Guilty as Cinnamon

by Leslie Budewitz

  The stylists had seen Alex arguing with Tamara. They’d also seen him leave while she was still alive.

  And they’d seen a man I assumed was Tariq.

  I bought a raspberry smoothie at the bakery and walked slowly up the street, sipping and mulling. According to Danielle, Tamara had wanted to bring Tariq with her on the new venture, but he hadn’t passed the test.

  That had been weeks ago. If he’d been unhappy—and who wouldn’t be—he’d have told Tamara so back then. No reason to follow her, camp out across the street from the new space, and wait for an opening.

  Unless he hadn’t known he was out of the picture until Alex’s tirade. If she’d left him dangling, only to discover unexpectedly that he was being left behind, that might have fired him up. Spurred a confrontation. Prompted an impromptu assault with a deadly pepper.

  I shivered. Tariq had sat in my car. Petted my dog. Hadn’t mentioned that he’d hoped to be part of Tamarack.

  If he’d expected Alex to fire him at any hint of treachery, no wonder he kept his lips zipped. I’d obviously acquired a reputation for being closer to Alex than I actually was—a pipeline of info to and from the chef himself.

  I tucked that thought away. Investigating Tariq would have to wait.

  I paused to let a delivery truck pass. Took another sip and noticed the note written on my cup:

  Watch for the changeable lady.

  I stared at the words. What on earth—?

  In the shop, Arf munched a dog biscuit, and I relayed his adventures to my staff. The vet had guesstimated Arf’s age at roughly five, and he’d belonged to Sam for about a year. Before that, who knew.

  “Have any of you seen a character dressed all in gray, except for a red scarf and a black hat? I saw him—her—whatever—last night when I walked by, and something seemed odd. But I was too far away to tell.”

  “Odd is the middle name down here,” Sandra said.

  “Truth to that,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’ve got another wild hare to chase.”

  “Investigating?” Reed’s face lit up at the hint of intrigue. Sandra rolled her eyes and waved one hand in the air as if to say, “Bosses—what can you do?”

  I hopped a bus and zipped down to the jail, hoping visiting hours hadn’t ended. On the way, I read the newspaper article again, more carefully. The only new piece of information was the cause of death. Bhut C hadn’t been named specifically, but figuring that out didn’t take a rocket surgeon. Any serious cook could make the link.

  Any serious cook . . . That knocked the suspect pool flat open.

  “I almost didn’t come here,” I told Alex through the Plexiglas and the plastic phone. My nose twitched—the jail staff did not stint on disinfectant. “Because everywhere I go, every question I ask, I discover that you haven’t been telling me the truth.”

  On the other side of the clear wall, Alex shifted in his seat. Energy radiated off of him, as always, but this time, the vibes had nowhere to go.

  “I didn’t kill her, Pepper. You have to believe me.”

  A spasm stabbed my neck. I don’t have to believe anything. “So who did?”

  His eyelids fluttered shut. Did he not know, or not want to say?

  “I struck out at Tamara’s house,” I said. “But I talked to a few restaurant neighbors—retail clerks, a couple of hair stylists, and the guy who runs the Indian place next door—”

  “Ashwani Patel?” Alert now. A crease cut across his forehead. “Don’t believe a thing he tells you.”

  “You know him?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone in the restaurant biz seemed to know each other.

  Alex tried to fold his arms, but the short metal phone cord stopped him. “We—crossed paths. He and his wife had a series of restaurants. None really took off. Probably why they split up.”

  My brow furrowed. If Tamarind wasn’t a success, why had Tamara so badly wanted to open next door? “Where is she now?”

  His left knee bounced like a drummer’s hand. “Gone, I guess. You know cooks.”

  I was learning. They skip around like drops of oil on a hot griddle.

  “Alex, you promised to tell me the truth. You admitted you went to see Tamara Wednesday, but you didn’t tell me you argued on the sidewalk. Yelled and threatened her.”

  He blew out a noisy breath. After a long moment, he wriggled in his chair, half turning from me, then glared through the scratched plexi.

  “I needed to know why.” He was the chef, demanding cooperation. “After all I had done for her, why?”

  His changing moods and tones were giving me whiplash. “Seriously? Her plans surprised you? Did you honestly expect her to stick around forever?”

  When he finally answered, head tilted back, eyes hooded and unfocused, his voice was tired and thick, like a dough that’s been overworked. “Maybe not. But she was different. Lot of flakes in this business. Talented cooks who do their work and go home—or get stoned or high or drunk. You try to hold on to the good ones. You push ’em to do better, better, better.” His hand tightened on the phone. “To meet your standards, night after night after night. But you ride ’em too hard, and one day, they don’t show up. Or they walk out in the middle of service and you got nobody to take their station and orders piling up and you’re disappointing people. You’re messing with the rest of your crew. Your diners are goners and everybody suffers and it stinks.”

  He stared at failures I couldn’t see—the server impatient for a missing meal, the too-rare filet sent back for refire that throws off all the intricate timing, the night’s special that sparks no palates. “You get a sense for who’s gonna last. And you hope to hell you’re right. Sometimes, though, you fool yourself. You don’t wanta know what you know, so you shove it aside. But you know.”

  I’d been in enough kitchens to understand what Alex was telling me: Every image of the confident chef in sparkling whites waiting, just waiting, for you to walk in and feel the love, teeters on a tightrope. He—or she—dare not for one second admit that he might fall, might fail, might tumble to the floor and crack like a raw egg or a crystal goblet.

  I let the silence sit between us as long as I dared. Jail guards watch the clock the way a fish cook watches a pan of butter browning for the halibut.

  “Who else, Alex? You were watching for signs. Who else did you think might leave?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Promise me you won’t fire anyone,” I said. “But what about Tariq?”

  His eyes snapped to attention. “Tariq? What do you know that I don’t?”

  “Promise me.” He nodded reluctantly, and I continued. “He thought Tamara was taking him with her, but Danielle had other ideas. I don’t think Tariq knew until you canned her in front of the full staff.”

  A cranberry flush covered his face. He leaned back as far as the phone cord let him. “Kid’s a hothead. That’s part of his problem in the kitchen. Thinks he’s special because he’s heard that all his life. Doesn’t realize out in the real world, everybody’s special and you have to work your tail off.”

  In other words, Tariq wanted to be Alex. “But would he kill her?”

  “Apparently so.” He gave me one of those believe-it-because-I-said-so looks. I hate those looks.

  And I didn’t buy it. Alex had had another suspect in mind before I mentioned Tariq. Who?

  “You said you should have known Tamara would leave eventually. But tell me the truth here, if you can.” I leaned forward, my hazel eyes boring into his browns. “Before Lynette dropped the dime, did you know—did you even suspect—that Tamara had other plans?”

  His lips tightened. “I’d like to say I did. But she blindsided me.”

  And in Alex Howard’s world, that was a fate worse than rubbery calamari.

  Seventeen

  The hills are so steep in downtown Seattle that some
of the sidewalks have cleats.

  —Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

  I hopped back on the bus and, once again, found myself at the First Avenue Café in the pause between prep and service.

  “Alex is hanging in there. He asked me to give you a message,” I told the staff gathered at the big table in the basement. Familiar faces, mostly, except the borrowed Exec, who’d greeted me warmly. I deleted the expletives and rephrased the rest, giving the boss’s words a kinder, gentler tone: “I’m so sorry I’m not there with you to mourn and remember Tamara. The best way to honor her is to keep the faith. To keep on cooking. I’ll be back before you know it”—or as he’d put it, as soon as these dickheads cut me loose. “In the meantime, I’m counting on all of you to help the police find the real killer, and to keep our customers satisfied.”

  Then I settled into the chef’s office off the basement kitchen—roomy by Spice Shop standards, but dwarfed by the executive office Alex keeps upstairs in the corporate suite—for interviews. Or as I’d told the staff, “conversations.”

  “Thought you might need a little liquid courage.” Scotty Glass tossed a thick paper coaster sporting the Café logo on the desk and topped it with a stunningly beautiful drink, the orange twist stretching up the side of the glass like a ballerina’s curved arm. “I hear you been talking to a lot of people. Everybody who knew Tamara.”

  I stared at the drink, a perfect Negroni.

  Coincidence? Or a message that he knew I’d talked with Danielle Bordeaux? She’d called him Alex’s man, in a tone that implied she and Scotty were not the best of friends.

  Why would he care?

  “Nothing you say goes beyond me. You have my word,” I repeated to each employee. By the end of the interviews, and the end of the Negroni, the sounds drifting down from the main kitchen told me Saturday night promised to be as crazy busy as Friday. One prep cook, one hostess, and two servers confessed they’d known about Tamara’s plans and had hoped to join her staff. Reasons ranged from wanting to work with Tamara to being part of something new to escaping the strictures of Alex Howard’s domain. As the prep cook put it, “Every good chef is tough. I wouldn’t want to work for one who isn’t. But I don’t need my head bashed in every night.”

  Figuratively speaking. While they all mourned for Tamara, no one wanted to accuse anyone else of murder.

  I felt Tariq’s eyes follow me as I passed through the kitchen. Hard to imagine that sweet face belonging to a killer.

  No doubt what Eve said to Adam when one son killed the other.

  The prep cook put a hand on my arm. “You wanted to know how much ghost pepper we had left. Three ounces, ground. Two eight-ounce bottles of oil—boss used all the whole chiles making the oil.”

  “Thanks.” That pretty much accounted for their standing order. In other words, no bhut C had gone AWOL. “Hey, do you all clock in? Who keeps the time records?”

  “They’re in the office,” she said. “Behind the door.”

  I trotted back down the stairs. Pushed aside the apron that had been tossed haphazardly over the wall-mounted machine. Half modern, half 1950s, an electronic recorder flashed the current time, a rack of paper cards next to it. The cards, marked for each day of the week, fit into a slot for stamping. The bookkeeper would then manually calculate each employee’s hours.

  “Tariq Rose,” I muttered, scanning the cards, and sure enough, it was right where it ought to be. But Alex Howard Enterprises apparently paid on Fridays. The only time records were for yesterday and today.

  Parsley poop.

  Back upstairs, the energy in the kitchen had risen to medium boil. Knives flew, sauces simmered. No one could be interrupted, even to ask if Tariq had been on time last Wednesday.

  “Hey, Glassy.” I perched on a barstool.

  He took my glass and raised it, asking if I wanted another.

  “No, thanks. Why didn’t you tell Alex that Tamara intended to leave the Café? And that she invited you to go with her?” That last part was a guess, drawn from the undertones of Danielle’s comments, but it made sense.

  For an instant, all motion stopped. Then he picked up where he’d left off, the mirror behind the bar showing his hands shaking as he reached for a bottle and a corkscrew. A muscle in front of his ear twitched.

  “Who says I didn’t?” He set two glasses of white wine on the bar, the wine just cold enough to fog the outside of the glass with a thin veil of condensation.

  “Because I know who told him.” Though I doubted Glassy knew Lynette or her role, his nervousness told me I’d guessed right. Her name had not made the news accounts, and Alex had sworn he hadn’t told anyone but the lawyers and detectives. “And if he imagined for one half second that you’d considered going with her, the explosion would have rocked this building off its foundation.”

  A server grabbed the wine. Glassy waited until she’d stepped away. “Alex and me go way back. Sometimes a good friend’s job is to save you from yourself. Self-made men don’t always understand that other people just want the same chances they had. My way of thinking, if an employee doesn’t want to stay, why would you want ’em to?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to talk, see if you can salvage the relationship?”

  “Sure. But if they’re determined, I say go, be happy.”

  “So you helped her make the break, but you didn’t tell him. Because you thought he’d try to stop her.”

  The big man leaned forward. When he spoke, his voice left no room for doubt. “Not by killing her. You know him better than that.”

  Truth be told, I thought I did. What made Alex an SOB at times was that he drew lines and expected other people to honor them, no questions asked. And despite what some may think, there is a clear line between being a hard-nosed businessman and being a killer.

  “Thanks for the drink, Glassy. Your Negroni is almost as good as Danielle’s.”

  His thin smile held no joy as he reached for a bottle of gin.

  * * *

  I rescued my dog from the darkened shop. He’d been alone less than ten minutes, but I felt guilty anyway. We took the long way home, circling through the park so we could stretch our legs and peek at the sky.

  Though I try hard to see the metaphorical blue sky, nothing beats the real thing.

  With encouragement—and compost—from my neighbors, I’d nursed a few perennial herbs through the winter and now had a lush deck garden. I snipped a few sprigs of parsley and mint, a variety called Mojito, and despite feeling fed up with Alex Howard and his troubles, I flicked on the TV news to check for updates. If there were any, they’d been pushed aside by news of road project cost overruns and the search for a missing child on Bainbridge Island, which ended happily when the boy was found asleep in a neighbor’s camper.

  That reminded me of young Kane. I whirred the ingredients for lemon-tahini sauce with my immersion blender, nicknamed the whizzy-uppy thing, my pulse matching the motor’s vibrations. My heart, alas, did not stop racing when I unplugged the blender.

  In the corner, Arf gnawed another bone from the friendly sous. Bones serve many uses in kitchens, but what better use than rewarding the hero of the afternoon? I still wondered what had prompted him to take off after the child, but he wasn’t telling.

  “Even dogs deserve their secrets, eh, boy?” Canned garbanzo beans drained in the sink. I chopped red onion and dumped it into the big food processor, adding the beans, fresh herbs, cumin and other spices, and more lemon. My Lebanese chef customer deep-fries his falafel, but while I don’t mind cleaning out the food processor, I hate washing up a grease-spattered stove, so I pan fry them instead. Healthier, too. Plus the leftovers would be yummy on salad next week.

  Scoop, pat, pat, pat. Eight falafel burgers lined up on the butcher-block counter. I warmed the pan and talked to my hero, working his bone. I told him everything I knew. It wasn’t muc
h. It wasn’t enough to acquit Alex, or to accuse anyone else.

  “Here’s the problem.” I lifted the first batch of hot burgers out of the pan. “The two people we know who had motive to kill Tamara are Alex and Tariq. But Alex . . .” The next batch hit the heat with a sizzle.

  Alex was too rational, too self-controlled, too—I waved the spatula like a wand, hoping to conjure up the right word. “Scheming” sounded too harsh. The man simply expected people to fall in line. It never occurred to him that he wasn’t king of the world.

  By all accounts, the kitchen tirade when he fired Tamara had been theater, conducted as a warning to the rest of the staff. They’d all agreed on that.

  Tariq, on the other hand, was a loose cannon. He had the cheffy temper tantrum down, but hadn’t yet grasped that it only works when paired with commitment and discipline. If Tamara’s public firing had been his first hint that she’d ditched him, he could easily have lost it and attacked her. I could see him tending that anger, feeding it like a sourdough starter until it bubbled up and boiled over. I could see him following her to the new space the next day to confront her.

  And then, carried away by rage, kill her? That wouldn’t get him the job he wanted, but young firebrands don’t think that far ahead. He’d choke her, hit her with a hammer or a two-by-four, shove her so hard she fell and hit her head on a sharp corner.

  But force her to breathe a lethal dose of bhut C? The killer had to either fling it in her face, leaving traces on her clothing and in the space around her, or stick her head in a bag.

  Uhhhh. My shoulders rose and my whole body shuddered.

  I cut a pita in half, split it, and slipped it in the toaster oven. Popped the cork on a light Pinot Noir from Oregon. Took a sip—suh-weet. Set my glass on the dining table, a round, slightly battered cedar table my former mother-in-law had given me when I set up solo housekeeping. She knows my love of timeworn furniture, my passion for pairing the mismatched.

  All that reminded me of Tag. I hadn’t returned his text or Tracy’s call, using It’s Saturday as my mental excuse. And, I didn’t do anything wrong.