by Sarah Zettel
“Have you met my sous, Reese?”
“Not yet.” Mel had a very precise eye for exactly how much over-the-topness someone could take, and toned the show down to a firm handshake and professional smile before he turned to Felicity.
“Felicit-tay!” Mel took both her hands in all solicitous concern. “My poor dear! I heard about Oscar. First that awful breakup and now a stroke! Such a shock! Don’t worry, we have it all under control.”
Breakup? What breakup? Who broke up? I didn’t get a chance to ask. Felicity gave Mel a quick peck and pat on his cheek. “Mel, swear to me you are not kidding.”
“I never kid about combat readiness.”
“Like the new place, Mel,” I said, surveying the domed and gilded lobby in front of us. “Small, but very tasteful.”
“Why, thank you, my dearest one. I had it made up ‘specially for you.”
The Carriger Hall was a relatively new event space, but a relatively old building. A bank back in the 1900s, it had all the vaulting, granite, marble, stained glass and gilt trim you could ask for. The atmosphere was custom tailored to say this was a building for the ages and it would care for your money as long as the city stood.
Except apparently some of the executives had been taking better care of themselves than of their investors, and the bank folded in 2008. The building reopened shortly thereafter as a palace for marriages, banquets, and charity events. Somehow, while the rest of the country was looking under the cushions for spare change, Mel and his backers had managed to beg or borrow (I’m reasonably sure he didn’t actually steal anything) enough to restore the gilding, painting, and stained glass to their original glory.
The joint was jumping now. As Mel explained, they were debuting a spring designer collection, and we got to see his people hanging banners, setting out flowers, laying out buffet tables and reception tables. It was the kind of controlled, loud, preperformance chaos we could all appreciate. Mel, the proud papa of a five-thousand-square-foot gilded-cage child, led us through it now, pointing out the perfections of setting, traffic flow, staffing, and all the useful spaces, both large and small.
From my and Reese’s perspectives, of course, the best part was the on-site kitchen down where the vaults used to be. Nothing was worse than having to cart the food in from some outside space and try to keep it hot, fresh, and pretty. Mel stood up, proud and patient to Reese’s rapid-fire quizzing about the number of staff he had booked for the Big Day. We would have to assemble only a foundation crew for the kitchen. When we finally got back to the vaulted lobby, Reese made a quick call to Hank back at the Aldens’ to make sure everything was proceeding with dinner and snack prep there. Then Mel took him up to the main office to review the specifics of the service. Felicity was still firing off notes and messages from her PDA. She also showed every sign of sprinting out the revolving doors for a cab. I almost had enough mercy in my soul to let her go.
Almost.
“Let’s me and you go get coffee.” I grabbed Felicity’s arm. “We need to go over some lists.”
This did not fool her for a second, and she yanked away from me. “I knew it. You’ve had a gray cloud over your head since you walked in here. What’s going on?”
I ignored her question and instead headed down the street toward a little café I’d spotted called Bean There, Bun That. Why did people insist on doing things like this to innocent little dining establishments? However, they roasted their own, and the guy in the black T-shirt behind the espresso machine seemed to know what he was doing as he scooped, tamped, poured and added a neat cap of foamed milk. The Danish were fresh baked too, which was a nice surprise. I bought a peach pastry for me and a cheese one for Felicity.
I set Felicity’s Danish in front of her, and she looked at it weakly. “How can you eat with all this work to be done?”
“I’m a chef. I can eat anytime. You should eat too.” I pulled her BlackBerry out of her fingers and set it beside me, out of reach. “You need your strength.”
Felicity tore off a corner of Danish and nibbled on it, possibly to keep from nibbling on her own fingernails. She did not, however, stop eyeing her BlackBerry. This is known as negotiating from a position of strength.
“Did you know Karina Alden was dating Oscar?”
Felicity’s hand froze with another bit of Danish halfway to her mouth. “Oh. You found out about that.”
I wrapped both hands around my paper coffee cup, but that turned out to be a very bad idea, because I nearly crushed it. “Yes, Felicity,” I said in a tone my people would have recognized as the one they least wanted to hear at the end of a bad shift. “I found out about that.”
Felicity went quiet, tearing off small bits of Danish and eating them one at a time. I folded my arms to keep from taking that lovely pastry away from her until she could promise to eat like an adult.
“I didn’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t suppose it matters much…now.”
“Felicity! Somebody’s trying to tear this wedding apart, and the ex-caterer who was an ex-boyfriend is now an ex-human being, and you say it doesn’t matter? What is your problem?”
But we both knew what the problem was. It was simple and universal. Prestige and money mess with your head, and they are very, very hard to turn down.
“God, what a disaster.” Felicity slumped backward, and her elegant fingers tore another piece of pastry into little crumbs. “I never should have agreed to take this job.”
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“It had all the hallmarks of a gotcha marriage from the beginning. I mean, honestly, a Maddox and a vampire? It has to be the bride trying to pull one over on her family.”
“So, why me, Felicity? What am I doing here, making things worse?”
“Honestly?” She scooted her newly created crumbs around with one perfectly manicured fingernail. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists. I was never letting Felicity near a decent piece of baking again. Ever. “I don’t know. When Oscar quit, I had to come up with a list, fast. When Mrs. Alden heard your name, she said we should get you. I knew it’d be trouble,” she added, “but she said she’d heard good things about you. I mean, you were there when Deanna was going on about how much she likes Nightlife.”
Yes, I was there. I just couldn’t reconcile what I’d heard with the fact that they had to know that my being in the picture would make things worse. Unless somebody was deliberately thumbing their nose at Grandpa Lloyd. Or deliberately trying to sabotage the wedding.
“Anything else, and can I have my life back?” Felicity nodded meaningfully toward her BlackBerry.
“In a second.” I laid my hand over her life. “That messy breakup Mel was talking about. Was that Oscar walking out of the wedding, or Oscar walking out on Karina Alden?”
“What do you care, Charlotte? Neither of them is in this anymore.”
“But I am in it, up to my chef’s whites. Which was it?”
Felicity sighed, then ate another bit of Danish. I kept my hand over her BlackBerry, just in case she was thinking of trying a snatch and dash.
“Unusually, Karina walked out on him. There was a blowup of some kind. This being Oscar, she probably found out he was seeing somebody else, or planning on seeing somebody else.”
“And that’s it?” I asked.
“That’s all I know. I swear on my business license, Charlotte.”
I pushed the PDA into Felicity’s shaking hands, and she snatched it up. “I’ll fax the contract to Nightlife.” She got to her feet with a speed that suggested she was worried I might be thinking about another BlackBerry-napping. “We’re good?”
“We’re good.”
Felicity gathered her things together, popped the last bite of Danish into her mouth, and left me sitting there with the dregs and the crumbs. I let out a long, slow breath and smoothed my hair down with both hands.
I’d lied to Felicity. We weren’t good—at all. As already pointed out, I don’t deal well with unanswered questions. Threats
make me positively testy. This fresh reminder that I had been deliberately dragged into this disaster on flimsy pretenses was not making anything better.
I got to my feet, bused the table, and walked outside. I really needed to head out to Brooklyn Heights. I had a million details to organize and a million phone calls to make, and I had to get in there and back up Reese for this dinner tonight. And yet, I was only a few blocks from Perception, Oscar’s main restaurant. It might or might not be open for business, but I knew down to the bottom of my chef’s heart, somebody would be in there, no matter what. There’d be strategies to plan, press releases to argue over, territory to stake out, backers to reassure. That all took staff on the ground, and without Oscar around to issue his own set of threats, one of them might even be willing to talk to me, even if Felicity wasn’t.
I turned east and started walking.
There are few things as sad as a restaurant closed up on a Saturday. It was sadder somehow because Perception’s facade was made to boast a lively clientele. The street-level entrance was all sparkling glass and brushed brass. The outdoor terrace up above sported an art deco railing and a scalloped canopy in that particular shade I always think of as fleur-de-lis blue. The place somehow looked Parisian retro and modern New York chic at the same time.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with a need to say good-bye. The first thing I saw when I turned the corner of Perception’s building was a small, round-hipped woman standing stock-still on the sidewalk. Her chestnut hair tumbled loose from a sparkling clip to curl around the shoulders of her stylish red Jackie O. dress.
I’d never seen her before, but I knew her. She had her sister’s hair and coloring and something of her mother’s steel around her jaw. This was Karina Alden.
Karina stared at Perception’s door, oblivious to the people stepping around her. Her whole attention centered on the black-bordered sign that had been Scotch taped to the glass. It featured an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Oscar, his smile displaying teeth as white as his chef’s coat and tall toque. Who the hell managed to look so at ease in a toque? Beneath the photo were three handwritten lines:
Oscar Simmons
August 15, 1969–May 21, 2011
He Will Be Missed.
She didn’t even glance sideways when I stopped beside her. We all stood there for a long time. I kept sneaking glances at Karina Alden, but she remained absolutely focused on Oscar’s photo, as if willing it to speak.
“He was really something else, wasn’t he?” I said finally, awkwardly.
Karina drew in a long, shuddering breath and let it all out again, clearly using the time to decide if she was going to talk to me. “Yes, he was,” she said at last, still without turning her eyes away from the shiny publicity photo. “You knew him?”
“I worked for him for a while.” I held out my hand. “Charlotte Caine.”
She stared in surprise for a minute before she shook my hand. “You’re Charlotte Caine? Didn’t you…” she stopped. “Sorry. Karina Alden.” She gave me a ghost of a smile. “I expect we’ve heard of each other.”
“I expect we have.”
But evidently neither one of us could think of anything safe to say about what we had heard about each other, because we both let our eyes drift back to Oscar’s memorial photo.
“He wasn’t a bad person, you know.” Karina said this as if continuing some other conversation. Or maybe she just assumed because I was an ex-employee, and female, I’d have hard feelings toward Oscar. It was a reasonable assumption. “He just…didn’t know when he had enough.”
I shifted my weight, trying to find some kind of answer that didn’t involve the word “greedy.” “You spend a lot of time living hand to mouth when you’re coming up the ladder,” I tried. “Some people never get over it.”
“I hadn’t thought of things that way,” Karina whispered so softly I could barely hear the words under the city’s eternal background noise. “I suppose it makes sense.”
We stood there a bit longer. I pictured myself turning toward her. So, what do you really think about your sister marrying a vampire? Were you working with Oscar as well as sleeping with him? When Oscar had dropped the phrases “exclusive products,” and “branded marketing” the other night, I’d assumed he was talking about a line of frozen raw sauces or something. But these days, star chefs had their names on everything from knives to shoes. Why not perfumes? Never mind that almost none of us actually wore the stuff. It’s simply not practical. My sense of smell is one of the major tools of my trade, and it directly affects the sense of taste. I can’t be smelling of Chanel No. Zillion when I’m trying to check the seasoning on the soup of the night. But Oscar had an audience, and even I had seen the perfume bottles sporting celebrity names.
Why did Oscar really quit your sister’s wedding?
I pictured any such cozy little talk coming to an abrupt end, quite probably in a storm of public shouting. I conjured up three or four alternate conversational scenarios, none of which went any better. My throat tightened. I had to do something. I couldn’t just stand there. Something had to give.
Then, it did.
“Chef Caine.”
I spun on my heel. A short, broad man came around Perception’s corner. He wore a rumpled, blue sports coat, and had a thin ring of gray hair edging his mottled scalp. I recognized him at once, the way you do a person you’ve hoped never to see again.
“Detective Linus O’Grady.”
“Little” Linus O’Grady was the head of the New York City Police Department’s Paranormal Squadron. He looked as though he’d let himself go soft years ago, and his drooping brown eyes gave him an uncanny resemblance to a mournful spaniel. But I was past being fooled by appearances. The last time I’d been alone with Little Linus it was in an interrogation room. He’d been in Bad Cop mode, and I’d needed a lawyer to pull me out of there. Right now, though, I couldn’t help noticing the dark circles under O’Grady’s spaniel eyes that said he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. Sympathy poked its head up through my other memories, and I lacked the strength to smack it down.
Karina Alden, however, had an entirely different reaction.
“I’ve got nothing left to say to you!” She hitched her designer purse strap higher on her designer dress shoulder and marched away up the street.
I could sympathize with that too. I knew all about Little Linus’s particular way with the ladies, especially when he suspected them of something. This caused a new question to slide into my mind.
What did Linus O’Grady suspect Karina Alden of?
“Did you know him?” O’Grady nodded toward Oscar’s memorial sign.
“I worked for him once.” I was not, however, in a mood to be distracted from my own—albeit currently unspoken—line of questioning. “What are you doing here, Detective?”
O’Grady smiled ruefully. “Can’t tell you. Sorry.”
I stared at the sign. “It wasn’t…Oscar wasn’t…”
The detective pursed his mouth. He regarded me thoughtfully and for a long time.
“Actually, I was thinking I might need to come talk to you, Chef. Have you got a minute?”
No. I did not. I most definitely did not. I needed to be in Brooklyn. Hell, I could arrange to need to be in Los Angeles, if it would get me away from O’Grady.
“Or maybe you need to get back to the Aldens’?” he asked. “You took that job over after Chef Simmons walked out, right?”
This was the detective’s way of letting me know he already had a lot of facts in hand, and that he was not happy with them. And, incidentally, my walking away right now would make him less happy. Was I sure I wanted to do that?
Linus was very efficient with the subtext.
“You’re not going to cut me a break here, are you, Detective?”
“Nope.” He started down the sidewalk.
“Didn’t think so,” I said to his back as I started following along behind. He didn’t even look back to make sure I was there.
>
Linus walked me to a faux Irish bar on the other side of the street. It had a dim interior tricked out in dark-stained trim and tables that had been ordered prescarred from the supplier to give the place the carefully staged version of what somebody thought a Dublin neighborhood hangout ought to feel like. The bartender seemed to know O’Grady, though, and he nodded us over to a wooden booth in the back, which did smell authentically of old beer.
We sat down, and O’Grady pulled out his notebook. I tensed. He ignored me as he flipped through the pages. A server brought us a couple of waters and left a couple of menus. We both ignored those. I can read upside down, but O’Grady’s handwriting was so cramped and crooked, it defied all attempts at deciphering. I suspected he did that on purpose.
Then, much to my surprise, O’Grady closed the book, leaned back, and studied me instead. The overhead lighting showed up the dark rings under his drooping eyes like smears of soot on his ruddy skin.
“Chef Caine, if you wanted to poison someone in your kitchen, how would you do it?”
“I wouldn’t,” I answered at once.
O’Grady clearly mistook my speed for fear. “Hypothetically.”
“Nothing hypothetical about it. It’s impossible.”
“You’re sure?”
“You can’t poison just one person in a restaurant kitchen. Especially if it’s a busy place.” Like Perception. “Almost anything you’d put the poison in is made up in large batches ahead of time. The poison would have to be odorless, tasteless, and not interfere with the cooking process in any way, because even if you poisoned one piece of meat or fish being made à la minute, you’d have the expediter, the line chef, and maybe the executive chef poking at it and tasting it. If the poison’s in a salad, you can add whoever’s running cold prep to that list. And that’s all before it gets out of the kitchen. Once the plate hits the pass, there’s no way to be sure which server’s going to take it to the dining room, and there’re all kinds of ways it might get sidetracked on the way there. It could be sent to the wrong person, or dropped, or even sent back.”