Roux Morgue

by Claire M Johnson

  Not bothering to search for a parking space, I went straight to the garage on Vallejo.

  The jeweler’s was just off Washington Square. The sidewalk in front was still damp from a hosing down, the windows filled with traditional wedding bands and watches. I imagined it might survive another three years before closing its doors. Couples bought their wedding bands at Tiffany’s these days, oversized rocks being the order of the day. The simple and restrained gold rings in these windows would have little appeal to a generation who measured the strength of their commitment to each other by the number of carats, the more the better.

  As I opened the door, a little jangle announced my presence. Flocked wallpaper, the height of chic in 1963, graced the walls. Glass and mahogany cabinets formed a small U that made up the whole shop. I amended my prognosis. It would close by the end of the year, no doubt to be replaced by an upscale ice-cream place.

  A small, well-dressed, older man appeared from behind a curtained alcove. He would have done hand-springs if I could have played the Uncle Dom card. But I couldn’t exactly do that since Plan A meant lying through my teeth in order to find out the identity of Allison’s lover. The faint smell of starch preceded him. I immediately envisioned his wife starching and ironing to perfection seven white shirts every week. Topped with a red tie, a white button-down shirt complimented a black pinstriped suit, a white carnation in the lapel. He probably had worn the same outfit for the last forty years. Probably doubled for selling wedding rings and attending funerals. Although for funerals he’d switch the jaunty red tie for a somber blue one.

  A quick up and down of my attire left him with a puzzled crunch to his forehead. He brought a hand over his bald spot, as if polishing his head were going to provide inspiration. Decades of selling jewelry had, no doubt, given him a preternatural ability to guess the balance of his client’s bank accounts down to within a five-dollar estimate solely based on their wardrobe. The jeans, tee-shirt, red Converse high-tops without socks, and fifteen-dollar haircut relegated me to constant overdraft, a bankruptcy imminent; however, the cashmere jacket screamed constant funds, hence the confusion.

  A heavy-lidded blink of his eye and a sonorous, “Madam?”

  “Good morning. I’m here on behalf of Allison Warner.”

  “Yes?”

  He wasn’t even giving me a tiny opening. Damn. I brushed a hand over the lapel of my jacket to draw his attention away from the cheap silver hoops in my ears.

  “On behalf of her parents,” I lied. “I worked with her.” That wasn’t a lie.

  “Oh?”

  “At the cooking school. École? We had gone to school together and we were friends and…were…” I started to falter, followed by a completely spontaneous spilling of tears.

  I hadn’t realized he was that close to ending our exchange until the rigid cast of his shoulders fell dramatically. He whipped out a handkerchief and handed it to me.

  He bowed his head. “A great loss.”

  I nodded and dabbed at my eyes. “A friend…” My voice trailed off. I was thoroughly ashamed of myself and was frantically thinking of a way to exit gracefully, because once again, in an effort to prove how smart I was, I’d conveniently forgotten that there was a real person in all this drama: Allison. Who should have been standing here instead of me, trying on her wedding band for that final fit.

  “Loretta,” he called into the back. “A cup of coffee.”

  I waved a hand in weak protest.

  “No, I have to go. I’ll just…” God, how could I get out of here? I began mumbling some nonsense about leaving. I was roundly ignored. Before I knew it, I was hustled into the back, beyond the curtain, and pushed rather forcefully into a chair. A steaming cup of coffee with a small plain biscotti nestled on the saucer was placed before me.

  “Drink,” he commanded in a severe tone so like my uncle I suspected they might be fifth cousins once removed. I knew when I was beaten. I drank the coffee black and nibbled on the cookie. I could hear the rhythmic hiss and steam of an iron in the next room. We sat there for several minutes in silence. There were no other customers, and I had the grim feeling that I was possibly the first and last customer of the day. And I wasn’t even a customer.

  “Mr.?”

  “Garibaldi,” he finished for me.

  “Mr. Garibaldi. I think I’ve made a mistake coming here. I don’t know if Allison’s parents knew she was getting married, and I thought that I…” I didn’t finish the sentence because I couldn’t say, “Hey, I’m playing Nancy Drew and came in here prepared to tell you any number of bald-faced lies because I want to know who Allison’s boyfriend was.”

  “That explains it,” he nodded thoughtfully.

  “Explains it?” I asked, the slightly evil side of me, the one whose middle name is curious, taking over the show once again.

  He waved a hand in the direction of the shop. “When you’ve been in business as long as I have, you know the types. The young couple who return six months later trying to resell you the set because they are already getting a divorce. The older couple who are desperate to keep their marriage together and think that purchasing new rings will get them another ten years. The ones truly in love, these are my favorites, whose hands shake as they try on their rings. I’ve seen them all.” He paused. “Then there’s your friend and you.” This was said with the tip of a half-eaten biscotti pointed in my direction. He popped the rest in his mouth and chased it with a mouthful of coffee.

  I managed a weak smile.

  “Me?”

  “That jacket isn’t really you. You wear it as if it itches. I suspect it was a Christmas present.” He looked at my feet and pointed at my red Converse. “Those are you.” He continued, politely ignoring my blush. “She was a very beautiful woman.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “You read about her…” I let the word “death” hover in the air.

  “Quite sad. Her ring was very unusual. She was one of those very much in love. I remember her coming in to the shop, her hands, rough and red from the day’s baking. She didn’t want any of the standard rings. She wanted an heirloom ring, an antique from Italy. I carry a small number. Most people think they are too gaudy, too Italian, but that is what she wanted. She was quite insistent. Her fiancé was Italian.”

  Unfortunately, I had just taken a sip of coffee and found myself coughing to stifle what was definitely a choke of dismay.

  “You know him?” Mr. Garibaldi asked sharply.

  “Um, vaguely,” I said, thinking I was going to rip Antonello’s head off the next time I saw him.

  “I never met him. Which is why she stuck in my mind. I have been in business thirty-nine years and always meet the fiancé.”

  I stared at him. “He never came in?”

  “Not once. How well do you know this man? Is he the type of man to let a woman pick out her own wedding ring?”

  I thought about all the help that Antonello had given me over the years: first as a mentor, then invaluable career advice, then the friendly shoulder to cry on when Jim left me. Was he that type of man?

  “I don’t know him well at all,” I confessed.

  ***

  I left the shop with a raging headache, wearing a pair of gold filigree hoops that Mr. Garibaldi assured me brought out the green in my eyes. A guilt purchase, yes, but when I saw them nestled against the black velvet, the delicate intertwining of the hair-thin gold strands, I thought again of Allison’s lingerie and how I’d systematically denied my femininity, from the white cotton of my underwear to the serviceable, cheap haircut. I put them on before I left the shop. A definite, if expensive, step in the right direction.

  I knew this sort of headache. It would prove impervious to any milligram combo of Motrin I could safety inflict on my stomach lining. It was a stress headache, and the only way to stop it in its tracks was to shove Antonello up against a wall and scream at him until I was hoarse.

  I zigzagged my way through town to the sc
hool, cursing city planners and traffic engineers and plate tectonics for creating a city that was all hills, one-way streets, and timed lights. I was in even a worst mood when I arrived at the school than when I left the jewelers, not a mean feat, only to be greeted with a scene that was becoming all too familiar; students milling around in the dining room with coffee cups and cheeks wet from crying.

  Before I could open my mouth, Antonello grabbed my arm.

  “Mary, oh my God, Mary! Where have you been?” This segued into rapid-fire Italian, of which I understood nothing, and gigantic hand motions, of which I had to step back to avoid being whacked in the head.

  “Stop! What’s the matter?”

  “She never showed. The morning pastry chef. The Japanese one. Benson’s been calling you all morning.”

  I dragged him into a now empty kitchen.

  “She’s Chinese,” I snapped at him.

  “Where were you, Cara?”

  “In North Beach, you bastard. At the jewelers?” I checked my cell. Dead. Of course. “Don’t look so innocent. Cara,” I mocked. At his look of confusion, I growled at him, “Stop it, Antonello. Just stop it. I—”

  Someone grabbed my arm, digging fingers into my bicep with such force that I flinched. I whirled around to protest until I saw who it was and the look on his face. It was Marc. “She’s dead, Mary. Shelley’s dead!”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Why is it when you’re going through something like this it seems to take forever? Every word you utter, every swipe of your hand through your hair, every roil of your stomach, even batting your eyelids, takes so much goddamned effort and time, and yet when you look back you can’t pinpoint anything; it’s a blur.

  My inevitable confrontation with Antonello was postponed.

  As if it were humanly possible to stand in that dining room and be oblivious to the clusters of people guzzling coffee, smoking cigarettes, and crying into their aprons, several people came up to me demanding, “Did you hear?” Shelley had been killed in her apartment. When she hadn’t shown up for work, Benson had called the cops and they had sent over a squad car. During one of these ghoulish exchanges, out of the corner of my eye I saw Marc being politely escorted out of the dining room by two uniforms. At which point, O’Connor hooked an arm through mine and more or less dragged me to the oven room to give me the quick run down.

  Given the temperature in the apartment and the lividity marks, the coroner estimated that Shelley had been strangled sometime late Sunday night, possibly early Monday morning. The television show CSI not withstanding, time of death isn’t that easy to pinpoint; no coroner wants to go on record for the exact time of death and then get his or her ass handed to them in a sling when it gets to court. But given that it was winter, plus an analysis of the contents of her stomach and the cartons of take-out in the refrigerator (The Slanted Door would later confirm that she’d picked up her order and was very much alive at 7:45 Sunday evening), the coroner would commit to a twelve-hour window between ten Sunday night and ten Monday morning.

  Being her boyfriend immediately made Marc the prime suspect. On top of that, everyone in their apartment building had heard them screaming their heads off at each other for nearly two hours, punctuated by lots of swearing and door slamming, and culminating in Shelley dumping Marc’s clothes in the hallway.

  Under normal circumstances, Marc looked mighty good for it.

  But Marc had a really nice alibi. Me. From nine o’clock on, Marc and I were shattering public indecency laws in the back of his van in the school’s parking garage. (Security tapes would corroborate our stories, explaining the security guard’s broad leer when I drove in today). And the two hours before that, we’d been eating dinner. And drinking. And dancing. And fantasizing about committing those indecent acts.

  “They’re taking a statement from that over-sexed spatula king down at the headquarters, but I need to hear it from you first so I know if this is related to, you know,” O’Connor looked over his shoulder, “why I’m here. At the school. Anyway, you can vouch for him from what time to what time?”

  For two people who rarely blush, both our faces were flaming. Which was six hundred different kinds of ridiculous, since neither of us were sweet sixteen, but that didn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference.

  I was standing with my back against the wall. “You think this is related to…” I waved a hand in the air. “You know, why you’re…”—cough, cough— “…here?”

  He didn’t answer for a second. Then, “I don’t know. Seems likely, but damned if I know how.”

  Turning away so that I didn’t have to see his face, I mumbled, “Seven that night until about six,” and then began arranging a jumble of oven mitts into neat little piles to avoid looking at him.

  “Six in the morning?” In an equally pathetic attempt to avoid looking at me, O’Connor began opening and closing the doors of the deck ovens, as if checking for a forgotten sheetpan of cookies.

  “You, um, saw us. The elevator, remember?” The piles weren’t completely even. I moved one mitt from pile A to pile C.

  “Give it to me.” O’Connor had finished checking all the decks and started all over again, because I had a monopoly on the oven mitts, and short of whipping out a screwdriver and disassembling the entire oven, there wasn’t any other possible distraction. “Blow by blow.”

  I tried not to wince at that.

  “We had dinner; that took a couple of hours. Then we—”

  “It took you guys two hours to have dinner? What in the—?” He slammed one of the doors with a wee bit too much force.

  I messed up the three neat little piles I’d made and then threw the mitts on top of the deck oven.

  “Goddamn it, O’Connor. We ate dinner, we sipped champagne, we danced. We fed each other raspberries dipped in melted chocolate. Then around ten—I’m kind of fuzzy here about the time because I was nice and toasted by that point, but let me assure you, he wasn’t out of my sight for a second—we managed to stagger our way to his van, in the garage, and then we fucked like rabbits for several hours until we fell asleep around four. You saw us at six. In the elevator. Then we showered and got ready for class. He wouldn’t have had time, at any point, to kill her, because he was either flirting with me or fucking me. Got it? I refuse to be embarrassed about this. Do you hear me?”

  I knew I sounded strident and, all protests to the contrary, embarrassed, but hell. I wrapped my arms around myself as if to physically brace myself because I half expected him to snap back, “It would be hard not to as you’re shouting,” but he said nothing. He just shared my shame.

  “You need a ride down to headquarters?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll let them know you’re coming. Give them a head’s up about his alibi. He’s not going to do anything stupid and lie to protect your honor, is he?”

  I bit back a bitter chuckle, because that’s exactly what O’Connor would have done, but I doubt that Marc was that chivalrous. It probably would never occur to him.

  “Don’t worry. I imagine he’ll give a hickey by hickey account of the whole evening.”

  “Mary, Christ…”

  At that I left the room.

  ***

  Like I said, a blur. Coolie appeared out of nowhere and insisted that she drive me to headquarters. It wasn’t until the drive home that I remembered that she wasn’t even to suppose to be at school, but clearing out her apartment; I’d ask her about it later.

  It is a measure of how insane the last six months of my life have been that being interrogated in a murder case was now ho-hum. Been there, done that. Yeah, I know the coffee machine is in the basement and that it really sucks.

  I managed to keep a few shreds of dignity, brazening it out with the interrogator, giving Marc his written-in-stone alibi with a minimum of detail. But I knew. By midnight, the only people who didn’t know that Jim’s ex-wife had bonked a guy ten years her junior in the back of a
VW van would either be dead or on vacation. A phone call from Jim was inevitable, and if I thought my embarrassment with O’Connor was extreme, discussing my Sunday night high jinks with Jim would be the Olympics of mortification. I’d rather stick a fork in my eye. My only hope was that his embarrassment was so great that he’d just leave a message.

  Although questioned separately, Marc and I finished up our statements at the same time. We shuffled down the hall together toward the exit, mute, Marc sniffing every other step. Coolie took one look at Marc, and suddenly I found myself with two houseguests. Coolie herded us into the car, drove us home, and slung a slim arm around Marc’s shoulders, steering him into her room the second we crossed the threshold. Which was a good thing, because he’d been on a crying jag since the entrance to the bridge, and I was on the verge of beating him into silence with a handful of maps when we pulled into my driveway. Even I knew that this was beyond the pale—the guy’s girlfriend had just been murdered—but it was an indication of how close I was to losing it.

  I was exhausted and wired and felt like total shit, a charming combination, so I did what every red-blooded chef would do. I began to cook.

  Luciano must have done some food shopping because my refrigerator was full. I could do something with this. Yeah. Several bottles of wine, fresh pasta, basil, spinach, and feta; a baguette and two baskets of organic cherry toms sat on my countertop. It was too early in the year for any decent local fruit, but a bag of Courtlands screamed baked apples.

  As I knew it would, the smell of baking raisins, sugar, cinnamon, and apples somewhat restored my equilibrium. I had no intention of getting fancy here. What we all needed were some greens, a good hot meal, and something sweet. I washed the spinach, sliced some red onion, crumpled the feta, and tossed it all in a tart basalmic vinaigrette. Once the apples were done, I brought water to a boil, chopped basil, sliced the toms in half, threw the fettucine in the hot water for a couple of minutes, drained it, and then tossed it all in olive oil, with lots of salt and cracked pepper. The carbs would do us good.