Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery

by Lucy Burdette

  He jotted physically small in the box where Jonah’s name intersected with hers.

  “And Yoshe’s death could have been a suicide or an accident, but not Jonah’s. On the other hand, if they were both murders, neither seems meticulously planned,” Wally said. “Especially the first one. You couldn’t assume you wouldn’t be seen whacking Jonah—there were hundreds of people at the party, no?”

  “Yes. But if it was an accident, or the person didn’t mean to hit him—or at least not that hard—why not let someone know? Get help and limit the damage? Maybe even save the man’s life.” I flashed back to my feeble attempts at CPR and how dreadful it felt to have failed.

  “People do this all the time—act in some utterly stupid way and then panic and try to hide it.” Wally lined the pad up with the edge of his desk and tapped his pen on Jonah’s name. “On television, it’s all about love, money, or revenge. With politicians, it’s power.”

  I nodded, trying to massage away the headache that had begun to brood behind my forehead. “So if I could figure out what each of them came to the weekend hoping would happen,” I said, “maybe I’d have an answer.” I closed my eyes and ran my mind over what I thought I knew. “To begin with, every one of them appeared to need a career boost.” I described Yoshe’s troubles with her new manuscript: the deep shame she would feel if it failed—or if the editor refused to publish it at all. And Sigrid’s tanking book sales and bad reviews—she’d flat-out told me her career rested on this new novel. And Dustin’s waning performance as the director of the seminar. Where would he find refuge on this little island if his dream crashed? And Fritz’s dreadful meat-themed poetry: In spite of his audience at lunch, it had to be going nowhere fast. No one had specifically pointed to him as a suspect, but good Lord, poetry about protein? Deadly.

  Wally wrote summarizing notes in each square on his grid.

  And Eric? His practice seemed to be in fine shape, and his relationship with Bill humming along … but who knew? He simply wasn’t talking. “I can’t think of anything for Eric,” I said. “I thought his life was going just fine.”

  “How about Olivia?” he asked.

  “The only thing Olivia needs is a man,” I answered grimly. “And it looks like she’s on the way to snagging one.” I drummed my fingers on the notepad. “Though why she’d be interested in a small-town Key West cop is beyond me.” Wally scribbled single and desperate in her section, which made me smile until I realized the same words could be applied to me.

  “A couple of folks mentioned a Key West restaurant franchise that several of these writers hoped to invest in.” I explained about the proposed fast food restaurant that the founders had hoped would spread paradise from Pasadena to Providence.

  “I hate that idea,” said Wally. “Either you’re in Key West eating something wonderful or you’re not. It’s like eating Italian or Chinese in the airport. No one believes that’s real ethnic food—just something you have to tolerate if you forgot to bring your own sandwich. Why would a perfectly wonderful chef or writer want to tag onto a project like that?”

  “You sound like Jonah,” I said. “Only less crazy.” I grinned. “I think the only plausible answer is money.”

  Wally added dollar signs to the notes he’d made in Yoshe’s, Jonah’s, and Dustin’s columns. “So, why do you think Jonah was killed?” Wally asked. “Some vague threat about honesty doesn’t seem like enough of a reason.”

  I thought back to the first night, the food writers arranged onstage behind him like a Greek chorus. And the palpable discomfort that radiated from the writers when he turned to them with his warning: “Caveat emptor—my policy of utter transparency will be in full effect.”

  “I got the feeling he planned to be quite specific. He hated the path today’s food writers are taking and he believed he could change it by exposing their truths this weekend. He was going to go even further than he had in the memoir. He told us that on opening night.”

  “Someone felt so threatened by what he might say that they killed him?”

  “Something like that.” I squirmed, thinking about the editorial letter I’d stolen from Yoshe’s briefcase. I wanted to show him, but it felt wrong. It was wrong—he might very well fire me for lousy ethics.

  Instead, I described my conversation with the elderly man next door to the Audubon House—how he thought he might have seen a man with glasses running from the direction of the party, past his little house and on toward Duval. And then another idea clicked in. “What if the killer was captured on the Duval Street webcam?” I sighed, my enthusiasm ebbing away as quickly as it had rushed in. “We’ll never know. The police could access the archives, but they certainly aren’t going to show them to me.”

  “You don’t need the cops for that,” he said. “You need access to the right Web site. Or a friend with that access.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned, then typed in a Web address on his computer. A photo of the sidewalk outside Sloppy Joe’s came up on the screen, along with a bar for choosing the time interval you wished to view. “When would this person have been running?”

  “Say it was nineish when I found Jonah? Maybe as late as quarter to ten. Let’s start fifteen minutes before that.”

  For the next ten minutes, we squinted at the antics of tourists and street performers passing down Duval Street, but recognized no one. In the background, the noise from the bar roared in a fuzzy way, with occasional blasts from car horns and mufflerless motorcycles passing by. Then came a familiar figure. More tall than short. With glasses. Walking quickly, almost at a trot, looking horribly worried.

  I felt sick to my stomach, really sick. Like the night I ate an entire order of bad oysters and spent the next eight hours hugging the toilet. And the twenty-four hours after that lying in bed like a wet rag.

  Eric. I shrugged carelessly, hoping that nothing showed on my face.

  “Oh well, I can look at this later, make sure none of our suspects passed by. But even if they had, it doesn’t mean anything, really.” I sprang up from Wally’s folding wicker chair. “Right now I better get back to work. My boss is a bear and I owe him a big article,” I said.

  18

  Usually the food that meets your hunger sends you into a calmed and expansive state of deep satisfaction, but I instead sat in that café and became quite heavy and defeated.

  —Gabrielle Hamilton

  I closed my office door, even though doing so shut out the only natural light and usually left me quivering with claustrophobia. I woke my computer and typed in the Duval Street webcam address again. I watched Eric trot down the street several more times, reentering the time and date stamp, trying to decipher the look of panic on his face. And the way he kept looking over his shoulder. He did not look like a man who’d come down with a sudden migraine. Had he seen something he shouldn’t have that scared him badly? Or had he done something awful? But if that was the case what possible reason could my friend have had for killing Jonah?

  My iPhone buzzed. Private caller came up on the screen—usually the sign of a badgering telemarketer, or worse. But I couldn’t take the chance of missing news about my mother. “Hello?”

  “Hayley Snow?” The words quaked and shimmered. “You told me to call you if I thought of something else.”

  “Who is this?” I barked. Then I recognized the raspy voice of the old man who lived next door to the Audubon House. “Yes, thanks so much for calling.”

  “I did think of something I forgot to mention. The cats and I had breakfast early the other morning, just like always. I shouldn’t give them milk—my daughter says it’s bad for their digestion, but they look forward to it.”

  “A tiny splash won’t hurt them,” I said, trying to be patient while his story unfolded. “My Evinrude loves milk almost more than he loves me.”

  The old man laughed. “Evinrude, that’s a name you don’t hear often.”

  “He purrs like a well-oiled engine,” I said. “Always has, since he was a kitten. But anyway, you
were saying you forgot to tell me…”

  “After breakfast, Boris and I were walking the perimeter of the property and I saw him stop to rub his jowls on something in the bushes. You know how they like the way that feels, the way we like our neck and shoulders rubbed?”

  I could picture the big white cat stalking around the yard behind the old man with his walker, stopping to scratch his cheeks on a tree limb or an old paint can or … I hoped it didn’t turn out to be something gross. “Uh-huh. So, what did Boris find?”

  “It was a big metal statue of a bird. Only the legs were broken off. Couldn’t figure out how in the heck it got on my property, half-buried in the weeds. But I guess people throw all kinds of trash around in this town. So I picked it up and dragged it back to my porch. And that’s where the police officer found it.”

  My heart started to pound. This had to be the egret that had disappeared from the scene of the crime on Thursday night. The bird that went missing and made me look like a fool. “Which police officer was that?”

  “The detective with the horse face. Some name like Bran Flakes.”

  I burst out laughing. In less than twenty-four hours, Bransford had been demoted from “chiseled” to “horse-faced.” And his name had morphed from some distinguished European heritage to breakfast cereal.

  The old man chortled along with me. “He came back around again yesterday to ask what else I might have seen or heard. I guess they figure one old man can’t remember much, but if you go back a second time he might dredge something up. Or make it up, even.” He chuckled again. “Lucky thing Boris found that bird. And like I said, the detective saw it on my porch and his eyes got so big, I thought they might pop right out of his head and roll off into the dirt. So then he asked me if he could take it and I said, why not? It don’t belong to me. And he wrapped it up in his jacket and carried it off. I should have thought of this when you were here, but sometimes my brain just don’t go where it should.”

  “Not to worry. Thank you so much for calling,” I told him. “You and those cats enjoy the sunshine today.”

  I hung up and sank back into my chair. Somehow the bird had to be connected to Eric’s arrest. Was this the physical evidence Officer Torrence had mentioned? But what were the chances Bransford would tell me anything about it? Slender. Still, I packed up my belongings and headed out—the chances of my getting any more writing done here were even more slim than that.

  I drove superslowly on my way to the police station, looking down all the alleyways off Eaton Street and in the parking lots too, hoping I’d spot Mom or her bike. Of course, she could have gone anywhere—into New Town for grocery shopping at Publix or a quick sandwich—or even buzzed right off the island. But why, when we’d had lunch plans as clear as plastic wrap? And why not call me? None of it made sense. Unless she was in trouble. Or angry. I drove with a piercing sense of dread—and I wasn’t going to feel better until I spotted my mother puttering up on her bright pink scooter and knew Eric was safely back home, the arrest a nightmarish mistake in the past.

  I parked in front of the peach-colored police department and picked up the intercom phone that hung outside the front door. A gruff male voice answered, “KWPD.”

  “I’m hoping to catch a word with Detective Bransford?” I said, wishing my voice didn’t sound like a lost little girl’s.

  “He’s not in.”

  “Are you expecting him later? It’s about a missing person.” And clearing my friend of murder, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Doubt it,” said the gruff man. “Torrence is covering the desk. I’ll put you through to him.”

  I groaned aloud and considered slamming the phone down and running. But before I could make that move, Officer Torrence appeared at the double glass doors, pushed them open, and poked his head out. “Can I help you, Miss Snow?”

  Too late to bolt. “My mother’s missing,” I said, and horrified myself—and probably him—as a trickle of tears started down my cheeks. The opening salvo for what felt like many more.

  “Come in,” he said, swinging one of the heavy doors open wide and waving me through. “Coffee? It’s been sitting on that burner a couple hours, so I don’t recommend you say yes.” He smiled and I followed behind him down the greenish blue cement-walled hallway to his office. When we were settled, me on a folding chair, him behind his desk, I scanned the framed citations for bravery and excellence in community relations and marksmanship on the wall above his head.

  After a minute, he asked, “So, about your mother?”

  Now, in spite of my efforts to keep them inside, the trickle of tears turned into a torrent as the stress of the weekend gained purchase. Two deaths too close to me. And two of the people I was closest to in the world, one in jail, and the other maybe in danger. I put my face in my hands and leaned onto his pristine desk blotter and cried. Finally I gathered myself and peeked through my fingers. Torrence, looking thoroughly alarmed, had nearly overturned his chair while flapping his hand behind him for a box of tissues.

  “Let’s start fresh,” he said, grabbing the box and pushing it over to me.

  I wiped my face and explained how Mom had failed to meet me as promised. And then, because why would he take me seriously otherwise, I told him that before she disappeared, she’d been asking questions about Yoshe King’s unfortunate death at the bed-and-breakfast near the Southernmost Point.

  “I assume you know that we found her body on the rocks,” I said, parrying his disapproval before he could say anything. “I hope my mother didn’t get in over her head with her inquiries. She’s a little bit nosy, in a creative kind of way.” He looked annoyed now, his face darkening and fingers gripping the arms of his chair. “It’s not that we don’t trust you guys to do your job—”

  “But?” he asked, leaning back in his chair until it squawked and the buttons on his shirt threatened to pop.

  “But it’s gotten personal,” I said. “Our friend Eric Altman is in jail and we’re positive he didn’t kill anyone.” I sniffled away some tears for the second time in ten minutes. “Can you tell me why he was arrested? Just a hint maybe? Does it have something to do with fingerprints on a bird statue?”

  His dark eyebrows undulated and he licked his lips as his chair snapped upright. “That would be an excellent reason to arrest someone,” he finally said. “As for your mother, it’s too early to file an official report, but I can let our patrol officers know to keep an eye out for her.”

  He jotted some notes about her appearance (auburn curls and hazel eyes like me, only twenty-plus years older and without my father’s widow’s peak) and what she might be wearing. This I had to guess from what I’d seen in her suitcase, but I assumed she would have dressed up for the luncheon. When he’d gotten all the details along with my phone numbers, he promised he’d let the detective know I’d come by.

  “Not necessary,” I assured him. Bransford wouldn’t be calling me back tonight—he’d be drooling over a bloodred rare steak and garlic mashed potatoes in the cozy courtyard at Michael’s. Washed down with a bottle of expensive wine and then Olivia Nethercut for dessert.

  I left the PD and drove the short distance to houseboat row. Water glinted in the sunshine, wind chimes tinkled, and the steady hum of someone power-washing their home pulsed in the background. Odd how life could look and sound exactly normal, when the truth couldn’t be more different. I felt acutely alone—meeting with Torrence had done little to dispel that—and eager to see the cheerful face of my elderly housemate.

  I parked the scooter near the Laundromat and trotted up the finger to Miss Gloria’s place. “Helloooo!” I called. No answer. I jumped onto the deck and hurried into the houseboat. The living area was pin neat, the pillow and bedclothes I’d left tangled on the couch folded away, the breakfast dishes upside down in the drainer, papers on the counter tidied into a neat stack.

  I put the kettle on for tea and nibbled at the last remnants of strawberry-rhubarb cake, thinking sorrowfully of the lunch we were mis
sing. Then I noticed a note scribbled in Miss Gloria’s old-fashioned script lying on the counter near the fridge, a copper-speckled rock on the corner for ballast.

  Up the dock playing cards with Mrs. Dubisson, the note read. Bill called. Eric’s mom is coming into town this evening. Then in parentheses: Should we offer to put her up? She can share my double bed. I’ll let you call and suggest it.

  Four women in this tiny space, all sharing a bathroom no bigger than a closet? “Absolutely not!” I yelped aloud, and then jotted on the paper: I’m sure Bill will want her to stay with him or maybe get her a hotel room up near their home. We’ll have them over for drinks or dinner, okay?

  I poured hot water over the green tea bag in my mug, and sorted through the stack of yesterday’s mail. Most of it was addressed to Miss Gloria, including a few bills, catalogs, and a postcard from Cory Held at Preferred Properties.

  Who says real estate doesn’t move over the holidays? We sold four homes last month! was splashed across the top of the card. Underneath were snapshots of two condominiums and two wooden conch houses, all staged to look adorable and tropical with red SOLD banners slapped across the photos. Someday. I restacked the mail, added honey to my tea, and dug the letter I’d lifted from Yoshe’s belongings out of my backpack.

  Settling into a wicker chair out on the deck, I sipped my tea and read the letter again, slowly. I’d never seen actual correspondence between a writer and her publisher, but this seemed unusually harsh. The editor had taken issue with Yoshe’s food and her writing, but even more interesting (and probably devastating to Yoshe) were the questions about the authenticity of her recipes. I wondered if the call Yoshe had taken at breakfast had been from the publisher. But why call the bed-and-breakfast’s house phone instead of her cell? How would they even have that number?

  I wished I knew more. My gaze swept over the letter again, pausing on the letterhead. Certainly this person would not talk to me. Unless I called and impersonated Yoshe’s next of kin? But I didn’t even know her name.