Criminal Confections

by Colette London

  He caught me eyeballing his lunch and smiled. “The staff are very kind to me. They brought those things here a little while ago, but I’m afraid I haven’t made a dent.” Bernard took a step back, then gestured for me to give him Poopsie. I did, then watched as he cuddled the small filthy Yorkie. “You need a bath, don’t you?” he cooed lovingly to the dog. “Yes, I think you do!”

  His gaze flicked to the open door. I took the hint and hastily shut it behind me. Neither one of us wanted to chase Poopsie all over the grounds if she escaped again. I doubted Bernard had the stamina. I would probably collapse if I ran.

  Hmm. Maybe my plan to outpace danger wasn’t entirely well-thought-out. I wasn’t too concerned, though. I wasn’t exactly a CrossFit competitor, but I could still outmaneuver a golf-shirted retiree. Unless, I mused as I examined the cottage’s tasteful furnishings and spotted at least two heavy-duty lamps, that retiree came armed with a weapon. Then I might have trouble.

  “I’ve been here all day,” Bernard told me, puttering with a water-beaded pitcher of tea. Ice cubes clanked into a tall glass as he filled it. “Waiting for Isabel to come back. I’ve been afraid to leave, afraid to move . . . afraid to look for Poopsie.”

  The little Yorkie scampered underfoot, sniffing everything. Bernard smiled at the dog, his eyes growing misty. Poor Bernard.

  He actually thought Isabel might be coming back.

  “I’m sorry.” I added a murmured thank-you for the tea he gave me. He also nodded toward the impromptu buffet, inviting me to sample the goods. So I did. “Have you heard anything?”

  “From Isabel? No.” He shook his head. “That’s not unusual, though. She . . . sometimes goes away, you see. Quite by surprise.” He looked wistful. “I think she does it to keep me on my toes.”

  If you asked me, that was a pretty terrible thing to do just for kicks. But then I wasn’t a sought-after lingerie model. Chances were good that Isabel got away with things I didn’t.

  “Then you think she’ll come back?” I asked, scarfing more.

  Wow. The fresh bread and cheese were scrumptious. Clearly, Bernard’s nosh was culled from a different source than whatever the kitchen used to feed plebeian attendees. Feeling enlivened, I munched down a few almonds. Then a grape.

  Too late, I realized Bernard was staring at me.

  I almost choked on a mouthful of crusty sourdough baguette spread with moist, tangy Bucheret chèvre and chutney. It was a nice break from nonstop chocolate, but I didn’t want to be rude.

  “I was hoping you could tell me that,” Bernard said.

  The oddly expectant tone of his voice put me on edge. Everything I’d just consumed settled in an unmoving lump in my belly. Cautiously, I put down my unfinished bread and cheese.

  “Why would I know whether Isabel is coming back?”

  “The two of you spent a lot of time together.”

  Hmm. I’d hardly call one (injury-plagued) shared soak in a hot-cocoa mud bath and one (broken, nearly lethal) chocolate-fondue body wrap date “a lot of time together.” But I didn’t want to agitate Bernard. He seemed pretty upset already.

  “I liked Isabel,” I assured him. “I thought she was fun.”

  “‘Liked’?” Bernard advanced on me. In the corner, Poopsie napped off her outdoor adventures. “You ‘thought she was fun’?”

  Oops. “I still do!” I assured him, realizing too late that I’d used the past tense. “Honestly, Mr. Lemaître, I do. I didn’t mean to imply that Isabel was gone forever or anything.”

  Have I mentioned I can sometimes put my foot in my mouth?

  He frowned. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

  “Nothing!” I put up my palms, frozen in place. “Nothing.”

  “You must have talked about things while you were spending all that time at the spa,” Bernard persisted. “What did Isabel tell you?” His voice quavered. “Did you know she was leaving?”

  Belatedly, the truth smacked me upside the head. Isabel must have used me as her excuse while she was enjoying lusty “personal training” sessions with Hank. No one could believably claim a need to “work out” multiple times every day without arousing suspicion. Not even an underwear model like Isabel.

  “I promise you, I didn’t know Isabel was leaving.”

  I really didn’t want to be part of all this. It was painful enough to know that this nice man’s marriage was unraveling.

  “You must have told her!” Bernard yelled.

  I jumped. Even as an older man, he was still imposing. I couldn’t help being reminded that he used to be the head honcho at Lemaître. Like Christian, Bernard had probably done his share of intimidating underlings and menacing competitors.

  “I . . .” I swallowed hard, willing myself not to bolt. Not yet. I took a deep breath, then smiled. “What would I have told her?”

  “You know.” Bernard’s low, rough tone didn’t sound any less threatening to me. “You’re the one who has Adrienne’s journal.”

  I blinked, startled. “Adrienne’s journal?”

  “I saw her give it to you during the scavenger hunt.” He examined me with distaste. “She was probably going to get on Isabel’s team and show it to her herself.” That was an interesting conjecture. “I know you must have read it.”

  I didn’t understand how a notebook full of chocolate percentages, recipes, and formulas could have concerned Isabel. Or Bernard, at this point. But I had read it. Most of it.

  Maybe, it dawned on me, I’d overlooked something crucial.

  “I’m the one who should have that journal.” Bernard looked away, out the cottage’s window, where people weren’t trapped with an angry sexagenarian. “I’m the one who loved her!”

  I gawked at him. Did he mean . . . “You loved Adrienne?”

  That would explain his entreaty to me at the awards banquet. Don’t forget Adrienne. Remember her the way she was.

  It also explained his breakdown while giving his speech.

  I’ll never forget you! he’d cried while holding up his award. Never! No one will ever know what you meant to me.

  At the time, I’d thought Bernard had been referring to his absentee wife, not his older, less-attractive mistress.

  It just went to show, youth and beauty weren’t everything.

  His red-rimmed eyes met mine. “Don’t be coy. I know you know. I know you couldn’t resist. You had to give Isabel all the dirty details, didn’t you? Everything you read in Adrienne’s journal, everything you knew, everything she ever told you!”

  “Mr. Lemaître, I promise I did no such thing.”

  “I want it,” Bernard said stubbornly. He closed his eyes. “To remember her by. Giving it to me is the least you can do.”

  “I don’t have it,” I said honestly. Danny did.

  Why was Adrienne’s journal so in demand, anyway?

  “Give it to me!” Bernard bellowed, shaking with rage.

  I shrank, then retreated a step. Poopsie woke up. The Yorkie skittered around on the wood floors, wagging nervously.

  “That ‘journal’ is a chocolatier’s notebook,” I told him, shaking my head. “It’s not a diary. It’s not what you think.”

  He was completely unconvinced. I must have seemed like a capable liar to him. If so, that would have been a first for me.

  “If it’s so innocent, why did Adrienne give it to you to protect?” Bernard asked reasonably. “Why did she hide it?”

  I couldn’t answer that. I couldn’t tell him that Christian had accused Adrienne of selling Lemaître Chocolates’ secrets. But thinking about the scavenger hunt reminded me of Adrienne’s eagerness to be on Team Yellow: Rex’s team. Not Isabel’s team—which Adrienne had drawn before I showed up. Had Adrienne been planning to sell her notebook to Rex—in plain sight of Christian and all the rest of the industry bigwigs—but then chickened out?

  It would have been fittingly egomaniacal of Rex to stage an underhanded exchange that way. He would have appreciated an ostentatious screw you to his co
mpetitors . . . and to Christian.

  “I don’t know why Adrienne wanted to hide her notebook,” I told Bernard. Warily, I tried to change the subject. “Are you sure Isabel left because she was upset about Adrienne?”

  Bernard frowned deeply. “Why else would she leave?”

  The words überhot personal trainer came to mind.

  But so did Rex. “Did Isabel ever . . . step out with anyone?”

  For a minute, Bernard looked befuddled. He blinked, then put his hands on his hips. He gazed out the window again.

  He gazed some more. I hoped he wasn’t going into another dementia haze. That would have been colossally bad timing.

  Just when I finally felt I was getting somewhere.

  “You know,” I went on awkwardly, keeping my voice gentle, “in retaliation for your relationship with Adrienne?”

  “Well,” Bernard finally said in a geezerish tone, “Rex always had a thing for Isabel. But he’s gone now, so . . .”

  So I gawked at him, wondering if Bernard was hinting he knew about their hookup. I was reminded of my earlier suspicions that Bernard might have killed both Rex and Adrienne—especially if he’d found out about his wife’s fling with the Melt CEO.

  “Rex?” I prodded. Wow, I was getting pretty pushy.

  Bernard went dewy-eyed again. “I’m going to miss Rex.”

  Maybe this was all a dead end, I decided. Maybe Lemaître’s revered founder was just as doddering as I’d suspected before.

  On the other hand, recent events would have unsettled anyone, no matter how quick-witted they usually were.

  “Yes, it’s a shame about Rex,” I said. “Poor Rex.”

  “His death wasn’t an accident, you know.” Bernard’s voice became sharper. More venal. “I think Christian pushed him off that trail. Everyone knew how steep it was. My nephew always was jealous of Rex’s work with me. He resented our closeness.”

  I doubted Christian resented anything except sharing the spotlight or being caught low on discount chocolates. But for the sake of information gathering, I went along with Bernard.

  “Surely Christian wouldn’t kill anyone!” I laughed.

  Nervously (and unconvincingly), of course. But I managed it. Somehow. By now, I really, really wanted to know more.

  “Why not?” Bernard’s eagle-eyed gaze met mine. How did he keep veering back and forth between lucidity and senility? “I’m pretty sure he’s the one who put something in Adrienne’s drink. He never got over her wanting to ‘defect’ to Melt when Rex offered her a job. The funny thing is, Rex did that for me.”

  “For you?”

  Bernard nodded. “I asked Rex to rescue Adrienne. From Christian. After my nephew forced me out and took over Lemaître completely, things were dreadful at the company. Everyone was worried. Resentful. Unhappy.” A brief, sardonic grin passed over Bernard’s face. “Everyone except Christian, of course.”

  Of course. That meshed with what I’d heard.

  “Which means, I suppose, that if not for me—” Bernard broke off, his voice cracking. “Adrienne might still be alive.”

  Was Bernard pointing the finger at Christian . . . or himself?

  If I’d heard the Lemaître Chocolates’ founder making that statement an hour ago, I would have thought he was confessing to killing Adrienne. I would have thought his mistress had pushed him too far—maybe by demanding that Bernard divorce Isabel once and for all, and be with her instead. I would have thought that he’d had enough, and—as autocratic and seemingly bulletproof as any CEO of his stature—had decided to put an end to things with Adrienne . . . either premeditatedly or impulsively. After all, Bernard and Isabel had seemed dedicated to making their marriage work while canoodling at the scavenger hunt. Their behavior could have pushed Adrienne into issuing an ultimatum—one she would pay for with her life. It was all perfectly credible.

  But now, given Bernard’s desolate eyes and vaguely shaky hands, none of that mattered. I still couldn’t think of the grandfather of San Francisco chocolate-making as a murderer.

  Besides, all the evidence (except for Poopsie, at least) pointed to Isabel having left Bernard on her own. What else could have happened? Was I really supposed to believe that Bernard had overdosed Adrienne, pushed Rex to his death, and then—with nothing more to lose—had killed Isabel, too?

  I imagined him bashing her unconscious with a heavy lamp, like the one that had concussed me. Packing up all her things. Piling those things (and Isabel’s body) into her Mercedes under cover of darkness, and then . . . what? Driving her car off the steep curves of the Pacific Coast Highway and into the ocean below?

  And what about Poopsie? Well, I deduced, the Yorkie had obviously run away during all the turmoil. Until I’d found her.

  I had to admit, that sounded pretty far-fetched. Things (technically) could have gone down that way . . . you know, on TV.

  Or maybe, I mused, Bernard was more invested in Lemaître Chocolates’ future than I knew. Maybe he wasn’t senile. Maybe he didn’t want Adrienne’s “journal” for sentimental reasons. Maybe he wanted her notebook to keep her chocolate-making acumen for himself—or to find proof of her selling secrets to a competitor.

  Maybe vengefulness grew wild on the Lemaître family tree.

  With effort, I pulled myself out of that morass of secrets, lies, double crosses, and prime-time-worthy shenanigans.

  “I’m sure you did all you could for Adrienne,” I told Bernard in a soothing voice. “After all, Christian isn’t the only ‘brilliant and accomplished man’ in the Lemaître family.”

  “What?” Bernard snapped. “What do you mean by that?”

  He didn’t seem comforted by Christian’s “power phrase.” But then, I hadn’t expected him to be. I was angling again. Snooping around, I’d learned lately, was becoming kind of habit forming.

  It wasn’t so different from troubleshooting chocolates, actually. Both involved identifying problems, testing theories, and finding solutions. Except now I wasn’t looking for the ideal chocolate-raspberry truffle or the ultimate malted milk shake.

  I was looking for the not-so-perfect murderer.

  Innocuously, I shrugged. “Only that you would have tried to save Adrienne if you could have.” I watched him carefully. “You were there at the welcome reception, weren’t you?”

  “When Adrienne died, I was with Rex.” Bernard looked haunted by that—far too haunted to be lying to me, I thought. “Trying to work out a partnership deal. I’ll always regret that.”

  Well. So much for his earlier alibi, when he’d claimed to have been with Isabel. I guessed now, with her gone, Bernard no longer felt any loyalty toward his wife—or any obligation to protect her . . . if that’s what he’d initially been trying to do.

  Interestingly, he’d just scuppered Christian’s alibi, too.

  “Partnership deal? Were Lemaître and Melt merging?”

  “Rex needed money. I had money—money I had no impetus to invest in Lemaître anymore.” Bernard looked at his tasseled loafers. “I wanted to make Melt bigger than Lemaître. I wanted to make it succeed in a way that Christian never could.” He cast me a prideful glance. “There’s more to chocolate than minding the bottom line. But my nephew will never understand that.”

  “You were angry with him for pushing you out.”

  “Angry?” Bernard startled me by chuckling. “Maybe at first. But ultimately? No. What I said at the awards banquet was true.”

  I didn’t think he remembered any of that gibberish. Wisely, I refrained from saying so. There were still those lamps nearby.

  “I am grateful for Christian forcing me out,” Bernard went on, echoing his awards speech. “It made me rethink my legacy.”

  He seemed so utterly enlivened by that idea, I couldn’t help buying in. “What will your legacy be now?” I asked.

  Bernard’s irascible gaze swerved to mine. “Making sure that whoever hurt Adrienne pays for what they did.” He gave me a cockeyed smile. “And making more yummy chocol
ates, too!”

  His mood swings were creeping me out—and giving me antsy feet, too. Because if Bernard had thought that Rex had hurt Adrienne (and subsequently killed him for it) or that Isabel had hurt Adrienne (and . . . ditto), then maybe his wild-eyed vendetta could touch just about anyone at Maison Lemaître. Including me.

  Or Christian, I had to admit. It wasn’t all about me.

  “Hey, I hear you there!” I said jovially, making a move toward the door. “Well, now that Poopsie’s home safely and I’ve thoroughly raided your lunch, I guess I’d better be on my way.”

  I turned away and walked. I was almost home free when...

  “Not so fast,” Bernard said. His voice was low. Ominous.

  I stopped, not looking at him. Instead, I gazed yearningly outside the window, where life went on as usual: threat free.

  For one spine-tingling moment, I believed Bernard could have killed Adrienne. Rex. Isabel. Even me. What was I doing?

  If a killer was threatening you, politeness wasn’t called for. But social parameters were hardwired. I couldn’t just run.

  I’ve heard that the impulse to be polite—even in the face of obvious danger—sometimes got people killed. Now I understood.

  I still couldn’t quite force my feet to move.

  “You forgot your dessert!” Bernard followed me. He pushed a napkin-wrapped bundle into my numb hand. “It’s cookies. Not chocolate this time.” He paused. “You want to know a secret?”

  Not really. I gulped. My common sense vanished. I nodded.

  “Some days, I don’t eat any chocolate,” Bernard confessed.

  Then he gave me a chortle and herded me toward the door.

  I practically sagged onto the floorboards on my way there, casting one lingering glance at my doggy buddy, Poopsie. Had I truly just gotten freaked out by a grandfatherly chocolatier?

  Being around all this murder and mayhem was affecting me. Not in a positive, puppies-and-rainbows way, either.

  “I don’t, either,” I squeaked, opting to play along.

  Ahead of me, Bernard considerately opened the cottage door. Outside I smelled chocolate and life, fresh air and freedom.

  He lingered. Maybe he was experiencing the same things?