Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  “Oh. What was I saying?”

  “Who knew about the menu,” he said. Patient, as usual.

  “The upcoming menus hang on the door of the cooler. The date and the name and location of the client would be printed at the top. Anybody who’d been in would be able to look—which would be Amanda, and Jamie and Crystal, because they normally help with the loading and unloading.”

  “Who are Jamie and Crystal?”

  “Oh. Two of the waiters. Jamie is Tom’s nephew. Crystal’s . . . dunno. Sleeping with him, I reckon. I don’t know how serious it is. But Jamie’s been working for Amanda for years.”

  “Good-looking,” Brett said. “Black hair, blue eyes. Her husband’s nephew. Hmm. Crystal’s the brunette. Small. The other two waitresses were from overseas.”

  “Mate,” she said. “How do you do that? I barely remember what they look like. You saw them once.”

  “I told you. I’m a salesman with more than twenty years of practice. It’s a skill, like cooking. If you don’t develop it, you strike out fast. Somebody else knew, too, though. The client.”

  “Right,” Willow said, mouthing “Thanks” at Azra as she set the mug of tea down in front of her. “The anniversary couple’s daughter-in-law. She had an email and a printout with the menu. And anybody she told, of course.”

  Brett hesitated, and she asked, “What?”

  “I checked her out,” he said. “That is, I checked the event out. Dave’s brother-in-law belongs to the Bowling Club. He practically lives there, according to Dave. He was there that night. Dave took me to meet him and a couple other guys there, including a cop. I raised my suspicions with him, for what it’s worth, but all I heard was some smack about the daughter-in-law. Fenella. Bossy, right? Jealous?”

  “I don’t know about jealous,” Willow said, “but bossy—yeah. She was.” Really? He’d gone to the bowling club on his crutches, as immobile as he’d been then, to try to find out more? “Have I mentioned that I love you? I can’t believe you did that for me. Thank you.”

  Across the table, Azra’s head came up, and she stared. All Brett said was, “Yeah, well, I’m not sure it did much good. Would Fenella have had a chance to mess with the bag of mushrooms?”

  Willow had thought about this one. “Yeah. She kept opening the fridge and rearranging the drinks, checking things over like she suspected if she didn’t, we’d somehow stuff up and fail to provide service as contracted. Drove me mad. Why would she do that, though? The mushrooms weren’t really poisonous, just nasty. As you saw. Not likely to kill people, if that’s what she was after. Anyway, would you choose to poison a whole party just to get back at somebody? That would be more than cold. That would be evil.”

  “You’re right. As far as Dave can tell, she’s not that. Just not the most delightful person. As to why? It would be jealousy. Ruining the event. She was doing all the hard work, and she wasn’t recognized enough. That happens. I’m not saying it’s likely, I’m saying it’s psychologically possible. All she had to do was not eat the pizzas. And she would know that nobody would be likely to die.”

  Willow tried to think back. It wasn’t easy. “She could have done it, if she had a Ziplock bag in her purse. I wouldn’t have been looking every minute, and otherwise, it was just the servers. In and out, of the fridge and the kitchen, and not taking much notice. Crystal and Jamie, especially, don’t have what you’d call pride of ownership. The German girl, Martina, was better. I can’t ask her, because she’s gone back to Germany. It wasn’t Martina, unless she’s a homicidal maniac, but how would you know who was a homicidal maniac? Anyway—it would be an unpleasantness maniac, with those mushrooms. Which seems even less likely.”

  “I’d love to think it was the daughter-in-law,” Brett said. “Nice and easy. But Dave says there’s nothing else happening. Everything’s back to normal, and no change in her behavior. He’s even made the supreme sacrifice and hung out there three or four times to be my detective dog, and he says—no. As he put it, ‘Bloody nightmare to be married to, if you ask me. The fella might slit his own wrists, but she’s not likely to do it. Nag him to death, more like.’ Besides, if you took that step, surely you’d do something else. Or brag about it. Hint about it. Something. And then there are these odd things in the books. I think it’s the business, Willow. I’ve got incomings and outgoings attached to the events, and price per person calculated. There are some discrepancies.”

  “Discrepancies,” she repeated. Her heart had started to thud. Bang. Bang. Bang. The hairs on her arms were standing up, and she didn’t want to know this, but she had to.

  “I started with the event you did for me,” he said. “That was the easiest, because I was more familiar with what we ate and used. There’s a line item here for Quality Linens, for two hundred dollars. But we didn’t get linens. I drove down the hill for paper replacements instead. Would that be something you used in the kitchen?”

  “Uh . . .” Willow had three fingers pressed to her forehead. “I don’t recognize that. It could be weekly linen service. You go through heaps of aprons and towels.”

  “That’d be overhead,” Brett said, “but the item was coded to this event. There’s also an item from Gold Coast Restaurant Supply for propane heaters and fuel. Three hundred there, including delivery and pickup. It was warm, though, and I don’t remember propane heaters.”

  “I haven’t heard of the vendor.” She felt stupid. “But I don’t usually order that type of thing. I do the food and the on-site supervision. Could they have been ordered just in case, then cancelled, and it was non-refundable?”

  “Could be,” he said, “though you’d ask for better terms from a supplier than that. Or it could be sloppiness, coding it to the wrong event—and charging us for it. I’m going to read you the list of the food and beverage vendors. You tell me if there’s anything off.”

  There were two names on the list she didn’t recognize: Arcadia Wines and Spirits, for thirty-six bottles of sparkling wine, cost seven hundred dollars, and Osiris Organic Dairy, for ninety-five. She hadn’t been the one to order the wine, though, so again, she couldn’t say for sure.

  “When I get there,” Brett said, “I’d like you to run through the entire list of vendors listed for the past six months, and see if any are unfamiliar. I looked up the restaurant supply and the linen place, and their websites aren’t as robust as I’d have expected. A price list and a couple photos, though that doesn’t mean as much as it might. They’d be dealing with repeat customers, presumably. But we need to dig a little deeper. My nose is twitching again, and it’s twitching harder. Even if it’s only five hundred dollars extra, we were billed for a hundred fifteen guests at ninety-five dollars per person. Eleven thousand dollars. If you subtract even that five hundred, you get ninety-one dollars a head, which is more in line with some of your other events.”

  “The PR said that at the time,” Willow said. “Ninety-five dollars per person. That was why I first asked Amanda about costs, because I thought it was high.” The sinking feeling in her gut was more like a lead weight now.

  “If it’s a scam,” Brett said, “it’s not a big one. Five hundred dollars? Even fifteen hundred? And possibly not on every event? That isn’t much to risk your business for. The variance in per-head price could be due to the menus, I realize. I don’t know what I’m looking at there, except that I’d assume a sit-down dinner with meat would be more. But how much more? Also, is Amanda possibly skimming from you now, because she can, or has she been overcharging her clients, or some of her clients, all along? You said she’d been running it as a smaller-scale local outfit. It’d be easier to scam bigger functions where you could bury the details, especially if they’re private parties with nobody taking a hard look at invoices. A good-sized company is more likely to have somebody checking, but the person isn’t going to know how many tablecloths got used. And now, of course, Amanda is sharing the profits with you, which makes a big difference.”

  “People care about price, though.”
This, Willow could seize hold of. “They care more when the event is smaller, because they don’t have the budget for anything else. If Amanda wanted to raise her prices, she’d just raise her prices. You can’t spring an extra thousand dollars on the client after you’ve agreed on a price. I don’t know enough about the business side of things, but I do know that. And she does share. I get twenty-five percent of the profits. What would be the point?”

  “The skim comes off the top,” Brett said. “Just like an old-fashioned bottle of milk. You invent a few vendors, and when you have a big event where you think you can slip it by, you estimate five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred more than it would really be, and you ‘pay’ those expenses to yourself, through a sham company you’ve created. A lot of your vendors use PayPal, it looks like. Nothing easier than to set up a PayPal connected to an email address you control. She pours twenty-five percent of what’s left after the skim into your bottle, while she gets seventy-five, plus what she’s taken off the top.”

  The logic of it was making Willow’s head hurt, but Brett knew so much more about business than she did. On the other hand, thinking she couldn’t understand was what had landed her here, so she’d bloody well better start trying harder. “Could you give me another example?” she asked. “A dead simple one?”

  “Say you have ten people,” Brett said, shifting gears as smoothly as he did everything else. “And you charge a hundred dollars each. How much is that?”

  “A thousand dollars. Thanks. That’s how simple I need it to be.”

  “And say your profit margin is twenty percent. Which is two hundred dollars, so your costs are eight hundred. Amanda gets seventy-five percent of the two hundred dollars, and you get twenty-five. How much does each of you get?”

  “Uh . . .” Willow was rubbing her forehead again. “Seventy-five times two. A hundred fifty. And, uh, fifty dollars.”

  “Right. But if the cost was actually seven hundred dollars, because one of the vendors was fake, and she sent the extra hundred to a PayPal account she’d set up? How much does she get now?”

  “Sorry.” Try as she might, Willow was getting fuzzy. “I forgot what I said.”

  “She got a hundred fifty on the books,” Brett said. “Seventy-five percent of the two hundred dollars profit, plus her extra hundred, which gives her two hundred fifty, while you still get fifty. She also only pays taxes on the first hundred fifty, because the rest has gone to another bank account, offshore. Australian tax rates are high, but I’d still be hard pressed to see how she’d take in more than ten or twenty thousand dollars a year that way, and it’s a lot of risk for such a small amount of money. Unless she’s looking to divorce her husband and is hiding assets.”

  “I don’t think so,” Willow said. “She’s mad about him, and Amanda’s not good at hiding her feelings. Plus—hiding ten thousand dollars a year? She’s not moving to the tropics on that. And what if the mushrooms are tied in to this? It doesn’t make sense. If she’s skimming money now because I’m bringing more in, why would she want me to bring in less, while she has to work more? Why wouldn’t she just say she’d made a mistake and buy me out again? She’s at least half wishing I hadn’t signed on at all. She likes having me to do the work, and she doesn’t like sharing the power.”

  “Because she doesn’t have it,” Brett said. “That one’s easy. She spent your investment. It could be the husband, too. Again, though, not much money. Ten thousand dollars a year? What does that get you?”

  “I don’t know. He makes even less sense, as far as the mushrooms. Why would he want to get rid of me, if he were able to skim off more with me here?” It was all crashing down, and she had a palm against her temple now, trying to shut out the headache. “Are you sure about this?”

  Tea, she remembered. Tea would be good. She had a mug at her elbow.

  “No,” he said. “The amounts I’m seeing aren’t big enough, and the evidence isn’t clear enough. It could be carelessness in coding expenses to events, and you just need to hire a bookkeeper. Which would cut into your profits some, of course, and in any case—I wouldn’t want a business partner who treated me with this kind of disrespect. I’ll know more, though, when you run down the list of vendors with me, and I do some digging. Make some calls, see who answers and what they say. But there’s another option, too. Would you consider just letting me get you out of it?”

  Her tea was cold. Her hand stopped with her mug halfway back to the table, and she set it down again. Carefully, hearing the dull ting of it striking the table, then taking her hand off it and tracing her finger over the rose she’d painted. “What do you mean?”

  Still patient. “You won’t have lost much value yet. I’ve got a firm of corporate lawyers on retainer down there. I can get you out with what you put in.”

  Right, she thought and didn’t say. You mean you’ll pay for it. “I . . . I need to think about that. It’s . . . I’ve had so many ideas for it. For Nourish. I’d need to know for sure that something was wrong. And this booking . . . I’ve been cooking all day. Having ideas of what to ask. What to say.” She had her head in her hand now, tugging at her hair, and all she wanted was to lie down and pull the duvet over her head. Or, possibly, to cry, except that she didn’t do that. Try as she might, her brain was shutting down.

  “Right,” he said. “How tired are you?”

  “Oh, you know.” She tried to laugh. “A bit. But—mate. It’s only seven-thirty in the evening here. What time is it there?”

  “Ah . . . one-thirty.”

  “In the morning. How tired are you?”

  “Some. A little hard to sleep, though, until I get tired enough. Never mind. Get some sleep, baby. I’ll see you and Azra Friday morning. Don’t worry, and tell her not to worry, either. I’ve got a plan.”

  When they rang off, Azra was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “So.”

  “So,” Willow said. “I can’t have a . . . talk.” She had to blink back the tears. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I know that you’re worried, too, about your problem, your mum, your job, but I’m . . . I’m done.”

  Azra came around the table and embraced her. “No worries, love. Even Queen Elizabeth hangs up the tiara sometimes and goes for a walk with the corgis. Switch off. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  She got her energy back. She always did. At three o’clock the next afternoon, Stephanie Oxford, Brisbane’s wedding planner of choice, whose blond hair was even more perfectly colored than Amanda’s and whose pedicure was pristine, was taking a delicate nibble of a lemon tart in Nourish’s dining corner. Jessica Spelman, Nick Dean’s fiancée, a dark brunette who looked more sporty than sophisticated, had laughed her way through the tasting like the whole thing was a joke and was now eating a green-and-yellow ice block with obvious enjoyment, while her mum, another brunette named Kate who wasn’t any more pretentious than her daughter, had eaten both of her tarts, with no nibbling necessary. Willow could feel the excitement fizzing in her veins the same way it had this morning, surfing that last, biggest wave.

  “With your day,” she told Jessica, “I’m going to throw out all my hard work and say that I wouldn’t do the Asian fusion.” Time to jump in and go for it. “It’s getting to be almost too popular. It’d be more fun to do something more unique, surely. I’d suggest seafood-slash-vegan instead. We’d have to take over Nightcap’s kitchens for the day, but as you’ve booked the whole place and they have a pretty good kitchen, that shouldn’t be a problem. Get the seafood fresh off the boat, and as much grilled as possible. Scallops and salmon, like we talked about. Prawns, too, and even Moreton Bay bugs, depending how high you want your spend to be, though we’ll call them ‘bay lobsters’ for the Yanks. They won’t eat them otherwise. Rock oyster bar. They’ll be so plump and juicy in October. Baby asparagus, sugar snap peas, yellow squash, and red capsicums on the grill. Spring wedding? That’ll be brilliant. Corn and bean salad to offset the sweetness of the seafood, Greek salad with lemon basil dressing, and the feta on the side f
or the vegans. Quinoa salad as well. That’s three things vegans can eat. Not too bad.”

  “Not everybody will want seafood, surely,” Stephanie, the wedding planner, said. Kate and Jessica didn’t join in the objection. Willow would have bet money that they could both peel and eat a dozen grilled prawns in ten minutes or less, and that they’d love to.

  “Meat pies,” Willow said. “Dinky-di Aussie again. Americans love meat pies. They think they’re exotic, and everybody loves to break their diet. Steak and mushroom, chicken and veggie. You’ve tasted my flaky pastry, and I do my own tomato sauce. It’ll be the best meat pie anybody’s ever had. The whole thing’s like you’re having a barbie on the beach, but better. You’re eco-lodging it, even though you’re not. Everybody’s got their shoes off, because it’s a party, and the boys are having as much fun as the girls. Fairy lights.”

  “I love it,” Jessica said. “Awesome. I’ve already decided the flowers are going to be . . .” She looked at her mum.

  “Informal,” Kate said. “With eucalyptus leaves.”

  “Maybe I’ll wear sparkly thongs with the dress,” Jessica said. “That’d be funky and fun, especially as I’m not wearing any poufy meringue. If I’m going to kill myself in the gym for this, I’m wearing some kind of boho thing with tiny straps and not much back, so I can show off the effort. And I’m doing flower wreaths.”

  “You know,” Willow said, the energy all but sparking off her now, “instead of a traditional wedding cake, you could do a tiered pavlova.” She grabbed her phone and swiped to a photo of cream-covered meringue studded with halved strawberries and kiwifruit slices. “Here. Get the meringue in the pav instead of the dress. Heaps more fun. I know a baker who can do that for you. Vegan cupcakes, for the holdouts. Chocolate, so they can pretend they’re sinning, and I’ll make a coconut ice, non-dairy. We find a really nice Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir—I have a sommelier mate who can help with that, and with choosing the beer as well—and you’re home and hosed.”