Steamed

by Conan-Park, Jessica

  “Oh, okay. I get it. So now you think I killed Eric, too, huh? You think I poisoned you because you’ve been trying to figure out who the murderer is? I’m outta here.” Josh threw on his shoes. “Call me when you catch the real murderer, Chloe,” Josh snapped as he walked out my back door.

  I didn’t stop him from leaving.

  NINETEEN

  “HEATHER, this is not a spa,” I informed my sister. I peeked out of my mummylike wrappings and glared at my monster of a sibling. “We belong in one of the Egyptian rooms at the Museum of Fine Arts.”

  “Chloe, this is very trendy right now. Try to embrace this experience, and you might actually benefit from it.”

  Heather had lied to me. Spa meant pedicures, facials, relaxing massages. This place, called Wrap It Out, was some bullshit fake of a spa where clients paid actual money to be entirely wrapped up in stretchy bandage material, doused with smelly liquid—embalming fluid?—and have supposed toxins extracted from their bodies. I was lying on a padded table, totally immobilized, and stuck there until the spa warden returned to unwrap me.

  “Especially,” she continued, “after your food poisoning experience. This is the perfect way to completely remove foreign substances from your skin. You won’t believe how refreshed you feel after. It’s wonderful,” she proclaimed, sighing with content.

  I rolled my head to the left and stuck my tongue out at her. I turned to the right and looked at Adrianna. Heather had surprised me by inviting Ade along for the torture.

  “Could we talk about something else, please? Anything to make time go faster?” Ade pleaded from her cocoon.

  “Fine,” Heather said. “Chloe, keep telling us about Josh and how he tried to murder you last night.”

  “He did not try to murder me. At least, well, he just couldn’t have.”

  “The point is, you just told us that Josh has a history of unstable behavior and is a definite suspect. I told you you were rushing it,” Heather said.

  “No, that is not the point at all,” I shot back. “Josh is totally pissed off at me because I accused him of assaulting me with bad risotto.”

  “Look,” Adrianna began, spitting a loose bandage off her mouth, “nobody’s perfect, but that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Eric’s murder or your food poisoning. So what if Josh has been fired? Life is not neat and orderly with everyone behaving in exemplary fashion at all times. Christ, Owen has been fired from zillions of jobs. Before he got the blimp job, he was the personal assistant to a comedian, then he cleaned the shark tank at the Aquarium, and then he was the golf ball marshal at that country club.”

  “A golf ball marshal?” Heather shrieked. “What kind of job is that?”

  “He was very important. Who do you think picks up all the stray golf balls off the course? But the manager found him swimming in the lily pond and asked him not to come back. See? So, Owen got fired from all those jobs, and he’s perfectly normal.” Ade paused. “Okay, he may be a little unusual , but it’s just taken him a while to settle in to something. Same thing for Josh. He had to work out some issues at those other restaurants, but he’s doing great at Magellan, right? And who cares if he freaks out once in a while? He’s passionate about his work, which is probably one of the reasons the restaurant is doing so well.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “He sounds dangerous,” Heather warned.

  “Heather, Josh is no more dangerous than you or I,” Adrianna said. “Seriously, do you think I’d let Chloe go out with someone I thought had even the slightest chance of being a killer? Really. I met him, and he’s totally into your sister and totally harmless. I know she rushes into every relationship, but that’s because she’s passionate, just like Josh. Which is why they’re such a good match.”

  “And I think passionate is great. I do. But she also needs to display some sense of caution, guarded optimism, self-control, or whatever you want to call it,” Heather elaborated.

  “Hi. I’m still here. I’d wave, but I can’t move. I know you can’t see me behind the wraps, but I can hear you.” I felt as if I were in my Group Therapy class again. How had I become everyone’s favorite subject of analysis? “Josh did not set out to poison me, okay? And now he’s never going to talk to me again.”

  “Okay, well, if Josh didn’t kill Eric Rafferty, who did?” asked Heather.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

  When we’d finally been released from our “spa” treatments, I had to admit I did feel pretty good. I said good-bye to Heather and Adrianna and headed to Home Depot. Instead of taking responsibility for my own behavior in the manner advocated at social work school, I’d begun to suspect that it was the unfinished and crooked stripe of paint in my bedroom that was the reason Josh and I hadn’t slept together and were now fighting. Who wanted to have sex in that horrid environment? Just to prove how dedicated I was to reforming my unlucky bedroom, I was going to pay full price for Ralph Lauren paint. Choosing a color would be easy; my friend Ralph, as I thought of him, limited himself to attractive hues.

  I kept the car windows down as I drove; the putrid liquid the evil spa-keepers had poured on my wrappings to detoxify my body was making me queasy. Also, my stomach was empty. I was sorry I’d eaten all of the cookies I’d taken with me last night.

  The cookie batter! Made from scratch: with flour, butter, sugar, chocolate chips . . . and fresh eggs. Fresh raw eggs.

  I was a complete idiot. Josh hadn’t poisoned me; I had poisoned myself. Frantic, I yanked my cell phone out of my purse. Josh didn’t pick up his cell, and I couldn’t blame him. Like an obsessed stalker, I tried back six times in a row but didn’t leave any messages. I didn’t know what to say or how to apologize for being such a jerk; I just hoped I could make it up to him.

  I took a break from my desperate calling to run into Home Depot. It was crowded, as it always was on Sundays, and to get to the paint aisle, I had to fight my way past a crowd inspecting leaf blowers. I’d almost made it to Ralph’s paint chip display when the Oops paint cart loomed before me, and I succumbed to my usual sympathetic sense of obligation. I was putting a gallon of what I hoped was a sexy blue with aphrodisiac powers into my cart when someone started loading even more cans of rejected paint onto the shelf. I looked up to see Brian standing before me. He was now clad in an orange store apron instead of the white coat he wore at Magellan.

  “Hey, Brian. I didn’t know you worked here,” I said, completely caught off guard. It was like seeing your math teacher at the mall: teachers existed only on school grounds and had no business materializing in places where they had no reality. Similarly, Josh’s sous chef had corporeal form only at Magellan and could have appeared at Home Depot only because of some sort of cosmic accident.

  “Chloe,” Brian said with surprise. “Hey, what’re you doing here?”

  “I come here all the time. I have so many cans of Oops paint at home you wouldn’t believe it.” I paused. It felt uncanny to talk to Brian outside Magellan. “I can’t believe you have the time to work here, too.”

  “Well, I just work a couple days a week to make a little extra money. This is my section, the paint department. Being a sous chef pays the bills and not much else, so . . .” As his voice trailed off, he shifted from side to side, clearly uncomfortable talking to his chef ’s girlfriend except at the restaurant. He looked down at my can of paint. “So, um, I gotta go. I have a couple more hours here, and then I might go in to the restaurant to help Josh. I’ll see you later, Chloe.”

  I watched him walk away, staring dumbly at Josh’s protégé as he made his way awkwardly to the back of the store. I flinched with embarrassment for him as he tripped over his own feet and bumped into a woman pulling rollers off a shelf.

  I pushed my cart with its gallon of paint to the front of the store. Skipping the self-checkout, I went to a human cashier to pay. I was disconcerted and confused and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off about Brian. He certainly was clumsy; no wonder
he’d had so many accidents in the kitchen. I handed over a five-dollar bill, took my receipt, and picked up the can—the can with the neon orange splotch of paint on its lid.

  The can marked with the same color as the traces of paint found on Eric’s body.

  In all that Josh had said about Brian, he’d never mentioned a second job. I wondered whether the police knew about it. And Josh. Did Josh know? Clutching the gallon of paint, I ran to my car, got in, and tried Josh’s cell phone, which he still refused to answer. Damn! Smelly or not, I had to see Josh.

  Next I dialed Detective Hurley’s number. As I listened to the ring, something else hit me. Last night at Magellan, after Brian had told me about Josh’s fits of temper and the jobs he’d lost, Brian had been sharpening the kitchen knives. I now realized that Brian’s technique had been the reverse of Josh’s. When Josh sharpened a knife, he held it with the blade facing away from him. Brian had done the opposite: instead of safely drawing the sharp blade away from his body, he’d drawn it toward himself. For any chef, even a young sous chef like Brian, it was second nature to sharpen knives all the time. When Josh had made that wonderful dinner for me at my house, he’d brought his own sharp knives, but before using them, what had he done? He’d sharpened them. The practice was ingrained in any chef. If Brian had used Josh’s cimiter, there was good chance that he’d sharpened it, not in the men’s room at Essence, of course, but at Magellan, when he’d first picked it up. The police had the cimiter, which had undoubtedly undergone close forensic examination. A forensics expert would certainly be able to determine whether the blade had been honed by someone who pulled it toward him along a sharpening steel, as Brian did, or by someone who moved the blade away from his body, as Josh did. But had the experts looked for that difference? What did forensics experts and police detectives know about chefs? And about chefs’ all-but-instinctive habit of putting razor edges on the blades of all the knives they touched?

  I finally got the detective’s voice mail and, speaking more quickly than clearly, said that I was on my way to Magellan, that Brian worked in the paint department at Home Depot, that chefs sharpen knives all the time without even thinking about it, and that different chefs sharpen their knives differently! I hung up only to have Detective Hurley call me right back.

  “I couldn’t understand anything you said on the message,” he said with annoying calm.

  I explained my theory as best I could while peeling around corners and beeping at cars to get out of my way. I simply had to warn Josh about his murderous colleague! I told Detective Hurley about the orange paint used to mark Oops paint cans and informed him that Brian worked in the department that sold Oops paint. I asked the detective to find out whether or not the murder weapon had been examined for evidence about how it had been sharpened and who had sharpened it. Maybe differences in sharpening techniques even revealed themselves in wounds? I was willing to bet that the medical examiner could examine photographs taken during the autopsy and confirm that Josh’s sharpening style was inconsistent with Eric’s neck wound. But that Brian’s style was a perfect match.

  “Chloe, I appreciate your desire to help, but you need to go home. You’re done for the day,” Hurley barked at me.

  “Okay, okay. I’m just going to Magellan to find Josh, and then I’ll disappear.”

  “Go home now.”

  “I’m turning the car around as we speak,” I lied before saying good-bye. In fact, I’d pulled into a residents-only spot around the corner from Magellan. I raced out of the car and to the front of the restaurant. Magellan was closed, as I knew it would be, but I tried the locked door anyway. Josh must be hard at work in the kitchen preparing food for the wedding party. I pounded on the door but got no response. Peeking through the window, I saw no one. The lights in the dining area were off, but the kitchen lights were on. Josh had to be around somewhere. Sprawled on the floor with a neck wound identical to Eric’s? Or with a knife sticking out of his chest?

  There had to be another entrance to the restaurant, a delivery entrance at the back. I rushed around the corner and past my car, and came to an alley that ran behind Magellan. My heart was pounding as I entered the alley and tried to determine which door was the restaurant’s. As it turned out, the correct door was easy to identify because someone else was also trying to get into Magellan: Timothy Rock.

  “Chloe! What are you doing here?” he asked. “Oh, that’s right. I heard that you and Josh are an item. That’s great news.” Although Tim smiled at me, he looked harried, probably because Essence was failing. I couldn’t blame its owner for having left a button undone on his flannel shirt or for having missed a patch of whiskers when he’d shaved.

  “I’m looking for Josh. The front door is locked, though, so I thought I’d come around the back.” I banged on the door.

  “Me, too. I tried my old keys in the front, but they didn’t work. I can’t believe Maddie changed the locks. Why would she do that to me?” Tim looked hurt and pitiful.

  “It might have nothing to do with you, Tim,” I tried to reassure him. “Maybe she fired someone who had keys or someone lost the keys or something.” Worried about Josh, I rapped on the door with my knuckles until they hurt.

  “Speaking of firing people,” Tim turned to me. “The reason I’m here is that I’ve been trying to reach Maddie all morning, but she isn’t answering the phone. Home, work, cell. But I’ve got to warn her about one of my waiters. This guy used to work for us at Magellan, and Maddie sent him over to me because she knew I needed someone strong to lead the waitstaff. Turns out, though, he’s been stealing money from me, and he was probably stealing from Magellan, too. I fired him last night, and I want to make sure Maddie doesn’t take him back.”

  “I’m pretty sure she won’t.”

  Tim looked puzzled.

  I mustered all the social worker sensitivity I could. “I hate to tell you this, but Madeline knew about Ian’s scams. That’s why she let him go.”

  Tim stared blankly at me.

  “Josh!” I bellowed. “Josh, open the door!” After again banging it, I said to Tim, “About Madeline and the waiter. I’m so sorry. I’m not sure why she did it. Damn it! Josh! Josh, open up!”

  “No,” Tim said, “you’re wrong. I don’t know how you think you know that, Chloe, but you don’t know Madeline. She would never have knowingly sent me a crook. She was great throughout our divorce, and she’s done nothing but try to help me with Essence. You’ve got your story mixed up on this.”

  “It’s Ian, right? The waiter you’re talking about?”

  Tim nodded in surprise. “Yes,” he started slowly. “But you’re still wrong. And since you seem to know all the restaurant gossip, you probably know that Maddie kept Veronica on as her bookkeeper. So you can see, there were no hard feelings there,” he announced triumphantly.

  Tim and Veronica? He had to be kidding. “Look,” I said, “I have to talk to Josh.” Inspiration struck. “Do you have a key to this door? Maybe she just changed the front locks.”

  “Got it,” Tim said, working his key into the lock. His satisfied look said, See? I told you so. He swung the door open.

  Ahead of us was a dimly lit hall with a flight of stairs running down on the left and, on the right, a corridor that led to Magellan’s lovely open kitchen. This corridor, unlike the corresponding one at Essence, was obviously for employees only; the floor was covered in linoleum, a clipboard with loose papers hung from a nail, and the overall appearance was slightly shabby. I wondered whether it had been Madeline who’d advised Tim to locate Essence’s restrooms almost next to an exit that provided a convenient means of escape for patrons skipping out on their bills—and had allowed Eric’s murderer to vanish, too, of course. As I’d seen when I’d peered in from the main entrance, the kitchen lights were on. It immediately became apparent that Josh was here at Magellan, not in the open kitchen, but somewhere down the flight of stairs. Josh’s voice echoed through the hallway and stairway, as did loud crashes. I followed Tim downs
tairs to the lower level of Magellan.

  “Josh is in a mood, I guess,” Tim whispered to me. “He can get a little wild sometimes.” Tim grabbed my elbow and stopped me. “Chloe, you need to know something. Josh is a great guy and a great chef.”

  “But?” I prodded.

  Tim let out a big sigh. “He’s got a mean temper. And you can’t expect him to be in a great mood these days. After all, the knife used to kill Eric Rafferty was Josh’s. And he knows how to use it. He has no alibi for the night of the murder.” He paused. “You should think about whether or not this is the kind of person you want to be involved with.”

  “Get out of here, you little bitch!” Josh shouted. There followed a loud clatter of metal.

  Then Madeline’s voice. “Stop it! Get away from me!”

  My heart was pumping ferociously. Josh was attacking Madeline! Tim pushed past me and flung open the door to what proved to be a storage area and lower kitchen with stacks of boxes, a gigantic stainless-steel sink, long counters, a zillion-burner gas range, a walk-in refrigerator, and big pots and pans suspended from hooks.