Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials (10 page)

Family and Partners

Despite the best efforts of Mycroft Peters and Commissioner Raja, the guests (and
caterers) of the ill-fated brunch party did not get home till after dark that Saturday.

However, Aunty Lee (with Nina in tow) was at Aunty Lee’s Delights before nine the
next morning. The café and shop did not open till eleven but there was a catering
job that evening to prepare for and Mark had texted Aunty Lee and Cherril saying he
would be over to discuss something important with them. Aunty Lee hoped this meant
the handover would finally be completed and was preparing a celebratory breakfast—
chwee kueh,
or little steamed rice-flour cakes with savory preserved radish topping. She was
still buzzing with excitement from the previous day’s happenings, and stirring boiling
water into sifted and salted rice and tapioca powder to form a smooth batter was as
good an outlet for her energy as anything. And of course she did her best to keep
up with the news. For this she now needed only Nina’s good eyesight and an iPad2 (on
the kitchen counter) but so far there had been nothing new.

Running the café had kept Aunty Lee blessedly busy after her husband’s death. She
felt he watched over her there, not least of all because one of the last portrait
photos of the late ML Lee, taken with him in his wheelchair, hung by the door of the
café. That was where he used to sit in his wheelchair, when walking, even from their
house up the road, became too tiring. There was at least one photograph of him in
each room of the house and shop so that Aunty Lee could talk to him wherever she was.
He did not answer, but then he had seldom answered even when he was alive. He had
always said his energetic little wife talked enough for them both. In this photograph
ML was wearing a blue-and-white golf shirt and squinting a little against the sun.

Aunty Lee loved the little café kitchen. It was small enough to get around quickly
but there was space to fit in friends. She always felt that bonds formed while cooking
together ran deeper than those formed merely eating together.

“Smells good.” Cherril came into the shop and joined them in the kitchen.

Aunty Lee said, “Mark likes
chwee kueh
. I made the traditional topping but also
gula melaka
banana sauce to pour on top.”

“Good.” Cherril looked haggard and stressed.

Despite the excitement Aunty Lee had gone to sleep fast and slept well. She had mastered
the technique during her husband’s last illness (turn air-conditioning to very cold,
take a very hot shower, turn off phone and all lights, and repeat “wake up at six
A.M.
, wake up at six
A.M.
” to herself till she did) or she might have been up all night going over the events
too. She felt sorry for Cherril, who looked as though she had not slept at all the
night before.

“You better go home and rest after settling everything with Mark. I can manage tonight
myself with Nina’s help.”

“I have to go home by eleven anyway. The police are coming to the house to talk to
me.”

“Why not come and talk to you here? We are all here; they can talk to us all together!”

“The police already listen to you talk too much yesterday, madam,” Nina pointed out.
Nina was worried about repercussions her boss seemed to have missed. After all, wasn’t
the caterer always the first suspect in a food poisoning case?

“Mycroft thinks Mabel Sung killed her son because he was not going to recover and
she didn’t want him to suffer, and she couldn’t bear to live with the thought, so
she killed herself as well.”

“Mabel Sung didn’t kill herself,” Aunty Lee said firmly. “She wasn’t the type. And
she wouldn’t have killed her son. You tell me she killed her husband, I say maybe.
But not her son. And no way she would kill herself.”

“Hello, Aunty Lee.” Mark came in, followed by Selina.

“Aunty Lee, lucky for you more people didn’t eat your
buah keluak
yesterday!” Selina said.

Though Mark had comfortably addressed his stepmother as “Aunty Lee” since before she
married his father, it sounded strange to Aunty Lee when Selina called her that. But
then perhaps it only felt strange because Selina seemed to be enjoying it so much
as she continued, “Aunty Lee, you could have poisoned everybody at the party. It could
have been a mass murder. Aunty Lee, we could be coming to visit you in Changi Prison
now!” Selina laughed and nudged Mark to share the joke. But Mark only said, “Hello,
Cherril, how’s things?”

“Cherril, you look tired. Are you sick? You look like you’ve put on weight. Are you
pregnant?” Even the thought of her stepmother-in-law in prison could not distract
Selina for long from the threat of other women.

“That’s the first thing people always say. Food poisoning,” Aunty Lee said to the
photograph of ML Lee on the wall by the wine room door.

“Let people say what they want. As long as they don’t come and make a lawsuit,” Nina
said in the same direction.

“If it wasn’t food poisoning, then what? You’re not going to say there’s another murderer
around?” Mark laughed.

“I heard Sharon Sung tell the police it was probably suicide,” Aunty Lee said. “She
said her brother was depressed from being sick and a burden and he talked about killing
himself before. And then she said maybe her mother killed her brother because she
couldn’t bear to watch him suffering, but then Dr. Yong said no way because Mabel
knew that Leonard was going to be completely healed soon.”

“Must be one of the praying healing people said that, madam.” Nina wiped down an already
clean counter.

“No, it was the slimy little doctor,” Aunty Lee said eagerly. “And I saw Sharon give
him such a nasty look and he stopped talking.”

“I still don’t understand why anyone would risk eating something that smells funny
and could kill them!” Mark laughed again.

“Some people eat fugu fish,” Cherril snapped. She flashed a glare at Mark that came
and went so quickly Mark was not sure he hadn’t imagined it. He had recently shared
photos of his first taste of fugu fish (350 Singapore dollars for a few translucent
slices) at a top restaurant in Japan.

“Some people like taking funny risks,” Selina said, looking around the café meaningfully.

Cherril felt this was directed at her. But she was in no mood to spar with Selina.
“Look, Mark, you said we could settle the handover today?”

“It’s not a handover,” Selina said quickly. “It’s a buyout. You’re buying out the
business from Mark.”

The others looked at Mark but he only gave an exaggerated “Don’t ask me, she’s the
boss” shrug. It was clear he had been instructed to let Selina do the talking.

“We have an estimate of how much the business is worth. That’s not including the profits
that come with the wine dining program. We are not including wine dining as part of
the deal because Mark is willing to come in and help with that, for a consultation
fee, of course.”

“Frankly put, you need me,” Mark said. “I know every bottle of wine in the wine room
with my eyes closed.”

A police car slowly drove past the road in front of Aunty Lee’s Delights, going deeper
into the estate where their houses were. Cherril watched it, distracted. “I should
be going.”

“I hope you’re not going to back out just because of this business. You had a verbal
agreement with Mark,” Selina said. “It was as good as settled.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that.” Cherril pulled her attention back. “It seems
a good part of the wine stock here is on consignment.”

“That’s how these things are done,” Mark said. “Of course it only works when the suppliers
know you well enough. But they all know me, so it won’t be a problem.”

“You can’t just use Mark’s name,” Selina said quickly. “The wine is here on consignment
to Mark. So he will sell the bottles to you and pay the suppliers after he takes his
cut. That’s only fair because he’s the one who arranged to have the bottles brought
in and he’s the one who made sure that they were kept in the right conditions. This
way it’s easiest for everybody. You pay Mark and he’ll take care of everything. Then
you can go ahead and run the business however you want to.”

“But I don’t want to buy the wine from Mark,” Cherril said. “This is great, actually.
We can return all the bottles and nobody will have to pay for them!”

“Cherril, listen to me. If you don’t take the wine, how are you going to run a wine
business?” Selina said with the sarcastic precision of a teacher facing a particularly
slow student.

“It’s not going to be a wine business. It’s going to be a drinks business. That’s
what it says on the contract, right? Aunty Lee showed me her copy.”

That was indeed what the contract said. Mark had focused on wines because Mark always
focused on what he was interested in.

“I can come and help you if you’re afraid you don’t know enough about the wines,”
he said kindly. “For example, in Singapore you have to be careful of room temperature
wines.” His wife might look down on Cherril for not having a university degree, but
Mark had always found a willing listener in her. “The French recommend serving their
reds
à chambre
but the temperatures of French
chambres
are probably around eighteen to twenty degrees Celsius. Here room temperatures can
go up to thirty degrees Celsius and anything you store and serve at that temperature
is going to taste heavy, hard, and very bitter. That’s why the wine room is so important.
And it’s even worse for sweet dessert wines. But there you have to be careful not
to overchill them, especially the more complex and vibrant ones. I’ll point out to
you the ones you should take special care with. Not just because they are more expensive,
which they are, but because you don’t want to damage their vibrancy . . .”

Mark rose, intending to walk Cherril round his precious wine room yet again. But Cherril
shook her head. “Not now, Mark. Thank you. I’ve already learned so much about wine
from you, Mark. But that’s not what I want to focus on. I’m going to serve all kinds
of hot and cold drinks to go with all the food. Maybe there will be some wine and
some beer, but that’s not what I will be focusing on.”

Mark looked flabbergasted. Selina stepped in. “Well, what are you going to do with
the wine room, then? It cost a lot of money, you know.”

Aunty Lee knew that. She had paid for the construction of the wine room because, as
Selina had pointed out, it was installed in her café. And she loved it. The inch of
high-density, rigid foam insulation was discreetly covered with unfinished oak, the
sophisticated Breezaire system worked almost silently, and Mark had chosen a double
pane of dark-tinted glass for the door that hinted at joys within without revealing
too much.

Despite being widely seen as the sweet old aunty championing traditional foods and
cooking methods, Aunty Lee loved modern electronic gadgets and systems. She might
have an enormous charcoal brazier standing in the back alleyway, but she also had
Certis CISCO Integrated Operations round-the-clock burglar and fire alarms, which
Nina had linked to the nearest neighborhood police station. And though Aunty Lee swore
by the superior quality of spices hand-pounded in the heavy granite mortar and pestle
(never to be washed with soap), she also owned the latest models in blender mixers
(for catering) and took no chances with her API Food Poison Detection Kits and a GHM-01
Detector for Common Heavy Metals that covered possible food contaminants from rusty
water pipes to arsenic.

She had been less happy about the room’s exit to the rear alley, a legacy of its origin
as a toilet. “If you don’t lock the door properly, alcoholics can come through the
back door and steal my kitchen equipment.”

“Alcoholics are hardly likely to steal your kitchen equipment, Aunty Lee,” Selina
had pointed out sarcastically.

“You think just because they like to drink they don’t like to cook?”

“I’ll make sure Mark locks the door properly,” Selina had said.

Now Aunty Lee had the temperature-controlled walk-in storeroom every Singaporean cook
dreamed of. It would be perfect for store-at-room-temperature goods like soy sauce
and sesame oil once they got rid of the wine bottles. “I could make kimchi,” Aunty
Lee said dreamily. “Part
achar,
part kimchi. It will be like a fusion pickle.”

“We will serve wine of course,” Cherril said. “After all, it would be a waste not
to when we have the wine license. But it’s not going to be our main focus. We’re also
going to serve cocktails, mocktails, and doctails. Doctails . . .” Forestalling the
question: “Doctails are the medicinal drinks. The drinks that TCM and folk remedies
recommend as healing. Honey drinks and aloe vera and wolfberry teas as well as energy
drinks.”

“That’s actually a good idea!” Selina said. “Traditional Chinese medicine is a growing
market today. Mark, are you sure you don’t want to do this? You haven’t signed the
papers yet. This could work. You take care of the wine, I take care of everything
else. You—this to Aunty Lee—“you must agree not to sell any kind of cold drinks or
desserts so that people are forced to buy from us . . .”

Mark had intended to cultivate a Singapore-based wine appreciation platform. Making
money from the business had never been a priority for him. And now even the people
he had been trying to help didn’t appreciate him.

“I don’t want to,” he said sulkily.

Aunty Lee wondered how this would influence his next career step. ML had been wise,
she thought, to set a limit on how much of his inheritance Mark could tap into during
her lifetime. Though both he and Mathilda had been left well off by their father and
would be wealthy by Singapore standards after her death, Mark had already drawn substantial
loans on his future inheritance.

The shop phone rang just then. Nina answered, “Aunty Lee’s Delights, good morning,”
brightly enough, but as she listened to the voice at the other end her expression
changed. “But it is not a problem, ma’am. You want to postpone until tomorrow or another
day? No? But you should speak to Aunty Lee first. She is here, I will pass the phone
to her, you wait—”