by Molly Fitz
“She’s been complaining up a storm tonight. Perhaps she’s looking for a heated time out … ” When I nodded toward Gloria, I might’ve actually detected something from Burton. Was that a response from the man of stone?
It looked like distaste and a little, could it be, anger? Even though this was the first time I’d sparked his attention, I found this tiny acknowledgment of his disturbing. I had no desire to fan that fire and find out just what he was made of. I needed to step away. Time to do my rounds.
I slipped the tray under my arm and walked through the tables, stacking empty glasses up as I passed them. I gathered drink orders for my return trip. Not for the first time, I wondered just what prompted Vlad to think having a demon posted in the bar was a good idea. Or perhaps Burton came as a package deal since I’d heard, or maybe assumed, that the club was situated on the entrance to the Underworld. It’s not like the underbelly of eternal purgatory could be moved. Surely nothing else could possibly happen since I was friends—or at least I thought I was—with a demon.
If I’m honest, in some ways, I was glad he was here. I hoped that besides escorting people in through the fiery gates, he was also keeping whoever was down there from getting out. We had enough riffraff without recycling more evil entities. Those bad boys were never any good at cleaning up after themselves and tended to leave a huge mess and a small tip. No thank you.
For now, I was happy enough to be staying in Gran’s condo with a talking cat and a too-furry-for-the-Florida-heat dog, a new hairdresser on speed dial, and one solved crime under my belt. Now that Henry’s death was explained, I could enjoy what was left of my working vacation while things were quiet. Knowing me, things wouldn’t be quiet for long.
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We hope you enjoyed Curses, Cats & Corpses. It’s part of “A Charmed Cocktail Cozy” series which you can keep reading HERE.
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If you like this, then you’ll also love Grandma Must Die. She can either expose her magic blood by curing the deadly spell, or stop the infection from spreading by killing the source...the grandmother. Get your copy HERE.
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Murder of a Po’Boy
by Denise Jaden
About this Story
MURDER OF A PO’ BOY
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A tabby cat takes a road trip to bustling and mystical New Orleans
A food tour in New Orleans where murder is on the menu…
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When Mallory Beck wins a food tour experience in New Orleans, she invites teenage Amber, her foodie BFF, to join her on a road trip of French and creole cuisine. Mallory’s cat-sitter cancels at the last minute, and presumptuous, cheeky Hunch helps himself to shotgun in Mallory’s Prius. A good thing, too, because when a know-it-all food tour participant turns up dead and wrapped in Mardi Gras beads, they’ll need Hunch’s keen nose to sniff out any foul play.
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Surrounded by tight-lipped locals and voodoo theories, Mallory and her team of sleuths have their work cut out for them to clear Amber’s name from suspicion and get to the bottom of what happened to the Po’ Boy who didn’t make it through to the last stop on the food tour.
Copyright © 2021 by Denise Jaden.
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All rights reserved.
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Chapter One
It was six o’clock in the morning and I was already talking a blue streak to my ornery cat.
“Listen, Hunch, you’ll like Seth. I promise. He’s related to Amber, so how bad could he be, right?” Using my sixteen-year-old BFF’s name made Hunch pause from his pacing along the backseat of my white Prius. In truth, I didn’t know much about Amber’s older brother, Seth. “You’ll have to stay in his room because their mom is allergic to all things furry, but Seth goes out all the time. He’ll take you with him.”
This was a guess, but apparently, Seth liked animals. I’d at least asked that much.
When I pulled into the driveway of Amber’s mom’s mansion, the sun’s glow was barely peeking over the horizon. The town felt dark and quiet so I turned off my engine and picked up my phone to text Amber.
Three dots appeared. I waited a long time for two words to appear.
I stared at my phone, but no more dots appeared. Even Hunch sensed something was wrong and climbed onto the console to nuzzle up to my shoulder—a good deal more affection than my late husband’s cat usually gave me. I didn’t believe animals could read, and yet, I clearly wasn’t convinced because I flashed him my phone screen so he could have a peek.
He let out a mix between a mewl and a growl.
“I know.” I stroked his head, accepting the rare opportunity when he’d let me give him some love. Still, the dots indicating her reply didn’t appear. “I have a bad feeling about this, too—”
A knock on the passenger window made me slap a hand to my chest as my heart skipped a beat and then pounded. But it was only Amber. I’d neglected to unlock her door.
She opened the door, but didn’t get in. A red and white duffel bag sat at her feet, and she wore a black hoodie that read: THAT’S A HORRIBLE IDEA. WHAT TIME?
I didn’t notice her frown until she picked up Hunch and cuddled him to her neck. He immediately started purring.
“Bad news, Hunchie.” Amber was the only one who could get away with cutesy nicknames with my cat.
“What? What bad news?” I strained my neck to see the dark upper rooms of the Montrose mansion. “Where’s Seth?”
My hope deflated before I even had the question out. I’d been looking forward to this road trip for months. After Amber had entered a cooking contest at school, she’d caught the bug for competition and insisted I enter Foodie Elite Magazine’s original recipe contest. The food tour I’d won tickets to in New Orleans had high ratings in all the food magazines, and I’d heard great things even before I won the tickets.
“Seth can’t take Hunch?” I guessed because Amber still hadn’t answered me.
“Seth can’t take Hunch,” she echoed into my cat’s fur.
Hunch wasn’t the type of cat you could drop off at any old pet kennel. Hunch had been my mystery-author-husband’s assistant before he passed, and I often suspected the cat had a bigger brain than I did. He wouldn’t last a day in a cage without a single stimulating human conversation.
And it would dishonor Cooper’s memory to put Hunch in such a place.
I heaved out a sigh, trying to let go of my anticipation for the trip.
“But I came up with a backup plan,” Amber said.
I raised an eyebrow in question. With her bristly attitude, she didn’t have a lot of school friends, and her mom claimed to be highly allergic. Our detective friend, Alex Martinez, worked twelve-hour days, so he wasn’t an option either.
“It turns out our hotel accepts pets.” She continued to hide half her face behind Hunch, clearly concerned about my reaction.
“They accept pets? In the hotel rooms?”
Hearing the disbelief in my tone, Amber placed Hunch into the passenger seat and pulled out her phone. She navigated to the sponsoring hotel’s website and flashed her screen to show me the words: AND YOU CAN BRING YOUR SMALL PET!
I stared at the words, tentatively allowing a spark of hope. “You want to bring Hunch on a fifteen-hour car ride?” My eyebrow was so high, I was certain it blended with my hairline.
“Why not?” Spoken like a true teenager.
“Why not,” I echoed under my breath. But I did have Hunch’s litter box and food with me for Seth. Hunch knew better
than to scratch up furniture. “You’re going to be all by yourself for two days while we’re on our food tour,” I told my cat in my sternest tone.
This apparently signaled my agreement and made Amber squeal into the quiet early-morning air. She raced to the back of my car to throw her bag into the trunk.
I turned to my cat, who waited patiently on his haunches for Amber in the passenger seat with what could only be described as a look of triumph.
“You win. Apparently, you’re coming with us.”
Chapter Two
With almost a thousand miles to cover in one day, I didn’t have much more energy for arguing, so I caved pretty quickly to Amber’s pleas to practice her driving. She needed fifty hours for her level one permit, and we both knew her mother wouldn’t help with that.
Soon, Amber had her phone hooked into the sound system, and music was playing. I was surprised it wasn’t her usual top-forty fare.
“Jazz?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I downloaded a whole playlist to get us in the mood.”
Amber was like me that way. When she did things, she liked to do them right. With our latest venture—a catering business—she was forever coming up with theme ideas for our menus. “It’ll make us memorable,” she’d said right from the beginning. And it had. We had quickly gained a following within Honeysuckle Grove.
A road trip to New Orleans, followed up by an elite food tour, should have been exciting enough on its own to be memorable, but with the excitement in our lives lately, from helping our detective friend, Alex, in solving murder cases to quite literally running for our lives, I was happy to let Amber make these next four days memorable for less exciting reasons.
I was back in the driver’s seat by the time we made it to our hotel, just after eleven, which was right downtown in the French Quarter and overlooked the Mississippi River. As expected for a Friday night, the city was lively with music and people, and if I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have wanted to go exploring.
“This is where they’re putting us up?” Amber asked. “Ritzy.”
High praise from a girl who had grown up traveling to five-star hotels with her family.
I felt a little underdressed in jeans and a T-shirt. After I parked, she grabbed her duffel bag from the trunk. I looked from my now-wide-awake cat to the tall tower of hotel rooms, lit along the frame with narrow blue lights.
“You’re sure they allow pets?” I suddenly wondered if Amber had stretched the truth or shown me a different hotel’s website to get her way.
Amber furrowed her brow, which didn’t inspire confidence. “Oh. Yeah. Maybe I’ll wait out here with Hunch while you double-check.”
“They don’t allow pets?” After a fifteen-hour drive, I was way too tired for this.
“They have some rooms for pets. Ask if they can move us to one.” Amber shrugged, like this wasn’t such a big deal.
I sighed out my fatigue and reached for the door.
I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Chapter Three
Sure enough, the front desk clerk practically laughed in my face when I asked if my room allowed pets or if they could move me to a room that did.
The fortysomething man shook his head. “We have one theme room designed for small pets but it’s always booked up months in advance. Why? You don’t have a pet with you now?” The alarm was clear in his tone.
“Oh, no, nothing like that.” I laughed nervously while wondering when I might have time to find us another pet-friendly hotel. “My niece was thinking of adopting a… dog while we were here in town. But I’ll tell her it won’t work this trip.”
Thankfully, the front desk clerk accepted my explanation and handed over two key cards. I took them and gritted my teeth all the way to the car.
“Nope. No pets in our room,” I told Amber the second she got out of the car. “Apparently, there’s only one room allowing pets and it books up months in advance. Who knew?” Amber loved to dish out sarcasm, so I figured she’d better be able to take it.
She nodded, solemn for only about two seconds. Then she reached inside the car and retrieved Hunch, placing him into her duffel bag.
I pulled my small suitcase from the trunk, which had doubled in weight. “What on earth…?”
“I put some of my stuff in there to make room for Hunch.” Amber bent to murmur something to Hunch before covering the opening of the duffel bag with her jacket.
I supposed I should just be happy she had some kind of a plan. My tired brain was ready for a good night’s sleep.
Inside the hotel’s front doors, we angled for the elevator, but halfway through the small lobby, a tall slender blond man intercepted us.
“Mallory Beck?” he said such a strong Irish accent, it almost sounded put on. I nodded. “Howya? Liam O’Conner, at your service. I’ll be your host from Foodie Elite Tour.” He held out a hand, and I shook it. “Jerome said you’d pulled up.” Liam motioned to the front desk clerk, who was watching us.
On instinct, I angled my body to hide Amber and her duffel bag. “Oh, yes. We couldn’t leave West Virginia any earlier, so I’m afraid it was a long day of driving for us.” I hoped he’d infer that all I wanted in the world right now was a bed.
But he just laughed heartily. “It’s grand. And who’s this youngwan with ya?”
I’d been trying to keep the focus away from Amber, so I quickly rattled off, “This is my niece, Amber. Hey, that’s a great accent you have. Is it Irish?”
He nodded, but didn’t elaborate. “And will you be joining us on the food tour, Amber?”
“Yeah, we’re super excited for it, right, Aunt Mallory?” She elbowed me. We often posed as aunt and niece while working investigations, but I’d just saddled her with calling me Aunt Mallory for the duration of the two-day tour.
Liam turned toward the bar, which gave me a chance to sidestep a couple of feet away and press the elevator button. But when I turned back, another couple headed our way. “You should meet some of our other guests. We were chatting in the bar. Will you have a mineral with us?”
Was mineral water common in New Orleans? Or perhaps Ireland? Or was it code for some other sort of drink? Didn’t matter. I certainly didn’t have the energy or the pet-freeness to sit and visit in a bar right now.
“Oh, I’d like to, but—”
“Clive, Scarlett, this here’s Mallory and her niece, Amber. They’ll be joining us on the tour.”
Clive had a sweep of black bangs that appeared shellacked into place. He reached to shake my hand vigorously. “How y’all doin’? Nice of you to bring your niece to this thing. She’s gonna learn a lot from me about good food. So are you, I bet.” Clive’s voice was even louder than Liam’s, and I wondered how many “minerals” he’d had tonight.
Scarlett stood back and smiled quietly. She had bright orangey-red hair and wore a flowered tea-length swing dress, like something out of the fifties. I was about to ask about her gorgeous vintage pendant with tiny pearls draped along the bottom edge when she put in, “Clive knows a lot about food. He studied cooking in Paris.”
“That’s right.” Clive puffed out his chest.
I hadn’t been to Paris, but from everything I’d heard, I had trouble picturing loudmouthed immodest Clive studying there.
“Come on! Join us in the bar,” Clive said. “Liam’s been rattling on about himself for too long.”
I had a feeling Clive had been the self-involved talker.
“Ahh, Mallory and Amber are knackered,” Liam answered for me. “And I should get some good sleep myself. Going to be a full day tomorrow.”
Clive’s eyes slid down to Amber’s side, where she clutched her duffel.
I stepped into his vision and reached out a hand. “It was so nice to meet you, Clive. I look forward to getting to know you and Scarlett better in the morning.”
Thankfully, the three of them let us go. As I looked at Amber’s slightly wriggling duffel bag, I wondered if Liam was also staying in
the hotel and if he’d be joining us in the elevator. But thankfully, a second later, the elevator dinged its arrival, and Liam stuck around to wish Clive and Scarlett a good night.
“What are we going to do with Hunch while we’re on tour?” I slid my key card into the lock of a fancily carved white door. “If we leave him here, the maid will find him.”
As I opened the door, Amber pulled the Do Not Disturb sign from the back of it. “We’ll just put this up.”
Everything seemed so easy for Amber.
“There’s no way his litter pan will fit in either your duffel bag or my suitcase. How do you suppose we’re going to sneak that up here?” I hoped she had let my cat out on some grass before bringing him upstairs.
She shrugged—her ever-present response to every conundrum. “So we’ll bring him in the car.”
“In the middle of July?”
“We’ll put the sign up, and I’ll come back and take him out.” She swept by me into our room and effectively changed the subject. “Whoa, Mallory! Look at this room.”
She placed her duffel bag on the floor, and Hunch wormed his way out of it. A second later, he was sniffing every inch of our floor.
The Mardi Gras-themed room was decked out in lime green and fuchsia drapes. At the end of our brocaded bedspreads was a row of brightly colored bobbles the size of my head that imitated Mardi Gras beads.
“This is awesome!” Amber spun around and landed on her back on one of the beds, looking up at the chandelier and the masks that decorated the upper half of the room.