Several more seconds ticked by, and I could tell that he was debating whether to tell me.
“Poison,” I guessed.
He raised an eyebrow.
“That’s why you’re taking his food and the daily special. You suspect that the health inspector was poisoned. And you suspect…me?” I held my breath.
He shrugged. “I don’t know yet for sure. I’m just—”
“Covering all bases. Yes, I know.” I was more sarcastic than I should have been.
Then something caught my eye. “Wait just a minute, Deputy Brisco.” I inspected the dozen or so huge evidence bags lying on the butcher-block counter of the steam table, filled to the brim with the daily special.
“Can I have a closer look at that bag? The one with the plate in it?” I pointed. “Mr. Cogswell’s meal?”
“Why?” Ty said.
“Because I see mushrooms.” I pointed at the contents of the bag.
“So?”
“There aren’t any mushrooms in the special that Juanita made. The mushrooms are only in Mr. Cogswell’s meal.”
“Interesting,” Ty said.
I relaxed a bit. “No self-respecting Timinski, Bugnacki, or Matkowski would ever be caught dead putting mushrooms in their pork and scalloped potatoes! So, you see, Deputy Brisco, I couldn’t have poisoned Mr. Cogswell!”
Chapter 3
Ty laughed, and I felt somewhat better, but it didn’t clear the frosty cloud of suspicion hanging over my head.
“You do have a motive for wanting him out of the way. You failed his inspection.” Ty’s accusation didn’t sound better with a Texas tone. “And you said you read the letter and were on your way over here.”
“To clean, not to kill, for heaven’s sake.”
“I hear you.” He nodded, but then his blue eyes bore through me like a laser. “Did you make the pork and scalloped potatoes?”
I shook my head. “Juanita made it. According to Silver Bullet custom, the day cook makes the specials.” I felt like I was casting suspicion on Juanita, so I quickly added, “But Juanita didn’t poison anyone.”
“I can’t rule her out yet, or you either. I can’t rule anyone out yet. I will do a thorough investigation, I promise you that.”
I swallowed hard. Here I was, the owner of a diner that didn’t have a morning cook, and I was now under suspicion of killing the health inspector.
This wasn’t going to be good for business.
Deputy Lou Rutledge looked amused by the entire exchange.
I wasn’t.
“I think we’re done here, Ty,” Deputy Rutledge said, after three hours of snooping, bagging, labeling, and dusting for prints. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee and a doughnut, courtesy of Miz Matkowski, and then pay Hal Manning a call at the Happy Repose. We can interview Cogswell’s girlfriend there.”
I wanted to rescind my offer of free coffee and doughnuts for Ty Brisco. He dared to suspect me? Well, he could just pay for his own.
Deputy Rutledge pushed open the doors and left. Deputy Brisco continued to stare at me, and suddenly I felt guilty, even though I totally was not.
Guilt came naturally to me, especially when I skipped church, cheated on my diet, or let dust accumulate without prompt annihilation.
“Are you done in here?” I asked him. “Since Juanita might have just quit on me, I need to get my bearings and open the kitchen. After all, the sign says that we’re open twenty-four hours a day. Using your baseball cliché, I need to step up to the plate and cover all bases.”
“Just one more thing. Show me where you keep your mushrooms.”
I looked at the palms of my hand, as if I’d written the location of my supplies there. “I assume they’re in the walk-in cooler, if we have fresh ones, which I doubt. Canned mushrooms would be in the stockroom. But from what I remember, Uncle Porky would never let a mushroom cross the threshold of this diner. He hated them, and, therefore, everyone else had to hate them.”
Ty followed me to the back of the kitchen. I climbed the one cement step, yanked on the metal handle, and flipped on the industrial light switch. We walked in.
“I don’t see any mushrooms,” I said. “And we just had a delivery today, but I’m almost positive we didn’t order any mushrooms. I can check the invoice, if I can find it.”
“No mushrooms?” Ty asked, checking the shelves. “There were mushrooms in Cogswell’s pork and scalloped potatoes. You pointed them out yourself.” Shining a flashlight at the shelves, he lifted the lids of the boxes and peered in.
“Ty, if I were the person who poisoned Mr. Cogswell, would I keep a supply of mushrooms around, poison or edible?”
“I’ve seen criminals do some pretty dumb things.”
“I’m not that…dumb.”
His chin jerked downward, and a grin teased the corners of his mouth.
“Oh, you know what I mean!”
He chuckled.
This was a puzzle.
His radio went off, and he listened to a garbled message. I couldn’t make out a word, but all law enforcement and emergency people could understand radio talk.
“I’m supposed to call Hal Manning,” he translated.
“Who?” That name sounded familiar, but my brain was shutting down.
“The coroner-slash-funeral director.”
“Oh yeah.”
We escaped the cooler and walked into the stockroom. No canned mushrooms.
We returned to the kitchen, and Ty pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket and punched in some numbers.
“Hal, this is Ty Brisco.”
All I heard was “Yes…No…Oh…Is that right…? You don’t say” as I stared at the spot where Mr. Marvin P. Cogswell the Third had had his last meal.
There would be no Marvin P. Cogswell the Fourth.
I was itching to move the step stool, but I didn’t dare. I wanted to disinfect the spot on the steam table where the plate of pork and scalloped potatoes with the allegedly tainted mushrooms had sat.
“This is now a crime scene,” Deputy Brisco said.
I jumped at the sound of his voice, and then slowly his statement penetrated my doughy brain.
“I think you figured that out already,” I said sadly. “But, please believe me, Deputy Brisco—I had nothing to do with Mr. Cogswell’s death. I would never, ever do such a thing.”
He raised a perfect black eyebrow. “Not even for a failed inspection?”
I raised two blond eyebrows that needed to be plucked. “Hell no!”
Heat washed over me like a blast from the pizza oven. I shed my parka and tossed it on the step stool recently vacated by the man I was accused of poisoning. I quickly picked up my coat and held it.
I was thankful there was a late-night cook due to arrive any moment now, fingers crossed.
Just then, Nancy stuck her head through the pass-through window. “Bob, the cook, called. He won’t be in tonight or probably the rest of the week. Something about the flu.”
I felt my head getting spacey, even more doughy. “Fabulous. Just fabulous. What else can go wrong?”
I saw myself being handcuffed by Deputy Brisco and taken to the Sandy Harbor sheriff’s department, wherever it was.
“Who’s going to take care of the diner?” I heard myself saying to myself. “It’s supposed to be open twenty-four hours.…The neon sign on top of the diner says so.…I have to cook. I can’t go to jail. Can’t go. Aunt Stella and Uncle Porky. Their diner. No, my diner. No mushrooms in the pork and scalloped po—”
It was so hard to hold up my head. I felt myself about to faint. I knew the signs, since I’d fainted once before—when I caught Deputy Doug cheating on me with Wendy on the floor of our bedroom. At least he hadn’t used our bed.
My knees wouldn’t lock. I was going to slump onto the wet and grimy cement floor—a floor that should be cleaner, according to the report filed by the late Mr. Marvin P. Cogswell the Third.
But strong arms circled me, holding me up. “C’mon now, Tr
ixie, don’t faint on me. Wake up, darlin’. Breathe.”
I heard Deputy Brisco’s voice in the distance, and I tried to get my knees to work. I could smell spice and leather. It was coming from…him. The cowboy from Houston. No, the Sandy Harbor cop.
“Mmm…,” I said, thinking how nice it felt being held by a man again. It had been a long time.
Then I remembered that he was the one who was accusing me of poisoning the health inspector.
I took several deep breaths, found my knees, and pushed myself away. “If you’re going to arrest me, do it now and get it over with.”
He smiled in that charming way he had, but I wasn’t charmed.
“I’m not going to arrest you—not yet anyway.” He had the audacity to grin. “I have to investigate further, talk to the coroner, wait for the tests to come back. I’m just trying to sort things out, and—”
“Cover all bases.”
“Yeah.”
He touched my arm. “If you didn’t do it, don’t worry. Right?”
I wanted to kick his tight butt right out of the diner.
“I have to go. Will you be okay?” he asked.
Will I be okay? He insinuates that I’m his primary suspect, and then he has the cheek to ask that?
“I’m going to cook…and bake.” I had decided. That was what would take my mind off Mr. Cogswell’s death. Besides, what else could I do? I had no help.
I saw Ty out of the diner, making sure he walked down the stairs and away from me. Then I noticed that the diner had a decent-sized crowd, but the revolving pastry carousel, that I’d loved to watch as a kid, was out of pastries, pies, and cakes. Nancy was making coffee. The other waitress—what was her name?—was refilling cups.
“Nancy, the kitchen is open. We have people that need to be fed, and I’m cooking. Let’s rock. Oh, and pull all the daily-specials slips off the menu. There’s no pork and scalloped potatoes remaining.”
What a waste of good food.
“Okay, Miz Matkowski.”
“Call me Trixie.”
Call me pooped. Call me overwhelmed. Call me a suspect!
I did my best thinking while I worked. I wasn’t going to be suspected of something I didn’t do. I had to figure this out.
Mushrooms.
The first thing I was going to do was to check the invoices for mushroom orders—just as soon as I could find them. Aunt Stella must have kept them somewhere.
And the next thing I needed was another cook, maybe two. I couldn’t do this for twenty-four hours.
Juanita. I had to ask her if she knew that there were mushrooms in the Wednesday special. Then I’d beg her to come in and take the morning shift. If she really intended to quit, I needed to find a replacement. Maybe I needed to hire even more help, especially if I went to jail. The Silver Bullet was a Matkowski legend. It had to go on.
Even if I couldn’t.
“Two cows, and make them cry.” Nancy stuck an order onto one of the metal clothespins on the revolving rack above the steam table in front of me.
“Two cowboys on a raft,” said Chelsea, the other waitress that I’d just met, doing the same thing with her order.
I wiped my hands on a crisp new towel. “Ladies, you need to translate from Dinerese until I get used to it.”
They laughed. “We had our own language with Porky and Stella.” A gold bead pierced into Chelsea’s tongue had me mesmerized. Every now and then, I could hear a slightly slippery S.
“Two cows are hamburgers. ‘Make them cry’ means to add onions.”
“Got it.”
Chelsea giggled. “‘Two cowboys on a raft’ means two western omelets on toast. Oh, and I’ll need a wrecked hen and an order of done dough with axle grease. That’s scrambled eggs with dark toast and butter.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to say that?” I asked.
Chelsea wet her lips, and the gold ball glinted in the fluorescent lights overhead. “Yeah, but it’s not as much fun.”
“True,” I conceded. “By the way, would either of you know of anyone who’d like a cooking job here?”
Nancy snapped her fingers. “Cindy Sherlock. She just lost her job over at the Dollar-O-Rama for dipping into the cash register.”
“Um…I don’t think so,” I said, cracking two eggs into a bowl for the wrecked hen.
“But she was putting money in, not taking it out,” Nancy said, wide-eyed. “Her little brother, Jason, didn’t have enough money to buy his mother a pair of salt and pepper shakers for her birthday.” She turned to Chelsea and added, “They looked like sunfish.”
“And you know this…how?” I asked.
“I was behind Jason in line. He was counting out his pennies and was short about fifty cents. Cindy took a dollar bill out of her own pocket, exchanged it for four quarters, and slipped two of them onto Jason’s stack of money so the kid couldn’t see. I guess that Mr. Haberton only saw Cindy taking money out of the till and slipping it into her pocket or something. Then he started yelling at her and said that she was fired.”
I put bread into the toaster and put the setting on dark. Then I took out two hamburgers from the fridge nearby and tossed them onto the grill.
Nancy shook her head. “Cindy and I both tried to tell Mr. Haberton that he was wrong, but then Jason started crying, and then Cindy got upset. She tossed her smock on the counter and walked out with Jason.”
“And Cindy helps her mother with the bills. There are nine kids in the family, counting her,” Chelsea added. “Her father died a couple of years ago—boating accident on the lake.”
I decided to hire Cindy immediately; she needed a job. Then another question occurred to me: “Can she cook?”
They both shrugged, but then Nancy snapped her fingers. “She must be able to. There are nine kids in the family, and Cindy’s the oldest.”
That didn’t mean that she could cook, but the sweet girl obviously needed a job. We’d both learn at the same time and take Dinerese 101 together.
“Can someone call her? Tell her to come to the diner. I’d like to meet her.”
Chelsea whipped out her cell phone from the pocket of her apron. “I’ll do it.”
She punched in some numbers as I slathered axle grease on the toast and then flipped the burgers. They smelled divine. I had added a touch of Worcestershire sauce to the mix along with some bread crumbs, eggs, and my special herb mix.
“She can drive down now, but she has to bring her brothers and sisters. She’s babysitting,” Chelsea said, holding her cell toward me like the Statue of Liberty holding her torch.
“You can bring them all, Cindy,” I said, talking to the air toward the cell. “My treat, if they’re hungry.”
“Hear that?” Chelsea asked the cell, then turned to me. “They’ll be right here.”
“Tell her not to rush. The roads must be slick.”
Chelsea returned the phone to her ear. “Hear that?” she asked, then lowered her voice. “Yeah, Trixie’s okay. She’s nothing like Mr. Haberton.”
I smiled as I turned to look for the hamburger rolls, wondering if I was supposed to toast them. I decided to toast anyway. I added sweet pickles to the plate, dill pickles that Aunt Stella had put up, a tomato and some lettuce to the side, and topped it off with a couple of carrot curls around a radish rose that hadn’t had enough time to “bloom” yet in a bowl of ice water. As soon as I had time, I’d make more.
“Hey, Trixie, it’s cute, how you arranged the veggies,” Nancy said.
“Thanks. The radish roses are my favorites. My mother showed me how to do them when I was just a kid.” If I had more time to prep, I could really dazzle her, but I didn’t have that time. I was lucky if I knew where the axle grease was stored. I hurried to prepare the western omelet.
They both picked up their orders and left. I just had enough time to catch my breath before Chelsea tacked up another order, this time a large one.
“Four lead pipes with rounded cows, two pigs between two sheets, four gra
ss clippings in the alley, and two groundhogs.”
I held up my hand to Chelsea. I was getting a headache. “Chelsea, stop!”
“Sorry. Make that four spaghetti and meatballs, two ham sandwiches, four side salads and two hot dogs,” she said. All I could hear was the number of times I heard her slur an S.
“Oh, and Cindy Sherlock is out front. This order is for her brothers and sisters.”
“That was fast. Please ask her to come back to the kitchen. She can help me prepare this order.” This would give me an opportunity to try her out.
Cindy was a sweet, somewhat shy girl about twenty years old. She was tall—about five foot ten—and reed thin and pale, with a huge smile. She offered her hand to me, and her handshake was firm. Her fingernails were chewed down to the quick, and her bright cherry-red hair was thin and shaggy.
She had no piercings or tattoos that I could see. I was still old-fashioned in that regard and hated that look, especially on women, but neither would have prevented me from hiring her. I immediately liked the girl.
“I can’t be too long, Mrs. Matkowski, or my brothers and sisters will tear your diner apart.”
“Chelsea and I will watch ’em,” Nancy said. “Take your time, Cin.”
Cindy nodded her appreciation and turned to me with an uneasy smile.
“Can you cook?” I asked.
“Sorta. Kinda. I cook for my family. I mean, I can learn how to do this. And I really need this job.”
“Okay, help me do your order, and we’ll talk.”
Cindy was a quick study. She’d do fine in time. I remembered being glued to Aunt Stella’s side as she instructed me how to fry eggs just the way the customer ordered. And right by the big shiny steam table, I remembered Uncle Porky teaching me how to make spaghetti sauce, the Matkowski way. Basically, you tossed in every veggie and chunk of meat within a five-mile radius and let it simmer on the stove for a month.
After Nancy and Chelsea carried the order out to her family, I motioned for Cindy to take a seat on the kitchen stool.
Yes, that kitchen stool.
I planned on tossing it in the Dumpster soon because it would always remind me of the poor health inspector.
“Can you work days or nights?”
Do or Diner: A Comfort Food Mystery Page 4