“Hi, Chloe. This is Robin. From the TV show.”
“Robin. Hi. How are you?” I couldn’t imagine why Robin was calling me.
“Fine. Fully recovered. Well, I’m fine considering the hellish week it’s been. The station is having a fit about what happened. They’re trying to spin it in a way that doesn’t get our show off the air forever. It’s a nightmare, actually. But the reason I’m calling is that I wanted to find out more about this wedding ceremony you’re performing for your friend. Angelica, is it?”
“Adrianna. Adrianna and Owen.”
“I thought I might be able to do a piece on getting a license to perform a wedding ceremony. It’s such a fun idea that a friend of the couple can officiate. After Monday’s disaster, I’m trying to find other pieces to do for the station in case they yank the chef series. This wedding business sounds like a great human interest story. I was thinking that we could film the wedding, if your friends don’t mind. But maybe they already have a videographer.”
On their budget, Ade and Owen most certainly did not have a videographer. My parents had mentioned the possibility, but there was no way that my friends would accept more than my parents were already paying for. Adrianna and Owen did, of course, want a video of their wedding, but all they intended to do was to shove a recording device into a guest’s hands and hope for the best. “Robin, that would be wonderful,” I said. “I’m really excited about doing this wedding. Ade and I have been friends for ages, and I just adore her. And Owen is a good friend of mine, too. I know they’d love to have you film their wedding. I don’t even have to ask.”
“Listen, I have to run, but how about we meet for dinner tomorrow? Have the bride and groom come with you, and I can talk to you more then about how you got licensed. I’ll bring Nelson, and we can talk about filming the wedding.”
Although I wasn’t dying to spend an evening with that creepy Nelson, I was eager to find out more about him. What’s more, sometime during the dinner, it would be easy to slip in a subtle reference to gardening and to find out whether Robin or Nelson had a garden.
“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll have to run the idea by Adrianna and Owen first and make sure it’s okay with them, but I’m sure they’ll love it. Where do you want to have dinner?”
“Why don’t we meet at Marlee’s restaurant? Alloy, it’s called.”
“It’s in the South End, isn’t it?” So were dozens of other trendy restaurants.
“Yes. Tomorrow at seven? The food is fantastic. Very contemporary. You’ll love it.”
The choice of Alloy didn’t surprise me, since Marlee was one of the chefs in rotation on Chefly Yours. I assumed that her food must be good. She was, after all, competing against Josh and Digger, both of whom I knew to be talented. “That sounds great. I’ll see you there.”
I scrounged around in the kitchen for something else to eat and came up with nothing good for dinner. Too bad I wasn’t meeting Robin tonight.
I called Adrianna and explained Robin’s idea for filming the wedding. “It wouldn’t cost you a thing, and you’d have the entire day on tape. Isn’t this cool?”
“That sounds really nice. Please tell Robin we accept her offer. But I’m not eating at Alloy, I can tell you that. I have a client who ate there once, and she said it was the worst.”
The real reason for Adrianna’s refusal suddenly occurred to me. “My treat,” I said casually. Not that I had all that much money! But Ade and Owen had practically none.
“No, it’s not that, Chloe. Really, she said that it was pretentious and snobby, superexpensive, and the food was nasty.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. If I was going to shell out money for a pricey dinner, I expected the food to be delectable. I hoped that Ade’s client had lousy taste buds.
“Didn’t you read the Mystery Diner’s review a few months ago? He totally panned the place. Said it was one of the worst restaurant experiences he’d ever had. Not only was the food a disaster, but he wrote that it was dirty and probably broke every health code in the book.”
The Boston Mystery Diner, who wrote a popular column for a local paper, was genuinely mysterious: nobody knew who he was. Josh told me that restaurant staff around the city were forever wondering, worrying that the patrons on a given evening included the elusive reviewer.
“I’m surprised he wasn’t sued,” I said. “I didn’t see that one, but you know how unfair some of his reviews are. He said Pinnacle serves a revolting basket of fried clams, and I think it’s the best seafood place in Boston.”
“True enough,” Ade agreed. “Can you imagine what an awesome job that would be? Eating in restaurants with no one knowing who you are? And eating everywhere and having the paper pay the bills? I’d do that job in a heartbeat.”
“Join the club. You sure you don’t want to talk to Robin yourself?”
“No. I’m sorry, Chloe. I can’t eat at that place after what I’ve heard. Besides, I’m too huge to leave the house. I’ll probably end up having the baby in my apartment because they won’t be able to push me out the doorway.”
“Very funny,” I said. In spite of Adrianna’s joking and protestations, I remained half convinced that her real reason for refusing to come with me to Alloy was money. Or money and pride. I was sure that she already felt indebted to my parents and wanted to avoid feeling like an object of my charity. She was not, in fact, totally housebound. And Alloy was surviving in the South End, where competition among restaurants had to be ferocious. How bad could it really be? “Do you have any requests for how the wedding is filmed?” I asked. “Anything you want me to pass on to Robin or Nelson?”
“Tell them not to film my goddamned mother. I just know she’s going to be difficult, and I don’t need a visual reminder of her stinky attitude when I watch that video twenty years from now. If they accidentally get her on tape, have them put one of those blurry circles over her face and remove her voice from the audio. What’s today? Wednesday? She’s coming in on Friday, so the countdown to doom has officially started.”
“Don’t worry about her. There’ll be enough people around to keep her under control,” I assured Ade while reminding myself to designate someone to head the official Kitty Patrol.
I hung up and searched the Web for reviews of Alloy. The ones I read were far from fantastic. A local arts and entertainment magazine called Alloy’s food “undeveloped and mundane” but admitted that the dishes were helped by the bountiful use of fresh herbs. The reviewer was not ready to dismiss Alloy and hoped that time and experience would improve this little restaurant’s fare. Online customer reviews were mixed, with some people raving about simple ingredients and dramatic presentations, and other people complaining about small portions and an overemphasis on elaborate style at the expense of flavor.
I looked up Alloy on Boston’s Mayor’s Food Court, a Web site that was, I thought, a bane to restaurants and a great boon to consumers. Posted on the site were the results of every Boston restaurant’s health inspections, and not just general results, either, but details about every violation, no matter how minor. According to the home page, “The Mayor’s Food Court provides consumers with current information about Boston’s restaurants so that they can make informed decisions about where they will eat.” In other words, I could make an informed decision not to eat at Restaurant X, which was infested with rodents and cockroaches, and routinely stored food at temperatures meant for growing a plethora of bacteria.
I have to admit that out of curiosity, I’d looked up Simmer a couple of times. Because Josh was an absolute fanatic about keeping his kitchen sterile and up to code, I’d never found any violations. As I soon discovered, Alloy, on the other hand, had been repeatedly cited for improper cooling of cooked or prepared foods, unsound equipment maintenance, toxic items not properly labeled, and evidence of—ewww!—rodents.
All I could think of was the Monty Python sketch about rat tart. Still, I absolutely couldn’t cancel the dinner. One point of it was to get a free pro
fessional wedding video for Adrianna and Owen. Another was to ask about gardening and thus to find out who might be growing foxglove. The third point was frivolous: being in a “human interest story,” to use Robin’s phrase, would be a hoot. Being in? Well, as the official solemnizer, I wouldn’t just be in the story, I’d be one of the stars. So rat tart or no rat tart, and Nelson or no Nelson, I had to go. I wondered whether Nelson would have his camera at the restaurant. From what I knew of him, I had to assume that yes, he would, so I’d better dress accordingly. Never having been the subject of a human interest piece before, I wasn’t sure exactly what was involved, but if I was going to discuss my role as a one-day solemnizer at a wedding ceremony, I presumably shouldn’t wear a tube top and stilettos.
I tried to reach Josh on his cell at Simmer but just got his voice mail and didn’t feel like leaving a message. I parked myself on the couch, ordered in Thai food, and lamented the crummy schedule that kept Josh chronically exhausted and separated him from me.
While washing down yum nuah and drunken noodles with a few bottles of beer, I dealt with a phone call from the same detective who’d questioned Josh the other day. With my mouth half full of food, I reeled off my account of Francie’s death to a man who sounded less interested in figuring out who had killed Francie than he was in learning where he, too, could get good Thai food. In his view, was her horrible death just one more murder? Or maybe the authorities felt hopeless about solving the crime. If so, I could understand why. After all, the crime scene had been compromised, and a great deal of the evidence had been destroyed.
“You know,” I said, punctuating my words by jabbing my fork in the air, “I heard that digitalis is what killed Francie. That’s foxglove. It’s a common biennial. I hope you’re finding out who does and doesn’t have a garden. I, for one, don’t. I live in a condo. There’s a yard, but it’s just a lawn, really, with no flowers.”
“Ma’am, I really can’t comment on the investigation, but we’re doing everything we can,” the disembodied voice said unconvincingly.
“I watched that woman die, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a pretty sight.” I took a big swig from my beer. “And why didn’t that police officer think something fishy might be up when he got to the house and there was a half-dead woman and a bunch of other people sick and vomiting all over the place, huh? That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
Okay, my alcohol tolerance was negligible, presumably because in a show of solidarity, I’d had almost nothing to drink since Adrianna got pregnant. With Ade out of commission—she was the only girlfriend I ever went to bars with—abstaining from alcohol had been an easy sacrifice. Somehow the lure of the beer that Josh kept in my fridge had sucked me in tonight, and the alcohol was hitting me hard.
Even so, I answered as many of the detective’s questions as I could, but I knew almost nothing about the people who’d been at Leo and Francie’s. The exception was, of course, Josh. I’d never seen either Francie or Leo before, I knew Digger only through Josh, and I’d met Robin, Marlee, and Nelson only a few times. I hung up and polished off the spicy beef salad.
“Damn detective,” I said to Inga, who was perched on a windowsill, eyeballing my noodles. Inga licked her paw in response.
I heard a thud as Gato leapt down from the fridge and casually strolled into the living room as though he hadn’t been hiding out for the past few days. He gave Inga the hairy eyeball and hissed spitefully before hopping onto the couch and curling up a foot away from me. I reached over, patted him, and whispered, “That’s a start, buddy.”
THIRTEEN
THURSDAY was a day of rain-barrel activities: researching designs that I could pass on to hunky Emilio, returning phone calls from potential clients, and preparing written materials on the environmental benefits of watering gardens with rainwater. I was pretty pleased with the pamphlet that I came up with to pass out to clients. I gave myself extra credit for printing it on recycled paper. I was building an e-mail list, too, so that we could keep clients posted on new developments in the exciting world of rain barrels without using more paper than necessary.
I worked steadily, with hardly any interruptions, and by early evening I was starving and ready for my dinner with Robin and weirdo Nelson. The grilled cheese and tomato sandwich that I’d eaten for lunch hadn’t satisfied this gourmet girl, and I was really hoping that the fare at Marlee’s restaurant would be better than the Boston Mystery Diner claimed.
I showered, dried my hair, and stood disgruntled in front of my closet, unable to find anything I was in the mood to wear. Then I remembered that I still had a bag of Adrianna’s prepregnancy clothes to root through. In spite of my loyalty to Adrianna, I dreaded the inevitable day when her fabulous clothes would once again fit her, and she’d demand their return. In the meantime, I was making the most of the goods. Until now, I’d been wearing her summer things, but it was relatively cool this evening. In almost no time, the fall clothes that had been stashed in a large bag in my front closet were strewn all over my bed, and within minutes, I was wearing a brand-new outfit. Ade’s pants were a mile too long for me, so I opted for a camel-colored wrap skirt that could’ve been meant to be long and an off-white scoop-neck top. I pulled on some nylons and shoes, and feeling like a crazy cat lady, ordered Gato and Inga to behave themselves. Then I left for Alloy.
On-street parking in the South End can be tough to find, but I lucked into a legal spot about a block away from Alloy—a block away according to Google Maps, anyway. Still, I had a hard time finding Alloy, mainly because I expected it to occupy one of the charming old brick town houses that are typical of the South End. In fact, the outside of the restaurant was so modern that I couldn’t even figure out how to enter the building. Large metal-framed glass panels covered the face of the eatery. Peering in, I saw Robin and Nelson seated at a stainless-steel table off to the left. Robin was talking on her cell phone but caught my eye and waved. I casually waved back and pretended to inspect the architecture. The glass panels all looked the same to me, and I could not for the life of me determine which one was the entrance. No welcome signs, no door handles, no overhead awning! Metal light fixtures that hung equidistant from one another across the length of the restaurant facade provided not a hint about where to enter the restaurant. I walked slowly to my right and watched Robin’s face pinch in confusion. I then headed left and, in desperation, ran my hand along the side of the building in hope of discovering a tactile clue about how to get in and have dinner here.
Aha! I touched a barely noticeable keyhole and pushed. What was presumably the door hardly moved, so I gave a kick and, at last, found myself in the interior of Alloy, which was so hard to break into that it should have been named Fort Knox. If the food was as crummy as the reviews claimed, maybe the owners were deliberately trying to keep customers out.
Finding no hostess up front to greet me, I simply joined Robin and Nelson at their table. “Hello,” I said but was unable to take a seat because there were no more chairs at the table. “Oh, I guess I better ask for a chair.” I whirled around to find a staff member to help me.
“No, Chloe, you have a seat. There’s a stool under the table,” Robin explained.
Indeed, hidden beneath the table was a backless stainless-steel stool. Doing my best to hide my surprise, I pulled it out. “I see. How . . . modern.”
Who the heck wanted to eat while sitting on a cushion-less, backless metal stool? First I’d been unable to come in, and now I didn’t want to sit down. The entire room was so heavily decorated in metal that I wondered whether I should have worn the Tin Man’s outfit out to dinner. Perching on the stool, I silently vowed to avoid alcohol tonight lest I get off balance and tumble off my seat.
“So,” Robin said with a bright smile, “Marlee should be out any minute. As soon as she gets a break.” I looked at Robin’s beady eyes and was struck by the realization that she quite strongly resembled a hedgehog: a cute, delicate little body that you just wanted to pick up in your hand and cuddle. Excep
t that I knew what a nasty bitch she could be while directing a shoot.
Despite the unusual and, I thought, unfriendly decor, Alloy was about three-quarters full of diners. I suspected that the would-be patrons who’d have made up the fourth quarter had been unable to locate the door.
“How are you, Chloe?” I barely recognized Nelson without his camera pointed in my face. His plaid golfer’s cap, which concealed his bald spot, seemed to violate Alloy’s unofficial dress code, which evidently called for trendy formality. And the hat made it unattractively obvious that Nelson’s ears were three sizes too big for his head. I was glad that I’d raided my cache of Ade’s fall outfits.“You doin’ okay after what happened with Francie?”
“I’m all right, I guess. Still in a state of shock, I think, but I’m okay.” I really did not want to rehash the details of that fatal day. Besides, to ferret out anything incriminating about Robin or Nelson, I’d need to use subtle methods; I couldn’t just blurt out the questions I actually wanted to ask, such as whether either one of them had murdered Francie. Thankfully, we were interrupted.
A waitress approached our table to deliver menus. She held up a pitcher of ice water. “Would you like me to refill your drinking vessels?”
Our drinking vessels? You had to be kidding me. But the pretentious phrase was oddly appropriate: the cylindrical metal tubes that sat on our table certainly were not glasses. “No, thank you. I’m fine,” I said while sucking in my cheeks to hide my smile.
The waitress poured water for Nelson and Robin while she robotically recited the specials. “Alloy uses herbs that the chef grows in her own garden. All of our dishes are complemented by fresh herbs. Tonight we have a cucumber soup made with organic cucumbers, crème fraîche, and homegrown dill, and garnished with a spiral of lemon zest.” She looked down and flicked a piece of lint off her apron. “Then there’s a farm-raised chicken leg encrusted with fresh herbs and roasted with a mélange of organic mushrooms and topped with a truffle foam.”
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