A Measure of Murder

by Leslie Karst

  “So who was it?”

  “Marta.”

  “Huh. Well, that doesn’t really mean anything. Tons of people use those cough drops. Though not me. I’ve always hated that menthol flavor. But even if it was Marta’s wrapper, she has every reason to be up in that room.”

  “I know.” I stood up to refill my coffee cup, prompting Buster to follow me to the kitchen and back to the dining room. “But still, it makes me wonder. Like, did Marta and Kyle ever hang out? Did they even like each other? She seemed awful annoyed with him at the audition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “Yeah, he was in prime form that night,” Eric said. “And I don’t think of him and Marta as being buddies or anything. But you know, now that you mention it, I do remember seeing them together on one of the days off on the Eastern Europe trip. I was kind of surprised at the time but didn’t think much of it after that. Lots of folks get thrown together on trips like that who might not normally hang out.”

  “Well, what were they doing when you saw them?”

  “Just walking down the street near our hotel, is all. It was in Leipzig, I think. Some afternoon we had off.”

  “Were they serious, laughing?”

  “Christ, I don’t remember, Sal. They weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary, nothing that stuck in my mind. Other than being together. But they could have just run into each other on the street by accident. What’s this thing you have about Marta, anyway? You seem kind of obsessed with her.”

  “I am not obsessed,” I retorted, perhaps a little too defensively. “I just ask ’cause, well . . . Okay, I know you’re gonna think this is weird, but I’ve been thinking about Amadeus—”

  “Oh boy. Here we go.”

  “Wait. Just let me finish. You know how Salieri was trying to get Mozart to finish the Requiem before he died so he could claim it as his own? Well, I’ve been wondering. What if that rumor that someone started about Marta is true?”

  “What rumor?”

  “I told you the other night at sushi. Someone’s been saying she didn’t write the composition that got performed this summer in Chicago, that someone else composed it and she’s passing it off as her own.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Eric said, and then blew his nose again. “How could someone even do that? The person who wrote the music would just come forward and announce it was theirs.”

  “Not necessarily. They might not even be aware she’d claimed it as hers. Or that it had been performed in Chicago. They could live in Japan, or Texas . . . or Leipzig.”

  “Uh-huh. And I’m guessing you have a theory as to how this would relate to Kyle’s death, I suppose?”

  “I do. If Kyle knew she hadn’t written it, he could have been blackmailing her, and she killed him to shut him up.”

  “Then why on earth would she tell you about the rumor, after she’s killed off the guy who started it? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Yeah. I guess that is a flaw in the theory.”

  “Ya think?”

  But I was not yet ready to concede defeat. “Okay, so what if she just asked about the slander to throw me off track? You know, so that no way would I suspect her, since she’s the one who brought it up in the first place?”

  But even as I said this, I realized how silly it sounded. Not to mention the fact that I’d used the same lame rationalization about what Steve had told me about the window frame.

  Not surprisingly, Eric laughed, setting off another coughing fit. When he’d recovered enough to speak again, all he had to say was, “I thought I was the only one in this conversation taking drugs right now. But man, you’re tripping, girl.”

  * * *

  After we’d hung up, I set about making some breakfast. Eric was right, of course, I thought as I dropped two slices of eight-grain bread into the toaster. (Though I sure as hell wasn’t about to admit as much to him.) After all, it was absurd enough to think Marta would appropriate someone else’s music and then allow it to be performed under her name at a world-famous festival. But then add to that murdering Kyle for blackmailing her over it and then telling me, someone she barely even knows, that there’s a rumor going around that she did in fact steal the music?

  You’d have to be incredibly stupid to do something like that. And one thing I was fairly sure of: Marta was not stupid.

  I slathered honey and peanut butter on my toast, sat back down at the dining room table, and reached for my Requiem score. Might as well at least take a look at that Recordare quartet. I saw right away that Marta’s description was correct. The alto part didn’t look all that difficult. The movement was relatively slow and had none of those tricky melismas that were still causing me such grief in the opening and closing movements.

  Licking the honey from my fingers, I grabbed my laptop and opened the song-learning site to track number five of the Requiem. It couldn’t hurt to run through it and see how I did, right? I hit play and, to my shock and astonishment, made it through the entire movement with only a few mistakes. Of course, hearing the alto part twice as loud as all the others while I sang along didn’t hurt. But still. Shazam!

  After running through it once more, I decided I should hear the piece the way it was meant to sound, instead of with the cheesy electronic piano the song-learning site used. I found a video of some chorus and chamber orchestra from England doing the Recordare on YouTube and turned up the volume to give it a real listen.

  Whoa. Now that was something—what a difference! The way the four parts wove together over the orchestra, it was like the tendrils of some delicate and exotic vine intertwining as they crept across a wall of exquisitely carved marble. Simply lovely.

  Well, dang. Maybe I should audition for the part.

  I was picking my way through the movement, this time with the help of an online piano keyboard, when my phone chirped with a new text. Seeing that it was from Margaret Ng, I stopped singing and opened her message:

  Code is exact same format we use here, but file not on our server. U might check if other firms use same code. Keep me posted!

  Interesting. “Thx!” I texted back, and then clicked open the scan of Kyle’s will I had on my desktop. I studied the code at the end of the document again: six letters and five numbers with a double backslash in between. Our firm had used four letters and four numbers with no backslash. But how could I check what other law offices did?

  And then I remembered that I had an accordion folder full of briefs from cases I’d won while at my firm—a sort of trophy case I’d taken with me when I left the law. Jumping up, I headed for the file cabinet in the study and brought the folder back to the dining room table. I’d saved the opposing briefs for some of the cases as well as mine, and they should all have some sort of ID code at the end.

  One by one, I turned to the last pages and checked their codes: four letters and four numbers; six numbers and no letters; four and four with one backslash at the end; five and five with a forward slash in between; another four and four. But none the same as the one on Kyle’s will.

  Okay, so it didn’t prove that the will had come from Lydia’s law firm, but it sure provided support for my theory. I picked up my phone and punched in the number Kyle’s brother had given me. He answered before the second ring.

  “Sally, hi. I was hoping you’d call. So did you get the will? What do you think?”

  “I think it looks kind of suspicious, actually.” I told him about the pleading paper and how it was not what law firms used for wills and also about the code at the end of the document and how it matched the ones used by Lydia’s firm.

  “I get why she might have used the wrong kind of paper,” Robert said, “since she’s not a lawyer and might not know any better. But why the hell would she put a code at the end that could lead anyone back to her firm?”

  “Who knows? Maybe when you’re a legal secretary, it just becomes habit, since you’re so used to adding it for every single document you do. I know when I drafted briefs
for my firm, it was pretty automatic for me to put the code at the end. But whatever her reason, there’s no file with this code on the server now, so she must have deleted it after she printed the document out.”

  “But why would she have even done it at her law firm?” he responded. “Why not just print it at home?”

  “Yeah, I thought of that too. But once she decided she wanted it on pleading paper, she probably had to do it at work. In the old days, you’d print legal pleadings on paper that came with the numbers and line already on it, but nowadays no one buys that kind of paper anymore. Firms just format their computers and printers so that when you want something on pleading, it prints all that stuff out along with the text. So if Lydia wanted it to be on pleading paper, she would’ve had to do it at the firm.”

  “So what do we do now?” Robert asked. “How do we prove it, if it is true?”

  “Good question. I suppose you could just call and blindside her with it, and maybe she’ll give something away?”

  “But if she doesn’t, then all that would come of it would be she’d be warned that we were onto her. It’s so frustrating,” he said, letting out an exaggerated groan. “I don’t even know what Kyle saw in her in the first place. You know he wasn’t even sure Jeremy was his son?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Which makes what she did with the will all the more aggravating, if the kid in fact isn’t his. Kyle found out when Jeremy was about one and a half that Lydia had been seeing someone else before he was born. And then after they break up, he ends up having to pay child support for the kid, too?”

  “Well, at least he got that big inheritance from his uncle, so he wasn’t hurting for money.”

  “Not our uncle—he’s alive and well. It was some rich friend of his who died.”

  “Oh. Jill seemed pretty sure it was an uncle. But I guess you would know, since it’s your family. So glad to hear he didn’t die,” I added with a laugh. “So anyway, about maybe talking to Lydia, lemme think on it a bit.”

  “Will do. I’ll defer to you on this, since you’re the lawyer.”

  “Was,” I said. Not that anyone ever seemed to pay attention to that fact.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Javier asked me to help out on the Gauguin line that night—a first, which showed he was starting to have at least some confidence in me as a cook. I was going to shadow him and be available in case the place got busy and we needed another set of hands for the deep fryer or maybe, just maybe, wielding a sauté pan.

  Even though it was a Tuesday night and thus bound to be fairly slow, I was kind of nervous. I really wanted to show Javier that I could do this and not burn the brown butter or blow the ratio for the red wine pan sauce. Which I suppose was kind of silly, since I am technically his boss.

  Nevertheless, I got to Gauguin almost an hour early in case Javier had any last-minute instructions for me. Which turned out to be a good thing, because as soon as I got there, the chef gave me the alarming news that Kris wasn’t coming in—a sick kid or husband or something, he wasn’t sure—so I was going to have to be a real line cook for the night. And when I say “alarming,” it wasn’t just me who felt that way. As Javier reviewed the mise en place for all the hot line dishes with me, he was talking a million miles an hour, and his native Michoacán accent was starting to slip out, a sure sign he was also nervous as hell.

  I started out at the stove, tending sauté pans and sauce pots for the à la minute orders, and it was okay for a while, as long as the tickets were just dribbling in. But once orders began to come in faster, I got frazzled. First I overcooked a medium-rare steak au poivre, which Brian luckily caught before it went out to the dining room. After that, I think I panicked. I had just finished panfrying an order of chicken with artichokes and pancetta when I realized with a pang that I couldn’t remember what kind of deglazing liquid went into the dish. Standing there in a daze, I stared at all the bottles above the stove until Javier glanced over and yelled out, “Dry sherry!”

  Finally, to make matters even worse, I committed the total rookie mistake of grabbing a hot pan without using my side towel and spent a half hour clutching ice cubes in my hand between orders to soothe the burn.

  At around eight thirty, we got a whole slew of orders all at once for our special, poussin à la Grecque, and Javier moved me over to the charbroiler. We now had close to a full house, unusual for a Tuesday, and everyone was feeling the pressure caused by having only the minimal weeknight staff, made all the worse by Kris’s absence.

  I’d already worked the Gauguin grill one night previously and had quickly discovered a knack for the position. The two trickiest parts of the job are remembering the order your steaks, chops, and chicken quarters go onto the grill and making sure they’re cooked to the patrons’ preferences. But for someone like me with strong organizational skills, it’s a fun challenge.

  I’d quickly come up with a system of placing the new orders at the far back of the charbroiler and then moving them forward as the cooked ones were plated and sent off. And from years of home barbecuing, I found I was able to accurately gauge how well done the steaks and chops were by simply pressing the pieces lightly with tongs. (Okay, so there was that earlier incident of the overcooked steak au poivre, but it had been panfried, not grilled.)

  So I was happy for the move to the charbroiler, to return to a station I felt more confident at. And as I stood there at the grill, flipping eight orders of spatchcocked game hens slathered in garlic and oregano and then basting them with lemon juice and olive oil, I felt focused and calm, oblivious to the tempest awhirl about me.

  “Fire the rib eyes for twelve!” Brandon shouted, poking his head through the pickup window.

  “Got it,” I answered and, grabbing one of the two steaks I’d taken from the cooler on seeing the ticket come in, threw it onto the back of the grill behind the hens. It would be the medium-rare order; the rare steak would go on a minute later.

  I started to step back to give myself a respite from the intense heat blasting from the grill but jumped forward again on hearing Javier’s voice call out, “Behind you!” The head chef scuttled past me and made his way to the end of the line, where he stood conferring with Brian.

  Time for that second steak. I laid it next to the first and then inspected my Cornish game hens. The two nearest looked done, so I pulled out the instant-read thermometer I keep clipped inside the breast pocket of my chef’s jacket and inserted it into their thighs: 166 and 167 degrees—perfect. Snagging the pair, I set them on two warm plates and handed them over to Reuben, who finished the entrées off with a mushroom and basmati rice pilaf and a stack of thinly sliced roasted zucchini and eggplant. He had just passed the plates through the pickup window to Brandon when there was a shout from the other end of the kitchen.

  “Fire!”

  I turned toward the voice, wondering if the shouter was upset about an order of mine that hadn’t yet been fired, but then realized it was the prep cook, Tomás, who was doing the yelling. “It’s on fire!” he shrieked again, gesturing with the stainless steel containers he held in each hand.

  Before I could identify where exactly he was pointing, the ANSUL system was activated, and its fire-suppressant agent started spewing from the nozzles above the Wolf range, causing all of us to jump back out of the way. Within seconds, the hot line was enveloped in several inches of white foam.

  The entire kitchen staff stood there, stunned.

  “Damn,” Reuben finally said, breaking the silence. “It’s a freakin’ winter wonderland.”

  I stared at the charbroiler and stove, at my beautiful game hens and rib eye steaks and all the sauté pans and sauce pots whose contents were now hidden under a blanket of who-knew-what noxious chemicals. What a nightmare.

  Javier was standing next to me unmoving, his eyes wide and mouth slack. Once it was clear the nozzles had finished extruding their white goo, he shook his head as if to clear it and then stepped forward to shut off all the burners on the Wol
f range. “Go ahead and turn the charbroiler and salamander off, too,” he called out to me over his shoulder as he reached down to dial the oven knobs to their off position. “We don’t want to risk any gas leaks or electrical fires.”

  I did as he instructed and then turned to Tomás. “You saw it,” I said. “Did one of the pans catch fire?”

  “No,” he answered. “It was in the garbage can.” The prep cook indicated the wastebin at the far end of the Wolf range, now also covered in white foam. “There was smoke and flames coming out of it.”

  “Really?” I said. “That’s weird.”

  But then I remembered my dad telling a story about a fire starting in his garbage can after he’d thrown away some rags with paint thinner on them. It had been a hot day, and the rags had apparently spontaneously combusted. The fire could have caused a lot of damage to his house if a neighbor hadn’t seen smoke coming out of the can and rushed over to warn him.

  It was certainly hot as blazes in the Gauguin kitchen right now, what with all the cooking elements having been on full blast. But we didn’t keep any solvents like paint thinner at Gauguin. It had to have been a spark from the stove that ignited something in the can. “Did anyone throw any grease or greasy paper into the trash?” I asked, raising my voice above the din that had erupted in the kitchen once the shock of the ANSUL system going off had passed. “Or see anyone who did?”

  No one admitted doing such a thing or to seeing anyone do so. But then again, all our staff had been trained never to place highly inflammable items into the kitchen garbage can.

  So who could be lying? It had to have ignited for some reason.

  I walked over to the wastebin; it was now a charred, foamy mess. So even if I wanted to sift through its no doubt disgusting contents, I seriously doubted I’d be able identify the fire-starting agent.

  Looking back up, I surveyed the people now crowding around the stove and realized I was standing next to Brian, who hadn’t moved from where he’d been immediately before the fire—right next to the wastebin. As I stared at the cook, apprehension growing in my chest, he turned to meet my gaze. I wasn’t positive, but I thought I detected the trace of a smile before he leaned over to murmur something to Javier.