The Proof is in the Pudding

by Melinda Wells

  I indicated the line of ingredients we’d be using, and picked up the bottle of marsala. “Now, the unusual thing about this recipe is that while it calls for wine, we don’t put the wine into the mix. We’ll be moistening our hands with it when we roll the meatballs.”

  One of the boys started making hiccupping sounds and staggered in an imitation of someone drunk. The other children giggled until the boy’s mother tugged on his shirt sleeve and shushed him.

  We always ate what we made in these classes. When the meatballs had been cooked and consumed, Eileen and I gathered up the used paper plates and plastic forks, dumped them into our trash bag, and set out fresh ones.

  “Because this is a Mommy & Me class, what we’re going to do next is make two dishes from a Hollywood mother and daughter. One of my favorite actors was Richard Crenna. His widow, Penni, and their daughter, Seana, are terrific cooks and they’re sharing with us Penni’s Mexican Chicken Kiev and Seana’s Quiche.

  “Seana told me that when she and her father ate her quiche together, she’d always leave the end of the crust on her plate. He would lean over, wink at her, and eat the leftover piece. It’s one of the little father-daughter moments she treasures.

  “Now, the crust for this quiche can be bought ready-made at the market, but I’m going to show you how easy it is, and how much fun it is, to make your own crust using just flour, a little salt, some Crisco, and a few tablespoons of ice water. It’s my absolute favorite piecrust, and the recipe is right out of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. I recommend that everyone have the original Betty Crocker Cookbook in their kitchen libraries. Now, I have to warn you kids: You’re about to get a little messy.”

  The children cheered at that. The women groaned.

  “Don’t worry, moms. We have a big stash of Handi Wipes all ready for the cleanup later.”

  Eileen and I passed around small bags of all-purpose flour, measuring cups, and mixing bowls. “Since a quiche uses only a single crust, let’s start by measuring out one cup of flour…”

  ***

  By the time Seana Crenna’s Quiches were in the ovens, eight young faces were smudged and sixteen little hands were caked with flour. Eileen helped the mothers and the nanny wipe everyone clean and I started to organize the ingredients to make the final recipe of the class, Penni Crenna’s Mexican Chicken Kiev.

  I was explaining that this was one of Richard Crenna’s favorite meals and that Penni frequently made it for their party guests, when I heard the door from the appliance shop open.

  I looked up to see the petite figure of Yvette Dupree, the Global Gourmet, the woman Keith Ingram had mocked to me the night of the gala, the woman Eileen told me Ingram had despised.

  Yvette Dupree was one of the people I was most eager to talk to. Now, before I could find her, she had found me.

  30

  With Eileen and the other women busy cleaning flour off the children, I hurried over to my unexpected visitor.

  “Bonjour, Della. Excusez-moi. I do not wish to disturb, but I must speak to you.” Her French accent was as melodious as it had been the night of the gala, but now there was urgency in her tone.

  “Give me just few minutes, Yvette-”

  She stared past me and her lips compressed into a thin line. “That girl? Why is she here?” Her pitch had turned icy.

  I saw that she was staring at Eileen, who was wiping the face of one of the children and hadn’t seen Yvette.

  “That’s Eileen O’Hara. She’s my assistant. Why?”

  “Cherchez la femme.” Her voice was full of bitterness. “I think that girl killed Keith, and that she will try to kill my Tina out of jealousy.”

  “Yvette, that’s ridiculous.” I steered her back toward the door through which she’d entered scant minutes before. “We’ll talk outside.”

  On the appliance shop side of the door I saw that there were customers examining the merchandise. Mrs. Tran was guiding a young couple through the ultramodern kitchen exhibit. The quietest part of the shop was just where we were standing.

  “You’re wrong about Eileen,” I said. “She would never kill anyone. What in the world made you think so?”

  “Merde!” The woman scorned. “She was-how do you say in English-dumped? For Tina. Keith was cochon… pork, nes pas?”

  “You mean he was a pig.”

  “Oui. One can kill for love. Even love of espece d’animal, t’es degueulasse!”

  I didn’t have to speak French to know that whatever she just said was an insult, because she practically spit the phrase. But her opinion of the late Keith Ingram wasn’t what was important to me. What did she know about Eileen?

  “Yvette, what makes you think Eileen had any interest in Ingram?”

  Her raised eyebrows and pursed lips suggested she thought that I was too stupid to be walking around upright. “Tina told me. Ever since her mamma died, I have been like zee mamma to her. Ma petite fille has terreur. Terror.”

  “Has anyone tried to hurt her?”

  “Non. She has protection. But she cannot attend soirees. It is like prison.”

  “I can’t believe that she’s in any danger. You and her father should let her go on about her normal life. But something else has happened. Did you know that someone tried to kill Roland Gray late Thursday night?”

  Beneath her rouged cheeks, I saw her go pale. She swayed slightly.

  I reached out to steady her. “Yvette? Are you all right?”

  She gripped my hand. “Was he alone…?”

  Yvette was staring at me so intently I realized she must know Roland, and yet when were standing together, watching him work at his stove, I hadn’t seen any sign of recognition from either of them.

  “I was with Roland,” I said. “We were having coffee when a sniper shot at him through the café window. The bullet grazed his forehead. Eileen never met Roland. Doesn’t this prove to you that she’s not the killer?”

  “I must go.” She turned away from me and was gone, without so much as an “au revoir.”

  I watched her hurry through the kitchen displays and disappear out onto Montana Avenue.

  Eileen opened the door and poked her head out. “Where did you go? Everybody’s ready.”

  “I just needed a breath of air,” I said, deciding not to tell her about Yvette Dupree’s surprise visit.

  I followed Eileen back into the classroom and resumed my place at the preparation table.

  When I’m teaching a class, or doing the TV show, I enjoy the activity so much that I have no trouble concentrating on the task of simultaneously cooking and explaining the steps, but Yvette Dupree’s accusation against Eileen, and her odd behavior when I told her about the attempt on Roland’s life, had left my mind swirling with questions. Part of me wanted to race through this last demonstration, but I couldn’t do that. The women in class had paid to be here and they deserved my full attention.

  “Penni Crenna’s Mexican Chicken Kiev has to be made in advance and kept in the refrigerator before baking,” I told the class. “Last night I prepared four casseroles, one for each of our ovens here.” I indicated the line of crockery baking dishes on the prep table. “I wanted you to see what they look like after refrigeration and just before they go into the ovens. Eileen and I have the oven temperatures ready at 350 degrees, so let’s put them in now. They only take twenty minutes to bake, so by the time you’ve watched and helped put the recipe together, the ones I prepared last night will be ready to be enjoyed.”

  I took a package from the refrigerator.

  “We start by putting these skinless, boneless chicken breasts between two pieces of wax paper.” I smiled at the children and picked up a wooden mallet. “Now who’d like to help me pound them down until they’re about a quarter of an inch thick?”

  Eight little hands shot up.

  31

  My noon to three PM adult class was composed of eight men over sixty-five of them were either widowers or divorced-a newly married couple in their twenties, and two women in th
eir fifties or sixties whom I suspected were trolling for second husbands. They always dressed as though they were going to an upscale luncheon and brought their own heavy-duty aprons that protected their clothing better than the paper ones I handed out.

  Whatever their individual reasons for enrolling, they were a compatible group and a pleasure to teach. Still, I was eager for three o’clock to come. I had places to go, and a murder to investigate.

  “Today’s menu starts with dessert,” I said as they assembled around the preparation counter. “It’s a delicious ice cream cake that we have to make first so it can spend time in the freezer before we’ll be able to eat it near the end of the class.”

  I removed a package from beneath the counter. “This is a store-bought pound cake,” I said. “Of course you can bake your own, but if you’re in a hurry-say if you have visitors who show no sign of leaving by dinnertime-keep a plain cake and containers of ice cream in your freezer so you can come up with something yummy without leaving the house. The other two dishes we’re making today will be my favorite green peppers stuffed with a ground turkey mixture, and Pasta Caruso. That’s a recipe created by Fred Caruso, whose day job is producing movies and TV shows. He produced one of my favorite HBO movies, The Rat Pack. We’ll start on those dishes just as soon as we get this dessert into the freezer.”

  I held up a loaf pan lined with two lengths of wax paper placed crosswise. “When cutting the wax paper, leave yourself at least two extra inches of paper on each side, because you’ll be using them to lift the ice cream cake out of the pan after it’s frozen.”

  I sliced the pound cake into sections and demonstrated how to place several slices around both sides and at the two ends inside the loaf pan. “Next, we take either a quart of one flavor of softened ice cream, or-my favorite-two pints in different flavors. Begin to pack them into the loaf pan, halfway up. Then place the last pieces of cake on top of the first layer of ice cream. Next, add the second layer of ice cream and put the loaf pan in the freezer. Allow an hour or two for the ice cream cake to set, then lift it out of the loaf pan and turn it out onto a dessert plate. Sprinkle some fresh fruit, like raspberries or blueberries or sliced strawberries around the cake. Top it with fresh fruit, or with a few swirls of whipped cream, or Cool Whip, or even with a light dusting of powdered sugar. Then slice and serve. But don’t expect to have any left over for a midnight fridge raid.”

  ***

  Liddy arrived a few minutes after three. The last members of the cooking class had left and Eileen and I were cleaning up.

  She held up the Neiman Marcus shopping bag she carried. “Here’s your costume, Nurse Ratched.”

  Liddy took a folded set of scrubs out of the bag, handed them to me, and reached into the bag again. “And here’s your prop.”

  It was an authentic-looking medical chart, encased in a metal holder.

  “When you carry it in front of you, it covers most of the face on your ID badge.”

  “You’ve thought of everything,” I said.

  “Go get changed, Aunt Del. I’ll finish up here.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  The tiny bathroom in the corner of the school area was clean, but it was the size of the broom closet it had been before the toilet and the tiny sink were installed. I wouldn’t be able to tell how I looked because there was no mirror over the washbasin.

  It took quite a bit of twisting and stretching in that cramped space, but I managed to take off my own slacks and sweater and wiggle into Liddy’s hospital employee costume without straining one of my muscles, or splitting the seams on her blue scrubs.

  I folded up my own clothing and put those items into Liddy’s shopping bag.

  When I emerged, Liddy nodded in approval and said, “You look very official.”

  “Does the staff at St. Clare’s wear this color?”

  “I suddenly thought about that in the middle of the night, so I went over this morning and wandered around to check. Apparently, there’s no regulation, because I saw the employees in both blue and green. A couple were in a sort of salmon shade, or maybe those started out orange and faded. Anyway, some of the women wear print tops over scrub pants, but I’d never do that because the contrast cuts the body in half and would make my rear look wide.”

  Eileen was gazing at me with worry in her eyes. “Are you sure you should do this? Is it illegal to pose as somebody who works in a hospital?”

  “I’m just wearing the outfit. I’m not going to work on a patient,” I said.

  That was mostly true, but I knew that if I got caught in this impersonation by a hospital official and the police were called, I’d be in a fix trying to explain what I was doing there, dressed as I was. And if Detective Hatch caught me questioning Roland Gray, I might get slapped with a charge of interfering with a police investigation. That, on top of having my fingerprint at the scene of the break-in at Ingram’s house, could land me in big trouble indeed.

  ***

  During the ride to St. Clare’s Hospital, I’d pulled down the passenger seat’s visor and flipped open the mirror. With a tissue from the packet Liddy kept in her glove compartment, I wiped off my mascara and lipstick. As a final touch, I’d twisted my hair into a coil and pinned it against the back of my head. The style-if one could call that a style-wasn’t meant to look good, and it didn’t.

  As we approached the hospital, Liddy asked, “Which parking lot? For the emergency entrance, or the main one?”

  I pointed to the right. “Main entrance. The last information I had was that he’d been moved to the second floor.”

  Liddy steered her Range Rover toward the visitor’s ticket booth, took one from the machine, and proceeded into the lot.

  She’d just nosed into a parking space when I saw someone I recognized exiting through the hospital’s large glass front doors.

  “Quick-duck down!” I thrust my head below the windshield until my face was level with her gearshift.

  Automatically, Liddy bent down, too.

  She whispered into my shoulder. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Yvette Dupree just came out of the hospital. I don’t want her to see us.”

  “Do you think she went to visit Roland Gray?”

  “She must have. It’s too big a coincidence for her to be here for any other reason,” I said.

  A few more seconds passed.

  “I’m getting a neck ache,” Liddy said. “How long do we have to stay down here like this?”

  “Until I finish counting to one hundred… seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one. Okay, that’s close enough.”

  I slowly lifted myself on one elbow until my eyes were above the dashboard. I took a cautious peek outside, and was just in time to see Yvette Dupree getting into a taxicab. “She’s leaving,” I said.

  The cab pulled away from the entrance and moved into the circular driveway that funneled vehicles back to the street. I sat up. “She’s gone. In a taxi, but I got a look at the cab’s number.”

  Liddy sat upright behind the steering wheel and handed me the pad and pen she kept in the driver’s side door pocket. “Write that number down before you forget. We should try to find out where she went after she left here.”

  “I love that ‘we.’ ”

  “Every investigator needs a partner,” she said. “Sam Spade and Miles Archer. Andy Sipowicz and the Jimmy Smits character on NYPD Blue, Dirty Harry and the female cop that Tyne Daly played. And, of course, our Big John and your Mack.”

  I didn’t want to point out that each of those relationships had ended in the death of one partner.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  As we’d planned, we separated in the parking lot and approached the entrance to the hospital from different directions. We reached the big glass doors at the same time, but I was behind Liddy. She took her cell phone out of her purse and pretended to be on a call.

  Liddy was giving a performance. Dressed in a figure-flattering navy blue designer suit with a short skirt, Liddy strode insid
e with a slight swagger that was intended to draw attention to her hips and her shapely legs.

  In a posh British accent, she said loudly into the mouthpiece, “I’ve decided what I want: the double strand of pearls… The twelve millimeters… That’s right, with the platinum clasp. And I want the following inscription on my husband’s Patek Philippe: ‘Less than tomorrow but more than yesterday.’ No-I don’t want a comma after the ‘tomorrow…’ ”

  It worked. Necks swiveled toward her from the left and from the right.

  When I entered in her wake, no one seemed to notice.

  I went directly to the elevators and pressed the Up button while Liddy disconnected her pretend call and studied the board listing various departments in the hospital.

  The elevator arrived, discharged passengers, and I got on. Liddy was right behind me.

  An attractive man in his forties, his brown hair peppered with glints of silver, was already in the elevator. He smiled at Liddy. She smiled back. To judge from his white coat and badge, he was a doctor. I retreated as far back into the elevator as I could go, and was grateful to the people who crowded in around me.

  Liddy, the attractive doctor, and I all got off on the second floor. The two of them started toward the nurses’ station, while I lagged a few feet behind, pretending to study my bogus patient’s chart.

  At the nurses’ station, Liddy upped the wattage on her smile. Still sounding like a younger version of Queen Elizabeth, she addressed the woman behind the desk. “I beg your pardon, but I’ve just come from London to see my brother. I’m a tad jet-lagged and can’t remember the number of his room. His name is Roland Gray.”