Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery

by Lucy Burdette

  “And I didn’t want to bother you, but I thought you’d want to know: The police arrested Eric for Jonah’s murder. Bill hired a lawyer who’s headed to the jail at the sheriff’s department. He told Bill to stay home and wait for him to call with news.”

  “I’ll meet you at their house,” I said, and she hung up. I saved the file I was working on and ran down the stairs and out to my scooter. Business was starting to pick up a little on Southard Street, mostly people having breakfast, or mainlining coffee, or in line at the ATM. It’s easy to run through your cash on a Saturday night in paradise.

  Mom arrived at Bill and Eric’s place at the same time as me, looking utterly confident on her pink scooter. We knocked on the door and barged right down the main hall despite Toby’s yapping protests. Bill was sitting on the couch on the back porch, the newspaper spread across his lap, his face devoid of expression, eerily calm.

  “Oh, poor Bill,” Mom said, plopping down beside him, grabbing his hand, and pressing it to her lips. “You’ve had a horrible week! What in the world happened?”

  Bill sighed, folded the paper, and shifted a couple of inches away from Mom. “As I said in my message, two police officers picked Eric up this morning. Our lawyer thinks it’s likely that he will have to spend the night in the clinker, this being Sunday. Hard day to get the cogs of justice rolling. I hope he doesn’t have to share a cell with one of his patients.” He barked out a strangled laugh and brushed away the Yorkie, who was leaping at his knees.

  “So you’ve already got a lawyer,” Mom said, throwing a worried-sick glance my way. “What else can we do for you?”

  “Nothing really.”

  The dog raced to the door, yapping, and then careened back to Bill.

  “We could take Toby out for a spin,” I suggested. This worried me most of all—usually Bill channeled their dog’s needs like an experienced psychic.

  Bill shrugged. “Fine.”

  I snapped the leash onto his harness and he trotted out ahead of Mom and me, lifting his leg on a bougainvillea just off the front porch. We followed him around the block, stopping to let him sniff and relieve himself, and bark at the neighbor’s tortoiseshell cat and a squashed Cuban tree frog he found in the gutter.

  “I think Bill’s in shock,” I said. “I hope his lawyer is competent. The one I had last fall was a real loser.”

  “How in the world could Eric be mixed up in this murder?” Mom wondered. “And why isn’t he speaking up for himself? This isn’t how he’d tell one of his own clients to handle a crisis.”

  When we returned to the house, Bill was on the phone, pacing back and forth across the porch as he talked. “I have no idea, Edna,” he said squeezing his face into a horrible grimace. “He won’t tell me anything. Yes, I’ll call you the minute I hear something.” He dropped the phone into the receiver and collapsed onto the couch with a heavy sigh.

  “Eric’s mother. I don’t know what to say to her,” he said. “Your son may be a murderer? But I’ll keep you posted?”

  “It’s so upsetting to be completely in the dark,” I said. “He still wouldn’t say why the cops would think he’s involved?”

  “Nothing. Not one word,” said Bill with a deep frown.

  “What if I call Edna back and ask her if she remembers anything about this Jonah?” Mom asked. “You know she lives in the same neighborhood as me at home. I wouldn’t say we were ever close-close because Eric’s mom worked and I didn’t have to.” Her gaze flicked over to me, then back to Bill, unleashing in me another surge of guilt over the ill-considered alimony comment. “But I always liked her—we were friendly.”

  “I don’t want you two to get more involved than you already are,” Bill said. “I’m sure with our lawyer’s pressure, the police will find out what really happened and clear Eric. If Mrs. Altman knows something about Jonah Barrows, she’ll tell the detective.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mom. “Citizens have to fight for themselves. Eric isn’t helping his case by keeping secrets. I’ll express my condolences and explain that we’re looking for leads to the real killer.”

  I didn’t really like the idea of my mother meddling, but what were the chances that Mrs. Altman would spill her guts to a random cop calling from Key West? Not good. I plucked the phone from its cradle and brought it to her. She carried it out to one of the wicker chairs facing the garden and dialed.

  “Edna, how are you? It’s Janet Snow. I’m in Key West, visiting Hayley. Can you imagine? What’s the weather like up there?”

  “Mom,” I warned. “Just get to the point.”

  But she put a finger to her lips, listening intently to the high-pitched rant on the other end of the line.

  Back in our neighborhood of immaculate split-level homes with neat lawns and elaborate swing sets, the Altmans’ weedy yard and peeling tan paint had plain stuck out. Mr. Altman had bolted for a new life in California when Eric was five. But unlike my father, once he started his second family, he quit paying regular child support and rarely contacted his son. Mrs. Altman took a job in the local hardware store and covered her despair with a hearty cheerfulness when she was out in public. Obviously Eric couldn’t confide in her about his problems—she had all she could manage just to keep their family fed and housed. And he knew it. But every once in a while both of them talked to Mom when their emotional dams were ready to burst.

  My mother explained to Mrs. Altman our thoughts about Jonah’s murder and how, of course, Eric couldn’t have killed him—he didn’t even know him. Then she listened for a few more minutes.

  “Is that right?” my mother was saying, a shocked note in her voice. “When he lived in New York? And you’re certain his name was Jonah?”

  She murmured into the phone for several more minutes. “No, no, I can’t think that it would help for you to run down here.” Bill made a wild slashing motion across his neck and my mother smiled and nodded. “I swear, Edna, we will get to the bottom of all this. We will make sure Eric doesn’t go to jail.” She finally hung up and let out a big whoosh of air. “That was something,” she said. “More than I expected, really.”

  “Tell us,” I said.

  “Well. Edna says that Eric had a connection with a man named Jonah that went way back. She isn’t sure what exactly their relationship was—Eric was in graduate school in New York and he didn’t tell her much about his life. He was coming out back then and it was hard on everyone, especially him. And her.” She smoothed the fabric on Bill’s shoulder and looked at me. “You probably don’t remember, but he was on an honesty binge for a couple of years. He began to needle his mom about family secrets and the way she and his father never talked about things that were important and difficult. He told her that keeping quiet because it was easier was just wrong.”

  “He’s mellowed since then,” I said, thinking this sounded an awful lot like what Jonah had preached to the opening-night crowd.

  15

  It’s a cabbage rather than a rose, a tangy ring of bologna rather than a sirloin. Side effects may include heartburn.

  —Dwight Garner

  Within a few minutes, we’d hammered out a plan with a new urgency. None of us could believe that Eric was involved with Yoshe’s death. He had little interest in Asian cooking. He was not a celebrity stalker. Their lives would not reasonably have intersected prior to this weekend. But if we could find out what had happened to Yoshe, we might find out what really happened to Jonah, and thus clear Eric.

  Bill would stay home to field phone calls with potential news. Someone needed to stay put, and frankly, he seemed flattened by Eric’s arrest, drained of vitality like a root vegetable that had spent too many months in the crisper. Mom would ride over to the Key West library and do some research on Yoshe’s background, looking for a possible connection between the deaths, including the franchise that Sigrid had mentioned. Before this, Mom had felt awful about Yoshe’s death. But now she was on a personal mission: No neighbor of hers was going to suffer with her son in prison if t
here was anything she could do about it. For my part, I would return to Key Zest, finish my review, and surf the Web for information about Jonah’s activities in the late 1990s, back when Mrs. Altman thought Eric might have met him.

  After half an hour glued to my keyboard, I finished the review draft for Santiago’s Bodega. I e-mailed it directly to Wally so I couldn’t obsess any further or make grim comparisons between my own work and that of Olivia Nethercut. When I’d been in the business as long as she had, I could beat myself up about the speed and brilliance of my writing. Now it felt like a victory just to get a story finished.

  I typed “Jonah Barrows” into the Google search bar and came up with the usual potpourri of intriguing but useless links—a kid with a similar name had won a chocolate-pudding-eating contest. Samantha Barrows had appeared as a character on Days of our Lives. And Jonah Barrows himself had ten thousand something fans on his Facebook fan page, and twice that number of Twitter followers. Sidestepping the temptation to get sucked into reading all the posts and tweets these fans must have generated, I skimmed over news headlines from the 1990s about the crack epidemic in New York City, various murders, and the death of a New York University undergraduate. How could any of this be related to Eric? Waste of precious time. I set up a Google alert so I would be informed of any new developments that came along about Jonah.

  Then, wishing I wasn’t so curious but unable to stop myself, I typed “Detective Nathan Bransford” into the search bar. I scrolled through several pages of news about crimes and public relations in Key West before coming across this headline: “Miami Rookie Police Officer’s Wife Held by Hostage.”

  The article explained that a Miami drug dealer out on bail had gone to the home of the arresting officer and taken his wife hostage. After twelve hours of failed negotiations, a SWAT team entered the home through a basement window and shot the alleged dealer to death after a barrage of gunfire was exchanged. Officer Nathan Bransford’s wife, Trudy Bransford, was not injured in the incident.

  Whoa. I couldn’t imagine the guilt and rage that he must have experienced, realizing that his wife’s trauma and then her decision to leave him were directly connected to his work. This was much worse than a garden-variety nasty divorce.

  Stomach gurgling a hungry lament, I rummaged through the office refrigerator, looking for something else to tide me over to lunch. Wally had tucked a tin of mixed nuts into the far reaches of the bottom shelf with his name printed on the label in neat block letters. Clearly off-limits. I scooped out a small handful and smoothed over the top to disguise my looting. With my brain feeling slightly fortified and a little less sluggish, I returned to the computer and brought up the Match.com Web site. Spying, yes—and I would have melted from embarrassment if anyone caught me. But I couldn’t help myself—I’d been dying to look ever since Mom had mentioned this last night.

  A small colored box popped up on the screen, asking for my age range and zip code. I typed in forty to fifty, and 07922, my mother’s information. Another box materialized, asking me to register with the site to begin trolling for prospects. But a page was shadowed behind the registration form, including photos, screen names, ages, and cities of local prospects. My mother was one of the prospects: LetItSnow, 46—Berkeley Heights. I groaned and closed the window on the computer.

  Pacing around the small office, I tried to force my focus back to helping Eric. Obsessing about Bransford and my mother’s dating life was not helpful. Then I thought of calling Stan Grambor, the psychologist who shared Eric’s office space. We’d met at Eric and Bill’s open house after their recent home renovation. I remembered finding him low-key and approachable—the kind of shrink I’d consider hiring if I ever considered hiring a shrink to replace Lorenzo. Not likely.

  He answered the phone on the first ring. “Stan, it’s Hayley Snow. I’m a friend of Eric Altman’s.” I explained how we’d met and then plunged right in to describe Eric’s arrest and what had happened to Jonah Barrows. If anyone could keep a confidence, it ought to be Eric’s suitemate.

  “That’s dreadful! I’m stunned. How can I help?”

  I explained that my team and I were collecting information that might help the cops find the real killer. No need to tell a psychologist that my team consisted of me and my mother. And Bill, who was essentially deadwood at the moment. And that the cops couldn’t be less interested in my theories.

  “The problem is, he refuses to exonerate himself. So I’m wondering how he seemed to you over the past few days.”

  “He was quiet this week,” Stan said. “And busy. He didn’t have time to schedule lunch as we often do. Houseguests, he said. You know how that goes!” He brayed with laughter.

  I sure did—Mom. “Can you think of any reason why he wouldn’t try to defend himself?”

  Stan cleared his throat a few times. “Let me puzzle over that a minute. Hmmm.”

  In my limited experience, shrinks don’t jump to conclusions quickly. They like to sift through all the data and then generate a tentative hypothesis and then—

  “The best question might be, whom is he protecting with his silence?” Stan said. “It could be himself. But more likely, someone close to him?”

  I thought of Bill, who was acting almost as oddly as Eric himself. Eric would do anything for Bill. But since Bill had never entered the Audubon House grounds, I didn’t see how he could have killed Jonah. Nor did he know him. “Maybe Eric was quiet this week for some other reason. Was he especially worried about any cases? I know you can’t tell me specifics.”

  Stan hummed tunelessly to himself, like the hideous canned music you’re subjected to when you’re put on hold trying to straighten out a bill. He stopped humming and said, “He asked me in passing if I’d ever lost a client.”

  “And then?”

  “I haven’t, but I told him what a supervisor once told me—if you stay in this business long enough, it’s bound to happen. Some folks you just can’t save. They are too far down the tunnel and simply can’t see the smallest flicker of light.” He clicked his tongue and sighed. “Then my ten o’clock came in and I never did get to ask Eric why he’d inquired. I’m sorry. It sounds like I should have been paying better attention. I hope I didn’t miss anything—I haven’t seen news about a suicide in the Citizen.”

  “Speaking of that,” I said, “there was a second death related to the food writers’ conference—a woman found on the rocks below her third-floor balcony.” I felt my throat close up with the memory of finding the body. “We’ve been trying to imagine what frame of mind she’d have had to be in to throw herself off.”

  This was the kind of question I’d have asked Eric, had he been available. Only I wouldn’t have been reluctant to let him see and hear how sick I felt about finding Yoshe. How the horror of crawling across the rocks to confirm her identity seemed to mushroom as the hours ticked by. And he would have known the things to say to ease me forward. But Dr. Stan didn’t know me and I couldn’t expect that from him.

  “Terrible—I’m so sorry to hear that!” A bit of silence on the phone again. “If this was a suicide attempt, she didn’t think it through,” Stan said. “Not like hoarding pills for weeks or months, for example, and then swallowing them with a fifth of whiskey for good measure. Nor would it be a certain death—she could have escaped with broken bones, no? Or even snapped her back and ended up a paraplegic. If it was a cry for help, without true intent to die, it reeks of desperation and a histrionic personality. Are you certain it was a suicide?”

  “Not really,” I said. “We’re not certain about anything.”

  “Any problems in her life that might have looked insurmountable?”

  “I don’t know enough to answer that,” I said. In the background, I heard the dull buzz announcing the arrival of one of Stan’s patients.

  “My patient’s here. Please do call if you have any other questions. And I’ll keep an eye on Eric when I see him next,” he promised. “I’m certain this will all turn out to be a terribl
e misunderstanding.”

  I hung up, wishing I could borrow his optimism, and tried to imagine whom Eric might be protecting. Had he actually been arrested for the death of one of his own clients rather than Jonah? I felt certain that wasn’t what Bransford had told me. Was Bill so distressed that he’d completely butchered the story?

  I twirled in my desk chair until I felt dizzy. And feeling dizzy made me think of Sigrid. There had been no love lost between her and Yoshe—that much was clear from the lunch we’d all shared. Or Sigrid and Jonah, for that matter. If I ever had a book published, I didn’t think I’d be quite so willing to talk to strangers about getting lousy reviews. Even the ones I thought were agenda-driven garbage. I pulled Amazon.com up on my computer screen and typed “Sigrid Gustafson” into the search bar. One of the featured reviews for her new novel had been written by Jonah and was titled “Fictional Culinary Buffoonery.”

  “The concept is intriguing, a novel set in Sweden depicting a dysfunctional family whose problems are reflected through their dinner preparations over a long holiday weekend, and then a murder mystery. But Gustafson loses her way and her readers by stooping to a combination of cliché and melodrama. Her attempts at humor fail to enliven the plot, just as lingonberry jam fails to lighten a heavy stew. The characters exist merely as a vehicle for the author’s ramblings about Nordic food archetypes. The execution is dry and the recipes, drier still. The plot is thin in a way that the author herself can never aspire to.”

  Whew. I would have felt the stirrings of a murderous rage after reading this excoriation of my novel—I was willing to bet Sigrid had too. And it wasn’t one of her older books, as she’d told me at the dinner party last night. It was Dark Sweden, the newest—the one her career trajectory now rested on. What might have happened the first night of the conference between her and Jonah? The review was dated earlier this week, so likely this would have been the first time she’d seen him since its publication. With a flash of insight, I remembered her being in the bathroom as I attempted to chat with Olivia. Had she looked flushed or sweaty or otherwise guilty? I couldn’t recall the details. But I could honestly picture her losing her temper, grabbing the metal bird, and swinging it at Jonah. Maybe surprising herself when she connected. But why not report the incident as a terrible accident?