A Killer Kebab

by Susannah Hardy

“Ready to go home?” Kim put her hand on the shifter.

  “May as well,” I said. “Do you mind driving me around back? I just want to double-check that Tim locked the door after he was finished.”

  Kim drove to the end of the block, then up Vincent Street. “Scene of the crime,” she said without humor. We were nearing the building that housed MacNamara and MacNamara. The sign over the door, which hung on an old-fashioned wrought iron rod perpendicular to the exterior of the building, swung violently in the wind. A light was on in the office. I checked my watch. It was nearly eight o’clock at night—way past business hours. Now that he was in charge, had Junior developed a work ethic?

  Just as we passed the building, the door opened and a figure came out onto the street. The cut of the coat was definitely feminine. Whoever it was had her hat pulled way down and her scarf pulled way up. She stood at the curb, apparently intending to cross the street. Kim pulled to a stop to let the woman cross in front of us. The headlights illuminated her, but it was impossible to make an identification, bundled up as she was.

  Kim spoke first. “A bit late for a legal appointment, especially with Jim MacNamara not even in the ground yet. I wonder who that is?”

  The woman got into a light-colored compact car parked a few yards in front of us. The lights blazed up, cutting through the November darkness.

  “It’s not Lydia,” I said. “That woman is too tall.” She was about the same height as Jennifer Murdoch, though. Had Jennifer come back to harangue Ben about the videocamera?

  Kim started forward again. She drove as slowly as she could past the parked car. I looked into the windows but they were opaque, still defrosting. I didn’t recognize the vehicle.

  “Do you have to get home right away?” I said. “Let’s drive around the block and see if we can figure out where she goes.”

  “Ooh, are we on a stakeout? Count me in,” she said gleefully.

  “I honestly don’t know. But I don’t trust Junior.”

  Kim drove up Vincent Street to the next intersection, made a right, then increased her speed and made another right back onto Theresa. She pulled back onto Vincent. The taillights of the vehicle were visible up ahead. I glanced at the law office as we passed for the second time. The lights were now off. Ben must have parked around back because there was no other vehicle on the street.

  We followed the car at a distance, which wasn’t difficult since the streets were empty. A few minutes later, the car pulled in at the River Rock Resort.

  Kim parked and turned to me. “Now what?”

  “Beats me.” Sheldon Todd was staying there, so I supposed I could follow the mystery woman in on the pretext of my needing to speak to him. But it was late enough that Angela, or whoever she had at the front desk, would think it odd, my showing up now. And what would I say if I ran into the woman? “Excuse me, but who are you and why were you meeting with Junior MacNamara after hours?” I didn’t have that kind of moxie.

  We stared up at the shabby façade of the River Rock. There were half a dozen cars in the lot. The lobby was lit, but there were only a couple of upstairs windows illuminated. We watched, but another window didn’t light. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything. The woman might not have gone directly to her room, or she might just be checking in, which would take longer. Had Jennifer and Steve Murdoch had another fight? That would explain her checking into the River Rock. If it was her.

  “You may as well take me home,” I said. “We aren’t going to find out anything else tonight, and you’ll want to get home to Pete.”

  Kim dropped me at the back door of the Bonaparte House, then waited while I went inside before driving off. I locked up, then went straight to bed, too tired to even be creeped out about sleeping here, where a murder had occurred one floor down. It had been one heck of a long day.

  SIXTEEN

  I slept later than usual the next morning and was still in my slippers and fleece pajamas and drinking my first cup of coffee in the restaurant kitchen when a knock sounded at the back door. It was Marielle, dropping off the keys to the Casa di Pizza.

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “Tempting, but I need to get to the hospital. I really appreciate this.” Her expression was apologetic, as though she wasn’t used to asking for help. Which was something I understood.

  She handed me the keys and left.

  Sufficiently caffeinated, I reviewed my mental to-do list for the day. I had a number of phone calls to make, which I would do before I went to the Casa. I started out by texting my daughter, asking her for a status on her flight information.

  And then I texted Jack. I miss you. He probably couldn’t respond—he hadn’t been able to call me last night—but it made me feel better to let him know I was thinking about him.

  Next, I dialed Dolly. “How are you feeling?” I asked when she picked up. “Do you need anything?”

  “Hey,” she rasped, then set off in a short fit of coughing, which sounded less intense than yesterday. When she caught her breath, she said, “Better. And no. I think the prescription Doc Phelps gave me is working.” There were shades of her usual upbeat self in her words.

  “Well, don’t overdo, okay? You want me to bring you dinner?”

  “We’re all set here. Harold and Brandy are taking good care of me. I’ll be up and around to cook your Thanksgiving.”

  Whether there would be a Thanksgiving dinner remained to be seen. My restrooms were all torn up, my cook was going to need a clean bill of health before I could let her into my kitchen, and I hadn’t even thought about the menu, let alone doing any local advertising. Oh, and a murder had happened here. That might bring people in, or it might keep them away.

  “Any news from Russ?”

  She gave a dry snort, but managed to keep herself from breaking into another fit of coughing. “You mean, from the slammer? Brandy went to see him, but he wouldn’t talk to his own sister. Just asked about his dogs.”

  “Do you want me to, uh, ask around? See if I can find out anything?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic about that offer since, like his mother, I thought it wouldn’t hurt Russ to cool his heels in jail for a while, whether he was guilty of murder or not. He’d been guilty of plenty of other things in the past that he hadn’t been prosecuted for. Still, if he was innocent—and that was a big if—I’d get involved for Dolly, if she wanted me to.

  Fortunately, she didn’t, because she simply said, “Nope.”

  We said our good-byes and disconnected.

  Next I sent a text to Liza. Normally she’d be up by now and I would have called, but I knew she was under the weather too, maybe in the early stages of whatever Melanie and Caitlyn had, so I didn’t want to disturb her if she was sleeping in. I wondered what, if anything, Dr. Phelps had diagnosed. But if it had been anything serious, Liza, or somebody on her skeleton staff, would have called.

  My eyes fell on the pile of Gladys’s recipes still on the prep counter. Beginning to read through them would be a good project for this afternoon. I drained my coffee, rinsed out the cup, and went upstairs to get dressed.

  As I put on my jeans, I realized there was something in the pocket. I pulled out a folded piece of paper—the photocopy of Franco’s Thousand Island dressing recipe, the one he thought was an original. I opened it up, set it on the bed, and wiped my hand across the surface to flatten it.

  Huh? I read through again. The recipe was labeled “Sophia’s Sauce.” I read through the ingredients, then thought back to the dressing I’d made yesterday from it. I had followed the recipe—this recipe, at least—exactly. But my dressing didn’t taste like the one Franco had served me and Brenda at the Casa, what seemed like weeks ago but was really only a few days. Franco’s dressing had contained Worcestershire sauce. The recipe I was holding in my hand did not.

  And what else had Franco said? Something about . . . grammar? Punctuation? Sophias Sauce, he’
d said. No apostrophe.

  Well, the title of this recipe contained an apostrophe.

  And this was clearly not Franco’s recipe, the one he’d said he planned to post on his restaurant’s website and send to the local newspaper, the Bay Blurb.

  I hadn’t asked for the recipe. He’d offered, and he was planning to go public with it. So why would he send his server over with a fake? It made no sense.

  Unless it wasn’t Franco who’d sent it.

  I thought back to that server. I’d never seen her before. During the busy season, that wouldn’t be unusual. The restaurants and bars and other businesses in town were heavily staffed by college students who needed summer jobs. But by this time of year, when almost everything was shut down or running on minimum power, it was unusual to have a nonlocal on staff.

  Had she altered the document? But why?

  I sat down on the bed, shivering. I realized I was still in just a T-shirt so I pulled my cardigan over my arms, grateful for the immediate warmth.

  What was it with all this document altering anyway? First the Bloodworth Trust documents, and now this recipe. If there was a connection, it escaped me.

  Unless it was Jim MacNamara. But he was already dead when that waitress dropped off the recipe. And Franco had said he used a Watertown lawyer, not Jim. So any similarities had to be a coincidence.

  Another shiver ran through me, despite my warm sweater.

  Other people had an interest in Thousand Island dressing, beyond making a choice as to what they would put on their salads. There was that guy a couple towns over who claimed he’d found the original recipe in a safe.

  And there was Angela Wainwright at the River Rock.

  Franco had been assaulted in his own restaurant. What if the reason hadn’t been money? What if someone had been looking for his recipe?

  I pulled out my cell phone. Suddenly, the prospect of cleaning up at the Casa di Pizza alone didn’t seem all that appealing. I could call the BBPD, get one of the deputies, like Tim Arquette, to come over while I worked. But according to Tim, they thought it had simply been someone looking for money, someone who was long gone.

  Lieutenant Hawthorne from the State Police? No. Just No.

  Brenda had said she was going to the boat show today. I looked out the window. The sky was dark. Gray. Ominous. That storm we’d been promised was coming in today. I dialed Brenda anyway.

  “You home?” I said.

  “Yeah. I decided not to go to Syracuse. Looks like I could get there, but it’s the getting back I’m worried about. What’s up?”

  “Meet me at the Casa in twenty minutes?”

  She agreed.

  * * *

  Brenda was already there when I arrived. The air was so damp and heavy, I felt like I’d trekked miles, though it was only a block and a half. I unlocked the door and we went inside.

  “So why are we here?” Brenda asked. “Place is a mess.”

  “I told Franco’s daughter I’d come in and straighten up.” I began to right chairs and reposition tables and Brenda joined in.

  “And in case whoever did this comes back, I’m expendable?” She gave a good-natured laugh.

  “More like, I’m a wimp and I need moral support.” Brenda was also tough—she needed to be in her line of work, prowling the streets of Bonaparte Bay at night during the tourist season—and I would not have been surprised if she’d been packing. Maybe not a gun, but something.

  “You’re no wimp. But I’m glad you called.” She righted the salt and pepper shakers and brushed the spilled spices off onto the floor.

  I felt a little surge of pride. She didn’t think I was a wimp! Even if I wasn’t quite sure I believed it, it was nice to hear.

  “The refrigerators need to be emptied. You want to help with that, or keep going out here?”

  “Out here,” she said. “And I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  Back in the kitchen, I opened the extra-large refrigerator door. Franco didn’t have a big walk-in like we had back at the Bonaparte House. I found what I expected: dairy products, including a half-dozen giant blocks of mozzarella shrink-wrapped in heavy plastic from the factory near Ogdensburg, a few towns downriver. I checked the expiration dates. Other than one that was opened, which I set aside, these would be fine for a couple of weeks and I replaced them on their shelf. Several large tubs of red sauce, whose handwritten labels indicated they’d been made a couple of days ago. They’d still be good today, but I wondered if he’d want me to donate or freeze them. Deciding to err on the side of caution, I made room on the freezer side of the unit and put them in. When he did reopen, the sauce would be one less thing he’d have to worry about.

  My mind wandered as I got into the rhythm of the work: pull, check expiration, sort into freezer, fridge, throw away, or donate to the First Methodist Food Pantry.

  In the background, I could hear Brenda moving things around, but it barely registered. Suppose someone did want Franco’s recipe. What could he or she do with it? My understanding was that a recipe itself couldn’t be copyrighted or patented, which I’d found out when Dolly had once asked me about protecting her special pie crust recipe. But it could be trademarked, like Toll House® chocolate chip cookies.

  Could someone be trying to trademark Thousand Island dressing? That would explain why someone would give me a fake, and why my car and this restaurant had been ransacked. Maybe someone was looking for all the copies of the original. But that seemed naïve on the part of whoever was behind this. Who was to say Franco hadn’t already sent a real copy to the Bay Blurb or to his Aunt Tillie in Kokomo?

  Still, the bigger question was why. Thousand Island dressing recipes were a dime a dozen. There were bottles of the pink, lumpy stuff on every supermarket shelf in America, manufactured by several different companies. Nobody really knew which recipe was the first one, though I thought Franco had a pretty good case for his. How valuable could it be? My guess was not very. There was an awful lot of competition out there.

  The sound of Brenda’s voice brought me out of my thoughts. I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and headed for the front of the restaurant.

  A woman was there, talking to Brenda, who had her arms folded over her chest. Brenda cut her eyes to me.

  “Can I help you?” I said to the woman, suddenly realizing I knew who this was. “You’re the waitress, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I came in for my shift last night, but the police sent me home without telling me anything. Franco’s not answering his phone, and I saw the ‘Closed’ sign out front. What’s going on?”

  No sense trying to be discreet. News of the attack would be all over the Bay by now. I was only surprised she hadn’t already heard about it. But then, she didn’t appear to be a local.

  “Franco was attacked yesterday. He’ll be all right in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, he’s closing the restaurant until he’s well enough to come back.”

  Her lips, glossy as though she’d just applied makeup, turned down. “Great. And I’ve got a car payment due.” She must have recollected herself, thought about how that sounded, because she added quickly. “I mean, I’m sorry about Franco. Two weeks? I guess I can pick up a shift or two somewhere else.”

  Even though she’d been insensitive, I couldn’t really blame her. Jobs were precious in the North Country.

  I stuck out my hand. “I’m Georgie Nikolopatos. From the Bonaparte House. And this is Brenda Jones. We’re here helping Franco temporarily close up.”

  “Piper. Piper Preston.” She gave my hand a tentative shake, then dropped it.

  “You brought me an envelope the other day. Thanks.” I watched her closely. Her face was expressionless.

  “You’re welcome. I, uh, gotta go. If you see Franco, tell him I hope he feels better.” She turned to leave.

  “Say, Piper,” I called to her back. “Who gave you
that envelope to give to me? Franco? There was no name or note inside.”

  She stopped, then faced me. “I just found it on the counter with a sticky note addressed to me, telling me to deliver it to you. I assumed it was from Franco, but we didn’t talk about it.” Piper left.

  The woman was either lying, or somebody had used her. For what purpose was anybody’s guess.

  SEVENTEEN

  I bagged up the items to be donated and made a list for Franco for tax purposes, which I left in a drawer near the point of sale machine, then realized I’d need to go get my car to deliver everything to the food pantry. So the bags went back into the refrigerator for now. I made a run to the Dumpster out back with anything too close to its sell-by date to risk giving to the church. By the time I completed these tasks, Brenda had finished straightening up the front of the house and was waiting for me.

  “We done?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the place looks good. I’ll lock up and come back later to get the food. Thanks.”

  “Call me if you need me again,” Brenda said. She left through the back door.

  I locked up and was right behind her.

  Within a half hour, I’d retrieved my car, picked up the food, and delivered it. Before I left the church parking lot, my cell phone rang. I put the car into Park again and answered.

  “Georgie,” Liza said. “I wanted to give you an update.” Her voice was weak, breathy as though each word cost her. My worry meter ticked up. My friend and cousin was getting sicker.

  “Did Dr. Phelps make it over there yesterday? What’s wrong with you all?” A little knot formed in my stomach in sympathy.

  Liza drew a ragged breath. “He did. Thinks it’s some kind of food poisoning. He took . . . samples for testing.”

  Food poisoning. Two words that struck terror into the heart of any restauranteur. And I had no desire—or need—to know what kind of samples had been taken. “But you developed your symptoms after Melanie and Caitlyn. Do you know what caused it?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But we’re all living on canned chicken broth and ginger ale now. I’ve sent the staff and the last couple other guests home.”