Killer Mousse

by Melinda Wells

  “For our main dish, we’re having Easy Cranberry Chicken. I call it that because it’s easy to fix and easy on the budget. I’ve taught children as young as eight how to make it in my Saturday morning Mommy and Me cooking class. All you do is stir together a sixteen-ounce can of whole-berry cranberry sauce, one envelope of onion soup mix, and half a cup of Russian dressing. Then you dip your chicken pieces into the blend and swish them around a little. The kids love to do this.”

  With the chicken pieces fully swished, I tore a length of foil from a roll on the preparation counter, lined a baking sheet with it, and placed the dredged chicken on the foil-covered surface. “If you have any liquid left, drizzle it over the chicken pieces. About the ingredients: You don’t need any particular brands. I save money using manufacturer’s coupons and taking advantage of in-store specials. That’s how I buy all my hair care and house cleaning stuff, and laundry detergents, too.”

  At the sink, I squirted my hands with antibacterial soap and ran hot water over them. “Always wash your hands after working with poultry, meat, or fish before you touch any other food.” I added lightly, “I think I must scrub more than the average surgeon.” Drying my hands with a paper towel from the roll on a spindle next to the sink, I went back to the prep counter. “The tray of chicken goes into our preheated three-hundred-and-fifty-degree oven to bake for about an hour and a half—that is if you use both white and dark meat pieces as I did here. If you just want skinless, boneless chicken breasts, then the baking time is about an hour.”

  Time for another commercial break. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll show you how to transform a basket of vegetables into an unexpected treat.”

  As soon as I was off the air, Liddy Marshall quick-stepped up to the right side of the set and motioned frantically for me to join her at the sink where she whisked a brush from her shoulder bag and tamed loose strands of my dark brown hair.

  “Listen,” she whispered. “You’re always telling me I shouldn’t eavesdrop, but this time you’ll be glad I did. During the first commercial break when you went backstage, I overheard your producer talking to the girl on Camera Two. He told her Mimi Bond—that bad bleach job in the front row—is going to be your taster at the end of the show tonight. He wants her to be sure to keep the camera on Mimi.”

  I felt my mouth drop open.

  Liddy said triumphantly, “I didn’t think you knew about it.”

  “No.” And I wasn’t happy to find out this stunt had been kept from me.

  “By the way, you look great,” Liddy said. “I was afraid your hair would photograph too dark and dull on TV, but it doesn’t. The lights are catching all the shades of brown. I’m glad I talked you into wearing the blue shirt that matches your eyes.”

  “Do I sound okay? Am I making sense?”

  “You seemed a little nervous at first, but only somebody who knows you well would catch that. After you dropped the bowl—and that was a hoot—you seemed more like yourself. Natural.”

  “Can you believe this? At the age of forty-seven I’m starting my third career.”

  “And no one’s going to shoot at you, like they did when you had to teach at that awful high school in gang territory.”

  If I lose my cooking school, I’ll have to go back to teaching anywhere the district sends me.

  In my earpiece, I heard, “Ten seconds to air, Della. Nine…eight…”

  “Gotta go.” I gave Liddy’s hand an affectionate squeeze.

  As Liddy scurried back into the shadows, I took my place behind the counter.

  When the camera light went on, I said, “Now we’re going to take this eggplant”—I had to force myself to keep a straight face, because the vegetable I was holding really did resemble Mimi Bond in her purple dress. I put it down and indicated the rest of the ingredients lined up in front of the camera.—“and turn these into a beautiful one-crust pie.”

  I kept up the conversational patter as I sliced, chopped, sautéed, and seasoned. Setting aside the pan of cooked vegetables, I began to put together a simple piecrust.

  “You can use a store-bought crust, but it’s really so easy to make one from scratch. To moisten this mixture of flour, salt, and Crisco, I use three or four tablespoons of ice water. A lot of cookbooks will just say ‘water,’ but the colder the water, the lighter the crust. And if you don’t happen to have a rolling pin, use a wine bottle or a beer bottle, but soak the label off first. If it’s an empty bottle, fill it with cool water before using it.”

  With the dough rolled out and draped in a pie pan, I demonstrated how to layer the vegetables, adding Parmesan cheese. “Last, I take the red and the green pepper that I’ve cut into strips and arrange them on top, alternating the colors in a sunburst pattern. You could use a yellow and an orange pepper, too, but they’re usually too pricey for me. When I have time, I’m going to make a little vegetable garden in my backyard and grow my own.”

  In my earpiece, I heard, “Ten seconds to the final commercial break.”

  I told the audience, “I’ll keep putting this together and pop it into a three-hundred-and-fifty-degree oven. When I come back, I’ll show you how the three dishes I’ve made are going to look when they’re ready to serve.”

  While the commercials played, I made another quick trip backstage to the refrigerator, took out the pre-prepared chocolate mousse, and brought it onto the set. As the director had rehearsed with me, I moved the other two pre-prepared dishes that I’d had sitting on the rear counter up to be displayed next to the mousse. The overhead camera would take close-ups of the food for what the director called “beauty shots.”

  When we were on the air again, I said, “Here are the Easy Cranberry Chicken and the Sunburst Vegetable Pie—all baked and ready to eat.”

  There was enthusiastic applause from the audience, but when I glanced at Mimi, I saw her hands remained in her lap, her fingers curled into claws.

  “If you’re like me,” I said, “the star of any dinner is dessert. I just have one more thing to do before we can dig into the chocolate mousse.”

  I picked up a piece of semisweet chocolate and grated it over the mousse. “You can be extra fancy and decorate the top, but this is how I like it best—with just a dusting of freshly grated chocolate.” That last touch completed, I put down the grater. Now I asked the question to which I already knew the answer: “Who’d like to have a taste?”

  “I would!” Mimi Bond propelled herself out of her front-row seat and rushed to the set. A second before she’d spoken, I saw Camera Two swing in Mimi’s direction. It was absolute proof that Liddy was right about this being pre-arranged.

  The former Cooking Diva smiled broadly as she waved at the camera. “Hello, everybody. I’m Mimi Bond, and I’m taking a little vacation from my own show, but I wanted to be here tonight to help Della. I’m volunteering to be the very first one to taste her famous Killer Mousse.”

  Mimi bustled around the counter, subtly elbowing me out of the TV frame. Jada Powell pulled Camera Two back so that her shot included both of us.

  Pretending that I was delighted to have her there, I scooped some mousse into a dish and handed it and a spoon to Mimi. I was thinking how desperate for attention she must be to have arranged to taste the mousse, just so she could be in front of the camera again. Instead of being annoyed, it made me feel sad for her.

  “Oh, it looks so yummy,” she cooed. She took a big mouthful and screwed up her face in disgust. “Eeewww. This is awful.”

  “It can’t be. When I made it this afternoon, I scraped the sides of the mixing bowl and licked the spatula clean. It was delicious.”

  I snatched up another spoon and plunged it into the mousse, but before I could taste it, Mimi gasped and dropped her dish. It landed sharply on my foot. Some mousse plopped out, but the bowl rolled off my shoe and onto the floor without breaking.

  “Mimi? What’s the matter?”

  Her answer was a deep moan. She pressed her fists hard against her chest as her face twisted i
nto an expression of agony.

  I yelled, “Somebody call nine-one-one!”

  Mimi’s body stiffened and her eyes rolled back in her head. She started to sway. I reached out to keep her from falling, but she was too heavy for me. She slipped from my fingers as she fell forward and crashed facedown onto the studio floor.

  I fell to my knees beside Mimi. Grabbing her by the shoulders, I lifted her head to help her breathe. But she wasn’t breathing.

  I felt for a pulse in her neck. No pulse.

  George Hopkins, the show’s producer, loomed above me on the other side of the counter, barking the studio’s address into his cell phone, demanding an ambulance. I’d last seen him a half hour before the show. He’d looked cool and bored, but now he was sweating, and his smooth brown hair was slightly askew. I hadn’t known it was a toupee.

  “What happened? What’s wrong with her?” His small eyes blinked double-time.

  “I think she’s had a heart attack,” I said. Remembered grief stabbed at me: My husband had died of a heart attack.

  George pressed the phone to his chest and muttered a curse. “We don’t have a doctor here, or a defibrillator. Do you know CPR?”

  I stood up. “I’m afraid it’s too late.”

  “How can you be so calm about this?”

  “I’m not. But if I let myself go to pieces, it could start a panic, and people in the audience might get hurt.”

  Suddenly a female on the premises let out a wild cry. A pale, thin, young woman from the front row jumped up and rushed toward me. Her face was contorted into an expression of fury, and her voice was a wail. Before I could tell her to stay back, she screamed at me, “You killed my mother!”

  2

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Emitting a guttural shriek, she flew at me with her fists flailing. “You killed my mother!” I threw up my arms to ward off her blows. George grabbed her shoulders and pushed her away from me. The effort jarred his toupee farther off center.

  “Faye, stop it.” He gave her a shake. “Come on now, get hold of yourself.”

  “I’m so very sorry about your mother,” I said, “but I swear that I didn’t do anything to harm her.”

  The young woman George had called Faye stopped thrashing. Her arms fell to her sides, and she bent forward from the waist and dissolved into great, gulping sobs.

  Small and slight, and probably no older than nineteen, she was the total physical opposite of her full-bodied, flamboyantly coiffed and attired mother. The daughter wore no makeup, not even lipstick or mascara. Her complexion, her knit pants suit, and her limp, shoulder-length hair were all beige. Even though she must have been sitting next to Mimi, I hadn’t noticed her. Until this eruption, there had been nothing about her that was vivid or memorable.

  Liddy, the warmhearted Earth mother, hurried up to us, gestured for George to step away, and put her arms around the hysterical girl. With soft, comforting words, Liddy gently drew her over to the right side of the set and dabbed at her face with soft tissues.

  Members of the audience, curious to get a closer view of this unexpected real-life drama, were getting up and stepping over camera cables to approach the set.

  I faced them and stiffened my posture. Using my old high-school-teacher voice, I said, “Take your seats.” The authoritative tone must have startled them, because they stopped moving forward. “Sit down, everybody, please. Paramedics are on the way. We need to keep the floor clear.”

  There was some grumbling but no sitting. “I’m waiting,” I said, in a vocal quality meant to strike fear in the hearts of students. It must have reached them on some visceral level, because those adults began to move back. Some sat; others formed small groups in the corners and whispered. I didn’t care whether they sat or stood; all that mattered was that I’d quashed the rebellion. I’ve still got it, I thought wryly. I just don’t want to have to use it in a Los Angeles classroom again.

  I turned to George Hopkins. His globular face was usually red, but now he was almost as white as my roll of paper towels.

  Lowering my voice, I said, “I know what we’re supposed to do. I was married to an LAPD detective for twenty years. Call the police, then call security and have them guard the doors until the police arrive. No one leaves unless the investigators say so. And we’ve got to keep everything exactly as it is.”

  George made the calls. Upon disconnecting, he said, “I’ll stay by the door until the cops get here,” and hurried toward the entrance.

  The show’s director, Quinn Tanner, finally appeared in front of me from the control booth above the studio. British, in her thirties, and very slender, she had long black hair parted in the middle and held away from her face by a large tortoiseshell clip at the back of her neck. Normally, Quinn’s personality was so cool and low-key that she was practically a cliché of British understatement, but now, with sparks of rage in her eyes, she was more animated than I’d ever seen her.

  “Mimi keeling over—it went out over the air. I didn’t have time to cut to a commercial or even to black. Then Mickey called and shouted at me for letting the viewers see it. What the bloody hell went wrong down here?”

  “She collapsed,” I said, stating the obvious. “George called the paramedics.”

  Quinn reached down to touch Mimi, but I put my hand out and stopped her. “Don’t.” Leaning close so as not to be heard by anyone except Quinn, I said, “I’m afraid she’s dead. I asked George to call the police, too.”

  “This is bloody awful.” Quinn glared at me accusingly. “What did you put in that mousse?”

  “It’s nothing to do with the mousse. I think Mimi had a heart attack.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” Quinn stormed away and got into a huddled conversation with the two camera operators, Ernie Ramirez and Jada Powell. Ernie looked distraught, and Jada was crying.

  I couldn’t understand Quinn Tanner lashing out at me. She hadn’t been exactly warm during our several days of prebroadcast rehearsals, but she’d at least been polite. Yet in an instant, nice Dr. Jekyll had turned into nasty Ms. Hyde. I wondered if she and Mimi had been close friends, and if her anger was really grief.

  I remained standing next to Mimi to make sure no one came near her. By keeping people away as much as possible, I could try to give her a little dignity in death. She didn’t have much; when she fell, her skirt had bunched beneath her, revealing her legs up to the middle of her thighs. For the sake of her modesty, I wanted to pull the dress down at least a few inches, but I knew that disturbing her body in any way was the wrong thing to do.

  My take-charge bravado was purely fake. George had asked how I could be so calm. What a joke. The truth was that my insides were knotted with anxiety. Mimi Bond had just died during the debut of my show, in front of thousands of people—on live television. It was terrible enough for the woman to die, and for me to see it, but now her daughter was accusing me of killing her.

  Even during the worst of my prebroadcast nerves, I had never imagined a catastrophe like this.

  There was no time to think about that now. At the entrance, George Hopkins admitted a two-man team of paramedics. He pointed to where Mimi’s body lay sprawled. Guiding a gurney piled with equipment, the paramedics rushed forward and sprang into action.

  The older one had gray hair that stood up in rows of one-inch spikes, like a garden of nails. He ordered me, “Out of the way.”

  Obediently, I moved over to the right side of the set, next to the sink.

  Liddy had persuaded Mimi’s daughter to sit down at the end of the empty front row. The girl was quiet, staring off into the distance with a stunned expression. Liddy gave her a pat on the hand and came over to stand with me.

  “You poor thing,” Liddy whispered, nervously clenching and unclenching her hands.

  “I’m all right, really.” I hoped that saying it would make it so.

  Liddy hooked her arm through mine as we watched the medics try in vain to revive Mimi.

  A uniformed female police o
fficer in her twenties arrived a few moments behind the paramedics and went straight to confer with them.

  A tall, beefy Better Living Channel security man named Al Franklin came in and replaced George at the door. He glanced at the producer’s head, bent to whisper something, and George quickly straightened his toupee. Jolly and avuncular, Al was the night security man. I met him for the first time this evening, just before he ushered the audience into the studio. The other times I’d come to the studio had been during the day.

  Relieved of guard duty, George hurried across the studio to where Quinn was standing with the camera operators. He took Quinn’s hand, but she pulled away immediately and turned her back to him. I wondered what that was about. No time to ponder. The older paramedic, his mouth set in a grim line, shook his head at the policewoman. They stopped working on Mimi.

  The officer took the mobile phone from her belt and made a call. As she turned away from the medics and faced us, we heard the words “suspicious death.” I knew she was reporting to her headquarters and asking them to send a detective.

  Liddy tugged at the sleeve of my shirt and whispered, “She said ‘suspicious death.’”

  “That means this studio has just been declared a crime scene.”

  Liddy grabbed my hand and whispered frantically, “Oh, Del—that girl accused you. You’re in serious trouble.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. But icy prickles of fear were dancing around in my chest. “She’s traumatized. She can’t really think I’m responsible for her mother’s death.”

  Or can she? And will anyone else believe her?

  From her shoulder bag, I heard Liddy’s cell ringing “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. She plucked the phone out. “I had it off during the show,” she told me. Flipping the top open, she said, “Hi, sweetie…. Oh, I thought you were Bill…. No, it was pretty awful, but we’ refine…. She’s right here…. She didn’t answer her cell because she forgot to bring it.” Liddy extended the hand with the phone. “It’s for you—Big John. He saw what happened on TV, and he’s been trying to reach you.”