by Lee Hollis
She was clearly upset.
“Besides, I was not even here when it happened,” Tilly said. “Fredy was supposed to be here, but apparently he wasn’t. So if they’re going to blame anyone, they should blame him!”
“Were you on your break?”
The question seemed to startle Tilly.
She paused, not sure how to answer the question.
A very simple question.
And that’s when poor Nurse Tilly began to visibly melt down. “It’s none of your business what I was doing! Now if you don’t mind, I have a job to do, and I don’t have time to be hanging around here talking to you!”
Desperate to get away from Hayley, Tilly bolted out from behind the nurses’ station and fled down the hall to the break room, violently slamming the door behind her, leaving no one but Hayley standing at the nurses’ station, puzzled as to what she had said or done to upset Nurse Tilly so much.
Her erratic and suspicious behavior was suddenly raising a very big red flag.
Chapter 14
“But we have to open tonight, in honor of Romeo’s memory!” Kelton, Romeo’s sous-chef, cried, pumping a fist in the air.
The rest of Romeo’s staff, consisting of head waitress Betty, another waiter, Devon, who was a student from the College of the Atlantic, and one busboy, Lenny, the big kid who rarely said a word, all murmured in agreement.
When Hayley had gathered the staff at the restaurant, she never in a million years expected the restaurant to open on the same day that its owner had tragically died. She had simply called the meeting to promise that she would try her best to make sure that whoever was executor of Romeo’s will would fully pay the staff what they were owed out of the estate, assuming the restaurant would remain closed.
But now she had a potential mutiny on her hands.
Hayley nodded, acknowledging their desire, and spoke slowly and deliberately. “I think it would be a moving tribute to open the doors and invite customers in to celebrate the life and food of Chef Romeo, but I’m not sure practically how we would do that.”
“By moving ahead with business as usual,” Kelton explained matter-of-factly. “We just do our jobs like it’s any other night. I know how to prepare his food. Chef Romeo personally trained me; he had faith in you to run things while he was in the hospital; we have Betty and Devon to serve the customers and Lenny to bus the tables. We can do this.”
Kelton had been a fry cook over at Jordan’s Restaurant for over a decade, but after years of watching the Food Network, he knew it was time to up his game in the kitchen, exercise some creativity, challenge himself more than just slapping burgers on the grill and frying onion rings every day. Chef Romeo had finally given him that opportunity when he invited Kelton to come work for him.
Hayley certainly understood their passion during this time of grief, but she was hesitant to move forward. “Look, I think it’s a great idea, I really do, but I’m not sure tonight is the right time. Maybe after a couple of weeks, once we know who the restaurant now belongs to, if there is even a will, we can plan some kind of memorial here at the restaurant and serve all of Romeo’s specialties. . .”
“That may be too late. You know how things go, especially if he didn’t write a will. The bank could come in and take over this place, and then we’ll never have the chance to do it,” Betty argued.
“But is opening tonight even legal, given the circumstances now?” Hayley wondered aloud.
“Who cares? What are they going to do, arrest us? I say we go for it,” Devon declared. “Let’s give Romeo the befitting send-off that he so richly deserves, one that matches his larger-than-life personality!”
“I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re supposed to open in an hour. How will people even know to come? I’m sure they all heard the news about Romeo by now.”
“I checked the reservations. We’re fully booked and nobody has called to cancel. We’ve only gotten a few messages inquiring if we were going to open tonight, given the circumstances. I can call them back and say yes, dinner is still on.”
Hayley’s mind reeled.
She was not sure what she should do.
Finally, Lenny, the quiet busboy, spoke up, surprising everyone. “It’s what Chef Romeo would have wanted.”
Hayley knew there was no pushing back on that one, because the kid was right. Chef Romeo desperately wanted his restaurant still open when he was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, so there was no reason to doubt he would want it open even now in the event of his untimely death.
“Okay . . .” Hayley sighed.
The staff cheered.
“Then let’s get to work!” Betty cried.
By the time Hayley opened the doors to the restaurant forty-five minutes later, there was already a crowd of hungry customers milling around outside. They poured in and filled up all the tables, a few stopping to silently mourn for a few moments in front of the portrait of Chef Romeo Hayley had found in his office and hung over the fireplace in the main dining room before the start of the dinner rush.
More cars pulled into the gravel parking lot, and Hayley knew by five-fifteen she was going to need more help. It was time to call in reinforcements. She phoned Liddy and Mona to hurry over and help. Mona was bored at home alone, so she was easy to convince, but Liddy was a harder sell because she was on her way to a women’s-only Yin-restorative yoga class. In the end, Hayley knew they would both show up for her, and they did.
She assigned Liddy the hostess role, in charge of reservations and seating customers. Betty and Devon were overwhelmed, and so Hayley had Mona take a few tables as a waitress. She knew it was a risk. Mona was not what you would call a people person, but Hayley had little choice. Liddy was chipper and friendlier, or at least she could fake it better, so she needed her face to be the first one customers saw as they entered the restaurant.
True to form, Mona had barely been at it for ten minutes before she was flagged down by a man with spaghetti sauce all over his face. “Could I have another napkin, please?”
“Maybe if you ate more like a human being instead of a wild animal, you wouldn’t need so much paper to wipe your face! Think of all those poor, wasted trees! Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Hayley instantly marched over and pulled Mona aside. “Mona, you cannot talk to the customers like that!”
“What do you mean?”
“You were unnecessarily rude to that gentleman!”
Mona glanced over at him, genuinely confused. “Who? You mean Harry Bunker? Oh, please.” She yelled over in the man’s direction. “He loves it when I abuse him! Don’t you, Harry?”
He smiled and waved at Mona before wiping the marinara sauce off his face with the sleeve of his shirt.
Hayley stared at Mona, dumbfounded.
“Excuse me,” said a woman sitting at a table behind them. “Could I get another glass of Merlot?”
Mona folded her arms. “Really, Darla? That’ll be your third one already and you haven’t even been served your appetizer yet. Are you that anxious to get a second DUI?”
Hayley held her breath.
But Darla just laughed and handed the empty wineglass to Mona, who then turned back to Hayley and barked, “Now if you’re done complaining about my obviously winning personality, I have food to serve!”
Mona turned out to be right.
The ruder she got, the more the customers loved it.
It was part of her shtick.
She was a novelty.
A couple of tables even requested her as their server.
And so Hayley left her alone.
She made her way over to the hostess station, where a mob of people crowded the area by the door with dozens more still waiting outside.
On her iPad, Liddy was perusing a diagram of the restaurant with all its tables. She noticed Hayley standing beside her. “We were already overbooked, and now we have a bunch of walk-ins. I told them it was going to be at least an hour and a half on the waiting l
ist, but no one’s leaving to go somewhere else.”
“I wish Chef Romeo was here to see his restaurant so busy,” Hayley said wistfully.
“I’m sure he knows,” Liddy said with a sorrowful smile.
The rest of the evening was a blur.
By the time the last customers left around ten-thirty after polishing off their homemade tiramisu, Hayley’s feet were throbbing, and she finally plopped down in a chair to catch her breath. Kelton ambled out of the kitchen, Lenny wiped down the last of the tables, Liddy cashed out the register, and Mona popped open a bottle of Chianti as she, Betty, and Devon pooled their tips.
“What a night,” Hayley said, declining the glass of wine Mona was trying to hand her, too exhausted to drink. “Chef Romeo would be very proud of all of you.”
“Thank you for allowing us to do this tonight,” Betty said to Hayley. “We all appreciate it.”
“It just goes to show that Chef Romeo was right about this place. It was going to be a huge hit in town,” Kelton said, smiling.
“Well, we can’t stop now,” Liddy said offhandedly as she studied her iPad screen.
“No, this was a onetime thing,” Hayley reminded her. “What we did tonight was in honor of Chef Romeo, but I’m afraid the future of his restaurant is out of our hands.”
Liddy set her iPad down on a checkered tablecloth. “We are fully booked for tomorrow night. What do we say to all those people who could not get in tonight and want to come and eat and pay their respects tomorrow?”
“Hayley, we made more tips tonight than the last three weeks combined. I have rent due and Devon needs to pay for his tuition. We can’t stop now. At least until someone tells us to.”
She was hopelessly outnumbered.
Even her BFFs were standing firm with the staff.
Although neither would probably admit it, they had a lot of fun tonight. And why should she be responsible for laying off Kelton, Betty, Devon, and Lenny, devastating their finances as long as there was a way for them to keep making money, at least in the short term?
It was against her better judgment.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Hayley bucked her judgment.
And it certainly would not be the last.
“Okay, see you all tomorrow,” she sighed.
In celebration, Mona opened another bottle of Chianti from the wine rack.
Chapter 15
Randy had hoped to be released from the hospital the following morning, but Dr. Cormack wanted to be sure there would be no reoccurrence of the inflammation of the pancreas. Although his gallbladder had been removed and was the suspected cause of the acute pancreatitis, the doctor decided to err on the side of caution and keep Randy another day or two. Needless to say, Randy was not pleased with this decision, and Hayley found him in bed in a foul mood and pouting when she arrived just after eight in the morning, still bone-tired from the night before working at Romeo’s and not looking forward to yet another night ahead.
Randy absentmindedly played with a few remnants of scrambled eggs with a plastic fork as she entered the room.
“How are you doing today?” Hayley asked.
“I feel fine, maybe a little weak, but I can rest up at home and be back at a hundred percent in no time,” Randy huffed.
“First of all, there will be no going home when you get out of here. Not with Sergio all the way down in Brazil and no one there to look after you. You will be staying at my house, at least for a week or two,” she said firmly.
Randy opened his mouth to protest.
Hayley held up a hand. “I have already made up Gemma’s room for you, and so I do not want to hear another word about it.”
Randy hurled his plastic fork down on the tray. “I’m going stir-crazy here. I can’t sleep. What if whoever that was who snuck in here and killed Chef Romeo tries to do the same to me? What if he finds out I saw him? I’m a loose end, a sitting duck!”
Hayley noticed Randy’s blood pressure rising rapidly again on the monitor beeping next to the bed. “Okay, you need to calm down. They’re not going to let you out of here if your blood pressure is off the charts.”
“I just can’t get the image out of my head of that man holding poor Romeo down and draining the life out of him with whatever he injected in that tube,” Randy said quietly. “It was horrific. I felt so helpless.”
“Well, don’t worry. The nursing staff is on high alert after what you witnessed. They’ll keep a close watch over you.”
“All anybody is really talking about is Nurse Fredy. Nobody can figure out what happened to him!”
Hayley paused, wanting to tread carefully. “Do you think it’s possible . . . ?”
Randy shook his head. “No, it wasn’t Fredy. I’m sure of it. Believe me, I stared long and hard at Fredy with puppy dog eyes, enough to make him feel uncomfortable, so I would recognize him in a heartbeat. This was someone I had never seen before.”
Randy threw his head back against his pillow and sighed, exasperated. He stared up at the ceiling for a few moments, then turned back toward Hayley. “Have you come up with anything yet?”
She wanted to tell him that she was too exhausted after working at the restaurant until the wee hours of the morning, and did not have a moment to even think about starting any kind of lone-wolf investigation into what Randy saw. But instead, she just sat down in a chair next to the bed, smiled, and said, “No, but there is no time like the present. Besides this mysterious man wearing the medical mask, did anyone else come into the room to see Romeo that you can remember?”
Randy stared back up at the ceiling again, thinking. “Not that I recall . . . But I was pretty out of it . . . Wait . . .”
Hayley scooted her chair closer to the bed. “What?”
“I was pretty drugged up and in and out of consciousness all day. At the time I thought it was some kind of weird dream . . . But maybe . . . At one point, I heard voices, like they were in my head, they were going back and forth, arguing . . . I couldn’t understand what any of it meant.”
“Do you remember what the voices were saying?”
Randy struggled with his memory, eyes flickering, a frown on his face. “It was something about . . . a kitchen. . .”
“A kitchen?”
“Yeah, they were yelling at each other about a kitchen.”
“Who?”
“Two men. One could have been Romeo, but like I said, I was pretty groggy and I thought I was just dreaming,” Randy said.
Something dawned on Hayley and she gasped. “Could one of the voices have been Vic Spencer?”
“The contractor?” Randy asked.
Hayley nodded.
Randy sighed. “I suppose so . . . I mean, I haven’t seen Vic in a long time, not since Sergio and I ran into him and his girlfriend at the village green last Fourth of July where we went to watch the fireworks. I can barely remember what his voice sounds like.”
“Vic recently renovated Romeo’s kitchen at the restaurant. Romeo was not happy with his work, he was refusing to pay Vic the rest of what he owed, and Vic was threatening to sue him.”
“I guess it could have been him, but again, I can’t say for sure,” Randy said, glowering. “I can’t even say it wasn’t just a dream. I’m sorry. I’m not much help at all.”
“No,” Hayley said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. “It’s a solid lead. I personally saw Vic making verbal threats against Romeo the day of his heart attack. He is definitely a suspect. Do you think it’s possible he could be the man in the medical mask?”
Randy leveled his gaze at Hayley. “Yes.” Then there were lines across his forehead as he wavered. “Maybe. I don’t know . . .”
Hayley stood up. “Well, get some rest. I promise I will follow up on Vic and keep digging to see who else might have had a motive, okay?”
Randy cracked a smile. “Thanks, sis.”
She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the forehead. “I have some errands to run. I’ll stop by again later this af
ternoon to check in on you.”
Hayley headed out, passing the nurses’ station, where she overheard a few of the staff still discussing what could have happened to Nurse Fredy.
She rode the elevator down to the lobby and walked outside to the parking lot to her car. She unlocked her SUV with the remote and was about to slide up into the passenger’s seat when she noticed a glint in the grass nearby. Something was catching the sun, causing it to glimmer. Curious, she wandered over and saw in the grass a metal clasp attached to a laminated card that was facedown. Hayley bent down to pick it up and turned it over.
She let out a gasp.
It was an ID badge.
Fredy Sanchez.
A photo of Nurse Fredy’s handsome face smiled up at her.
How did his badge wind up in the grass outside the hospital?
Where was he?
What had happened to him?
Chapter 16
Clutching Nurse Fredy’s ID badge, Hayley marched back inside the hospital and up to the nurses’ station on the second floor, where she found Nurse Tilly manning the reception desk while staring into space.
“Look what I found outside, Tilly,” Hayley said, slapping the badge down on the counter.
Tilly did not answer her.
She just sat there lost in thought, a troubled look on her face, worry lines stretched across her forehead.
Hayley leaned forward and tried again, louder this time. “Tilly?”
That finally did it. Tilly snapped to attention and looked up at Hayley. “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just not myself today.”
“Is anything wrong?”
The question seemed to stump her, as if she wasn’t sure how she should respond, and so her answer was more of a question. “No?”
She was clearly bothered by something, but Hayley knew the typically frazzled nurse didn’t want to talk about it, so she shoved the badge closer to Tilly, who reached over to pick it up and examine it.
“What’s this?” Tilly asked.
“Fredy Sanchez’s hospital ID badge.”
Tilly’s eyes widened in surprise. “Where did you find it?”
“Outside lying on the grass next to the parking lot.”