“Mom needs help with a luncheon she’s catering,” I said in a bright voice. “So this little break is the most perfect timing ever.” I didn’t mean it, but I wasn’t going to let Wally see how worried and sad this potential change made me.
11
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
—Truman Capote
I whisked down Southard and through the gates that marked the entrance to the Truman Annex, slowing enough to wave at the guards who lounged in the little gatehouse. Hanging a right on Emma Street, I buzzed over several blocks to the Truman Little White House, one of the island’s biggest historical attractions. The building is quaint and adorable, with white shingles and louvered slats covering the second story, and red, white, and blue buntings hanging from the first-story windows. When not in use for official business, the grounds are in high demand for weddings and other parties.
The rental company had already begun to set up tables and folding chairs on the lawn behind the white house. Tourists in bright clothing with buttons on their shirts that identified their cruise ships relaxed in white Adirondack chairs, filed in and out of the gift shop, and gawked at the party activity. Mom, wearing a crisp white blouse, black pants, and an apron, was talking with a tall man near the back gate that led to the Harbor Place condos, where I’d lived for six weeks when I first arrived on the island. Pushing away my misgivings, I veered over to get instructions.
“Did you know that seven U.S. presidents either used this building to do the business of the White House, or arranged for peace talks to take place here? Harry Truman, of course, spent many weeks on these grounds during his presidency,” said the man, whose voice sounded altogether too familiar. “These flags”—he gestured at a set of six flagpoles—“represent the nations who attended peace talks with Colin Powell in 2001. The countries whose flags are on either end, Armenia and Azuriastan, were the warring factions.”
Yep. Same sandy hair and broad shoulders. Same professorial tone. Same phony heartiness reserved for people he wished he didn’t have to waste time on. I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out that there was no country called “Azuriastan”—it was Azerbaijan.
“I could go on for hours about the history of this place,” the man added.
And, of course, he could have. Leave it to Mom to find my ex, Chad Lutz, aka Lutz the Putz. He loved knowing more than the person he was talking with—which I’d judged adorable in the early, rosy days of our short relationship. Later on, not so much. My heart banged and a sheen of sweat broke out on my upper lip. I mustered an enthusiastic smile so fake he could surely see through it. But he looked almost as uncomfortable as I felt.
I slipped my arm around Mom’s waist and squeezed.
She smooched me on the cheek. “You’ll never guess who I ran into!” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize him because he looks a little more substantial than I remembered.” Mom’s not so subtle way of saying he’d gained a spare tire. “Chad was just telling me about the history of the Little White House.”
“Nice,” I said, baring my teeth. I hadn’t seen him face-to-face since the day I’d rescued him from a would-be killer, shortly after he’d thrown me out of his penthouse. The reunion felt about as horrendous as I’d imagined—a dead romance full moon dragging in a tidal wash of insecurity and humiliation.
When I failed to produce any small talk, Mom continued in a chirpy voice. “He says business is booming these days.” Chad was one of the premier divorce lawyers on the island, known for his relentless and ruthless attacks on the opposition.
“You can always bet on relationships going sour,” I said. “If that’s the way you choose to live.” I grinned to soften the sarcasm, hoping to avoid a scolding from my mother later. She believed in bringing enemies to their knees with kindness, rather than making a frontal assault.
“Hayley is doing so well in her food critic job,” my mother said, words hushed now, as if sharing a precious secret with Chad. “And her social life puts those folks in the paparazzi gallery in the Key West Citizen to shame. I had to literally beg her to help me out with this party.”
“I should let you get to work, then,” Chad said, backing away. “Nice to see you both.” He wheeled around and headed for the parking garage where he stored both his Jeep Wrangler—his beach car—and his Jaguar sedan, used for official lawyerly transportation.
“Such a twit,” Mom said with a laugh as we watched him go. “Glad you scraped that guy off your shoes.”
“Umm, I think it was the other way around.”
“You would have gotten there, sweetie,” she said, and pulled me into a quick hug. She clapped her hands. “I am so glad you’re here. I don’t know why I thought I could pull this off in forty-eight hours by myself.”
We trotted over to the table where the bar was being set up. Mom’s boyfriend, Sam, also dressed in black and white, was arranging champagne flutes on the table.
I gave him a kiss on the cheek and rumpled his salt and pepper hair. “She’s got the whole family working.”
“I should have known when she said she had a little project going today that I wouldn’t be lounging around the dipping pool,” Sam said. “Your mother does not know how to relax.”
Mom hurried over, wiping her hands on her apron. “Maybe we should move the bar a little farther back to open up the circulation. I can pretty much guarantee our most popular drinks will be the Arnold Palmers and the champagne.” She winked at Sam. “Ladies who lunch like to pretend they’re not really drinking.” She turned to me. “Can you start unloading the coolers from the van?”
Within half an hour, white cloths covered the tables and Mom had arranged glass cylinders filled with limes and pine cones in their centers. We scattered dozens of tea lights and ropes of gold beads around them. The places were set with white china and silverware, and red-and-green-plaid napkins tied up with gold mesh ribbons. Sam and I had lugged the coolers full of chicken salad, green salad, and cupcakes to the serving tables on which we’d arrange the plates.
“Here comes the boss,” Mom said.
A white SUV roared up and parked on the sidewalk. Jennifer Cornell—a blond whirlwind—hopped out. A strong young woman with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail got out of the passenger’s side.
“I’ve brought reinforcements,” Jennifer told Mom. “This is Mary Pat Maloney. She fills in for me in the high season and emergencies. Luckily she has a few days off from her day job.”
I recognized her immediately as Edel’s irreverent line cook, the woman who’d made faces behind Edel’s back but worked as hard as anyone in the kitchen. Would she be willing to talk about Edel? Or why Glenn Fredericks was on Bransford’s mind? Something told me she’d have some interesting theories.
Mom fanned her face with her hand and hugged Mary Pat. “You’re a lifesaver, honey. I’d feel awful if I flubbed my first assignment.”
Jennifer’s gaze swept over the tables. “It looks lovely so far,” Jennifer assured my mother. “If everything is under control, I need to head back to the kitchen to work on tonight’s event.”
“You’re working tonight, too?” I asked.
“Nothing too fancy, just a Christmas-cookie nibble at Schooner Wharf after the parade,” she said. “Come by if you can.”
Mary Pat and I began to arrange the green salad and chicken salad on plates as the women attending the luncheon filtered in, dressed in flowing pantsuits or short dresses, with a few wide-brimmed hats and lots of chunky jewelry. Not much like the crowd I ran with.
“Any more news on the fire at the Bistro?” I asked Mary Pat, once we had all the salads served and had passed the baskets of piping-hot biscuits.
“We’re hoping to open the restaurant by the weekend,” she said. “All the fish we ordered has been sitting for too long, so it will have to be trashed and replaced. Edel’s apoplectic about the stone crab claws. The harvest is way down this year and prices have skyrocketed. She paid a bloody fortune for
what’s now essentially cat food. Any felines who frequent the dump will be in heaven.”
“Have you seen Edel?” From Mary Pat’s report, it didn’t sound like she’d heard about the death.
“I rode my scooter over this morning to check on things—she was there arguing with the fire marshal, and then the good-looking detective.” She paused to study me. “He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?” She wiggled her fingers—quotation marks around “friend.”
I felt my eyes go wide. By now it shouldn’t have surprised me how much people knew about everyone else’s business on this island. “I wouldn’t say we’re friends. But not exactly enemies, either. We’ve had a few dustups, that’s all. Were they able to identify the body in the fire?”
Mary Pat’s turn for wide eyes. “There was a body?”
I blew out some air and nodded. “If it’s confirmed that the fire was arson, the death could be a murder.”
“OMG, that’s horrible,” she said. “I’m surprised Edel wasn’t completely off her rocker. How in the world does she think we can open the restaurant under those circumstances?”
“She’s hoping it will all be wrapped up quickly,” I said, “though I’m not sure how exactly.”
Seeing Chad Lutz had gotten me thinking about divorces, nasty divorces in particular. How much bad blood could be generated when two people who thought they loved each other realized the love had run cold—that it had in fact frozen into icy hatred? “I hope you don’t mind if I ask: Have you met Edel’s ex?”
She looked at me as though I was about five steps behind a normal person’s thinking. “Of course I’ve met him. I worked with the two of them for years. But, honestly, I don’t think he’s been down here that much lately. At least not since their wedding—and that’s got to be ten years ago. He certainly wouldn’t torch her restaurant.”
“Wait. They were married in Key West?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “They spent their honeymoon here, too. I think that’s when they came up with the idea of the Bistro.”
More surprises. “They came up with the idea together? I thought it was Edel’s baby.”
Mary Pat shook her head. “They did everything together until all hell broke loose.”
“All hell?” I asked.
“The divorce, I mean,” said Mary Pat. “Last summer.”
“What about Glenn?” I asked. “What’s his role in the restaurant family? Edel was pretty hard on him the night I visited your kitchen.”
My mother signaled us from across the lawn and we began to clear the tables, scraping the leftovers into a gigantic trash bag and stacking the plates. A tiny white-haired woman in a white jacket and gold pants stood up, replaced her straw hat with a Santa hat, and addressed the lunching ladies. “Thank you so much for your support for our holiday fund-raiser. We’ve amassed two thousand dollars so far …”
“Edel’s a perfectionist,” Mary Pat whispered. “It’s not just Glenn—it’s anyone who doesn’t measure up to her standards.”
“Is her ex involved in the finances of the Bistro?” I asked.
Mary Pat stopped her work to stare at me, her cheeks pink from both exertion and the sun, which had come out from the morning clouds and glared down on us full strength. “I very much doubt that. But I’m not privy to the accounting side of things,” she said. “I work in the kitchen.”
“Sorry,” I murmured. “I know I sound nosy. I’m just concerned about what’s going wrong over there. And with the fire and the death, I’m afraid someone’s upped the ante.”
“Unless it was a homeless guy trying to keep warm,” she said. “Not that that’s not terrible, too. But just suppose he gets sloshed and crawls into Edel’s back yard to spend the night. Because where else is a guy with no money gonna sleep? But then he feels cold. He lights some trash on fire, and things get out of control and he’s overcome with fumes and doesn’t get out in time. Maybe he never even wakes up.”
Which all seemed quite logical, even if I didn’t quite believe it happened that way.
“Good point,” I said. “I’m always curious about how folks end up on this island and how long they’ve been here. I didn’t realize that Edel had her heart set on a Key West restaurant ten years ago.”
“We all start out with dreams,” Mary Pat said. “Some of them get trampled.” She shouldered a tray of my mother’s gorgeous raspberry red velvet cupcakes and marched off to deliver them to the ladies.
12
If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. If you are gonna be one, be one.
—Dana Herbert
When all the women had teetered away from the luncheon and the Little White House grounds were restored to their pristine condition, I took off on my scooter for Houseboat Row. Mary Pat had clammed up completely for the remainder of our shift, as if she could sense my intense curiosity about her crushed dreams. She wasn’t about to tell me anything more about them.
I had an hour before I was due to don my elf costume and show up at the Bayview Park public tennis courts where the holiday parade route began. I planned to spend some of that time Googling Edel’s husband and Mary Pat Maloney. But before investing too much time in an Internet sinkhole search, I checked the Key Zest Web calendar to see what Wally had laid out for the next few weeks. I preferred to get a little ahead on my assignments by planning my restaurant meals and drafting some of their history before I visited. Other than the Latitudes review, which I’d already submitted for editing, and the feature on Edel’s restaurant, which had been postponed indefinitely, there was nothing listed. For me, anyway.
Wally was assigned to write a piece on finding a great Christmas dinner in Key West if you weren’t cooking, as well as a story on art openings during the holiday season. Ava was doing a roundup of musical events in the month of December. Ava? Writing? Since when did she do anything for Key Zest aside from boss the rest of us around? Even Danielle was writing a piece on last-minute gift suggestions. Possibly the busiest time in our calendar across the whole year and I had zero assignments. Zilch, nothing, nada.
Pushing back a cloud of foreboding, I went to the deck to visit with Miss Gloria. Our home rocked gently in the wake of a large motorboat and a snatch of “The Holly and the Ivy” drifted from the boat’s radio. At home in New Jersey, at this time of day, it would have been dark already—and freezing. Miss G was stretched out on a chaise longue, a cat tucked under each arm, a pink fuzzy afghan over her legs. Wisps of white hair stuck out from the green-and-red elf hat on her head. From the next boat over, our four-legged, gray-furred neighbor yapped at me, but without much energy. Miss G put the newspaper down and grinned.
“Heaven, isn’t it? Even Schnootie is relaxing.”
“Heaven,” I agreed as I sank into the chair next to her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look glum.”
“I suppose I am.” Miss Gloria hated it when I treated her like a fragile old lady and held things back that might upset her. On the other hand, she wasn’t young. And, besides, whatever I told her would make its way back to my mother sooner or later. Not that she intended to tell secrets, but she sometimes forgot that’s what they were.
I settled for this: “I’m worried about work. Worried about getting fired. Worried about the magazine getting bought out. Worried that Wally’s been too distracted by his mother’s illness to stay on top of everything. And worried about him, most of all—he seems tired and unhappy.”
Miss Gloria’s forehead wrinkled right up to her elf hat and she remained quiet for a minute. “Wally’s a smart man. But don’t underestimate the effects of cancer. Everything about it is hard—the diagnosis is terrifying, the treatments are arduous, and the process strains even the closest relationships. Not to mention destroying the feeling of invincibility most of us carry around before this nasty disease sweeps in. My sweet husband battled cancer for almost ten years until it finally got the best of him. I’m sure there were things that slipped through the cracks wh
ile our attention was on his sickness.”
Which made me feel terrible—sad for what she’d endured and sad for the loss of her husband. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I hate cancer!”
“Me, too. But they weren’t all bad times,” she said. Evinrude butted her hand and she stroked him until he purred. “It brought us closer together in some ways.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is he letting you in?”
“Excuse me?”
“Wally. Is he sharing his feelings?”
I shook my head. “Not really. But we haven’t had any time alone to speak of.”
“Everyone reacts differently,” she said. “I saw that during my husband’s treatments. Some people—men especially—don’t want to talk about any of it. But holding it in can make the process so isolating.” Now she stroked Sparky’s head with one hand, and Evinrude’s with the other. “Just make sure you offer him the opportunity.”
“Thank you. You’re so smart,” I said, coming over to kiss her forehead, and then straightening the elf hat, which had slipped to a rakish angle, almost covering one of her eyes. “You look like you’re ready for the parade.”
She patted her hat and grinned. “Your mother and Sam are picking me up in a little while and we’ll watch it from the vacant lot in front of Bare Assets.” We both giggled, because the idea of watching a Christmas parade from the vantage point of a strip-club parking lot seemed so nutty.
I went back inside to my cabin to dress for the float. The costume fit a little more snugly than I’d expected, which should not have been a surprise, given than Danielle had done the ordering. With her deep experience on the bench as a bridesmaid, she’d assured me that one should always order a size down or risk an unflattering, baggy fit. I squeezed into the red-and-green tights, added an inch to the skirt’s waistband with the judicious use of a giant safety pin, and Velcroed the pointy, felt elf shoes over my red sneakers. Then I pulled on the hat—similar to the one Miss Gloria was wearing, only taller and with more bells—and jingled out to the deck. Schnootie began to bark furiously and flung herself to the end of her leash. She choked and sputtered and started to bark again.
Death With All the Trimmings: A Key West Food Critic Mystery Page 8