A Berry Baffling Businessman

by A. R. Winters

  “Right,” she said, answering some question I hadn’t heard asked. She pulled out her phone and held it up in front of her. She panned it from one side of the room to the other before walking out and giving herself a tour of my very, very empty home.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Preparing.”

  “For what?”

  “Taking you shopping.”

  There wasn’t any more discussion to it than that, and a few minutes later I found myself back downstairs in the kitchen. Except this time, there was something different. This time there was a skinny, hippy-looking gray-haired fellow vigorously stirring a large bowl of thin batter.

  “Jonathan!”

  Zoey let herself out through the kitchen’s back door.

  “Hey, boss!” he said, smiling big. Then his smile fell away. “Am I fired?”

  “Not unless you want to be.”

  “Phew!” he said, smiling again. “I guess I’m not fired, then. That’s a relief, ‘cause I’ve been studyin’ up and I got all kinds of ideas!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like pecan cinnamon rolls and breakfast burritos. I’m making pancake batter right now.”

  I was suddenly very glad that I’d gone last night to restock the pantry instead of putting it off until today. With plenty of staple ingredients to work with, Jonathan would have customers coming in and out in droves.

  He stopped stirring and pinned me with a serious look. “Boss, I’ve been hearing rumors. You found a new dead body, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, Jonathan… Have you been gone that long? I did find a murder victim, yes, but I’d really rather hear about you. Where have you been?” What I really wanted to ask was what had been going on.

  Jonathan’s brows pinched together as he focused his gaze on the big bowl of batter he was stirring. Then, finally, he said, “I want to tell you, boss, I really do, but I can’t yet. I made a promise. It’s not one I can break.”

  There was nothing I could say to argue with that. Making someone a promise was a big deal, and it filled me with relief. If Jonathan’s absence had been about promises, then it must have been about helping someone in some way. “You’ll tell me when you can?” I asked.

  “I give you my word,” he said, and I smiled, because he’d more than demonstrated that saying that meant something to him. They weren’t just words. It was a vow.

  Jonathan took over the open grill with his world-class pancakes and I got to work making three different kinds of quiches. I had to keep putting them back in the oven to get them cooked all the way through, but I eventually got them there. Once done, I handed them over to Jonathan to add to the breakfast offerings.

  After that, I started prepping food for the lunch crowd. I put four whole chickens in the oven to cook. Then I found a recipe online for a beef and barley stew that included turnips in addition to a host of other root vegetables. By the time I got all the ingredients prepped and thrown into a pot big enough to bathe in, the chickens were done. Actually, they were overdone. It didn’t hurt anything, though, because I turned them into chicken salad with lots of mayo, walnuts, and sliced grapes. There was enough going on in it that the slightly dry overcooked meat was barely noticeable.

  A newly rested Zoey was back by mid-morning, and I was ready to go. We had a killer to catch, and the café was in good hands with Jonathan at the helm.

  “We can’t go,” Zoey said.

  “What?” I imagined Zoey’s car firebombed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sebastian’s here. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh…” That was a turnabout. He hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in talking to me when we’d found him at the Cornish’s party out at the Camden Falls lodge.

  I studied Zoey’s face.

  Nothing. No emotion.

  But she wasn’t fooling me. I knew that still waters ran deep. Her feelings for Sebastian were intense. She just had them buried.

  “You up for talking to him?” I asked. She’d bowed out last time.

  She gave a simple nod. It was enough.

  I loaded up a tray with cups of coffee and plates of the remaining spinach, feta, and sun-dried tomato quiche and then headed out into the café. Sebastian was sitting at the same table where we’d sat and talked after I’d found him standing where his father’s body had been found.

  He didn’t look good. He was still pale and his dark circles had darkened further. He didn’t look like he’d slept in days, and the way he looked at the quiche, I wondered if he’d eaten. There was no gaiety in him. It was a stark difference to how he’d look at the Cornish’s party.

  With great politeness, he waited until I’d unloaded the tray and Zoey and I had sat before he picked up his cup and took a sip of coffee.

  “I want to apologize for yesterday,” he said. “I was rude. Brusque, even—I was brusque. I shouldn’t have talked to you that way.”

  I felt like there was an elephant standing right behind me, trumpeting in the air at what he wasn’t saying. He’d been “brusque” because he hadn’t wanted me to talk to Daria. He’d wanted—very adamantly—for me to leave her alone.

  “You had a lot on your mind,” I said.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. I took a bite of the quiche, and then he did the same. His brows went up. “This is… this is”—I held my breath in anticipation of what nice thing he was going to say—“salty.”

  I exhaled and frowned. Mine wasn’t salty.

  He took another bit from a different spot. “Oh, I see now. It’s bland here. Not enough salt.”

  Drat! I hadn’t mixed the ingredients thoroughly enough. I resisted the urge to hit my forehead on the table.

  Despite the complaints, Sebastian continued to eat. “Not bad,” he said halfway through.

  “What else?” Zoey asked. “Why are you here?”

  I blanched at Zoey’s directness, but it did the trick.

  “You’re right,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t come here just to apologize. I want to explain what I was doing at the Cornish celebration.”

  “You’re dating Daria Cornish. You were there as her date,” Zoey said.

  “Um, no. I mean, yes. Daria is my girlfriend. My father didn’t know, and her father doesn’t know.”

  “What would your father have done if he’d found out?” I asked.

  Sebastian shrugged. “I don’t know. Disown me? It doesn’t matter.”

  “The man’s dead,” Zoey said. “It matters.”

  Sebastian flinched but retained his demeanor. “No, what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d disowned me. I’ve been getting trust fund payments since I was eighteen. I made some nice investments, and I don’t live lavishly. If he’d disowned me, I would have been sad, but I wouldn’t have been ruined.”

  I wondered if Daria could say the same. Seemed that if Sebastian’s father had found out that Daria and he were a couple, the next person who would have found out would have been Daria’s father.

  “So you’re independently wealthy,” I said. “Is Daria?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about those things.”

  “What have you talked about?” Zoey asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sebastian said, raising his voice. “We talk about stuff. Boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.”

  “Does she know you feel that way?” Zoey asked.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Forget all that. I want to talk to you about why I was at the Cornish celebration.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to give him the chance to spread his propaganda on a little thicker. He’d already had his say about why he’d been there when we found him at the party.

  “Where was Daria last night?” I pressed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where were you?”

  “When?”

  “Between 1 and 2 AM.”

  “At the B&B, asleep.”

  “Alo
ne?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Asleep?” I asked, wanting him to confirm it again. I didn’t want him coming back later saying that he'd actually been awake on a video call with Daria during the time that someone was trying to set my apartment on fire.

  “Yes, asleep,” he answered, exasperated.

  Now there was no way he could provide Daria with an alibi. He didn’t appear to have any inkling about what she’d done.

  “Look,” he said, “I was at that party because I had to be at that party. I want you to know that. I’m still grieving my father. I’m not looking for a good time. I’m… I’m… I’m swamped. You have no idea. He had his fingers in pies I never knew about. A newspaper, several restaurants, three different produce distribution centers, wood mills, a shipping container manufacturer, and even a television station. His lawyer faxed me paperwork on where he had put in a bid to own part of a satellite. A satellite! What did he want with a satellite?”

  I had to admit, that was a pretty eclectic collection of investments. I could understand his interest in shipping containers, distribution centers, and wood mills. Ollie had owned the premier packaging company on the East Coast. Those companies either provided base packaging materials or focused on moving products from one place to another—an activity that generally needed a package.

  Looked like Ollie was a shrewd businessman.

  “Why did he own stock in a newspaper company, restaurants, and a TV station?” Those were as far out there as the satellite.

  Seb shrugged and shook his head. “Pop liked having a say in how things would go. He was mostly laid back. That’s how he liked people to see him, but really, he was only laid back if he had enough control to make sure the situation was going to go the way he needed it to. Then he was fine.”

  “And if he didn’t have control?” Zoey asked.

  “Then he’d figure out what angle he could work so that he could gain control. I guess that’s why he had his fingers in so many pies. There was always some string he could pull, some favor he could call in.” His shoulders slumped and he hung his head. “It’s one of the reasons I never told him about Daria. I knew he’d ruin it for me. I knew he’d find a way to pull somebody’s string somewhere to make it harder and harder for us to stay together. I wanted to tell him. I did. I just couldn’t.” He snapped his fingers and leaned in. “This is what I’m talking about. When we were kids, Pop wanted to take me and my brothers out to a restaurant once, and he tried to reserve a back room on short notice. They wouldn’t do it, so he bought up a majority of the restaurant’s shares. He held meetings there left and right after that, all on short notice. Not to be mean, but because he could and he wanted to make sure they knew he could. It would have been like that. He wouldn’t have been able to handle not being in control of what direction my life took with Daria. He wouldn’t have been able to gain enough influence over her.”

  “So just because he couldn’t get the seating he wanted, he bought interest in multiple restaurants?” I couldn’t imagine someone trying to do that with my café. I’d tell them to take a hike, but maybe that was because I had some control freak issues of my own.

  “Oh, yeah! He had majority shares in two different Burger & More outlets, in Muumuu’s, Smolder, and Lava Joe’s.”

  “In Smolder?” I asked, wanting to be sure I’d heard him right. “The one in Chicago?”

  “Yeah, and a lot more than that. He had a majority share in a lot of restaurants. Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.”

  “Smolder is Chef John’s restaurant,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Chef John, the guy who catered the packaging conference.”

  “Oh, yeah… I don’t know the employees. I know the people at the packaging hub and the main office, but that’s it.”

  “Why majority shares?” Zoey asked. “Why not a minor share?”

  Seb shrugged. “Not sure, but the numbers weren’t adding up. I’ve got an accountant looking into things now. We suspect that Pop awarded shares to key people, like the chef, maitre d’, and manager at a restaurant. To incentivize performance.”

  Zoey pushed her chair away from the table. “We have to go,” she said. “Where’s Daria and where is Robert Cornish? We need to talk to both.”

  Seb gulped. “Daria’s not part of this. Neither one of them are.”

  “Only someone who knows who the murderer is could say that with any conviction,” Zoey said. “Do you know who killed your father?”

  Seb dropped his gaze and shrank in his chair. He shook his head with the merest of movement.

  I leaned forward to close as much distance between us as I could. “Sebastian, do you know for sure that Daria didn’t kill your Pop?”

  Without looking at me, he shook his head no. Then he got up and walked out the door.

  “Let’s go,” Zoey said. “We need to talk to Robert Cornish—then we’re going shopping.”

  Chapter 26

  “Do we know where Robert Cornish is?” I asked when we got to Zoey’s car.

  She pulled out her phone and then swiped through some screens. Then her eyes went wide. “You’re not going to believe this. Robert Cornish is at the hospital.”

  “Somebody tried to kill him, too?” We needed to make a big list and start marking people off. Whoever was still alive at the end of it all was the killer.

  “No, Larry’s been tweeting. Robert’s visiting Lara.”

  “Did he know Lara?”

  “I don’t know, but he took her a dozen pink and yellow tulips.” She held up her phone so that I could see the photographic proof. The flowers were stunning. Too stunning, and too personal.

  “We gotta go,” I said. “I want to get to the hospital before he leaves.”

  I couldn’t count the number of traffic laws Zoey broke getting us there. She took some back roads and side streets that I hadn’t known existed, and she took a detour through somebody’s backyard.

  We did a mad sprint to the hospital’s main doors as soon as she got us there, and we didn’t slow down until we were in sight of the ICU. But we needn’t have hurried. Robert Cornish was sitting in a chair next to Larry and didn’t look in a hurry to go anywhere. As for Larry, he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on when we’d seen him the last time. He hadn’t moved from his watchful spot.

  Robert Cornish looked up at us. There was no recognition in his eyes. He was something of a silver fox. He had a stylishly trimmed beard and everything about him spoke of money in some small way that was hard to put a finger on. Even simply sitting there, his very presence seemed to demand attention. He might as well have been sitting at the head of a table in a boardroom.

  “Kylie… Zoey… You came back,” Larry said, smiling, as he stood to shake our hands. “This is Bobby Cornish,” he said as he sat back down. “Bobby, this is Kylie and Zoey.”

  “Hello,” Bobby said, and offered his free hand to shake. His other arm cradled the tulips. “Are you friends of Lara’s?”

  How to answer that? We weren’t even there to see Lara. We were there to grill Robert for answers.

  “We were with her when she collapsed,” Zoey said. “We wanted to know how she was doing.”

  “She’s doing much better!” Larry said. “They say she’s really coming along. They might even move her out of ICU to a regular room in a day or two.”

  Suddenly, my shoulders were lighter. I was surprised at how relieved I felt that she was going to be okay. I hadn’t even realized I’d cared.

  “How are you doing, Larry?” I asked, concerned. I sat down on the other side of Robert. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees so that I could see past Robert to Larry.

  “I’m good.” He chuckled. “Actually, I’m great.” He wore a smile from ear to ear. “The lawyer was here to see Lara. Oliver left her a bunch of stock in his company.” Something in my expression must have given him pause, because his bright and cheery disposition took on a sudden humbling. “Ohhh
, ah… I’m really sorry about what happened to Oliver. It’s just that I thought I was back to not doing so great when he died because I figured his son, Sebastian, wouldn’t keep me on. But when I talked to Lara after the lawyer left, she said she wanted me to head to Mexico.” His smile was back, full blast. “She wants me to open a marketing firm aimed at expatriates. She’s going to come down and run it with me when she feels better, but she wants me to leave right away—as soon as the police will let us—and get things set up.”

  “She’s going to fund it with her inheritance?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I think that’s the plan. It’s great!” He seemed to remember the full breadth of the situation again and once more dimmed his internal glowing light of happiness. “I mean, you know, I’m really excited about it. I think it’s a great opportunity.”

  Right…

  I turned my attention to Robert. “You’re here to see Lara?”

  He nodded. “I haven’t had the chance to pay respect to Oliver. I don’t even think the police have released his body yet, so I’m here pay respect to the woman he wanted to marry. Least I could do.”

  “Were you and Oliver close?”

  “We’d known each other for over forty years. I suppose you could have called us close. We knew each other. Sometimes hated each other, but we did know each other. It was wrong what happened to him. Wrong.” He looked down at the flowers in his hands, and I wondered what he was doing still sitting here.

  “Will they not let you back to see Lara?”

  “He’s waiting. They’ll only let one person back at a time,” Larry answered for him. “But people only get a few minutes. The nurses don’t want her worn out.”

  I glanced at the flowers Robert held. They probably wouldn’t let her keep them since she was in such a controlled environment, but I was sure she’d be happy to see them nonetheless.

  “Robert, where were you the night that Oliver died?” Zoey asked.

  I cringed. No easing into the questions by her. It was a good thing I usually did most the talking.

  “Excuse me?” Robert replied. He seemed taken aback at Zoey’s bluntness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, eager to smooth his ruffled feathers. “I own the café where Oliver’s body was found. We’re trying to piece together what might have happened.”