Out of the Frying Pan

by Robin Allen

  “Are you hard of hearing? I didn’t do it. I wanted the money back so I could make it look like my company was giving a big donation to the farm.”

  I let the disgust on my face offer my opinion about that, then said, “Where did you go after you left the barn?”

  “To my car.”

  “But not to put the money there, like you told Mike.”

  “Too many people were in the parking lot, and I thought it safer to keep the money with me.”

  “Oh, right. We wouldn’t want your stolen money to get stolen,” I said. “And not only did you steal money, you stole people.”

  “People?”

  “Person. Colin Harris.”

  I didn’t know the circumstances of Colin becoming an employee at Weird Austin Spirits, but I thought it best to keep lobbing accusations at Randy. In spite of his denials and dismissive attitude toward me and my interrogation, he still had the best motive.

  “Now that’s a guy who had it in for Dana,” Randy said.

  “Colin? How’s that?”

  “She fired him for reporting her to the labor board.”

  “Her own sous ratted on her?” A sous chef is the vice president to the president, the Tonto to the Lone Ranger, the Scully to Mulder, the Walter to el Duderino. They’re not supposed to squeal.

  “And then he came to me for a job,” Randy said smugly. “Of all people.”

  “You didn’t have to hire him.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Listen, I’ll admit I’m not above kicking someone when they’re down, but I’ve never killed anyone.”

  If Randy was the murderer, he would never confess it to me, so I had to either come up with irrefutable evidence against him, like Dana’s measuring cup covered with his fingerprints, or move on to my next suspect, which had just become Colin Harris.

  “You’re still a cheat and a thief,” I said, “and I’m going to report you to Perry and the Friends.”

  “The money will be back in the Friends account by close of business today,” he said. “And to apologize for the small mix-up in communication between myself and Mike that resulted in a temporary reduction in funds, I’m going to purchase an irrigation system for the farm.”

  No doubt with Weird Austin Spirits splattered all over it as the sponsor. “With what money?”

  “Not to worry, my dear.”

  “Where’s Colin this morning?” I asked.

  “At the Wolff, I presume. Herb hired him back as executive chef.”

  Blimey! Gavin said Herb fired Colin. Had I uncovered a conspiracy? Did Dana’s husband and her sous chef plot to kill her? I didn’t know of any professional or personal disputes between Herb and Dana, but Jamie would.

  I left Randy at the hostess stand while I went to fetch Drew for their meeting, but I got distracted by laughter in the kitchen when I entered the wait station. I stepped onto the chair and peeked over the door, lest I interrupt filming.

  My eyes immediately locked onto Jamie interviewing Ursula and Logan, and I saw what the world would soon see: poised, articulate, handsome Jamie Sherwood, as natural in front of the camera as a stag in the forest, being ogled and appraised by every doe-eyed woman in the room. And soon, by 1.2 million viewers.

  I felt a hand on my waist. “Is Randy still here?” Drew asked.

  “Yes, sorry.” I put my hands on his shoulders and hopped off the chair. “He’s waiting for you up front.”

  “He’s not our killer?”

  “He says he’s not, but he’s a scumbag liar. He as much as admitted to stealing money from the Friends.”

  “I’m not sure I want to do business with a cheat,” Drew said.

  “Randy would never cross Mitch, but it wouldn’t hurt to get any deals you make in writing.”

  “Will do. Are we still spending this afternoon at your house? I’ve been reading the dictionary.”

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and gazed up into his hazel eyes. “You might beat me at Scrabble one of these days, but you won’t have the chance today. I really want to keep going with my investigation. Randy was number one on my list, but I have others.”

  “You still like Bjorn Fleming?”

  “And now Colin Harris.”

  “For reporting Dana to the labor board?”

  I pulled back and punched him lightly on the chest. “You know about that? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought everyone knew,” he said. “Isn’t your new couch coming today?”

  “John Without is going to let them in.”

  “Without? Really?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Sure,” Drew said. “Now how are you going to get out of here?”

  Twenty-Four

  Only I would be forced to choose between leaving through the kitchen where I would interrupt one of my boyfriends interviewing my stepsister for a cable television show, and leaving through the front door, which would out my other boyfriend as a co-­conspirator to the restaurant supplier I had just accused of murder.

  “I’ll wait in the second dining room while you bring Randy back here to the office, then I’ll leave through the front door,” I said.

  That was, so far, the only plan that had worked all day, and a few minutes later, I sat in my Jeep and called Gavin.

  “You’re awfully busy on your day off,” he said.

  “I’m trying to earn some extra credit with Golferina.” Golferina is our secret nickname for Olive. Not because she regularly takes the afternoon off to go golfing, because she doesn’t, but because we’ve never seen her dressed in anything but black polyester pants and one of her well-stocked supply of short-sleeved polo shirts from various golf courses throughout the US.

  “You mean Bovina?”

  “Ha! Where did that come from?”

  He laughed. “I suggested it and she’s trying it out.”

  “Oh, Gavin, you’re terrible.”

  “Merely a small payback for calling me Kowsaki all the time.”

  “I didn’t think that bothered you.”

  “Does it bother you when people mispronounce your name as Mark-ham?”

  “Yes, but you’re not as tightly wound as I am,” I said. “What can you tell me about the White Wolff Inn’s last inspection?”

  “I did them in August,” he said. “They scored in the high nineties. Drinking from open containers, ice scoop in the ice.”

  “I’d like to inspect them again if it’s okay with you.”

  “For the case you’re working on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you have my blessing.”

  The White Wolff Inn is not an inn in the Holiday or Ramada sense of the word. It’s a tavern that pours frosty mugs of micro-brewed beer and offers fat gourmet sandwiches served with homemade herbed potato crisps and cucumbers in brine (don’t call them pickles) and mascarpone cheesecake. To counter the formal atmosphere of white tablecloths, black-aproned waiters, and valet parking service of Vis-à-Vis, its big sister two blocks away in downtown Austin’s Warehouse District, the Wolff has cherrywood tables and chairs, bartenders to take your food order, and a serve-yourself parking validation stamp attached to a brass chain at the bar.

  I pulled into the alley and entered through the open back door, which had a hand-written sign that read Closed—Death in Family. A hatless Colin Harris sat on a barstool, a sink full of water filled with Idaho potatoes to his right, a tall gray trash can in front of him, and a deep tub of peeled potatoes on his left. His eyes and nose were red, but potatoes don’t usually induce tears, so I figured he couldn’t contain his guilt over poisoning Dana.

  “Is it that time again?” he asked when he saw me.

  “There’s no set schedule for surprise inspections, otherwise they wouldn’t be a surprise.” I looked around the small kitchen and
didn’t see any cooks or dishwashers. “Are you alone this morning? Where’s Herb?”

  “Making funeral arrangements.”

  I nodded. “I’m surprised to see you here, Colin. Yesterday you were working for Weird Austin Spirits.”

  “Herb called last night while I was at the party and asked me back.”

  “Is that so?” I said. That must have been why he left early.

  He used the tip of the potato peeler to dig out an eye. “He needs someone who knows what they’re doing. You know … with Dana gone.”

  “Sure he does,” I said. “Except Randy Dove told me you were fired for reporting Dana to the labor board. And now Dana is dead and your new title is Executive Chef.”

  He blinked at me. “What are you driving at?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you killed Dana to make it happen.”

  “That’s not even close to how it went down.”

  “Why don’t you start with why you reported Dana to the labor board.”

  Colin wiped his runny nose on his sleeve. “Chef’s been really good to me,” he said. “She’s an amazing person when you get to know her, but lately, with the Friends election and all the stuff with Randy, she’d been making some bad decisions.”

  “Like what?”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter now,” Colin said, telling himself it was okay to tell me. “She was making everyone work a couple of hours off-the-clock every shift.”

  “Everyone? Waiters and cooks?”

  The minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13/hour, so Dana wasn’t saving much money, but neither were the waiters losing much. Cooks, however, typically earn in the $10-$15/hour range and can make as much as $20-$25/hour depending on experience and rank. Say seven cooks on a shift, that’s a hundred or so dollars a shift, times twelve shifts because her restaurant serves lunch and dinner six days a week, and double that if she did it at both of her restaurants. It would add up to a lot of savings for Dana, but the interest she accrued on employee resentment would compound by the minute.

  “We went around and around,” Colin said, “but I couldn’t change her mind.”

  “Yet she handed the Wolff over to you.”

  “That was before I reported her.”

  “What does this have to do with Randy and the election?”

  “Nothing directly, but she wasn’t in her right mind because of it.”

  “Why do it in the first place?” I asked. “Her restaurants are doing really well as far as I can tell.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but Good Earth voted for Chef to bring in a restaurant, and she wanted to cut payroll costs so she’d look more solvent for the bank. Even if I’d known, I still would have reported her.”

  “What do you mean, bring in a restaurant?”

  “Bring in a restaurant,” he repeated. “Tables, chairs, a dining room, cooks cooking food, waiters serving customers. A restaurant.”

  It happens so rarely that people begin at the beginning when they’re explaining something that I’ve gotten good at backing into a story. “Are you saying that Good Earth wanted Dana White to open a restaurant at the farm?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Whoa! “And you reported Dana to the labor board in the middle of all this? No wonder she fired you.”

  “I had no choice,” Colin said. “These people are my friends, and I had to do what was right for them. Besides, I wasn’t really fired. More like a temporary leave, but Chef didn’t know.”

  I was sure that made sense to him, but no clarifying questions came to mind, so I motioned with my fingers for him to keep talking.

  “She was really ticked off when she found out and wanted me gone immediately, but Herb did the actual firing. That’s when he told me they’re opening a restaurant at the farm. Herbivore they’re calling it. It’s going to be all organic and vegan using the farm’s produce.”

  My taste buds snapped to attention at that description. Austin has lots of vegan restaurants, and most have some organic offerings on their menu, but none serving recipes prepared by Dana White. And none had such a perfect setting! I imagined a solarium-type room with huge glass windows overlooking colorful fields bursting with earth’s bounty. What a fantastic idea!

  Except Dana was dead.

  Colin lobbed a peeled potato into the tub, then dunked his hand into the sink and fished out another. “Herb said Chef would see how impossible it is to run three kitchens by herself, and he’d convince her to re-hire me. He told everyone I quit so it’d be easier when I came back.”

  “Why did you go to Randy Dove for a job?” I asked.

  “Randy came to me. He heard I quit at an ABRA meeting and called me the next day.” Colin shook his head sadly. “I knew he did it just to twist the knife in Chef.”

  Interesting choice of words from Colin. And another lie from Randy? “But you took the job anyway,” I reminded him.

  “I still have bills to pay, but I didn’t want to start at another restaurant knowing I’d have to leave soon.”

  “Please, Colin. Cooks start and leave all the time.”

  “I don’t want to get that kind of reputation,” he said, then dropped his eyes. “And I guess I wanted to get back at Chef, too, a little bit.”

  “That wasn’t the smartest move,” I said. “Working for an enemy Dana hated as much as she hated Randy. She might never have hired you back, especially if she had lost the election.”

  Colin nodded. “I know. I wasn’t thinking. I felt like such a jerk delivering that champagne to her. She thought it was an olive branch until I told her it was from Randy and she figured out what was going on.”

  Colin’s explanations sounded believable, but he knew what he was doing going to work for Randy. He admitted that he wanted to get even with Dana for firing him. He knew she would be at the party and their paths would cross. He knew Dana would discover this second treachery on top of reporting her to the labor board. Did he want the ultimate revenge?

  I didn’t think so. Someone soft-hearted enough to risk his very good job to do right by other employees wouldn’t kill his employer, especially when he believed he would eventually get his job back.

  And now with this revelation about the farm and all that implied, I felt more sure that the answer was at Good Earth. But the cops were conducting their own investigation, so I would have to wait until the next day to get that answer. It looked like my day off was going to happen after all. I could still do a later yoga class, then kick Drew’s butt in Scrabble.

  “I just remembered somewhere else I have to go,” I said. “You and the Wolff get a break today, which is good, because you’re not wearing a hair restraint.”

  I left Colin to his spuds and drove to Markham’s to check on the status of filming and to plan the rest of my day. This time I came in through the front door. You don’t have to tell me twice not to do something.

  “Cut!” Mindy yelled.

  A dining room full of people turned their heads in my direction.

  In addition to everyone from the morning, the players now included several of Markham’s food servers, bartenders, and hostesses. They wore pants and skirts and collared shirts, and posed on barstools at the bar and at tables in the main dining room. It had the look and feel of a regular weekday lunch service, but was happening after lunchtime and was made up almost entirely of Markham’s employees.

  “I thought you were filming in the kitchen,” I said.

  “We’re in the dining room now,” Mindy snapped.

  “Is that so?”

  “We can use you,” she said. “Sit there with Jamie and act like you’re having a good time.”

  She pointed to Jamie sitting at a two-top decorated with a white tablecloth, two place settings, and two half-empty glasses of white wine. He didn’t have any food in front of him, so
I didn’t know if he had made an appropriate wine pairing. He obviously hadn’t planned to pretend dine with me because I drink red wine with everything from popcorn to kale salad.

  “Actually, Mindy, I have a yoga class to get to,” I said. I heard a man clear his throat and located Mitch sitting at a booth with Nina. My father shouted Penelope Jane with his eyes. I turned back to Mindy. “But I’ll be overjoyed to spend my day off supporting the restaurant.”

  “Lose the backpack,” Mindy said.

  I handed it to the bartender, Andy, then walked up to Jamie’s table. Ever the gentleman, he stood when I approached and held out my chair. “What’s all this?” I asked as he settled me then took his place across from me.

  “Mindy’s doing some crowd shots,” he said. “For cut-aways.”

  “Listen up, people!” Mindy said. “We’re going to do another wide shot, then move among the tables for some random close-ups, filming from different angles. I’d love for you to act like you’re having a good time. Talk about whatever you want, but keep your conversations to a murmur, and no big movements. And smile!”

  “Expecting company?” I asked, pointing to a glass of wine.

  “Mindy’s been rearranging everyone and somehow Logan ended up with me, but Trevor pointed out that she was too young to be my date, so they moved her to Daisy’s table.” He dropped his voice. “So, what did Mindy want with you earlier?”

  “She said she loved the authentic cowboy boots I was wearing last night and wanted to know where I got them. I told her I bought them at Target.”

  “Jim Carrey and Maura Tierney,” he said.

  Liar, Liar. “She wanted me to apologize for spilling wine on her, so I did. For Logan.”

  I turned all the way around in my chair so Jamie couldn’t see me and looked for Drew. I saw him several tables away sitting with Trevor and two waitresses, like couples on a double-date. I smiled at Drew, hoping he had witnessed Mitch’s strongly glared directive and knew that I had no choice but to have an intimate pretend meal with Jamie. Drew crossed the first two fingers of his right hand and put them over his heart, his nonverbal way of saying “I love you.”