The Club

by Jane Heller

“A theme cookbook. You know, a book that tells how to throw themed parties. A Romantic Valentine’s Day Dinner for Two. A Family Christmas Brunch. A High School Graduation Barbecue. That sort of thing.”

  Brendon nodded but looked incredibly bored. I couldn’t blame him, but I pressed on.

  “I was so impressed with that menu you came up with for the Wild West July Fourth party that I wondered if you’d let me include it in the book.”

  “You mean the Wagon Train Menu?” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “But that was just chili and hot dogs. No big deal.”

  “Yes, but it was the way you pulled the party together, the effortless execution of the menu, that impressed me. It’s no mean feat to serve chili and hot dogs to three hundred people and make it look easy.”

  “Well, the whole thing did take some planning,” he conceded.

  “Right. And that’s just what my readers would want to know about: how you planned the party—from A to Z. Which dishes you prepared ahead of time. Which dishes were made just before the party began. How you juggled your duties as chef with the job of overseeing the staff. Where you were every minute of the party.”

  “Where I was every minute of the party?”

  “Yes. In Martha Stewart’s books, she always gives her readers a complete account of her movements during a party. Organization and planning are very important aspects of entertaining, as you must know.”

  Brendan said nothing, but appeared to be mulling over my questions, especially the one regarding his whereabouts the night of the party.

  “For example,” I went on, “give me an idea of what you did after the chili and hot dogs were set up on the buffet table.”

  “What I did?” he said.

  “Yes, what you did,” I said.

  He scratched his head. “Well, I guess I went into the kitchen and checked on the desserts.”

  “Great. Now you’re getting the idea. Then what?”

  “I…uh…well, to tell you the truth, I think I ate a couple of hot dogs.”

  I smiled. “So you took time out to sample your own cooking. Yes indeed, Martha Stewart says one must always taste one’s creations.”

  Brendan nodded. He was a bit slow, I realized. Not what you would call a quick study.

  “Now then,” I continued, “after you ate a hot dog, did you go back outside to supervise the meal or did you stay in the kitchen?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Do you remember being at the buffet table when the desserts were served?”

  “Yeah, I was there.”

  “The whole time?”

  “No, not the whole time. I had a headache. I went back to my cottage to get some aspirin.”

  Aha. The old I-had-a-headache alibi. I was betting that the real reason Brendan disappeared from the party was to follow Claire to the sand trap and kill her.

  “Don’t tell me you had a headache too,” I played on, hoping Brendan was on the verge of incriminating himself. “I thought I’d never recover from the band’s drum solo. My head was pounding for days.”

  “What drum solo? I didn’t hear any drum solo.”

  “Gee, that’s funny. It was deafening.”

  Interesting. So Brendan hadn’t heard the drum solo. Was that because he was down on the golf course, giving Claire Cox the headache of her life?

  “We had all started on our chili and hot dogs when the Cowpokes’ drummer started doing a little Led Zeppelin,” I said. “It didn’t do much for my head or my digestion.”

  “Yeah, well, I must have missed it,” said Brendan, beginning to understand that he had just admitted something he hadn’t intended to admit. The fact was, he couldn’t have missed the drum solo unless he was a good distance away from the band—like in a sand trap.

  “What did you do after you got your aspirin?” I asked.

  “Hey look, Mrs…What did you say your name was?”

  “Mills. Ms. Judy Mills.”

  “I don’t think I want to be in your book after all.” Brendan’s expression had turned sour.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I was hoping we could give the readers a real feel for your Wild West July Fourth party.”

  “Nope. I don’t like talking about my work. I’m a chef, not a celebrity. You like my food? I’m flattered. But that’s it, okay?”

  “Well, I suppose if you’re—”

  “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go back to the kitchen.”

  He started to get up from the table.

  “Brendan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad we had this talk. You’ve been much more helpful than you can imagine.”

  He gave me a puzzled look, scratched his head again, and went back to work.

  After my chat with Brendan, I debated whether I should run to the phone in the ladies’ locker room and beep Tom. I was eager to tell him about Brendan’s admission that he had wandered far enough away from the party to miss the band’s ear-splitting drum solo, but I was supposed to meet Nedra at the pool and didn’t want to arouse her suspicion by not showing up. Unfortunately, it was Nedra who didn’t show up. I guessed she was in the bushes somewhere with Rob, practicing her strokes.

  I found a chair near the deep end of the pool, deposited my towel, beach robe, and purse there, and walked down to the shallow end. I always went into the water at the shallow end, where you could tiptoe in with all the other wimps, little by little, inch by inch. Sure, I felt like a jerk as I watched the more daring souls do back-flips off the diving board. But how else could I avoid getting my hair wet?

  I was about halfway into the water when I heard an incredibly annoying beeping noise coming from a chair near the deep end. I assumed it was somebody’s beeper, or one of those black Casio watch alarms that people are always programming to go off every hour on the hour. But nobody ran over to claim responsibility for the noise, and the little beep kept going for what seemed like an eternity. Suddenly I realized that the little beep was my little beep, that it was coming from my beeper, which was in my purse lying on my chair! All eyes were on me as I hurried out of the pool, opened my purse, shut the beeper off, and read Detective Cunningham’s display message asking me to call him as soon as possible.

  Some informant I was. Now everyone at the club would wonder why I, an out-of-work cookbook editor, would need a beeper. Maybe they’d be so curious they’d ask Hunt, who’d ask me, and then what would I do? If only I’d switched the beeper to the vibrator option the way Tom had suggested. Then I wouldn’t have everybody staring at me—including Duncan Tewksbury, who had shown up at the pool and plunked himself down on the chair next to mine.

  “What was all that about?” he asked, as if I’d polluted his air.

  “Must have been a wrong number,” I shrugged and hurried inside to call Tom.

  “Isn’t there somewhere else we could meet?” I asked Detective Cunningham. We were sitting in his Chevy Caprice in our usual haunt, the parking lot of the Stop ’n’ Shop.

  “You don’t like Stop ’n’ Shop?” he said. “How about Waldbaum’s or maybe the A&P?”

  “I had something more exciting in mind. Something more police-y.”

  “Police-y?” He laughed. “You crack me up.”

  “Thank you,” I said, assuming he meant it as a compliment. “In the movies, the cop and the informant meet in mysterious, out-of-the-way places.”

  “Yeah, only this is the suburbs, not the movies,” he said. “But hey. You want police-y? I’ll give you police-y.”

  Tom turned on the ignition and drove us out of the parking lot so fast I nearly herniated a disk in my neck.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  He sped along Route 1, heading north, darting in and out of traffic, weaving in and out of lanes. I wasn’t surprised when he got stopped for speeding several minutes into our ride.

  “Umm, we’ve got company,” he said as he looked
into his rearview mirror and saw a patrol car’s lights flashing behind us.

  He pulled over onto the shoulder and waited.

  “You were speeding,” I said. “The speed limit’s thirty-five here. I’m pretty sure you were doing sixty.”

  He didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

  A state trooper came up to his side of the car and asked to see his license and registration. Instead, Tom showed the officer his badge.

  The cop took a quick look at it and smiled. “Have a good day, Detective,” he told Tom, then winked at me and walked back to his car.

  “Hey,” I said. “He didn’t give you a ticket. He didn’t even give you a lecture.”

  “Professional courtesy,” Tom said and started the car. “It’s one of those police-y things you were talking about before.”

  “Are police informants eligible for this professional courtesy?” I asked. “I sure could use it. I got stopped a couple of weeks ago for going forty miles an hour in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. I couldn’t believe it. ‘How can you give me a ticket when I’m not even going the speed limit?’ I asked the cop. And do you know what he did?”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “He checked out your legs.”

  “How did you know?” I said, amazed.

  “Professional courtesy.” He grinned. “Cops know each other’s routines. When a cop stops you for driving under the speed limit, he just wants to check out your legs.”

  “How did he know I was wearing a skirt from three cars back?” I asked.

  “Instinct,” said Tom. “Cops are born with it.”

  Tom turned off Route 1, and a few minutes later, we were on a winding country lane that led to an even more winding country lane. We went up a hill and down a hill and ended up on a tiny dead-end street that backed up to the Sasquahonek River. The view was dramatic and, if you weren’t crazy about heights like I wasn’t, a little scary.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked after Tom had turned off the ignition.

  “You wanted something exciting and police-y,” he said.

  “Exciting, I understand. This is a fabulously atmospheric spot. But police-y?”

  “You should see it at night,” said Tom. “Big make-out place. The police are always chasing couples out of here.”

  “Oh, you,” I said and swatted Tom’s thigh.

  Tom’s thigh. Talk about fabulously atmospheric spots. Muscular. Tight. So near and yet so far. I looked up at his face and felt my own flush.

  This is dangerous, I said to myself. You’re having problems with your husband. You’re feeling undesirable, unloved. And you’re sitting in a car with a very attractive single man who’s probably yearning to rekindle the passion he shared with his dearly departed wife. It’s a scenario that can only lead to one thing. And you’re not the adulterous type, Judy, remember?

  “So why did you beep me?” I asked Tom in an effort to get down to business.

  “I wanted to check out your legs,” he said.

  I took another swipe at his thigh. “Seriously. Why did you want to see me?”

  “I looked into that business at Westover,” he said. “About June Douglas, the woman who said Larkin Vail tried to get her drunk.”

  I nodded.

  “It turns out that Ms. Douglas has a reputation for boozing it up,” he said. “‘A real lush,’ people say. So maybe Larkin Vail spiked her Gatorade, and then again, maybe not.”

  “Just to be safe, I think I’ll get my own drink before I play against Larkin in the Tennis Tussle on Friday night. Maybe she’s moved from vodka to strychnine.”

  “Tennis Tussle?”

  “Yeah, it’s one of the club’s most popular events. Every Friday night there’s a mixed doubles tournament, followed by Bloody Marys and barbecued chicken.”

  “You country club kids sure know how to have fun,” Tom smirked.

  “Don’t we?”

  “Yeah, while you’re out there tussling with each other on the tennis courts on Friday nights, I’m out on the streets, tangling with criminals.”

  “Aww, poor thing. Listen, from the look of things, you may be a lot safer on the streets than I am at the club. I still think Larkin might be our murderer. But I have another suspect for you to chew on.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Brendan Hardy. He’s the chef at The Oaks and a really lousy cook.”

  “If he’s so lousy, how does he keep his job?”

  “Good question. He was hired by Duncan Tewksbury, Claire’s great-uncle and the chairman of the Board of Governors. Whenever someone complains about the food, Duncan defends him. It’s weird.”

  “What makes you think Brendan might have killed Claire Cox?”

  “Because Claire was determined to upgrade the club’s food, which she found embarrassingly poor. There she was, trying to convince all these hot-shit women to join The Oaks, and she couldn’t even offer them a decent meal.”

  “Did Brendan know she wanted him out?”

  I shrugged. “My guess is that she spoke to her great-uncle about it, and that Duncan might have passed the information along to Brendan.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because Duncan and Brendan are a gruesome twosome at the club. I always see them huddled together, probably conjuring up new ways to give the members indigestion.”

  “Refresh my memory. Duncan Tewksbury didn’t get along with Ms. Cox, right?”

  “Right. When Claire got into the club, it spelled the end of Duncan’s reign of chauvinism. He lost out to her on the issue of admitting single women. He lost out to her on the issue of the Men’s Grill. He lost out to her on just about every issue that mattered to him—except the issue of the chef. Claire wanted Brendan out. Duncan wanted Brendan to stay. Now Claire is dead, and Brendan’s still in the kitchen turning out meals you wouldn’t feed your worst enemy. What’s more, I had a little chat with Brendan and it seems he can’t account for his whereabouts the night Claire was murdered.”

  “That’s not what he told my partner. He said he was in the kitchen cooking dinner for three hundred people.”

  “Yes, but then he left the party. He said he had a headache and went to his cottage to get some aspirin.”

  “So?”

  “So his cottage is directly behind the kitchen, which is right next to where the band was playing. Brendan says he never heard the drum solo. And trust me, you couldn’t not hear that drum solo, unless, of course, you were way down on the golf course, hitting a woman over the head with a golf club.” I paused. “Oh, and another thing: Brendan loves to play golf. And guess whose golf clubs he plays with? The golf pro’s—including the golf pro’s pitching wedge.”

  Tom turned to face me, then nodded his approval.

  “I’m not bad at this informant stuff, am I?” I asked, feeling as if I had finally impressed Detective Cunningham with my sleuthing.

  “Not bad at all,” he said, then reached out to pat my knee.

  The minute he touched me, my leg shot straight out, like when the doctor tests your reflexes with that dopey little hammer. I was so embarrassed I wanted to crawl under the seat of the car.

  “Easy,” he said. “I’m not gonna bite you.”

  “Sorry. It’s been so long since a man touched me I forgot how it felt.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted having said them. The last thing I wanted to do was burden someone else with my problems, someone I barely knew, someone who had hired me to perform an important job. How unprofessional can you get!

  Still, when Tom started asking me to elaborate on my remark, when he seemed so interested, so caring, so sympathetic, I couldn’t resist opening up about my private life. Maybe it was the fact that he had lost his wife, that he understood pain and suffering, that we were alone together in his car in the middle of nowhere that had loosened my tongue. All I knew was that I found myself going on and on about Hunt, about our seven years together—especially the last couple of years when things had begun to disintegrate
between us, about Kimberley, Charlton House, F&F, and the rest of it.

  “What a waste,” said Tom, shaking his head, his eyes boring in on me. “You’re a fantastic woman, Judy. A man would have to be crazy to neglect you.”

  I blushed at the compliment.

  “Really,” he went on. “You’re a special lady. Don’t you know that?”

  He touched my hand. I melted. Flattery always made me melt. So did being touched by a handsome man with whom I was alone in a car.

  Tom looked at me with soulful eyes and shook his head again. “Such a waste,” he said, then took my hand in his. I thought he was going to kiss me as he drew me closer. But he reached up and brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen against my cheek. I didn’t flinch this time. Perhaps I was getting more comfortable with his touch, more comfortable with the idea that a man who was not my husband was touching me.

  God, what was happening to me, to my marriage? First I lied to Hunt by not telling him I was working for the police. Then I blabbed to another man about our marital problems. Now I was allowing this other man to touch me in a way that was sure to lead to trouble. I considered getting out of the car right then and there, but I didn’t exactly have another ride home, did I? What’s more, I didn’t really want to go home.

  “Remember when I told you I was a sucker for damsels in distress?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I meant it. You sound like you need someone, Judy. You sound like you need a man.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Now I’m in trouble.

  Tom inched his face closer to mine. I could feel his breath on my skin. No onion rolls this time.

  It would have been so easy to let it happen, so easy to just go ahead and let him kiss me. He was handsome and virile and sexy—straight out of one of Arlene’s romance novels. And I was very attracted to him, no question. But I couldn’t get my jerky, plaid-panted husband out of my mind. Not for one second. He might as well have been sitting in the back seat of Tom’s Chevy, watching us. It was no use.

  “I think we should head back,” I said, breaking the spell of the moment. “Hunt will probably be home by now.”

  “So? From what you told me, it doesn’t sound like he’ll care whether you’re there or not.”