by Holly Plum
“Come again?” Detective Price questioned.
“As the host, it was Brandy's job to taste all the foods,” Mari explained, with growing impatience. “Who is to say that it was my salsa that killed her? Just because it was the last thing she ate, that doesn't mean my salsa was poisoned."
“We don’t know that for sure yet,” the detective replied. “So far all witnesses are saying that she ate the salsa and only the salsa. We will know shortly if you salsa truly was tampered with, Ms. Ramirez.”
***
After escorting Detective Price out of the restaurant, Mari got into her car and waited for the steering wheel to cool. She pondered the events of the morning and the interview in her dad’s office. Whatever the detective might have said to the contrary, it was clear that he still suspected Mari of being involved in the murder of Brandy Davos. Certainly, he hadn’t bought her suggestion that maybe someone else’s food was responsible. Mari hated the fact that whenever a crime was committed, suspicion always seemed to fall on her family. She wanted to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were innocent of this particular crime. But to do that, she was going to have to conduct her own investigation.
Mari would have to begin by interviewing the man who was, in her opinion, the most likely suspect.
A few minutes later, Mari stood at the head of the line in the Lucky Noodle. “Yes,” she said to the woman at the register, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Chun.”
Jia Chun’s eyes narrowed into slits of contempt, but she said nothing as she marched into the back of the restaurant. A minute later she returned, looking as cold and composed as ever. “Mr. Chun will see you in the back."
Mari found Mr. Chun in his office, busily using the end of his polo shirt to clean the glasses that were too big for his face.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” Mr. Chun said. “I’m not a murderer. I’ve never killed anybody. I’m not about to start killing people now either. The restaurant is doing very well, and you can be sure to mention that to your father.”
“But you can help me catch the killer,” Mari replied. “It may be someone in your restaurant. I want you to tell me everything you saw at the festival.”
“All I know,” Mr. Chun stated, putting his glasses back on so that his eyes were momentarily magnified, “is that Brandy Davos died while eating your salsa.”
“Yes, and we both know that I had nothing to do with her murder,” Mari clarified.
“Whatever you say.” Mr. Chun shook his head. “I don’t know anything. I was arguing with you when she died. I was nowhere near the crime scene.”
“Was anyone else in your family, anyone who works for you, in the tent at the time of Brandy’s death?”
Mr. Chun shook his head. “Jia was here. We’ve been understaffed. Right now the two of us are running everything. If she’s not here, then I am. When I’m not here, she is. I was the only person at the festival. And I was with you.”
Mari decided to press her luck. “Your egg rolls…what were they called?"
“Shanghai egg rolls,” Mr. Chun answered. “And no, I’m not giving you the recipe.”
“That’s not what I was worried about. How many egg rolls did you set on that hot plate when you entered the tent this morning?”
“Two dozen." Mr. Chun didn't hesitate to answer. He lifted his chin with confidence. "They would have won too."
"I guess we'll never know," Mari answered. “By the way, how many egg rolls were there when you went back into the tent after Brandy’s death?”
“Two dozen, of course.”
“You’re sure about this?" Mari raised her eyebrows. "Because anyone could have eaten one when you left the tent.”
Mr. Chun tugged at a thin strand of hair. It was clear he was reaching the end of his patience. “There were exactly twenty-four Shanghai egg rolls, no more and no less.”
“Then that means—”
“It means Brandy Davos never tasted any of my food,” Mr. Chun said in a patronizing voice. “Your salsa was at the end of the table. She started there and planned to work her way down the line. But she never made it to the next dish, which was mine, because she dropped dead before she could reach it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Mari was no more successful in her attempts to interview the other people who had been present in the town square at the time of the murder. She started with Katerina Georgiou, owner of a Greek restaurant called Athena Burger.
“I didn’t know much about her,” said Katerina, the curly-haired woman who had found Brandy's body. “All I can tell you is we weren’t friends.”
“Any particular reason why?” Mari asked.
“She was rude,” Katerina replied, seeming to regret the heated nature of her comments even as she made them. “Brandy insulted my food. She marched right into my restaurant and yelled at the chef when the dolmades she'd ordered weren’t perfect. She had a nasty temper.”
"Did she?" Mar nodded, not sure if it were true or not. She, like Katerina, didn't know Brandy that well either.
“Mind you, it’s terrible, what happened,” Katerina went on, taking out a cigarette and attempting to light it with shaking fingers. “I wouldn’t have wished such a fate on anyone. When she hit the floor, I thought maybe she had passed out from heat stroke. It was a hot one this morning. But her face turned a particularly nasty shade of purple. I was scared. You have to understand that I was afraid for her. I didn’t want her to die.”
“I believe you,” Mari responded, placing a consoling hand on her arm. “Believe me, I do.”
Katerina let out a deep breath. “I already told that detective everything I know. Good luck figuring out who did this. Brandy wasn’t a good person, but she didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Katerina’s assessment of Brandy Davos puzzled and irritated Mari. Brandy was a headstrong woman and a consummate professional. Brandy had stood up to people when she didn’t get what she wanted. She wasn’t easily intimidated. If a man had exhibited the same behavior, he would have been praised as headstrong and assertive. But for some reason when a woman did it, she was hated for it.
Mari wasn’t sure whether it proved the validity of her theory that Katerina’s disdain for Brandy was shared by Bubba Jones, the casual artist.
***
“Now you know I would never speak ill of the dead,” Bubba said, pacing around the back of his pizza shop. The restaurant was empty even though it was dinnertime. “But you wanted my honest opinion, and I’m fixin’ to give it to you.”
“Okay,” Mari replied. She sat in a corner booth with notebook and pen in hand.
“Brandy was the worst.” Bubba clenched his fists into balls and closed his eyes tightly as if crooning a sad song. “I mean, the absolute worst.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Bubba fell back against the wall, seemingly exhausted by the mere thought of Brandy Davos.
“Did she ever do anything to hurt you?” Mari asked boldly.
Bubba smirked. “What didn’t she do? Brandy asked me out, and when I refused, she spread rumors about my pizza all over town. This place wasn't always so empty.”
Mari reminded herself not to stare at him with her mouth open. “Hang on… she asked you to go out with her?”
“Why are you so surprised?” Bubba responded. “Now I don’t go out with just anybody. So when she came strolling in here and tried to give me her phone number, I immediately tore it up. No thanks, good lady, is what I said. Life is too short.”
“I can’t imagine she took that well,” Mari said in an amused voice. She had a strong suspicion that Bubba was making the whole story up to impress her.
“She didn’t take it well at all.” Bubba cleared his throat. “Brandy vowed never to eat at my restaurant again. She left, and within a few weeks, I noticed a serious decrease in the number of customers coming in. It was a pre-sisyphus drop.”
“Do you mean precipitous?” Mari guessed.
“Sure. Whatever." Bubba took a de
ep breath. "Pretty soon nobody was coming in anymore. You have to understand that I used to have actual customers. But this has been the case for the last three months. Empty. And here I am just twiddling my thumbs, waiting for someone to show up. Yesterday I spent the entire day painting. I didn’t make a single pizza.”
“And you think it had something to do with Brandy?”
“Well,” Bubba said, lazily scratching his belly, “I got to talking to some folks, and it turned out that they weren’t coming in because they had been warned not to. You wouldn’t believe the rumors. Rats in the ice machine. Rats in the ovens. Rats in the ladies room. Someone said the Canadian bacon wasn’t made out of real bacon, but koala, if you can believe it.”
“Sounds rough,” Mari responded.
“And then I spoke to a photographer for the local paper, who told me he had overheard Brandy Davos talking to the editor-in-chief. I guess she had told the editor-in-chief not to eat at Bubba’s either because the meat lover’s pizza was like death on a plate.”
“She really said that?”
“That's what I heard." Bubba shrugged. "But based on my conversation with that photographer, I’m confident that Brandy was the source of all the rumors. All because I wouldn’t go out with her.”
It didn’t matter whether or not Brandy had ever asked Bubba to go out with her. Mari reflected as she pulled out of the parking lot an hour later. Since she had been his only customer, Bubba was closing up early. It also didn't matter whether or not Brandy had actually spread the nasty rumors that he had attributed to her. What mattered was that Bubba thought Brandy had been spreading those rumors. The fact that he thought that made him a suspect. All he needed was a motive, and he and Katerina both had one. They had both disliked Brandy—though, in Bubba’s case, the dislike edged into outright hate. Katerina had been sorry about her death or at least done a convincing job of acting like it. Bubba didn’t seem sorry at all.
Mari pulled up in front of the pioneer museum to find the booths and tents fully set up. Even the murder hadn’t interrupted the day’s preparations. After leashing Tabasco, she decided to visit the judge’s tent one more time where she found all the plates laid out as before. None of them appeared to have been touched since that morning, for understandable reasons, though she noted that a chunk seemed to have been taken out of her salsa.
“That’s just great,” Mari said under her breath. “Investigate my food, but no one else’s.”
“It’s a real shame, isn’t it?” came a voice from behind her. Mari jumped and turned around to find a woman in an all-white suit standing in the door of the tent. The contrast of her clothes against the dark backdrop of the evening sky was striking.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Mari said, coming forward and extending her hand. Tabasco growled softly.
“Opal Tims,” the woman replied. “I organize the Chile Fest every year.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before.”
“Normally, I don’t drive out here until the day of the festival. But normally people aren’t murdered the day before it begins. I’ve been on the phone and in police interrogation rooms all day, and at this point, I just can’t see any way around it. I’m afraid we’re going to have to call off the Best Bite in Town competition.”
Mari felt a prickle of disappointment. She had been looking forward to the competition for a long time and had expected it to yield you a good reward.
“I guess I can’t blame you.” Mari sighed. “No one’s going to want to eat any of the food we prepared after what happened today.” Tabasco wiggled, trying to break free from his leash.
“I think I’d better go,” Opal said, giving the dog a wary look.
Tabasco finally broke free and went charging at the nearest table of food. Opal watched in horror as Mari ran after him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tabasco dashed through the rows of tables, Mari following in close pursuit. A small crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the chase, a few of them even trying to leap in front of the dog and cut him off. Tabasco knocked over a whole table of papier-mâché baskets, and he ducked in and out of Bubba Jones’s art booth. Down the street, Tabasco ran without stopping. Mari was out of breath by the time she reached the steps of the local chapel.
Here at the very edge of the festival grounds, the whole world lay still and quiet. Mari heard crickets chirping in the large patches of overgrown grass on the other side of the train tracks. The evening wind was cool on her face.
Tabasco had paused at the corner of the church and now stood gazing into the alleyway where a crew of workers had set up a beer garden a few hours before. Mari heard the slamming of a door and the low rumble of a couple of voices heatedly talking. As quietly as she could, she crept toward the edge of the alley and knelt down low to avoid being seen as she listened.
“Look, all I’m saying is, I’ll think about it,” came the drawling voice of Bubba. “I’d like to take you up on your offer. I really would. But I would be taking a huge risk.”
“You’ve got nothing to lose,” came a second voice. A man’s voice. “You know what people have been saying about your meats. What Brandy said.”
“I know what Brandy said,” Bubba said through his teeth.
Mari peered around the corner. A white van was parked in the lot in front of the beer garden. One of the van’s back doors had been opened, and a stout man in a gray uniform was nonchalantly leaning against it, a beer in one hand. Bubba wiped the back of his sweaty neck. He looked deeply uncomfortable.
“Then you want to make sure no one ever says those things about your meat again,” the man said. Whatever he was trying to get Bubba to do, he was very insistent about it.
Bubba let out a reluctant sigh. “What’s your final offer?”
The man said a number. Bubba’s face turned white.
“Seriously, that much?”
The man shrugged. “Right now, I’m the best chance you’ve got.”
Bubba shook his head sadly. “If word of this gets out, I’ll be ruined. I’ll never be able to show my face in this town again."
In spite of his reservations, Bubba reached into his wallet and carefully counted out the amount requested. The uniformed man waited with an outstretched hand, trying not to look too eager.
Realizing that the transaction was nearing completion and that they would soon be leaving the alley, Mari grabbed Tabasco and raced back to her car. She felt unnerved by what she had just witnessed. Bubba had a secret he wanted to keep the world from finding out. To that end, he had just paid a man an enormous sum of money to stay quiet.
One line from their conversation kept playing in her head again and again as Mari drove toward Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant. Then you want to make sure no one ever says those things about your meat again. It suggested the lengths to which Bubba was willing to go to silence the people who had been spreading rumors about him. Mari's stomach tightened as she thought about Brandy’s lifeless body, and about the hatred Bubba had expressed.
If word of this gets out, Bubba had said, I’ll be ruined.
Had Bubba poisoned a woman to stop her from slandering his restaurant and putting him out of business? Mari played the conversation over again and again in her head. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of Lito Bueno’s a few minutes later, Mari was sure she had found her murderer.
***
Because Alex had slipped out of the restaurant without any explanation, Mari found herself closing that night with the help of Chrissy, a perky blonde in her mid-twenties, and Mateo, the taciturn bus boy.
“Brandy’s death is literally the only thing anyone’s talked about all night,” Chrissy said with her usual cheerfulness. “I’m honestly kind of sick of hearing about it.”
“Did you know Brandy?” Mari asked Chrissy.
“Yeah, we went to school together. She was on the newspaper staff in high school. A real go-getter. She was the one who exposed the fact that Vice-Principal Garland had bribed the
leaders of the National Honor Society to nominate his own sons as members. Everyone knew they were completely unqualified for the positions. Brandy wrote a whole exposé about it.”
“Maybe I should add your old Vice Principal to our list of suspects,” Mari commented. She was only half-joking.
“And his two sons,” Chrissy added. “They actually transferred to a new school. They were so embarrassed. Of course, Vice Principal Garland took over as Principal there and within a few months they were both in the National Honor Society.”
“I bet Brandy was ticked off about that," Mari mumbled.
“Oh, she was rattled by the news. There wasn’t a thing she could do about it." Chrissy placed her hands on her hips.
Mari laughed. “You know, I kind of like Brandy. She seems to have made a ton of enemies, but she was a spirited woman. She knew what she wanted in life, and she went after it.”
“Don't be so envious,” Chrissy said with wide eyes. “One of her enemies got even in the end. I like being alive, thanks very much.”
“I know what you mean,” Mari's brother David chimed in. He was wiping down the tables with a wet rag. “To a certain kind of guy, there’s something very attractive about a woman who doesn’t let herself get bossed around. I don’t like having a girl I can control. Give me someone magnificently uncontrollable, I say.”
Mari stared at David. She had never known him to be such a passionate supporter of women’s rights. “David, I’m impressed,” Mari teased. "Especially since the last thing you said to me before closing last night was you're the girl, so you clean it up."
David blushed, glancing in Chrissy's direction. His attempt to impress her had backfired. "I said that? That doesn't sound like me."
"I'm pretty sure that's what you told me," Mari insisted. "Word for word."