Death is Semisweet (19 page)

“I will do my best to convince that individual to do the right thing,” the doctor said enigmatically.

H
eaven wiped her hands on the kitchen towel draped through her apron strings and picked up the phone.

“Yes?”

“This is Marie Whitmer, from the executive offices at Foster’s.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded tense, worried.

“And this is Heaven Lee, but I guess you know that since you asked for me. We met the day that Claude was arrested. What’s up, Marie?”

There was a pause. “The brothers wanted me to call you and let you know they have decided to cancel the event scheduled for New Year’s Eve. They are afraid that either people wouldn’t attend or if they did attend …” Silence.

“That something bad might happen to them?” Heaven offered.

“Exactly. The Fosters wanted all you chefs to know they will still donate the proceeds of the recipe book sales to the food bank and they hope to have a party at some time in the future, when all this quiets down.”

“I think that’s a good judgment call under the circumstances. No sense in getting other innocent people involved, eh, Marie,” Heaven said, anxious to get back to the walnuts she was frying in olive oil. She made a gesture for Paula Kramer, the pastry chef and baker, to check them.

“Innocent people. Oh, God,” the voice on the other end of the line said, cracking into sobs. “It’s my fault.”

“Marie, what are you talking about? I know it must be hard for you,” Heaven said in her most soothing voice.

“I’ll never forgive myself if poor Claude goes to jail,” she said and then the phone went dead.

“Marie!” Heaven yelled. Was Marie just on edge because her job and her boss were both in jeopardy, or was she trying to confess? The kitchen phone rang again. Heaven considered just letting it ring. It was getting
late and she needed to help with the prep. The café wasn’t open for lunch this week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve but they had lots of reservations for dinner.

She’d never been able to resist a ringing phone.

“What?” she said sternly as she answered, trying to indicate she was a busy woman.

“I’m at your back door. I have to go to the paper store, where we get our tissue and wrappers and stuff. Can you come with me?” It was Stephanie.

“Ha. I wish. I’m coming out,” she said as she hung up the phone and walked out the kitchen door. Heaven slipped into the passenger’s seat of Stephanie’s old BMW which was already parked where the delivery trucks usually pulled up the alley. “I can’t go anywhere. I’m behind. Did you see the outside of the restaurant earlier, before the painters?”

“Oh, yes. I was compelled by prurient interest to drive by on my way to work. I feel like I’ve brought you bad luck. Our whole family is falling apart and somehow you’ve been sucked into the vortex.”

Heaven patted her friend’s hand. “I didn’t really get to talk to you last night, just that call from the car when Iris and I were rushing to get back to Kansas City. Tell me more about your cousin.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes and smiled a half-hearted smile. “After lunch Janie disappeared for a while. I say that now, but I was so worn out I didn’t notice yesterday. Her father and I were taking naps in our chairs and everyone else was playing gin rummy. I think she’d been in the kitchen secretly binging on chocolate cake and all of a sudden she came out, upended a piece of cake in the middle of the card table and raved about how she hated chocolate.”

“At your mom’s?”

“Yes, it was quite the scene. Everyone was telling her to sit down, telling her she must be overly tired, to have some tea. She dodged the whole pack and ran out the back door. The last I saw her she was running down the sidewalk without a coat, jumping into her car and whizzing away.”

“Wow. She’s had a meltdown. How is she today?” Heaven’s mind was racing. Janie had just turned into a prime suspect.

“She’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

Stephanie shrugged. “I mean no one has seen her or spoken to her since she left my mother’s. Her folks are frantic. They had a key and went to her house but it didn’t look like she’d been home. They’ve called the police—”

“But she hasn’t been gone long enough for a missing persons report,” Heaven finished Stephanie’s thought. “I think we should let Bonnie know about this. When she tells the missing persons unit that Janie is involved in two homicides, they’ll start looking for her.”

“But she isn’t exactly involved,” Stephanie said defensively.

Heaven was practically jumping up and down in her seat. “Well, she’s a member of the family and she obviously has problems about eating and chocolate and has a love-hate relationship with the product and her employers that must make her job difficult. Steph, maybe she’s the one who’s responsible for all this.”

“You mean the blimp and Oliver Bodden and the bugs in the candy and all that?”

“And maybe after she left your family she came over to the café and broke the windows and wrote that stuff.
Before I knew she was your cousin I saw her eating a Foster’s candy bar at that body building show I went to at Woodside. She was very guilty looking. Put that together with her former eating disorders and all the family feuding over the company. She could have fixated on destroying Foster’s.”

Stephanie looked sad. She glanced at her watch. “I have to get to this supply house before they close. Will you please call Bonnie?”

“Of course.” She considered telling Stephanie about her conversation with the brothers’ secretary but decided it could wait. Stephanie was overwhelmed right now with all this family stuff and running her own business. “What are you thinking?”

Stephanie put the car in reverse, her foot still on the brake. “I hope Janie is all right. If she’s the one who did all this, and I hope you’re wrong about it, but it does make sense, then she could have hurt herself, maybe commited suicide in a fit of Christmas guilt.”

Heaven got out of the car and leaned her head back in to try to reassure her friend. “Maybe she just went to a cheap motel to gorge on her candy bars. She’ll probably call soon,” she said with a cheery wave as her friend backed down the alley.

She was never going to get her prep work done. The kitchen would be cross with her.

“Heaven, isn’t it time for you to go back to the kitchen,” Murray said, glancing at his watch for effect.

“It’s only six,” Heaven said as she stared at the door of the restaurant. “Did I describe her? Sixties, under five foot five, dark hair …”

“I know, supremely competent.” Murray was able to
finish the list. “Don’t you think this Marie Whitmer will ask to see you if she shows, which I’m not convinced she will?”

“Yes, I guess. I didn’t even actually talk to her. I just left a message on her machine at work, asked her to come in, said it was very important. Stephanie hasn’t called, has she?”

“Not since she called at five,” Murray answered, trying to sound patient. “I’m sorry about her cousin.”

“And her uncles and her whole family. I’m sorry for them all especially now that it looks like Janie was behind all this and framed her own uncle for one of the murders. Or maybe it’s the secretary or dear Uncle David.”

“What does Bonnie say about all this?” Murray asked.

“She said to butt out, that I’d already made somone mad enough to vandalize the café. Sometimes she’s such a cop. She did lean on the missing persons unit to go by Janie’s house and knock on the door, peer in the windows and ask a few questions of the neighbors, not that it did any good. People aren’t real alert about comings and goings around the neighborhood on Christmas Day.”

“I thought you asked Bonnie to be here, so she could swoop in on the secretary if she showed.”

Heaven shrugged. “She had a homicide department Christmas party tonight and she chose that instead. Can you imagine? I’m sure she knows we can handle this.”

Murray couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, yeah. I’m sure that’s just what Bonnie said.”

“Heaven?” a voice called. She turned and saw Kathy Hager standing there. “I just wanted to stop by and thank you for inviting me to your Christmas party. It meant a great deal to me, and I’m sorry I was out of
town. The holidays have been tough for me since Courtney died, so your gesture was really sweet.”

“Of course. I’m sorry you were out of town too. I understand how tough the holidays can be after losing someone.” At that Kathy’s face crumbled. Her lip quivered. She sank onto a barstool near Heaven as if she was unable to hold herself up anymore.

Heaven looked around. Murray had moved away from them and was seating a four top. “Kathy, are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?”

“I’ll be fine. Sometimes it just hits me again, her death, being alone. And it all happened so unnecessarily.” Her voice had turned angry.

Unnecessarily? Heaven didn’t get that. “What do you mean, unnecessarily? Breast cancer is tragic, but what could anyone have done?”

“Well, it’s complicated, but it didn’t have to happen. I know it could’ve been avoided. You see, the company Courtney worked for was bought out by another company. The next day, the very next day, mind you, the company closed the facility she worked at and laid off everyone.”

Heaven shook her head. She’d asked, now she had to listen, although she still didn’t see how a layoff caused a death. “Companies can be so cold. That’s why I’ve tried to never work for big companies. How did this happen?”

“You know how a company is supposed to give you a chance to keep your health insurance? Well, Courtney’s extension fell between the cracks. The policy was dropped and she didn’t know it until they found a lump in her breast. When she went to work here in Kansas City, that breast wasn’t covered in her new insurance because …”

“It was a preexisting condition,” Heaven said. What a sad story. She looked around the room. Had Marie, the secretary, snuck in when she wasn’t looking? “I guess without insurance you don’t get a lot of options in your treatment.”

Kathy smiled bitterly. “And because we were in a same-sex relationship I couldn’t have her on my insurance at the university. She was screwed every way you look at it.”

Heaven had to get to the kitchen. The room was filling up. She changed the subject. “Joe told me you went pheasant hunting. How’d you do?”

“Yeah, up in Nebraska with my son-in-law. I enjoy the heck out of it. We bagged ten pheasants and about thirty quail. It was relaxing to me.”

Heaven thought about her father and brother going hunting at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It tugged at her. Familiar activities make you miss the people that used to do them, especially around the holidays. “Relaxing sounds good. I hope I get to do it again before I’m too old to enjoy myself.”

Kathy jerked her head toward 39th Street. “I just happened to drive by here early this morning on my way back in town and all your windows were boarded up and the place was a mess. You sure did get it back together fast.”

Heaven motioned to the bartender to come over. “It was just surface stuff that could be fixed. Talking about your partner really puts windows and graffiti in perspective. Kathy, I’ve got to get back to the kitchen. Let me buy you a drink. Tony, get Kathy whatever she wants,” she said and made a quick exit, looking at the door one last time, hoping Marie Whitmer would show up soon.

·  ·  ·

J
anie opened her eyes. She must have fallen asleep again and now she was stiff, cold. She wore a cotton blouse and jeans and the place that she’d been taken didn’t seem to be heated. She tried to move her hands, which were tied behind her back. The skin on her fingers was cracked, her knees were skinned, her lips were pulled tight and parched by the duct tape. She hadn’t had any water in days, or was it just a few hours? She rolled over on her face and tried to get up on her knees. Her ankles were also tied together but she had wiggled a little play in the rope. She curved her toes to push against the floor slightly and rose up to her knees, trying to get a better sense of where she was. It was dark but nothing could wipe out the smell. There was paper all over the floor. It crackled as she moved. Even before her captor had turned on the light she knew what was around her. When had that been? The light? The feeding?

The thought of that, the forced feeding, turned Janie’s stomach. She gagged and sank back down on the floor, rolling over on her back and her raw, skinned hands, gasping for air. She could hear someone walking above her. Had that walking been going on all the time, or was it a new sound?

She felt hope and dread in about equal proportions. Where was she and how could she escape?

I
’m a failure,” Heaven stated dramatically. She took another bite of a chocolate-covered cherry she’d found in a box of chocolates on Sal’s counter. Sal’s regular customers gave him holiday gifts.

“You don’t do that right,” Sal proclaimed.

“What right?”

“Eat the chocolate-covered cherry. You have to put the whole thing in your mouth and then bite into it. Everybody knows that.”

Heaven flourished her half-eaten cherry around, getting some of the filling on her hand in the process. “I like to live dangerously, Sal, everybody knows that,” she said, putting the rest of the candy in her mouth, licking the sticky spot on her hand quickly, hoping Sal wouldn’t catch her.

“Stop that and wash your hands in the next sink,” Sal ordered without looking around.

Sal had two hair-cutting stations in his shop complete with barber chairs and running water and those sinks
with indentations for the neck. Sometimes he went back and forth between two customers. Right now he just had the bartender from the biker bar down 39th Street in his main chair, trimming his beard.

Heaven did as she was told and washed her hands.

“Now, what’s this I’m-a-failure bull,” Sal said gruffly.