by Sarah Zettel
“Erg-ah.” I replied. Fortunately, I rallied. “I just wanted to make sure all the samples will be ready for the tasting.”
“Paolo is filling them now. We will be at the Aldens’ at four p.m. Was there anything else?”
“No. Yes.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Marie, is everything all right there?”
Marie’s pause wasn’t just pregnant; it was nine months gone. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”
The sidewalk shifted underfoot. I had not heard Marie just give an evasive answer. It was not possible. Marie faced you head-on, kind of like a glacier when the ice age is coming.
“Shall I give you back to Chef Vamadev?” asked Marie.
“Yeah. Please.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Zoe, you on track for opening tonight?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”
There are times when all you can do is tell the truth. “Because you’re in way the hell early and you won’t tell me why.”
“I’m in way the hell early because I want to be sure everything’s on track for opening,” Zoe shot back. “If you think you need to come in and check up on us, you can do that. It’s your kitchen.”
I winced. I had that coming, and we both knew it. Either I trusted Zoe, or I didn’t. The big problem was, especially after Marie’s nonanswer and Reese’s and Hank’s high-speed evasions this morning, I wasn’t sure which it was. But I couldn’t possibly believe Zoe was pulling some kind of fast one on me, could I?
No. I couldn’t. Absolutely not. If only because if I started down that road, I’d drive myself out of what was left of my tiny little mind. And my tiny little mind had more than enough to keep it busy.
“I’m sure it’ll be great. But I’ll call back later for the update, all right?”
She said it was. Whether or not she meant that was between her and her conscience. We hung up, and I stuffed the phone into my purse and pulled out my notebook, stepping a little farther out of pedestrian traffic as I did. I flipped the pages open to tick off the list of suppliers I’d met with, underline the time for the cake tasting, and add a few questions about the morning-of buffet that needed answers.
I closed my book and stared at it. An outrageous thought began to slowly gel in my brain. It had the advantage of not being actively dangerous—probably. But if I got caught, there’d be a hue and cry, and I would not come out looking good. And word of what I had done would most certainly spread around, possibly to people who could make things actively dangerous for me.
I stuffed my notebook away, pulled my phone out again, and dialed Brendan.
“Charlotte. Is everything okay?” One of the things I loved about Brendan was his directness.
“I wish I knew.” I told him about the nonreaction to last night’s robbery. “Do you know if Henri and Jacques are actually in ICE custody?” I asked.
“Henri is, but he should be out tonight. Rafe Wallace is having a field day with this. Jacques, on the other hand, seems to have gotten away.”
That one is faster than he looks. Apparently Anatole wasn’t the only one to find this out. “And the gun?”
“Nothing. If the Renaults took it, either Henri ditched it or Jacques still has it.”
Because clumsy as it seemed, this could all still be a way to frame the Renaults, and break up the wedding.
I sucked on the inside of my cheek. “That might explain why the wedding’s going forward.”
“I’m not following.”
“Adrienne was awfully mad with Lloyd about the raid last night. She thought he staged it. If she thinks Lloyd stole the gun, she’d have no reason to call off the wedding, because she’d know it wasn’t the Renaults who were making the trouble.”
Brendan was silent for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that. You could be right.”
“It’d make for a nice change,” I muttered. “It’d also mean that none of this has anything to do with Oscar’s death, which would make things a lot simpler.”
“Wouldn’t it? Okay. I’ve got to make some more calls, and then I’ll take another run at my grandfather. We’ll figure this out, Charlotte.”
“Yeah,” I answered, shoving my cropped hair back, “I know.”
Brendan, of course, heard my hesitation. “Was there something else you were calling about?”
“Kind of.” Brendan waited. “I’m going to swing by Perception.”
“I thought you’d already done that.”
“Yeah, but this time I’m going to try to steal Oscar’s chef’s notebook.”
16
Sneaking into a restaurant currently holding several hundred employees plus several hundred guests may seem counterintuitive, if not utterly whacked. But, as I explained to Brendan, this was actually the perfect time. If I tried to get in on Monday when Perception would be closed, I might be seen, and remembered. Plus, by Monday, Perception might be an official crime scene. I had no doubt Detective O’Grady was currently breathing down the neck of some helpless lab tech, trying to hustle along the results on Oscar’s tests. I was much more confident in my ability to tiptoe past a collection of my colleagues when they all had better things to worry about than I was in my ability to pull the same stunt with any of Linus O’Grady’s hand-picked people.
Brendan, not surprisingly, also wanted to know why in the world I thought this bit of grand theft notebook was necessary. His skepticism on the point vanished when I reminded him that a chef’s notebook was part appointment book, part diary, and part PDA. If Oscar had been meeting with anybody new, or receiving any new income, or plotting any big changes, the odds were good he’d have made notes about it in his book, and maybe, just maybe with what we knew about the Aldens, we could work out who had made him all dead and everything. I will not say Brendan was happy with my idea, but he did concede the point that this would be useful for us to get our hands on, as long as I was careful. I promised, three or four times.
When Brendan finally let me hang up, I found a cab and had the driver drop me off three blocks from Perception so I could walk the rest of the way. But rather than stroll right past Perception’s front window, hands in my pockets, I stuck to the far side of the street, trying to look as if I were on my way somewhere else.
Perception was definitely open for business. There was a steady stream of customers crowding into the front door, and the terrace was brimming with people in their best Sunday-go-to-brunching clothes. Perception was a full-fledged “red and white” establishment. It served humans during the day and switched over to its nightblood-friendly specialties after dark. One day Nightlife will be able to do the same, I told myself. One day.
Perception’s alley was a full-fledged alley too—Dumpsters, smells you really didn’t want to be able to identify, bags of linen, empty milk crates, and restaurant employees standing around puffing cigarettes as fast as possible before they had to get back inside. I walked right on past the alley mouth without breaking stride, but I did get a look at the three guys standing around in their personal tobacco fog. All of them wore baseball caps—two Yankees and a Baltimore Orioles. When I got to the end of the block, I found one of the guys with a folding table full of knock-off sports paraphernalia that grace the majority of the corners in Midtown, bought myself a Yankees cap, and walked back. The alley was empty. Smoke break was over. I settled my new cap low on my forehead, grabbed a milk crate—because empty hands in a working kitchen invite suspicion—and walked in through Perception’s entirely unlocked back door.
Nancy Drew, eat your heart out.
I was used to restaurant kitchens and might actually be more at home in them than I am anywhere else. But my first look at Perception knocked me back, hard. For starters, it was big. This was not a kitchen; this was a previously unknown sixth borough. The fish station was the size of my entire hot line. Prep counters stretched out for blocks, but they still looked crowded with the white coats practically elbow to elbow as they chopped and rolled and portioned. Cooks stood on step stools to stir the massive vats of st
ock and mashed potatoes with paddles that could have been salvaged from a Roman galley. While I watched, three guys pushed in carts of fresh bread and rolls from a separate bakery tucked out of sight somewhere, and two women in matching pink bandannas came in from the opposite direction, carrying trays of cheesecakes high over their heads to get them through the sea of bodies. An open stairway led up to a sort of loft space lined by the executive offices. All five of them had windows so management, and Oscar when he was still around, could survey their domain. There were banks of ovens, mazes of blast chillers, and a solid wall of heat and human voices. The cooks were yelling, the apprentices were yelling, the chefs were yelling, the servers streaming in and out the doors were yelling. And I was about to expire from the internal collision of sheer envy and the desire to roll up my sleeves and dive right in. I told you, chefs are not normal.
This was not my real problem, though. My real problem was those offices up in the loft, with their big, shining windows. Two of them had the blue curtains closed. But on the third set of windows, those curtains were pulled wide open, and a paunchy guy was inside at his desk, with a thin woman leaning over his shoulder so she could see whatever was on the computer screen. I’d counted on being one white coat in the crowd. But the crowd was all down here and the place I needed to be was up there, and the odds were very good its door was locked.
Somewhere, Nancy Drew was having herself a real good laugh.
My other problem was that I was now doing the one thing I absolutely under no circumstances could be caught doing—standing around. A person standing still meant something, somewhere was not getting done. A person standing was a person you could give orders to, and that meant you might notice you had no idea who the hell the person was, and that the person’s particular white coat lacked the pretty blue piping and neat embroidery with the restaurant name that yours sported.
I shouldered my crate and skirted the wall, starting to perspire from heat and the sudden knowledge that maybe this had not been the best idea after all. About half a block ahead of me, I saw a stringy, graying man come round the corner, pushing a mop cart. Brushing past him and heading around that same corner, I found what I’d been hoping for—the storeroom for cleaning supplies. I ditched my empty crate, then grabbed up a towel to stuff into my pocket, as well as disposable gloves, a spray bottle, and a couple of trash bags. Restaurant kitchens generate an incredible amount of garbage. The cans are pretty much always too full, and somebody’s always going around emptying them out. One look at my uniform, and another at my trash bags, and I would be instantly identifiable as somebody with a necessary job to do, but low enough on the totem pole that I was surely somebody else’s problem.
I readjusted my new cap and headed out again.
Noise and heat to rival a subway platform in the August rush hour dragged me down. I kept trying to sneak glances up at the loft offices, and I kept having to pay way more attention to where I was going, ducking and dodging around the cooks, chefs, and runners. I spotted an overflowing can and emptied it out, because if I didn’t, somebody might notice. This meant I had to go out to the alley and toss the bag in the Dumpster and start the whole trek across what I was coming to think of as hell’s half acre over again.
“Behind!” bellowed somebody.
I ducked and twisted, but in the wrong direction. A chest slammed into my shoulder and my foot slipped on a wet patch, and I was down on my rear with a blizzard of shredded greenery descending around my head, along with a cloud of swearing, scattered applause, and a couple of whistles.
“I said behind!” A medium brown woman reared over me. “You know what behind means, you—” And she stopped, because we had both recognized each other.
“Charlotte? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Minnie?” I blinked up at her from my undignified and unsafe position in the kitchen’s traffic pattern. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here.” She yanked me to my feet and dragged us both over by the blast chiller. People were swearing and ducking around the fresh parsley, which was rapidly getting trodden into green slime.
“Since when do you work here?” I whispered, well, I said in a normal tone that counted as a whisper in there.
“Since yesterday. Half the staff took off when Simmons shuffled off the mortal coil. Charlotte…”
“Shhh!” I held up both hands. “Shhh, Minnie, please. I’m just…” There was no explanation short enough or good enough for what I was really doing there, so I skipped that part. “I need to get into Oscar’s office.”
“Jesus. Not you too.”
“What?”
“Somebody get that crap cleaned up!” hollered a voice out of the crush.
“Yes, Chef!” I hollered back. “What do you mean not me too?
“Half the effin’ city wants in there. Yesterday I saw Mario throwing out some little nerd-accountant type. They’re saying Oscar was keeping an extra set of books and this guy…”
“Crap clean up now!” hollered that same voice. “Perez! Get your ass back to your station! Also now!”
“Yes, Chef!” we chorused. I grabbed Minnie’s coat. “Help me out?”
Minnie gave me a hard look, then stuffed her side towel into my hand and pointed at the floor. “Crap clean up, now,” she said, and was gone.
I bit my lip, crossed my fingers, hustled back to the supply room for a mop cart, and started cleaning. The guys at the nearest prep counter glanced at me, and away again, getting their attention back on their knives where it belonged. I scooped and mopped and dried, and took the swearing of people trying to get past me. This was bad. It could be an hour, or more, before Minnie could get away from her station again, and there was nothing I could do about that. I glanced over my shoulder at the loft offices where the man and woman were now having an argument. How in the hell did I think I was going to pull this off?
“You with the mop!” Minnie’s voice rang over the kitchen roar. “Now!”
“Perez, what is your problem!” demanded another voice.
“No problem, Chef!”
I shoved my cart over to the spot at the end of the counter where Minnie was overseeing a cutting board loaded down with some truly gorgeous wild game chops. She’d also knocked her water bottle over onto the floor, and the puddle was spreading into the aisle. As I started in with the mop, Minnie’s elbow joggled me hard. We both swore, and something heavy dropped into my pocket. It jingled. Keys.
“You owe me big-time, Chef C.,” she breathed.
“On it, Cook M.” I emptied her trash can, ditched the mop back with the cleaning supplies, and headed up the stairs.
I didn’t waste time glancing around to see that no one was watching. That really would have looked suspicious. I just let myself into Oscar’s skybox of an office and closed the door behind me, making good and sure I snapped the lock shut. Thankfully, the curtains were already drawn, but that didn’t necessarily buy me any time. I could still hear the raised voices next door. That pair could come storming out at any second and notice my silhouette moving around in there. Probably Oscar had several notebooks; one current and a stack of old filled ones kept for reference. If I was lucky, I’d only actually need the most recent. Hopefully I could find it and get out of there, in something approaching a New York minute.
Unsurprisingly, Oscar Simmons’s office was a tribute to Oscar Simmons. The walls were covered with framed prints of the magazine covers graced by him in his whites, smiling, and artfully posed with plates of food or glasses of wine. Empty space between the prints was taken up by framed award certificates and gold medals. The bookshelves held his dozen volumes on the art of fine dining and how to translate it to the home. All of them, I happened to know, had been written by other people whose names would remain forever unknown. There was a six-top table to one side, for hosting meetings and working lunches. His desk was a marvel of space and cleanliness. You could have prepped for dinner rush on its gleaming surface, if you swapped out the pristine
blotter for a cutting board. The computer was state-of-the-art. The pen set might have actually been gold.
And he was still dead. I felt very strange standing there with so many copies of his face smiling at me.
So I decided not to stand anymore. I rounded the desk and started pulling out drawers, which, fortunately, were not locked. They held paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. Even the great Oscar Simmons couldn’t get away from it. The voices next door halted abruptly. A door opened. I ducked down and squeezed my eyes shut. A door closed. Then, there was nothing, and more nothing. I started breathing again, and as long as I was down there anyway, pulled open the very bottom drawer.
Bingo.
In this age of smartphones, PDAs, and tablet computers, a notebook can seem one step away from a clay tablet. But despite the computer industry’s best efforts, it’s still one of the most efficient ways to store information you’ll need to find again quickly. You never run out of charge, you can do text and graphics with the same simple instrument, and it’ll never show you the spinning beach ball of death.
Oscar Simmons might have existed in the restaurant equivalent of the stratosphere, but the notebooks piled in his drawer were as battered, stained, and well-thumbed as mine. If they were anything else like mine, they were filled with appointments, wish lists, memos and meeting minutes. They were also personal, if not private. I picked up the top book. This was where the work happened and the ideas blossomed. If I hadn’t felt like an intruder before, I did now. I gritted my teeth, glanced at the door, and flipped the book open to the last page.
Oscar’s handwriting was as terrible as I remembered it being. The book’s last page, dated back in January, had some sketchy possibilities on updating Perception’s appetizers, a reminder of a phone call from a new supplier, and a meeting with the sommelier; that was it.
It also wasn’t the last page, or at least, it hadn’t been. I frowned, running my finger down the stubble where the rest of the sheets had clearly and obviously been torn out.