“It wasn’t planned,” I shot back. “My folks met Edel on the parade route and invited her for a drink. I had no idea she’d be here. And how was I to know we’d see you?” I swallowed, feeling furious with Ava and disappointed in him. To be honest, I felt more than disappointed. I was angry with him, too. What had happened to the boss who’d go to the mats for his employees if that was needed? What happened to the man I thought would be my boyfriend? All of that, gone up in smoke like Edel’s restaurant.
“I went online and noticed that you’ve given me no more assignments,” I said. “It looks an awful lot like you’re rolling over and allowing us to get fired. It’s not like you,” I added. “At least have the courtesy to tell us the truth so we can look for other jobs. So we can look out for ourselves.”
Wally groaned. “I’m dancing as fast as I can. Right now I don’t have that much leverage. You need to do your part, too, try not to antagonize her every time you cross her path.” With a grim expression on his face, he started back to Ava’s table.
I wheeled around and returned to my family, my appetite evaporated. It was going to be impossible to pretend that everything was fine. I needed to get out.
Edel stood up. “I’m going to walk over to the restaurant and see if there’s any news. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll let me into my own place.” She grimaced and then reached to shake my mother’s hand. But my mother ignored the hand and hugged her instead. “Thanks for inviting me. Turns out I’m not much in the mood for a party,” Edel said, once she’d pulled away.
“I’ll walk over with Edel,” I told Mom and the rest of the gang. “I’ll catch you guys tomorrow.”
Then I marched out after her, glaring in the direction of Wally’s table. Whether he approved or not, I refused to have my actions dictated by Ava. Nor was I going to sit in this restaurant and pretend Ava wasn’t there, discussing my future with my boss. The anxiety generated by the whole scene was turning my neck into a concrete pillar. And my heart along with it.
14
Rage as clear and clean as grain alcohol poured through her, burning everything unnecessary away.
—Barbara O’Neal, The All You Can Dream Buffet
Edel and I wove through the throngs of holiday celebrants crowding the docks and walkways along the harbor. Drunken, naughty-worded versions of Christmas carols drifted out from the bars, and the lights on the boats shimmered on the water. As we approached the Bistro on the Bight, its windows black, Edel grew ghostly pale, her eyes looking even sadder than they had in Turtle Kraals. The darkness must have reminded her, if she needed reminding, how much business she was losing this week by not being allowed to open. She had a grim look on her face and a slump to her shoulders. The official notice was still taped to the front door.
“I’m going to look in back,” she said.
I trailed along after her, the smell of wet, charred wood getting stronger as we approached the rear patio.
Several lengths of crime-scene tape flapped from the blackened remains of Edel’s fence and storage shed. But a path of sorts had been cleared to the back door.
Edel pulled a ring of keys from her pocket. “I’m going in,” she said. “I need to see what’s what inside.”
“Wait until they give you a formal nod,” I warned her. “I’ve had too many run-ins with this police department.” I bit my lip—how did I say this delicately? Nothing came to mind. “They’re a little bit, well … Neanderthal in their approach to solving crimes. Or should I say thickheaded and clumsy?” Which wasn’t exactly fair or accurate. But I couldn’t think of another way to slow her down.
I laughed, but Edel shook her head and marched toward the back door. She paused to take a deep breath, then inserted a key into the lock and disappeared inside. I backed away into the alley’s shadows to keep an eye out for trouble.
Minutes later, I heard a loud argument between a man and a woman on the dock in front of the restaurant, followed by a big splash. Rubbernecking had become an instinct for me lately. I dashed down the alley. By the time I reached the water, a large man was scrambling up a ladder attached to the pier, sopping wet and laughing. The woman who had apparently shoved him was laughing, too. They staggered off in the direction of Duval Street, clutching each other and howling, their argument forgotten.
But then down Edel’s alley, a siren whooped. I hurried toward the noise. Two police cars had pulled into the alley leading to her restaurant, their blue lights flashing. I arrived just in time to see the cops tumble out of the car with their guns drawn.
“Get out of here,” one yelled at me, a short, stocky woman with short black hair and intense brown eyes. “Police! Get back!” She waved me away as they sidestepped toward the back door and plastered themselves flat to either side.
“This is the Key West Police,” she shouted, toeing the door open and pointing the gun inside. “Come out with your hands up.”
A third cruiser raced up the alley and a burly cop I did not recognize burst out of his car and barreled across the patio to join the others. Within moments Edel stumbled out of her restaurant, her hands on her head and her eyes wild. A fourth car surged up to the scene, this one unmarked. Lieutenant Torrence was driving and Detective Bransford rode shotgun.
Bransford leaped out of the car. “What’s going on here?”
“It’s only Edel Waugh. She owns the place,” I piped up from my corner in the shadows.
Bransford whirled around. “What the hell? What are you doing here?”
My knees felt wobbly and my heart rate soared. “This is a terrible mistake. She didn’t do anything wrong,” I began to explain. “She didn’t break in; she has a key. You have to understand that this is the busiest time of the year and this restaurant is her livelihood. She needed to find out what shape her kitchen was in. How much damage has been done with the beef and fish and all that, because it will affect her ability to open.”
“A man has died in a fire that was purposely set,” said Bransford, his eyes narrowing to slits. “We closed off access to the property because it’s a damn crime scene. And she wants to look over her ground beef?” He spat on the ground and spun away.
Edel was steered to the nearest cruiser and instructed to put her hands on the roof. The female officer patted her down. “Clear,” said the officer in a curt voice. Then she opened the back door of the cruiser and prodded Edel to take a seat.
“Are you ready to talk?” Bransford asked.
“I’ve been cooperating with everything so far.” Edel scowled, clenching her hands into fists. “Perhaps there’s a better question. Like, can’t you and your people solve a simple crime so the rest of us can return to work?” Edel stood up and crossed her arms over her chest, which didn’t do much to dispel the impression that it was one small woman against the big fierce Key West Police force.
“Where were you between noon and eight o’clock Monday afternoon?” Bransford asked.
“She was in the Latitudes bar on Sunset Key in the evening,” I pitched in. She needed someone, anyone, to stick up for her. “You can ask any member of my family. We all saw her there.”
Bransford turned around to stare. “I don’t recall asking you anything,” he said.
He pivoted back to Edel. “Does the name Juan Carlos Alonso mean anything to you?”
“I wish it didn’t,” Edel said, her face tightening and her lips quivering. “I’m certain you’re already aware that he’s my ex.”
I stared dumbly. “Your husband was killed in the fire?” I asked.
Edel refused to meet my eyes.
“Have you known all along that the victim was your husband?” I couldn’t believe I’d spent this much time with her, trying to support her, and she’d held back this crucial, critical, astonishing, disturbing piece of information.
“No, I did not,” she squawked.
Bransford repeated, “Where were you Monday afternoon?”
The air seemed to leak out of Edel like runny frosting from a pastry bag. She slumped into the
cruiser’s open door, collapsing onto the battered black upholstery, her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved as though she were weeping. But then she straightened up and looked him square in the face.
“I was here. Getting ready for the opening on Tuesday.”
“I’d like you to come down to the station for a chat.”
Edel said nothing, but angled her legs back into the cruiser. The lady cop slammed the door shut and got into the passenger’s side of the vehicle and they backed away. Bransford and Torrence headed to their car.
“This isn’t your business, Hayley,” Torrence said over his shoulder. “You need to stay out of it.”
So much for having a sympathetic friend with an inside track.
I started the long walk back to my scooter, which I’d left at Bayview Park before the parade, trying to puzzle out what could have happened yesterday. Could Edel really have torched her own restaurant and killed her ex? That seemed to be the working theory of the KWPD. The possibility made me feel physically ill—it was too much to keep to myself.
Several blocks from the tennis courts, I called my mother. “The cops just took Edel off.” I explained the rest of what had happened. “The thing is, she didn’t even put up a fight. She hardly looked surprised.” I tried to picture the expression on her face after Bransford mentioned her husband’s name. “More like she’d been waiting for them to figure this out and track her down.”
My mother was silent for a moment—not her natural state. “In truth, we really don’t know her all that well. We like her. And we love her food. But I suppose anything could have happened. Maybe she was way underwater financially and this was the only way she saw out.”
“Roasting her ex was going to solve her money problems?” I asked, my voice squeaking into soprano range with outrage.
“You’re right, honey. That sounds ridiculous. But people don’t always think clearly when they’re stressed. Eric or Joe could tell you that.” She covered her end of the phone and spoke to someone, then came back on the line. “We’re headed back to the Truman Annex for Christmas cookies and tea. Want to swing by?”
“No, thanks. I’ll see you soon.” I hung up, wishing I didn’t rely on her so much. And feeling dissatisfied with the conversation, but not sure what I’d wanted her reaction to be, either. It boiled down to this: As furious as I’d been with Chad Lutz after he’d humiliated me and thrown me out, would I have burned him up? No way. I might have felt like it, but I’d have never followed through. What kind of woman would? I hated to think too much about the gruesome details. Honestly, I couldn’t relate to that much rage. This was the kind of incident that had I seen the headline in the newspaper, I would have skipped right over it.
I finally reached my scooter and drove the rest of the way home to Tarpon Pier. The lights had been doused in Miss Gloria’s bedroom, though our strings of Martha Stewart’s best low-wattage white lights blinked cheerfully across our roofline.
I glanced up the finger, hoping for a nightcap and someone to share it with. Connie and Ray waved from the top deck of their houseboat. So I dropped off my helmet and backpack on our boat, grabbed a half bottle of white wine from our refrigerator, and went up the dock to join them.
“Mind if I come up for a few minutes?” I called.
“Come on. We haven’t seen you in ages.”
I bounded up the inside stairway and out to the deck. My friends were sprawled in low beach chairs, surrounded by the potted banana trees that Ray was trying to cultivate. They were drinking beer and holding hands—their own slice of paradise.
“You look kind of dragged out,” Connie said. “Rough day?”
I sank down onto a weathered teak bench and poured myself a glass of wine. “I’ve been spending some time with the chef-owner of that new restaurant that’s supposed to open on the bight.”
“The one hit by the fire,” Ray said, nodding. “I biked by the place. It could have been much worse than it was. Most of those buildings along the harbor are wood. Plus all those boats with gas tanks …”
“Were they able to identify the victim?” Connie asked.
I swallowed hard and grimaced. “Apparently it was Edel’s husband. Though actually, he was her ex. Judging by the way the cops were treating her tonight, I’d say they think she was responsible.”
Ray rubbed his fingers across his chin and took a swig of his pale ale. “She burned down her own restaurant to kill him?”
“It doesn’t make sense, does it? Unless she killed him and then attempted to hide the evidence.” I tried to put myself in her place, imagine how I’d feel if I’d killed a man I used to love. Maybe even still did. Horrified. Shocked. Sickened. Scared witless. And terrified of getting caught. “I suppose if you were desperate about what you’d done, setting a fire could seem like a solution. On the other hand, she’s also desperate about her restaurant succeeding—and the fire and the death are definitely not advancing that cause.”
“Desperate?” Connie asked.
I nodded. “And driven.”
Ray shifted taller in his low chair and dropped Connie’s hand. “This is not to excuse someone hurting anyone, or especially not murdering someone, but … Key West is a hard place to be as an artist. And I imagine that goes for chefs and restaurants, too.” He began to peel the label off his bottle, the expression on his face stony.
“The town appears so artsy and low-key and easygoing. And welcoming. Of course, the idea of getting away from an icy winter and plying your art in paradise is practically irresistible.” He tapped two fingers on his lips and frowned, looking over the deck railing to the headlights blurring by on North Roosevelt Boulevard, aka Route 1.
The only way in to paradise. And out, too—should your dreams get busted, I could imagine him thinking. And I knew exactly how scary that thought felt.
He glanced back at us. “But underneath the surface, the competition is incredible. The established artists are trying to beat back the newer artists and they’re all trying to hold their tiny bit of ground so the visiting muckety-mucks careening down from New York City don’t push them out of the spotlight.”
Connie took his hand again and squeezed. I sipped my wine and nodded sympathetically. I hadn’t heard a lot about Ray’s painting career lately. He’d made a big splash at the Gallery on Greene last spring, but no new shows since then. He hadn’t shared anything much when I’d asked how things were going, so I’d been afraid to push.
“Why are you involved with her?” Connie asked.
“She asked for my help.”
“Why you?”
I shrugged. That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? I finished my drink, said good night, and trotted back down the finger to my houseboat, feeling bone tired but not sleepy. Going to bed would be an exercise in futility. Instead I booted up my laptop and curled on the couch with Evinrude draped over my hip. I typed in the names of Edel and her ex in the Google search bar. Several headlines popped up—reviews of their New York City restaurants, largely glowing, and, farther down, a headline from last summer in the Page Six section of the New York Post.
JUAN CARLOS ALONSO PARTIES AT POP-UP RESTAURANT IN BROOKLYN.
The first paragraph read: Juan Carlos Alonso doesn’t appear to be pining for his partner and soon-to-be-ex-wife, Edel Waugh. He was photographed in the after-hours pop-up restaurant, Munchies, with singer/songwriter Hazel Hernandez. Hernandez is best known for hiking up her skirt and twerking à la Miley Cyrus during her appearance on the TV cooking reality show Topped Chef. She was eliminated from the chef competition after her performance. Alonso and Waugh have filed for divorce and are alleged to be in a bitter contest over ownership of their flagship restaurant.
All of which, considering the source, I needed to take with a grain of salt. I typed in both of their names again, but this time adding “divorce” to the search terms. I clicked on the next article, a month after the first, which proclaimed that Edel and Juan Carlos were in a bitter custody fight over their brand a
s well as their restaurants.
Should you doubt the worth of a chef’s brand, the author of the article wrote, consider the losses faced by Nigella Lawson or Martha Stewart or, particularly, Paula Deen after missteps in their personal affairs. When celebrity chefs cut themselves with the sharp knives of their own bad behavior, they bleed money from their tarnished brands, rather than blood from their fingers.
I wondered which one of them—Edel or Juan Carlos—had wanted the divorce. And how the split had affected their restaurant. And whether divorce law would have allowed Juan Carlos a percentage of a new restaurant if it had been started without him. Would it matter if Edel had moved to Key West? Would he still be able to claim a piece of her success?
One person I knew would have some insight. I had his phone number seared into my brain, like grill marks on a raw steak. Chad Lutz. He hadn’t acted entirely unfriendly when we’d run into each other at the Little White House earlier, though that may have been the effects of my mother and Sam and his reluctance to be rude in a public setting. I fidgeted with my phone. He was a night owl—a text at eleven p.m. would not have been unusual or unwelcome. At least not from someone he liked.
Finally, I caved in to my curiosity and texted him the question.
I had a minute of uncomfortable waiting before the phone buzzed back.
I’ll be at the Courthouse Deli at 9 am for coffee.
In Chad’s usual terse style, he’d not invited me to meet him. But what else could that mean?
15
You can’t microwave a career or a life.
—Cal Thomas
My alarm buzzed at 7:30 the next morning, an hour before I was due at We Be Fit for my personal training session with Leigh Pujado. Not my idea of a great way to start the morning, but Leigh had convinced me that lifting weights was the only way to counteract the meals I was consuming—bigger muscles meant more calories burned. If I planned to stay on in my position as food critic over the long haul, she’d added. A big if, as things stood now. I had time for a quick cup of coffee, a bowl of cereal, and a glance through the Key West Citizen. I scanned the front-page headlines and opened the paper, skimming over the usual whining in the Citizen’s Voice until my attention caught on the crime report.
Death With All the Trimmings: A Key West Food Critic Mystery Page 10