Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “Eh, Carol, know why cannibals won’t eat clowns?” Victor asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Dey tas’ funny.”

  I smiled, ducked back into my niche, and continued to mull over my personal life. I couldn’t blame Chad for feeling a bit insecure. With his family, I considered it miraculous that Chad was normal.

  “Carol.”

  I jumped and turned.

  “Sorry.”

  Delores stood in the entrance. Her large, thick-lashed eyes looked red and puffy. With her dark hair and brown skin, her blue eyes always startled me a little, even though from Abundio’s red hair and freckles, it was clear fairness ran in the family’s genes.

  “Whatcha need, Delores?”

  She stared at the table, then at the floor. When she raised her head, she looked haunted and ineffably sad, like a deserted child.

  How did Fortier do this? How did a middle-aged chef command such power over a stunningly beautiful girl?

  “The melon baller?” she asked.

  I glanced guiltily at the doughy scoop at the end of my table. “Tell Suzanne I’m sorry. I thought I’d be done with it before you missed it. I didn’t think we served melons in December.”

  A tear leaked down Delores’ smooth cheek.

  “Oh, sweetie....” My heart ached for her. I stopped myself from saying Fortier wasn’t worth it, and instead grabbed the folding steps from the hall. “Sit down. Have a good cry.”

  Her blue eyes widened at the sight of the steps, but she complied. I handed her one of the ubiquitous, small white towels, and noticed a glow-in-the-dark Band-Aid on her plump thumb. But, she didn’t cry anymore.

  “I better get back before Suzanne gets mad.”

  “Suzanne will not get mad.”

  Of everyone in the kitchen, Suzanne had the most even temper. She was the only one of us that I’d describe as sweet. Even Delores had flared up when she thought Fortier’s eyes were roving, as no doubt they had been. How did a possessive twenty-year-old deal with the fact her boyfriend had once been her mom’s lover, I wondered.

  “Are you okay?” Delores asked.

  “I just had a surprising thought.” I didn’t tell Delores it was about her. What if she had recently learned about her mom and Fortier? I didn’t know exactly when Fortier had been with Esperanza, but it had been a long time ago. Delores would have been a child, maybe even a baby. Esperanza struck me as a private, discreet person. It was possible that she had never told Delores, that Delores had learned about the relationship the way everybody else did—through kitchen gossip. Could such a discovery provoke a fiery, jealous girl to kill? I reminded myself of my basic contention: anyone could kill if the circumstances were right. I was back in the groove and my mood felt lighter.

  I did a quick look-see into the kitchen. Eldon hovered by a frantic Ray on the front line. The front line demanded more skill and timing than the mass cooking in the back line, and Ray had not been properly trained. Like several others, he’d been tossed into his new position by Fortier’s death and was learning the job under pressure.

  In spite of Eldon’s preoccupation, he could bounce over to the bakery at any moment. “Let’s give Suzanne the melon baller and punch out for an official break.”

  Delores agreed. “No offense, Carol, but this room gives me the creeps.”

  The whole kitchen was a little creepy given that a murder might have occurred here. How Eldon had kept it running without a hitch spoke to his managerial skill. In my imagination his coup involved the CEO of the conference center speaking to someone in power about 600 plates a day at fifty dollars a plate.

  We entered the Employees Dining Room where Suzanne’s cousin had been hired to fill Big Red’s place as he moved into the main kitchen. Even before Fortier’s death, the kitchen operated on the burn-and-turn principle: Burn ‘em out and turn ‘em over.

  Delores and I filled paper cups full of coffee and Delores picked up a couple of my overdone spice cookies that’d been relegated to EDR. We sat in the corner furthest from the steam table.

  I launched right in. “Would you happen to know the last thing Fortier ate before he died?”

  A blush rose from the top of her chef’s smock to the bottom of her white hat. The question had been blunt, but I didn’t see anything embarrassing about it.

  “I meant food,” I stammered, feeling like an idiot. “Do you know what food he ate last? Excluding the lebkuchen dough he may have sampled.”

  She nodded, and the blush deepened a shade.

  Now I was confused. “Well, what?”

  She squinched her face and squirmed in her seat.

  “Tell me,” I coaxed.

  She shook her head.

  “Come on. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Honey,” she croaked.

  I nodded, eager and waiting.

  Delores scooted the cafeteria chair closer and whispered, “We went in the walk-in cooler.”

  This particular Fortier ploy had become part of the initiation rite for every female employee. Many years ago, for me, it had been instructive. When Fortier had led me from the cooler, I’d felt the half dozen sets of eyes staring at my nipples, and since then I’d managed, in spite of Fortier’s good looks, abundant energy, and impressive knowledge of cooking, never to forget how juvenile he could be. My vigilance didn’t prevent incidents like the one in the locker room, but I’d circumvented a lot by not being alone with the guy and not passing him in the tighter spots of the kitchen. I felt guilty for not warning Delores, when on her first day, she had emerged in the puff of cold fog, asking about the labels, oblivious to the guys checking out her chest.

  “At first it was like a picnic,” Delores continued. She had no discernible accent, but her voice had a muted quality, a lack of explosive b’s and p’s, probably learned from her mother. “He was eating the honey on your scones, but he said they were bitter like you didn’t stir in the soda good.” Delores lowered her eyes.

  I thought badly of the dead. The nerve of him saying my scones were bitter!

  “Then....” She blushed again. “He wanted to put the honey on my....” She giggled, the nervous sound of a modest person. Her hands fluttered around her lap. “I couldn’t.”

  Part of her embarrassment seemed to stem from her inability to accommodate Fortier. Hatred of the guy erupted in me like torched kerosene. He’d taken an innocent young lady and made her feel ashamed of her purity.

  “But he did eat more honey?” I pressed.

  She winced. “From my nipples.”

  SIXTEEN

  I glanced at the clock up on the wall behind the steam table. “We’d better get back.” We were entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks. I was enough of a one-person show to take them back-to-back, but Delores was new and vulnerable. She couldn’t afford for Eldon to write her up.

  We tucked our paper cups into the garbage can. “Did Fortier get sick right after that?”

  “I think so. We can’t see the line chefs from the garde manger, and we’re not on the route to the bathroom.”

  “When did you guys go into the cooler?”

  She reddened and shrugged. “Mid-morning?”

  I made a mental note to ask Eldon about how and when Fortier had first gotten sick.

  We left the cafeteria and entered the tacky hallway used only by employees. We passed the employee restrooms and locker room. I pushed at the swinging door into the kitchen.

  “Who gave him the honey?” I asked.

  “I think Tio Victor.”

  I paused with my hand on the door into the kitchen and shushed her. This was a new twist. We were about to enter near the dishwashers, but Delores hadn’t shown the slightest hesitancy in mentioning Victor.

  “Why you want me to be quiet?” she whispered.

  She evidently had not grasped the possible connection between the honey and Fortier’s death. However, the murderer certainly knew the connection and might not appreciate others making it.

  I backed away f
rom the door, so it wouldn’t swing back out and hit me in the face.

  “Tio Victor keeps bees,” she explained in a low voice, baffled by my behavior.

  I nudged her into the supply room at the end of the hall. “Promise me you’ll keep our conversation a secret.”

  “Gawd,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “You think I’m gonna tell people ‘bout that?”

  “Don’t tell anybody about any of it.”

  I wondered if my advice could be considered an obstruction to justice. Certainly Delores should tell the police. I could not imagine her Uncle Victor giving Fortier anything but a sock in the jaw. If he had given the honey to Fortier, it would have been to kill him.

  “Are you sure the honey was from Victor?”

  “It was a Kris Kringle present.” She frowned and picked at the Band-Aid on her thumb. “We sorta got in a fight about it because Jean wouldn’t let me see the tag.”

  “Tag?” I asked excitedly.

  “On the ribbon. Jean told me it was from his secret admirer. He did that to make me mad, I know.”

  I realized why she hadn’t connected the honey and the death. She wasn’t dumb. She was too innocent to imagine murder. She might be in for a shock when the police reported the autopsy results. To her, Fortier’s death had been an inexplicable act of God. I dismissed my earlier idea of her as a suspect.

  “Delores, what happened to the jar of honey?”

  “I don’t know. I left first.”

  Something was happening to me. My heart banged. Adrenaline and endorphins shot like starbursts through my body. The excitement was like a drug rush. The missing jar of honey could be a solid piece of evidence. The police had looked for it, but half-heartedly. At the time, there’d been no direct link between it and Fortier’s death.

  My mind raced. What if Fortier knew he’d been poisoned, had sat on my stool because he could go no farther, and put his finger in my dough, not to sample it, but rather, knowing it was full of molasses and honey, to point at it, a desperate, last minute message? Nah, I thought. I had been reading too many mysteries.

  Delores’s gaze switched across my face a couple of times and then ran over the wire shelves, the stacks of plates and trays. “I really should get back to work.”

  I was blocking the girl’s path from the supply room to the swinging doors. “Just out of curiosity, Delores, whose name did you draw in the Kris Kringle?”

  “Patsy,” she said. “Actually I drew Suzanne’s name, but Eldon wanted to switch.”

  That made sense. Eldon would be at a loss for what to get Patsy. On the other hand, his eyes tracked Suzanne whenever she trotted across the kitchen.

  I pushed open the door. “Who had your name, Delores?”

  “Ray.”

  I wanted to know if the jar of honey could have been a Kris Kringle present. If so, who had drawn Fortier’s name? I couldn’t imagine Fortier participating in the gift exchange, but if he hadn’t, wouldn’t he wonder about an unexpected gift? With his ego, maybe not. According to Delores, there had been a tag on the jar. Could it really have been from Victor?

  All through my shift, I stayed wired as though on a double espresso. After that, I returned to the EDR for lunch. I saw the room and the people as though for the first time. A line filed before the shiny stainless steel table with its Plexiglas sneeze guards. The aromas of leftover prime rib and horseradish crowded the small, warm room. I knew most of the employees only vaguely, since most were from the on‑coming shift. I started and finished earlier than my co-workers. However, Buzz stood in line, in uniform, taking a late break. He turned and winked at me. My heart did a weird little soft shoe with cane and top hat.

  Since the party, something had changed in our relationship, and I didn’t like it. I wanted the good old days when a wink was just a wink.

  I slid a plastic plate from the shelf, but waved people ahead of me as I stalled, hoping Alexis would show. Being stubborn and obsessive, I needed to let go of my initial suspicion of Julieanne—and, maybe, by extension, Alexis—before I could focus on this new twist—the honey from the supposed Kris Kringle. Uncle Victor?

  I had shed my uniform and slipped on rose-colored sweats, but the tight braid of my hair pulled on my scalp. I looked forward to the tingling pleasure of its release. My mouth salivated at the smell of the succulent meat, until I remembered the last time I’d eaten at work—the petit four at the party. Nausea fluttered through my belly.

  The guy at the end of the line turned to me. “Dead meat.” He wrinkled his nose.

  “Do you prefer it pulsating?” The line moved and I hung back.

  “I guess you don’t feel like eating either,” he said.

  He was thin and anemic-looking. In truth, I thought most Americans ate too much red meat, but this guy’s attitude was annoying. And in his case, some red meat might do him good. Plus prime rib was tasty.

  “We have incisors for ripping meat from bone.”

  “Oh, one of those,” the cadaver said. He stepped forward and inspected the cases for dead plants to eat.

  I made a face at his back. I was standing on tiptoes to see how much prime rib remained when Alexis hustled into the room, in uniform but out of breath. I stepped into the line. Preoccupied with the clock, she grabbed a plate and stood behind me.

  I turned. “Hi, Alexis.”

  “Oh, hi, Carol.” She jiggled the plate in one hand. The fingers of the other rubbed at her thumbnail.

  I inched forward and spooned rosemary potatoes onto my plate. In sotto voce, I said, “I was very interested in our discussion the other night.”

  Alexis glanced around the room and spotted Buzz at a table. She nearly dropped her plate.

  I tonged broccoli flowers and Alexis followed suit. “I was hoping I could meet Julieanne. Talk to her.”

  “She left.”

  “Left?” I echoed. Her action screamed guilty like a neon pink sign. It seemed abrupt, a definite reaction. On the other hand, my progress had been sluggish. Ten days had passed since Fortier had been murdered in the bakery. I also had the nagging detail of the honey. If it had been the vehicle, how had Julieanne gotten the poisoned product into the kitchen? How had she known to disguise it as a Kringle present?

  “She went back to New Orleans,” Alexis said.

  I wondered what the cops would make of that.

  Alexis forked a slab of meat onto her plate, placed it on a tray, and gathered silverware. Her gaze flicked over the nearly full room, to where Buzz sat alone. I wondered if she’d get up the courage to sit with him, and where I could go if she did. As Alexis remained mired in personal crisis, her guard down, I asked, “Do you know who’ll inherit Jean’s condo?”

  “Me.” She looked up at me, her eyes fearful, but whether about the condo or sitting with Buzz, I didn’t know. I led the way to his table, deciding to eat fast so the two would be alone.

  “Did your uncle leave a will?”

  “What?” Her fingers tightened on her tray.

  I pitied her. No member of the opposite sex had ever reduced me to a bumbling stupor, although I’d once had a confusing crush on a guy, who I later realized was my brother Donald’s first boyfriend.

  “A will?” I prodded, as we seated ourselves at Buzz’s table. Buzz and I exchanged glances. Alexis said nothing. I felt like kicking her. I did. Fast and friendly under the table.

  “No, uhm,” she said, as though prodded from a slumber. “He had one of those things, a living trust.” Resentful eyes locked on mine.

  So she knew Fortier was leaving her the yacht harbor property. No wonder she’d called him generous.

  I stood up with my plate. Alexis’s chocolate brown eyes looked panicked. “No offense,” I said, “but I’ve decided to eat outside.”

  Buzz looked at me like I was crazy, a completely logical response I realized, when I stepped into a misty rain. I gulped lunch and went home to make a phone call.

  SEVENTEEN

  As it turned out, what the police made of Julieanne�
��s disappearance was nothing much.

  “We have no reason to suspect her,” the nice Detective Carman told me over the phone. Without the autopsy results, I supposed they couldn’t officially suspect anyone. In the meantime, ten days had passed. Today was the twenty-ninth. The killer had had a lot of time to cover his or her tracks. He could have disposed of the honey a long time ago.

  Detective Carman thanked me. I grabbed my book Deadly Doses and wandered to the backyard, feeling like an idiot. Had I expected them to send a posse galloping to New Orleans to drag Julieanne back to Santa Cruz? They barely had the staff to deal with everyday burglaries and obvious murders like the shooting on the West Side.

  If only gangs could practice restraint, I thought. Poison would be so much more efficient than drive-by shootings. With a little arsenic, the Watsonville rival gangs of Northside and Poorside could wipe out one another, and the whole affair might be passed off as a bad batch of chorizo.

  In our tiny backyard, as in the front, Chad and I had foregone any attempt at a lawn and had opted for an English garden, a flagstone path through wildflowers and drought-resistant perennials. Along the redwood fence hung baskets of fuchsias, chenille plants, and pelargoniums.

  I lounged on the brick landing. Lola snuck up on me, as though she might startle me away, and curled around my butt. Her caution had no doubt developed because I hopped up to do “things” in a manner that mystified even my husband.

  Chad had hoisted Lola from a free box at the flea market because he felt sorry for her. Back then, I’d made some snide comment about picking the ugliest kitten he could find.

  Now I scratched under her pink flea collar. “Lola, you are so cute.” And she was.

  She purred and squeezed her round green eyes shut in ecstasy, then stretched, arching, as if to say, “Of course.”

  With my perverse aversion to tables of contents, I leafed through Deadly Doses. I found oleander under Poisonous Plants, Quickly Fatal, after monkshood and before paternoster pea. In Sanskrit the plant’s name meant “Horse Killer,” in Arabic and Italian “Ass Killer.” Well, that was appropriate.