Healthy Place to Die

by Peter King

“Go ahead.”

  “I want you to know that I am not a scandalmonger—”

  “I never thought you were. Tell me and stop teasing, Marta.”

  She crinkled her eyes in a smile. It showed up the lines, but that didn’t matter. “I saw Kathleen talking to Michel Leblanc—twice.”

  “Surely that’s not—”

  “Once was in the Roman baths. They were in a very serious conversation. Another time was on the lawn. They were well away from everyone else, and Michel seemed to be shouting and waving a finger at her.”

  Michel. Now that was a surprise. The mild-mannered Frenchman seemed much miscast in that role.

  “I hope it helps,” Marta said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your investigation,” she said, turning her unseeing gaze back on the volleyball game.

  “I told you I—”

  “I know you did. If I can help any more, just ask me.” She tired of volleyball and began to walk away, but she tossed a final comment over her shoulder.

  “I love mysteries, even if I can’t understand them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I WAS ON DUTY once more at ten o’clock in the morning. Again, I was obliged to follow the schedule set out by Carver Armitage, as the various presentations had been planned so that a wide range of foods and cooking styles could be covered without duplication. Carver had selected roast duck with orange as this morning’s dish.

  The conference room, modified with portable equipment, was full, and I noticed Elaine Dunbar in the second row. Tim Reynolds was there, this time with a different lady, a statuesque redhead. Marta was there and so was Helmut Helberg. Karl Wengen was present, Gunther Probst came in, and Millicent Manners entered at the last minute. The indefatigable Caroline de Witt introduced me.

  “This is one of the most famous dishes in the world,” I began, “and it can be eaten in a different version in every country. It’s a national dish in France, where they claim that the Rouen and the Nantais ducks are the best due to the crossing of domestic ducks with wild drake. Florentines point out that the duck is included in their cookbooks of the fifteenth century. In England, the Aylesbury duck is considered the best, whereas in the USA, the canvasback duck is popular but the Long Island duckling reigns supreme. It has a distinguished heritage, for in the nineteenth century one of the first Yankee Clippers brought nine Peking ducks from China. Millions of Long Island ducks are descended from that stock.”

  On the bench in front of me was a fine bird. “This is a duck with Nantes ancestry, although it is from Alsace. It weighs four and a half pounds. Heavier than that, a duck begins to get tough.” I pulled the bird toward me and took a long, sharp knife. “First, I’m cutting off the head and the feet … now I’m plucking the feathers. I’m removing the wishbone, greasing inside with butter, sprinkling with salt, and pricking the skin so that some of the fat can escape.”

  I put the bird into a roasting pan—“the smallest possible,” I advised. “Meanwhile, some butter has melted in this pan. I’m adding some sugar and pouring it over the bird. The oven is preheated to three hundred and fifty, and I’m putting the dish in. Some prefer to braise on top of the stove. Either way, it will take one and a half to two hours.”

  I indicated the makings of the orange sauce: the peel boiled in a small amount of water, the juice with a little Curaçao, several slices, a few spoonfuls of bitter orange marmalade, some tarragon vinegar, roux, and chicken stock.

  “The efficient staff prepared a similar bird and put it in the oven an hour and a half ago,” I said, “so let’s see how it is.” It was nicely browned, and I removed it while I added some meat stock, some flour, and some sherry to the juices in the pan. I heated for a few minutes, stirring constantly. I put the bird back in the pan and added the orange sauce, heated quickly, and put the bird on a large heated plate. I cut the duck into quarters, poured the sauce over them, and spread the slices of orange on top.

  “I’ll cut these up so you can all have a taste,” I said. “The French insist that potatoes do not go with duck, but in England and Germany at least, roast potatoes are served with it. Peas, carrots, turnips, and glazed onions go very well.”

  While everyone was tasting, I mentioned the other ways of cooking duck: Bordelaise style, in which the duck is stuffed and served with cèpes—small mushrooms; casserole style; in a curry; braised with olives; with sauerkraut; with cherries; with apricots; with applesauce; and in a terrine, a pâté, or a mousse.

  “Some chefs prefer not to stuff duck at all because it gives off too much fat and the stuffing will absorb this. The roasting temperature can be higher, but today’s more fat-conscious cooking suggests a slow and gradual melting of the fat so that it can be siphoned off with a baster.

  “The kitchen here prepared an excellent terrine of duck,” I added. “Some of you probably had it. Anyway,” I went on, “the versatility of the duck is obvious from these few examples in which so many fruits and vegetables go well with it.”

  The duck that had been passed around was gone in minutes, and several people proclaimed their intention to wait until the next one was ready for consumption too. Questions flowed. “What about Oriental ways of cooking duck?” was the first.

  “My favorite among those is Bali style—the duck is stuffed with spiced cassava leaves. Most Indonesian restaurants serve it.”

  “How do you know when to stuff a duck?” was another question.

  “If you want to use stuffing, then it should be a duck. With duckling you may or may not, as you choose,” I answered.

  “Is there any reason to braise rather than roast?” was the next question.

  “The best rule to follow,” I said, “is to roast a wild duck but to braise a domesticated duck.”

  “You can see why my problem gets worse,” said Gunther Probst mournfully as the session broke up. “So many foods, even just the ones to go with duck.”

  “It makes you all the more useful,” I argued. “Manual recording is not nearly as efficient as your method with the computer. You can handle so much more data.”

  “I guess so.” He sighed.

  No one had left. Everyone was still there, discussing and asking more questions. Helmut Helberg came across the room. “I should sell more duck then, should I?”

  “It has a lot going for it,” I said. “It’s low in calories and has no cholesterol. Most cooking methods bring the fat way down. Ducks are easy to raise, so they are potentially cheap.”

  “They make a good alternative to chicken and turkey,” he agreed. “I’ll have to look into that.” He nodded in satisfaction. “Lobsters the other day, duck today—yes, I am getting a lot of ideas here.”

  A lady with her hair tied back and wearing an expensive-looking suit came to tell me how much she enjoyed the presentation. “But what about duck soup?” she asked. “You didn’t mention that.”

  “It was the title of a very funny Marx brothers film,” I told her. “It’s not a soup at all. You can, of course, put pieces of cooked duck into a soup just as you can so many of the foods found in the kitchen.”

  People finally began to filter out, and Elaine Dunbar was one of the few left. “I don’t eat duck very often,” she said. “Maybe I should try it more; sounds like it comes in lots of ways.”

  “I think you’d enjoy it,” I told her. “In fact, I’ll have a word in the kitchen—maybe they can put another duck dish on the menu.”

  “I’ll have it if they do,” she said.

  “Meanwhile, are you thinking up more ways of linking cooking with crime?”

  “Seems to be no problem. The Coca-Cola trials and appeals ran for more than ten years, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t realize it was that long. Contrasting drinks, though, on that basis, the legal wrangles over the right to call a beverage ‘champagne’ ought to run for a century!”

  “They well might. It goes over great in the media too,” Elaine said. She was becoming animated. “Here’s this tiny ar
ea of France, the department known as ‘Champagne’ fighting the rest of the world, claiming that if a sparkling wine is not made in Champagne, then it isn’t champagne. The public loves the David versus Goliath contest.”

  “The problem with champagne,” I suggested, “is how to distinguish the different, brands from one another. By taste? No, it’s by image, the taste is irrelevant.”

  “Surely lots of connoisseurs can tell the difference. Isn’t that what wine tasters do?”

  I was about to answer when she said, “Look, I was just going to go to the baths. Why don’t you join me? We can continue this debate there.”

  I didn’t reply immediately.

  “Something wrong with that idea?”

  “Ah, no. I’ve had a couple of experiences there that I wouldn’t want to repeat.”

  She looked at me curiously. “Not in the baths, surely?”

  “No, not there—”

  “Right,” she said promptly. She was a young woman who usually had her own way, that was obvious. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

  A winding path led into the cavern baths, where the steady drip and gurgle of condensing and flowing waters echoed from the rock walls. Inside, it was like a vast subterranean palace with two large marble pools interconnected to form a figure eight. Shining green ferns in red clay pots glistened damply, and black wrought-iron and wooden beach-style chairs and chaise longues were strewn around the edge of the pools.

  Bronze dolphins spouted water into the pools, and a gentle mist rose from the water surfaces. Hidden lighting in the ceiling of the cavern threw a green cast on to the scene below. It all looked like a set for Indiana Jones Finds Atlantis.

  A slight murmur rose and fell. It was not from the denizens of the spa gasping with pleasure in these hedonistic surroundings but evidently from the cycling of the equipment, feeding, filtering, and exhausting the water, which had a blue-green tinge. This was mostly due to the green lighting because the pools were not lined on the walls and the bottoms with the conventional aquamarine tiles but consisted instead of sheets of reflective glass.

  No one was here, to my surprise. I walked past the edge of the pool, where I had to pry open a heavy door of foggy glass to see beyond it. It was a sauna room filled with scented steam that flooded out to engulf me. At first, I could see nothing, then very slowly I realized that there was a row of slatted wooden seats all around the walls. One end of the room was much hotter, and the steam became a denser white.

  Only one person was there. She was female, naked, and sat propped against the wall in an awkward position, eyes closed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MY IMMEDIATE REACTION WAS, “Oh, no, not again!” but as I plunged through the steam, her eyes opened and she smiled.

  “Must have fallen asleep,” Elaine said. “What took you so long?”

  My look of alarm puzzled her. “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a naked woman before?”

  It must be pleasing to always have the right thing to say on the tip of one’s tongue. Maybe those who do have a repertoire from which they can pick the appropriate bon mot, but only a very extensive repertoire would contain a snappy response to Elaine’s question.

  Luckily, she was not disposed to silences, either her own or those of others, and she went on, “Your clothes are getting wet. Better take them off.” I must have hesitated because she said, “It’s all right. There’s no one else here.”

  “What was it we were talking about?” she asked eventually, her voice as foggy as the air in the sauna.

  “Wet clothes?”

  “No, before that.”

  “Champagne, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, that was it. We finished that conversation, didn’t we?”

  “I think so,” I said as there came noises from the pool area: a couple of loud splashes and then voices that echoed metallically from the cavern walls.

  “Let’s start another conversation out there,” Elaine said.

  Outside the sauna room, pristine white terrycloth robes hung on a rack, and we put them on. In the pool, two shapes were thrashing through the water and another two swimsuited figures sat by the water’s edge.

  We took a couple of wrought-iron chairs well away from them. “We went very quickly from Coca-Cola to champagne,” I said, “but I’m sure there are lots of other potential cases that you have your eye on for your legal future.”

  “Endless.”

  “Is your fiancé in the legal profession too?”

  “I don’t have one,” she said carelessly, watching the two stroking, splashing swimmers.

  “I thought you said—”

  “I did. I often say that as a smokescreen. Keeps unwelcome attention away.”

  The other two figures, one male, one female, dived into the water, and the scene was like one from an ambitious art film with the mirrored walls and bottom of the pool having their images chopped into slices by the churning water.

  “I didn’t realize you were a detective when we first met.” Elaine’s tone was conversational.

  “But now you’ve realized it?”

  “Somebody told me, I don’t remember who.”

  “I’m not really a detective,” I said. “I often have to explain this. I hunt for rare foods, seek out obscure herbs and spices, advise on food substitutes and sources, unusual cooking methods. I help out wherever a knowledge of the history of food is concerned. Someone nicknamed me ‘the Gourmet Detective’ and it has stuck.”

  She listened with interest. “A fascinating job,” she commented.

  “Some of the time. Like other jobs, there are stretches of routine too. Of course, you could have found out all this by just asking me.”

  She leaned back in the chair and smiled. “I rather like this way better, don’t you?”

  I returned her smile.

  “You never get involved with any Sam Spade stuff then?”

  She was watching the swimmers again, so it was hard to guess if there was anything behind the question.

  “Very rarely.”

  “Most of your clients aren’t in the restaurant business, I take it?”

  “Some of them are, certainly,” I said.

  “No crimes in the kitchen?”

  “Sorry, counselor,” I said, “but can you make your line of questioning more specific?”

  “Very well, Your Honor. Have you ever run across murder in a restaurant? It must be an easy place to commit such a crime. After all, many foods can be poisonous, or can contain poisonous substances—or so I understand.”

  “That’s specific,” I admitted. “All right, I was involved in a case not too long ago where a murder was committed at a banquet. Poison was involved in that one. As to a murder by poison in a restaurant—no, I can’t say I’ve ever run across a case like that.”

  She nodded slowly, very slowly, and I waited for some exposition but none was forthcoming. “Are you going to tell me more?” I asked.

  She pursed her lips. “Mmm, no, I don’t think so.”

  “You can’t ask a question like that and then just drop the subject,” I protested.

  “I’ll have to drop it if you can’t contribute,” she said tartly.

  “I can’t contribute, but surely you can—this is your story. What restaurant? Where? When?”

  “You missed ‘who’ and ‘why.’” She smiled as she said it. She had a nice smile when it came from her human persona as opposed to the professional, the lawyer. “I don’t know the answers to most of those queries, and I’m only guessing at the others.”

  Another couple came in and joined the swimmers in the pool. Voices and water noises became tangled with the echoes from the rock walls and roof. “This is the case you mentioned before, isn’t it?” I said. “You said that the case was being reopened.”

  “Yes, this is the one.”

  “It has a fascination for you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, whenever you want to tell me more, maybe I can become fasc
inated too.”

  She nodded. “Lawyers often hire private investigators, you know.”

  “I told you I’m not a—”

  “You told me, yes.”

  She regarded me with that look clever teachers give to backward pupils sometimes. It means “I am wiser than you. I know more about this than you do.” She turned her gaze on the swimmers for a moment and when she looked back at me, it was an appraisal, an assessment of how I might fit into her plans.

  For my part, I was wondering if I should tell her about Kathleen Evans and her mysterious death—or disappearance—or both. Maybe I should, I thought, but not now. Kathleen’s fate had nothing to do with Elaine’s case, and after all, Elaine was a lawyer, about to launch a career. Unless there was a client, she had no reason to be involved.

  Come to think of it, I had no reason to be investigating Kathleen and the circumstances surrounding her sudden disappearance. I didn’t have a client either, although I had been involved during her last day—if that’s what it was.

  It was disappointing. This encounter with Elaine sounded now as if it had been planned for the purpose of ensnaring me in—well, I had no idea in what. The invitation from Kathleen Evans to meet her in the Seaweed Forest now shone in a new light. Maybe Kathleen had had the same motive—to involve me in some plot or at least find out what I knew. I would have preferred to think that it was me they wanted, but it was looking as if that was erroneously self-centered.

  We walked back to the main buildings. “Just in time for lunch,” she reminded me. It was hard to comprehend that it was that early in the day, as so much had happened. Still, it’s nice to know that a woman has a healthy appetite.

  Although there was no formal seating arrangement for the midday meal, I didn’t see Elaine when I entered. I took a seat next to Tim Reynolds, who promptly began a conversation. “Just the man I’m looking for—well, one of them anyway. It’s my wife’s cousin. Ex-wife really—second ex-wife, that is. Stan’s a good friend; we go to football games together. He wants to open a restaurant and he’s looking to me to invest in it. Called me last night. Can’t do it without me, he says. Now, I’ve been careful with my money, but it’s dwindling nevertheless. If I put money in Stan’s restaurant and it failed, I’d be in bad shape. What do you think? Is it a good investment?”