Rest in Pizza (17 page)

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Authors: Chris Cavender

BOOK: Rest in Pizza
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Maddy frowned. “Do you mean to say that you’re not even going to try to stop her?”
“You heard what she said,” I replied as I walked past her and into the Slice. “Janet wasn’t in any mood to be reasoned with. There’s nothing I can do about the woman, so why not make some pizza?” I looked down the promenade and saw three college-aged students coming our way. “Unless I miss my guess, there are our first customers of the day.”
We all walked inside, and I was thankful that I had the kitchen to myself. Janet’s threat had disturbed me, not because I had anything to hide, but because a false rumor could kill a business quicker than the truth could.
I’d meant what I’d said, though. Whatever Janet said, there was nothing I could do to stop her from spreading things about me around town. In her mind, I’d broken her trust first, so she clearly felt justified doing whatever it took to get me back.
I just hoped it was a storm that I could weather, and prayed that it wouldn’t sink me and my business forever.
I didn’t think our lunch break would ever arrive, but finally it was time to close the Slice for an hour. I’d instituted the policy a while back, and hadn’t regretted the loss of income at all. The freedom it gave us to get away from pizza for an hour was priceless, and Maddy and I usually took our break together, unless one of us had a particular errand to run or a boyfriend to meet. We were both free this break, but I didn’t plan on using the time to eat. I had a plan, and if I knew my sister, she’d go right along with me. With Maddy, the more chance of getting caught doing something we shouldn’t be doing, the better. I hoped Bob knew what he was getting himself into by proposing, but then again, that only mattered if Maddy said yes. I knew her better than anyone, including Bob, and I had no idea how she was going to answer him, or even when.
Maddy brought back a bin full of dirty dishes. “That’s the last of it,” she said, the relief clear in her voice. “I already let Greg go. I hope that’s all right with you.”
“It’s fine,” I said. We didn’t need him for what I had in mind. “Do you feel like doing something dangerous and just skipping our lunch today?” I asked her.
“Do you even have to ask?” she replied with a smile.
“Don’t you even want to know what it is I have in mind?” I asked.
“If you’re in, then I’m in. You should know that by now. So, who are we going to kidnap? Or are we going to rob a bank, instead?”
“Actually, you’re not that far off. I thought we might do a little breaking and entering,” I said.
Maddy nodded. “Okay, it’s not as risky as I thought, but that’s fine. Who exactly are we going to burglarize?”
“I thought we might check out Benet’s room and see if we can uncover any clues,” I admitted.
“Don’t you think they’ve moved his stuff out by now?”
“I don’t think Patrice is thinking that clearly at the moment,” I admitted, remembering how soused she’d been when I’d last seen her.
“Maybe not, but Jessie and Oliver seem to be on top of things.”
“What’s it going to hurt to take a look for ourselves?” I asked. “I’m willing to bet that Kevin Hurley and his crew are finished with the room, or he wouldn’t have come calling over here this morning asking for my help.”
Maddy grinned. “That whole thing was a little surreal, wasn’t it?”
“I still can’t believe it happened, but I’m not going to get used to us sharing information. I have a feeling this was a one-time thing.”
“Well, you certainly made the most of it while you had the chance,” Maddy said. “I know you hate the idea of dirty dishes just sitting around, but what do you say to leaving them and doing them later? We might not have all that much time to nose around if we finish everything up here.”
I looked at the stack of dishes, and then realized that Maddy was right. If we did them now, we’d lose precious time investigating, and I wasn’t sure how much of that we had to squander. “Sold,” I said as I took off my apron and grabbed my car keys. “Let’s go see what we can discover.”
“I had no idea it would be that easy,” Maddy said as her apron joined mine on the counter.
“You know how I get sometimes. Come on. I’ll drive, and you can spend the time coming up with a way to get us into Benet’s room.”
Maddy laughed. “Trust me, it’s not going to be all that hard. Steve Jenkins works the front desk over there, and that boy’s got a crush on me a mile wide.”
I knew Steve loved our pizza, and visited the Slice at least once a week, but I had no idea he had any romantic inklings towards my sister. While Maddy was younger than me, she was still a good fifteen years older than Steve, and he didn’t look the type to go after older women.
“If you’re sure,” I said.
“Trust me. We’re golden.”
 
“Hey, Steve,” Maddy said, offering the skinny young desk clerk the biggest smile she had in her arsenal. “How are you doing today?” Per my sister’s request, I stayed off to one side so she could talk to the front desk clerk without me looming over them.
“I’m fine, Ms. Spencer,” he said as he took a step backward, though there was a desk between them. “What can I do for you?”
“We need a favor,” she said, lowering her voice a little and giving him a conspiratorial little wink.
Steve looked around as though he were being offered contraband. “What kind of favor did you need? I can’t just give you a room, you know.”
Maddy laughed. “It’s nothing like that. We just need to get into a room for a few minutes.”
“Is it your room?” he asked. “Because if it is, someone forgot to put your name on our registration sheet.”
Maddy shrugged. “Not exactly, but it’s okay. Nobody’s going to mind,” she said as she reached out and touched his hand lightly.
“Sorry, but I can’t do that. I’d like to help, but if I did, I’d lose my job,” Steve said as he pulled his hand away. Whatever hold Maddy might have had over the young man was clearly strictly confined to the restaurant.
“We need to see Antonio Benet’s room,” I said as I stepped forward.
“Why do you want to see
his
room?” Steve asked, clearly alarmed by our request. “The police just released it an hour ago. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”
“We won’t take a thing,” Maddy said. “I promise.”
“That’s not it,” Steve said. “I couldn’t give you the spare key to his room even if I wanted to.”
“But you said the police already released it,” I pushed.
“They did, but a man’s up there right now packing everything away. He had a note from Mrs. Benet, so I thought it would be all right to give him the key and let him clear the room so we can rent it out again.”
“What’s the room number?” I asked, a new urgency in my voice. I hoped we weren’t too late, since I had an idea of who was packing Benet’s things but didn’t know if the man up there was a legitimate representative of the widow.
“He’s in room twenty-four,” he said. “It’s on the second floor.”
I’d figured that out all on my own. “Thanks for the information. The next time you come in, your pizza’s on the house.”
“Thanks,” Steve said. “I really appreciate that.”
“I could have gotten the information on my own,” Maddy said as we walked up the stairs.
“I know you could have,” I said. Maddy was a lovely woman, but she might have overestimated her appeal to younger men, though I wasn’t about to tell her that.
As I suspected, I saw Oliver Wills through the open door of Chef Benet’s room.
What I hadn’t expected to find was him cramming a batch of papers into a briefcase, and the chef’s clothes and other belongings scattered all over the room’s floor. Had he found the place that way, or had the chef’s assistant been looking for something in particular before we’d arrived? I had to stop him, at least until I could uncover what he’d been looking for.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked as I stepped inside, with Maddy close on my heels.
Chapter 16
“O
h, it’s just you two,” he said as he turned and looked at us. “Patrice asked me to collect her husband’s things for her. She couldn’t face coming back here.”
That might have been true, but then why did he look so guilty as he explained it to us?
“Is that his briefcase?” I asked as I pointed to the leather satchel.
“Yes, of course it is,” he said, and then tried to hide it from me.
I looked down at the embossed
OW
on the side. “Funny, I was under the impression that his initials were
AB
. Oliver, are you taking those papers for yourself, or are you going to give them to the widow?”
He looked at me as though I were a pesky gnat that was in serious need of swatting. “Okay, you caught me. Sure it’s my briefcase, but why shouldn’t I take them? They’re the latest recipes I just finished creating for him, and they’re not going to do him any good now, are they?”
“So, then, you’re stealing from a dead man?” Maddy asked from across the room. I saw that she’d separated from us and was doing a little snooping of her own. Why had she given up that position of power, though, by commenting on Oliver’s actions, thereby drawing his attention to her?
He looked over at her, and then said glumly, “You can’t steal what belongs to you already.”
“But didn’t Benet already pay for them?” I asked, moving in closer so that I could touch the briefcase lightly. I had to get Oliver’s attention back to me so Maddy could keep digging.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. He paid me peanuts for my treasures,” Oliver said with open contempt for his former boss. “I gave him gold, and he somehow managed to spin it into straw.”
“Kind of like a reverse Rumpelstiltskin,” I said. There was a stack of cooking magazines on the side of the desk where Oliver had been searching, and I pretended to be clumsy when I knocked them to the floor. That should buy my sister a little extra time. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I’ve never been so clumsy in my life.”
I bent forward and began collecting them, but with my newly feigned clumsiness, I managed to scatter them even more across the floor.
Oliver put the briefcase down, though I noticed that he still kept it close to him, and then started to help me pick the magazines up. It took all I had not to peek at what Maddy was doing, but I didn’t want to give Oliver any ideas, and I especially didn’t want to point out that while he was helping me, my sister was doing as she pleased unsupervised.
I delayed it as long as I could, but Oliver and I finally managed to gather everything and replace it on the desk, despite my active attempts to keep him from doing it. “What are you two doing here, anyway?” he asked after he collected the briefcase again.
Fortunately, I’d been working on an answer to that question since we’d spotted Oliver there ahead of us. “We were here on a pizza delivery, so we thought we’d swing by and see if anyone had taken care of the chef’s belongings. It was pretty clear that Patrice was in no shape to do it, and we wanted to give her a hand.”
“She
has
been drinking a lot since we first heard the news,” Oliver admitted. “I’m worried about her.”
I searched his eyes to try to see if there was something deeper there when he spoke of Benet’s widow, but I didn’t see anything. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t hiding something, but it encouraged me to believe that they were just friends, and not something tawdrier. “Shouldn’t you be with her right now, if that’s the case?”
“Jessie’s taking care of her while I do this,” Oliver explained. “It looks like I’m not the only one who’s going to be out of a job now.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Well, it’s pretty clear that if Benet’s not on the air, he doesn’t really need an assistant, does he?” There was the hint of a slight smirk as he added, “He doesn’t need an executive producer either, so Jessie’s been scrambling, trying to come up with another show to pitch.” He looked absolutely smug now.
“Do you think she’ll actually change her mind about you?” I asked. I’d heard Jessie before, and I didn’t believe it for a moment. Then again, if she had another use for Oliver, I could see her stringing him along until she got what she wanted. That didn’t necessarily mean that she was a murderer, though, just a shark. From what I’d read, that made her good at her job, and nothing else.
“You’d be surprised. The last time I spoke with her, I have to admit that I was pretty persuasive. She’s starting to come around,” Oliver said with a grin.
“Well, good luck to you with that,” I said as I hugged him. He’d been about to turn around to see what Maddy was up to, and I knew that I needed to stop him. I couldn’t exactly see what she was getting, but it was small enough to fit into her purse. I’d have to find out later what she’d gotten. For now, I needed to keep distracting him.
“If you two will excuse me, I have more work to do here,” he said as he extracted himself from my grip.
“The more the merrier, I say. We’ll stick around and lend a hand,” I said. I looked over at my sister, and whatever she’d been trying to retrieve was most likely in her possession now. “Isn’t that right, Sis?”
Maddy nodded and offered Oliver a big, if insincere, smile. “We have at least half an hour to help you before we open the Slice back up for our dinner crowd.”
“Thank you, but I really do need to do this myself. Thanks for the offer, but I’m kind of pressed for time right now.”
Maddy and I reluctantly let ourselves be led out of the hotel room, and Oliver closed the door firmly behind us. Not only that, but a second later, I actually heard him flip the bolt as well.
We got down the hallway before I asked Maddy, “What did you find?”
She looked around to be sure that Oliver hadn’t followed us, and then pulled a crumpled envelope out of her pocket. “I don’t know if it’s important or not,” she said as she handed it to me.
I took the envelope, covered in a grafitti of random scrawls and numbers, and pulled the letter from inside it. As I smoothed it out on my leg, I saw that it was from the network that Benet had claimed was hiring him.
But the contents of the letter told a much different story.
Dear Chef Antonio Benet,
First of all, thank you for coming to us with your new idea for the proposed cooking series, Around the World with Dinner and Drinks. While we believe that this idea has some basic merit, we aren’t sure that your proposal fully captures the essence of what one of our shows should be, so we are respectfully declining.
We wish you continued success on your current show on your current network.
Sincerely,
Hiram J. Wannamaker
CEO, Food Bites, Inc.
Maddy had been reading over my shoulder. “That lying little sneak. He was just holding his own network up for more money, wasn’t he? Benet had no intention of leaving.”
I looked at the letter again, and saw that it had been dated six days before. “Maybe, but what if Benet thought the new show was in the bag when he told Jessie he was leaving? How hard would it have been for him to go back to her and tell her that he’d been wrong?”
“I’ve got a hunch that this was just confirmation of something he already knew,” Maddy said. “Either way, it was information not everyone had access to, and he must have tried using it as leverage.”
“I’m just glad we found it,” I said. “Maybe we should go talk to Jessie and see if she knew that Benet was just bluffing.”
“Don’t forget: we have to deal with Patrice, too,” Maddy said. “Is there one chance in ten that she’s sober?”
“I’m afraid that might be asking for too much.”
Maddy shook her head. “I understand getting lost in booze if you’re torn up inside over losing someone you love, but honestly, she didn’t seem all that upset by Benet’s murder.”
I remembered how dead inside I’d felt when I’d lost Joe, and I knew that I never wanted to feel that way again. “I can’t really say. All I do know is that everybody handles it differently,” I said.
Maddy grabbed my arm. “I didn’t mean to say that. I was in no way comparing Joe to Chef Benet.”
“I know that,” I said as I tugged my arm away. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
“Then why are you crying?”
I reached up and brushed a cheek. Odd, I hadn’t even realized that there were tears on my cheeks. “It’s nothing.”
“I upset you,” Maddy said. “That’s always something.”
“Forget about it, okay? Let’s just go talk to Jessie and Patrice.”
Maddy nodded, accepting my offer to move on and forget this exchange had ever happened. “You’ve got it. Any ideas on how we should approach them?”
I considered it a moment, and then said, “I think I’d like to split them up, if it’s possible.”
Maddy didn’t answer until we made it all the way to my car. “I can come up with something, but there’s something I need to know first. Do you have one in particular you’d like to tackle yourself?”
I’d thought about it, and I didn’t have to give it another moment’s consideration. “I want to take Jessie, if you don’t mind.”
She laughed. “Wow, it didn’t take you long to pull that trigger, did it?”
“I’m sorry. If you want Jessie, I’ll take Patrice.”
She frowned. “No, I think we’re better off doing it the way you suggested. You never know, maybe if I start drinking with her, she’ll confide in me.”
“Don’t get too soused,” I said. “We still have a full night’s work at the Slice, and I need you sober.”
“How sober?” she asked with a grin.
“Enough so I don’t have to worry about you wielding knives in my kitchen.”
“I’ll do my best, but maybe you need to plan on doing some of the later prep work on the veggies yourself.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.
By the time we got to the hotel, Maddy and I had worked out the basic framework of a plan.
“Are you good?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied. “The only problem is, I still don’t know how we’re going to separate them.”
“There’s only one way I know how to do it,” Maddy said. “We’re going to have to use the truth.”
“You’re right. I have to let Jessie know that I’ve got something she needs to see without letting Patrice overhear us,” I said.
“That’s what I’m thinking. Don’t give her the letter too quickly, though. Milk it for what it’s worth, and see if you can find out if she already knew about Benet’s rejection before you show her the letter.”
“Can I at least show her the envelope to tease her with it?” I said, joking.
Maddy groaned a little. “That thing is such a mess, I’m surprised you even kept it. Was there actually a grocery list scribbled somewhere on it?”
I nodded. “I figured it must have been part of some kind of recipe Benet was working out on his own. If we can believe Oliver, I doubt that it would taste very good.”
“Well, at least it shows that he was trying. I have to give him credit for that.”
“I’ll give him that,” I answered as we neared the door, “but that’s all I’m going to give him.”
Taking a deep breath, I knocked once, waited a minute, and then knocked again.
Jessie finally came to the door, and she tried to give us a smile, but for a split second I’d seen the tension she’d been feeling before she managed to hide it. “Ladies, what brings you two here again so soon?”
“We need to talk,” I said to Jessie.
“Patrice and I have nothing more to say,” Jessie replied.
“Funny, I thought you might want to discuss this,” I said as I held the envelope up so she could see her competitor network’s logo in the return address.
“What is that?” she asked as she reached out her hand for it.
I pulled it back, and then tucked it safely back into my pocket. “It’s what we need to talk about.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t leave Patrice alone,” she said as she looked back at Benet’s widow.
“I’ll stay with her,” Maddy volunteered. “She doesn’t need to hear what her husband was up to before he was murdered. There’s no use putting the poor woman through anything more than we have to.”
Jessie thought about it, and then nodded. “Let’s take a walk, Eleanor. You’ve got five minutes, and then we’re coming back here.”
I agreed, but before Jessie would leave, she turned to Maddy. “Don’t let her drink too much.”
“Should she even be drinking at all?” Maddy asked in all seriousness.
“Honestly, no, but when I tried to get her to stop, she wouldn’t. Just try to limit it, okay?”
“Okay,” Maddy said.
After the door was closed, Jessie looked back at it. “Are you sure they’ll be all right in there?”

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