Prime Cut

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Heat the oil in a large, heavy skillet. Over medium-high heat, sauté the chicken breasts for 2 minutes per side, or until almost cooked through. Place the chicken breasts in the wine mixture, cover, and cook over medium-low heat another 6 to 10 minutes, until the chicken is just cooked through. Serve immediately.

  Makes 4 servings

  “I told you, stop” she rasped. “Goldy, I’ve hired another caterer.”

  My knife clattered to the cutting board. Be calm. She’s a client. The client is always right.

  “Weezie,” I said, attempting to assume a voice of reason and patience, “you can’t hire another caterer. You’ve already paid in full. I … I’ve got all the food here.” The client, I thought, is always—

  “I know I have to pay for the food. But, well …” She cleared her throat, as if she were reading from a prepared text and had lost her place. Behind me, Julian thumped relentlessly on the chicken. “I want a refund on the labor and gratuity cost. I have the contract in front of me.” Her voice was turning shrill. “Two hundred for the labor and ninety for the gratuity. Please send it today. If I don’t receive the refund in four working days, I’ll have to contact my lawyer.” She hung up.

  I gently put down the phone. Is your lawyer your fiancé, honey-bunch? Julian had piled up the flattened chicken pieces and was grating black pepper onto a plate loaded with flour. He saw my face and froze. “What?”

  “Weezie Harrington’s party is canceled.” I stared in dismay at the tomatoes. “Or rather, we’re canceled. The party’s still on.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She didn’t say why,” I murmured. I thought of Arch’s tuition that was still unpaid, of Tom’s paychecks that were not forthcoming.

  “Sit down, Goldy, for crying out loud. You look like you’re going to keel over.”

  I stared around the makeshift workspace. Our dining chairs were stacked, weblike, against the far wall. Sawdust lay in heaps on the floor. Tentacles of wiring stuck out from walls with half their plaster missing. Bent nails littered the corners like so many dead bugs. The phone rang again.

  “I’ll get it.” Julian dived for the portable. “Golddocks’ Catering. You’re calling this early, you’d better have a great booking for us.” He paused. “Oh. No, Goldy can’t come to the phone at the moment. This is her assistant.”

  “Julian, stop!” I cried. “I’m waiting for a call from Sylvia Bevans! Please, it’s important!”

  He covered the phone with one hand. “It’s not Sylvia. Just drink your coffee and let me handle this, okay?”

  I reached for my espresso, which was now lukewarm. Too bad it wasn’t Marla calling. I absolutely hated the IRS consuming her every minute. If hot gossip was burning through town on Weezie Harrington’s motives for canceling us, Marla would be the first to hear. “J can help you,” Julian insisted. As the person on the other end spoke, Julian struggled to keep his face composed. “Why?” he asked belligerently. “Oh, yeah, who?” After a moment, he said, “We’ll just have to see about that.” and banged the phone down.

  I finished the espresso. “Weezie again? What did she want, for me to drive over with her check? If she doesn’t get her two hundred and ninety dollars back in the next hour, Andy Fuller will prosecute me and demand it in equal installments of brownies? Or better yet—”

  But the pain in Julian’s dark eyes brought me up short. Whatever he had just learned from this caller, it was more serious than Weezie’s treachery. “That was Edna Hardcastle,” he said. “She’s canceling us for the wedding reception Saturday. She’s hiring another caterer. And get this, she wants a refund on her labor and service charge.”

  I pictured the bags of wedding reception hors d’oeuvre crowding our freezer. I thought of the checks from Edna and Weezie that had formed the solitary cushion in our checking account. Sometimes people hit you to be cruel. Other times, they just act viciously behind your back. “Did she tell you why she’s canceling? Or who her new caterer is?”

  “Craig Litchfield. His prices are much lower, she said.”

  Tom, freshly showered and dressed, came into the room. “Give me an apron and a knife. I want to help. Plus, I figure something must be going on, the phone’s ringing so early. Is everything all right?”

  I told him what had happened. He was perplexed. “They both fired you?”

  “Not only did they both fire me—they both want refunds. Two hundred labor for Weezie, plus ninety in service charge. Five hundred labor for Edna, plus two hundred ten for gratuity, since it’s figured on the total cost of food and labor.” I glanced at Julian, who was slapping the flattened chicken in the flour, then setting the pieces aside, as if nothing had happened.

  “So you get to keep the food? What have you got here,”—Tom stared at my printout—“appetizers, chicken, rice, sugar-snap-pea-and-strawberry salad, greens and vinaigrette, cake that you’ve already made. What are you going to do with the food you have? I’m available to eat it.”

  But I had already reached for the phone book. It was just before seven o’clock. I looked up Merciful Migrations, punched in the buttons, got a recorded menu that gave me options and another number. I took a deep breath and called that number. A groggy Leah Smythe answered.

  “Hello? This is Merciful Migrations. We can’t help if you’re trying to get rid of elk on your property.”

  Now there was a greeting. “It’s Goldy Schulz, the caterer.” Leah groaned, and I took a deep breath. Was I ready to step into Andre’s job? Probably not. But I was going to give it a go, anyway. For André and for myself. “Listen, Leah, I have a lot of wonderfull food here, and I was wondering if you were still looking for meals for the shoot.”

  “Goldy,” interjected Tom. “Forget it.”

  I ignored him. On the other end of the receiver, masculine-sounding mumbling stopped Leah from responding immediately. She covered the mouthpiece, then came back. “This is just like the other guy,” she said drowsily. “He’d do free catering for me if I’d vote for him for the Soirée. I told him I didn’t have a say in it. The votes belong to Marla, Weezie, and Edna. I don’t have a vote, Goldy.”

  My skin went cold. “I would never try to bribe you, Leah. Nothing I do is free, but my services are reasonably priced. You need a caterer and I’m already familiar with the site and setup. The food will be ready when you need it. How many more days of shooting do you have?”

  “It’s Wednesday,” she said with a yawn. “Two, if nothing goes wrong. Today and tomorrow. Stretch into Friday if there’s a screwup.” She sighed, as if what she really wanted was to go back to sleep. “All right, you can have the booking. But you’ll need to abide by André’s original contract.”

  “I may not be able to provide the exact food he was offering to you. Only the price.”

  She yawned again. “Just a minute.” More muffled conversation. “If you can be there by ten to do a breakfast-type coffee break and then lunch for fifteen people, that would be great.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll call Rufiis and have him open the gate for you. What time should he be there?”

  “Eight-thirty. And, is that Ian Hood with you there, by any chance? I’d like to talk to him later today about the voting for the Soiree.”

  Leah covered the phone, then returned to say Ian could chat with me after the lingerie shots today. Super, I thought, hanging up. If they wanted a coffee break during the lingerie shoot, I had just the recipe for the occasion.

  “We’re on,” I informed Julian and Tom. “Coffee break and lunch. There’s fresh fruit in the walk-in we can slice. We’ll pick up yogurt on the way, and I’ll make cakes on the griddle when we get there. In Scotland they call a griddle a ‘girdle,’ but it’s really just pancakes. Girdle cakes for a lingerie shoot. Pretty cute, eh?”

  “I don’t like this,” Tom commented as he pulled out strawberries to slice. “I don’t want the two of you going up to that cabin unaccompanied.”

  The phone rang again and we all looked at it.


  “It might be Sylvia,” I said. The way this morning was going, she would be calling to say Litchfield had won the tasting.

  “I’ll let you know if it is,” Tom offered as he hugged the strawberry bowl to his chest and snagged the phone from the sawhorse. After a moment of silence, he put down the bowl and pulled out his ubiquitous spiral notebook.

  “Go ahead,” he ordered. He wrote furiously. “Thanks. You free today?” A pause. “Think you could go out to Gerald Eliot’s former workplace? A cabin in Blue Spruce. Goldy’s catering up there and it’d make me feel better if you’d stay with her.” I shook my head furiously; Julian groaned. Tom raised an eyebrow at me and grinned. “Sure. Come by our place about seven forty-five. Oh, wait. Could you pick up a couple of gallons of fat-free vanilla yogurt on the way?”

  “I’m going to the cabin, too,” Arch announced from the doorway. “Lettie might be there. I want to talk to her about my radio equipment.”

  “You are not going,” I said firmly. Why was everyone in this house up before seven on a summer morning? How were Julian and I going to get the prep done with all these interruptions? “They’re doing a lingerie shoot today, and Lettie’s too young to wear lingerie. And if she isn’t and she is in the shoot, it would not be appropriate for you to be there.”

  “Call her up and invite her over for lunch,” Tom interjected wisely, while Arch was still trying to puzzle out what I’d just said. “I’ll be working on the kitchen. You can have sandwiches on the deck. Eleven-thirty.”

  “I sent her an e-mail about my ham radio equipment, and she can’t wait to see it,” Arch said earnestly. “Get this—her dad taught her how to put an antibugging device on her phone.”

  “Wow,” the three of us said simultaneously. Arch vanished up the stairs to shower and agonize over his clothing for the day.

  Thick, sweet slices of strawberry fell before Tom’s expert knife. “That was Boyd,” he announced. “He told me I passed the lie detector test.” When we exclaimed our congratulations he held up the knife to stop us. “That only means I wasn’t consciously compromising an investigation. But I did get the background we were looking for.” He deftly cored the pineapple. “First off, Boyd interviewed that cabdriver you talked to, Goldy. The one who drove André out to the cabin Monday morning. Nothing unusual about the chef, just a lot of grousing about how he was serving more gourmet dishes for skinny people who wouldn’t understand or appreciate his food. No complaining of tightness in the chest, pain down his arm, anything.”

  I could just imagine it. “Did he talk about the food being done for that day? Or why he was coming early?”

  “Yup.” Tom frowned, gripped the juicy pineapple, and began carving the sides. “According to the cabbie, André insisted the food was already done. But the chef had some ‘other work’ to do that meant he needed to get to the cabin early. He just didn’t say what kind of work. As to Merciful Migrations and the historical society? The society’s in pretty good shape. They’ve got a few big donors who keep ’em going. Ian Hood’s group is another story, though. He supports most of their work with the fashion photography, but he’s been losing bookings because he’s so hard to get along with, and so many photography studios are opening in Phoenix. Leah Smythe? She’s land-rich only. Plus she works for the studio and for the charity for very little remuneration. Donations and the money from the Soirée make up the rest of the budget. According to Boyd, if Ian stopped supporting the organization, the elk would be on their own.”

  “Hmm.” Would it be so bad if the elk were left to fight developers on their own? Probably, my inner voice replied.

  “I asked Boyd to find out just how land-rich Leah was. He said he’d have to check—”

  The phone rang again. “Fourth time’s the charm,” I announced, and politely gave my greeting into the receiver.

  “This is Sylvia Bevans, returning your call.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I gushed. Should I get her opinion on Craig Litchfield’s mode of stealing clients? No: what I really needed to know had to do with a murder, not any kind of theft. “Listen, Sylvia, I called for some historical background, if you don’t mind. I’m doing catering out at the Merciful Migrations cabin today. I’ve become so fascinated with Charlie Smythe,” I raved as Tom rolled his eyes, “I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about him. Do you have time for that?”

  “Well. I suppose. Of course, I’m always glad when Aspen Meadow people want to know their roots. It certainly is more important than adding extra lanes to the highway, which seems to be the main area of interest anymore. What do you want to know about Charlie?”

  “Everything,” I said as I hit buttons on my espresso machine to fuel myself with more caffeine.

  “I presume you know that Charlie Smythe was the grandfather to Leah Smythe and Weezie Smythe Harrington, yes?” When I mm-hmmed, she went on: “Char-lie Smythe settled at the cabin after the War Between the States, which is what he called it, as a member of the losing side. Like a lot of restless army men, Charlie came west, but only after he’d scammed ten thousand dollars off his aunt in Kentucky. Ten thousand was big money in 1865, my dear.”

  Julian was peeling kiwi. Tom dumped the sun-yellow pineapple chunks into the big blue bowl we were using. He picked up a cantaloupe and began slicing off the ribbed skin. I reached for the bananas. “He stole ten thousand from his aunt? The creep.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry to say, and the story is that the poor woman died of grief. And Charlie was no one-time scam artist. He became addicted to thievery. It kept life interesting, I suppose.” She sighed deeply, as if she were discussing a piece of lovely china that had been carelessly broken.

  “Back up, Sylvia, okay?” I sipped the foam from the espresso. “What about this aunt? She had ten thousand dollars in cash?”

  “Oh, no,” Sylvia said sternly, as if I’d flunked a history class. “She’d buried a strongbox of gold coins before the war, but after Appomattox she was afraid the victorious Yankees would find them. Charlie promised to deposit the coins in a bank, and that was the last anyone in Kentucky saw of him! Next thing you know, it’s 1866 and Charlie and his wife, Winnie—grandmother to the two Smythe girls—are buying land in Colorado with a whole lot of gold coins. They purchased a thousand acres in Aspen Meadow and twenty-seven hundred in Blue Spruce. Wait a moment while I pour myself some tea, would you?”

  “Sure.” I was the last one to deny folks caffeine.

  “Where was I?” she asked a moment later. “Oh, yes, Charlie’s land. The Aspen Meadow acreage was to be an investment. The Blue Spruce land was where Charlie was going to have his ranch and his timber business, according to his boasts. He cut down trees, built the cabin, and got bored. So he abandoned Winnie and their small son Vic, the story goes. Charlie turned to crime, alas. He stole horses in the early years, then robbed stagecoaches in the later ones. He ended up trying to rob a bank. That’s how he was caught, in the end. He was in his sixties, if you can imagine. And then he died,” she concluded sadly, “at the age of seventy, in Leavenworth, during the flu epidemic of 1918.”

  Puzzled, I stopped slicing. Something wasn’t right. “In the letter to his wife, he waxes euphoric about the rural life they shared.”

  “You don’t need to tell me the contents of that letter, Goldy. Perhaps he honestly repented, and missed his family. Prison does that sometimes. Now I must go.”

  Prison brings repentance? I wondered as I replaced the receiver. I thought of The Jerk, and shook my head.

  “So what’s the deal?” Julian asked impatiently, eyeing the clock. We had a little over an hour before we needed to be at the cabin. As I was giving the two of them a summary of what Sylvia had just told me, the doorbell rang.

  It was Sergeant Boyd, a half hour early, no less.

  “Escort service,” he said cheerily when I opened the door. His black crew cut stood up in short, clean spikes. He was wearing a white shirt and dark pants. A white apron hugged his huge belly.

  “Nice g
etup, Sergeant.”

  “We aim to please, ma’am.”

  With assurances from Tom that he would put in the first batch of kitchen windows in our absence, we packed up the foodstuffs for coffee break and lunch—formerly Weezie’s birthday dinner—and took off. I had written refund checks for Weezie and Edna; when I dropped them into a mailbox on Main Street, I murmured a prayer for that elusive psychological phenomenon, perspective.

  A breeze stirred the trees as Boyd, Julian, and I headed out to Blue Spruce in my van. The air was balmy, the sky porcelain blue. On the far mountains, a breath of early autumn gold stained the swaths of aspen trees. Time to start over, I told myself.

  I asked Boyd if he could tell me anything else about the department’s interview with the cabdriver who’d brought André to the shoot Monday morning. Boyd replied that he’d told Tom all there was to tell. He himself had never officially been on this case. If he had, he wouldn’t be able to come out to help today. Undercover, more or less, he concluded solemnly, so that no one recognized him. Well, great, I thought as I frowned and tried to process what Sylvia had told me.

  Charlie Smythe built the cabin and got bored … became a thief, died in Leavenworth…. But what could any of this have to do with Gerald Eliot, really? How could it affect what Rustine had told us, that weapon, that unknown something Gerald had found that was going to make him rich? What had happened to the land and the cabin after Charlie Smythe died, before Leah and Weezie inherited it? And what did any of this have to do with André burning himself, overdosing on his medication, and dying of hypotension? As we pulled up to the dirt road to the cabin, I realized I had no more clue to what was going on than I’d had when I’d broken into the Homestead yesterday. So much for amateur sleuths. But I was not going to give up. I was going to be in the cabin where André died, and I was going to poke around and ask some questions. Even if I had to be obnoxious or bribe people with cake. Preferably the latter.