by R. E. Ellis
Butcher’s Knife
a Hewitt Fairfax mystery
by R. M. Ellis
Copywrite
©2018
All Rights Reserved
Devonia Technical Communication Services
Ottawa – Ontario – Canada
ISBN: 978-1542823562
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
Chapter One
There's something a little bit magical about an empty restaurant in mid-afternoon, in the hours before it opens. The lowering sun sends dusty, golden beams through the dining room windows, the waitstaff chats quietly while they roll silverware into starched napkins, and the noise from the kitchen is muted and relaxed. In short, no one's freaking out yet.
This wasn't Hewitt Fairfax's favorite time of day—for him, a sense of rising anxiety cancelled out the pleasure of the quiet—but he did like to see his staff calm and happy, and the tablecloths clean, and the specials board freshly written in chalk. Somehow it always managed to get smudged and illegible by the end of the night. Dinner service at Hewitt's could be busy and exhilarating, or it could be a series of fires to put out, sometimes literally, but these languid afternoons were mostly all the same.
But this rainy Wednesday in early March was different. As soon as he stepped in through the service entrance, he noticed the lack of salsa music.
"Where's Julio?" he asked the prep cooks, Pete and Eugene. Pete just shrugged laconically and Eugene, a heavily tattooed older man that Fairfax had hired straight out of rehab, said, "Ain't seen him. Ain't seen hide nor hair of his skinny ass." He chuckled as he went back to chopping onions.
Fairfax dropped the armload of flowers he'd brought for the tables onto the prep counter. Then he muttered a few choice expletives and went down in the basement to put on his chef's whites. …
Since he'd be doing Julio's job as well as his own—and his own was crazy enough, since he had yet to hire a kitchen manager—he anticipated a long and hectic night. In a weird way Fairfax relished the idea. Working hard, even frantically, was the only way Fairfax could ever truly relax. It sounded like an oxymoron, but Fairfax explained it to himself through the concept of the flow state. In the flow state, he'd read once, you forget time, forget anxieties, forget everything but the task at hand. The flow state is a deeply pleasurable and extremely creative one. It's the state painters are in when they fuss over getting the color of a flower petal just right, or birdwatchers when they're hot on the trail of a rare woodpecker. Back when he was a cop, and especially in later years when he was a detective, he sometimes felt it when he was questioning suspects or chasing fugitives. And chefs, they achieve flow when the orders are coming in, the pans are sizzling, the servers are grabbing the plates as soon as the garnish goes on.
Tonight, though, he couldn't get there. Everything was off. First of all, the desserts were late. Fairfax didn't do dessert, he just didn't get sweets, so he had MaryLee from MaryLee's Catering bring them in. And when MaryLee showed up literally minutes before the restaurant opened and began slapping cheesecakes and pastries and whatnot all over the prep space, he'd snapped at her.
"Seriously? You're doing this right here? And where the hell were you?"
MaryLee's face dropped, then became pissed off. Fairfax actually liked MaryLee a lot. She was almost always in a good mood and had a clever sense of humor. She was a couple of years younger than Fairfax and pretty cute. But she didn't take any crap.
"Maybe if you didn't have stuff piled all over the walk-in, I could put the desserts in there."
"Sorry," said Fairfax quickly. "Short staffed tonight."
"Short tempered, too, it seems." Her face softened. "Look, I don't have a job tonight, Hew. You want some help here?"
"Nah, go home, enjoy your evening."
"I'm serious. I was a hell of a line cook in my day."
Fairfax put his paring knife down. "Well, okay. You want to do salads?"
"Sounds great."
So he shifted everyone over, and the most experienced line cook became de facto sous chef, which was good, but the rhythm was off. Also, he couldn't find his knife.
Many chefs are a little obsessive about their knives, and Fairfax was no exception. When he graduated from culinary school, his buddy Desmond gave him a set of hand-crafted knives he'd designed especially for Fairfax. Des had been a good cop but left the force when a gunshot wound made it hard for him to stay on his feet for long, and Des rejected the offer of a desk job. He'd always had a fantasy of turning his knife-making hobby into a full-time business, so he did. And they were great knives. Fairfax couldn't have afforded the whole set of them if he'd had to buy them himself; he'd be lucky to have the cash for a little old filet knife. They were gorgeous, with specialty wood handles and high carbon stainless steel blades. The handles of Fairfax's knives were juniper, a heavily-grained wood that was a mix of dark and light.
"Dark and light," Desmond had said that graduation day, when Fairfax opened the box. "Just like you."
Fairfax didn't have a joke to make back, because he was too stunned and moved at the sight of these gorgeous knives. He vowed not to use them until he had his own restaurant.
So, anyway, the main knife, the chef knife, was missing. At first Fairfax figured he'd put it down somewhere stupid during the shuffle of the dinner service, so he tried to remember where, but then he realized he couldn't remember putting it down at all. He had plenty of back up knives so it wasn't a huge deal, but it was odd, for sure. Who would walk off with a chef knife?
When they'd locked the doors after the last customers left—the snapping sound of the deadbolt always made Fairfax happy—he went into the basement again and called Julio. His cell went straight to voice mail, so he called the young man's home number. Julio lived with his aunt Guadalupe and helped support his two young nephews, his aunt's grandchildren, who lived there too. Guadalupe answered the phone.
For a chef, Fairfax's Spanish wasn't great—he figured he was too old to learn a new language by the time he first worked in a kitchen—but it was good enough to understand that Julio wasn't at home, either, and that his aunt thought he was at Hewitt's. She seemed to be complaining about a girlfriend. Did Julio have a girlfriend? He'd never said a thing about a girl to Fairfax.
MaryLee stuck out the evening to the bitter end. When he thanked her, sincerely, out on the delivery dock, both of them getting soaked with rain, she'd laughed and shrugged and said that she sometimes missed restaurant work. "Tonight was a good reminder why I started a catering business," she added with a smile. Fairfax watched as she crossed the parking lot to her little delivery van, the hood of her rain parka hiding her face. When she was safely locked in her van, she gave Fairfax a quick wave. Then he drove Eugene, the prep cook, to his halfway house and then headed home.
Coming home: Fairfax couldn't get used to it. After Angela, and after his retirement, he'd sold the lakefront house he'd lived in with his wife for fifteen years. It was too big, too many memories. Good ones as well as bad ones, but all of them hurt. So he rented this little place just outside Finley, a cottage, a miniature house for his new, miniature life. It was a log-cabin type place, built expressly to rent out by the guy who owned the property. Fairfax lik
ed the quiet. He'd always thought of himself as a city person, but when he left the city and drove up the hills to his place, trees and fields replacing the houses and people, a great calm would come over him. The air was clear; at night the stars were plentiful and huge. In winter he'd grab a few logs for the wood stove before going inside. At times the quiet was so huge and deep it felt like a thing, like a comforter thrown over the whole place. He couldn't get used to it, but it was all right.
He was too tired to make a fire tonight. He poured himself a whiskey and tried to find something on his giant-screen television to watch, but he was in that mood where television is too loud and unbearable, though he liked it well enough at other times. The whiskey soothed him, so that when he went to bed, turning to his side and pulling the blanket up around his ear, he fell asleep quickly and thoroughly.
It was his phone that woke him up, buzzing and tinkling and making a general racket on his nightstand. There was a moment of confusion when he picked it up—how does this thing work? In the old days, you just picked a phone up and no matter how asleep or drunk you were, you could just press the big plastic barbell to your head and talk into it and be heard. Now you had to swipe one way, or hold your finger on a button, or some other thing that you just couldn't remember when seconds before you had been asleep and dreaming.
But he figured it out. And the person on the other end of the phone—not a wire, there weren't any wires anymore—told him that they'd found Julio.
"You found him?" Fairfax asked, uncomprehending. Then, "But who are you?"
"Jared Thompson, Finley City Police. We're calling about Julio Nunez, an employee of yours. Apparently, you called his aunt, looking for him?"
So strange that the police were calling him, he who just a short while ago—okay, over five years now—he had been the police. He made these calls.
"Julio's my sous chef. Is he...okay?"
"I'm afraid he's deceased. I'm sorry for your loss."
"Oh," said Fairfax. "Jesus. An accident?" The kid drove too fast, no doubt about that, in his vintage Chevy Suburban.
"We're looking at this right now as a homicide case. Would you consider coming in and talking to us tomorrow, say 11am?"
"Eleven, eleven," said Fairfax. "I guess I can do that." He had no idea what he had planned the next day; his mind was blank.
"We appreciate that. Again, sorry for your loss."
There was a click and the phone was off. There was no hanging up, just a setting down, gently, on his night stand.
Julio, dead.
Homicide?
He didn't feel sad at first. The information was too new and strange. Instead he felt a cold and terrible feeling, a kind of galactic loneliness, as if his heart had suddenly gone in a rocket to the heart of space, with no destination and no hope of return.
Then the sadness.
Chapter Two
Fairfax hired Julio as a dishwasher the week the restaurant opened. He was a teenager with just a few words of English, but Fairfax had never seen such a scrupulous worker. He scrubbed lipstick stains off of glasses before putting them in the dishwasher; he poured boiling water down the garbage disposal and threw squeezed-out lemons in as well at the end of the night—all without having to be told. He watched the prep cooks carefully so that when one didn't show up, Julio slipped seamlessly into the job. Though he liked having such an excellent dishwasher, Fairfax promoted him out of the job within a few months. The kid also had a great attitude. He loved salsa music and sang along with the radio, though he couldn't sing worth a damn.
It was a weakness of Fairfax's that he grew attached to his employees and felt hurt when they quit. When Julio asked for fewer hours so that he could go to night school—he wanted to study restaurant management—Fairfax was torn. He let the kid have the reduced schedule, in the end, though he was afraid he was going to quit eventually. Instead he was murdered.
Fairfax showed up at police headquarters at 10:00 instead of 11:00.
"You're early, Hew," said Louise Peabody, the chief of police. "Thompson's not here yet."
"This fits my schedule better. What happened, Lou?"
They went into the chief's office and sat at her desk. She told Fairfax that Julio's body had been found at a quarry just outside of town. A couple of teenagers looking for a place to make out saw the body in the headlights of their car. They didn't even get out of the car, just called 911.
"Good for them," said Fairfax.
"A butcher's knife was sticking out of his chest."
"Well, shit."
"This one." The chief help up a clear plastic evidence bag with a knife in it. It was cleaner than you'd think.
"Yeah. That's mine," said Fairfax.
"Yours? Seriously?"
"My chef knife. Jesus." He put his head in his hands. Then he added, "It's not a butcher's knife."
"Whatever kind of knife, it's going to forensics in Albany. I can't give it back to you."
"No shit," said Fairfax.
Once Officer Thompson arrived, the chief told Fairfax they'd be asking him a few questions—did he want call a lawyer first, or anything like that?
"Lawyer? What the hell are you talking about?"
"It's way too early to call anyone a suspect," said Thompson carefully, "we're just asking questions. But, well, you saw him last, and you say it's your knife, so..."
"Wait, what? I saw him last?"
"His aunt said he was at work Tuesday night. Is that correct?"
"Yes, sure."
"And I take it from talking to–" The cop looked down at a notebook in his hands. "To a dishwasher named Simons that you and Julio Nunez were the last to leave the restaurant? Simons says that he finished mopping around midnight and you and Nunez were still there."
"That's correct. We were going over some menus in my office." Fairfax could not believe he was on the receiving end of an interrogation. "But I was obviously not the last to see him. Because someone killed him."
"So you saw him at the restaurant after midnight? What time, exactly?"
"Look," said Fairfax. "I came here to ask questions, not answer them."
The chief cleared her throat. "And we asked you here to answer them. Thompson, you don't know Fairfax, but he was a good cop. Not a perfect one–" Fairfax raised his eyebrows at this. "But an excellent one. I know you have to ask your questions, Jared, but I think you should know that Fairfax could not have anything to do with this."
"Just trying to figure out what happened, ma'am," said Officer Thompson.
"If you value your balls," Chief Peabody said, "don't you dare call me 'ma'am' again."
Once Fairfax was on the street again, Thompson's card in his pocket, feeling annoyed that the young cop had promised to be in touch "extremely soon," he headed for the flower shop to get some daisies for Julio's aunt. What would Angela have done in this situation? His wife had always handled this sort of difficult thing for him. She would have brought food. But what kind? Fairfax felt like an idiot not to know, but he often felt like an idiot when it came to social stuff.
Sitting in his Volvo station wagon, Fairfax had a brain wave. MaryLee would know what to bring—and she delivered, so he wouldn't have to show up at the door with a bag of donuts like a nincompoop. He had MaryLee on speed-dial.
He called her and explained. It took her a minute to digest the news. Sometimes he forgot that other people had never been cops, and other people weren't used to terrible things happening.
"Oh, wow," she said. "Homicide? Wha...? Poor kid. Poor family. What a... what a waste."
"Yeah."
"Oh, geez." MaryLee was crying.
He decided not to get into the fact that it was his knife, and that it was in Julio's ribcage. "So...can you?"
"Food? Yep. Yep. Soup. Something like a beef noodle. Filling, so they won't have to think about cooking, and they can freeze it if they're inundated."
"Perfect," said Fairfax, watching a woman come out of the convenience store across the street. She loo
ked vaguely familiar, but he didn't have his glasses.
"When my mom died," MaryLee continued, "my dad got like five lasagnas but didn't have room in his freezer for them."
Fairfax squinted. He remembered he did have his glasses; they were in his pocket. The woman across the street sprang into focus and Fairfax saw that it was one of his waitresses, Katy White. She was leaning on the hood of her car, apparently doing scratch tickets. He felt a momentary pang—playing the lottery–didn't he pay his wait staff enough? Not as much as he would like, for sure. Maybe Julio really was getting into some kind of illegal sideline business to fund restaurant school.
In any event, Fairfax was going to have to tell his staff what happened and shut the restaurant for a couple of days. His employees would lose quite a bit of cash, unfortunately, and so would he. For a minute he considered paying for their time off, but to be honest, money was a little tight lately.
"Thanks, MaryLee," he said, cutting her off and shutting his phone.
A minute later he realized he never gave her Julio's aunt's address, so he called her back.
"You can be a jerk, you know, Hewitt."
"So I've heard," said Fairfax.
It was just as awful at Julio's house as he'd imagined. A woman he didn't know answered the door and took the flowers without a word. She left the door open, though, so Fairfax figured that meant he was invited in. He stepped into a clean but shabby hallway where he wiped his shoes off, then through an archway into a small living room. Guadalupe was there, sobbing her heart out. Fairfax figured she had been doing so since she got the phone call from the cops. Other family members sat around looking stunned and miserable.
"My condolences," said Fairfax, squatting down next to the tiny woman and putting his hand on her shoulder. She responded by pulling him into her arms and pressing her face into his shoulder. "You, You, You," she moaned. "You" was her way of saying "Hew." It could be confusing.
"You know who did it?" asked a young man who Fairfax was pretty sure was Julio's brother. Anger was coming off the kid in waves.