Roux Morgue

by Claire M Johnson

  Shellfish. Why in the hell had she eaten shellfish? She knew she was allergic.

  Allison, her nails digging into the tablecloth, her lips a black blue, was in full-blown anaphylactic shock. The panic in her eyes haunted my dreams for months. Her chest heaved in staccato humps in a desperate bid for air. With a shudder she slumped unconscious against Antonello.

  I ran into the pastry kitchen to search her purse for an epi pen, found it, raced back to the dining room, and jabbed her with it. It was too late.

  To this day I remember Allison’s death in choppy, short, black and white segments, like five-second cuts from a film: Antonello ripping off her chef’s jacket to administer CPR; Benson hovering over her and screaming, “Oh my God,” his hands fluttering in a spastic twitch; Étienne running to the first aid kit cabinet, gauze and bandages spilling onto the floor as he frantically searched for Benedryl; the horrible silence of dining room as we realized she was dying; and the absolute worst, Antonello ordering Allison to breathe and trying to pour Benedryl down her throat, the pink liquid dribbling out the corners of her slack mouth; her limbs lay splayed in haphazard abandon against the gaudy floral dining room carpet.

  After the paramedics had strapped Allison to a gurney and wheeled her away, Curt posted himself at the front door. Like the theater, the show must go on. He lied to patrons that we’d suffered a burst water main and that their reservations would be honored next Friday.

  After the ambulance left, everyone was at a loss as to what to do next. Students milled around in disparate groups drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Benson sat alone in a corner of the dining room and stared into space, slowly emptying a magnum of wine, a coffee cup at a time. When anyone would get within three feet of the table he’d growl, “Go away.” The chefs parked themselves at another table in the dining room far away from the scene of Allison’s death, never again to claim that part of the dining room as their turf. Finally after Antonello whispered in his ear, Étienne, the most senior chef, ordered the chefs and the students to put the food away and clean up the kitchens; then we could all go home.

  I took one look at the hollow, red-rimmed eyes of Allison’s students and dismissed them. On autopilot, I cleaned up the pastry kitchen myself. I found some comfort in putting things away. It was silly, but although I couldn’t save her life, I’d make Allison’s kitchen clean.

  Antonello came to check up on me around nine o’clock. Like tending to a child, he wiped my cheeks free of tears. I hadn’t even known I was crying.

  “What’s this with your pocket?”

  My right pants pocket was bloody.

  “Oh the keys,” I muttered. I held up my hand; I had one long cut along all four fingers. When I saw Allison choking to death, I’d squeezed her keys so hard that I cut my fingers on the edges of the saw teeth. He led me over to the first aid cabinet.

  “That needs to be cleaned. Cara, you shouldn’t carry your keys like that, you’ll put a hole in your pants,” he fussed, more to say something than anything else. As if either of us gave a good goddamn about the pants.

  “They’re not…” I started to say that they weren’t mine, they were Allison’s, but I couldn’t finish the sentence. Looking into his face, I realized that time hadn’t passed him by at all. I’d been fooled by his quick step and his general joie de vivre. The skin around his eyes was parchment paper-thin with that hint of gray that circles the eyes of older Italian men. And watching him apply bacterial ointment to my cuts, I saw the gnarled hands of the older chef, the knuckles puffy, the skin folded on itself with thousands of microscopic wrinkles from washing your hands and handling too much acidic food. Just what my hands would look like in ten years.

  He finished bandaging me up, put the first aid kit into the cabinet, and turned back to me.

  “You will be okay.” It wasn’t a question. “I tell Allison’s parents.” Whenever Antonello gets excited or upset, his English deteriorates. “I don’t wan’ that drunken Benson or the police doing it. You go home and get some sleep, eh?”

  I nodded with more confidence than I felt. “Thanks for the first aid. Are you all right?” I hoped that sounded fairly ambiguous. If he didn’t want to confide in me I understood. Maybe he was worried I’d feel betrayed, who knows? If he wanted to have an affair with Allison that was between him and his wife.

  For the tiniest of seconds his shoulders slumped and his eyes scrunched as if in pain. Then he adjusted his hat and smoothed his apron.

  “Cara, I call you, tomorrow. I must make my phone call.” He hugged me and walked out of the kitchen, across the dining room, and in the direction of the office.

  The specter of Allison’s parents made me realize I needed to find her purse in the supply cabinet, return her keys, and then give it to Antonello to give to her parents. Unlike me, whose purse could easily hide a small child, Allison had a small leather backpack-cum-purse affair, just large enough for a coin purse, checkbook, pen, keys, a small vial of perfume. When I opened her purse, the scent of Chanel No. 5. wafted out.

  I sprayed a little perfume on my wrist and inhaled it. Smell is the ultimate memory jogger for me. The smell of pine trees make me think of Christmas; the thick scent roast beef sizzling in an oven recalls Sunday night dinners at my mother’s house. And the smell of that perfume unleashed a hundred memories of when Allison and I were students. The Christmas she and I won a citywide competition for the best gingerbread house. The spring we’d made a spun sugar replica of the Conservatory of Flowers for the mayor’s charity ball. Good memories, memories to replace that horrific death in the dining room. We should have been better friends; there was so much we had in common.

  I took one last whiff of my wrist and snapped her purse shut.

  Crossing the dining room, I saw Dean Benson slumped over a table in a drunken stupor, his arms cradling his head. The magnum was empty. He was mumbling over and over something into his arms that sounded like “Mama.”

  When I reached the office I stopped. Antonello sat in the receptionist’s chair; his body and arms hugged the top of the desk in an imitation of Benson. But through the glass door I heard deep, harsh sobbing.

  I turned away and went down to the locker room and put her purse in my locker. I couldn’t deal with Allison’s funky lock right now. I’d give him the purse later.

  I called my mother from my cell phone and spent the night at her house. There were too many people alone in their grief that night, and I didn’t want to be one of them.

  Chapter Nine

  A morning spent drinking tea with my parents, Ed and Roz Grant, did a lot to blunt the shock and grief of Allison’s death. My parents are retired and live on a cul-de-sac in Kensington, a tiny enclave squeezed between the Berkeley and El Cerrito hills that butts up against the flats of Albany. No one on the block is under seventy.

  In contrast to my crisis-to-crisis life, their lives were enviably calm and orderly. My stepfather devotes his day to reading three newspapers and communicating with POW groups online. He was in the Royal Air Force in World War II and spent four years in a Japanese prison camp. His POW group is campaigning to get reparations from the Japanese and British government before they all die off.

  Mom’s passions are her family, gardening, swearing, her dog, and gambling, not necessarily in that order. Everyday she visits the local seedy liquor store to buy daily scratchers and bi-weekly lottery tickets. Just about the time the family starts quizzing her on exactly how much money she spends on the lottery, she wins a five hundred dollar jackpot that shuts us up for a while.

  Their house is always clean and the tea’s sharp and sweet. This morning a heavy, cold mist obscured the garden, only accentuating the sense of sanctuary I feel at their home. When I think about not having their kitchen as the ultimate refuge when I’m upset or just want to gossip, I start to hyperventilate and panic.

  I repeated all the details of Allison’s death before our tea had a chance to cool. Mom used to be an ER nurse and se
cretly relishes details about death: decapitations and dismemberments being personal favorites.

  “She must have been a severe allergic reaction,” my mother asserted, with an authoritative shake of her head. She wore her “nurse” face; chin firm, brown eyes sharp. Even her hair had authority. I used to pity the doctors she worked with. Mom never surrendered her opinions and knowledge honed over forty-five years of nursing to some mere doctor. “Was Allison allergic to shellfish, like me?”

  “Yeah, super allergic. She even had an epi pen in her purse.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “Everyone knew about it. The students were given a warning about it the first day of school. If it had shellfish in it, you had to warn her.”

  “I hope to God some poor student wasn’t responsible. Poor girl. Remember what happened to me last summer? Maybe the same thing happened to her. Scared the shit out of me.”

  My stepfather lowered the New York Times, leaned his bald head forward, and wriggled his forehead in remonstration. “I warned you about that crab, Roz.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  Mom has been routinely avoiding crab for years after one particularly nasty reaction. Recently, however, she’d been nibbling little bits of crab here and there and nothing seemed to happen. Last summer we were at a family get-together at my aunt’s house and ten minutes after downing a crab cake my mother sprouted hives nearly as virulent as Allison’s were. Fortunately my cousin Sam is a doctor and injected some antihistamine in her right away. Sam surmised that the iodine in the shellfish accumulated in my mother’s system until that last near-fatal bite turned the iodine level toxic.

  “I know just how she must have felt. Her poor parents.” Her voice was somber. She reached across the table to squeeze my hand, as if to reassure herself that I was indeed alive and not an apparition.

  My chest tightened with tears remembering the panic on Allison’s welt-poxed face as she fought for the tiniest bubble of air.

  The ring of the telephone made me jump. I leapt out of my seat to grab it before the second ring.

  “Grant residence.” I said.

  “I thought I’d find you at your mother’s place. You okay?”

  O’Connor. I turned my body away so that my parents wouldn’t see me blushing. I glanced over at the oven to see if it was on; the kitchen felt awfully warm all of a sudden.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I didn’t want to spend the night by myself. It was pretty ugly.”

  “You two were students together, weren’t you? That must have been tough. I’m sorry.”

  As soft as marshmallow, O’Connor’s voice held none of that businesslike, brusque tone he’d adopted since becoming a student.

  “Thanks, O’Connor. Yeah, we went back a long way.” I could hear my voice start to shake and squeak. I cleared my throat. “Sounds pretty quiet at your place. Where are Moira and the kids?”

  “Stevie has a field hockey game this morning. Why were you at the school so late?”

  Mom began mouthing “Hi” in the background. I rolled my eyes in acquiescence. She and O’Connor have a mutual admiration society going on.

  “My mother says hello.”

  “Tell your mom hello and that I hope she’s doing well.”

  “Mom, O’Connor says hello and hopes you’re doing well,” I repeated in a rush.

  “How come you were there so late?” he repeated. “If there was more prep you should have told me. I could have stayed late and helped you.”

  The thought of O’Connor and me working in tandem, alone, not buffered by nine other students was a scary proposition. I undid the top two buttons of my nightgown.

  “I was up in the library doing some research. I lost track of time and when I checked my watch it was four thirty. I thought I’d eat dinner at the school, hoping the traffic would have died down by the time I’d eaten.”

  “Did you see anything unusual before Ms. Warner went into shock?”

  He’d been doing a pretty good job until he slipped with that “Ms. Warner.” The wonderful heat causing my wrists and underarms to sweat evaporated, leaving me chilly and cold.

  “Is this a professional phone call?”

  Silence.

  I walked out of the room and into the bathroom so my parents wouldn’t see my face or hear my voice. Despite all my grousing and complaining, the sick feeling in my stomach, disappointment the size of a casaba melon, made me realize I’d secretly been celebrating O’Connor’s surprise appearance at the school. I whispered to myself that he was there for me. He faked a disability, put a second on his house, all so he could legitimately be with me, all in the name of true love.

  Could I get any more pathetic?

  Although my fingers dug so fiercely into the plastic of the phone that I broke two nails, I forced my voice to be calm.

  “I thought you called to inquire about my welfare. It’s merely the prelude to an interrogation, isn’t it?”

  More silence, then, “You’re paranoid, Mary.”

  Bracing myself with one hand on the counter top, I refused to let it drop.

  “Are you investigating Allison’s death?” I demanded.

  “No,” he snapped back.

  “Don’t insult me, O’Connor. I was married to a cop for ten years, god-dammit. I know what a preliminary investigation sounds like. What’s wrong with Allison’s death?”

  O’Connor heaved a sigh ripe with frustration.

  “Get a life, Mary. Last fall’s murder has you looking for bodies everywhere. This is not a murder investigation. You and I are not teaming up together and doing Nancy Drew again.”

  The snide reference to Nancy Drew was like putting a blow torch to a pot of oil. I sat down on the toilet and pressed the phone to my forehead. How was I going to make it through the next three weeks with this man in my classroom?

  All of a sudden I heard the chatter of his kids and wife in the background. The game must have been called for weather.

  “There were over fifty people in that dining room. You want the gory details of Allison Warner’s death, start dialing. I’m going to hang up now. But before I do I want you to know, O’Connor, I’d rather stick both hands in a deep fat fryer than work on another case with you.”

  I punched the End button, cutting him off. I looked in the mirror.

  Liar.

  ***

  Not only a liar but a fool as well.

  My feet dragged against the cold linoleum as I slunk into kitchen and put the phone back. I felt, rather than saw, four eyes begging an explanation of why I had to secret myself in the bathroom with the phone.

  Avoiding eye contact, I announced to the kitchen cabinets, “I need a hot bath.” I shuffled back to the bathroom to scald clean my foolish desires. I filled the tub to the very top with blistering hot water and raked a soapy washcloth over my legs, arms, and back.

  What in the hell was I thinking?

  With every pass of the washcloth I forced myself to visualize Moira’s face again and again. I reminded myself that she wasn’t a non-entity that O’Connor could or would discard like an orange peel, but his wife, mother to his three children. Someone he’s been married to for seventeen years. Someone whose house I know nearly as well as my own. Someone whose kids call me Aunt Mary. Someone who under no circumstances should be betrayed, even in fantasy.

  The hot water and brutal scrubbing left my skin mottled and raw like a sausage, but my state of mind resolute and determined. I dressed slowly, each maneuver accompanied by a resolution. Pull on underwear—no more delusional fantasies about O’Connor and me reenacting the food scene from Tom Jones. Struggle into bra—fill the gaps in my own life, without the benefit of swarthy, sexy, married, Irish cops. Pull on jeans—do sit-ups, stomach looking flabby, can’t compete against twenty-somethings on dating scene with squishy middle. Force turtleneck over head—join organizations to meet men, no cops and no chefs allowed. Pull on socks and boots—don’t let biological clock propel you i
nto situations that humiliate and debase you. Comb hair—sue Clairol for convincing you that Radiant Ruby was the hair color for you. Check hair in mirror—go back to therapist to find out why you have this thing about aging. Brush teeth—O’Connor had another reason for being at the school and it didn’t involve you, so get over it.

  Mid-stroke I stopped. The foam from the toothpaste dribbled down my chin.

  If O’Connor wasn’t a student because of my undeniable charms, why was he there? I dismissed out of hand Jim’s hints that O’Connor was on medical leave. Nonsense. If O’Connor weren’t conducting an undercover investigation of the school, I’d eat lima beans every night for a week. I loathe lima beans.

  I finished brushing my teeth with so much vigor that my gums bled. The little angel of common sense whispered, “Don’t snoop around, Mary. Last time it nearly got you killed.” The devil of pride, appealing to my wounded vanity, sneered, “Oh yeah, who solved that case, you or O’Connor? Who was two steps ahead of the game the whole time?”

  No contest who won that battle.

  Gathering up my nightclothes and toiletries into a ball, I crushed them into my overnight bag. It was time to get moving, time to find out what was so damn interesting about École d’Epicure that O’Connor would go undercover.

  Chapter Ten

  Two minutes after I’d wiped the toothpaste from my chin, I was out the door and driving to San Francisco.

  With my eyes focused only on body parts below the neck, I kissed my parents goodbye, thanked them profusely for their hospitality, and exited the kitchen with some asinine excuse about buying bananas.

  I didn’t need bananas. What I really needed to do was to hunt through Allison’s purse and locker for clues.

  Which were at École.

  Heading up the Bay Bridge incline to Yerba Buena Island, I turned on my windshield wipers. It was after eleven, but the fog still hadn’t lifted. Some days it doesn’t. Like a tired dowager settling her gray skirts, it sits over the region all day and doesn’t budge. Landmarks had disappeared, swallowed up by the misty curtain, and visibility was about twenty feet. Whenever I drive in that kind of fog, I get a tickle on the back of my neck warning me I might be entering the Twilight Zone.