A Deadly Feast

by Lucy Burdette

  I folded the front page of the newspaper and tucked it into my pocket. Then I walked to the little back porch, where my roommate, decked out in her best Thanksgiving sweat suit, was crouched in our mini garden of container pots, trimming herbs.

  “I’m going out for an errand. Back in a jiffy, OK?”

  “Remember that I’m having a drink and a snack with my mah-jongg group this afternoon in the Truman Annex? Not all of them are so lucky as to have personal chefs in their families. In fact, some of them don’t have families at all.” She grinned and waited until I confirmed. “Mrs. Dubisson is driving. I’m thinking I’ll have her drop me off at your mother’s place afterward and I can take a little catnap in a spare bedroom?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  “Do you want me to bring the pies and pecan bars now? Then you can buzz down on your scooter later with just the whipped cream?”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Listen.” She scrambled up and came over to take both of my hands. “Try not to worry about Odom. Imagine you’re in that enormous jail and news spreads through the inmates, who are itchy with boredom and full of gossip like a bunch of old ladies. And it’s even worse than usual because it’s a holiday and they really, really don’t want to be stuck there.”

  She squeezed my fingers until I nodded.

  “Remember playing telephone as a kid? By the time any kind of news reaches Odom, it’s probably distorted as all get-out. And what are the chances that an escaped criminal is going to drive the length of the Keys to wreak havoc? You’d be really dumb to do that, because there’s only one road out. A sheriff’s department roadblock is a given. And besides, Nathan’s a very good cop and a strong man. Honestly, he can take care of himself.”

  I felt tears prick my eyes. I so wanted that to be true.

  Chapter Twenty

  In the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new. It’s all theft. Anyone who claims to have “invented” a dish is dishonest, or delusional or foaming.

  —Jonathan Meades, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime’s Culinary Thefts

  The roads on the way down to the cooking store were still quiet, except for occasional joggers and walkers, many wearing green and pink and blue tutus and goofy hats and carrying beers after finishing up the traditional Hog’s Breath 5k Hog Trot. I was able to park right behind the store and walk around the Mel Fisher museum to the store entrance. The front door was unlocked, and Martha was busy at the stove. She looked up. The expression on her face was not welcoming.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “The habanero candy is just getting to the soft ball stage. I can’t leave it now. Can you hang out for a bit?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to think of words that might relax her. “You know I love this place. And my mother-in-law-to-be gave us a gift certificate as part of her wedding present. I don’t know if I’ll succeed in convincing Nathan that one of your dinners would be fun, not torture. If he says no, I get to pick out all kinds of cool cooking stuff. Or else bring a friend. My mom would love it.”

  She gave a tight smile in return and resumed her station at the stove. I wandered around the store, mentally adding merchandise to my list of possible purchases. I didn’t want to leave Miss Gloria’s kitchen bereft, if and when I finally moved next door. And Nathan should have a chance to veto my selections, though I doubted very much he would care about what was in our kitchen drawers or about any potential china patterns or Italian ceramic serving dishes. As Miss Gloria had explained to Nathan’s mother, fancy dishes didn’t belong on a houseboat anyway.

  On a shelf containing cookbooks and cooking magazines, I spotted one I hadn’t seen before with a glossy cover showing two chefs at work at a magnificent professional stove with a copper exhaust hood. I leafed through the pages displaying stunning kitchens and perfectly groomed chefs standing behind their showstopper dishes. This was a serious restaurant chef catalog, not so much for novice home-style cooks. As I flipped through the back pages, I noticed listings for peculiar ingredients. Some chefs were looking for sources, other vendors were selling—Iranian saffron at ten thousand dollars a pound, Indonesian vanilla at thirty dollars a bean, Lambda olive oil at seventy-five dollars per 500ml. Who ordered these things? And what did they cook with them?

  In my talks with Martha this week, I had been recognizing that cooking the same dishes over and over could get tedious. Yes, in the right restaurant as a head chef, you could make plenty of money. But how many plates of fried yellowtail snapper could one chef make before her soul cried out for something more adventurous? Martha’s cooking was both idiosyncratic and ambitious. She wouldn’t have taken a job like this one if she hadn’t been willing to take risks.

  Then I thought about my own cooking and the food I prepared and what a big part of my life it had become. But some of the great pleasure of the meals I made was serving them to people I loved, and let’s be honest, eating them myself. If I had to make the same thing over and over and send it out to waiting strangers, would I too begin to chafe at the constraints? Would I be looking for newer ways to make things, techniques or ingredients that would bring more acclaim?

  Martha finished pouring her molten candy out on the countertop and came over to where I stood. “What’s up?”

  “They found the body of the guy who was on the food tour with me in the dumpster behind the Buoys’ Club.”

  “Which guy?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

  I pulled the article out of my backpack and smoothed it on the counter. “Marcel, the one whose wife died.”

  As she studied the photo—a younger version of Marcel without the scruffy beard—the look on Martha’s face turned from slightly annoyed to truly terrified. Whatever she was afraid of felt very real.

  “Maybe you’d better tell me the rest of the story. And then I think it’s time you told the police.”

  Martha glanced at all her ingredients laid out on the counter, sniffed the chipotle-basted smoked turkey in the oven, and tapped the hardening candy with a fingernail. “I have fourteen people coming to dinner. I just can’t get involved with the cops right now.”

  “If you won’t talk to Lieutenant Torrence, you’re going to need to tell me what exactly happened in the past. Because I feel like I’m working a giant jigsaw puzzle with only the outside pieces available. And maybe the cat batted away some of the pieces in the middle.”

  I flashed a friendly smile and then shut up. On the way over, as I’d practiced what I would say to her, I’d made myself a promise—I would say what I had to and then fall quiet. Biding my time and biting my tongue didn’t come to me naturally, but I’d become convinced that this was the only way to encourage her to talk. It felt like a ten-minute stretch of silence, and I had to squeeze my fingernails into my palms to keep from bailing her out.

  Finally she spoke. “You have to understand that this happened long before the MeToo movement. There was no one to turn to. He had all the cards. He was the executive chef and the owner of the restaurant where I worked. He’d written a cookbook that had shot off the shelves and even hit the LA Times best-seller list. All the foodies in Seattle were vying for a reservation at his restaurant. He even had a short-lived TV show, and he was named one of the most eligible, desirable, and adorable bachelors on the West Coast.”

  “This guy was a fancy chef on a TV show?” I asked, touching Marcel’s face in the paper. My voice betrayed the disbelief I was feeling. He looked like a washed-up biker, not a celebrity chef.

  She only nodded.

  “There was no one you could talk to? No one who might have noticed he wasn’t quite what he seemed?” I had to push back my impatience, let her tell the story in her own time.

  She shook her head emphatically. “Even the other kitchen workers wouldn’t have believed me. There were women salivating to go out with him, and well, look at me.” She gestured at herself from head to toe—tattoos, ponytail, jeans. “I’m neither ele
gant nor eloquent. And besides, he told me that he would ruin me if I opened my mouth. And I absolutely believed him. And I believed that I was the only one he had abused.”

  Of course my mind jumped instantly to wondering what exactly he had done. But her lips pinched together as if to say that’s all she’d reveal about the matter.

  “And I also believed I was oh-so-lucky to be on his team, regardless of how he treated me.” Her gaze met mine. “And honestly, I was in a way. I learned so much. He was brilliant in the kitchen. Brilliant.”

  She fell silent again, fingering the crimped edge of the newspaper. Could he really have changed enough that Martha wouldn’t have recognized him? And what about him; had he seen her? Had he not realized she was working in Key West at this venue?

  I had a million questions about what had actually occurred, but I didn’t think the details mattered so much as the effect it had had on her.

  “And so how did you get out from under that situation?” I asked, pinching myself mentally for the awkward phrasing.

  “I knew I had to leave. Disappear. But me leaving wouldn’t have bothered him a bit. He would have told the world I was flighty and unreliable. And then he could have replaced me with one of the other up-and-coming female chefs who wanted to work with the master.”

  “Sounds so frustrating,” I said. “You must have been furious.”

  She nodded her head emphatically. “Heartsick and angry. I wanted to make him suffer for what he’d done, and the only thing I could come up with was food poisoning. So the last afternoon before I ran away, while the rest of the staff was eating their family meal, I stirred a laxative into every sauce and every salad dressing. It was odorless and tasteless, so all it did was make every liquid a little bit thicker than normal. But more than half of the customers who came in that night became ill. It was a huge scandal that rocked his reputation. A friend in the kitchen called me later and told me he interrogated every single staff person the next day. And then he started on the vendors. He was livid, enraged. Somebody must have seen me in the kitchen, or maybe suspected me when they remembered I didn’t eat with the rest of the staff. And they snitched. Then it all made sense to him and he blamed me for ruining him. But he had no way to punish me—I was gone. Poof. Vanished.”

  “And that turned out to be the very night the food critic was visiting with her dining companions?”

  She nodded again. “For me, bent on revenge, the timing couldn’t have been better. For him, it couldn’t have been worse. My friend told me not to come back anywhere near his restaurant. She believed he was angry enough that he might really hurt me.” She looked straight at me. “So you see, he may have felt he had reason to damage me in any way he could.”

  “The police may come question you before tomorrow,” I said. “I have no control over that. But if they don’t, you will go to the station in the morning and make a report? You need to tell them what you told me so they can clear you as a suspect.”

  “I promise that I will.”

  “What happened after you left his restaurant?”

  “If you took a look at my work history, you saw there was a big gap after I left his place because I had no references. I didn’t even want to say I’d worked in his restaurant for fear they’d contact him. I couldn’t risk that. On the other hand, I was never going to get promoted past line cook without references; it didn’t matter how good my food was or how innovative my ideas were. I was out of a job and starting from scratch. And I felt so incredibly guilty and ashamed. But I had no way to fix any of it. So there was no point staying in Seattle. I traveled for a while and I drank more than I should have and finally ended up here. You know what they say about the people in this town, right?”

  “Yeah, hold the state of Florida upside down and shake it, and all the loose nuts fall down to Key West.” We both laughed.

  “Do you mind telling me a little more about him? What was he like as a man and a chef?”

  She sighed heavily. “When I started out, women were not thought of as chefs. We were cooks and prep staff. We had to work twice as hard to prove ourselves as competent in the kitchen. And it was a given that the atmosphere would be like a locker room. I could take all that. I wanted to be there. It was what came after that that I couldn’t take. He shouldn’t have had the right to assume he could mess with the bodies—and minds—of the women in his kitchen. I don’t care what a genius he was. But if you wanted to stay there, you went along with it.”

  I frowned, wondering where Marcel fell on the continuum of harassment, and how much it really mattered. It was her story, and her life that had veered off the course she’d set for herself.

  “You may be wondering whether his sins boiled down to a little butt patting or ogling. But it was more than that, I promise you. He was on another level altogether. He wanted to hurt me and humiliate me. It wasn’t something I could live with any longer.” She patted her face with a dish towel. “I was afraid of him, honestly. And I felt so ashamed about what had gone on between us. But also, what I’d done to retaliate. I ruined him. And because his restaurant tanked, all the people who worked for him lost their jobs too.”

  She was trembling as she talked, and I thought I could see how hard it had been to hold that secret.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that. And really sorry that you had no one to talk with. But I’m very glad you’ve landed on your feet here.”

  For the first time since I’d come in, she smiled.

  “Do you have any idea why his wife died? Or what happened to him? Or even why he was in town?”

  “I truly don’t know. I can only say that after Audrey died, I began to wonder if this was some kind of payback. If he’d sent someone to sneak into my kitchen and plant something that made her ill.” She picked up a tiny hammer and began to crack the habanero candy into jagged chunks.

  “You mean you thought he was paying you back by poisoning someone in your kitchen? To make the death look as though it was your doing? But why choose his wife as the victim? Unless he was trying to get rid of her anyway.”

  “I have not one clue,” she said, sinking onto a barstool.

  “Knowing what you know about him, could there be any other reason that Marcel was in Key West?”

  She thought this over. “Remember how you were asking yesterday about trends? And I mentioned saffron and culinary gold?”

  I nodded. “In fact, I was reading about some of that stuff in one of your magazines.” I pointed to the magazine on the rack across the room.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was involved in distributing that kind of thing.”

  That didn’t sound like cause for murder to me. “Who do you think could have killed him? Are you sure you didn’t recognize the other people on that tour?”

  Martha’s head dropped to her hands. “I am so sure. I didn’t even recognize him, even though that face has haunted me for years. But why on god’s green earth would he have been on a small-town tasting tour with a crazy woman if he was in the middle of something illegal, something big enough to have gotten him killed?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “And think about what your history has to do with what happened this week. The cops are going to be very interested in that.”

  Honestly, if I’d been a cop, I would have insisted on hearing a lot more from Martha.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The nifty thing about being omnivores is that we can take nourishment from an endless variety of flora and fauna and easily adapt to a changing world—crop failures, droughts, herd migrations, restaurant closings, and the like.

  —Jeffrey Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything

  After leaving Martha’s kitchen, I drove north on Eaton Street for a straight shot to my houseboat. But it occurred to me that the Metropolitan Community Church website had noted that JanMarie Weatherhead was helping to prepare their Thanksgiving dinner, a feast that would be distributed to shut-ins and the elderly later this afternoon. Might she hav
e overheard a conversation the other day that could shed some light on either of these deaths? It was not far out of my way, and it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  The church was located just north of White Street on Petronia, in a residential neighborhood that tourists didn’t often see unless their conch tour train driver took a detour. This morning, the front doors were thrown wide open, and I could hear a buzz of conversation coming from inside and smell the ubiquitous scent of roasting turkey.

  After calling hello and getting no answer, I went inside, following the wonderful smells. The kitchen was located down the hall, light-years from the fancy setup at Isle Cook Key West. A middle-aged woman with short graying hair whom I recognized from the food tour looked up from the industrial stove where she was mashing sticks of butter into a giant pot of potatoes. A steaming bowl of stuffing redolent of celery, onions, and powdered sage sat on the counter next to the refrigerator. And next to that was an enormous green bean casserole, the fried onions toasted to a perfect crispy layer on top. No caramelized jalapeño relish or cornbread financiers would come out of this kitchen—this was the kind of holiday menu my grandfather would have preferred.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said in a bright voice. “If you’re here to help deliver the meals, please take the stuffing and go on back to the coffee room where they’re setting up. As soon as I get the potatoes ready and Woody finishes carving the bird, we’ll be ready to go.”

  I felt sheepish about arriving under false pretenses and interrupting their busy day. “You’re JanMarie Weatherhead, right?” I asked. “We sort of met on the seafood tour last week.”