If You Can't Stand the Heat

by Robin Allen

  “That kind of thing doesn’t happen in my restaurant,” the owners and managers say. “My people know better.” Yeah, and their people also know about food costs, docked pay, and lost jobs.

  Basically, I’m the food police, keeping the dining public relatively safe from gross and careless people.

  “Poppy!” Vidal said, approaching me with his quick, small steps. “So good to see you.”

  I know Vidal from the Austin Bar and Restaurant Alliance meetings and socials I used to attend when I worked at Markham’s. As the children of restaurant owners, we always had something to commiserate about. Like me, Vidal had worked in the family business through high school and college, but moved to air-conditioned offices after he graduated with a degree in architecture. When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Vidal came back to help out. Ten years later, he’s still helping.

  He took my extended hand in both of his. “Where is Mister Kawasaki?”

  “Vacation.”

  “I believe I’ve heard of that,” he said. “It’s when you take time off work, isn’t it?”

  “I hear there’s something called ‘relaxation’ involved.”

  “I’ll leave you to your work.” He patted my hand before letting it go. “Please find me if you need anything.”

  I clipped my badge to my waistband, found a clean apron in the linen room, washed my hands with soap and warm water for the regulation twenty seconds, then stretched on a pair of gloves. Over the next thirty minutes, I sidestepped sweaty cooks and harried waiters as I shined a flashlight under ice machines and stoves, and took temperature readings of refrigerators and cold food tables, ovens, and steam tables, working my way full-circle to the walk-in.

  While I scanned the shelves for unmarked containers, cooks came in and out, pulling tubs of marinara sauce, bagged calamari rings, stuffed mushrooms, butter, and veal cutlets. As they moved one item out of the way to get to another, they were careful not to put any items on the floor, or place raw meat above anything, even temporarily. They knew the rules, but whether they adhered to them because I was there or because they cared about food safety I would never know for sure.

  I felt heavyhearted as I stood in the refrigerated room. The kitchen and the cooks reminded me that Évariste Bontecou had been just another one of them. Not a nice one of them, but an alive one.

  Vidal opened the door. “Is everything okay? You’ve been in here a long time.”

  “I’m making notes on a couple of minor infractions.” We stepped into his office and went over the score sheet. I had seen the busboy sneaking a smoke in the linen room and a cook not wearing a hair restraint. “Ninety-six isn’t bad,” I said.

  “No, not bad,” Vidal said lightly, but I caught a flash of anger in his brown eyes. Mostaccioli’s would have received a perfect score otherwise. Then he pressed his lips together, a look of concern crossing his thin face. “I’m so sorry to hear about that terrible business at Markham’s. And Mitch. How is he?”

  “Thank you, Vidal. He’s still in the hospital, but should be out today or tomorrow.”

  “Very good,” he said, placing the inspection sheet on his desk. “I hope to see him at a ABRA meeting soon. The Markham’s presence is sorely missed.”

  “Will Denton should be attending the meetings.”

  We were interrupted by the busboy, the one I had caught smoking. “Oh, sorry,” he mumbled then disappeared.

  “You’re going to fire that kid, aren’t you?” I asked.

  Vidal sighed and shook his head. “That is my son, and you know as well as I that you cannot fire family.”

  And Vidal knew as well as I that the life you felt entitled to could be eclipsed by the life you were obligated to. He would be doing that boy a favor to fire him. I remembered Daisy’s warning that I could get sucked back into Markham’s. It made me even more determined to find Évariste’s killer.

  My phone vibrated. “Nina?”

  “Nope, Jamie.”

  So, he still had my number. “What’s up?”

  “Want to meet me at the University of Java?”

  “I’m in the middle of inspections.”

  “I need some info for my piece. Can you take a quick break?”

  If I left the area for a little while, I might regain the element of surprise with another restaurant. “If you’re buying.”

  _____

  I found Jamie at a two-top on the patio, making notes in a reporter’s notepad, oblivious to a foursome of college girls openly ogling him. Regardless of who he is with or how he is dressed, Jamie’s smooth pale skin, curly brown hair, brown eyes that looked copper in a certain light, and high cheekbones invite ogling wherever he goes. That day he wore a maroon t-shirt and dark blue cargo shorts that showed off his adorable knees.

  He looked up as I approached the table, then grinned as he stood and pulled out a chair for me. Gorgeous and chivalrous. “You’re looking much better today, Poppycakes.” And sweet.

  “Thanks,” I said, trembling at the deluge of feelings coming too fast to process. Elation at being with the man I thought I would one day marry gave way to gratitude for taking care of me the day before, which turned into anger and then sadness at what he had done to me, to us. And underpinning all of that lay an attraction so suddenly powerful that I didn’t so much sit as collapse into the chair. I wanted to kick him and kiss him. But I stayed put. “What do you want to know?”

  He clicked his pen. “Everything.”

  After making him promise that he wouldn’t publish anything without my prior approval, I went over what I remembered. I told the story slowly, answering his questions as they came up, mining my memory banks for the littlest detail. “Are you sure it was a meat cleaver Trevor put against his neck?” Yes. “How many people heard Ursula threaten him?” About ten. “What did the body look like before the medical examiner pronounced him?” Dead.

  Jamie looks affable and kind, so people tend to underestimate him. He asks more questions than most strangers do, so anyone who has his attention assumes that he’s interested in them as individuals. Which is true, but only to get what he needs from them, whether it’s information for a current story or a lead on a new one. One earnest look and a “Please go on” in his serious voice and people answer every question he asks, plus some he doesn’t.

  “Do you want another espresso?” I asked. He nodded, still writing notes. I picked up his empty cup and walked indoors. In the main dining room, college kids studying for exams crowded the tables, and young couples who probably had thousand-dollar multi-cup espresso makers sitting on imported Italian marble countertops at home sat across from each other tapping on their PDAs. I like quieter places, like the Green Muse, but Jamie is an espresso snob and U of J puts a perfect head of foam on theirs. I placed his cup and saucer in the overflowing bus tub, which sat too close to a plate of fresh brownies.

  I stood in line behind two long-haired sweaty dudes holding skateboards who fidgeted behind a Black lesbian couple cooing their Asian baby. The manager, Rex, stepped behind the counter to help. He blanched when he saw me. I get that reaction a lot. In the time it took toast to burn, every restaurant in Austin knew that I had left Markham’s to become a health inspector.

  “Relax,” I said. “I’m here as a customer today. An espresso and a coffee please.” He turned to make them. “But you need to empty that bus tub and relocate the brownies. I’d hate to see what the kitchen looks like right now.”

  He turned back and pushed my order toward me on the counter. “On the house,” he said. “For the long wait.”

  “I didn’t wait that long,” I said, handing him a ten-dollar bill. Accepting anything but tap water from a restaurant is grounds for dismissal, and his gift of free coffee was insulting. As if six dollars worth of hot brown caffeinated water could make me ignore the fact that he was endangering the public’s health.

  By the time I returned to the table, Jamie had made more scribbles in his notepad, circling some words, joining others with arrows. The
college girls grumbled when I blocked their view of him. He didn’t look up until I set his cup down. “What do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Help me prove Ursula didn’t kill Évariste.”

  “The police will do that,” he said, gazing lovingly at the foam on his espresso before tossing it back in one gulp. “Ambrosia.”

  “I know, but it might take time. And if the police are happy with Ursula in jail and her knife dripping with Évariste’s blood as Exhibit A, they’re not going to look too closely at anyone else.”

  “Aren’t we pleased with the idea of Ursula sitting in jail for a while?”

  Ursula thinks that because Jamie gives her food glowing five-star reviews, he likes her personally, but she has no idea of his true feelings. He can’t stand her, mostly because she made me so miserable for the seven months I worked under her, but also because she’s just not that likable.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m going to put aside my personal feelings for you, and I’d like you to put aside your feelings for Ursula. You know she didn’t do it.”

  “You have personal feelings for me?”

  Thousands of them, all safely tucked away in a box on a shelf in a locked room I never go into. “Don’t be fatuous, Jamie.”

  He leaned back in his chair, into a stream of sunlight that lit his curls and brought out deep auburn highlights. The girls behind me gasped. He hadn’t shaved and I remembered how his scratchy chin felt on my face.

  And then I remembered her.

  Like just about everyone in the Live Music Capital of the World, Jamie is also a musician. A drummer who plays in a few local bands. He was playing a gig one night. Crown Royal was on special. He was drunk. She was drunk. It just happened.

  From the beginning, I suspected that she hadn’t been some random girl at the club, that he knew her, which meant that I probably knew her. But he refused to tell me even that much. Not that it mattered, really. He was the one who had betrayed me, not her. Still, I wanted to know what the chances were that this girl could show up again and tempt him. When he stayed mum, I simply eliminated the possibility of him cheating on me again by ending our relationship.

  He must have interpreted the look on my face. “Are you ever going to forgive me?” He sounded exasperated rather than contrite.

  “Are you ever going to tell me her name?”

  He tapped his pen against his notepad. We had arrived at a familiar impasse.

  “I’m sure you’ve been working on a story about Évariste since before he arrived in Austin,” I said. “Find out anything that could help us?”

  He flipped through his notes without reading them. “I did some digging into his background. He’s in Dutch with a lot of people.”

  I slid my coffee toward him. “Like who?”

  “Like investors, the Internal Revenue Service, casinos.” He sipped “He owes money to all of them.”

  “Are you thinking it’s a hit?”

  “I don’t think the IRS would kill him because he owes back taxes. And it’s unlikely that an investor or casino would kill him; otherwise, they wouldn’t get their money.”

  “Casinos have been known to break a leg or two,” I said defensively.

  “You’ve seen too many movies.”

  “Ralph Fiennes and Nick Nolte,” I said, playing one of our favorite games. One of us names two actors and the other has to name the movie they starred in together.

  I had caught him off guard, but he didn’t miss a beat. “The Good Thief. It would have been a better movie if Nolte didn’t sound like he had wasps in his throat.”

  “What if the investors have an insurance policy on Évariste?” I asked. “It would be like setting fire to a restaurant and collecting the payoff.”

  “Can you insure a chef ?”

  “Dang, Jamie, if you’re going to shoot down all of my ideas, maybe I should do this on my own.”

  “I want to help you,” he said. “I just don’t think casinos or investors got hold of Ursula’s knife and stabbed Évariste on his smoke break. If they wanted him dead to collect the insurance money, they’d make it look like an accident. They’d run him off the road in Las Vegas or set his restaurant on fire with him in it.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I just thought it could be significant somehow that he owed a lot of money. People murder for money every day.”

  “It is something. It’ll just take some time to see how it fits in with the picture so far.”

  I sipped the coffee I had offered him. “What do you know about Évariste’s wife, BonBon?”

  “She’s also his business partner.”

  “So if Évariste owes money to investors, she owes money to investors.”

  “Correct.”

  “That might explain her outburst the night he died.” During my information dump, I had told him about the excellent smack down BonBon gave Évariste.

  “I thought you couldn’t understand what they were talking about.”

  “I couldn’t. They did most of their yelling in French. The only word I understood sounded like ‘imbecile.’ ”

  “Probably a term of endearment,” he said. “The French do things differently.”

  “I assumed they were arguing about something personal, but maybe it was business.”

  “I know it happens all the time, but I really don’t get how someone who is so successful can get himself in so deep,” Jamie said. “A Michelin star and two restaurants packed every night with an average check of at least three hundred per person. Surely he has enough money by now that he doesn’t need investors. He could have bought them out.”

  “Maybe Évariste lost all of his money at the craps table,” I said. “It’s probably no coincidence that his restaurants are located in the two gambling capitals of the world. You said he has gambling debts, too.”

  “Nothing significant, though, when you think about it. A couple hundred thousand. Between his restaurants, television appearances, and product endorsements, he probably makes that in a few months.”

  “I’m still betting it was a crime of passion,” I said.

  “You said you never got an answer from Belize about why she came back to the restaurant after her shift ended. Do you think she was meeting Évariste?”

  “Maybe. And she acted strange when she dropped the lemons on him.” I took another sip of coffee. “She seems to have more looks than brains, though, and she’s not that pretty.”

  “You don’t have to be a criminal mastermind to take advantage of a quiet moment behind a busy restaurant.”

  “Even BonBon could have done it, then,” I said.

  “That would fit in with your crime of passion theory. But how did she come to possess Ursula’s knife?”

  I had already considered that, but then something else came to me. “I’ve been assuming someone took Ursula’s knife from her knife roll, but maybe it was lying around the kitchen somewhere. BonBon could have picked it up when she argued with Évariste.”

  “If she swiped the knife ahead of time, it was premeditated.”

  “Unless she hadn’t meant to kill him. Either way, that’s a wicked thing to do to your own husband.”

  Jamie leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, and fixed his dark eyes on me. I missed him so much.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Before I say this, I want you to know that it has nothing to do with how I feel about Ursula.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s entirely possible that the police have the right person in custody.”

  I had seen that coming.

  “And there’s a chance that what we find out, if we find out anything, could help them prove their case against her.”

  That, I hadn’t seen coming.

  “This is Ursula York we’re talking about. She skewers beef, not celebrity chefs.”

  Jamie drained the last of the coffee and shot me a serious look.

  “I want the truth,” I said. “If she killed him, then I’ll have to accept that.”


  “Okay,” Jamie said. “Who’s minding the store while Mitch is in the hospital and you’re going for your detective’s shield?”

  “The new GM, Will Denton. I’m surprised you don’t know about that. Your grapevine is usually well-tended.”

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “I heard something about that, but Markham’s hasn’t been on my radar lately. Is there a good reason why Mitch hired a GM?”

  “You mean is there a good story? Not really. He wants to spend more time with Nina, traveling, country clubbing, and playing golf, so he hired Will to run things about a month ago.”

  “Golf ?”

  “He bogeyed the eighth hole at Silver Niche last week.”

  “It’s about time he took some time off.” Jamie flipped the cover on his notepad. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about that night?”

  “Nope,” I lied. I hadn’t told anyone I found Évariste before Belize did.

  Jamie walked me to my car. A few months ago, he would have kissed me goodbye, but we stood there awkwardly, on the verge, until I held out my hand. He took it, then pulled me close to him. He felt so solid, smelled so comfortable.

  “I miss you,” he whispered.

  I thought I was finished shedding tears over Jamie, but they had just gone dormant for a while. They were back now, stinging my eyes, reminding me of my broken heart. “I’ve got to go,” I said, pulling away from him and climbing into my Jeep. With one stupid, selfish act, Jamie had dumped more pain into my life than I ever thought I could handle. I didn’t know if I could forgive him, much less give him another chance.

  Nina called as I pulled out of the U of J parking lot. “Your father is in surgery,” she said, her voice scratchy.