Restaurant Weeks Are Murder

by Libby Klein

  Money started changing hands between the seniors. Mrs. Davis waved her fingers. “Pay up.”

  Gigi lost the ability to stand and dropped to her knees.

  Adrian threw his arm out and pointed at Tim. “Aha! Finally, you admit it!”

  “Yeah, I admit it. I was twenty years old. I was young and stupid. It was a horrible mistake that I’ve been ashamed of for years. But you still graduated second in your class with honors. I didn’t ruin your life, you’ve done that all on your own. You’re so full of yourself that you can’t handle the slightest criticism. If your scores suck, it’s because you argue with the judges and insist you know better.”

  “I do not!” Adrian started to protest, but the judges were all nodding in agreement.

  Tim stomped his foot forward, and Adrian shrunk down. “And I had nothing to do with the pantry or any other sabotage this week. I’m just trying to make the best food I can to represent Maxine’s and get my picture on the cover of South Jersey Dining Guide. I don’t even know what you’re talking about with this blackmail stunt.”

  Adrian held the letter up prepared to complain some more.

  “The envelope is from me.”

  The audience gasped, and the camera swung in my direction. I sighed. Here we go.

  Ivy picked up the handheld microphone. “Are you blackmailing Chef Adrian?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What’s in the envelope?”

  Adrian opened his mouth, snapped it shut, and then shoved the envelope into his chef coat. “Nothing. It’s not important.”

  Tim crossed his arms and flexed his biceps. “A minute ago, you were trying to ruin my reputation over that envelope. Now, what’s in it?”

  The arena hushed. The room was quiet enough to hear the feedback from Mr. Sheinberg’s hearing aid.

  Ivy applied some pressure. “Come on Adrian, what’s in the envelope?”

  Sawyer yelled from the stands. “It’s a security camera photo and receipt from Handyman Haven that shows Adrian bought a hacksaw last Saturday night.”

  The audience gasped again, and seniors started passing money down to Itty Bitty Smitty.

  Aunt Ginny hollered back from the judges’ table. “I called that one! I get half!”

  Adrian was ready to bolt. “I can explain. It’s not what you think.”

  Louie blew a gasket. “You tried to frame me for rigging Poppy’s oven!”

  Roger’s thumbs moved like lightning, tapping out the updates for social media.

  Gia was on Adrian like thunder. He grabbed him by his chef coat and pulled Adrian to his toes. “Did you fix Poppy’s oven to explode? Did you? I will make you regret the day you were born.”

  Momma was at Gia’s back swatting him with her apron and chattering reproof.

  The blood drained from Adrian’s face. “No! No no no no no. I didn’t. I didn’t touch Poppy’s oven or try to frame anyone for it! I only cut the line on my own range. That was all!”

  Oliva spouted a line of obscenities in Italian. Gia translated, and cleaned it up. “Did you tamper with the thermostat on the deep fryer?”

  “No, I swear. Look, I came in late Saturday night after we’d all been sabotaged and cut the line on my stove. I knew some of you thought I had sabotaged the pantry, and I wanted to throw suspicion off of myself—because I didn’t do it. But I didn’t touch anything else. Not Saturday, and not since. Really. Look, I stashed the hacksaw in the walk-in behind a box of turnips. Go see for yourself.”

  Ivy took off running for the pantry with Frank wheeling the camera behind her. The chefs all crammed in the small doorway to watch Ivy check the huge refrigerator. She bent over boxes of carrots and lettuce and fished around behind the turnips. She turned and looked into the camera, then pulled up a small hacksaw.

  Adrian breathed a sigh of relief. “See. The police found the hacksaw that was used on Poppy’s oven in Louie’s truck yesterday. It was taken into evidence.”

  Vidrine added, “Plus it was a lot manlier.”

  Philippe laughed. “What is zat, a toy hacksaw?”

  The color rushed back into Adrian’s cheeks. “No, it’s a regular manly hacksaw. It’s just—travel size.”

  “I think that’s the one the Girl Scouts use,” Louie snickered.

  Everyone followed Ivy back into the arena where she held the tiny hacksaw up for the audience.

  When they’d stopped laughing, Mrs. Dodson called out, “Is he the one who poisoned Bess with Horatio’s spoon?”

  The audience chatter kicked up again.

  Adrian held up his hands, pleading. “I didn’t. Food is my life. I would never resort to manipulating it to harm anyone. No matter how much of a low-life-slug-critic Horatio Duplessis is. And I didn’t even know the lady who died. I’m innocent. I’ll take a lie detector test. You can watch my every move on camera. See for yourself.”

  “Why should anyone believe you, Adrian?” Tim asked. “You’ve been lying about the sabotage all week.”

  Adrian rounded on Tim. “Are you going to call me out for lying after you’ve held on to your lie for twenty years?”

  Tim backed down.

  I made a face at Ivy. “Maybe the person responsible for sabotaging the ingredients should come forward so everyone can stop accusing everyone else.”

  Ivy shook her head no.

  I nodded mine yes.

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I switched the labels in the pantry.”

  Mrs. Dodson whooped and tapped her cane. Seniors started passing money down to her.

  Adrian was so shocked you could have knocked him over with a gentle breeze. “But—”

  Ivy implored the chefs. “I wanted to drum up some drama for ratings. I didn’t know you would all get in such a twist and start sabotaging everything else.”

  Louie called out, “Who sabotaged the appliances?”

  Vidrine added, “And who killed Bess?”

  No one was willing to fess up to either, and the room grew rambunctious.

  Ivy held her hands up. “Okay, settle down everyone. We don’t have all the answers yet. All we know is that Adrian sabotaged himself.” Ivy crooked her finger at Frank to follow her with the camera and took the microphone over to interview Adrian. “Tell us why you did it. Why would you sabotage your own oven to try to win the competition?”

  Adrian wouldn’t answer, so I answered for him. “Because he’s bankrupt.”

  The audience jabbered amongst themselves and checked their dailies. One of the seniors from Mother Gibson’s church jumped to her feet and did a little hallelujah dance. “It’s me! It’s me! I said he was really broke.” She collected her money and waved it around.

  Horatio twisted his mustache. “That isn’t news. It’s common knowledge that he’s broke. He’s in debt up to his eyeballs. For golly sake he still lives at home. Everything he owns is in his mother’s name, and Helen Baxter rules with an iron fist.”

  Adrian pleaded with Ivy. “You don’t know my mother. All she cares about is the bottom line. She’s the Baxter in Baxter’s By the Bay. She has no eye for artistry. All she cares about is profit. If I don’t bring Baxter’s bottom line up, Mother is shutting us down. My whole future rides on winning this competition.”

  Mother is really his mother.

  Adrian looked much smaller with the turbo knocked out of his engine. “This contest was my last chance to drum up a success. But the sabotage, then the poisoning, then the other poisoning. They’ve ruined my business.”

  Horatio blurted out, “Your business can’t be more ruined by this event than by what you’ve done to it yourself.”

  Adrian closed the distance between himself and Horatio in seconds. He slammed his hand down on the judges’ table. “You ruined me with your horrible reviews of Baxter’s. What do yooze have against chefs? Why yooze got to be so critical?”

  Horatio raised his palms in the air. “I’m a critic. It’s my job.”

  Adrian shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped away from the t
able. “Why do you have to be so mean about it?”

  “Huh,” I breathed out loud to myself.

  “Huh, what?” Tim asked me.

  “If Adrian was trying to murder Horatio, he would have attacked him just now. He didn’t even touch him.”

  “Maybe that’s because of the camera recording his every move.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Adrian isn’t a cold-blooded killer. Maybe he’s all talk.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Ivy moved to the center of the arena and put her hands in a time-out position. “Okay everyone, let’s take ten then come back and regroup.”

  Philippe was incredulous. “Take ten? Why are we not getting zat cop in here? He is clearly your killer.”

  “We don’t know that,” Ivy answered. “And I’m not going to get the police involved based on circumstantial evidence.”

  Philippe threw his apron off and stormed out of the arena.

  I ducked after him. It was time to fry this fake Frenchie.

  I followed him down the hall toward the main foyer and the Hall of Honors. He strode to the back of the foyer and turned a corner. There was a door with an Emergency Exit sign lit overhead. Philippe pushed his way through the crash bar, went around the hall, and entered a room full of vending machines. He smacked the side of a vending machine, kicked the bottom corner with his foot, and a Twinkie popped out.

  “How did you know it would do that?”

  Philippe jumped. “What do you want with me, madame?”

  “How about the truth?”

  “Zee truth about what?”

  “For a start, I saw the morning show footage.”

  Philippe looked away. He unwrapped the Twinkie and shoved it in his mouth. When he was done chewing he said, “They made me look like a fool.”

  “I know,” I soothed. “It wasn’t right.”

  “They did not care about what I was making, or how to caramelize onions. They only want to look cute in zee apron on camera. Then they humiliate me by spitting my food out like it was bad. I will never do another TV spot again.”

  “No one could blame you for that.”

  “Is zat why you corner me down here? To ask me about this ancient history?”

  “Did you slip Ashlee some peanut butter to get even?”

  “My God, woman! Who do you think I am?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I am Philippe Julian, Chef de cuisine. I study under zee master, Pierre Escargot at Le Cordon Bleu. I do not kill people.”

  “Mm hmm. Préférez-vous les recettes traditionnelles?”

  Philippe screwed his face to a pained expression.

  “I asked if you prefer the traditional recipes.”

  Philippe shrugged. “I know.”

  “I ask because every one of your recipes is a Julia Child masterpiece. I would know because I’ve seen every episode of The French Chef, and I’ve read both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking cover to cover.”

  Philippe’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

  “Everything you’ve made this week has had very minor substitutions, but I’d recognize the recipes anywhere. I’m willing to bet that you were making a boeuf bourguignon with Moroccan spices and raisins before we were called to a time-out.”

  Philippe blushed crimson.

  “Tu ne parles pas français.”

  Philippe just stared at me.

  “C’est oui, ou no?”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “I said, you don’t speak French, do you?”

  Philippe remained silent.

  “The thing is, Le Cordon Bleu only started translating classes to English in the late eighties. That was after you would have attended.”

  Philippe’s ears started to glow hot. He lost the accent. “What is your problem with me?”

  “And Pierre Escargot is a character from a ’90s variety show on Nickelodeon. You’ve never even been to Paris, have you?”

  “Why do you care so much about what I do, lady? I haven’t been giving you a hard time. Why can’t you mind your own business?” He punched the vending machine on the side. It released a Kit Kat this time.

  “I think it’s fascinating that you know just the right spot to do that.” I looked around the room. “And that you knew where this room was. Especially since the lobby upstairs marked this hall as an emergency exit only. Didn’t Bess say she recognized someone in the competition? Yet all the other chefs went to top-tier culinary schools or were self-taught. You’re the only one who lied about it.”

  Philippe kicked the trash can. “Fine! Enough! I went here.”

  “Why isn’t your name on any class list? I searched a decade of yearbooks for you online last night.”

  Philippe dropped his face in his hands. “Isn’t it enough that I had to be mocked by that witch every day? I won’t put up with your mocking too.”

  “I’m not mocking you. I just want you to come clean.”

  “I failed, okay? I flunked out of community college. So, what!” Philippe started pacing the tiny room. “Some of the most successful chefs never went to school at all, like Vidrine and Louie, as you already pointed out. Being classically trained doesn’t make or break you. Just look at Adrian Baxter, Culinary Institute of America, second in his class, and he lives with his mother, flat broke.” He tapped his chest. “I reinvented myself. I’m successful now. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Unless you killed Bess Jodice for recognizing you.”

  Philippe turned on me. “I wish I had. Because whoever killed her, did me a huge favor. It was only a matter of time before she figured out who I was, and tried to ruin me. She was a bitter woman who loved to taunt the weak and sensitive. She made my life a living hell. She constantly humiliated me on her Wall of Shame, and then she failed me. Oh, but she loved my dishes in the contest. If she had remained a judge, I would have won for sure. That was going to be my sweet revenge. No, I didn’t kill her. I wanted to rub her face in my success.”

  “Wall of Shame? What is that?”

  “Her Wall of Shame is where she posted failing grades on her special bulletin board. Took pictures of your flops and hung them up to embarrass you. Picked apart your recipes until you were terrified of ever holding a whisk again. She was vicious. You would think she invented cooking the way she judged who was worthy to practice the art and who wasn’t. She didn’t just mark you down. She destroyed you. You don’t know what I had to do to get over her torture and move on with my life. It was always my dream to be a chef. To create delicious masterpieces. People would line up for hours waiting to dine in my restaurant. So, I memorized the cookbook of the greatest chef of all time.”

  “Why don’t you just make up your own recipes?”

  Philippe flew at me, spittle flying out of his mouth. “Because I can’t! I don’t have that gift. I can follow a recipe, but I just can’t make my own.”

  “Of course, you can. You’ve been doing it all week.”

  Philippe straightened. “What?”

  “Making up a recipe is the same as playing with new ingredients and putting that twist on something familiar. It’s being creative with flavors to turn the usual upside down. Like swapping out chip steak for ham in a quiche Lorraine. Or using coconut oil in place of shortening. Swapping like for like. Adding a pinch of this, a dash of that.”

  Philippe’s eyes narrowed as he considered my words.

  “You just lack the confidence.”

  “Having the Devil as a professor will do that to you.”

  “She sounds perfectly horrible.”

  “She was, but what she did to me was only a fraction of what she was capable of.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There is one student who will live in infamy for giving his class food poisoning. She tortured him worst of all. He didn’t fail, he just disappeared one day, never to be heard from again.”

  “You don’t remember his name, do you?”

  “Remember it? It was on our exams
. His portrait hangs on the Wall of Shame to this day.”

  “What! It’s still here? Why didn’t you say that sooner?”

  “It’s an unwritten rule, you don’t speak that name here.”

  “Where is this Wall of Shame? I want to go see it for myself.”

  “I’ll tell you where it is, but I’m not going down there. Never again.”

  Philippe wrote directions on the back of the Kit Kat wrapper and told me I was on my own.

  I followed his scrawl to the letter. Down the hall, to the left, descend the dark stairwell. Around the corner. Then, through the double doors that say boiler room. There, I found the Wall of Shame.

  It wasn’t the Polaroid snaps of fallen soufflés, burnt pies, or lopsided cakes that caught my eye. It wasn’t the failing exam sheets covered in red pen, the newspaper articles about school competitions that had not been won, or the vicious cartoons mocking students for their mistakes. It was the portrait of a young Horatio that hung in the center of the wall over the name Horace R. Snaarg that took my breath away.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “I knew you’d eventually find your way down here. I tried to warn you to stay out of it. Now you’ve forced my hand.”

  I didn’t have to turn around, I knew that voice. Why did it have to be him? He’d been praising my cooking and encouraging me to follow my dreams all week. He’d given me hope that I had what it took to be a professional chef. Was any of it real, or was he just playing me? My heart trembled with disappointment. “You’re R. Snaarg, the executive producer behind Restaurant Week? It makes sense now. Only the producer would be able to sabotage the equipment, send three people to the hospital, one to the morgue, and still insist the station go on with the show.”

  “You’re a lot sharper than most of the chefs upstairs. They’re blinded by ambition, grasping for fame, stepping on each other to get ahead. You pay attention to what’s going on around you and follow your instincts. I knew if anyone figured it out, it would be you.” Horatio reached a shaky hand and touched the plaque under his picture. “Horace R. Snaarg. Poisoned twenty-one classmates and one grad student with salmonella.”

  I nodded at his portrait. “Is this why you killed her?”