The Whole Enchilada

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Oh, yeah? Picasso was a collage artist, too. So what?”

  “When did Holly go to art school, exactly?” I asked. “Do you remember?”

  “After she got divorced from George. It would be in the Amour notes, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I’m just wondering how close they were. Or weren’t.”

  The six of us spilled out of our vehicles in the conference-center parking lot. Julian and Boyd said I was not allowed to carry anything. They and the boys took boxes, as did Marla—without grumbling, for once—and marched inside. I limped. Since we were so close to the solstice, the late afternoon light was still bright gold. The mountains, enveloped in a thick veil of pine pollen, appeared very far away. If I hadn’t been in so much pain of every kind, I would have enjoyed it.

  “We’ll eat first,” said Julian, smoothly taking over as chief executive, once we had all the food for the next night stored in my conference kitchen’s huge refrigerators. He shimmied the lasagna out of the oven. The salad lunches he’d made for us were a memory, and the six of us fell on the rich layers of melted mozzarella, fontina, ricotta, tomatoes, onions, and mushrooms, as if starved.

  Julian commissioned Boyd and the boys to help him with the dishes, to give Marla a break. She was so effusively grateful that I laughed.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be busy,” she said indignantly, and pulled out her cell. She then began working her lines of communication, asking friends if they knew anything about Kathie Beliar. Also, had they ever heard of an artist named Yurbin? If not, could they please call their friends, and so on. Marla didn’t say why she wanted information about Kathie and Yurbin, but her pals knew if she was calling, something was up.

  I couldn’t bear not to be doing something. I stared at the tables in the dining area, trying to figure out how I was going to make the twelve people who’d made reservations for the fund-raiser feel comfortable in the vast space.

  But then something odd happened. Maybe people had read the e-mail from me, and were responding to that. But I didn’t think so. What was more likely was this: the sheriff’s department had by that time made several hours’ worth of inquiries of parishioners. I could imagine the drill: “Your priest, Father Pete, has been attacked. Do you know anyone with a grudge against him? Who, exactly?”

  So St. Luke’s parishioners began calling my cell. They weren’t phoning because they knew Marla and I had discovered Father Pete and Kathie Beliar. Nor, bless them, did they want the inside scoop on what had happened to Father Pete. No: they wanted to make reservations for the dinner. By the time I got off the phone an hour later, I had reservations for an additional ninety-eight people, putting us at one hundred ten. No one wanted veggie burgers, either.

  Marla shook her head. “Now that our priest has been stabbed, parishioners suddenly care about what he’s been begging them to do for a couple of months. There’s Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt and now there’s such a thing as Episcopal guilt. Go figure.”

  I took a deep breath, balanced on my good leg, and looked around the dining room. “Unless you know something about manna that I don’t, you’re going to have to tell me where I’m going to get eighty-some prime steaks on short notice. And don’t ask: I know Tom will veto a potluck.”

  “Probably even a buffet,” said Marla, unhelpfully.

  14

  One hundred ten people?” Tom asked in disbelief when he came in at midnight. “You’re kidding.” He searched my expression in the pale aura from the maroon-and-yellow lamp he’d given me for my birthday. “You’re not.” His look turned tender. “Miss G., you still look exhausted. Call the dinner off, won’t you?”

  I swallowed. “I can’t. Father Pete wouldn’t want us to. Listen, we donated all the steaks and veggie burgers we were going to use to the freezers of Aspen Meadow Outreach. We’ll figure something out. It’ll be fine. Julian has been his usual amazing self. Plus, Boyd, Arch, and Gus have been great. So, do you have any news on Father Pete?” My throat began to close. I managed to say, “Is he . . . awake?”

  “They did surgery to repair both lungs. He woke up briefly, but lapsed back into unconsciousness before our guys could question him.” Tom’s shoulders slumped. When he said he was taking a shower, I followed him into the bathroom.

  “What about your team?” I asked from outside the shower stall. “Did they find out anything?”

  “Why don’t you take off your clothes and come in here? Then I’ll tell you everything. I’ll be careful of your leg.”

  I smiled in spite of all that had happened. Grief had temporarily emptied me of joy. Now I longed to be close to Tom. I unwrapped the bandages on my leg and slipped into the steamy stall.

  “Oh, I like what I see,” Tom said.

  I laughed as he pulled me to him. I clasped his middle. We made love slowly, carefully, because of my leg. I almost collapsed when I shook. But Tom caught me.

  “That was very nice.” He carefully toweled my back. “Let me put some ointment on your leg and rewrap it.”

  I allowed myself to be tended to, then pulled on pajamas and slid between the sheets. “Seems to me,” I murmured, when I was next to him, “that you were going to tell me what your team had found.”

  Tom sighed and tucked our quilt around my shoulders. “Kathie Beliar is pretty much a blank. Thirty-five years old, divorced a decade ago, moved up here from Aurora, according to the few friends we could find in her address book. She claimed she wanted to start over. She didn’t seem to have any enemies, at least that we could find. No one with a grudge. Even the ex-husband didn’t hate her. He just said she didn’t want to be a housewife. She moved into a little place up here, then was a substitute teacher for a while. But she didn’t like how hard it was to control kids. So the Mountain Journal hired her to sell ads. She took on office work for a couple of real estate companies. One of the real estate agents sold a piece of women’s fiction, and that lady got so much attention—again, according to these same friends—that Kathie suddenly announced to anyone who would listen that she was going to be a poet. But as far as we can tell, she never got anything published. There was a slender file of . . . I suppose you would call it verse . . . in her house. We’re talking twenty-some poems, mostly along the lines of the breeze in the trees making her knees freeze, then she sneezes.”

  “Walt Whitman’s reputation will remain intact, then.”

  Tom chewed the side of his mouth. “Kathie’s friends? They seemed to feel sorry for her. They said she used to talk incessantly about becoming a published poet. But the only file thicker than the poetry one was the one containing rejection letters from literary magazines.”

  All the hostility I’d had for Kathie Beliar evaporated. In place of the anger I felt sadness . . . and again, distress with myself, that I’d been so angry and judgmental.

  Tom said, “When the poetry thing didn’t work out, according to her pals, she was going to open a stable and raise show horses. Apparently she got the idea from a home buyer who came into the agency. He bought a huge, classy place, with a lot of acreage. Kathie volunteered to help out in his stable. ‘Until,’ she told her buddies, ‘I can get established.’ She mucked out stalls, cleaned tack, and bugged the owner incessantly to allow her to show his horses. I mean, like in horse shows.”

  “I’m from New Jersey, remember. I know from horse shows. But I wasn’t aware Kathie was into equestrianism.”

  Tom’s damp hair touched my cheek. “She wasn’t. We asked the stable owner about her. He hemmed and hawed and said he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. Finally he confessed that he’d told her she couldn’t ride, because, well, she was terrible at it. She quit in a huff, and he said he felt bad about it. But he simply could not allow her to be the one riding his mounts in shows. Kathie gave up on the stable-owning pipe dream and went back to working for a real estate agency. Apparently some of the clients there talked about how great your parties were, how you were just the best caterer, but, wait for it now. Don’t get angry. They said you were
not cheap.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said hotly. “Anyone who goes into catering for the money should have his or her head examined. Sometimes I think that means me, frankly.”

  “Miss G., I’m telling you what Kathie’s friends said. And here’s the interesting bit. Kathie also told her friends she thought Holly was the most gorgeous, glamorous person around. Working for the real estate company, Kathie was the one who set up the rental for Holly. Holly had told her you were her friend. It was as if Kathie became convinced she’d make a mint catering, and become glamorous and gorgeous at the same time, if she could undercut you. She took a weekend cooking class in Denver, but never worked in a restaurant or for a catering company, as far as we can tell. She just decided, boom, to be a caterer, just the way she was going to be a glamorous poet or a glamorous owner of show horses. So she didn’t need the breeze to freeze her knees as she carried her poems to the post office, or get stuck on a truck when she had stables to muck—”

  “Tom.”

  “Sorry. Kathie had taken notes on the parties she’d heard you were catering. Marla had talked about giving the boys’ birthday bash at her fabulous new house. The St. Luke’s fund-raiser had been opened to the Aspen Meadow community. So our theory is, she thought if she copied you but charged less, she’d become Holly’s glamorous new best friend, and have a built-in clientele.”

  “That is just too bizarre.”

  Tom shrugged. “Those same friends we tracked down? They said she talked about nothing except becoming a caterer like Goldy Schulz.”

  I thought of one of those Zen-type sayings I’d learned from my mentor, André: Talking is not doing. The more you talk, the less you do.

  “But,” Tom was saying, “since Kathie had also been energized about being a poet, and then about training show horses, they pretty much ignored her. That might explain why she was so eager to take over the birthday party at Marla’s, as well as the church dinner. She wanted to prove that she was serious.”

  “But she’s not . . . she wasn’t . . . even a parishioner at St. Luke’s.” I took a deep breath. “What about Father Pete? Any idea why he was attacked? I mean, do you even know who was stabbed first?”

  “Our blood-spatter guys have already developed a theory. The perp attacked Father Pete first. The hit punctured his right lung. He spun around, staggered into a wall, then slipped on his own blood and fell.” I shuddered, and Tom stopped talking. “You sure you want to hear this?” I nodded. “Near as we can tell, Kathie tried to run away. The killer caught her by the hair, reached around and stabbed her in the heart. Father Pete had recovered a bit by then, we think. He stood up and tried to fight the attacker. So the perp knifed him in the other lung. How Father Pete avoided drowning in his own blood, we don’t know. But after the second assault, he passed out. We figure that’s when the guy, or very strong woman, broke into the secretary’s locked desk, got the key to the church files, and rummaged through them.”

  I had a brief vision of poor, dear Audrey Millard, the church secretary. Lovely as a mountain bluebird, older, single, she was devoted to Father Pete and would be devastated by the attack. I made a mental note to call her, if Tom would allow it. “What was the attacker looking for?”

  “Miss G., if we knew that, then we’d have a better idea of who, or what, exactly, we’re dealing with here. Our guys are trying to reach the church secretary now.” He stopped talking again. “Audrey Millard?”

  “Yes. One of your guys should stay with her, I think. She . . . may come across as fragile. And she may be fragile. But she has a good memory. She’ll probably be able to help you regarding any questions you have about Father Pete.” I took a deep breath. “I know it’s late,” I said apologetically. “But did you hear my message to you about Yurbin?”

  He said he had, but the investigation at the church had taken priority. So I began to tell him about Yurbin, collage artist. Tom turned the light back on, and scribbled in his notebook. When I was done, he called the department about Audrey. Also, the night crew still working on the Holly Ingleby case should be told about Yurbin, who might know something about Holly.

  “Think your guys will be able to find Yurbin?” I asked, once Tom was back beside me.

  “The guy shows up at a party Marla hosts . . . that’s followed by a homicide? If he’s listed somewhere, anywhere, we’ll find him.” He added, “Audrey Millard? She fell apart when she heard about Father Pete.”

  Julian beat us into the kitchen the next morning. He was reading my computer screen, but offered to make us both coffee. Tom said he would do it, then gazed around in sudden amazement at a dozen-plus loaves of frozen homemade oatmeal bread now thawing on our counters.

  “Oh,” said Julian, blushing. “I just took them out to thaw, because I thought we would need them tonight.” He looked at me, puzzled. “Dad’s Bread, Goldy? I thought your father had passed away.”

  “A while ago,” I said, then explained that the loaves were from a recipe of my father’s. Unfortunately, Dad hadn’t written down how he’d actually made the bread. He’d only taped the recipe he used—as a jumping-off point, he’d proudly told me, as he kneaded and slapped the dough—onto an index card. The now-crinkled bit of newsprint was almost illegible, as the tape, brown and curling at this juncture, had pulled off several apparently crucial words in the recipe. I’d made numerous guesses as to what the missing words were. As many times as I’d made the bread, I not only had ended up with a dough that was much too sticky, I also hadn’t quite hit the taste or texture that my father had produced, seemingly without effort, in his own lovingly tended loaves. I concluded by telling Julian that it wasn’t until Tom had stood beside me and pressed down on the tape, then guessed correctly at the missing words—add two additional cups flour—that the right combination of ingredients had revealed themselves.

  Tom smiled. “Goldy was almost there.”

  “Super,” Julian said. His face turned serious. “Now. Do we know what’s going on with Father Pete? Nobody’s called.”

  Tom put a cappuccino in front of me, swiftly texted the department, and moved outside to care for our animals. When he returned, his cell pinged. “ ‘Priest stable. Still unconscious,’ ” he read aloud. “Okay. Let’s talk about this dinner tonight. Nobody brings anything. No buffet, no grill, no food standing out anywhere where people can mess with it. We think it’s possible Holly Ingleby and all the birthday guests were given tainted food, but we don’t know how or by whom.”

  Julian said he’d made lists of what we could cook on short notice . . . for dinner for one hundred ten. Tom listened to Julian run through possibilities. Maybe people could bring salads? Julian asked. Tom shook his head, as I knew he would. “Whatever the two of you decide to cook for tonight has to be plated up in the conference-center kitchen and brought out to the tables. Also. Tonight? I’m posting Boyd plus Sergeant Jones at your conference center, Miss G. Not only are Holly and Kathie Beliar dead, but Father Pete is teetering on the edge, and we don’t have a clue as to who booby-trapped Holly’s deck. We don’t even know if any of this is connected. The only thing Holly, Kathie, Father Pete, and you have in common?”

  I looked at him and waited.

  Tom said, “St. Luke’s.”

  “Pretty tenuous connection,” I said.

  Tom was adamant. “Our two sergeants will watch you at all times. I don’t want any volunteers helping. No one will have the chance to doctor the food.”

  “But you don’t even know—” I began.

  Tom’s expression was severe. “You either do it my way or you cancel this fund-raiser.”

  Julian intervened, ever the peacemaker. “Not to worry! How about this? We do a vichyssoise first. You have a dozen containers of frozen stock, and enough leeks, potatoes, and whipping cream to outfit the French armed forces, who would no doubt appreciate that we’re making a French soup. The only challenge will be getting it thoroughly chilled by tonight. This bread will be thawed soon, so it’ll work. Plus, you’ve
got another dozen loaves in there.” He gave me a quizzical expression. “Your freezer also has a mountain of zipped plastic bags of chocolate cookies. Where did those come from?”

  I sighed. “Christian Brothers High School Bake Sale. They told me to bring a few loaves of bread and a dozen cookies. I thought I’d doubled my father’s bread recipe, but it ended up making quadruple the number of loaves I was aiming for. And the cookies? CBHS had asked for so few, I was sure they must have said a dozen dozen. They didn’t. But it was fun. I was experimenting with extra-bittersweet chocolate and had a whole lot left over.”

  Tom raised an eyebrow at me, as if to say, A dozen dozen? I ignored him. Math skills had never been my long suit. Not only that, but Tom had been asking me for a while to get my hearing checked.

  “Okay,” Julian continued. “It’s going to be warm this evening until sunset, so the guests probably won’t mind having all cold food. We’ll start with vichyssoise, then move on to poached and chilled shrimp—you’ve still got lots of jumbo shrimp in the walk-in, remember, and instead of making something weird, I’ll put together a sauce with zing that contrasts with the creaminess of the soup. And for those people with shellfish allergies, of which we have four? You have Cornish hens in there that we can roast. We can artfully arrange the shrimp or hens on the dishes, next to a salad of romaine lettuce with fresh tomatoes, scallions, and hearts of palm. We’ll lightly dress those with sherry vinaigrette. Your supplier left you with lots of packages of early haricots verts. I can cook those quickly and chill them, then use a different dressing for them, for contrast.”

  I had forgotten that my supplier had left perfect packages of those long, thin string beans so favored by the French. I had no idea where she’d found them this time of year. So now we were up to vichyssoise, poached shrimp or Cornish hens, romaine salads with tomatoes, steamed haricots verts vinaigrette, bread, and . . . what were we missing? Something slightly sweet. To Julian, I said, “My head’s reeling.”