“What did Ken say?” I asked.
“Ken asked him if he looked in the bathroom. Maybe he took it off in there. So we went into the bathroom, you know, to help him find the watch. He musta seen the look Ken gave me because he got really mad.”
I could just see the three of them crammed into the small bathroom, looking for something that wasn’t there. No way Alan could have become sober and coherent in a matter of thirty minutes, or however long it took Cal to tell Ken, and for them to come back.
“He was still drunk, he grabbed for Ken. He had a good hold on him, but Ken slipped out of it when Alan lost his balance and fell on the floor. Ken ran, but Alan got me by the leg. I grabbed for the door frame, trying to pull away from him and get out of the bathroom.” Cal took a deep breath. “Alan started yelling at me. ‘Did my brother-in-law send you?’ I told him yes, and then with his other hand, he grabbed me by my hair, pulling me up as he stood up.”
“Go on,” Max prompted.
“I tried to get away. Then Alan slipped on water on the bathroom floor, and his head hit the sink pretty hard. He didn’t even try to break his fall. I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Ken. He told me to drag Alan to the balcony and throw him over. No way could I lift Alan by myself, and I told Ken that. So Ken came back to the room, and we picked Alan up and tossed him over the side. I thought for sure he’d land on the deck, but the only thump I heard was when he bounced off the lifeboat.”
“Why kill him?” I asked.
“I couldn’t get in no more trouble. I promised Marvin I’d go straight. I was gonna move in with him in San Francisco, but I had to stop selling drugs and go straight for at least six months. Now he’ll never let me be his roommate. I always wanted to live in Frisco.” Cal whined.
Nick reached down and removed the watch from Cal’s arm, handing it to Max.
“Why rob him?” I asked.
“Why not? He had this sweet watch, there had to be more valuable stuff in the room.” Cal touched his arm where the watch used to be. “And he went on and on about how much money he had. But he didn’t have any money, did he? We searched that cabin and found nothing of value other than the watch. And we only got that cuz I was slick when I pulled it off his arm.”
“Okay, since you waived your right to an attorney, this will all be admissible in court,” Max said.
“Wait a minute,” Nick said. “Didn’t this all happen in Mexican territory?”
Max nodded.
“Then we’re done here. We just need to turn Cal and Ken over to the Federales, or whichever Mexican authorities patrol the high seas.”
Cal screamed at the top of his lungs, “NO! PLEASE! NO!”
Epilogue
Charles
Mimi wanted to tell the rest of the story, but she was too sappy after reuniting with Nick. We didn’t finish the rest of the cruise, disembarking with Nick, Max, Kennard, Calvin, and the Federales. Mimi and I boarded a charter flight with Nick and headed home, while Max stayed behind with his crime scene crew to help the Mexican authorities with their investigation.
I don’t know if Max decided to extradite Ken and Cal back to the United States or decided to let the Mexican government take care of it. I didn’t want to know. And I never wanted to go on another cruise again.
I hoped Alan’s life insurance policy paid off, and Kendra could move on. I’m not sure about Mimi, but I never saw any of the Ohio State crew, Kendra or the Wallis’s again before disembarking. Roger did make a point to stop by and thank us, and to apologize for having his hands tied by his company’s defense attorneys.
I understood, sort of. I do things for my employers most people wouldn’t want to know about. Then I come back home and pretend I’m a regular person.
I felt bad for Alan. I’d say he made his own bed, but did he? Who knew bragging about working hard and being successful would make someone break into his room and rob him. Too bad he didn’t stay passed out. He might still be alive. And maybe he’d have changed. Or was that a little like asking a leopard to change its spots?
I suppose you want to know the truth about Dominic. Was I involved in his death? I guess, in a roundabout way, I was.
When I realized he planned to come back to Salinas and reclaim his life, I may have made a phone call to the head of the Capurro cartel. Mrs. Capurro was thrilled to hear her no-good, squealing, backstabbing, lily-livered son was still alive. She thanked me profusely, even sending me a massive bouquet of flowers to the agency.
Afraid of what might be in the arrangement, I took the flowers out to the middle of a lettuce field and left them there. If there was a bug, it would hear tractors, traffic, and eventually field workers. If there was a bomb, no one would be hurt. Or so I hoped. I never did hear of a bomb going off in a field, so maybe the flowers were just a nice gesture.
I didn’t think the police, or FBI would ever find out who placed the bomb on Dominic’s car. From what I hear, the Capurro cartel is really good at flying under the radar. And on the occasion when they make a mistake, they own enough people to take care of it.
Mrs. Capurro did remind me of one important thing: blood is not thicker than water, and money trumps family now and then.
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Jamie Lee Scott is the USA Today Bestselling Author of the Gotcha Detective Agency Mysteries. When Jamie isn’t writing, she’s riding. She lives on a small farm with her husband, horses, her dog, Chica, and a few cats. In her spare time, she’s a competitive barrel racer and award-winning screenwriter.
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Other Books by Jamie Lee Scott
Gotcha Detective Agency Mystery Series
Textual Relations
Death of a Sales Rep
What a Meth
Tagged You’re It (a novelette)
Bad Vice
Electile Dysfunction
Who Gives A Split
Mary Had a Little Scam
Trespassers Will be Prostituted
The Knife Before Christmas
A Lie in Every Truth
Love is a Many Splintered Thing
Willa Friday Culinary Cozy Mystery Series
Pasta, Pinot & Murder
Sushi, Sauvignon & Murder
Mousse, Moscato & Murder
Breakfast, Bouchy &Murder
Sneak peek at Pasta, Pi
not & Murder
The best thing about being a food stylist was being able to work with food, and the worst part was dealing with clients. Not all of the clients, but enough of them. And the deadlines! There was always a deadline, wasn’t there? I knew what I had to do and when it needed to be ready, and I had plenty of lead time, but I inevitably waited until the last minute to do it all. Food styling was easier than running a restaurant kitchen by far. Being a food blogger was easier, but the income was still lacking. I still took on food styling and photography jobs, but I’d finally started earning an income from my blog.
I’m Willa Friday, and I’m the main writer and owner of A Dish In Thyme food blog. But with my blog, it’s not just about food; it’s about wine, too. Living in the most luscious wine country in California, it was a given for me. Pear, which was in the heart of the Sonoma Valley, was where I called home. My husband’s (correct that, ex-husband’s) family owned a winery along the Russian River.
Sure, blogging had deadlines, but there weren’t any crazy Saturday night dinner rushes in a kitchen that felt like a summer in El Paso. No picky customers who knew nothing about how a salmon should be cooked, and no staff. Yes, that was the best part: no customers, and no staff who didn’t show up for work or bother to call in sick.
Prepping food for a photo session was tedious, but fun. Even better, no one, and I do mean no one, complained about how the food tasted. Almost no one was stupid enough to take a bite of the food sitting at my prep station. I don’t care how enticing my hero steak looked, it wasn’t edible. (A hero in food styling was the perfectly prepped piece of meat, the perfect apple slice, or the perfect plate of whatever I was photographing). Hero equaled perfect, like a romance novel, but with no flaws, because I made sure there were no flaws. Photoshop was my real hero. I’d learned how to make anything look perfect with Photoshop.
That beautiful glass of lemonade, so cold it made the glass sweat? It was colored water at room temperature, in a glass that had been sprayed with Scotch Guard, and misted with glycerin, so the “sweat” didn’t run down the glass before the photograph was taken. And the ice cubes were acrylic.
This was the fun of food styling and photography for me. The magic of making a mouthwatering plate of food, then taking pictures of my creation in all of its glory: the perpetual beautiful food or drink.
I’d done the restaurant thing for almost ten years before I caved. The fact that I’d worked in that boiler room of a kitchen with my husband, a fellow chef, didn’t make it any easier or enticing. Working together had been the beginning of the end of our marriage. Then I traveled the San Francisco Bay Area for almost another decade, styling food for restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and wholesale clients. The travel got old, fast. I still took on a few clients for styling sessions, but now they came to me. My life consisted mostly of writing recipes, testing them, then blogging about them. And most importantly, pairing many of the meals with the perfect wine. A Dish in Thyme (adishinthyme.com) started off as a meal prep blog, and still has meal prep recipes, but I mostly made it about quick cooking, foods I love, and the wine I relish.
I smiled as I thought about my life, while I waited for my new assistant to arrive for work. He’d been a sous chef, and was looking for another career in food while taking a break from Hell’s kitchens. At least in this career, if my employee didn’t show up, it wasn’t a complete disaster. I’d put off hiring an assistant for years, but I was ready for some help now.
I had a photo shoot for a new coffee shop in San Francisco who wanted a new and fun look for their posters and POP (point of purchase) materials. Something that reflected their industrial stores, but with a hint of “relaxed.” Phffffft, there was nothing relaxing about coffee or the coffee business. It was craziness, with crazy customers.
I’d already practiced with my first latte, and headed to the sink to dump it out when there was a knock on the door. I sat the white porcelain cup on the counter next to the sink and walked over to unlock the door.
My studio was next door to my home, both of which belonged to my mother-in-law. I had signed a ten-year lease for the studio right before I divorced her son, which was two years ago. Hattie Friday was the matriarch of Vendredi Winery Inc., and her son owned and ran Vendredi’s restaurant.
Vendredi is Friday in French. When you had a name like Friday, you couldn’t exactly name your restaurant Friday’s. Not because the name was taken, but because it sounded so blah. Vendredi’s sounded so much more chic. Too bad no one who didn’t speak French could pronounce it properly (hint: the accent is on the last syllable). The family didn’t much care if people could pronounce the name, as long as they bought their food and wine there. The property had a vineyard, a winery, a bed and breakfast with a bistro, and Peter’s fine dining restaurant. It was also home to Hattie Friday, whose mansion was at the top of the hill, and to Peter, Tommy and me. We had the cottage at the bottom of the hill.
I kept the door to my work studio locked, because I didn’t like to be bothered when I was working, and because Hattie and my ex-husband, Peter, loved to walk in quietly to try to scare the crap out of me. Since they both lived and worked on the property, they were always around. Not only did I not like their intrusions, they’d inevitably catch me on a tedious project, and I’d have to spend at least an hour fixing what got messed up when I jumped. Or I’d have to start from the beginning in some cases. Such a waste of time and money.
I opened to the door. Jacob Jackson stood there, looking adorable in his chef’s pants and white coat. I fully expected him to pull out a toque and put it on his head after he walked in. The young sous chef, I guessed him to be about twenty-five, would have had all of the girls in Vendredi in a flutter with his dirty blonde hair and big brown eyes. Luckily, he wouldn’t be working in the restaurant or the winery. He was all mine. His smile nearly made me wish I was in my twenties again.
“Hey, I thought maybe I was early,” he said. “The door locked and all.”
I looked at my watch. “Actually, you’re thirty minutes late.”
He pulled his phone from his pocket. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I was listening to music in my car and fell asleep. It was a late night last night.”
What I wouldn’t give for a late night that wasn’t work related, or dealing with my daughter’s anxiety at starting college. I patted him on the shoulder. “Last time this will happen, right? I need you to be punctual. What if our client was here for the styling and photo shoot?”
He shrugged.
I took this as his understanding that he wouldn’t have a job if he was late again, but I didn’t push it because it wasn’t really that big of a deal. Not at the time anyway.
“We’re starting with a photo shoot for a coffeehouse this morning. Then this afternoon, we’ll be working on a pasta dish for my blog. I’ll be teaching you some of my styling techniques.”
“I’m a pasta master,” he said, heading over to the hand washing sink to wash his hands. “Where’re your gloves?”
“Gloves?” I asked.
“Yeah, food service gloves.” He looked at me like it was my first day on the job.
Ha, he had a lot to learn. “We aren’t serving this food to the public, not to mention most of it will never be eaten. At least not on purpose. No gloves needed, unless we’re working with food dye, and you don’t want to get your fingers stained. Now, if we’re testing a recipe we plan to eat, that’s a different story.”
“Cool.” He looked at the latte on the counter. “This looks good. You have an espresso machine?”
“This is our project for the morning.” I pointed to the coffee machine. “I do have an old fashioned coffee maker if you want to start a pot. I only keep decaf in the studio, so I don’t get the shakes from the caffeine.”
Jacob dried his hands, then walked over to my prep table. I saw his hands shaking already; he didn’t need any caffeine. “That coffee looked delicious. This is going to be fun, I think.”
I sure hoped he liked it. T
raining a new assistant was a pain in the butt. Teaching all of the trade secrets, and the tedious ins and outs of food styling took time and money, and I disliked training, because it took me longer to get my job done. But once they had a good handle, it made my job much easier and I could concentrate more on the photography and my blog.
“The key is attention to detail on the front end, which is the production side. The camera sees everything and magnifies it. I prefer to get it right in production, so I don’t have to do so much retouching work in post.”
I had four white coffee cups sitting on a bar towel on the concrete countertop of my studio kitchen prep area, along with a bottle of clear dishwashing detergent, a bottle of soy sauce, and some clear foaming hand soap.
Before I could even show Jacob how to make the “coffee”, I heard the door to my studio open. Damn, I’d forgotten to lock it again when I let Jacob in. It opened slowly and quietly, and I heard it because I didn’t have my headphones on, nor was I engrossed in a tedious project. I put my finger up to my lips, and turned to watch my mother-in-law creep into the room.
“Good morning, Hattie.” I leaned against the counter and smiled.
She looked up, clearly disappointed. Acting innocent, as if she hadn’t planned to scare the crap out of me, she asked, “Did you get a new car?”
Even though Hattie owned the Vendredi property, the mansion on the hill overlooking the acres of grapes lining the hills, and her famous Sonoma Valley Hats Off Bed and Breakfast, she could be so immature. I never worked for her, but I lived in the old staff quarters, and that made me an easy target.
She wore neon pink Lycra running pants and black running shoes with a pink swoosh. Her razor back, skin tight, top belonged on a twenty-year-old, not a seventy-year-old, but I had to give her credit, she wore it well. Being five-four and weighing a hundred pounds, she took her running seriously, and it showed.
Love is a Many Splintered Thing Page 13
