Death By the Glass #2 (3 page)

Rivka finished getting dressed.

“There has to be something wrong with Andre Morales,” said Sunny, stuffing her street clothes in a locker and shutting the door.

“Nope, he’s perfect,” said Rivka. “I say go for it. No credit check, no trunk and glove box inspection, no web searches, no best-friend character references, no phone calls to the parents. This guy is pre-approved for the night.”

“You’re giving pre-approval to someone you’ve never met.”

“I’ve never met Sting, but he’s pre-approved.”

“This is all very interesting, but we have about three hours to make enough pasta to feed a hundred and forty hungry socialites.
On y va?
”

“
Vamanos
.”

They found the kitchen a noisy hive of activity, with white-jacketed cooks busy at every station. Since Sunny’s tour, the kitchen had taken on a buzz of controlled urgency. Andre made brisk introductions all around, then went back to managing the flurry of tasks. Sunny and Rivka got started, and were quickly absorbed in the wordless familiarity of cooking. Within a few minutes they were cranking out pasta and simmering an assortment of wild mushrooms, including the ones Sunny had collected that morning.

Everything was going smoothly until she added dried morels to the mushroom sauce. She found a gallon jar of them in the pantry, shook a good-sized mound into a saucepan, and covered
them with boiling water. When they were soft, she drained the liquid into a saucepan where a batch of chanterelles was simmering and started chopping the reconstituted morels, which she then added to a large stockpot full of mushroom sauce. She repeated the process with a second heap of morels. She was nearly finished chopping the second batch when she noticed something funny about one of them. The shape looked slightly wrong. Morels ought to be honeycombed. This mushroom looked wrinkled. She pushed it aside and sliced it open. Inside, membranes formed several chambers. Morels are hollow, with just one chamber. She poked through the morels until she found another wrinkled one and sliced that open. Again, multiple chambers.

She turned off the heat on the saucepan and covered it, then did the same with the stockpot. She dumped the morels on the cutting board into a pot and put the lid on.

She sighed and stood looking at the cutting board with her hands on her hips, fuming.

Rivka looked over. “What’s up?”

“False morels. Not so good,” said Sunny. She caught Andre’s eye and waved him over.

Andre concurred without hesitation that all the sauce and all the mushrooms should be discarded. He thanked Sunny sincerely for noticing the problem, said they should send a runner out for more mushrooms, and then moved on to talk with another chef who was signaling for his attention.

“He’s pretty calm for someone who almost served toxic mushrooms—his toxic mushrooms—to a restaurant full of his best customers,” Rivka said.

“He did the right thing and he did it authoritatively and gracefully,” Sunny said with appreciation. “All we can do now is wait. I don’t know what they’re going to find at four o’clock on a
Sunday, but we can’t get by with just these.” She poked at the few remaining chanterelles she had picked.

All the runner brought when he returned was a few pounds of supermarket mushrooms and a dank bag of shiitakes. Sunny held up a button mushroom to Rivka.

“This is not good,” Rivka said.

“Hang on, I’ll bet they’ve got a few cans of cream of mushroom soup in the pantry,” said Sunny sarcastically. “That’ll fix it up!” She felt like she was going to laugh or cry, maybe both.

“Let’s just hope they keep the wine flowing out there,” said Rivka.

Sunny went into the pantry and came back with a bottle of white truffle oil. “White gold to the rescue.”

Three hours later, they put up the last serving of fettuccine, upending the stockpot and scraping it to get at the sauce. A waiter came by with glasses of wine. Rivka ticked hers against Sunny’s and drank. Her face glowed with sweat.

“Who are we doing this for again?” she said.

“The Napa County Open Space Coalition.”

“Let’s just write them a check next time.”

“Done,” said Sunny. She smoothed her bangs to the side with her fingers. “You didn’t happen to bring the evil fire sticks, did you?”

“I did.”

“Let’s go. I can definitely justify one after that ordeal.”

They walked through the kitchen to the back patio and pulled up chairs at a long plank table under a tree. A heat lamp hissed overhead, warding off the chill.

“Do you think we pulled it off?”

“Maybe,” said Sunny, striking a match. “It was not our best work, that’s for sure. But you can get pretty far on heavy cream
and butter.” She exhaled. “Not to mention truffle oil. I’m just happy we didn’t poison anyone. I can’t even think of it.”

“What if you weren’t the one handling the morels? What if nobody noticed before it was too late?” said Rivka. “Somebody could have died, right?”

“Probably not. The potency varies. I’ve never heard of anyone dying from them, but I certainly wouldn’t want to take the risk. Apparently people eat them in Sweden and Norway all the time, but I’ve always been told they’re highly toxic. They actually have the same chemical as rocket fuel. Plus the poison builds up in your system, so maybe you’ve been eating the occasional false morel mixed in with your regular morels your whole life without a problem, then one day you take a whiff of the steam while they’re cooking and drop dead.”

“Rocket fuel in your fettuccine,” said Rivka, shaking her head.

Sunny sat back, watching the smoke trail up from the cigarette and feeling the short, sweet wave of relaxation wash over her. She called it the squeegee effect, the way nicotine passed through her mind, wiping it clean for a minute or two before a rain of thoughts pattered over it again. They listened to the muffled clatter of pots and clink of dishes from the kitchen. Their dish might have been a disaster, but at least it was over. At least nobody was going to get sick. And who knows, maybe no one noticed that there were hardly any mushrooms in the mushroom sauce.

“I think I might try out one of those showers before dinner,” said Sunny.

“What, and waste a perfectly good layer of kitchen funk?” said Rivka, stubbing out the last of her smoke. “I feel like I’ve been dipped in duck fat.”

Family meal,
as the management called staff dinner at Vinifera, started late and went later, often transitioning into a poker game the waiters played until the early hours of the morning. On Sunday night, after service wrapped up for the fundraiser, the staff, both front and back of the house, slowly gathered around the plank tables out on the patio and drank wine. Wide dishes of polenta, grilled vegetables, and roasted meat and fish arrived and were passed around. After an event like Night of Five Stars, there was plenty of good wine left over from tables that had ordered far more than they could drink, leaving bottles standing open and full, ready to be spirited out to the back patio.

Family meal was well under way when Andre Morales finally joined them. Of the several places to sit, he chose the one next to Sunny.

“It’s cold out here, aren’t you freezing?” he said, rubbing her shoulders briskly before he sat down.

They began a hushed conversation about magical outdoor suppers they’d been to, and how at the good ones everyone would linger, talking and sipping wine, tethered to the table in the failing light and unwilling to go inside even when it got cold and dark. When he turned to talk to her, his face was very close.
At those moments, her whole field of vision was his eyes. The rest of the table would bubble up with laughter and rowdy voices, then subside into small, quiet conversations, but it was all background noise.

Remy Castels, the sommelier, appeared periodically, carrying a bottle in each hand and walking up and down the two tables, filling glasses. Once he came out with a magnum of ten-year-old Nuits-St.-Georges in one hand and a tasty six-year-old Bandol red in the other. He seemed to have gained weight and color since Sunny had met him in the wine cellar that afternoon. Now his face was almost cheerful as he went around the table urging people to finish off their glasses so he could fill them with something else. Across from Sunny, a woman with short, spiky hair dyed electric blue at the ends leaned forward to light her cigarette from a tea candle. She exhaled and caught Sunny’s eye. “I understand you ran into some false morels,” she said.

Sunny nodded. “Dried ones. Mixed in with the others in that big glass jar.”

“First the Champagne bottle jinxes us, then there are poison mushrooms in the pantry. This place is getting pretty scary,” said the woman. “I’m Dahlia, by the way.”

“Sonya McCoskey,” said Sunny. She turned to Andre. “Do we know where they came from yet?”

“They would have come from our usual supplier,” he said. “A guy up in Portland. I left him a message about it.”

“I’m not an expert but I can tell the difference between a false morel and a real one,” said Sunny. “It would surprise me if a person who makes his living selling mushrooms would make that kind of mistake.”

“Yeah, but who knows who he has working for him,” said Andre. “He certainly doesn’t pick everything himself. Most of the suppliers get their mushrooms from the seasonal crews that
come through town every winter. I’ve always wondered how reliable they are.”

“You mean the mushroom gypsies,” said Dahlia.

Sunny sipped her wine. “I learned to cook from a woman who said you should always know exactly where every ingredient comes from. That ideally, you would be familiar with the actual place it came from. We always visited the local farms and orchards. She liked to see exactly where everything was grown. She would taste every ingredient before she used it, and taste every dish before she served it. Of course, you can’t do that in a place this big.”

“Are you talking about Catelina Alvarez?” said Rivka.

Sunny nodded.

“We do that here,” said Andre. “The expediter tastes practically everything that goes out.”

“Not every plate,” said Dahlia.

“Not everything on every plate, but he spot-checks throughout the night,” said Andre. He looked at Remy, who’d just brought out a bottle of golden Château d’Yquem Sauternes to general approval.

“Who sent that out, Nathan?” asked Andre.

“No, it is compliments of Eliot,” said Remy.

“Eliot sent out a bottle of Château d’Yquem? The same guy who suggested we charge people for extra bread? What’s the occasion? Is he feeling okay?”

“I don’t ask questions, I just pull the cork and pour,” said Remy, his intonation only very slightly flavored by a French accent.

Andre drained his glass and held it out for a splash of the sweet dessert wine. “Where is Nathan tonight? I didn’t see him.”

“I don’t know. He never showed up,” said Remy.

“I thought tonight was unusually peaceful,” said Dahlia.

“Maybe he’s finally decided to leave us alone and go live at some other restaurant,” said one of the guys down the table.

The bartender, Nick, who Sunny had seen on the telephone that afternoon, had been sitting quietly at the end of the table for some time. Now he said, “He never called for his car, either. It’s still out there where I parked it last night.”

“That’s odd,” said Dahlia. “He never stays home all day. Did anyone try to reach him?”

“Eliot called, but there was no answer,” Nick said.

“He never answers his phone,” said Andre.

“He’s probably hung over,” said Nick. “He was feeling pretty good when I took him home.”

“If Nathan Osborne stayed home every time he was hung over, we’d never see him,” said Andre.

“Who is Nathan Osborne?” asked Sunny.

“One of the owners of the restaurant,” said Andre. “The guy with all the special tubs in the walk-in. He got a DUI a few years ago, so now he won’t drive his car if he’s had anything to drink, which is good, except that it means somebody here has to drive him home practically every night, which is bad.”

“The guy needs a chauffeur,” said Nick.

“Why does he need a chauffeur when he has you?” said Remy.

“Pipe down, Frenchy,” said Nick, reaching for a glass of wine that had been sitting on the table, unclaimed, for some time.

“Wait, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Dahlia, stopping his hand in mid-air.

“Excuse me?”

“Give me that.” She stuck her fingers in the glass and removed what looked like pine needles, evidently from the tree they were sitting under, and dumped the wine out on the ground.

“I was going to drink that,” said Nick.

“I know. Did you see what was in it?”

“Your fingers, for one thing. And a little roughage. It’s good for you.”

“Not that roughage. That’s a yew tree,” she said, pointing up. “The Celts called it the Tree of Death.”

“Dahlia is our resident Wicca priestess,” said Andre.

“I’m not a priestess,” said Dahlia. “And I’m pretty sure I don’t deride your beliefs, at least not to your face.”

“I am not deriding anything. You’re so touchy,” said Andre.

“That’s three, you know,” said Dahlia.

“What’s three?” Sunny asked.