but every restaurant you run is all you.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a hand. “Yes, you've got your long-trusted managers—Ops upstairs, your front of the house manager, Glassy at the bar. You treat them well and trust them to be professionals. But it's always
your
world. Tamara wanted to create
her
restaurant.” I remembered her standing in my shop, talking flavors and sketching ideas for presentation. I remembered her lying on the floor of the unfinished space.
“She needed financial support and experience behind her. Danielle could provide that. But she trusted Tamara's vision. She didn't need to take over.”

Alex set his cup on the floor. Elbows on his knees, he rested his forehead on his arms. When he sat up, his eyes were filled with sadness and, perhaps, if I weren't imagining things, a hint of regret. “I'm an SOB sometimes, aren't I?”

I smiled, but without humor. “Meanwhile, Patel was continuing his spendthrift ways, running up bills his restaurant couldn't pay, setting up fake corporations and using her name. Any idea whether she knew?”

“She never said.” He sat upright, leaned back, and crossed his arms. “Patel's not the first guy to play the corporate name game, but sooner or later, they get you. Some little thing trips you up. A waiter gripes to the labor department about the house keeping the tips, or a cook bitches about no bathroom breaks, and ka-boom. You think he killed her?”

I stood and took a few steps before answering. “I've spent enough time around lawyers to argue both sides of that. If he truly didn't know she was still around until she showed up with plans for a hot new restaurant next door—”

“One that would have put him out of business,” Alex said, “by being a hundred times better.”

“—then seeing her would have been like seeing a ghost.” Is that what the old woman meant when she'd hinted at a
bhut
?

Alex angled in the chair to face me. “He got enraged, confronted her, and things got out of hand. I always heard he had a volcanic temper.”

I gave him the look the kettle gave the pot.

He colored, understanding. “Beyond the heat of the kitchen. That's part stress, part showmanship. I mean real anger. Violent anger.”

“Or he planned to kill her, to stop her.” I paced under the watchful eye of a hand-carved raven mask, a Northwest tribal totem. “But that doesn't explain the choice of weapon.
And, I'm thinking out loud here, but if he was relying on her credit and reputation to stay afloat financially—”

“Right,” Alex said. “Why kill the cash cow?”

“Or the credit cow. But maybe that didn't matter. It was Tamara Langston who died, not Ashley Brown. Common name, easy to fool people.” I stopped and faced him. “Ah. That's it. What if she tumbled to his scheme and threatened to expose him?”

“I'll ask around. Talk to my suppliers and see what they know about Patel. See if they'd heard from her.”

“Careful. Word might leak back to him and tick him off,” I said.

“Good.” Alex rose. “If he thinks people are onto him, he might get scared and make a mistake.”

“Alex, the cops think I told the reporters that she was killed with
bhut C
. It was you, wasn't it? Through your staff.”

His eyes flicked almost imperceptibly at the door.
Ops
.

“Why? Didn't you think that would make them focus on me?”

“No.” He sounded surprised. “You would never betray confidential details. I thought that would make them look elsewhere, try to figure out who else had inside info.” His voice took on a rare tenderness. “It was the only way I could think of to clear you from suspicion.”

Sure as sugar, I hadn't expected that.

*   *   *

“PEPPER.”
The sound of my name penetrated my mental fog as I neared the Spice Shop.

Knock me over with a feather
. “Danielle. What brings you down here?” Heaven help me, my first thought sprang from my business brain, wondering if we still had a chance to become her supplier. My second thought, mercifully, came from my empathic brain, which told business brain to shut up.

“Can we talk?” In her dark pants and stacked heels, her
teal raincoat open, she looked at first glance like any other well-moneyed woman on a mission, but it didn't take long to detect the worry in her hazel eyes.

A few minutes later, after I'd checked in with my staff, we settled at a table on the main floor of Lowell's, overlooking the Great Wheel on Pier 57.

“This place never changes,” she said. “How long's it been here—fifty years? Sixty?”

The waitress, who could have been an original employee, slid steaming mugs in front of us and whipped her order pad out of her apron pocket. Snooping had made me ravenous. “Two eggs over easy, hash browns, and toast. With butter and cinnamon sugar.”

“Cinnamon toast,” Danielle said. “Sounds heavenly.”

While patience is not my middle name—nor my first, though they start with the same letter—waiting was getting easier. When someone is dying to talk to you, give them space and you'll learn the most astonishing things.

Danielle's jaw moved as she wet her lips, then turned her attention to the black leather bag on the chair beside her.

It was as if the dead had come back to life. On the table between us lay Tamara's bright green notebook. Who knew what secrets lay etched on its ivory pages?

“She left it in my office last week. Wednesday morning, a few hours before . . .” She swallowed hard and reached for her coffee. “I found it this morning. At first, I assumed she'd left it by accident, but if she knew someone was after her . . .”

Hard to believe it had been a full week since Tamara's death. “Did you call the police?”

She pursed her lips, her eyes downcast. “I—I should, I know, but I wanted to tell you first.”

I pulled a napkin out of the stainless steel dispenser, covered my fingers, and drew the notebook toward me. Inside the cover, Tamara had written her name and the address in Wallingford. One by one, I turned the pages with
the napkin. Notes for recipes, lists of ingredients, flavor combinations.
Black chickpeas, citrus-cilantro dressing?
one read. She'd made sketches for how to plate an entrée—the relationship of garnish to sauce to filet of halibut. A graceful pencil drawing showed a cocktail glass next to the words lime—
wedgy, not too thick
.

A fat section held tasting notes from restaurants she'd visited, each entry dated and detailed. From the classic Metropolitan Grill and the Dahlia Lounge to the quirky Oddfellows Café. Specialty spots like Salumi, serving the best cured meats around, and her favorite cupcake shops.

Alex may have worked hard to keep Tamara-Ashley undercover, but she'd ventured far and wide in her search for the flavors of the city. All, I knew, with the aim of bringing her own vision to life. Or to the plate, which to a chef is the same thing.