Death in Four Courses: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (10 page)

Bill shrugged and wiped his face on his sleeve, looking as forlorn as I’d ever seen him. I hoped he was overreacting. After all, the cops had let Eric go after a short conversation, right? Maybe this mess involved one of his therapy patients, in which case he wouldn’t be allowed because of professional ethics to divulge anything. Even to Bill.

“Okay if I try to talk to him?”

Bill shrugged again. “You can try.”

I popped up, crossed the porch, and went through the kitchen, Toby bouncing behind me, his toenails clacking on the Dade County Pine floor. Remnants of dinner had been abandoned on the speckled gray granite counter—a nice piece of grilled salmon, barely eaten, potato salad, and
haricots
vert
s. I continued down the hall to the guys’ room and tapped on the closed door.

“Eric? It’s Hayley. We’re all worried. Is there any way I can help?”

I paused to listen but heard nothing. Possible he was snoozing already, but not likely. He was a night owl and a restless sleeper, even in the best of conditions. Besides, Bill said he’d just arrived home. No one drops off to sleep that fast. Except for my ex-boyfriend, Chad, after you-know-what. Which had always been a point of contention and not worth one nanosecond more of my brain time. I shook my head to clear those unwelcome thoughts and tapped again, with a little more force. “Eric? We’re here to support you, whatever you’re going through.”

“Thanks for that. I appreciate you guys coming over. I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t open the door or offer to talk things over. What was the right thing to do? Would it help to remind him I’d been through something similar? Maybe he needed one more little nudge.

“We could brainstorm—”

“Right now what I need is space.” His voice sounded flat and hopeless and utterly definite.

“You got it,” I answered, and retreated down the hall
to the others, stopping first to put the potato salad into the fridge. It looked too good to abandon to the ravages of botulism. Then I dipped a finger into a small bowl of mustard sauce—light and spicy with a touch of honey—considering what to say to Bill. Just the facts, I supposed.

“Like you said, he needs space.” I wrinkled my nose and sat back down. Toby jumped up beside me and pawed at my hand until I scratched behind his ears. “This isn’t like him. Isn’t he the guy who always, always wants to talk things over?”

“Always,” said Bill. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the cushion behind him.

Mom started to straighten the magazines on the coffee table, looking as helpless as I felt. There wasn’t enough of a mess to clean up to contain her anxiety.

“Do you have butter and chocolate in the house?” she asked. “If anything will bring him out—”

“Fudge pie will,” I said, moving Toby off my lap and getting up to help. If Mom and I had one thing in common, it was the urge to cook and eat during a crisis. Even the whiff of crisis brought a surge of recipes to our minds. I wasn’t the least bit hungry after our enormous dinner, but just making the pie would feel therapeutic. And it would be something tangible we could leave behind as a token of our love and support.

I cleaned up the remnants of their dinner, tucking the plates and silverware into the dishwasher and scraping a few leftovers into the dog’s bowl. Toby rooted through the food, pushed the green beans to the side, and snapped up the fish. Meanwhile, Mom melted
three squares of unsweetened chocolate and a bar of butter in the microwave and began to beat some eggs. Bill paced a few laps around the living room and collapsed back onto the couch.

“I can’t understand how the Jonah Barrows business would have anything to do with Eric,” I said as I greased a glass pie pan with butter and turned on the oven. “What could possibly lead them to even consider the possibility that he knew something about Jonah’s death?”

“Or killed him,” Bill called from the couch, his face darkening like a summer afternoon thundercloud.

He sprang up and strode off the porch into their small garden. We watched him lope down the path past the potted basil and purple impatiens, then past the three-tiered fountain and the ceramic-tiled concrete bench, over to the towering traveler palm and an even taller stand of black bamboo. A gust of wind blew, rustling the stiff stalks of bamboo and causing them to rattle like old skeletons. Bill bolted back up the stairs, Toby circling through his feet, yapping with excitement.

“Maybe he did know him. Why else would he be acting so weird? If the police call you in for questioning about a murder, why wouldn’t you tell them everything you know and be done with it?”

I could answer that question from personal experience. I’d had nothing to do with the murder of Kristen Faulkner, but under the pressure of the police investigation, I’d felt guilty as hell. If they’d had time to press me a little bit longer before I hired my buffoon of a
lawyer, I probably would have confessed. My skeevy lawyer told me there have been hundreds of lawsuits filed—and won—against police departments for the kind of psychological pressure that caused innocent people to buckle.

“You think it would be easy—you didn’t do it, so just say so. But you panic. And you start feeling and acting guilty even if you aren’t.”

“But why wouldn’t he simply say he didn’t know the man? Why lock himself away like this? It makes him look bad.” Bill leaned on one of the barstools facing the kitchen counter, looking pale and shaky. “Remember how he came down with that terrible headache at the party last night and had to rush home? Since when does he get migraines? What if wasn’t a headache at all? What if he fought with Jonah Barrows and something terrible happened between them?”

Mom dropped the whisk and clapped her hand to her mouth, her eyes shining with sudden tears. “Oh my gosh, this is my fault. I’m the one who told the detective that Eric went to the grapefruit bitters table right around the time that man died.”

I shook my head. “If he didn’t know Jonah, he certainly wouldn’t have killed him.”

I stirred the beaten eggs into the cooled chocolate and added vanilla and flour, feeling sick to my stomach and, for once, speechless. Maybe he
was
involved somehow.

“Surely it was an accident, then,” said Mom. She poured the batter into the pan and slid the pie into the oven. “Our Eric would never hurt someone on
purpose. And he’s not the kind of man who would run away from trouble.”

“In seven years together, he’s never shut me out,” said Bill. “No matter how bad things got. I’m beginning to wonder if I know him after all.” Bill got up, snapped a leash on his dog’s collar, and stormed from the house.

Mom and I waited the twenty-five minutes it took the pie to bake, hoping Bill would return and Eric would get lured out of his room by the incredible scent of warm chocolate. But neither happened. We pulled the pie from the oven and hunkered on the back porch, listening to the night rustling, waiting for the dessert to cool. Finally we served ourselves small triangles and loaded dollops of French vanilla ice cream on top. Not that we needed rich pie on top of what we’d already consumed at Santiago’s. But it was hard to know what else to do. We both picked at our third dessert of the night.

Mom dropped her fork on her plate and pushed it away. “It feels like rain,” she said. “I hope he didn’t take the dog too far.” She sighed. “Should I pack up and come home with you?”

As cramped as Miss Gloria’s houseboat would feel with three of us shoehorned in, I had to agree it was time for Mom to clear out. Whatever was going on with Eric, entertaining a houseguest would not be an asset in hashing things through. Even well-meaning and goodhearted company like my mother. She would straighten the kitchen and cook little treats and natter cheerfully
about the weather and the interesting people she’d seen on the streets of Key West, but right now the guys needed privacy.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I said. She went into the spare bedroom to pack while I called a cab and alerted Miss Gloria and left a note for my friends.

B and E: Mom came home with me for tonight at least. Let us know what we can do. The pie tastes amazing with vanilla ice cream. And maybe a shot of whiskey on the side
. I drew a little smiley face and a row of
x
’s and
o
’s and stuck the paper to the refrigerator, where it would be hard to miss.

At the sound of the taxi’s horn, I carved off a piece of the pie for Miss Gloria, wrapped it in foil, and helped my mother carry her stuff out to the front stoop. Ten minutes later, the taxi driver dropped her at Tarpon Pier and I pulled in behind on my scooter. As we walked up the finger, the moon glided out from its cover of clouds, causing sparkles of light to dance on the water like a thousand pearls of tapioca. We could hear the deep cowbell clank of the wind chimes on the Renharts’ boat, and the answering silvery notes from Connie’s front porch. Miss Gloria bounced out on the deck to meet us and I hoisted the suitcase from the dock to her porch.

“What fun having your mom visit—it’s a hen party!” Miss Gloria said, clapping her hands. Ninety-seven pounds of exuberant welcome. She reached for the foil packet Mom was carrying and peeked inside. “And good heavens, you brought chocolate too!”

Hard to imagine all was not right with the world.

Just after six the next morning, I dressed quickly and scribbled a note for Mom, telling her to hire a cab and meet me at the conference at nine. Then I grabbed my backpack and headed out on my scooter in search of Cuban coffee. It felt strange to be riding in the morning darkness, a little lonely, a little spooky—and chilly. It had rained half the night, and then the front cleared out, leaving colder air and wind. I wished I’d worn an extra layer.

I was feeling bone-dog tired too. Miss Gloria’s couch was as lumpy as I’d expected and my housemates had
snored through the night in stereo. And I was edgy—Bill had texted me around midnight, thanking me for being understanding and respecting their privacy. And for the chocolate pie, which he rated five out of five stars. But he didn’t mention Eric, nor had there been any word from him.

On top of that, I had gotten a worrisome text message from Bransford:
Thx for dinner. Sorry can’t say more about your friend. Encourage him to hire a lawyer.

The idea that Eric could really have been involved with Jonah’s death was eating me alive. Why else would Bransford think Eric needed legal representation? Only slightly less worrisome was the probability that my mother had tipped the police off to Eric’s possible association with Jonah. I hadn’t wanted to make her feel worse than she already did by jumping on that bandwagon, but she
had
fed that information directly to the detective.

I sputtered across White Street and down Southard to Five Brothers and parked my scooter on the sidewalk. The small, idiosyncratically stocked grocery and sandwich shop was already busy with early risers: construction workers, retirees, cops, and the homeless. The smell of powerful coffee and grilling bacon and egg sandwiches on Cuban bread lured me to the back corner, where I ordered one of each, thinking I could save half of the sandwich for Danielle. I moved aside to wait for my order and nearly tripped over Officer Torrence.

“Good morning,” I said. “You’ve got the early shift.”

“Crime never sleeps,” Torrence said, baring his teeth and straightening the badge clipped to his shirt.

We’d spent so much time together the night Jonah Barrows died. Had he warmed up to me the slightest bit by the end? Would he tell me anything more than Bransford could about the case? Probably better to ask in general terms.

“Any progress on solving Jonah Barrows’s murder?”

“We’re following leads,” he said. “I suspect there will be an arrest soon.”

“That’s it?”

He laughed, wiping a skim of steamed milk off his mustache. “You don’t quit, do you?” He bit into his sandwich and chewed, and then tucked the remainder into its foil wrapping. “You should try one of these—delicious.”

I just stared.

“I’m sure you want to know about your friend. Mr. Altman is a ‘person of interest,’ as they say on TV. I believe that’s as much as I’m authorized to divulge. But it’s hard to dispute physical evidence.” He shrugged, gathered up the remains of his coffee and sandwich, and started out of the shop. “Have a nice day!”

My food and coffee arrived shortly after he left. I packed it into the crate on the back of my scooter, determined not to ruin the morning by fuming over the Key West Police Department. If they were about to arrest someone, and Eric was a person of interest, was he about to get arrested? And what physical evidence could he possibly be talking about?

If I could keep my focus, I’d have a couple of hours at the office before the conference started to rough out a tribute to Jonah, begin the piece about the conference
luminaries, and think about my review of Santiago’s Bodega. Then I could concentrate on asking questions about who—besides Eric—might have had it in for Jonah. I hiked up to the second floor and retreated to my office, really a cubbyhole the size of a small walk-in closet, and booted up my computer. I unwrapped the sandwich and began to eat, the melted cheese oozing over the crispy bacon and egg, the fresh roll toasted a nice light brown. After wolfing down half the sandwich and licking the bacon grease off my fingers, I started to work. But the thoughts I was grasping for were floating just out of reach. I had words and sentences and even a couple of paragraphs. But nothing anyone would consider insightful. Or even publishable. Nothing that would snatch my precarious job from the slavering jaws of Ava Faulkner. So I ate the second half of the Cuban sandwich, the part I’d planned to save for Danielle, and buried the wrappings in my trash can.

Around seven thirty I heard her whistling in the reception area, then the whoosh of water as she filled Mr. Coffee, followed by his answering burble.