Killer Pancake gbcm-5

by Diane Mott Davidson

  I switched on the coffee urn and tried to ignore him as I reached for the cookie tin. I didn’t want to get upset on a festive occasion, especially a festive, lucrative occasion. Let the mood fit the food, we always say in the food business. But when Reggie marched up in his gaudy print shirt and edged between me and the dessert-plate platter, my mood turned decidedly dark.

  “Would you please go back out to the dining room?” I said in a pained, sweet voice. I reached for the container of fudge cookies and arranged them decoratively on a separate piece of stoneware.

  When I looked up, the brown hair around Reggie Hotchkiss’s bald spot was trembling. His thin, good-looking face was filled with rage. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you and your fascist-pig husband are doing investigating my place of business without a search warrant.”

  I leaned back, startled. A temptation arose to use language that certainly would never get Goldilocks’ Catering invited back to the Braithwaites anytime soon. To keep my temper in check, I reached out for a fudge cookie, brought it to my mouth, and took a huge bite. The dark, velvety moistness melted over my tongue. I closed my eyes and chewed. It was better than a shot of tequila.

  “Are you going to answer me,” Reggie yelled, “or are you going to stuff your face? What kind of damn caterer are you anyway?”

  This eruption brought a furious, flushed Julian catapulting into the room. He slammed an uneven stack of plates down on the counter and hollered, “What in the fucking hell is going on out here?”

  So much for future catering at the Braithwaites. I calmly swallowed the fudge cookie, squeezed past Reggie, and hoisted the platter of cookies. This I offered to Julian.

  “Would you please,” I asked with as much charm as possible, “take these goodies out to the guests? Mr. Hotchkiss wants to have a chat with me, and we’re going to have to go outside, I’m afraid.”

  But Julian didn’t take the tray. Instead, he addressed Reggie Hotchkiss: “You touch her, and I will beat your bald head to a pulp. Understand?” His sneakers squeaked on the tile floor as he grabbed the platter from me. “I’m going to be out on that deck in five minutes. Five minutes. Got it?”

  Reggie Hotchkiss stared at the ceiling. He said, “Ah, but I do feel such a bond with the younger members of the working class.”

  Julian glared at him in disbelief, then pushed through the door to the dining room.

  “Come on, Reg, you want to talk, let’s make it snappy,” I said as I led the way to the side deck.

  The sun had set, and the sky, now violet, promised a perfect backdrop for fireworks. I sighed and wished fervently that Reggie were not there. Unfortunately, he placed his imposing self with its red, white, and blue shirt once again in front of my face.

  “First,” he said suddenly, holding up one index finger, “you call my place of business. You say”—and here he raised his voice to a falsetto that resembled nothing that had ever come out of my mouth—“‘oh, my, but I want to buy all kinds of stuff from your fall catalogue!’ Then next”—voice back down, a second finger up—“you make an appointment under false pretenses—”

  I’d suddenly had enough. “Don’t you dare bully me,” I said evenly. “I made an appointment. I kept it. I even paid for a job that didn’t get finished. What’s your complaint, anyway? I’ve got work to do and you’re interrupting it.”

  “Oh, I’m interrupting your work, oh, excuse me.” Reggie flailed his arms. “And what about all our new products that you wanted to order?”

  “You mean all those products you stole from the fall line of Mignon Cosmetics? Those?”

  His face colored in great red and white splotches that dashed with the loud shirt. “What?” he bellowed. “What?”

  “Excuse me, Reg,” I said, furious myself now, “I think you know quite well what I’m talking about. I catered that banquet for Mignon. You were there too, spying in your cute blond wig. You got your list of what you figured would be money-making Mignon products and you just copied them into your fall catalogue. Anybody with half a brain could see the plagiarism.”

  His face contorted with rage. Maybe I’d gone too far, maybe it took a full brain to figure the theft he’d committed. But he’d made me so angry with his accusations, I couldn’t help it. And besides, I hadn’t told him the cute blond wig had fallen on my head when I was escaping Lane, the needle-wielding facialist.

  “You are in some kind of trouble,” Reggie warned in an ominous voice. This time the index finger trembled when he pointed. “You have just dug yourself into a hole so deep, you’ll never get out, lady. You—”

  “Hey, you stupid fuck!” yelled Julian from the deck door. He strode angrily out onto the deck and squared off against Reggie’s patriotically clad paunch. “What’d I tell you about not threatening her?”

  “I know who you are too,” Reggie raged at Julian, still wagging his finger. “You’re the low-class creep that Claire Satterfield had finally decided was her one and only. Lucky you, boy. She went from robbing the grave to robbing the cradle!” The colors in his face were decidedly unhealthy.

  “You better watch what you say,” growled Julian, suddenly aware, as was I, that the rest of the guests had appeared on the other deck, their faces filled with curiosity about the disappearance of their fellow guest, their servers, and the resulting commotion.

  Reggie held up his hands. “No competition from me, guy. I didn’t want to sleep with her, I just wanted to hire her. That woman could sell cosmetics just by standing still. How was she in bed?”

  That did it. Julian lunged forward. Reggie began to whack indiscriminately. I tried to step between them and caught the brunt of Julian’s forceful, angry body on one side and Reggie’s chest on the other.

  From the middle of the male sandwich, I choked out, “Go inside, Julian! Please!”

  He obeyed by whirling around and striding angrily back into the kitchen. Reggie Hotchkiss fell against the deck rail. Absent male support, I tottered on the deck planks. I caught my balance just a moment before my trajectory would have landed me on the grill. The pain from Julian’s body crashing into mine was concentrated in my head. I rubbed my temples and tried to clear my brain.

  When I looked up at Reggie Hotchkiss, he had recovered. Standing stock-still, he hissed, “I have been mistreated and misjudged, and I am not going to forget it.”

  “Fine.”

  He brushed imaginary dust off the American-flag shirt and made his final pronouncement in my direction. “In the classless society,” he said as he headed for the deck stairs, “there will be no need for servants. You will be obsolete.” He trod heavily down the wooden steps and headed for his Bentley, presumably not the same one he had driven up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  Everyone was staring. I asked lightly, “In the classless society, who does the cooking?”

  Sensing that the excitement was over, the guests on the deck turned their attention back to Babs. Her perfectly made-up face was trembling with anger, but she managed to announce breathlessly that, goodness, time was marching on! Each guest was to carry a sparkler and a glass of sparkling wine down to the lower garden. Lawn chairs were set up there, she trilled on. Even as she spoke, the maid was moving across the yard lighting upright torches. The dark-haired woman Reggie Hotchkiss had come with volunteered to light the sparklers and pour the wine. Her high, laughing voice seemed to indicate that she minded not in the least that Reggie had deserted her.

  But there was more abandonment going on. In the fading light, Charles Braithwaite skulked away from his guests, walking swiftly down the path toward his greenhouse. From the furtive, quick nature of his stride, it didn’t look as if his purpose was to set up chairs, join in festivities, or have sparkling anything.

  I took a deep breath of evening air and tried to remember what I still had to do. Babs was paying her maid to stay late and clean up, so all Julian and I faced was packing the pans and containers we had brought and schlepping them back down the deck stairs to the van.
But cigarette smoke drifting upward from underneath the deck made me doubt Julian’s commitment to the packing task.

  “If a caterer is smoking next to the house,” I announced downward into the deepening darkness, “that could get him into distinct trouble with the hostess, to the extent that a certain caterer and her capable assistant wouldn’t get paid. We might not get paid anyway, after having a little squabble with a guest.” I didn’t tell him I needed help. If Julian wanted to unwind from his encounter with Reggie Hotchkiss, then that was fine by me, as long as he didn’t get into any more arguments. Arch was in Keystone; Tom was working late; I had nothing to look forward to except an empty house and a rousing argument with Tom over switching my food. The later I got to it, the better.

  The glowing butt of Julian’s cigarette moved past one of the torches. I watched him turn not toward the garden, but in the direction of the greenhouse. After I’d brought our platters in from outside and come back out to check that the grill was off and the deck clear, I couldn’t see him anymore, as the guests holding their champagne and their twinkling sparklers moved in a slow, loud knot down to the chairs.

  The maid bustled about helping me clean pans. I checked my watch when all the catering supplies were in boxes: Nine forty-five. Julian had not returned. The fireworks would be starting soon. There was no sign of Charles Braithwaite either, but that didn’t surprise me. I decided to wait ten more minutes out on the deck. It was not like Julian to be inconsiderate. On the other hand, he’d been so upset that he probably lost track of time.

  There was a flash of light followed by a loud peh-beh! sound and a puff of gray smoke beside the lake. A white shot of light rocketed upward, paused, and then a shower of white lights sprayed down from the sky over Aspen Meadow. The blossom of brilliance reflected gloriously in the smooth surface of the lake. The show had begun.

  There was another boom and flash, and this time the shower of overhead glitter was emerald. In the few seconds of light, my eyes scanned the garden and the greenhouse. Julian’s silhouette was briefly visible, along with the smoke from a cigarette. He was standing beside the rose-laden fence.

  For heaven’s sake, I wondered, what was he doing? An explosion-generated scream accompanied the next luminous fall of bits of light, and I felt a wave of unease. Impulsively, I headed toward the torchlit path. Maybe Julian was watching the fireworks and had forgotten about me completely. Maybe he was in one of his grieving-and-smoking spells and needed me to snap him out of it.

  I made my way down the paved walk and learned to fix the path ahead by stopping at the torches, then waiting for the intermittent sprays of colored lights overhead. I knew I was getting close when the heady smell of roses and the laughter of Babs and her guests announced my proximity to the split-rail fence. I maneuvered around the fence and soon found myself at the edge of the greenhouse.

  “Julian!” I whispered. “Where are you?”

  “Over here!” came his called response after a moment. “Come on around to the front!”

  I followed his voice and tried to figure out where the front was. In a flash of pink and blue sparkles that reflected in the near side of the greenhouse panes, I saw that I was on the shorter wall. The door was probably somewhere along the longer one. When I came around to the length side of the greenhouse rectangle, I could make Julian out. He was standing beside a slightly open door.

  “Julian! For heaven’s sake! What are you doing?”

  “Sorry if you’ve been waiting for me,” he said when I was by his side. “I was thinking about that awful Hotchkiss guy … and smoking where Babs couldn’t see me … and then I … well, I just got here. The door is open, and that worries me.”

  “You stayed down here in the dark, and left me to wonder what in the world had befallen you, and now you’re worried about a door? So what about the damn door!”

  Julian’s earnest, boyish face and blunt-cut blond hair was suddenly revealed by a glistening shower of red, white, and blue. “Don’t be upset,” he pleaded. “It’s just that Dr. Braithwaite … you don’t understand, he would never leave this place open! Especially if he was going to be having guests who were strangers. The guy’s a security nut about his experiments. I don’t know where he is, but I think I should stay here and guard the place until he gets back. He’s got a lot of stuff in there that’s pretty dangerous.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to think. Really, Julian’s loyalty to Charles Braithwaite was admirable. Misguided, but admirable.

  “Okay look,” I told him, “we can’t stay here and wait for the host to show. Just close and lock the door. Please.”

  “No,” said Julian stubbornly. “I owe it to Dr. Braithwaite at least to check if there’s been any damage. Then we can call the police or something.”

  “Okay then,” I said as amiably as possible. “Let’s go inside and turn on the light, if there is one, and see if there’s been any vandalism or whatever. Maybe there’s a phone to call the main house or the police. Otherwise, we really need to go back up to the house.”

  “Okay, okay.” Together, we moved up the concrete steps to the open door. “Actually,” he added meekly, “I was kind of afraid to go in there alone.”

  Well, that was just peachy, I thought rather indignantly, as my hand felt along the inside of the Plexiglas. Did a lot of stuff that’s pretty dangerous include woman-eating plants? I groped along the slick surface. My fingers brushed something cold and I instinctively recoiled. Then I realized it was a conduit leading to a light switch. Triumphantly, my fingers found the switch. I flipped on an overhead fluorescent fixture.

  After the near darkness it took a moment to adjust to the light. Julian stepped forward and peered around the greenhouse, which really looked more like a lab than a place to raise flowers. Row upon row of tables was neatly piled with equipment that meant nothing to me. There were plants arranged on shelves too, a cornucopia of flora in all stages of development. But at least the place seemed orderly, and not as if someone had broken in and made a mess trying to steal, vandalize, or whatever it was Julian seemed so worried about.

  “Looks pretty innocent,” I commented as I moved toward one of the tables. “Maybe he just forgot to lock the door …”

  “No, no, no, don’t touch anything,” Julian warned. He gestured at the space. “You’re looking at a lab set up for molecular biology,” he said with genuine awe. He pointed to two metal boxes on a near table. “Those are gel boxes for electrophoresis. That’s the process for analyzing DNA. When our class visited, Mr. Braithwaite told us he was looking for an enzyme in plants that produces blue color. You know, because scientists hadn’t had any luck at, like, splicing it into roses because the color receptors just weren’t there.”

  I looked at the boxes, fascinated. So this was where he’d created the blue rose. In spite of the uneasy feeling that Julian and I didn’t belong there, I found it astonishing that someone could put together this kind of complicated scientific setup in our little burg of Aspen Meadow. Of course, with enough money, you could probably analyze sunscreens in Antarctica.

  “You just put the plant into the gel and look at it through the microscope?”

  Julian shook his head. “No, no, first you have to grind it up.” He pointed to a cylindrical tank that was three feet high and about three feet in diameter. “You have to put the flower petals into liquid nitrogen, which is what’s in that vat. You grind the petals in there till they’re like a fine powder, then you have to add a buffer—”

  “Liquid nitrogen?” I interrupted. “Isn’t that pretty cold stuff?”

  He grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him amused since Claire’s death. “Try minus one hundred ninety-six degrees. That cold enough for you? You wear latex gloves, Goldy.” He pointed to some gloves tidily placed by a mortar and pestle next to the tank. “If you put your hands in there unprotected, they’d break off. Put your head in, and you’d be the headless horseman. Not to mention that the fumes would suffocate you.”

 
I decided I’d had enough science lesson. “Okay Julian, thanks. Let’s go back up to the house.”

  “But I haven’t told you about the sequencing gel apparatus and the laminer air-flow hood! Not to mention the gene gun. That’s really cool.”

  Cooler than minus 196 I couldn’t imagine. “Gene gun? Can you shoot anybody with it?”

  “Very funny.” He moved to a table and picked up what looked like an elongated pistol. “You introduce your bit of DNA into the axillary buds of the flower you’re experimenting with, and you pray like mad that you end up with your blue daffodil, or whatever it is—” He fell silent as his eyes rested on a cluster of flowering plants that I could just dimly see. They were grouped next to the vat of liquid nitrogen. “What the hell?” Julian peered in closely at the flowers. “He had these covered up last time … oh my God, it’s a frigging blue rose!” He picked up a small pot and held it up to the light. I felt my heart stumble in my chest. I wanted to get out of there so badly. “Judas priest!” cried Julian. “Look at this, Goldy! I can’t believe it! Do you know what this means?”

  A whimper came from behind a shelf of books at the far end of the lab. Julian and I gaped at each other.

  “Go away!” sobbed the voice. “Just leave!”

  Julian carefully put the pot down with the others. “It’s him,” he stage-whispered to me.

  The sobs grew louder. “Just go away! Leave me in peace!”

  “Dr. Braithwaite,” Julian said as he moved toward the shelves, “we were just worried about you, when the door was open—”

  The entire shelf of books erupted at that moment as a growling Charles Braithwaite heaved them forward and emerged with his arms outstretched. Julian jumped back from the cascade of volumes. Sobbing, his arms raised, Charles Braithwaite had the aspect of a skinny, white-haired ogre. He growled at us, then screeched, “Go a-way! Leave!”