Chopping Spree

by Diane Mott Davidson

  She advised him not to pay my bill…. Well, here we were setting up in the kitchen and I still didn’t have a ring. I glanced around the kitchen: Liz was bringing the Asian stock up to the simmer and unwrapping the dumplings. I drizzled the glistening marinade over the wild mushrooms, and went to look for our host. By golly, I was going to pack everything up and skedaddle if he didn’t pay.

  Shane, his mouth drooping, sat in what I hoped was not a drunken stupor on a love seat across the living room from Page and Pam. The sisters’ conversation seemed to be reaching the simmer much faster than our dumpling soup.

  “I helped Aunt Linda find the new doctor who did her so much good,” Page was insisting, gesticulating with her wineglass. “I fired that cardiologist who’d misdiagnosed her, and I was the one who ordered new tests and hired her a new cook. You couldn’t be bothered, Pam, because you were too busy trying on nighties for men twenty years your senior—”

  “Excuse me, but at least I have a job,” Pam retorted, then slugged down wine. “That’s unlike some people, who live off others’ unearned wealth.”

  “Oh, so you’re a communist now?”

  “Furthermore,” Pam steamed on, “I didn’t go rifling through Aunt Linda’s cobalt stems until I found the goblet where she hid the diamond pendant—”

  “That diamond pendant was stolen!”

  “By whom?”

  “The cook!”

  “Would that be the same cook you hired?”

  “I didn’tknow she was a thief!” Page screamed.

  Pam took another noisy gulp of Burgundy. “Excuse me, but I think you know all about thieves!”

  “Exactly what are you insinuating?”

  “You’ve got that pendant and I want to know where it is!”

  “Shane,” I said in a low voice. “I’ll need payment before we can proceed.”

  Shane’s face was frozen in pain. While the two sisters screamed, he hauled himself out of the love seat and motioned for me to follow him down the hall. Intent on their argument, Pam and Page did not register our departure, which was probably for the best.

  “These are the bathrooms, in case clients ask,” he told me, pointing to each side of the hallway. I told him this was good to know. I reached in to flip on the lights of a black-and-silver rest room on one side, and a peach-papered and marble-countered one on the opposite wall. I never broke my stride. I didn’t want to give Shane the chance to get distracted—again.

  “OK, now we need to be quiet and quick,” he warned, as he creaked open a door that bore a floral-bordered needlepoint sign: Page’s Place.

  “You’re going to take the ring out of your wife’s room?” I asked, incredulous. I looked around the room. Page’s Place was as disheveled as Pam’s Audi. Clothes spilled out of drawers of white-and-gold French Provincial furniture; open closet doors revealed a heap of discarded coats next to a heap of shoes; the plush cream-and-floral carpeting was so paved with discarded stockings and rejected lingerie that it was like a Victoria’s Secret obstacle course.

  Like her sister, Page was a dedicated slob.

  Shane put his finger to his lips, then paused to listen. Page and Pam were now squabbling over who Aunt Linda would have wanted to have the cobalt.

  “I bought the ring for her birthday next month,” Shane told me. “But she always goes through my stuff, and she found it and took it.” His nose wrinkled. “See, one time I had to take one of her presents back and she’d already gone through my stuff to find out what she was getting. When the bills came in, I decided to return one gift, an emerald bracelet. She was furious and…well, you’ve seen how Page is when she’s furious. So now, no matter how good I get at hiding stuff, she gets better at finding it, and she takes her presents, so I won’t decide I’ve been too extravagant and return them. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve gotten better at going through her stuff, so—” He stopped when he saw my mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter?”

  “You said we needed to be quiet and quick.”

  Shane took long, zigzagging steps across the large room, avoiding discarded outfits as if they were piles of elephant dung. Since my legs weren’t quite as long as his, I had a hard time following him.

  “Here we go,” Shane announced, pulling open a drawer dripping with slithery nightgowns. He groped in the back of the drawer for a silk sachet of potpourri. “This’ll just take a sec,” he promised.

  He untied the lace drawstring of the sachet, sending bits of dried rose petals fluttering to the floor. His stealthy behavior was making me so nervous that I averted my eyes hastily and looked around the room. Four lacy bras, black, beige, white, and pink, were laid out on the chaise lounge. Clearly, Page hadn’t been able to decide among them. All four were of the amply padded variety. Page Stockham may or may not have been a thief, as her sister claimed, but there was no doubt the woman stretched the truth.

  “Here we go,” declared Shane, as he extracted something shiny from the potpourri. More dried petals fluttered to the carpet. He handed me the ring—it was a dazzling trio of jewels: sapphire, diamond, and ruby—and told me to try it on.

  “It looks like something for the Fourth of July,” I commented, as I obeyed. The ring was a tad big for me. Not that it mattered, because this was collateral. I took it off and slipped it deep into my skirt pocket.

  “Yeah, well,” Shane muttered, as he hastily reassembled the gutted potpourri bag, tucked it back into the drawer, and picked at the dried bits at his feet. “Let’s just hope she doesn’t go looking for it before her birthday.”

  “Shane,” I protested, as he hustled me down the hallway. “I really don’t think this—”

  “Aunt Linda never intended for you to have the chandelier! We specifically talked about it when I was visiting her!” Pam’s voice shrilled from the living room.

  “You mean, visiting her when you were ten?” Page shrieked back.

  The doorbell rang. Peeping through the hole, Shane gasped. “It’s four of my investors!” he said, trying to be heard above the yelling. “Can’t you do one of those distractions you mentioned?” he begged me. The ringer bonged again: Page and Pam raised their hollering a notch. “Just do something, will you?” Shane implored desperately.

  I zipped into the kitchen, where Liz was spooning out juices and melted fat from the standing rib roast pan. The roast wasn’t quite done, of course, but I really needed to start on the gravy from the drippings Liz was gathering. The doorbell chimed again. OK, first things first. When in doubt, reach for a cliché. I nabbed a pack of matches, hopped up on a chair, teetered perilously toward a stack of bookshelves, and lit the entire pack without closing the cover before striking. Then I thrust my little conflagration up to the kitchen smoke alarm.

  Within seconds, the pealing of the alarm made me think I would go prematurely deaf. But the alarm certainly had the desired effect. I heard Pam screeching to Shane for her car keys. Shane, his face stricken, appeared at the kitchen door, while I imitated one of the Broncos’ razzle-dazzle plays by doing a one-handed toss of the keys to him, while keeping my little book of matches held high.

  Over the racket Liz cried, “Goldy, what the hell are you doing?” Still, she had the presence of mind to slam the kitchen door shut behind Shane. We heard Pam make a noisy, stamping exit out the front door—so much for keeping the investors out of the fracas—while shouting, “I’ll be back to talk about this some more! I’m not done!” Liz actually giggled.

  Next Page’s voice shrieked at the kitchen door, accompanied by her pounding on same. Liz cried, “Please go to a separate part of the house, Mrs. Stockham! We don’t want the smoke smell to wreck your—uh—cobalt stuff! Not to worry! We’ve got the situation under control!”

  Page stamped away. I hoped it was not in the direction of Page’s Place, where she might want to try on some of her jewelry to calm herself down. But I had no time to worry about that: The chatter from arriving guests was unmistakable. My mind chattered, too, when a volume on an upper bookshe
lf snagged my attention. Unfortunately, it was then that the fiery matches reached my fingertips. I yelped and flung the ball of flame toward the sink. It hit the roast, landed in the pan, and ignited. Without thinking, Liz grabbed an open bottle of Burgundy and poured it over the flames, and a genuine explosion rocked the kitchen. I screamed, jumped down from the chair, nabbed an extra-large bottle of Evian, and dumped the contents on our beautiful, blazing, twenty-dollar-a-pound prime beef.

  Ad Guys’ Roast Beef and Gravy

  4-to 5-pound standing rib roast, prime grade

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  Melted unsalted butter, if necessary

  ¼ cup high-quality Burgundy

  ¼ cup all-purpose flour

  3½ cups homemade beef stock or 2 tablespoons beef bouillon granules dissolved in 3¼ cups boiling water

  Preheat the oven to 450°F. Take out a roasting pan with a rack and line the bottom (underneath the rack) with either a very large piece of foil that completely covers the bottom of the pan and can be folded up over the sides or two pieces of foil that have been rolled tightly in the middle to form one large piece. The bottom of the pan should be completely covered with an airtight piece of foil.

  Use a paper towel to pat the roast dry, then season the roast with the salt and pepper. Place the roast, bone side down, on the rack. Insert an instant-read digital thermometer into the roast so that the sensor is in the middle of the roast.

  Place the roast in the oven and immediately reduce the oven heat to 325°. Roast until the temperature reads 115°F. (At this point the beef is quite rare, and the cooking is not done yet.) Remove the roast to another pan (even a large pie plate will do) and return it to the oven. (To obtain medium-rare, the roast should be removed when the thermometer reaches 125°F to 130°F; for medium, 135°F to 145°F.) If the thermometer reaches the desired temperature before the gravy is finished, remove the roast to a serving platter and tent it with foil.

  Drain off the fat in the bottom of the foil-covered pan and measure it; you should have ¼ cup. If you have more, discard it. If you have less, add melted butter until you have ¼ cup. Place this in a sauté pan over low heat.

  Pour the Burgundy directly into the bottom of the foil-covered roasting pan and let it sit while you start on the gravy.

  Raise the heat under the sauté pan to medium-low and whisk the flour into the fat. Whisking constantly, cook the flour in the fat until the mixture just begins to bubble and turn color, less than 5 minutes.

  Using a heatproof plastic spatula, scrape the flavorful brown bits adhering to the foil into the wine. Stir this wine mixture into the cooking fat–flour mixture. Whisking constantly, add the beef stock in a slow stream. When all the stock has been added, taste the gravy and correct the seasoning.

  Over medium-low to medium heat, whisk and cook the gravy until it thickens and bubbles. Serve hot with the roast beef.

  Makes 4 to 6 servings

  The smoke alarm was still squealing as Liz, now splashing a second bottle of Evian over the still-flaming roast, yelled, “I don’t think they’re going to hire us again!”

  In spite of all this, the luncheon came off well. I was disappointed not to have had a chance to talk to Pam about the Barry mess, but wasn’t sure I actually would have been able to. And anyway, my disappointment was allayed when Marla sashayed through the front door, claiming she was taking the place of someone who was sick. Because the luncheon was quite a bit smaller than Monday’s party, we didn’t have the opportunity to share gossip—except when she tiptoed into the kitchen to say Page and Shane had started to fight again, and that Page had stalked out. A few moments later, I saw Page’s Audi—a duplicate of her sister’s—whiz away.

  Without his wife there to scrutinize and criticize his every move, Shane was unexpectedly brilliant. His enthusiastic pitch about The Gadget Guy On-Line reminded me of Tom Sawyer’s whitewash-the-fence psychology. Only a select few were good enough to do this job, and if you wanted to be in on this opportunity to invest, you were just going to have to get in line! Shane’s enthralled guests all beamed and asked, Was there an upper limit on how much one could invest? All, that is, except for Marla, who gave me a dramatic wink.

  The food, despite our disastrous start, was out of this world, if I do say so myself. As if on cue, the snow began to flutter down again as Liz and I ferried out the steaming, fragrant bowls of soup dotted with floating dumplings. Liz stoked the fire in the dining room fireplace while I served Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad. Since Liz and I had learned one of Julia Child’s lessons well—Never criticize your own food at a party—we were able to serve “Lightly Smoked Prime Rib” without batting an eye or even giggling. The investors gobbled it all up, right to the Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler, of which, like the investment, everyone demanded large pieces.

  While we were serving the lunch, however, my curiosity began to nag. During the ring-stealing and fire-starting escapades, I’d seen a couple of things that had perplexed me, and I wanted to look into them—OK, snoop—a bit more. There were a few too many things about the Stockhams that were bothering me—the vicious way they fought, the nasty games they played, their ruthless habit of blaming others for their financial problems. All these, plus their current money mess brought on by The Gadget Guy’s eviction from Westside, were making me wonder if they were more involved in the death of Barry Dean than the cops suspected. Anything to try to help Julian, I said to myself, as I scooped globes of ice cream.

  While Liz handed out seconds of ice cream and cobbler, I climbed back onto the kitchen chair and turned my attention to the bookshelves. The lowest shelf contained the usual assortment of gourmet cookbooks people bought these days but rarely used. All looked brand-new. Above them was another array of cookbooks, these of the specialty-fad type, featuring Cooking With Bananas the Fiji Way, Creative Tofu Touches, and Bread Soups from Around the World (spare me). My guess was that these books hadn’t ever been opened.

  But above those, I’d spotted something that hadn’t quite fit. As Tom was always telling me, that’s what you should look for. Off the top shelf, I pulled a well-worn copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, otherwise known as The Big Book. Was Shane or Page an alcoholic? Or thinking he or she might be? The way Page had been hitting the wine this morning might indicate so. But why keep this reading material in the kitchen, as if to hide it? Still perched on the chair, I opened the book and caught two pieces of paper before they fluttered to the floor.

  Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad

  4 ounces Portobello mushrooms (about 1 large or medium-size)

  4 ounces shiitake mushrooms

  1 ounce oyster mushrooms

  3 large garlic cloves, peeled and pressed

  2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

  2 tablespoons best-quality medium-dry sherry (recommended brand: Dry Sack)

  2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

  6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  Nonstick cooking spray

  6 cups field greens (mesclun)

  To clean the mushrooms, wipe them carefully with damp paper towels. Remove the stems from the Portobello and shiitake mushrooms and discard. Using a sharp knife, lightly trim the gills from the Portobello mushroom and slice into 1 x 1-inch pieces. Slice the shiitakes in half. Weigh the mushrooms; you should have about 8 ounces total.

  In a large glass bowl, whisk together the garlic, mustard, sherry, and vinegar until well combined. Pour the oil into this mixture in a steady stream, whisking all the while. Place the mushrooms into this marinade and mix very carefully to coat all sides.

  Spray a grill with nonstick spray and preheat the grill for 5 minutes, while the mushrooms marinate. Do not over-marinate the mushrooms, or their delicate flavor will be lost.

  Grill the mushrooms over medium-high to high heat for about 3 to 4 minutes per side, or until cooked through. Serve immediately on a bed of field greens.

  Makes 4 servings as a side dish, 2 servings as a
main dish

  The first was a list of the Twelve Steps, but something about it was different. I read, We admitted we were powerless over our spending, that our lives had become unmanageable. I turned to the second sheet. Shopaholics Anonymous Meeting Times, the heading announced. Hmm. I’d heard of Debtors Anonymous, but not this. Meetings were held at two times, on two days—ten o’clock in the morning and seven in the evening Mondays and Thursdays, in the—I had to read this part twice—shoppers’ lounge at Westside Mall? Hello? Would you have an AA meeting in a liquor store?

  Hearing Liz approach, I shoved the book back into its spot, then scrambled off the chair.

  “Ten more coffees, two more teas,” she announced, giving me a quizzical glance as I shoved the chair back into place. “Want to refill the coffeepot?”

  “I already did, and it’s percolating,” I replied. “I’m going to the little girls’ room,” I added.

  Liz bustled around, working on the hot drinks. Meanwhile, I sprinted down the hall, turned on the fan in the peach-colored bathroom, and, still standing in the hall, shut the door hard. Then I whipped into Page Stockham’s room, aka Page’s Place.

  Unless I was very wrong, I’d glimpsed something here, too. Something—no, make that things—that I’d seen before, but in a wholly different context. If I was right, these items were of interest not only to me but maybe to law enforcement. I tiptoed over the clothes-strewn floor, bypassed the chaise lounge with its multicolored array of bras, and only cast a cursory glance at the armoire with its jumble of jewelry. As quietly as possible, I eased the bifold closet door to its fullest open position, then flipped on the light.