An Appetite for Murder (26 page)

I began to babble. “I know that must seem intrusive and appalling, but the thing is, the cops still believe I killed Kristen. So—”

“So you figure you’ll shunt them off in my direction?” She planted her hands on her hips and scowled.

“Well, that’s not—”

“I don’t suppose I could expect you to imagine what the last six months have been like for me.”

“I can certainly understand the cheating boyfriend part of it,” I offered, baring my teeth with a girlfriend-­to-­girlfriend grin.

“I didn’t just lose a man. I lost my livelihood,” she said in a grim voice. “Do you know how long I saved up to buy that place? And how long it takes to build a staff that can work together? A staff that cares about the place even half as much as you do? And then build a
clientele who are willing to come back over and over and spread the word to their friends?”

“I’m sorry it happened that way,” I said. “I know it’s a terribly hard business. My mom would say it’s challenging enough to cook decent meals at home for your own family. And Doug told me the
Miami Herald
food critic was planning a major spread on your place right before Robert left.”

She looked near tears.

“Robert was the linchpin in that kitchen. He was the spark that made the difference between good food and great. Maybe I would have stayed on if the review had been written, but when the critic canceled . . .” She shook her head. “That disappointment was a knife to my gut. I couldn’t go on pretending everything would be fine. I’d find another chef. We’d rebuild our reputation. Never mind the excruciating personal embarrassment.”

She wiped her face with the edge of her apron. “When things go really bad in my life, I stay sane by stripping life down to what I can literally control. In this case, I decided I could make burritos. One by one. Jalapeños, guacamole, shaved cabbage . . .”

She took off her apron, folded it in quarters, and slapped it on the counter. “I’m sorry about Miss Faulkner’s death, but I had nothing to do with it.”

Then she came around the cooler, marched past me to the front door, and flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. She held the door for me.

“We will not be serving lunch today.”

“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”

—­Harriet van Horne

My stomach pitched and yawed, more from shame now than hunger. Everything I touched on this island seemed to turn sour. I dialed Detective Bransford’s phone extension and a left a message telling him about what Turtle had seen from his perch on the
Danger
and my stepmother’s suggestion about poisonous nuts in the pie crust. Let him do the police work—­I was obviously a disaster.

I mounted the scooter and started it up, with no place to go and no one to talk to. I motored over to Higgs Beach and slouched at an empty picnic table, lowering my cheek to rest on the cool concrete and willing my mind to empty. A black and white gull hopped up on the bench beside me, pecked at some crumbs, and splattered the edge of the table with poop.

“You ingrate!” I yelped.

“You talkin’ to me?”

Tony’s drawl startled the bird away and me out of my daze. I shook my head and pointed to what the bird had left.

He shrugged and grinned. “When you gotta go . . . ​Did y’all find Turtle? I haven’t seen his ugly mug anywhere today.”

I sat up straight and smoothed my wrinkled cargo shorts. “We did have a chance to chat and he told me what he saw. But then I’m afraid I scared him half to death.”

“Easy to do,” said Tony, doffing his hat. “Y’all have a good day. The cake was awesome.”

“Thanks.” I mustered a smile and he sauntered away.

My phone rang and Deena’s name came up on the screen. What in the world would she want with me? The way things were going, Chad had probably told her to call and ream me out. About something.

“Hayley,” she said when I answered. “I feel silly about this after our last conversation, but I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

“What’s up?”

“I can’t find Chad.”

I let loose a snort of laughter. “You’re barking up the wrong banyan here, Deena. I’d be the last one to have any insight on that topic.” I glanced at my watch. “Monday morning. If I remember correctly, he ought to be right there in the office harassing you about how you’re not typing fast enough to keep up with his dictation.”

“That’s why I’m worried. He had an appointment in
court first thing this morning and two new clients back-­to-­back wanting to talk about filing for divorce. Litigious clients with deep pockets. He didn’t show for either and now they’re mad at me. And he isn’t answering his cell. Or my text messages.”

“That’s weird,” I agreed. “Silence from the man whose e-­mail trigger finger is the fastest gun on the island. You tried his home phone?” Not that I’d ever seen him use it for an actual phone call—­he only had it installed to buzz repairmen through the locked front door.

“I tried it,” she said grimly.

“Has anyone else seen him?”

“He was here early this morning. His office light’s on and he left a couple of files open on the desk.” She sighed. “Oh, well, you were a long shot. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“No problem,” I said. “Hope he turns up.”

Deena’s call left me with an uneasy feeling. Chad may have been lousy at texting or calling me, especially as our relationship nose-­dived, but he was always in touch with Deena. I walked over to the water and sat by the sand, doodling with a stick, letting the events of the last week flit through my mind. I’d talked with a number of people who disliked Kristen, but none of them seemed angry enough to kill her. Wouldn’t committing a murder have to be fueled by toxic rage? The kind that Deena heard often through the closed doors of Chad’s conference room. I threw my doodling stick in the water, watched it wash away, and settled on one disturbing question.

What if the pie had actually been meant for Chad, not
Kristen? And the murderer didn’t know him well enough to recognize his aversion to sweets in general but especially the key lime flavor? If that were all true, Kristen ingested the poison accidentally. And all the ideas I’d had about who wanted to kill Kristen meant nothing, because nobody did.

The next question followed logically: Who would actually want Chad dead? Because of his divorce practice, I imagined there might be a number of possibilities. He was ruthless when it came to protecting his clients’ assets. I remembered the nasty memo I’d found in his apartment when I’d gone over to clean. With Chad’s killer lawyer instinct, surely there were more like this in his office clipped to the files of other clients. Many more. I pulled out my phone and redialed Deena.

“You’ve heard something?” she asked.

“Sorry, no. I was wondering about those files Chad left on his desk this morning. Whose were they?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

I could imagine her pursed lips, painted, glossy, and disapproving. “You called me for help, not the other way around.”

“Sorry,” said Deena. “After ten years’ working for him, client confidentiality is so ingrained—­at this point it’s almost a genetic trait. Chad would fire me in an instant if I said anything about anything. Even if his life was in danger.”

“And it might be,” I said, and explained my idea that Chad might have been the murderer’s target. “After all, the poisoned pie was delivered to his home, not Kristen’s. She wasn’t actually living there, was she?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “But what do the files have to do with any of that?”

“They might be related; they might not. But, if I were in your position, I’d go through all of them and make a list of the people he’s represented in horrendous divorces. Especially the cases that dragged on awhile—­and maybe focus on the ones that he won. And then, if it were me, and he doesn’t show up in good time, I’d call the cops. Detective Bransford is the guy I’ve been talking to.” I read off his cell number. “He’s overbearing, and takes himself awfully seriously. But he’s kind of cute,” I added with a strained laugh.

She thanked me and signed off.

I leaned on my elbows back in the sand, the weak sun warming my face. Wishing for a sandwich. Or a couple of those amazing crabmeat choux pastries that had been served at Kristen’s funeral. Made by Chef Robert, I now knew.

Deena called again.

“Hayley, I listened to his office voice mail.” She paused and I could imagine her thinking through how much to say. “One of his clients, who shall of course remain nameless, called to report that his black Audi sedan was stolen on Saturday. The client keeps it garaged a few blocks away, so he didn’t notice until yesterday evening that it was missing. They found it abandoned in the golf course parking lot out on Stock Island. This case fits the description you mentioned—­it was ugly and he won big.”

The puzzle pieces slid into place and I jerked up to sitting, visualizing the grille of the car that had tried to run me off the road. Had it been an Audi?

“Who was the client?” I demanded.

“I can’t say the name,” she said. “But I’m worried.”

“Oh, for crying out loud—­then call the cops,” I said.

I hung up, reviewing the names I could remember from the weeks I’d lived with Chad. Not that he talked to me about his clients—­he was more close-­mouthed than Deena. But I couldn’t help sometimes seeing bits and snatches of the work he brought home. If Chad had been the murderer’s target, wouldn’t he or she be highly distressed about killing Kristen?

My brain worked itself back around to Meredith, the pastry chef who insisted to Eric at the funeral that Kristen didn’t deserve to die. What if she hadn’t known that Kristen was staying with Chad, and she killed her accidentally? I thought about her despair in the cemetery and her loyalty to Kristen. And how she’d come so close to landing a dream job in a fancy restaurant. I couldn’t remember if she’d said she was divorced, but she certainly had no kind words for men. And I imagined that she was quite capable of constructing a sophisticated piecrust containing ground, poisonous nuts, so delicious that the person eating the pie would never notice the addition. In fact, the nibbler would only notice the unusual and delectable sweetness. Possibly even gobble a second piece, just as I had, before the poison infused her system and began to shut it down.

And Meredith had the same initial as the woman mentioned in the memo I’d seen on Chad’s desk when I was cleaning. The woman who’d been fleeced in her divorce settlement, losing her home, her car, and worst of all, her dog. If Meredith accidentally murdered her friend
instead of doing in her ex-­husband’s divorce lawyer, her hysteria made perfect sense. And it might even make sense that she’d tried to kill me, because she knew that I was asking way too many questions about the murder: I’d interrogated her twice in some detail. I hoped I was dead wrong, because I liked Meredith. She was struggling with the same kind of career angst as me.

But if I wasn’t wrong, Chad was still a moving target. I called Deena back but was shunted to her voice mail. “It’s Hayley again. This is urgent. Go to his desk and check on the files. If there’s a file open on someone named Meredith who lost everything to Chad’s client, he could be in big trouble. Call me.”

Next I considered calling Eric, but we hadn’t spoken since that awkward conversation about his ruined Mustang. Would he even care? Hopefully, a long friendship would trump painted sheet metal. I left a message on his voice mail, explaining my new theory.

This was the problem I’d been grappling with all week: Who really cared about my theories? The answer should be the man I was paying to defend me. I held my nose and dialed my lawyer. If he didn’t react reasonably, I would fire him on the spot. Luckily his beleaguered secretary answered and offered me the choice of getting transferred to his cell phone or put through to voice mail.

“Voice mail would be fine,” I told her quickly and waited for his pompous introduction. When the beep sounded, I considered telling him about Turtle’s observations. And mentioning my new theory that the pie hadn’t been meant for Kristen at all. That someone had
wanted Chad dead, not Kristen. But what came out of my mouth was: “Mr. Kane, this is Hayley Snow. I will no longer need your services.”

Then I dialed Detective Bransford, feeling unaccountably nervous when his voice mail beep sounded.

“So, I had this idea that Chad Lutz was the target of the poison, not Kristen Faulkner. Uh, I should say this is Hayley Snow, but you’ve probably figured that out, being a detective and all. What I’m suggesting is that the killer didn’t realize that Chad despised key lime pie. He wasn’t a big fan of desserts in general because, let’s face it, he’s very vain and can’t bear the idea of a potbelly. But I’m not talking about that. This is probably too much information, but he puked his guts out a couple of years ago after eating a piece of KLP. You know how you develop an aversion to a certain food once it’s hurled back up the wrong way?”

I sounded like an absolute idiot. “What I’m trying to say is . . .” What was I trying to say? I continued to blather to his voice mail. “There’s a pastry chef in town who’s a big fan of Kristen’s. You may have seen her at the funeral—­she was devastated to the point of becoming publicly hysterical. And what if that makes all the sense in the world because
she’s
the one who killed Kristen? By accident?”

His voice mail cut off. If he was at all interested, he could call me back. I considered phoning Meredith. But if she were the killer, she’d figure out I was onto her and bolt. Maybe better still, I would drop by Cole’s Peace Bakery. If Meredith were there, I’d buy a loaf of bread, chat innocently as if I knew nothing, and then call
Bransford the second I left the shop. If she wasn’t, I could try to wrangle her address out of one of the other workers.

It was almost four p.m. by the time I got across town. The bakery was closed. I was swamped with a mixture of disappointment and relief. In the window of the Restaurant Store attached to the bakery, a small red fifteen-­percent-­off sale sign had been taped to the door. This was too tempting to ignore. I went directly to the cutlery department and perused the knives. Finally, I chose a Japanese paring knife and a plastic protector and carried them to the counter. While the clerk rang my items up, I said: “I was hoping to talk with Meredith who works next door about a catering gig. She does desserts, right?”