“I’m worried about Nathan. He’s been working nights and he won’t share what it’s about. I know I’m signing on for more of this in the future, but it’s hard to strike a balance. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway. But every day I read about police officers in the news—and it’s rarely good.”
“That is hard,” he said. “There has to be a lot of trust.”
“But that’s not what I needed to talk to you about, though thanks for asking.”
I described what had happened on the food tour and how Martha Hubbard was so worried about someone stalking her. Or sabotaging her, or something. Then I told him about meeting with Audrey’s widower. “He said the strangest thing—he wished his wife had been murdered rather than any of the other possibilities that might explain her death. Does that seem odd?”
“That’s one thing I’ve never heard, and I’ve learned to expect anything and everything from a person who’s grieving,” said Eric. “Tell me more about him.”
So I described what he’d told me about their difficult marriage and her history of depression and possibly infidelity and how the darkness had suddenly seemed to lift from her psyche and she’d insisted she come along with him to Key West. And how it was like the early days of their marriage and then suddenly she was gone and he was left completely blindsided. And how completely different Audrey’s sister’s vision of Marcel and their marriage had sounded.
“She hated Marcel and blamed him for how badly Audrey’s life turned out.”
“If Audrey hadn’t died right there at the table,” Eric said, after mulling this description over, “I might have said that she could have been experiencing the euphoria a depressed person sometimes feels once they’ve decided to take their life.”
“I don’t see how that could’ve happened—how she could have killed herself right in front of everyone else and no one saw her do it?”
“She probably didn’t,” he said. “Unless she had something lethal and quick acting on her person. If everyone was talking and laughing and drinking beer and so on, would they have necessarily noticed someone swallowing a pill?” He paused and hollered for Barkley, who had begun to hump his brother on a nearby picnic table while the other dogs looked on. “But that’s kind of a wacky theory. And probably the medical professionals would have picked something like that up. What about prescription drugs? Do you know of anything she might have been taking?”
“I don’t. Both Marcel and Audrey’s sister made it sound as if she’d tried every treatment out there.”
And then a light dawned on his face and he asked me to describe what we’d eaten.
So I scrolled through my memory, listing the pie, the smoked fish dip, the seafood, the cheese, the beer.
“All the things,” he said slowly, “that interact very badly with an MAO inhibitor.”
“And in plain language, that means?”
“It’s an antidepressant. Not a new one. And it’s not that commonly prescribed because of the strict dietary limitations that must be carefully followed while taking it. People don’t like being told what they can and can’t eat. Also, if a patient is bipolar, the MAO inhibitor should only be given in combination with a mood stabilizer like lithium, in order to reduce the risk of inducing mania. But lithium sometimes makes people feel logy and they gain weight and feel tired, so it’s not unusual for patients to quit taking it. Did she seem like she was getting a little manic?”
“Hard to say, not knowing her baseline. Though she seemed quite happy overall. And the day was perfect. And she wanted to visit every tourist attraction on the island in the next day and a half. And she was very wound up about where they should eat dinner. Which I know is important, but still …”
We both laughed and watched Chester and Ziggy run laps around the perimeter fence of the park in hot pursuit of the mini Aussies. “What happens if you eat the forbidden foods?”
“The drug works by blocking the breakdown of tyramine, and that can help relieve depression. But if you eat foods high in that compound, like strong cheeses or smoked fish or beer—especially tap or home brew—the tyramine can build up. And that can cause severe headache, spikes in blood pressure, and in the worst cases hemorrhagic stroke.”
“And that’s exactly what her husband said was the preliminary diagnosis.”
“Sounds like it’s worth reporting this to Nathan so the police can follow up. I have to get to work,” said Eric, glancing at his watch. “Would Ziggy like a drink of water before we go?”
“Whatever your guys are doing, he’ll want to do,” I said, watching Nathan’s wiry little black dog trot behind Eric’s Chester and Barkley. The dog wearing a purple dress waded into the large pan under the faucet, and the other three slopped big gulps of water around her legs.
“On another subject, there was a big brouhaha at the strip club last night. And that got me thinking—what do you think would possess a woman to take a job in a place like that? And what else goes on in there, anyway?”
“Our favorite bartender from a restaurant near the airport quit to take a job at the Buoys’ Club. I’m sure the money was good—imagine someone without a whole lot of education suddenly making three to five hundred a night. But still, it made me sad.”
“Sad?”
“Sad that she felt she had to work there. It’s soul crushing. Do you know that they label the dancers with numbers instead of their names? The numbers correspond to nautical location points. I don’t know how a woman can go in there every night and come out emotionally OK.” We hugged and he held me at arm’s length. “Try to think happy thoughts the rest of this week, OK? I’ve heard there’s a very special wedding coming up.”
I clipped Ziggy’s leash on and headed back to Nathan’s apartment. Once inside, I rustled around in the papers stacked by his phone to find a pad so I could leave a note. Sticking out from underneath his Key West Police Department mug filled with pens and pencils and a screwdriver was a brochure from Analise’s food tour. I slid it out. Isle Cook Key West and Garbo’s Grill were circled in blue ink. The other stops had black check marks beside their names. What the heck?
Underneath that was a copy of Menu magazine, a free insert published quarterly and distributed in the Citizen. It might have been considered a competitor to my beat at Key Zest, though it did not provide reviews or articles, only menus and ads. Was he using this to order takeout? I doubted it, as he was a creature of habit and rarely branched away from his favorites, unless dragged by me. I flipped through the pages and noticed several had been dog-eared: Martin’s, the Perry Hotel, Santiago’s Bodega, Michael’s. That last name made me smile, as we’d had our first attempt at a date there. He’d been sidelined by a case and never showed up. Some things hadn’t changed much since then.
I pulled his notepad out and scribbled down the information about the side effects of an MAO inhibitor, followed by Miss you and a series of x’s and o’s.
Chapter Fifteen
Something has gone grotesquely wrong when chefs brag that the chickens they buy lived happy, stress-free lives, but can’t promise us that the women they employ aren’t being assaulted in the storage room.
—Pete Wells, “Scandals Keep Breaking, but Restaurateurs Have Yet to Own Up,” The New York Times, January 2, 2018
After leaving Nathan’s apartment, I drove downtown and parked behind Preferred Properties to go to the office. Since I hadn’t received any feedback about whether my piece on the food tour would run, I thought maybe it would be better to hash this out in person. And besides, I needed some direction on what articles Wally and Palamina wanted me to work on for the season leading up to Christmas. I’d been so busy with plans for the wedding, there hadn’t been much space in my brain for thinking ahead. Not that I’d honestly get a word written this weekend, but I could make some notes and pretend it might happen.
Danielle was sitting at her desk in the hallway with a plate of fruit in front of her. Surely these weren’t the exact same grapes and chunks of pineapple,
but the fruit looked droopy and forlorn and so did my friend.
“Oh my gosh, I told you I’d bring cookies this week. It’s been so crazy I completely forgot.” I bent over to hug her.
She shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about it. My mother and her sister are going all out for Thanksgiving, so one tiny week of dieting won’t hurt me a bit.”
“Who else will be at your family dinner?” I asked.
Her fair skin flushed pink. “I’ve invited my guy to come and meet the family.”
I clapped my hands with excitement. “That’s a big step. They don’t mind you dating a cop?”
“We’ll see,” she said, grinning.
“Bring him to the wedding,” I said. “We’d love to meet him, too. Unless you think that would scare him off.” Then another thought popped into my head. “Unless Nathan is his boss and that would be too weird.”
“But I didn’t RSVP that I was bringing a date,” she said. “That messes up your count for the caterers and all.”
I laughed. “You know my family; they’ll make sure there’s double the food we need. And alcohol, too. Then my mom will end up begging the guests to take leftovers home. She’s neither Italian nor Jewish, but she’s generous like them when it comes to food.”
“I’ll ask him,” she said, blushing again. “He can always say no. Speaking of no, you missed Wally by fifteen minutes. He’s heading up to the mainland to share the holiday with his brother. Is he not coming to the wedding?”
“He sent his regrets.” I couldn’t be sure whether he was really busy or just plain didn’t want to come. Either way was fine. I would hate for someone to feel uncomfortable at my celebration. I tipped my head in the direction of Palamina’s office.
“Is she in? I wanted to do a little brainstorming before I turn off my mind for the weekend.”
“She’s there, but I’ve barely heard a word out of her. She’s very glum,” Danielle whispered. “Even more than normal.”
Palamina could wax hot and cold, and she definitely tried to keep clear boundaries between her and us staff. “Do you know why she’s upset?”
“You can be sure she wouldn’t confide in me,” Danielle said.
“Is she headed to New York today? I would never travel on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—it’s the worst,” I said. I had done it once to fly back up to my mother’s place in New Jersey. A freak snowstorm had brought travel in the entire southern half of the East Coast to a screeching halt. And that had meant I’d spent ten extra hours in the Atlanta airport with a lot of other cranky travelers. I’d arrived in the early-morning hours of Thanksgiving and gone directly to bed.
I tapped on my bosses’ door and went inside when invited. Palamina was sitting at the desk she shared with Wally, squinting at her computer screen. Her face looked even more pale and gaunt than usual. “Have a seat,” she said, waving me to the folding chair beside her. “I didn’t expect to see you today. Or any day this week, to tell the truth. Aren’t you getting married?”
I tried not to get ticked instantly, without much success. The stress of the week had torn my politeness filters right off. “So what, you were expecting bridezilla, bridal basket case, Queen Bride or something? All me, me, me—”
“Cut!” she said, finally smiling. “That wasn’t fair on my part. My only exposure to brides was my sister—and she tortured us for a full year. The last week before the wedding was the worst—she insisted that every moment revolve around her. We were all screaming banshees by the end, and then she ended up divorced a year later. So I’m not used to seeing a normal bride—the kind who would even come to work two days before the big event.” She grinned and I felt glad that I’d decided to stop in. “I’ll start again. Good morning, Hayley. How’s it going? What’s up?”
“I’m plenty nutty this week,” I admitted, astonished at how quickly her apology had punctured a hole in my ballooning outrage. “Maybe more than I expected. But I’m finding that channeling my anxiety into work and thinking about other people’s problems helps me tamp it down. In other words, I’m not off the clock. Not until this afternoon.” I grinned back at her.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Palamina said, smiling again. This much warmth was a side of her I hadn’t seen lately.
I explained how I’d planned to write up the food tour article and my concerns about whether we ought to be running it before the questions about Audrey’s death had been settled. “I’m also thinking ahead to the pre-Christmas season.”
“What are your thoughts about the food tour bit?” she asked.
I wished I didn’t always feel as though her inquiries were a series of traps set to finally uncover the weak spots in my mind. I tapped a finger on my chin, focusing on the tiny water feature she had installed last week in a corner of the office. It made a hissing noise that she found relaxing. For me, not so much. It suggested that a trip to the ladies’ room was overdue.
“I have a bias because Analise is my friend. And I hate to run anything that will damage our local merchants. Unless, of course, the food at a place is consistently awful or makes people sick—that’s a different story and they’re fair game.”
She interrupted. “So that leaves us where?”
“My instinct is we should wait until the police clear up the facts about the death before we run the piece. Otherwise, it looks like we didn’t know about it and we look foolish. And if we did know about it but don’t mention it, we lose our credibility in the community. People are bound to find out, and then it appears like we’ve joined the Bubba pipeline.” Bubbas was the name for the old boys’ club in Key West, suspected of protecting each other’s interests, often at some considerable cost to the town or its people.
“I agree. What do we know about the death so far?”
How much to tell her? I hated her to think I was nosing around when it wasn’t my job, but on the other hand, she was smart and might have some good ideas. And we were kind of on a roll. So I described how Analise had asked me to speak with both Audrey’s husband and her sister. And how Eric had mentioned the possible medication interaction, and that other stops on the tour hadn’t offered any seriously useful observations. “In other words, we’re nowhere.”
“Let’s hold off on publishing the article,” she said. Then she fell silent, fiddling with the pen lying next to her computer. “I suppose now is as good a time as ever.”
I could feel the sweat pop out all over me. What was coming next—reduction in salary? It would be hard to go lower than what I was making. Cut my hours? Spend more time in the office? I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to hear.
“I think you do food very well,” she said, “and you know I’m not a particular fan of food. I eat,” she laughed, “pretty much because I have to, but it’s not in my DNA to care about it like you do. Or maybe,” she mused, “it’s not a DNA problem; it’s that my family didn’t care, so I never learned to appreciate the pleasures of food. What mattered in my household was being smart and thin—you could never be enough of either. Neither of my parents liked to cook or eat—I envy your relationship with your mom.”
She’d never been so open about anything in her personal life. I felt sorry for her description of her family—180 degrees from my own. I nodded gravely.
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking that although you do food well, you could do more. You could write bigger stories, and I suspect our readership would be very interested.”
“Like politics?” I asked, thinking of Frank Bruni, who’d started out as a food writer, landed a job as the New York Times restaurant critic, and now wrote essays about political and social problems.
“Not that big,” she said. “I was thinking of staying within the realm of food and restaurants but going bigger than reviews. You did a little of that with the Cuban food and influence piece last winter, and it worked well.”
I flushed with gratitude. She didn’t dole out a lot of compliments. “So maybe food trends,” I suggested. “Who’s trying what and h
ow are they doing it and how is it working out?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Pitch me some ideas and let’s see where we go. I’d like to see you try to get at the psychology behind the trends, rather than simply describing them. But in addition to that, we’ve heard so much about the MeToo movement this year. Even in the food world, haven’t a few celebrity chefs been taken down?” I nodded. “How does that play out here on the rock? Have local cooks experienced harassment? Have locals in the food industry noticed things changing for female chefs?”
“I would love to take a crack at that,” I said, thinking immediately of Martha Hubbard. She would surely be willing to talk to me about her experience as a female in this man’s world. Or what had been a man’s world up until now. She sort of owed me at this point.
“Shoot some ideas over to us. I’m curious—what’s your technique when you approach a subject and ask them to talk about something like this? Best buddies? Good cop, bad cop? Motherly?”
“Honestly, I don’t think a lot about it. I’m curious about what makes people tick, and I think they appreciate that.” I started to tell her more, but she began to rustle around her desk as if she was anxious to return to work.
“I won’t keep you. But I’m glad we had the chance to chat.” I stood up and grabbed my backpack. “When are you leaving for Thanksgiving? Or do you have some people coming here?” I was almost certain she had mentioned plans in New York.
“He broke the relationship off,” she said in a flat voice. Though if I listened carefully, I thought I could hear it tremble.
“Oh geez, that’s awful timing. I’m sorry.” I paused for a moment, picturing how lousy she must feel—dumped on the cusp of a major family holiday. And her with a family who didn’t care about celebrating with food. “If you don’t have other plans tomorrow, come to my mother’s house. We’re doing Thanksgiving together. It will already be chaotic, so one more can’t possibly make it worse. She’ll insist. And you’ll like my stepmother. She’s not a big foodie either, but smart as a whip.”
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