Rest in Pizza (8 page)
Authors: Chris Cavender
“Would you do it?” Cindy asked me.
“I suppose I could,” I said reluctantly. I couldn’t wait until this was over, so in a way, finding Benet was in my favor. The quicker he gave his talk, the faster I could reopen my pizzeria and get life back to some semblance of being normal.
“Thank you,” Cindy gushed, and disappeared back into the crowd. I had to wonder if one of the reasons she’d left so abruptly was to steal my opportunity to change my mind.
I grabbed Maddy’s arm and started pulling her toward the door.
“Hey, I don’t have to go, too, do I?” she protested.
“Sorry, it’s your sisterly duty,” I answered.
“How did you come up with that? It’s not exactly playing fair, is it?”
“Hey, blame the sister’s handbook,” I said with a smile as we left the bookshop. “If I have to tackle that arrogant jerk by myself, I might not trust myself to behave.”
“In that case, I’m definitely coming,” Maddy said. “Could I hang back and watch the fireworks?”
“Come on,” I said. We got away from the crowd and started walking down the promenade to the Slice. The crowd thinned to nothing by the time we were in front of the pizzeria, and I wondered if I shouldn’t try some kind of promotional gimmick myself to drum up a little business sometime. We could certainly use the income, and the exposure, too.
I reached into my purse for my key, only to realize that I’d loaned mine to Chef Benet.
“I need your key, Maddy,” I said.
She was staring into the big window up front, and I had to repeat myself to get her attention. “Maddy? Did you hear me?”
“That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?” she asked as she kept looking inside.
“What?” I asked, trying to see around her.
“Is that Benet? He’s just sitting at a table with his back to us.”
“Maybe it’s part of his process,” I said.
“Do you think?”
“Who knows?” I asked. “Give me your key so we can get him and get this thing going.”
Maddy handed me her key ring, and I found the right key and opened the door. As I handed her keys back to her, I said loudly, “Come on, Chef, you’re late.”
He didn’t respond to my voice. In fact, he didn’t even move a muscle.
“Chef, it’s time,” I said, this time more forcefully than before.
I suddenly had had enough of his prima donna attitude. I put a hand on his shoulder and shook him a little. “Enough with the attitude. Let’s go, buster. You’re keeping everyone waiting.”
And then I looked over his shoulder and saw one of my kitchen knives sticking in his chest all the way to its hilt.
I felt his neck, but not only was there no pulse, his skin was eerily cold to the touch.
“Get the police chief, Maddy,” I said. “Someone murdered Chef Benet.”
Chapter 7
M
addy didn’t move, though. She just stood there staring at Benet. “Eleanor, are you sure he’s dead?”
addy didn’t move, though. She just stood there staring at Benet. “Eleanor, are you sure he’s dead?”
“There’s no doubt about it in my mind, but if you want to check for a pulse yourself, be my guest.” We were wasting time, and I was done debating what our next course of action should be. “Maddy, if you don’t want to go get Chief Hurley at the bookstore, you can always stay here with the body and I’ll go get him myself.”
That snapped Maddy out of her funk. “No, that’s okay. Thanks for offering, but I like your plan better.”
Before my sister could get out the door, I thought about the best way to handle it, and then suggested, “Ask him to come over here, but don’t tell him why. We don’t want to cause a panic if we don’t have to.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and then Maddy was gone, leaving me alone with the dead body of a man I had never liked much in life.
I tried not to look at Benet, but it was hard not to. It was no secret to anyone that I hadn’t been a fan of the man, but even he had to have deserved better than he’d gotten in the end. It couldn’t have been a pleasant way to go, facing your killer as they stabbed you face-to-face.
A thought suddenly struck me. What if the killer was still in the pizzeria? We’d never even made it into the kitchen, and there was a lot of room to hide back there. By sending Maddy off to get Kevin Hurley, I’d left myself vulnerable and open to attack. The dining room was clearly empty, except for the dead body, but that still left too many places for a murderer to hide.
I was walking softly toward the door that separated the two areas when I heard a voice behind me ask, “What exactly is it that you think you’re doing?”
“Chef Benet is dead, and the killer might still be here,” I said softly to Chief Hurley as he walked into the Slice.
He drew his revolver, and then motioned me back behind him. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me by the door, or on the other side of it, but I wasn’t going to leave him alone, not that I had a chance if an armed murderer managed to overpower him.
I listened carefully as he disappeared into the kitchen, taking in every imagined whisper of sound. I must have been holding my breath, because when the chief came back out, his weapon was holstered. I nearly passed out from the strain.
“Nobody’s back there. You’re all clear,” the chief said as he duplicated my earlier effort and checked for the chef’s pulse.
“He’s cold to the touch,” I said.
“I still have to check.”
Once the chief of police was satisfied that the chef had put on his last demonstration and cooked his own last supper, he looked at me. “Eleanor, did you touch anything?”
I thought about it, and then asked, “Are you kidding me? I’m here every day, remember?”
“I’m talking about since you walked in the door and found the body,” he explained.
“Let’s see.” I thought about what I’d done since Maddy and I had found the chef, and ticked off the items that I could remember touching since I’d been there. “All I can think of are both sides of the doorknob, the lock, and his neck.” I shuddered a little as I recalled the icy touch of his skin, but I buried it just as quickly as it had surfaced. That was one memory I was going to do my best to suppress.
“You didn’t touch the knife handle, though, did you?” Kevin asked as he took his radio out and made a call in code. The only thing I got was “the Slice,” because the numbers he used didn’t mean a thing to me.
“No,” I said simply. “At least not today.”
“Does that mean that you recognize the murder weapon?” he asked as he bent forward to study the handle of the knife.
“It’s one of mine,” I admitted.
That got his interest. “From here, or from home?”
“It’s part of a set I’ve got back there,” I said as I pointed to the kitchen.
Kevin Hurley nodded as he looked around the dining room. “As far as you can tell, is there anything out of place?”
I looked around, but everything looked normal to me. “Not out here. At least not that I can see at first glance.”
The police chief nodded. “Good. You’ve been helpful, but why don’t you go outside and wait with Maddy while I finish up here? She trailed behind me, and I know she wants to see you. I’ll be back out as soon as I can.”
I nodded, happy enough to get as far away as I could manage from the body in my pizzeria.
Maddy hugged me the second that I walked outside. “I shouldn’t have left you by yourself in there,” she said in a rush. “I regretted it the second I walked out. Eleanor, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, there’s no reason to beat yourself up about it. I asked you to do it, remember? Someone had to get the chief, and the other one needed to stay with the body,” I said.
Maddy shook her head, a frown still plastered on her face. “We should have called 911 from the dining room,” she said. “Eleanor, I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but as I went to get Kevin, I realized that we didn’t even check the kitchen. Whoever killed Benet could have been waiting there for you.”
“But they weren’t,” I said, calming my sister as much as I could. Maddy was a rock most of the time. It was only when she felt she’d put me in jeopardy did she ever react the way she was at the moment. I pulled away from her and stared into her eyes. “You didn’t do anything I didn’t ask you to do, and it all worked out fine in the end.”
“Not for Benet,” she said as she glanced back inside the dining room. “Who would want to kill the Chef?”
Who wouldn’t? I thought, one of the most uncharitable things I’d thought recently. I felt ashamed of my reaction, but it was still a valid point. “If you ask me, it might be easier to count the people who knew Chef who might not want to see him dead. The man didn’t exactly exude kindness or inspire love, did he?”
She shrugged. “I feel horrible even thinking it, but I’m honestly surprised someone didn’t do something to him sooner.” Maddy must have realized how that sounded, because she quickly added, “You know what I mean, Eleanor.”
“Trust me, you’re not saying anything that I haven’t been thinking,” I said. “But I don’t know how much of that I should say to the chief. I wasn’t a fan of the man myself, and more than one person heard us arguing. I’m not in any mood to volunteer going on his list of murder suspects.”
“Got it,” she said. “I agree.”
I looked up the promenade and saw Patrice Benet fighting her way toward us through a pair of police officers who were holding the crowd back.
Had someone told her already that her husband was dead?
Jessie and Oliver showed up a second later and were trying to restrain her, but it didn’t appear that they were having much luck.
If anyone was going to stop her from rushing in to see her husband’s dead body, it was going to have to be Maddy and me.
“You can’t go in there,” I said as I blocked Patrice from coming anywhere near the front window of the Slice. “How did you even hear about it so quickly?”
“Someone shouted it out from the sidewalk, and we all heard it inside the bookstore,” she said. Her eyes were pleading as she asked me, “It’s not true, is it? Please tell me they were lying.”
How was I supposed to handle that? I had to wonder who had announced the chef’s murder to the world, when we’d just discovered the body ourselves. Had someone overheard Maddy talking to Kevin Hurley and put two and two together, or had they seen me inside with the body? Worse yet, could the killer have brazenly announced the crime to confuse things as quickly as he could? I’d have to think about that later, but it didn’t help me deal with the problem I had standing in front of me at the moment. Right now, I had a brand-new widow to deal with, and I had to deliver the worst news I’d ever had to in my life.
She must have read my expression, because Patrice broke down right there on the promenade in front of my pizza parlor. I guess my expression of sorrow and sadness must have been enough of an answer for her.
Jessie and Oliver sandwiched her in a hug, more police officers began to arrive on the scene, and most of the folks from the book signing had followed Patrice and everyone else to us. It was a bad day for my pizzeria, an even uglier one for Cindy, but it was honestly a tragic day for Patrice.
And for Chef Benet, it was his last.
“I need to get away from here,” Patrice said as she watched the chief put police tape around the door to the Slice. We’d all moved out of the way and we were now standing farther down the promenade where we wouldn’t bother the stream of officers coming in and out.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t deal with being here right now,” Patrice said, her words coming out between her sobs. She managed to pull herself together, at least a little, and then said in a steadier voice, “Everywhere I look reminds me of Antonio. Can someone give me a ride back to my hotel room?” She frowned again, and before anyone could answer, Patrice added, “No, I can’t go there, either,” she said, giving it a moment’s consideration. “What am I going to do?”
I don’t know what made me suggest it, but before I knew what I was saying, I said, “You can come home with me. It’s not far, and you can have some time to wrap your head around what happened today.”
“I can’t impose on you like that,” she said, almost automatically.
I should have kept my mouth shut then, but I pushed forward. “It’s no imposition. I live alone, so you won’t be disturbed.”
Maddy said, “I hate to interrupt, but Eleanor, can I talk to you a second?”
“It’s fine,” Patrice said. “Go on.”
I stepped away with my sister and asked, “What is it, Maddy? The woman’s in some serious pain. If we can help her, we should.”
Keeping her voice low, my sister said, “Think about this before you do it. For all we know, Patrice could have murdered her husband half an hour ago, and you just invited her into your home.”
“Do you honestly think she’s a killer?” I asked softly as I looked over at her. The woman didn’t look capable of killing anyone, especially by driving a chef’s knife into his chest. Then again, it could have been a crime of passion, facing the victim and skewering him as she watched him die. I had to remember that the killer hadn’t stopped halfway in when, there was no doubt in my mind, the job was done; they’d continued until the knife had been buried all the way to the hilt, pinning Benet to the chair he’d been sitting in like a butterfly on a display board.
“Tell me something. We’ve dealt with murderers before. What exactly does a killer look like?” Maddy asked. “If we’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t tell what someone might do just by looking at them.”
She was making some good, solid points, but I didn’t see any way out of rescinding my offer. “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. What am I going to do now? I’ve already invited her to stay with me.”
Patrice came over to us before we could come up with a solution to my dilemma and said, “Excuse me, but I’m going to have to decline your kind offer. Oliver and Jessie have offered to take me to another hotel. I don’t feel right imposing on you, and I need to be among people I know at a time like this.”
“It’s no problem at all,” I said. I felt as though I’d just dodged a bullet, though from what Maddy had said, I wasn’t sure how sincere I sounded.
“I appreciate that. You understand then, don’t you?”
“Perfectly,” I said. It might have been nice having Patrice close enough to question now that I realized what a good suspect she was, but I didn’t want to have to watch my back in my own home every second I was there, either.
“Don’t worry. We’re all staying, at least until the police are done with us,” Oliver volunteered. “We’ll be at the Ridgecrest Inn in Mountain Lake. It was one of the places I scouted out when I came here a few days ago.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said. A thought occurred to me that I needed to be around these people more, since they were all the most likely suspects in Benet’s murder. “Let me bring you some pizza tonight,” I said. “It’s the least I can do, and none of you are going to feel like going out.” And it would offer me a chance to talk to them again. It didn’t take a genius to realize that with Benet being murdered in my restaurant, some folks were going to think I had something to do with it, and I couldn’t afford that. I wished I could say that it was the first time I’d found a dead body in the Slice, but I would have been lying.
“That would be comforting, somehow,” Patrice said.
“Excellent. I’ll see you at seven,” I said.
After they were gone, Maddy said, “That’s a great idea and all, but what makes you think Chief Hurley is going to release our kitchen in time for us to follow up on your offer and make pizza tonight?”
I did my best to smile at her. “Maddy, we don’t have to use the oven at the Slice. I can make a good pizza at home, even if we don’t have access to our regular things. Joe and I bought a portable brick-lined pizza oven before we ever opened the Slice, and I’ve still got it sitting in the basement. It makes fine pizzas, trust me.” I touched my sister’s shoulder. “Thanks for stepping in before Patrice agreed to come home with me. I don’t know what I was thinking making that offer.”
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