“What’s happened?”
“That school friend of yours, Carole Adams, e-mailed from where she lives in Delaware. She saw Roland Gray making pudding on the show and started experimenting. After a bunch of tries she came up with a pudding version of our nut butter fudge.”
“That’s Carole,” I said. “She’s always loved a challenge, and if someone didn’t give her one, she challenged herself. I never thought of trying to alter the fudge ingredients to create a pudding. How does her recipe sound?”
“I didn’t just read it. The cooks were busy filling the orders for brownies and fudge, so Walter and I bought a hotplate and a pot at the hardware store down the street. We tried out the recipe in his office.”
Walter was so knowledgeable about the equipment left from our building’s days as a bakery that we asked him to stay on with us. An extra plus was that his many stories about Old Hollywood were very entertaining. He’d developed a personal following among many of our regular walk-in customers. It was at his suggestion that we’d added a small coffee bar in the front area where he could regale people who stayed to drink coffee and eat our brownies.
“Walter made the pudding. I just read out loud Carole Adams’s recipe and handed him what he needed. It’s so easy, and it’s really good. Now I’ve got to figure out the cost of packaging and what we need to do to ship it. If we’re able to add the nut butter fudge pudding to our line, I’m convinced we’ll have a winner.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “And we need to decide how to compensate Carole.”
Eileen went to the refrigerator and peered inside.
“Are you hungry? I can make something for you,” I said.
“No, thanks. I had a hamburger with Walter. I’m thirsty.” She took a bottle of orange juice from the top shelf, poured herself half a glass, and drank it. “I didn’t see your Jeep in the driveway,” she said.
“I’ll have it back sometime tomorrow, I expect.”
Eileen must have sensed that I was being evasive, because she turned and looked at me. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“What happened? Were you in an accident?” I heard a note of concern.
“No, nothing like that.” I gestured to the chair across from mine. “Come sit down. I’ll tell you what happened today.”
I didn’t let Eileen know how truly awful Hatch’s search had been, but even my much milder version brought tears to her eyes.
“Oh, Aunt Del, I’m so sorry! This is all my fault.”
“Stop it,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It is not your fault. It’s Keith Ingram’s fault because of what he did to you, and it’s mine because I stupidly left a fingerprint when I broke into his house.”
“I’m afraid to ask, but did Detective Hatch find my DVD?”
“There wasn’t anything to find. I destroyed it.”
Eileen and I had been so close for so many years that she could tell from the slight shake of my head that I didn’t want her to ask any more questions.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Eileen took a deep breath and wiped her eyes with a paper napkin from the blue dragon napkin holder on the center of the table. She’d made it for me when she was in a middle school craft class. All grown up, she’d urged me to get rid of the dragon holder, saying it was ugly. “It looks like something done by a child with no talent at all for crafts,” she’d said.
“That’s exactly why I like it,” I had told her, “because one particular child made it for me.” I think she was secretly pleased that I kept it.
Getting back to what was important right now, I said, “Look at these pictures and the guest lists from the gala. Tell me if there’s anyone here that you ever saw with Ingram. Or if he’d mentioned any of these names to you.”
Eileen studied the photographs. “That’s a good one of you.” She pointed to a picture in which I was leaning forward slightly as I watched actor Coupe Deville working on his Philly Cheesesteak. “You’ve got a great profile.” She pulled another photo toward her. “Yvette Dupree. Keith really hated her. A couple of months ago we were watching TV late one night and when she came on a talk show, he was so upset he turned off the set. In fact, I thought he was going to throw the remote. I asked him what was the matter and he said he couldn’t stand her, that she was a total phony who’d tried to ruin his career. That’s all he’d tell me. I’d only heard him speak so negatively about one other person.”
“Who?”
“Eugene Long. That’s another reason I was so stunned when he told me he was going to marry Tina Long. He’d said her father was an unscrupulous, vindictive drunk who had done so many crooked things, he deserved to spend his life in jail.” She shuddered. “When I think back, there were little signs about the kind of person Keith was, but I didn’t let myself see… Aunt Del, I thought I loved him. I was so stupid!”
“He put up a good front. When I met him the day he interviewed us for his column, he was charming. I’m not surprised you were attracted to him. Neither of us had any idea what he was really like.”
“But I learned. Too late,” she said bitterly. “And look at the trouble I’ve caused you and Daddy.”
“We’ll be all right.” I gave her hand a comforting pat.
“I could tell the police the truth and get you off the hook,” she said.
“No, you can’t. If you did, that would convince Detective Hatch your father had a powerful motive for murder.”
“I’ve put both of you in an awful spot. I’m so sorry.”
“Stay strong,” I said. “We’ll get through this.”
Somehow.
I didn’t sleep very well that night.
***
The police hadn’t returned my Jeep by the time Eileen and I had to leave for the Mommy & Me cooking class I taught every Saturday morning, so we loaded two cardboard boxes full of ingredients into her car.
Before we left, I phoned St. Clare’s Hospital, asked to speak to Roland Gray, and was transferred to the second floor.
“Nurses’ station,” a female voice said briskly.
“Good morning. Would you connect me to Roland Gray’s room, please?”
“Mr. Gray isn’t taking calls.”
“All right. Can you tell me how he’s doing?”
“We’re not allowed to give out information about patients,” she said.
I was getting frustrated, but kept my tone pleasant.
“What are your visiting hours?”
“Mr. Gray has is not having visitors.”
It was taking an effort, but I remained genial. “My name is Della Carmichael. Would you ask him to phone me? My number is-”
“I’ll tell him you called.” And then that Angel of Mercy disconnected.
Eileen saw me gritting my teeth. “No luck?”
“I’m not through yet.” I dialed the hospital’s main number again. When an operator picked up, I asked her when visiting hours were.
“From nine AM until noon, and from three PM until seven PM.”
“Thank you.”
My cooking class for adults, which followed the Mommy & Me session, ran from noon until three.
I told Eileen, “I going to find a way to see Roland Gray this afternoon if I have to buy a set of scrubs and pose as a hospital employee.”
“You won’t have to buy anything, Aunt Del. ”
“What do you mean?”
Eileen reminded me that while Liddy Marshall had given up acting for marriage and motherhood, now that her twin sons were in college she sometimes worked as an extra in movies and on TV shows.
“Liddy’s been on General Hospital several times as a nurse in the background, and she always supplies her own costumes so they’ll fit. You two are the same size,” Eileen said. “Why don’t you call her while I finish packing up.”
I grinned at Eileen and reached for the phone. “I knew there was a reason I put up with you all those years when you were a teenager.”
Liddy was delighted at my scheme for gettin
g in to see Roland Gray.
“Of course you can have the outfit, and it comes with an authentic-looking ID badge. Don’t worry about the picture. Those things are so bad hardly anybody’s recognizable.”
“Great.”
“I’m coming with you,” Liddy said. “In case you need someone to create a diversion. Aren’t you lucky you have a best friend who’s an actress?”
29
I was lucky to have Liddy as my best friend, in more ways than one. She was the person who had set me on the path of cooking for a living.
My father had been a veterinarian and my mother was, and still is, an accountant in San Francisco. Because they both had to work full-time to support us, and I was the oldest of the four children, I’d prepared the meals from the time I was ten years old. My grandmother Nell taught me how to shop carefully for food, and how to make dinners from scratch. The fresh ingredients she showed me how to choose went into meals that were both more nutritious and cheaper than packaged dinners heated in a microwave. Learning what she called her “Nellie Campbell menu magic” was exciting. Cooking never seemed like a chore. As an adult it became my hobby, my relaxation. I enjoyed feeding people I cared about.
When I met Mack, I was a brand-new high school English teacher and he was in his third year as a police officer. I’d loved teaching English, and did it for fifteen years, until the terrible day when a student I’d given an F to for cheating brought a Glock to school and shot at me. I saw the pistol a moment before he pulled the trigger, and ducked. The bullet streaked past my head and smashed into the wall. When I saw where it had lodged in relation to where I was standing, I realized that it hadn’t missed me by much.
The school’s basketball coach had been out in the hallway when he heard the shot. He’d rushed in and subdued the boy before he could fire again. The young gunman glared at me, cursing. “Next time I’ll pop you when you ain’t looking.”
I stayed home for a week, jumping at every unfamiliar sound. At night, even with Mack’s arms around me, I dozed only in snatches. I stopped leaving the house, ordered groceries over the phone, and asked for them to be delivered. Tuffy was just a year old then. Instead of our jaunts through the neighborhood, I walked him around our backyard.
Liddy told Mack she was afraid I was becoming agoraphobic. It was her idea that I make a professional switch and teach that other thing I loved: cooking.
It took most of our modest savings, but with Mack’s and Liddy’s unwavering encouragement, I found the perfect space-in the back of a kitchen appliance store-and jumped through all the hoops that the State of California requires when someone wants to open a small business. By the time I was ready for students, I felt like my pre-gunshot self, and Tuffy and I were strolling around Santa Monica again.
Liddy rounded up most of the people who enrolled in my first classes, but within a few months word of mouth was sending students to me. Soon they were bringing their friends. The business grew to the point where I was almost breaking even. The first month when the school actually earned a tiny profit, I celebrated by treating myself to a professional manicure. That night I had another celebration, an especially sweet one, with my husband.
The next morning, Mack suffered a fatal heart attack while he was jogging. That same afternoon a vase of yellow roses arrived. They had been ordered the previous day. The card said, “Congratulations, Cookie. I knew you could do it. Love you always, Mack.” Cookie had been my nickname since the first time I’d made dinner for him when we were dating.
The little school that I called The Happy Table was barely surviving financially, until I had the good luck to be hired to host a cooking show on the Better Living Channel, replacing the previous host, who had been fired. Depending upon whom one talked to, she’d lost the job either for drinking on the air or for being impossible to get along with. Or both.
Taping three half hours a week, and doing one live hour-long show on Thursday nights, had made me cut back on the number of classes I taught, but I never wanted to give up my little school. The TV exposure had increased enrollment to the point that the weekend courses were filled, with a waiting list. The school still wasn’t making much money, but at least it wasn’t drowning me in debt any longer. While I enjoyed teaching cooking to a television audience because the shows reached a great many people, the fact was that I got the most pleasure out of watching people who were standing right in front of me learn new kitchen skills. And the excited expressions on the faces of the children, when they learned how to make something they could eat, was priceless.
My cooking school was located in the back of Country Kitchen Appliances on Montana Avenue, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets. The front of the building was white clapboard siding, accented by dark green shutters. Customers entered through red Dutch doors.
At ten minutes to nine o’clock on Saturday morning, Montana Avenue in front of Country Kitchen Appliances was not the busy thoroughfare it would be in another hour, so it was easy to find a parking place near the store’s entrance.
I fed a handful of quarters into the meter while Eileen removed the two cardboard boxes, one at a time, from the back of her VW and set them on the sidewalk.
“Look, there’s Mrs. Tran,” Eileen said.
I glanced up to see a tiny, gray-haired Vietnamese woman smiling and waving at us through the front window. We waved back. Mr. and Mrs. Tran owned the store.
Eileen lowered her voice. “I’m afraid to ask Mrs. Tran, but do you know how her husband is doing? He scared me half to death when he fainted last Saturday.”
“When I came to visit him on Monday he looked frail. He was supposed to have some tests on Tuesday. Mrs. Tran told me that he hasn’t been very strong since his years doing forced labor in a Communist reeducation camp.”
Eileen looked puzzled. “I don’t understand? What kind of a camp?”
I put the final quarter into the meter. “When the North Vietnamese Communists defeated South Vietnam, many, many men from the educated, professional classes were taken from their homes and families and sent away to do hard labor. The Communists called it ‘reeducation.’ Some didn’t survive. Many of those who did were never the same again.” I picked up one of the two boxes. “Mrs. Tran said it took them almost fifteen years to finally get to America. A lot of that time they had to spend in refugee camps.”
“They’re such an upbeat couple,” Eileen said. “After what they must have gone through, I’m ashamed to make such a fuss over my problems.”
“Atrocities go on every day somewhere in the world. We’ve been very lucky,” I said.
I try not to forget that. I appreciate the accident of birth that put me in a relatively safe part of the world.
Mrs. Tran held the Dutch doors open as Eileen and I carried the boxes inside.
“Good morning,” she said brightly.
Eileen and I returned her greeting.
“How is Mr. Tran?” I asked. “Did he have the tests you mentioned?”
Her smile dimmed a bit, but she maintained a cheerful demeanor. “We are very hopeful. Good doctors here.”
I matched her positive tone. “Tell Mr. Tran that I’m sending him my best wishes.”
“That will please him,” she said.
The store’s telephone rang. Mrs. Tran excused herself to answer it.
“She has such a delicate face,” Eileen said. “She must have been lovely when she was young.”
“She still is,” I said. “It’s just a different kind of beauty now. Part her bone structure, and part her spirit.”
***
The Happy Table cooking school was in the back of the store; it had been converted from what had once been a storeroom. To get there, we had to carry our boxes past an array of attractive kitchen equipment. The Trans had arranged the merchandise so that it looked as though the store was divided into four separate kitchens, each in a different style, from the sleekest modern to cozy country. The layout worked to the advantage of the Trans, because many of the stu
dents bought items that caught their attention as they were walking through the displays.
“One day, when I have some extra money, I’m going to buy a new KitchenAid stand mixer,” I said. “In red. The problem is that the one I’ve had for twenty-five years refuses to wear out or break down.”
Eileen chuckled. “That company must have missed the class on ‘planned obsolescence.’ So many things start going to pieces right after the warranty runs out.”
For the past three years, Eileen had worked as my assistant at the school to earn extra money, so the two of us had set up for these classes many times. It didn’t take us long to cover the preparation tables with disposable cloths, organize the ingredients for what I was going to demonstrate this morning, and check the four stoves to make sure the burners and the ovens were working.
We finished just as the eight Mommy & Me teams began to arrive. Eileen handed out disposable aprons for them to put on.
The seven mothers, eight children, and one nanny placed themselves around the preparation tables. They were a nice ethnic mix. The two youngest mothers were about thirty, and the two oldest were deep into their forties. The rest were somewhere in between. The nanny was a Latina in her early twenties, accompanying a six-year-old girl named Alicia who didn’t want to let go of her caregiver’s hand.
The other seven children-five more girls and two boys-ranged in age from six to nine and were much bolder than little Alicia. One of Eileen’s jobs was keeping the children corralled near the prep tables where she could watch over them.
I told the class, “Today’s recipes form a theme: They’re dishes with family connections. The first one we’re going to make is Linda Dano’s Italian Meatballs recipe, which was taught to her by her mother-in-law. You moms probably know Linda Dano as an Emmy-winning actress, but when Linda’s husband, Frank Attardi, was diagnosed with lung cancer, she stopped working to be with him full-time. After he lost the battle, she became the national spokesperson for the Caregivers Survival Kit and Support Partners. Linda calls her mother-in-law, Marnie Attardi, her role model. Marnie worked in a glove factory while raising her three children. She and her husband, Anthony, never owned a home, but now, through an organization called HeartShare Human Services, and contributions from Linda and Frank, there’s a residential home for developmentally disabled adults named in their honor. It’s in Frank’s home borough of Brooklyn, New York.”
The Proof is in the Pudding Page 16