Killer Mousse

by Melinda Wells

  None of those twenty-seven said they’d known Mimi Bond personally, although some of them had seen her Cooking Diva show. Further, they told the detective that they had waited outside until being ushered in a few minutes before the show began. They said they had never been anywhere in the studio except where the audience was seated, or to the small guest restrooms behind the seating area.

  Hall told them they could go home. “Officer Cutler took your names and addresses. If we have any further questions, we’ll contact you.”

  Three spectators were left.

  “This is Iva Jordan, Mrs. Mickey Jordan,” I told Detective Hall. “Mickey Jordan owns the Better Living Channel.”

  Hall asked her, “Where’s your husband?”

  “He went to New York very early this morning for a stockholders’ meeting. He’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  Iva’s face was normally pale, but right now she looked positively bloodless. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. I reached out to take her hand and discovered it was cold and damp.

  “Iva, are you all right?” I asked.

  “I don’t feel well.” Her voice had an unnatural hoarseness. “I need to go home.”

  It was obvious Hall didn’t like that, but he agreed, albeit reluctantly. “If you’re sick, I can talk to you tomorrow.”

  “There’s really no point, Detective. I didn’t know the dead woman, so there’s nothing I can tell you that would be of help.”

  Hall’s jaw tightened. I guessed that he didn’t like being told what to do. I had a healthy streak of that myself.

  “Sometimes people know more than they think,” he said flatly. “We’ll be talking.”

  Iva looked so unsteady that I asked, “Do you have someone to drive you home?”

  The woman sitting beside Iva spoke up. “She came with me.”

  “And who are you?” the detective wanted to know.

  “Ah’m Lulu Owens. All Things Crafty? That’s the show Ah do here.” Her accent was distinctly southern, the hominy-and-honey tones native to Georgia and South Carolina. Lulu Owens, deep in her fifties and not trying to hide it, was lean and strong, with gray hair tied back in a ponytail that reached almost to her waist. She had muscles enough that I could picture her on a ranch, roping cattle, but her complexion was so soft and pink that I suspected she carried a parasol when she went out in the sun. Putting an arm protectively around Iva’s narrow shoulders, and giving Detective Hall a flirtatious wink, she said, “Ah don’ know anything ’bout what happened tonight, but you come see me anyway. Ah jes’ love to talk to interesting men.”

  Hall ignored her flirting and gestured impatiently toward the door. “Go ahead. Take Mrs. Jordan home. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Ah’ll be lookin’ forward to that,” Lulu said, as she steered Iva toward the exit.

  I’d listened to cop conversations for twenty years and learned that unless a murder was just a random act of violence, the best way to find a killer was to investigate the victim, concentrating on family and friends—some of whom had murder in their hearts. I was curious to know what Lulu might have to say about Mimi Bond as a person. Their shows taped in the same building. Definitely, I was going to get together with Lulu.

  Detective Hall turned his attention to the last person left: Mimi’s daughter. The girl was sitting slumped, her shoulders hunched forward, with her hands folded in her lap. She’d stopped staring into space and was now looking at the floor.

  Before I could introduce her, Detective Hall demanded, “Who are you?”

  Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Neither could Hall. She flinched when he took a step closer to her. As though to keep some distance between them, she cleared her throat and spoke up. “Faye…Bond.”

  “Any relation to the deceased?”

  “This is Mimi’s daughter,” I said.

  When he responded, “I’m sorry for your loss,” she began to cry again. Tears started sliding down her cheeks, and then came great, gasping sobs that shook her small frame. Her uncontrolled grief was like a punch to my own heart because I remembered the pain of losing not only my husband, but my dad, too. Their deaths had seemed like amputations, the hacking away of something from my own body. Silently, I gave thanks that my mother was still alive and healthy.

  Faye Bond’s weeping was so intense that Hall asked if she wanted him to call a doctor. She shook her head but kept on sobbing.

  Liddy sat down next to Faye, opened a fresh package of Kleenex, and gave her a handful of tissues. The girl dabbed at the torrent gushing from her eyes, but that didn’t lessen the hysterical crying.

  Giving up trying to question Faye Bond tonight, the detective ordered Officer Cutler to drive her home.

  It was almost four hours after Mimi’s death when Detective Hall finally told Liddy and me that we could leave. Liddy could have gone home much earlier, after he’d finished questioning her, but she explained that we’d come together in her car. Hall offered to assign one of the police officers now on the scene to take me home, but she refused to leave me. Leave me alone with him, was what I knew she meant.

  The SID woman took not only my fingerprints but my palm prints, too, then gave me a tissue to wipe my hands. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that investigators now used the kind of ink that didn’t stain the skin.

  Detective Hall had continued to interrogate me long after he’d released George Hopkins, Quinn Tanner, the camera operators, and the members of the crew. The same questions came at me—over and over—each time phrased a little differently. He was skillful, but if he was looking for discrepancies in my account, or hoping that I’d break down and confess to killing Mimi, he was disappointed.

  “You can’t honestly think that I murdered Mimi Bond. I didn’t know her, and never met her before tonight.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. If you did have any earlier contact with her, you can be sure we’ll find out about it.”

  “All you’re going to find out is that I’m telling the truth.”

  “Even if you didn’t know the Bond woman, you might have wanted to eliminate a competitor. You can’t deny that you fed her the mousse that killed her.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You really think I’d murder someone just to have a TV show?”

  Detective Hall’s expression morphed from grim professionalism into a grimace of disgust. “I’ve seen victims who were killed for a lot less,” he said. “Go. I’ll be in touch. Don’t leave town.”

  It angered me to be suspected of murdering a woman I’d only met tonight, but I stopped myself from asking sarcastically if he meant that I couldn’t leave the town of North Hollywood and go home to Santa Monica. Instead, I remembered Mack. The job of a homicide investigator was hard. They saw the absolute worst in human beings: ugliness and evil that most of the rest of us were spared.

  5

  After Liddy steered her Range Rover away from the North Hollywood TV studio, heading toward Santa Monica to drop me off, she dialed her husband, who had watched the show and had called her half a dozen times to be sure she was all right.

  Liddy let him know when she’d finally be home. “If you warm up my side of the bed, I’ll make it worth your while, honey.” She giggled at his response, told him he was “very naughty,” and disconnected. “I swear,” she said with a happy grin, “since the boys went off to college, it’s like Bill and I are on our honeymoon again.”

  I wish I had someone to call; there wasn’t anyone to warm up my side of the bed. But when we got to Santa Monica, there was a surprise waiting for me.

  As soon as Liddy pulled up in front of my small, one-story little English cottage in the five hundred block of Ninth Street, I smelled the night-blooming jasmine that grew beside my front door. Then I saw a pair of silhouettes sitting on the front steps. Framed against the light coming through the living room window were the shapes of a two-hundred-pound man with broad shoulders and a seventy-pound dog with a rounded head. />
  Indicating the larger silhouette, Liddy said, “I see Big John is still here.”

  Both man and dog got up when I climbed down from Liddy’s Rover. They were an impressive pair. John O’Hara was six feet four and Tuffy stood forty inches from shoulder to paws. The moment John let go of Tuffy’s leash, my black standard poodle ran toward me, wagging his stubby tail. Actually, his whole body wagged. I knelt down and hugged him.

  “Hey, Tuffy, you act like I’ve been gone for a month instead of seven hours,” I said, scratching below his ears and stroking his cheeks. “Yes, I missed you, too.” I stood up. Still wagging, Tuffy nuzzled his head against my thigh.

  “You okay?” John asked as he stooped to pick up Tuffy’s leash.

  “The immediate answer is yes, I am. If you mean the bigger picture—do I still have my new career—I don’t know.”

  “You were really good on TV. They’d be crazy to let you go,” Liddy told me. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Now I’m going home to my man.”

  We said our good nights softly, so as not to disturb sleeping neighbors, and Liddy drove away.

  I asked John, “Where’s Eileen?”

  “In bed. She’s got an exam in the morning. I told her I’d wait up for you.”

  “I appreciate that. Can you stay a few more minutes?”

  “As long as you want. There’s a nurse with Shannon tonight.”

  This was a painful subject to John, but because John and Shannon and Mack and I had been friends for so many years, I had to ask. “How’s she doing?”

  “The doctor just changed her medication. He thinks it will give her more good days than bad ones.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “I hope so.” John didn’t look encouraged; I dropped the subject.

  “Shall we go inside?” he asked. “If you like, I’ll sit with you until you’re ready to go to bed.”

  “I need to breathe in this clean night air. Let’s take Tuffy for a walk. I want to tell you about tonight and get your investigators thinking.”

  “Such as it is, my brain is yours.”

  John handed me the end of Tuffy’s leash, and we started to walk south down Ninth Street. Remembering my civic responsibility, I asked, “Do you have any more plastic bags?”

  He chuckled and reached into the pocket of his jeans. “One. But I don’t think old Tuff’s got anything left to deposit.”

  It was an unusually soft night for the twenty-first of October: cool, but not cold enough to need anything heavier than the lightweight wool jacket I was wearing. As we strolled toward the lights on Montana Avenue, which was three blocks south of my house, I told John about the events of the night, including the fact that someone had cut the plug off the on-set refrigerator so I couldn’t use it.

  “I was thinking about this on the way home,” I said. “My guess is that Mimi Bond did it so I’d have to use the crew’s refrigerator. Back there, she wouldn’t be seen sabotaging the mousse. It wasn’t hard to maneuver the refrigerator away from the wall just enough to reach behind and disconnect it. Then cutting off the plug and inching the fridge back into place wouldn’t have taken more than a minute, at most.”

  “But how could she know she wouldn’t get caught on your set by somebody who wasn’t in on her scheme?” John asked.

  “It wasn’t a big risk. Mine was the only show using the studio tonight, so there weren’t many people around. When nothing’s being taped, the work lights in the studio are minimal. The broadcast lights on my kitchen set weren’t turned on and checked until about half an hour before the security man let the audience in. The killer knew Mimi was going to ruin the mousse. He or she must have been somewhere in the studio and saw Mimi sabotage it after I put it in the backstage refrigerator. As soon as Mimi left, the killer added the ground peanuts.”

  “How many ways are there to get into the studio?” John asked.

  “Three. Through the front office where a security person sits at a monitor watching the front gate, through the back entrance to the loading dock, and through a side entrance where the studio audience lined up before being let in. The people in the audience were watched and then brought in by the night security man.”

  “How did Mimi Bond get in before the broadcast?”

  “Detective Hall asked that. The night security man let her in. Even though her show had been canceled, he said she still came to the studio, looking for things she said she’d forgotten. He felt sorry for her, so he always let her in.”

  “So the killer either works at the studio, or has easy access to it. I don’t like the thought of you being around a murderer. I think you should quit.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said, “but this job is important to me.”

  “You staying alive is important to me. And Eileen. You’ve been a second mother to her.”

  The warmth in John’s voice made me a little uncomfortable. If Eileen had been present, I would have hugged him, but during times we were alone together, by unspoken agreement, John and I kept a certain distance between us. Perhaps it was an old-fashioned sense of propriety. As we walked, I told John as much as I knew about the people at the studio who knew Mimi Bond. I ended by telling him about Detective Hall’s intensive questioning of me.

  “Do you believe he seriously suspects me of murder?” I asked.

  “Unless cops find the killer standing over a gunshot victim with a smoking gun, or holding a bloody knife over somebody who’s been stabbed—and that doesn’t happen nearly often enough—we try to figure out who had a motive and who had the opportunity. Let’s talk about opportunity for a minute. Who knew you were going to make chocolate mousse tonight?”

  “Lots of people could have. The menu and ingredients had been posted on the wall in the production office for at least a week.”

  “Why was that?”

  “So George Hopkins’s assistant could buy the ingredients I’d need in order to make the dishes on the air. Then the prop person had to make new labels for everything.”

  “New labels? Why?”

  “They fake the brands, so we wouldn’t appear to be giving any real company free advertising. When I agreed to do the show, I had to turn in one hundred and fifty-six recipes—three dishes each for a year of shows—so they can design labels and plan when to buy what ingredients.”

  John was silent for a few minutes, his features creased in the pensive frown Eileen and I called his “thinking expression.”

  After we’d strolled a block or so, he said, “Hall knows that statistically speaking—and eliminating gangs and drive by shootings—stranger murders are rare. Someone in a victim’s family is most likely to be the killer. Next come rivals, either romantic or business. The business rival category is where you come in. The way Hall may be looking at it is that you wanted to keep your TV show, and that you’re the one who had the most opportunity to put ground peanuts in the mousse.”

  Exasperated, I said, “But that’s absolutely ridiculous. I didn’t know about her allergy, or that she would be there tonight.”

  “The problem with your story is that you can’t prove a negative. You could have learned about her allergy from watching her show. You could have found out somehow that she would be there. Maybe you even called to invite her.”

  I started to remind him that there would be no calls to Mimi Bond from any of my numbers, but he anticipated me. “You could have used a public phone or a prepaid cell,” he said.

  I tried to laugh, but it was a weak attempt. “This is unreal. Me, a murderer? I don’t even jaywalk.”

  “I know you couldn’t kill anybody, but Hall doesn’t.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Go about your business,” he said. “Let the cops do their work. I’ll check in with North Hollywood and see how they’re progressing.”

  That was a little too vague for me. Someone had used my show—messed with my life—to murder a woman. I decided to find out what I could about Mimi Bond on my own. Maybe I could learn something t
hat would lead to identifying her killer.

  I smiled to myself in the dark. After Detective Hall’s relentless grilling of me, it would be poetic justice if I solved the mystery before he did.

  6

  After John left, I found a note from his daughter, Eileen, telling me that my mother and my two sisters in San Francisco had seen the show and phoned, anxious to find out what happened. They wanted me to call them at my sister Keely’s house where the three of them had gathered—“no matter how late.” Those words were underlined. I smiled; in my head I could hear Keely dictating that message in her authoritative tone.

  I hoped Keely meant that: It was now one o’clock in the morning.

  She snatched up the phone after what couldn’t have been more than half a ring on her end. Her brisk “hello” was followed immediately by two distinctive clicks, signaling that my sister Jean and our mother had picked up the extensions. Everybody started talking at once.

  Although Keely is the youngest of the siblings, she’s also the bossiest. In seconds she had them quiet, then commanded me: “Tell all.”

  I related what I knew. Most of it. I left out the part about Detective Hall’s bizarre notion that I might have murdered Mimi, and the other part—about my intention to do some investigating of my own, in case he wasn’t seriously looking in other directions. I didn’t want them worrying because they might all decide to arrive on my doorstep. I loved my sisters and my mother, but there was too much going on at this moment for me to enjoy a mass visit.

  When their questions were finally exhausted, they began giving opinions about how I should dress in future shows, and what dishes I should make on camera.

  Jean said, “Show a little cleavage.” Her voice was typically soft and playful.