The Walking Bread

by Winnie Archer

  She let go one more, followed by a halfhearted growl. She backed up a few steps, but never took her bulging eyes off Miguel. “You’re a rascal,” he said to her, “but you’ll come around.”

  We took her back outside. Miguel sat opposite me at the patio table, and once again, I told my tale about Vanessa, the spiritual advisor, Dixie and her omission, and the ten investors in Max Litman’s condo development deal.

  He leaned forward as I relayed the details Johnny Wellborn had told Mrs. Branford and me.

  “I have something to add to that,” he said.

  Now I leaned forward. “About the condos?”

  “I didn’t know about the condo, but I might know something about the investors.”

  I opened my notebook, fine-tipped pen in hand, and waited. If there was something noteworthy, I was ready to jot it down.

  “Running a restaurant has some perks,” he said.

  “Right. Like unlimited brisket queso, white queso, and Diablo shrimp tacos,” I said, and right on cue, my stomach growled.

  “Besides the food,” Miguel said, but he laughed. “Hungry?”

  Now that he mentioned it, I couldn’t actually remember when I’d eaten something besides a bite of bread. My stomach rumbled again. “I guess I am.”

  “Let’s go get some dinner, then,” he said, starting to stand.

  I reached over to grab his wrist. “No, no, no. Tell me first. What did you learn?”

  He lowered himself back down. “I’ve been training this new server. He’s pretty good, so today was his first solo. My mother was on the floor, too, so I stayed in my office to catch up on the billing and ordering.”

  “Your mom?” Her English language ability was fairly limited and I’d never known her to wait tables.

  “Sitting at the hosting station and just keeping her eye on the new kid,” he amended.

  “Okay.” I waited, pen still at the ready, while he went on with his story.

  “There was some problem with the food at one of the tables. The new kid—”

  “Does he have a name?” I interrupted.

  “Oh yeah. Jesse. So, Jesse was dealing with that. Apparently it wasn’t going well, so my mom went to see what was happening. To see if she could help.

  “Jesse ended up dealing with it fine, though. My mom was heading back to the hostess station when she overheard some people talking at a table. It was pretty heated.”

  “They were fighting?”

  He shrugged. “Fighting. Arguing. They were having a disagreement.”

  I rolled my hand in the air so he’d keep going. “About . . .”

  “She didn’t hear everything, but she did hear Max’s name. They were talking about money they’d lost thanks to him and what they were going to do about it.”

  “The investors!”

  “Possibly,” he said.

  He was right not to jump to conclusions, but the coincidence was too big to ignore. “But they have to be.” I wrote the word investors at the top of the blank page in front of me, circling it three times. “What else did your mom hear? Did she see who they were? Did she recognize them?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t have her glasses, so she couldn’t see them well. Blurry faces. One man spoke Spanish. She heard him take a phone call. The woman had dark hair. Light eyes. One man had a hat on. Nothing else stood out.”

  “How many were there?” I asked.

  “Three men, one woman.”

  I wrote that down. So half the investors got together, which meant Wellborn had either lied or he was out of the loop, because these five investors did know each other.

  “Did she hear anything else?”

  “Just one thing,” he said.

  I waited expectantly. Maybe it was the break we needed to be able to move forward and help Billy.

  “She said one of them kind of laughed and said the world was better off. Then one of them reminded the guy that they still didn’t have their money, and then they all got quiet again.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t recognize any of them?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  It was interesting information, but disappointing that we couldn’t ID at least one of the people at the table. But then it dawned on me. Johnny Wellborn was one of the investors. He had said they were silent investors. He had said he didn’t know who the others were. But if these people were the investors, had Johnny Wellborn been among them?

  It stood to reason that if five of the investors knew each other, the remaining five did, too. Whether or not Johnny Wellborn was at that lunch didn’t matter. The fact was, Johnny Wellborn had lied.

  And then another thought occurred to me. Someone had had to pay for their meal. Or maybe they all paid separately. “Did they pay with credit cards?”

  “Cash,” he said, but then he smiled, a satisfied expression on his face. “Except for one.”

  This was good. Wellborn hadn’t ponied up, but maybe this person would. I thought about all the times I’d paid with my credit card. It showed the last four numbers, but no name. Unless the waiter had a really excellent memory, the odds were slim that he’d even looked at the name on the card. “Is the signature legible?” I asked, trying to stay hopeful. Unless there was something helpful in this story, Miguel wouldn’t have brought it up. I tapped my fingers on the table, waiting.

  “The credit card number itself doesn’t help us, and no, the signature isn’t legible. It’s more of a scribble. But listen, I’m not done. The new server ran into a problem running the credit card so he asked my mother to do it. She had to run the card. She’s the one who took it back to the table. We have always made a point of trying to make our customers feel welcome. Like they have had a personal experience eating at Baptista’s.”

  I’d been on the receiving end of that. Every time I ate there, they greeted me by—“Right. You thank people by their names,” I said, suddenly knowing where he was going with this.

  “Bingo.” He pulled out a pale yellow sticky note and handed it to me, a single name scrawled across the middle of it. “My mom did what she always does. What we all do. She looked at the name on the card before giving it back with the slip to sign. Vicente Villanueva.”

  My excitement felt like a million needles pricking my skin from the inside out.

  The name did not ring a bell, but we had a name nonetheless. “Do you know him?”

  “No, but I looked him up.”

  “Miguel, you’re a man after my own heart.”

  “I already have your heart,” he said with a slight grin and a quick upward flick of his eyebrows.

  He did, indeed. “So who is he?”

  “Turns out he’s a VP for a hotel chain.”

  “So how does he know Max?” I asked, thinking aloud.

  “How did anyone know Max?” Miguel said. “Real estate. Construction. Art cars. That was his trifecta, right?”

  “Plus he needed spiritual advice,” I said, telling him about my appointment with Vanessa the next morning.

  He arched a brow. “So you’re going to see a fortune-teller.”

  “She’s a life coach,” I said, making air quotes as I said it.

  “And an angel reader. 1096,” he said.

  “1096?”

  He circled his index finger near his temple. “Crazy.”

  “Ah, police code. Got it.” I thought back to my first encounter with Vanessa. She hadn’t struck me as someone full of great wisdom, an angel reader who could summon the spirits of the netherworld, or a 1096. She seemed pretty normal, in fact. “I guess I’ll find out.”

  “I’m assuming Vicente Villanueva and this life coach don’t run in the same circles.”

  That seemed like a pretty safe assumption to me. “I guess we need to pay Mr. Villanueva a visit, don’t we?”

  “First we need to get you some real food,” Miguel said. He stood, picked up my empty mug and the forgotten piece of sourdough bread, and headed inside. I followed with my laptop, Agatha trotting along
beside me. I’d expected Miguel to put the dirty dishes on the counter to be dealt with later, but instead, he gave them a quick wash and set them to dry on the absorbent mat next to the sink.

  I stood on my toes to brush my lips against his cheek. Instead of going back to the dishes, he spun, taking me into his arms. His hand splayed across my lower back, a little light pressure pressing me closer until not a bit of air could pass between us. “I like coming home to you.” The tenor of his voice dropped just enough to hear suggestion laced in it; then he left me with no doubt, pulling me into a kiss.

  Before I could succumb and forgo the idea of food in favor of dessert, my cell phone bleated out the ringtone I had programmed for Emmaline. Any call she made to me while Billy was a suspect was going to be about the case. I pulled away from Miguel to answer, grabbed the phone from the table, and put her on speaker.

  “I gave the information to Lane,” she said.

  “And?”

  “And he is more interested in making the clues fit his suspect rather than the other way around. We can’t count on him, Ivy,” she said, her voice void of emotion.

  “What about the investors? Those are real people with real motives.” I couldn’t fathom why the sheriff wouldn’t pursue that lead.

  “This is high profile,” she said. “He has to solve it quickly, and Billy is right there for him on a silver platter. He doesn’t think he needs to look any further.”

  Which meant he’d feel the same way about looking into Dixie and Vanessa. He had set his jaw, dug in his heels, and had all but named Billy as the guilty party. At this point, I knew Em could talk until she was literally blue in the face and still not get Lane to budge in his stance.

  Miguel spoke up. “We have a potential lead.”

  “Hey, sorry. I didn’t know you were there, Miguel.”

  “No problem. Been talking to Ivy about some customers at the restaurant.” He went on to tell an abbreviated version of his story. “The name’s Villanueva. Vicente.”

  “Vicente Villanueva,” she repeated. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  We hung up, took care of Agatha, and headed out. “I need to stop by the bread shop first,” Miguel said as he drove us out of the historic neighborhood.

  I looked at him, surprised. Normally I was the one needing to stop here, or run in there, with Yeast of Eden always being high on my list. “I need to adjust the restaurant’s bread order,” he explained.

  Miguel ran Baptista’s Cantina and Grill like a well-oiled machine. He was part of every decision and had his hand in every part of the restaurant his parents had created. He’d recently made some adjustments to his twice-a-week order with Olaya. “The tortas are our number-one seller now,” he continued. “I’m running out every single day.”

  “We can call it in,” I said, knowing that Olaya could easily adjust the number of rectangular rolls she made for him.

  “We could, but I want to talk to her about a few other things. I still want you to take photos of the restaurant, by the way. New menu. New tourist brochure for the hotels and chamber.”

  We’d talked about that a while back, but life in Santa Sofia had gotten in the way. I was glad he hadn’t forgotten. Building my photography business would be slow going, and every job would help.

  “You’re adding new breads to the menu?” I asked, getting back to the reason for his visit to Yeast of Eden.

  “Mexican cornbread,” he said. “I’m putting a new chocolate chile soup on the menu. The cornbread would be the side.”

  “Chocolate and chile?” I wasn’t sure what I thought of that.

  “Similar to chicken mole. Blackened ancho chilis, onions, tomatoes. Just a hint of chocolate.”

  “Well, when you put it that way. . . .” I trailed off, my stomach growling again.

  He leveled a serious gaze at me as we rolled up to a stop sign. “You have to eat, Ivy.”

  “I know,” I said. “I will.”

  A few minutes later we were there. There was no parking in front, so Miguel pulled into the small lot behind Yeast of Eden. My mind flashed back to the first time I’d seen him again after returning to Santa Sofia, right here in this parking lot. At that moment, I never would have predicted that we’d end up together, yet here we were.

  The bread shop was closed for the day, but I knew Olaya would still be here. Miguel and I entered through the back door straight into the kitchen. She had it set up with various baking stations, stainless-steel countertops, multiple bakery racks ready to receive trays filled with whatever came out of the oven, the professional ovens themselves, and an enormous movable mirror stationed directly above the primary baking workstation. She used this to demonstrate process and technique during the monthly classes she held.

  We found her in the little office off to the side of the kitchen. The space was small. Aside from the desk chair Olaya sat in, there was only one other. I sat there while Miguel leaned against the doorframe. They spent a few minutes discussing Baptista’s bread order, making adjustments to both quantity and variety. Fifty additional telera rolls were added to cover the demand for tortas. The pan dulce order stayed the same. They moved on to the Mexican cornbread. “I can make it in several ways,” she said after he’d described the ancho chili soup. “I can layer the bread. Pour half the batter into the pan, lay down the green chilis and cheese. Pepper jack, I think. And last, I pour in the rest of the batter. That is the simple way. To be fancy, I can add jalapeños and corn, creamed and niblets. Mmm. Que bueno.”

  “That sounds great,” Miguel said. “How many—”

  Olaya waved one hand in the air. “That was option one. There are others.”

  I drew my lips in, stifling a laugh. Olaya took her baking very seriously. If she had multiple options, she was going to share them all.

  Miguel nodded. “Right. Of course. What’s option two?”

  “Option two is to make them as muffins with the mix-ins worked into the batter. This would be easier to handle, pero maybe not as pretty on the plate. This would not be my choice.”

  This time I did laugh. “Olaya, you are too funny. Why mention it if it’s not the best way to go?”

  She responded without looking up from her paperwork. “Ivy, the decision is not mine to make. I must give all the choices so Miguel can make the best decision.”

  “Is there a third choice?” Miguel asked.

  “Por supuesta,” she said. “The last is a stuffed cornbread. It is layered. No, no, not layered. This one is, how do you say . . . ?” The word came to her. “Ah, it is stuffed. It has chorizo, onion, cheese, chipotle chilis in adobo, and black beans. Pero ay mas.” She tapped her finger against her cheek, thinking. “Ah, sí. Tomatoes, of course, and cilantro.”

  At this point my stomach had a mind of its own, rumbling steadily. “That sounds like a meal by itself.”

  Her eyes pinched. “Ivy, you are neglecting yourself.”

  “I’m going to feed her. The restaurant is the next stop.”

  “Bueno. Entonces which bread do you prefer?”

  “I think you’re right about the muffins. Too casual,” Miguel said.

  Olaya ticked off the two remaining choices on her fingers. “Simple layered or deluxe stuffed.”

  “I need to try them,” Miguel said.

  Olaya nodded with approval. It had all been a test, I realized. She already liked and respected Miguel, but I knew that his response had elevated him in her estimation. “That is the right decision,” she said. “I will make them for you.”

  “Perfect.” He seemed to know he had passed her test, too, and smiled. After they worked out a few more details about his standing order, I stood up to leave.

  She walked with us back through the kitchen. We stopped at the back door. “Do you have news?”

  Miguel answered. “The name of a man we think might have invested in a deal with Max.”

  “A deal that went south,” I added. “We are on the hunt for a man named Vicente Villanueva?”

  In
my experience, there wasn’t much that rattled Olaya. She was calm and collected. But hearing the name cracked her veneer. “¿Que dice?”

  We both stared at her. “Vicente Villanueva,” I said. “He invested a lot of money with Max Litman.”

  “He lost a lot of money with Max Litman,” Miguel said.

  “Do you know him?” I asked, but from her reaction the answer was evident.

  “Vicente Villanueva es el novio de Martina,” she said. I didn’t know much Spanish, but I understood that. Vicente was her sister Martina’s boyfriend.

  Chapter 17

  Olaya had called Martina the moment we’d put together the connection between her and Vicente Villanueva, but she hadn’t answered the phone calls, and she didn’t text. There was nothing to do but wait.

  “Food,” Miguel had said once we were back in his truck. “You need to eat.”

  I had started to argue. How could I eat when there was a potentially viable clue that could lead us somewhere concrete? “We could—”

  He held his hand up, palm out. “No, we couldn’t.”

  I planted my hands on my hips. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

  “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong.” He tapped his index finger to his temple. “I can see the wheels turning.”

  “We can find Martina, which will help us find this Vicente Villanueva guy. Which could lead us to the other investors. All of which could end up helping Billy.”

  “Come on, Ivy. You want to drive all over Santa Sofia looking for Martina?” He held up his hands, palms to the ceiling. “Needle,” he said, raising one hand. He lowered that one and raised the other. “Haystack.”

  Even though searching high and low for Martina is exactly what I wanted to do, I took his point. It wasn’t practical, or realistic. I had no choice but to give up the fight. “Okay. Food first, but we’re talking a quick meal, not a drawn-out sit-down.”