Toast Mortem

by Claudia Bishop

  “Her husband was killed yesterday and she wants to go ahead with this thing on Friday?” Mark Anthony Jefferson looked as if he might be reconsidering the Bonne Goutè mortgage.

  “That widow is not behaving in what I would call a respectful way,” Nadine said, finally.

  “That’s right,” Elmer said.

  “We could turn it into a memorial,” Harvey suggested.

  “You mean all that money’s lost, that’s what you mean,” Marge said. “Just to be clear about this. That woman took the check and whether or not we have the dinner, she’s going to keep it?”

  “That’s right.”

  A look of admiration passed over Marge’s face and was gone. “Then Harvey’s right. We have to have the damn dinner. So we’ll make it a memorial. With lots of dancing.”

  “I could do a banner,” Harvey said. “Very tasteful. Rest In Peace, Bernard LeVasque, with maybe the most famous of his dishes drawn in the borders.”

  “That’d be some kind of turkey recipe, then,” Marge said. “Well, this is just peachy. What the heck, the food’ll be good.”

  “They don’t have a head chef,” Miriam pointed out. “And their pastry chef is working somewhere else.” She glanced sideways at Quill. “What they have left is vegetables, fruits, seafood, and jellies. Not what I’d call a well-balanced menu.”

  “They’re all cooks. Let ’em cook,” Elmer said.

  “At a hundred dollars a plate?” Miriam shook her head. “I’m not happy with that. Not at all. If we’re paying a hundred dollars a plate, we ought to get the best chef in the northeastern United States.”

  Everybody looked at Quill.

  Quill tucked her charcoal pencil away. “Okay. I’ll ask her.”

  Miriam leaned over and hissed in her ear, “Go get ’em, Sherlock.”

  14

  ~Chevon a la LeVasque~

  For six to eight personnes

  4 pounds goat shoulder and leg in 2-inch cubes

  1 teaspoon rosemary

  1 teaspoon thyme

  2 teaspoons kosher salt

  3 cups lima beans

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  ½ cup salt pork, chopped

  2 medium onions, sliced

  2 medium carrots, sliced

  3 rutabagas, chopped into 1-inch cubes

  2 medium tomatoes chopped into small bits

  3 celery stalks with leaves, chopped

  2 Turkish bay leaves

  2 cups white wine

  Mint for garnish

  Rub the salt and herbs over the goat meat. Sauté the goat with the salt pork and the olive oil. Put all ingredients together and simmer for one hour in a covered pot. Garnish with mint.

  —From Brilliance in the Kitchen, B. LeVasque

  “They want me to take charge of the kitchen?” Meg ran both hands through her short dark hair, so that it stood up in spikes.

  “It was Miriam’s doing. She approves of our investigation. Which means Howie’s worried, I think, that maybe Davy’s going to come to the wrong conclusion.” Quill squared up her minutes pad onto the tabletop. They were squeezed around Meg’s miniscule table. One of the first things the sisters had designed when they remodeled the old inn was their own quarters. Quill made her own rooms into a refuge; Meg made hers into a retreat. Meg’s didn’t have a kitchen. And since she didn’t have a kitchen, she didn’t need a table except to heap cookbooks on. Quill had stacked them all on the floor.

  “Miriam,” Meg said. “Well, well.”

  “Who’s that?” Clare asked.

  “Howie Murchison’s girlfriend,” Meg said.

  “The town librarian,” Quill said at the same time.

  “Howie is the senior partner in Justin’s law firm. He has a girlfriend?” Clare looked a little disappointed, which would please Howie enormously.

  Quill smiled. “I see you’re on first-name terms already.” Howie hadn’t turned up at the Chamber meeting after all. Quill guessed that he’d sat in on Clare’s interview with Justin for the whole time.

  “He’s a nice guy.” Clare shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Very reassuring kind of guy.”

  This was true. Even if he hadn’t been a very good lawyer, which he was, Howie looked the part. He was of middle height, with a noticeable bald spot and a small belly. Quill knew for a fact he’d worn the same pair of expensive loafers for ten years, before Miriam threw them out in exasperation.

  “Did he give you any opinions?”

  Clare bit her lip, but she said steadily, “He thinks I might be arrested. Certainly taken in for questioning. He told me up front that he was the judge for this county, and that he’d have to recuse himself if there was any possibility of a trial. I said, okay.”

  “But you were here helping me all afternoon the day LeVasque was murdered!” Quill said. “You have an alibi.”

  “They’ve come closer to the actual time of death. LeVasque was killed between one and two o’clock.”

  Quill sat back and said, “Damn.”

  “Right. I volunteered to go down to Peterson’s liquor and pick up those cases of cheap wine.”

  “You weren’t gone more than half an hour,” Quill said. “And you came back with six cases of red and six of white. I can swear to that.”

  Clare looked away. “Can you really? You were all over the place. Kitchen, restaurant, your office . . . Howie said a decent prosecutor could make mincemeat of your testimony.”

  “Harry Peterson can say that you came right in, picked up the order, and came right out!”

  “And where was I before I got to the store? Where did I go right afterward?” Clare took a deep breath. “There’s worse to come.”

  Neither Meg nor Quill said anything.

  “I did go up to the academy. Just for a minute. I was so furious at that little sh . . . that jackass, for pulling that dirty trick that I did want to kill him. I wasn’t really going to kill him, of course. I just wanted to give him what for.”

  “And somebody saw you?”

  “Somebody did. Mrs. Owens.”

  Quill digested this very bad news for a moment. Then she said irritably, “Doesn’t she have a first name?”

  “If she does, no one’s heard it before. I suppose it’s on a birth certificate somewhere.” Clare attempted a smile. It didn’t work.

  Quill wrote Mrs. Owens??? in big caps on her pad. “What did you do exactly? When you got there?”

  “I walked in the front door. Somebody’s usually on reception, but there wasn’t anyone there. I walked up to the tasting room doors. They were closed. That means a tour group. I walked back to the reception desk. Mrs. Owens came down the hall . . .”

  “From where, exactly?” Quill was drawing a map of the first-floor layout.

  “Right there.” Clare put her finger on the east side of the building. “The washrooms.”

  “Then what?”

  “I asked her where LeVasque was. Actually, what I said was, ‘Where is that little shit?’”

  “And what did she do?”

  “She said she hadn’t seen him. I looked at the clock over the desk, realized I had to get back here and I left. And no, I don’t think anyone else saw me. Just Mrs. Owens.” A tear trickled down her cheek. “I was just so mad.”

  Quill doodled for a minute. Then she flipped to the last page in her sketch pad. “Do either of you recognize this recipe?” She laid it on the table.

  “Six eggs,” Meg read aloud. “Two and two-thirds cup canned coconut. Three cups puffed rice cereal. One package mars . . .” She sat back. “Mars? Mascarpone? What?”

  “I don’t know. This was on a scrap of paper in LeVasque’s hand.”

  “You pried his cold dead fingers open and got it out?” Meg grinned. “That’s my sister.”

  “That’s not a recipe,” Clare said.

  Quill raised her eyebrows. “It looks like a recipe.”

  Meg rolled her eyes. “What she means is it isn’t food.”

  Quill looked at the reci
pe again. “Eggs are food, cereal’s food . . .” The penny dropped. “Oh. You mean it’s not gourmet food.”

  “Have I ever told you how much I hate the word ‘gourmet’?” Meg demanded passionately.

  “Not that I recall,” Quill said.

  “There’s food, that is, delicious, nutritious, wonderful food, and then there’s stuff like this.” She flicked the paper with a contemptuous finger. “I wouldn’t serve a farm animal stuff like this, much less a human being.”

  “You are so right,” Clare agreed. “What’s worse, I’ll bet you fifty cents that ‘mar’ means marshmallow. One ten-and-a-half-ounce package of marshmallows.”

  “Oh my God,” Meg said. “I’ll bet you it is. Gaah!”

  Quill, who was fond of marshmallows and even fonder of puffed cereal with a little cream and lots of raw sugar, dragged matters back to the point. “So what was this doing in LeVasque’s hand?”

  “Beats me,” Clare said.

  “Maybe it’s part of a poison pen letter,” Meg said. “You know: dear Chef LeVasque, cook this, you bozo! Sort of like giving him the finger. Did the scrap of paper look like stationery?”

  “It was from a yellow pad. The ones with lines. There are probably five million lined yellow pads in the northeastern United States alone.”

  “So what do we do now?” Clare asked anxiously.

  “We go undercover at Bonne Goutè. Or rather, you two do. I can handle things on my own here for the rest of the week. The party’s Friday, right?” She frowned. “That doesn’t give you two a whole bunch of time.”

  “The menu was posted Sunday night,” Clare said. “So the fresh stuff’s been ordered. I imagine everyone’s been working on their part of the meal. I was supposed to do tarte pêche, for example. And of course, I haven’t done a thing about it.”

  “I’ve got a copy of the menu somewhere around here.” Meg got up and began to rummage in the pile of papers stacked on her coffee table. “I’ll make a list of the ingredients and see what we can come up with. It’s too late to order anything in quantity, so I’ll just have to cope. I remember thinking there was a real challenge in there.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d just want to follow his original menu?” Quill said tentatively. “It’d leave you more time to investigate.”

  Meg didn’t bother to dignify this with an answer. She dug into an accordion file and emerged with the invitation to the Welcome Dinner. “Here it is! Yep. I was right. Goat. Goat and quail.”

  “Goat?” Quill said, who hadn’t paid attention to the menu at all. “I don’t think the Chamber members know about the goat.”

  “It’s a locavore menu,” Meg said. “Only local foods. It’s called chevon, of course, to sneak it past the people who’re put off by the idea, but it’s actually very delicious. And really good for you. Chevon roti. Hmm. He meant to roast it. Idiot. It’s much better braised.”

  “Come to think of it, neither Miriam nor Howie was hounding me for tickets,” Quill said. “So at least a few of the Chamber members know about the goat.” She shook herself. “Anyway. Here’s what we need to do. I thought we’d take a logical approach here, and divide our investigation into three categories: means, motive, and opportunity.”

  “Sounds good,” Clare said nervously, “except that the person with the means, motive, and opportunity is me.”

  “Yes, well. We’ll exclude you, of course. Let’s begin with opportunity. Who was at the academy between the hours of one and two that day?”

  Clare made a face. “About a hundred day-trippers in the tasting room, for starters.”

  Quill beamed at them. “And who among them had a chance to snatch the weapon from our kitchen?”

  Clare smiled. “They all came in from Buffalo on a tour bus that morning. But there was a class earlier in the morn—”

  Quill, eager to make her point, interrupted her. “So we can rule out the day-trippers.”

  “But what about the breakfast class?” Clare insisted. “Your WARP people or the urps or whatever they’re named. They came in for Basic Brunch Techniques.”

  Quill rubbed her forehead. “Hm. But they hadn’t met LeVasque before, had they?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Still . . .” Quill thought a minute. “Meg, you missed the butcher knife when?”

  “Monday night. Around eight thirty.”

  “And you, Clare, when did you last use the knife?”

  “Monday night, around eight o’clock.”

  “And who, other than the three of us was in the kitchen?”

  Meg ticked the names off on her fingers. “Mike, Carol Ann, Devon, Mallory . . . and the miserable son of a gun himself.”

  “LeVasque. Right. So what are the odds that LeVasque himself took the knife?”

  “But, why?” Clare asked.

  Quill shook her head. “We don’t know that, do we? But I can think of a couple of reasons right off the bat.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Meg scoffed. “Why would he steal a knife from my kitchen?”

  “He was in the middle of a dirty tricks campaign, wasn’t he? My first thought is he wanted the knife to set you up for something awful. His fingerprints weren’t on it, were they?”

  Clare shook her head. “Not as far as I know.”

  “We should make a note of that, just in case.” Quill wrote knife fgprints DK???? on her notepad.

  “That little bastard,” Meg marveled.

  “Now, now.” Quill looked at the growing list in satisfaction. “Okay. Now, when you guys go undercover at the academy . . .”

  “Should I dye my hair?” Meg asked sarcastically.

  “Shut up. You need to find out where these staff members were.”

  “Which staff members?” Clare asked.

  “The ones who hated his guts,” Meg said.

  “Everybody hated his guts.”

  “We’ll start with the most obvious motives,” Quill said. “If we have to move on down to the guy who mows the lawn or the people from WARP, we will. And you can help us here, Clare. Who hated him the most?”

  “Me,” Clare said promptly. “He was blackmailing me, or as good as. But after me? Madame, I suppose.”

  “Why would she wait to kill him after all these years of marriage?” Meg asked. “Why not, like, right after the honeymoon?”

  “They had a huge fight over money Sunday afternoon. He spent a lot. He drew a whole slug of cash out to buy that Mercedes a couple of months ago and he’d drawn a whole bunch more out earlier in the week. Madame was livid. Told him if he took any more she was going to divorce him.”

  “Good,” Quill said. “I’m putting a star after her name.” She put down her pencil and looked at them. “Which brings me to something important. Did any of you notice how she talked about him last night?”

  “Coldly,” Clare said.

  “With indifference,” Meg said.

  “In the past tense,” Quill said. “Didn’t she? Didn’t she say ‘I had’ and ‘he was.’ How did she know he was dead?”

  “Wow.” Clare blinked at Quill. “You’re really good at this.”

  “Not at all,” Quill said modestly. “Okay. Who else have we got for suspects?”

  “Pietro Giancava, the sommelier. He does cheeses, too. He had a green card. I know for a fact that LeVasque threatened to send him back to Italy if he complained about his salary one more time. And his green card is due to expire at the end of the month. Madame wanted to keep Pietro on. He’s a wizard at picking good reds. And he’s got a great palate for cheese.”

  “Raleigh Brewster?”

  “Raleigh’s a friend of mine,” Clare said, her color rising. “She could no more stick a knife in somebody’s back than . . . I don’t know what. Anyhow, she didn’t kill him.”

  “We need to rule her out, at least,” Quill said gently. “You never know where these things are going to go. What if the police discover she had a motive? We can’t just exempt her because of a feeling.”

  “You’re
exempting me because of a feeling.” Clare looked from Meg to Quill and back again. “By God, you aren’t, are you? I can see it in your faces.”

  Meg covered Clare’s hand with her own. “There was one incident here at the Inn, years ago. Quill and I made a very good friend.” She paused. “Anyhow, it turned out badly.”

  Clare set her jaw. “I suppose you turned this person in?”

  “We’ll tell you the story sometime,” Quill said. “And no, we didn’t. We didn’t have to.”

  Clare sighed. “Right. So I turn rat fink on my good friend Raleigh. You haven’t met her yet, but Raleigh has a daughter. She’s off for orientation at Ithaca College this week. She’s cute. Really cute. She hit eighteen in July, and LeVasque hit on her.”

  “Hit on her?” Meg said. “Like, how do you mean?”

  “From what I can gather, it was just a grope and a lewd suggestion. But Divia’s back for Labor Day weekend, and then she’ll be back during school vacations, and Raleigh was worried sick.”

  “The man was disgusting,” Meg snorted.

  Quill looked at the names on her list. “Jim Chen?”

  Clare shook her head. “Can’t think of a thing, there. Jim and Mrs. Owens don’t get along, but she really asks for it. Jim himself gets along with everybody. LeVasque called him names, and Madame herself never heard the term politically correct, but then, the two of them treated all of us that way. And it isn’t as if Jim can’t find another job. He gets better offers all the time. But his family’s here in Ithaca, and he loves the area.”

  “Put two stars next to Chen’s name,” Meg said to Quill.

  “On the theory that the least likely person did it? If the least likely person turns out to have done it, we’ve really messed up this investigation. Nope. We get results by proceeding in a methodical way, and that’s what we’re doing. We’ll move Jim to the bottom of the list.”

  “Motherhood has made a huge difference in this woman,” Meg said to Clare. “Huge.”

  “Mrs. Owens,” Clare said. “She’s my favorite pick.”

  Quill poised her pencil over her list. “Motive?”

  “I wish I could come up with something. Anything. But if you want the truth, I think she had something on him, and not the other way round. She’s lousy at her job. The very idea of that woman giving you advice on condiments is laughable, Meg. And she’s lazy. Not to mention mean. I have no idea why LeVasque kept her on. She had every reason to keep him alive, well, and signing her paychecks. She couldn’t get a job at a truck stop.”