Killer Crust (A Pizza Lovers Mystery)

by Chris Cavender

  “That’s a threat! You can’t threaten me!” He whirled around and looked at Anna. “You heard that, right? You’ll be able to testify about what she just said to me.”

  “I’m sorry; I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a little preoccupied with something else. What did she say?” A ghost of a smile slipped past her lips, and then it was gone just as quickly as it had surfaced.

  Kenny looked at his assistant in amazement, and then he turned to the twin from Raleigh and Sandy. “Surely you both heard it.”

  It was an odd request for reinforcements, especially since Kenny had so recently admitted to rooting for both of their teams to be disqualified from the competition.

  Sandy shook her head, and the twin added, “I have more important things on my mind than trying to follow your petty little conversation.”

  “I guess it’s just your word against ours, then,” I said.

  Maddy grinned. “Don’t you just love it when it works out that way?”

  I could tell that Kenny was about to respond when the back doors opened again with three minutes left. Sandy visibly deflated as the twin with us smiled as the other walked in, a little breathless and flushed. There was bright red lipstick on his cheek, but if he knew about its presence, he didn’t seem to mind.

  The twin who’d been with us tapped his watch, and his brother just smiled. That was the only exchange between them as they reunited on the stage.

  “Where is he?” Sandy asked again, the worry thick in her voice. Finally, she threw her apron down on the stage and said, “I’m going to go find my husband. I don’t care about this stupid contest anymore.”

  I blocked her way. If I could keep her from doing something foolish, even if it cost me a win here tonight, I was going to try to do it. “Think about it, Sandy. What if Jeff shows up on time and you’re out searching the complex for him? You need to wait at least until that clock hits zero before you go searching for him.” I glanced up at the clock and saw that there were only ninety seconds left. Her husband was cutting it close—there was no doubt about it—and I had to believe that something dire was holding him up. “Just give him the ninety seconds, and then you can go with a clear conscience,” I said.

  “Okay, I guess I can do that, but when that thing hits zero, I’m out of here.”

  “You don’t have any choice then, remember?” Kenny asked, getting a little of his steam back. “If you don’t leave willingly, they’ll have you escorted off the stage.”

  “You’re not helping,” I told Kenny.

  “I wasn’t trying to,” he said with a wicked grin.

  With five clicks left on the clock, Jeff rushed into the auditorium.

  “He has to be on stage for it to count,” Kenny said. “He’ll never make it.”

  Jeff must have heard him, or else he spied the clock himself, because he raced for the stage, launching himself in the air with one second left. Just as his left hand touched down on the stage in front of us all, the clock hit zero.

  “He didn’t make it!” Kenny shrieked with joy. “He’s disqualified.”

  “That’s not true. He made it at the last second,” I said, and Maddy and Sandy backed me up.

  “No way,” he said as he looked around. “Where’s Jack Acre? He needs to make a ruling on this right now.”

  Instead of Jack though, Frank Vincent walked out onto the stage from the back of the room with a nervous smile on his face.

  “Where’s Jack?” Kenny asked, the insistence thick in his voice. “We need a ruling here.”

  “I’m afraid that Jack won’t be able to make it tonight,” Frank said.

  “If he’s not here, then who’s going to be our judge?”

  Frank smiled again, and even looked a touch embarrassed as he admitted, “That would be me. It turns out that I’m the new CEO of Luigi’s, not Jack. Now, if you’ll all take your places at your stations, we can get started with the grand finale.”

  I looked in the fridge, but it was practically empty. “Frank, we’d love to get started, but none of our supplies have arrived from the kitchen yet.” For one split second I worried that someone else had stolen them, but after checking, each team reported the same thing.

  Frank turned to one of the men with him on stage and said calmly, “Steve, go see what the holdup is, okay?”

  “Your brother wouldn’t have put up with this kind of sloppiness, and neither would Jack Acre.” Kenny must have lost his mind talking to the final arbiter of the contest like that, snapping under the pressure.

  I wasn’t sure how Frank was going to react to the personal nature of the attack, but he took a moment, caught his breath, and then smiled at Kenny, though there wasn’t an ounce of warmth in it. “My late brother—and Jack Acre, too, for that matter—had their own style of running things, and I have mine. I find that people respond better to kindness than fear.” He hesitated, and then added, “But if you believe that anything about this contest is unfair in any way, you’re free to withdraw your team from consideration.” It was as though he were channeling his brother for just a moment, and my worries about Frank having the backbone to run the company were gone.

  Anna didn’t even try to hide her smile now as she nodded happily toward Frank. He took a second to grin back at her, and I had to wonder if there might not be something going on between them. I had a hunch that Helen had been wrong about her, just as she’d mistaken Sandy’s allergy attacks for tears.

  “Thanks for the offer, but we’ll stay and bake with the rest of them, and we’ll win this thing fair and square.”

  Frank laughed a little at that, and then said, “How refreshing a change that would be for all of us.”

  At that moment, I realized that he knew the contest had been rigged before, at least once. If the Raleigh twins had paid off Jack Acre as Maddy and I suspected, two different teams had tried to influence the outcome of this competition. At least now I firmly believed that we were all on a level playing field. No matter what happened from here on out, I truly felt as though we’d be judged on the merits of our pizzas, and not the favors any of us had managed to curry along the way.

  The back doors opened again, and three staff members from the kitchen came in wheeling large carts in front of them. As they took the ramp on the right side of the stage, Frank looked at us all and grinned. “See? We’ll be ready to commence in no time.”

  We each got our selections based on the lists we’d provided, and it was finally time to begin. This was it.

  Frank was a little nervous as he took the microphone, and his voice cracked a bit at first, but he soon found his way, and after a moment, he even began to look comfortable with the mike in his hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself. I am Frank Vincent, the new CEO of Laughing Luigi’s Pizza Dough. It’s been a traumatic time for us these past few days, and I mourn the loss of my brother, our company founder, but he, more than anyone else, would have urged us to go on. If you would, I’d like to ask everyone to bow your heads in a moment of silence for George Vincent, or as you all knew him, Laughing Luigi.”

  We were all dead silent, and I could hear the heat kick on above us from normally whisper-silent vents. The effect was stunning in its simplicity, finer than any spoken eulogy.

  After a suitable interim, Frank lifted his head and said, “After tonight’s contest is finished, we’ll all break up for an hour so the results can be tabulated and the final winner chosen. We’re going to set up a cocktail party here in the meantime, and that takes a little time, so if you’ll bear with us, we’ll announce the winner then.”

  I wasn’t happy about the last-minute change since the check was supposed to be awarded the moment the winner was announced, but I took some satisfaction from the fact that no one else seemed all that thrilled about the delay, either. On the plus side, it would give all of the contestants a chance to get cleaned up before the big announcement. I didn’t know about anyone else, but if I won, I didn’t want my picture in the newspaper to be
of the outfit I currently had on. Frank was going to be better at this than I gave him credit for.

  He reset the clock to ninety minutes, and then said, “Begin. Remember, this is the pizza chef’s choice, so wow me.”

  I turned to Maddy, smiled, and asked, “Are you ready?”

  “All the way, Sis. Let’s win this puppy.”

  We worked in happy tandem, not needing words to communicate on something we made individually just about every day we were in the kitchen at the Slice. I realized that I’d be glad to get back to my old stomping grounds soon and forget all about competitions, and more important, murder, though I wasn’t all that eager to make pizzas again anytime soon.

  After the dough was the perfect temperature—something I’d become used to determining given the flurry of my recent pizza making using Luigi’s products—I knuckled it into the pan, pressing it firmly all around and making a nice crust ridge. The sauce was next, the last of our own blend, which I carefully ladled out over the dough in a counterclockwise pattern. I wasn’t sure why I did it that way, but it was a habit long ingrained in me. While I’d been waiting for the dough to reach the proper consistency and temperature, I’d grated our special blend of cheeses, and it was ready to be added now. I let it fall like snowflakes, covering the pizza in a pleasing pattern. My part was over for the moment as I gently slid the pizza to Maddy, where she waited to add her own artistry to the pie.

  After my sister had arranged the toppings on top of the cheese, I took it from her and slid it into the oven. I set the timer just in case, but I wasn’t about to rely on that to tell me when it was done.

  As I shut the oven door, I said, “And that’s that.”

  “We did the best we could,” Maddy said with a tired smile. “No matter what happens now, we can both hold our heads up high.”

  I started to help her clean up our workstation, but she said, “I can handle this. You watch the pizza. That’s your only responsibility.”

  “Okay,” I said. After all, we could be baking a pizza worth twenty-five grand, and that was worth the extra attention.

  I was almost ready to pull the pizza from the oven to test it when I felt someone tap me on the shoulder.

  It was Sandy from Asheville.

  “Do you have a second?” she asked.

  “Maybe sixty of them,” I said, though I kept watching the cheese and toppings for just the right shades and hues.

  “I just wanted to wish you two the best of luck,” she said. “You’ve worked really hard to make this happen, and if you hadn’t helped me keep my cool this evening, Jeff and I wouldn’t even be in the competition right now.”

  “Thanks. Good luck to you, too.”

  As Sandy left us, one of the twins asked loudly, “Hey, Asheville, aren’t you going to wish us luck, too?”

  “We all know that you don’t think you need it,” Sandy replied. “You must have been shocked when Frank took over the judging for the last stage. How much did it cost you to buy Jack Acre off?”

  “What are you talking about? Have you been smelling too much pizza sauce lately?” he asked.

  Sandy shook her head. “Give it up. I happened to be looking out my window when you gave Jack Acre an envelope full of money. You didn’t think anyone saw you do it, did you?”

  The twin bit his lower lip so hard I thought it might bleed when his brother tried to shut her down by saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, she does. We saw it, too,” I said. While it wasn’t technically true that we’d been able to identify Jack Acre as the other person in the transaction, I was going to back Sandy up all of the way. Frank Vincent had been standing close by during this exchange, but it was obvious we’d all forgotten about him until he spoke. “Is this true?” he asked both the Raleigh twins. “If it is, you are in serious trouble.”

  “They’re either honestly mistaken, or they’re knowingly lying,” one twin said.

  “Be very careful about what you say right now,” Frank said.

  “We aren’t about to let some little hippy from Asheville taint our good names,” the other twin said as he approached her menacingly. Jeff moved forward to block him, but I was even quicker, and stood between Sandy and the threat to her. “Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”

  “You?” he asked with utter disdain. “Please, you aren’t even worthy of being on the same stage as the rest of us, and we all know it.”

  There may have been a part of me that would have agreed with him before the contest had begun, but now I knew better. “I might not sell as many pies as the rest of you, but I’ve proven that I belong here just as much as you do.”

  “That’s enough!” Frank Vincent snapped. “Everyone, go back to your stations this instant.”

  One of the twins started to say something else when Frank cut him off. “If any of you leave your work areas again, or so much as address another contestant during the remainder of this competition, you will be disqualified and escorted off the stage immediately. Don’t think I’m bluffing either. Do you understand?”

  We all nodded, and I headed back to Maddy, who had a worried expression on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  And at that moment, I realized that I’d been so wrapped up in the exchange that I had completely forgotten about my pizza. The timer reminded me of it just as I smelled that stage of a pie’s life where it was already too late to pull it out in time. Most folks might not be able to tell the difference, but it was amazing what thirty seconds could do to a pizza that was already done.

  I reached in with an oven mitt and pulled the pizza out, sliding it out of the pan just as it hit the cooling rack.

  Maddy leaned over, looked at it for a moment, and then she said, “It looks nice.”

  “It is, but it’s not perfect, is it?” I asked, furious with myself for wasting this opportunity to show the world that I knew what I was doing.

  “Hey, I should have pulled it while you were defending Sandy,” my sister said.

  “No. I won’t let you do that, Maddy. It was my responsibility, not yours. I’m just sorry that I let you down.”

  Maddy hugged me. “Eleanor, you could never do that.”

  I felt better, even though I knew that it wasn’t true. I cut the pizza, slid it into the warming station, and waited.

  Within four minutes, everyone else’s pizzas were ready as well.

  It was time for the final judging, but I didn’t need to hear the results to know that we weren’t going to win. If the twins—or even Sandy—had staged that confrontation as a way of distracting me, it had worked beautifully.

  Frank tasted each slice and seemed to savor every bite. When he got to ours, I shook my head and dropped my chin slightly. Maddy put her arm around me without saying a word. That was okay. She didn’t need to.

  After Frank was finished, he approached the podium. “I’m pleased to report that each of these four pizzas is worthy of the grand prize. We should give the contestants a round of applause for all of their hard work and craftsmanship in constructing their pizzas over the past two days.”

  The applause felt great, and I suddenly realized that Maddy was right. No matter what, we’d held our own with some very talented pizza makers.

  “Now, we’ll reconvene here in one hour for the cocktail party where I will announce the winners and hand out the check.”

  David was the first one to greet me as I stepped off the stage. He pulled me to one side, wrapped me in his arms, and gave me a heartfelt kiss. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Thanks, but I overcooked the last pizza. We can’t win.”

  “I’m not talking about the competition,” David said. “We all saw how you stepped in to protect Sandy from being pummeled by that twin. You didn’t even hesitate, did you?”

  “I couldn’t just stand there and watch him bully her,” I said.

  “Neither could her husband, but you beat him to it, didn’t you? Five years from now no
one is going to remember who won this contest, but I’m willing to wager that not a soul who saw it will be able to forget how you defended Sandy the way you did.”

  Bob and Maddy joined us in our little alcove just off the stage. “Are you two celebrating already, or can anyone join you?”

  “You two are always welcome,” I said.

  Bob looked up at the stage. “Do you think there’s any of your pizza left? I’d love a slice of it, myself. Yours was by far the best-looking pie.”

  “It’s not our best effort,” I said. “And besides, aren’t you worried about tasting a tainted pizza?”

  He pretended to consider it, and then nodded his head gravely. “For one of your slices, I’m willing to take the chance.”

  I hugged him, and then my sister gave him a kiss.

  David grinned. “Man, I knew that I should have said that.”

  Maddy and I both laughed, and then we hugged him as well.

  Once we were all free again, Bob asked, “I suppose you both want to shower and change before the cocktail party.”

  “You’d better believe it,” I said.

  “Good. That will give David and me time to grab some dessert from the restaurant. Are you two hungry?”

  “I don’t think I could eat a thing,” I confessed, and Maddy agreed with my sentiment.

  “Then we’ll meet you back here in an hour, okay?”

  “That’s perfect,” Maddy said. “You always know just what to say and do around me.”

  “Believe me, it only comes from the experience of a great deal of trial and error,” he replied.

  Chapter 15

  Maddy and I took the elevator to our floor. When the doors opened, I glanced up and down the hallway to see if anyone was watching me. After I saw that the coast was clear, I ducked into my sister’s room the second she opened the door.

  “Why are you acting like a character from a Cold War spy movie? Was someone following us?” Maddy asked as she bolted the door behind us.

  “Not that I was aware of, but we can’t take any chances. I still don’t want anyone to know that I’m staying with you.”